The Mogambo Guru

09/19/07 - The Pinecone Currency of Camptown

09/20/07 - The Sound of One-Way Betting

09/21/07 - Silver and Gold Salvation

09/24/07 - The Economic Boffo Comic

09/25/07 - Inflation Leads to Bigger Bullet Biting

The Pinecone Currency of Camptown

If you are a person who thinks that there are conspiracies everywhere and that there are secret, coded messages everywhere, too, you may be interested to learn that from CaseyResearch.com I have noted one of these "secret significances" in his latest newsletter; it contains only four exclamation points in the whole thing.

The first exclamation point is at the top, where you are told you can "Sign Up Free!"

The second exclamation point is found in a snippet in the header, "$700! - Gold logs a close above the magic number."

Tellingly, the other two appear in the actual text in the section written by a guy named "Ed Steer" (Steer. Get it? Steer? Like steering you to safety? And you call yourself a conspiracy buff? Ha!) that are down near the end of the newsletter, and actually used in adjacent sentences! Is that significant or what?

Anyway, the first sentence says, "The World Gold Council is predicting that India's gold consumption this year will be north of 1,000 tonnes!" Immediately following, the next sentence includes the only other exclamation point; "That's a 50% increase over last year and a whopping 40+% of 2007 gold production!"

Perhaps this is significant in that the rest of the article says that this all comes, "in the face of the worst economic, financial and monetary crisis the world has experienced since 1929", which is bad enough, but I think it is good news that "the Gold/Silver Cartel is about to crash and burn" because that means, to me, that anybody owning gold and silver are going to get stinking rich, rich, rich as the two metals explode upward from their suppressed prices.

And mightily suppressed they are, too, as their prices have gone nowhere even though, as MoneyandMarkets.com reminds us, "As recently as just five years ago, foreigners had loaned $3.2 trillion to America. The amount the United States owes to foreigners has grown by leaps and bounds - to $3.9 trillion in 2003…$4.8 trillion in 2004…$5.4 trillion in 2005…$6.4 trillion last year…and now over $7 trillion!"

With a national debt now registering north of $9 trillion, does that mean that only $2 trillion is owed to Americans? Hahaha!

Perhaps this would explain why Marc Parent at mparent7777-2.blogspot.com leads off his column with the growth in M3 money supply, which is the biggest, baddest, all-inclusive estimate of money supply, which includes everything that could possibly be construed as money.

There is some difficulty in calculating M3, of course, such as in getting true and reliable information from "institutional money market mutual funds, time deposits in amounts of $100,000 or more, repurchase agreement liabilities of depository institutions (in denominations of $100,000 or more) on U.S. government and federal agency securities, and Eurodollars."

But all of that is, fortunately, not my problem, as calculating things is actual work, and I don't do work unless I get paid a lot of money for it, and usually not even then, which is why nobody pays me money to do work anymore, which is probably why I have no money.

Fortunately, both he and John Williams at shadowstats.com are not so lazy as I, and after busily working, working, working while I am goofing off, they independently get answers that agree on direction and general magnitude, and it looks like M3 in the USA is growing at almost 14 freaking percent a year now! Fourteen freaking percent!

Normally, I would soon begin the traditional Screaming Insane Mogambo Phase (SIMP) of the discussion, as the ramifications of an increasing money supply means increasing prices, and all over the world people are getting angrier and angrier about the way that consumer prices are rising, but are paradoxically happy that the increasing money supply is also financing higher prices for stocks, bonds and houses, and how this means that people are as stupid as the proverbial "bag of hammers", and thus I scream because I assume that screaming at them is the only thing that can get through those thick skulls of theirs that inflation is a Bad, Bad Thing (BBT).

So I was just drawing in a big, deep inhalation breath in preparation, when up jumps Junior Mogambo Ranger (JMR) Grant E. with the perfect example, which may prove instructive!

"While on a camping vacation this summer," he begins, "my son and two other friends started playing an interesting game. They all setup 'shops' to sell things - basically anything that wasn't tied down or in use in the campsite. The real interesting thing was they used pinecones for money.

"So it starts out that a pre-enjoyed pop can goes for 5 pinecones. Sniffing the empty red wine bottle, a couple of pinecones. As the game progressed, the kids found that the supply of pinecones was virtually unlimited as they scrambled in the adjacent woods to gather up the money. I watched this unfolding demonstration economy with fascination!

