Global oil supply can weather Iran sanctions, Obama says

US President Barack Obama vowed Friday to implement tough sanctions on Iran, citing rising production and strategic reserves as alternatives to Iranian oil and boosting speculation that some nations plan to tap into emergency stockpiles this year.

President Barack Obama vowed on Friday to forge ahead with tough sanctions on Iran, saying there was enough oil in the world market - including emergency stockpiles - to allow countries to cut Iranian imports.

In his decision, required by a sanctions law he signed in December, Obama said increased production by some countries as well as "the existence of strategic reserves" helped him come to the conclusion that sanctions can advance.

"I will closely monitor this situation to assure that the market can continue to accommodate a reduction in purchases of petroleum and petroleum products from Iran," he said in a statement. Read more......

Brace For “Massive Wealth Destruction”

Reminiscent of the 1970s and the U.S. fiscal and monetary conditions which soared gold from $35 to $875 per ounce by Jan. 1980, Marc Faber, author of the Gloom Boom Doom Report warned investors of the dire implications of the world’s central banks presently engaged in a global currency war.

But unlike the 1970s and the problems with the U.S. dollar, this time, in addition to the dollar, the euro, pound sterling and yen are also devaluing against everything of tangible value. And the speed at which these currencies depreciate in the coming years will most likely dwarf the decade which included the Vietnam War, Middle East conflicts, U.S. budget deficits and resulting stagflation. Get my next ALERT 100% FREE

“Somewhere down the line we will have a massive wealth destruction that usually happens either through very high inflation or through social unrest or through war or credit market collapse,” he told CNBC, Monday. “Maybe all of it will happen, but at different times.” Read more......

Panorama: Poor America

Panorama's Hilary Andersson comes face to face with the reality of poverty in America and finds that, for some, the last resort has become life in a tented encampment.

Just off the side of a motorway on the fringes of the picturesque town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, a mismatched collection of 30 tents tucked in the woods has become home - home to those who are either unemployed, or whose wages are so low that they can no longer afford to pay rent.

Conditions are unhygienic. There are no toilets and electricity is only available in the one communal tent where the campers huddle around a wood stove for warmth in the heart of winter.

Ice weighs down the roofs of tents, and rain regularly drips onto the sleeping campers' faces.

Tent cities have sprung up in and around at least 55 American cities - they represent the bleak reality of America's poverty crisis. Read more.....

How Do I Buy Gold and Silver?

I am hearing more and more questions about how to buy gold and silver:

• How do you buy gold and silver?
• Why should I buy gold and silver?
• What kind of gold and silver should I buy?
• What is the difference between numismatic and bullion coins?
• Which of these should I buy?
• Where can I buy gold and silver?

Including the following important questions:

Will the government confiscate my gold and silver?
Can the government make owning gold illegal?
How do I know if my gold and silver dealer is reputable?
Do buyers get some kind of confirmation that what they are buying from these shops is real and certified?

These are just some of the questions I will try to answer in this post.

Why You Should Own Gold and Silver
First off, why should you own precious metals? Read this:

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. Read more.....

My Prediction of a Global Economic Depression by 2012 Is Being Terribly Vindicated

In 2009, I published a short book entitled "Global Economic Forecast 2010-2015: Recession Into Depression." At the time I made my original forecast, sovereigns across the globe were accumulating massive levels of public debt, unprecedented in economic history, with supposedly two objectives in mind: 1.) Stabilize the world's banking and financial systems, which were in danger of total collapse after the implosion of Lehman Brothers and the near extinction of other investment banks. 2.) Compensate for a fall-off in private sector demand through stimulus spending in order to halt the free-fall contraction in GDP.

The policymakers cheered their actions, which essentially transferred the bad debts of the private sector onto the public's balance sheet, and created a new modality in sovereign fiscal policy, which I named "structural mega-deficits." I did not share the optimism of the policymakers in the United States, United Kingdom and across the Eurozone. The premise of my forecast was that this massive rise in public debt to GDP ratios among the advanced economies would at best buy, at very high cost, a short period of stabilization at a level below peak economic performance. Eventually, however, the level of sovereign debt would exceed the capacity of the afflicted economies to sustain, leading to a full-fledged sovereign debt crisis towards the latter part of 2011. This would precipitate, by 2012, a global economic depression. Read more......

The Worst Economic Recovery Since The Great Depression

The record of President Obama’s first three years in office is in, and nothing that happens now can go back and change that. What that record shows is that President Obama, with his throwback, old-fashioned, 1970s Keynesian economics, has put America through the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression.

The recession started in December, 2007. Go to the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org) to see the complete history of America’s recessions. What that history reveals is that before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.

When President Obama entered office in January, 2009, the recession was already in its 13th month. His responsibility was to manage a timely, robust recovery to get America back on track again. Based on the historical record, that recovery was imminent, within a couple of months or so. Despite widespread fear, nothing fundamental had changed to deprive America of the long term, world-leading prosperity it had enjoyed going back 300 years. Read more......

Mike Nesbitt elected new Ulster Unionist leader by 80% margin

Saturday evening former Ulster Television anchor Mike Nesbitt was elected the new Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader over farmer John McCallister by a margin of 407 votes out of a total of 665: 536 to 129. That computes to roughly 80 percent to 20 percent, a larger margin than most had predicted. Nesbitt had neutralized his opponent's call for the party to go into opposition by calling for a committee to investigate the issue to be chaired by McCallister.  But the real thing that Nesbitt had going for himself was name recognition--probably the most crucial factor in politics. As a former news anchor/presenter he was well known to party members where McCallister was not, particularly east of the Bann River. Nesbitt's first challenge will be to stop the rot by deciding on a clear course of action for the party and an identity that the party has lacked since the rival Democratic Unionists stole the UUP's policies in 2006.

In the two-week leadership campaign he emphasized repair to the party rather than alliances with other political parties whether the Conservatives or the Democratic Unionists.  He will have to soon implement this before a skeptical media decides that the honeymoon period is over and starts sniping at him.   This means that he will have to avoid the type of "own goal" errors that his predecessor, Tom Elliott, made. As a media-savvy person Nesbitt should not find this too difficult.

Of some 2,000 party members eligible to vote in the election, which was held at the Ramada Hotel in Belfast during the party's annual general meeting, only 665--or less than a third--ended up attending the meeting and voting. This is a significant drop since the last election in 2010 when Elliott was elected with 939 votes cast. It may mean that the party's base is starting to abandon the party--either for other parties or simply joining the  ranks of the apathetic middle class in the province. This will have to be reversed if the party is to have a future.

There are two obstacles to the opposition option. First, there is no allowance in the Good Friday Agreement for a political opposition and hence no funding. Second, the UUP's natural partner in the opposition, the nationalist SDLP, is opposed to the opposition option. Before opposition can be seriously contemplated answers to both these problems must be found.