For historical comparisons, I went back to check on some of your recent postings.
Most certainly, I am not ignoring history, as a search of my own past postings would have suggested. I am, however, seeking to point out that that strict comparisons between past and present are never aligned.
Broadly speaking, comparative points in history may tend to repeat the general thrust of the past, but not of the specific circustances.
My points concerning the nature of the global financial and economic system is simply this:
1) A globally integrated system will often experience severe shocks or turbulence, but otherwise will not collapse.
2) The movement of capital will, in part, re-align itself and emerge elsewhere. In this instance, the current European or US strongholds maya well end up being displaced by the emerging Asian Tigers (ie: the global Chinese influence, for instance).
3) Moving from any form of rigid system such as the Bretton Woods gold-standard linked monetary system to one which is free floating will automatically adjust both the international cost of capital, the relevant stores of value, and the extent to which debt or wealth will either be calculated, valued, or represented.
4) Unlike the 1930s, today the global system has an inbuilt social security safetynet. Remember, Roosevelt's New Deal involving the TVA took until 1933 to emerge through Congress (some 3 years later).
As for your own predictions of 8th May, I would have to say that you have naow become somewhat of an optimist!!!
Back then, you were predicting a DOW of 5000 within 6 months (by end October). Now, you are predicting a DOW of 5500 (albeit, since 25th July).
With gold, you also predicted a rise to US$400, and an AUD exchange rate of 80c.
I can't comment on the gold price (not enough research done yet on this, but a rise above US$340 is doubtful in my opinion, and a retracement to $US285 is quite possibly still on the cards).
As for the FX rates, I am already on the record elsewhere as saying the following: 1) AUD to trade in a 53 - 56 range between now and year end. 2) AUD to dip to 53 by November; and 3) AUD to top out at 56 by December, following an interest rate rise in the late November /early December RBA market committee meeting.
On an average AUD of 54.5, gold @ $US400 would be worth $AU733. But, at AUD 80, the same price of gold would be $AU500.
In practical terms, this would be enough to send most Australian gold explorers, or producers, into the ground (to pardon a pun).
History, therefore, has a wonderful way of reminding us of our origins, our formative beginnings, and of the means by which we have advanced to our present state of being. It offers guidance, inspiration, and enlightenment. It does not, however, repeat itself. The human pysche though is something altogether different. In history, it seeks out comfort, reassurance, and equivocation of what it is now seeking to explore, or achieve.
At the first sign of hesitation, it highlights the drawbacks, and the excuses that others will seek to rely upon.
By its very nature, therefore, just as one considers that history will again repeatitself, human intervention applies an alotgether different spin to it, thereby resulting in a different outcome to the one originally envisaged.
You may well end up being right, but in the process of being so, you will also end up wrong, as history today already carries with it the events of the past, as opposed to back then, when the history by which we are now judging ourselevs was still to be written.
