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My childhood friend Glenn Klotz (son of Red Klotz, at 5'7" the shortest basketball player ever to play in an NBA game) grew up in a beachfront home in the Atlantic City island community of Margate, NJ. An environmental activist and blogger, Glenn has fought a tireless battle against the further proliferation of artificial dunes such as the one that has cut off ocean views and breezes for pedestrians on the Atlantic City boardwalk. The battle has now been lost as a result of Hurricane Sandy, he says, and this seems likely to produce a property-insurance windfall for owners of NJ beach-block homes that typically sell for $2 million or more.  Glenn wrote me recently as follows: The big push is on here to get Margate in the dune system. (Click here for the full story in the Atlantic City Press.) The Press story is one-sided garbage. They found some guy who had nothing to do with the actual fight [against the dunes] and set him up as a spokesperson for anti-dune forces. At this point, however, the battle has been lost, effectively ended by Hurricane Sandy. My position is to let them have their stupid-ass dunes, for all the good it will do in the long run.  In fact, 95% of the damage island-wide was from bay-side flooding, and all the dunes in the world won't hold back the bay. From this point forward, here's how things are going to work, and it's ironic: The new flood-elevation maps will turn most of [Absecon] Island into flood zones, and homeowners will either have to lift their homes to qualify for flood insurance or be barred from selling them. But -- get this! --the beach-block, with its government-built-and-paid-for dune, will be exempt!  Once again, the Too Big To Fail crowd gets some socialism for

It is with great sorrow that we note the recent passing of our dear friend Jonathan Auerbach, whose investment dispatches from around the world were as entertaining as they were enlightening.  He was an ebullient optimist in these troubled times, and it was this quality, along with his extraordinary generosity and kindness, that we will recall most fondly. Jon was given to doing business deals on a handshake, sometimes in places where you or I wouldn’t dare travel without an armed escort or a letter of introduction from the local chieftain.  A photo in his midtown NYC office showed a fledging stock exchange in a place so remote that it shared space with a café.  And yet, never once did he pay a bribe in any of these backwaters, nor was he ever threatened by some Banana Republic dictator to come to terms.  Some men are easy to like and to trust, and Jon was one of them. He was a gentleman’s gentleman and one of the classiest guys we've had the pleasure to know.  The Yiddish word for men like Jonathan Auerbach is “mensch,” and he stood out even among them. Global Reach He departed this world supposedly owing us dinner at Peter Lugar’s.  Jon had always insisted that our daily forecasts made him “tons of money.”  This was surely a kind exaggeration, since his investment style -- wholly unlike ours, which is to trade for relatively small gains -- was to swing for the fences. Few stockbrokers with global reach have done this more successfully than Auerbach, Grayson & Co.  The firm operates in 130 markets around the world and was among the first foreign brokers to do business in Iraq, Egypt, South Africa and Russia.  “Even when they’re bombing in Gaza, they’re trading in Ramallah,” Auerbach told

The topic headlined above is currently being debated on Capitol Hill, pushed by 'Little Timmy' Geithner and either ignorantly or duplicitously reported on by the usual apparatchiks: The New York Times, Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, L.A. Times et al.  Lest Obama's loyal minions embarrass themselves by reflexively supporting this nitwit idea like so many others they've embraced in the past, here's something for them to ponder from The Privateer, one of my very favorite reads.  Editor Bill Buckler drops a well deserved turd in the punch bowl with this trenchant and succinct analysis: "If the US Dollar was not the world’s reserve currency and U.S. Treasury IOUs were not the world’s preferred holding of reserves behind their own currencies and financial systems, the Treasury’s debt limit would have been done away with a long time ago. But the US Dollar IS the world’s reserve currency so the debt of the US government IS the underpinnings of the global financial system. That being the case, the system stands or falls on the continuing perception that Treasury debt paper is a viable form of 'reserve' and that the debt of the US government will NEVER become 'unsustainable'.  An announcement by the US government that it was getting rid of any 'limits' to its debt-generating capacity would put that perception at risk - quite possibly at grave risk. "That is the reason why the debt limit remains - even though it has not been an impediment to ever increasing Teasury indebtedness for well over half a century. It is easy to laugh at the seeming absurdity of a Treasury 'debt limit' and many people do. Take it away, however, and the fiction that sovereign debt is 'sustainable' - let alone any 'confidence' in its eventual repayment - would be MUCH harder to

I recently attended the Hard Asset Conference in San Francisco.  The meeting concluded with a panel discussion that featured Rick Rule, Paul Van Eeden, Ian McAvity, James Dines, Jay Taylor and Adrian Day.  Two of them named as their top mining-sector pick the same company, a firm that is focused on prospect generation and the creation and acquistion of royalties and investments.  For the identity of this company, along with some timely Hidden Pivot analysis of its shares, drop by the chat room and check out my posts from November 26, starting at 17:57. (Don't subscribe? Click here for a free trial that will allow you to join the chat room discussion for a week and to access trading 'touts' behind the subscriber wall.) I'll also mention a James Dines recommendation that surprised me: Bank of America (BAC).  I rolled my eyes when he mentioned this one, but when I looked at BAC's daily chart for the first time in months, I realized that Dines is clearly onto something. BAC is currently trading for around 9.84, but it will be an odds-on bet to reach 15.90 once it has exceeded a Hidden Pivot 'midpoint resistance' at 11.31.

