Mr Rogers, the respected currency trader and hedge fund pioneer, cautioned that when the downturn takes hold “the world is going to be in worse shape because the world has shot all its bullets.”
Speaking in an interview with business television channel CNBC, the septuagenarian investor said that “since the beginning of time” there has been a recession every four-to-six years, and that’s mean another one is due around 2012.
However, he said that due to the extraordinary measures already adopted by central banks and governments around the world, the arsenal of available tools to combat the next recession is somewhat lacking.
With reference to Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, he said: “Is Mr Bernanke going to print more money than he already has? No, the world would run out of trees.”
Meanwhile, Robert Shiller, co-creator of the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller house price index, warned that the next downturn may come even sooner.
“For me a double-dip is another recession before we’ve healed from this recession. The probability of that kind of double-dip is more than 50pc. I actually expect it,” he said. His prediction came despite the S&P/Case-Shiller index for May showing a 4.6pc year-on-year increase in house prices in 20 major US conurbations.
Marc Faber: On Cashflow, Montreal, Girlfriends and The Economy
Marc Faber breaks it down on Montreal and The Economy (interestingly enough, I was just in Montreal chopping it up. I am completely sold on the place, definitely going to spend a month or two there next summer. Montreal Data Sheets coming soon.):
We as a society must stop pretending. Most of us think that we still have money in the bank to protect, so we go along with the game of extend and pretend. For some of us, the game has already ended. The rapacious zero interest rate policy that I call Bernankecide has already robbed millions of savers of their life savings. This is the reality that has yet to hit home for many Americans who are content to wallow in the status quo. Unfortunately, the longer it takes for them to wake up, the worse their, and our, fate will be.
My mother and millions of other senior citizens are among the victims of the game that policy makers and those who empower them are playing. Their life savings are gone because Bernankecide, the financial genocide of the elderly, forced them to spend their principal. Now the government is indirectly confiscating 8% of my income because I must support my mother. That percentage is likely to grow as her health deteriorates.
Millions of other boomers are in the same boat. They are forced to pay this immoral hidden tax because Ben Bernanke decided that the innocent must pay for the sins of the guilty. While Bernanke’s ZIRP goes on allowing the banksters to continue to collect their fat bonuses, it steals the savings of millions of Americans, eliminates their disposable income, and cuts the spending power of millions of others who must now support those rendered destitute. The guilty benefit, and the innocent are punished.
Bernanke knows that, yet he continues to side with the criminal bankers in support of the financial genocide of the super elderly, and their children, the baby boomers who must increasingly support them.
If you’re looking for a safe place to put your investments, Chad Venzke has a suggestion: Dig a hole in the ground four feet deep, pack gold and silver in a piece of plastic PVC pipe, seal it, and bury it.
The 30-year-old central Wisconsin resident trusts no one but himself to store and protect his gold and silver—not banks, not investment funds, and certainly not the government. It’s precisely because of this suspicion of institutions that he invests in those metals to begin with. In case of emergency, “you always want to have your precious metals within arms reach,” he says.
Venzke is hardly the only investor who wants his precious metals nearby at all times. A pound of gold worth about $24,000 can easily fit in a pocket; how to protect it is a decision that carries expensive consequences. Do-it-yourself investors who don’t trust banks must find creative storage options, whether burying gold in the yard, submerging it in a koi pond, stashing it behind air-conditioning ducts, or placing it under carpets. All these options are debated in online gold and silver investor forums. They’re also debated and demonstrated in youtube videos, including one by Venzke that has been viewed more than 7,000 times.
Christina Romer had traveled to Chicago to perform an unpleasant task: she needed to scare her new boss. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s top political adviser, had been very clear about that. He thought the president-elect needed to know exactly what he would be walking into when he took the oath of office in January. But it fell to Romer to deliver the bad news.
So Romer, a preternaturally cheerful economist whose expertise on the Great Depression made her an obvious choice to head the Council of Economic Advisers, gathered her tables and her charts and, on a snowy day in mid-December, sat down to explain to the next President of the United States of America exactly what sort of mess he was inheriting.
Axelrod had warned her against pulling her punches, and so she didn’t. It was not a pleasant presentation to sit through. Afterward, Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s friend from Chicago and Romer’s successor, remarked that “that must be the worst briefing any president-elect has ever had.”
But Romer wasn’t trying to be alarmist. Her numbers were based, at least in part, on everybody else’s numbers: There were models from forecasting firms such as Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Analytics. There were preliminary data pouring in from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve. Romer’s predictions were more pessimistic than the consensus, but not by much.
