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Dear CIGAs,
Check out the top twelve indicators that the economy is bad:
12. CEO’s are now playing miniature golf.
11. I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.
10. I went to buy a toaster oven and they gave me a bank.
9. Hotwheels and Matchbox car companies are now trading higher than GM in the stock market.
8. Obama met with small businesses – GE, Pfizer, Chrysler, Citigroup and GM, to discuss the Stimulus Package.
7. McDonalds is selling the 1/4 ouncer.
6. People in Beverly Hills fired their nannies and are learning their children’s names.
5. The most highly-paid job is now jury duty.
4. People in Africa are donating money to Americans. Mothers in Ethiopia are telling their kids, “finish your plate; do you know how many kids are starving inAmerica?”
3. Motel Six won’t leave the lights on.
2. The Mafia is laying off judges.
And my most favorite indicator of all.
1. If the bank returns your check marked as “insufficient funds,” you have to call them and ask if they meant you or them.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
You think buyers are kicking back?
The government in financial matters has not recently asked if you want whatever you are told to buy.
Silverton to be closed by FDIC rather than sold
Lita Epstein
Jun 5th 2009 at 10:00AM
The FDIC found buyers for Atlanta’s failed bankers’ bank, Silverton, but none of Silverton’s suitors wanted to pay enough for it. After analyzing the offers, the FDIC decided it would be less costly to shut the bank down than to accept the bids received.
Bidders included the Carlyle Group with a consortium of private equity investors, including Lightyear Capital, Harvest Partners and Colony Capital. “We have to do what is least costly to our insurance fund and to shut it down for good was less costly than the bids we received,” a spokesman for the FDIC told the Financial Times.
This would not have been the first time a private investment group bought one of the failed banks. Last month, Carlyle, with three other private-equity firms, bought the banking operations of Florida’s BankUnited from federal regulators. Regulatory hurdles and restrictions do make these deals more difficult to finalize. U.S. regulators have not yet decided whether or not it’s a good idea to allow private equity groups to buy banks.
Silverton was easier to shut down because it was a bankers’ bank with about 1,400 small banks in 44 states as customers. When the FDIC took over Silverton it set up a “bridge bank” to service the other small banks and gradually assisted these small banks with setting up operations through another of the bankers’ banks. Bankers’ banks serve as the middle man between community banks and the Federal Reserve.
The failure of Silverton is expected to cost the FDIC $1.3 billion. Silverton had $3.3 billion in deposits at the time it failed and $4.1 billion in assets.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
What is the Fed worried about? Could it be Ron Paul’s, “Edit the Fed,” bill, HR1207?
Fed Intends to Hire Lobbyist in Campaign to Buttress Its Image
By Robert Schmidt
June 5 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve intends to hire a veteran lobbyist as it seeks to counter skepticism in Congress about the central bank’s growing power over the U.S. financial system, people familiar with the matter said.
Linda Robertson currently handles government, community and public affairs at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and headed the Washington lobbying office of Enron Corp., the energy trading company that collapsed in 2002 after an accounting scandal. She was also an adviser to all three of the Clinton administration’s Treasury secretaries.
Robertson would help the Fed manage relations with lawmakers seeking greater oversight of a central bank that has used emergency powers to prevent Wall Street’s demise. While she wasn’t tied to Enron’s fraud, her association with the firm may raise questions, analysts said.
“Some members of Congress think there are votes in attacking the Fed” after it “unnecessarily and unwisely entangled monetary policy with fiscal policy,” said former St. Louis Fed President William Poole. “The Fed is going to have a tricky time of unwinding what has been done” and will need to “keep in touch with members of Congress more thoroughly,” said Poole, now senior fellow with the Cato Institute in Washington.
Robertson served under Treasury Secretaries Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin and Lloyd Bentsen. She didn’t return calls seeking comment.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
You cozy up and look at the immediate result.
Remember #1 is that Israel makes a major miscalculation.
Saudi FM to U.S.: Cut off aid if Israel doesn’t end occupation
By Haaretz Service
The United States should cut off its aid to Israel if the country does not end its occupation of Arab land, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister told Newsweek in comments published Friday.
In response to a question on whether the U.S. should carry out the move, Prince Saud al-Faisal said: “Why not? If you give aid to someone and they indiscriminately occupy other people’s lands, you bear some responsibility.”