"Suddenly the prices of things started going up. That pre-enjoyed pop can - well, that'll cost you 10 pinecones now! There were so many pinecones in circulation that soon buckets of them were being offered for some of the more prized pop cans. My son, who now had declared himself the bank, was now running a lottery!! More bucket loads of pine cones came flooding in."

Beyond the humor ("This was just too funny to watch" he says), the lesson was that "it proved that even kids playing a simple game can show us the ways of inflation. Monetary inflation begets price inflation. Pinecones or your favorite paper currency, the fate will be the same."

Exactly! And that is why I sigh, and cry…my, oh my, how I cry and sigh.

Jack Crooks at MoneyandMarkets.com innocently asks, "Just how much money is tied to the yen carry trade?" Because I do not know, I am instantly defensive. "Why in the hell are you asking me?" I think to myself. "Are you trying to embarrass me? Is that what you are thinking, punk? You want to mix it up with me, you little bastard?"

But I was, as usual, too quick to anger, as this was apparently just a rhetorical question, and he immediately supplies the answer as, "Some estimates put the total value of yen-denominated borrowing at more than one trillion U.S. dollars! And those estimates don't account for the hundreds of billions in loans that are linked to these investments via margin credit and derivatives."

Well, since I have seen this "huge yen carry-trade" thing and this derivatives thing so many times before, I am immediately getting bored and my mind is wandering, wandering, idly wandering towards thoughts of tacos and naked ladies, and then to naked ladies bringing me tacos ("And a cold, frosty beverage, babe!") and then I was wondering what would happen if I had to choose between tacos and beautiful naked ladies, and how that brings up a very interesting twist on that whole "marginal utility" thing, and I realize I have forgotten the whole point of "marginal utility" and then I'm starting to bore myself to death when, suddenly, my ears prick up as he says, "Indeed, I think it's fair to say that this is the biggest one-way bet in the history of the financial markets."

Oooh! I love the idea of the one-way bet! Naturally, I am confused, and my mind is whirling at the concept of "the one-way bet", because I have never actually seen any real "one-way bets", and so this sounds suspiciously like the old Zen classic, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?", to which the Transcendent Mogambo Answer (TMA) is "The sound of a handgun cocking in the other hand if you don't watch your step, chump."

Mr. Crooks is apparently not interested in my weird and oddly homicidal misinterpretation of the Tao, and blithely goes on to say that borrowing Japanese yen (JPY) to convert to dollars to invest in American debt and asset markets means that when the Japanese interest rates go up (and the dollar correspondingly goes down), "These borrowers will be squeezed from both sides. They'll be forced to close out their bets because of the sudden increase in risk. And they'll come under even greater pressure to close them out because of the higher financing costs."

Huh? Well, if all this sounds confusing, join the club, bub. I think I got an inkling of maybe what he is talking about when he went on, "But remember: BEFORE they can pay back all those loans to Japanese lenders, they first have to convert their dollars (and other home currencies) back into yen."

Alas, it turns out that it didn't really help, and now I have no idea what we are even talking about anymore, although I seem to remember that it had something to do with tacos and hot naked chicks, but looking around the room I see that I was mistaken, as I see none of either, and I am crestfallen, completely demoralized, and more confused than ever.

Perhaps the way my eyes were glazed over or the way my mouth is hanging open in utter, bewildered stupefaction tipped him off that some more explanation was needed. So he says, "You can probably see where this is going: The unraveling of all these bets against the yen would trigger a massive yen rally."

Then, tantalizingly, he says, "Even WITHOUT the explosive buying from the huge payback of borrowed yen, it is the most undervalued major currency in the world." In the whole world!

Intrigued, I ask, "How undervalued?" He answers, "Measured in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), the yen is more than 30% undervalued against the dollar, and even more undervalued compared to the world's other major currencies." Wow!

Perhaps it was all this talk about currencies and their values and exchanges rates that prompted JMR Mikael M. Karlsson, who is a Professor at the University of Iceland, to write to me. Normally, I don't read mail from professors as they all similarly tend to start out, "If you were in my class, I'd have you expelled!" unless the professor is from Duke University, in which case the message would have continued "And then thrown in jail for the rest of your life because you are a guilty white man!"

But, thankfully, his email did not follow this timeless formula, a fact that I freely interpreted to mean that he thinks my message is crucially important and I am not as stupid as people think.

