Bears are by nature cautious and while
caution can be an ally, it can also be fatal where bold action is required.
It
is understandable that investors who believe in paper money and
paper-denominated assets do not understand gold. Gold, after all, is the
natural refuge of disbelievers in the current financial paradigm; and, as
today’s credit and debt-based paper markets come under increasing
pressure and gold moves increasingly higher, most “paper bulls”
remain increasingly perplexed.
In
October 2009, when gold had again breached the $1,000 level, investment
advisor Chad Brand warned investors not to jump onto “the gold bandwagon”.
Unfortunately, for Mr. Brand’s clients, it was the time to
jump—and still is today.
From
Chad Brand, Seeking Alpha, October 7, 2009: http://seekingalpha.com/article/165317-gold-prices-a-familiar-trend
Here is a 35-year chart of gold prices.
Based on what you see, would you want to jump onto the gold bandwagon?...I am
bearish on gold over $1,000 per ounce and this chart is a good reason to at
least be careful with the current precious metal of choice. The latest trend looks very familiar…
Chad Brand is the President of Peridot
Capital Management LLC, a paper money advisory firm; and fifteen months after
Mr. Brand cautioned investors to avoid the gold “bandwagon” gold
is now $1,400, a 40 % gain.
My advice: Avoid gold bears.
They’re dangerous, especially now.
THE NADLER KEY TO PREDICTING
GOLD
Because gold bears have consistently
cried “bear” during gold’s 10 year ascent, it is logical to
assume their predictions are of little value. But this is erroneous. To the
contrary, I believe that the predictions of at least one gold bear, Jon
Nadler, can be used to accurately predict the future price of gold.
Kitco’s Jon Nadler is
today’s most notorious gold bear; and, although Mr. Nadler’s
predictions are remarkably consistent, they also have been consistently
wrong; but within this consistency lies a clue to tomorrow’s price of
gold.
The website www.buygoldco.com kept track of Mr. Nadler’s
predictions regarding the future price of gold in 2010.
In November 2006, he predicted in
2010 gold would average $800.
In October 2008, he predicted gold
would be in the low $500 an ounce range in 2010.
In January 2010: he predicted “With a view to the
three-year average gold price still near $845…
In May 2010 (with gold at $1200), He
predicted the 2010 price would end [lower]…gold
at the $800 per ounce figure. I am not alone in computing such
figures. I still
think between $680 and $880.
From 2006 to 2010, Nadler predicted the price of gold would be
in the low $500s to the high $800s today, a spread of approximately $400, the
mean being approximately $700.
Based on this data,
the apparently unerringly accurate Nadler Gold Predict-O-Meter is as
follows:
To accurately predict the
future price of gold, investors can take the arithmetic mean of Mr.
Nadler’s predictions—then simply double it, i.e. $700 x2
= $1400, a number which, astoundingly, is almost exactly
today’s gold price, i.e. $1405, at the end of 2010.
There is indeed gold
in the droppings of bears, at least one of them; but be forewarned, you will
have to look long and hard to find it.
BURYING THE TRUTH IN A TIME
OF LIES
In
August, theaters in the US began showing the trailer of Inside Job, a
movie that promised to explore the truths behind the economic collapse that
has leveled much of the world’s economies and banks since 2008.
A
$20 million effort written, produced and directed by MIT grad Charles
Ferguson was scheduled for theatrical release in early October 2010 by Sony
Classics; and a great number, including myself, anticipated its
release—a release, however, that was to be far different than expected.
Two
weeks ago, I wondered what had happened. The movie had not opened here as
scheduled and the trailer was no longer being shown in theaters. I then
discovered Inside Job was playing at a local independent theater with
virtually no publicity.
The
film is as riveting as its trailer promised, see
http://www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/. Ferguson’s pointed questioning
of bankers, government officials and business school professors exposes his
subjects for what they are, i.e. educated, overly-confident, smarmy,
self-excusing promoters of Wall Street’s greed who had sold themselves
to mammon in order to further their own ambitions.
Inside
Job
narrated by Matt Daemon delivers its message so effectively that those who
control what America sees—and does not see—have made sure that
most Americans will never see it, a movie that clearly indicts those
responsible for America’s ills, i.e. themselves.
