GEAB 63: Global Systemic Crisis: The 5 Devastating Storms of Summer 2012 at the Heart of the Global Geopolitical Dislocation

Here are the highlights of GEAB 63 (March 2012) entitled "Global Systemic Crisis: The 5 devastating storms of summer 2012 at the heart of global geopolitical dislocation":

• Global Systemic Crisis: The five devastating storms of summer 2012 at the heart of the global geopolitical dislocation.  Global recession, debt crises, stock market crashes, potential war with Iran.
  
• Summer 2012: The US falls back into recession as Europe stagnates and BRICs slow down. LEAP 2012 predicts a global recession in 2012.
• Summer 2012: Central banks roadblocks and the rise of interest rates. The US federal reserve must now manage two new problems: the lack of demand for US treasuries and the rise of two other currencies: the Euro and the Chinese yuan.
• Summer 2012: Storm on currency markets and western public debts. After several attempts to stabilize exchange rates over the last few quarters, the failure to come to an agreement for a new currency at the G20 in order to build a new monetary system will lead to more currency volatility and further debt crises in western economies.
• Summer 2012: Iran, the war "too many". Whether this war occurs or not, it will be the war too many for the western world.
• Summer 2012: The new stock market and financial institutions crash. Iran's allies, such as China, are likely to hurt Washington financially by diversifying US dollar assets into other currencies.by announcing with Moscow that they will stop buying US treasuries in order to stop the US war machine.
• 2015: "The great fall of western real estate" - Excerpt of the chapter on the evolution of US residential real estate. As the US manufactures less and less, the country will become poorer and accelerated the fall of American real estate.
• Strategic and operational recommendations. Consequence of the emergence of 3 main monetary zones (US Europe and China). Inflection point for Gold. Commodities: conflict vs recession. End of the illusion for the US economy. Orange alert (whatever that means) on financial products..
• The GlobalEurometre - Results & Analyses. 85% of respondents think of European governance is being put into place.

The full GEAB 63 (PDF format) is available to LEAP 2020 subscribers for 200 Euros per year (10 + 6 issues).

Jim Rogers: Gold Going Much Higher In This Decade

ET Now interviews Jim Rogers on the 23rd of January 2012.

They asked him about commodities following the monetary easing by China, and he replied that natural resources such as silver, rice and natural gas usually benefit during periods of massive money printing. If the world economy gets better, there will be shortages, if it does not, they will print money. He owns more precious metals than base metals however.

If there is a conflict with Iran, everything will go down initially, except maybe crude oil, but this would be positive for Gold in the long term. He sees many people in Washington want to do something about Iran, and it looks like something will happen even though it's sheer madness.

India to Pay For Iranian Oil with Gold

I've just seen a report on Russia Today saying that following sanctions from the US and Europe on financial transactions with Iran, India and Iran had found a compromise and India would now buy Iranian Oil with Gold.

Would that have any significant effect on the Gold market? Let's see the numbers. Russia Today's reporter said that Indian imported 12 billions USD of Iranian oil per year. Gold is now about 1670 USD per ounce. So That would be around 1.2 millions ounces of Gold or 200 metric tonnes of Gold per year. That's a massive amount considering India had 557.7 tonnes of Gold reserves in 2010 (source: Wikipedia). I assume India will not want to see their reserve go down, so they'd have to buy those 200 tonnes on the Gold market. By the way, 200 tonnes would just be the amount purchased by India from the IMF in 2009 (when gold was around 1100 USD). Another way to look at this numbers is to compare it to the SPDR Gold Trust Holdings - the largest manager of Gold-based ETF - that stood at 1,239 tonnes in May 2011. So if India and Iran actually implement this scheme for one or more years, this would be extremely disruptive on the Gold market both by the amount of required physical Gold and the geopolitical implications of such move.