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Gold and Silver • Gold: Who’s Selling Who’s Buying Who’s Lying
Gold: Who’s Selling Who’s Buying Who’s Lying
Darryl Robert Schoon
Posted May 09, 2013
Although the Pharisees of paper money successfully forced down the price of gold, like those who lobbied Pontius Pilate to crucify Jesus, the consequences of their actions will backfire beyond their wildest imagination.
The decision of the paper money cabal to force down the price of gold is akin to Japan’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor. Although the attack was successful, the eventual consequences were not what Japan had envisioned.
Recently, an article, The Gold Correction: What’s the Big Deal?, at Seeking Alpha posted the following chart. However, measured from its September 2011 high of $1901.35, gold’s fall is 28 %, a drop remarkable similar to its 2008 correction of 27.7 %.
THE 2008 CORRECTION AND/OR MANIPULATION
The 2008 correction of gold occurred during a period of extreme financial and systemic distress. Global markets were in disarray, Wall Street banks were collapsing and trillions of dollars of Fed money was necessary to protect the bonuses of investment bankers whose bad bets had caused the collapse-just the environment when gold would be expected to rise.
Instead, gold fell. In 2008, as today, the same hands were on the scale forcing the price of gold lower. In the fall of 2007, gold had rise from $680 to $1,033, An astounding 51.9 % increase. This is exactly what the paper money cabal feared most, a concomitant rise in the price of gold during a period of extreme financial stress.
If gold quickly rose during a period of heightened investor fear, it would signal to fearful investors that although paper assets were at risk, gold offered not only a safe haven but outsized gains as well; and the investors’ subsequent fear-fueled greed would easily dismiss any resistance the paper money cabal might offer.
To counter the allure of gold in such heightened circumstances, in my article, Gold Buying Opportunity of a Lifetime posted March 18, 2009, I wrote:
When gold made its run in the fall of 2007 from $680 to $1,033 in spring 2008, the Swiss National Bank sold 22 tons of gold to cap gold’s riseÉOne year later (after the collapse of global stock markets in the fall of 2008), gold made another run at $1,000; but this time when gold hit $1,009 on February 20th [2009] , LeMetropole reported central banks sold 220 tons of gold to force gold below $900.
In 2009, the paper money cabal had also pushed gold lease rates into negative territory to prevent gold from rising above $1,000. On March 17, 2009, in his article, Gold Price Manipulation More Blatant, Patrick Heller wrote:
On Friday, March 6, gold lease rates turned negative for the day. What that means is that anyone who wanted to lease gold would actually be paid a fee in addition to getting a free gold loan.
No sane person would choose to lose money loaning physical gold, in addition to the risk of never getting the gold back from the other party. However, if someone (such as the U.S. government) wanted to suppress the price of gold, this is one tactic to try to accomplish that purpose.
I can come to no other conclusion than that a large quantity of physical gold surreptitiously appeared on the market on March 6 with the sole purpose to drive down the price of gold. The quantities were large enough that they almost certainly could not come from private parties. With most of the world’s central banks now being net buyers of gold reserves, they would not be the source of this gold. By process of elimination, the suspicion falls upon the U.S. government as the ultimate party responsible for this blatant action to manipulate the price of gold.
Of course, the U.S. government would not want to be identified as the cause of this leasing anomaly. Instead, such manipulation was almost certainly conducted by multiple trading partners of the U.S. government.
This sledge hammer tactic worked at driving the price of gold further away from the $1,000 level – at least temporarily.
Mr. Heller need look no further than Alan Greenspan for confirmation that central banks-in collusion with bullion banks-were, in fact, manipulating gold with lease rates. Eleven years before, on July 24, 1998, before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had testified:
Central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan
Although Greenspan was to fail as an economist he excelled as a politician, and as disingenuous as Alan Greenspan’s tenure was, Greenspan’s testimony as to the readiness of central banks to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise is an admission sufficient to quiet those who would still believe otherwise.
Regarding the central bank leasing of gold, in The Gold Market: Seen Through A Glass Darkly, I wrote:
After gold’s explosive ascent in 1980, central bankers began seriously ‘manage’ the price of gold. A lower price of gold would indicate not only an abatement of monetary problems but investors would be less inclined to trade their paper banknotes for the safety of gold when they could more profitably leverage their paper banknotes in the bankers’ paper markets.
