A Thought Experiment On The Value Of Gold

My "Trail Guide" FOFOA wrote a new piece just Wednesday.  In it he describes how hard it is to convince those we know to buy some gold.  Even when many of those know that our system has gone horribly off the rails.  He is not trying to convince others, he is mostly just reporting as well as charting what he feels will be the end-game, at least regarding gold.

fofoa.blogspot.com

In the comments section below his article, there was a remarkable comment by one of his readers "Hill C", I lightly edit the quotation:

"Do you believe that China would exchange its current $2 trillion reserves for all of America's gold currently valued at $419 billion?  The answer is almost universally "Yes or probably"."

In other words, lots of people that "Hill C" knows believe that China would happily trade its $2 trillion dollar horde for $419 billion in gold, taking a US$ LOSS of over $1.5 TRILLION to take the gold.

Furthering Hill C's idea, do you think that the US government would allow China to do that?  To let the Chinese take our $419 billion in gold in exchange for settling the $2 trillion in debt?  The answer is: NO WAY.


---

The below graph is a tool that I am now going to be using to monitor stress in the physical gold markets. That is, how available gold (that would be the metal, not gold futures or other types of "paper gold") really is at the market price.

Buying REAL GOLD always costs more that the quoted "spot" price (found at kitco.com or 24hgold.com or even right here at my blog).  This higher price exists because there is a "premium" (spot plus a "premium", the premium covers other costs like transport, opportunity cost of capital, etc.) over the spot ("paper") price of gold.

The graph below shows the price of gold (Y Axis) vs. the premium over the price of gold (X Axis) in order to be able to buy a 1 oz Gold Eagle (coin), America's most popular retail way to buy gold.  The graph's data points are from Dec 30, 2011 - Jan 13, 2012, so it is very short term.  The original data comes from the eBay/24hgold.com joint venture widget.

Click on the image for a better view.

To help interpret the graph, please look at the five points above "0.10".  That 0.10 means that on each of those times I took the data that a Gold Eagle had a 10% percent price premium (on eBay) vs. the quoted price of gold in the markets.  Note that the premium has varied quite a bit in just a bit over two weeks, from 7% to 19%.  Please also note that there is NO time information, the linear trend you can see shows that as the recent price of gold has been lower, the premium tends to be higher.

FOFOA believes that what is going to happen sooner or later is that the "paper gold" price will not reflect the real value of gold (because of the approximately 100 times the paper claims on each physical ounce, that is LOTS of derivatives claiming the same ounce).  "Paper gold" will eventually become worth less (worthless), and for a short time there will be NO GOLD available because owners of gold will NOT sell...  Until the price of gold goes much higher...

The graph (and the Widget, found at 24hgold.com, at their home page at the bottom), will help me follow how scarce physical gold is vs. the paper price.  This is the ONLY way I know of at present to follow this dynamic.

---

Let's go back to the Thought Experiment above (would China exchange its $2 trillion of Treasury debt for just $419 billion worth of gold).  That kind of implies that gold is/should be worth over $7600 / oz right now (($2 trillion / $419 billion) * $1600).

Let's think some more.  If the USA were to pay off our debt by exchanging gold for it, the price of gold would have to be $75,000 per ounce...

Review of Barron's, Dated 9 January 2012

My weekends normally have a fairly steady rhythm, on Saturdays I run errands while my wife does the grocery shopping.  Sundays is doing things around our apartment.  Sometimes we get out, yesterday was one of those days.  I took her to a mall for several hours, and since I knew that I would likely have the time to read Barron's, I bought it and brought it along.

This week's review will be shorter than normal, and even when I review it at more length, it will still be an injustice to a weekly newspaper that is both big and densely packed with information.  The MAIN reason this week's review is short is that my wife is having company today: two of her friends are coming over to speak in Italian.  I of course want know part of that...

Alan Abelson wonders if the little recovery in the stock market was just a "Holiday Pop".  Of more interest to me was his last section, partly about gold (hey what else), in which he quotes from Tom Fitzpatrick of Citigroup. Tom is bullish on gold, he feels that it is on its way to $2400 after a first stop at $1802 ($1802?  why not just leave it at $1800?).  Fitzpatrick likes the technicals of gold here.  Tom goes on to make other predictions:

-- 10-year Treasury yields to an even lower 1.25%, 30-years to 2%
-- the euro down to $1.20, maybe even $1.10
-- the S&P (now at 1277) takes a dive to about 1000 before bouncing back up to about 1200

---

On Page 12, Barron's quotes George Soros:

"If the common currency were to break down, it will lead to the breakup of the [EU].  This will be catastrophic... for the global financial system."

