Two Sensational Facts About Gold Investing That You Might Not Know

[Onebornfree /Financial Safety Services commentary: the title of the piece below, "4 Sensational Facts About Gold Investing That You Might Not Know" , includes the words "sensational","facts", "gold" and "investing". However, here, courtesy of yours truly, are two  more"sensational facts" that you might not know about gold "investing" that the article in question does not  even come close to addressing - that will doubtless be exceedingly unpopular with "gold bugs" [ I'm a recovering gold-bug myself], "hard money" types and the average gold-loving "libertarian". Nevertheless, I feel that these facts are important for you to understand if you wish to hang on to your savings long term, or if you are looking to make a lot of money via speculations in gold : 

Sensational Fact [1] :  "Investing" Is Not The Same As "Speculating":
there is a vast difference between the meaning of the word "investing", and  the word "speculation". To my mind, an investor attempts to invest and achieve no more than the average gain as historically measured long-term over a number of years for whatever they choose to invest in. On the other hand , a speculator speculates in various markets in an attempt to achieve gains that far exceed the long term historical average gains for whatever it is they choose to speculate in.

Sensational Fact [2] : most gold "investors" are speculating , not investing:                                                                                        
If you put all of your savings [i.e. money you cannot afford to lose]  into one specific type of "investment", such as gold [but the exact same applies to stocks, or bonds, or whatever],  you  are not investing, you are in fact speculating. Why? Because each class of "investment" [i.e. precious metals/commodities, bonds, cash, T-bills, stocks etc. etc.] , only performs well in one, or possibly two, types of economic environment. Therefor, if you place all of your long term savings [i.e. money you cannot afford to lose] into gold, for example, then you are speculating [with money that you cannot afford to lose], that a particular type of economic environment must occur, in order for you gold to "profit". 

Question [1 a]: are you absolutely certain that the economic environment that historically gold has always done well in [i.e. inflation] has to definitely occur within your lifetime? How do you know for sure? 

Question [1b]: do you understand  that simple economic theory demonstrates that no single person can successfully, reliably, predict the economic future? 

Question [2] : can you really afford to be speculating in gold  [or whatever] with money you cannot afford to lose]?

2  Good Reasons to Buy Gold Now:

 I can think of two very good reasons for buying gold now: 

[1]as part of a fully diversified long term savings plan. [i.e as an "investment" ]

As part of a long term savings plan for money that cannot afford to be lost, a certain percentage of total savings is always allocated to gold bullion. 

This gold is bought regardless of current price or supposed future outlook for the gold market. My long term savings plan recommends that you _always_ keep a certain percentage of your savings in gold, come what may [and so the question of whether or not gold is or is not in a bubble right now is not even an issue]. 

or, 

[2] as a short to medium term speculation for those who think that gold is either [a] in a bubble that still has a long way to go upward [and therefor takes a "long position" betting on continuance of the upward trend] , or [b] is "an accident waiting to happen" and about to suffer a significant price collapse [a "short" position- profiting from a decline in golds price as measured in $US]. 

As nobody can predict the future of gold prices relative to  all others, ALL speculations [i.e both long or short positions] should only be made with money that the individual can realistically afford to lose!  

Regards, onebornfree/ Financial Safety Services . ]

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4 Sensational Facts About Gold Investing That You Might Not Know

By Frank Holmes
CEO and Chief Investment Officer
U.S. Global Investors
Posted Jan 24, 2013

Our ever-popular Periodic Table of Commodity Returns has been updated through 2012. Investor Alert readers love this chart as it shows a decade of results across 14 different commodities, providing strikingly rich information in a very familiar format.

Last year, 11 commodities rose in value, with wheat rising as the top crop after seeing a significant decline in 2011. It was a similar rags-to-riches story for the next few leaders, including lead, zinc, natural gas and platinum, which all climbed double digits in 2012 after falling in 2011.

Only three commodities declined over the year: Crude oil fell by 7 percent after rising 8 percent the previous year. Nickel declined for the second year in a row. In 2012, the metal lost 9 percent and in 2011, nickel fell another 24 percent.