To
understand how Inside Job was silenced (yes, it was “an inside
job”), a comparison can made to other movies released in 2010
Leap
Year budget:
$19 million opening
screens: 2,511
Legion budget:
$26 million opening
screens: 2,476
The
Tooth Hurts budget:
$48 million opening
screens: 3,344
Edge
of Darkness budget:
$60 million opening
screens: 3,066
Inside
Job budget:
$20 million opening
screens: 2
Of Inside
Job, Richard and Mary Corliss of Time Magazine wrote: If you’re
not enraged by the end of the movie, you weren’t paying attention.
If
you don’t see the movie you won’t be enraged—and that’s
exactly what they’re counting on.
Go
see Inside Job. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to America.
ANOTHER MOVIE, ANOTHER SCANDAL
On
June 17, 2004, Martha and I attended a private showing of Dodgeball, a
movie written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, the son of my friend
Marshall Thurber. The movie was to open the next day (on 2,694 screens) and
was to become the largest grossing film of any new writer/director.
The
showing in Hollywood was memorable for another reason. After the movie, I was
to meet a figure in a scandal revealed to me years before by Dr. Norman
Bernard Thirion, formerly Howard Hughes’ private banker.
That
person was Dr. Nake Kamrany, a professor at USC. In 1987, Norman Bernard
Thirion told me that Dr. Kamrany had been an innocent bystander in a plot run
out of the Reagan White House to embezzle, i.e. skim, millions of Saudi
dollars intended to help the Afghan freedom fighters in their fight against
Soviet aggression.
Thirion
(who had raised the funds) had been cut out of the deal when he threatened to
tell the Saudis their money was going to be used to pay Israel for Soviet
arms captured during the six-day Syrian war. The Saudis were Thirion’s
clients and Thirion rightfully believed the Saudis would feel betrayed if
their money ended up in Israeli banks.
Members
of the Reagan White House intended to profit as the arms deal was being run
through Transglobal Movie Productions, a front company set up by its
chairman, General Robert E. Cushman, former Commandant of the US Marine Corp,
former Deputy Director of the CIA and Reagan White House confidant.
The
Reagan White House had set up the deal as a “private venture”;
believing they could profit as private citizens instead of the public
servants they were. But when Thirion threatened to tell the Saudis about the
pending deal with Israel, General Cushman immediately dismissed Thirion as
Transglobal’s representative.
Within
the year Thirion was indicted on bogus charges of soliciting loan fees and
extradited from Monaco where he lived; and Thirion’s life as a private
banker to financial luminaries such as Howard Hughes and Adnan Kashogghi came
to an abrupt halt after his extradition and conviction in US courts.
Thirion
believed the trumped up charges originated from the White House in order to
discredit him and to prevent any attempt on his part to recover funds due him
from Transglobal Productions.
Thirion
also believed his appeal would be granted and that he soon would be released.
But on March 5, 1987, the 8th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals
denied Thirion’s petition and that evening Thirion asked me to write
down his story, a story that no one ever expected would be told.
After
hearing Norman’s story, it was clear that both Dr. Kamrany and Dr.
Thirion had been used by the White House as pawns to embezzle Saudi funds
meant assist the Afghany’s fight against Soviet aggression. My talk
with Professor Kamrany confirmed that Norman Bernard Thirion’s tale was
indeed true.
Dr.
Kamrany said he knew the other principals in Cushman’s Transglobal
Movie Production Company (known to him only as a “private
venture”), that the Afghan resistance had never received any of the
Saudi money raised on their behalf, and that he himself had seen Soviet
weapons in the hands of the Afghan resistance and wondered how they had come
by them.
Thirion
had told me about the White House embezzlement in an attempt to gain his
release from prison and wanted his story in the hands of an unidentified 3rd
party in case the Reagan White House decided to take a more direct course of
action to silence him.
That
is how I came to know the details of a story that few know about and that
fewer still want known. The media avoids any story that implicates those that
pay their bills. This certainly applied to my attempts to tell
Thirion’s story to the media.
