Goldmember

Furthermore, they signed the Central Bank Gold Agreement in Sep99. This ostensibly limits gold sales. But in reality, it limits gold purchases and redistributes gold between them If you don't hold it, you don't own it.

IMHO you're full of it. You offer no valuation for gold. I do and here it is. The UK has 310.3tons of gold reserves. It's monetary base is approaching £1 trillion. So if the SCO+, BRICS+ and EAEU adopt a gold standard AS THEY ARE DOING, then the World will have to follow suit as everyone dumps un-backed paper funny money. That means a gold price of £100,000 to fully back the monetary base. As J.P. Morgan correctly said, when asked if credit was money: "Gold is money and nothing else." EVEN IF they don't adopt a reset to the gold standard, paper funny money is GUARANTEED to lose purchasing power THAT'S THE WHOLE IDEA OF PAPER FUNNY-MONEY RATHER THAN GOLD. And ESPECIALLY with being up to our eyeballs in debt now. So WHERE'S proof of a bubble? Why hold 1~2% if it's in a bubble? Where's the logic, rather than unfounded claims?

Has it happened yet? Did I blink and miss it?

Prescott set up a new office, the Office of the Deputy Fat Bar Steward. This published a new set of housing stats despite having no discernable new source of information over and above that of the other housing indices. Prescott contributed to the Halifax Fact Book for 2002, revising figures going back decades so that the last housing crash was depicted as a plateau. In the following year the CML revised the figures back (still lies but not as ridiculous). Prescott restricted supply of housing to the lowest since 1924 by limiting planning permissions. Prescott discouraged builders by imposing the US scam of "affordable housing" whereby builders were forced to set a percentage of cheap homes on expensive land so that they either didn't start the build, or they offset the cost on the other houses on the plot. Prescott compulsory purchased houses in Liverpool, paying the victims only £30,000. The reaon for this was just MORE HOUSING in the form of £100,000 flats. As for "stability". Herr Braun removed the powers of regulation from the BoE and gave them to the FSA who failed to restrict bank lending of liar loans. If you believe this fat scumbag then you probably believe he's bolemic too. KICK HIS F&*&(*&ING HEAD IN!!!

History tells of gold-rush excess repeatedly and, no, it's not different this time; there can be little doubt about it now. It is a very obvious fact that Herr Braun has screwed the UK economy worse than Hitler could have possibly dreamed of when he dropped counterfeit £5 notes. Debt is ridiculously high; the worst ever in terms of household debt, public sector deficits and trade deficits. The bacon, tomato and lettuce brigade numbered 30,000 in 1998 but now number about a million and represent a whopping 12% of mortgages. Guess who's holding up the property market! Rent is now typically 3% of the property value whilst mortgages are 7%. It's a Ponzi scheme whereby BTL are only making money as long as property values are rising. Ridiculously, in recent interviews, these financial geniuses claimed they would simply buy up property if it fell. BTL will get worse from both ends. Not only are house prices falling from their record worst ever 9 times earnings, but the credit crunch is raising borrowing costs and preventing re-mortgaging, especially in the BTL sector. On Thursday, the money markets failed to respond to the BoE rate cut and instead raised rates prompting some commentators to suggest the BoE had lost control of rates. So interest rates are rising and mortgage deals are being removed even as house prices fall SHARPLY. The BTLs are going to become sandwiched!!!! "Peter Spencer, chief economic adviser to the Ernst & Young Item Club, said: "The fact of the matter is that the market rather than the Bank is now dictating monetary policy -- and not from the point of view of controlling inflation, but from the point of view of a random walk. It is behaving in a way which is totally rational for individual banks but adds up to a major deflationary issue. "I think this is a very grave situation indeed" Daily Telegraph - "Market fears Bank of England has lost control of rates" Herr Braun and little Eddie Ballsup should be strung up from the nearest lamp post.

Doesn't much matter. "Market fears Bank of England has lost control of rates", suggests the Daily Telegraph. When Merv cut rates this Thursday, the money market failed to respond and instead raised them. As the Mogambo Guru says, "we're all freakin' doomed!"

