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My High Dividend Stocks
This is my high dividend stocks site where I help site members find high dividend stocks with earning power and strong balance sheets.
My High Dividend Stocks
This is my high dividend stocks site where I help site members find high dividend stocks with earning power and strong balance sheets.
A Second Worldwide Financial Crisis is Coming
Jason Brizic
October 7, 2011
The Euro crisis is real and the Euro is doomed. This will trigger the next global financial crisis and worldwide recession.
<a href=”http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1039.html”>Busted Euro, Busted Dream</a>
The Eurozone is just beginning to implode starting with the PIIGS. Those governments made welfare promises that they can’t pay for (in Euros).
The PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) are running budget deficits above 3% of GDP. This violates EU rules. But the European bureaucrats are powerless to stop the violators. You can view this on the following graph. Only Estonia had a balanced budget as of last spring. Germany was slightly above the 3% limit.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13366011
Greece will default first. That is obvious because one year Greek government bonds are yielding over 100%. Ireland will likely be next and then the rest of the PIIGS will tumble which have much bigger sovereign debts.
Do you want to see how small Greece is in the whole European debt crisis? Look at <a href:http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/02/weekinreview/02marsh.html>this</a> from the New York Times back in December 2010.
The northern European banks lent trillions to the PIIGS. They will need massive bailouts that dwarf the previous bailouts. The northern European banks bought default insurance from the American banks. The US banks are exposed to the European soverign debt crisis also. The yield curve is flattening and we are going into a second recession. Plan accordingly. Read this site to sidestep as much of the calamity as possible.
There will be a time to buy high dividend stocks with earning power and strong balance sheets down at the bottom like in March 2009. But we aren’t there yet.
For more tips, go here:
http://www.myhighdividendstocks.com/category/tip-of-the-week
Busted Europe, Busted Dreamby Gary North Recently by Gary North: Gold Confiscation: A Highly Unlikely Threat The European Monetary Union is going to break down. This will be followed by a break-up of the European Union. This is denied by the New World Order's promoters of international unification. They have been planning for this since the end of World War I. They have been actively implementing this by stealth since the early 1950s. They used treaties to bring this political unification to pass. They used economic unification as the bait. The hook of political unification was always buried in the bait. The threat facing the NWO is that the economic bait has turned out to be poison. The EMU is based on a common central bank and a common fiat currency. But without a common system of government, there can be no fiscal union. There can be no central planning by Keynesian means. The nationalism implied by Keynesian fiscal manipulation has led to the Greek crisis. The EMU rested on an unlikely premise: the wisdom of Europe's commercial bankers, who had spent their careers in highly regulated domestic markets. Always before, bankers in large banks could count on their national central banks to bail them out. But, in this new world banking order, the European Central Bank does not have the flexibility to bail out all of the large national banks that are now in big trouble. There are members of the ECB's board who are part of the German-Dutch axis, which favors tighter money and stable prices. The Board must placate them to some degree. This reduces the ECB's response time. The Party Line of the EU and the ECB is that there is no unity-threatening problem or series of problems facing the central government. They insist that the current problems are temporary. We have heard all this before. THE BREAKDOWN OF COMMUNISM The greatest event of my life was the suicide of the Soviet Union on December 31, 1991. The Communist empire went under without a shot being fired. The Communist Party's senior officers looted the Party's funds and sent the money to Swiss bank accounts. Then they privatized the state's main economic assets so that they and their cronies became incredibly rich. The second greatest event was the decision of Deng Xiaoping in 1978 to free up Chinese agriculture. That led to the most rapid economic growth in human history. Nothing like it had ever happened to so many people. South Korea's per capita economic growth, 1950 to 1990, was greater, but South Korea was a much smaller nation. Communism was the most powerful ideology of tyranny in man's history. It failed operationally in the USSR in less than 75 years. It failed in Communist China in less 30 years. The cash nexus seduced the vanguard of the proletariat. The inevitable socialist victory was exposed as a gigantic fraud. The messianic religion of Marxism went down with the two Communist ships. Today, the rag-tag army of tenured Marxist professors