EU Treaty Exposes English and French Differences

12/9/2011 Portland, Oregon - Pop in your mints… As many are aware, the EU ramrod "save the currency" treaty was quickly accepted by the countries who are all in on the Euro, while those who saw that drinking the Euro koolaid was likely to kill them, namely England, rejected the treaty.

For us, this exposed the fundamental differences in the English and those on the continent.

One of these differences being that the French tend to think of children as innocents who become corrupted as they age (which is why they are more apt to tolerate the immoral shenanigans of their governing class more than the Brits or Americans do), the English understand that children, as much as adults, are capable of both good and evil at any age. They hope for the best and, at their best, prepare for the worst. This is why the French could not believe the premise of the Lord of the Flies. Why were these children portrayed as being aggressive to each other?

While this observation is neither here nor there, we leave you with the French and English leaders as they interacted at the EU summit.

Stay tuned and Trust Jesus.

Stay Fresh! David Mint

Email: davidminteconomics@gmail.com

P.S. For more ideas and commentary please check out The Mint at http://www.davidmint.com/

Key Indicators for December 9, 2011

Copper Price per Lb: $3.57
Oil Price per Barrel: $99.41
Corn Price per Bushel: $5.85
10 Yr US Treasury Bond: 2.05%
FED Target Rate: 0.07% ON AUTOPILOT, THE FED IS DEAD!
Gold Price Per Ounce: $1,711 PERMANENT UNCERTAINTY
MINT Perceived Target Rate*: 2.00%
Unemployment Rate: 8.6%
Inflation Rate (CPI): -0.1%
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 12,184
M1 Monetary Base: $2,255,500,000,000 RED ALERT!!! THE ANIMALS ARE LEAVING THE ZOO!!!
M2 Monetary Base: $9,623,700,000,000 YIKES UP $1 Trillion in one year!!!!!!!

John Corzine Testifies to a Congressional Panel on MF Global Collapse

12/7/2011 Portland, Oregon - Pop in your mints…

Today the world witnessed one of the most surreal spectacles that we can imagine.  John Corzine, former CEO of MF Global, the Primary Dealer which went bankrupt on October 31st and is now missing $1.2 billion of client funds, was called on to testify by a group of men in the US Congress who are trying to understand what went wrong and how they can prevent it from occuring again.

You can see the agonizing hearing in all of its glory by clicking the link below.  Our humble observations:

1.  Neither Mr. Corzine or Congress said anything that should give any measure of confidence to participants in the global financial markets.

2.  Mr. Corzine is sorry this happened.

3.  One of the members of the panel stated the obvious "we got to find that money."  Understatement of the year.

4.  Mr. Corzine is so confident that the client funds will be recovered that he mumbled, after being pressed by a member of the panel, that he and the other executives would personally reimburse clients in the event that it wasn't (NOT!)

5.  Questions about the Federal Reserve's ability to properly vet firms who are qualified to be Primary Dealers.

We didn't know whether to laugh or cry.  Mr. Corzine looked like a large elf from the camera angle and the members of congress, in most cases, sounded less than up to the task of understanding what happened, much less being able to craft legislation which would prevent a similar event in the future.

It was like watching political professional wrestling.  The entertainment value was fairly high, excitement filled the room, but it left you wondering if what you saw was real or simply scripted and well acted by all involved.

All in all, it was a synopsis of the level corruption and ignorance that grace the halls of power in America circa 2011.

See the entire sorry spectacle courtesy of C-Span:  http://www.c-span.org/Events/Fmr-Senator-Corzine-to-Testify-in-MF-Global-Investigation/10737426111-1/

Perhaps now the Farmer and the Cowman will befriend each other, grab their pitchforks, and storm capital hill until their $1.2 billion is returned.

Stay tuned and Trust Jesus.

Stay Fresh!

David Mint

Email: davidminteconomics@gmail.com

P.S.  For more ideas and commentary please check out The Mint at www.davidmint.com

Key Indicators for December 8, 2011

Copper Price per Lb: $3.49
Oil Price per Barrel:  $98.57
Corn Price per Bushel:  $5.90   10 Yr US Treasury Bond:  1.97% FED Target Rate:  0.08%  ON AUTOPILOT, THE FED IS DEAD!
Gold Price Per Ounce:  $1,706 PERMANENT UNCERTAINTY
MINT Perceived Target Rate*:  2.00%
Unemployment Rate:  8.6%
Inflation Rate (CPI):  -0.1%
Dow Jones Industrial Average:  11,998  
M1 Monetary Base:  $2,255,500,000,000 RED ALERT!!!  THE ANIMALS ARE LEAVING THE ZOO!!!M2 Monetary Base:  $9,623,700,000,000 YIKES UP $1 Trillion in one year!!!!!!!