In case you forgot this message, just the first part of the first sentence of the preamble to the Mighty Mogambo Message (MMM) starts off, "We're freaking doomed because the stupid Supreme Court let the stupid Congress and President ignore the Constitution of the United States by letting the Federal Reserve create excessive amounts of fiat money and credit that is going to make prices rise in a horrible price inflation, and it is inflation that is the killer of economies, and to prevent such a catastrophe of anyone creating excessive amounts of money and credit, the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution the absolute, letter-of-the-law requirement that our money shall only be made of silver and gold to prevent the government from even getting the chance of creating excessive amounts of money, but now with our stupid fiat currency and insane degrees of fractional-reserve banking, the inflation in consumer prices has gotten so high that now I can't afford to buy a lousy bucket of fried chicken, or even an 'Economy Meal', which is a hell of a misnomer in that that it consists of, you know, like one scrawny chicken drumstick, one lousy roll and a crappy watered-down soft drink, giving you a 'meal' which is so small that it should be called 'Tiny Rip-off Snack', but when you complain to the stupid manager about how you are getting ripped off, you get a load of their stupid crap like…").

Well, it turns out that the professor's email was neither, and he just kindly sent a link to Paul Grignon's famous video "Money as Debt", at Google. In case you've never seen it, it does a pretty good, and pretty entertaining job, of showing what a piece of crap the U.S. dollar is, and why.

This is much nicer than all the sites that show what a piece of crap I am, but never "why."

Silver and Gold Salvation

Having the government and the Federal Reserve in cahoots with each other reminds me of a humorous classroom exercise where the teacher had the students complete some well-known phrase. For the phrase fragment, "When the blind lead the blind…", one insightful young student had completed the sentence as "get out of the way" - which is perfectly correct, and damned good advice!

However, if the teacher had asked the kid to complete the phrase, "When the Congress leads the Federal Reserve to create more and more money so that Congress can borrow and then spend more and more money to 'fix' more and more problems of more and more people…", he would have been correct if he had finished the phrase by saying, "Then The Mogambo is right! We are freaking doomed!"

And so while even little kids know the terrible price we will pay for our stupidity and greed, there is a salvation! Adrian Ash at bullionvault.com writes, "the last time America's credit rating came into crisis - during the late '70s - inflation ate both equity and fixed-income investors alive", but "Gold, on the other hand, rose by 510% for dollar-based buyers."

Gold! Just like I have been yelling about! See? I'm not as stupid as you thought!

He also notes that it wasn't just us clever Yanks that made a bundle, but, "The metal rose five times over against the British pound (GBP) too, and spot gold prices gained more than 370% for German investors. Japanese gold buyers made four times their money inside three years."

On the other hand, let's not forget silver, and to that end SilverMiners.com featured a mineweb.com essay that reported, "The latest figures from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission show that the net speculative long position on COMEX stood, at the end of August, at just 4,196 tonnes. Silver was trading, at that point, at between $11.80 and $12.00."

I furtively look around the room to see if anybody else is as confused about this information as I was, as it meant absolutely nothing to me. Hell, I wasn't even sure the guy was speaking English, for crying out loud! I was hoping there would be a lot of other people scratching their heads and looking puzzled looks so I could rise to my feet and say "Of course, I understand exactly what you are saying, but there might be some people in the audience who do NOT have the encyclopedic knowledge and high IQ necessary to fully understand it all, like you and I do, and you had better explain it to them, because you gotta admit that most of these people sure look pretty stupid!"

At that, the crowd got even more hostile towards me for trying to help them out! Fortunately, Mineweb immediately diverted their attention by explaining what it meant; "This net speculative position is at its lowest level since the end of April 2003, when silver was about to embark on its four-year bull run." A four-year bull run? Wow!

Suddenly, my heart jumped into overdrive, and I felt a cold chill that could only mean that I did not have enough silver stashed away, and leapt up to go out and get some more. And perhaps it was my sudden, rapid exit that prompted him to ask, as I ran down the hall, "So does this mean that prices are poised to move higher?" I thought to myself, "It sure as hell does, if I can get enough money!"

And other prices are poised to move higher, too, and one of them is oil. And why oil? Well, that is the conclusion that I reached after reading Jim Puplava's interview of Matt Simmons, who is Chairman of Simmons International and author of the book Twilight in the Desert, at the Financial Sense Newshour.