By that point, the shape of the crisis was clear: The housing bubble had burst, and it was taking the banks that held the loans, and the households that did the borrowing, down with it. Romer estimated that the damage would be about $2 trillion over the next two years and recommended a $1.2 trillion stimulus plan. The political team balked at that price tag, but with the support of Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary who would soon lead the National Economic Council, she persuaded the administration to support an $800 billion plan.
Jim Rogers Is Bullish On All Commodities, But There’s Only One Sector He Would Buy Right NowBBC Speechless As Trader Tells Truth: “The Collapse Is Coming…And Goldman Rules The World”
Ingrid Casares & Chris Paciello Back in Biz with The Light Group at the Delano?
If you believe the rumors, South Beach is about to go retro, back to the days when people actually danced at clubs, when real celebrities came to party because they wanted to and not for a carefully orchestrated, trite tabloid photo op, and when the words South Beach and hip together in the same sentence was anything but oxymoronic. That’s right, we have excellent sources telling us that the Captain and Tennille of 90s Miami nightlife, Chris Paciello and Ingrid Casares, are teaming up again, this time as partners in the food and beverage operations at the Delano left recently vacant by Jeffrey Chodorow, who was bought out by the hotel’s owners, Morgans Hotel Group, for $20 million.
Chris Paciello back on South Beach scene at Delano
For the first time since he was released from federal prison five years ago, Miami Beach’s fallen nightscape overlord has returned to where it all started.
Chris Paciello, now 40 and described by some who have run into him as “subdued and humbled,” is settling down at the Delano Hotel.
He’ll be living there for the next few months as he works to give back to the legendary beachside resort its No. 1 ranking among hipsters and celebrities.
Deja view: Mixed reviews on the return of Chris Paciello
Ever since we broke the news that old school South Beach club guy Chris Paciello was returning to his old stomping grounds and possibly reuniting with his former partner Ingrid Casares in the nightlife biz, the reactions have been as polarizing as the Tea Party vs. the Democrats only, instead of tea, it would be vodka. On one side you have the champions, cheerleaders and aging club kids who can overlook his past and subscribe to the Nostalgia Party (there’s already a Chris Paciello Fan Club and “Chris Paciello, The King Is Back” page on Facebook), while on the other side you have those who say it’s just wrong to glorify the return of someone with a criminal past—we’ll call them the Concerned Party. Both sides will argue back and forth over this until the lights come on in the new Light Group-sanctioned Delano hot spot, so there’s really no end to the debate.
Some say people are jealous or nervous that the reunion of the team some say made South Beach the nightlife capital it once was will ruin their own businesses, and others say that people are downright nervous in general, not for business purposes, but for reasons involving personal safety. It’s no secret Paciello had a violent past, for which he has served time in prison. It’s no secret that he had enemies, some who still live and work on South Beach. We spoke to nightlife veteran Gerry Kelly, currently serving as marketing and nightlife operator at Trio On the Bay, who worked with Paciello and wasn’t exactly BFF with the guy back in the day. “I was surprised to hear he was returning to Miami,” Kelly admitted. “I do believe we all learn from our experiences in life. Miami’s nightlife and entertainment culture has changed so much since the late 90s that we all have to adapt and change to keep up with the never ending new trends. The city is definitely big enough for everyone and I wish him the best.”
‘Limelight’: The Rise And Fall Of The Church Of Rave
On Friday, a documentary ostensibly about the rise and fall of a one time club king named Peter Gatien opened in New York (it opens around the country next month). In the early to mid-1990s – the height of rave culture in the U.S. – Gatien owned the biggest clubs in New York City, including Limelight, which lived in a deconsecrated Episcopal Church in the Chelsea neighborhood. Today Gatien lives in Toronto, where he was deported in 2003 after pleading guilty to tax evasion. And Limelight has become a mall. It calls itself a “Festival of Shops.”
Much of the story told in Limelight will be familiar to readers of Clubland, a book chronicling mid-’90s nightlife written by Frank Owen, who covered Limelight at its height and followed its scandalous end in the pages of local alternative weekly the Village Voice. It certainly was to the documentary’s director, Billy Corben, who read the book as he was pursuing another documentary about the man who ran the biggest club in Miami in the mid-’90s. Owen appears frequently as a kind of expert witness in Limelight.
“I had read Clubland because of our interest in Chris Paciello and Liquid in South Beach, and the Miami angle,” says Corben, best known for 2006’s Cocaine Cowboys. Corben and producing partner Albert Spellman still intend to make a movie about Paciello. But first, they’ve made Limelight, which focuses on Gatien, the eye-patched Canadian nightclub impresario who owned Limelight, Palladium, Tunnel and Club U.S.A., who was brought to trial by the City of New York under mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s mid-’90s crime crackdown, alleging that Gatien was overseeing a massive drug ring in his clubs.
