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There’s something symmetric about this year’s number “2012” isn’t there?  February 2nd, 12th, 20th and 22nd and December 2nd, 12th, 20th, and 22nd are going to be kind of cool for numbers geeks looking for auspicious dates upon which to get married or receive ass tattoos, perhaps.   Maybe the Mayans will come through with a nice atmosphere sucking asteroid strike on one of those days as well?   That would be special, no?

Anyway, without much further ado, I will set forth some of my predictions for the next 365 days, should we get all of them…

• The Giants will luck their way into the playoffs thanks to the incompetence of the 2011 NFC East, and because God wants to punish the Ryan Brothers.  They will lose in the first round to the far more deserving Atlanta Flackons (sic).
• Jerry Jones will publicly admonish, but keep his Ginger Head Coach, Jason Garrett.
• Rick Santorum will come in second to Mitt Romney in the Iowa Caucuses, and then gain enough momentum to place a distant second to Romney in New Hampshire.
• Santorum wins in a tight race in South Carolina, prompting Romney to offer him the Veep slot two months prior to the convention in order to lock down the wary evangelical vote.
• Tim Pawlenty’s head explodes simultaneous with Pat Robertson’s.  Pawlenty for “woulda shoulda coulda”  because he dropped out too early,  and Robertson upon realizing the GOP is running a Mormon-Catholic ticket.
• The New Orleans Saints win the Superbowl over the New England Patriots in Indianapolis.
• Indianapolis (Colts) take Andrew Luck with the first round pick and keep Peyton Manning… for now.
• The U.S. dollar peaks at $81.50 on the DX-Y Index, and proceeds to break down below the April ’08 lows (sub- $72.00) by September.
• Gold breaks $2,000.00 by April, followed by Silver breaking its old highs in May.
• With the drop in the dollar, and the prospect of the end of the Obama Error, the market goes dipschit, peaking at 14,000 in the Dow and 1700 on the S&P before everyone realizes we’re running on fumes, and we sell off after the 2012 elections.
• The 2012 Presidential Election if one of the nastiest on record.  Obama drops his class warfare rhetoric as a losing strategy and takes on the First Victim status.  David Axelrod wheels out mystery women on Mitt Romney and the Veep candidate (presumably, Santorum).
• Sarah Palin is a lighting rod, playing the black hat for the GOP, pointing out every government takeover and socialist move passed over the last five years (including the last two years of the Bush Administration).  Obamacare will become a millstone on the President’s neck as more unintended consequences arise, and the forced coverage purchase laws are declared un-Constitutional.
• The Euro stays a viable currency, but Greece, Spain and Portugal drop out of the union.   Italy’s and Ireland’s banking system are saved by British and German investors and stays in the European Union with new manacles.
• President Obama becomes increasingly disassociated with his re-election and by the time he loses to Romney in November, he will have convinced himself — and his true believers — that he will be a more effective member of the Democrat party out of office.

• Romney’s acceptance speech will be affable and conciliatory, hoping to mend the divisiveness of the past six years.  Neither the Tea Party nor the Hard Left will be very happy about the results
• Besides UPS, my best picks of the year will be COP, MON, AG, RGLD, DE and PBR.

And now, the kickoff!   Happy New Year and Geauuuuux Giants!

 

 

 

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We talked today, so you know what I was doing this afternoon.  I liked the way the miners and even the silvers hung in there today despite the savage sell-off in the morning at the POG/POS level.  It convinced me to add another 10% or so to my 60% position.   I added SLW, AG, and GDX (two silvers and a gold).

To some extent I’m justifying my “Hang on, Sloopy” act over the last week or so, and I have to admit I was surprised to see that sudden cut below $1600 on the POG today.  However, when I noted that the $HUI was bouncing off long time support even as the price of gold (and silver, yeesh!) was still plummeting, I was pretty sure we were not far from the final washout.  That’s what I’m betting on now and for the remainder of the week.

If tomorrow we see a continued bounce (off of the $500 floor) in $HUI, then I will add more to the above and perhaps go have a sandwich in a park with some homeless people for the next couple of days.

