Thursday, June 14, 2012
Monday, May 23, 2011
Major Inflationary Spiral
May 2011 Issue #85
Inside this issue ...
eight inflationary forces.
of life and most widely traded commodities.
Why the U.S. is getting hit by no less thanMy price projections for the basic necessitiesUpdate on core gold positions, and more! In last month’s issue, I showed you how the dollar was
sitting on the edge of a cliff and how its long-term bear
market, which will soon accelerate, will send the U.S.
economy into one of its worst inflationary spirals, ever.
I also told you that in this month’s issue, I would show
you how high and how far prices can go for some of
the most widely traded commodities, and for the basic necessities you
consume each and every day.Minimum Price Targets by 2016 For Select
Consumables And Commodities
MINIMUM
Projected %
Item Current price by 2016 %Change
Unleaded Gasoline $3.94 $7.00 77.6%
Folgers Coffee $3.58/lb. $15.40 330.2%
Bananas $0.69/lb. $2.30 233.3%
Idaho Potatoes $0.80/lb. $1.81 126.3%
Land O’Lakes Butter $4.18/lb. $14.38 244.0%
Large AA Eggs $1.89/dozen $3.31 75.1%
Oscar Mayer Bacon $6.99/lb. $16.86 141.2%
Milk $1.85/quart $5.50 197.3%
Bread $2.59/loaf $15.09 482.6%
Hershey’s Chocolate bar $1.55/1.2oz. Bar $7.47 381.9%
Corn $7.57/bushel $36.58 383.2%
Aluminum $1.25/lb. $4.25 240.0%
Copper $4.65/lb. $7.08 52.3%
Cocoa $1.93/lb. $11.32 486.5%
Gold $1,505/troy oz. $2,441 62.2%
Oi l $100/bbl $185 85.0%
Palladium $859.30/oz. $3,000 249.1%
Silver $34/oz. $137.87 305.5%
Wheat $9.01/bushel $52.51 482.8%
Soybeans $14.33/bushel $62.12 333.5%
Sugar $0.40/lb. $2.49 522.5%
Tin $15.08/lb. $24.91 65.2%
U.S. Economy On Verge Of
Major Inflationary Spiral
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
U. S. debt rated C - S&P, MOODY'S, FITCH LYING
U. S. ranked 33rd among 47 nations.
Weiss ratings just shook up the cozy world of credit. Smashing the lock on sovereign debt ratings held by Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investor service, and Fitch ratings. Weiss just announced their own ratings. The Weiss rated U. S. debt 2 notches above junk. Primarily because of large deficits.
Weiss ratings just shook up the cozy world of credit. Smashing the lock on sovereign debt ratings held by Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investor service, and Fitch ratings. Weiss just announced their own ratings. The Weiss rated U. S. debt 2 notches above junk. Primarily because of large deficits.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Unemployment is 20%
Shadow Stats – Unemployment is 20%
June 9, 2009
Shadow Stats is reporting that the Unemployment rate in the United States is at 20% if measured like it was in the 1930′s. Meaning for an apples to apples comparison, we are in the year 1933, with 1934 being the worst year at 25%.
Many people view the Shadow Stats economists as more “real” than the fudged government numbers that drop counting the unemployed as unemployed when their benefits run out. Shadow Stats also counts the former Banker that was forced into a minimum wage part time job at McDonald’s as unemployed, whereas the government accounting states he is employed now.
Even though his salary went from $10,000 a month to $500 a month and is facing foreclosure.
The fact is that the unemployment rate is at about 20%, already at great depression levels circa 1933 and with a completely valid potential to reach the depression level of unemployment.
To be honest, the worst of the great depression came at that time, and from that point moving forward we entered into an economic recovery, but even during the recovery unemployment was still staggering.
So you have put this in perspective, if unemployment was 50% one month and the next month it’s at 49%, you are in some sort of recovery… but try telling that to the 49% of the people looking for a job.
Now you know how the government views a recovery..
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Obama's Assault on South Carolina Jobs
by Newt Gingrich
Throughout the 2010 campaign, in this newsletter and elsewhere, I kept returning to a simple refrain to explain the intractability of America's economic woes: job killing policies kill jobs.
