“Where on earth has the SEC been?”

Baltic Dry Index. 2982 -39

LIR Gold Target by 2019: $3,000.

Those have a short Lent, who owe money to be paid at Easter.

Benjamin Franklin

For the next few days of Holy Week there won’t be a daily LIR update. Check with the blogs for possible updates as news warrants. We wish all our Christian readers, and all who are celebrating Easter at this time, a very happy and holy Easter 2010. The next regular update will be on Monday April 5th.

More on the SEC later. We open today with Climategate, and the UK’s “independent” enquiry into the University of East Anglia’s dodgy Climate Research Unit. Operating on the traditional British fair play rules of hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil, especially when it involves a British institution and all 3 UK political parties are signed up members of the global warming camp, the investigation is widely expected to come up with the desired result. So how independent is a “Perfidious Albion” enquiry into dodgy climate science and cover up? Below, the Telegraph covers the story.

Can we trust the 'Climategate' inquiry?
Sceptics have not been surprised to find that almost all the members of the 'Climategate' inquiry are committed advocates of global warming
By Christopher Booker Published: 6:24PM GMT 27 Mar 2010

There has been a curious by-product of the attempts being made by the University of East Anglia to whitewash last November's embarrassing leak of documents from its Climatic Research Unit. Since it set up not one but two supposedly "independent" inquiries into the "Climategate" affair, climate sceptics were intrigued but not entirely surprised to find that almost all their members were committed, even fanatical advocates of global warming, and hence unlikely to be over-critical of the CRU's bizarre record.

Most recently, the sceptics have been particularly intrigued by the background of the man chosen by the university to chair an assessment of the CRU's scientific record. Lord Oxburgh declared on his appointment that he is linked to major wind-farm and renewable-energy companies. He admitted that he advises Climate Change Capital, which manages funds worth $1.5 billion, hoping to cash in on the "opportunities created by the transition to a low-carbon economy", in a world market potentially worth – its website boasts – $45 trilllion.

What Lord Oxburgh kept quiet about, however, is that he is also a director and vice-chairman of a strange little private company few of us had heard of known as Globe International. The name stands for "Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment", and it describes itself as a worldwide network to lobby governments to take more drastic action on climate change. Globe is certainly well-connected, as it showed just before last December's Copenhagen conference by staging a seminar addressed by, among others, the conference's chairman Yvo de Boer, as well as Nancy Pelosi and Ed Markey, the leaders of the campaign to push a cap-and trade-scheme – which could make a lot of people fabulously rich – through the US Congress.
The international president of this lobbying organisation turns out to be none other than Stephen Byers MP, now best known for his description of himself on last week's Dispatches as "like a cab for hire", happy to take £5,000 a day for using his influence as a lobbyist.

Globe clearly knows how to pick its men. Its UK parliamentary team also includes Elliot Morley MP, Globe's former president, and David Chaytor MP, both of whom now face criminal charges for fraud in connection with their expenses claims, Considering the record of some of his colleagues, it is perhaps not surprising that Lord Oxburgh was not too keen to declare his interest in this odd little outfit when he was appointed to chair an inquiry as to whether the world can rely on the evidence produced by the CRU to support its advocacy for global warming.

But I am sure we can all have every confidence as to which way his inquiry's conclusions are likely to point.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/7530961/Can-we-trust-the-Climategate-inquiry.html

Below, more on Bloomberg on yesterday’s story on Irish banks. The “true” recapitalisation they need is $43 billion, it now turns out. On this basis, probably the Economist magazine is correct in assessing that the real Greek debt problem is $75 billion rather than the EU-IMF rescue package of $25 billion.

Irish Banks Need $43 Billion on ‘Appalling’ Lending
By Dara Doyle and Colm Heatley
March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Ireland’s banks need $43 billion in new capital after “appalling” lending decisions left the country’s financial system on the brink of collapse.

The fund-raising requirement was announced after the National Asset Management Agency said it will apply an average discount of 47 percent on the first block of loans it is buying from lenders as part of a plan to revive the financial system. The central bank set new capital buffers for Allied Irish Banks Plc and Bank of Ireland Plc and gave them 30 days to say how they will raise the funds.

“Our worst fears have been surpassed,” Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said in the parliament in Dublin yesterday. “Irish banking made appalling lending decisions that will cost the taxpayer dearly for years to come.”

The agency aims to cleanse banks of toxic loans, the legacy of plunging real-estate prices and the country’s deepest ever recession. In all, it will buy loans with a book value of 80 billion euros ($107 billion), about half the size of the economy.

“The information that has emerged from the banks in the course of the NAMA process is truly shocking,” Lenihan said.

---- Ireland may not be able to afford to pump more money into the banks. The budget deficit widened to 11.7 percent of gross domestic product last year, almost four times the European Union limit, and the government spent the past year trying to convince investors the state is in control of its finances.

The premium investors charge to hold Irish 10-year debt over the German equivalent was at 139 basis points yesterday compared with 284 basis points in March 2009, a 16-year high.
Ireland’s debt agency said it doesn’t envisage additional borrowing this year related to the bank recapitalization. It is sticking to its 2010 bond issuance forecast of about 20 billion euros, head of funding Oliver Whelan said in an interview.

“The bank losses, awful as they are, represent a one-off hit. It’s water under the bridge,” said Ciaran O’Hagan, a Paris-based fixed-income strategist at Societe Generale SA. “What’s of more concern for investors in government bonds is the budget deficit. Slashing the chronic overspending and raising taxation by the Irish state is vital.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aiI8N1UP2rFM&pos=1

Over on the other side of the Atlantic, an ex-Clinton appointment, Robert Reich Secretary of Labor, finally gets it right on how Wall Street’s banksters were given free reign in the last decade. Rarely have I been on the same side as Clinton appointment, so this is perhaps a cheap shot, but where were you Mr. Reich from 2002-2007 as Mr. Greenspan and Co. unleashed the real estate bubble and triple-A swindle?

Fraud on the Street
Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday it had begun an inquiry into two dozen financial companies to determine whether they followed accounting practices similar to those recently disclosed in an investigation of Lehman Brothers.
Where on earth has the SEC been?

It’s now clear Lehman Brothers’ balance sheet was bogus before the bank collapsed in 2008, catapulting the Street and the world into the worse financial crisis since 1929. The Lehman bankruptcy examiner’s recent report details what just about everyone on the Street has known since the firm imploded – that Lehman defrauded its investors. Even Hank Paulson, in his recent memoir, referred to Lehman’s balance sheet as bogus.

In order to look like it could borrow $30 for every dollar of its own money, Lehman shifted liabilities off its books at the end of each quarter. Its CPA, Ernst and Young, approved of this fraud against the advice of its own whistle blower, whom Ernst and Young fired.

Lehman’s practices couldn’t have been all that different from those of every other big bank on the Street. After all, they were all competing for the same business, and using many of the same techniques. Lehman was just the first to go under, causing a financial run that led George W. to warn “this sucker could go down” unless the federal government came up with hundreds of billions to bail out the others.

In other words, the TARP covered the other bankers’ assets and asses.

We now know, for example, Goldman Sachs helped Greece hide its public debt and then placed financial bets that Greece would default, using credit-default swaps to avoid risking its own capital. It’s the same tactic Goldman used for (and against) American International Group (AIG): Hide the ball, and then bet against the ball and fob off the risk to investors and taxpayers, using derivatives to remove the risky tactics from the balance sheets. Even today no one knows the fair value of the complex derivatives underlying these and related maneuvers, which is exactly the point.

Congress is now struggling to come up with legislation to stop this from happening again. And the Street is struggling to stop Congress. As of now, the Street’s political payoffs seem to be working. Proposed legislation still allows secret derivative trading in foreign-exchange swaps (similar to what Goldman used to help Greece hide its debt) and in transactions between big banks and many of their corporate clients (as with AIG).

But wait. We already have a law designed to stop this sort of fraud. It’s called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Think back to the corporate looting scandals that came to light almost a decade ago when the balance sheets of Enron, WorldCom, and others were shown to be fake, causing their investors to lose their shirts. Nearly every major investment bank played a part in the fraud — not only advising the companies but also urging investors to buy their stocks when the banks’ own analysts privately described them as junk.

Sarbanes-Oxley – Sarbox, as it’s come to be known – was designed to stop this. It requires CEOs and other senior executives to take personal responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of their companies’ financial reports and to set up internal controls to assure the accuracy and completeness of the reports. If they don’t, they’re subject to fines and criminal penalties.

Sarbox is directly relevant to the off-the-balance-sheet derivative games the Street played and continues to play. No bank CEO can faithfully attest to the accuracy and completeness of its financial reports when derivatives guarantee that the reports are incomplete and deceptive.

So where has the SEC been?
http://robertreich.org/post/485015444/fraud-on-the-street

We have finally reached the end of the month and end of quarter. The Fed’s market wizards and others, take to the field today to window dress the markets. The great disconnect from economic reality has never been greater. In our Kafkaesque, Alice in Wonderland, bankster mark to the model accounting world, the bailed out banksters are back betting the ranch in too big to fail “prop trading,” and busy paying out the bonuses before the next Lehman hits. Stay long precious metals. There is no reason to think it ends any better second time around.