in Western universities have as their only surviving models Cuba and North Korea. The satellite photo of the two Koreas – bright lights in the south, one light in the north – is the most powerful epitaph of Communism there is. Now another victory of liberty over centralized politics is unfolding. It is taking place in Western Europe. It is not going to be reversed. The New World Order's number-one poster child – the European Union – has begun to fall apart. Nothing will reverse this. There are those in the West who will deny this. There are also those who from 1992 until today insist that the collapse of the USSR was in fact a gigantic deception. The Communists are still in control, they tell us. These people cannot bring themselves to admit that Communism lost the battle. Like the original Communists, they believe in the absolute sovereignty of political power. They believe that the West could not possibly have won, because the Communists were better at intrigue and military power. But the West did win, because the Communist leaders gave up the dream of a socialist world and decided to go for the money. Let me tell you how I knew that the Communists had failed completely. First, the new Russian government changed major cities' names back to their pre-Bolshevik names. Leningrad became St. Petersburg. Stalin re-named Volgagrad to Stalingrad in 1925. Khrushchev changed it back in 1961 as part of his de-Stalinization program. Both changes revealed the nature of politics in Russia. The names of cities were testimonies to the ruling power. That was why the name changes after 1991 were significant. Second, mobs of people pulled down statues of Soviet leaders. One of the statues that disappeared was that of Pavlik Morozov, the 13-year-old boy who informed on his father. He had been made a hero by Stalin after he was murdered at age 15. He had the boy's relatives executed for the crime, although they all denied that they had done it. The Morozov story was taught to Soviet children until the very end of the regime. His statue has disappeared from the public park built in his memory. The fall of the Soviet Union was no deception. It was real. That was two decades ago. There is another fall coming. BREAKDOWN TO BREAK-UP I will state it again. The breakdown of the European Monetary Union will be followed by the break-up of the European Union. The EMS is breaking down. A few columnists in the West are now admitting this. On the whole, however, the Party Line of the media follows the Party Line of the EU bureaucrats: "The crisis in Greece is a temporary aberration. It will be solved by EU, IMF, and ECB policies." The problem with the Party Line is that Greece keeps flaring up. Short-term interest rates are over 100%, indicating a loss of faith by investors in the Greek government's ability to make interest payments in euros. If the EU, the IMF, and the ECB had a plan to deal with the underlying problem in Greece – its looming inability to make interest payments in euros – they would have implemented it. They keep announcing temporary bridge loans. These "bridge loans" are in fact sinkhole loans. Everyone presumably knows this, yet they do not invest accordingly. The various stock markets' wild gyrations in Europe indicate that hope and fear are balanced, unlike any government's budget. Hope will degrade into fear as reality sets in. What is reality? That large European banks bought Greek government bonds, because they assumed that no member of the EMU would pull out as a way to default on euro-based debt. But it is clear that this is exactly what Greece will do. The default is statistically inevitable. The sinkhole is a bottomless pit. The euro was the poster child of European unification, just as European unification was the NWO's poster child for worldwide unification, the dream of the Trilateral Commission. The euro was rammed down the throats of Europe's national central bankers in 1999. They had enjoyed considerable autonomy. National politicians also resented the fact that they would no longer have great influence in domestic monetary affairs. They would henceforth have to persuade the bankers at the European Central Bank to follow policies that would sustain national welfare state policies. That world is gone, but there are domestic politicians in PIIGS nations who would very much like to restore it. They are being pushed hard by voters to break free of the "austerity" programs being rammed down their throats by the IMF and ECB. The Bible teaches, "The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is the servant to the lender" (Proverbs 13:22). This ticks off the borrowers. The Bible also teaches, "The wicked borroweth and payeth not again" (Psalms 37:21a). This really ticks off the borrowers. "That's an insult to our integrity!" Then, when their governments announce limited cutbacks in domestic spending, the threatened employees take to the streets. "You owe us what you have promised!" In short, voters want to impose austerity on the creditors. They do not want creditors to impose austerity on their welfare state governments. Some interest groups are going to get stiffed. The Party Line at the EU, ECB, IMF is that employees of high-deficit countries are going to get stiffed. The Party