This equation made sense to the American people. Amidst a bad economy sparked by the financial crisis, the Democrats had passed a $787 billion big government boondoggle, a massive government takeover of healthcare, and threatened to raise income taxes and a new tax on energy. The American people understood that the natural resiliency of the U.S. economy had been damaged by the Left's big government ambitions and made the Democrats pay at the polls.
Despite a historic defeat in the 2010 elections, however, it is clear that President Obama and the left wing coalition he leads are determined to ignore this lesson.
The latest job killing effort by this administration comes from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which has filed a frivolous and devastating complaint against the Boeing Company.
It is frivolous because the complaint is unprecedented in the 76 year history of the National Labor Relations Act.
It is devastating because the complaint puts thousands of jobs in South Carolina at risk.
Moreover, if this complaint is successful, the precedent set could prevent millions of jobs from being created throughout the United States, as entrepreneurs and businesses decide whether to invest in our country…or outside it.
Suspicious Timing
In October 2009, Boeing decided to open a new production facility in North Charleston, SC to meet the growing demand for its 787 Dreamliner airplane.
The decision came after months of negotiations with the machinists union leadership at Boeing's main production hub in Puget Sound, WA. Since 1995, there have been five work stoppages in the Puget Sound plant. The most recent strike, in 2008, lasted 58 days and cost the company $1.8 billion.
Still, Boeing negotiated in good faith with the union leadership for the Puget Sound facility to try and find a way to open the new factory there. In exchange, Boeing wanted a ten year moratorium on strikes so the additional capacity upon which the company was about to spend billions of dollars would be a sound investment.
Boeing and the union were unable to reach an agreement so the company looked elsewhere. They eventually settled on South Carolina, which is one of the twenty two “right-to-work” states in our country where workers cannot be forced to join a union.
The complaint filed last month by the NLRB on behalf of the machinists union alleges that Boeing located the new facility away from Puget Sound in retaliation for the 2008 strike, which is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act. It makes this accusation despite the months Boeing spent negotiating with the union to try and reach a deal to open the new facility in Puget Sound, and despite the fact that there is a clear legal precedent that allows companies to consider the impact of future strikes when deciding where to open new facilities.
It is the timing of NLRB's complaint, in fact, which seems retaliatory in nature, not Boeing's business decision.
The complaint comes a full seventeen months after Boeing announced the location of the new facility and thirteen months after the union leadership first asked NLRB to look into the issue.
This action by the NLRB is even more disturbing when you consider that it is being led by Lafe Solomon, the acting General Counsel for NLRB, who still needs to be approved by the Senate. He only holds his position because of a recess appointment by President Obama.
The president also used a recess appointment to place Craig Becker on the NLRB after Becker was rejected by a Democratic Senate in 2010.
As a recent Daily Caller article discovered, Becker's past writings reveal a disturbing socialist bent that bear directly on the Boeing complaint.
Becker has previously written that the federal government should control and constrain the freedom of companies to direct their capital and resources as they please in order to rig labor negotiations in favor of unions. Becker has also written that the NLRB possesses the power to impose card-check policies on the nation without an act of Congress.
An Assault on the Right to Work
It is clear that President Obama is packing the NLRB board with left wing ideologues as a payoff to his union boss allies, so that the fix is in with regard to this case and others like it.
The move is consistent with an ongoing pattern in the Obama administration, in which they use the apparatus of big government to reward their allies and punish their opponents.
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was exactly right when he characterized the complaint as “one of the worst examples of unelected bureaucrats doing the bidding of special interest groups that I've ever seen.”
If the NLRB is successful in overturning Boeing's perfectly rational business decision, it puts tens of millions of future jobs in all 22 right-to-work states in jeopardy. It would make it effectively impossible for U.S. companies to open new facilities in right-to-work states if they are currently located in one that allows forced unionization.
Global Competition Is a Fact, Not a Theory
The Left simply cannot come to grips with the intensity of global economic competition and the demands it places on U.S. economic policies.
This blindness to reality was on display in the reaction to a recent USA Today article showing that Americans paid less taxes in 2009 than any time since the 1950s. The article has been used by the Left in recent days as a counter to the conservative case that tax increases would be devastating to any economic recovery, possibly driving us back into recession.
Their argument shows the Left is completely missing the point. In the new global economy, America is not competing against itself from 1990, 1970 or 1950.
We are competing against Germany, which today has only a 15% federal corporate income tax (and recently hit a 19-year low in its unemployment rate), compared to a 35% corporate tax rate in the U.S., the highest of any central government in the industrialized world.
