I hope everyone loaded up on gold (now up 50%)and silver (up 85%) and is happy, because the flip side is very gloomy. The dollar continues to lose value and the resulting decline in American wealth looks like it will cause class warfare. Whether it is only economic warfare making everyone poor or whether it develops into physical violence is still not clear.
Greater than 93% drop in the greenback - Since the US government decided to use central planning to control interest rates instead of the free market and the gold peg, the dollar has lost more than 93% of its value. For centuries the dollar value of gold hardly moved. Then politicians created the FED early last century. Do you remember $35 an ounce? I do, and now it's $570. When Alan Greenspan went before congress last year, he was asked how was the US Government going to be able to finance its obligations regarding Social Security (i.e. pay retirement checks). Greenspan's answer was that it was no problem, they would just issue Government checks. When the senator looked confused, Greenspan added, 'the problem is whether these checks would buy anything of value'. The economically challenged senators still didn't get it. What good is a monthly check for $10,000 if a loaf of bread costs $10,000.
At his State of the Union speech, Bush lamented he couldn't get Social Security reform through congress. The Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton cheered. I hope that tape is replayed when retirees riot over their worthless SS checks. But, at least this gives us someone to blame. Americans aren't saving for their retirement, instead they are going ever deeper into debt, confident the Government will give them a nice retirement check.
Both Republicans and Democrats are spending like drunken sailors. No worries mate, we'll just borrow some more. Now that Americans aren't saving enough to finance this debt, we have to borrow from foreigners at the rate of $2 billion a day. The amount of wealth we will have to transfer to these foreigners to repay this $8 trillion debt will bankrupt a whole generation. Unless, of course, we just issue worthless Government checks and inflate away the value of the dollar. But who are our central planners going to blame. There must be someone. How about Wal-Mart. Maryland central planners are going to force health care costs for employees, their spouses, children, parents, relatives, pets, etc. onto Wal-Mart. Maybe we can have a windfall profits tax to pay for our debt. The central planners in Russia and China never let windfall profits happen. Maybe we just won't let foreigners spend the dollars they so foolishly accepted. We can call it National Security and not let them buy Unocal and not let them operate our ports. When they stop accepting our dollars, we can be happy with all our paper money, happy and poor.
I still think the best protection from our central planners are hard assets like gold, silver, oil sands, gas, etc. Then you don't have to worry when they let the printing presses roll.
Tom
One thing I do find curious in my recent economic news and info research, is the apparent timing of the creation of the Iranian oil bourse trading in Euros rather than Dollars, scheduled to open on March 20th(?) and the Federal Reserve's announcement last November 10th that it would cease publishing M3 currency aggregation information starting March 23rd.
Not providing the M3 info would (supposedly) help to hide any trend in rapidly increasing money printing to help monetarize the US growing debt.
Trading oil in Euros rather than Dollars would (supposedly) put greater pressure on the dollar as the international reserve currency, thereby significantly weakening the Dollar's value and thereby increase the temptation to print more money to monetize increased debt caused by Dollar devaluation.
Like I say, I don't purport that all of this is accurate and factual, it's just things I've been reading and analyzing lately, but it has pricked my interest to watch more closely how all this continues to develop.
Thanks for posting your dad's letter.