I
was learning a cold hard lesson in modern American politics that I had not
been taught when getting my degree in political science at UC Davis years
earlier, to wit, when it comes to the powerful, no one wants to point
fingers. I thought because the story included politically powerful figures
such as President Ronald Reagan, retired Marine General and former CIA Deputy
Director Robert E. Cushman, and Ambassador William Wilson, and countries such
as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan and covert agencies such as the Central
Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, there would be a great
deal of interest in the story.
I
was wrong. Just the opposite is true. In America, as elsewhere in the world,
everyone is afraid to accuse the powerful of wrongdoing. If the culprit had
been a poor black women selling crack to fund a black women’s uprising,
the outcry would have been deafening. As it was, I couldn’t get a
response.
DRS,
Light In A Dark Place, Bolinas Press, 2006
Later,
I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the US government requesting
information held by the Reagan Library pertaining to Thirion’s story.
The statutory limit for a response passed years ago and while I don’t
expect an answer, if I did, I doubt it would be the truth.
My
generation came of age during the rebellious 1960s and some, including
myself, broke away from the parent culture that was even then headed in the
direction in which it finds itself today, i.e. bloated, bankrupt and without
a compass on increasingly stormy seas.
Unfortunately,
America doesn’t grasp the magnitude of its present troubles. This is
the great tragedy of this once great nation and its once great people. Today,
Americans are still futilely hoping against hope that more credit and more
liquidity will restore a dream they once had. It won’t.
America’s
dream of power based on credit-based wealth was not the dream of the Founding
Fathers. The Founding Fathers wanted freedom and justice; not the indentured
servitude of the many to the few for which Americans unwittingly traded their
freedom.
Today
in America, movies—as well as political candidates—are approved
by the powers that be before being offered up for America’s
consumption. Unfortunately, Americans no longer have the capacity to
critically think and consequently haven’t the means by which to
understand the enormity of what is about to happen, either to them or to the
nation.
Enjoy
the fruits of your ambitions, America. You earned them—or, rather you
bought them on time with credit, the bill for which is now due and owing.
Cry not America
For
the loss
Of
your freedoms
And
dreams
Why
mourn them now
You
who did not notice
Their
absence before
From Light In A Dark Place
DRS, Bolinas Press, 2006
Two
years after meeting Dr. Kamrany, I included Norman’s story in my book, Light
In A Dark Place, which Martha and I presented to fellow members at
Marshall Thurber’s Positive Deviant Network, the PDN, in 2006. For
those interested in the details of Norman’s story my book, Light In
A Dark Place, is available at amazon.com (US and UK).
The
following year we presented How To Survive The Crisis and Prosper In The
Process, to the PDN and my writing on economic issues took precedence
over Norman Thirion’s tale of what actually transpires behind the US
government’s self-proclaimed need for secrecy.
It
was perhaps my rage after seeing Inside Job that caused me to re-tell
Norman’s tale at this time. The movie reminded me of the arrogance of
those who rule, immune to the rule of law and who have usurped the nation for
their own ends.
Norman’s
story about how the Reagan White House so callously used the plight of a
people in distress to plunder and profit is little different than the story
told in Inside Job. The names and circumstances may be different, but
the motives are the same and so is the nation.
As
2010 draws to a close, we as a nation and a people are now closer to the
economic and political rendering that awaits us. Those who pillaged this
nation and its ideals for profit and power have all but destroyed this once
great country; and the rest of us must now prepare to survive its inevitable
collapse.
On
December 18th, I began Dollars & Sense a call-in show
on local Tucson TV now available on Youtube,
http://www.youtube.com/user/SchoonWorks#p/a/u/0/c41V_-nMOtg. The next show
will be Saturday, January 8th at 8 pm MST and can be viewed live
on the internet at www.accesstucson.org.
Access
Tucson TV, being community-based, does not accept advertising and I have
donated five one-year subscriptions to Moving Through The Maelstrom
including a download of How To Survive The Crisis and Prosper In The
Process for their silent auction which ends on January 1st at
5 pm.
Those
who wish to bid may do so at Access Tucson Online
Auction. Community
is what will get us through this crisis and this is an opportunity to
participate in the process. For those not used to the concept of community,
try it; it’s not as bad as you fear.
These
are dark days. Better days are coming.
Buy
gold, buy silver, have faith.
Darryl Robert
Schoon
www.survivethecrisis.com
www.drschoon.com
Check his Blog
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