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I’m just not certain I can take it any longer.
You know I have a theory. The theory goes like this (and I admit, up front, it’s far fetched)… Sometime during the Cold War, certain powers that be in the U.S. and Europe decided, in the name of keeping the West free, to innoculate their states periodically with a nasty dose of tyrannical gov’t . They did this knowing that electoral politics would eventually usher in a balancing freedom-oriented policy regime that would relax the tyrannical restraints and allow natural markets to “flush out” the body politic as it were, and restore the “classical” economy to it’s normal value-creating state of spreading prosperity.
A lot of people think that first post-War inoculation shot came with Jimmy Carter’s inept single term. However, I believe Carter was really just the capper of a particularly loathsome trio that started with Lyndon Baines Johnson and was followed directly by Richard “Wage /Price Freeze” Nixon and his milquetoast second veep, Gerald Ford. Those three created a cycle of war and inflation (Nixon took us off the gold standard for good as well) and stupid economy gumming regulation that culminated in the body politic crying Uncle for a respite.
In that regard, Reagan only had to do a few things, just as Romney will only have to do a few in January of 2013. Like Reagan did, Romney will only have to undo some of the more illogical (and unrealistically ideological) regulatory burdens thrown up over the last six years since the Pelosi-Reid wagon rolled out of the 2006 electoral winner’s box. Too, Romney will have to dismantle Obamacare, and that might get sticky, considering it’s tar-baby-like, multi-thousand page, unfunded legal status. Tax reform will also take some hard work and many late night battles over ideology and dollars and cents (sense?)
But our economy is a funny thing. It’s self-repairing for one thing. In fact, ironically, all it really needs is for the beatings to cease for morale to really improve. Everyone who ever got past elementary economics knows that does not mean blaming regulatorily-enforced high carbon fuel prices on “speculators” instead of on a police-state-level blind ideology that won’t take even the most elementary steps (Keystone is not just a great light beer, Mr. President) toward self-preservation. Smart citizens — and even not so smart, but just not so readily blinded citizens — eventually grasp the simple basics of supply & demand, and from that can intuit where the power to manipulate markets really resides.
But the good news is that such dunce-cap buffoonery will soon be over. The sleights of hand, the excuses and the kabuki grow wearisome for all but the most ardent of clinging acolytes. The counter-scams and red herrings grow less comic and more maudlin. Soon gone.
Soon.
Gone.
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SLW under $30, RGLD under $60 and EXK under $9.00 are birthday presents like not even Midas’s daughters received on the days of their betrothal. If I get ten seconds of meeting-less, conference call-less bliss tomorrow, I may even pick up a bail of in the money options.
Bless you for your patience with me, and with our economy, ever resilient.
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Welcome back.
Seriously, I missed the precious metals chatter…
Good to hear you’re still onboard RGLD. Been stalking for awhile – looks like it’s time to pull the trigger.
Hells yes.
Great commentary.
“The Blind Leading” (no handicap!).
Good to read again, go to the JIG!
it seems once we give out welfaire of any kind its hard if not impossible to take it back. to your call for romney,im not convinced he will win.
It is very difficult to unseat a sitting President, no matter how incompetent.
However, Jimmy Carter makes for excellent precedence. And ex-sub commander, he wasn’t even as nutty as this True Believer, however.
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All the best, Senator. Very nice to read your thoughts, when your schedule allows you to post.
Jake practicing the art & science of positive thinking
http://www.intrade.com/v4/home/
Odds of Obama winning currently 60.5%
Odds of Romney winning currently 37.5%
Place yer bets!
Yes, startlingly close to what the Reagan “odds” were vs. Carter at the same time in 1980.
Odds, no?
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yep, fairly meaningless at the stage
Find some time to smell the roses, sir.
I look like the guy in your avatar pic right now!
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ahhh,sanity(i mean jake) is back. hope you are recharged and ready to kick ass.glad u’s back.
Thanks, but apparently some of the “overnight leftists” are not as enthused. 😉
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I am all in gdx….going to ride out whatever is to come.
I don’t know if I’d want to be “all in” anything right now, but I think we are much closer to a bottom in PM’s than a top.
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Yes I am suffering some pain.
