Ellis Martin Report with David Morgan March 23 2012

from OpportunityShow:

Ellis Martin interviews David Morgan in the second of a three part discussion. Mr. Morgan recently posted a video on Youtube entitled, “Silver is the Achilles Heel to the Entire Economic System” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHc4Vp4I9_I Mr. Martin chose to ask about the reasoning for putting together such a piece as well as attempting to identify the audience for such a message as well as the purpose for it. Is trading in silver and gold usurping the system? Dr. Ron Paul weighs in before Congress and Chairman Bernanke on the subject in the referenced video.

Signs of recovery grow in housing market

The battered housing market looks to be on the mend as buyers make a tentative return and house prices stabilize.

Sales of new homes in February fell from January but jumped more than 11 percent compared with the same month last year and prices rose, according to data released on Friday that was in line with other recent signs of a slow recovery.

Big challenges lie ahead, most notably in the form of a glut of unsold properties - many of them foreclosures - and tight lending by banks. But even if the recovery is slow and bumpy, the worst of the six-year slump seems to be over.

"The housing market is slowly coming back. It's still a depressed market, but it's getting better. We have a long way to go," said Patrick Newport, an economist at Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts.

New home sales slipped 1.6 percent to a seasonally adjusted 313,000-unit annual rate in February, the lowest since October, but were up 11.4 percent in year-on-year terms, the Commerce Department said.

The median new home price jumped 8.3 percent to an eight-month high of $233,700. Compared with February last year, the rise was 6.2 percent.

The report rounded off a week of mixed U.S. housing data and followed a similar pattern seen in the bigger market for existing homes - sales also fell in February, but stayed close to their highest level in nearly two years and prices rose for the first time on a yearly basis since November 2010.

Realtors say they are seeing higher traffic volume and are moving more houses off the market than a few years ago.

"My listings are selling much more quickly compared to the past few years, even approaching 2007 pre-crash levels," said Lindsey Sanders, a Realtor with Muffley & Associates in Atlanta.

"I began seeing a meaningful uptick in open house traffic last summer and it has continued to improve. I think this is a combination of sellers finally becoming more willing to ask market prices for their homes instead of bubble-level prices."

Builders tell a similar story. An index measuring confidence among homebuilders held at a near four-year high this month and they anticipated an increase in sales over the next six months.

While the pace of home construction fell last month, permits for future projects approached a 3-1/2-year high. Much of the activity is concentrated in the multi-family segment, as demand for rentals soars.

SPOTTY RECOVERY

The recovery remains spotty. According to CoreLogic, for every two homes sold, there is one that could be foreclosed. It estimated the so-called shadow inventory of homes at 1.6 million in January, down from 1.8 million a year ago.

KB Home, the fifth-largest U.S. homebuilder, on Friday said net orders for new homes declined 8 percent in its first quarter as cancellations rose.

"Don't expect this to be a broad-based, rocket-ship recovery," said KB Homes Chief Executive Officer Jeff Mezger on an earnings call. "The overall housing market is better, but this is definitely a localized recovery ... and in some cases, it's a zip-code-by-zip-code recovery."

KB's order decline was in sharp contrast to the strong order growth reported by other U.S. homebuilders, including D.R. Horton, Pulte and Lennar, who have forecast an improving housing market.

While the pace of new home sales held above 300,000 units for a sixth straight month, they are just over a fifth of their 1.389 million unit peak reached in July 2005.

"Mindful that more healing needs to be done, we expect new home sales in 2012 to post their first annual increase in seven years, rising 12 percent," said Sam Bullard, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Last month, the inventory of new homes on the market was unchanged at a record low 150,000 units. At February's sales pace it would take 5.8 months to clear the houses from the market, up from 5.7 months in January.

New home sales last month surged in the Northeast and West but slumped in the South and Midwest.

New home sales account for about 7 percent of the overall housing market and face stiff competition from the used home segment despite low levels of stock.

"Buyers have been able to take their time as they have little fear that prices or rates will get away from them. Mortgage rates, though, are beginning to rise slowly and that could continue through the rest of the year," said Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pennsylvania.

"Add price increases to that and there is a little more urgency to the decision. So while investors may be disappointed by this report, I think better times are just about here so be a little more patient."

