Wednesday, 9 October 2013

Scrip.



Baltic Dry Index. 2146 +31

LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000.  Revised due to QE programs.

"Can't anybody here play this game?"

Casey Stengel.

For more on scrip, coming soon to America if common sense doesn’t quickly reappear in Washington, scroll down to Crooks Corner.

While President Obama and the Washington lunatics flirt with plunging the US economy into an unnecessary new depression, in Asia it was time for China to step up to centre stage. While President George W. Bush will go down as the man who lost Latin America, President Obama seems all too willing to take on the role of the man who lost much of East and Southeast Asia.  Stay long fully paid up physical precious metals held outside of John Bull and Uncle Sam’s larcenous reach. Both have form, as they say in Ali Baba’s cave.

Without losers, where would the winners be?

Casey Stengel.

China Builds Asean Role in Obama Absence

By Shamim Adam - Oct 9, 2013 5:05 AM GMT
Southeast Asian leaders today start a two-day summit where talks with China on territorial disputes in the resource-rich South China Sea may overshadow discussions on progress toward forming an economic community.

Heads from the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations are gathering in Brunei and will then take part in the broader East Asia Summit, where U.S. President Barack Obama’s absence may give China space to press for more influence in the region.

Major powers are asserting themselves in Asia as they hunt for new sources of growth, while assuring leaders they are not trying to dominate smaller countries or contain each other. China has softened its tone after disputes over waters rich in oil, gas and fish raised tensions with countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines, agreeing to talks on a code of conduct for the area.

The summits in Brunei’s capital of Bandar Seri Begawan come after leaders from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum concluded meetings in Bali yesterday. They pledged to work together to revive growth while those involved in a key trade deal kept to a year-end deadline on completing talks.

 “Global growth is too weak, risks remain tilted to the downside, global trade is weakening and the economic outlook suggests growth is likely to be slower and less balanced than desired,” the leaders said in the statement.
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Taiwan Warns That China Could Mount Successful Invasion by 2020

By Debra Mao & Argin Chang - Oct 9, 2013 3:53 AM GMT
China may be able to successfully invade Taiwan by 2020 as it develops technology to prevent allies such as the U.S. from coming to the island’s aid, the Taiwanese defense ministry said.

A military modernization campaign has seen China’s People’s Liberation Army enhance its ability to make long-range precision strikes and develop so-called area-denial technology, the ministry said in its 2013 National Defense Report

----The assessment comes as China and the island it considers a breakaway province have deepened economic ties. Chinese President Xi Jinping signaled he wants a political resolution, saying at a regional summit this month that the two sides can’t hand those problems “down from generation to generation.”

China and Taiwan have been ruled separately since Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island during a war against Mao Zedong’s Communists in 1949.

China has stated that “separatist forces” in Taiwan are the main threat to peace, Taiwan’s defense ministry said. The PLA is already able to seal off Taiwan’s main island and occupy outlying islands, according to the report.
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China Calls Japan Report of Xi-Abe Handshake at APEC Meaningless

By Bloomberg News - Oct 8, 2013 9:37 AM GMT
A Chinese foreign ministry official refused to confirm a Japanese newspaper story that President Xi Jinping and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shook hands at a summit in Bali, calling the report “meaningless.”

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying was asked three times at a daily media briefing in Beijing today if Xi and Abe met on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Bali. Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper reported they shook hands yesterday.

“What I have seen is some Japanese media reporting that President Xi had a handshake with Japanese Prime Minister Abe on the sidelines of the APEC leaders meeting,” Hua said. “Don’t you think the relevant reports are meaningless?”

----No formal bilateral summit has been held between Japan and China for more than a year. Abe and Xi shook hands and spoke briefly during a Group of 20 summit in Russia last month.

Asked a second time about the handshake, Hua said China hadn’t delivered “any report on the issue that you mentioned.” When she was asked about it a third time, Hua said Japan needed to “show sincerity” and remove obstacles to improved relations. She said China has been committed to solving the two countries’ problems via dialogue.
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Elsewhere, the IMF was again issuing more warnings on the risk from any Fed taper, and down grading the prospects for the BRICs and Euroland.

