Treasuries Lack Safety, Liquidity for China, Yu Yongding Says

From Bloomberg news:

U.S. Treasuries fail to provide safety or liquidity when it comes to managing China’s $2.45 trillion foreign-exchange reserves, said Yu Yongding, a former central bank adviser.

“I do not think U.S. Treasuries are safe in the medium-and long-run,” Yu, a member of the state-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote yesterday in an e-mailed response to questions. China is unable to sell the securities in a “big way” and a “scary trajectory” of budget deficits and a growing supply of U.S. dollars put their value at risk, he said.....read on

Interview with John Embry

Geoff Candy interviews John Embry of Sprott Asset Mgmt on mineweb.com......listen here

Interview with Pierre Lassonde

Pierre Lassonde and Eric King discuss gold price forecasts and % of asset allocations in gold....listen here

Let Them Eat Cake

by Paul Craig Roberts:

It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.

When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.

The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.

Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.

Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.

The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them.
Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?

How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office?
Who was Blair really serving?

These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.

While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio. The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”

Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders.

The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US--one in six of the population--were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.

US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released.

Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps.

The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive. The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain.

And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.

Staring into the Aybss

The latest essay by Martin Armstrong.....read here

What a Difference a Year Makes

By Jim Willie: A theme of frequent mention has been the Paradigm Shift in the financial world. It refers more specifically to the global shift away from a USDollar-centric alignment. The major industrialized nations of the world, along with major energy producers, struggle to develop a monetary and commercial system that is not based upon the seemingly crippled and certainly bloated USDollar. The challenge is daunting, since expertise on financial structures, even in an honest legitimate fashion, is somewhat lacking outside the Anglo world. Changes indeed come. Many observers, investors, and participants in the global economic and financial world who had held firm to much hope of bonafide structural improvements and of improved prices in valuable traditional assets find themselves slowly fading in that hope. Many less sophisticated people, who are involved in stalled investments and who observe the constant machinations, point to the landscape as simply not changing much. Great discouragement comes when the system seriously broke down, yet no important substantial alterations took place to the power structure or the foundational structure to the system. The high priority to maintain both the system and the power merchants is evident. The compliant financial press is a subtle weapon. Many point to price levels of their favorite or most respected assets or indexes, and conclude not much has changed. Many point to the incessant stream of deceptive economic assessments about a fictitious recovery, like Green Shoot nonsense, like Jobless Recovery contradictions, like Second Half Recovery that never arrives. Many point to the same old same old in legislation that favors those entrenched with power, like the wealthy tax cuts certain to see extension. In many respects, the appearance of sameness is prevalent....read on