Hong Kong moves gold reserves from London

Hong Kong recalls gold reserves from London - MarketWatch:

"Hong Kong is pulling all its physical gold holdings from depositories in London, transferring them to a high-security depository newly built at the city's airport, in a move that won praise from local traders Thursday."

To keep grain prices down, limit the market

David Fry can get mad - and rightfully so. Excellent analysis on the recent limitations imposed on funds. So this is the government plan to keep grain prices down?

The CFTC Is Needlessly Breaking Good Products -- Seeking Alpha:

"DBC (PowerShares DB Commodity Tracking Fund) and DBA (PowerShares DB Agricultural Fund) are in the news as the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Corporation) has revoked the position limit exemption for these funds. They have also intimidated the issuers of UNG (United States Natural Gas Fund) into not issuing more shares to meet demand, essentially breaking the issue as an effective product and needlessly costing investors a fortune. In the case of UNG, this is part of a government effort to squash speculation in energy markets, always a politically correct or populist thing to do."

Scientists Ponder Engineering Earth

With a shining record in the fields of food, health and safety, humanity finally stumbles on the final solution: diverting the rays of the sun. Everything could apparently be great if we could only shut off the sun.

A fitting illustration of lunacy and hubris for the Kali Yuga - the age of darkness. The next project, we suppose, would be to re-engineer life so it does not require photo-synthesis.

Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya...

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Engineering Earth 'is feasible':

"Such approaches could be effective, the authors said in their report.
But they also stressed that the potential of geo-engineering should not divert governments away from their efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
Suggestions range from having giant mirrors in space to erecting giant CO2 scrubbers that would 'clean' the air.
Such engineering projects could either remove carbon dioxide or reflect the Sun's rays away from the planet"

Washington Admits to Peak Oil

checkthemarkets.com - Washington Knows The Truth: Peak Oil and Natural Gas:

"Projected production, as you can see, is suddenly shriveling up. From 107.5 million b/d of oil projected for 2030 in 2007, to 102.9 million b/d in 2008, to this year’s meager expectation for 93.1 million. That’s a drop of 13.4% in only two years, and posits production growth of only 11.6 million b/d (14.2%) from 2006 levels.

If that isn’t an admission that the era of Peak Oil is upon us, what is?"

Great Peak Oil chart

Peak Oil: A Reality or a Lie? -- Seeking Alpha:

"Still not convinced about ‘Peak Oil’? Then review Figure 2 which charts the expected combined flow rates for crude oil, lease condensates and Canadian Oil Sands. As you can see from the grey shaded area, production is about to decline by roughly 5 million barrels per day by 2012."

BTW, the Chinese just bought into Canadian oil sands.

a left-wing radical, poet, religious fanatic, forex trader

From the InformedTrades forum:

"as i trade the forex market, Lord,
allow me to recall
that this is for your magno-glory not mine,
that my main objective
is to make myself a more
effective servant,
more able goodness to spread,
more influential in my struggle for justice."

"Recent Concentration of Volume in Financial Stocks: Coordinated Capital Infusion?"

Recent Concentration of Volume in Financial Stocks: Coordinated Capital Infusion? | The Big Picture:

"My best guess? We’re seeing a massive infusion of capital into very troubled financial institutions, no doubt aided by short covering and the participation of program traders and proprietary daytrading firms. Where is the capital coming from? Why has it poured in so suddenly (the really large infusions began in early August)? Why is it coming in at such a pace that it is dominating NYSE volume? Zero Hedge rightly wonders why this hasn’t triggered alarms at the exchange. And why is it happening with only the weakest financial institutions?

If you were the government and you saw that these institutions were on the verge of a major fail, with billions of taxpayer dollars at risk, I’m not sure you’d announce that to the world. Nor, at this point politically, could you ask for yet another bailout package. But you would only pour money into those stocks at a frantic pace (capable of detection) if you perceived a dire need for the capital.

I’m not inclined toward conspiracy theories, but it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which this is not a (frighteningly necessary) coordinated capital infusion, with taxpayer dollars ultimately at work in financial markets."

In the old country, in what's now longingly called "the happy days", just before a national banking system failed and inflation went triple-digit, we used to call this "making a run".

vanityfair.com on Paulson

Todd S. Purdum on Henry Paulson | vanityfair.com: "And with that Paulson ducked into the private bathroom adjoining his office, closed the big paneled door, and audibly, violently, and repeatedly threw up. He emerged a moment later as if nothing had happened, but in a few minutes he did the same thing all over again. I asked if he wouldn’t rather stop, and resume our conversation another time. “That’s O.K.,” he said. “I’m just going to go through this all. I won’t remember it. You know, I barely remember the details now.”

[...]

watching him over many months, it was hard not to be impressed by the resolve with which this moderate old-line Republican—a man with a threshold faith in the wisdom of markets—became the greatest economic interventionist of his generation."