We are competing against Singapore, which has a capital gains tax of zero, compared to a potential 35% capital gains tax in the United States.
We are competing against Switzerland, which caps the federal personal income tax rate at 11.5%.
We are competing against Canada, which just last week reelected an incumbent Conservative government that has pledged to cut the corporate tax to 15% and lower the personal income tax for families – all while planning to balance its entire budget by 2015.
Consider the case of the New York Stock Exchange. This icon of American free markets is now owned by a Dutch holding company.
That $10.2 billion takeover was driven by simple economic reality. As Walter Gavin, Vice President of Emerson, explains, the Netherlands has a tax code which makes it more profitable for the NYSE to be owned by a Dutch company than by an American one. In fact, according to Gavin, the United States lost almost forty companies to Amsterdam in 2010 alone thanks to their more business friendly environment.
This brings us back to President Obama and his union allies' assault on South Carolina jobs and all twenty two right-to-work states in America.
If the NLRB's complaint is successful, U.S. companies will simply increase their flight of capital and new facilities to places outside the United States. In the midst of a struggling economy, it will make it harder for businesses to operate in America, not easier.
The union bosses and their political allies in the White House aren't going to save union jobs by attacking right-to-work states. They'll simply prevent new jobs from being created here in America.
Drop the Complaint, Withdraw the Nominees
In recent months, following his defeat at the polls in the 2010 elections, President Obama had been making overtures to the business community. The hiring of Bill Daley as Chief of Staff was supposed to send a signal to America's entrepreneurs and businessmen that he is trying to shed his anti-business image.
This action by his appointees at the NLRB will throw all that effort out the window.
The NLRB is an independent agency of the federal government, which means President Obama cannot order it to stop. However, if President Obama really wants to convince American entrepreneurs their government is not actively hostile to job creators, President Obama should speak out against this destructive complaint.
More importantly, he should withdraw the nominations of Lafe Solomon and Craig Becker from consideration for Senate approval, which would effectively stop this complaint in its tracks.
Again, it all comes down to the simple fact that job killing policies kill jobs. The president has a choice whether to allow this job killing policy to continue.
The American people are now watching to see if President Obama values job creation more than he does paying off his union boss allies.
Throughout the 2010 campaign, in this newsletter and elsewhere, I kept returning to a simple refrain to explain the intractability of America's economic woes: job killing policies kill jobs.
This equation made sense to the American people. Amidst a bad economy sparked by the financial crisis, the Democrats had passed a $787 billion big government boondoggle, a massive government takeover of healthcare, and threatened to raise income taxes and a new tax on energy. The American people understood that the natural resiliency of the U.S. economy had been damaged by the Left's big government ambitions and made the Democrats pay at the polls.
Despite a historic defeat in the 2010 elections, however, it is clear that President Obama and the left wing coalition he leads are determined to ignore this lesson.
The latest job killing effort by this administration comes from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which has filed a frivolous and devastating complaint against the Boeing Company.
It is frivolous because the complaint is unprecedented in the 76 year history of the National Labor Relations Act.
It is devastating because the complaint puts thousands of jobs in South Carolina at risk.
Moreover, if this complaint is successful, the precedent set could prevent millions of jobs from being created throughout the United States, as entrepreneurs and businesses decide whether to invest in our country…or outside it.
Suspicious Timing
In October 2009, Boeing decided to open a new production facility in North Charleston, SC to meet the growing demand for its 787 Dreamliner airplane.
The decision came after months of negotiations with the machinists union leadership at Boeing's main production hub in Puget Sound, WA. Since 1995, there have been five work stoppages in the Puget Sound plant. The most recent strike, in 2008, lasted 58 days and cost the company $1.8 billion.
Still, Boeing negotiated in good faith with the union leadership for the Puget Sound facility to try and find a way to open the new factory there. In exchange, Boeing wanted a ten year moratorium on strikes so the additional capacity upon which the company was about to spend billions of dollars would be a sound investment.
Boeing and the union were unable to reach an agreement so the company looked elsewhere. They eventually settled on South Carolina, which is one of the twenty two “right-to-work” states in our country where workers cannot be forced to join a union.
