Gerald Celente thread

[barbaro]

Almost 1 hour, but well worth a watch.

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[barbaro]

Celente on the Jeff Rense radio show. A 30 minute interview.

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[barbaro]

More Celente. He's been busy. A little repetitive, but he has insights.

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[barbaro]

Another interview. This one a bit longer.

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[barbaro]

Europe and the spreading contagion. Austerity measures in Europe and in the US.

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[barbaro]

Watch this.

[Jet Gorgon]

^ Only $11 trillion? Unfortunately, I believe him, but made in America days are over with union wages.

[barbaro]

^ Union membership is less than 8% of the US workforce.

Here is part 1:



Part 2:

[Jet Gorgon]

^ Union membership is less than 8% of the US workforce.

Is that coz the mfg they worked for closed or moved overseas?

[barbaro]

^ Union membership is less than 8% of the US workforce.

Is that coz the mfg they worked for closed or moved overseas?

Part of the reason only in a few cases.

The main reason is that union or non-union, producing goods overseas means

cheaper wages
less mandatory fees like social security
OSHA
unemployment payments under the programs
lower overhead costs.

If you want to dicuss the topic of Celente, please do. But union have not been discussed at all by Celente. He has never discussed unions in the years I've been following him, nor at all in this thread.

[Jet Gorgon]

^ True on what I've heard from Celente. Food riots? Big customer boom at food banks these days.

[Rural Surin]

Lets see shall we?

I'm not a big fan of "experts" at the moment.

Indeed. One should always be suspicious of experts. Easier to apply the natural historical cycles.

[Panda]

Watch this.

One thing I disagree with Celente about is that a loss of faith in the world hegemony $US and its subsequent devaluation will be the end-game for USA.

Celente claims that mom and pop stores rather than supermarkets and family farms rather than corporate mass production farms were USAs strength back when the country was an economic powerhouse.

One of the main reasons why western standards of living have improved is because of greater efficiency in production. That is you have to work for less hours to get the things you need to live comfortably.

Ask yourself,-- would you do your shopping at a mom and pop store when a supermarket down the road is selling the same products 30% cheaper? Would you buy a shirt with a made in USA label for $20 when you could get the same thing made in China for $10? Lets get onto farming and food production now. USA and places like Australia can produce good quality rice for about the same price as developing countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan. We can do it because we are simply more efficient at farming despite the labour costs being much higher. In Thailand there are lots of mom and pop stores and there are lots of inefficient labour intensive farms, but the products are only cheap by our standards because their standard of living is so low compared to ours. That is they have to work a heck of a lot longer to get the basic essentials they need to live.

A return to mom and pop stores, family farms and self imposed "buy only US made" would mean a drastic cut in living standards for the people of USA, as it would for any other developed country.

When indeed the world community does lose faith in the $US hegemony, and the $US takes a big devaluation in trading power, it wont be a financial armageddon, it will simply make US made products more competitive on the domestic and international market. That will create more jobs, but at the cost of increased prices and a decreased standard of living for the citizens. Yet that is exactly what USA needs to get back on its feet and out of the debt spiral. Simply put, USA and many other developed nations have been living on debt and exporting their jobs to developing countries to maintain a standard of living that is not sustainable in the long term.

The economy of Greece didnt collapse because of a banking crisis, it collapsed because other countries stopped buying their debt on fears that Greece wouldn't be able to pay them back. USA however, will always be able to pay back its debt in $USs as it owns the worlds printing press. Just that paper money wont be worth as much in exchange for real goods and services.

But the real catch 22 is that because the US virtually owns and controls the worlds money supply, and therefore can never default on its paper debts, international wealth moves towards the safety of the $US when the world economy starts to look bad. This simply drives up the trading value of the $US, while removing capital from productive enterprise. A spiral that drives the value of productive enterprise in the stock market down and exacerbates USAs loss of productivity and subsequent unemployment problem.

The solution of course is to replace the current $US world paper money hegemony with a productivity based world trading currency. Something that has been talked about quite a lot in recent years. And something that must eventually happen.
When that day comes, and the $US is knocked off its world hegemony pedestal to face the rest of the world on equal economic terms, the $US will crash in trading value. It will be hard times for a lot of US citizens as prices for the previously cheap imported goods escalate to possibly double. Mega inflation and more job losses as consumer spending gets tighter. But short term pain for long term gain as the USA becomes more productive again. Something however no short term government wants to be left holding the can for. So, in the meantime the US government just keeps milking the international monetary system through their hegemony by printing more $s, going deeper into debt and spending more.

In the end USA will recover and settle at a level in line with its productivity rather than the current debt based standard of living. All be it with a lot of pain in the short term. But other countries will suffer also, especially those holding large amounts of US debt and large amounts of $US reserves. They will wake up to find that all the wealth they thought they held in $US paper money is now worth much less in terms of real tradable goods and services.

[Panda]

Gold Price - LIVE streaming gold price chart includes breaking news

I monitor gold prices and FX rates on a daily basis. The site listed above is one of the more useful sites with up to the minute real time changes.

The interesting thing consistently shown is that the BRIC countries move in unison with the $US (Brazil, Russia, India and China.) The HK$ and Japanese Yen also consistently move in unison with the $US.

Generally when gold goes up the $US goes down. But right at the moment both gold and the $US are on the increase against most currencies. Of course with the BRIC countries plus Japan and Hong Kong tagging along. The Aussie $ has had a decline in recent weeks as has the Euro. The Canadian $ is travelling OK but has slipped a little against the $US in recent weeks.
But the really interesting thing is that investment is going into the British Pound at the moment, -- its on the rise. It seems a lot of capital is going out of productive investment and into paper money of the traditional big players, USA, UK and Japan along with the BRIC countries and gold.

Things are up and down on a daily basis, but if this flight of capital into paper money (and gold) continues it will mean money going out of productive enterprise and into fiat currencies with no intrinsic value other than faith.

Could this be the beginning of a stock market crash and world economic crisis that Celente is talking about for 2010?

[Black Heart]

2016.....Re-arranging the chairs on the Titanic.

[harrybarracuda]

Is this one of those where they keep predicting something that's bound to happen eventually, then claim that their prediction was uncanny or some such shit?

[Deckwan]

I am a Celente fan, but like Marc Faber (who lives in Chang Mai I think) they are right but early. And they like most of us who saw all this coming totally underestimated how much can kicking the central banks and governments would do.

They can keep this shit show gong a LOOOOOONG time!