Buying Gold: Why Are The Chinese Gobbling Up Gold Like There Is No Tomorrow?

Why are the Chinese buying so much gold?  In 2010 it has been demand out of China that has been one of the primary factors for the dramatic rise in the price of gold.  Gold is up approximately 26 percent this year, and most analysts expect it to go even higher in 2011.  So is China buying gold at a breathtaking pace because they view it as a good investment, or are there other factors at work here?  Do the Chinese view gold as a hedge against inflation?  Is China seeking to get out of U.S. Treasuries?  Has gold simply become much more attractive than paper currencies such as the euro and the U.S. dollar?  Or could China be preparing for the coming financial collapse that so many economists see coming?  It is always difficult to tell exactly what China is up to, but one thing is for sure - they are buying gold like there is no tomorrow.

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/buying-gold-why-are-the-chinese-gobbling-up-gold-like-there-is-no-tomorrow

Nicole Foss on Canadian real estate: “We are in a massive bubble”

Ms. Foss writes under the name Stoneleigh over at The Automatic Earth (TAE). She and her writing partner have been chronicling and interpreting the on-going credit crunch as the most pressing aspect of our current multi-faceted predicament. The site integrates finance, energy, environment, psychology, population and real politics in order to explain why we find ourselves in a state of crisis and what we can do about it. Prior to the establishment of TAE, she was editor of The Oil Drum Canada, where she wrote on peak oil and finance.

Foss runs the Agri-Energy Producers’ Association of Ontario, where she has focused on farm-based biogas projects and grid connections for renewable energy. While living in the UK she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, where she specialized in nuclear safety in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, and conducted research into electricity policy at the EU level.

Here is the full clip. Fast forward to 13:40 for the bit on real estate. 

Investors Make Bets On When Life Insurance Policy Holders Will Die

A Cheery Holiday Message from Bankster: Death Eaters on Wall Street

Today a stunning expose on a publicly-traded company called Life Partners Holdings. Are you ready for this?

Life Partners creeps around asking the unemployed, the elderly and the sick (especially people with HIV/AIDS) to sell them their life insurance policies for cash. Then they bundle these policies into securities and sell them to vultures -- oh, I am sorry, “investors.” Then the “investors” sit around and wait for people to die -- the sooner the better for the purchasers of these death bonds. The future of this industry “looks bright,” chirps National Underwriters.

How much is the gold price going to rise?

END THE FED!

Must watch !!!

Fed Treasury Holdings: $1,000,341,000,000 (in less than 24hrs from previous 991billion)

"It's time for the Fed "one trillion" hats- as of 2:00 pm Eastern, the Fed's Treasury holdings has surpassed $1 trillion. Add to this the well over $1 trillion in Mortgage backed securities and agency debt held by the Fed, and there is your perfectly quantified reason why the S&P has just hit a two year high, and why the Nasdaq bubble is alive (all the newly printed money is keeping the party going). Basically, with the Fed the de facto purchaser of all securities with a yield of under 4%, the entire definition of a risk-free rate has to be scrubbed. To be sure, risk-free will very quickly become risk-full when and if the Fed, in its attempts to succeed with central planning where so many have failed before, either finally loses control over rates, or far less probably, decides to remove some of these extra trillions in free liquidity. Until then, the banker party is on in full force. By the end of this month, the difference between the Fed and the second largest holder of US debt will have surpassed $100 billion... and continue climbing at a rate of about $30 billion per week. And it will not stop (till US probably becomes Weimar).

Will Julian Assange Make Brian Moynihan (Or Another Bank CEO) Resign?

Will Julian Assange Make Bank of America CEO, Brian Moynihan (Or Another Bank CEO) Resign?
According to an advance preview of an interview with Julian Assange by the Times of London's Alexi Mostrous, the Wikileaks founder has announced that he has "enough material to make bosses of a major US bank resign." While this can be merely the latest step in the chess game between Wikileaks and Bank of America, with the former assumed to hold destructive material on the other, with the latter escalating last Friday and blocking all of Wikileaks payments, it may potentially hold some insight into just what material Assange has on either Brian Moynihan, or some other bank executive. That said, the plan likely has worked, and the entire (at least financial) world will be tuned in to see just what details the Times releases tomorrow, although it is likely safe to assume that nobody's hopes are very high: after all, many wonder just what Assange is waiting for to release his latest docket of banking data. We can only hope our skpeticism has taken the best of us this time...