Coal was the worst-performing commodity in 2012, falling nearly 17 percent. Coal’s been going through a rough spell lately; in fact, the commodity has not been king for five years (although it did record a 31 percent increase in 2010). As Global Resources Fund Portfolio Manager Evan Smith explained to listeners during our recent presentation, for the first time ever in the U.S., natural gas provided more electricity and power than coal did.

As you can see from the table, commodities often have wide price fluctuations from year to year given the many factors affecting supply and demand, such as government policies, union strikes, and currency volatility. That’s why when it comes to commodities and commodity producers, many investors “leave the driving” to active money managers who understand these specialized assets and the global trends affecting them.

Take gold and gold companies, for example. After investing in the mining industry for decades, we’ve taken note of several facts about gold that continue to surprise our investors.

Here are four of the latest:

1. Gold Has Been A Consistent Performer Over The Decade

While the precious metal did not shoot the lights out in 2012, gold’s bull rally goes on. It ended the year up 7 percent, making it a phenomenal 12th year in a row that gold rose in value. In a special gold bar version of the Periodic Table below, you can easily see gold’s rotation among the commodities from year to year.

What’s fascinating is the three-year rising pattern relative to other commodities that emerges when you focus on the bars. Over the past 10 years, gold has risen in position compared with the others for three years in a row, then fallen in relative position in the fourth year before repeating the cycle. Will it follow the same pattern and be in the top half of the Periodic Table in 2013?

2. Gold Should Remain A Hot Commodity In 2013

Considering the global easing cycle and the continuous running of monetary printing presses, I believe the Fear Trade will continue to be a driver of gold over the next several months. Take a look at the projected rise in the balance sheets as a percent of GDP from the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England over 2013. The ECB is estimated to have a balance sheet that is nearly 50 percent of its GDP by the end of the year. The Bank of Japan is right behind the ECB, with its balance sheet projected to be nearly 35 percent of GDP. As Mike Shedlock of Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis said, “The race is on to see which central bank can load up its balance sheet with the most garbage the fastest.”......................

Read rest of article here
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FINANCIAL SAFETY SERVICES DISCLAIMER:

Financial Safety Services is NOT an investment advisory service. Financial Safety Services is an educational service that teaches the interested individual non-original [i.e. invented by others far more intelligent than myself], time-tested safe methods/principles that might be successfully used by the individual for relatively low risk speculations in various financial markets.

ACCURACY OF INFORMATION : Financial Safety Services MAKES NO CLAIMS AS TO THE ACCURACY OF ANY INFORMATION EITHER GIVEN AT THIS BLOG SITE, OR IN PERSON TO PAYING CLIENTS. All information given/sold, must be understood to have been acted on AT THE INDIVIDUALS OWN RISK .

********************************************************************

More About Financial Safety Services

[Free phone consultations via "Skype". To set a time/date email: onebornfreeatyahoodotcom ]

Financial Safety Services is a private , mostly off-line, international, person to person consulting service that attempts to show its real-time [i.e. non-internet derived] clients how to speculate safely with money that they can afford to lose. Money that the client cannot afford to lose should never be risked in these speculations

For more than 20 years, nearly all of Financial Safety Services clients to date have been found via direct [i.e off-line, in-person] referral from previously satisfied clients only.

No attempts are made to procure clientele via the selling of the sporadic, deliberately incomplete online information posted at this site. All valuable information is sold to clients, via e-mail, or preferably in person, on a "need to know" customized basis, depending on their specific speculative wants/needs.

Therefor any/all posts at this site are for the reference and possible benefit of pre-existing , real-world, paying clients only as part of my services [and to perhaps help emphasize a particular point I make to them in private], and never for the benefit of the general reading public and casual internet reader at large.

Internet posts arer not made on a regular schedule in order to build an on-line audience; only when I feel that so doing is beneficial to my actual existing clientele.

I have no interest in gaining clients first hand from any posts made either here or elsewhere [if it happens, it happens!] - as I previously stated, to date [20 years+], nearly all of my previous clients have come to me via direct, in-person referral from other satisfied clients- that is, [1]an existing client personally recommends my services to a close friend, [2] the friend contacts me, [3]we discuss their wants/needs, [4] I make a decision as to whether or not I can really help them, [5] We come to a financial agreement- or not :-) .

None- Client Questions?

