Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Ilaine who wrote (76795)	7/24/2011 8:49:57 PM
From: Tommaso	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 218647

>>>he does understand the history of the Great Depression of 1929-1939 better than almost anybody else he does understand the history of the Great Depression of 1929-1939 better than almost anybody else <<< Possibly. But the trouble is that our problems are not those problems. Our problems are closer to those of France about 1715.

To: Ilaine who wrote (76795)	7/25/2011 1:35:09 AM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Respond to of 218647

That's the smartest man in nearly all rooms: <only got a 1590 on the SAT, albeit better than me (1451). Maybe not the smartest man in the room > But bear in mind that a test at a particular time and place measures only what it did then. Since he specialized in money, he no doubt has a good grasp of the subject. Mqurice

To: Ilaine who wrote (76795)	7/25/2011 1:48:03 AM
From: elmatador	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218647

History is not reality. It is an interpretation of what really happened.

To: Ilaine who wrote (76795)	7/25/2011 5:50:31 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218647

most unwise to equate the coming Darkest Interregnum with the earlier Great Depression unless the bernanke is an expert on any one of the earlier empires such as rome or any of the 26 dynasties of china, he is an irrelevancy i am thinking back on what you once said about the greek / roman legacy and russian cultural affinity, and am enthusiastic to see if such legacy n affinity is applicable, as my interpretations re olives and pizza and alcoholism were apparently not what you meant at the time any new thoughts re putin being a nice guy ?

To: Ilaine who wrote (76795)	7/25/2011 3:18:07 PM
From: carranza2	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 218647

Bernanke.......ah. Paul Krugman, another Princeton Economics Dep't brilliant guy, probably roomed with Bernanke, but got himsel a Nobel, thus outshining The Bald One, and therefore moving into the same league as Al Gore and other luminaries, had this to say about gold as recently as 2009, proving that SAT scores, PhDs from Princeton, Nobel Prizes and Federal Reserve Chairmanships are about as useful as tits on a boar in the real world. Why? In a nutshell, these guys lack wisdom and judgment but their impressive credentials have propelled them higher and higher. When they f*ck up, which is often and spectacularly, they rely on their credentials. Odd, that word, credentials, has the same root as credibility and, probably, credit, i.e., the thought that we are to take things on faith because.....well, just because we are smarter than you....bollocks. As you will see, he suggests that the gold thing is a marketing scam, never mind that the central banks of just about every nation are buying as much of it as they can and that Joe and Jane Six Pack have not caught on. Two years worth of experience to the contrary, a spectacularly rising gold price, and a total and complete failure of the Keynesian model, have not changed the fraud's perspective as he has not said anything about the erroneous blog article he published in the NYT. krugman.blogs.nytimes.com The Glenn Beck / DeBeers Connection Kash, at the Street Light, has a very good post on the price of gold and its relationship or lack thereof to inflation fears. He points out that the market for gold is surprisingly small, so that it would take only a relatively small number of extra buyers to push the price way up, even when other, more direct measures of expected inflation remain low. And he draws a parallel with diamonds: It’s also conceivable that a good advertising campaign by gold producers could be enough to move the price of gold. Imagine that an effective, sustained advertising campaign, targeted at wealthy, conservative individuals in the US, is able to persuade 25,000 of them per month to switch a portion of their financial assets into gold. (Note that the target audience would be those roughly 3 million US households that have over $1 million in financial assets.) Suppose for the sake of argument that each of them is persuaded to shift just 5%, or $50,000, of their portfolio into gold. Such an advertising campaign would have the effect of pushing $15 bn per year into the market for investment gold — very possibly enough to have a significant impact on the price of gold, given how small the overall market for gold is. Note that a very similar thing happened to the market for diamonds in the middle of the 20th century. The DeBeers diamond cartel used an incredibly successful advertising campaign in the 1950s to cement the idea of the diamond as the premier gemstone, and in so doing permanently changed the value of diamonds. Surprisingly, though, Kash doesn’t say explicitly that this parallel is not at all hypothetical. Glenn Beck was financially intertwined with Goldline, and therefore had a financial stake in pushing fears of hyperinflation. And he had many, many viewers. So there was a direct channel through which conservative Americans were being pushed into buying gold. Market prices almost always tell you something useful. But sometimes what they tell you is that there’s a marketing scam in progress.