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

To: Casaubon who wrote (48834)	2/11/2000 8:43:00 AM
From: Alex	Respond to of 116786

HOW SUMMERS ROCKED MARKET By JOHN CRUDELE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A little trick that the Clinton administration played last week on the Federal Reserve and the bond market cost Wall Street billions of dollars. And the chaos that was started last week cost Washington billions yesterday when it encountered the worst 30-year bond sale in at least 17 years. That wasn't Treasury Secretary Larry Summers' intention when he upstaged the Fed's interest rates hike by announcing that 30-year bond sales would be curtailed and eventually phased out. But that's exactly what happened. Then, rubbing salt into the big brokerage firms' wounds, Summers riled the markets again this week when he tried to correct his goof. The results? More big losses. The notion of junking 30-year bond sales is ludicrous, of course. There is no federal budget surplus. Bureaucrats like Summers -- desperately trying to keep rates down and the bubble inflated -- are hoping to reduce government borrowing from private citizens by raiding the Social Security trust fund. The trick is simple: Cut the issuance of 30-year bonds and leave IOUs -- which are no different than bonds -- in the retirement trust in place of the cash taken. That may or may not work for a while. But it definitely won't work when Social Security needs its dough back and the government will have to do an enormous amount of extra borrowing from private citizens, over and above what's needed to run the country. But that'll be another administration's problem. While Summers might be a hero in this White House for his bold and completely unexpected announcement the day of the rate hike, he might want to stay away from Wall Street for a while. "The losses are in the billions," said one insider who surveyed the damage right after the remarks made by the unsavvy successor of Wall Street insider Robert Rubin. "Goldman won't go bankrupt. But a lot of people lost their bonuses for the year, and some people will be fired." Goldman and all the other investment banks on Wall Street have had quite a good run during the Clinton administration. And in bubble-land you don't go poking your finger at anyone lest the air start coming out of every investment. So those skunked by Summers will probably brood in private. Michael Belkin, a Fed watcher who runs Belkin Ltd., says Summers not only "has earned the enmity from burned fixed income traders on Wall Street," but that his bond buyback "could prove the bane to the overheating U.S. economy." By tricking the bond market into pushing long-term interest rates lower, Summers will probably force the Federal Reserve to institute more interest rate hikes than would have been needed to slow inflation. nypostonline.com

To: Casaubon who wrote (48834)	2/11/2000 11:53:00 AM
From: goldsheet	Respond to of 116786

> I no longer set price objectives in advance. I just try to let the market tell what it is doing That's what I do when it comes to trading, but it is still fun to throw a few wild ideas and guesses into the GPM discussion.

To: Casaubon who wrote (48834)	2/11/2000 3:59:00 PM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 116786

Le Metropole members, It pleases me to tell you that a wire service took the recent comments by Jack Thomson, Chairman of Homestake Mining out of context. One of GATA's most ardent supporters and a significant Homestake shareholder spoke to the chairman today he was so upset about the wire service headline. Our GATA supporter told me that Jack Thompson was one stand up guy, could not have been nicer and was very bullish about the price prospects for gold. Some highlites of what Jack Thompson had to say today to him:  The day of reckoning for the shorts is accelerating  A tremendous amount of selling or liquidity has been absorbed by the gold market buyers. That liquidity is going to dry up and buying gold in size will be much more difficult without having to pay up for it.  Homestake is lightly hedged and will stay that way. The amount of hedging that Homestake does amounts to about the ROUNDING ERROR of their competition. Good news for the gold market and for all you Homestake shareholders!