Carter toured the research facility where I was working. My boss snuck over to meet him. When he returned I asked him what Carter was like – “A little peanut of a man”.
And don’t forget Whip Inflation Now.
Wasn’t that Ford? A little before my time, but…
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Hi Jake, been a while since posted..SLW and RGLD are very attractive in that they will find some good deals..equity financing for junior and midcap PM companies has been shutdown..so SLW and RGLD, FNV etc have much less competition for deals and will get deals that normally would not get, as the juniors dont have option of financing on their own
i also like the jr’s.
I don’t know if I like FNV as much as the other two, but SLW and RGLD are “life timers” in my book.
They are like the McDonalds and Burger Kings of their respective niches.
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Don’t agree with it all, but on the self repairing nature of the economy, I can’t agree more.
I’ve been saying for a long time that they don’t need pro-business reforms. They don’t even necessarily need to do anything with taxes, although certain measures would certainly help. All they need to do is stop professing change. Give everyone some level of certainty on what the future will hold and capitalism and human ingenuity will figure out a way to make it work.
That’s exactly true, with one caveat…
If you “fundamentally change” (sound familiar) the incentives within an ecnomy, as the Europeans have, for instance, you may not “kill” the economy, but you will debilitate it in the sense that instead of running on six cylinders, it will first run on five, then four, then three… and then maybe two….
Increasingly, the part of the economy that “works” (both literally and figuratively) is overwhelmed by the parts that do not.
We will see this here in this country with regard to the “three costs” of Social Security, Medicare, and interest that are slowly absorbing the majority of our tax and other gov’t income.
One sixth of the populace is now categorized “in poverty.” Who are these gov’t programs supposed to help, anyway?
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Interesting theory, but far fetched and silly, methinks. Why not use Occam’s Razor snd simply accept that the human animal is greedy and short-sighted as a species (but not to be generalized to every individual), and that a handful of well-intentioned men 236 years ago could not set up a system that would contain man’s greed and lust for power indefinately?
Who are these “powers that be” anyway? If they exist, why would they be a force for good, when throughout history such power has only served itself?
**(Psssst! Buddy! Yes, you, the one who took the above literally. Over here… Lean closer, I have to whisper something in your ear… no, closer… clooooser… yes, good)**
IT’S A METAPHOR!
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Nixon a bad President? You have been reading too much leftist claptrap. The man was a foreign policy genius.
Foreign policy?
C’mon!
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Really? He campaigned on getting us out of the war. After assuming control he immediately sent the 9th div home and more followed soon after. Promise kept.
He acknowleged that Cambodia and Laos were part of the problem and that the North was stalling the peace talks in order to regain strength after being wiped out in Tet 1968. Enter Gen. Curtis LeMay who “bombed them back to the peace table”. The South would have won except for one thing, the Democrats defunded the war. Hello communists, goodbye anyone who disagreed.
And more importantly he ended the cold war, not Reagan. He sowed seeds of doubt between the CCCP and China by making a series of trips to their countries. They were ready to nuke each other until Uncle Sam stepped in and served as the benevolent godfather. We gave them food while they toned down the rhetoric and opened their doors to us. (This was only a few years after Khrushchev threatened to nuke the US if need be).
So get your facts straight before you start an argument with The Eye-Talian Stallion.
Here, I just found this on the Britannica site for you by Googling “Nixon, Detente”
Nixon’s visit to China in February–March 1972, the first by an American president while in office.
In May 1972 Nixon paid a state visit to Moscow to sign 10 formal agreements, the most important of which were the nuclear arms limitation treaties known as SALT I
Created the Basic Principles of U.S.-Soviet Relations, summarizing the new relationship between the two countries in the new era of détente.
I’m not arguing he was pretty good (or not) in foreign policy. He certainly could have done more to prevent the Dems from losing SVN, that’s for sure.
But that said, who gives a fuck? He instilled “wage and price freezes” like the best New Deal asshat, and he took us completely off the gold standard.
Those things make him a bigger mook than Rocky implicated in a Watergate break-in.
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You need to get on a wayback machine and see what the burning issues of the day were.