We end for today and Easter with the NY Times on a major policy shift in US energy plans. The US government is finally making plans to reduce US oil dependency on ever more unstable overseas supply. Of course, that assumes that oil is actually found in commercial quantities and gets exploited.

Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling for First Time
By JOHN M. BRODER Published: March 30, 2010
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.

Under the plan, the coastline from New Jersey northward would remain closed to all oil and gas activity. So would the Pacific Coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border.

The environmentally sensitive Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska would be protected and no drilling would be allowed under the plan, officials said. But large tracts in the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska — nearly 130 million acres — would be eligible for exploration and drilling after extensive studies.

The proposal is to be announced by President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Wednesday, but administration officials agreed to preview the details on the condition that they not be identified.

The proposal is intended to reduce dependence on oil imports, generate revenue from the sale of offshore leases and help win political support for comprehensive energy and climate legislation.
But while Mr. Obama has staked out middle ground on other environmental matters — supporting nuclear power, for example — the sheer breadth of the offshore drilling decision will take some of his supporters aback. And it is no sure thing that it will win support for a climate bill from undecided senators close to the oil industry, like Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, or Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana.

The Senate is expected to take up a climate bill in the next few weeks — the last chance to enact such legislation before midterm election concerns take over. Mr. Obama and his allies in the Senate have already made significant concessions on coal and nuclear power to try to win votes from Republicans and moderate Democrats. The new plan now grants one of the biggest items on the oil industry’s wish list — access to vast areas of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/science/earth/31energy.html?hp

As with nearly everything, the devil is in the details, and this policy shift is a sop to get votes to get a climate bill passed. A climate bill based on the myth of man made global warming, and designed to further the ends of the great vampire squids and carbon trading scams.

At the Comex silver depositories Tuesday, final figures were: Registered 54.24 Moz, Eligible 61.77 Moz, Total 116.01 Moz.

See the land, her Easter keeping,

Rises as her Maker rose.

Seeds, so long in darkness sleeping,

Burst at last from winter snows.

Earth with heaven above rejoices...

Charles Kingsley

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Crooks & Scoundrels Corner.

The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.

Groucho Marx.

The envelope please. Today, it’s the turn of the crooks and scoundrels in Germany’s giant export industries. There may be another reason that Germany doesn’t want to bailout Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland. According to Der Spiegel below, it looks like much of Germany’s export success depends on “useful payments” to corrupt officials in the importing countries. Perhaps without the payments, Germany’s export miracle will turn into a bust.

Below, the SEC of all people, get on Germany’s case. The useless, toothless US Agency that looked the other way while the fraudster Madoff bilked mostly Jewish organizations and charities all around the world of up to 60 billion dollars, and who did nothing while Wall Street’s great vampire squids did “God’s Work,” and packaged and securitized, and sold on to unsuspecting brain dead “sophisticated” global investors, hundreds of billions of fraudulent “triple-A” toxic waste, even as they bet against the rubbish they were selling, nearly collapsing the whole global financial system in the process, this agency is now hot on the case of $4.4 million of alleged German bribes in East Europe. It’s a funny old world, on fiat money, regulatory selective enforcement and back door protectionism. My guess is that in retaliation it won’t be long before Brussels is putting Microsoft and others through the wringer again. And didn’t GM just demand German bribes to remain manufacturing in Germany? Whatever else it is, it isn’t capitalism in any meaningful sense.

US Investigators Crack Down on Daimler's Culture of Corruption
By Dietmar Hawranek 03/30/2010
After corruption scandals involving engineering giant Siemens and truck manufacturer MAN, Daimler is now in the spotlight. The US is pressing charges against the carmaker over alleged bribery payments to foreign governments. The case will likely be settled out of court.

Sometimes two letters are enough to tell an entire story. In this case, the two letters, which were printed on the labels of three files in a safe at the Mercedes-Benz office in Istanbul, were "N.A."
The German automaker produces busses in Turkey, which it sells in countries around the world, including North Korea, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania and Russia. The company apparently paid €3.3 million ($4.4 million) in bribes to secure business in these countries.

This, at least, is the way the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) interprets the content of the files with the letters "N.A." -- an abbreviation for the words "Nützliche Aufwendungen" ("useful payments") -- printed on the label. It's another -- and very German -- way of saying "bribes."

The story behind the files is particularly dramatic, because it also involved the suicide of an executive. Rudi K., who worked for Mercedes-Benz's parent company Daimler in Nigeria, was apparently involved in the payments. He was faced with a difficult choice: report poor sales figures or risk a jail term.

American attorneys questioned K. for several days. He later told his wife that he was treated like a hardened criminal and was under "enormous pressure." Then K. committed suicide.
The affair has proved to be extremely expensive for automaker Daimler, which is set to pay $185 million to settle a lawsuit in the United States. The case raises many questions. How could a respected global corporation like Daimler apparently have violated German and international law for years by paying bribes in at least 22 countries around the world? Could it be that the Daimler case is in fact typical for Germany, which until recently was the world's largest exporter? Are German companies as good at corruption as they are at exporting?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,686238,00.html#ref=nlint

Germany's Ferrostaal Suspected of Organizing Bribes for Other Firms
By Jörg Schmitt 03/30/2010

German engineering group Ferrostaal is under suspicion of paying bribes to secure contracts and of organizing bribery payments on behalf of other firms for a fee. The case could have repercussions for the whole of German industry, says one former executive of MAN, Ferrostaal's former parent company.

It was enough to arouse suspicions. For many years, there had been recurring stories about presumed bribe payments by Essen-based plant construction group Ferrostaal. In one case, the company allegedly paid 200,000 deutsche marks (€102,258, $138,099) to former Indonesian President Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie. In another, the family of former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha is believed to have received 460 million deutsche marks for the construction of a metal-processing plant.

Few of these allegations have stood up in court, however, partly because some of the payments occurred during a period when so-called "useful expenditures," or payments made to procure contracts, were not yet illegal in Germany.

But since Wednesday of last week, there are many indications that bribery payments were commonplace at Ferrostaal. Klaus Lesker, a member of the executive board, was arrested last week, and the Munich public prosecutor's office is also investigating two former board members and other senior executives for "a particularly serious case of bribing foreign officials in connection with international business arrangements," as well as for suspected tax evasion.
The prosecutors' list of suspects now includes about a dozen people. Investigators have their sights set on five projects, worth a total of almost one billion euros, which the group is believed to have secured through bribery.

The investigators also believe that the numbers could quickly rise in the coming days. "What we have now is just the beginning," says one official.

A few key documents already fell into the hands of prosecutors last year, during their corruption probe into Ferrostaal's former parent company, engineering group MAN. Last July, authorities conducted a raid on Ferrostaal offices in Essen because they suspected that bribes had been paid in connection with the sale of eight oceangoing tugs to a Hamburg shipping company.
Did Ferrostaal Arrange Bribes for Other Firms?

In the proceedings that has now been launched, under case number 565 Js 33037/10, the investigators can apparently rely on the extensive testimony of two witnesses. The allegations against Ferrostaal are serious: Did the company not only pay bribes itself for years, but also do the dirty work on behalf of other companies in return for a fee?

A case in point is that of Giesecke & Devrient, a Munich-based company that specializes in banknote and securities printing. The case concerns the sale of five printing and embossing machines, as well as a system used to destroy banknotes, to the Indonesian state-owned banknote printing company. Ferrostaal is believed to have brokered the deal and, through a consultant, paid bribes to local officials.

Giesecke & Devrient, which is also under investigation, says it "has not been aware of any irregularities to date."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,686513,00.html#ref=nlint

But from this earth, this grave, this dust,

My God shall raise me up, I trust.

Sir Walter Raleigh

The monthly Coppock Indicators finished February:
DJIA: +95 UP. NASDAQ: +291 UP. SP500: +118 UP. The great Bull market goes on with the all three continuing higher in positive numbers.

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Help the LIR fight Banksterism, the EU, and for sound money.
If you can, help the LIR stay around and make a difference. Please make a donation at the PayPal link on the website or better still become a sponsor for what looks like an exciting 2010. Capitalism not banksterism.

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Sunspots – A 22 year colder world? (From 2004?)

Spotless Days March 30 Current Stretch: 0 days
2010 total: 6 days (7%)2009 total: 260 days (71%)Since 2004: 776 daysTypical Solar Min: 485 days
http://www.spaceweather.com/

The long minimum seems to have ended.

New Solar Cycle Prediction
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/29may_noaaprediction.htm

Is the Sun Missing Its Spots?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/science/space/21sunspot.html?8dpc

Are Sunspots Different During This Solar Minimum?
-----But something is unusual about the current sunspot cycle. The current solar minimum has been unusually long, and with more than 670 days without sunspots through June 2009, the number of spotless days has not been equaled since 1933.