FWTW (I am not a George Soros fan)

---

Union Pacific (UNP), Cisco (CSCO), Robert Half (RHI) and Alcoa (AA) are all mentioned favorably in separate articles on each company.  Medifast (MED), a competitor of Weight Watchers, not so much...

---

Ray Tiernan ("Technology Week") writes on the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show coming soon in Las Vegas.  Last year, a bunch of companies announced their own versions of "tablet computers" to compete with Apple's iPad.  Despite the fanfare, none of them sold very well.  Mighty Apple.

This year, Tiernan notes, may very well have old names like Microsoft and Intel come out with a bang.  Microsoft is likely to sell its new Windows 8 operating system as well as make a bigger push into cellphone OS.  Intel also will introduce "three-dimensional" transistor (no details were given) as well as cell phone chips.

---

John Steele Gordon writes a guest article on how even in the 1800s the government was a bad venture capitalist (the Erie Railway, to compete with the Erie Canal).  The Erie Railway never worked out well, very expensive, way over budget and much slower to build than anticipated.  The Erie Railway went bankrupt, over and over again.  Kind of reminds me of the California Hi Speed rail project, which will connect Fresno with Bakersfield (later LA and SF) or Solyndra...

---

The Classifieds had a few gems of note.  You might want to check out "The Most Luxurious Residence in the Caribbean": www.onesandylane.com.  Other things there include another midwest farm for sale (1525 acres), internet website domain names for sale, a Colorado ski resort and a "reverse merger" opportunity.

---

Editor Thomas Donlan writes that even with ethanol subsidies expiring, he sees no end to government distortion of our energy markets.  Sigh...

---

This weekend's Cover Story is about the money market funds ("Broken Forever"), where we see that even non-insured (FDIC) money market funds are only offering some 0.02%...  This story is in the quarterly Mutual Funds section.

---

In the Markets Section on Page M5 is an update on Joy Global (JOY, recently moved to the NYSE).  Joy is one of the very few makers of BIG mining equipment and machines.  This is a company I like, and the future looks good for mining machinery makers...

---

NOTHING of note happening in Europe (!), Asia, the bond markets or even in commodities.

Money stuff:

-- A fairly big drop in Federal Reserve assets (still very close to $3 tn...)
-- No real changes in M1, M2 or the Monetary Base
-- The US$ is stronger vs. everything except: the mighty Peruvian Sol kicking the dollar's teeth!

---

Verdict: You make the call.

A New Widget

I was just over at Ancona's blog, while there I saw he had an interesting widget which I will try out now.  It comes from ClustrMaps and it apparently will track where my visitors come from for all to see.

Let's see how it works over the coming days!

The below is my grand total of where my hits have come from (Blogger supplies this):

United States 9,754

Brazil 532

Canada 497

United Kingdom 469

Australia 322

Germany 299

Bahrain 153

Japan 151

New Zealand 149

Russia 124

Cars In Peru. Life In Rural California.

Two for the price of one today!

OK, this first one is in Spanish, but it has some very interesting information for a bearing buyer for Peru.  There are 147 brands of cars in Peru, 91 of which are from China!  12 from Japan and 10 from the USA.  China is very strong because Peru has a free trade agreement with China (as it also does with the USA and Korea).

Japanese brands have 37.6% of the market, Korea 22.9%, China 14.4% and only 11.7% from the USA.

Their automobile association predicts a 20% growth in number of cars sold in 2012 vs. 2011.


