Dr M Khalid's global village blog

Although the decentralized digital currency first appeared in 2009,  Bitcoin’s  popularity has really taken off in recent weeks and the value of the coins has skyrocketed since January. The world’s largest Bitcoin exchange,  Mt. Gox , currently has the currency listed as being worth $209 per coin. Although you can purchase bitcoins, the real way to get your hands on some is to mine for them using a computer. The process involves solving a complex mathematical algorithm and it becomes harder to find blocks of bitcoins as time goes on because there’s only a set number of them in the system (the total number of bitcoins in existence will never exceed 21 million). Anyone can mine for bitcoins, although attempting to find coins on your own is now very difficult because so many people have jumped onboard the digital gold rush in recent weeks. Check out the  Bitcoin mining profitability calculator  to see the average generation time for a solo block. You ca...

When the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency first implemented a working version of the Internet in the 1960s it seemed like a fringe experiment not dissimilar to Bitcoin today. It wasn’t until a protocol called TCP/IP emerged in the 1970s and was commercialized that the Internet was positioned to take off. In short, this protocol allowed every website and service built on it to have its own “address” and a way to communicate information. This averted chaos, allowing users to find what they were looking for, allowing websites to work together and enabling networks to do the hard lifting of directing traffic in an orderly and predictable way. Without TCP/IP, the Internet as we know it would not exist. Bitcoin today is in roughly the same development phase that TCP/IP was back then. Instead of IP addresses and websites, Bitcoin has unique strings that represent money and a mechanism to send these strings securely and safely wherever you want. It is a protocol that is allowing ...

Some new features were announced recently and are gradually being rolled out to users across the globe. Perhaps most significant among them is   the introduction of tabs to your inbox .   Gmail ( GOOG )   will now automatically sort incoming mail into a few different groups: Primary (stuff from real people, such as friends, family, and colleagues); Social (alerts from   Facebook ( FB ) , Twitter, and the like); Promotions (sales e-mails and other marketing material from stores), and Updates (reciepts, statements and confirmations from banks, airlines, and other businesses). The tabs sit at the top of your inbox, with preview numbers to let you know if anything new is in them. If a message is appearing in the wrong tab, you can drag and drop it into another one (or right click and select which tab you want), at which point Gmail will ask you if you’d like future e-mails from the same sender to go in the tab you selected.  http://www.businessweek.com/a...

According to a report just released by The Boston Consulting Group. The report, “ Maintaining Momentum in a Complex World: Global Wealth 2013 ,” shows that global household wealth grew by 7.8 percent in 2012, to $135.5 trillion. That's a big jump from 2011, when it rose 3.6 percent in the aftermath of the financial crisis.  Behind the rise was a strong rebound in world equity markets, which contributed more than usual to the rise in private wealth and increased rates of saving.  The greatest growth was in the Asia-Pacific region (ex-Japan), where private wealth rose 13.8 percent in 2012, to $28 trillion. After Asia, wealth in Latin America grew 10.5 percent, to $3.9 trillion. The Middle East and Africa rose 9.1 percent, to $4.8 trillion. Growth was less spectacular in Western Europe (5.2 percent, to $35.8 trillion) and North America (7.8 percent, to $43 trillion). Ref:  http://www.bloomberg.com/money-gallery/2013-05-30/where-the-world-s-millionaires-live.html

United States (Rank 1) Official gold holdings: 8,133.5 tonnes Percentage of foreign reserves in gold: 75.1% --- Germany (Rank 2) Official gold holdings: 3,391.3 tonnes Percentage of foreign reserves in gold:: 72.1% --- Italy (Rank 3) Official gold holdings: 2,451.8 tonnes Percentage of foreign reserves in gold: 71.3% --- France (Rank 4) Official gold holdings: 2,435.4 tonnes Percentage of foreign reserves in gold: 69.5% --- China (Rank 5) Official gold holdings: 1,054.1 tonnes Percentage of foreign reserves in gold: 1.6% ---- Switzerland (Rank 6) Official gold holdings: 1,040.1 tonnes Percentage of foreign reserves in gold: 10.0% -- Russia (Rank 7) Official gold holdings: 976.9 tonnes Percentage of foreign reserves in gold: 9.5% --- Japan (Rank 8) Official gold holdings: 765.2 tonnes Percentage of foreign reserves in gold: 3.1%  --- The Netherlands (Rank 9) Official gold holdings: 612.5 tonnes Perc...