Losing even blind faith in the Euro and USD, remembering Pearl Harbor

12/7/2011 Portland, Oregon - Pop in your mints…

Today we continue to watch the relative calm in both the stock and bond markets with our jaw hanging just inches from the floor.  In our estimation, the calm, or homeostasis, is perhaps the only thing that is completely inexplicable under the current state of affairs.

Just what is that state of affairs, you ask?  A few off the top of our head:

-          Downgrades or the threat of downgrades to nearly every sovereign bond on the planet

-          A resulting dearth of quality assets to be used as collateral in the financial system

-          A debt based economy collectively attempting to live within its means

-          The resulting collapse of the debt based economy

-          An imminent war in Persia

But these are simply large events that are leading to a great number of small decisions which are in turn causing more unforeseen large scale events, etc.  The result being that, much to the chagrin of the financial authorities, a majority of the world is embracing frugality.

A quick recap for those are joining us for the first time, the powers that be, the current currency regime, rely on an ever expanding amount of debt in order to continue to function.  It is a system that is based on trust and blind faith, for it offers nothing of lasting value.

In the short term, the system, if functioning properly, allows a great deal of power to be centralized.  It also encourages, albeit indirectly, nearly every sort of vice and shuns virtue.  The system tends to reward bad behavior and to promote into leadership those who are least likely to possess a moral compass.

The system is no longer functioning as designed.  The reach of the currency regime is shrinking and will continue to shrink until the only ones who maintain faith in it are the most morally decrepit individuals and institutions on the planet.  They will continue to trade their increasingly worthless paper until they realize that they are simply shuffling paper amongst themselves, long after they have completely lost any semblance of control that they had on the situation.

Much of this paper shuffling is running through the stock and bond markets, and seemingly these markets are calm.  However, the illusion of stability is being maintained at the cost of trillions of new dollars and Euros being created which are rapidly losing value against anything tangible.

In the United States, the dollar will begin to significantly deteriorate sometime in March, according to our crude calculations.  The Euro, whose handlers have been late to start the game of shameless currency debasement, is more likely to implode with the European banking system as they gag on the sewage of assets that are on their balance sheets.

The great irony of the current currency regime is that a currency which has attempted to maintain its value will become extinct, shunned for one whose value is plummeting.

The Euro and US Dollar are showing the world the two paths that a currency regime can follow to destruction.  It will be interesting to see which car ceases to operate first, the motor that runs out of gas or the one that has its gas tank overflow and goes up in flames.

Either way the economy, which is the motor of the vehicle in the metaphor we have just jumped to, is currently being retooled to run on another type of combustible, one that will last much longer than the current blend of currency gasoline which is nothing more than flammable vapors.  If the currency, and the assets which back it have real value, the economic motor will be allowed to run at a more even pace.

Gold and Silver, ready or not, here we come.  Until then, the economy is sputtering and running on fumes.

Pearl Harbor

We cannot let today pass without a few brief words about Pearl Harbor.  Like 9/11, Pearl Harbor served as a national wake-up call.  Both served as the justifications for the largest military actions and suppressions of freedom (which seem to go hand in hand) that America has known. 


The explosion of the USS Shaw during the attack on Pearl Harbor, courtesy of the US National Archives


As this day that lives in infamy passes, we pause to honor those who perished in these events and the subsequent military actions which occurred as a result of these events.  May they rest in peace, and may mankind learn to avoid the suffering and sacrifices they had to endure at all costs.

War is not necessary and must be undertaken only after every other attempt to engage and deter an aggressor has been exhausted.  It is an act of desperation, not a form of economic stimulus, and it troubles us that the widespread loss of life and property has been referred to as the force which lifted the US out of the great depression.

Those who hold to such a theory are not only following an indefensible logic, they are hurling the ultimate insult to men and women who have fought to defend Freedom throughout history.  For any “stimulus” which has been observed is not the result of the decision of a politician to go to war, rather, it is a result their tireless efforts and indomitable spirits which lifted this and many other countries from the ashes of war.

We pray that more of these heroic efforts and indomitable spirits will not be squandered in Persia.

Stay tuned and Trust Jesus.

Stay Fresh!

David Mint

Email: davidminteconomics@gmail.com

P.S.  For more ideas and commentary please check out The Mint at http://www.davidmint.com/

Key Indicators for December 7, 2011

Copper Price per Lb: $3.53
Oil Price per Barrel:  $100.51

Corn Price per Bushel:  $5.82  
10 Yr US Treasury Bond:  2.12%
FED Target Rate:  0.08%  ON AUTOPILOT, THE FED IS DEAD!

