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On Friday, the S&P 500 finished at an all-time high. It was the fourth all-time high in as many days. This year alone the S&P has hit 48 new highs. Since we finally broke through the 2007 pre-GFC highs in the summer of 2013 we’re now looking at more than 320 new highs in this bull market: That’s more than 15% of all trading days in this time. So for the past 7 years the U.S. stock market has reached a...

Last reply by knightx on Mon, 16 Aug 2021 02:54:44 +0000

Last reply by theshadowrealm on Mon, 16 Aug 2021 02:31:32 +0000

Nixon's Gold Treachery Made Me A Cynic

Authored by James Bovard via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Fifty years ago, on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. government would cease honoring its pledge to pay gold to redeem the dollars held by foreign central banks. Nixon declared he was taking “action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators.” But there was no way to defend the dollar against politicians. Nixon touted his default as therapy for his tormented fellow citizens, promising it would “help us snap out of the self-doubt, the self-disparagement that saps our energy and erodes our confidence in ourselves.” Nixon wrapped his decree with lofty political rhetoric, appealing to the nation’s “greatest ideals” and promising a “new prosperity” that “befits a great people.”

The dollar thus became a fiat currency – something which possessed value solely because politicians said so. Nixon spurred the Federal Reserve to create an artificial boom to boost his reelection campaign. To suppress the damage from a flood of new money, he imposed wage and price controls, making it a crime to raise prices without government permission.

At that time, I was working in a peach orchard in rural Virginia for 10 hours a day, reaping $1.40 an hour and all the peach fuzz I could take home on my arms and neck. Nixon’s wage controls doomed any chance of getting that raise to $1.45 an hour. But no loss – I was leaving that job soon to go back to high school. I was 15 at that time and an avid coin collector. I soaked up the rage at the reckless federal policies that permeated Coin News and other numismatic publications.  “Government as scoundrel” was the theme of many editorials and articles I read in those periodicals in the following months and years. I had no savvy on economics but my gut sense told me something was profoundly amiss. Nixon’s decree spurred my reading and researching. 

Nixon’s gold default was also a landmark for America’s rising economic and political illiteracy. In the era of this nation’s birth, currency was often recognized as a character issue – specifically, the contemptible character of politicians. Shortly before the 1787 Constitutional Convention, George Washington warned that unsecured paper money will “ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.” The Coinage Age of 1792 established gold and silver as the foundation for the nation’s currency and authorized a death penalty for anyone who debased the nation’s gold or silver coins.

Unfortunately, politicians later exempted themselves from penalties for debasing the currency. In 1933, the U.S. had the largest gold reserves of any nation in the world. But fear of devaluation spurred a panic, which President Franklin Roosevelt exploited to seize people’s gold. FDR denounced anyone who refused to turn in their gold as a “hoarder.” Any citizen caught with more than $100 in gold coins faced ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine. (The penalty was not as harsh the Soviet Union’s death penalty for anyone caught “hoarding” wheat from a collective farm.)

FDR asserted that banning private ownership of gold was necessary to give government “freedom of action” – which he quickly exploited by devaluing the dollar by 59% with a decree raising the value of gold from $20 an ounce to $35 an ounce. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau hailed the gold policy as part of the administration’s “plans for a restoration of public confidence,” but the de facto default on government debts set the precedent for boundless federal arbitrariness for the rest of the decade. FDR tried every trick to drive up prices, foolishly confident that a mere change in numerical prices would spawn prosperity. The resulting inflation was invoked in the early 1940s to help justify imposing payroll tax withholding.

In the mid-1960s, the dollar was under pressure from perennial federal deficit spending and President Lyndon Johnson responded by eliminating all the silver in new dimes and quarters. After severing the dollar’s link to silver, LBJ demanded that the Federal Reserve pump up the economy. He even summoned Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin to his Texas ranch and “physically beat him, he slammed him against the wall, and said, ‘Martin, my boys are dying in Vietnam, and you won’t print the money I need,'” according to Dallas Federal Reserve president Richard Fisher. Since LBJ didn’t murder Martin at his ranch, the media could continue to portray the Federal Reserve as “independent” of political control. The Fed accommodated LBJ sufficiently that the inflation rate more than tripled between 1964 to 1968, rising from 1.3% to 4.3%. The rising inflation set the scene for Nixon’s gold repudiation.