----During the period from 1645 to 1715, the Sun entered a period of low activity now known as the Maunder Minimum, when through several 11- year periods the Sun displayed few if any sunspots. Models of the Sun's irradiance suggest that the solar energy input to the Earth decreased during that time and that this change in solar activity could explain the low temperatures recorded in Europe during the Little Ice Age.

----The same data were later published [Penn and Livingston, 2006], and the observations showed that the magnetic field strength in sunspots were decreasing with time, independent of the sunspot cycle. A simple linear extrapolation of those data suggested that sunspots might completely vanish by 2015.These observations caused researchers to wonder whether the characteristics of sunspots are different now than in other solar cycles.http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009EO300001.pdf

Big freeze could signal global warming 'pause'
The Arctic conditions which have brought Britain to a standstill over the past week could be the start of a "pause" in global warming, some scientists believe.
Published: 9:20AM GMT 11 Jan 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/6965342/Big-freeze-could-signal-global-warming-pause.html

Sunspot cycle 24: Together with sunspot cycle 25, the next two global cooling cycles. The new “Dalton Minimum?” Twenty Eight months now with low sunspots numbers, and counting. February was the 28th month of yet another low number of 18.6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Minimum

Smoothed sunspot numbers (SSN). 2007, Oct. 0.9. The end of cycle 23.

Sunspot cycle 24: Nov 1.7. Dec 10.1. Jan 3.4. Feb 2.2. Mar 9.3 April 2.9. May: 2.9. June 3.1. July 0.5. August 0.5. Sep 1.1 Oct. 2.9. Nov. 4.1 Dec 0.8. Jan 1.5. Feb 1.4. Mar 0.7. Apr 1.2. May 2.9. June 2.6. July 3.5. Aug. 0.0. Sep 4.2. Oct 4.6. Nov 4.2. Dec 10.6 Jan 13.1 Feb 18.6

Sunspots. http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml

The count. http://sidc.oma.be/products/ri_hemispheric/

Why a New Minimum. http://sesfoundation.org/dalton_minimum.pdf

The “Carrington Event,” September 1, 1859.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/06may_carringtonflare.htm

Current Space Weather.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

What happened to global warming?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8299079.st

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This week’s featured links: Silver & Gold Miners + Rare Metals.

With US trillion dollar deficits stretching as far as the eye can see, and voodoo economics the order of the day at the central banks, I think it is now time to begin selectively scaling into precious metals companies that mostly meet the following criteria:

Adequate cash reserves. Good management. Strong in-ground reserves or prospects. NAFTA based, or else located in countries with strong rule of law.

Endeavour Silver Corp. TSX: EDR. http://www.edrsilver.com/s/Home.asp

Semafo TSX: SMF http://www.semafo.com/home_company_intro.php

ATW Gold Corp. TSX.V: ATW. http://www.atwgold.com/

US Silver Corp. TSX.V: USA. http://www.us-silver.com/s/Home.asp

Excellon Resources Inc. TSX: EXN. http://www.excellonresources.com/

First Majestic Silver Corp. TSX: FR http://www.firstmajestic.com/s/Home.asp

New Jersey Mining Company. OTCBB: NJMC
http://www.newjerseymining.com/index.html

Atna Resources Ltd. TSX: ATN. http://www.atna.com/s/Home.asp

Barkerville Gold Mines TSX.V: BGM. Formerly International Wayside Gold Mines Ltd.
http://www.barkervillegold.com/s/Home.asp

Shoreham Resources Ltd. TSX-V: SMH
http://www.shoreham.ca/

ATAC Resources Ltd, TSX.V: ATC. http://www.atacresources.com/s/home.asp

Evolving Gold Corp. TSX.V: EVG http://www.evolvinggold.com/

Lydian International Ltd. TSX: LYD. Note: LYD operates in Armenia, a region carrying higher risk than our usual safer picks in NAFTA lands. http://www.lydianinternational.co.uk/

The story of rare earths and metals is mostly one of China producing and exporting, Japan, America and everyone else importing. Vital to our new technologies, and lifestyle, and critical to hybrid and electric cars, Rare Earth Elements and Heavy Rare Earths, are a strategic choke point held in China’s hands. Lately China has been squeezing that choke point. I think that AVL at Thor Lake Canada, has a property of global importance. A property with the ability to offer NAFTA access to REEs and HREs for the decades ahead. As America and the west move to reduce over dependence on oil from unstable regions, we will see demand for rare metals take off.

Avalon Rare Metals Inc. TSX: AVL. http://www.avalonraremetals.com/

We will be adding more REEs as appropriate.

Warning.
Sadly we are all in unexplored territory. The world has never before suffered a severe recession/depression while operating on fiat currency. As is widely apparent, the central banks haven’t a clue and are making up the rules as the flounder along. They never saw it coming they claim, although it was obvious to many fine writers though not unfortunately in the mainstream media, that a giant financialised derivatives gambling economy would always end badly. There are no experts now, for the simple reason that we have never before faced such a sudden synchronised and deep collapse in the global economies.

The unfortunate fact that we are operating on fraudulent currencies is highly likely to mean it all ends many months from now, in a fiat currency revulsion, but only after the monetary authorities have first tried pouring in endless amounts of newly created money. A derivatives gambling world with an estimated quadrillion dollars of face value has to be unwound and the losses absorbed. In this sort of investing environment, cash, gold and silver and tangible assets are favoured over stocks and intangible assets.

As always if thinking about making an investment, it’s important to do one’s own due diligence. No one has more at risk in an investment than you do yourself. In these difficult economic times, there will likely be several false bottoms before the real one arrives and hindsight allows us to confirm that the bottom is in. Even then, a “V” shaped rebound is highly improbable. A double dip recession seems likely. Beware the false "statistical" government subsidised "recovery." It is a "recovery" bought from a future of fiat currency collapse.

Graeme Irvine

London Irvine Report: www.londonirvinereport.com/

Graeme@londonirvinereport.com

Irish Banks.

Baltic Dry Index. 3021 -77

LIR Gold Target by 2019: $3,000.

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.

Albert Einstein.

Today we offer our condolences and sympathy to the families of all who were killed and injured in yesterday’s atrocity in Moscow. Yet another attack on western civilization. We also wish all our Jewish readers a very happy Passover wherever they may be celebrating it this year.


We open today with Ireland, where the government later today will effectively take over the banking system. The banks will pass on their bad loans, dodgy securities and toxic waste to the National Asset Management Agency. In effect the bad bank of the citizens of the Republic as they bailout their failed gambling banksters. I suspect that this is the model the ECB will use all across Europe, once the Club Med dominoes start falling when the double dip recession begins to hit. Stay long precious metals during this price pause.

Approach each new problem not with a view of finding what you hope will be there, but to get the truth, the realities that must be grappled with. You may not like what you find. In that case you are entitled to try to change it. But do not deceive yourself as to what you do find to be the facts of the situation.

Bernard Baruch.

March 30, 2010
Ireland on the brink of full-scale bank nationalisation

The Republic of Ireland faced the prospect last night of having most of its banking system nationalised amid growing speculation that the Dublin Government would raise its stakes in both remaining private sector operators — Allied Irish Bank and Bank of Ireland.
Shares in both slid yesterday after a report that the Government’s stake in AIB would rise from 25 per cent to 70 per cent and its holding in BoI would be lifted from 16 per cent to 40 per cent.
Each bank will be offered less than originally expected for questionable loans and other toxic assets being transferred into the state-run “bad bank”, the National Asset Management Agency, according to The Irish Times.

Those “haircuts”, bigger than anticipated, would erode capital and force the banks to tap the Government for fresh equity, analysts said.

The agency is due to issue a statement today about taking on €54 billion (£48.5 billion) of the assets, while the Irish Government is also expected to announce details of future capital requirements for the banks. The Government’s existing equity in the two banks was accepted in lieu of cash when they were unable to pay interest on preference shares issued to the Government in return for a previous rescue.

With the Irish Nationwide and EBS building societies being merged and nationalised, and Anglo Irish Bank, the other large banking company, also nationalised, most of the industry would be in the State’s hands.

Ireland is the first significant Western country to be faced with the humiliation of wholesale bank nationalisation in this crisis, although the Republic took its three main banks into state ownership 18 months ago. In the mid-1990s Sweden was forced into bank nationalisation but emerged from it with a profit.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article7080026.ece

Elsewhere in EU-land, rinse and repeat has entered the repeat phase in East Europe. It’s hot money time once again, according to the IMF. Why should it end better second time around, doesn’t seem to be a concern of the hedge funds and banks. Below, Bloomberg covers wave two of the great financialised funny money investment game in East Europe. We have learned nothing it seems, except that failure will get bailed out, so get in quick and get rich.

IMF Concerned About East European Currency Gains, Belka Says
By Agnes Lovasz
March 30 (Bloomberg) -- East European governments and central banks should move to curb currency gains that threaten to derail the economic recovery and damage competitiveness, an International Monetary Fund official said.

