Nothing Like the Good Ol’ Bank of Japan

 

 

 

Today’s Playing Field

 

Gold, and particularly gold mining stocks have fallen back over the last few days, and in the case of the mines, the reaction has been fairly drastic. Even as the price of yellow stuff climbed to a record $411 an ounce, there was a sell off in the mining stocks, which, after all, have increased in price much faster than the metal itself (there’s a logic to this, since the price of extraction remains flat, the mines’ profits begin to rise with each bump up in the price of the end product). 

 

According to Reuters, the fall off in price reflects an anticipation of end-of-year maneuvering as traders lock in profits.  The dollar has also stopped its crazy skid and actually moved back up a penny or so from its low with the Euro.  It seems the Bank of Japan has been soaking up dollars from the world market in order to keep the Yen at a price that allows them to not loose market share to countries whose currencies are locked to the dollar, namely, of course, China.  Not so, for the Brits’ Pound, which continues to climb.

 

The Brits, it seems have been borrowing and spending nearly as fast as their Yank cousins according to a report out from the Bank of England today, which puts household debt at historic highs.  The difference, it seems, is that Blair is not up for re-election this year and the adults there have decided to do something to slow things down by raising interest rates on government bonds which are now in the 10-years some 60 basis points higher than US T-Bills.  Risk-adverse money –it seems there are a few of us still around—has been flowing there like the melting of the glaciers at the North Pole.

 

Of course, in the US, we have invented a new kind of recovery, one in which fewer people do more business.  At the height of the greatest government cash push in history (all, BTW, borrowed from the future), jobless rates once again were up this week.  What will Alan Greenspan do next?  Who knows what Carl Rove will cook up!

 

In Japan they went so far as to have negative interest rates –which in real terms is what we have in the US—in which they paid people to borrow.  Unfortunately, the strategy backfired as it served to drive down prices, thereby encouraging the thrifty Japanese to put off purchases in anticipation of even lower prices the following year.

 

Not to worry about the Americans, though.  It seems we bought even more SUV’s this November than last.

 

Bush, of course, caved first to the Europeans on steel when they had him by the balls:  they had targeted retaliatory steps against products coming from key electoral states.  The dirty secret there, anyway, was that the tariffs were keeping steel prices artificially high thus raising costs for American manufacturers and actually costing more manufacturing jobs than they were saving steel jobs that have no future in any case.  I hope you followed that!

 

Then he caved to the Chinese on Taiwan on a little issue like democracy.  Maybe even he has finally realized that if the Chinese ever wise up and start spreading their reserve assets around, the whole pyramid scheme on which he has bet his re-election will come tumbling down.  And that’s the rosy outlook on DW today.  So, I wouldn’t make any medium or long-term bets long on the dollar.  Meantime, I think I will run to the cash machine and pull out Euros today while the getting is, well not exactly good, but better than, say, $1.25, which is likely to soon be the situation.  Thanks BOJ!

 

Bucky Balls

 

Now, a word for our godfather, Buckminster Fuller:  Bucky’s legacy, as incorporated in his invented word, Dymaxion, emphasizes the non-static nature of reality and secondly the power to be derived from the infinite simplicity that is the essence of Nature’s grand design.  Standing in the Pantheon, as impressive a testament to the enormous advances the ancient Romans made in architecture –the brick and mortar dome is actually larger than the cast iron one on the Capitol in Washington—you can lean your hand against the massive stone pillars weighing thousands of tons that hold up the structure.  Compare that to Bucky’s best known structures, the geodesic domes that can be fitted together, even for large structures with fewer people and in less time than it would have taken to move just one of the Pantheon’s granite pillars from the quarry to the city.  It’s hard to imagine the size of the crews that worked on these ancient monuments but the dynamic is the force of a great institution –in this case, the most powerful state ever known on earth.

 

Bits and bytes have for all practical purposes no friction as they pass through copper and fiberglass conduits at nearly the speed of light.  As the number of users and uses increases, the costs diminish.  The great machines of the corporate media, like the columns in the Pantheon, adsorb massive infrastructure and personnel resources.  For such, they need to behave like the great empires of the past.

 

In the Dymaxion world, change is inevitable, information is crunched into something useful, spin turns static, talking heads become so many trophies on the screen, like marble heads in a mausoleum.

 

The real infrastructure of the web is as light and malleable as the lines of code that support the communication and distribution system.  We look forward to seeing what these dynamics are going to bring together but I am confident that the need to cut through the bullshit is so enormous that given the kind of persistence and optimism that characterized the original Dymaxion man, this will become a valuable and cherished resource.

 

 

 

 

rmb

 

dymaxionweb@verizon.net

 

Copyright 2003 Richard Mendel-Black All Rights Reserved

 

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