Since the early 1980s, supplies of newly mined gold have constantly fallen short of market demand for gold; but notwithstanding supply and demand fundamentals, gold prices nonetheless fell for 20 straight years. In 1980, the average price of gold was $615. By 2001, it was only $271. Clearly, the free market price of gold was being distorted by ‘outside’ forces.
THE REAL QUESTION IS NOT WHETHER THE FED IS MANIPULATING GOLD BUT WHERE THE GOLD IS COMING FROM.
There has been conjecture that gold stolen by Japan from China prior and during WWII is the source of the supply of gold coming onto the market. In 2012, GATA’s Chris Powell discounted that possibility in his post, If U.S. had ‘Yamashita’s Gold’, they’d put it in Cracker Jack boxes.
While I concur with Powell that if the US had access to such gold in 1968, they would have employed it to prevent the collapse of the London Gold Pool. It is my belief, however, that such gold did exist but, in 1968, "Yamashita’s gold", i.e. China’s stolen gold, was still a tightly held secret of the US government privy to only the top echelons of the CIA and a few others.
More importantly, however, in the 1960s China’s stolen gold, i.e. ‘Yamashita’s gold’, had not yet been laundered into the international banking system. The laundering of the illicit horde of gold was not to happen until the 1980s, the decade when, not coincidentally, American Barrick, a junior oil and gas producer, was to become Barrick Gold.
No less than the esteemed Professor Antal E. Fekete recognized the possibility of gold laundering by Barrick when he questioned Barrick’s inexplicable and self-defeating strategy of unhedged forward selling of gold at prices far below the market.
In his August 2006 article, To Barrick Or To Be Barricked, That Is The Question, Professor Fekete suggested Barricks strategy could, in fact, be an operation to cover up the laundering of gold. The professor wrote:
Is Barrick a front to cover up gold-laundering?
..unless Barrick was a front to cover up gold laundering by governments, in which case unilateral forward selling was not a mistake but a deliberate policyÉThe suspicion that Barrick is a front to cover up a gigantic gold-laundering operation, presumably on behalf of a government (or governments) that need more time to complete a gold acquisition program in the order of thousands of tons of gold, is hard to escape.
In my book, Light In A Dark Place, I quote from EP Heidner’s Collateral Damage which confirms what Professor Fekete had surmised-but Barrick wasn’t laundering gold to complete a gold acquisition program as believed by Professor Fekete-Barrick was, in fact, laundering China’s stolen gold to bring it into the international banking system.
US Intelligence operations had been siphoning off the gold [China's stolen gold] for three decades. However in 1986 Vice President George Bush took over the gold from Marcos and the gold was removed to a series of banks, notably Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation, UBS and Banker’s Trust, and held in a depository in Kloten, Switzerland.
In 1992, George Bush[former Director of the CIA] served on the Advisory Board of Barrick Gold. The Barrick operation would create billions of dollars of paper gold by creating ‘gold derivatives’ É[and] would become an investment for nearly every gold bullion bank associated with the Marcos gold recovery [China's stolen gold]. These banks would loan gold to Barrick, which would then sell the borrowed gold as derivatives, with the promise of replacing the borrowed gold with their gold mining operation.
Barrick, which has no mining operations in Europe, used two refineries in Switzerland: MKS Finance S.A. and Argor-Heraeus S.A. – both on the Italian border near Milan, a few hours away from the gold depository in ZurichÉThe question that Barrick and other banks needed to avoid answering is: what gold was Barrick refining in Switzerland, as they have no mines in that region?
Barrick would become a quiet gold-producing partner for a number of major banks, and its activities became subject to an FBI investigation into gold-price-fixing. The records on this investigation were kept in the FBI office on the 23rd floor of the North Tower which was destroyed by bomb blasts shortly before the Tower collapsed.
p. 11, Collateral Damage: US Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, EP Heidner (2008)
CONJECTURE, CONJURING AND CONFIDENCE GAMES
The drop in the price of gold has ignited a frenzy of gold-buying around the world. It is my belief that the gold being sold is not China’s stolen gold, but gold purloined from the central banks of countries still vulnerable to the considerable pressure of Western central banks.