The zloty has surged 22 percent in the past year against the euro, the second-best performer after South Africa’s rand among currencies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Hungary’s forint is up 17 percent, the Czech koruna has gained 8.6 percent and the Romanian leu has risen 3.9 percent as investors regained appetite for emerging market assets.

Strengthening currencies will “negatively” affect growth, said Marek Belka, director of the IMF’s European department, in an interview in Warsaw yesterday. “This is something that we should fear. An excessive appreciation of domestic currencies can undermine growth.”

The zloty, forint, koruna and leu are benefiting as investors switch funds from some euro-region economies including Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain to buy assets in the eastern members of the EU, which have the potential to grow faster and where deficit and debt levels are lower.
Investors are rewarding austere fiscal policies, including IMF-led programs in Hungary and Romania. Poland, the only EU member to avoid a recession during the credit crisis, and the Czech Republic are also returning to fiscal tightening after spending to stimulate economies and bail out banks.

‘Potential Danger’

“All this liquidity that is in the world is looking for yields,” said Belka, who served as Polish prime minister in 2004. “The assessment of risk has improved so the money is flowing in. This is certainly a potential danger.”

Authorities must look at ways to limit the inflow of funds from abroad, including curbing the availability of foreign currency-denominated loans, Belka said. Difficulty in rolling over those loans contributed to Hungary’s near-default in late 2008 after the credit crunch froze its bond market.

“The countries should look at prudential regulation that should discourage some of the foreign currency investments and loan-taking denominated in foreign currencies,” said Belka.

Central bankers are speaking out against the currency gains and have threatened to intervene to halt the moves.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601095&sid=aEvwdjrmFFOU

On the other side of the Atlantic, another largely under reported problem continues to grow. Below, the NY Times covers a story that ends in defaults if/when the feared double dip recession actually arrives.

State Debt Woes Grow Too Big to Camouflage
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH Published: March 29, 2010
California, New York and other states are showing many of the same signs of debt overload that recently took Greece to the brink — budgets that will not balance, accounting that masks debt, the use of derivatives to plug holes, and armies of retired public workers who are counting on benefits that are proving harder and harder to pay.

And states are responding in sometimes desperate ways, raising concerns that they, too, could face a debt crisis.

New Hampshire was recently ordered by its State Supreme Court to put back $110 million that it took from a medical malpractice insurance pool to balance its budget. Colorado tried, so far unsuccessfully, to grab a $500 million surplus from Pinnacol Assurance, a state workers’ compensation insurer that was privatized in 2002. It wanted the money for its university system and seems likely to get a lesser amount, perhaps $200 million.

Connecticut has tried to issue its own accounting rules. Hawaii has inaugurated a four-day school week. California accelerated its corporate income tax this year, making companies pay 70 percent of their 2010 taxes by June 15. And many states have balanced their budgets with federal health care dollars that Congress has not yet appropriated.

Some economists fear the states have a potentially bigger problem than their recession-induced budget woes. If investors become reluctant to buy the states’ debt, the result could be a credit squeeze, not entirely different from the financial strains in Europe, where markets were reluctant to refinance billions in Greek debt.

“If we ran into a situation where one state got into trouble, they’d be bailed out six ways from Tuesday,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard and a former research director of the International Monetary Fund. “But if we have a situation where there’s slow growth, and a bunch of cities and states are on the edge, like in Europe, we will have trouble.”
California’s stated debt — the value of all its bonds outstanding — looks manageable, at just 8 percent of its total economy. But California has big unstated debts, too. If the fair value of the shortfall in California’s big pension fund is counted, for instance, the state’s debt burden more than quadruples, to 37 percent of its economic output, according to one calculation.

Unstated debts pose a bigger problem to states with smaller economies. If Rhode Island were a country, the fair value of its pension debt would push it outside the maximum permitted by the euro zone, which tries to limit government debt to 60 percent of gross domestic product, according to Andrew Biggs, an economist with the American Enterprise Institute who has been analyzing state debt. Alaska would not qualify either.

State officials say a Greece-style financial crisis is a complete nonissue for them, and the bond markets so far seem to agree. All 50 states have investment-grade credit ratings, with California the lowest, and even California is still considered “average,” according to Moody’s Investors Service. The last state that defaulted on its bonds, Arkansas, did so during the Great Depression.
Goldman Sachs, in a research report last week, acknowledged the pension issue but concluded the states were very unlikely to default on their debt and noted the states had 30 years to close pension shortfalls.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/economy/30states.html?hp

We end for today with events and commentary on China. Below, two different views on China. It’s not a bubble, says JP Morgan’s man in far away London.

Don't focus too much on China, says JP Morgan AM
Chinese valuations are not yet in bubble territory, but investors should avoid confusing economic performance with stock-market returns, says emerging-markets head Richard Titherington.
By Joseph Marsh 29 March 2010

Much has been written in recent months about whether Chinese stocks or property are overvalued, and a growing number of editorials and research papers seem to be coming out on the side of the bears.

The strategist for the investment arm of a large Asian state-owned institution recently told AsianInvestor that they believe the country is heading for a crash. There are too many potential problems in the Chinese economy and financial markets for that not to happen at some point, she argues. In which sector or part of the economy that crash takes place is less certain, says the strategist, but it is inevitable.

"We should only be in China with calculated risk and exit strategies based on the senario of a crash somehow, somewhere that will have a domino effect and impact investments in China," she adds. Now that Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao has publicly said (in mid-March) that it will take the nation another 40 years to be a moderately developing country, it means those
"who want to hitch their wagon to China's back" have to "deal with it".

Of course, there are plenty of people who say prices in China have some way to run before they hit bubble territory. One is Richard Titherington, chief investment officer and head of emerging markets equity at JP Morgan Asset Management in London. He oversees the firm's global emerging-market funds, including emerging Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America.

"I don't think China valuations, either of equity or property, are bubble-like in general," he says. "There are always individual property projects or stocks that are overvalued of course. It might become a bubble, but is not there yet."

On average, Chinese price-to-earnings ratios are in the mid-teens, which he does not feel is excessive. Some stocks, such as China Mobile, have a P/E closer to 10x, and China P/Es range from 10x to 40x, he says.

"It's still a market where stock selection is extremely important," says Titherington. "When you look at previous bubbles, everything was overvalued, and that's not the case with China."

Asked what sort of levels would concern him, he said he would be concerned if P/E ratios were to significantly exceed earnings growth. "If you assume Chinese earnings growth is in the high teens or 20%," he says, "then if you're paying significantly above that, you're in dangerous territory."

Yet while Titherington plays down the 'China bubble' concerns, he does feel there is too much focus on the country to the exclusion of other emerging markets.
http://www.asianinvestor.net/News/170637,dont-focus-too-much-on-china-says-jp-morgan-am.aspx

After the recent Google hack attack and the outrageous treatment of the Rio Tinto three in a communist travesty of justice in a kangaroo court in Shanghai, although that does an injustice to kangaroos everywhere, I suspect that far fewer will now want to trust in Chinese good intentions and goodwill. Why would anyone in Taiwan want to join such an unjust system. I suspect that China’s bubble is about to get severely tested in the year ahead. When “the next Lehman” hits and it will, I expect China to go “boom.” Below, Morgan Stanley disagrees. I think the great vampire squids are talking up their book.

Chinese Stocks to ‘Break Out,’ Morgan Stanley Says
By Shiyin Chen
March 30 (Bloomberg) -- China’s stocks, among the worst performers globally this year, may “break out” in the second half as the yuan strengthens and slowing inflation eases concerns about monetary tightening, Morgan Stanley said.

A “weak” recovery in developed nations may reduce the risks from higher consumer prices while a stronger Chinese currency will fuel gains in Chinese stocks traded in Hong Kong, Morgan Stanley analysts led by Jerry Lou wrote in a report today.

“Because we think growth will remain robust and inflation will ease in the second half, the market could break out with tightening concerns easing,” Lou wrote. “Given the strong momentum in China’s domestic economy and the already recovering export sector, we think even a double dip in developed economies in 2010 would not derail China’s growth.”

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index has dropped 4.7 percent this year, the fourth-worst among 92 global measures tracked by Bloomberg, amid concerns over the nation’s currency policy, the outlook for the property market, the risks of non- performing loans in the banking industry, the impact of tightening on growth and the outlook for the global economic recovery, Morgan Stanley said. The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index of H shares has lost 4.5 percent.

‘Fragile’ Recovery

Widening deficits in Europe and a failure to boost employment in the U.S. have spurred concerns the global economic recovery will falter. A so-called double dip is a “real possibility” because the global economy remains “quite fragile,” World Bank chief economist Justin Lin said March 25.

-----Morgan Stanley economist Wang Qing expects the yuan to resume a “gradual appreciation,” starting with a marginal revaluation early in the second half, Lou wrote in today’s report. The currency could end the year as much as 5 percent higher against the dollar, the analyst also said.

