India just did a MASSIVE front run against the rest of the world. The next country that tries to acquire 200T [of gold] is going to be a bid in a rising mkt.
IMF sells gold to India’s Reserve Bank
By John Letzing
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — The International Monetary Fund said Monday it’s selling 200 metric tons of gold to the Reserve Bank of India, to help shore up the fund’s finances. The sale is part of a total of 403.3 metric tons of gold approved for sale in September, the IMF said. The sale will “help put the Fund’s finances on a sound long-term footing and enable us to step up much-needed concessional lending to the poorest countries,” IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said in a statement. The sale, which is in the process of being settled, occurred over two weeks ending Oct. 30. According to published reports, the IMF is currently the third-largest official holder of gold, after the U.S. and Germany.
With all the talk of GOLD being in a bubble I found this to be an interesting view. GOLD has outperformed most if not ALL asset classes in the YOY catagory and has held its own on most time increments for the past 10yrs and longer. Below is a monitor of GOLD vs the SPX and a random FX sampling on a daily and QTD view.
Why do they need to tap the treasury seeing that all the banks are all flush. No?
WASHINGTON — Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said her agency is considering borrowing from the U.S. Treasury to replenish its deposit insurance fund.
“We are carefully considering all options” including borrowing from the Treasury, Ms. Bair said Friday after a speech in Washington.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125328162000123101.html#mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews
Please consider these excerpts from Janet Yellen’s recent speech.
Key Quotes
- As painful as this recession has been, I believe that we succeeded in avoiding the second Great Depression that seemed to be a real possibility.
- I regret to say that I expect the recovery to be tepid.
- Even if the economy grows as I expect, things won’t feel very good for some time to come. In particular, the unemployment rate will remain elevated for a few more years, meaning hardship for millions of workers.
- My own forecast envisions a far less robust recovery, one that would look more like the letter U than V. A large body of evidence supports this guarded outlook.
- Unfortunately, more credit losses are in store even as the economy improves and overall financial conditions ease.
- Certainly, households remain stressed. In the face of high and rising unemployment, delinquencies and foreclosures are showing no sign of turning around. Even recent-vintage loans are experiencing rising delinquency rates.
- The chances are slim for a robust rebound in consumer spending, which represents around 70 percent of economic activity. Consumers are getting a boost from the fiscal stimulus package. But this program is temporary.
- It may well be that we are witnessing the start of a new era for consumers following the traumatic financial blows they have endured. While certainly sensible from the standpoint of individual households, this retreat from debt-fueled consumption could reduce the growth rate of consumer spending for years.
- My business contacts indicate that they will be very reluctant to hire again until they see clear evidence of a sustained recovery, and that suggests we could see another so-called jobless recovery in which employment growth lags the improvement in overall output.
Exceptional times call for exceptional measures. The European Central Bank, like other central banks, has introduced non-standard measures to tackle the financial crisis and cushion its impact on the economy – what I call “enhanced credit support”. These have contained the threats to the stability of the euro area’s financial system and supported the flow of credit to companies and households over and above what could be achieved through interest rate cuts alone.
Because of their exceptional nature, these measures will have to be unwound once economic and financial conditions normalise. We at the ECB designed the non-standard measures with our exit strategy in mind, and we are ready to implement this strategy when the appropriate time comes. Stressing the importance of the exit strategy should not be confused with its activation: it is premature to declare the financial crisis over. Today is not the time to exit.
The writer is president of the ECB
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c50df098-98b7-11de-aa1b-00144feabdc0.html
We need some more Lehmans so we can get out of this. Over the past 20 years Messrs Greenspan and Bernanke introduced crony capitalism to the West which is leading to a lost decade[s]. Market fundamentals are that failures should collapse and be replaced by creative new forces rather than being propped up as zombies. Financial institutions have been failing for centuries and the world has survived. Had the central bank allowed the failure of Long Term Capital Management to run its course, Lehman, Bear Stearns, et al would still be here. Everyone would have lost so much capital and fired so many incompetents that the madness of serial bubbles (dotcoms, housing, consumption etc) would never have occurred. Consider the alternative had they propped up the bankrupt Lehman. There would be even more of the same insanity in our central banks and governments than we have now. The idea that a problem of too much debt and too much consumption can be solved by more gigantic debt and consumption is ludicrous.Would that governments stop interfering with fundamental principles and let the market clean out mistakes! Marx is singing in his grave there in London as the US government now controls the auto, mortgage, insurance, banking, et al industries and he has not fired a shot. Letting Lehman fail was perhaps the only thing governments have done right during this whole drama.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/15030bea-9d6a-11de-9f4a-00144feabdc0.html
Mr. Buffett declined to predict the short-run course of the stock market. But corporate data from Berkshire shows his company was selling more stocks than it was buying by the end of the second quarter, according to Bloomberg News. Its spending on stocks fell to the lowest level in more than five years, although the company is still deftly picking up shares in some companies and buying corporate and government debt.
