Change Management International - Robert Ian

If You Think Oil Is Expensive Now, Wait Until Your Congresman Pumps Your Gas

The oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico rages on. The details are spotty at best. In an interview on MSNBC, oil expert Matt Simmons pointed out that the YouTube video everyone has been fixated on with oil pumping out is not the source of the large second plume of oil that is the size of Maryland and Delaware. He said "we've been focusing on a leak the size of a mouse and behind that mouse is a leak the size of a tiger."

That tiger is getting hungry and is ready to wreak havoc on coastlines and ecosystems throughout the Gulf of Mexico and potentially the eastern seaboard of the United States. Possibly even further. Soon, we'll be approaching two months worth of oil gushing into the gulf. Tourism is being slaughtered. Economies are being destroyed. Jobs are being lost. Some reports are suggesting that the oil dispersant called Corexit is helping to keep much of the oil underwater, out of sight, and to a lesser degree, out of mind. Only time will tell.

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Financial Change: A Wolf in Wolf's Clothing

What's next? That's a question I am often asked by clients, audience members and teleseminar participants. The answer to that question is a moving target because there are so many things one needs to stay on top of in order to remain nimble enough to navigate rapid change. Here are several "What's next?" scenarios to keep in mind as we move through the summer:

Banks are scrambling. In conversations with several banking executives I have been told that banks are not loaning money. They are authorizing far fewer loans. An unspoken, behind the scenes trend, is that banks are attempting to cross collateralize every kind of loan on their books. Companies and small business people who, for years, have had lines of credit for payroll or seasonal expenses are now being told they must securitize those loans with any kind of asset they might possess. In other words, having even one loan at a bank can put all your other assets as risk. Customers that object are being told to take their business elsewhere. The squeeze is on. The solution is to opt out of using banks whenever, wherever and however you can.

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Teleseminar Audio: Global Economic Changes and Gold

Robert's second teleseminar was another successful event. Again, over 100 people from around the world registered and listened to this program.

This teleseminar series is a work in progress and is evolving with each broadcast. This presentation featured a significant amount of Q&A and was reflective of the current interests of our participants.

Robert will be conducting regular teleseminars each month going forward. Please sign up for his email list to stay informed.

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Bank Failures and Bailouts: How You Will Secretly Pay

Last Fall it was 416 distressed banks. Now, according to FDIC Chairman, Sheila Bair, the number has risen to 775 distressed banks. And according to Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, she has identified nearly 3000 community and regional banks that are classified as "risky" due to the coming collapse of the commercial real estate market. Regardless of whose numbers you look at, Sheila Bair's near term numbers, or Elizabeth Warren's longer term numbers, the number of at-risk banks is growing by leaps and bounds.

The conclusion is that for the foreseeable future, the trend that will be realized, is continuous bank consolidation. Is this necessarily a good thing? Well, if you're one of the banks who gets to do the consolidating, it's a great deal for you because a significant amount of the risk in terms of troubled assets is being subsidized by the FDIC. The FDIC is also entering into loss share agreements with the acquiring banks further increasing the potential losses for the FDIC as additional loans fail in the coming months and years.

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Strategic Defaults Carry Little Stigma For Delinquent Borrowers

There was an informative article on Marketwatch.com this week about strategic defaults on home mortgages. Strategic defaults are when borrowers who are underwater on their home loans, decide it's not worth it to stay current on their payments each month. Typically borrowers who strategically default continue to meet their other financial obligations like credit cards and auto payments. According to research presented in the article, Morgan Stanley estimates that 12% of all mortgage delinquencies in February were the result of strategic defaults. And the trend is growing.

The trend is growing because the stigma is disappearing. "Stigma" has long been the scarlet letter of the financial industry when it comes to delinquent borrowers. Stigma used to be an effective tool because it used to be, not so very long ago, that there were jobs, that there was access to credit, that there was a market in which to sell your home, and if you defaulted, it was likely due to some lack of responsibility on your part. That used to be true. But by and large, not so, anymore.

