[QUOTE=ewmayer;235342]... but I do think he's not a citizen." Where do folks like this come from? (This particular one, not completely surprisingly, hails from Alabama.) Of course since most of us will never be in a position to personally view the relevant physical evidence, it leaves endless room for charlatanry and "unreasonable doubt". You say "dude, that`s idiotic", and the claimer can simply retort "well, have you seen the birth certificate? Huh? have you? Yeah, I didn't *think* so." So how does one try to reason with such a person? (I didn't in this case, BTW, but the general question remains).[/QUOTE]The state in which I was born (Oklahoma) long ago destroyed my birth certificate.

All certificates were microfilmed before being destroyed. When I've requested a copy of my birth certificate, they send me a copy on paper, from the microfilm image.

Does that inability to produce the original paper certificate mean I lost my citizenship, or am ineligible to be President?

That's the retort to use with "birthers" -- ask [I]them[/I] to show you [I]their[/I] original birth certificates!!! Many might learn for the first time that they're in the same situation as the President -- or, perhaps, that by their own standards they're ineligible to vote.

[QUOTE=cheesehead;235394]Does that inability to produce the original paper certificate[/QUOTE]

If I understand the situation correctly, this isn't the same thing as what keeps feeding the birther's conspiracy theory. My understanding (from memory here, so the details may be a bit garbled) is that Hawaii has a birth certificate and a "Certification of Live Birth." The Certification of Live Birth has less information, and is sometimes called the "Short Form Birth Certificate." The controversy lives on because only the short form has been made publicly available. I'm not aware of anything the makes is impossible to produce the long form. I'm also not aware of anything that makes it necessary to produce the longer form.

The QE2 Sails Again
 

So Bernanke announced QE2 to the tune of $600B over the next 6 months ... basically the Fed is going to monetize all net Treasury debt issuance over that time span. More tellingly, the Fed statement made it clear that this latest round of money-printing madness is completely open-ended ... basically they are now officially committing to printing asnd printing "until the economy recovers". As if one thing had anything to do with the other. (If anything, any correlation between the two will pove to be of the inverse variety.) Markets needed a day to figure out whether they liked this, today have "seen that it is good".Of course oil and commodity prices are predictably ratcheting upwards in roughly the same amount that equities are ... oh, yeah, squeezing the crap out of everyone who doesn't have most of the net worth tied up in stocks is going to really boost the economy.

ZeroHedge reminds of us via a 2008 news piece from another insane currency-printing banana republic:

[url=http://www.zerohedge.com/article/headlines-2008-zimbabwe-stock-exchange-soars-others-crash]Headlines From 2008: "Zimbabwe Stock Exchange Soars As Others Crash"[/url]
[quote]While markets across the world have been crashing, the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange has being seeing record gains as citizens turn to equities to protect their money from the country's hyperinflation. The benchmark Industrial Index soared 257 percent on Tuesday up from a previous one day record of 241 percent on Monday with some companies seeing share prices increase by up to 3,500 percent. But before Wall Street traders start packing their bags and heading south, they should bear in mind that these figures are just another representation of Zimbabwe's collapsing economy and are almost meaningless in real terms. Zimbabwe, once a regional breadbasket, is staggering amid the world's worst inflation, a looming humanitarian emergency and worsening shortages of food, gasoline and most basic goods. Inflation is at 231 million percent, but some experts put it more at about 20 trillion percent. [/quote]
[i]My Comment:[/i] And that`s why we like to call him "Zimbabwe Ben" Bernanke ... BTW, the official band name for Zimbabwe Ben and his merry band of mad money printers is (in tribute to an Elton John hit) "Bennie and Inkjets".

As the dollar slowly sinks in the west ...
 

[QUOTE=ewmayer;235564]So Bernanke announced QE2 to the tune of $600B over the next 6 months ...
[/QUOTE]The currency markets are also showing what they think of the QE2 re-fit. Some telling graphs are available at [url]www.xe.com[/url]

When even the GBP is starting to look strong against the USD, despite the UK's less than optimal economy, you have to start wondering.

