New Silver target: $8........why not?
Manorcourtman
Posts: 8,023 ✭✭✭✭✭
Is this possible and if not why? Some have predicted $80 oil and why wouldn't this drag the PM's to new lows? At $80 a barrel where would PM's settle at? What an interesting week in the PM market!
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I don't think $8.
<< <i>Where the hell are the Hunt brothers when you need them
6 feet under .... but who needs them
<< <i>Is this possible and if not why? Some have predicted $80 oil and why wouldn't this drag the PM's to new lows? At $80 a barrel where would PM's settle at? What an interesting week in the PM market!
$80 would be a welcomed relief by the "average Joe," but would only delay the inevitable day of reckoning when Oil runs dry. High Oil prices stimulate research in Alternative Fuels.
Also looking for VF-EF Seated halves.
Sell me your old auction catalogs...
My local B@M claims to be out of all silver.. Except the ASE's they are pushing for 19.50
You see, that's what most people fail to realize, the "finite-ness" of so many things we take for granted. Concerned about PMs? ...employment, housing, health care, food, stocks, etc.? Just wait.
edit - 05/30/09 - I couldn't resist adding this, just for the record. Maybe I'll remember to keep updating it. When I made the above statement in Aug08 in reply to the oil running dry comment, little did I realize that the bottom dropout would occur so soon. Trends downward at the time were one thing. The monumental drop, and crash, was another.
Has economic twilight fallen on nation's Sun Belt?
By TODD LEWAN, AP National Writer Todd Lewan, Ap National Writer – Sat May 30, 5:01 pm ET
ORLANDO, Fla. – We first heard the term decades ago: The "Sun Belt" was just starting a run of phenomenal growth — and no wonder. It conjured a sunny state of mind as well as a balmy place on the map.
Everybody, it seemed, wanted a spot in the sun.
Industries such as aerospace, defense and oil set up shop across America's southernmost tier, capitalizing on the low involvement of labor unions and the proximity of military bases that paid handsomely, and reliably, for their products and services.
Later, San Jose, Calif., and Austin, Texas, developed into high-tech nerve centers; Houston grew into a hub for the oil industry; Nashville became a mecca for music recording and production; Charlotte, N.C., transformed itself into a center for low-cost banking and finance; and then there were the new Dixie Detroits, places like Canton, Miss., Georgetown, Ky., and Spartanburg, S.C., that began rolling out Titans, Camrys and BMWs.
Meanwhile, other warm-weather havens offered their own variants of the Sun Belt dream — as Fountains of Youth for 60-and-up duffers, as Magic Kingdoms for fun-seekers, as Cape Canaverals for middle-aged northerners looking to launch their second acts.
Air conditioning, bug spray and drainage canals that transformed marshes into golf-course subdivisions — these innovations, plus the availability of flat, low-taxed land attracted migrants from Brooklyn and Cleveland, Havana and Mexico City to locales once dismissed as too hot, too swampy, too dry, too backwater-ish.
"We Give Years to Your Life and Life to Your Years!" That was the sort of slogan you'd hear from developers pitching the promise that a new start in the Sun Belt might even, in the best of circumstances, extend one's time on Earth.
In this way, for a generation or more, the Sun Belt thrived like no other region in America — a growth so steady it felt as though the boom would never end. But now it has, replaced by a bust that has left some swaths of the region suffering as severely as anywhere in the current recession.
What brought the dark clouds to the Sun Belt, and are they here to stay?
Interviews with economists and demographers across the region, and data from The Associated Press Economic Stress Index, a month-by-month analysis of foreclosure, bankruptcy and unemployment rates in more than 3,000 U.S. counties, suggest that the answers are not all encouraging.
___
Some cities — Las Vegas, Phoenix, Fort Myers are good examples — hitched their floats to housing bubbles and got caught up in development that depended largely on, well, development itself, rather than sustainable, scalable, productive industry, economic analysts say.
It's in these places where the economic meltdown "will likely find its fullest bloom," Richard Florida, the urbanist and author, wrote recently in an Atlantic Monthly article titled "How the Crash Will Reshape America."
AP Stress Index figures, which calculate the economic impact of the recession on a scale of 1 to 100, illustrate how the downturn has played out in some of these communities:
_In Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, the Stress Index more than doubled from 5.12 at the beginning of the recession in December 2007 to 12.67 in March 2009, worsened by a foreclosure rate that nearly tripled.
_Mounting foreclosures in Las Vegas' Clark County drove up its Stress Index score from 10.5 at the start of the recession to 19.3 in March 2009.
_In Lee County, home to Fort Myers, unemployment has doubled and foreclosures have soared 75 percent since the recession began, lifting its Stress Index from 10.5 to 19.98.
The boom in parts of the Sun Belt was, Florida wrote in the Atlantic, a "giant Ponzi scheme" — a growth machine that banked on wishful thinking, on the hope that an unending stream of new arrivals would forever inject their money into construction and real estate.
But as often is the case with such schemes, there comes a day when the engine sputters, gasps, and conks out. A day when the faithful stop turning up.
In the Sun Belt's newer, shallow-rooted communities, the roadkill is most evident: Where once there were "boomburbs," there now stand "ghostdivisions." Where property-flipping was once almost a middle-class sport, joblessness and "For Sale by Owner" signs reign.
The fallout is traceable in other ways, too. Nevada — the only state with a lower proportion of native residents than Florida — has seen net migration plunge 61 percent in two years; Arizona, 55 percent.
Were it not for immigrants, many of them from Latin America, and for fertility, the Sunshine State would actually have lost population last year — an "astounding development in the Florida experience," says Bill Frey, a senior fellow and demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
He said the end of steady movement of people into the Sun Belt is part of a broader trend of curtailed migration during this downturn. "The merry-go-round has stopped, in terms of people moving from place to place."
Does this mean we've witnessed the Rise and Fall of the Sun Belt? Will those who swept into these Miracle-Gro states get swept out just as quickly, leaving behind a sprawl of hollow houses, cul-de-sac moonscapes and mosquito-infested pools — the stucco ghettos of the 21st century?
Or will the latest downturn merely force the Sun Belt to reinvent itself again?
___
The housing bubble in many places revealed an obsolescent model of economic life, in which cheap real estate encouraged low-density sprawl and created a work force "stuck in place, anchored by houses that cannot be profitably sold," Florida wrote in his March article.
These places, he says, include older, factory towns across the northern Rust Belt but also countless communities in the Sun Belt whose prosperity was built on "fictitious wealth."
What to do? Scrap policies that encourage homebuying, he suggests, and give incentives to more mobile renters who can go where the jobs are.
In the digital age, he says, industries will likely cluster in "mega-regions" of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings (e.g., the Boston-New York-Washington corridor). These areas will surge, lifted by the brainpower of educated professionals and creative thinkers that turn out "products and services faster than talented people in other places can."
In short: Those that can draw talented, young people with high-quality, higher education will reap the spoils.
There is some evidence to suggest an imbalance in American educational achievement across regions. According to research by two Harvard economists, Edward Glaeser and Christopher Berry, educational attainment is no longer as evenly spread across America as it was in the '70s.
Places such as San Francisco, Boston and Seattle now turn out two to three times the college graduates of, say, Akron or Buffalo. When examining postgraduate achievement, the researchers found even greater disparities.
If locales that boast premium universities will be able to more quickly pick themselves off the mat, a question arises. In the Sun Belt's "sand cities," their expansion now halted, where will the tax money come from to pay for college upgrades?
Parts of Arizona, Nevada and the Los Angeles exurb of Riverside overbuilt and overstretched, said Anthony Sanders, a professor of finance and economics at Arizona State University.
Like Looney Toons characters who, suspended in mid-air, look down to behold they've run off a cliff, officials are scrambling to reverse course — either by scrapping government services they'd promised or, at the very least, by hiking taxes to pay for services created in expectation of bigger suburbs, exurbs.
Phoenix is in this fix. Shocked by a 33 percent plunge in home values between October 2007 and October 2008 alone, the city is running a $200 million budget deficit, a shortfall that's only expected to grow. (It has petitioned the federal government for funds.)
California has an even wider hole in its battered canoe.
That state "went on a spending spree that was incredible," said Sanders. Now, at a time when many resident retirees are in no mood, or shape, for tax increases, "they're having to raise taxes or cut back services, both of which are making moving to California a lot less desirable than it has been in previous decades."
Other Sun Belt states are making similar "mistakes," Sanders said, adding: "Unless we lower the tax burden, making it simpler for businesses to do more operations, and freeing up the ability to attract workers, the economy here is not going to come back."
The challenges don't end there.
Even before the Crash of '08, the Sun Belt was being buffeted by outmigration of factory jobs abroad. In the Carolinas, for example, industries that linked up the economy, society and culture for more than a century — furniture making, tobacco and textiles — had been gutted by a decade of decline.
And although the overall expansion of the Sun Belt's economy has been dramatic, the distribution of the region's prosperity has been uneven; of the 25 metropolitan areas with the lowest per capita income in 1990, 23 were in the Sun Belt.
That has to change, said Warren Brown, a demographer at the University of Georgia, although he noted that the Sun Belt's unbridled growth in the '80s and '90s was "unsustainable, bound to cool off," and not just because of bursting housing or migration bubbles.
The limits of natural resources were poised to put the brakes on development in the Land of Sunny Dreams anyway, he said. Two biggies: oil and water.
"Long before we run out of land, we'll be running out of water," he said. "Water is a major issue right now."
___
Doomsaying pundits have played the Sun Belt dirge before.
In 1981, for example, Time magazine declared Florida, a "Paradise Lost." The state then embarked on an epic boom, in which the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach corridor ballooned into the seventh-largest metro area in America.
Granted, today's news from the Sunshine State is hardly cheery: It ranks near the top in foreclosures and near the bottom in high-school graduation rates. There's a water crisis, an insurance crisis, a budget crisis.
So why do some experts caution that talk of Florida's demise — and the Sun Belt's — is exaggerated?
Among other things, Frey, the Brookings demographer, notes that outmigration from metro Miami actually fell last year, and in years to come "we're going to have large numbers of immigrants in the United States who are going to help us in all kinds of ways," he says.
Stan Smith, a professor of economics and director of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida, says tourism, the "momentum" of decades of population growth, and already extensive networks of personal connections will again draw more migrants to Florida.
Frozen credit won't last, he says. Real estate price declines — as much as 70 percent in some Sun Belt counties — will encourage buyers. And with home heating costs in the "Frost Belt" only expected to rise, Smith says, the attraction of warm weather to retiring Baby Boomers can't be overestimated.
Florida is one of only nine states without an income tax. Couple that with the fact that its taxes on corporations and financial transactions have many exemptions, he says, and "the effects of the positive factors will continue to outweigh the negative."
Recovery will take time, though, and few economists see any significant growth in the Sun Belt before 2010. Steve Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York City, agrees that states that have piled up surplus housing "are not going to solve it in this budget cycle or the next budget cycle. It's going to be with them for five, six, seven years, no doubt about it."
And yet, to say all areas across the Sun Belt are in for long-term decline is simplistic, he says. Scanning the most recent employment maps put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals "a 'belt' in the middle of the country — Texas is part of it — that is doing quite well." (The AP Stress Map backs up that finding, revealing a swath of comparatively unscathed counties starting in North Dakota, stretching through South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas and ending in Oklahoma and Texas.)
Out of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties, the majority were in Texas (19), Georgia (14), North Carolina (11) or Utah (nine), according to U.S. Census figures last year. Raleigh-Cary, N.C., and Austin-Round Rock, Texas, were the nation's fastest-growing metro areas, registering growth rates of 4.3 percent and 3.8 percent, respectively. Both high-tech centers, the two metros are also sites of major college campuses that helped cushion them.
Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston registered the biggest numerical gains, the census figures show. Phoenix and Atlanta ranked third and fourth in growth, respectively, followed by Los Angeles, despite the housing slump.
"Obviously, the best situation is a state that hasn't had a residential meltdown, still has a low-cost advantage, and has a weather advantage," Malanga says. High-tax states, such as California, are going to take longer to rebound.
And yet, Sun Belt states will have to offer more than tax incentives to reel in companies in the new, global economy, says Keith Schwer, executive director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada.
Quality health care, quality recreation, quality education — companies and individuals consider the caliber of amenities before relocating. Cosmetic fixes don't help, he says. "You can't hide your warts."
Does all of this mean the Sun Belt will have to reinvent itself to grow again?
Rethink may be a better term.
As an example, Caron St. John, director of the Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurship at Clemson University in South Carolina, says Sun Belt states now rationing funds ought to consider returning to "First Principles" — that is, channeling what little money they have toward elementary and high schools rather than higher education.
"Elementary and high school children — we can't scar their lives because of a budget crisis. That has to be the first priority."
The question is whether the Sun Belt will show the rest of the nation how to retool schools, save water and energy, and better plan its suburbs and exurbs in an era of less.
"By necessity, we're already being forced to address these issues," says Schwer, of the University of Nevada. "This crisis is an opportunity, more than anything else, to reset things, to put some balance back into our lives."
Should happen before around Q2, 2009.
.............
To escape the slaughter, which is well uderway, and may have spike-style
reversals, we have to abandon almost everything we think we know about
"economic fundamentals."
National-Debt, Inflation, Oil Prices, Technicals, Foreign Currencies, Fiat-Currency Slogans:
fugedaboutem, if you expect to make money in PMs during the next 48-months.
Disregard the TRUTH of a failed currency; it WILL bankrupt you. Accept that you, the
peasants, and the ruling-class WILL all be using paper-dollars to buy groceries for
the duration. When too many such dollars get into the hands of the peasants, a
brief window of low-risk exists to accumulate PMs safely; that window has now closed.
The first-half of 2005, was the last best hoarding period that we are likely to see for
a good while. Wise folks KNEW that the ruling-class and their government would
not allow the peasants to continue to use their mortgaged-shacks as ATM machines
indefinitely. What few fully grasped was that the unwinding would send MANY of
the big-guys and their "companies" into the toilet along with the foreclosed peasants.
The carnage is not likely near half-time.
A competition for dollars is underway to a degree that few can recall; unless they
lived as adults in the early 1930s. All but the top-tier are desperate for cash. In
that environment, it is not possible for the "fundamentals" of PMs to allow them
to perform like the economic books say they should.
The crushing can be called "manipulation" or "artificial" or any other denial-based
phrase the bagholders select. The facts remain the same: The metals - and other
good things - have to get flushed down the drain as liquidity shrinks into nothingness.
I have traded/held metals for decades, and done OK. In 1980, I bailed at the opportune
moment - and "moment" IS about the right word - and moved money into deeply
disocounted mortgages and real-property. A similar cycle-component now appears close,
and can likely be repeated successfully.
..................................
How do we know where we are in the demolition cycle?
My family has owned/operated/financed pawn shops for about 80-years. The PBI
(Pawn Brokers Index) is a reliable gauge during EVERY phase of an economic
calamity.
We look at several elements of the surveyed books.
Pledge Acceptance: The number of widgets loaned on and accepted.
(In our markets, pledges are at a 35-year high.)
Pledge Redemptions: The number of widgets redeemed from pawn.
(In our markets, redemptions are at a 40-year low.)
Pledge Categories: The KIND of widgets offered as pledge.
(In our markets, few non-stolen collectibles are being seen.
Little jewelry is coming in. Most pledges are elctronic items
purchased at WMT. The next highest cat is "work-used equipment."
Tradesmen are dropping off their tools at record levels.
Followed by home-used equipment; lawnNgarden. In "normal" times,
snow-blowers line the summer sidewalks and back-shelves. NOW,
the stores are FULL of lawn-mowers, too. LMs usually don't show-up
until the start of winter.)
Pledge Valuations: The wholesale/retail value of pledged widgets.
(70%+ of unredeemed pledges go to equipment-rental stores. The
prices they are willing to pay are 50% below last year's levels. Retail
out-traffic is SLOW, and there is substantial discounting.)
Resistance To Acceptance Of Offers: The variation in the loan-amounts that are deemed acceptable by customers.
(In our markets, the acceptance rate of first-offers is above 95%.
Historically, there has always been a little back-and-forth on
good items; not now. The pledge has lost all of his negotiating
ability/power/desire. They'just want CASH to pay LIVING EXPENSES.)
NO commodity-bubble can stay inflated in times like we are in.
Banks, for many years, have been happy to extend flexible lines of credit
to our businesses. Now, they are issuing "special" credit cards with goofey
interest rates and terms attached; when we need money to loan on junk, we
show-up with the cards and "negotiate" the best deal we can. We too no longer
have ANY "power" to get cheap dollars. We just want CASH to "loan" to peasants
so they can continue to survive..... and, so we can make a profit.
............................
So, what are you gonna do?
Hold the amount of physical metal that makes me comfortable.
SHORT SLV against the box. (And, beyond the box, too.)
When you hold in-hand PMs, your downside is locked/mitigated
on your SHORT position.
If the metal goes down, your SHORT position can be covered at
a large profit and you can buy MORE physical metal with your
profits, if you choose.
If the metal goes up, you simply SHORT more SLV into each leg
of the strength, average up, and DO NOT cover until the downward
trend resumes.
MOST folks look at "short positions" as "trades." They can be daytrades,
AND they can be LONGTERM investment vehicles. MOST of the great
fortunes made and retained in the 1920s were built on lengthy SHORTS.
From 1995 to 2001, MANY of the largest fortunes made and retained came from
shorting the "internet bubble." Start looking at SHORTS as a LOOOOONG TERM
strategy, IF you want to get rich. (Shorting the financials when they were
"going to the moon" in 2005, likely made more millionaires than any trade
in history. And, lots of those profits have not even been collected, yet.)
Just as LONGS do not have to sell when their shares tank, neither do SHORTS
have to cover when their bets turn north. And, remember, in the end, the
SHORTS will ALWAYS be right.......at some future point in time.
..........................
Why should anybody listen to you?
Look through the back threads and check my track record on the current cycle.
My tades are there.
I guessed right, this time and the time before that.
The metal-pumpers are MOSTLY scamsters who want to suck in the novice
money after the train has already come off the tracks. Follow their advice
and you WILL lose your money.
I was one of the pump-and-dump gang in the 1970s. I know how the
scam works; and, believe me, it IS a SCAM.
SHORT more SLV on ANY strength.
END of RANT.
I Miss the days of buying a roll of ASE's every year. 2005 was the last year I bought a roll. I plan to catch up on 06 ,07 ,08 rolls if silver will drop to $10
I was one of the pump-and-dump gang in the 1970s. I know how the
scam works; and, believe me, it IS a SCAM. SHORT more SLV on ANY strength.
storm888, now I see the perspective that you have. I don't doubt that your family's business gives you some valid signals on buy/sell trades of precious metals.
However, you are advocating a trading strategy with the implied goal of getting rich. You are putting investors of precious metals into the discredited category of "metal-pumpers".
Sorry, man - there's a big difference between investing and pumping a position. You're promoting a speculative position based on making a short term killing. You're the one doing the pumping here.
There is a difference between capital preservation and speculation. Most smart investors speculate, it's true. But most smart investors protect their core positions steadfastly. Nothing that you've said would persuade me to start shorting SLV or GLD.
I knew it would happen.
As far as I can tell, there are NO "pumpers" here. The "pumpers" are the newsletter boys and their clients, like MONEX.
"Sorry, man - there's a big difference between investing and pumping a position. You're promoting a speculative position based on making a short term killing. You're the one doing the pumping here.'
I am not pumping anything. I am stating MY position and revealing MY actual trades. Time will tell who is right.
"There is a difference between capital preservation and speculation. Most smart investors speculate, it's true. But most smart investors protect their core positions steadfastly. Nothing that you've said would persuade me to start shorting SLV or GLD."
MANY investors' CORE-positions are heavily weighted toward LONGTERM short-interests. That has ALWAY been the case. I have stayed SHORT on MANY stocks for several years before I covered. Now, thanks to ETFs, I can do the same with commodity trades.
Folks who bought $22 and $23 SAEs in March did not really "preserve" much of their capital when
they dumped at $13 yesterday.
I don't run from ALL my long positions when they have a setback. And, I sure won't abandon a
short position unless an OBVIOUS trend vanishes. Even then, I usually support the SHORT with
more bets. I short INTO strength; that is how money is made.
HISTORY tells us that "simply staying short near the top of ANY investment" will almost always,
eventually, yield a winner. What goes up, must come down; usually.
what a rough few months it's been. Hope you all are able to get a gulp of air occasionally.
thank you
1000
<< <i>Something around <$6 seems pretty likely, to me. Should happen before around Q2, 2009. >>
Somebody's Crystal Ball needs polishing....
<< <i>
<< <i>Something around <$6 seems pretty likely, to me. Should happen before around Q2, 2009. >>
Somebody's Crystal Ball needs polishing.... >>
Who are you to question his self professed "expertise" on the Silver market? He's only off by nearly $10 an ounce.
I know one thing - I didn't sell those silver eagles that I bought at $21.00. Nor did I sell the ones I bought at $7.00.
I knew it would happen.
<< <i>I wonder if Storm is still riding that short position on silver's strength.
I know one thing - I didn't sell those silver eagles that I bought at $21.00. Nor did I sell the ones I bought at $7.00.
Yeah I've been buying Silver since the late 90's some was bought at $5 an ounce some at $7, some at $9, some at $12, some at $14 even a little bit at $17 but I also got aggressive once it fell to the$10-$13 range both buying .999 and trading 90% into .999 when the premiums were way up on 90% effectively getting nearly 10% free Silver in the conversion.
Unlike Yukon Cornelius I don't view Silver and Gold as the be all and end all of everything in life, however I do view it as insurance against something I have no control over just like my farmland and house with no mortgage. It helps me sleep better at night and after the substantial hit my retirement accounts took (although they've recovered much of what was lost on paper) I realize how quickly things can change for the worse so this time I've been selling select stocks as they hit my target price so shall I also sell some of my Silver and Gold into strength.
The days of buy and hold are probably gone for nearly any form of investment as the world has transformed into an era ruled by a daytrading mentality, this doesn't sit well with me as buying great companies and holding them worked well for me in the past but like the song goes the times they are a changing and so must some of us old timers and our way of thinking.
I knew it would happen.
<< <i>Great job Jerry! Sub 10.00 silver seems like such a no-brainer now, amazing we thought it was a gamble such a short time ago.---------------------BigE >>
We were given a second chance after the 2008 election at 9-ish. It seemed like a no-brainer to me then and sheer genius now.
Loves me some shiny!
<< <i>So the $80/barrel prediction caught my eye. Aren't we hovering there right now again? With words of +$100 coming quick again? >>
closer to $90
In response to the OP's original question, at $87.79 oil, silver should settle at about $28.56.
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