Stocks are now outpacing inflation expectations at a rate that preceded that last two crashes. 'Expectations of price increases (inflation) are a sign of potentially stronger demand growth and higher margins, which is a positive for stocks.' Source:  @ParagonCap Investors and traders are increasingly buying stocks with borrowed money. Despite the 6.5% stock market rally over the last three months, a handful of billionaires are quietly dumping their American stocks . . . and fast. Warren Buffett, who has been a cheerleader for U.S. stocks for quite some time, is dumping shares at an alarming rate. He recently complained of “disappointing performance” in dyed-in-the-wool American companies like Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and Kraft Foods. In the latest filing for Buffett’s holding company Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett has been drastically reducing his exposure to stocks that depend on consumer purchasing habits. Berkshire sold roughly 19 millio...

Summary:Buy Gold for long term (few years) only when it crossess above USD 1500 per ounce. For that we may have to wait at least 3 to 6 months and see when this downtrend reverses. Click on the above images to view enlarged. This is a Gold price chart of SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) which almost follows Gold price in USD. Multiply its price by 100 to get approximate price in USD oer ounce. Chart courtesy: yahoo finance. Unsafe to buy Gold for short term till it crosses the 50 day EMA. Unsafe to buy for long term till it crossess the 200 day EMA and remain above it for at least 6 months.    It will probably cross 200 day EMA only when it crosses above the blue trendline which is at $1500  per ounce. Price in USD with charts can be seen at these two sites: Gold price: http://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html Yahoo: Chart with moving averages (multiply price of GLD etf by 10): http://in.finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=GLD&t=5y&l=on&z=...

A year after Superstorm Sandy, residents along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts should prepare for "an extremely active" 2013 hurricane season, U.S. forecasters say. There is a "70 percent likelihood" that will be three to six major hurricanes this year with winds above 111 mph, according to the 2013 hurricane outlook unveiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center on Thursday. A house leveled during Superstorm Sandy in Fairfield, Conn. (Dylan Stableford/Yahoo News)     During the six-month hurricane season, which begins June 1, forecasters anticipate 13 to 20 named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher). Of those, seven to 11 could become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher).   Those ranges are above normal. According to the   National Hurricane Center , the seasonal average is 12 named storms, six hurricanes and three major hurricanes. Hurricane season ends Nov. 30. The dire forecast comes as many...

There is a major shortage of physical gold in the banks. These banks obviously don’t want to lose customers, but their behavior and the reluctance to deliver also points to a real shortage in the physical market. So the disconnect between the paper and the physical market (for gold) is continuing. Refiners still have major production delays and demand continues to be very high, ‘No matter how much they produce,’ as one refiner told me today. And premiums are still high also.” Egon von Greyerz told King World News that clients are having tremendous problems getting their physical gold out of Swiss banks as well as other major banks as the shortage intensifies. Greyerz also discussed the fact that refiners simply cannot keep up with demand, “no matter how much they produce.” Below is what Greyerz, who is founder of Matterhorn Asset Management out of Switzerland, had to say in this extraordinary interview. More often now, than ever, we are encountering incidents when the banks ar...

May 13, 2013   |   Categories:   Articles & Columns   |   Tags:   craig roberts ,   |     Print This Article There are many signs of gangster state America. One is the collusion between federal authorities and banksters in a criminal conspiracy to rig the markets for gold and silver. My explanation that the sudden appearance of an unprecedented 400 ton short sale of gold on the COMEX in April was a manipulation designed to protect the dollar from the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policy has found acceptance among gold investors and hedge fund managers. The sale was a naked short. The seller had no gold to sell. COMEX reported having gold only equal to about half of the short sale in its vaults, and not all of that was available for delivery. No one but the Federal Reserve could have placed such an order, and the order came from one of the Fed’s bullion banks, one of the entities “too big to fail.” Bill Kaye of the ...

  The first $50 bill is a 1913 "Gold Certificate," issued directly by the US Treasury and fully convertible into gold. The second $50 bill was issued by the Federal Reserve in 1914 and was convertible into nothing. Both versions of this $50 bill circulated freely in American commerce. In the summer of 1944, delegates from 44 countries met in the midst of World War II to reshape the world's international financial system. The location of the meeting - in the plush Mount Washington Hotel in rural Bretton Woods, New Hampshire - was designed to ensure that the delegates would have no distractions, and no pressure from lobbyists or Congressmen, as they worked on their plans for post-war reconstruction. The meeting was born out of the determination by US President Franklin D Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill to ensure post-war prosperity through economic co-operation, avoiding the economic conflicts between countries in the 1930s th...