Efforts by Chinese officials to curb rising property prices will weigh on the property and materials industries only in the “near term,” Morgan Stanley said. A credit crunch is also unlikely, according to the report.

The brokerage is joined by Martin Currie’s Chris Ruffle in predicting a rebound in Chinese shares. Ruffle, who helps manage $19 billion, said in a March 26 interview with Bloomberg Television the stock market may “move forward again” after May and June as inflation concerns ease.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601089&sid=a.s.i1FZbhm8

We have arrived at the end of quarter waiting for the usual market window dressing to get underway. In this thinner trading week of Holy Week and with Passover underway as well, dressing up the markets should be easy for the NY Fed and their Caribbean Cronies and the other helpers.

At the Comex silver depositories Monday, final figures were: Registered 54.24 Moz, Eligible 61.60 Moz, Total 115.84 Moz.

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Crooks & Scoundrels Corner.

The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, a NY Times article that casts doubt on global warming, man made or otherwise. In typical NYT editorial form, the article is heavily spun to downplay the skepticism and to push the “GW” agenda, now rebranded as “climate change” in the European media, since the facts no longer fit in well with global warming. Unfortunately, the planet has always undergone “climate change” and as politically correct, PR terms go, climate change as stand-in proxy for man made global warming from CO2, doesn’t quite excite the public enough to force them to adopt all the carbon trading scams. I suspect that just as soon as the left wing promoters of carbon taxes, plus the great vampire squids who profit from them can manage it, climate change will morph back into global warming again, with the emotive rubbish of extinct polar bears and melting glaciers back on the mainstream media agenda.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

Charles Darwin.

Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming
By LESLIE KAUFMAN Published: March 29, 2010
The debate over global warming has created predictable adversaries, pitting environmentalists against industry and coal-state Democrats against coastal liberals.

But it has also created tensions between two groups that might be expected to agree on the issue: climate scientists and meteorologists, especially those who serve as television weather forecasters.

Climatologists, who study weather patterns over time, almost universally endorse the view that the earth is warming and that humans have contributed to climate change. There is less of a consensus among meteorologists, who predict short-term weather patterns.

Joe Bastardi, for example, a senior forecaster and meteorologist with AccuWeather, maintains that it is more likely that the planet is cooling, and he distrusts the data put forward by climate scientists as evidence for rising global temperatures.

“There is a great deal of consternation among a lot of us over the readjustment of data that is going on and some of the portrayals that we are seeing,” Mr. Bastardi said in a video segment posted recently on AccuWeather’s Web site.

Such skepticism appears to be widespread among TV forecasters, about half of whom have a degree in meteorology. A study released on Monday by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was “caused mostly by human activities.”

More than a quarter of the weathercasters in the survey agreed with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” the researchers found.

-----Several well-known forecasters — including John Coleman in San Diego and Anthony Watts, a retired Chico, Calif., weatherman who now has a popular blog — have been vociferous in their critiques of global warming.

The dissent has been heightened by recent challenges to climate science, including the discovery of errors in the 2007 report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the unauthorized release of e-mail messages from a British climate research center last fall that skeptics say show that climate scientists had tried to suppress data.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/science/earth/30warming.html?hp

Science is facts just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

Henri Poincare

The monthly Coppock Indicators finished February:
DJIA: +95 UP. NASDAQ: +291 UP. SP500: +118 UP. The great Bull market goes on with the all three continuing higher in positive numbers.

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Help the LIR fight Banksterism, the EU, and for sound money.
If you can, help the LIR stay around and make a difference. Please make a donation at the PayPal link on the website or better still become a sponsor for what looks like an exciting 2010. Capitalism not banksterism.

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Sunspots – A 22 year colder world? (From 2004?)

Spotless Days March 29
Current Stretch: 0 days
2010 total: 6 days (7%)
2009 total: 260 days (71%)
Since 2004: 776 days
Typical Solar Min: 485 days
http://www.spaceweather.com

The long minimum seems to have ended.

New Solar Cycle Prediction
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/29may_noaaprediction.htm

Is the Sun Missing Its Spots?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/science/space/21sunspot.html?8dpc

Are Sunspots Different During This Solar Minimum?

-----But something is unusual about the current sunspot cycle. The current solar minimum has been unusually long, and with more than 670 days without sunspots through June 2009, the number of spotless days has not been equaled since 1933.

----During the period from 1645 to 1715, the Sun entered a period of low activity now known as the Maunder Minimum, when through several 11- year periods the Sun displayed few if any sunspots. Models of the Sun's irradiance suggest that the solar energy input to the Earth decreased during that time and that this change in solar activity could explain the low temperatures recorded in Europe during the Little Ice Age.

----The same data were later published [Penn and Livingston, 2006], and the observations showed that the magnetic field strength in sunspots were decreasing with time, independent of the sunspot cycle. A simple linear extrapolation of those data suggested that sunspots might completely vanish by 2015.These observations caused researchers to wonder whether the characteristics of sunspots are different now than in other solar cycles.
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009EO300001.pdf

Big freeze could signal global warming 'pause'
The Arctic conditions which have brought Britain to a standstill over the past week could be the start of a "pause" in global warming, some scientists believe.
Published: 9:20AM GMT 11 Jan 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/6965342/Big-freeze-could-signal-global-warming-pause.html

Sunspot cycle 24: Together with sunspot cycle 25, the next two global cooling cycles. The new “Dalton Minimum?” Twenty Eight months now with low sunspots numbers, and counting. February was the 28th month of yet another low number of 18.6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Minimum

Smoothed sunspot numbers (SSN). 2007, Oct. 0.9. The end of cycle 23.

Sunspot cycle 24: Nov 1.7. Dec 10.1. Jan 3.4. Feb 2.2. Mar 9.3 April 2.9. May: 2.9. June 3.1. July 0.5. August 0.5. Sep 1.1 Oct. 2.9. Nov. 4.1 Dec 0.8. Jan 1.5. Feb 1.4. Mar 0.7. Apr 1.2. May 2.9. June 2.6. July 3.5. Aug. 0.0. Sep 4.2. Oct 4.6. Nov 4.2. Dec 10.6 Jan 13.1 Feb 18.6

Sunspots. http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml

The count. http://sidc.oma.be/products/ri_hemispheric/

Why a New Minimum. http://sesfoundation.org/dalton_minimum.pdf

The “Carrington Event,” September 1, 1859.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/06may_carringtonflare.htm

Current Space Weather.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

What happened to global warming?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8299079.st

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This week’s featured links: Silver & Gold Miners + Rare Metals.

With US trillion dollar deficits stretching as far as the eye can see, and voodoo economics the order of the day at the central banks, I think it is now time to begin selectively scaling into precious metals companies that mostly meet the following criteria:

Adequate cash reserves. Good management. Strong in-ground reserves or prospects. NAFTA based, or else located in countries with strong rule of law.

Endeavour Silver Corp. TSX: EDR. http://www.edrsilver.com/s/Home.asp

Semafo TSX: SMF http://www.semafo.com/home_company_intro.php

ATW Gold Corp. TSX.V: ATW. http://www.atwgold.com/

US Silver Corp. TSX.V: USA. http://www.us-silver.com/s/Home.asp

Excellon Resources Inc. TSX: EXN. http://www.excellonresources.com/

First Majestic Silver Corp. TSX: FR http://www.firstmajestic.com/s/Home.asp

New Jersey Mining Company. OTCBB: NJMC
http://www.newjerseymining.com/index.html

Atna Resources Ltd. TSX: ATN. http://www.atna.com/s/Home.asp

Barkerville Gold Mines TSX.V: BGM. Formerly International Wayside Gold Mines Ltd.
http://www.barkervillegold.com/s/Home.asp

Shoreham Resources Ltd. TSX-V: SMH
http://www.shoreham.ca/

ATAC Resources Ltd, TSX.V: ATC. http://www.atacresources.com/s/home.asp

Evolving Gold Corp. TSX.V: EVG http://www.evolvinggold.com/

Lydian International Ltd. TSX: LYD. Note: LYD operates in Armenia, a region carrying higher risk than our usual safer picks in NAFTA lands. http://www.lydianinternational.co.uk/

The story of rare earths and metals is mostly one of China producing and exporting, Japan, America and everyone else importing. Vital to our new technologies, and lifestyle, and critical to hybrid and electric cars, Rare Earth Elements and Heavy Rare Earths, are a strategic choke point held in China’s hands. Lately China has been squeezing that choke point. I think that AVL at Thor Lake Canada, has a property of global importance. A property with the ability to offer NAFTA access to REEs and HREs for the decades ahead. As America and the west move to reduce over dependence on oil from unstable regions, we will see demand for rare metals take off.

Avalon Rare Metals Inc. TSX: AVL. www.avalonraremetals.com

We will be adding more REEs as appropriate.

Warning.

