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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Haim R. Branisteanu who wrote (40617)	10/2/2008 3:38:04 PM
From: Secret_Agent_Man	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 220218

Haim, the electronic price is not real, just try to buy 1 oz maples,eagles.buffaloes at the spot price or the usual 5% premium aint gonna happen- and i wont even discuss the manipulation issue because even tho HP admits they "intervene" they dont mess with gold...yeah right

To: Haim R. Branisteanu who wrote (40617)	10/2/2008 8:00:09 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 220218

hello haim, am on koh samui, and the view to the financial tsunami is spectacular, especially when accompanied by good food and fine drinks. on the issue that is gold, yes, it is real money, harder to come by, by all reports of pen pals all over the world, and so much paper counterfeit gold gets transacted as waves of hedge fund redemptions and cycles of speculator margin calls dothe wet work, forcing out the last bit of goodness from a pile of junk. gold is performing its traditional role, even in its counterfeit paper form, as the instrument that is liquid when all els transact less well. this phase shall pass, giving rise to a glorious phase of ramp, as the last of the monetary parachutes get torn away from weak hands on the doomed airplane. Gold represents what it always represented, monetary salvation, financial redemption, wealth saviour, get-out-of-money-purgatory-free certificaion, and in its physical form, an opt-out of the evil-men-created-serfdom paper money system. lastly, we must keep in mind, that gold is up YTD,and suffered o indignities of 2% + 20% embaezzlement by fund managers just in in-tray, by Christopher Wood of greed & FEAR · World stock markets are likely to reach at least some interim low this month, if they have not already done so. This would set the markets up for a rally back to the moving averages, before the growing awareness of the nasty consequences of the credit crunch on real economic growth next year cause stock markets to head back down again. · GREED & fear has no such conviction that government policy will solve the credit problem. But what government policy can probably do is to prevent an immediate Asian Style V-shaped downturn at the considerable cost of a much more protracted period of slow to zero growth. This looks increasingly like the path the West has chosen to follow as taxpayer funded bailouts and forced nationalisations and other forms of fiscal guarantees increasingly proliferate. · The more stock markets plunge and interbank lending rates soar, the more policymakers feel compelled to do something to put a halt to soaring risk aversion. If the coming Congressional package does not do the trick and financial markets freak out again, GREED & fear's guess remains that the next step will be a forced closure of all markets. That "time out" would be used as a period to agree a coordinated global policy response. · GREED & fear still views the Paulson package as a fundamentally flawed approach. It is much better on all counts to recapitalize financial institutions directly after they have gone bust. If taxpayer money is going to be spent, it makes sense not only to help the lenders but also the borrowers by coming up with some government sponsored scheme to change the terms of the mortgages to make it easier for qualifying borrowers to repay. · The most interesting development in Europe this week has been the Irish decision to guarantee its bank deposits. Political pressures within Euroland are inevitably rising as the politicians face up to the downside adjustment consequences of maintaining the currency bloc. Macro traders should remain long the PIIGS spreads. · The euro, along with sterling and the commodity bubble currencies, are likely to remain the key losers in the continuing counter-trend US dollar rally. GREED & fear expects this rally to continue so long as deflationary pressures continue to predominate, as they now do. The drivers of the US dollar rally will remain the mechanical effect of short covering as borrowers buy back dollars, the sharply declining US current account deficit and the anticipated move of interest rate differentials in favour of the US. · The MSCI AC Asia ex-Japan Index has ended the quarter at 368.6, almost exactly the same level it reached two weeks ago. This is a level where GREED & fear is willing to be a long-term buyer. GREED & fear still hopes this is the bottom, though any rally from here is likely to suffer a retest in coming months. · What China does or does not do in the next six months is probably going to be as critical for investors in Asian equities as what Washington gets up to. GREED & fear is at present overweight China on the view that an increasingly aggressive policy response is coming. China is a monolithic state which means the PRC can effectively do what it wants while it also has the protection of a closed capital account. · It is important that Asian policymakers, and most particularly Beijing policymakers, respond to the US slowdown in an appropriately constructive way. This is that they increase their efforts to move their economies away from excessive reliance on export led growth. · Fundamentally, Asia should be dramatically less exposed to the present financial fallout than America, Europe or indeed Australasia. Still if risk-averse psychology takes over Asia can certainly worry itself into more of a problem than the fundamentals would warrant. · As for India and Indonesia, they should be fundamentally much more resilient regardless of policy because of the lack of exposure of their economies to exports. These are the two Asian ex-Japan economies with the lowest exports to GDP ratio. · There has been comparatively little written about the likely massive redemptions coming in the global hedge fund industry. The real problems here are surely in the credit and arbitrage "spaces". For such investment strategies tend to employ leverage to a far greater extent than plain vanilla equity hedge funds. · The present provides an ideal time for specialist fund managers in Asia and emerging markets to launch long-only equity funds, most particularly in the devastated small cap area. GREED & fear would advise fund managers to offer lower fees in return for money locked up for a certain period. · GREED & fear will make one change in the Asia ex-Japan relative-return portfolio this week. The overweight in Indonesia will be increased by one percentage point, with the money taken from Singapore.