It beats Christmas shopping.

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I mentioned I was going to say a word on that execrable and stupid Henry Blodget piece from the other day, the one in his Business Insider blog extolling this new bizarre left wing theory stating that it’s not entrepreneurs after all who create jobs but the  concept of  “demand.”

Suffice it to say, I’m shocked that such a jejune theory could be promulgated by a guy who at one time was actually hired to analyze stocks for a major Wall Street firm (albeit a guy who has since been banned from ever working on that side of the game forever).

Saying “Demand” causes job growth is a little like saying “oxygen” causes job growth, in the sense that if there were no oxygen, we’d be too busy gasping for air to bother to create jobs.

The whole idea is intentionally denigrating in the tradition of the political Left in that it implies that there is no credit due to entrepreneurs for having an idea, risking capital, and pouring hard work into a new enterprise.  Blodget’s crazy claim is that all those factors don’t matter, because — get this — if there weren’t the cash and the desire (which equal “demand” to him) to buy the product or service, their would be no revenues and therefore, no jobs.

In Blodget’s world, the chickens are slave to the egg!  But is that really the case? That without a consumer “demand” present, we’d have no production economy?  Well let’s go back to a hypothetical pre-history to find out:

On a primitive island, where most sustenance is derived from the indigenous banana trees, people traditionally spend most of their day searching about for banana trees which they can climb and then painstakingly harvest bananas by hand.  Local smart guy Oog rigs a scaffolding platform one day out of bamboo and cane rushes and finds he can harvest four times as many bananas as the typical islander can using the old method.  Oog soon finds he has a surplus of bananas, which he finds he can trade for other foods, clothing and perhaps a concubine or two.

Soon Oog realizes that he can make the scaffolding platforms for other islanders, which he does, in exchange for more trade items, and perhaps a plot of land for a new house.   This distribution leads to a massive increase in productivity on the island, which leaves the other islanders with more time (ah the essential commodity!) to commit to other useful tasks, perhaps in seeking alternate foods (the local javelina look tasty, but they were hard to catch and bananas took less time to harvest).

In the meantime, Oog has hired a couple of young men to help him construct his scaffolds and to develop a sharp new projectile or two to help with the javelina hunting ideas he’s been working on.  He pays them in a portion of the goods he obtains in trade for his invention.  They in turn have excess goods with which to trade their fellow islanders, who now have time to continue developing this micro-economy outside the initial “firm” of Mr. Oog’s.  A cycle of job creation has begun.

Now in the above case, “demand” is nothing more than common sense.  Mr. Oog, through his ingenuity, has devised a time saving device for his fellow islanders, and they quite sensibly recognize the value in “purchasing” an item like that to free up their own lives for other activities.   What they pay for the device is irrelevant, as Mr. Oog can take many forms of specie — from trade goods to service — in exchange for his invention, were it mutually beneficial for him to do so.  Blodgett’s “demand” is a red herring.

In the same way so is his insistence that no one would buy Steve Jobs wonderful iPhone were it not for “demand” from the mindless consumer masses in the form of desire and cash.  But don’t the last three years put the lie to such inanity?  In some of the worst economic times in modern history, iPhones have sold faster than Carl Lewis on crank.   That’s because consumers saw the value in an entrepreneur’s idea, risk and execution– not because they just happened to have a few extra hundred bucks they weren’t using.

To act like an economic system is not one of choices and decisions which lead to rewards and penalties is to perpetrate an invidious lie that would suggest we are all powerless as individuals.   I can imagine only one purpose for promulgating such nonsense, and call me cynical, but it’s a dark one, ending in death and slavery for all but the very few.

Best to you all.

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Europe is not lost if there are guys like this still fighting the Euro Movement

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No, not that kind of “hope,” — not the kind that comes with all kinds of government takeovers of your private person and property. Not the kind we’ve been enduring for three plus years, and two before that in the joint houses of Congress. Is there anyone out there who still supports further meddling with businesses, with your healthcare, with your very livelihood? Is there anyone out there who still thinks they’re being helped by your friendly friend from D.C.?