FDR’s prohibition on private gold ownership contained a loophole for rare coins with numismatic value. Luckily, the feds did not vigorously police that exemption. By 1973, I was buying Mexican and French gold pieces to save and to sell to high school classmates and others. After I got laid off from a construction job in the summer of 1974, I saw it as a sign from God (or at least from the market) that I should buy more gold. I liquidated most of my coin collection and put all my available cash into gold and also took out a consumer finance loan at 18% to purchase even more. That interest rate was the gauge of my blind confidence. I had been closely following gold prices and was convinced a price spike was coming. Nixon’s resignation in August did wonders for the price of gold.

I didn’t get rich but made enough to help cover my costs for sporadically attending Virginia Tech, with some money left over to pay for my first literary strikeouts. Though Nixon assured the nation in 1971 that “the effect of this action… will be to stabilize the dollar,” the “Nixon Shock” was “followed by a decade of one of the worst inflations of American history and the most stagnant economy since the Great Depression. The price of gold rose to $800 from $35,” as Lewis Lehrman noted. Americans have suffered 570% inflation since Nixon “stabilized” the dollar.

Nixon’s gold decree and other policies helped me recognize that politicians are far more perfidious than the media portrays. If the government would intentionally destroy the value of the currency, I wondered what else it was undermining. The Watergate scandal provided further evidence of “politician” as synonym for “damn rascal.” The dissolution of the Vietnam War clinched the case as Americans learned how presidents had conned the nation into a pointless Asian bloodbath. Gas shortages and gas lines beginning in late 1973 confirmed that any cadre of “best and brightest” in Washington was an optical illusion.

Fifty years after Nixon’s betrayal, America is again facing rapidly increasing inflation. The Biden administration is embracing almost boundless deficit spending in its quest to throw unrestricted free money at any non-millionaire who might vote for Democratic candidates. Most of the fawning media coverage on Biden policies is as economically illiterate as the cheerleaders for Nixon’s chicanery long ago. If the government continues on this path, it is only a question of time until fresh debacles result. But from the economic wreckage, a new generation of cynics may arise who do a far better job of putting politicians back on a leash.   

Tyler Durden Sun, 08/15/2021 - 22:30

Last reply by andy54hawken on Mon, 16 Aug 2021 02:16:09 +0000

Deep Diving For Metals: Visualizing Ocean Mining

The mining sector has been one of the biggest beneficiaries in the COVID-19 recovery.

Several countries’ recovery packages have ignited demand for commodities like copper, iron ore and lithium. Given that more metals are necessary for electrification and the clean energy transition, many companies are looking at an unexplored market: ocean mining.

Mining of the Deep Sea is still under study but metals are abundant on the seafloor. Reserves are estimated to be worth anywhere from $8 trillion to more than $16 trillion.

Visual Capitalist provides this infographic from Prospector provides a visual overview of the seabed mining process.

Down in the Depths

The most prolific area for ocean mining is the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and Mexico. Almost 20 international mining companies have contracts to explore the region which spans over 5,000 kilometers.

Most of the metals are found in potato-sized rock-like polymetallic nodules. Millions of years old, the nodules grow by absorbing metals from the seawater, expanding slowly around the core of shell, bone, or rock.

Source: The Pew Charitable Trusts

It is estimated that there are 21 billion tonnes of polymetallic nodules resting on the ocean floor in the CCZ, containing an estimated:

• 6 billion tonnes of manganese

• 226 million tonnes of copper – about 25% of land-based reserves

• 94,000 tonnes of cobalt – about six times as much as current land-based reserves

• 270 million tonnes of nickel – 100 times the annual global nickel production in 2019

Cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts are found on the sides of underwater mountain ranges and seamounts. Similar to nodules, these crusts form over millions of years as metal compounds in the water. Roughly 57% of them are located in the Pacific.

