On The Edge: Karl Denninger on 2010 and Predictions for 2011

Max's guest for this week's show is Karl Denninger who is the founder of market-ticker.org. Karl gives some predictions on the US economy in the New Year. He is downbeat and forecasts a terrible year for the housing, banking and myriad of sectors. He says the Europe would also disintegrate and says people there will have a weaker euro in parity with the dollar. China will also break the peg and people would see a rise in commodity price, bubble assets and less export to the US.

Is The World's Richest Man, Carlos Slim, Entering The Silver Market

From King World News

A source in mergers and acquisitions out of Europe has alerted King World News that Carlos Slim may be looking to enter the silver market in a big way. Gold and silver are in big bull markets and this is attracting the attention of some of the smartest money around the globe. James Turk commented, “If this deal does happen Eric, this is going to make the silver shorts choke.” Fresnillo has a current market cap of roughly $19 billion.

The European source commented, “This deal has been floating around for a while, but I think this time it is going to happen. It’s in his backyard. This is the world’s richest man wanting to get into silver.”........read on

End of Empire: China-Russia oil pipeline launched

and of course the Oil will be paid for in Yuan and not US$

From Press TV:

Russia and China have launched a 3,600-kilometer pipeline to export the oil of the biggest producer in the world to the biggest consumer of the product.

The pipeline, linking Siberia to refineries in the northeastern Chinese city of Daqing, started its operation on Saturday.

"At 11:50 a.m., Yao Wei, general manager of the Pipeline Branch of Petro China Co., Ltd. (PBPC), pushed a button in the China-Russia border county of Mohe, Heilongjiang Province, five hours after the crude oil began being pumped through the pipeline to the border, marking the official start of operations after a two-month trial," China's Xinhua news agency reported.

As the first oil pipeline between Russia and China, it will allow Beijing to increase its oil imports from Moscow.

A total of 2,694 kilometers of the pipeline was constructed on the Russian side and some 930 kilometers of it was assembled in China.

Under a 2009 deal, China will import about 300,000 barrels or 15 million tons of oil per day through the new pipeline each year until 2030.

Karpen's Pile: A Battery That Produces Energy Continuously Since 1950 Exists in Romanian Museum - Uses Gold and Platinum

From IBTimes UK:

The "Dimitrie Leonida" National Technical Museum from Romania hosts a weird kind of battery. Built by Vasile Karpen, the pile has been working uninterrupted for 60 years. "I admit it's also hard for me to advance the idea of an overunity generator without sounding ridiculous, even if the object exists," says Nicolae Diaconescu, engineer and director of the museum.

The invention cannot be exposed because the museum doesn't have enough money to buy the security system necessary for such an exhibit.

Half a century ago, the pile's inventor had said it will work forever, and so far it looks like he was right. Karpen's perpetual motion machine now sits secured right in the director's office. It has been called "the uniform-temperature thermoelectric pile," and the first prototype has been built in the 1950s. Although it should have stopped working decades ago, it didn't.

The scientists can't explain how the contraption, patented in 1922, works. The fact that still puzzles them is how a man of such a scientific stature such as Karpen's could have started building something "that crazy."

The prototype has been assembled in 1950 and consists of two series-connected electric piles moving a small galvanometric motor. The motor moves a blade that is connected to a switch. With every half rotation, the blade opens the circuit and closes it at the the start of the second half. The blade's rotation time had been calculated so that the piles have time to recharge and that they can rebuild their polarity during the time that the circuit is open.

Karpens Pile: A Battery That Produces Energy Continuously Since 1950 Exists in Romanian Museum

The purpose of the motor and the blades was to show that the piles actually generate electricity, but they're not needed anymore, since current technology allows us to measure all the parameters and outline all of them in a more proper way.

A Romanian newspaper, ZIUA (The Day), went to the museum for an interview with director Diaconescu. He took the system our of its secured shelf and allowed the specialists to measure its output with a digital multimeter. This happened on Feb. 27, 2006, and the batteries had indicated the same 1 Volt as back in 1950.