The complaint filed last month by the NLRB on behalf of the machinists union alleges that Boeing located the new facility away from Puget Sound in retaliation for the 2008 strike, which is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act. It makes this accusation despite the months Boeing spent negotiating with the union to try and reach a deal to open the new facility in Puget Sound, and despite the fact that there is a clear legal precedent that allows companies to consider the impact of future strikes when deciding where to open new facilities.
It is the timing of NLRB's complaint, in fact, which seems retaliatory in nature, not Boeing's business decision.
The complaint comes a full seventeen months after Boeing announced the location of the new facility and thirteen months after the union leadership first asked NLRB to look into the issue.
Boeing has already begun construction of the new facility, hiring over 1000 people in South Carolina and investing $1 billion. This complaint puts all those jobs created and all that money invested at risk.
This action by the NLRB is even more disturbing when you consider that it is being led by Lafe Solomon, the acting General Counsel for NLRB, who still needs to be approved by the Senate. He only holds his position because of a recess appointment by President Obama.
The president also used a recess appointment to place Craig Becker on the NLRB after Becker was rejected by a Democratic Senate in 2010.
As a recent Daily Caller article discovered, Becker's past writings reveal a disturbing socialist bent that bear directly on the Boeing complaint.
Becker has previously written that the federal government should control and constrain the freedom of companies to direct their capital and resources as they please in order to rig labor negotiations in favor of unions. Becker has also written that the NLRB possesses the power to impose card-check policies on the nation without an act of Congress.
An Assault on the Right to Work
It is clear that President Obama is packing the NLRB board with left wing ideologues as a payoff to his union boss allies, so that the fix is in with regard to this case and others like it.
The move is consistent with an ongoing pattern in the Obama administration, in which they use the apparatus of big government to reward their allies and punish their opponents.
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was exactly right when he characterized the complaint as “one of the worst examples of unelected bureaucrats doing the bidding of special interest groups that I've ever seen.”
If the NLRB is successful in overturning Boeing's perfectly rational business decision, it puts tens of millions of future jobs in all 22 right-to-work states in jeopardy. It would make it effectively impossible for U.S. companies to open new facilities in right-to-work states if they are currently located in one that allows forced unionization.
Global Competition Is a Fact, Not a Theory
The Left simply cannot come to grips with the intensity of global economic competition and the demands it places on U.S. economic policies.
This blindness to reality was on display in the reaction to a recent USA Today article showing that Americans paid less taxes in 2009 than any time since the 1950s. The article has been used by the Left in recent days as a counter to the conservative case that tax increases would be devastating to any economic recovery, possibly driving us back into recession.
Their argument shows the Left is completely missing the point. In the new global economy, America is not competing against itself from 1990, 1970 or 1950.
We are competing against Germany, which today has only a 15% federal corporate income tax (and recently hit a 19-year low in its unemployment rate), compared to a 35% corporate tax rate in the U.S., the highest of any central government in the industrialized world.
We are competing against Singapore, which has a capital gains tax of zero, compared to a potential 35% capital gains tax in the United States.
We are competing against Switzerland, which caps the federal personal income tax rate at 11.5%.
We are competing against Canada, which just last week reelected an incumbent Conservative government that has pledged to cut the corporate tax to 15% and lower the personal income tax for families – all while planning to balance its entire budget by 2015.
Consider the case of the New York Stock Exchange. This icon of American free markets is now owned by a Dutch holding company.
That $10.2 billion takeover was driven by simple economic reality. As Walter Gavin, Vice President of Emerson, explains, the Netherlands has a tax code which makes it more profitable for the NYSE to be owned by a Dutch company than by an American one. In fact, according to Gavin, the United States lost almost forty companies to Amsterdam in 2010 alone thanks to their more business friendly environment.
This brings us back to President Obama and his union allies' assault on South Carolina jobs and all twenty two right-to-work states in America.
If the NLRB's complaint is successful, U.S. companies will simply increase their flight of capital and new facilities to places outside the United States. In the midst of a struggling economy, it will make it harder for businesses to operate in America, not easier.
The union bosses and their political allies in the White House aren't going to save union jobs by attacking right-to-work states. They'll simply prevent new jobs from being created here in America.
Drop the Complaint, Withdraw the Nominees
In recent months, following his defeat at the polls in the 2010 elections, President Obama had been making overtures to the business community. The hiring of Bill Daley as Chief of Staff was supposed to send a signal to America's entrepreneurs and businessmen that he is trying to shed his anti-business image.