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Atlas Is About To Shrug: How Ayn Rand's Epic Novel Is Playing Out In Real Time As The Global Financial System Collapses

Another week, another trillion dollars. European Union finance ministers agreed this week on a 720 billion Euro bailout for troubled Eurozone countries, hoping and praying that somehow this intervention will keep out-of-control markets from attacking the weaker members of the 16 countries that use the faltering Euro. It isn't going to succeed. The battle has already been lost. Mathematically the game is already over. Derivatives and debt have pushed the Eurozone and Euro to the edge of collapse. And this is being solved how? By adding even more debt?

The markets, and I use that term loosely, because freely traded markets haven't existed in this world for a very long time. The markets rallied on this news. The markets, and the trading programs that run them, are as psychotic and insane as the finance ministers who actually believe they have done something good for the people of the European Union. When in reality, what's actually happened, is they have tightened the shackles of financial bondage and sold their citizens into a deeper level of financial slavery, that can never be repaid. Freedom can never be achieved. Because when massive amounts of debt are issued to solve the problem of massive amounts of debt, the casualty, is your future production.

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As Currencies Collapse What Happens To The Dollar And Gold?

As I write this commentary, the dow has fallen nearly 250 points, the NASDAQ has dropped 80 points and gold is down 11 dollars. All of this is occurring amidst fears that the economic crisis in Greece could spread, and spread rapidly. Those fears are well founded. The gyrations that are occurring throughout the global economic landscape cannot be looked at as independent events. They are all interconnected events closely aligned with one another, separated only by time, and whatever paper currency in which they are denominated.

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Teleseminar Audio: Gold to Infinity - Why Gold Will Conquer Inflation

Our first teleseminar was a major success. Over 100 people from around the world registered and listened to a sneak peak of Robert's opening keynote address at the Chicago Resource Expo. In addition to the overview of Robert's presentation, he took questions from listeners on a wide range of gold and economic subjects.

Robert will be conducting regular teleseminars each month going forward. Please sign up for his email list to stay informed.

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The Job Of The Future: Til Death Do Us Part

Once again, so much is happening so fast. The Obama administration has been accused of misleading the taxpayers about the General Motors loan repayment. According to a report confirmed by the Inspector General, one category of TARP loan was repaid with another category of TARP money. According to the report, General Motors did not pay back their taxpayer loan out of production by selling new cars, they paid it back by obtaining another taxpayer loan. This is passed off as free market capitalism. In other words, real capitalism is now DOA. Dead on Arrival.

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Bill Clinton "Admits" To Being "Wrong" About Derivatives

It's always refreshing when high profile politicians drop their guard and appear to tell the truth. It happened last week when former President Bill Clinton gave an exclusive interview to THIS WEEK on ABC. He acknowledged on camera that he was wrong to listen to what he called: "wrong advice against regulating derivatives". That wrong advice came from his former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.

Clinton's direct quote said: “On derivatives, yeah I think they were wrong and I think I was wrong to take [their advice] because the argument on derivatives was that these things are expensive and sophisticated and only a handful of investors will buy them and they don’t need any extra protection, and any extra transparency." He went on to say: “And the flaw in that argument was that first of all sometimes people with a lot of money make stupid decisions and make it without transparency.”

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Why You Should Stay The Course On Gold and Silver (and gold and silver shares)

Stay the course. That's what I told a good friend of mine this past week who was getting anxious and nervous about gold and silver shares not performing at the higher levels he thought they should be at by this point in time.

He told me the past year and a half have been really hard to get through. Friends of his who are invested in the dow saw half their portfolio evaporate in the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009. My friend saw 80% of his gold and silver shares evaporate in the same period. He's having a hard time reconciling the fact that many of his friends have seen their stock market portfolios rebound almost completely, while his gold and silver shares have only recovered halfway. His friends, his family and even his wife, are questioning his rationale (and judgment) for investing in gold shares. To complicate matters, the difficult economy has forced him to sell a little bit of his gold and silver, just to stay alive, and keep the wolf away from the door, this past year and a half.

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Hitting The Reset Button On The Global Financial System

The more I turn on the mainstream news, the more I want to turn it off. Everyday, it feels more and more like Alice in Wonderland, because everyday, we're doing all the running we can do, just to stay in place. And the place where we're staying, grows darker by the hour. At the Commodity Futures Trading Commission hearings two weeks ago, we were told with a straight face that the London physical gold market is actually a paper market for gold. They just call it a physical market.

