http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a309371.htm

SRINAGAR: Thousands of Indian security forces have launched an offensive against Muslim mercenaries in a mountainous area of Kashmir, police said yesterday.

Nearly 7,000 soldiers and police commandos were involved in the operation begun on Monday in a 50 square kilometer area in Doda district.

A senior officer said the offensive was launched following reports of mercenaries hiding in the hills.

``Soldiers, paramilitary forces and ( police ) commandos are advancing uphill through thick forests from different directions towards the suspected hideouts,'' the officer said.

India's Hindu nationalist government last week ordered a crackdown on Muslim mercenaries, large numbers of whom are known to be active in Kashmir, the country's only Muslim-majority state.

The state's chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, was also quoted as saying that India will use its newly acquired nuclear weapons in a war if necessary.

``We will not hesitate to use a nuclear bomb if the country's security is endangered,'' the Economic Times newspaper quoted Mr. Abdullah, an ally of the ruling nationalists, as saying.

The Press Trust of India quoted him as saying India would be compelled to use ``nuclear weapons in self-defence if attacked by any country, including Pakistan and China.''

- AFP

http://www.hkstandard.com/online/news/001/asia/news003.htm

With Asian demand for GOLD drying up because of the huge loss of wealth from stock/currency/real estate implosion and sanctions on Pakistan/India hurting their ability to consume gold the probability of continued weak gold prices is high. A lot of entities that buy, hoard or mine gold will have to sell to make ends meet. IMO

At any rate, if you could give me a clue as to which 10k's to look up, I would appreciate that very much.

Right now, alot of oil companies are high fliers -- Royal Dutch Petroleum, Exxon, Shell, etc. This could really make a dent in the markets if the '7 Sisters' took a dive in earnings. Of course, I guess the producers are the hardest hit, not the refiners -- who are probably getting windfall profits by not reducing prices. I sure haven't seen any effect on gas prices at the pump -- so far. So -- someone down the pipeline is making a fortune.

Are you perhaps referring to 10k's on American banks listed on US exchanges that are creditors to the OPEC oil producers? If so do you know which ones are worried? Donald is our banker sleuth par excellance, and he would be very interested in what I think you are telling me. Looks like we have alot more than the 1 trillion or so in debt defaults from the SEAsian events last year-- and the US ( and other ) banks that have exchange/credit risk. Any idea how much more debt we are talking about?

I wonder -- so far most of the bad debt reported has been from Japanese, Hong Kong, and European sources. But much South America debt comes from US sources. Is OPEC financed mostly by US and European banks? This sounds alot closer to home to me. Chase bank? JP Morgan, etc?

Would a fellow Canadian be so kind as to suggest the best institutions from which to buy/sell coins & bullion at the retail level? ( preferably in Western Canada )

Thank you.

I think we need to be careful in analysing the behavior of gold in these deflationary times, as the last time we had such a collection of serial deflations the price of gold was fixed, and most of us had not even been born.

If you can, could you post a url or two to support your statments about these oil producers nearly being in arrears? I recall not so long ago reading that Venezuela could not pay its own federal phone bill. But, I do not know about Mexico or other countries.

http:///gold.conversion.html

Reminds me of the old story about the country shopkeeper who used to sell birdshot by the pound. He broke his scale so started to use a pint jar to measure, thinking 'a pint's a pound the world around'. Needless to say when word spread he had a run of people buying birdshot by the pint and nearly went broke selling it.

Also, when you say Princes of Davos you mean the BIS, right? At first, I thought you meant the 2,000 guys who assemble in Davos each January for their annual global talk-fest. Now, If I've got this right, you have demonstrated that REAL financial affairs, such as currency pegging, as opposed to what Mozel would refer to as the Massa giving the slaves his scrip to use on the plantation, are always denominated in gold. Always measured in gold. And everything else is just Massa. Do I have this straight? This is fascinating stuff.

You are my favorite teacher, please don't get discouraged with me!

Finally, as I have already alluded, the Committee reaffirmed its view that the time has come to add a new chapter to the Bretton Woods Agreement by making the liberalization of capital movements one of the purposes of the Fund and extending, as needed, the Fund’s jurisdiction

for this purpose. It requested the Executive Board to pursue its work on this issue with determination, with the aim of submitting appropriate amendment of our Articles of Agreement as soon as possible.

http://www.imf.org./external/np/speeches/1998/050898.HTM

away.....to watch this here gold thingy unfold...... ( slowly ) ...

EB

PppppppppppphhhhhhtF* will not be posting again 'till gold reaches 330...... ( hmmmmmm ) ......that should do it for the year then.....uh huh.

kiwi ( Ok I'm busted for wishful thinking... )

Please do not use this site for prank postings. There is lots of speculation on GOLD and goofy dribble like this just adds to the discomforting picture of the 'blinded goldbug'!

1. the rally yesterday was a fake, even after pulling Europe/London in this morning ( PM quote up $5.90 ) , and we are about to fall out of bed, or

2. This dip is a fake, and someone is trying to make us think we are about to fall out of bed, and we are about to have a really big rally, or

3. The war between traders is climaxing, and there's no telling what will happen, or

4. The word got out that Farfel was back, and that was all it took.

1 ) Devaluations: Gold fire sales from deflationary events cannot be predicted regarding the when, but they will happen. Could be Hong Kong, Russia, South America, even Europe. So we should be ready for the twitches.

2 ) Dollar/gold carry: We are told by FV that 8000 tonnes of gold are being loaned -- mostly by CB's. Now that the EURO looks like a weak threat to the dollar for some time, what could affect the dollar/gold carry trade? I don't know, but I'm hoping our fellow kitcoites might have some insight on how much longer the price of gold can be held down like this. Just how much more gold can the CB's loan out? I don't think they can loan it out twice, at least.

Unsuspecting Executives Become Fair Game in 'Buzzword Bingo'

June 8, 1998

Ray Mundt, chairman of Unisource Worldwide Inc., has just learned that some of his employees have been playing a popular game called buzzword bingo, in which participants track the jargon their bosses utter during staff meetings.

I don't know, Mr. Mundt muses, how this is going to interface with the communications side. I think it will deter from it.

Bingo!

Word Play

The '90s are supposed to have given the world the transformed workplace -- employees who embrace liberating technology working in organizations themselves liberated of hierarchies and craving the team input of the working stiff.

Maybe so. But in cubicles and conference rooms at companies from annuity sellers to paper distributors, drones and peons are slyly mocking the new corporate culture -- and their cliche-spouting bosses. One of their weapons is an underground game called buzzword bingo, which works like a surreptitious form of regular bingo. Buzzwords -- incent, proactive, impactfulness, for example -- are preselected and placed on a bingo-like card in random boxes. Players sit in meetings and conferences and silently check off buzzwords as their bosses spout them; the first to fill in a complete line wins. But, in deference to the setting, the winner typically coughs instead of shouting out bingo.

Buzzword bingo arose as a reaction against half-truth and responsibility-dodging in the workplace, says former Silicon Graphics Inc. software engineer Chris Pirazzi. When Mr. Pirazzi, now a software engineer elsewhere, worked at the high-tech company, he wrote bingo cards featuring phrases like, At Stanford, we ... ( In Silicon Valley, it's hip to let people know you attended Stanford University. )

The game, by all accounts, began at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View,

Calif. Tom Davis, a scientist and one of the company's founders, says that one day in early 1993, he was sitting in the office of a friend who had scrawled corporate-speak on his blackboard. A light bulb went off, and Mr. Davis wrote a computer program to generate bingo cards filled with the jargon he had seen, plus motivational cliches like Step up to it. He says he coined the name buzzword bingo and passed the cards along to colleagues with a note written in the spirit of the new game: The ball's in your court.

His employees took the ball and ran with it. Since then, the game has spread up and down the corporate and governmental landscape like an out-of-control empowerment session.

High Speakers, Hijinks

Seniors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology played bingo at a graduation ceremony two years ago when Vice President Al Gore spoke,

feverishly marking his buzzwords, including a Gore perennial: information superhighway. Mr. Gore came prepared -- someone tipped him off before his appearance. When students cheered after he uttered the word paradigm, the vice president then asked, Did I hit a buzzword?

During a later speech by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Labour delegates played a decidedly U.K. version called New Labour, New Bingo. Their handmade cards included some of Mr. Blair's notable platitudes: stakeholder and greater say. Blair spokesman Godric Smith says of the bingo episode: Real high-minded, big-picture stuff.

Someone eventually sent a copy of the game to cartoonist Scott Adams, inspiring its appearance in a Dilbert comic strip. It's subversive, says Mr. Adams, who admits to using the word optimizing in a recent conversation. It's as naughty as you can get without getting fired.

Indeed, as far as anyone knows, nobody has been fired over buzzword bingo, perhaps because it's usually played below the radar of corporate superiors. In some cases, peers use it to loosen up meetings: At First Colony Life Insurance Co., Lynchburg, Va., annuity salesman David Doran recently told eight co-workers that they couldn't leave his meeting until they used all the buzzwords he had printed on a flip chart -- company-handbook argot such as voice of the customer and what's our

deliverable on this?

As the meeting dragged on to an hour, they were all trying to steer the conversation to use all the buzzwords in one sentence, Mr. Doran says. It was hysterical.

Even some bosses sympathize. At Unisource, a paper distributor, Mr. Mundt, the chairman whose own employees play the game, says, I can understand why workers are playing because I have heard a lot of speakers

who are basically boring or they're not saying anything.

Goring the Cliche-Speakers

Ridiculing double-speak, in fact, is the singular object of the game for many. Software engineer Spencer Sun says he got colleagues to play at a San Francisco firm owned by a corporation he identifies as Big Evil Parent Company. The chief executive arrived to deliver thinly sugar-coated bad news about declining sales. To boost the troops' spirits, Mr. Sun distributed buzzword bingo cards before a meeting with the CEO as a way of thumbing our noses at the whole thing.

One day last fall, Seattle paper saleswoman Joyce Boewe figured she was in for another dull meeting and decided to liven things up with a rousing

bingo match. Before the meeting, and unbeknownst to her bosses at Websource Inc., a unit of Unisource, Ms. Boewe quietly handed out bingo cards filled with corporate-speak such as core competency partnership and net net. During the meeting, the staff unobtrusively checked off target words as they were used by various speakers. Whispers and smiles shot through the room.

Then things abruptly turned cutthroat. Saleswoman Susan Rowe started asking the speakers leading questions to draw out buzzwords that were on her own card, says salesman Hume Crawford. No matter -- Ms. Rowe says her efforts were in vain when too few buzzwords got used and the game ended in a stalemate. She thinks, though, that her questions might have won brownie points. There is, she observes, an apple-polishing aspect to buzzword bingo: You can excel at bingo while appearing to hang on to the boss's every word. Certainly, it keeps you awake during dull meetings, she says.

More than a dozen Web sites now sport game cards that Internet surfers can download, often free. Web-site designer Benjamin Yoskovitz says he is writing what he calls the Official Buzz Word Bingo Rule Book. One modification he is devising assigns points to buzzwords; employees tally scores at the end of meetings if no one hits bingo.

It may, in fact, be time for some rule changes. The game can easily get out of hand. Four employees, of gofast.net Inc., a St. Paul, Minn., Internet company, have been playing a covert marathon game at staff meetings for nearly three months. The employees rigged their Palm Pilot hand-held computers to churn out new cards whenever they have a meeting.

When a player wins, the computer will make a melodic beeping noise.

To date, the beep has yet to sound, indicating a need to reprogram the computers to create more winning opportunity, says Eric Miller, one of the players, letting fly with a buzzterm of his own.

IMHO, the inherent strength will eventually shine through.

BUY and HOLD. GO Gold!

Speculare ( pdeep ( UK rates ) ) ID#233181:

Copyright © 1998 Speculare/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved

You or anyone else see the late Fri. Reuters

story on Spain's contribution to the ECB of

4.9B U.S. of 71B domestic reserves, to be

11.4% of total ECB reserves.Concerning Spain's

share, article goes on to state: The majority

of that total is likely to be denominated in

U.S. dollars, with a small proportion held in

gold, analysts said.

What's to happen with the vast amount of

excess reserves? If they pledge not to sell,

how can they lend L/T when producers are

closing out hedge books...to shorts? Australia

and Argentina are not directly part of this

Euro equation although they went ahead and

bailed out too. As one of the bankers said,

bonds offer a better return on reserves. Any

thoughts on this, and I don't mean (

THOUGHTS! ) like another

Interesting questions. I imagine anyone here would have to spend at least an hour to research and write answers to your questions. How about doing it yourself and offering us the benefits of your work? Look forward to it.

Also, they can say they were thinking of going to a gold standard anyway -- later -- when talk of an Asian or Moslem world gold backed currency starts to really heat up. So - no real competition for the US dollar - yet.

I wonder -- how will silver do? Do we have to wait for CRY0 to bottom? Perhaps not.

Anyone know why Hong Kong is dropping? Has the Yuan devaluation on the black market exceeded the previously known 7%? Interesting times. Hard to be a gold bug in these deflationary times.

away.....to the grind

Éß

away....to w/w

Éßkiddinaround

aurator......i knew that one.........it's just a matter of time before the merkans win the world cup......... ( haha ) ............am still waiting for my first prize.......btw, put my second batch-o-beer down yesterday....she's a Pale-Ale......and looking good. used leaf hops this time and bagged 'em. hops smells awfully familiar to it's cousin and it's sticky too......the seeds are similar. saved a few and will plant......what the hell......uh huh. also used hard water from faucet outdoors...indoors is too soft. will keep you and jims posTED.

go gold...... ( ? )

The bankruptcy lawyer, who asked not to be named, said that Chinese banking officials have told him they are considering a 7 percent devaluation of the yuan in the second half of the year to reclaim some of the competitive advantage. Still, while the government's official line is that it will not devalue, the concern is evident.

Cut and paste these two lines together for URL, and fix hxtp:

hxtp://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/business/msnbc/story.html?s=n/

msnbc/business/19980607/19980607101

Please do not assume that the EURO launch may be the turning point. Despite the hoopla, the EURO group is much closer to the US/IMF mindset. Hence a gold rally right now may be disappointing. And -- a Chinese Yuan devaluation is looming. Gold will perform better after the next devaluation, not before, even if the bottom is probably in.

On the other hand, I am heartened by the outspokenness of the BIS, and its new office in Hong Kong. This supports what Kictcoites have been saying for a long time -- that the next gold backed currency will be in Asia, not Europe or the US.

Keep ( at least some ) of your powder dry.

If this keeps up, then the lead indicator given by the breakout on the $A Gold chart is going to work again. I note that the Aussie Gold index was up about 10 points today. Not much, but then again, the market as a whole fell 15 points.

The $A -$US Gold comparison charts still make interesting viewing - up at the Privateer website. BTW, the latest exchange rate I have is $A 1 = $US 0.598. At Kitco's present price ( $US 297.50 ) , that gives and Aussie Dollar Gold price of just over $A 497.

I dream of miners of ore bodies of precious metals in nickel-iron asteroids. Of men and women smelting ores with the focused fury of a kilometer wide array of solar reflectors. Do any of you remember a story entitled The Man Who Sold the Moon or the story of a man who manufactured remote sensing evidence of PMs on the moon and thereby caused a gold rush. What better way to kick us Earth-bound stick-in-the-muds in the butt and get us moving into space.

P.S. The average concentration of Silver in the average nickel-iron asteroid {0.035ppm} is poor compared the average in Earth's crust {0.08ppm}. But the average concentration of GOLD in the average nickel-iron asteroid of 1.800ppm is 900 times that of Earth's crust's average of .002ppm.

Do not take my word for it - check out my source FWIW

http://www.shef.ac.uk/chemistry/web-elements/Au/geol.html

Once asteroid mining or the mining of iron-nickel ore bodies on the moon comes on line, the ratio of such Silver and Gold will be 1:51 not 51:1. Transporting Gold to Earth will be neglible compared to its value per ounce. By then we will have so depleted the reserves here that both metals will be worth orders of magnitude more than they are today. But when these new Klondike fields are struck - the POG will drop like a meteorite.