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Next War Threats George Bush, according to the BBC, hasn't ruled out the use of force against Iran if they resume work on their uranium enrichment program. Frankly, we are somewhat concerned about such threats - because what they translate to is "George Bush is ready to start another war if Iran begins uranium enrichment." (Two is not enough?) There two overarching truths to the situation are a) Iran threatens the US dollar because of its plans to begin an oil trading bourse in 2006 which will not be based on U.S. dollar dominance, and 2) with 4% of the world's oil and considering that Iraq is now at 59% of prewar production, the oil motives are clear - while CONgress is on vacation Bush can play gunboat diplomat without oversight.
The idea that the Bush Wars are economic in nature is hardly arguable. Especially if you have been reading the problems of Bunny Greenhouse, a non-political and highly efficient government contracting officer who the pols are systematically trying to destroy because she dared to question that phat contracts which Halliburton and others have gotten from the Bush administration without proper competitive bidding.
My skeptical view on the U.S. version of gunboat democracy has raised the hackles of several readers - and here's a typical letter:
Watching them Black SUV's Vacationing George Bush got his first taste of protest when his black SUV went near the Cindy Sheehan protest near Crawford Texas on Friday. No incidents, but we are still watching closely to see who the woman might be that is referred to in the latest web bot advisory out Friday morning.
Border War Update We notice that new Mexico governor Bill Richardson Friday declared four counties along the (porous) border with Mexico "disaster areas." We also notice how the Bush administration hasn't done anything but talk around the issue. Write this down: Bush ignoring Border issues and pimping CAFTA while Democrat Richardson is defending our borders.
Reading Rights We notice that Google has run into a bit of a firestorm with publishers over its plans to scan collections of books which are copyright. Google now says it won't scan them, but the issues of scanning copyright works on the web is still an ugly one.
Cell Outs Good read from MyWay this morning on how Americans are just downright rude when it comes to cell phones going off in meetings. An amazing 2/3'rds of Americans are wearing the electronic leashes despite the potential health issues and the high costs of the monthly bills. We don't use them because we've made other - and I might add free of recurring bills - arrangements to conduct any urgent communications needs: ham radio work just fine, thanks.
Reader Comment:
I can only reply that I helped my neighbor run phone patches out of Alaska following the Good Friday Quake in '64 - there were no cell phones then, which may color my perspective. On the other hand, during the quake in Seattle in 2001 (6.something) my ham radio provided me with all the information I needed while telephones were down and cell sites were not giving dial tones.
Demographic Shifts The state of Texas is now a Minority-Majority state according to the Census Bureau.
Help from the People's Economist. A reader sent me a note this morning and was mentioning how the price of things seems to be going up rather quickly. Her note:
Peoplenomics Turns 200 (Weeks) Unbelievable as it sounds, we produced our 200th weekly report this morning - and we take a look at some of our earlier work to see if it is still sound thinking today. (It is...) If you're not a subscriber and have $30 to invest in brain food, click here.
Share with a friend The more people who read this site, the more worthwhile it is for us. To send a referring note via email to anyone you know who is smart and "gets it" by clicking here.
Books We have a number of interesting e-books for sale in our bookstore. If you're planning to sell your own home, you might want to check out the "For Sale by Owner Coach" and our best seller:" "How to live on $10,000 a year or less..." We should have a great little ebook titled "How to be a Reporter" out next weekend. If you ever need to write, whether for business or pleasure, there's bound to be something in this one you'll find useful. Friday Urgent Web Bot Forecast This just out of web bot processing this morning and of immediate importance:
This is extracted from a more detailed report for subscribers to www.halfpasthuman.com reports, excerpted exclusively here by permission when this future scanning technology picks up something in the "near field". Accident involving an auto - woman? Let's see how it plays out... this won't be a local thing, it will be a national headline if the processing has grabbed the right linguistic inferences.
Trade Deficit Spikes No, it doesn't mean the end of the world - that's already been scheduled. But what it does mean is that America is still spending piles more than we are selling overseas. Last year was a record shortfall and this year we're running 11 percent ahead of that, so clearly on a global trade/debt basis, we have managed to get into what threatens to be the nonlinear portion of the curve.