In 2012, India’s central bank, the Royal Bank of India, received a High Court notice to explain gold deposits currently with the Bank of England and the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. India’s central bank is required by law to keep 85% of its gold reserves in India yet 47% of India’s gold is deposited with the Bank of England and the Bank of International Settlements, see http://www.punemirror.in/article/62/201 … gland.html
It is likely that India’s gold has been leased by the Bank of England in order to suppress the price of gold. India is a former crown colony and its imperial shackles have not yet been completely removed.
The international monetary system based on credit and debt is, in truth, a confidence game in which gold was once a critical component. But when ties between paper money and gold were severed in 1971, confidence in the bankers’ paper money began to falter; and, today we are witness to what happens when confidence in a global confidence game begins to evaporate.
In my current youtube video, The Economic Crisis: Then and Now, I discuss the on-going economic collapse. It isn’t over yet. When it is, then and only then, will we be free of the bankers’ dream of eternal debt.
Buy gold, buy silver, have faith.
###
Darryl Robert Schoon
http://www.321gold.com/editorials/schoo … 50913.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Thu May 09, 2013 12:09 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
American • The Chart That Proves That The Mainstream Media Is Lying To
The Chart That Proves That The Mainstream Media Is Lying To You About Unemployment
By Michael, on March 10th, 2013
The mainstream media is absolutely giddy that the U.S. unemployment rate has hit a "four-year low" of 7.7 percent. But is unemployment in the United States actually going down? After all, you would think that it should be. The Obama administration has "borrowed" more than 6 trillion dollars from future generations of Americans, interest rates have been pushed to all-time lows, and the Federal Reserve has been wildly printing more money in a desperate attempt to "stimulate" the economy. So have those efforts been successful? Well, according to the mainstream media, the U.S. unemployment rate is falling steadily. Headlines all over the nation boldly declared that "236,000 jobs" were added to the economy in February, but what they didn’t tell you was that the number of Americans "not in the labor force" rose by 296,000. And that is how they are getting the unemployment rate to go down – by pretending that huge numbers of unemployed Americans don’t want jobs. Sadly, as you will see below, the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that have a job is just 0.1% higher than it was exactly three years ago. And we have not even come close to getting back to where we were before the last economic crisis. For example, more than 146 million Americans were employed back in 2007. But today, only 142.2 million Americans have a job even though our population has grown steadily since then. So where in the world is this "economic recovery" that they keep talking about?
At this point, the "unemployment rate" has become so meaningless that it really isn’t even worth paying much attention to. If you really want to know what the employment picture looks like in the United States, you need to look at the employment-population ratio.
As Wikipedia tells us, many economists consider the employment-population ratio to be far superior to other measurements of employment…
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development defines the employment rate as the employment-to-population ratio. The employment-population ratio is many American economist’s favorite gauge of the American jobs picture. According to Paul Ashworth, chief North American economist for Capital Economics, "The employment population ratio is the best measure of labor market conditions." This is a statistical ratio that measures the proportion of the country’s working-age population (ages 15 to 64 in most OECD countries) that is employed. This includes people that have stopped looking for work.
A chart of the employment-population ratio in the United States over the past several years is posted below…
As you can see, the percentage of Americans with a job fell from about 63 percent to below 59 percent during the last economic crisis. Since that time, it has not risen back above 59 percent. This is the first time in the post-World War II era that we have not seen the employment rate bounce back following a recession. At this point, the employment-population ratio has been below 59 percent for 42 months in a row.
Yes, we should be thankful that things have stabilized, but as you can see there has been no recovery. The percentage of Americans with a job is essentially exactly where it was three years ago. Despite the trillions of dollars that the U.S. government has borrowed, and despite the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing, the employment situation in the U.S. has not turned around.