The interview with the foreign minister, which is for the magazine’s June 15 issue, was published a day after Obama vowed in a speech in Cairo Thursday to personally pursue a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Faisal added: “The United States has the means to persuade the Israelis to work for a peaceful settlement. It needs to tell them that if it is going to continue to help them, they must be reasonable and make reasonable concessions.”
He went on to say that that the normalization of ties between Israel and the Arab world can only come after Israel leaves occupied land.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Metals always grow as currency implodes!
Russian ruble to go palladium
05.06.2009
Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the Russian Parliament, the State Duma, said that the participants of the Economic Forum in St. Petersburg would discuss a possibility of making ruble coins from precious metals.
“We could offer the world the Russian ruble made of palladium. It would be a very strong currency. One may recollect the golden ruble, which Russia had during the tsarist times. It was a freely convertible currency and was circulating very well,” Gryzlov told reporters Thursday.
The President of the Association of Russian Banks, Garegin Tosunyan said that the coins made of precious and semi-precious metals would obviously be in demand on the market. “It has little to do with convertibility, but it would be quite normal as a measure against inflation and devaluation. Why not?” he said.
State Duma deputy Anatoly Aksakov believes that such a measure would not be effective.
“Such coins will become a numismatic rarity, a must-have for private collectors. Golden ten-ruble coins used to play a positive role in domestic and international settlements indeed, although it was the period of hyperinflation. The Russian economy should be modernized to make the ruble attractive.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
It is getting really expensive these days to rent an army.
Let’s hope our future is not the same as Crosus’s, the renter of two Roman legions. For the historians out there, he lost his head by renting those legions.
Pakistan asks U.S. debt forgiveness
Published: June 6, 2009 at 7:33 AM
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 6 (UPI) — A meeting between U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani included a plea for debt forgiveness, officials said.
Gilani asked Holbrooke during their Friday meeting to help Islamabad’s struggle against Taliban militants by writing off $1.35 billion it owes to the United States, Pakistan’s English language newspaper Dawn reported.
Holbrooke told Gilani he would look into the matter, Minister of State for Finance and Economic Affairs Hina Khar told Dawn.
Also during the meeting, Gilani reportedly urged the White House to persuade Congress to put requests for substantial increases in military aid to Pakistan on a fast track while it battles Taliban militants in the North West Frontier Province.
Dawn said Gilani acknowledged that the United States had funneled $300 million in humanitarian aid to Islamabad in its efforts to help millions of refugees in Swat and other war-torn northwestern districts.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Here is the King of anti-Gold religionists in government.
In Britain, a desperate prime minister hangs on
Gordon Brown is burdened by ongoing economic crisis and expenses scandal
By Kevin Sullivan
updated 3:11 a.m. PT, Sun., June 7, 2009
LONDON – Two years ago, Gordon Brown entered 10 Downing Street for the first time as prime minister and promised, without a smile, to “try my utmost.”
The brainy, stone-faced Scot was the perfect tonic for a British public jaded after a decade of his flashy predecessor, Tony Blair. Within a week, Brown’s popularity ratings had soared to 77 percent.
Now a battered Brown finds himself desperately clinging to his job, facing a fed-up public, a rebellious party and, if things get much worse, the prospect of being one of the shortest-serving prime ministers in modern British history.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Gerald Celente has made accurate forecasts to a degree that if I was 180 degrees opposed to his view, I would reconsider mine.
The salient point for you is his opinion of the dollar and gold.
Here is one more resource for you.
Exclusive Interview with Future Prediction Expert Gerald Celente
by Terry Easton
06/05/2009
It’s the end of the world as the Greater Depression hits after 2010’s failed “W-recovery”
Human Events had the opportunity to interview forecaster extraordinaire Gerald Celente, President of Trends Research Institute, several days ago — and the future he predicts looks bleak indeed. In fact, as Mr. Celente sees it, the Great Depression will seem like a mild recession as what waits for us in 2011 hits with the force of a Katrina financial hurricane.
In case you’re wondering who Mr. Celente is (if this is still possible), he’s appeared — along with his predictions — on Oprah, CNBC, Reuters, NBC, PBS, BBC, the Glenn Beck Show — the list goes on an on. His Trends Report has been successfully predicting the major future trends impacting our lives for 3 decades, including calling the dot com crash back in the 1990’s.