Paul

The desperate jockeying for position in the currency market will cause lots of screaming as the currency wars accelerate. Nobody wants to have a strong currency when the world economy is stuck in the doldrums. It is funny, QE2 will hurt the average person on the street, make foreign governments angry because of declining currency, and does not in the end do anything realistically helpful to the economy.

I hate to say it Paul, but IMO, the GBP is headed even lower than the dollar. The central bank can't continue to prop it up without serious blood letting.

DarJones

[QUOTE=Fusion_power;235571]I hate to say it Paul, but IMO, the GBP is headed even lower than the dollar. The central bank can't continue to prop it up without serious blood letting.[/QUOTE]

Gotta disagree with you on this one - unlike the US, the UK has made a credible start at the kind of harsh fiscal austerity needed to begin to rein in decades-long overspending. The US is doing precisely the opposite, and almost deliberately trying to rub the rest of the world's noses in it, a kind of "look at what we can do because we have the world's reserve currency" arrogance.

The anti-Fed pundits keep saying that the bond markets will punish us for our profligacy at some point, but now that the Fed *is* the bond market (much like the government now is the mortgage market), is that even possible? Perhaps because for every dollar of new debt issuance we have to roll over roughly 5 dollars of maturing debt, there is still some semblance of a bond market ... but I wonder. Perhaps the Ponzi masters at the Fed have that covered by way of their being in bed with the primary dealers, so even if foreign governments switch to not buying (or becoming net sellers) of treasury debt, the PDs can show their continuing "gratitude" for the various government bailout monies by making sure the debt auctions are well-bid. And by gradually shortening the average maturity date of the total debt (e.g. by replacing long-duration maturing debt with shorter-duration new paper), the Treasury can keep the rollover beast under control for quite some time. Of course there are limits to that as well, but the whole point is to buy time and pray for recovery to magically occur, and/or for the dollar to become sufficiently debased so the debt-to-GDP ratio levels out or even shrinks. Back to the taxation-without-representation theme there.

[QUOTE=Fusion_power;235571]I hate to say it Paul, but IMO, the GBP is headed even lower than the dollar. The central bank can't continue to prop it up without serious blood letting.[/QUOTE]Then we'll have to agree to disagree. The BoE has spent the last two years doing most everything it can to make the GBP weaken rather than prop it up. Interest rates have been at an all-time low of 0.5% for 20 months and we've had our own batch of QE.

Although it may sound like a mutual-admiration society, I'm with Ernst on this matter.


Paul

Modern Debt Collection | How to fix the economy
 

[b]Modern Debt Collection:[/b]

Courtesy of our legal-eagle friends at the Bankruptcy Law Network (hat tip: Mish), for your horrified amusement, we present some interestingly creative debt-collection tactics:

[url=http://www.bankruptcylawnetwork.com/2010/11/02/debt-collector-scam-reaches-new-low-the-unicredit-bogus-courtroom-scam/]Debt Collector Scam Reaches New Low: The Unicredit Bogus “Courtroom” Scam[/url]
[quote]It isn’t easy for consumers to protect themselves these days, from robo-signers, foreclosure-rescue scams, and all manner of abusive collection tactics, but the Unicredit scam may take the prize for sheer audacity. [b]It seems that Erie, Pennsylvania debt collection agency Unicredit not only set up a fake courtroom, complete with phony judge, with which to bamboozle and intimidate, but it dressed up employees like sheriff’s deputies to “serve” faked court papers on consumers.[/b]

The Unicredit scam, as outrageous as it is, differs mainly in scope from tactics that are commonly used by creditors and collection agencies, whose stock in trade is to mislead, exaggerate, and intimidate.

And while I haven’t seen the pseudo-courtroom scam before, the pseudo-law enforcement official is nothing new.

