Saudi Arabia, the world's fourth-largest holder of foreign exchange reserves, is sitting on more than twice as much gold as previously thought, according to new estimates that point to the revival of bullion as part of emerging economies' official reserves.
The changes in Riyadh's reserves were revealed by the World Gold Council, the industry-backed body which regularly tracks official bullion holdings. According to the WGC, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, the central bank, has gold reserves of 322.9 tones, more than double the 143 tones it had previously reported.
The central bank said in a footnote of its latest quarterly report that gold data have been modified from first quarter 2008 as a result of the adjustment of the Sama's gold accounts'.
Sama did not respond on Sunday to calls seeking further comment.
Analysts said the rise in official gold holdings probably represented an accounting shift rather than fresh purchases. One possibility is that a large fraction of the country's gold was not considered until now part of the official reserves.
But without an official explanation, analysts were keeping options open. At current prices, the extra gold in Saudi Arabia's official reserves amounts to $7 billion.
The revelation could fuel gold's rally as it is a further sign that central banks are keen on gold, after two decades of selling their bullion.
[Iran Press TV Latest] A prominent US economic and banking expert has portrayed a grim outlook for the world's most powerful economy, saying the "crony capitalism" runs rampant in the US.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Gerald O'Driscoll, the former director of the Center for International Trade and Economics at the Heritage Foundation believes that a growing tide of fraud and corruption has surged in the current US financial system that is on the verge of becoming "an economy of liars" run by crony capitalists.
In the wake of a bruising financial turmoil in the US, including a sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2009, many experts have persistently called for root and branch financial reforms in the US Congress.
These days, people might think that US is reeling from financial straits and that the worst is behind them, but pundits predict the next mortgage crisis is on the horizon.
According to O`Driscoll, who has been a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, "free markets depend on truth telling... but in the US today, we are moving away from reliance on honest pricing. The federal government controls 90% of housing finance. Policies to encourage home ownership remain on the books."
"Fed policies of low interest rates result in capital being misallocated across time," he added. "Low interest rates particularly impact housing because a home is a pre-eminent long-lived asset whose value is enhanced by low interest rates."
O`Driscoll argues that "while protecting citizens against force, both at home and abroad, is the government's most basic function, protecting them against fraud is closely allied."
He went so far as to state that US government "has failed miserably to perform this basic function", and the reason lurking behind the failure is that financial services regulators failed to enforce laws and regulations against fraud."
On March 2009, Former NASDAQ chairman Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty to eleven accounts of federal crimes including an estimated $64.8 billion fraud and money laundering.
This senior analyst on banking and monetary policy also bristles at gimmicks employed by the Lehman Brothers prior to its bankruptcy in order to hide its leverage and to conceal how much money it was borrowing, arguing that it's hardly tenable to believe regulators were in dark about such irregularities and illegal procedures at the heart of US financial system.
"Congressional committees overseeing industries succumb to the allure of campaign contributions," O'Driscoll observes. "The interests of industry and government become intertwined and it is regulation that binds those interests together."
He reiterates, "we call that system not the free-market, but crony capitalism. It owes more to Benito Mussolini than to Adam Smith."
Posted by: Fred ||
06/21/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
Time for us to not miss capitalizing on the next crisis. Expose back room Congressional Deals and start a Constitutional Amendment for Term Limits. The politicians won't pass the law. We have to get organized and get the Amendment started state by state.
#4
Unfortunate use of the term 'crony capitalism' in an otherwise on the money analysis.
What O'Driscoll describes is more accurately called 'crony governing', since it is government channeling money, contracts, etc to its cronies.
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O`Driscoll argues that "while protecting citizens against force, both at home and abroad, is the government's most basic function, protecting them against fraud is closely allied."
Agree 100%. Unfortunately, much of what government does, especially governments on the Left, is fraudulent in one way or another, such as the global warming circus.
#6
Fred posts from Iran Press TV to tell us what is being fed to other people. In this case the article says "there's corruption over THERE, don't look HERE, look THERE ....."
#7
A prominent US economic and banking expert has portrayed a grim outlook for the world's most powerful economy, saying the "crony capitalism" runs rampant in the US.
A news report is in this Month's Civil Engineering magazine, right after an article asking for clever ideas to stop the BP leak, but the source is from April, and edited below.
About 10 miles off the Santa Barbara coast, at the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel, a series of impressive landmarks rise from the sea floor. They've been there for 40,000 years, but have remained hidden in the murky depths of the Pacific Ocean-until now.
They're called asphalt volcanoes.
The largest of these undersea Ice Age domes lies at a depth of 700 feet (220 meters), too deep for scuba diving, which explains why the volcanoes have never before been spotted by humans, says Don Rice, director of NSF's Chemical Oceanography Program, which funded the research. "They're larger than a football-field-long and as tall as a six-story building," says David Valentine, a geoscientist at UCSB and the lead author of a paper published on-line this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. "They're massive features, and are made completely out of asphalt." Gee, I wonder where all the oil and gas went? Did we have an EPA 40,000 years ago?