Key thing to remember: This is the June report, so the most recent data is 45-day old history. So with oil going where it has lately, what do you think will happen when we get the August report, which will be our around the middle of October? $66 Oil It looks like the next pause might be $75 as the price of oil is now at $66 a barrel this morning. This means we expect to see gasoline in the range of $3.05+ for the good stuff here in L.A. by mid week next. Although the market is expected to open lower this morning, I continue to be completely surprised that the Dow, which at the open is something like 130 points up from last Friday's close, hasn't dropped substantially from here. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the increase, except the market is acting like the Dow is being measured by Euros, and so as the dollar falls, the Dow seems to go up like it's supported by the currency swing, not fundamentals of oil, employment, the War, and so on.
Next Week's Downer? From fractalist Gary Lammert:
These numbers, like 21/52/49 of 42-52 translate in fractal studies to a pattern (up or down) where the moves hit extremes 21 days into it, then 52 days, then 52 - and finally 49 days - where we are now - of an expected final range date between 42 and 52 days. China Stalling on Iran Why, might you ask, would China be trying to stall the issue of Iran starting uranium enrichment coming up for discussion at the UN Security Council? Sadly the answer is simple - as we wrote earlier this week, China is pouring resources into Iran, and has a vested interest in letting the US getting involved because it will drain our resources and make us more easily overwhelmed economically by China, which could bring us to our knees at any time now because of their currency and export power (and our addiction to same).
Can't Get There From Here No terrorism involved - just a wildcat strike that has lest 70,000 travelers stranded as British Airways sorts out a catering dispute at London's Heathrow Airport.
Can't See There Officially, the haze in Malaysia continue to spread into other areas. More meaningful to us is this email from a reader there who reports:
We appreciate the first-hand report - and if you ever see news events happening first hand, please send us eye witness reports, especially if the story has an economic impact, so that we may better assess what is occurring and adjust our plans accordingly.
Tax Shelters The government crackdown on abusive tax shelter promoters has yielded criminal charges and a pleas bargain worth noting, especially if you are pushing the edge of tax shelter law.
Young Powell Want to find former FCC boss and son of Colin Powell, Michael Powell. Call the investment firm of Providence Equity Partners which invests in media and communications companies.
Powell's joining an investment firm is interesting to us, as we have long held that anyone serving in government should go through a five-year 9or longer) "cooling off period" after serving in public office. On the one hand, we appreciate Powell's high value to an investment firm, but on the other, we think that to put a former regulator into the position of being able to make money off the industry he supervised could be interpreted as a broad conflict of interest.
Think about the implications in other industries. Would you want someone from the Interstate Commerce Commission advising a competitor in the transportation world? Would you be comfortable if an FAA safety official went to work for a major aircraft manufacturer? How about an FDA type going to work for a drug company?
Democracy as we understand it is not just about "being fair" - it's also about insuring that there is an appearance of fairness. We therefore, we think "cooling off periods" for federal regulators of all stripes should be required in order to give the appearance that there are no hidden agendas or conflicts.
Powell's reign at the FCC dug mega corps a clear channel to amass media empires and now he stands to profit from that. As a taxpayer, I'd sure like a "cooling off period."
Chalk these up as nutjob ranting: We don't believe anyone who has a net worth of more than $5-million should be allowed to run for public office, either. That might help insure real people, not the elected aristocracy and their corporate gifting pals, get to run things.
Stones Back There is not usually much discussion of what I do for a living when I am not being a grumpy skeptic of the hyper-cellulose economy, but at the moment and for about 30 of my working years it has been either in broadcasting (as an engineer or newscaster/news director) or managing schools that teach these fine arts. So, it should come as no surprise to you that when the Rolling Stones get a new tour underway, the reviews are one of the first things I turn to. Being around tinseltown I think the most interesting side-note about the Stones is that the very last thing I would have expected from singer Mick Jagger is the role of "controller" but folks I know who were on the 2001 tour report he is an exceptionally good operations man who it was claimed to me, would often ask for backup and details on receipts of all sizes. Part of me didn't want to hear that - I like to think of Jagger as the best rock & roll singer of all time, but from what I've heard around town, he's a lot more than that: rock icon and a damn good controller to boot.