Mr. Celente’s forecast on our impending future is based on his study of history. He says we are bent on destroying our currency, bankrupting our government, and unleashing a violent citizen-against-citizen eruption as the economy collapses into chaos and marshal law fascism.
Quite a claim. And God help us if he is right — again.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
The entire excuse for the short squeeze dollar rally was another imaginary Green Shoot, “the Employment Report,” that Commercials use to squeeze the dollar up. That report is FALSELY interpreted.
Temp work covers up the depth of unemployment. Adding in discouraged, part-time employees almost doubles the national rate.
Temp work helps mask joblessness among Americans
updated 12:48 p.m. ET, Sun., June 7, 2009
Associated Press Writer Frank Bass
TOWNSHEND, Vt. – For weeks, Greg Noel roamed the spine of the Green Mountains with a handheld GPS unit, walking dirt roads and chatting with people as he helped create a map of every housing unit in the United States.
Work was good: The sun was out, the snow was gone and the blackflies hadn’t begun to hatch. But now that work is over and Noel, 60, and more than 60,000 other Americans hired in April to help with the 2010 census are out of work once more.
It’s a familiar predicament in today’s economy, in which some 2 million people searching for full-time work have had to settle for less, and unemployment is much higher than the official rate when all the Americans who gave up looking for jobs are counted, too.
Because of the surge of hiring for the census, April unemployment only rose to 8.9 percent – a much slower increase than had been feared. Figures out today show unemployment now stands at 9.4 percent.
But consider these numbers:
The 9.4 percent May unemployment rate is based on 14.5 million Americans out of work. But that number doesn’t include discouraged workers, people who gave up looking for work after four weeks. Add those 792,000 people, and the unemployment rate is 9.8 percent.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
“We’re one of the most secure facilities in Canada,” Christine Aquino, mint spokeswoman, said Thursday. “Doing business with the mint is still safe, and this review will likely give us some suggestions on how to improve our processes.”
Doesn’t this article say they can’t find a good amount of the gold and they think it is an inside job?
Where did they find this spokeswoman, on financial TV?
Mint looks for gold, freezes worker bonuses
BY IAN MCLEOD, OTTAWA CITIZEN
JUNE 4, 2009
OTTAWA — The Royal Canadian Mint is withholding employee bonus pay as special auditors enter a fourth month hunting for unaccounted gold that insiders say could be worth as much as several million dollars.
The Ottawa Citizen reported Wednesday that external auditors are investigating an “unreconciled difference” between the 2008 financial accounting of the mint’s precious-metals holdings and the physical stockpile of gold, silver and palladium at its Ottawa headquarters. The mystery raises possibilities from sloppy bookkeeping to a gold heist.
Stealing gold or other metals would be a considerable feat, one that would have to evade state-of-the-art security technology.
“We’re one of the most secure facilities in Canada,” Christine Aquino, mint spokeswoman, said Thursday. “Doing business with the mint is still safe, and this review will likely give us some suggestions on how to improve our processes.”
The mint has delayed asking federal Auditor General Sheila Fraser to sign off on the Crown corporation’s consolidated financial statements for 2008, as required by law, and senior government and mint officials have been secretive about the probe.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
First China/Brazil and now China/Russia. The dollar rally is going to run into real problems.
The set up is perfect. The 2nd week of June is coming up with a target for the big lift off in the 3rd. $1650 is a minimum for this phase. Alf thinks an overrun could be double that $1650.
Good luck to the Goons. Their window of opportunity, if the Goons have one, is in the next 2 weeks ONLY.
Russia, China should dump dollar in trade – Medvedev
Fri Jun 5, 2009 3:07pm IST
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia and China should consider switching to domestic currencies in bilateral trade without going to the dollar, Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview with Kommersant daily published on Friday.
China has already entered similar agreements with Brazil and Belarus. The deal involves a currency swap agreement between the two countries. Trade turnover between Russia and China reached about $50 billion in 2008 and is set to increase.
“I think that we can think about such positions, for example the rouble against yuan,” Medvedev was quoted by Kommersant as saying. Russia’s own attempt to switch to the rouble in bilateral trade with Belarus has so far not been successful.
Leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China, known by their BRIC acronym, are meeting in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on June 16 to discuss the role of the dollar in the global financial system among other issues.
Medvedev said bilateral currency deals between trade partners ease impact of the economic crisis in an environment when many countries have difficulties tapping international capital markets.
