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Think gold is high? Wait till dollar bonds are dumped, Davies says
The West is close to the point where its paper currency system is insolvent, and as a result gold is heading to $5,000 an ounce, according to the manager of a gold fund.
“A paper currency system ultimately ends in insolvency,” said Ben Davies, the chief executive of Hinde Capital in an interview with CNBC.com on Tuesday. “We have arrived at this point in the West. So why own worthless paper?”
His belief that gold will hit $5,000 an ounce is not shared by many major players in the market. On Sunday, Goldman Sachs raised its 12-month price target for gold to $1,860 an ounce. In early trading Tuesday, spot gold hit a record $1,778 an ounce, before pulling back.
Goldman based its new target on Read more…
New signs economy’s recovery faltering

Evan Solomon worked at the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday as fears that the economy was stalling rattled the markets.
The U.S. economic recovery is faltering, and Washington is running out of ways to get it back on track.
New reports Wednesday showed a steep slowdown in the manufacturing sector and weak private-sector job creation in May. The grim news comes on the heels of other recent indicators — falling home prices and consumer spending — that reflect an economy slowing to a limp this spring.
The data dash the sunnier expectations that many analysts had entering the year; many forecasters had expected economic growth of 3.5 to 4 percent in 2011.
Instead, the U.S. economy appears to be settling back into a pattern of Read more…
Fed Ready to Print More Funny Money on QE3 Rumors
Simon Maughn, co-head of European equities at MF Global, has told CNBC that a third round of so-called quantitative easing is in the works. The private Federal Reserve will again become the marginal buyer of bonds.
The latest effort by the Fed to finance the government’s staggering deficit will end in June.
If the private Federal Reserve owned by offshore banksters stops this lending scheme, interest rates will rise significantly which in turn will exert tremendous pressure on the American public. If interest rates surge anytime soon, millions of indebted Americans may default on their debt, thereby bankrupting the American financial institutions, as Puru Saxena, founder of Puru Saxena Wealth Management, notes.
“The bond market is going in one direction which is up-falling yields which is telling you quite clearly the direction of economic travel is downwards. Downgrades. QE3 (a third round of quantitative easing) is coming,” Read more…
PBOC’s Zhou Urges Cutting China’s $3 Trillion of Foreign-Exchange Reserves
Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
China needs to reduce its foreign- exchange reserves as they exceed the level the nation requires, central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said.
The management and diversification of the holdings, which topped $3 trillion at the end of March, should be improved, Zhou said after a speech at Tsinghua University in Beijing late yesterday. The rapid accumulation is putting pressure on the sterilization operations of the People’s Bank of China, he said.
The nation’s foreign-exchange reserves climbed $197 billion in the first quarter, reflecting global imbalances that Group of 20 finance ministers agreed last week to address through deeper scrutiny of their economic policies. China’s surging holdings are fueling inflation that accelerated last month to the highest in 32 months, prompting the government to boost banks’ reserve requirements this week for the fourth time this year.
“Foreign-exchange reserves have exceeded the reasonable levels that we actually need,” Zhou said. “The rapid increase in reserves may have led to excessive liquidity and has exerted significant sterilization pressure. If the government doesn’t strike the right balance with its policies, the build-up could cause big risks,” he said, without elaborating.
The world’s second-biggest economy grew 9.7 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, faster than economists had forecast, and consumer prices climbed Read more…
Pressure on Portugal After New Credit Downgrade
LISBON — Portugal’s borrowing costs pushed higher after Moody’s downgraded the country’s credit rating, stoking the pressure on the country’s beleaguered minority government.
The yield on Portugal’s ten-year bond rose 0.04 percentage point to 7.44 percent. The equivalent yields for Greece and Spain, two other euro countries struggling with high borrowing levels, were down modestly.
Moody’s Investors Services cut the country’s rating by two notches to A3 late Tuesday, saying the debt-stressed country is struggling to generate growth and faces a tough battle to restore the fiscal health needed to calm jittery financial markets.
Prime Minister Jose Socrates said late Tuesday he would quit if Parliament doesn’t consent to his government’s latest batch of contested austerity measures.
Portugal aims to raise up to €1 billion in a sale of Read more…
US Treasurys Dumped, Pimco Sees Value In Emerging-Market Bonds
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–The valuations on U.S. Treasurys are not attractive in a historical context and Pacific Investment Management Co. is moving money toward emerging-market debt, said the fund’s founder Bill Gross in an interview on Thursday with CNBC.
Reports came out on Thursday that the bond-fund giant had dumped all of its holdings of U.S. government bonds. Gross said better valuations can be found elsewhere, where yields are not artificially boost by Federal Reserve purchasing.
“The overvaluation [in Treasurys] has been dependent on the purchasing power of the Fed,” said Gross, who does not believe there will be a third round of “quantitative easing.”
Pimco did not participate in Thursday’s 30-year auction nor Wednesday’s 10-year auction, Gross said, though both were considered well-received.
The fund still owns about Read more…
After the ecstasy of revolution, the Bankers quietly begin carving up Egypt and North Africa
By Richard Eastman
21st Century Wire
Feb 25, 2011
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is ready to lend one billion EUROS a year to Egypt for reconstruction and “free-market reform”- even as Egypt’s Minister of Finance Samir Radwan has gone begging to the City of London bankers and the British Ministry of Trade and Investment for relief on debt payments that are about to throw Egypt into bankruptcy.
All this, as Egypt has been such a good boy with regards to privatization and austerity, measures which awarded Egypt its celebrated 7 percent growth rate- mostly in investments that will end up in international hands as ventures fail to pay out with ever diminishing Egyptian domestic purchasing power.
FRESH CYCLES OF DEBT
First EBRD will lend at interest and build what they want backed by Egyptian collateral and the value of the projects themselves. Then when it turns out they can’t make the debt payments because of all the interest we have sucked from them, we take over all of the assets we have developed. That’s freedom and EBRD is really going to give it to them. After all EBRD is experienced at this. In 1991 the EBRD was organized to financially lead Russia and Eastern Europe in their transition from paternalistic socialism to sustainable free-market economies open to international Read more…
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