Confidence Slides, Heightening Risk of a Slowdown

From Bloomberg: Confidence among U.S. consumers tumbled in July to the lowest level in a year, heightening the risk of a slowdown in economic growth.

The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary index of consumer sentiment decreased to 66.5, the lowest since August and less than the most pessimistic forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.....read on

Fed's volte face sends the dollar tumbling

From the UK Telegraph: The euro rocketed to a two-month high of $1.29 and sterling jumped two cents to almost $1.54 after the Fed confessed that the US economy may not recover for five or six years. Far from winding down emergency stimulus, the bank may need a fresh blast of bond purchases or quantitative easing.

Usually the dollar serves as a safe haven whenever the world takes fright, and there was plenty of sobering news from China and other quarters on Thursday. Not this time. The US itself has become the problem.....read on

From ArabianMoney.net: Agora Financial founder and highly respected market commentator Bill Bonner is not tempted to sell his gold, despite the worry that deflation might persuade a few investors to sell. ‘If we were speculators, we might consider selling our gold,’ he says, ‘in tune with our deflation now, inflation later forecast. But we’re not gamblers. We hold gold because it represents real wealth, not because we think it will go up in price.....read on

The Keiser Report

The latest Keiser report: looks at the latest scandals of downgrading America, investors seeking security in gold, bank profit abominations and federal ponzis. In the second half of the show, Max talks to Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio about the Canadian economy and housing bubble, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and how to fix the world.....watch here

Recssion 2010 - Depression 2011?

By Aubie Baltin: The very same people (Bernanke, Geithner, Wall Street, the Media and all their Economists) who have consistently shown themselves to be untrustworthy are looking more and more like the clowns that they really are; when they try to convince us that paper money is less risky than Gold and Silver. That statement alone illustrates their complete lack of credibility and understanding of risk and reward, as they contend that any austerity in the USA will lead to a "very rough second half": Especially in terms of the jobs market.....read on

Gold & Fiat Money

An epic essay by Sarel Oberholster on Gold & Fiat Money, one to show those doubting your interest precious metals: "I do not under any circumstance favor raising the price of gold. It would perpetuate that "barbarous metal" in international monetary use. We have quite rightly broken the link between gold and our domestic money. We should also break the link between gold and international money. The supply of money, neither domestic nor international, should not be dependent over the long run on the accidents of supply and demand in the marketplace for just one commodity." July 12, 1968 - Darryl R. Francis, President of the Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

And so it came to pass not long after the speech by Mr. Francis that in August 1971 US President Richard Nixon unilaterally broke the US$/gold peg and declared the US$ no longer convertible to gold. The convertibility of US$'s to gold was the last tenuous link between fiat currencies pegged to the US$ and gold. I pick up the tale of Gold and Fiat Money in January 1971 and will tell this tale with graphs. Graphs of fiat money; of consumer inflations and asset inflations; interest rates; central bank activities; gold prices; and official gold movements....read on

Trade Wars Final Nail in Coffin

From the Daily Bell: The vanishing American consumer and the coming trade war ... With American consumers pulling back, these other economies have also been slowing down. This means Obama won't easily find the export markets they need to create enough jobs to make up for the vanishing American consumer. President Barack Obama speaks about exports, jobs, and the economy, Wednesday, July 7, 2010, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. President Obama has vowed to double U.S. exports within the next five years. That's because exports are critical for rebooting the American economy. It's clear American consumers can't get the economy going on their own. They can't restart the jobs machine. They've run out of money and credit. It's not just that one out of four Americans is unemployed or underemployed (working part-time, overqualified, or at a lower wage than before). More significantly, the Great Recession burst the housing bubble that had let American consumers turn their homes into ATMs. Now the cash machines are closed.....read on

The Insidious Transformation of Markets into Casinos... How Brokers Became Bookies

By Ellen Brown: "You all are the house, you're the bookie. [Your clients] are booking their bets with you. I don't know why we need to dress it up. It's a bet." - Senator Claire McCaskill, Senate Subcommittee investigating Goldman Sachs (Washington Post, April 27, 2010).......read on

The End-Game and The Illusory Gold Bubble

By Darryl Robert Schoon: When the end-game began, gold was $35 per ounce. Today, gold is $1200. When the end-game is over, gold will be far higher.idway through 2010 we are approaching the end of the end-game, the resolution of the monetary imbalances that began in 1971. For more than 2500 years, gold was money: but, in 1971 that changed. After 1971, money was no longer connected to gold. For the first time in history, money had no intrinsic value.......read on

Truth about Markets - New Zealand

Max & Stacy discuss:
- anti-whaling movement and the success of economic actions taken.
- the US spy agencies given access to the banking system SWIFT.
- internet social networking and virtual currencies.
- false flag cyber attacks.
- the strength of the Australian & Canadian dollars

........listen here