Hello Maurice, I wrote this post to you earlier, on Friday, while traveling. I like to post and touch someone, especially you, and often times Pezz, for it is good therapy for the recipient, may help in retirement management, and is good for me, in first bouncing then pounding in ideas:0)
I am riding in a comfortable double-decked train traveling with client's employees from ShiJiaZhuang to Beijing (3 hrs). After intermodal transport via taxi from train station to the airport, I will fly from Beijing to Hong Kong and arrive home in 9 hours total elapsed time.
I must mention that I always enjoy time spent with clients' people, playing with them as one team or battling the odd rogue as two.
I have nothing weighty to post at this time or indeed ever, and only have some random factual observations and incidental polite thoughts on some seemingly trivial matters that should be obvious to the most casual of passing observers, as usual and before, in mirage-like contrast to those Blixes wandering in the desert looking for sand, or them very expensive Joes walking the Afghan mountains searching for a 6 foot 4 Arab hooked to a rumored dialysis machine presumably pushed around by an one-eyed mullah.
What's next? Searching for a mustached and thuggish looking Saddam in a nation full of look-alikes? A TV show that starts out like, 'will the real Saddam please stand up?'
Thinking along these waves, Blair and Bush always call Hussein by his first name, Saddam. Why is that? Do Hussein Saddam and Udey call Blair Tony and Bush George?
Anyhow, back to topic, the sun is shining. There is harmony and peace all around me, and not a Transport Security Authority agent or homeland safety soldier in sight. Neither is there an inkling of a CDMA phone. All is as it should be, or so it seems.
We in Freedom Kowloon and Money Rock Hong Kong are not yet at orange alert, red alarm, purple panic, or even green concern; and people are using duck tape sparingly, because the export demands have suddenly increased, counter-acting against China's newly announced but intuitive and sooner-or-later expected occasional trade deficit, contributed to in part by the 90 tons of imported gold, many millions of ounces of copper, untold barrels of petroleum, and a fleet of cars that uses the petroleum.
We are experiencing confused puzzlement about a world that has apparently gone more confused than ever.
Some Chinese factories are gearing up to supply gas masks, responding to sudden rise in trade inquiries, at the possible detriment of CDMA gizmos and Toys r' Us widgets.
My fellow passengers in the first class soft seat train carriage (USD 7) are chatting about the big events of the world, probably much as their compatriots do in other nations, some in their respective first class transports.
The newspapers here are devoting a large portion of their printed real estate to the subject of the latest fad, Valentines Day.
What is there for us to post about? ... No, not booms, busts or recoveries, but variations and competing theories on TEOTWAWKI (pronounced strangely, but maybe easily for folks in your neighborhood, te-o-twaw-ki), easier to remember than 'The End Of The World As We Know It', AFAIK FWIW, first given LOL form by Bill Bonner of dailyreckoning.com .
A warning, this TeoTwawKi, same as that TFCO2001 (The Financial Collapse of 2001), is a progression continuum, to be watched, and is not an event singularity, to be watched for.
While on the way from the hotel Crown Plaza, a 5-star offering by the US-based Holiday Inn for the masses in China, to the train station, I spotted my very first of hoped for many more "China Mint Gold Coin Shop". This is a brand new central bank initiative, perhaps in preparation for TeoTwawKi. Can manias and IPOs be far behind?
I believe I am glimpsing at a probable abracadabra that will register strongly on the abracadabra monitor scale, with the indicating needle hitting, then pinned at TeoTwawKi.
I am paying more attention to signs of TeoTwawKi because the concept may prove to be even more inexorable, and wildly profitable, than the currently progressing TFCO2001, that continuing happening that is happening to my wager and your loved QCOM and global everything else, awful days after terrible nights. In other words, the nature trade, obvious exchange, apparent wager and sure bet (“NTOEAWSB”, pronounced N-Toe-Aws-Be).
Yes, TeoTwawKi is happening, setting us up for NToeAwsB, much like a gentle rolling wave crest of a geography altering crimson tsunami, and may soon become the subject of a dedicated SI thread.
Thankfully, in anticipation, a good portion of my savings is hiding, in the form of an old Aztec artifact, ready to survive the maybe long depressive transition and perhaps longer interim darkness.
I saw on last night's TV something else that is curious, the infomercial advertisement of an elitist private K1-K12 boarding school, offering the best of the best, in multiple languages, from the sciences, to the humanistic, and then various forms of martial arts, all for the little emperors and princesses.
I understand a brother of President Bush had just opened a similar school in Shenzhen two months ago, implicitly figuring it to be a better investment than everything everywhere else, bar none. He could be right as we are in the beginning of the TeoTwawKi Script, continuing on from the CFCO2001 epilogue.
So, you see, all is getting odder in this crazy mixed-up world we live in, and getting more mixed up everyday.
I mean, here we have a situation where the Americans are deliberately uniting the disparate interests of its Moslem strategic competitors and its atheist N.Korean something or other through the Axis of Evil concept, snubbing its longtime despotic Islamic allies, and alienating its traditional and recently civilized and Christian friends via Circularity of With US or Against US slogan, to the alleged benefit of a supposed Jewish war criminal.