Should a casual reader/none client have a serious question about an assertion I make on this site, they must write to me at: onebornfreeatyahoodotcom and I will do my best to answer their question. Their first question will usually be answered for free. After that, fees may apply.

Current Client Questions.

All existing, paying client questions are of course, answered for free [usually via private e-mail]- it is part of the service!

onebornfreeatyahoodotcom

Regards, onebornfree 

Terry Coxon on Government, the Reality of Regulation and the Importance of Asset Protection

[Freedom Network  and Financial Safety Services commentary: Terry Coxon is a person who I have read and admired for many years now, his book "Keep What You Earn", is, in my humble opinion  an all time classic on asset protection. I would encourage anyone reading this Daily Bell interview to read that book at least twice through. Also, I believe his much maligned Passport Trust system is a very important and useful tool for the individual seeking more financial privacy, safety, and therefor by direct effect, more personal freedom.]

                                                       

Introduction: Terry Coxon is the author of Keep What You Earn and was for many years a close collaborator with and editor for the late Harry Browne. He currently is a regular contributor to The Casey Report. Mr. Coxon has a distinguished history as an architect of innovative financial planning arrangements, including the Permanent Portfolio Fund, the United States Gold Trust (the first gold ETF), the Passport Financial Offshore Trust and the Open Opportunity IRA.

Daily Bell: Glad to speak with you again. Let's jump right in. You've been speaking out for freedom and free markets for decades. Yet things seem to be getting worse. Why is that?

Terry Coxon: Once the public accepts or even tolerates the notion that regulation is needed for one thing, it's ready to accept every claim that regulation is needed for something else. Roll back the clock and look at what has happened.

The unstated premise of the Pure Food And Drug Act of 1906 was that individuals acting privately are too lazy, gullible and silly to stop handing their money to providers of rotten food or of poisons labeled "medicine," whereas individuals acting as government employees are energetic, shrewd and purposeful. If you accept the premise, then of course you want the same energetic, shrewd and purposeful people to prevent any mistake that you fear the lazy, gullible and silly might make. That's why today anyone who wants to smoke in a bar in California has no choice but to grab the stool by the window and lean his head out.

Daily Bell: Does regulatory democracy work?

Terry Coxon: I'd call it a great success. It works splendidly for:

        •       Businesses, especially the bigger firms, that want to freeze out new competitors

• Politicians who want to point to their accomplishments

• Politicians who want campaign contributions

• Politicians who want to re-enforce the dependency of their business constituents

• Foggy-headed individuals galloping to the rescue of millions of people they will  never meet

• Utopians who enjoy their thoughts of intellectual and moral superiority

• People who enjoy punishing

• People who doubted that they really existed until they acquired the power to punish

• People who've decided that their best career plan is to collect a government paycheck for                     going through the motions prescribed by particular laws

•        Individuals who are afraid of being free

• Individuals who resent those who are not afraid of being free

The numbers add up.

Daily Bell: Who is behind regulatory democracy and why does it continue to function from a regulatory and enforcement aspect despite its failure?

Terry Coxon: It hasn't failed at all. Just ask any of the people I've listed. It delivers what they want.

Daily Bell: Why do facilities like the SEC continue to gain power despite their incompetence?

Terry Coxon: You can rate the SEC as incompetent only if you judge it by its stated purpose. If you judge it by how well it serves the people on my list, it's performing swimmingly.
As for the public, any investor who thinks he's being protected by the SEC is a sheep waiting to be shorn. Quiz the people waiting in the sheering pen and you'll find that the place is crowded with people inclined to believe that individuals holding government-employee IDs are energetic, shrewd and purposeful.

Daily Bell: You were caught up in the system via the SEC. Tell us about that.

Terry Coxon: Imagine Martians destroying your planet.

Daily Bell: What needs to be done to reduce this regulatory plague?

Terry Coxon: I don't know that there is anything that can be done to stop the plague. Freedom is man's natural state but it is not his usual condition. By history's standards, liberty for the general public is an abnormality. The best you can do is to understand the problem, so that your head doesn't get filled with fictions and so that you can try to avoid getting hurt. One way to look at The Daily Bell is as a mental health project. By confirming for visitors that their doubts about government are in fact well founded, you help them get past the official fictions and stay grounded in reality.