Data for the employment-population ratio from the beginning of 2008 is posted below…
2008-01-01 62.9
2008-02-01 62.8
2008-03-01 62.7
2008-04-01 62.7
2008-05-01 62.5
2008-06-01 62.4
2008-07-01 62.2
2008-08-01 62.0
2008-09-01 61.9
2008-10-01 61.7
2008-11-01 61.4
2008-12-01 61.0
2009-01-01 60.6
2009-02-01 60.3
2009-03-01 59.9
2009-04-01 59.8
2009-05-01 59.6
2009-06-01 59.4
2009-07-01 59.3
2009-08-01 59.1
2009-09-01 58.7
2009-10-01 58.5
2009-11-01 58.6
2009-12-01 58.3
2010-01-01 58.5
2010-02-01 58.5
2010-03-01 58.5
2010-04-01 58.7
2010-05-01 58.6
2010-06-01 58.5
2010-07-01 58.5
2010-08-01 58.5
2010-09-01 58.5
2010-10-01 58.3
2010-11-01 58.2
2010-12-01 58.3
2011-01-01 58.3
2011-02-01 58.4
2011-03-01 58.4
2011-04-01 58.4
2011-05-01 58.4
2011-06-01 58.2
2011-07-01 58.2
2011-08-01 58.3
2011-09-01 58.4
2011-10-01 58.4
2011-11-01 58.5
2011-12-01 58.6
2012-01-01 58.5
2012-02-01 58.6
2012-03-01 58.5
2012-04-01 58.5
2012-05-01 58.6
2012-06-01 58.6
2012-07-01 58.5
2012-08-01 58.4
2012-09-01 58.7
2012-10-01 58.7
2012-11-01 58.7
2012-12-01 58.6
2013-01-01 58.6
2013-02-01 58.6
So is there anyone out there that still wants to insist that the employment picture in the United States is getting significantly better?
Anyone that wants to claim that "unemployment is going down" should at least wait until the unemployment-population ratio gets back up to 59 percent. Otherwise they just look foolish.
Yes, the Dow is at an all-time high right now. But a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts.
Most Americans understand that the Dow has been pumped up with all of the funny money that the Fed has been printing. Most Americans understand that the stock market really does not accurately reflect the health of the U.S. economy as a whole.
Just consider these numbers…
-The number of homeless people sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City has increased by 19 percent over the past year.
-The number of Americans on food stamps has risen from 32 million to 47 million while Barack Obama has been in the White House.
-According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either "poor" or "low income" at this point.
-Median household income in the United States has fallen for four consecutive years.
No, the truth is that everything is most definitely not fine.
If everything is fine, then why did the Federal Reserve inject another 100 billion dollars into foreign banks during the last full week of February?
The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve are desperately trying to prop up the entire global economy. Unfortunately, the global financial system has been built on a foundation of sand and the tide is coming in.
Back in 2008, a derivatives crisis was one of the primary causes of the worst financial panic since the Great Depression.
So did we learn our lesson?
No, the boys on Wall Street are back at it again as a recent article by Jim Armitage described…
Historically, stock markets, being driven by humans, have tended to have a similar length memory of catastrophes, before making the same dumb mistakes again.
But it hasn’t even been five years since derivatives (on that occasion based on daft mortgages) blew up the world, and yet these exotic creatures have already returned. With a vengeance.
Research from Thomson Reuters declared that banks were creating more derivatives known as asset-backed securities than at any time since before the Lehman Brothers crash. Of those, 22 percent were made up of – and forgive me the alphabet soup here – CDOs and CLOs. The very type of derivatives that exploded last time. At this stage last year, only 6 percent fell into those categories.
In other words, banks are creating more of the riskiest types of the riskiest products.
At some point, we will have another derivatives crisis even worse than the last one.
When that happens, financial markets all over the globe will crash, economic activity will grind to a standstill and unemployment will go skyrocketing once again.
But as you saw above, we have never even come close to recovering from the last crisis.