Gold as the first respondants have noted is not being bid up by debt. When the credit reverses, housing prices will fall but gold won't (at least not for this reason). As to whether it will become monetised again, Credit Suisse/Chevreux certainly believe that the days of the dollar are numbered and with the euro also being a fiat currency (and not backed by F16s), the only alternative will be gold. Note the central banks are not dumping their gold wholesale and have been hoarding it since the US defaulted in 1971. Though, this could be simply to keep gold out of circulation as the US does with 8,000 tonnes of other nations' gold stored FREE OF CHARGE at the Federal Bank of New York. Russia, Indonesia, Argentina etc. are loading up on gold. It looks like the very scenario of nations choosing gold as a medium of exchange again will happen in the coming years. Certainly the creaking calamity that is the US economy cannot be a good thing to replicate. With the, NOW HIDDEN, US M3 in the tens of trillions (which includes eurodollars) the price of the 8,000 tonnes of US gold in Fort Knox should be about $40,000 an ounce as only 100% backing would avoid a run on the dollar (something which is in progress now). The $57 trillioni in liabilities that the US owes makes debasement of the dollar a "statistical certainty" according to Gary North of lewrockwell.com whilst his fellow writer, Bill Bonner, predicts a "Hyperflationary Depression". Despite the obvious market manipulation of the gold price, it has still outperformed the much hyped stockmarket and hedge funds in recent years. During volatility as we've recently seen, gold keeps its value and is only sold short by the crooks a day or so after the stockmarkets have crashed.

In the US, there's been a surge in house building leading to excess supply. In the UK, there's been the lowest rate of house building since 1924 in recent years and has just got even lower with only 168,800 being built in the latest 12 monthly figures. The deputy fat, unpleasant scumbag has rigged the housing market figures with a new department supplying housing statistics which have been total lies that even erased the last housing crash; representing it as a plateau instead. The scumbag's department was also responsible for planning permissions. The scumbag also imposed the "affordable" housing scam that deterred builders from building on expensive land that they would have to build a cheap house on. The scumbag has compulsory purchased houses in Liverpool and demolished them. Yet the "urgent" requirement to justify the compulsory purchase order was just to build flats in their place; compensating the previous owners by only £30,000. Herr Braun, our unelected ruler, has instituted the PFI scam whereby hospitals are knocked down and replaced by other (badly built) hospitals down the road as a sop to the building industry along with the guaranteed profits. This also includes the £40m Scottish parliament buildings which eventually cost us, the taxpayer, over £400m plus the multi-million £ enquiry into why these thieves gave our money away and conducted by the thieves themselves. His promise to build x number of houses by 2016 is rubbish, he'll be long gone by then. Hence property prices in the UK are being kept up by a restriction of supply rather than genuine demand. The morons buying in this market are bidding against each other and paying through the nose in mortgage interest. The debt will linger long after the house prices have collapsed and that is guaranteed because globalisation is just about irreversible and that means low wages are here to stay.

China announced during the second "Strategic Economic Dialogue" that she would no longer accept US Treasuries. China dumped these in April (5.8bn) and May (6.6bn). This has triggered the recent market turmoil where the central banks have deliberately induced a crash to support the dollar and US treasuries which are being touted as a "safe haven" even though the dollar is collapsing. The trade war is very obvious starting in pet food, then other food and now toys. The "excessive" lead paint and magnets that might be swallowed in toys is ridiculous. Quality control is an ongoing process and requires regular corrections to put right any faults. The media are simply highlighting part of standard process in quality control in all industries. Furthermore, the magnets and the design of the toys that contain them were designed by Mattel so it's their fault and the lead paint is bogus as we used to have lead pipes supplying water just 40 years ago (note the lead pipe in games of Cluedo indicating what used to be standard practise in plumbing). Lewrockwell.com notes that the CFCs in aerosols can't possibly cause the ozone hole because they're heavier than air and that Dupont's patent expired just as the ozone/aerosol problem surfaced. Dupont now has a monopoly on the replacement. Was lead similarly besmirched? Do children like licking paint? Anyone who believes the UK has the world's best: 1) inventors, 2) police, 3) armed forces, 4) television, 5) freedom, 6) law courts, 7) etc. is a SUCKER and has been fooled by the Ministry of Truth. As George Orwell said, he realised at an early age that everything you read in the media is untrue. As a writer for the Independent wrote in his last article before moving into a P.R. job, every single newspaper with the exception of the Telegraph has made "consistent losses" for the last 15 years and the only reason the proprietor's buy these loss-makers is for the influence. Baaa!

Yep! Out and out BS. Not a grain of truth in any of them.

The Telegraph had a poll about debt. Most of those posting replies said borrowers onlyl had themselves to blame. But this is not the case. Very few borrowed vast sums to splash out on booze, birds and holidays. Most of the badly indebted were simply unfortunate to go through a divorce or other set back. In addition, buying a home is a fundamental requirement. But it is the government which has deliberately FORCED people into debt. This is how it works: Prescott, restricts planning applications so that home building is the lowest in almost 100 years. A prospective home-buyer is forced to increase the amount they borrow because of higher prices. It may not be much, say 1% more than if Prescott hadn't rigged the market. However, the process is iterative. The higher price he/she paid means other house prices rise too. The next buyer is forced to pay, say, 2% extra and so on and so forth.