Daily Bell: We believe we've noticed an uptick in the aggressiveness of the regulatory state − the aggressiveness regarding gun control, for instance. We believe that there is a power elite behind this aggressiveness. We believe that this group is pushing forward with plans to consolidate world government. Disarmament is part of that plan. Agree? Disagree?

Terry Coxon: Some people are far more effective than most in moving government in their preferred direction. Call them the power elite if you like but I don't believe you need to refer to a power elite to understand and explain how government works.

The starting point in making sense of government is to stop thinking of it as though it were a person. It's not a person. It's many thousands of people (including the members of what you call the power elite) pushing and tugging on one another in an effort to direct and control their collective power. It's a scrum. Everyone in the scrum has his own purposes, which is why government so often behaves in a contradictory fashion − attacking cigarette companies while at the same time subsidizing tobacco farmers, for example. Multiple personality disorder is an excellent model of government behavior.

Today most of the people in the scrum are lovers of big government, and they feel about private gun ownership the way monkeys in trees feel about panthers. There is a reason for their passion about gun control: Control over weapons is at the heart of government power.
It's a postulate of political science (both among libertarians and among more conventional folks) that government is the institution that holds an effective monopoly on the exercise of force. I think that touches on the truth but then glances off it. The monopoly isn't on force per se. It's a monopoly on intimidation. I've come to that conclusion by considering how a monopoly arises spontaneously.

A natural monopoly occurs in an industry if and only if the available technology supports unlimited efficiencies of scale. In such a situation, where any firm can turn out the product more efficiently than any smaller firm, the result is that the biggest firm forces the others out of business. It becomes a monopoly.

It's the production of intimidation (more so than the production of force) that enjoys efficiencies of scale. Regardless of how large or small the groups, a larger organized group of unarmed men can be expected to succeed in subduing a smaller group of unarmed men, if that is what they set out to do. And the intensity of the motivations of the two unarmed groups matters little. Both groups know who is likely to win any contest so even if the members of the larger group are only marginally interested in prevailing, the usual result is that no contest takes place because the smaller group sees that the odds are badly against it. The smaller group is intimidated.

Lovers of big government hate privately owned guns with such passion and obsession because weapons dampen the economies of scale in the production of intimidation. A single armed individual may succeed in overcoming multiple armed government employees, even though he would have no chance of overcoming them if no one were armed.

And private weapons dampen the efficiencies of scale in the production of intimidation in another way. With lethal weapons as part of the mix, motivation becomes a big factor. Three armed men who are seen to be seething with anger or who show a belief that they either must prevail or die may succeed in intimidating six armed government employees who are watching for 4 o'clock so that they can start getting overtime pay.

I wish the truth were gentler but that is, I believe, how things actually work. For myself, however, I have no taste for being part of either group.

Daily Bell: You deal a lot with asset protection and estate planning. Tell us about that.

Terry Coxon: It's a big topic.

No one wants to be a financial victim of what so many governments have become, but protection means dealing with multiple threats to wealth and covering all the bases. Here's a broad outline.

1. Decide on the kinds of things you want to own. That's the first step because you make can those decisions independently of how you handle the next steps.

2. Decide where you want to own things. Keeping everything in your home country is a mistake because it means volunteering now to cooperate in whatever the government decides to do tomorrow.

3. Decide how you want to own things. In the US, direct, personal ownership just isn't what it used to be. It's now more of an illusion of property than a reality. Direct personal ownership now means that you are the government's unpaid custodian. You take care of things until a tax collector or a regulatory agency or a judge says "hand them over." Using a foreign company to hold assets, especially liquid assets, would be a big improvement. But the thorough solution is an international trust. You hire the right institution to own things for you. No arrangement is sturdier.

4. Build exactly one plan, a single plan for all your objectives. That single plan should coordinate the goals of asset protection, internationalizing your investments, avoiding estate taxes, reducing income taxes, achieving privacy and generally becoming less dependent on what happens in your home country. If you have a separate plan for each objective, you risk tripping over yourself.

Most people can be far better protected than they are. For people in the US, all the goals I listed (which are the ones most commonly mentioned by my planning clients) are achievable to one degree or another.