So you can believe the mind-numbing propaganda that the mainstream media is trying to feed you if you want. Unfortunately, the reality of the matter is that we have not recovered from the last major economic crisis, and another one is rapidly approaching.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch … employment
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun Mar 10, 2013 10:21 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
The Chart That Proves That The Mainstream Media Is Lying To You About Unemployment
The mainstream media is absolutely giddy that the U.S. unemployment rate has hit a “four-year low” of 7.7 percent. But is unemployment in the United States actually going down? After all, you would think that it should be. The Obama administration has “borrowed” more than 6 trillion dollars from future generations of Americans, interest rates have been pushed to all-time lows, and the Federal Reserve has been wildly printing more money in a desperate attempt to “stimulate” the economy. So have those efforts been successful? Well, according to the mainstream media, the U.S. unemployment rate is falling steadily. Headlines all over the nation boldly declared that “236,000 jobs” were added to the economy in February, but what they didn’t tell you was that the number of Americans “not in the labor force” rose by 296,000. And that is how they are getting the unemployment rate to go down – by pretending that huge numbers of unemployed Americans don’t want jobs. Sadly, as you will see below, the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that have a job is just 0.1% higher than it was exactly three years ago. And we have not even come close to getting back to where we were before the last economic crisis. For example, more than 146 million Americans were employed back in 2007. But today, only 142.2 million Americans have a job even though our population has grown steadily since then. So where in the world is this “economic recovery” that they keep talking about?
At this point, the “unemployment rate” has become so meaningless that it really isn’t even worth paying much attention to. If you really want to know what the employment picture looks like in the United States, you need to look at the employment-population ratio.
As Wikipedia tells us, many economists consider the employment-population ratio to be far superior to other measurements of employment…
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development defines the employment rate as the employment-to-population ratio. The employment-population ratio is many American economist’s favorite gauge of the American jobs picture. According to Paul Ashworth, chief North American economist for Capital Economics, “The employment population ratio is the best measure of labor market conditions.” This is a statistical ratio that measures the proportion of the country’s working-age population (ages 15 to 64 in most OECD countries) that is employed. This includes people that have stopped looking for work.
A chart of the employment-population ratio in the United States over the past several years is posted below…
As you can see, the percentage of Americans with a job fell from about 63 percent to below 59 percent during the last economic crisis. Since that time, it has not risen back above 59 percent. This is the first time in the post-World War II era that we have not seen the employment rate bounce back following a recession. At this point, the employment-population ratio has been below 59 percent for 42 months in a row.
Yes, we should be thankful that things have stabilized, but as you can see there has been no recovery. The percentage of Americans with a job is essentially exactly where it was three years ago. Despite the trillions of dollars that the U.S. government has borrowed, and despite the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing, the employment situation in the U.S. has not turned around.
Data for the employment-population ratio from the beginning of 2008 is posted below…
2008-01-01 62.9
2008-02-01 62.8
2008-03-01 62.7
2008-04-01 62.7
2008-05-01 62.5
2008-06-01 62.4
2008-07-01 62.2
2008-08-01 62.0
2008-09-01 61.9
2008-10-01 61.7
2008-11-01 61.4
2008-12-01 61.0
2009-01-01 60.6
2009-02-01 60.3
2009-03-01 59.9
2009-04-01 59.8
2009-05-01 59.6
2009-06-01 59.4
2009-07-01 59.3
2009-08-01 59.1
2009-09-01 58.7
2009-10-01 58.5
2009-11-01 58.6
2009-12-01 58.3
2010-01-01 58.5
2010-02-01 58.5
2010-03-01 58.5
2010-04-01 58.7
2010-05-01 58.6
2010-06-01 58.5
2010-07-01 58.5
2010-08-01 58.5
2010-09-01 58.5
2010-10-01 58.3
2010-11-01 58.2
2010-12-01 58.3
2011-01-01 58.3
2011-02-01 58.4
2011-03-01 58.4
2011-04-01 58.4
2011-05-01 58.4
2011-06-01 58.2
2011-07-01 58.2
2011-08-01 58.3
2011-09-01 58.4
2011-10-01 58.4
2011-11-01 58.5
2011-12-01 58.6
2012-01-01 58.5
2012-02-01 58.6
2012-03-01 58.5
2012-04-01 58.5
2012-05-01 58.6
2012-06-01 58.6
2012-07-01 58.5
2012-08-01 58.4
2012-09-01 58.7
2012-10-01 58.7
2012-11-01 58.7
2012-12-01 58.6
2013-01-01 58.6
2013-02-01 58.6
So is there anyone out there that still wants to insist that the employment picture in the United States is getting significantly better?