Bob Chapman - The Financial Survival - 23 March 2012

Bob Chapman - The Financial Survival - 23 March 2012 : the next week should be a very good week for gold , Frau Merckel of Germany said that Germany would not add or extend the money available for the bailouts of the PIIGS countries in southern Europe...the insiders know that the bailouts won't work for Greece

The Oil Conundrum Explained

The Oil Conun­drum Explained

Oil as a com­mod­ity has always been a highly valu­able early warn­ing indi­ca­tor of eco­nomic insta­bil­ity. Every con­ceiv­able ele­ment of our finan­cial sys­tem depends on the price of energy, from fab­ri­ca­tion, to pro­duc­tion, to ship­ping, to the consumer’s very abil­ity to travel and make pur­chases. High energy prices derail healthy economies and com­pletely dec­i­mate sys­tems already on the verge of col­lapse. Oil affects everything.

This is why oil mar­kets also tend to be the most mis­rep­re­sented in the main­stream finan­cial media. With so much at stake over the price of petro­leum, and the cost steadily climb­ing over the past year return­ing to dis­as­trous lev­els last seen in 2008, the Amer­i­can pub­lic will soon be look­ing for some­one to blame, and you can bet the MSM will do its utmost to ensure that blame is focused in the wrong direc­tion. While there are, indeed, mul­ti­ple rea­sons for the cur­rent high costs of oil, the pri­mary cul­prits are obscured by con­sid­er­able disinformation…

The most promi­nent but false con­clu­sions on the expand­ing value of oil are cen­tered on asser­tions that sup­ply is decreas­ing dra­mat­i­cally, while demand is increas­ing dra­mat­i­cally. Nei­ther of these claims is true…

The sup­ply side of the oil equa­tion is the absolute last fac­tor that we should be wor­ried about at this point. In fact, global oil use since the credit cri­sis of 2008 has tum­bled dra­mat­i­cally. This decline accel­er­ated at the end of 2011 and the begin­ning of 2012 all while oil prices rose:

http://www.energyasia.com/public-stories/markets-world-oil-demand-fell-3...

In its Feb­ru­ary Oil Mar­ket Report, the Inter­na­tional Energy Agency (IEA) fore­cast a reduc­tion in the growth of demand into the Spring of 2012, despite reports from the main­stream media that oil prices were spik­ing due to “recov­ery” and “high demand”. Simul­ta­ne­ously, the IEA reported that petro­leum inven­to­ries rose to the high­est lev­els since Octo­ber, 2008:

http://omrpublic.iea.org/currentissues/full.pdf

The Baltic Dry Index, which mea­sures global ship­ping rates and the demand for freight in gen­eral, has fallen off a cliff in recent months, hov­er­ing near his­toric lows and sig­nal­ing a sharp decline in world demand for raw mate­ri­als used in pro­duc­tion. A fall in the BDI has on mul­ti­ple occa­sions in the past been a pre­dic­tive indi­ca­tor of stock mar­ket chaos, includ­ing that which struck in 2008 and 2009. A sharply lower BDI means low global demand, which should, tra­di­tion­ally, mean decreas­ing prices:

http://investmenttools.com/futures/bdi_baltic_dry_index.htm

So, sup­ply is high across the board, inven­to­ries are stocked, and demand is weak. By all com­mon mar­ket logic, gaso­line prices should be plum­met­ing, and far more Amer­i­cans should be smil­ing at the pump. Of course, this is not the case. Prices con­tinue to rise despite defla­tion­ary ele­ments, mean­ing, there must be some other fac­tors at work here caus­ing infla­tion in prices.

Iron­i­cally, stock mar­ket activ­ity in the Dow has now come under threat from this infla­tion­ary trend in oil. Ris­ing energy costs have essen­tially put a cap on the epic explo­sion of equi­ties, and many main­stream ana­lysts now lament over this Catch-22. The prob­lem is that these investors and pun­dits are oper­at­ing on the assump­tion that the Dow bull mar­ket is legit­i­mate, and that the rally in oil is some­how an exten­sion of a “health­ier econ­omy”. This ver­sion of real­ity, I’m afraid, is about as far from the truth as one can stretch…

In the candy coated world of Oba­ma­nomics, high priced stocks are a valid sig­nal of eco­nomic growth, and oil is ris­ing due to demand which extends from this growth. In the real world, stock val­ues are com­pletely fab­ri­cated, espe­cially in light of record low trade vol­ume over the past sev­eral months:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/19/markets/trading_volume/index.htm