Thursday Gas: No Apparent Reaction - Yet Although there are a lot of headlines around the 'net this morning on the high price of gasoline, the price is less of a story than the underlying issue of "How high does it go before it hurts?"
We haven't put a pencil to it (partly because we haven't made any real measurements) but what we expect is that as higher gasoline prices appear, they will take up to 4-5 years to completely work their way through the economy. The reason? When the price of gasoline goes up to say $4 a gallon, the immediate impact (almost instantly) is the amount of money taken from the consumer's wallet. But then the price goes up of that home delivered pizza and the other providers of home services. Maybe your cable bill will go up a tad because to make a service call will now cost the cable company a bit more in gas.
The longer delay items from gasoline prices come when in wage talks with your boss (not that I expect you to win, mind you) you will argue in a few months that "The price of gas is killing me - I need more money just to commute to the office..." And that's how it ripples out. High prices at the pump today become talking points in wage discussions later, and that in turn, depending on big a component labor is in what your company produces, will push what your employer charges for his goods or services. This process can take years, not days.
Of we were called upon to make a forecast, we would suggest a sort of "S" curve effect where there would be little impact on use of $3.00 gas, but as the price moves toward the $9-$10 dollar range, the consumption would fall off to a mere fraction of what it is today.
As you can see, this is not particularly scaled, but it should convey the idea that somewhere between where we are today and $4.00 gas, consumption would begin to decline quickly and by the time we see $8.00 or $9.00 gas, the economy has pretty much had its butt kicked and the only uses will be agricultural and military to keep order among the ranks of unemployed who would be more interested in hanging bankers that most anything else at that stage because unemployment would likely rise to more than 25% of the workforce. Remember, bad as that sounds, in our next Depression, unemployment would probably never go higher than 50-60% because everyone else, one way or the other works for government!
Hazy Days of Summer We have heard of pollution causing haze problems in the Amazon, but we didn't really expect forest fires to cause disruptions in places like Malaysia. But that's pretty much what is going on today as the country's biggest port is shut down due to haze and smoke.
Pakistan's Delivery System As the war of words continues heating up over Iran restarting production of enriched uranium, from which bombs could be made, we see that Pakistan has developed cruise missile capability. Given what we know about geographical mapping systems, such as www.earth.google.com, and the cost of GPS units (Under $100) it wouldn't take much creativity to build a guidance system that would deliver a nuke close enough to an intended target to hurt. "Close enough" is the concept in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nukes
Philippines Blasts The war on terror has long focused on Iraq (because they were going to accept Euros for oil) and now planning centers on Iran for the same reason - they are planning to open an oil bourse which will be denominated in something other than US dollars, which could cause dollar panics around the world within the next year. That said, we continue to point out that in non-oil countries, such as the Philippines, where we see explosions and violence attributed to militant extremists, the story doesn't get picked up much by mainstream media. The inference? No resources = no coverage.
Not So Friendly Skies Not the day to be in the airline business, although I miss it from time to time (then I sober up.) British has a catering dispute. Northwest faces a possible mechanics strike. The head of Thai is in trouble over accounting irregularities. And the whole industry is about to get screwed by rising oil prices. Ripples to watch? Hotel and motel chain stocks. Rental car operating margins.
Least Downloaded Patch? We laughed at the report in Information Week that Rock Star Games (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) has a patch out that removes the sex and violence from the hit video game. In case you haven't played the real game, there is a hack called the "Hot Coffee" mod which unlocks the additional sex and violence in the program, but which was disabled by Rock Star publicly. So, if you're a parent, the clean up patch is on the Rock Star site. Otherwise, here are the details of the "Hot Coffee" mod...
Voice over I Spy The FCC has ruled that internet telephony services such as Vonage, and others, include government wiretapping capability just like regular hardline carriers. You know what this means, right? The drug crowd, the terrorists, and everyone else of ill intent will simply freeze on the most recent untapped versions as the new tapped VoIP products come out. There is still some question about services like Skype when calls aren't switched to the PTSN (public switched telephone network).