They had mentioned that "unlike the lessons they teach you in the 7th grade physics class, the 'Karpen's Pile' has one of its electrodes made of gold, the other of platinum, and the electrolyte (the liquid that the two electrodes are immersed in), is high-purity sulfuric acid." Karpen's device could be scaled up to harvest more power, adds Diaconescu.......read on

Gold hits 10th annual gain; silver surges in 2010

From Reuters.com:

The entire precious metals complex had a stellar run in 2010, led by palladium's 97 percent rise, in a broad commodities rally that pushed the 19-commodity Reuters-Jefferies CRB index .CRB up 15 percent.

Spot silver, too, swept higher for an 83 percent gain on the year, as investors sought the white metal as an alternative to gold....read in full

Gerald Celente's Predictions for 2011

Gerald Celente is interviewed by Eric King, of King World News on his predictions for 2011......listen here

Investing in Gold Ahead of the Chinese

The Mogambo Guru

There are a lot of things in this world that I do not understand, and perhaps it is because of this persistent befuddlement that, for some mysterious reason, I think it is Highly, Highly Significant (HHS) that the Chinese Gold & Silver Exchange is planning "a first"; an international gold contract denominated in renminbi. Agora Financial's 5-Minute Forecast notes that "Right now, the Hong Kong-based exchange settles all its trades in Hong Kong dollars," which should be enough to get the job done, you would think.

So why a new international gold contract denominated in Chinese renminbi? I don't know, which is not unusual because I actually know so little about anything, but The 5 says, "Adding renminbi to the mix could boost the exchange's trading volume by 20%, to a daily total of $6 billion," which I assume means that commissions, fees and money made by middlemen would increase, for one thing! Hahaha!

My shallow cynicism aside, all of this comes at a time when "skyrocketing demand for gold in China" is evident in that Chinese imports of gold through the first 10 months of the year of this year total to more than 209 metric tons. The total for all of 2009 was, by contrast, just 45 tons.

So 209 tons of gold is a hefty 500% increase in buying, which is hard to dismiss out of hand, much less when considering that this may, or may not, have something to do with the fact that "Chinese regulators have approved the first mutual fund to invest in gold-backed ETFs."

And it is even harder to dismiss when you notice that there is nothing about Chinese trusting gold for the last few thousand years or so and so what in the hell did you think that they would spend some of their rapidly rising incomes on, or that commentary buying silver is so suspiciously absent.

Naturally, I come to the only conclusion that makes sense; buy gold, silver and oil ahead of the Chinese, who are buying them ahead of the Federal Reserve creating so much money in quantitative easing 2 (QE2), which makes it all so easy that you, the Chinese and I all have to exclaim, "Whee! This investing stuff is easy!"

And it becomes especially easy, and especially obvious when, as part of a recent Congressional frantic move to get more money into more hands so that these mysterious hands will spend it and thus, somehow, reanimate a dying economy where government spending is half the economy and debt-financed consumption is the other half, a tax break was passed so that the 6.2% Social Security tax that workers must pay on their incomes will be reduced to 4.2%!

A $45,000 income will thus be increased by $900! I assume that the Medicare tax and the employer's matching 6.2% tax will remain intact and due, so that employment will now be taxed at a total of 13.3% instead of the 15.3% of the last few years.

And I assume that the $900 "found money" will be reduced by the entire sum being taxed as ordinary income at the marginal rate, instead of the previous 50% being taxable, but it's still a nice piece of change!

And it will be doled out, paycheck by paycheck, increasing the fabled Keynesian "propensity to consume," as opposed to a lump-sum remittance that results in a higher Keynesian "propensity to save," which is at the bedrock heart of the ridiculous econometric theory to which the asinine Federal Reserve ascribes.

And the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan, and central banks everywhere.

In short, there's more money, more money, more money, more money, more money and more money, everywhere you look, making the decision to buy gold, silver and oil against such terrifyingly inflationary floods of money even easier, so that, "Whee! This investing stuff is easier than I originally thought earlier in the paragraph!"

The Mogambo Guru
for The Daily Reckoning

Richard Daughty (Mogambo Guru) is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the writer/publisher of the Mogambo Guru economic newsletter, an avocational exercise to better heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it. The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning , and other fine publications.

dailyreckoning.com

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