Sadly we are all in unexplored territory. The world has never before suffered a severe recession/depression while operating on fiat currency. As is widely apparent, the central banks haven’t a clue and are making up the rules as the flounder along. They never saw it coming they claim, although it was obvious to many fine writers though not unfortunately in the mainstream media, that a giant financialised derivatives gambling economy would always end badly. There are no experts now, for the simple reason that we have never before faced such a sudden synchronised and deep collapse in the global economies.

The unfortunate fact that we are operating on fraudulent currencies is highly likely to mean it all ends many months from now, in a fiat currency revulsion, but only after the monetary authorities have first tried pouring in endless amounts of newly created money. A derivatives gambling world with an estimated quadrillion dollars of face value has to be unwound and the losses absorbed. In this sort of investing environment, cash, gold and silver and tangible assets are favoured over stocks and intangible assets.

As always if thinking about making an investment, it’s important to do one’s own due diligence. No one has more at risk in an investment than you do yourself. In these difficult economic times, there will likely be several false bottoms before the real one arrives and hindsight allows us to confirm that the bottom is in. Even then, a “V” shaped rebound is highly improbable. A double dip recession seems likely. Beware the false "statistical" government subsidised "recovery." It is a "recovery" bought from a future of fiat currency collapse.

Graeme Irvine

London Irvine Report: www.londonirvinereport.com/

Graeme@londonirvinereport.com

The G-1. Europe’s Banks.

Baltic Dry Index. 3098 -79

LIR Gold Target by 2019: $3,000.

"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made."

Groucho Marx

We open this morning with trouble in US debt sales. Hopefully it’s just an aberration, or China sending a shot across America’s bows before the US Treasury publishes its list of currency manipulators on April 15th. At worst it is a sign that US debt sales are now starting to overwhelm the supply of available and willing investors in US debt at current yields. The G-1 is still rushing towards a full scale debt crisis, even if the Euro-zone looks like getting there first. Stay long precious metals, preferably held outside of America and the UK. They both have past form at being unsafe locations to hold precious metals.

"Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can't make head nor tail out of it."

Timothy Geithner, with apologies to Groucho Marx.

Sell-off in US Treasuries raises sovereign debt fears
Investors are braced for a further sell-off in US Treasuries after dramatic moves last week raised fears that the surfeit of US government debt is starting to saturate bond markets.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Published: 9:06PM BST 28 Mar 2010

The yield on 10-year Treasuries – the benchmark price of global capital – surged 30 basis points in just two days last week to over 3.9pc, the highest level since the Lehman crisis. Alan Greenspan, ex-head of the US Federal Reserve, said the abrupt move may be "the canary in the coal mine", a warning to Washington that it can no longer borrow with impunity. He said there is a "huge overhang of federal debt, which we have never seen before".

David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff said Treasury yields have ratcheted up 90 basis points since December in a "destabilising fashion", for the wrong reasons. Growth has not been strong enough to revive fears of inflation. Commodity prices peaked in January and US home sales have fallen for the last three months, pointing to a double-dip in the housing market.

Mr Rosenberg said the yield spike recalls the move in the spring of 2007 just as the credit system started to unravel. "The question is how the equity market is going to handle this back-up in rates," he said.

The trigger for last week's sell-off was poor demand at Treasury auctions, linked to the passage of the Obama health care reform. Critics say it will add $1 trillion (£670bn) to America's debt over the next decade, a claim disputed fiercely by Democrats.

It is unclear whether China is selling US Treasuries after cutting its holdings for three months in a row, or what its motive may be. There are concerns that Beijing may be sending a coded message before the US Treasury rules next month on whether China is a "currency manipulator", though experts say China is clearly still buying dollar assets because it is holding down the yuan against the greenback. Some investors may be selling Treasuries as a precaution against a trade spat.

Looming over everything is the worry that markets will not be able to absorb the glut of US debt as the Fed winds down its policy of bond purchases, starting with an exit from mortgage-backed securities. It currently holds a quarter of the $5 trillion of the MBS market.
The rise in US bond yields has set off mayhem in the 10-year US swaps markets. Spreads turned negative last week, touching the lowest level in 20 years. The effect was to drive credit costs for high-grade companies such as Berkshire Hathaway below that of the US government.

This may have been a technical aberration.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/7533014/Sell-off-in-US-Treasuries-raises-sovereign-debt-fears.html

Back in Europe, the EU’s great, the good, the not so good, the awful, the shifty and the downright dishonest, all got together last week to kow-tow to Germany and dither over a viable assistance plan for the tax and work shy Greeks. What emerged left the Greeks and Club Med even worse off than before. In effect, Germany told the Greeks to financially “drop dead” first, i.e. get shut out of the debt market, before being allowed to apply to the IMF and EU assistance. The others in the Euro-zone all willingly went along. Below, the Telegraph covers the worst of all worlds. Seen from Athens, actually defaulting and exiting the Euro-zone, now looks a fitting response.

"Too bad ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation."

Henry Kissinger.

Europe has left Greece hanging in the wind
However you dress it, the Greek package agreed by EU leaders is a capitulation to German-Dutch demands. There will be no European debt union as long as Angela Merkel remains Iron Chancellor of Germany.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Published: 8:48PM BST 28 Mar 2010

The Frankfurter Allgemeine summed up the deal succinctly: "No member of Europe's monetary union should be liable for the debts of another state. Bilateral credit from Berlin for Athens is not the same as German acceptance of responsibility for Greek debt."

This shatters the assumption since Maastricht that monetary union leads inexorably to fiscal union. By drawing the IMF into Euroland's affairs, Germany has broken the spell and reduced EMU to a fixed-exchange system with knobs on, like the 1930s Gold Standard that it so resembles. No wonder Jean-Claude Trichet at the European Central Bank is cross.

Far from stemming contagion, the deal leaves Club Med exposed. Underlying default risk has risen for Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, as well as for Ireland, Slovakia and Malta even if credit markets keep missing the point. The world's top holder of EU debt does understand. Greece is the "tip of the iceberg", said the deputy-governor of China's central bank. "The main concern today, obviously, is Spain and Italy."

The 'rescue' resolves nothing for Greece, either short-term or long-term. The EU statement said "no decision has been taken to activate the mechanism." Precisely. The joint EU-IMF facility can be activated only ultima ratio – as a last resort – once Greece is shut out of debt markets and not until eurozone stability is threatened.

“So they want Greece to reach the point of bankruptcy before they help us?” asked Greek opposition leader Antonis Samaras

Greece is worse off than before. It cannot decide when to invoke the mechanism. It has given up its right as an IMF member to go to the fund when it wants, leaving it prisoner to Europe's deflation dictates. "The IMF would be a lot softer than Europe," said Ken Rogoff, the fund's former chief economist.

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, an ECB board member, said the deal has at least averted "Europe's Lehman". I agree that there is an equivalence of sorts between America's sub-prime and the Club Med bust and that a European banking system with wafer-thin capital buffers and a cupboard full of skeletons cannot risk a Greek debacle at this juncture, but what exactly has been averted? Roughly €22bn (£19.8bn) in joint IMF-EU funds might be available, some coming from states in trouble themselves. This is not enough. No encore is likely. Germany will not pay twice.

Erik Nielsen from Goldman Sachs said Greece must raise €24.7bn by late May. The noose then tightens. Long-term debt amortisations are 7pc of GDP this year, 10.2pc on 2011, 11.8pc in 2012, 9.7pc in 2013, and 10.4pc in 2014. "Greece faces both a liquidity crisis and a solvency crisis. It is not clear that European policy-makers fully appreciate the scale of the problems," he wrote in a report, Here Comes The IMF.

Mr Nielsen said Greek data released last month show that the budget deficit is 16pc of GDP on a "cash basis", rather than the official 12.7pc on an "accrual basis". The IMF is watching closely, having warned last June that Greece's "cash fiscal data show consistently weaker results than accrual data, which has been inadequately explained." Translation: the real deficit is 16pc.
Greece is drowning.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/7532852/Europe-has-left-Greece-hanging-in-the-wind.html

Why does any of this matter? Below, one of America’s best economic writers spells it out in detail. I recommend following the link to read John Mauldin’s whole excellent article.

"If the financial system goes down, our business is going down and, trust me, yours and everyone else's is going down, too."

Lloyd Blankfein. CEO Goldman Sachs. November 8, 2009

What Does the Greek Debt Crisis Mean For Your?
Mar 27, 2010 - 06:36 AM By: John_Mauldin

-----Now, we come to a critical point in our discussion of the critical state. Again, read this with the markets in mind:

"In this simplified setting of the sandpile, the power law also points to something else: the surprising conclusion that even the greatest of events have no special or exceptional causes.

After all, every avalanche large or small starts out the same way, when a single grain falls and makes the pile just slightly too steep at one point. What makes one avalanche much larger than another has nothing to do with its original cause, and nothing to do with some special situation in the pile just before it starts. Rather, it has to do with the perpetually unstable organization of the critical state, which makes it always possible for the next grain to trigger an avalanche of any size."