Wednesday Another Web Bot Hit? We're pleased to be privy (on an exclusive basis) to some amazing proprietary technology that seems to give a sense of future events based on linguistic shifts on public portions of the internet. Once again today we may be watching the beginnings of a www.halftpasthuman.com web bot project hit that has been on our radar since January 16, 2005 ALTA105_3 report which said in part:
As the work on the model and linguistic shifts continued on this coming event in the Antarctic region, things resolved in the July 16, 2005 ALTA1105_1 to this:
Naturally, we were quite surprised to read this morning about an Australian volcano erupting right on schedule, and right in place:
We remain skeptical, but we would almost expect this volcano to possibly build to major intensity (which would mean prime time TV pictures soon) because of the emotive levels associated with the web bot forecast - or alternatively - more and bigger activity in the same general area.
One of the trends that we expect to emerge over the next few decades will be the regionalization of countries in North America. Perhaps a break up and recombining. Canada is heading that way quickly with a report out today that a third of western Canadians would like to have a country separated from the eastern part of Canada.
There's some pretty good discussion of the content at the Harper College web site based on Washington Post writer Joel Garreau's 1981 book.
One can certainly quibble about the concept, as I would have included the Mississippi states in the Bread-basket. Nevertheless, next time you hear about the Minutemen trying to defend the Mexican border, or you read stories like today's about western Canada where people I know don't think much of government backed French-language signs (to them it would be like requiring all government paperwork in Missoula to be in Spanish) consider that there are alternatives to the present country maps.
The one catch: Not very many borders are set by statesmen without the involvement of armies and bullets. Garreau's concept, by the way, also fits nicely in the Middle East, or any other area where you see tribal, resource, social, or religious affiliations and distributions that vary from the arbitrary lines on maps. If you have already read Garreau's book and frame your thinking with its concepts, I apologize for being redundant.
Iran Nukes In a move which is sure to light a fire under Hair Trigger Dick (Cheney), we read that the seals are to come off the equipment in Iran which could be used to generate weapons grade fissile materials. Oh sure, Iran says they won't, but this is the world of politics, and just like every CONgressman renounces Big Money before the election, once in power, pols of all nations and stripes do what they can to increase their power. For Hair Trigger Dick, that means dusting off the tactical nuke options, and for Iran, it means forging ahead without international support. If figure it's only a matter of time until the interests collide, if they haven't gone past some point of no return already.
Bird Flu Rising Another "it's only a matter of time" story is the one percolating out of Russia, China, Vietnam, and a few other places about Bird Flu. H5N1 is suspected of causing a big increase in bird deaths in Kazakhstan, where scientists are trying to assess the risk to other fowl and humans.
We find an oddity in the operation of the balance of nature here. Under normal (meaning no humans interfering) conditions, we would expect to see a balance between birds and insects for example. Yet, as man has continued to attempt domination rather than develop a cooperative way of living on the earth, events seem to strike out a balance on their own globally. While the number of birds may drop dramatically, so too the number of insects may be dropping as evidenced by the decline in bee populations which will drive the price of honey up, perhaps in the same way Bird Flu will change America's taste for finger-licking-good fast food.
By the way, speaking of bees, we have made a note that at our place in Texas we will not do some planned land clearing till November or so, after seeing that racing legend A.J. Foyt was attacked by a swarm of bees while doing some cat skinning down in Texas this weekend. Lest you go off on my insensitivity toward cats, realize the kind of cats referred to are the Caterpillar kind - and yeah, I love driving a D-6 whenever I can find an excuse.
Fractal View Looking ahead for the markets, our fractal whiz checks in:
From our Houston (Oil) Bureau Oil & Gas Market Report: Remainder ’05 through ‘06 Exclusive to UrbanSurvival.com By Bernard Grover
The general sense of the petroleum market going forward from late summer 2005 is one of increasing prices despite heavy drilling and development of new and existing fields. There is a growing push to deliver product to refineries and reserves. However, reports show reserves both in the US and worldwide being well-supplied. Price explosion can not be laid on lack of product, in this case. Therefore, pricing is being driven by market perceptions being influenced by political events and lack of increased capacity to deliver refined product to consumers.