IMF sours on BRICs and doubts eurozone recovery claims

Fund admits that emerging markets have exhausted catch-up growth models

The International Monetary Fund has thrown in the towel on emerging markets. After years of talking up the BRICS club of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, it now admits that these countries have either exhausted their catch-up growth models, or run into the time-honoured problems of supply bottlenecks and bad government.

The Fund has cut its forecast for the developing economies by 0.5pc to 4.5pc this year in its latest World Economic Outlook, and by 0.4pc to 5.1pc next year.

The 2013 estimates have been slashed by 1.8pc for India, for Mexico by 1.7pc, and 1pc in Russia, compared to forecasts made in April. Similar damage is expected for Turkey, Indonesia, Ukraine, and others with big trade deficits as details are fleshed out.

The IMF was caught off guard by the ferocity of the emerging market rout when the Fed began to talk tough in May, threatening to turn down the spigot of dollar liquidity that has fuelled the booms -- and masked the woes -- in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

----Since emerging markets now make up half the global economy, the IMF has had to cut its world forecast to 2.9pc this year and 3.6pc in 2014, with plenty of “downside risks”, especially in Europe.

“Global growth remains in low gear. A likely scenario for the global economy is one of continued, plausible disappointments everywhere,” said the IMF. The gloomy `tour d’horizon’ suggests once again that frothy markets fuelled by easy money have decoupled from underlying reality of stagnant output.

The report pours scorn on claims that the eurozone is safely out of the woods, warning that little has been done to change the warped structure of monetary union.

The crisis-stricken states of Southern Europe face many more years of wage cuts and “internal devaluations” to claw back lost competitiveness and reverse the huge imbalances that built up in the early years of monetary union.

The IMF warned that Europe’s debt crisis may erupt again unless the European Central Bank takes action to stop the contraction of bank credit, and EU leaders deliver on their summit pledges.
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In better IMF news, at least for the UK, the IMF was forced to eat its earlier words when it consistently got the UK economy hopelessly wrong. This being the bureaucratic European led IMF that was once led by a French pervert, the IMF still insisted it was right at the time while the UK was wrong. Enough said about the need to seriously reform the IMF.

IMF upgrades UK growth in embarrassing about-turn

Britain forecast to grow 1.4pc this year, double the rate estimated in April when the IMF singled out the UK and George Osborne for criticism.

The International Monetary Fund has upgraded its growth forecasts for the UK by more than any other advanced economy in an embarrassing u-turn for the global financial institution.

Britain is now expected to grow by 1.4pc this year, double the rate projected in April when IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard singled the UK out for criticism and accused George Osborne of “playing with fire” with his austerity programme.

The following month, the Fund urged him to borrow as much as £10bn this year to pay for infrastructure investment and business tax cuts in an attempt to boost growth.

The IMF appeared to moderate its position in its World Economic Outlook, saying that "public investment can be brought forward to offset the drag from near-term fiscal tightening, while staying within the medium term fiscal framework". In May, it said action was "essential".

Instead, it acknowledged the UK’s sharp turnaround, saying: “Recent data have shown welcome signs of an improving economy, consistent with increasing consumer and business confidence.”

----Britain is now expected to end the year with the second fastest annualised growth rate of the G7 group of leading nations. At 2.3pc, the pace of expansion in the three months to December will be better than the US’s 1.9pc and only slower than Japan’s quantitative easing-fuelled 3.5pc growth.

It is the second time the IMF has upgraded its UK forecast in the last three months. In July, the 0.7pc outlook was raised to 0.9pc before today’s larger increase. The IMF also sharply upgraded its 2014 projection from 1.5pc to 1.9pc. Both the 2013 and 2014 upgrades were the largest of the world’s leading seven nations.
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"Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money."

Daniel Webster

At the Comex silver depositories Tuesday final figures were: Registered 43.15 Moz, Eligible 123.11 Moz, Total 166.26 Moz.  


Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.

Today as a special service to our American based readers, a primer on scrip and the Disney dollar, coming all too soon to much the USA, if the lunatics in Washington actually allow the Federal government to run out of borrowing power. If it wasn’t so deadly serious in real life, the current situation in Washington would be worthy of a Hollywood comedy.

