Money, Markets, and Metals

• Change.  Discontinuous change
  If you were a wealthy Southerner in 1860, most of your money was invested in land and slaves.  It had been a sometimes bumpy road, but from the time that Eli Whitney was granted a cotton gin on March 14, 1794, slaves and land had continually gained value as world demand for cotton cloth exploded.
   
• SOME THINGS I DON’T KNOW
  As my children never tire of reminding me, there are a lot of things I don’t know.  High among them – or at least heavy on my mind lately – are the outcomes for deflation, numismatic coins, and silver.  Before I address those, however, bear with me for a little background.
   
• A MONEYCHANGER INTERVIEW: TIM WOOD:
  WHICH WAY DO MARKET CYCLES POINT?
  The trick for the market technician is to identify the cycle. That’s made harder because there are various cycles working within one another. For example, there is a four-year cycle in the stock markets. Within that four-year cycle there is annual cycle. Within that annual cycle there is a weekly cycle, and within that weekly cycle there is a daily cycle.
   
• FIREBELL IN THE NIGHT:
  Freddie Mac shares fall further as executives replaced
  One executive fired, two quit; accounting practices cited
  Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (FNM) combined control 42% (more than two-fifths) of the US mortgage market.  The federal government created these so-called “Government Sponsored Enterprises” (GSEs) precisely to pump up mortgage availability.  The law does not force GSEs to register with the SEC like every other corporation, and exempts them from securities law. GSEs “bundle” mortgages and with those mortgages as backing, issue “agency paper” (“securitise mortgages” into bonds).  In plain English, this is a scheme to monetise real estate.  Its purpose is pure inflation to buy poor people’s votes.
   
• PONDERING INFLATION AND DEFLATION
  Before we contemplate the future at all, it is good to remind ourselves that God has hidden the future from us.  We cannot know it, so whatever expectations we might form, no matter how good our reasoning, they remain just guesses.
   
• Moneychanger interview with David Tice 
  David W. Tice presides over David W. Tice & Associates, Inc., an investment research and management firm in Dallas, Texas. With sixteen years’ experience in the investment business, Mr. Tice is both a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and a Certified Public Accountant (CPA).
   
• The Moneychanger Interviews Bob Chapman 
  "The guardian elitists know the old order is dying. We are witnessing the end of an epoch, the final collapse of an entire system. We are about to enter in 2001 a time of economic and social dislocation perhaps unprecedented in history. Wars of all kinds will flourish throughout the planet. … [A]mid this suffering mankind will have its best opportunity in 1,000 years to bring about, at long last, a new, just world economic and social order..."
   
• A Moneychanger Interview: Mr. John Exter, Simplex Munditiis 
  This interview appeared in the June, 1991 Moneychanger. In recent days I have been thinking about it over and over, because it appears that after all these years, John Exter’s vision of the final debacle of fiat money is now unfolding.
   
• Volatility is Back 
  Watching stocks, gold, and silver, the cross currents, whipsaws, and apparent contradictions could confuse anybody. I wanted to bring everything together into one article to try to make some sense out of it. Maybe that way we can get some inkling of where things are headed.
   
• The Great Depression 
  After today’s (4/14/2000) performance it seems obvious that we’re in the midst of a severe collapse of stock prices, a.k.a. a "crash." I’m no prophet, but history teaches that long financial manias are followed by long and equally severe depressions. At the very least, we ought to position ourselves as defensively as possible.
   
• Interest Rates, Bonds & The Dollar 
  US Treasury bonds, the bellwether indicator for the market’s interest rate expectations, appear to have put in a double top. Neither of these tops reached as high as 1998’s peak. This is all odd, because it hints that the market expects higher interest rates, even in the face of the Fed’s established pattern of lowering rates to support the stock market and ward off the Recession Demon.