Financial topics

[OLD1953]

Will the Japanese earthquake be enough of a crisis to cause them to move into a new generational era? There are already calls for everyone to move together as one.

[John]

Will the Japanese earthquake be enough of a crisis to cause them to move into a new generational era? There are already calls for everyone to move together as one.

No.

[vincecate]

China has the ability to stabilize the gold price immediately by declaring that they will pay X amount per ounce guaranteed under any conditons no matter what New York does to the futures price. If prices rise above X, China can then counter the Fed by selling gold and driving the price down.

China has plenty of dollars to put a floor on the price of gold. They could buy maybe 1/3rd of the worlds gold at the current price with the dollars they have. However, they don't really have that much gold and could not put a lid on the price of gold for long. There is something like 165,000 tons of gold and they have only like 1,000 tons.

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

[Higgenbotham]

China has the ability to stabilize the gold price immediately by declaring that they will pay X amount per ounce guaranteed under any conditons no matter what New York does to the futures price. If prices rise above X, China can then counter the Fed by selling gold and driving the price down.

China has plenty of dollars to put a floor on the price of gold. They could buy maybe 1/3rd of the worlds gold at the current price with the dollars they have. However, they don't really have that much gold and could not put a lid on the price of gold for long. There is something like 165,000 tons of gold and they have only like 1,000 tons.

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

Totally agree, depending on how much they accumulate they can calculate at what price they can manipulate it back down. But they have no power to do so at present; they can only put a floor under it for now.

[Higgenbotham]

Getting back to the subject of The Order, I found a passage from the book "The Silent Brotherhood" which covers a little of what was mentioned earlier. This book is no longer in print.

From page 7, "Authorities were alarmed at the harrowing plans the group laid - sabotage against dams, water supplies, utility and communications lines - all designed to transform American cities into Beirut. They stopped Mathews only four months short of attempting the shutdown of a major US city through terrorism."

I'm sure there are more details in the book, but I didn't find them at first glance.

Also, it appears the group had up to 75 members. The group consisted mostly of factory workers who had become unemployed during the recession of the early 1980's.

The group got their funding by holding up an armored truck on a California highway, which netted $3.8 million. With the money, they established a network of safe houses. Before the ring was busted, they had imminent plans to steal a $50 million shipment from Hawaii; they had infiltrated an organization through a disgruntled employee who provided the details of these shipments.

[John]

The Nikkei is down over 5% in the first hour.

However, the Bank of Japan has promised to flood the market
with "massive liquidity" - $86 billion.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-1 ... quake.html


John

[OLD1953]

They'd have to set a high price to manage that. Cost would probably be more than they'd be willing to pay.

[Lily]

It may be that by 2050 most of the fish left in the wild are poisonous to humans. The ocean is a classic case of "tragedy of the commons" and bad things will happen. But I bet that the number of pounds of living stuff eating algae in the ocean is not down all that much. Nature will evolve so that the algae is still eaten, just maybe not by things humans like to eat. I don't really see any conflict with my views and that documentary. It does not really say, "all fish" will collapse, just ones we now eat.

You really don't see this as a problem? You don't have to take it seriously if you don't want to, but don't say you weren't warned. It's not 'all' fish, just the ones we 'can' eat. Algal blooms are not harmless - they don't just change ocean biospheres into a different but equal environment, they suck out all the oxygen and nitrogen in the water and leave a dead zone in which *nothing* can live, including algae, so when the algae run out of resources and die off, they leave nothing. Except jellyfish. Wait until your local beaches are unswimable because they're clogged with thousands upon thousands of lethal, mindlessly aggressive jellyfish, as is already happening in Japan, and see if it doesn't seem like a big deal, then.

Letting my generational predilections show a little, it constantly astonishes me how blithe people can be about massive planetary-scale environmental problems like this. The reason these problems get so bad is because people foolishly assume that no matter how much damage is done, it will never be a problem! Do people think we can just modify environments willy-nilly without being ourselves harmed in the process? Do they think what happens to us isn't intimately related to what happens to our environment? Assuming that nature will balance itself in a way that is positive for humans, when humans are actively knocking it out of balance as hard as they can, is unwise at best.

Population in the US is over 70 per square mile, and that includes a LOT of mountain and desert. No, we do not have enough arable land, even counting old style hill farms, for even 1/2 the current population to survive as low tech subsistence farmers. World wide, it's about ten percent of the current population could survive as subsistence farmers. And that's stretching it.

Organic permaculture is substantially more productive than 'conventional' industrial agriculture. I'm not talking about "low-tech" farming, I'm talking about cutting-edge but ancient-informed techniques similar to those used in New Guinea, which supported a population denser than the 17-th century Netherlands without any technology beyond wood and stone. There's no reason for us to be luddites now, of course, when technology is legitimately useful, but not all 'uses' of technology are useful. I'm just saying that modern technological methods of agriculture are very destructive and wasteful, not questioning the usefulness of technology in general. I'll present the data on this topic later if anyone wants it, but for now suffice it to say that I've done an LOT of research on it, and there IS enough land for everyone.

I would guess that a group of 25 tech savvy milleniels could target a company and bankrupt it within 90 days. It wouldn't take more than 100 times this number to bring down all infrastructure in the United States. So if GE et al want to survive they had better have a plan for how they're going to employ most of these people because food stamps aren't going satisfy them and the authorities aren't going to be able to control them by force Soviet style - those days are gone.

Let me attest that you're, ah, actually not far off with that 90-day number. Assuming we're talking about using coordinated violence and not just cyberattacks, the infrastructure in this country is absurdly vulnerable. I think it would take more than 250 people to take down all the infrastructure in the entire country, but not more than ten times that. But then again, we've absolutely no reason to attack vital infrastructure like that, and most of us would be horrified at the notion. We'll use absolutely peaceful measures as far as possible, and if we do have to resort to violence I think you'll find that we use the absolute minimum effective level. We Millennials, I suspect and hope, will almost certainly not reproduce anything like the Silent Brotherhood - largely because that approach is necessarily doomed to failure. Look up Gene Sharp for hints of what a Millennial-lead revolution might look like.

But yeah, if you wargame it out, the advantage in modern warfare is tilted strongly towards guerrillas and away from occupying forces, and the greater the availability of modern computation and communication tools to the popular insurgency, the more uneven the contest. People have not yet seen the true effects of this trend any more than they'd seen the true effects of mechanization and armor on the battlefield before the Blitzkrieg was first used.

[vincecate]

We used to get deflation as often as inflation. But since leaving the gold standard we don't get deflation.

historical-annual-inflation-rate.JPG (63.22 KiB) Viewed 4740 times

[vincecate]

You really don't see this as a problem? You don't have to take it seriously if you don't want to, but don't say you weren't warned. It's not 'all' fish, just the ones we 'can' eat.

That documentary is not saying "ones we can eat", it is saying the main ones we are currently eating. In particular top predators. The ocean can make far more sardines than tuna. In fact, getting rid of top predators like tuna can result in far more small fish for us. We may see people moving toward eating more small fish. That is fine by me.

I am rather worried about making it through the next 3 years. I think there is a good chance there are less people alive on this planet 3 years from now. The personal payback for me trying to save the worlds fish just can't justify any personal effort or worry. I think there are still things I can do that can have a payback for me and my family over the next 3 years. So "worlds tastiest fish populations crashing by 2050" is just not that important to me right now. I think it is a perfectly rational position, even if you don't.