As regards peak oil, Mr. Puplava ominously says, "All the canaries have stopped singing", an ominous reference to the fact that the mining industry used to stick a canary down in a mine to see if the air was poisonous by noting whether or not the bird died, a callousness towards canaries that reminds me of the Federal Reserve policy of constantly creating the poison of too much money and credit, and then watching their indicators to see how many people died a financial death.

How does miners killing canaries remind me of the Fed? The difference being that when the canary dies, they don't then stuff the mine full of more canaries, but the Federal Reserve will drop interest rates to increase borrowing, to increase debt, to increase the money supply, to increase demand and spending, to increase inflation in prices, to increase the rate of people eventually dying a financial death. Weird!

Mr. Puplava apparently thinks I am making too much of this canary thing, maybe because he is not a "bird person", or maybe because the topic was supposed to be about oil, not canaries.

So perhaps that is why he stays focused on oil, saying, "I think the BP Statistical Review talked about a refinery capacity at about 17.5 million barrels today; and yet our consumption is 21 million barrels a day."

Naturally I raise my hand and ask, "How can we consume more petroleum products than we refine from crude oil? It doesn't make sense to me! How can you use more than you make? It's impossible! Is this one of those rare times when it is YOU that made a mistake, and it's ME that is correct for once in my whole, miserable, rotten life?"

Imagine my embarrassment when he brushes me off by easily explaining that "it's not just the fact that we're importing oil, it's the fact that we have to import the refined products of oil", too.

Well, why is that? Well, for one thing, we haven't built an oil refinery in the United States in more than twenty years, and Mr. Simmons said that now the "core units" of domestic refineries "basically on average are about 85 years old." Hahaha!

So this is how you develop "energy independence"? Hahaha! I was right! We're freaking doomed!

Last week we set a new record in the national debt, which has now officially breached the $9 trillion mark.

We are also setting records in sheer, slimy corruption, as the limit on that debt (as last set by Congress), was only $8.965 trillion, and is now overspent by Congress (except Ron Paul) and they are all pretending not to notice! What absolute dirtbags!

And speaking of dirtbags, I cannot believe that Christopher Dodd, longtime chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has not resigned in disgrace at this subprime fiasco (which, lest we need reminding, originated in the banks, as do all economic crises). I mean, he was THE guy in the Senate Banking Committee position to look at this crap and say, "Whoa! Maybe That Idiot Mogambo (TIM) is onto something here, because these insane degrees of money and credit expansion by the banks are obviously wrong, and if we keep this crap up we are going to be freaking doomed!"

Even more amazing, I can't believe that he is actually running for President! Hahahaha! The most provably economically clueless weenie in Congress now wants to take his worthless act to the White House! Hahaha!

The only saving grace in this whole stinking mess is that I am not from Connecticut, the weird little state that actually elected, and consistently reelected and reelected, this selfsame Christopher Dodd, and who now must live with the shame of having done so.

If fact, this is now the punch line to one of the jokes in my new, fledgling Vegas act! The actual line is, "Well, you certainly stepped in a big pile of some real stinking dog crap and ruined your shoes when you came out of the doctor's office after being told that the tests confirm that you have a terrible disease that will kill you in less than a month because there is no cure, but at least you are not from Connecticut, and thus had nothing to do with electing the ruinously incompetent Senator Christopher Dodd from Connecticut, and thus who directly authorized by the sin of omission the economic mess we are in today, and which will cause misery and suffering undreamt of in your nightmares! So rejoice that you can die with a clear conscience, and hopefully in a different pair of shoes!"

Now, I don't know if John Stepek in the Money Week's Money Morning magazine was making a comment about my new career as a boffo stand-up comic in Vegas or what, but I notice that he took this opportunity to report that "Planned redundancies by U.S. companies rose by 85% in August", which is such a nice term, as I would be much happier being fired because I was "redundant" rather than being just "worthless human garbage who thinks he is funny, but he isn't, and should have been fired long ago, but wasn't."

Not only that, but employment is falling everywhere, and Addison Wiggin at The 5-MinuteForecast says that even "temp jobs are falling off faster than expected." The laughable thing about employment is that regardless of fewer people working, the latest report is that the unemployment rate FELL! You are probably rubbing your eyes in disbelief, as if to say, "How in the hell did they do that?"