Low trade vol­ume means very few investors are cur­rently par­tic­i­pat­ing in active trade. This lack of invest­ment inter­est in the mar­kets allows big play­ers (such as inter­na­tional bankers) to use their mas­sive cap­i­tal to swing stocks whichever way they choose, even to the point of cre­at­ing false mar­ket ral­lies. Throw in the fact that the pri­vate Fed­eral Reserve (along with help­ful hands-off approach by our gov­ern­ment) has been con­stantly infus­ing these banks with fiat printed from thin air, and one can hardly take the cur­rent ascen­sion of the Dow or the S&P very seriously.

Another issue which should be stressed is the renewed ten­sions in the Mid­dle East, namely, the very dis­tinct pos­si­bil­ity of an Israeli or U.S. strike in Iran, and the pos­si­bil­ity of NATO involve­ment in Syria (which has exten­sive ties to Rus­sia and Iran). Cer­tainly, this is a tan­gi­ble dan­ger that would have unimag­in­able con­se­quences in global oil mar­kets. How­ever, the threat of grow­ing war in the Mid­dle East is in no way a new one, and has been ever present for the past decade. It hardly explains why despite hol­low demand and extreme sup­ply, the price per bar­rel of oil has been an unstop­pable ris­ing tide. Attempts by Saudi Ara­bia to reverse infla­tion­ary trends by promis­ing increased pro­duc­tion in the wake of Iran tur­moil has so far been ineffective.

Simul­ta­ne­ously, large oil reserves have been dis­cov­ered off the coast of Greece:

http://www.balkanalysis.com/greece/2010/12/08/greek-companies-step-up-offshore-oil-exploration-large-reserves-possible/

Off the coast of Ireland:

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/ireland-on-the-verge-of-an-oil-and-gas-bonanza-679889.html

Mas­sive fields in Mon­go­lia have been uncovered:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2009–08/08/content_8544985.htm

And of course, the vast shale oil fields in North Dakota and Mon­tana are finally being tapped:

http://www.mtpioneer.com/archive-July-oil-reserves.htm

Oil sup­ply has been ample and large oil reserves are being dis­cov­ered yearly. Spec­u­la­tion would be the next obvi­ous assumed cul­prit, and there are cer­tainly some sig­nals of such activ­ity. Oil spec­u­la­tors tra­di­tion­ally use the forced accu­mu­la­tion of oil inven­to­ries to reduce mar­ket sup­ply and arti­fi­cially increase prices. Inven­to­ries have indeed been high. How­ever, as pre­vi­ously stated, demand for oil has been sta­tic or fallen in most coun­tries around the world since 2008, and there has been NO petro­leum short­ages due to manip­u­lated mar­kets. In fact, there have been no petro­leum short­ages period. Spec­u­la­tion has the poten­tial to cause sharp but short term shifts in mar­kets, but one must take into account the long term trend of a par­tic­u­lar com­mod­ity to under­stand the root cause of its increas­ing or decreas­ing value. Again, inad­e­quate sup­ply is NOT the trig­ger for the ongo­ing oil price prob­lem, whether by threat of war, or by reduc­tion through speculation.

This schiz­o­phrenic dis­con­nec­tion between the stock mar­ket, and oil, and true sup­ply and demand, is, though, a symp­tom of one very dis­turb­ing ill­ness lurk­ing in the back­wa­ters of the U.S. fis­cal blood­stream; dol­lar devaluation.

We all under­stand that the Fed­eral Reserve has been engaged in non-stop quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing mea­sures in one form or another since 2008. We don’t know exactly how much fiat the Fed has printed in that time, and won’t know until a full and com­pre­hen­sive audit is finally enacted, but we do know that the amount is at the very least in the tens of tril­lions (be sure to check out page 131 of the GAO report below to find their break­down of Fed QE activ­i­ties. This is just the money print­ing that has been ADMITTED TO, in excess of $16 trillion):

http://www.gao.gov/assets/330/321506.pdf

The dol­lar is being thor­oughly squashed. Why is this not show­ing in the dol­lar forex index? The dol­lar index is yet another exam­ple of a use­less mar­ket indi­ca­tor, being that it mea­sures dol­lar value rel­a­tive to a bas­ket of world fiat cur­ren­cies, ALL of which also hap­pen to be in decline. That is to say, the dol­lar appears to be vibrant, as long as you com­pare it to sim­i­larly worth­less paper cur­ren­cies that are being degraded in tan­dem with the green­back. Once you begin to com­pare the dol­lar to com­modi­ties, how­ever, it soon shows its inher­ent weakness.