A brief survey of field service and construction companies shows revenues running at or near double year-over-year for both the quarter and the year-to-date (cf. http://biz.yahoo.com/cbsmb/050808/06571b452f2e4f398c02cbdef8fc4a02.html?.v=1) due to strong day-rate pressure. A similar survey of the major producers shows a similar, though less dramatic increase in revenues attributable to strong oil prices. Drilling activity remains at recent highs with worldwide rig utilization riding at capacity (graphs courtesy ODS-Petrodata).
(All this assumes a stable world - and that's a stretch, for sure - GU)
The Second A-Bomb If you don't count the Army tests that exposed soldiers at the government's Nevada test site to radiation, the last deliberate use of an A-bomb on humans was on this day 60-years ago at Nagasaki.
Fear Mongering Brits The police chief of London is stirring the pot by predicting that another attack on the financial sector of the city is only a matter of time. I figure it must be a slow news week when stories like this are making headlines along with the faux news executives who put on hour+ specials on the Aruba missing woman case.
Surely, it's poor form on my part to be looking ahead instead to the economic impacts of the Fed decision to raise rates ( statement ) and wonder what might do to housing prices and precious metal prices. To be sure we find stories and blogs this week saying the bubble is intact, while others says the peak is in.
Video Question Something may be changing in a fundamental way - the profits of video stories seem to be fading according to a report in the LA Times this morning. Some things to ponder:
Before you jump to the conclusion that the new time sink at home is the broadband internet (which it is, by the way) you might want to read the L.A. times editorial this morning about the implications of an FCC decision of last Friday which puts cable companies and phone companies on equal footing because there are some potentially bad impacts on small 'net businesses there.
Despite the FCC's position, we think over time that government will have to step in and license web usage in the U.S. - because it's just too much freedom for all the lanolin producers to have - they might get coordinated and that would threaten the powers that be.
The Franklin Case The implications of Israeli spying against the US are continuing to build - not that you will read much about it in mainstream media. But the pieces are starting to come together and it keeps pointing to (successful) foreign attempts to influence America's policies in the Middle East in general and the war drumming lead-in to Iraq which the Chicago federal grand jury is also sniffing around as a sidebar (or more) in the Valerie Plame case investigation.
Chemical Blaze Just outside the Detroit in Romulus Michigan, a big chemical company fire broke out last night with a thousand or more residents evacuated.
Tuesday
Long Term Outlooks We reported to you on Monday that the Saudi's are making no secret of repatriating $360 billion from the US to other places closer to their home. After consultations with Cliff at www.halfpasthuman.com, I've come to consider the Saudi moves one of the most interesting of the past six-months. Just collecting the headlines puts it in perspective: What would drive the Saudi's to pull out their money from the West without so much as trying to hide it from the public? A number of disturbing possibilities come to mind, but the two that are at our top of the heap are a pending Saudi production decline or perhaps the Saudis have a "heads up" on a financial disaster to come.
We see the theme of the Saudi's "suddenly" (*over a few months) "running out" of oil as prospect #1. Not that they will actually run out, per se, but they will likely according to industry experts like Matt Simmons, run into huge problems with water cut. The only way the Saudis have been able to maintain their current production levels is to inject huge amounts of seawater into down wells in order to push oil up out of extraction wells. Fine, as long as it works, but the difficulty comes as the oil field being exploited reaches its end-of-production zone. Here, what happens is instead of pumping in 18-million barrels of seawater to "pressurize" a field (and extract say 10-million barrels of oil), the amount of seawater required increases by a factor of 2, 3, even 6 or 10-times what is being pumped now.
The disturbing idea is that the Saudis have the mental horsepower to plot out the increasing problem of water cut and figure more or less precisely where they are on the production/decline curve. Then we ask the logical question, "If you knew that your oil had indeed peaked, and would never go to higher production than it is today - something that would crash and trash the inflated Western Economy, especially the housing bubble in the US which is almost entirely auto driven - wouldn't you get your money out of harms way before you got run down by your own oil problem? We think there's a very good chance this is what is presently in play.
The other alternative is that the Saudi's have gotten a heads-up (again a long lead time - long enough to move money around) that the US would be hit with another 9/11 type event this fall, and thus they are moving assets in advance. Although this seems like the less likely of the two possibilities, it still much be considered because the move is undeniably occurring, and the forces of militant Islam, of the improvised explosives variety, not my Islamic colleagues and friends who are every bit as committed to a peaceful world as I am, have tipped off their money sources in the Kingdom with long lead time.
