Hi Maurice, <<gold will double [and stay there]>> Come on, help me out by using your CDMA-enabled imagination. Gold will not just double.
Do you know what our CDMA-toting Indians will do when threatened with atomic tan by their genetic cousins?
Message 17510454
I do not know either. So how come you know that the Aztec folks were wrong, as we are stepping backward along temporal axis to their violent era?
I apologize for burdening this post to you with some random observations and haphazard thoughts.
Dated May 22nd, 2002.
I am on the train from Beijing to ShiJiaZhuan 3 hours away. The city is meant for no investor's money. My issue is how to extract residual value from a past power plant investment bubble.
I like bubbles, be they Chinese red-chip stocks, DotScam, HK real estate, telecosmic nothingness, and, gad, even gold:0)
Bubbles, when properly exploited, makes one wealthier, similar to revolutions in the way they facilitate the transfer of wealth. I know revolutions. They are products of Aztec crowd psychology.
On the one hand, psychology can make USD's rise a piece of good news, and can interpret USD's fall as better news.
OTOH, psychology can cause the stock market to fall as interest rate falls, and to rise when the borrowing rate decreases (Oh, OK, I will not harp on Japan again).
I get back to the topic of human emotion. Rational behavior is bunk. Humans behave irrationally. We see this in extreme price movements in the markets from one day to the next, in the same exact economy and geo-political space, shoved 24 hours forward.
Humans act on mind bursts and incomplete information, filling in what they cannot know with nightmarish fears and children’s imaginations. Humans like to be part of crowds, and are hardwired to be part of groups for safety, in families, towns, burgs, nation-states, and market surges.
Interruption: A guy opposite me on the train has just fallen asleep and his head is nestled on his arms next to my palmtop keyboard. He is wearing a Rado look-alike branded Eista. The trademark museum-look (black onyx style) is perfect, probably costing the same as a genuine Swatch [EDIT: I was wrong. It cost USD 23 retail]. The product will make it on to the shopping channel in US soon, no doubt, consumption bubble allowing.
BTW, I think it is funny the way CNBC talk about gold bubble in the midst of a consumption frenzy wrapped within a USD bubble. It is amazing what one cannot see when one refuses to look.
Date May 23rd, 2002
I am on the bus from ShiJiaZhuan back to Beijing.
Beijing has a problem, perhaps better known as an opportunity. The newest talk around town is that Beijing is planning, clearing, and digging to construct more space than all of same in the whole of Europe.
I am not sure whether they are talking East, West, or both together. My father-in-law is enthusiastic; I am cautious; and so there is nothing new under the moon.
The huge pieces of land, long ago aggregated, are beginning to stir with activity. Caterpillar and Komatsu should do well.
I am feeling unusually bullish, which is never a good sign, but of no danger, until I start feeling god-like, and we are a long way from that state.
I was just reviewing my YTD gain, and now it is at 3.93%. I am well on my way to catching up to Pezz, without doing very much, and just by allocating cash into different cash, by the Tonka-ful.
Currency plays are elegant: they filter out such equity noises as product markets, company management, technology iteration, and leave behind the delicacy of nation-state economic performance, the pearl of macro-financial management, the roe of fiscal believability, and the aroma of political machination.
Gold plays are perhaps more chic. Gold purifies out everything mentioned above, including the explicit promise or implicit lie by political masters of Aztec crowds, that obligation – the paper is money, and leaves behind the essence of systemic risk.
Gold, like the roe of Sturgeon, the bubbly spirit of grapes, and the creamy meal of milk, is simply simple, easy to understand, effortless to explain, good, and fattening, but not in moderation, at any price.
Gold is a pure play on unadulterated distillation of universal fear blended with the essence of timeless distrust. Gold leverages on fear, and pivots on distrust, amplifies via Maurice's telecosmic Q, and levitates atop waves of uncertainty. Gold is a state of mind, Q-net is the tool of wave propagation.
Maurice figures greed is an all consuming force that will propel Q. Maurice chooses to invest in Q, when he should have ... He will figure it out over the next 24 months. Maurice does not understand and has not allowed for the power of fear.
IMO, anyone thinking or acting in accordance with ‘greed being a more powerful force than fear’ does not understand and has not experienced fear.
They have never lost everything including hope for a secure future.
I am reckoning that gold is the original function of permanent value and timeless wealth. The first amongst equations.
Once upon a time, paper currency was a first order derivative, easily 'integrate-able' back to the original function.
Now, fiat paper is a second order derivative, abandoned by officialdom and transformed by private intermediaries, with its critical features lost in complexity of derivation, bearing no semblance to the original function of value and wealth.
In any case, the global investing electorates, joined by US domestic voters, are casting their ballots; the results are beginning to be evident, and the consequences possibly serious.
The officialdom can no longer reach for your hero’s aspirin for all diseases, a Greensputin rate cut, once more.
The aspirin seemed to have worked for Mexico, Asian financial storm, LTCM, … Enron … California electricity crisis, WAT and whatnot. These issues had nothing to do with rates and liquidity, and thus rates and liquidity cannot be the solution, just as aspirin does not work for itchy foot. Nevertheless, Greensputin tried his pet theories on our wealth. His force is ebbing, and he is failing.
The aspirin will definitely not work for wobbly currency and shifty capital flight, even in Greenskaput's fevered mind, because it cause worse stomach bleeding. Checkmate in two.
How do we survive this scene? Have I mentioned gold?
<<okay, I'll go and look at some gold coins! It would be fun if nothing else. [Hmmm, first signs of a drug addict]>>
Oh, yes, I see, you are beginning to hesitate. Do not be tempted by Snowshoe’s admonition, come over to the dark side, away from the crowds, now.
Chugs, Jay |
