Showing posts with label gold. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gold. Show all posts

2013-02-18

Fancy that!

For about a year now, as a mental exercise, I have tried to think and, more importantly to feel in my gut, differently about my meager pension and bank savings.

I have never paid much attention to daily news reports about the fluctuating prices of stocks, or bonds, or mutual funds, or real estate, or commodities. I've never owned much of any of them except for a share in our house.

My miserably few savings are sitting at the bank, in simple cash, as an ordinary expense account.

What I began doing, however, in June 2011, is to 'virtually' track the value of that bit of cash as if I had cleverly converted it into gold and bitcoin back then, in June 2011.

As the months creep by, I've been intrigued to notice that my wee bit of capital, had I allowed it to simply stagnate as inert gold and electronic bitcoin, would now be worth quite a few more dollars.

Conversely, my little pool of hard earned cash, even including accumulated interest, could not possibly buy the amount of gold or bitcoin it could have in June 2011.

Fancy that.

2013-02-13

Bitcoin matters, folks. A lot!

Greetings everyone.

It's been a while since I've posted here. Six months ago I suddenly tired of what Facebook had become and decided to re-evaluate Twitter. In the process, I'm sorry to say, I abandoned this blog ... and you too for a while.

Well, recent encounters with the worlds of finance, parcel post, banking and service industries in general have drawn me back to you. I'm furious, frustrated, and looking forward to your comments.

Two weeks ago, for the first time in decades, I needed to receive and send some money to two distant acquaintances. My bank insisted their 'wire transfer' service would meet my needs. For fees between $25.00 and $47.50 they could deliver the money within three days. They said.

Now, understand, I'm not talking about shipping actual physical currency here. No dollar bills, no metal coins, no gold bullion or anything like that. Just electrons. Bits and bytes traveling as electronic pulses at the speed of light over satellites and fiber optic cables.

Three days!

Now get this. The incoming wire to me, originally sent on December 28th, 2012 for $500, ended up as only $429.75. That was due to $70.25 in intermediary correspondent banking fees. But in addition to that, the process gobbled up two and a half working days of my time chasing the transaction after my bank 'lost it' in a manual sorting queue, following which it took a total of 46 days to arrive!

The outgoing transfer did get to its destination within 48 hours as promised, but it also cost an outrageous $47.75 in fees and I wasted an hour and sixteen minutes standing at a teller window in my local bank before bank staff figured out how to complete the task using their slow-as-mollasses-in-February computer systems.

Now get this.

Yesterday, without leaving my home even for a moment, without even getting dressed, I sent $ 273.87 to a business colleague in San Diego California. The transfer took me 47 seconds. My colleague acknowledged receipt in two minutes and fourteen seconds. And the total cost was ZERO! Nada! Zip. Nothing. I didn't even have to convert from CAD to USD.

How did I do it? One word: *Bitcoin* !

Now if you can give me one good reason why banks, credit cards, PayPal and Western Union shouldn't be scared shitless of this stuff, I'll give you an ear full of reasons why Amazon, eBay, Craigslist and Ottawa's Metro Glebe grocery store should start accepting Bitcoin as one of their favourite payment methods.

2011-09-23

Compounding Idiocy

German taxpayers are idiots.

They are furious because they think their taxes are going to help Greeks.

They have been fooled into believing their precious Euros will be applied to fixing a Corinthian bridge, paving a Spartan road, or feeding a homeless Athenian. Some Germans think it would be better to revert to controlling their own old currency, undiluted or contaminated by greasy Mediterranean Euros.

Don’t they realize they are being lied to just as much as the rest of us? The German Government isn’t taking existing money from tax revenues to give to Greece. They are borrowing it!

Every cent is channeled through the machinery of international finance in the form of extended credit and loan guarantees known as bailouts. Don’t they understand these are just more ‘debt’ owed to the same lenders, as all the previous loans were.

The fact is we are all German. We are all Greek. We are all idiots.

So long as the world’s financial institutions are chartered and structured as they are now, every cent of so-called bailout money goes first to 'service' existing loans, i.e. to pay the accumulated interest layered onto all previous interest. Not one penny will reach Greece. Greece will only go further and further into debt, owing more and more interest, until they collapse from exhaustion. They will then awake to find the lenders have not only pocketed all the interest that has already been paid, but that they now own all the assets pledged as collateral to obtain the original loan.

Are you really still distracted by interest rates being so low for a while? Don’t you see that's how they keep us hooked? It’s not the current rate Dummy, it's the accumulation!

Do you still think this is about Greece? Do you think the Arabian Spring is about Arabia or that the anger in the streets will remain in Athens and Cairo?

Wake up folks.

Compounding!

Lending is OK. Charging a service fee to cover expenses and even make a profit during the loan is OK. But charging and accumulating additional interest on the interest itself is compounding.

Compounding!

Repeatedly charging new interest, not on the original loan, but on past interest, operates like a giant global funnel collecting more and more cream from the world economy into a reservoir of obscene wealth and hoarding by the lenders and their legislative lackeys, the Governments that manage the guns that enforce the eviction orders when the compound interest isn’t paid.

That is why sheriffs enforce mortgage foreclosures. That is why the United States military operates in over a hundred debtor countries around the world: to enforce transfer of ownership to the lenders after interest defaults.

Greece is not sinking under the weight of borrowing. Nor have the United States of America used their trillions of dollars of debt to repair roads and bridges. None of us is sinking under the weight of our original loans nor even the interest charged on those initial loans. We are sinking under the weight of additional interest charged on earlier interest, manufactured out of thin air by the lenders.

Compounding!

Why do we pay at least twice as much on our mortgages as our houses are worth?

Compounding!

What are people walking away from when they default on their mortgage and lose their house?

Compounding!

What will Greece walk away from when they finally wake up and default on their sovereign debt?

Compounding!

Why are all currencies losing value compared to real resources, materials and services?

Compounding!

Why will the riots in the streets of Athens, Cairo, Damascus and Sana’a spread to London, Shanghai, Detroit and Los Angeles between 2012 and 2015?

Compounding!

There is a human, global and unprecedented revolution brewing. Commentators who dare point it out are being ignored or ridiculed. By the time they are also being persecuted it will be too late. The Banks, insurance companies, pension plans and most of the world's currencies will also have defaulted.

Human beings will finally recognize and revolt against compounding, but by then the former Lenders will have closed shop and waltzed off with legal ownership of the underlying real assets.

There, you have it in a nutshell.

Compounding until default leads to ownership by the lender.

What remains to be seen is whether the former lenders, the financial institutions that invented compound interest, foreclosure and transfer of ownership, can maintain their current influence over the warriors that enforce that ownership.

Will government and finance remain one? Totalitarian government and financial institutions brazenly and transparently control information.

Don't you understand the roles played by Dick Cheney and Carl Rove? Are you mysteriously sickened by how Barack Obama has so inexplicably betrayed his promise?

I'm with the people who are demanding genuine regime change. The one that really matters. Athens, Cairo, Beijing, London and soon to be New York.

Now you have the answer.

Compounding.

Come talk to me in 2015.

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