De acuerdo con el estudio de la AAP, en el Perú existen 147 marcas de autos, de las cuales 91 de ellas son chinas, 12 japonesas, 10 de Estados Unidos, 6 italianas, 6 peruanas, entre otras.
Las marcas chinas ya se encuentran en tercer lugar de preferencia. Las marcas más vendidas son las de Japón (37.6%), de Korea (22.9%), de China (14.4%) de Estados Unidos (11.7%), entre otras.
La AAP proyectó que durante el 2012 las ventas de vehículos nuevos serán de 180.000 unidades, un incremento de más de 20% respecto al 2011.

http://economia.terra.com.pe/noticias/noticia.aspx?idNoticia=201201061634_TRP_80692126

---

Zero Hedge's "Rocky Racoon" sent me this very interesting story from Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative (I guess) guy living in rural California.  Trust me, this is worth reading.  And it ain't pretty!

http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson122211.html
Best line from the article:  "We need middle-class misdemeanors to pay for the felonies of the underclass."
Should be required reading by politicians and law enforcement?
There isn't much to agree or disagree with since it's just one person's view.

December 22, 2011
A Vandalized Valley
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

A Gold Graphic

Here is a cool graphic showing very salient facts about gold in one nice cozy place.  Click on the image for a better view.

In this infographic we take a look at various facts about gold.

---

Number Sleuth is a site that's all about numbers. On our blog we will be posting infographics about statistical trends and various other number related facts.

Numbers make our world go round. Economies run on numbes. Science gets analyzed in numbers. Bombs get built by numbers. People are identified by numbers (social security numbes, phone numbers, street address numbers, etc.)

Number Sleuth is our attempt to pay homage to numbers, especially statistics, from a unique and refreshing angle and we hope you enjoy.

As time goes on we will be adding more and more features to this site so please stay tuned.

*******

Robert back at you here.  Here is their website.

http://www.numbersleuth.org/

I have yet to explore numbersleuth.org, but it looks like an interesting that site I would like, what numbers and all.  They will even let you place that image as a widget on a blog site, but the image was REALLY BIG, it did not "fit" in the widgets part of my blog. So, I just copied it and pasted it in above.

A Record Debt!

^---  The widget above shows us crossing the $124,000 line per taxpayer of federal government debt.  It was not too long ago when I put that widget up when we were at $119,000. (OK, yes, this debt widget shows slightly different numbers than the "Official Debt", but the difference is tiny).  We now owe more than 100% of our GNP!  This is usually the level when "SJGR".  Bad things happen at these (and marching ever higher) levels of debt

Do YOU feel more able to pony $5000 MORE as your "share"?  Are you happy about it?

The answer is: HELL NO!


The psychopaths running our .gov and our financial system have foisted over $5000 more per taxpayer just since Fringe Blogger Bearing started his blog!

---

OK, let me put away the emotion for a moment.  Let us explore what is possible to do in order to resolve it.  There are three ways that could be done to bring down our debt:

1)  Cut spending and/or raise taxes to put us into a surplus, that money would then be used to pay down the debt.  But, we already know how likely that is, in one of my probability classes I learned what zero probability was.  There is a 0% probability that this will happen.  They may raise taxes, but they will NEVER cut spending, not under the R Team (Ron Paul now has no chance of winning the nomination) and nor (especially) the D Team.

2)  Formal default of our debt is another way.  Our Treasury debt (the $124,000 per taxpayer) is held both US investors (individuals, banks, insurance companies, etc.) as well as foreign (China and Japan for example).  In the past, Reinhart & Rogoff (This Time Is Different) have shown us that defaulting on either (or both) the local and domestic debts has happened many times.  Two variations of this is partial default ("haircuts") and debt re-scheduling (putting the debt off further into the future).

3)  Defaulting via inflation, in which our Treasury and the Fed could just print the money, and so the value of the US dollar would decline in real terms, and the debt would then be easier to pay off in more abundant dollars that are worth less then before.  This is tricky to do though.  There are BIG losers in inflation, and if they do it wrong, BIGGER LOSERS in hyperinflation.  History provides many examples of this kind of default as well.

To my knowledge, the above three ways of paying down the debt (or in combination) are the ONLY ways of doing it!  How are we going to do that?  NO ONE (of importance) is seriously talking about this.  Lending more evidence that we are run by a psychopathic system that is completely irresponsible, out of control and led by people of very low quality...

This will not end well.  Most of you already know that.

When the widget shows us $125,000 per taxpayer, in some 5 - 6 weeks from now, although it does seem to be happening a little faster now (that would be known as "exponential growth", a topic I will write about soon), I will re-visit this whole sham of our national debt.

And Europe, on the whole, is probably a little further down this awful road than we are.

And, of course, I have not even addressed the other debts (debts incurred by states like California, credit card debt, onerous student loan debt and so on and so on) that are crippling our Middle Class, our financial system and our entire way of life.