This action by his appointees at the NLRB will throw all that effort out the window.
The NLRB is an independent agency of the federal government, which means President Obama cannot order it to stop. However, if President Obama really wants to convince American entrepreneurs their government is not actively hostile to job creators, President Obama should speak out against this destructive complaint.
More importantly, he should withdraw the nominations of Lafe Solomon and Craig Becker from consideration for Senate approval, which would effectively stop this complaint in its tracks.
Again, it all comes down to the simple fact that job killing policies kill jobs. The president has a choice whether to allow this job killing policy to continue.
The American people are now watching to see if President Obama values job creation more than he does paying off his union boss allies.
Your Friend,
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Police state coming near you
All those billions of dollars spent to prepare law enforcement and the US military for civil unrest are not going to waste.
This past week, police converged on Western Illinois University (situated in a town of about 20,000 people) as students engaged in their annual block party. Unlike previous years, however, this year a decision was made to respond with riot gear, tear gas, sound weapons, intimidation and mass arrests.
The most curious issue surrounding the response is that students, by many accounts, were not engaged in any significant unlawful behavior (open containers, maybe some intoxication and tomfoolery) and the block party was behind held, for the most part, at private residences.
Bored with the usual, local and surrounding police forces decided to deploy officers in full riot gear – at least a hundred of them. They were undoubtedly anxious to play with their new federally funded non-lethal anti-personnel weapons, as evidenced by their use of everything from LRAD sound weapons to tear gas to disperse and aggravate the crowd.
The events that unfolded at WIU are just the latest in a trend we’ve seen develop around the world in recent years. We’ll note that the governor of Wisconsin, when recently faced with mass protests, responded similarly by putting the National Guard on alert within hours of demonstrators gathering in the Capitol.
We would like to say that in the very near future large-scale police response will be the norm, but this is not the case. The future is now. Block parties, protests and any gatherings of large groups of people are already seeing a strong storm trooper presence and being dealt with swiftly once the order is given.
This past week, police converged on Western Illinois University (situated in a town of about 20,000 people) as students engaged in their annual block party. Unlike previous years, however, this year a decision was made to respond with riot gear, tear gas, sound weapons, intimidation and mass arrests.
The most curious issue surrounding the response is that students, by many accounts, were not engaged in any significant unlawful behavior (open containers, maybe some intoxication and tomfoolery) and the block party was behind held, for the most part, at private residences.
Bored with the usual, local and surrounding police forces decided to deploy officers in full riot gear – at least a hundred of them. They were undoubtedly anxious to play with their new federally funded non-lethal anti-personnel weapons, as evidenced by their use of everything from LRAD sound weapons to tear gas to disperse and aggravate the crowd.
The events that unfolded at WIU are just the latest in a trend we’ve seen develop around the world in recent years. We’ll note that the governor of Wisconsin, when recently faced with mass protests, responded similarly by putting the National Guard on alert within hours of demonstrators gathering in the Capitol.
We would like to say that in the very near future large-scale police response will be the norm, but this is not the case. The future is now. Block parties, protests and any gatherings of large groups of people are already seeing a strong storm trooper presence and being dealt with swiftly once the order is given.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Goodbye Obama and non Supreme Court appointees that we are stuck with
We have not had a Social Security increase since Obama took office. :Yet, he has billions to lend Columbia to build refineries that we should be building. He bails out banks and insurance companies and leaves the seniors to do without. Did you all know the FED which is largely responsible for the mess we are in aside from the "give everyone a mortage" fiasco by Fannie and Freddie.
I say do away with the FED which is not a government agency but is largely owned by banks, insurance companies and very rich people. Do away with Fannie and Freddie so they can't continue their give away programs that will lead to another round of housing disaster. Remember these past two years of struggling while Obama spent money flying to NY for a dinner theater night out. Remember him at election time in 2012. Don't buy into the dem bull that Ryan wants to do away with Medicare and Medicaid, he is trying to save it. By the By did you know your medicare tax dollars go by funny accounting into the same budget as the rest of the government money flowing into the general fund and did you also know that it is the practice of governments from small to Washington to take any extra money from one line item, move it to another line item near the end of the budget year and spend it? They play fuzzy math with the numbers and the way it shows in the budget but bottom line we pay for social security, medicare and medicaid which most of us never would use and they steal the money for buy votes programs and screw us over. Vote these bums out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)