Finally! The Polish Give the World a Communist Version of Monopoly!

1/27/2011 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…

Today we dedicate The Mint to a Pole named Karol Madaj who, with the help of the Polish National Remembrance Institute, has created a board game to teach people how to obtain goods in a Socialist (Communist) society.  According to AP, the game, called "Kolejka" which essentially means line or queue, is to help young Poles understand the hardships of life under communism.

Madaj has given the world an amazing gift, a chance to learn the despair of Socialism (commonly called Communism) without actually having to live through it.  We ask that they send copies to the White House and the US Congress members, along with a copy to every grade school in America, maybe the world.  It is that important. 

The man should win a Nobel Prize!

Kolejka is being loosely compared to Monopoly, a board game based on Capitalism.  The main difference being that, instead of moving around the board, acquiring property and charging or paying rent while dealing with other random events, the players in Kolejka choose a line to stand in to wait to receive what would hopefully be something they needed while trying to avoid standing in lines where inventories would run out before your turn came up, among other things.  From the AP article:

Pondering the State of the Union as the British GDP reading takes a Nosedive

1/26/2011 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…

Today all the buzz is about the State of the Union address that President Obama delivered last night.  Make no mistake, the President is perhaps the best orator that has ever been elected.  He gave what we considered to be a great speech.  It is ironic that only minutes after it was over there was already an uproar from nearly every corner of the Democratic base.  Environmentalists angered at the energy plan laid out and every parasite in the union complaining about the proposed domestic spending freeze.  Unfortunately, there is little He or anyone else in his administration can do, short of cutting taxes and relieving the people of Governmental regulations, that will help revive the American Economy to levels enjoyed just five short years ago.  The Democratic base will have to accustom itself to compromise or risk sounding like spoiled children.

The problem here in America is debt.  Specifically, there is way too much of it.  There is way too much of it because in the insane monetary experiment in which we live, the only way that "money" (and we use the term loosely) can be created is to create more debt.  There is only one way out of this mess, and that is to change the entire monetary system and make money that is backed by something real, that exists today.  Not an ambiguous claim on somebody else's future production.

If they had asked us to pen a few lines we would have taken full advantage of them.  Why beat around the bush on the issue of the currency?  Obama chose to simply ignore it, as have most Presidents.  But wouldn't it have been something if he had, in his classic Obama style, given it to the American public straight for a change?  Our contribution would have been something along the lines of:

An Inflationary Nightmare, a Stock Correction, and The End of the Bond Market Party all on the Horizon

1/25/2011 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…

“Change,

Now it’s time for change

Nothing stays the same

Now it’s time for change”

Hu Jintao with apologies to Motley Crue

We are back in our tiny perch today with our sights trained on the horizon.  In the foreground, we see, along with the world, the horror of another terrorist attack.  This time at the Domodedovo Airport in Moscow.  Such senseless acts of violence, no matter how you may attempt to explain or justify them, have absolutely no place in our view of the world.  We grieve for the dead and injured and we further grieve for the blow that this may deal to the hope of many.  When fear overtakes hope, that is when things get truly dangerous.

Further on the horizon we continue to see reason for hope.  Hope that the current slow death of the US dollar regime may be about to speed up.  For starters, the Dow Jones industrial average, where much of the FED’s printed money makes its first stop on its way into commodity prices, rose to nearly 12,000 yesterday.  Are happy days here again?  Are the largest companies in America and the world returning to such incredible profitability that we are going to experience another bull market in equities?  We don't know, but the Maket Oracle, which seems to call a lot of things correctly, is calling for a 10% correction by mid February.  We generally think that, while nominal stock prices will continue to rise, stocks as an asset class will under perform a little known asset class called "real stuff" for some time.