Even you poor people? Are things looking up?

Minorities? Has your lot improved? Environmentalists? Peaceniks? Feeling better about things?

How about you, union guys? Is it a brave new world out there? How are dues coming? Membership?

Farmers? Miners? Small manufacturers? Hey — even you, the guy who had the great idea about converting biomass into usable fuel. I’m sorry, what’s that? Your project was beaten out by a stampede of better-lobbied inferior competition?

And you, the Wall Street smart guys, with your Ivy League degrees, and your Alden loafers, I turn to you last, as I know you best.

Look around you. Where’s that guy you used to play squash with? What happened to the Asset Backed Debt department this year? How come you have to make do with one shared pool secretary instead of Helda working on your shit alone?  Glad you wrote that check four years ago to the good looking guy with the nice smile and the airy aphorisms that really didn’t have much of a point?  Was that little bit of feel good– that cocktail party affirmation– was it worth it?

Has it been worth it, people?

I think I know the answer, but I don’t want this to be about “I told you so.” I would rather turn it into an educational opportunity, if I might. I believe that if most intelligent people read Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, they would think very seriously about not only how this country works in very easy to grasp economic terms, but how it has grown to become the most free and strongest on earth. I highly recommend this tome (or the 4th edition, out recently) even for those of you who have no interest whatsoever in math or economics.  Professor Sowell breaks it down in very easily understood terminology.  You won’t be disappointed.

And after finishing that “good meal,” I don’t think they’d fall for the next guy with the cute smile and demagogic one-liners.  That’s just my take.

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Nothing has changed in my recent investment approach.  I continue to be long silver and gold names that I’ve detailed here already.  I continue to hold because of quotidian reasons like “seasonality” and the tendency of Santa Bernank to want everyone to have a holly jolly Christmas, as I’m sure you will agree.

On EXK! On RGLD! On SLW and AG!

Come GDX! Come EGO! Come AVL and IVN! Dash away! Dash away! Dash Away All!

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Listen, I’m willing to give just about anybody the benefit of the doubt.  There are tonnes (sic) of confused posters on this site, as evidenced by the  jumbled and disjointed list of demands, points of order and general temper tantrums archived on Monsieur Le Fly’s two “discussion posts” this weekend.   Some of them offer contradictory recommendations, seeming to hate the government-banking cabal that’s all but run this country since the turn of the 20th century, but then recommending an even stronger government regime to take it’s place.

Folks, this is replacing the loan shark with the prison warden.  I agree that we need to break the cycle of supported failure that crescendoed upon us in late 2008, but 2000 page bills from “friendly” members of Congress do nothing but cement that cycle.  The first thing you need to do is force the banks to stand on their own.    If that means forcing a complete separation from the Fed– which was the original intent — then so be it.  If the Fed wants to “rescue” one of its lender institutions, let it do so without our tax dollar.

I am convinced, as you know, that we did nothing but “kick the can down the road” in 2008, and that TARP and all of these other remedies are doing nothing but setting us up for another voluminous group of failures.   This is because we let the same cronies that supported the massively corrupt Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac write the “reform” bills that instituted a system where mega-banks, those egregious leviathans, can be bailed out, ad infinitum, by you and I, rather than allowed to fail or break up as normal businesses that fail must do.

There were many silly (and frankly, Marxist) definitions of capitalism promulgated on these board this weekend, but the worst were those that associated capitalism with this recent spate of bailouts.  If capitalism is about anything, it’s about the creative destruction of old forms in order to allow innovation to drive progress forward.

This betrayal of true capitalism  is why the recent bailouts of dinosaurs like AIG and GM and Chrysler were so pernicious.   The breakup of GM would have freed billions of dollars in contract-bound assets and quite possibly sparked a whole new revolution in disaggregated auto manufacturing.  Allowing AIG to dispense its well-deserved CDS losses to Goldman Sachs may have hurt Uncle Warren a bit in his pinchy pockets, but think of the logjam in the wealth managment business such action would have broken up.

Think about it — AB Bernstein is probably one of the most respected names in money managment.  They are also the chief competitor in private banking to Goldman Sachs, in terms of research and institutional managment.   Why should they be penalized because they did the right thing?