Gold Price Per Ounce:  $1,742 PERMANENT UNCERTAINTY

MINT Perceived Target Rate*:  2.00%
Unemployment Rate:  8.6%
Inflation Rate (CPI):  -0.1%
Dow Jones Industrial Average:  12,020  

M1 Monetary Base:  $2,155,200,000,000 RED ALERT!!!  THE ANIMALS ARE LEAVING THE ZOO!!!
M2 Monetary Base:  $9,627,300,000,000 YIKES UP $1 Trillion in one year!!!!!!!

The First of December: A poem, a memory, and a lesson

12/1/2011 Portland, Oregon - Pop in your mints…

The first of December has come.  Contrary to “political” belief, the first of December would have arrived even if the large European bank which caused all the global fake money shuffling amongst western Central Banks to occur yesterday had been allowed to fail.

Nature cares not whether a man or woman in New York or Frankfurt raise a finger to populate a spreadsheet with a number representing something that does not exist but as a figment of the popular imagination.  The sun would have set and a great majority of the world would have been none the wiser, and likely better off.

Make no mistake, the actions taken by Central Banks are made for the benefit of very few to the detriment of a great many.  For this reason, we have called it Man’s Greatest Catastrophe.

The first of December always brings with it a fond memory from our youth here at The Mint. 

Some 20 years ago we were in the midst of our junior year of high school.  Like many our age, we preferred hanging out with friends to completing our assigned homework.  A winter’s evening of that year found us doing the former while ignoring the latter.

On that particular evening, however, we were concerned.  We had to write a poem for a class in which we were struggling the next day.  At the time, it seemed a monumental task, made all the more impossible by leaving the task to the last minute. 

We shared the dilemma with our friends that evening as we were excusing ourselves early in order to work on the poem at home.

A dear friend of our spoke up:  “What does the poem need to be about?”

“Nature,” we replied.

“Hang on a minute,” replied our friend as he gathered pencil and paper and began to write.  Within five minutes, he handed me the draft of a poem and said, “There, now you can stick around a bit longer!”

We were stunned, not only at the unselfishness of our friend, but at the eloquent words which he came up with in such a brief time.  Our teacher, failing to see the genius and beauty in the poem, gave a merely average grade and forced us to revise and extend it.  The subsequent revision, as we recall, severely diluted the beauty of the original five stanzas and attempted to resolve something that was better left to the reader to resolve.

Courtesy of Wildlifearchives.com

Like so many things in life, an abundance of solutions robs people of the opportunity to think for themselves.  Between television, sermons, university lectures, and government policies, life is diminished for many by listening to the voices of men in place of the sacred dialogue between a man and his God.

Our friend’s poem allowed for this dialogue.

We hope to one day be able to locate the manuscript of his masterpiece to share it with you.  It is appropriately titled “The First of December” and is a moving description of a wintry scene witnessed by a man who is soon caught up in the wonder of it all.  He then abruptly realizes that all that he is witnessing is occurring and will continue to occur, without his intervention, long after he is gone.

The realization humbles him.

We leave you with the last stanza which is forever etched in our memory:

“Now I must go,
But I’ll always remember,
Life in the cold,
On the first of December”

Stay tuned and Trust Jesus.

Stay Fresh!

David Mint

Email: davidminteconomics@gmail.com

P.S.  For more ideas and commentary please check out The Mint at http://www.davidmint.com/

Key Indicators for December 1, 2011

Copper Price per Lb: $3.53
Oil Price per Barrel:  $100.14

Corn Price per Bushel:  $5.95  
10 Yr US Treasury Bond:  2.12%
FED Target Rate:  0.08%  ON AUTOPILOT, THE FED IS DEAD!

Gold Price Per Ounce:  $1,744 PERMANENT UNCERTAINTY

MINT Perceived Target Rate*:  2.00%
Unemployment Rate:  9.0%
Inflation Rate (CPI):  -0.1%
Dow Jones Industrial Average:  12,020  

M1 Monetary Base:  $2,155,200,000,000 RED ALERT!!!  THE ANIMALS ARE LEAVING THE ZOO!!!
M2 Monetary Base:  $9,627,300,000,000 YIKES UP $1 Trillion in one year!!!!!!!