Using a mass spectrometer, carbon dating, microscopic fossils, and comprehensive, two-dimensional gas chromatography, the scientists determined that the structures are asphalt. They were formed when petroleum flowed from the sea-floor about 30,000-40,000 years ago.
Chris Reddy, a scientist at WHOI and a co-author of the paper, says that "the volcanoes underscore a little-known fact: half the oil that enters the coastal environment is from natural oil seeps like the ones off the coast of California."
The researchers also determined that the volcanoes were at one time a prolific source of methane, a greenhouse gas. The discovery that vast amounts of methane once emanated from the volcanoes caused the scientists to wonder if there might have been an environmental impact on the area during the Ice Age. "It became a dead zone," says Valentine. "We're hypothesizing that these features may have been a major contributor to those events." Wait a minute! I thought global warming was caused by man-made CO2. It wasn't cave men breaking wind that ended the ice age?
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/21/2010 14:06 ||
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Actually, the latest Ice Age ended about 12,000 years ago. These "methane monsters" had about zero effect on the ice at that time. According to one record I read, the Gulf of Mexico has several THOUSAND natural leaks that put as much oil into the water as the BP well does.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
06/21/2010 15:02 Comments ||
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#2
Not as much as the BP leak but about two Exxon Valdez tanker loads a year seeps naturally into the Gulf every year.
The same thing happens off the coast of California. Some of the natural gas seeps are so prolific that oil companies, prevented from drilling there, simply put a cap over them and collect the gas:
Two small underwater containment structures positioned near Goleta Point, placed to collect natural seepage, have alone captured over 4 billion cubic feet of natural gas since 1982: enough natural gas to supply the needs of over 25,000 residential natural gas users each year.
In 1793, during the travels of English explorer James Cook, his navigator, George Vancouver, recorded in his journal that they had anchored off of Goleta. Vancouver reported that the sea was "... covered with a thick, slimy substance, which, when separated or disturbed by any little agitation, became very luminous, whilst the slightest breeze, that came principally from onshore, brought with it a very strong scent of burning tar." He continued that "... the sea had the appearance of dissolved tar floating on its surface, which covered the ocean in all directions within the limits of our view."
This also is consistent with the memory of my friend's mother who is now in her 90's. She spent her summers at the beach near Santa Barbara in the 1920's and 1930's. She said the beach was always full of tar and her aunt made the kids clean their feet with turpentine when they got back from the beach. She said the breeze smelled like kerosene. She said that after the war when drilling started, the beaches cleaned up and became usable. Before that time the beaches were normally fouled with oil and tar seeping naturally into the ocean.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
06/21/2010 16:02 Comments ||
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#7
In 1793, during the travels of English explorer James Cook, his navigator, George Vancouver, recorded in his journal that they had anchored off of Goleta
is this the same English explorer James Cook who died in 1779?
Residents of Kota Harapan Indah housing area, Bekasi, have blasted the local administration's decision to dismantle the Tiga Mojang (Three Ladies) statue from their area after pressure from fundamentalist groups. On Saturday, the Bekasi municipal administration decided to tear down a 17-meter-high Tiga Mojang statue, made by sculptor Nyoman Nuarta, from the entrance of Kota Harapan Indah, following protests from local hard-line Islamic groups.
Asep, 20, a resident of the complex, said, after the statue had been removed on Saturday morning, he now felt differently about boulevard where the statue once stood. I often spent Saturday nights with my friends, sitting and chatting on the sidewalk and we were always awed by the beautiful statue,' Asep told The Jakarta Post on Sunday. But since it was removed, we felt that we were hanging out in an entirely different place.'
A resident speaking on the condition of anonymity said he disagreed with the administration's decision to tear down the statue, considering the fact that it was made under pressure from hard-line Islamic groups. A work of art is supposed to be enjoyed. There is no point in reducing it to a religious issue,' he said.
Among the groups calling for the removal of the statue are the Islam Defenders Front (FPI), the Bekasi Movement Against Apostates and the Islamic Ummah Forum. The groups said the Rp 5 billion (US$550,000) statue, which portrays three women dressed in traditional West Javanese attire, was an insult to the Muslim-majority city since it symbolized attempts to convert people to Christianity.
We are happy to hear the Bekasi administration has finally dismantled the statue. If they hadn't done it, we would have taken matters into our own hands and taken the statue down ourselves,' Murhali Barda, the head of the Bekasi branch of the FPI, said Sunday.
