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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dave rose who wrote (16716)	12/28/2002 7:08:30 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82033

A number of cartels are totally or quasi-governmental. (wheat, cotton land, water, sugar, milk, eggs -- at least in Canada) The LBMA is not, and the LME is not governmental nor are the stock exchanges, but they have always benefited by government allowances, legislation charters, and connections. It is amusing to see the Yanks complain about CDN forestry management, which has traditionally been more of a pain to deal with from the standpoint of the small and medium sized business than it has been a help, "low" stumpage costs notwithstanding. (stumpages are all bid-price, which makes the minimums moot or irrelevant anyway!) It has been traditionally impossible to get the wood you want, due to environmental mania, regs, or government agent's stonewalling -- all of the above supported explicitly or tacitly by governments. Ergo, and for other associated reasons, costs are ordinarily driven up, not down by CDN forestry policies, so raw stumpage costs are moot. The softeware monopoly is not government, and a few business monopolies are not, but they benefit from pliant authorities or non enforcement of existing legislation. Once there is a certain size to business, everyone agrees its natural power make unfairness to new business a natural accrual given man's venial nature, and smaller business's needs but the enforcement of fairness gets scary unless it is extremely even-handedly applied. Someone evidently told the Republicans with appropriate largesse, that stopping a total-control situation by MS was not a good thing, as (if) they were too great a sector of the economy to hurt. Interesting take on the concept of business competition. Sort of like the arguments that one phone company was the only practical way to enable one to talk, coast to coast. But this argument is much less persuasive with software, given that I am talking to you, probably running a MS controlled PC, and I am using a Linux controlled PC. Nevertheless the point gets across. Gold is a controlled market it seems, with a closed reportage on volume and who is buying and selling, as if these mavens of money needed the security of a gov't intelligence operation. Nevertheless the metal is the choice of the small and independent miner, in that its price is stable and the market is extremely liquid at any scale and inelastic. Copper, zinc, nickel or iron, needs large scale production and some kind of penetration of market distribution structures that are nefarious and hidden from the the little guy. It seems at first glance that a small mine is hard to get into production even given ample capital and science. Shadowy groups spin whispered tales of lack of government co-operation and bad economics of the small or large operation. Is this true? Is it borne out by assiduous investigation of those operations extant or the actual profitability of ops large and small whose figures can be got at? The apples and oranges of it all seem to get thrown into one barrel. One thing is for sure, it seems that taking your chances selling one more donut to the masses seems far more attractive to our aspiring loans manager of Megalithic Money Inc. than digging one more nugget of gold or silver from the earth. Despite all the centures of geology and geophysics and certitude of the diamond drill and the science of metallurgy, the horror of risk unknown is piled more upon the extraction of a metal undeniably there with undeniable science, than upon the demand for widets as yet unsold to the fickle and feckless public. Whyfore? Your serve. EC<:-}