Are you not as confused as I am muddled?
The Americans may have invented this Axis concept because it wanted to avoid being seen as targeting Moslem countries while it targeted Islamic states, to be politically correct, and so added the ungodly N.Korean ingredient to the dubious stew.
The seasoning used in the stew was WMD, even though WMD in the world, for the most mixed-up part, are hoarded in the US, exactly enough to blowup this and all nearby planets, repeatedly, once every so many weeks, for a bunch of years.
Now, what we may soon have is a grand unification of Islam and WMD, backed by oil-short and suicide-prone N.Koreans. In other words, the worst of all possible unintended outcomes (“TWOAPUC”, pronounced Two-A-Puc).
Worse still, we now have stepped-up tension and talk of rejection of French Cheese and denial of German BMWs, on top of shortage of Venezuelan Oil, Mistreatment of Japanese Cash, hints of turning away of Chinese Money, and possible termination of Russian friendship.
For what? To what ends? At what cost? Financed how?
What is money for if not to be used for German cars, French fois gras, Belgian chocolate, Venezuelan oil, Japanese largess, Chinese renaissance, or Russian ladies? Complete TFCO2001, absolute TeoTwawKi, and positively TwoAPuc.
International electorates want to know, yet are not waiting for the predictably nature answer and practically obvious response.
To add consternation to confusion, the Republican Chairman of the US House of Representative's Ways and Means Committee floated the trial balloon of the US quitting the WTO. All that many years of work by the US, all for naught or be inherited by the other big trading nations, onward to entropy, or, eh, TeoTwawKi.
What next? Announcing competitive devaluations as a strategic initiative, rehearsing reflation printing as an exercise, and acting upon raising of tariff barriers to trade as economic recession palliative?
Possibly, and of course, as these actions would be certainly simplistic to understand, easy to sloganeer, and suitably natural, as in unthinking, for the mob to parrot. These actions hold much promise for unintended but profitable consequences.
The electoral result is apparently manifesting itself through DDGU, QDGU, millions marching on streets in dozens of countries, and of course, possibly OEU-NAD (Old Europe Up New America Down), and in one mixed-up corner of Germany, rejection of an American Rumsfeld nephew.
Too bad, as it is known, that one cannot choose one's relations, one-eyed, 6 feet 4, or chicken hawked.
Can NATO and Euro hold together against preemptive action by the American electorates? Will the German and the French electorates participate in competitive devaluation and energetic printing?
I am not waiting to find out, as before and always, preferring to point my mouse and tap my keyboard, sending still more of my money to Aztec haven, shuffling towards the exit, out of harms way.
I am, as often, excited, because Crisis = Partner, Volatility = Friend, ... even as tomorrow will be a better day than today, never in doubt.
While I am tapping on my keyboard I might as well ping CB ...
Hello CB, Ping! Are you there?
A serious question about your Range Rover or Land Rover, produced by BMW, owned mostly by Germans, worked on by the British, that, as argued by some crowd somewhere at some time, serve to finance terror and reward evil.
Are you perhaps ready for a Buick by General Motors owned mostly by Americans and worked on by the Chinese?
Are you considering boycotting German cars and French bags, a movement that seems to be gathering steaming hoards of chanting followers as shown on CNN in Holiday Inns in China?
What happens if Italy decamps from the chicken hawk camp, as its electorates may push to do? More boycotts? Back to something or other crawfish?
BTW, your favored Bernanke's program of reflating what must inevitably deflate is sending too much loose and idle cash my way, resulting in CLSA, that esteemed French organization quoted by you not so long ago, to upgrade Money Rock Hong Kong share market from under to over weight, anticipating both abracadabra and for good measure, TeoTwawKi.
Will you continue in your possibly hari-kari way of holding Greensputin fiat, much as the Japanese held on to their emperor’s paper, or will you hedge, even if by just a bit, having to choose either that most unfriendly Euro, or the very troublesome gold.
Maurice and CB, when will you two act on Greensputin's recent explicit warning about "the point of no return” (“TPONR”, pronounced T-Pon-Rrr) in regard to manic federal deficit spending, troublesome debt load, weighty interest payment, and presumably, by this listener's interpretation, leading inexorably on to the inevitable and ordained TeoTwawKi?
Given Greensputin’s record on timing, with “irrational exuberance” and such musty thoughts, we may have up to 5 years before the event singularity T-Pon-Rrr, marking the progression continuum of TeoTwawKi.
OTOH, I agree with CB. TeoTwawKi does not have to hurt much, if at all, and should be exploited, at the crest of the crimson deluge, as many times before.
For example, Thailand has just paid off its emergency IMF debt ahead of schedule, 5 years after being struck by crimson financial tsunami, and is now recovering, ready to bid up my Koe Samui beach land purchased little more than one year ago, just in time to build resort to host Chinese tourists sporting Greenspan fiat.
What a mixed up world we live in, where up leads to down, and down leads to up, ever changing, and where bigger bubbles lead to larger bangs, with each day a new TeoTwawKi day.
Chugs, Jay |
