BlackRock is handing out participation trophies to anyone who parrots their specific agenda, effectively silencing anyone who dares to disagree. This whole migration debate is being handled through a strictly left-liberal lens, where if you don't toe the line, you're immediately sidelined.
I’m calling for the removal of Mark Anderson68 from their moderator position. Their blatant bias has completely compromised the objectivity of this forum.
melloworca6 is losing their cool and swearing at people in the politics section.
melloworca6 said:Maybe try looking up from your own backside and seeing how the rest of the world works.
Since the name is in bold, I’m assuming we’re dealing with a moderator here—the same user listed as a mod for the "Health" subforum.
I have to ask: how does someone who gets so worked up that they resort to insults instead of actual arguments end up holding a moderator position? I’d strongly suggest stripping melloworca6 of their moderation privileges.
@Ryan Gomez4: While I’m on board with your prediction regarding economic collapse, I don't think things will spiral so far that society just stops functioning entirely. What I actually anticipate is a steady climb in unemployment, paired with a repetitive cycle where incompetent politicians jump from one region to another, hunting for some magical fix to our economic woes. One guy will swear by high tech, another will push for manufacturing, a third will pivot to finance, a fourth toward tourism or agriculture—but they’ll all just keep spinning their wheels until enough people realize that neoliberalism is a dead end.
For those convinced that automation is going to swallow every single job, take a look at how sardines are canned here in the States: http://www.youtube.com/v=Tc_Zim1Ra-0#t=178 The gist: fish move along a conveyor belt, workers grab them, trim the heads and tails with shears, and then stuff them into the cans by hand. Could robots do this? Sure, technically. But let's be real—it's still much cheaper to pay a person.
Word on the street is someone just dumped an amount of silver onto the CME Group that's basically what we mine in two and a half years. It feels like a blatant attempt to bait some naive retail traders into selling while the price is pinned down.
Harold Martin10 said:Meanwhile, someone holding gold right now can buy 5% less ammo, and that ammo itself is already 20% less valuable than it was a year ago.🙂
By the way, I’m not trying to play fortune teller here—I’m just pointing out that a 20% drop in what an ammo stash can actually buy isn't exactly great news for anyone holding gold.
If you sell your gold today, you're locking in a loss. Period. But that just means right now isn't the time to be selling.
Sure, once PM starts climbing and oil and other commodities start heating up, the average Joe begins thinking about shifting his cash into those assets. Then, suddenly, when ten to twenty percent of the population follows suit, prices skyrocket. Everyone else is left holding a handful of paper that’s suddenly worth about ten percent of what a barrel of oil, an ounce of gold, or even a chicken would have bought them just a few days prior.
Since nobody seems to have shared this yet: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-0...lessons-keynes
My take? We’re heading toward that incredibly rare moment where the yield on simply sitting on cash actually beats the return on investment. It sounds absurd, I know, but it points to one inevitable conclusion: precious metals are going to absolutely crush just about every other asset class out there—with the lone exception of mining stocks and natural resource plays.
When you actually sit down and watch the news, it’s hard to ignore the red flags. There are so many indicators suggesting the US economy is sliding, and frankly, our current footing feels incredibly shaky. We're seeing unemployment numbers being massaged right before elections, even though we had that 0.1% dip in Q4 despite the Quantitative Easing stimulus. Now, there's just more talk about printing money through further QE. Meanwhile, the middle class is being hollowed out, student debt is bloated to the point of total collapse, and banks are basically creative accounting their way through foreclosures—treating properties that should be underwater as if everything is perfectly fine. On top of that, look at the global stage: major economies are either already deep in aggressive QE and interventionism, like Japan and China, or they’ll be forced to follow suit very soon, much like the European Union.
By any standard economic logic, we should be seeing inflation by now. Yet, despite all the noise, the markets seem stuck obsessing over late 2011 price levels, and so far, we haven't seen any significant spike. People have been shouting about it and predicting it for years, but as of today, it hasn't materialized.
It makes me wonder if there’s some sort of invisible threshold—a tipping point where inflation stops being a slow, linear crawl and suddenly hits a step function. Could it be that inflation stays stagnant at around 2.5% for months, only to suddenly teleport to 6% or 8% and then rocket upward from there? After all, inflation reporting isn't some daily heartbeat; it's a quarterly snapshot.
From my perspective, those in power have zero incentive to announce high inflation. If they did, you'd see a massive flight of capital into any asset people hope will hold its value—think real estate, precious metals, oil, or food futures. At the same time, consumer spending would crater because people, terrified of losing their purchasing power, would start hoarding cash. That would tank stock prices just as interest rates rise for the corporations trying to produce goods. That's my take on why there's this "threshold" effect and why we're currently just muddling along in this strange limbo.