Stop right there and let the implications of that "language substitution" sink in for a moment. When bullion bank executives claim that their short positions in U.S. markets are offset with physical positions on the London market, what they are actually saying is that paper positions in the US are offset with paper positions in London. In other words, they are lying to your face, and they know it. The London gold market is leveraged, by their own admission, 100 to 1, paper to real gold. In other words, it's ALL paper. It's ALL leverage. There's virtually no real physical gold on the London market relative to the amount of trading that takes place. Bullion bank executives are relying on your interpretation of the word physical to actually mean physical, hold in your hand, gold bullion, instead of the phony paper certificates they have been using to exponentially prop up the dollar and other world currencies, while at the same time, smothering real gold with a paper blanket.

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Sneak Preview of GATA CFTC Whistleblower Analysis To Be Heard on GoldSeek Radio

The most explosive story of this past week was the public hearing held by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC. The discussion focused on large concentrated short positions in the marketplace held by major bullion banks, and whether these positions are indicative of market manipulation, and if so, should the CFTC impose position limits to curb such manipulation. At the heart of these hearings were presentations made by Bill Murphy and Adrian Douglas of GATA - the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee. For 11 years, GATA has documented, using evidence on the public record, how gold and silver prices have been artificially suppressed through excessive short positions by major bullion banks. This has resulted in gold and silver being kept artificially low, and the dollar, along with other world currencies, artificially high.

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Bill Murphy of GATA Reveals Whistle Blower in Gold Price Suppression Scheme

Bill Murphy of GATA Speaks to CFTC About Gold Suppression

Why Gold Will Be The Last Man Standing

I recently reconnected with a longtime friend who is in the process of re-deploying a significant amount of his portfolio into gold and gold-related assets. He's buying some physical gold. He's looking at investing in the only two gold ETFs that actually hold real physical bullion. He's contemplating the purchase of a precious metals fund that will give him exposure across the major gold producers and he's doing a private placement into a junior mining company that is about to release it's initial 43-101 resource estimate and go into production, possibly late this year. He is doing all this because he is convinced too many dollars have been printed or promised and as a result, the dollar is going to continue its decline, and inflation, possibly even hyperinflation, is going to emerge as other countries, and some U.S. states, become insolvent and default.

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US Could Lose AAA Credit Rating: Moody's

It's not the end of the world, but you can certainly see it from here. At least, that is, the dollar denominated world. Case in point: A Bloomberg article this week discusses that Moody's has released a report that says: "The U.S. and the U.K. have moved “substantially” closer to losing their AAA credit ratings as the cost of servicing their debt rose."

According to Moody's baseline scenario, the U.S. will spend more on debt service as a percentage of revenue this year than any other top-rated country, except the U.K., and will be the biggest spender from 2011 to 2013.

Financial TV was quick to dismiss the credibility of this report by calling into question Moody's unfavorable track record of rating banks and other institutions throughout the financial crisis.

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Congress and the Fed: Financial Arsonists

Congress is a collective mess. Bills are routinely passed that neither House nor Senate members have read. Legislators return to their states proclaiming THEY are doing a good job. It's always the OTHER legislators or the OTHER party that is the root of all evil. When something occasionally goes right, individual legislators step into the spotlight and claim credit. When something goes wrong or is unpopular, those same legislators hide behind the collective shield called Congress. In other words, Congress is a dysfunctional team.

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Payoff Existing Debt With Cheap Dollars

One of the assertions we commonly read about is that one of the benefits in an inflationary scenario is paying off existing debt with cheap dollars. That's true, only if you hold those dollars in an asset or investment that will benefit from inflation. If you hold those dollars as dollars, or in assets or investments that will not benefit from inflation, then you could easily be wiped out.

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Coming Showdown: States Vs the Federal Government - Who Will Win?

There are a number of actions being taken by state legislatures throughout the country that when looked at separately, appear to be symbolic statements of how individual states are expressing themselves against the growing mandates being thrust upon them by the federal government. When looked at collectively, these actions indicate a rapidly growing trend of how states are actively positioning themselves for what might very well turn out to be a true battle of survival between individual states and the federal government.

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