Now let's couple this idea with a few other concepts. First, one of the world's greatest economists (who sadly was never honored with a Nobel), Hyman Minsky, points out that stability leads to instability. The longer a given condition or trend persists (and the more comfortable we get with it), the more dramatic the correction will be when the trend fails. The problem with long-term macroeconomic stability is that it tends to produce highly unstable financial arrangements. If we believe that tomorrow and next year will be the same as last week and last year, we are more willing to add debt or postpone savings for current consumption. Thus, says Minsky, the longer the period of stability, the higher the potential risk for even greater instability when market participants must change their behavior.

Relating this to our sandpile, the longer that a critical state builds up in an economy or, in other words, the more fingers of instability that are allowed to develop connections to other fingers of instability, the greater the potential for a serious "avalanche."

And that's exactly what happened in the recent credit crisis. Consumers all through the world's largest economies borrowed money for all sorts of things, because times were good. Home prices would always go up and the stock market was back to its old trick of making 15% a year. And borrowing money was relatively cheap. You could get 2% short-term loans on homes, which seemingly rose in value 15% a year, so why not buy now and sell a few years down the road?

-----Greed took over. Those risky loans were sold to investors by the tens and hundreds of billions all over the world. And as with all debt sandpiles, the fault lines started to show up. Maybe it was that one loan in Las Vegas that was the critical piece of sand; we don't know, but the avalanche was triggered.

-----But it wasn't contained. It caused banks to realize that what they thought was AAA credit was actually a total loss. And as banks looked at what was on their books, they wondered about their fellow banks. How bad were they? Who knew? Since no one did, they stopped lending to each other. Credit simply froze. They stopped taking each other's letters of credit, and that hurt world trade. Because banks were losing money, they stopped lending to smaller businesses. Commercial paper dried up. All those "safe" off-balance-sheet funds that banks created were now folding. Everyone sold what they could, not what they wanted to, to cover their debts. It was a true panic. Businesses started laying off people, who in turn stopped spending as much.

------Let me be a little controversial here. The blame game that is now going on is in many ways way too simplistic. The world system survived all sorts of crises over the recent decades and bounced back. Why is now so different?

Because we are coming to the end of a 60-year debt supercycle. We borrowed (and not just in the US) like there was no tomorrow. And because we were so convinced that all this debt was safe, we leveraged up, borrowing at first 3 and then 5 and then 10 and then as much as 30 times the actual money we had. And we convinced the regulators that it was a good thing. The longer things remained stable, the more convinced we became they would remain that way.

And while the government is trying to make up the difference for consumers who are trying to (or being forced to) reduce their debt, even governments have limits, as the Greeks are finding out.

If it were not for the fact that we are coming to the closing innings of the debt supercycle, we would already be in a robust recovery. But we are not. And sadly, we have a long way to go with this deleveraging process. It will take years.

You can't borrow your way out of a debt crisis, whether you are a family or a nation. And as too many families are finding out today, if you lose your job you can lose your home. What were once very creditworthy people are now filing for bankruptcy and walking away from homes, as all those subprime loans going bad put homes back onto the market, which caused prices to fall, which caused an entire home-construction industry to collapse, which hurt all sorts of ancillary businesses, which caused more people to lose their jobs and give up their homes, and on and on.
It's all connected. We built a very unstable sandpile and it came crashing down and now we have to dig out from the problem. And the problem was too much debt. It will take years, as banks write off home loans and commercial real estate and more, and we get down to a more reasonable level of debt as a country and as a world.

And here's where I have to deliver the bad news. It seems we did not learn the lessons of this crisis very well. First, we have not fixed the problems that made the crisis so severe. We have not regulated credit default swaps, for instance. And European banks are still highly leveraged.
Why is Greece important? Because so much of their debt is on the books of European banks. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth. And just a few years ago this seemed like a good thing. The rating agencies made Greek debt AAA, and banks could use massive leverage (almost 40 times in some European banks) and buy these bonds and make good money in the process. (Don't ask Dad why people still trust rating agencies. Some things just can't be explained.)

Except, now that Greek debt is risky. Today, it appears there will be some kind of bailout for Greece. But that is just a band-aid on a very serious wound. The crisis will not go away. It will come back, unless the Greeks willingly go into their own Great Depression by slashing their spending and raising taxes to a level that no one in the US could even contemplate. What is being demanded of them is really bad for them, but they did it to themselves.

But those European banks? When that debt goes bad, and it will, they will react to each other just like they did in 2008. Trust will evaporate. Will taxpayers shoulder the burden? Maybe, maybe not. It will be a huge crisis. There are other countries in Europe, like Spain and Portugal, that are almost as bad as Greece. Great Britain is not too far behind.

The European economy is as large as that of the US. We feel it when they go into recessions, for many of our largest companies make a lot of money in Europe. A crisis will also make the euro go down, which reduces corporate profits and makes it harder for us to sell our products into Europe, not to mention compete with European companies for global trade. And that means we all buy less from China, which means they will buy less of our bonds, and on and on go the connections. And it will all make it much harder to start new companies, which are the source of real growth in jobs.

And then in January of 2011 we are going to have the largest tax increase in US history. The research shows that tax increases have a negative 3-times effect on GDP, or the growth of the economy. As I will show in a letter in a few weeks, I think it is likely that the level of tax increases, when combined with the increase in state and local taxes (or the reductions in spending), will be enough to throw us back into recession, even without problems coming from Europe. (And no, Melissa, that is not some Republican research conspiracy. The research was done by Christina Romer, who is Obama's chairperson of the Joint Council of Economic Advisors.)

And sadly, that means even higher unemployment.

-----And this next time, we won't be able to fight the recession with even greater debt and lower interest rates, as we did this last time. Rates are as low as they can go, and this week the bond market is showing that it does not like the massive borrowing the US is engaged in. It is worried about the possibility of "Greece R Us."

Bond markets require confidence above all else. If Greece defaults, then how far away is Spain or Japan? What makes the US so different, if we do not control our debt? As Reinhart and Rogoff show, when confidence goes, the end is very near. And it always comes faster than anyone expects.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article18229.html

At the Comex silver depositories Friday, final figures were: Registered 54.25 Moz, Eligible 61.55 Moz, Total 115.80 Moz.

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Crooks & Scoundrels Corner.

The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.

Today, discredited global warming in full retreat. While one winter doesn’t a summer make, the northern hemisphere winter of 2009-2010 fits in better with the arrival of global cooling due to the new Dalton Minimum in sunspots, than it does in the extinction of the polar bears and the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. Who needs carbon taxes and carbon futures except the great financial squids that speculate in them, backed up by too big to fail, should they get the gambling wrong.

Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming.

Al Gore, Sept. 9, 2005.

Cold 'hits Mongolia herders hard'
The International Red Cross has appealed for help for thousands of Mongolian herders who have lost their livestock because of extreme cold.

The Red Cross said that millions of animals had perished during the country's hardest winter in years.

It says it needs over $900,000 (£603,000) to provide emergency assistance to the worst-hit families and restock herds.

A BBC correspondent says those animals who survived are running out of food.

In recent months temperatures in Mongolia have dropped below -40C.

Local residents call it a "dzud" - a severe winter following a very dry summer, which has left reserves of fodder low.

Almost half of the country's population are herders or farmers whose main assets are their livestock.

According to the Red Cross, nearly 10% of Mongolia's livestock have died since December.

The agency said it needed money to provide emergency food aid to more than 3,000 families who have lost the bulk of their herds and to help them restore or diversify their livelihoods.

"The needs are steadily growing as more and more herders face up to the reality that many of their animals are dying," Ravdan Samdandobji, secretary-general of the Mongolian Red Cross, said in the statement.

"More and more people are left distraught and increasingly destitute."

The BBC's Chris Hogg, who is in Mongolia, says the weather is not expected to improve until mid May and herders say they expect the next few weeks to be the toughest yet this winter.
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8592189.stm?ad=1

China Has ‘Test’ Meeting Grains Goal, Premier Says
March 25, 2010, 11:50 PM EDT
March 26 (Bloomberg) -- China, the biggest grain user, faces a test meeting a crop-output target because of drought in the southwest and a cold winter in the north, Premier Wen Jiabao said, underscoring the challenges brought on by bad weather.

Meeting this year’s goal of growing 500 million metric tons of grains will be a “test for sure,” the Xinhua News Agency reported, citing Wen. Wheat output in China may fall because of the cold weather, Wen was cited by the state agency as saying during a trip to drought-hit Yunnan from March 19-21.

China’s leaders have prioritized food security to ensure that the world’s most populous nation has adequate supplies and stockpiles. Rivers in China’s southwest have plunged to record low levels, according to the Ministry of Water Resources. About 18 million people are short of drinking water, Xinhua reported.

“There is little prospect for meaningful rainfall until May” in the southwest, forecaster

Accuweather Inc. said in an e-mail. “The drought is badly affecting the planting of crops” and a serious shortage of water in reservoirs will make it even harder for planting to be sustained, it said.