[Following is the video and an edited transcript of an interview Rick did recently with the BBC’s Max Keiser. The discussion ranged from Apple’s plunging share price, to hyperinflation vs. deflation, to fraud in the international banking system, to Switzerland’s untraditional embrace of currency devaluations to cheapen its exports.] Max Keiser: Hi.  I’m Max Keiser.  Welcome to “On the Edge.”  It’s time now to go to Boulder, CO to speak with Rick Ackerman of rickackerman.com.  Rick, welcome back to “On the Edge.” Rick Ackerman: Thanks, Max. Max: Rick Ackerman, Barack Obama has been re-elected.  What impact do you expect on equities and commodity markets going forward, if any? Rick: I think they’re going lower.  But I never saw Romney as the answer, since our economic problems are bigger than politics.  I still see a deflationary end.  We’ve had quite a debate over the inflation/deflation conundrum. My take is that, at some point, we’ll have a hyperinflationary eruption, but in the end, assets all will be deflated. The stock market could enjoy a brief resurgence in the meantime.  Stocks are coming off lows this morning at what I call “midpoint pivots.”  They’ve all held.  But if they should slip next week, the market could go a lot lower. Max: It’s confusing for most people, because you have economists talking about deflation.  At the same time, you have news reports of thieves stealing roofs off of churches to sell the copper or to sell various metal components, drain pipes, et cetera, because the price of commodities are going so high, which of course sounds like inflation.  How do those two reconcile? Rick: It’s like trying to square the circle.  At a theoretical level, I don’t have any problem with the hyperinflation argument.  There’s a monetary blowout going on globally now, and eventually

[The following turned up in the Rick's Picks forum. However, it was unrelated to the discussion concerning White Gates Farm, and so I am reposting it below: 1) to give it greater visibility; and 2) because I share the author's skepticism that the gold price will achieve the stratospheric heights that Jim Sinclair has predicted (even if I am not so confident that government will not someday confiscate bullion or curtail its free exchange).  The author, who goes by the handle 'Doc,' blogs at silverdoctors.com RA] Well, Thanksgiving is over and so if I may I would like to begin a new conversation on the issue of Gold demand and Central Banks. Jim Sinclair has recently stated in response to one of his readers that Gold confiscation is not an issue of concern; that it is an unlikely scenario. He has strong views on the subject. More specifically, he wrote: “There was much to be gained by gold confiscation in the 1930s because we were on a gold standard. Gold in the 1930s was the only instrument of QE. It is not now nor will it be again in the future. There is no reason except some sort of fear of revenge to consider confiscation of gold, gold shares or the gold ETFs now. Those that worry so much about this do not really understand what gold was under a gold standard”. I beg to differ. I think Jim’s argument is not well thought out as he fails to consider the varied number of reasons for Central Bank accumulations that we are now witnessing across the globe. So I have penned a response to him that I will repost here at Ricks Picks for the benefit of others who may want to weigh in with their own views on this

"Culture changes policy; policy changes culture; and so the wheel of history turns," writes Myron Magnet in City Journal. "This is one of those moments when you can see it move. America’s traditional culture of self-reliant striving, of taming the wilderness, of limiting government from interfering with our own pursuit of happiness as we individually define it threatens to give way to a belief that our past and its values, from the heroic Founding onward, is a record of folly, vice, and misery, just as the British came to feel shame at their magnificent history." For the rest of the essay, click here.

From James Howard Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation: He's surely in for a rough ride in the four years ahead. There is a sickening, heavy sense of foreboding about the seemingly endless financial melodrama. It leads to the bewildering fork in the road at which the split paths lead to two different ways of going broke: savage deflation or turbo-inflation. Either way, you're toast. The gross interventions and arrant accounting fraud that pervade global finance, both in government and in private banking, can only lead to perversity and dysfunction in the operations of money that we depend on to remain civilized.

Georges van Hoegaerden, CEO of The Venture Company, is an out-of-the-box thinker whose e-mails are both provocative and enlightening.  His latest, which bears the headline above, refracts a theme that will be near and dear to the hearts of some who frequent the Rick's Picks forum.  A quote from Goethe contains the essence of it: None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. – Goethe To read the full essay, click here.