You are a Legendary Teacher

Everton Blender "Lift Up Your Head"

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Introduction to the Director

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"He said, She said..."

The Community Exchange System http://www.ces.org.za/

Introduction to the Director

Google Chrome Themes Gallery

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Google Chrome Themes Gallery

Memorial HealthCare System

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The Staff of Memorial Hospital. They are there to help You when You Need it. You can count on them for your healthcare needs...

http://www.mhs.net/

Ron Paul to Fed: All You Can Do is Print Money

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Become a Pay-it-Forward Angel

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Become a Pay-it-Forward Angel

Your Brain on Languages | Asia Society

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Your Brain on Languages | Asia Society

Where Is Quantitative Easing Taking the United States?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 03:31:00 -0500

November 8th, 2010 by Alex

The Federal Reserve finally announced the next official round of dollar devaluation (quantitative easing/money printing). Any brief hopes that the Federal Reserve was going to protect the purchasing power of the dollar started eroding in August and are now officially dead. The question now is, what does this new round of money printing really mean? Well, I’ve broken it down into three main possible categories: conspiracy, incompetence, or desperation.

Conspiracy: if what the Fed is doing is an authentic conspiracy, then there are many different scenarios that could unfold. Although conspiracy could entail a fake-out, overall, conspiracy mostly means major inflation. By inflating away the value of the dollar, that will act as a tax on all people holding dollars; it will pay for government debt and act as a subsidy for banks teetering on insolvency. Also, inflating away the value of the dollar will mean higher foreign profits for those companies and people doing business overseas.

Incompetence: if what the Fed is doing is authentic incompetence, then that means that the Federal Reserve is operating off a completely unreal model of how the economy works and fighting phantom deflation. As a result of such incompetence, inflationary expectations could get out of control and cause a major retreat out of the dollar and into hard assets and stocks. So, incompetence is mostly an inflationary scenario. If the Federal Reserve keeps turning to quantitative easing as the solution to the economic situation, we could see Dow 20,000 and a 50% devaluation of the dollar.

Desperation: if what the Fed is doing is authentic desperation, then that means the deflationists are right and that the dollar can handle a lot more quantitative easing before it becomes truly inflationary. As a result, that would mean the asset inflation we are seeing now ($1400 Gold, $27 Silver, $11500 Dow) is based on false inflationary expectations, and that, due to debt destruction, deflation is still roaring behind the scenes. Desperation doesn’t mean Dow 2000, but it also doesn’t mean Dow 20,000. Desperation could mean a more steady state of flip-flopping between deflationary expectations (like we saw during the summer) and inflationary expectations (like we’ve seen since September).

All I know is that regardless of what the reality of the situation is, people are making bets on their perceived realities. Some people continue to get out of dollars while some people are actually easing back into dollars. Unfortunately, all our economic data is suspect. And the economy is at the whim of a few people in power at the Federal Reserve. If there are enough people who believe opposite things, many markets may head in non-correlating directions. Those who have no more money than what they spend are actually lucky in a way these days. Because trying to figure out what to do with saved money right now is a conundrum. Do you put it in gold even though it is at a record high? Do you put it in the stock market even though the fundamentals of the economy aren’t very bullish? Do you send your money into foreign markets and assure that the American economy will be short the money it needs to recover and pay off debt. If I had to sum up what the Fed is doing with its current policies, it would be this: The Fed is forcing people to chase rainbows.

Get the Book! Dissolving Dollars

Roger Federer's One Mistake

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Sagia Castaneda - Song is StereoLove by Edward Maya

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Send Her My Love

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US National Debt Clock -- In Real Time

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US National Debt Clock -- In Real Time

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Download Celestia from SourceForge.net

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Download Celestia from SourceForge.net

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MetaCurrency Project

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Metacurrency project from TheTransitioner on Vimeo.

Law of Attraction widget from Meebo

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Zeitgeist Addendum

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Zeitgeist Addendum Creator and Director - Peter Joseph

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Transforming Money - from Debt to Empowerment

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 5 Apr 2009 20:50:00 -0400

http://www.seek2know.net/money2.html

This is an awesome link I found at
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The Future of Money

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Mexico conference on Future of Money... from TheTransitioner on Vimeo.

What are Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) and What are their Purpose?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:17:00 -0400

Definition

SDRs are defined in terms of a basket of major currencies used in international trade and finance. At present, the currencies in the basket are, by weight, the United States dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen, and the pound sterling. Before the introduction of the euro in 1999, the Deutsche Mark and the French franc were included in the basket. The amounts of each currency making up one SDR are chosen in accordance with the relative importance of the currency in international trade and finance. The determination of the currencies in the SDR basket and their amounts is made by the IMF Executive Board every five years.