China set the 500 million ton target in February and the goal is lower than last year’s harvest of 530.8 million tons, Xinhua said in the report late yesterday. Output had increased in the six years to 2009, the report said.

‘Having an Impact’

“The cold weather and drought are definitely having an impact on China’s wheat crop,” Jay O’Neil, an adviser to the U.S. Grains Council, said by phone from Shandong today. Still, it’s too soon to tell what the outcome may be because wheat is a “hardy” crop that can recover if conditions improve, he said.

The drought in the China’s southwest, which may have been caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon, extends southward into Southeast Asia. The Mekong River, which flows from China through five countries including Cambodia is at its lowest level in 30 years, Thailand’s Department of Water Resources said on March 10.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-25/china-has-test-meeting-grains-goal-on-drought-cold-wen-says.html

Germans lose fear of climate change after long, hard winter
Published: 27 Mar 10 13:17 CETGermans are losing their fear of climate change, according to a survey, with just 42 percent worried about global warming

It seems the long and chilly winter has taken its toll on climate change sensibilities despite the fact that weather has nothing to do with climate. The latest figure is a clear drop from the 62 percent of Germans who said they were scared of such changes just last autumn. The new survey, carried out by polling company Infratest for Der Spiegel magazine, showed a quarter of those questioned thought Germany would profit from climate change rather than be badly affected by it. Many people have little faith in the information and prognosis of climate researchers with a third questioned in the survey not giving them much credence. This is thought to be largely due to mistakes and exaggerations recently discovered in a report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the IPCC.

Germany’s Leibniz Community, an umbrella organisation including many climate research institutes, broke ranks by calling for the resignation of IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri.

Climate research has been put, “in a difficult situation,” said Ernst Rietschel president of the Leibniz Community. He said sceptics have been given an easy target by the IPCC and said Pachauri should take on the responsibility and resign.
http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20100327-26163.html

Global warming -- at least the modern nightmare vision -- is a myth. I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy makers are not.

David Bellamy. UK botanist and TV presenter.

The monthly Coppock Indicators finished February:
DJIA: +95 UP. NASDAQ: +291 UP. SP500: +118 UP. The great Bull market goes on with the all three continuing higher in positive numbers.

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Help the LIR fight Banksterism, the EU, and for sound money.
If you can, help the LIR stay around and make a difference. Please make a donation at the PayPal link on the website or better still become a sponsor for what looks like an exciting 2010. Capitalism not banksterism.

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Sunspots – A 22 year colder world? (From 2004?)

Spotless Days March 28

Current Stretch: 0 days
2010 total: 6 days (7%)

2009 total: 260 days (71%)

Since 2004: 776 days

Typical Solar Min: 485 days
http://www.spaceweather.com/

The long minimum seems to have ended.

New Solar Cycle Prediction
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/29may_noaaprediction.htm

Is the Sun Missing Its Spots?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/science/space/21sunspot.html?8dpc

Are Sunspots Different During This Solar Minimum?

-----But something is unusual about the current sunspot cycle. The current solar minimum has been unusually long, and with more than 670 days without sunspots through June 2009, the number of spotless days has not been equaled since 1933.

----During the period from 1645 to 1715, the Sun entered a period of low activity now known as the Maunder Minimum, when through several 11- year periods the Sun displayed few if any sunspots. Models of the Sun's irradiance suggest that the solar energy input to the Earth decreased during that time and that this change in solar activity could explain the low temperatures recorded in Europe during the Little Ice Age.

----The same data were later published [Penn and Livingston, 2006], and the observations showed that the magnetic field strength in sunspots were decreasing with time, independent of the sunspot cycle. A simple linear extrapolation of those data suggested that sunspots might completely vanish by 2015.These observations caused researchers to wonder whether the characteristics of sunspots are different now than in other solar cycles.http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009EO300001.pdf

Big freeze could signal global warming 'pause'
The Arctic conditions which have brought Britain to a standstill over the past week could be the start of a "pause" in global warming, some scientists believe.
Published: 9:20AM GMT 11 Jan 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/6965342/Big-freeze-could-signal-global-warming-pause.html

Sunspot cycle 24: Together with sunspot cycle 25, the next two global cooling cycles. The new “Dalton Minimum?” Twenty Eight months now with low sunspots numbers, and counting. February was the 28th month of yet another low number of 18.6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Minimum

Smoothed sunspot numbers (SSN). 2007, Oct. 0.9. The end of cycle 23.

Sunspot cycle 24: Nov 1.7. Dec 10.1. Jan 3.4. Feb 2.2. Mar 9.3 April 2.9. May: 2.9. June 3.1. July 0.5. August 0.5. Sep 1.1 Oct. 2.9. Nov. 4.1 Dec 0.8. Jan 1.5. Feb 1.4. Mar 0.7. Apr 1.2. May 2.9. June 2.6. July 3.5. Aug. 0.0. Sep 4.2. Oct 4.6. Nov 4.2. Dec 10.6 Jan 13.1 Feb 18.6

Sunspots. http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml

The count. http://sidc.oma.be/products/ri_hemispheric/

Why a New Minimum. http://sesfoundation.org/dalton_minimum.pdf

The “Carrington Event,” September 1, 1859.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/06may_carringtonflare.htm

Current Space Weather.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

What happened to global warming?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8299079.st

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This week’s featured links: Silver & Gold Miners + Rare Metals.

With US trillion dollar deficits stretching as far as the eye can see, and voodoo economics the order of the day at the central banks, I think it is now time to begin selectively scaling into precious metals companies that mostly meet the following criteria:

Adequate cash reserves. Good management. Strong in-ground reserves or prospects. NAFTA based, or else located in countries with strong rule of law.

Endeavour Silver Corp. TSX: EDR. http://www.edrsilver.com/s/Home.asp

Semafo TSX: SMF http://www.semafo.com/home_company_intro.php

ATW Gold Corp. TSX.V: ATW. http://www.atwgold.com/

US Silver Corp. TSX.V: USA. http://www.us-silver.com/s/Home.asp

Excellon Resources Inc. TSX: EXN. http://www.excellonresources.com/

First Majestic Silver Corp. TSX: FR http://www.firstmajestic.com/s/Home.asp

New Jersey Mining Company. OTCBB: NJMC
http://www.newjerseymining.com/index.html

Atna Resources Ltd. TSX: ATN. http://www.atna.com/s/Home.asp

Barkerville Gold Mines TSX.V: BGM. Formerly International Wayside Gold Mines Ltd.
http://www.barkervillegold.com/s/Home.asp

Shoreham Resources Ltd. TSX-V: SMH
http://www.shoreham.ca/

ATAC Resources Ltd, TSX.V: ATC. http://www.atacresources.com/s/home.asp

Evolving Gold Corp. TSX.V: EVG http://www.evolvinggold.com/

Lydian International Ltd. TSX: LYD. Note: LYD operates in Armenia, a region carrying higher risk than our usual safer picks in NAFTA lands. http://www.lydianinternational.co.uk/

The story of rare earths and metals is mostly one of China producing and exporting, Japan, America and everyone else importing. Vital to our new technologies, and lifestyle, and critical to hybrid and electric cars, Rare Earth Elements and Heavy Rare Earths, are a strategic choke point held in China’s hands. Lately China has been squeezing that choke point. I think that AVL at Thor Lake Canada, has a property of global importance. A property with the ability to offer NAFTA access to REEs and HREs for the decades ahead. As America and the west move to reduce over dependence on oil from unstable regions, we will see demand for rare metals take off.

Avalon Rare Metals Inc. TSX: AVL. http://www.avalonraremetals.com/

We will be adding more REEs as appropriate.

Warning.

Sadly we are all in unexplored territory. The world has never before suffered a severe recession/depression while operating on fiat currency. As is widely apparent, the central banks haven’t a clue and are making up the rules as the flounder along. They never saw it coming they claim, although it was obvious to many fine writers though not unfortunately in the mainstream media, that a giant financialised derivatives gambling economy would always end badly. There are no experts now, for the simple reason that we have never before faced such a sudden synchronised and deep collapse in the global economies.

The unfortunate fact that we are operating on fraudulent currencies is highly likely to mean it all ends many months from now, in a fiat currency revulsion, but only after the monetary authorities have first tried pouring in endless amounts of newly created money. A derivatives gambling world with an estimated quadrillion dollars of face value has to be unwound and the losses absorbed. In this sort of investing environment, cash, gold and silver and tangible assets are favoured over stocks and intangible assets.

As always if thinking about making an investment, it’s important to do one’s own due diligence. No one has more at risk in an investment than you do yourself. In these difficult economic times, there will likely be several false bottoms before the real one arrives and hindsight allows us to confirm that the bottom is in. Even then, a “V” shaped rebound is highly improbable. A double dip recession seems likely. Beware the false "statistical" government subsidised "recovery." It is a "recovery" bought from a future of fiat currency collapse.

Graeme Irvine

London Irvine Report: whttp://londonirvinereport.blogspot.com/
graemeirvine@hotmail.com