A Record Year!

I am happy to announce that our bearing import company in Peru (Ameru Trading del Peru S.A.) had a record year in 2011!

Year	Total Sales
1999	$442,634.70
2000	$545,369.41
2001	$413,146.06
2002	$390,902.78
2003	$396,484.10
2004	$422,405.76
2005	$495,858.49
2006	$629,388.58
2007	$780,246.53
2008	$894,069.17
2009	$863,963.03
2010	$905,912.08
2011	$926,366.52

Freedom & Liberty vs. The Psychopaths

What do the following have in common?:

-- the TV show "Dexter Morgan"
-- this article: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/148141-The-Trick-%20of-the-Psychopath-s-Trade-Make-Us-Believe-that-Evil-Comes-from-Others
-- and the "greatest truth never told"

That they live among us, the psychopaths.

It has only been in the last few weeks that I have been become aware of the huge interest now seen in how many people are waking up to see the damage that psychopaths (loosely, social predators without a conscience or empathy for others) have been doing to our society and have been for thousands of years...

The hit show "Dexter Morgan" features a main character who feels little or no emotion and has deeply driven need to kill others.  The wrinkle here is that Dexter is able to channel his murders to kill those who really deserve it.  It's a fascinating show...  Sickos / psychos everywhere...  My wife and I have started Season Two, but the show is still on (Showtime I believe) making it five or more years it has been running.  So far in Season Two, we find that maybe there is a tiny bit of empathy growing in Dexter (he is currently trying to get back into his girlfriend's graces), but we will have to see where that goes (please do NOT email me anything, LOL...).

Secondly, the link above takes you to an interview with three relative experts in the apparently monstrously huge problem of how psychopaths are ruling us and spreading havoc and pain in their wake.  And have done so for thousands of years.  The interview (transcript) is very long, but they define psychopaths and describe how you tell them from normal people.  They estimate that some 6% of people are psychopaths, the overwhelming majority being men.  Here are some characteristics:

-- they are wolves in sheep's clothing (outwardly they act like us, but only for their benefit)
-- they lie, and lie and lie.  They will often contradict themselves after just a few minutes...
-- most can identify other psychopaths easily, even when they are children
-- they can be charming to those they want something from, seem so normal...
-- when their guard is down, you can see how they treat waiters and the elderly (for example)
-- it's not just politicians: Jamie Dimon, Ben Bernanke, Jon Corzine, Lloyd Blankfein, etc.

And these psychopaths are responsible for wars, excess debt, astonishing robbery and genocides.  And they are our leaders.  From the article:

"It is not that power corrupts, it is that corrupt individuals seek power."

How can 6% of the people take over and continue their rule over us?  Part of the reason is they ARE so ruthless that we normal people just cannot understand them, that we cannot SEE people as being so bad.  But, they have "enablers" (my word) too: some 12% more of the population will follow psychopathic tendencies or psychopaths to get what they want.

Thirdly, a guy on the Internet has come out with a remarkable series of videos demonstrating that the psychopaths have been a tyrannical plague on humanity for thousands of years.  Take another look at that quote in blue just above.  He has done 35 videos to date.  They range from about about a minute to 10 minutes each.  I would suggest starting at the beginning, it will take awhile to get through them, but it is very enlightening:

http://thegreatesttruthnevertold.com/

Click the link above, then click on the video at his site.

He describes in great detail how the system ("the international financial $ system", my words, not his) is going to fail.  And it has been just the latest example in human history of the damage that psychopaths do.  He also shows us the way out!  The way out is for EACH of us to reach within to gather our personal liberty and freedom.  This is not an easy thing to do in a country now hurtling towards totalitarianism, but having been based on a Constitution that was the first really decent political system ever created.  When questioned  after the Constitutional Convention what happened, what they had created, in there, here is what a major player had to say (quotation not exact):

"A republic madam, if you can keep it."
-- Benjamin Franklin

Indeed, if we can keep it.

*****

It is up to us, as individuals who are waking up, to defend our families from the destruction of the criminally psychopathic individuals who rob us and get us into wars.

Apparently there is A LOT of recent and current study going on re identifying such people and how they get to the top.  For the rest of us, we must try to grow, through love, striving for personal freedom and to wake ourselves up.