The exact amounts of each currency in the basket, and their approximate relative contributions to the value of an SDR, in the past were and currently are:^[1]

Purpose

SDRs are used as a unit of account by the IMF and several other international organizations. A few countries peg their currencies against SDRs, and it is also used to denominate some private international financial instruments. For example, the Warsaw convention, which regulates liability for international carriage of persons, luggage or goods by air uses SDRs to value the maximum liability of the carrier.

In Europe, the Euro is displacing the SDR as a basis to set values of various currencies, including Latvian lats. This is a result of the ERM II convergence criteria which now apply to states entering the European Union.

SDRs were originally created to replace Gold and Silver in large international transactions. Being that under a strict (international) gold standard, the quantity of gold worldwide is relatively fixed, and the economies of all participating IMF members as an aggregate are growing, a perceived need arose to increase the supply of the basic unit or standard proportionately. Thus SDRs, or "paper gold", are credits that nations with balance of trade surpluses can 'draw' upon nations with balance of trade deficits.

So-called "paper gold" is little more than an accounting transaction within a ledger of accounts, which eliminates the logistical and security problems of shipping gold back and forth across borders to settle national accounts.

Joseph Stiglitz has argued that usage by central banks of SDRs as foreign exchange reserve could be viewed as the prelude to the creation of a single world currency.^[2] It must be understood that Gold and Silver have filled the role as global currencies for several thousand years of recorded history, and that the SDR as a storage of value is not a normal fiat currency.

It has also been suggested that having holders of US dollars convert those dollars into SDRs would allow diversification away from the dollar without accelerating the decline of the value of the dollar.^[3]^[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Drawing_Rights

Q. What are your reasons for thinking that "Islamic banking isn't Islamic"?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:25:00 -0400

Nadine Marroushi interviewed Tarek El Diwany in London during Summer 2007.

A. "My point is a little more refined than that. I am saying that Islamic commercial banking is not Islamic, and this is because commercial banking is a combination of usury and misrepresentation. The practice of usury is obvious and involves the advancing of money now in return for more money later, while the misrepresentation is less obvious and involves the creation of money out of nothing. Most of the time, the money that commercial banks lend is money that they themselves have created. Since neither usury nor misrepresentation can be Islamised, and since the business model of commercial banking requires both, there cannot be such a thing as Islamic commercial banking. For the same reason, there cannot be such a thing as an Islamic central bank. Historically, the Muslim world has had neither commercial banks nor central banks, though of course it did have institutions that fulfilled permissible functions such as payment transfer. In our rush to create an Islamic banking and finance industry, we have forgotten to ensure that the money we are using is itself Islamic. Islamic finance cannot be practiced with money that is un-Islamic. We therefore need a very fundamental reform of the institutional framework in Islamic banking and finance, but unfortunately the industry is simply refusing to address the issue."

http://www.islamic-finance.com/item149_f.htm

Interest

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:53:00 -0400

The amount of money charged by a lender / paid by a borrower for the use of money over a given period of time is referred to as interest. Thus a man who borrows $100 for one year and repays the $100 plus an extra $10 to the lender, has paid $10 interest. Interest is often expressed as a percentage of the principal. Here the rate of interest would be 10% per year since $10/$100 = 10%.

Islamic Banking isn't Islamic

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:42:00 -0400

by Tarek El Diwany
Original Summer 2000; updated June 2003

An abridged version of this article was published in Banker Middle East during November 2002

These are all signs that something has gone badly wrong in this industry. But I'm not saying that it is all the fault of the people on the inside. The Western academic establishment is at least partly responsible for the way that the Islamic financiers are thinking. For example, because Brealey and Myers have written a standard text on corporate finance, they are probably as big a force in Islamic finance as Judge Taqi Usmani. It is awfully hard to escape from the value judgements that the overwhelming mass of usury-based finance books contain. That's why an educated Muslim in Islamic finance can ask his client a shocking question such as 'what cost of finance are you looking for?' without thinking twice. He's been taught by Brealey and Myers that fixed-rate finance plays a part in any 'good' financing structure and so off he goes in search of a way to do fixed-rate finance Islamically. The possibility that fixed-rate finance may be completely incompatible with Islam in the first place may not even occur.

http://www.islamic-finance.com/item100_f.htm

Islamic Banking: Steady in Shaky Times

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:58:00 -0400

Principles Based on Religious Law Insulate Industry From Worst of Financial Crisis
By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 31, 2008; Page A16

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- As big Western financial institutions have teetered one after the other in the crisis of recent weeks, another financial sector is gaining new confidence: Islamic banking.

Proponents of the ancient practice, which looks to sharia law for guidance and bans interest and trading in debt, have been promoting Islamic finance as a cure for the global financial meltdown.

This week, Kuwait's commerce minister, Ahmad Baqer, was quoted as saying that the global crisis will prompt more countries to use Islamic principles in running their economies. U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmet, visiting Jiddah, said experts at his agency have been learning the features of Islamic banking.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/30/AR2008103004434.html