The dollar’s only sav­ing grace has long been its sta­tus as the world reserve cur­rency and its use as the pri­mary trade mech­a­nism for oil. This, how­ever, is changing.

Bilat­eral trade agree­ments between China, Rus­sia, Japan, India, and other coun­tries, espe­cially those within the ASEAN trad­ing bloc, are slowly but surely remov­ing the dol­lar from the game as these nations begin to replace trade using other cur­ren­cies, includ­ing the Yuan. I believe com­modi­ties, espe­cially oil, have been reflect­ing this trend for quite some time. The con­se­quences of the dollar’s ties to oil are detri­men­tal to all nations that con­sume petro­leum, and they are clearly mov­ing to insu­late them­selves from fur­ther devaluation.

Even after the release of strate­gic oil reserves back in the sum­mer of 2011 in an effort to dilute prices, and the announce­ment of an even larger pos­si­ble release of reserves this month, oil has not strayed far from the $100 per bar­rel mark. High Brent crude price have held for years, even after numer­ous promises from gov­ern­ment and media enti­ties admon­ish­ing what they called “spec­u­la­tion”, and promises of a return to lower energy costs. Not long ago, $100 per bar­rel oil was an out­landish premise. Today, it is com­mon­place, and some even con­sider it “afford­able” com­pared to what we may be fac­ing in the near future, all thanks to the steady decon­struc­tion of the last pil­lar of the U.S. econ­omy; the dol­lar, and its world reserve label.

Ulti­mately, no mat­ter how manip­u­lated and overindulged the stock mar­ket becomes, no mat­ter how many fiat dol­lars are injected to prop up our fail­ing sys­tem, the price of oil is the great game changer. As infla­tion is reflected in its price, and energy costs burn out of con­trol, the Dow will begin to fall, regard­less of any low vol­ume or quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing. In all like­li­hood, this conun­drum will be blamed on as many scape­goats as are avail­able at the moment, includ­ing Iran, or China, or Rus­sia, or Japan, etc. Each and every Amer­i­can, and espe­cially those involved in track­ing the econ­omy, will have to remind them­selves and the pub­lic that at bot­tom, it was the Fed­eral Reserve that cre­ated the con­di­tions by which we suf­fer, includ­ing cur­rency deval­u­a­tion and high oil prices, NOT some for­eign enemy.

The one pos­i­tive ele­ment of this entire dis­as­ter (if one can call any­thing “pos­i­tive” in this mess), is the man­ner in which the high price of oil tends to dash away the illu­sions of the com­mon cit­i­zen. It is an issue they sim­ply can­not ignore, because it affects every aspect of their lives in minute detail. Costly energy awak­ens the oth­er­wise igno­rant, and forces them to see the many dan­gers lurk­ing on the hori­zon. Hope­fully, this awak­en­ing will not be too lit­tle too late…

The Nine Stages Of Civilization – We’re In The Seventh ~ Apathy

A nation of apathetic and complacent spectators watch their world explode in between commercial breaks.

The United States is just over 230 years old and is now firmly entrenched in the seventh stage of all civilizations (Apathy) with only Dependence and eventually Bondage ahead of it. Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its eager hand

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through a nine stage sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacence to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again into bondage.

In our present Plutocracy we have just made the transition from complacency to national apathy ~ which will surely be followed by dependence on the state and eventually bondage by the state. As Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General, has said ~ ”We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.”

The obvious vehicle for this rapid shift in consciousness is FEAR and APATHY. FEAR, in actuality, is False Exaggerations Appearing Real (under the guise of National Security) but APATHY is a lack of interest and indifference and it has always been the Great American Sin.