Asset protection. It's not difficult at all to put liquid assets absolutely beyond the reach of future litigation risks, and it doesn't take long to get it done. Sixty days is plenty of time, once you decide to act. Immoveable assets, such as real estate, are more of a problem but the problem is solvable.

Estate tax. That's a tax on not planning. Even the largest taxable estate can be whittled down to almost nothing, and it can be done without interfering in investment decisions or giving anything away before you really want to. But it's a more complicated project than protecting against lawsuits, and it's a slow, gradual process that may take years.

Internationalizing your investments. Setting up accounts with foreign institutions has become a gigantic chore. But it's a kind of grunt work. What it takes is patience and persistence.
Income tax planning. There are some simple but rewarding steps that most people overlook. Few investors realize what they can accomplish with a familiar, homey thing like an IRA. There are other approaches that can accomplish even more, if your assets are large enough and if you have a tolerance for complexity.

Financial privacy. You can't have any but your heirs can have plenty.

Daily Bell: Tell us a little about the Passport Trust program. It's been quite a success.

Terry Coxon: An international trust is the permanent, robust solution for protecting family wealth. Nothing else comes close. I designed the Passport Trust program to make international trusts easy to understand and to eliminate unnecessary costs. Controlling costs lowers the wealth threshold at which real protection becomes practical.

Because an international trust can accomplish so much, getting the full advantage of one requires a lot of information. But the core concepts are quite simple. If you're curious, start by reading "Your Own International Trust." You can find it as a PDF at Passporttrustinfo.com. In ten minutes you can become a minor expert.

Daily Bell: Thanks for your time once again.

Original article source.

The Invisible Hand [Always] Strikes Back

[Financial Safety Services commentary:  a good article from Anthony Wile of  "The Daily Bell" follows below this commentary. Mr Wile is commenting on the idea, still being promoted by the establishment financial media, that the traditional "buy and hold" strategy for stocks is still reliable, and he zero's in on a recent Bloomberg article  that unabashedly promotes the traditional "buy and hold" concept that had seemed to work so well for both Wall Street and the proverbial " man on the street"  till around 2000 or so.  

Invisible hand vs. All-seeing eye

Of course, the truth of the matter is that "The Invisible Hand" , is always striking back and correcting capital misallocations. This effectively means that the economic future can never be reliably and consistently predicted. 

Meaning, if you take Mr Wile's "gloom and doom"/continuing bull markets for gold and other "hard" assets predictions seriously, bet on them all only using money you can safely afford to lose- in other words,  speculate in those markets you believe Mr Wile predictions will benefit, don't invest in them long term with money you cannot afford to lose.

 Likewise for any believed stock market boom  predictions by the likes of Bloomberg etc. - remember that these  future prosperity predictions have just as much chance of being right or wrong as do Mr Wile's {or any one else's} "gloom and doom" scenarios. 

And by the way money you cannot afford to lose should, as usual, always be kept in a long- term savings plan that has no bias towards any particular economic future, and that is instead designed to make a small profit regardless of what the economic future may hold: a stock market boom, a deflationary collapse, continued recession, or whatever. 

On the other hand, should you be lucky enough to have money you can afford to lose should events move against you, then stock market index option   "calls" [if you believe the stock market is headed upwards from here], or index option "puts", or "shorts" [if you believe the market has peaked and will shortly collapse], or maybe other similar simple arrangements that might also bring you profit should your bet be correct, [ with suitable "buy in" points and automatic sell prices and other safety measures firmly in place] , might be the way the to go. Or, if you feel [i.e."know"] that Mr Wile is correct, then buy gold bullion. 

Happy speculating! {with the money you can afford to lose, that is}] Regards, Financial Safety Services.

Saturday, December 29, 2012 – by Anthony Wile 

"Bloomberg has posted an article entitled "Americans Miss $200 Billion [by] Abandoning Stocks" that is presumably supposed to illustrate the folly of avoiding equities but in my view merely illustrates the difficulty of sustaining this meme.

And make no mistake, it IS a meme.

The idea that one can simply buy and hold equities like family heirlooms was always suspect and is more-so now. That's because people simply cannot internalize the reality of a failing economy and a booming stock market. The cognitive dissonance makes them wary.