It’s the wrong thing that it worked out that way, and one need not be a hippy despoiling a small park to realize that.

My argument with (many of) the hippies is that asking for more government to “regulate” such nonsense is just asking for more trouble.    Believe the fact that the large banks own Congress right now, and there single aim is to be dominant to the point where smaller banks are irrelevant annoyances.  Believe also that this aligns with Congress’s aims as well.  Why have to stretch your hand out to thousands of contributors when you can keep it to a neat and tidy ten or so?

Think about it.  The only way to break the cycle is to take the power to “Stick-Save” out of Congress’s hands.  Allow businesses to fail and you will create a stronger business arena from which to compete.  That’s real capitalism, and that’s what’s best for everyone — to whatever percentage they  might subscribe.

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I’m thinking the hippies may be buying gold here, however because I’m seeing some interesting formations in the weekly charts.   Take a look at our friend the double gold bull ETF,  DGP:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note how our price maintained support at those two key support lines over the last three weeks?  That’s a good sign.   The amount of room left in the stochastics also tells me that this run is not over.   What’s more, our stop loss line is pretty clearly demarcated here.

You can see the same action in a more exacting stand alone stock, the famous ANVil of ANV.  As capricious as this stock is known to be, it also seems to be adhering to the same rule of law that DGP has been.

My best to you all in these harrowing times.

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI6-JzxV-_M&NR=1 450 300]

Plantation Boss Liberals’ Response Seems Less Than Pleased

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According to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released tonight, Herman Cain now leads the GOP field with a 27% share of the vote, with Governor Mitt Romney pulling second at 23% , and helmet headed Rick Perry falling from 38% last month in the same poll to 16%  in this latest effort.

I would say that Perry turkey is cooked, and its time to move on to the only man with a computer science degree and an MBA in the field.   A man with a plan (no matter how flawed) to limit the claims of the federal government on the capitalist incentive system that made this country great.  A man who has worked his whole life — in every trade from digging ditches to running multimillion dollar revenue companies.

And maybe most important, Herman Cain is comfortable in his own skin — without having to repair to it as his designated aegis or truncheon.   What a refreshing concept!  Good luck Hermanator!

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And please, just stop with the Mitt Romney stuff already.  He’s the establishment candidate in the best traditions of other past fatted calf candidates, like Bob Dole and John McCain.  While I have great respect for Mitt’s operational background and vast business success, I cannot vote (in the primaries at least) for a guy who continues to back his moves in creating Romneycare, along with all the baggage attendant in that decision.

The voting public hungers for a conservative once again.   Herman Cain is thus far the only conservative candidate with the personality, wits and contacts to win the long race to the White House.

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I did get rid of the bulk of my QLD today, as reported in The PPT, but did little else.  I had a rather mammoth  order in all day for rare metal play QRM, but to no avail.  Luckily I already own a small horde of the name, but I was looking to add on a pullback today, to no avail.  I believe it ended up over 14% for the day.  I will continue my intense observations.

I continue to stalk select names in the rare earth (AVL)  and precious metal field (SLW, AG, EXK, RGLD, ANV),  even as this rally gets long in the tooth.  In the meantime I am also selling down some winners.  Not just QLD, but ARO and some other names that have gathered some moss.

Best to you all and to this blessed and still great country.  May she choose wisely.

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA 450 300]

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Celebrate a great life, never mourn it.

A life valued, oddly perhaps at first, but valued.

A child welcomed, an adventure claimed, a pathway blazed.

All because a young mother made a choice.  A great one, that– it turns out– has benefited all humanity.

Almost ironic how a man like this can talk about “connecting the dots,” and “destiny” and “karma.”

A boy adopted.

Like Larry Ellison, John Lennon, Charles Dickens, Nelson Mandela… and many others...

56 years of precious, valuable and shared life.

Celebrate.

R.I.P. — and thanks, Steve Jobs.

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UPDATE:  I bot QLD (large), early yesterday and GDX and GDXJ (medium) right before the close last night.

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