Line in the Greek trade unions is that the ECB, IMF, EU bureaucrats are going to get stiffed. Politicians in PIIGS nations claim that no one is going to get stiffed if the ECB, IMF, and EU will just lend more money to tide them over. The commercial bankers want the EU and ECB to serve as lenders of last resort to banks, so that, when the PIIGS default, the bankers will not lose their bonuses. Voters in Germany don't want to get stuck with the tab for bailing out PIIGS or banks. Investors in European stocks keep sounding like Rodney King. "Can't everyone just get along?" The New World Order's promoters are wringing their hands and pleading, "We worked so hard to sneak through this deal. We are not quite finished with our plans. Now voters are trying to kill it. It's just not fair!" I think of a classic video scene that best describes the present predicament of the NWO. THE BEST-LAID PLANS The Wall Street Journal published a report on the breakdown of the EMS. I liked the way it started out: When the history of the rise and fall of postwar Western Europe is someday written, it will come in three volumes. Title them "Hard Facts," "Convenient Fictions" and – the volume still being written – "Fraud." The author says that the first hard fact was military necessity in the post-War period. The Cold War began. The next hard fact was hard money. He correctly identifies this as "the gift of Ludwig Erhard, author of the economic reforms that created the Deutsche mark, abolished price controls, and put inflation in check for generations." Erhard was a disciple of Wilhelm Roepke, who was a disciple of Ludwig von Mises. In mid-June, 1948, Erhard unilaterally abolished the entire Allied military system of price controls, fiat money, and rationing. The next day – literally – the "German economic miracle" began. The author continues: "The third hard fact was the creation of Jean Monnet's common market that gave Europe a shared economic – not political – identity." The author has fallen for the ultimate fraud. Monnet had been working for political unification ever since he and Raymond Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s agent, sat together at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. In 1919, Fosdick sent a letter to his wife. He told her that he and Monnet were working daily to lay the foundations of "the framework of international government." [July 31, 1919; in Fosdick, ed., Letters on the League of Nations (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 18.] Fosdick returned to New York City in 1920, where he took over running the Rockefeller Foundation for the next 30 years. Monnet was the front man for the New World Order. He promoted political unification by wrapping it in the swaddling clothes of economic unification. The author accurately describes the suicide of Western Europe. In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe. Today it hovers just under 50%. In 1965, the fertility rate in Germany was a healthy 2.5 children per mother. Today it is a catastrophic 1.35. During the postwar years, annual GDP growth in Europe averaged 5.5%. After 1973, it rarely exceeded 2.3%. In 1973, Europeans worked 102 hours for every 100 worked by an American. By 2004 they worked just 82 hours for every 100 American ones. He argues that "It was during this general slowdown that Europe entered the convenient fiction phase." One fiction was that adding new members to the EU would enable the European economy to rival the output of the United States. Another fiction was that there was a central core of outlook and values that would unify the new collective. Here, he is woefully naive. That had been the assumption of the United Nations Organization from the beginning, and the League of Nations before it. That was the heart of Monnet's vision. It did not start in 1973.
He's got that right! Then he lists the frauds. First, Greece was allowed into the European Monetary Union. But that was not a fraud. The critics in the 1990s said that all of the Club Med nations would run deficits. They warned that the euro could not hold. There was no fraud involved in letting in the PIIGS. This was basic to Monnet's vision from 1919. It had to work. It must work. It is ordained to work. This is the NWO's religion. The non-PIIGS bankers thought it would work. They loaded up on PIIGS sovereign debt. This was not fraud. This was the implementation of a deeply political religion. This was self-deception on a continental scale. Yet he is right on this point.
He sees that this fraud is not going to hold together. There is a reason for this. The "fiscal union" that's being mooted will never come to pass: German voters won't stand for it, and neither will any other country that wants to retain fiscal independence – which is to say, the core attribute of democratic sovereignty. He makes a forecast: "What comes next is the explosion of the European project." Then he makes an assessment: "Given what European leaders have made of that project over the past 30-odd years, it's not an altogether bad thing." I'll say not. It is a great thing. It is, in fact, the greatest thing that is likely to happen in the first two decades of the 21st century. It is the extension of the two break-ups of the 20th century.