The developers of Kota Harapan Indah, however, said they had no plans to bring the Bekasi municipal administration to court. We know the [Bekasi] mayor was under pressure from the Islamic groups. It would be difficult hard to reverse the decision even if we went ahead and sued him,' PT Hasana Damai Putra operational director Fredy Yanto told the Post.
Fredy also denied allegations that the statue was obscene and was offensive to Muslims in Bekasi. The statue was meant to welcome people to the complex, just like other monuments built in many other cities,' he said.
In an interview with the Post on Sunday, the sculptor, Nyoman Nuarta, called the groups' interpretation of the statue silly and utterly misleading. I made the statue after learning more about [West Java] culture. I never thought about attaching any religious aspect to it. I don't even understand what the Trinity is,' Bandung-based Nyoman said via telephone. Why did I choose three [ladies]? It was simply because the statue would be placed in the center of a traffic circle so that it could welcome' motorists from three streets.'
YASOTHON, Thailand -- For a long half-minute, there was no sky. Only rolling smoke, left behind by a 48-foot homemade rocket screaming into the stratosphere, high above the fields in northeast Thailand.
"Oh, it's ascending gorgeously!" Beyond the ash cloud, a man with a megaphone provided color commentary in upcountry dialect.
Rockets, danger, whiskey, lust and superstition: there is almost too much to love about the "Rocket Festival" in Thailand's rural Yasothon province.
For more than a millennium, farmers in this region's baking flatlands have staged fertility rites to welcome May's seasonal rains. But sometime after the introduction of gunpowder, people living in modern-day Thailand (and Laos) gained the ability to fire symbolic phalluses -- rockets -- into the clouds. According to superstition, an astral conception of sorts takes place in the sky, unleashing showers that loosen parched soil so that crop planting can commence.
Today, the mock phalluses are as big as 55 feet long, fashioned from sturdy PVC pipe and packed with more than 130 kilos of gunpowder. "We use a big compressor to push it all in," said Pon Wannapongse, a day laborer, his cheeks charred black with ash. "It's fun. Me and these guys, we get together in my backyard and make rockets all night." No doubt with a plentiful supply of rice wine Most likely lao khao "whiskey".
This festival's thrills, however, run much deeper than amateur rocketry. Just as Catholics enjoy a gluttonous "Fat Tuesday" before Lent's seasonal fasting, rural Thais are allowed to briefly go wild before the rains come and the months of rice-planting toil begin.
Men joyfully parade the streets with comically huge wooden phalluses, aiming them at revelers for laughs.
This amnesty period for various indiscretions frees Thais from a year-round expectation of propriety. Though not perfectly followed, the Thai ideal calls for mannered men and virtuous women. The olden fertility rites -- and today's raucous rocket festival -- have long functioned as a much-needed release valve.
And those who want glory will craft gigantic rockets.
On the festival's last day, tens of thousands gather in a scrubby field for the main event: a face-off between men vying to launch the most magnificent rocket. Points are scored for height, distance traveled and eye-catching smoke trails, which trace cartoonish white spirals in the sky. No wonders the Muslims get pissed - They have to blow themselves up to make up for such fun.
In mid-May, Portland police Officer James Crooker went to Southeast Portland on a patrol call. With a few minutes to spare, he decided to get a coffee.
So, he popped into the Red & Black cafe on Southeast 12th Avenue near Oak Street, bought a coffee and was heading out when a customer approached him, saying she appreciates the hard job that police officers do every day in Portland.One of the co-owners of the cafe, John Langley, has another point of view. While the officer and customer were chatting, he walked up and asked Crooker to leave, saying he felt uncomfortable having a uniformed officer in the vegan cafe. Red and Black? Isn't that sorta -er- Racist?
The incident, which was brief, speaks volumes about the tensions between Portland police and some members of the community who are more worried about police shootings than protection.
Crooker said he was surprised to be shown the door but left immediately. He said this marked a first during his nine-year in law enforcement, two in Portland and seven in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
"The places that I've been kicked out of before have been places like the methadone clinic," he said. "I've never been kicked out of a regular cafe."
But the 36-year-old officer, who was born and raised in Portland, said it's all part of working this city's streets in a uniform.
"We have a unique relationship with the community," he said. "You're there to protect them but on the other hand they don't know what that involves. Being gracious is part of it."
A former Marine who served in Iraq, Crooker didn't take the incident to heart.
"It was not personal," he said. "He was being hostile to my uniform," he said.
Langley, who did not raise his voice during the encounter, agreed. "It's not about the police," Langley said. "It's about what the police represent to many people who frequent the cafe. See next paragraph....
The cafe draws vegans -- of course -- along with homeless people and animal-rights and environmental terrorists activists who Langley said have been targets of police abuse and harassment. Now I wonder why he didn't like the police near his establishment. Could he be a supporter for actual domestic terrorists? (no of course not - he's not a teabagger!)