Home demolition illegal, reports the right-wing Telegraph. This is the compulsory purchase order of homes in the UK by evil fat scumbag, John Prescott. Homeowners in Liverpool have had their homes seized by the state and they've been thrown out onto the street. Only £30,000 of taxpayers' money has been given in compensation by the UK's corrupt government whilst flats costing £100,000 have been built in their stead. Grandmother Elizabeth Pascoe, though, has won her court case and her eviction has been deemed illegal. If evicted she would be forced into debt and required to find come out of retirement having spent a lifetime earning a living and being responsible enough to pay off her mortgage. "Mrs Pascoe, 60, said: 'This is a Pyrrhic victory for me. It is bittersweet because much of my community has already been destroyed as a result of this initiative. Many of my neighbours who had lived here happily for decades succumbed only recently to various pressures and left.'" The Edge Lane scheme was described as "social cleansing" by Jane Kennedy, the local Labour scumbag MP, at the public inquiry that approved the plans. Gordon Brown has assisted in the debt creation of the UK public. He seized £5bn a year in 1997 from pensions then had the cheek to claim that there would be a £25bn shortfall by 2010. If he'd not stolen our money, there would have been a £40bn excess. But this would have been a liability for the pensions providers, those financial institutions, whom Brown works for. Brown overpaid the pensions rebate for those of us who don't trust the state and have contracted out. Then after the dot com crash, seized the full overpayment back. This meant the pension saver incurred additional losses through no fault of his/her own. If Brown had overpaid £100, and the stock market fell by 50%, then the saver would have lost an additional £50 before Brown claimed back the £100. The blame was placed on "computer error"; a system paid for by the taxpayer but the contract awarded to Texas based EDS who have been the subject of four public enquiries into their failing computer systems before the corrupt government awarded them the biggest IT contract in the world. Neo-Labour also bought millions of doses of Rummyflu even though it is useless and has harmful side-effects. The crooks said a vaccine would mask the symptoms (by killing the disease) and have also been peddling Rummyflu as a vaccine when it only relieves the symptoms of flu and has already been found to be ineffective against some strains of H5N1. Brown did the same trick to the poorest of society, benefits claimants were overpaid and after they'd spent the money, Brown demanded the overpayment back. Then he repeated the scam. EDS computer systems were again blamed.

U.S. Housing Slump May Lead to First Drop Since 1930s, reports Bloomberg.com: "'It's called 'How low can you go?' says Doreen Kelly, 52, who has dropped the price three times on her Westport, Connecticut, farmhouse to $799,900 after listing it in May for $938,000. 'The gains the real estate market made in the last three years just got wiped out on this particular house.'" Which shows that years of gains on paper can be wiped out in months. Back here in the UK, I looked at an area which I'd previously scouted out in 2001. There isn't a single house for sale at any price. Looked at another way, anyone who has their house up for sale now is desperate to sell and probably has two mortgages running at the same time as their circumstances drag them away.

We know this housing boom has been (particularly) artificial. Prescott restricted planning permissions so that the smallest number of houses for almost a century were built. He imposed the US scam of "affordable housing" so that builders with expensive land either hoarded it without building, or transferred the cost of cheaper housing onto the more expensive ones on the plot, pushing up their prices. We know that Brown failed to provide legislation to control the commercial banks when he made the BoE nominally independent. Only later did the FSA which inherited the BoE's responsibilities impose restrictions on lending. In the meantime self-certification mortgages (which Australia has also introduced recently) have contributed to the biggest global housing boom in history. We know that Brown is trying to stop the crash by introducing US style REITs, subsidised funding for houses for essential workers and the self-invested pensions which he changed his mind on at the 11th hour. Meanwhile, Prescott, who has created a department to report house prices when there's already a plethora of such sources, reports that two months ago the rate of house price inflation increased slightly. If you believe that you'll believe anything. Shops are reporting deflation; Sainsbury's 1.5% in food for 2005. Yet we're supposed to believe that people are starving to death whilst paying record prices for houses. The report that 770,000 home borrowers missed payments is in proportion to about 2m homes on the market at any one time. The market is made on the margin and a 38.5% increase in supply isn't exactly great for those selling, especially as these will be homes sold at "fire-sale" prices.

Bought my first house in 1985 for £21.5K. Put it on the market for £60K but too late. Chased the market down and then decided to head it off at the pass and eventually sold it for £42K. Look at the Halifax data and the decline is nowhere near as steep. But after the crash, I kept records and found that Halifax had been adjusting the figures month after month years later.

Keynesians and Monetarists are two sides of the same coin. Both are liars, government funded stooges and talk constant crap.