Thanks to what we call the Internet Reformation, many people are much savvier about how the market works and the way the economy behaves. Such individuals are not apt to assume that the US recession is over just because the mainstream media proclaims it is so. They are nervous and not easily willing to dump large amounts of cash into the stock market.

Who can blame them?

This doesn't stop Bloomberg from launching articles like this one. The idea of course – the dominant social theme if you will – is that investing is frightening but those with a strong stomach can become wealthy if they just "stay the course." Here's more:

Americans have missed out on almost $200 billion of stock gains as they drained money from the market in the past four years, haunted by the financial crisis ...

Assets in equity mutual, exchange-traded and closed-end funds increased about 85 percent to $5.6 trillion since the bull market began in March 2009, trailing the Standard & Poor's 500 Index's 94 percent advance.

The retreat shows that even the biggest gain since 1998 failed to heal investor confidence after the financial collapse that wiped out $11 trillion in U.S. equity value was followed by record price swings in equities, a market breakdown that briefly erased $862 billion in share value and the slowest recovery from a recession since World War II. Individuals are withdrawing money as political leaders struggle to avert budget cuts that threaten to throw the economy into a new slump.

"Our biggest liability in the stock market has been the total destruction to confidence," James Paulsen, the chief investment strategist at Minneapolis-based Wells Capital Management, which oversees about $325 billion, said in a telephone interview. "There's just so much evidence of this recovery broadening." ...

Individuals have also seen evidence that computerized trading is making stock markets less reliable. An equity rout temporarily sent the Dow down almost 1,000 points on May 6, 2010, causing investors to question the stability of market mechanics and the effectiveness of regulators.

Botched IPOs for Facebook Inc. (FB) and Bats Global Markets Inc. earlier this year led to concern about trading and exchange technology, while Knight Capital Group Inc. nearly went out of business in August after it bombarded U.S. equity exchanges with erroneous orders in the wake of improperly installed software that malfunctioned.

"Whether it's the flash crash, the low-growth economy, unemployment, uncertainty about jobs -- those things just don't engender any desire to risk money," Walter "Bucky" Hellwig, who helps manage $17 billion of assets at BB&T Wealth Management in Birmingham, Alabama, said in a phone interview. "Investors say: The stock market? I don't have a clue as to how it works anymore."

Those who have organized modern equity markets have no one to blame but themselves. While certain stocks (especially small stocks) may offer legitimate promise, the larger marketplace is seen as unreliable. Too much has been passed off as legitimate that is not.

And many investors have internalized the disconnect between the economy and stock market performance. The Federal Reserve's tremendous money printing has boosted stock prices over the past four years, but this has only illustrated the control that the elites exercise over investment activities.
Facebook was the big story of 2012, but its wretched overpricing and downright weird business model had investors scratching their heads. The suspicion that US intelligence agencies had a hand in both the IPO and the company itself didn't help Facebook's cause.

The Flash Crash received a good bit of attention, making investors aware – as they had never been before – of how quickly stock valuations could change. But it's really quantitative easing that is the outstanding issue – the one that Bloomberg chooses to present without properly explaining the mechanism.

There is generally a great deal of talk about how stock markets and stocks themselves are value-oriented investments. But what is clear to many people is how close the market came to a meltdown in 2007-2008. The system proved a good deal more fragile than people have been led to expect.

Couple that with the Fed's ongoing money-printing that has literally doubled equity values and you get increasing resistance to the whole idea of stock investing. First people are frightened by the breakdown of the system itself and then they are exposed to ongoing – "industrial strength" – monetary manipulation.

What do those in the industry expect? What do elites that have built up the modern stock market believe people will do with their money? People "get it" ... and not in a good way. The Age of Promotion is waning in the setting of a waxing monetary expansion that was aided and abetted by mainstream media misdirection for decades. Too bad.

Once the Great Depression hit, people gradually stopped investing in stocks. Even after World War II, there was no appreciable action in US equities. NYSE officials ended up going on road shows in the 1950s to tout the benefits of stocks and stock-market investing.

At the time, the markets were ripe for US stocks. The US dominated the world, which had been mostly destroyed by the war. US industry was ascending and US power was at an all time high. People who invested in stocks were amply rewarded.