Either way, it's a story of incredible importance and it ties in to...
Increasing US Troops in Iraq We have to ask this morning whether the Bush administration is pulling another bait-and-switch move with reports that forces will be pulled out of Iraq late this year and into next spring. The reason is the story which appears on the www.military.com site which says the US will actually be sending more troops to Iraq, not lowering the numbers as touted by mainstream media. Of course we will have troop pullouts next year, but perhaps only to get us down to the 138,000 in theatre, you think?
Next War: Iran That the US will soon be forced into a military show-down with Iran is almost without question. It's only a matter now of timing as we see it. Dumb, stupid, ugly and tactical nuclear, but we're quickly accelerating the war drum beat as we read today that Iran is being accused of having "secretly manufactured" more than 4,000 centrifuges which could be used in the production of nuclear arms.
What we are seeing now is little more than a "marketing campaign" by the Bush administration aimed at jawboning the Iranians out of their well cast plans to open a new oil trading exchange *(bourse) in 2006. You see the problems with this, of course: First, it would not be denominated in US dollars, and secondly, it would be outside of the sphere of manipulation of the rich families of England and Europe which we refer to as one of the factions in the war for control of the world among the various elite.
Where this campaign is right now is obvious - The US is building huge permanent bases in Iraq, and we will staff it with American military personnel just as which empire built Hadrian's Wall?
It's pretty much a given in my circle of friends that a similar plan by Iraq, to open an "unregulated" by US & European banker oil exchange, is what has cost them 3 years of war with the US, although another part of the war in Iraq could be traced back to the powerful families of Europe not getting their "right cut" in the oil-for-food scandal that continues to unfold even today.
Everywhere we look in the Middle East today, we see an intricate model of interlocking relationships, deals, threats, and double-crosses. Just a week back we were focused on Mauritania's change of hands. Am I the only one to notice that the coup took place a week before an oil program got underway? This was a blow to Israel because Mauritania had recognized it politically, but now we read that the US is backing off some of its demands that the old (pro-Israel) government be returned. This might signal that the US or West has somehow managed to come up with a promise of an acceptable range of outcomes from the new government.
To speculate that the US is prepared to allow moderate to petro-chemically conservative governance in the Middle East seems likely. If the US can bargain or bully its way into the a series of non-belligerent moderate Islamic states selling whatever oil they can produce, then that's the idealized outcome. Now, if it wasn't for Russia facing the same water cut issues with its oil production, and the Chinese trying to butt in to Iran by promoting more "tourism" there, the policy objective might have a chance. But we don't see it - things are just too polarized.
Noory and Hoagland Spot NASA Code Talker We have to admire AM Coast to Coast Host George Noory and Richard C Hoagland for spotting the code-talking between the space shuttle and NASA last night. When commander Eileen Collins asked in the open "how far down the runway the centerline lights were at the Florida strip, Noory and Hoagland figured it was code-talking because Collins would have made hundreds, if not thousands of approaches to the Cape and would not ask such a dumb question for anything other than to give a clear signal that the night landing was not in the cards and she wanted daylight in the desert out at Edwards instead. But the bottom line is simple enough: Shuttle's back safely.
Bank Job We give our Butch Cassidy and Sundance award to the robbers in Brazil who stole $78-million Canadian by digging a 300+ foot tunnel to get at the loot. Why Canadian though? Are they just loonies?
Markets Could be another day of up open and then flat to down at the end, as the oil price continues to hold near highs today.
Fed Day Be sure to drop by later today as we will post the Fed Meeting Results as soon as we get them (we're on the Fed mailing list). Bet on another quarter to keep other countries from following the Saudis and pulling out money from the US.