Among the stocks Mr. Buffett has been selling lately is Moody’s, the granddaddy of the much-maligned credit ratings industry. Berkshire, Moody’s largest shareholder, said last week that it had reduced its stake by 2 percent.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/closely-watched-buffett-recalculating-his-bets/
In 1986 Leif Hauge’s brother had a farm in Norway near the sea and wanted to keep his vegetables cool by circulating water from deep in an adjacent fjord that would flow through pipes and surround a storage area. It takes a lot of energy to pump water uphill 100 feet, and if you let the water run back down you waste the energy. Was there a way to recover some of the energy? Have the water running down lift the water going up? Leif Hauge set about building a device to do just that. He eventually gave up after figuring his brother didn’t have quite enough water pressure to harvest. But he learned a lot about energy recovery.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0907/people-ideas-desalination-making-sweet-water-from-motion.html
State government finances are a wreck. The drop in tax receipts is the worst in a half century. Fewer than 10 states ended the last fiscal year with significant reserves, and three-fourths have deficits exceeding 10% of their budgets. Only an emergency infusion of printed federal funny money is keeping most state boats afloat right now.
Most governors I’ve talked to are so busy bailing that they haven’t checked the long-range forecast. What the radar tells me is that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. What we are being hit by isn’t a tropical storm that will come and go, with sunshine soon to follow. It’s much more likely that we’re facing a near permanent reduction in state tax revenues that will require us to reduce the size and scope of our state governments. And the time to prepare for this new reality is already at hand.
Mr. Daniels, a Republican, is the governor of Indiana.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574390603114939642.html
“A new age of electricity is dawning with Smart Grids.”
FRANKFURT — German industrial conglomerate Siemens AG said Friday it expects to receive a total of euro1 billion ($1.43 billion) in electrical smart grid orders in 2009 and is aiming to get over euro6 billion more during the next five years.
In order to achieve that goal, Munich-based Siemens ( SI – news – people ) said it will take a 60 percent stake in the utilities consulting company Energy4u, based in Limburg, Germany, on Oct. 1, but did not offer financial details.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/09/04/business-mobile-telecommunications-eu-germany-siemens_6848505.html
Sept. 3 (Bloomberg) — HSBC Holdings Plc’s Swiss private bank says more rich foreigners are inquiring about moving to Switzerland, spurred by rising taxes at home and concerns about the erosion of banking secrecy for non-residents.
Switzerland’s decision to increase cooperation with the U.S. and neighbors such as France and Germany on tax evasion hasn’t dulled the Alpine nation’s allure for those who are able to take up residence, said Alexandre Zeller, chief executive officer of HSBC’s Swiss bank.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ae3NU.gekp.0
It saddens Don Luis Paparoni, who is almost 90, to summon up memories of the heyday of Venezuela’s coffee production.
“You see these hills?” he asks, gesturing to the lush green valley around Santa Cruz de Mora, a picturesque town at the lower reaches of the Venezuelan Andes. “They used to be carpeted with coffee plants. Now you’ll scarcely find any.”
Venezuela was one of the world’s top coffee exporters in the early 20th century. But for the first time last month the country was forced by looming shortages to import coffee from Brazil, even though locals say it is no match for the local quality Arabica beans.
“When I was young there wasn’t a single household in this town that didn’t have something to do with coffee. It was at the heart of our culture,” says Mr Paparoni, whose father immigrated from Sicily to establish one of the most productive coffee plantations in the Andes in the 1920s.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fa1bef56-97d6-11de-8d3d-00144feabdc0.html
When the rains failed this year they set off once again in search of water and pasture — but they found only despair.
“I could have stayed home or I could have come here, but it is all the same. All that you find is death,” said Peraguan Lesagut, an aging pastoralist who came five months ago with his herd.
After years of persistent drought Lesagut left his two wives and 16 children and drove 200 cattle to the foothills of Mount Kenya — Africa’s second highest summit. Now, only 40 are left; the rest succumbing to cold, disease and exposure.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/09/02/kenya.food.crisis/index.html
This is happening EVERYWHERE. This is deflationary.
Not to mention negative for the GBP and GOVT coffers.———–
According to a leading accountancy firm, one-in-five entrepreneurs who have started a business in the UK would not do so again under the present system, while almost 90pc believe the country is at serious risk of a “brain drain”.
“The message from business is clear,” Nigel May, tax principal at MacIntyre Hudson, said. “What was once a celebrated, competitive tax and regulatory regime has become increasingly burdensome, particularly for those ambitious individuals who underpin the health of our economy.”
https://www.ctmsoftware.com/eContracts/m_econ/Contracts/Listing_Contracts/PRINT_NTC_43_07.asp?co54gTSE3gd=864783&ag836fseYerPs2=4003&eYcry=Z66OI41ERCQKQ6CS7I6W
Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) — International Paper Co., the world’s largest pulp and paper maker, plans to remake commercial forests in the same way Monsanto Co. revolutionized farms with genetically modified crops.
International Paper’s ArborGen joint venture with MeadWestvaco Corp. and New Zealand’s Rubicon Ltd. is seeking permission from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to sell the first genetically engineered forest trees outside China. The Australian eucalyptus trees are designed to survive freezes in the U.S. South.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aEHNB_XJRWGU
Commodities/Futures, Currency | MacroMan | 
November 2, 2009 11:13 pm | 
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