Easy! They first reduced the estimate of the number of people in the total workforce, and then subtracted the reduced number of people still working to calculate how many people are unemployed! Hahaha! What a scam!

As usual, jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector, which has been going down for decades, no matter how they redefine "manufacturing" jobs. The latest wheeze was to define "hamburger cook" as a "manufacturing" job because it took raw materials, applied capital and labor, added some pickles and a dab of mustard, maybe a little cheese or a "special sauce and a sesame seed bun", and created a delicious protein-packed staple of the American diet when properly combined with a large side order of french fries and the extra-large sugary carbonated drink.

It's not much of a surprise, then, that Mr. Stepek reports, "the OECD is now worried that recession is a real possibility in the US."

Normally, one would think this to be alarming, but to show you the incompetence of the OECD, Mr. Stepek says that Jean-Philippe Cotis, chief economist of the OECD, actually said, "Downside risks have become more ominous. What we had not forecast was the extent of the spread of this financial risk beyond the US." Hahahaha! What a moron!

He didn't know that all things are connected to all things, as proved by Chaos Theory, and he actually thought that one large financial entity could go literally bankrupt and yet have no effect anywhere else? Everything would merrily continue along just as it was? Hahahaha! I leap to my feet and shout, "Chump! Chump! What a chump!"

Mr. Stepek tries to calm me down by saying that it was not just Mr. Cotis, but that "Everyone in any sort of position of financial authority seems to have been caught out by that one." Hahahaha! They were? Then I say that they're all morons! Morons, morons, morons! Morons everywhere! Hahahaha!

Again, Mr. Stepek is unimpressed with the light side of my dark humor, and changes the subject by saying that everyone believed, "U.S. subprime is contained, they said, not so long ago. And then in the same breath, they added that financial derivatives were a good thing, because they spread risk around." Hahaha! Now I am laughing anew at being reminded of that stupidity, too! Paraphrasing the Ancient Mariner, morons, morons everywhere, but nary a slob can think! Hahahaha!

I am embarrassed that nobody is joining me in my laughter, and so I decide that if they don't want pleasant, then I'll just be unpleasant, and so I ask with a little edge of petulance to my voice, "And how did anyone get so stupid as to think that, huh?" Well, not even the illustrious John Stepek knows that, even though it is completely obvious to me, and anybody else that can see profound conspiracies everywhere; mysterious rays are being beamed into our heads from outer space to make us so stupid that we actually believe that the Federal Reserve is the least bit competent to "keep prices steady" and "manage the economy" when they are actively pumping out the raw sewage of excess money and credit every hour, of every day, of every week, of every year, and now the U.S. dollar has lost 97% of its buying power since the despicable Federal Reserve was authorized by the idiotic Woodrow Wilson in 1913, replaced by fiat money by the arch-commie bastard FDR in 1933, and finally severed from gold by Nixon in 1971.

I had to laugh at the look on Mr. Stepek's face at being handicapped by the lack of a good conspiracy theory, as he has to resort to describing the actual behavior of the parties in the subprime fiasco, which was that they did it "because everyone in the chain thought that they were passing their risk on to someone else," and "they took on a lot more of it." Exactly! Hahahaha!

Then he turned the tables on me and showed me how childishly simplistic I was in that I was not even thinking about the knock-on effects around the world, like "And where have all those whopping bonuses been coming from that have been pouring into London's economy? From the financial sector. So if you're a believer in 'trickle down' economics, then you have to be worried about the turmoil in the markets just now."

And since profits from the financial sector produce over half of the profits made in the United States, then yes; I actually AM worried now! Yow!

Junior Mogambo Ranger (JMR) Dave R. sent an excerpt from the newsletter of Gary Dorsch, at sirchartsalot.com, that he thought might interest me, in that it is the exact kind of monetary crap that makes me crazy. "Martin Feldstein," it read, "chief executive of the National Bureau of Economic Research, called on Mr. Bernanke to lower the fed funds by 1% to prevent house price declines or a pullback in consumer spending from causing a recession."

Naturally I am instantly screeching at the top of my lungs that all this silly crap of always lowering interest rates is going to do is to postpone paying for our fiscal and monetary sins. And he even admits it himself, as this Feldstein halfwit said, "If Fed cuts rates and results in higher inflation - it would be the lesser of two evils." I can't believe my ears! What a moron! I bellow, "There is nothing worse than inflation! Nothing!"