It’s not always easy when you are scared and someone is breathing down your neck, but again, that is a debt collector’s stock in trade. The more urgent he makes everything sound, the more likely you won’t slow down to think, and ask yourself some practical questions.

The most important and most practical advice is to go see an attorney. If you’re being threatened with legal action, an attorney can tell you what really can (and can’t) happen. If you’ve already been intimidated or scammed into giving up something you shouldn’t have, an attorney can tell you how to redress the situation.[/quote]
[i]My Comment:[/i] Ah, but what if the fake cops get you into a fake interrogation room and tell you (falsely but convincingly) that under the provisions of the 2005 Bankruptcy "Reform" Act, you that you don't have the right to see an attorney until you sign certain (very real) waivers of legal rights? What next? Fake CIA "enhanced interrogation specialists" giving debtors (real) waterboardings to soften them up?

It's enough to almost make one yearn for the honest straightforward harshness of Dickensian debtor's prisons...


[b]How to Fix the Economy, Zimbabwe-Ben Bernanke Style:[/b]

Why, keep the stock market from ever dropping again. To that end, today's non-manipulated stock market closing 15 minutes brought to you by "The Chairman":

CA Budget Tricks, Part oo | Sarah Palin on QE2
 

From my neck of the woods, here is one of the many ways California managed to "close a $20 billion budget gap" this past year:

[URL="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/11/07/state/n100503S24.DTL"]Calif borrows $40M a day to pay unemployment[/URL]: [I]With one in every eight workers unemployed and empty state coffers, California is borrowing billions of dollars from the federal government to pay unemployment insurance.[/I]
[quote]The Los Angeles Times reports that the state owes $8.6 billion already, and will have to come up with a $362-million payment to Washington by the end of next September.

The continued borrowing means federal unemployment insurance taxes are going to increase, upping the annual payroll costs $21 a year per worker.

California tops the list of 32 states that have borrowed a total of $41 billion to pay claims.

The state took out its first loan from the federal government early last year, to deal with rising payment of benefits and number of claims.[/quote][I]My Comment:[/I] So that first major payment due next September covers a whopping nine *days* of unemployment borrowings? Oh, yeah, this is going to end really well.

[B]Sarah Palin may be a bubbleheaded demagogue...[/B]

...but at least the persons(s) in her inner circle who wrote this for her use seem to have a clue (I know, I am as shocked to see myself writing this as most of you):

[URL]http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/252715/palin-bernanke-cease-and-desist-robert-costa]Palin to Bernanke: ‘Cease and Desist’[/URL]
[quote]I’m deeply concerned about the Federal Reserve’s plans to buy up anywhere from $600 billion to as much as $1 trillion of government securities. The technical term for it is “quantitative easing.” It means our government is pumping money into the banking system by buying up treasury bonds. And where, you may ask, are we getting the money to pay for all this? We’re printing it out of thin air.

The Fed hopes doing this may buy us a little temporary economic growth by supplying banks with extra cash which they could then lend out to businesses. But it’s far from certain this will even work. After all, the problem isn’t that banks don’t have enough cash on hand – it’s that they don’t want to lend it out, because they don’t trust the current economic climate.

And if it doesn’t work, what do we do then? Print even more money? What’s the end game here? Where will all this money printing on an unprecedented scale take us? Do we have any guarantees that QE2 won’t be followed by QE3, 4, and 5, until eventually – inevitably – no one will want to buy our debt anymore? What happens if the Fed becomes not just the buyer of last resort, but the buyer of only resort?
...[/quote][I]My Comment:[/I] Of course this is followed by examples of the price inflation caused by the Fed`s money-printing, which include the price of oil, which immediately leads to a relapse into "drill, baby, drill!" ... gotta take the bad with the good, I suppose. Sarah Palin - the political analog of the chick with the really pretty face and the huge derriere.