The price of the break-up of the ECB, the EMU, and the EU will be high because of the frauds and convenient fictions that preceded them. If Europe's voters had not created welfare states, if they had not consented to a common fiat currency, but instead had abolished all central banking and had allowed competing private currencies, and if they had abolished tariffs and not created a bureaucratic monstrosity of non-governmental agencies with the power of government – the WTO and its peers – there would be low transition costs. But they listened to Monnet. They will now pay the price. So will all of its trading partners. So will the large American banks that sold credit default insurance to European banks. September 24, 2011 Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visithttp://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 20-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible. Copyright © 2011 Gary North |
Gold is down to $1,780 today. You should own at least $10,000 in gold coins. Buy some tenth ounce coins from your national mint. I like American Precious Metals Exchange www.ampex.com . I get no money from them. I just had a good experience buying from them. Don’t delay your first purchase forever. Central bankers are printing more money than they already have due to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe that will bankrupt both the big European banks and the big American banks. When these banks increase their lending, then prices of goods will skyrocket (including gold).
Gold-Backed Dollar Puts ‘Fair Value’ at $10,000 an Ounce: Chart of the Day
By David Wilson - Sep 14, 2011 10:01 PM MT
Paul Taggart/Bloomberg
Gold for immediate delivery closed at $1,819.63 an ounce on the spot market yesterday.
Gold for immediate delivery closed at $1,819.63 an ounce on the spot market yesterday. Photographer: Paul Taggart/Bloomberg
Gold has the potential to jump more than fivefold as the precious metal’s price catches up with the surging amount of money in the U.S. economy, according to Dylan Grice, a global strategist at Societe Generale SA.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows the price at which each U.S. dollar in the monetary base, compiled by the Federal Reserve, would have been backed by an ounce of gold for the past half century. International Monetary Fund data on the country’s gold reserves were used in the calculation.
Grice, based in London, identified this price as the metal’s “fair value” yesterday in a report. Since June, it has exceeded $10,000 an ounce, as depicted in the chart’s top panel. Gold for immediate delivery closed at $1,819.63 an ounce on the spot market yesterday.
The bottom panel tracks the value of U.S. gold holdings, based on the spot price, as a percentage of the monetary base for the 50-year period. August’s proportion was 18 percent of the $2.66 trillion in the economy. The latter figure was more than triple the amount three years earlier, reflecting efforts by the Fed to spur economic growth.
“There is a demand for an honest currency,” Grice wrote. “The last time honesty was perceived to be so scarce -- in the 1970s gold mania -- the dollar was over-backed by gold. If it happened then, why not again?”
U.S. gold holdings peaked at 131 percent of the monetary base in January 1980, when spot gold climbed to $850 an ounce after a more than 14-fold advance in the preceding decade. The high equals about $2,330 an ounce in today’s dollars, according to a Labor Department calculator.
To contact the reporter on this story: David Wilson in New York at dwilson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Baker at nbaker7@bloomberg.net
Recently by Ron Paul: The Illusion of Safety
Ron Paul joins Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday to discuss his rise in the mainstream presidental polls (to #3 on the latest Gallup) and the hot issues of the day. It is impossible not to notice how these interviews have changed. The normally belligerent neocon host was respectful as Ron smoothly and convincingly stated his positions.
Since this interview coincided with the media hysteria about Hurricane Irene, Wallace first asked Ron why he was opposed to FEMA. As the representative of a Gulf Coast district, Ron knows full-well the damage the weather can do. Indeed, he says: "It has the worst reputation for a bureaucracy ever. It hinders local people keeps people away from their homes. It's a system of central economic planning that is deeply flawed.....and it's broke."
Ron also rips the US intervention in Libya. He schools Wallace about the consequences of our destructive foreign policy. When asked about Gaddafi, Ron reminds him that "we've been very bad at picking dictators around the world. We may be delivering al-Qaida another prize."
Regarding Austrian economics – which Ron is actually asked about – he describes his solution for a healthy economy as, government “hands off, free markets, property rights, no bailouts, and sound money.” The Fed has caused endless problems with its policy of keeping interest rates artificially too low for too long. It has to stop monetizing debt.
When asked if he's in it to win it, Ron says Yes – but he wants to take a different approach – Not to seek power, but to seek to diminish it, to diminish dependency on government. People are waking up and saying "Ron Paul is right," he notes. Darn right!
August 30, 2011
Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.