Monday Irrational Monday I must be crazy, or something. I'm looking at a market which dropped around 83 points by the Dow last week (chart) and which according to some reports is set to open higher. Yet all I see in the headlines are stories that if anything, make me want to run back to the ranch as quickly as I can get there. The net rumor mill has the Saudi's reportedly repatriating a pile of money (mega-billions) back to their own accounts outside of America, while there's the potential for violence in the Kingdom, and here on this side of the pond the Fed meets tomorrow, which could spell the end (or at least a cooling) of the housing bubble. Yet the market seems to give not a hoot. Oil prices off to new intra-day highs? The market doesn't seem as worried as me. Maybe the Fed will pass - Australia says its rates are on hold - but we doubt it. The Fed needs to pay high interest to keep foreign money invested in our bubblenomic nightmare.
Back in b-school,, I remember learning that markets were efficient and nearly perfect. Thus, I can only conclude that I lack the vision, resolve, or just outright foolhardiness to make a fortune these days. No day trading, house flipping, of 100-hour work weeks for me. I'll just do my job, keep buying gold, and maybe at some point, the reality of the world's economic condition will catch up.
The White House has a big problem on its hands come January, as we have mentioned before - because that's when "Easy Money Al" (Greenspan) retires. OK, so this isn't making headlines in the U.S. I keep focusing on this because the rest of the world is watching this one like hawks, including the Chinese.
Gaza Foes Ahead Despite the surprise resignation of Benjamin Netanyahu this weekend as Israel's finance minister, the government says the Stage One pull out from the Gaza Strip will continue.
Dead Folks With the death of a key German banker a week or so back, the net seems preoccupied with the notion that bankers are being bumped off by forces unknown. However, the death of an investment banker in Hong Kong looks like it may have been the wife's doing - no mystery to that one, then.
The official story about Wim Duisenberg who drown in his swimming pool continues to be that he had a heart attack.
On the other hand, there is a bit more murkiness over the cause of death of former British foreign minister Robin Cook, who died Saturday in northern Scotland. You m ay recall that Cook resigned from government in 2003 as a personal protest of the Iraq War.
Runaway Grand Jury, or Coup? The reports of the Chicago Grand Jury investigation seem to be flying everywhere, including the Italian press which repeats the Tom Flocco story that George Bush will fire the prosecutor rather than allow a series of damaging "true bills" to be returned by the grand jury this fall. Nothing would surprise us - although we would certainly expect a false-flag terror operation first - as an excuse to seize even more power.
Iran Clock The countdown is on in Iran, we think, for a number of reasons. The biggest one is China. Not only is China making substantial investment in Iran, which would give Dick Cheney's bombing planners one more dimension to think about, but Iran is also cozying up to Syria which is sending its president to Tehran, as reported by Chinese media. With Iran restarting uranium enrichment, the bombing of Iranian facilities could either begin in a few minutes with no excuse or we could see a delay of a year or two while the administration waits for something big to be trumped up.
Non Items There we other stories this weekend, such as Jessica Simpson's hit at the box office with Dukes of Hazard, and the rescue of the Russian mini-sub. But these stories are of little strategic importance, unless you know the first couple of Calabasas or still have relatives in the Russian Navy.
Watch Gold & Silver The South Africa miner's strike is into a second day and talks have failed. This brings with it the possibility that the price of gold will start to creep upward - although no doubt some of the move up from the $420 was based on worries about the South African labor situation.
The other thing to be watching for is the phrase "nano silver" which is cropping up in a lot of places, from antibacterial socks to new Samsung washing machines. Just tuck it away - "nano silver." How do you think I recovered so quickly from a burst appendix? I think my sneaking home-made nano silver might have had something to do with it.
News from Elliott Wave International
Write when you get rich,
George Ure, The People's Economist
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| Bulldog Editions In the glory days of newspapering, the Bull Dog edition was the Sunday edition of the paper issued on Saturday morning. It had all the regular features, but might not have the absolutely most current up to the minute "headline" items. We've generalized that, such that when we issue something in advance of our regular Monday morning update, we call them "Bull dog editions." Whenever you see a BULL DOG notice on the top of this page, check back later for a more recent update. Bulletins are posted as our work schedule permits and as events warrant. We try to publish Mon-Fri by 6:30 AM Pacific (9:30 Eastern. Sometimes we don't awaken on time, but when delays are expected we try to publish a projected update time for your convenience. |
Saturday
August 13, 2005 08:44 A PDT
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