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Burke
01-25-2013, 08:39 AM
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is a financial writer who sometimes has a way of hitting the nail on the head while many others are looking the wrong way. Reading him helped lead me to predict the 2008 economic meltdown more than a year before it happened. Now he has written something else that has caught my attention.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/9825363/Bank-of-America-issues-bond-crash-alert-on-Fed-tightening-fears.html

When the stock market tanked a few years ago, many ran to bonds. Smarter people, however, got into precious metals because they realized that the govt money printing schemes were going to eventually destroy the value of bonds which are payable in money.

The Federal Reserve and other central banks have been printing money like crazy for several years now with the intention of propping up the stock market and keeping us out of a recession/depression. But they have shot their wad and have reached the point that some are expecting them to pull back.

Note this comment in the article:

"The great question is whether the world economy really is at the start of a fresh cycle of growth, or whether the roaring asset rally of the last few months is another false dawn driven by central bank liquidity that is failing to gain economic traction."

My opinion:

Nothing the govt has been doing has been helping the economy, just the opposite. They have just been kicking the proverbial can down the road, putting off the day of reckoning, and making it much worse when it arrives.

We are now in the trap people have been predicting for decades. We have a bubble economy being propped up by money printing that they cannot stop because they have to continue to pay for the entitlement state and try to prevent the entire economy from crashing.

The current stock market "boom" is a sucker's rally, and the bonds people have been running to are now seen to be in the process of becoming worthless because they will be repaid with inflated money.

If you have precious metals, be very glad you bought them.

Burke
01-25-2013, 11:06 AM
A friend responded to me about this with the following observation, which I think is spot on:

"Bernake has been buying US Bonds with printed money
as fast as he could for quite some time creating
a bubble. Hundreds of
financial people have been predicting the out come of this
would be a crash.
I think it is hard to judge whether we will have a Bond
crash or a currency crash, or both next.
Other countries are looking at the US dollar with contempt.
The so called currency wars are mostly that other countries are
shorting the US Dollar or otherwise positioning them selves
to profit from our crash, or multiple crashes."

malligator
01-25-2013, 12:10 PM
Corporate earnings do not match the recent market index increases. Even a financial dolt like me can see the bubble is about to burst.

Burke
01-25-2013, 03:55 PM
"The Fed also could be forced to shut down the printing presses if inflation gets out of hand, a condition that usually happens with little notice. If inflation surges and the economy is still weak, the Fed could find itself in an untenable situation.

"'You'd want to be out of stocks. That's a bunch of baloney when they say (the end of QE) can happen gradually,' Springer said. 'As soon as they announce they're not going to keep printing money and pumping money in, that's going to be the end.'"

http://m.cnbc.com/us_news/100405576?refresh=true

Get ready for the crash.

But then how are they going to pay all those entitlements if they stop printing money and the economy tanks?

g8orbill
01-25-2013, 06:34 PM
I went to my Thursday morning monthly business owners meeting with 75 small business owners yesterday and they all talked about how down their sales are since the 1st. I think we are seeing the beginning of an ominous trend.

surfn1080
01-26-2013, 07:26 AM
I hope for the sake of all of us this does not happen. Then again I have not faith in our current govt to do anything meaningful about it....

Burke
01-26-2013, 09:11 AM
The only thing the govts can do to help is to get the hell out of our lives. Military, cops, courts, prisons, essentially, is all we should have. Virtually everything else it does is just the exploitation of some for the benefit of others.

Burke
01-26-2013, 10:13 AM
Just asked a banker friend which was going to happen first: the collapse of the dollar or the crash of the bond market. He said he didn't know but that that is the big question. He agrees that we have reached the point that we can no longer stop printing money but that continuing doing so will cause horrendous inflation.