Instantly I am on the phone calling the National Bureau of Economic Research and screaming into the phone, "Let me speak to this Martin Feldstein jerk, because I have some Big, Big Mogambo News (BBMN) for him that it is not a choice of two evils, but a choice of when the Big Freaking Evil (BFE) hits us! We can bite the bullet now, or by lowering interest rates to start another boom to inflate the prices of stocks, bonds or houses, have another round of temporary asset inflation leading to being forced to bite a bigger bullet later.

"And I know that you are just a stupid receptionist, but even you have to realize that each time you do that, the bullet gets bigger and bigger, and pretty soon you are having to chomp down on a bullet as big as a freaking cannon shell! Have you ever tried to bite down on a cannon shell? You can't! It's too big!

"And yet, this silly little man thinks that continually increasing the money supply by lowering interest rates so low that people will be compelled by negative interest rates to borrow and go deeper into debt, which drives up prices, and that this is the 'lesser of two evils', when it is the sheer enormous size of the debt that is causing all of our problems as it is? Wrong! So let me speak to Feldstein, and pronto, you dumb receptionist moron!"

The receptionist politely said, "I'll have to put you on hold, sir, as there are already thousands of people ahead of you who want to give this low-IQ putz a piece of their minds, and confidentially we are getting ready to fire this mental midget screwball because he is obviously a real wanker!"

Okay, I admit that I made that part up, but only to salve my hurt feelings as she really said, "Goodbye, creep! I hate you!" and she hung up on me!

But Mr. Dorsch apparently couldn't get through to Mr. Feldstein, either, and sighs and says, "Thus, Americans must prepare for a further dilution of their purchasing power, and the most evil tax of all - higher inflation."

And anyway, I would expect Mr. Feldstein to say something idiotic like, "Who cares about inflation? Whatever the cost of a good or service, high or low, just put it on your credit card, and inflation will bail you out by letting you pay the debt in cheaper dollars!"

And it is not just more of this Feldstein guy acting insane, but insanity is everywhere, as I prove by juxtaposing two sentences from a report by the AP, as I flaunt my Awesome Mogambo Editorial Powers (AMEP) and deplorable lack of professional ethics.

First, I quote the article's report that "Individual earnings dropped for both men and women in 2006, but more members of each household worked, resulting in the overall increase in household income, said David Johnson, chief of the Census Bureau's Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division."

The actual facts are that clear-thinking guys like me have farmed the kids out to work in an illegal backstreet sweatshop to make some money. Hell, it's the only good reason to have children, as far as I can tell!

Now, note the jarring humor when I next quote the article as reporting, "The numbers provided some good economic news at a time when financial markets have been rattled by a slumping housing market." Hahaha! I'll say! The good news is that, as minors, their paychecks are sent to me, and I have the whole quiet house to myself since the kids are being chained to their sewing machines 24 hours a day, and my wife spends all her time out of the house, too, trying to get the police to get the kids back, for reasons I don't understand and I am tired of arguing about.

And it's not like I don't desperately need the money, as do we all, as I gather from the Wall Street Journal report that the latest estimate of Consumer Installment Debt was that total consumer borrowing increased at a 3.7% annual rate in July. Revolving credit (credit card debt) jumped at an astonishing annual rate of 6.6% in July!

In total, consumer credit outstanding grew by $7.5 billion in July, taking the total to a staggering $2.457 trillion owed! And as bad as that was, it was actually less than the whopping $11.9 billion that consumers added to their debt in June! Ugh.

Mogambo sez: The other day I woke up early, before the sun was up, and I thought the sky seemed brighter than usual. I idly thought that maybe it was because of everybody suddenly getting brighter, and that they were realizing that their only hope is to get their money into gold, silver and oil.

Then I went back inside, turned on the news and I saw that gold, silver and oil were up a little, but not enough to have resulted from people getting smart enough or bright enough to light up the night sky.

I don't know what this means. I'm too scared to think. That's why I think stupid things like this stupid "bright night sky" thing.

Now imagine what I would be like WITHOUT gold, silver, oil, and enough raw firepower to light up the sky. Brrrr!

So gold, silver and oil have obviously saved my worthless butt, and it might do wonders for yours, too!

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The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning and other fine publications.

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