I honestly think anyone trying technical analysis on precious metals is just fighting a losing battle against massive market manipulation. Some interesting news to chew on: yesterday, an entity like the Silver Institute scooped up over 500 tons of physical silver. Meanwhile, in Japan, the Prime Minister is moving to strip the central bank of its independence, while Russia is essentially printing Yen to fund their growth and national debt—exactly what our friend Nostradamus has been warning us about for ages. The Federal Reserve is ramping up primary issuance, too. Over here in the States, we’re seeing economic data being massaged to fit a "wishful thinking" narrative of positivity. In Spain, they're dipping into pension funds to cover state debt. And the Chinese? They’ve always printed whatever they needed, and they’ll double down now to maintain control during this period of cooling demand.
Once the Federal Reserve starts devaluing the Dollar, the Japanese Yen and the Chinese currency will inevitably be crushed under the weight of it all. Eventually, the Spanish will bleed their pension funds dry and have no choice but to beg the Federal Reserve to print enough to cover their deficits. When that happens, the Dollar will follow the path of the other major currencies. Even the Swiss Franc, which is tied to the Dollar, will go down with the ship.
If this isn't a fantastic medium-term setup for precious metals, then I don't know anything about football.
Gregory Wells5 said:We probably won't see that requested gold returned until 2020 at the earliest. Honestly, I doubt the Federal Reserve can even find an empty shipping container headed toward Europe right now... absolute joke...
If you listen to the cynics over at ZeroHedge, the US doesn't even have that much gold; they just have tungsten bars coated in gold, meaning it'll take seven years of digging just to find 300 tons.
It is interesting how they suddenly noticed that France—with the Federal Reserve pulling 350 tons out of Paris, again spread out over several years at 50 tons annually—has all of a sudden decided to intervene in Mali, one of the major gold producers in Africa.
Right now, everyone is forecasting recoveries and growth, but it feels more like wishful thinking than actual reality. If stocks dive a bit further, the scenario becomes more likely that precious metals become a safe haven not just for the goldbugs, but for the big institutional players too, which could send prices skyward.
Let’s not overcomplicate this. Can we just agree on the following summary: - We're staring down a massive influx of liquidity. Between QE4 and the Federal Reserve printing money to bail out government debt and "stabilize" the big banks, the floodgates are open. - The economy is essentially being suffocated; unemployment remains high and manufacturing is lagging significantly. - Ever since the turn of the millennium, the stock market hasn't matched the kind of performance we saw during those golden fifty years prior. - Gold is keeping pace with the expanding money supply, while silver generally follows its lead. - There's a very real chance silver could see a major price spike once it starts running thin as an industrial metal.
Ben isn't looking to crash the dollar; he's just printing as much as necessary to buy up those US Treasuries. He’ll keep the presses running indefinitely if that’s what it takes to keep liquidity flowing through the banks, all under the guise of stimulating the economy. But let's be real—banks aren't interested in building factories here in the States. They’d much rather gamble on speculation or grab cheap dollars to dump into emerging markets instead of actually investing in domestic manufacturing.
The dollar's value has to drop eventually. You can't just print money endlessly without any actual backing; eventually, its value against everything tangible is going to slide.
Anthony Evans78 said:I don't buy paper gold or silver to play the market or hunt for tops and bottoms. I buy physical bullion as a way to save and protect the value of my hard-earned money. Graham's theories apply to investing, not to basic saving. Until the human race invents a better way to store value than precious metals, I'm sticking with what works. Besides, 5,000 years of proven history is on my side, isn't it? And if we're talking about peaks and valleys, paper gold and silver are still light-years away from hitting a true ceiling.
The way I see it, the primary engine driving precious metals against fiat currency is simply the endless printing of money. Precious metals don't actually move much—they aren't really surging or crashing—it's just that the Dollar is constantly losing its value, which creates the illusion of growth in the metals market.
Given the perpetual state of crisis we find ourselves in today, I think it’s highly probable we’ll see an aggressive increase in money supply. That could easily send inflation spiraling into high single digits or even low double digits.
It’s fascinating watching the mainstream media push this narrative of a "moderate recovery," especially when you look at how the issues in Europe are just starting to boil over. To fix the mess, they'll either have to perform some kind of financial alchemy, or debt will pile up so high that interest payments become impossible to cover. If that happens, the only way out is a massive correction through inflation. The big banks won't like it, but sooner or later, it's inevitable.
We’ll see what happens when the fiscal cliff finally hits. It feels almost certain that the US will raise the debt ceiling, and since nobody in their right mind is going to swallow that massive amount of Treasury bills, the Federal Reserve will just print more dollars. When that happens, you can bet your life that gold and silver will track the money supply and climb.