Anyone that wants to claim that “unemployment is going down” should at least wait until the unemployment-population ratio gets back up to 59 percent. Otherwise they just look foolish.
Yes, the Dow is at an all-time high right now. But a bubble is always the biggest right before it bursts.
Most Americans understand that the Dow has been pumped up with all of the funny money that the Fed has been printing. Most Americans understand that the stock market really does not accurately reflect the health of the U.S. economy as a whole.
Just consider these numbers…
-The number of homeless people sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City has increased by 19 percent over the past year.
-The number of Americans on food stamps has risen from 32 million to 47 million while Barack Obama has been in the White House.
-According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point.
-Median household income in the United States has fallen for four consecutive years.
No, the truth is that everything is most definitely not fine.
If everything is fine, then why did the Federal Reserve inject another 100 billion dollars into foreign banks during the last full week of February?
The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve are desperately trying to prop up the entire global economy. Unfortunately, the global financial system has been built on a foundation of sand and the tide is coming in.
Back in 2008, a derivatives crisis was one of the primary causes of the worst financial panic since the Great Depression.
So did we learn our lesson?
No, the boys on Wall Street are back at it again as a recent article by Jim Armitage described…
Historically, stock markets, being driven by humans, have tended to have a similar length memory of catastrophes, before making the same dumb mistakes again.
But it hasn’t even been five years since derivatives (on that occasion based on daft mortgages) blew up the world, and yet these exotic creatures have already returned. With a vengeance.
Research from Thomson Reuters declared that banks were creating more derivatives known as asset-backed securities than at any time since before the Lehman Brothers crash. Of those, 22 percent were made up of – and forgive me the alphabet soup here – CDOs and CLOs. The very type of derivatives that exploded last time. At this stage last year, only 6 percent fell into those categories.
In other words, banks are creating more of the riskiest types of the riskiest products.
At some point, we will have another derivatives crisis even worse than the last one.
When that happens, financial markets all over the globe will crash, economic activity will grind to a standstill and unemployment will go skyrocketing once again.
But as you saw above, we have never even come close to recovering from the last crisis.
So you can believe the mind-numbing propaganda that the mainstream media is trying to feed you if you want. Unfortunately, the reality of the matter is that we have not recovered from the last major economic crisis, and another one is rapidly approaching.
I hope that you are getting ready.
View full post on The Economic Collapse
Shocking Numbers That Show The Media Is Lying To You About Unemployment In America
Did you know that the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed has continually been falling since 2006 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Did you know that the increase in the number of Americans “not in the labor force” during Barack Obama’s first four years in the White House was more than three times greater than the increase in the number of Americans “not in the labor force” during the entire decade of the 1980s? The mainstream media would have us believe that 157,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in January. Based on that news, the Dow broke the 14,000 barrier for the first time since October 2007. But if you actually look at the “non-seasonally adjusted” numbers, the number of Americans with a job actually decreased by 1,446,000 between December and January. But nowhere in the mainstream media did you hear that the U.S. economy lost more than 1.4 million jobs between December and January. It is amazing the things that you can find out when you actually take the time to look at the hard numbers instead of just listening to the media spin. Back in 2007, more than 146 million Americans were employed. Today, only 141.6 million Americans are employed even though our population has grown steadily since then. When the government and the media tell you that we are in a “recovery” and that unemployment is lower than it was a couple of years ago, I encourage you to dig deeper. The truth is that even the government’s own numbers tell us that the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed continues to fall and that the U.S. economy is heading into a recession. The Obama administration and the media have been lying to you about unemployment and about the true condition of our economy. After you see the numbers that I have compiled in this article, I think that you will agree with me.
First of all, let’s take a look at the percentage of the civilian labor force that has been employed over the past several years. These numbers come directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As you can see, this is a number that has been steadily falling since 2006…
2006: 63.1
2007: 63.0
2008: 62.2
2009: 59.3
2010: 58.5
2011: 58.4
In January, only 57.9 percent of the civilian labor force was employed.
Do the numbers above represent a positive trend or a negative trend?
Even a 2nd grader could answer that question.
