By Howard S. Katz

4-12-10

The explosive move in gold which I have been predicting for some months is now under way. He who hesitates is not lost, but he does make smaller profits. You have undoubtedly heard of the death of a thousand cuts. You now face the death (of your profit) by a thousand decisions to do nothing. But first, let us review the art of speculation.

There are two ways to approach the markets, investment and speculation. To invest is to put one’s money into an enterprise with the expectation that it will earn a normal return on capital. For example, you may give your money to a business owner to help him buy machines for his new factory so that he may produce more widgets. More widgets = more sales = more money, and he gives you an agreed upon percentage of this money. As Ludwig von Mises demonstrated, the average return on investment in a society tends to equal the interest rate plus an additional amount to account for the risk in that particular line of work. In sound money, free market America from 1788 to 1933, investments in high quality stocks tended to average 8% while the rate of interest was 5%.

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D. Stewart Armstrong

April 3, 2010

The words cartel and cabal can be used interchangeably in most circumstances. We’ll keep that in mind as we move forward but use the term cartel in this essay.

Cartels are dangerous. Whether they are banking, drug, political, gang, business, or floral, they exist to eliminate competition in any way possible. Cartels can be described as a group of businesses controlling the market or an alliance of like-minded political groups with common goals. Cartels are bad, free markets are good.

Cartels are dangerous because as entities they often behave like dictators and they take no prisoners. It is “their way or the highway” and if you disagree it usually means—splat for you! Cartels eliminate free markets and create monopolies to extend their own agendas at the expense of anyone or anything that stands in their way.

One would perhaps expect to experience cartels in third world countries but to see them operating so “out in the open” in America with total disregard for authorities gives one a true perception of how far we really have fallen as a nation. Cartels operating freely indicate that the authorities are complicit or corrupt. If we are to “climb back” and reclaim any kind of moral high ground as a nation we must eliminate the Cartels and the only people that can do that are the Americans themselves. It is my firm belief that the government is trying to “dumb down” the population as quickly as possible because their window of opportunity is limited. If that is conspiratorial, then so be it.

The operatives controlling Health Care, Immigration, Banking, the Federal Reserve, and even Congress are all suspect. The US Constitution and the Bill of rights were designed to advance the interests of the citizen and yet it has now been turned completely around so it would appear that they were created to serve the government. Something has gone terribly awry.  By design and over time, the US citizen has become a slave. We mumble and complain but do nothing. We are afraid of the Cartels—yesirrmassa.

The gold and banking cartels are the worst of them and they must be stopped in their endless pursuit of total dominion over the people. There is only one group that can do that, and again, it is the American People—working together with clear minds and total focus; and with a complete understanding of what is at stake—a free Republic and the future of our children outside the confines of slavery. If we, the people, win we get our country back, if we lose and we continue on as slaves—or worse. If we lose, it will be endless wars and bigger government. People, we are slaves at this point in time and it’s getting worse by the day. Did I mention that Cartels are dangerous.

I would urge all who have not done so to get up to speed on the CFTC debacle that occurred in the last week of March 2010 . Go to www.GATA.org for background and specifics. (GATA.org is quite amazing in the quality of information they offer.) It is beyond belief that these cartels are operating with impurity in the US when the joblessness rate is 25% in some parts of the country. Cartels don’t help the people or the economy—they help themselves to your labor, your wealth, and your liberties..

It has always occurred to me that we have a one party system, with two ambiguous and nebulous factions, that acquire their working capital from the exact same groups; but is it possible that the left is that much worse than the right vis a vis the elimination of our liberties? I leave that question for you dear reader, as I simply don’t know. I do know we have to get off of our collective asses.

JP Morgan, Lehman, UBS named as Conspirators in Muni-Bid Rigging

The big news over this weekend of March 25, 2010 is that the Cabal or Cartel representing the CFTC was brought into the headlights of the nations investors.

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Submitted by cpowell on Fri, 2010-03-26 21:53. Section: Daily Dispatches

www.gata.org

5:56p ET Friday, March 26, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

Today we welcome Frank Holmes, CEO of U.S. Global Investors in San Antonio, Texas, to the ranks of tin-foil hat wearers, rent-seeking parasites, and charlatans, on account of the interview he has just given to Alex Steele of Kitco News.

First, Holmes disclosed that his friend Eric Sprott, CEO and senior portfolio manager for Sprott Asset Management in Toronto, who may own Canada’s largest collection of tin-foil hats, recently tried to buy gold from the International Monetary Fund and was refused. Coincidentally, GATA learned this week on the best authority that a financial house far bigger than Sprott also recently tried to purchase gold from the IMF, also was refused, and wasn’t very happy about the refusal.

Ever since its unsatisfactory correspondence with the IMF in April 2008 GATA has maintained that the IMF has no gold at all and that the IMF’s supposed gold sales are merely bookkeeping entries between central banks enveloped in endless agitprop to scare the gold market down:

http://www.gata.org/node/6242

If you doubt this, try asking the IMF yourself: Exactly where is the IMF’s gold kept? In exactly what quantity in what vaults? What are the refineries of the bars and the bar numbers? Is the IMF’s supposed gold segregated from the gold reserves of its member countries or just mixed in with those reserves? When the IMF recently claimed to have sold gold to India, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius, did any gold leave any vault and move to another vault? If so, how much was moved from where to where? Can anyone outside the IMF even see the IMF’s supposed gold? Will the IMF provide public access to its gold records, or will it conceal those records just as the U.S. Federal Reserve admits concealing its gold swap agreements with foreign banks?

Fortunately for the IMF, the financial press never goes beyond reprinting IMF press releases.

… continued at www.GATA.org