At least some of us can see where & why gold is in a long term uptrend which started about 8 yrs ago. Certainly has been an interesting ride. I bought a few more ADU which looks like it's ready to go.
More reasons for Gold
The Difference That Eight Years Can Make: From global debt default to an the world's ninth biggest economy. Former President Putin is the public hero of most Russians, especially the ones who remember what Russia looked like when he arrived. Russia has risen from nowhere to become the world's ninth largest economy. Income per head has grown ten-fold in US Dollar terms. The average Russian now earns the equivalent of $US12,012, near what Portugal now achieves. Today, Russians are confident that on a per capita basis they will move past the annual earnings of Great Britain by about 2012-14. Russia is today the world's biggest energy exporter.
Russia's trade surplus widened in the first three months of the year to $US 53.6 Billion, the Russian Federal Customs Service said. That compared with a surplus of $U 33.5 Billion during the same period last year. In upper circles in Moscow, there is increasingly confident talk to the effect that the Ruble can be made into a reserve currency in its own right, backed by Russia's immense energy resources and one of the world's mightiest hoards of foreign exchange reserves. Gold is also an issue. The talk among Gold enthusiasts is that Russia has been a steady buyer of Gold on the market - through intermediaries. Russia is itself one of the major world Gold producers.
Yet Another Summit - Europe And Russia: On Wednesday, May 21, the European Union countries, all 27 of them, agreed to begin new wide ranging negotiations with Russia. The agreement among senior European diplomats paves the way for the Union and Moscow to start negotiating their first broad cooperation deal in more than a decade. Here again, the US has been left on the outside looking in. These EU/Russia talks follow of inherent necessity after the NATO Summit debacle where it was the continental Europeans who rebelled and told the US that NATO would not advance its alliance further eastward. Geo-politically, that opened the door for the China/Japan Summit which took place two weeks ago - see the Early May issue - #603 - of The Privateer. That summit in Tokyo, opened the doors for the upcoming EU/Russia talks. The feature of all these summits is that the US is being left on the outside looking in. They are not there - even as observers.
The Global Diplomatic Isolation Of The US: What has taken place in these many recent Summits all over the world is without diplomatic precedent since the end of WW II. Since then, whenever it mattered to the US, the US was there engaged in defending or advancing its own interests. Now - and this is the real difference - the US cannot even get observer status. It is left with its local Ambassador to watch events at a distance without being even in the corridors outside the conference venue. This is truly full-scale diplomatic isolation.
In this fast developing four-corner world, the US is being left all alone in its own corner. Diplomacy is always followed after a few weeks or months by what was agreed to starting to have real effects in the world. The direction here is already clear. The world is walking away from the USA.