If I were the Portland PD I would start keeping an eye on this place. If I were the Portland PD I would start ignoring the place, particularly any 911 calls, but I don't have as much class as Officer Crooker ...
But the cafe also draws customers like Cornelia Seigneur, who blogged about the incident on her website. Seigneur, a freelancer for The Oregonian who was enjoying lunch with her daughter on May 18 when Crooker came in, was the one who approached him.
"There have been some unfortunate situations recently," Seigneur said. "But overall the police are out there day in and day out protecting us."
She said she struck up a conversation with Crooker to show her support for police, who she said saved the life of a friend after he was shot by gang members.
When Langley asked Crooker to leave, she was startled.
"It was shocking," Seigneur said. "Everyone deserves to have a coffee, and he was served a coffee. It was humiliating."
She said there were only about three other people in the cafe and that no else seemed to notice the officer.
But the incident has fired a reaction, with dozens of comments pouring into Seigneur's website. Question is - will she return to the cafe? I wouldn't feel safe in a place where the police weren't welcome - unless I was well armed. I wonder how the owner feels about open-carry.....
It's been so overwhelming that she took the blog post down but put it back up Thursday afternoon.
The cafe, too, has received a deluge of calls, with about half supporting the cafe and the rest expressing anger.
"We've received threats," Langley said. "People have threatened to attack us and break our windows."
Still, he has no regrets.
"I never expected a police officer to come into the space," he said. "If it happened again, I wouldn't serve him." And of course if someone does break your window you will be the first to yell and cry for mommy the police to come and protect your propery.
Which they will do because they have class, and you are a sh*thead. (apologies to any and all piles if sh*t out there.)
#2
Actually the owner of the cafe just hung up a big "Rob me now" sign on his business -- think the cops are going to expend much effort looking for the person(s) that rob that place?
#3
If I saw a robber running from that cafe, I'd walk after them slowly enough to sip my coffee and munch my donut so I don't spill it on my cop uniform.
#5
You'd be surprised. Some joints like that refuse to pay the monthly VISA/MC merchant's fee so all they keep on hand is cash in the till for transactions. Or, similarly, they have a minimum required purchase amount for credit/debit usage, and again, customers end up paying cash because their muffin doesn't clear the minimum.
In a place like Portland, several hundred dollars in a till might be worth a stick up to a total low life.
#6
"We've received threats," Langley said. "People have threatened to attack us and break our windows." Boy that is troubling, maybe you should call...oh that right you don't like the cops. Suck to be you.
#7
Does 911 have a call block list? About time we started one the way this country is going down hill.
Posted by: Sheatch Protector of the Hatfields8107 ||
06/21/2010 17:39 Comments ||
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#8
I'm embarrassed to say I live in Portland. Lovely town, but filled with grass eaters who have no idea how the world actually works.
Typical "progressive liberals". Damn I hate them.
Unkempt, greasy, organic T wearing, Birkenstocked, geyser pants, tofu munching beta males all posturing trying to impress each other.
The few straight ones are attempting to attract the attention of the 35 year old "goth chick" with enough piercings, tats, cellulite, body hair and BO to deter the most desperate testosterone poisoned 22 year old male.
#10
Isn't refusing to sell food to a paying customer in a public restaurant considered discrimination? For instance, if it wasn't a cop but a minority trying to buy coffee you could only imagine the shit-storm to follow.
#12
IWW Wobblies and anarcho-syndicalists, according to the comments. Pain in the tail, but they seem to spend a lot of time aggravating "liberal" establishments: Starbucks, Wild Edibles.
In Dearborn, Michigan. Four Christian missionaries trying to convert Muslims were arrested and jailed Friday for disorderly conduct at an Arab festival in Dearborn, police said.
"We did make four arrests for disorderly conduct," Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad said Saturday. "They did cause a stir."
Haddad is a common Lebanese Christian name.
Nabeel Qureshi of Virginia and David Wood of New York, both with a Christian group called Acts 17 Apologetics, were arrested with two others after they were said to be causing disruptive behavior, police said.
#2
And so Sharia law arrives in the United States.
Who knew Sharia Law supercedes the US Constitution?
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
06/21/2010 11:49 Comments ||
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My jaw has literally hit the floor. I am astonished but, what exactly was the disturbance? How disorderly were they exactly? And if we're gonna start persecuting Christians can we please start with Fred Phelps and the Westboro Babtist Church? We should also think of putting the Catholic church under surveillance. No, seriously, this is not supposed to happen in the U.S. and I hope Christians go to their aid as quickly as possible.
#4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FXDAaiT6os
here's the link to the group members from Acts 17 Apologetics that were arrested. Really infuriating to think this is going on in the U.S.
#5
What I expect happened is that the 'Religion of Peace' started threatening extreme-violence so they arrested the Christians for exercising their rights.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
