There is more New Bad News (NBN) contained in November’s drop in payroll employment because, “Job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors in November.”

The New Bad News (NBN) to me personally is that this means that if I get fired again, then another job will be that much harder to find, especially since my job skills are apparently substandard, as I father from my current boss being sure that she can train a monkey to do my job and, as she said, “It will probably have better personal hygiene, too!”

Since experience has shown that I am not a “people person”, service industry jobs are especially difficult for me, and there always comes a time when I finally snap and I say, in a voice that gets louder and louder until I am shrieking, “I’m not going to ask if you want fries with that! You shouldn’t have any fries, because you are another big fat pig who spent all your money on fatty foods and sugared drinks instead of putting some money into gold and silver to protect yourself from the debasement of the purchasing power of the money thanks to the Federal Reserve creating so damned much money and credit to fuel doomed booms and a cancerous growth of government! And yet you want to talk to me about how you want some stupid fried potatoes, you moron? Hahahaha!”

Anyway, the report does not actually mention me by name or even wish me good luck in getting another job, but farther down in the report we find that “Total Unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers”, zoomed to 12.5%! It’s worse than I thought!

Personally, I am not sure how to interpret this exactly, but I know two things. For one, unemployment figures have never been this bad, as far as I know without doing any research of any kind; and secondly, the laughable CES Birth-Death Model figured that, perhaps by magic, 30,000 new jobs were created in November! Hahaha!

Part of the explanation could be that, as John Crudele of the NY Post explains, “Right now, the unemployment rate would be more than twice as bad if you go back to the way this figure used to be calculated” back in 1994 when “the Clinton White House decided that the unemployment rate needed to be modernized.”

And one of the things they did was decide that from now on, “anyone who had been out of work for at least a year was no longer counted as unemployed – they were just too lazy and discouraged to find work”! Hahaha!

Oddly enough, there is no statistical offset for people like me, who are the nation’s over-employed, which is to say we are chronically lazy, worthless and undependable louts who SHOULD be unemployed, but who actually have jobs!

The news media is happily parroting the official government pronouncements and those of its minions while ignoring my tragic story of love lost, and so they all join together to report that unemployment is 6.7%, while just up the street, the McKinsey Global Institute says that it estimates that the unemployment rate in the United States is actually 16.25%, and here’s John Williams at shadowstats.com putting it at 16.5%!

So it looks like a lot of people are getting fired, but on the other hand, government payrolls went up again, for the zillionth month in a row, this time by another 7,000 workers, bringing the total to a staggering 22.5 million government workers out of a total 144.2 million official jobs in the whole freaking country, which of course does not count the number of new prostitutes and professional thieves that have sprung up in response to financial devastation. So maybe the 30,000 new jobs assumed in the CES Birth-Death Model in actually pretty close! Hahaha!

Welcome to the hell of inflation!

Source: No Rest for the Unemployed

David Galland says profit taking by institutional investors has ‘trampled’ metal prices. But the deepening crisis on Wall Street, geopolitical tensions and a traditional September bounce could send gold soaring back towards $1,000 an ounce. David says this could “happen literally almost overnight.”

Here’s a no-brainer long-term investment strategy to stick to: buy and hold resources now.

This from The Daily Reckoning:

As we take a longer view on the precious metals here at Casey Research, I’m not much for commenting on current market gyrations or the various sub-themes that regularly emerge in the blogs.

First and foremost, as to the purported discrepancy between the price of gold on commodities exchanges and that of physical gold, in my view, any real discrepancy would be jumped on by the arbitragers so fast, it might even break the land-sound barrier.

As for the shortage of gold and silver bullion products, we would attribute this to a couple of factors. The first is that there has been some poor planning on the part of the mints. Secondly, the poor planning is likely due to a failure to appreciate how many people are coming to the conclusion that it is better to own at least some precious metals, instead of holding only the unbacked paper of governments.

As for gold’s recent steep fall in the face of the clear signs of physical demand, it seems clear that this was largely caused by gold traders taking profits. At every step up in this bull market, the precious metals have been stuck, for months at a time even, in trading ranges… the bottom of which evokes buying and the top of which triggers selling.

It is always worth keeping in mind that the defining feature of commodities exchanges is the leverage the instruments that trade on these exchanges offer. Consequently, the traders who call those exchanges home are able to marshal considerable juice in their quest for a new Lexus with 16-way driver seat features and custom leather interior.

The salient point is that while those of us who believe in the values offered by gold and silver like to think of them as “substantial” markets, when it comes to futures markets, they are like a gnat on the tail of an elephant. To make the point, consider that the cash value of foreign-currency contracts traded globally each 24-hour period is on the order of $3.2 trillion. By comparison, over the same 24-hour period, on average, $26 billion worth of gold trades hands. For silver, the number is even smaller, just $4.5 billion.

All of which is to say that (a) these are markets that can be “pushed around” by the traders, and (b) when a large number of traders shift into “take profits” mode, the price of the metals can be trampled.

The long and short of it is that range trading will go on for awhile, until something occurs in the psychology of the market that shifts the majority into the long side… at which point the upper end of the trend is decisively broken and the range is reset to a higher level. It is my contention that the top of the range for gold is now $1,000, and we could see it continue to test that level, then fall back, for some time. But really, who can say? It could happen literally almost overnight.

Shifting to a somewhat nearer-term perspective, however, it is worth looking at the chart from Seasons of Gold, the archived article from the April 2006 edition of the International Speculator.

While the chart hasn’t been updated lately, the data used is so long-term – 30 years – that updating it wouldn’t have changed anything by any noticeable amount.

Viewing the chart, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to assemble a scenario whereby the continued strong investment demand for physical gold meets the traditional strength of the Indian wedding season buying that contributes so much to the historical pick-up in gold prices in September.

Toss in the effective nationalization of Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE) and Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM), putting the U.S. taxpayer as the guarantor of last resort on fully half of the mortgages in the nation…and mix in some of the ripe geopolitical apples now falling from tall trees, or the imminent realization that oil isn’t going back to $50 or that the inflation phenomenon is not temporary, and we could see a big bump in the gold price over the next couple of months.

Time to go long in the futures market? Well, on that topic, all I can say is, tread carefully…and use as little margin as possible just now.

That’s because, as wild as things have been in pretty much all the markets, we haven’t seen anything yet. If there is one thing you can take to the bank, it is that, in the months just ahead, the volatility of virtually all markets is going to go ballistic. For the attentive trader, that can mean big, and repeated, opportunities for profit. But for the casual trader, high volatility can lead to quick loss making.

Sticking to a longer-term perspective – buying and holding and, if resources allow, buying more on the dips – is the way to go.

Source: Whither Gold?