Maybe the domestic economy outperforms gold over the long haul. But on the short to medium term? I’m looking at a crisis—no, a massive meltdown—that won't end anytime soon, because they keep using that old 2008 playbook to just drag everything out. We’re watching the administration sharpen its teeth on the housing market. Who’s to say they won't turn their sights on land next? This isn't the time to buy into reality while everyone is still playing optimistic, hoping things "won't get too bad." You buy when the pressure is on, when people are backed into a corner and start panic-selling everything just to escape the tax man.
For now, my money is on precious metals, especially silver. Silver has all the same drivers as gold, plus its own unique reasons to rally. Plus, it isn't one of those trendy investments everyone is piling into, which means it stays off the radar of heavy tax scrutiny. And even if the IRS does come knocking, how are they supposed to know what you've got tucked away in a safe at home or halfway across the globe?
It looks like someone went ahead and renamed the thread "Why NOT the USA? Reasons, campaigns, and protests" to "Why YES or NO to the USA? Reasons, campaigns, and protests."
It’s no joke if Viktor Orbán were to receive a missile from NATO, though as you suggested, other, less dramatic methods of removal—like a grassroots uprising—seem far more likely. I caught a piece in the latest Globe about Orbán, and it’s a perfect example of why you shouldn't touch the "sacred" concept of central bank independence. It was a terrible read, frankly, just pure indoctrination. So many civil servants, journalists, and influential figures in this country are so deeply brainwashed that they stop thinking the moment anyone questions these "sacred cows."
The list of shifts you mentioned—state-backed money printing, nationalizing banks, slashing foreign debt by decree (say, cutting repayments to a third), restricting imports to fix the deficit, boosting domestic production through import substitution, price controls, and so on—sounds familiar. About a year ago, an American representative at the WTO floated similar ideas regarding import restrictions (given the massive US deficit). The German representative, coming from a nation with a huge surplus, dismissed it as a "return to a planned economy." And we all know how much value a planned economy actually holds. It's worth nothing.
Do you honestly think a small state like Rhode Island has any chance of significantly curbing imports? Even if we did pivot back to a planned economy, how could Rhode Island sustainably fund its current level of consumption? On the revenue side, we rely heavily on tourism and remittances from people living abroad. We might be able to get agriculture up to speed relatively quickly, but when it comes to complex goods—machinery, electronics, automobiles—our domestic versions would be inferior and nearly impossible to export. Just look at the history of old American manufacturing giants that couldn't compete; our own citizens would revolt against those low-quality domestic products anyway.
Regarding the trade balance, the concept of "offsetting" used in arms deals sounds intriguing. You see it often—take the debates over whether to buy Saab jets or Mikoyan fighters. If the US buys aircraft for, say, a billion Euros, the Swedes might commit to importing a billion Euros worth of American goods in return. It has nothing to do with free trade, but it’s certainly balanced and fair. Perhaps that logic could apply to general commerce: for every import, you don't just find a seller; you mandate an offset for exports and then find a buyer for those exports too. At first glance, it sounds like bartering, but if there were an electronic exchange where such trades happened instantly, maybe it could work? Offset-based trade?
Maria Thomas48 said:It’s pretty obvious the new Treasury Secretary hasn't got a clue how to actually fund the budget deficit. It feels like he hasn't even glanced at this thread, otherwise, there would be plenty of much better ideas than what we're seeing right now.
Instead, he relies on these academic advisors from top economics departments who have spent their whole careers proving they're great at whatever favors they need to secure. I wonder if our Treasury Secretary will ever truly grasp where the real money in this country actually comes from.
Whether he understands it or not, do you honestly think primary issuance of currency is even feasible? What would it take? We’d need a total overhaul of the Federal Reserve laws, facing a barrage of criticism from every angle, and ultimately, massive external pressure. The issue isn't just that the US shouldn't print its currency in a way that offends the banksters; it's that we can't allow such a precedent to succeed, lest larger, more powerful nations follow suit. Will enough pressure be applied, or will there be a "sudden accident," a forced regime change, or perhaps an "accidental" nuclear strike on Washington, D.C.?
A question for Maria Thomas48—I have to hand it to you, that was a fascinating thesis you laid out. If our current monetary system, built entirely on debt, is driving us toward a reality where everything ends up being owned by the banks—and history tells us we've never actually seen that happen before—do we have any historical precedents for a "hard reset"? I'm talking about a total break in the cycle that forces everything back to square one.
Could it be through war and the total collapse of a currency, like what happened with the Reichsmark? Or perhaps a full-scale national bankruptcy and a complete restart, similar to what we saw in Argentina, Russia, or Iceland? Maybe even hyperinflation, much like the chaos in America?