Recently by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.: Ideas and the Culpability for Violence
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The trigger that apparently caused the market meltdown was the ever-so-slight suggestion from Standard & Poor's that the US government’s fiscal health might not be all that it is cracked up to be.
This was not a case of the little boy noting the emperor has no clothes. It is more like the little boy suggested that the emperor's clothes, while beautiful, might have been more carefully tailored to suit the imperial dignity. Hysteria followed, and the entire Obama cult called for the kid to be stoned.
Finally the emperor himself spoke in defense of his rainment. That’s when the market crashed.
But the downgrading of a government’s debt from AAA to AA+ can only have triggered a market avalanche if the truth is in fact much worse, and most everyone knows it.
S&P doesn’t have clean hands, of course. It holds a government monopoly, wants higher taxes, and rated crazed housing bonds AAA. But imagine, for just a moment, that US government debt were rated in the same way that municipal bonds or regular corporate debt are. Imagine that government bonds, like normal bonds, carried a default premium. Imagine, in other words, that the Federal Reserve were not in a position to pay everyone from welfare recipients to banksters with newly created money.
Under such actual market conditions, federal debt would not be rated as AA+. It would be worth even less than junk bonds. In fact, it wouldn’t even qualify for a market rating at all, because it would be utterly worthless and the institution that issued it would be in default and the whole rotten apparatus of the state would be seen to be bankrupt at its very core, in every sense.
We know this for one simple reason: There is no way that the government can fund its debt on taxes alone. There would be a revolution in this country in a heartbeat, and, probably, the entire American empire, domestic and foreign, would come crashing down, along with its banking and monetary systems.
If this actually happened, there would be no more "ongoing negotiations" about the budget and the debt. The cuts would be swift, extreme, gigantic. The federal government would have to behave like state governments, balancing the budget year to year. There would be no more plans for fake cuts in the planned increases, gradually phased in over ten years. The federal government would face actual market discipline. The S&P downgrade is only a slight taste of what would follow.
And let’s not just look at the downside. Hundreds of billions in resources would be freed from government control. The private sector would experience a huge infusion of energy. Interest rates would probably go through the roof, which means that people would actually be rewarded for saving, and saving is exactly what people would do as hundreds of banks went belly-up, large portions of the business sector had their credit lines cut, and merchants of death had to close their bloody doors.
There would be wailing and gnashing of teeth, but there would be no turning back. Within a few months, we would start seeing massive resource shifts and pockets of growth would return. New jobs would be available. New businesses would spring up. New financial firms would displace the old ones. Within a year or 18 months, we would be on a growth path, and this time it would be real and sustainable.
Of course this is not going to happen. Instead, the powers-that-be will continue their long game of "let’s pretend" as the economy sinks deeper and deeper, incomes fall, and the US gradually heads toward 3rd-world basket case status.
It’s not only the government that is bankrupt, of course. It’s the entire ideological apparatus that backs the state and its eternal expansion. The New York Times struggled for something to say about the obvious failure of the second stimulus. All they could come up with was: "shift every available resource toward jobs," "increased investment in infrastructure," more relief for homeowners, and another extension of unemployment benefits.
The only thing that this asinine editorial left out was the need to lower interest rates. And that’s because interest rates are already 0%, which has killed saving, terminated growth, and denied the public the fundamental freedom to sock away money in time deposits and let it earn something in exchange. The Federal Reserve is completely out of policy options, unless it is ready to embrace the Zimbabwe-Weimar solution.
Of course, the whole theory that the government can stimulate through control and robbery is wrong and counterproductive. It only ends up rewarding government and its friends while the rest of us suffer. If we ever get out of this depression, it will be because government is forced to stop this nonsense, and the economy really stimulated by taking a meat axe to the planning-spending-inflating apparatus.
This is the underlying reality that informed traders understand. The whole system is being propped up by the power to print, and that power alone. No matter how many miracles some people think that paper money can accomplish, there is an underlying realization that the whole system is a hoax.
But don’t take my word for it. Let S&P and many more competitive rating agencies go to town on US bonds and rate them as they would any bond in the private sector or even the public sector not backed by a printing press. Let reality speak, and let us listen.
August 10, 2011
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. See his books.
Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
Link to original article: http://lewrockwell.com/rockwell/day-of-reckoning188.html
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