"If you don't trust gold, do you trust the logic of taking a beautiful pine tree, worth about $4,000 - $5,000, cutting it up, turning it into pulp and then paper, putting some ink on it and then calling it one billion dollars?"

Kenneth J. Gerbino

Scrip

Scrip is a term for any substitute for legal tender and is often a form of credit. Scrips were created as company payment of employees and also as a means of payment in times where regular money is unavailable, such as remote coal towns, military bases, ships on long voyages, or occupied countries in war time. Other forms of scrip include subway tokens, IOUs, arcade tokens and tickets, and "points" on some websites.

Scrips have gained historical importance and become a subject of study in numismatics and exonumia due to their wide variety and recurring use. Scrip behaves similarly to a currency, and as such can be used to study monetary economics, as in the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op.

Company scrip was a credit against the accrued wages of employees. In the United States, where everything in a mining or logging camp was run, created and owned by a company, scrip provided the worker with credit when their wages had been depleted. These remote locations were cash poor. Workers had very little choice but to purchase meals and goods at a company store. In this way, the company could place enormous markups on goods in a company store, making workers completely dependent on the company, thus enforcing their "loyalty" to the company. Additionally, while employees could exchange scrip for cash, it was rarely done at face value. Scrip in this context was valid only within that area or town where it was issued. While store owners in neighboring communities could accept the scrip as currency, they rarely provided a 1 for 1 exchange. This was to avoid the risk of having coins/currency that were worthless anywhere else.

When U.S. President Andrew Jackson issued his Specie Circular of 1836 due to credit shortages, Virginia Scrip was accepted as payments for federal lands.

In 19th-century Western Canada, the federal government devised a system of land grants called scrip. Notes in the form of money scrip (valued at $160 or $240) or land scrip, valued at 160 acres (65 ha) or 240 acres (97 ha) were offered to the Métis people in exchange for their Aboriginal rights.[1]

During the Great Depression, many local governments were forced to pay employees in scrip at the height of the crisis.[2]

Scrip as a de facto form of currency within the setting of the mining or logging industry was discontinued around 1952.

Scrip is also related to the stock market where companies pay dividends in the form of scrip rather than paying actual currency.[citation needed] It is also a written document that acknowledges debt.

After World War I and the World War II, scrip was used in Germany and Austria; detailed accounts are in Notgeld.
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Disney dollar

Disney dollars are a form of corporate scrip sold by Walt Disney and redeemable for goods or services at many Disney facilities.

Similar in size, shape and design to the paper currency of the United States most bills bear the image of Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto or a drawing of one of the landmarks of the Disneyland Resort or the Walt Disney World Resort and are accepted at the company's theme parks, the Disney cruise ships, the Disney Store and at certain parts of Castaway Cay, Disney's private island in the Caribbean.
Disney Dollars were first issued in May 1987[1] and originally came in $1 and $5 denominations. In 1990, Disney added a $10 bill.

Disney dollars come in series of A and D, the former created for the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, Calif., and the latter for the Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, Florida. In 2005, both resorts released a $50 bill designed by Disney artist Charles Boyer to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Disneyland. Since 2005, they also have issued T series for the Disney Stores.

----Disney Dollars are created with anti-counterfeiting features such as microprinting, and hard to scan/copy reflective ink and imprinting on the front and back of the bill. In addition the bills are printed with serial numbers and letters which are unique to each bill. The Dollars have small bits of glitter scattered on them
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"Until government administrators can so identify the interests of government with those of the people and refrain from defrauding the masses through the device of currency depreciation for the sake of remaining in office, the wiser ones will prefer to keep as much of their wealth in the most stable and marketable forms possible - forms which only the precious metals provide."

Elgin Groseclose

The monthly Coppock Indicators finished September:
DJIA: +167 Up. NASDAQ: +213 Up. SP500: +203 Up. All three are back positive again, thanks to continued Fed QE.  High risk speculators will now use any stocks sell-off to go long. After the last Fed meeting and QE U-turn, the Bernocchio put is back on.

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