Soros gives $1 Million to Syria Humanitarian Aid

 UNITED NATIONS (AP) Billionaire financier George Soros is pledging $1 million for humanitarian efforts in war-ravaged Syria.

Soros announced the pledge to the International Rescue Committee on Wednesday night after receiving its Freedom Award in recognition of his lifelong support for human rights and an open society.

Soros said people are starving and will soon be freezing in Syria as winter arrives and malnutrition among children is increasing.

"This situation has arisen because both the government and the rebels use the denial of humanitarian aid as a tool of war," Soros said.

While prospects for a political settlement have improved following a U.S.-Russian agreement, he said "conditions for the civilian population are deteriorating because both sides continue to interfere with aid delivery in order to improve their negotiating positions in the coming peace talks."

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A Look At Warren Buffett’s ‘Favorite Metric’: Rail Traffic

Every Thursday, the Association of American Railroads reports weekly rail traffic in the U.S. They specify how much of the rail traffic was carloads and how much was intermodal.

Since intermodal traffic is the transportation of finished goods, and because carload traffic can be a wider variety of works in progress, intermodal is more favorable as an economic indicator.

Warren Buffett once stated on CNBC, when asked to identify the single most important economic statistic he would choose if he was stranded on a desert island for a month and could only get one set of economic numbers, that his favorite indicator was freight traffic.

In any case, this is an economic data series that is certainly worth tracking. Let’s look to the most recent numbers.

The AAR reports that intermodal rail volume for the week ending November 2 totaled 264,264 units. That is a 17.7% increase from the same week last year. We compare rail traffic year over year because the series is not seasonally adjusted and can be very volatile. Additionally, we’ll use long moving averages in our charts to better convey the trends. It’s notable that this Y/Y increase was especially high because the comparable week of 2012 was affected by Hurricane Sandy.

The 10-week moving average of intermodal rail traffic is up 6.0% year over year. That is the highest it’s been since March.

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Marc Faber: We’re in a worse position than in 2008

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Marc Faber : I been through 2 Gold Bubbles already.

Well, I lived through the bubble in gold in the 1970′s and by 1979, November, the gold price was around 450 Dollars and within three months it went up to 850 Dollars, so within three months, actually two months, November, December and early January, we made it big. It went up almost 50 percent. So a bubble usually characterized by a terminal upwards move in these real estate or gold or stocks or collectables that is almost vertical. In other words, an acceleration on the upside. And that hasn’t happened yet.

Moreover, one of the symptoms of a bubble is widespread public market invasion, in other words most people are one way or the other involved in the market, in real estate, like in the U.S. in 2007 or in NASDAQ stocks in 2000 or on other … Or in the 70′s, in the 70′s, when I was running Drexel Burnham at that time, our office was like a casino; people came in to trade gold 24 hours a day. That doesn’t happen today.

Okay, we have now better communication so we have the internet on which you can place orders through the internet and through phones and others but if I go to conferences and I talk about investments, I frequently ask the audience, how many of you own gold and how many have, say more than five percent of your assets in gold? Most, I mean, if at most three to five percent of the audience owns any gold, that’s about it. So where, say 12 years ago, if I had asked, who of you owns NASDAQ stocks, maybe 80 percent would have said, yes. So based on the ownership of gold from financial institutions and also based on the public participation, I don’t think we’re in a bubble.

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Marc Faber: Something fishy about the gold market

All  I want to say is, something is fishy about the gold market in the sense that if the Germans demand to have a part of the gold received in Germany, I think it would take eight years, we should put gold on three Boeings 747′s and you ship it to Germany and that’s it.

If the gold would be held in Germany, in a vault, and if there was a financial panic and they really needed to draw loans against the gold that they hold in Germany, they could obtain loans at any time from a bank or from another central bank or whatever it is. So they could have the gold in Germany and if they wish to obtain a large loan against those gold reserves and they wouldn't be that much anyway, but if they wanted to obtain a loan, they could have an auditor come and check the gold and then a bank or a central bank would essentially lend them money against that gold.

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Peter Schiff: Central Bank Monetary Cures Cannot Work

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Jim Rogers: Taper is unlikely to happen

Jim Rogers: If and when the Federal Reserve stops or even slows down printing money, and other banks also slow down, I do not think the Japanese will slow down. Maybe the English and the European banks will. There will be a moderating affect on markets because that is where most of the money has gone.


I am not sure it (Fed slowing down money printing) is going to happen. Firstly, Bernanke will not do it while he is here (Fed Chairman) because he does not want to go out with an egg on his face. Secondly, Ms Yellen is coming in. I doubt if she is going to do it at first anyway because, a) she is keen on printing money and b) she knows what will happen when they start slowing down. So she is not going to do it anytime soon. If they do start slowing down, the markets are going to react and they (Fed) will panic and come back and say, "oh we are sorry". So, I do not see much tapering anytime soon.

