Trend Alert- Breaking Point 2010 (Gerald Celente)

7 December 2009 — The first decade of the 21^st century is going out the same way it came in … with a bust and a bang.

• The dot-com bubble burst in 2000, and the Bailout Bubble will bust in 2010.

• 9/11 terror ushered America into the decade, and terror will strike again before the decade ends.

• The decade long wars waged by US and NAT0 against Afghanistan and Iraq are leading the world to the first Great War of the 21^st Century.

• The 20^th century belonged to America, in 2010 Empire America will be breaking apart. The signs are there for all to see.

World leaders and most economists see a very different future unfolding. They insist the financial crisis is over and recovery is on the way.

On the military front, America’s new Commander in Chief, Congress and the generals promised their war strategy will bring victory abroad and keep the homeland terror free.

Fed a steady diet of junk news du jour by the Cartoon News Networks, the general public remains largely oblivious or at best, grossly misinformed. As 2009 ends, the misadventures of Tiger Woods and the White House party crashers top the media menu.

Increased terror, escalating wars, economic calamity … these are just a few of the 2010 Top Trends featured and analyzed at length in our Winter Trends Journal that you will receive by early January.

In the meantime, to keep you alert, focused, and above all, prepared, within two weeks we will send you an overview of our 2010 Trend forecasts. It is important to have plans and strategies in place for the holidays, a time when so many are caught up in the spirit and paying little attention to the headlines.

Our high alert is not alarmism. Last year, just two days after Christmas, with most people in a holiday state of mind, Israel launched a major war against the Palestinians. There were a number of factors that could have led either to an instant economic meltdown or an escalation of the war beyond the Palestinian borders. Click here.

The worst was averted. Had it happened, only those who’d taken proactive measures at the first signs of major hostilities would have gone through the crisis unscathed. The trend lesson? War, terror and calamity are not set to time clocks. Anything can happen, anywhere, at anytime. Prepare for the unexpected. It is the close-combat state of mind.

In addition to the ominous forecasts, we also foresee a variety of social, health, environmental, entertainment, cultural, business and consumer trends that will be both profitable and transformational.

Publisher’s Note: If you have friends, family or acquaintances who still cling to “hope” and hope for “change”, you may consider giving them a holiday gift of hard facts, penetrating analyses and prescient forecasts … a subscription to the Trends Journal.

Regards,

Gerald Celente

Awaiting the Real Depression

Two bits of hot news on Friday – the employment report…and the action in the gold market.

According to the government, there were fewer people out of work in the month of November than there were in October. At least, that is the way the authorities tell it. The official jobless rate fell from its 26-year high of 10.2% down to a 26-year high of 10%. Good news, if you believe it’s the beginning of a trend.

The other big news is that gold fell $48. We’ll come back to that in a moment…

Elsewhere in the news, we find that bankers are lightening up – at least in their loans to speculators. Tony Jackson in The Financial Times says they’re at it again:

“US bankers are resuming their carefree habits as in the days of the credit boom. In lending to private equity, it seems they are once more issuing so called covenant-lite and payment-in-kind loans, whereby borrowers are freed from irksome conditions and can pay their annual interest by simply borrowing more. (more)

Options Signal Stock Peril as Analysts See Profits

Forecasts for the fastest U.S. earnings growth in 15 years are failing to convince options traders that the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index will extend its biggest rally since the 1930s.

S&P 500 options to protect against declines in stocks over the next year cost 22 percent more than one-month contracts at the end of last week, the highest since 1999, data compiled by London-based Barclays Plc and Bloomberg show. The gap shows concern that analyst estimates for record earnings by 2011 may prove exaggerated, endangering an advance that pushed the S&P 500 up 63 percent since March.

“It’s telling you that there’s severe anxiety about the future,” said Paul Britton, chief executive officer of New York-based Capstone Holdings Group LLC, which oversees about $1 billion. “People want to protect next year, and there’s a sense of urgency.” (more)

Lithium for 4.8 Billion Electric Cars Lets Bolivia Upset Market

The wind whips across a 3,900-square- mile expanse of salt on a desert plateau in Bolivia’s Andes Mountains. Plastic washtubs filled with an emerald-colored liquid rich in lithium dot the Uyuni Salt Flat, all the way to the volcanoes on the horizon.

Waist-high slabs of salt are piled around a pond that’s shimmering in the sun. Francisco Quisbert, an Indian peasant leader known as Comrade Lithium, sits inside a crumbling adobe building on the edge of the desert. He’s explaining how Bolivia, South America’s second-poorest country, will supply the world with lithium, which will be used in batteries that power electric cars.

“We have this dream,” Quisbert, 65, says. “Lithium could bring us prosperity.”

The world’s largest untapped lithium reserve -- containing enough of the lightest metal to make batteries for more than 4.8 billion electric cars -- sits just below Quisbert’s feet, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. (more)

Gold rally is not a bubble, mania stage ahead of us

By Doug Casey
Governments everywhere – prominently including the U.S., China, Britain, and Japan -- are creating hundreds of billions, even trillions, of new currency units. The backing, or “reserves,” for their various units are other currencies, mainly the U.S. dollar. The problem is that every one of the world’s currencies lacks an anchor in anything tangible; they’re all just floating abstractions.

Central bankers talk, idiotically, about replacing the U.S. dollar with the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) for use as an international reserve. The IMF isn’t even a government with police to prevent people from using alternatives to its SDRs. The idea is a complete non-starter. Entirely apart from that, the IMF will eventually be dissolved as a bankrupt shell. But that’s a story for another time. (more)

The Bank Job

Lloyd Blankfein—who was born poor in the South Bronx, put himself through Harvard, and became the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs in 2006, after 24 years at the firm—is a history buff, a lawyer, a wordsmith, and something of an armchair philosopher. On a Thursday in October—the very day when the firm announced it had made $8.4 billion in profits so far this year—he speculates whether Goldman would have survived the financial conflagration in the fall of 2008 entirely on its own, without any kind of help, implicit or explicit, from the government. “I thought we would, but it was a hell of a higher risk than I was happy with,” he says, sitting in his 30th-floor office in Goldman’s old headquarters, at 85 Broad Street, in Lower Manhattan. “As a result of actions taken [by the government], we were better off than we otherwise would have been. Was it dispositive? I don’t know. I don’t think so … but I don’t know.”

He adds, “If you ask, in my heart of hearts, do I think we would have failed … ” He pauses, then pulls out his trump card: at the height of the crisis, Warren Buffett agreed to invest $5 billion in Goldman Sachs. (more)

Grant: Dump Dollar, Return to Gold Standard

The dollar is a fundamentally damaged currency, and a return to the gold standard represents the best solution, says James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.

“A proper gold standard promotes balance in the financial and commercial affairs of participating nations,” Grant writes in The Wall Street Journal. “The pure paper system promotes and perpetuates imbalances.”

Investors around the world are losing faith in the dollar, he points out.

“It's not that the dollar is overvalued — economists at Deutsche Bank estimate it's 20 percent too cheap against the euro,” Grant says. (more)