[B]Irish Debt Woes Intensify:[/B]

[URL="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/business/global/08debt.html?_r=1"]Irish Debt Woes Revive Concern About Europe[/URL]: [I]When interest rates soared last week on Irish government bonds, it served as a grim warning to other indebted nations of how difficult and even politically ruinous it could be to roll back decades of public sector largess.[/I]
[quote]An Irish bond market already in free fall plunged further after Ireland announced on Thursday that it planned to nearly double its package of spending cuts and tax increases to try to rein in its huge deficit. Investors took it not as a sign of resolve but rather of Ireland’s desperation and uncertainty about the true extent of its problems.

The yield on Ireland’s 10-year bond climbed to 7.6 percent on Friday, expanding the gap with the 2.5 percent interest rate on comparable bonds issued by Germany, which is emerging most strongly from the European debt crisis.

Borrowing costs in Spain, Portugal and Greece also spiked upward again, as investor concern re-emerged that those countries would be hard-pressed to bring their deficits under control and avoid defaulting on their bonds.

Even as global stock markets rallied last week, those bond market jitters were a forceful reminder of how wary investors remained after Europe’s debt crisis last spring, despite the commitment of a combined 750 billion euros ($1.05 trillion) in bailout funds by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
...
Prime Minister Brian Cowen’s increasingly shaky political standing in Ireland may be threatened by the new deficit reduction measures, which will cut to the heart of the Irish welfare system, including health care.

In Greece, regional elections on Sunday were viewed as a test for the Socialist Party led by Prime Minister George Papandreou, whose government’s austerity measures have been wildly unpopular. In a televised address, Mr. Papandreou claimed victory in the elections and viewed the results as support of his economic policies.

International concerns about the high budget deficit in the United States, and Washington’s seeming willingness to print money rather than tackle tough debt-cutting measures, help partly explain the recent anti-American criticism from countries as diverse as Brazil, China and Germany. Countering those critics may be one of the biggest tasks for President Obama in Seoul, South Korea, this week at the Group of 20 meeting of the leaders of the world’s biggest economies.

Within Europe, though, the more immediate concerns involve Ireland. Its debt woes have stoked fear that it might even need to follow Greece and request a bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Such a move could do lasting damage to Ireland’s credit standing.

For the moment, at least, that outcome seems improbable. Unlike Greece earlier this year, Ireland has enough cash on hand to allow it to finance government operations through June 2011. And it has, at least temporarily, withdrawn from the bond market instead of paying the new, higher interest rates, which Irish officials say do not adequately reflect the country’s true economic condition.[/quote]

Silver Goes Parabolic | Who Said It?
 

[b]Silver Goes Parabolic:[/b]

In the wake of the recent allegations (see [url=http://www.zerohedge.com/article/whistleblower-exposes-jp-morgans-silver-manipulation-scheme]here[/url], [url=http://www.zerohedge.com/article/civil-and-criminal-probes-launched-against-jp-morgan-silver-market-manipulation]here[/url], [url=http://www.zerohedge.com/article/andrew-maguire-re-emerges-ex-goldman-trader-exposes-jpmorgan-hsbc-latest-silver-price-manipu]here[/url] and [url=http://www.zerohedge.com/article/rico-suit-filed-against-hsbc-and-jpmorgan-silver-market-manipulation]here[/url]) implicating Barclays and JP Morgan in a long-running and highly profitable manipulation of the silver futures market (in a nutshell, JPM acquired a huge set of silver short positions via its shotgun marriage to the now-defunct Bear Stearns back in the spring of 2008, and has since then been busily manipulating the silver market at selected intervals in order to depress the price and profit from whichever batch of shorts is due to expire next), silver has seen a parabolic price ramp, more than doubling off its 52-week low and hitting a new high of $29 per ounce today, likely fueled in no small part by the erstwhile maipulators getting a well-deserved short-squeezing. That price-ramp has led to some interesting phenomena, for instance related to commemorative coinage issue in Germany:

[url=http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-germany-unwittingly-adopts-silver-standard-due-soaring-price]Guest Post: Germany Unwittingly Adopts A Silver Standard Due to Soaring Price[/url]
[quote]Silver's sky-shot to a new 30-year high of $27.73 per ounce has led to a new phenomenon in Germany. For the first time in history it is theoretically possible to buy two last series of silver coins with a denomination of €10 and a silver content of 0.535 ounces for less than the silver equivalent. According to a report in German Daily "Welt" the soaring silver price has forced the German government to bring forward the starting time of sales of the 2 commemorative coins into October to save face. The coins now have a value of €10.66 but have to be sold at the denominated Euro value.

As this story is widely circulating in Germany it can be expected that these coins will be sold out by tomorrow.
Germany's time on a theoretical silver standard - the country was on a bi-metallic standard before the Weimar Republic in the 1920s - won't last long, though.

In order to counter soaring silver prices and keep the denominated value below the silver value the country has announced it will reduce the silver content to 10 grams or 0.3215 ounces in its commemorative silver coin line from January 2011.[/quote]
[i]My Comment:[/i] And to think, here in the US, non-numismatic-quality (due to high wear) WW2-era "silver nickels" (roughly 35% Ag) could be had in bulk for only a few times face value as recently as a few years ago - in fact, if one hunts around one might still be able to pick up some bulk coins at below their current melt value.


[b]Who Said It?[/b]

Today`s quiz question: Who wrote the following hagiographical piece about mega-corrupt (and now thankfully defunct) Texas energy [strike]racketeering cabal[/strike] company [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron]Enron[/url]`s "innovative and new-economy-ish" business model? (The foregoing Wikipiece is highly recommended background reading by the way ... see how many places and in what contexts you can spot the name "Gramm")

[quote]The retreat of business bureaucracy in the face of the market was
brought home to me recently [b]when I joined the advisory board at
Enron[/b]--a company formed in the '80s by the merger of two pipeline
operators. In the old days energy companies tried to be as
vertically integrated as possible: to own the hydrocarbons in the
ground, the gas pump, and everything in between. And Enron does own
gas fields, pipelines, and utilities. But it is not, and does not
try to be, vertically integrated: It buys and sells gas both at the
wellhead and the destination, leases pipeline (and
electrical-transmission) capacity both to and from other companies,
buys and sells electricity, and in general acts more like a broker
and market maker than a traditional corporation. [b]It's sort of like
the difference between your father's bank, which took money from its
regular depositors and lent it out to its regular customers, and
Goldman Sachs[/b]. Sure enough, the company's pride and joy is a room
filled with hundreds of casually dressed men and women staring at
computer screens and barking into telephones, where cubic feet and
megawatts are traded and packaged as if they were financial
derivatives. (Instead of CNBC, though, the television screens on the
floor show the Weather Channel.) The whole scene looks as if it had
been constructed to illustrate the end of the corporation as we knew
it.[/quote]
[i]My Comment:[/i] Hint: Not Wendy Gramm (wife of "destroyer of worlds" ex-Senator Phil Gramm, who later viewed the vast economic destruction he helped bring about and declared the resulting recession to be "mental") ... BTW, the bit about Goldman Sachs is especially rich ... the commenter lauds GS for being superior to "your father's bank" owing to its great financial innovation - of course we now know that the chief difference between the two kinds of institutions are that "you father's bank" actually had an interest in helping folks like him succeed, whereas the Goldman Sachses of the world are run as pure pillage-for-profit machines ... just as was the case with Enron.

-----------------------

p.s.: Here is the 1-year price chart for silver ... this is what tarders refer to as "going parabolic", and indeed one can nicely fit a parabola to the past few months` (and even more so the past several weeks') runup:

And speaking of parabolic blowoffs...
 

...they tend to reverse dramatically, often once a big short-squeeze (and resulting panic buying) has finished being covered - here is the latest intraday SLV chart: