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Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Gold is last refuge against universal currency debasement
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The Telegraph, London
Sunday, September 26, 201
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/802632...
States accounting for two-thirds of the global economy are either holding down their exchange rates by direct intervention or steering currencies lower in an attempt to shift problems on to somebody else, each with their own plausible justification. Nothing like this has been seen since the 1930s.
"We live in an amazing world. Everybody has big budget deficits and big easy money but somehow the world as a whole cannot fully employ itself," said former Fed chair Paul Volcker in Chris Whalen"s new book, "Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream."
"It is a serious question. We are no longer talking about a single country having a big depression but the entire world."
... Dispatch continues below ...
Sona Resources Expects Positive Cash Flow from Blackdome,
Plans Aggressive Exploration of Elizabeth Gold Property
On May 18, 2010, Sona Resources Corp. (TSXV: SYS, Frankfurt: QS7) announced the release of a preliminary economic assessment for gold production at its flagship Blackdome and Elizabeth properties in British Columbia.
Sona Executive Chairman Nick Ferris says: "We view this as a baseline scenario for gold production. The project is highly sensitive to the price of gold. A conservative valuation of gold at $1,093 per ounce would result in a pre-tax cash flow of $54 million. The assessment indicates that underground mining at the two sites would recover 183,600 ounces of gold and 62,500 ounces of silver. Permitting and infrastructure are already in place for processing ore at the Blackdome mill, with a 200-tonne per day throughput over an eight-year mine life. Our near-term goal is to continue aggressive exploration at Elizabeth and develop a million-plus-ounce gold resource, commencing production in 2013."
For complete information on Sona Resources Corp. please visit: www.SonaResources.com
The US and Britain are debasing coinage to alleviate the pain of debt busts and to revive their export industries: China is debasing to offload its manufacturing overcapacity on to the rest of the world, though it has a trade surplus with the US of $20 billion (L12.6 billion) a month.
Premier Wen Jiabao confesses that China's ability to maintain social order depends on a suppressed currency. A 20 percent revaluation would be unbearable. "I can't imagine how many Chinese factories will go bankrupt, how many Chinese workers will lose their jobs," he said.
Plead he might, but tempers in Washington are rising. Congress will vote next week on the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act, intended to make it much harder for the Commerce Department to avoid imposing "remedial tariffs" on Chinese goods deemed to be receiving "benefit" from an unduly weak currency.
Japan has intervened to stop the strong yen tipping the country into a deflation death spiral, though it too has a trade surplus. There is suspicion in Tokyo that Beijing's record purchase of Japanese debt in June, July, and August was not entirely friendly, intended to secure yuan-yen advantage and perhaps to damage Japan's industry at a time of escalating strategic tensions in the Pacific region.
Brazil dived into the markets on Friday to weaken the real. The Swiss have been doing it for months, accumulating reserves equal to 40 percent of GDP in a forlorn attempt to stem capital flight from Euroland. Like the Chinese and Japanese, they too are battling to stop the rest of the world taking away their structural surplus.
The exception is Germany, which protects its surplus ($179 billion or 5.2 percent of GDP) by means of an undervalued exchange rate within EMU. The global game of "pass the unemployment parcel" has to end somewhere. It ends in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and parts of Eastern Europe and will end in France and Italy too, at least until their democracies object.
It is no mystery why so many states around the world are trying to steal a march on others by debasement, or to stop debasers stealing a march on them. The three pillars of global demand at the height of the credit bubble in 2007 were -- by deficits -- the US ($793 billion), Spain ($126 billion), and the UK ($87 billion). These have shrunk to $431 billion, $75 billion, and $33 billion respectively as we sinners tighten our belts in the aftermath of debt bubbles. The Brazils and Indias of the world are replacing some of this half trillion of lost juice, but not all.
East Asia's surplus states seem structurally incapable of compensating for austerity in the West, whether because of the Confucian saving ethi, or the habits of mercantilist practice, or in China's case by the lack of a welfare net. Their export models rely on the willingness of Anglo-PIGS to bankrupt themselves.
So we have an early 1930s world where surplus states are hoarding money instead of recycling it. A solution of sorts in the Great Depression was for each deficit country to devalue, breaking out of the trap (then enforced by the gold standard). This turned the deflation tables on the surplus powers -- France and the US from 1929-1931 -- forcing them to reflate as well (the US in 1933) or collapse (France in 1936). Contrary to myth, beggar-thy-neighbour policy was the global cure.
A variant of this may now occur. If China continues to hold down its currency, the country will import excess US liquidity, overheat, and lose wage competitiveness. This is the default cure if all else fails, and I believe it is well under way.
The latest Fed minutes are remarkable. They add a new doctrine, that a fresh monetary blitz -- or QE2 -- will be used to stop inflation falling much below 1.5 percent. Surely the Fed has not become so reckless that it really aims to use emergency measures to create inflation, rather preventing deflation? This must be a cover story. Ben Bernanke's real purpose -- as he aired in his November 2002 speech on deflation -- is to weaken the dollar.
If so, he has succeeded. The Swiss franc smashed through parity last week as investors digested the message. But the swissie is an overrated refuge. The franc cannot go much further without destabilizing Switzerland itself.
Gold has no such limits. It hit $1,300 an ounce last week, still well shy of the $2,200-2,400 range reached in the late Medieval era of the 14th and 15th centuries.
This is not to say that gold has any particular "intrinsic value." It is subject to supply and demand like everything else. It crashed after the gold discoveries of Spain's conquistadores in the New World and slid further after finds in Australia and South Africa. It ultimately lost 90 percent of its value -- hitting rock bottom a decade ago when central banks succumbed to fiat hubris and began to sell their bullion. Gold hit a millennium-low on the day Gordon Brown auctioned the first tranche of Britain's gold. It has risen five-fold since then.
We have a new world order where China and India are buying gold on every dip, where the West faces an ageing crisis, and where the sovereign states of the US, Japan, and most of Western Europe have public debt trajectories near or beyond the point of no return.
The managers of all four reserve currencies are playing fast and loose. The Fed is clipping the dollar. The Bank of England is clipping sterling. The European Central Bank is buying the bonds of EMU debtors to stave off insolvency, something it just months ago vowed never to do. And the Bank of Japan has just carried out two trillion yen of "unsterilized" intervention.
Of course gold can go higher.
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Prophecy to Become Coal Producer This Year
with 1.5 Billion Tonnes of Resource
Prophecy Resource Corp. (TSX.V: PCY) announced on May 11 that it has entered into a mine services agreement with Leighton Asia Ltd. to begin coal production this year. Production will begin with a 250,000-tonne starter pit as planned in August, with production advancing to 2 million tonnes per year in 2011. Prophecy is fully funded to production and its management team includes John Morganti, Arnold Armstrong, and Rob McEwen.
For Prophecy's complete press release about its production plans, please visit:
http://www.prophecyresource.com/news_2010_may11.php