That's simply not the case today. US debt is in the tens, even hundreds, of trillions. The dollar itself is increasingly looked upon with suspicion around the world and its reserve status may be in jeopardy.
Perhaps most questionable from an investment standpoint is the money that has already been released by central banks in order to stimulate the economy. Much of this currency remains trapped in bank coffers, but it will circulate eventually.

The circulation of these trillions will cause tremendous price inflation – that will in turn result in significant interest rate hikes. As in the 1970s, these rate hikes will damp the recovery (to put it mildly), and stock prices as well.

I haven't even touched on the so-called fiscal cliff, which I believe will be resolved one way or another without the entirety of its tax-and-spend burden being implemented. But it, too, illustrates just how vulnerable equities are to outside political forces and their potential impact on the economy.
The past five years have shown investors clearly that stocks are NOT the proverbial "sure thing." There are good stocks, of course. There are good investments.

But this Bloomberg article is focusing on the wrong argument. The powers-that-be may wish to encourage stock investing, but reminding people of how far down the markets have traveled, and how extensively they have been manipulated by central bankers is not the way to do it.

The road to recovery for many kinds of equities will be a long and hard one. Even gold and silver stocks will struggle. The problem is that reality has caught up to the promotion. The market itself has struck back.

Of course one can argue, as we do, that the current US stock behavior – and modern downturns – have been in a sense planned by the powers-that-be for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with impending global governance. But it is also obvious that Money Power seeks a continual "buy in" to the systems it has created and implemented.

This time, people aren't buying. Despite all their power, the elites are still at the mercy of the Invisible Hand and the natural laws that govern us all. It will be nice to watch the Internet Reformation swing the pendulum back in the direction of truth." 

Article source

FINANCIAL SAFETY SERVICES DISCLAIMER:

Financial Safety Services is NOT an investment advisory service. Financial Safety Services is an educational service that teaches the interested individual non-original [i.e. invented by others far more intelligent than myself], time-tested safe methods/principles that might be successfully used by the individual for relatively low risk speculations in various financial markets.

ACCURACY OF INFORMATION : Financial Safety Services MAKES NO CLAIMS AS TO THE ACCURACY OF ANY INFORMATION EITHER GIVEN AT THIS BLOG SITE, OR IN PERSON TO PAYING CLIENTS. All information given/sold, must be understood to have been acted on AT THE INDIVIDUALS OWN RISK .

********************************************************************

More About Financial Safety Services

[Free phone consultations via "Skype". To set a time/date email: onebornfreeatyahoodotcom ]

Financial Safety Services is a private , mostly off-line, international, person to person consulting service that attempts to show its real-time [i.e. non-internet derived] clients how to speculate safely with money that they can afford to lose. Money that the client cannot afford to lose should never be risked in these speculations

For more than 20 years, nearly all of Financial Safety Services clients to date have been found via direct [i.e off-line, in-person] referral from previously satisfied clients only.

No attempts are made to procure clientele via the selling of the sporadic, deliberately incomplete online information posted at this site. All valuable information is sold to clients, via e-mail, or preferably in person, on a "need to know" customized basis, depending on their specific speculative wants/needs.

Therefor any/all posts at this site are for the reference and possible benefit of pre-existing , real-world, paying clients only as part of my services [and to perhaps help emphasize a particular point I make to them in private], and never for the benefit of the general reading public and casual internet reader at large.

Internet posts arer not made on a regular schedule in order to build an on-line audience; only when I feel that so doing is beneficial to my actual existing clientele.

I have no interest in gaining clients first hand from any posts made either here or elsewhere [if it happens, it happens!] - as i previously stated, to date [20 years+], nearly all of my previous clients have come to me via direct, in-person referral from other satisfied clients- that is, [1]an existing client personally recommends my services to a close friend, [2] the friend contacts me, [3]we discuss their wants/needs, [4] I make a decision as to whether or not I can really help them, [5] We come to a financial agreement- or not :-) .

None- Client Questions?

Should a casual reader/none client have a serious question about an assertion I make on this site, they must write to me at: onebornfreeatyahoodotcom and I will do my best to answer their question. Their first question will usually be answered for free. After that, fees may apply.

Current Client Questions.

All existing, paying client questions are of course, answered for free [usually via private e-mail]- it is part of the service!

onebornfreeatyahoodotcom