So how in the world can the Obama administration and the mainstream media claim that the employment picture is getting better and that we are in a “recovery”?
But most Americans believe what they are told. It is almost as if we are in some kind of a “matrix” where reality is defined by the corporate-controlled propaganda that is relentlessly pumped into our brains.
The only way that the government has been able to show a declining unemployment rate is by dumping massive numbers of Americans into the “not in the labor force” category.
Just check out how the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has absolutely skyrocketed in recent years…
2006: 77,387,000
2007: 78,743,000
2008: 79,501,000
2009: 81,659,000
2010: 83,941,000
2011: 86,001,000
In January, there were supposedly 89,868,000 Americans that were at least 16 years of age that were not in the labor force.
That number has risen by more than 8 million since Barack Obama first entered the White House, and that is highly unusual, because the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only increased by 2,518,000 during the entire decade of the 1980s.
You sure can get the numbers to look more “favorable” if you pretend that millions upon millions of American workers simply “don’t want a job” any longer. The truth is that if the labor force participation rate was at the same level it was at when Barack Obama was first elected, the official unemployment rate would be well above 10 percent.
But that wouldn’t do at all, would it? 7.9 percent sounds so much nicer.
And of course even if you do have a job that does not mean that you are doing okay.
If you can believe it, in America today 41 percent of all workers make $20,000 a year or less.
To me, that is a mind blowing statistic. It would be incredibly challenging for anyone to live on $20,000 a year, much less try to support a family.
If you live in Washington D.C. or New York City and you have a “good job” working for the establishment, you may not realize it, but there are tens of millions of American families that are really hurting out there. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point, and most of those people actually do have jobs.
For much more on the “working poor” in the United States, please see my previous article entitled “35 Statistics About The Working Poor In America That Will Blow Your Mind“.
If something is not done, the middle class will continue to disappear and poverty in America will continue to explode.
In a previous article, I noted that during Obama’s first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.
How bad do things have to get before people realize that we are living through a nightmare?
Sadly, most Americans still have faith in the system.
Most Americans are still convinced that our politicians will somehow find a way to turn things around.
Most Americans will gather around their television sets this weekend and watch the Super Bowl and laugh at all the funny commercials without even thinking about how America is literally falling apart all around them.
But there is one group of Americans that is acutely aware of how bad things have really gotten. Small businesses have traditionally been the primary engine of job growth in this country, but right now small business owners all over the nation are facing a tremendous crisis.
Millions of small businesses are on the verge of extinction, and yet our politicians just continue to pile on more taxes, more rules and more regulations.
A recent Gallup poll found that 61 percent of all small business owners in America are “worried about the potential cost of healthcare”, and that an astounding 30 percent of all small business owners in America are not hiring and fear that they will go out of business within the next 12 months.
In a previous article entitled “We Are Witnessing The Death Of Small Business In America“, I detailed how small businesses in America are being systematically wiped out. Small businesses are dying all around us, and the number of new small businesses continues to decline.
According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the decline in the number of startup jobs per one thousand Americans breaks down by presidential administration…
Bush Sr.: 11.3
Clinton: 11.2
Bush Jr.: 10.8
Obama: 7.8
Is that a good trend or a bad trend?
All of this is so simple that even the family pet should be able to figure it out, and yet most Americans seem oblivious to all of this. They just keep gobbling up the mainstream media propaganda and they just continue to go out and wildly spend money.
It is almost as if we didn’t learn any lessons from 2008.
Even while household spending in Europe has moderated, household spending in the United States continues to soar. Just check out the chart in this article.
And guess what? The infamous “no money down mortgages” are back. If we wait long enough, perhaps “interest only mortgages” will make a comeback as well.
Unfortunately, I am afraid that time is running out. we have been living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and it is only a matter of time until it bursts.
2008 was just a “hiccup” compared to what is coming. Our politicians and the Federal Reserve were able to keep the house of cards from completely crashing down back then, but they are not going to be able to avert the economic horror show that is rapidly approaching.
I hope that you are getting prepared. Back in 2008, millions of Americans suddenly lost their jobs, and because many of them did not have any savings, many of them suddenly lost their homes. One of the most important things that you can do to prepare for the coming crisis is to build up an emergency fund. If things suddenly go bad, you don’t want to lose your house and everything that you have always worked for.