Central Banks Coordinate USD Funding actions, the final act of currency homogenization is underway

11/30/2011 Portland, Oregon - Pop in your mints…

Living on the West Coast, there are two things which we take for granted here at The Mint.  First, that viewing Twitter is the quickest way to take a pulse of what is going on in the financial world.  Second, that we are, by virtue of our location, jumping into the financial news of the day when it is half over in New York and finished in Europe, allowing us not only to see the news but also the effect of the news on these markets.

With these two givens, we often pen our thoughts as a sort of digestion (or indigestion, as the case may be) of the events which are currently unfolding.  Such is the case today.

The Final Act

We’d barely had time to collect our scattered thoughts as news came that the final act of the tragedy that is the world’s financial system circa 2011 appears to be underway.  This morning, numerous tweets announcing that coordinated action amongst western central banks, specifically the Federal Reserve and its counterparts in Canada, Japan, Switzerland, and England, had been taken.  The action was taken to rush a fresh supply of cheap US Dollars to the ECB in time for the ECB to prevent a major European bank from imploding today.

Our guess is that the yet unnamed bank is BNP Paribas and by extension its many counterparties.  Any large French bank would be a candidate and we are just guessing that it would be the le grand chat.

The USD got torpedoed in today's coordinated action

As further evidence of the final act being underway, we see that the Federal Reserve suspended its POMO (Permanent Open Market Operation) for today until December 2^nd.  Not coincidentally, this latest operation was to withdraw liquidity from the US dollar system on a day on which apparently the system was calling for more.

To simplify what has happened for our fellow taxpayers we offer the following executive summary: 
Today is the final day of a calendar month, a day when accounts must be settled.  A large bank in the Euro zone did not have enough US Dollars with which to pay back its short term loans to other banks.  It turned to the ECB, which did not have enough US Dollars to backstop the large bank.  The ECB, then turned to the Federal Reserve, which quickly shifted gears from suck to blow and confirmed, once again, that it will print money any time there is a liquidity crunch, anywhere in the western world.

The FED will now wait until the dust settles on December 2^nd to see how much liquidity it can withdraw from the system without imploding it.  To them we say: good luck.

As longsuffering Mint readers are already aware, a debt based currency regime, which is erroneously referred to as a monetary system, relies on the infinite creation of debt along with its continued acceptance in place of money proper in order for the game to continue.  Once either of those conditions ceases to exist, it indicates that a majority no longer have confidence in the currency regime.  In other words, the currency regime has failed.

The western central banks appear to momentarily have their streams crossed, and in a pointless effort to homogenize interest (and by extension foreign exchange) rates, will increasingly take this sort of “coordinated action” until their currencies act and trade as one. 

A JP Morgan note on this most recent coordinated action highlights the fact that the Federal Reserve not only will lend dollars to these Central Banks at a discount, the foreign Central Banks will in turn lend their respective currencies to the Federal Reserve at a discount on demand.  This gives further credence to the fact that the system has already failed and is in retreat, with the Central Banks themselves left passing their currencies and credits amongst themselves and their member banks.

Once this is homogenization process is complete; a severe devaluation of the homogenized currency will take place which will leave any holder or the homogenized currency(s) as a savings device substantially poorer and the holders of real assets better off on a relative basis.

However, on balance, the world as a whole grows poorer every day that the centralized currency regime is allowed to continue its violently enforced monopoly on currency issuance.

Money proper was never meant to be centralized and controlled by a single entity, and the current system which engenders this centralization is exploding before our very eyes.  Yet it will not go without a fight.  Recent events in the Middle East and Iran indicate that yet another physical fight to expand this failed system may be at hand.

It is a further expression of the Might Makes Right ideology, and it is time to pray for the peace of Israel.
Stay tuned and Trust Jesus.

Stay Fresh!

David Mint

Email: davidminteconomics@gmail.com

P.S.  For more ideas and commentary please check out The Mint at http://www.davidmint.com/

Key Indicators for November 30, 2011

Copper Price per Lb: $3.56
Oil Price per Barrel:  $100.17

Corn Price per Bushel:  $6.01  
10 Yr US Treasury Bond:  2.07%
FED Target Rate:  0.08%  ON AUTOPILOT, THE FED IS DEAD!

Gold Price Per Ounce:  $1,747 PERMANENT UNCERTAINTY

MINT Perceived Target Rate*:  2.00%
Unemployment Rate:  9.0%
Inflation Rate (CPI):  -0.1%
Dow Jones Industrial Average:  12,046  

M1 Monetary Base:  $2,095,600,000,000 RED ALERT!!!  THE ANIMALS ARE LEAVING THE ZOO!!!
M2 Monetary Base:  $9,664,500,000,000 YIKES UP $1 Trillion in one year!!!!!!!