The market eventually will force them (Fed) to cut back. Eventually, the market is going to say, "we do not want this garbage paper anymore, we do not want to play this game anymore". But, I do not see that happening anytime soon.

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Marc Faber : FED Policy Has Made the Wealthy Wealthier

"We are in a gigantic asset bubble around the world with prices of real estate having risen a lot," he said. "The high end is at record highs. In the Hamptons, in Mayfair, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and we have a high inflation overseas, so I think that one day this asset inflation will lead to deflationary collapse one way or the other."

Faber echoes a growing number of financiers—from billionaire hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller to Omega Advisors' Leon Cooperman—who argue that the Fed policy has made the wealthy wealthier, primarily through rising asset prices. Rising stock markets have fueled a record number of millionaires in the U.S., with 1.7 million new millionaires added in the past 12 months, according to Credit Suisse.

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Jim Rogers: Excess liquidity globally driving equity markets

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How Warren Buffett Avoids Paying Billions in Taxes

Holding Stocks Forever Has Its Perks

Warren Buffett avoids paying tax bills by buying and holding it. He only has to pay capital gains taxes once he sell. So if he never and lock in his earnings. He can save a fortune on footing his tax bill.  

Of course, it’s wise to realize that Berkshire Hathaway is eventually going to have to pay taxes on those gains. It’s going to happen. Eventually. But for an indefinite period of time of Buffett and company’s choosing, while compounding money quicker all at the same time, the business will be able to delay paying their tax bill.

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Gold Bug Schiff Counters Goldman’s ‘Slam-Dunk Sell’ Gold Call

Peter Schiff lays an iPod-sized bar valued at about $40,000 on the sun room floor of his Connecticut mansion, and calculates it would cost about $250,000 for each floor tile to pave the room with gold.

He shows off $50 gold chips, to be used when paper money becomes worthless, a prediction repeated on his daily two-hour radio show broadcast from his basement studio to 68 stations in 30 states and 50,000 listeners online. The unabashed gold bug’s Euro Pacific Capital Inc. manages a $20 million mutual fund that invests in stocks related to the metal and lost 6.4 percent since it began in July. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Gold and Silver Index slid 1.5 percent in the same period.

He predicts bullion will reverse its 21 percent year-to-date decline and probably surge 52 percent to reach a record $2,000 an ounce within a year. That’s just the beginning: Schiff said he would “be amazed” if the U.S. dollar didn’t collapse and gold failed to skyrocket before President Barack Obama leaves office in 2017. 

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Marc Faber: Every Bubble will create some White Elephant Investments.

The point is, however, that in the real economy (a small capital market), bubbles tend to be contained by the availability of savings and credit, whereas in the financial economy (a disproportionately large capital market compared with the economy), the unlimited availability of credit leads to speculative bubbles, which get totally out of hand.

In other words, whereas every bubble will create some “white elephant” investments (investments that don’t make any economic sense under any circumstances), in financial economies’ bubbles, the quantity and aggregate size of “white elephant” investments is of such a colossal magnitude that the economic benefits that arise from every investment boom, which I alluded to above, can be more than offset by the money and wealth destruction that arises during the bust. This is so because in a financial economy, far too much speculative and leveraged capital becomes immobilized in totally unproductive “white elephant” investments.

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Marc Faber: Karl Marx was peobably Right.

So it would seem to me that Karl Marx might prove to have been right in his contention that crises become more and more destructive as the capitalistic system matures (and as the “financial economy” referred to earlier grows like a cancer) and that the ultimate breakdown will occur in a final crisis that will be so disastrous as to set fire to the framework of our capitalistic society.

Not so, Bernanke and co. argue, since central banks can print an unlimited amount of money and take extraordinary measures, which, by intervening directly in the markets, support asset prices such as bonds, equities and homes, and therefore avoid economic downturns, especially deflationary ones. There is some truth in this. If a central bank prints a sufficient quantity of money and is prepared to extend an unlimited amount of credit, then deflation in the domestic price level can easily be avoided, but at a considerable cost.

First, it is clear that such policies do lead to depreciation of the currency, either against currencies of other countries that resist following the same policies of massive monetization and state bailouts (policies which are based on, for me at least, incomprehensible sophism among the economic academia) or against gold, commodities and hard assets in general. The rise in domestic prices then leads at some point to a “scarcity of the circulating medium,” which necessitates the creation of even more credit and paper money.

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George Soros wins with OpenTable.

OpenTable Inc (NASDAQ:OPEN), a company that provides restaurant reservation solutions around the world. The stock shot up +13.79%, reaching $80.90, after announcing better-than-expected Q3 earnings. Billionaire George Soros acquired 36,000 shares (0.02% of his fund) for $62.49 each last quarter.

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