In addition, anything that you can do to become more self-sufficient and more independent of the system is a good thing, because the system is failing. The years ahead are going to be much more chaotic than what we are experiencing right now, and when the next crisis strikes you will be very thankful for the time and the energy that you put into preparing.
So what are all of you seeing in your own areas?
Are businesses shutting down?
Are people having a hard time finding good jobs?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
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Iran’s Lying Inflation Statistics
Steve H. Hanke
Today, the Central Bank of Iran released its inflation statistics for 2012. Remarkably, despite all of the international notoriety surrounding Iran’s outbreak of hyperinflation in October, the Central Bank claims that Iran experienced an annual inflation rate of only 27.4%.
The Central Bank has a habit of failing to release useful economic data, and what it does release often has what I would describe as an “Alice-in-Wonderland” quality. Indeed, the Central Bank’s official annual inflation rate is grossly off from the true rate. Using a well-established methodology, I estimate that Iran experienced an annual inflation rate of 110% during 2012.
Ever since hyperinflation briefly reared its head, back in October, the Iranian government has tried to prop up its faltering currency and stop its economy’s death spiral through force and deception. In a sense, these oppressive tactics seem to have “worked,” as Iran’s inflation rate has fallen somewhat since it peaked in October 2012. That said, Iran’s true annual inflation rate (110%) – which I calculated using objective, market-based data – is a whopping four times higher than the official reported rate.
The use of lying statistics is not a first for a country with hyperinflation. Indeed, when inflation begins to spiral out of control – such as the most recent cases in Zimbabwe and North Korea – it’s all too common for governments to wrap their statistics in a shroud of secrecy.
Now, this shroud of secrecy has cast its shadow over Tehran. Once again, lying statistics remain the order of the day.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Iran’s Lying Exchange Rates
By Steve H. Hanke
On September 24th, the Iranian government announced that it would adopt a three-tiered, multiple-exchange-rate regime. This wrong-headed attempt to exert more control over the price of domestic goods and combat inflation has failed (and will continue to fail). Since the rial began its free-fall in early September, international observers and the Iranian people have struggled to understand the implications of this exchange-rate regime.
Iran has a history of implementing a variety of multiple-exchange-rate regimes – with mixed results, to say the least. Indeed, at its peak of currency confusion, the Iranian government set seven different official exchange rates. As the accompanying chart illustrates, the story of Iran’s hyperinflation has been one of divergence between the official and black-market (read: free-market) exchange rates.
This divergence is a product of the declining value of the rial – freely traded on the black market. In consequence, prices are rising dramatically in Iran – by almost 70% per month, according to my estimates. That said, in order to make sense of this phenomenon, it is necessary to understand the system whose failure we are witnessing.
Currently, Iran has three exchange rates:
- The Official Exchange Rate: 12,260 IRR/USD
- Available only to importers of essential goods, such as grain, sugar, and medicine
- The “Non-Reference” Rate: 25,480 IRR/USD
- Purportedly 2% lower than the black-market rate
- Available to importers of important, but non-essential goods, such as livestock, metals and minerals
- The Black-Market Exchange Rate: Approximately 35,000 IRR/USD
- The last freely-reported black-market rate was 35,000 IRR/USD (2 October 2012). The most recent anecdotal reports confirm this number as the current exchange rate.
- The Iranian government (read: police) has recently cracked down on currency traders and has also censored websites that report black-market IRR/USD exchange rates.
This complex currency system results in lying prices that distort economic activity. By offering different exchange rates for different types of imports, the Iranian government is, in effect, subsidizing certain goods – distorting their true price. In consequence, any fluctuations in the black-market exchange rate – and, accordingly, in the price level – will be amplified to different degrees for different goods. The end result for Iranian consumers is confusion and mistrust, which, as we have seen, are feeding the panic that has been driving the collapse of the rial and Iran’s hyperinflation.
For the latest news on Iran’s hyperinflation, follow my Twitter: @Steve_Hanke
Iran’s Lying Exchange Rates is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
View full post on Cato @ Liberty