All figures are damned lies. The rate of increase of M4 in the UK has been about 12% in recent years and hit 13.1% recently. Most of the money doesn't go into consumer goods but into assets such as housing. This is why inflation of house prices has seen a doubling in the last five years, why the dot com bubble has re-inflated etc. Now they're trying to talk up consumer prices. Recent media articles claim that an early summer heat wave has REDUCED crops. In recent years, Tescos and Sainsbury's have reported deflation in the price of food of about 2%.

. . . soon after cutting them. Now they're only 0.1% behind Bradford and Bingley's instant access account.

So borrow as many millions as they'll give you. Spend, spend, spend and then declare bankruptcy. Rinse and repeat! And they all lived happily ever after. . . . Except that some of those who defaulted on their mortgages in the 1980s found the banks chasing after them just a few years ago.

UK M4 expansion has just slowed from 13.1% to 8%.

YOU'RE RIGHT. QUICK! SELL EVERYTHING AND PUT IT INTO YOUR DOLLAR ACCOUNT!!"!!

GBS are NOT worth 1/10th of the price of gold. GBS takes a small percentage once a year and is always quoted slightly below the price of gold. So each share is actually slightly less than 1/10th. You're money is theoretically guaranteed because GBS promise (?) to store physical gold to meet their obligations on a 100% coverage basis. There are restrictions on converting your shares to physical gold though. Physical gold can be purchased special delivery by mail order. It can be just as liquid, because you phone up, get a price fixed and then send the gold back and the same to purchase. The downside is the charges are usually about 5% but unlike GBS there is no annual charge and the government find it much more difficult to trace physical gold which is why they demand identities for anyone who purchases more than £5,000 worth or more than £10,000 in any year. Gold is NOT seasonal as it is unaffected by the weather and does not grow on trees. Charts are best for showing how stupid people are. Often stupidity is inversely proportional to the copiousness of the crapulence. Almost nobody bought Brown's stakeholder pensions because almost everyone realised they were a rip-off. In fact all pensions are rip-offs but stakeholder pensions are particularly obvious.

After the last housing crash in the late 1980/90s, I personally kept records of the Halifax monthly house price index and average house price. After a while I found that my figures needed correcting. Eventually it became clear that Halifax were fiddling the figures and quietly adjusting them month after month. The figures are a pack of lies from start to finish. Fat scumbag Prescott even supplied the historic figures for the Halifax factsheet 2002. He revised the 1980s crash so that it was no more than a plateau. The 2003 factsheet revised them back so that there was a small dip in prices. BOTH are still a pack of lies. There was a slump, as I remember, of at least 50%. My 3 bed semi had interested buyers at £60,000, but I held on too long and only sold it for £42,000, chasing the market down. Look at Halifax's figures for the last housing crash and they claim there was barely any loss at all!!! Just read the papers about how there's been a consumer led increase in GDP. Yet the Guardian contradicts its own story on this be reporting credit card lending is down to £7bn. Just read about how the hot weather has caused a reduction rather than an increase in fruit and vegetable output. In reality, the supermarkets have seen price deflation in food over 2005. There are lies, damed lies and statistics. But the statistic for honest statistics has to be close to zero.

The GDP Deflator measures the degree to which the government is overprinting money. velocity x money supply = real GDP x GDP deflator. Velocity is really the number of times the amount of money changes hands and is usually between 1 and 2. Money supply has been rising at typically 12% in recent years. This is actually the REAL rate of house price increases contrary to the 20% or so the government and all the lying banks have been talking about. If real GDP growth the velocity haven't changed, then the deflator is a measure of the rate of expansion of the money supply. In a situation where there is no debasement of the money supply (GDP increases are matched identically to money supply increases), the GDP deflator would be constant. What we're seeing is that the government wants an excuse to raise interest rates, probably to keep the pound price of gold high. They have, therefore, switched from quoting the equally nonsense CPI to the higher GDP deflator.

REITs, Government part-funded, negative equity mortgages and the SIPP fiasco whereby the legislation was cancelled at the last minute. It's clear that Brown is desperate to prevent the worst housing crash in history following the worst housing boom in history. This is the bone-head who said, "no more boom and bust". The latest is the "never-ending mortgage". "Warning over rise of the never-ending mortgage", reports the Sunday Times. This is a mortgage where you only pay the interest and your kids have the option of inheriting the loan. But isn't that just renting but at a higher price? The "homeowner" would be responsible for maintenance. They'd probably "buy" a bigger house than they would if they were really renting. They'd face vairiable interest rates. They'd be paying over the odds for a housing bubble with the latest REITs to help keep it afloat whilst on the other hand the "buy to let" brigade kindly keep rents down. A house I rented in 2001 is back on the rental market at the exact same price. To mortgage it at 5% would cost about £100 a month extra. Banks make a considerable profit from the interest mortgages which is why they levy a penalty if you pay your mortgage off early. A typical 25 year mortgage would have the "homeowner" paying almost double in real terms for the price of house.