Polymetallic sulfide deposits formed after seawater seeps into volcanic rocks can be found along tectonic plate boundaries on the Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic Ocean.

How Does Ocean Mining Work?

Extraction of minerals from the seafloor is planned to involve either modified dredging (for nodules), cutting (for massive sulphides and crusts), and transport of the material as a slurry in a riser or basket system to a surface support vessel.

The mineral-bearing material is then processed in a ship (cleaning and dewatering – with the wastewater and sediment being returned to the ocean) and then transferred to a barge for transport to shore where it will be further processed to extract the target metals.

Towards a Greener Future

Growing demand for batteries to power electric cars and store wind and solar energy has driven up the cost of many metals and bolstered the business case for seabed mining.

According to a study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, producing battery metals from nodules could reduce emissions of CO² by 70-75%,  cut land use by 94% and eliminate 100% of solid waste.

Here is a look at how ocean and land mining compares:

 

Source: The Metals Company

 

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has so far approved 28 exploration contracts in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans, covering 1.3 million square kilometers of the ocean floor.

With many companies turning their eyes to the unexplored riches of the ocean, seabed mining could offer a wealth of untapped minerals on the ocean floor.

Tyler Durden Sun, 08/15/2021 - 22:00

Last reply by snubnoze on Mon, 16 Aug 2021 01:57:38 +0000

In reply to Mikey.

In business as in life, you don’t get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate.

If that makes you uncomfortable or you’re not good at it, then be prepared to make less $$ and pay more for everything. There’s a reason that all the people at the top of business are low on the agreeable personality spectrum.

Last reply by ggower on Mon, 16 Aug 2021 01:35:12 +0000

I spend every last possible second of my time with my children and I still only get about 2 hours a day with them (during the week). I leave for work before they wake up (4am) and I don’t get home until 6:30pm. I keep them up as late as I possibly can just to get more time with them but they usually can’t go past 8:30/9:00pm since they wake up early as well (5am when my husband gets ready for work).

I think you would be surprised how many parents have long commute times (1hr +) – depending on where you are in the country obviously. The vast majority of my coworkers commute a lot longer than 30 minutes – myself (though my commute is egregiously long and definitely NOT the norm). Personally I would kill 30 minute commute.

Unfortunately I also have a job that requires a lot of prep work at home. I try not to do work at home during the week so I can dedicate my home time to my kids but that means on Sundays I have about 8-10 hours worth of prep work to do. So I get 2 hours 5 days a week, the entire day in Saturdays and less than a 1/2 day on Sundays. Also, quitting work for 3 years is not realistic in the slightest. We need 2 incomes to survive.

A pesar de la reciente recuperación, los impactos a largo plazo de la pandemia siguen siendo inciertos.

Last reply by tfldonut on Mon, 16 Aug 2021 01:11:09 +0000

I'm having problems with small bubbles appearing in the wax part I'm working on. Seems you can't use vacuum to cast wax parts. I've tried tapping the side of the mold to try to release the bubbles. I'm spraying the mold with mold release.

I'm heating the FF turquoise slowly and pouring it as soon as it's liquid. I'm not sure what temp it's at.

Due to the shape of the part, I'm pouring some wax into the bottom of the mold, installing the top half of the mold and then filling the mold. (I...

bubbles in wax casting

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Hi All,
I have had the plans for a while, and have finally made a start on it. Delivery from the metal munger arrived. Started with the rear plate.
Cheers
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I’ve spent over 40 years managing my own money and planning FOR retirement but I am realizing that it may now make sense to get some help managing my money AFTER retirement.

Like others who have commented, it is going to get much more difficult to keep and pass on our money to the next generation because of all of the talk around taxes and soaking the wealthy.

I never dreamed that managing and preserving our money may actually be more difficult than accumulating it.