1. Vietnam
2. Vietnam
3. Civil unrest
4. CCCP and China
5. The economy
Again you have been re-educated by leftists and their distorted history books. Ask any historian with a brain that reads, and they will tell you that Nixon was one of our best Presidents. And stealing a file in a hotel room? Compare that to 0bama stealing $5T or Carter giving away the Panama Canal and Iran. Clinton cumming all over Lewinsky in the oval office and then lying about it. Which of the four is worse?
if you werent in nam,or old enough to be drafted or even participate in the riots of 68,you dont know shit.
My dad was in Viet Nam – 2 years, helicopter search & rescue, 5 medals. (he also had 2 university degrees)
He thought Nixon was the best president, too.
What unit were you in? What year?
You need to read more closely. I was making LIGHT of Watergate. It was bullshit, who cares?
What I was not making light of were Nixon’s SOCIALIST policies.
YOU like him, and yet I’VE been “re-educated by the left?”
LOFL.
Learn history, learn your Marxist doctrine. Wage and Price freezes are Marxist idiocy. Taking the dollar off the gold standard was an out for the guns and butter inflationistas.
Our best President, save for perhaps Washington, was COOLIDGE.
(Amherst, ’88, I might add)
Small government is good government, Nixon was just another big gummint lover, despite his acuity with foreign policy.
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Actually he may be the worst of all time. It is because of him that we no longer have a check on GOV growth and spending. We no longer have that limitinig factor – GOLD!
Why did he take us off the gold standard? I’m totally apolitical, so not debating, just wondering.
Because France was about to take all of our gold, as was their guarantee. In effect, he put a stop to a “run on the bank.”
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The real question is why didn’t Reagan return us to the gold standard
Welcome back Sir. I’d like to hear your thought for PBR and AG here. Thanks !
Hold and BUY!
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Obridado !
I want to pick up PBR, but seems like going down more. Scared.
Any thought ?
Yes, my thoughts are PBR is experiencing the same shakes every other “could be nationalized” company in SA is experiencing right now.
That’s why I said hold.
+++++++
Jake, any thoughts on your old friend XG? Is this thing dead?
Getting cranked on Argentine Commie risk.
Blast these South American socialists. They can never be trusted.
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Thanks Jake. Do you still own any?
yes.
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Thanks Jake. We are oversold pretty good from an RSI standpoint. Hoping for some snap back action fairly soon.
Good to hear from you again. I’m running about 50% of the port now in GDX, GDXJ, and SIL and looking to add a little EXK soon. I don’t think the Clam can afford to let us down.
I think you are correuct. Metals seems to be holding their own today.
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I agree with your points Jake. Peeling back Obamacare, simplifying the tax code, and easing regulations on small businesses. I am torn however to the degree of deregulation, too much can be a bad thing, as we have already seen. Deregulate too much in terms of pollution controls and our kids could be wearing gas masks to school. Obamacare is terrible not because its socialist, but because it makes an already inefficient system even more inefficient. The system before hand was a number of different pieces and industries duct taped together.
But I think you are missing the forest for the trees here. The key to our economy and the resiliency of our economy is the consumer. Right now the consumer is in a balance sheet recession, it is forgoing spending to pay down debt. Once the consumer heals its balance sheet the economy will take off. Overregulation, Obamacare, etc do matter, but are only minor annoyances compared to the de-leveraging taking place.
I also find it humorous that people are quick to point out Reagan’s deregulation, but completely ignore the fact he began a trend of increasing government spending. Government spending is what puts money into the private sector, which increases demand, which increases GDP. What also helped was a bear market in interest rates, allowing credit to expand as well. Knowing how the government and private sectors interact is key to the economy, and a lot of people miss this fact.
Government spending did not fuel the boom, a freed up market, lower taxes and lower interest rates did.
I don’t buy the “consumer based economy” bullshit. Classical economics uses Occum’s razor — you make a friendly environment for entreprenuers to build businesses and they will naturally need to increase employment, and therefore business and individual consumption will follow. Trying to jack it from the other end via giveaways will leave nothing lasting, save a massive, economy destroying debt and too slow a growth rate to ever address it.
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Classical economics is also outdated.
Yeah, the law of gravity, too.
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Hahahaaha
Today,I’m buying> $EXK $RBY $NUGT
Are you a different guy than Hawaii 5-0?
You guys ought to have lunch.
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