Joseph Fort Newman, Atlantic Monthly, wrote about the Great American Sin of Apathy in October, 1922 ~ and it’s worth repeating now in March, 2012;

”What is the great American sin? Extravagance? Vice? Graft? No; it is a kind of half-humorous, good-natured indifference, a lack of “concentrated indignation” as my English friend calls it, which allows extravagance and vice to flourish. Trace most of our ills to their source, and it is found that they exist by virtue of an easy-going, fatalistic indifference which dislikes to have its comfort disturbed….The most shameless greed, the most sickening industrial atrocities, the most appalling public scandals are exposed, but a half-cynical and wholly indifferent public passes them by with hardly a shrug of the shoulders; and they are lost in the medley of events. This is the great American sin.”

Unless we as individuals, and then as a nation, conquer fear and apathy we are doomed to dependence and then bondage by a state ruled by the wealthy. That state of dependence is drawing near and only faith and the great courage of civil revolt and even civil disobedience can revitalize this nation ~ particularly with a major economic depression already underway.

Paul Fay, Real News, interviews Col. Lawrence Wilkerson on the fact that Obama, Panetta and Holder are undermining basic constitutional rights by justifying killing American citizens without judicial process and bypassing Congress in declaring war without congressional approval ~ and always under the guise of national security. Wilkerson expounds that the executive branch of the government has seized power contrary to the voice of the people which will eventually lead to tyranny ~ “The more power you accumulate, the more likely you will abuse it” 11 minute video:

And Tyranny and Dependence is the eighth step in the fall of civilizations ~ only to be followed by Bondage. In many ways George Orwell’s Oceania has nothing on 2012 America as Paul Joseph Watson wrote last year in Infowars.com ~ “Americans are now living in a society that in some cases is more draconian, more invasive and more Orwellian than the dystopian tyranny fictionalized in Orwell’s chilling classic Nineteen Eighty-Four. On almost every front, American citizens are under an equal or greater threat of abuse, control and more pervasive and high-tech surveillance than anything Winston Smith ever faced.”

And here’s the proof that Oceania is almost here ~ Wired magazine’s April cover story covers the current construction of the blandly named Utah Data Center ~ which is being built for the National Security Agency. “A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013…. It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration ~ an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.” Read full report ~

In other words, in just over one year, virtually anything one communicates through any traceable medium ~ which these days is virtually everything ~ will unofficially be property of the US government to deal with as it sees fit.

The codename of the project is Stellar Wind.

As Wired says, “there is no doubt that NSA has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.”

William Binney, a former NSA official as well as senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network, has gone on record (in Wired) to describe Stellar Wind, and offers the best summation of its consequences to all Americans ~ “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”.

And thus the stage will soon be set for America’s shift from Apathy to the eighth stage of a civilization’s collapse, Dependence on the State which will be quickly followed by Bondage to the State and Orwell’s prophetic words will finally become a reality ~ “There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live ~ did live, from habit that became instinct ~ in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

If you’re not outraged, you’re on life support.

Canadian Real Estate Craziness

Using a bunch of local firefighters are props behind him, F stood outside a firehall near Ottawa and tried to quell the global angst this pathetic blog had created. “I would like to see the (housing) market correct itself,” the elfin deity said. Regarding calls by the banks to murder the 30-year mortgage, and by academics to dump the 5% down payment, the finance minister said this was ‘a bit much,’ since banks are the ones who determine risk.

“We have bank executives in Canada saying ’You know, really the rules on insured mortgages should be tightened up’. They must forget that they are actually the ones that issue the mortgages — it’s their market, it’s not my market.”

Ah, if only that were true.

By every measure, Canada’s exceeded the orgiastic housing excess that preceded the American real estate implosion, including the government’s key role in making shelter unaffordable for the average family.

A greater proportion of our economy’s now dependent on building, selling and financing real estate than was ever the case in the US…

And look at this. The amount of exposure Canadians have to houses has exploded… (more)

Peter Schiff – Gold, Oil & The Fed’s Greatest Fear

from King World News:

With continued volatility in gold, silver, oil and stocks, today King World News interviewed Peter Schiff, CEO of Europacific Capital. Schiff told KWN it’s inflation that is causing the move in stocks. He also discussed gold and the mining shares, but first, here is what Schiff had to say about oil and the situation in Iran: “I hope we don’t get involved in Iran. Anytime we get more involved in the Middle-East we create more problems. Maybe the administration is looking for something to blame the high oil price on, rather than admit it’s excess money printing causing the problem.”

Read More @ KingWorldNews.com