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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bearcub who wrote (36733)	7/6/1999 11:43:00 PM
From: Rarebird	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116753

I just accesed it: Spot Gold: $257.20/257.65 I use IE5 Pentium II 450. The daily and weekly charting is good. forex.freeservers.com ( Direct Link for streaming quotes ). I didn't register. forex.freeservers.com ( not direct for streaming quotes) PS I checked these links. They work on my computer.

To: bearcub who wrote (36733)	7/7/1999 12:32:00 AM
From: Rarebird	Respond to of 116753

Very Good Read: Has derivatives disease infected US companies? Tuesday 6 July 1999 In Tokyo, foreign brokers have been in trouble recently. They are accused, as it were, of turning native and helping Japanese banks to hide some of their staggering losses. The route to concealment involves derivatives. If you own assets that have fallen in price, you have made a loss. If you don't want this known you will welcome help, particularly if your job is at stake. You need someone who will buy the assets at their original cost and such people are normally difficult to find. The problem can at least be postponed, if you can sell your duds at the wrong price and buy their duds at an equally wrong price to compensate. But you must not be found out and you must be able to pretend that the asset you have bought is worth its purchase price. This means either fooling the accountants, or having silly accounting rules. Derivatives, are ideal. The accounting rules are bizarre and many derivatives transactions are so complicated that no one understands them - least of all, it seems, many of those who buy them. Conniving at mis-priced transactions raises moral issues, but if you are 'flexible' then such problems can be accommodated. Flexible may be described as follows: 'I am flexible, you are devious, he is unreliable and they are downright dishonest.' As standards rise and fall things become less or more flexible. The rhythm goes with markets. Standards rise in bear markets and fall in booms. Just as Japan's bear market has raised standards so they have fallen during America's bubble. Confirmation of this has just been provided by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. Under pressure from dozens of companies, it has agreed to delay new rules on derivatives for a year. It has also backed away from a proposal to write off goodwill over 10 years. Under the new rules derivatives would have to be recorded at fair market value. Not, it would seem, an unreasonable idea. Shareholders would have a better idea of the real profits and balance sheets of the companies they own. It would also make it more difficult to disguise, Japanese-style, losses they might have made on other assets. More than 120 companies and banks asked for the delay arguing that computers, already swamped with Y2K problems, could crash. Unlike benighted foreigners, US corporations had previously been claiming that such problems did not apply to them. There are two likely explanations for this change of heart. The first is that many US companies still have real Y2K problems. The second is that they don't, but have something to hide over their holdings of derivatives. Optimists will presumably argue that the companies have a lot of unrealised profits which they would have to reveal under the new rules and they are loath to do this for fear of causing shareholders too much excitement. Only old curmudgeons will assume that derivatives have been used in America, as well as Japan, to allow profits to be overstated. smithers.co.uk PS. My wife told me yesterday that she saw an interview on CNBC with Ron Insana and Clinton. Clinton said that "all bubbles come to an end but we will try to prolong it as long as possible."