08:47 AM CDT on Tuesday, April 29, 2008

By DAVE LEVINTHAL / The Dallas Morning News
dlevinthal@dallasnews.com

QINGDAO, China – The secret to Dallas’ economic vibrancy may be mixed with shots of a clear liquid imbued with snake-venom potency and the burn of devil’s blood.

Qingdao whiskey alone doesn’t seal trade deals. But such lubricants haven’t harmed Dallas’ bid to sell itself to lesser-known Chinese cities as a pre-eminent inland distribution center for foreign goods shipped to the U.S.

Consider a scene Monday evening: What began as an ultra-formal, summit-style meeting between Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert and Qingdao Mayor Xia Geng ended with a lively 11-course dinner punctuated by handshaking, backslapping and more than a few toasts laced with promises of long-lasting friendship and cooperation.

All the while, delegation members and their Chinese counterparts breezily conjured visions of a bustling Dallas inland port where Qingdao goods in shipping containers would clear customs, then hurry by rail and trucks to North American markets at discounted rates.

That a delegation of two dozen Dallasites would travel halfway around the world to dine with and sign a “friendship city” agreement with Qingdao officials to further such a vision isn’t only impressive, Mr. Xia said, but itself worthy of pursuing strengthened business ties.

Also OnlineInteractive map: Follow the Dallas delegation’s China itinerary

Blog: Dallas City Hall

Interactive graphic: About inland ports

04/26/08: In China, Dallas mayor aiming to get down to business

04/20/08: Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert leads business delegation on China trip

Editorial: Mr. Leppert goes to China

“Dallas wants to be a partner. Our two cities will have a multiplication of business,” said Mr. Xia, who has a doctorate in economics. “We understand that Dallas is located in the center of the United States, and that’s an advantage. It helps our products. We’d also like to import from Dallas – import equipment – and take advantage of the exchange rate.”

To win the respect of Chinese politicians and businesspeople, who are sometimes one in the same, “it’s all about the personal relationships,” said Richard Allen, chief executive of The Allen Group, which is helping develop distribution centers at Dallas’ inland port project, which skirts the city’s southeasternmost corner.

“People do business with people they know, people they trust, people who show up,” Mr. Allen said. “I expect as a result of this trip, you’ll see in the near future some number of economic growth and jobs in Dallas. I do know one thing: There will be no click between us and China’s business if there’s no effort on our part.”

Said Mr. Leppert: “We talked about everything from situations in Chinese politics to our kids. It didn’t take long to develop an understanding. Moving forward, people will naturally work with people they are comfortable with.”

The delegation’s visit to Qingdao – a seaport of about 7.3 million on China’s north-central coast – included touring the headquarters of Hisense, an electronics manufacturer with limited penetration in U.S. markets. So far, at least.

Abandoning subtlety, a statement etched into a wall within Hisense’s office tower reads: “Our future lies in promoting overseas development.”

Meeting with a company like Hisense simply makes sense and could pay long-term dividends if, for example, officials there expand their operations or go shopping for a U.S. headquarters, Mr. Leppert said. If Dallas doesn’t aggressively pursue deals with Chinese entities, other U.S. cities assuredly will – given the robust growth of the Chinese economy, the mayor added.

Chinese officials, in turn, are all too eager to find economical routes into U.S. markets eager to absorb inexpensive Chinese goods.

During a visit Sunday to Tianjin, a coastal city of 10 million to the north, a delegation tour of the Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area so impressed vice chairman Ni Xiangyu that he practically insisted, “We need to – we must – work even closer.”

Tianjin Mayor Huang Xingguo, even before Mr. Leppert presented him with a personalized Dallas Mavericks jersey, declared that the delegation’s visit “will give us a very important record in Tianjin history.”

For all the glad hands and good feelings, however, Dallas officials haven’t yet secured signed trade agreements with any Chinese business or government. Specifics on who will ship what where, and when, are lacking. Delegation members acknowledge that these types of meetings rarely involve hard-core business negotiations.

After spending Monday night in Shanghai, the delegation today flies to Dalian for a day’s worth of meetings with the city’s mayor and economic development officials. On Wednesday, delegates spend the first of two days in Hong Kong.

Three more official lunches or dinners are scheduled. Spirits and spirited conversation will top each menu.

THIS JACKASS JUST GOT BACK FROM MEXICO TELLING MEXICO TO KEEP SENDING WORKERS TO THE USA, DALLAS WANTS TO BE KNOWN AS A DESTINATION CITY-

CHINESE PORTS BEING BUILT ON THE PACIFIC SIDE OF MEXICO, RAIL LINES AND HIGHWAYSDERECTLY INTO AMERICA NON STOP. THIS IS THE NAU IN ACTION-

PS rick perry will be running for another term in 2010, more perry means less for Texas.

Why Gold Was ‘Hacked’ Friday- and How Commodities / Gold & Silver Apr 19, 2008 – 01:00 AM By: Alex_Wallenwein Commodities Best Financial Markets Analysis ArticleThe market delivered a huge”drubbing” to gold and silver Friday– or at least that’s what thefinancial powers want you to think. To try and find out what happened, I looked at the Kitco 24-hour chart and saw that, for the very first time, the “New York Globex” system was listed at the bottom. Until yesterday, one only used to see the trading days for London, New York, Sydney, and Hong Kong. I have never heard of a “Globex” before, so I looked it up. Here is an article from January this year . Globex is a super-fast, 24 hour, around-the-clock and around-the-globe trading platform that was instituted by the Chicago Mercantile exchange. Since I had never heard of it anywhere before, I did a Google News search on it for today. Nothing. No news reports that Globex just went into effect for gold trading, or that it was planned to be put into effect. Hmm. A $35 price drop in gold coupled with the secretive launch of a brand new, super fast, 33 trades per second global trading platform for gold. What a coincidence! I remember when JP Morgan closed its trading desk in New York and opened in London so it could exercise its “gold control” on both sides of the Atlantic. The “Globex” appears to be an extension of the same strategy. What people often forget on days like this is that the COMEX is nothing but a paper-trading market. Contracts almost never go into delivery. Over 90% of the transactions are getting settled in cash, so the “prices” we all see flicker across our screens are about a accurate a reflection of true demand for physical gold and silver as TV sitcoms are of the lives of real people. The financial establishment is in its death throes, so they are going all-out in trying to cover up their own incompetence, excesses, and screw-ups, like the subprime related credit collapse, or the bond ratings debacle. This is just one more indication of the same. Remember the tremendous breakout of gold on Wednesday, only two days ago? That same day, the gold stock indexes shot up by a much larger degree than gold itself. That is a huge danger signal for the gold cartel and the financial establishment. Along with a protracted gold-up/Dow-down divergence, it is the one thing they cannot tolerate, so they had to slam gold really, really hard for the weekend to try and signal to Joe Mainstream Investor that gold I all its forms is a “bad deal” and he shouldn’t buy into it. Ha! Hang on to your physical. See what happens next week. If gold drops more, buy some more. You shouldn’t be in paper gold or stocks in any case, right now. These developments cannot hurt you if you are solidly invested in physical gold and silver (which is not to say that gold and silver will protect you from political developments, which include a total takeover of Wall Street – and Main Street – by the US Fed, initiated by the White House and duly rubberstamped by a sycophantic Congress. The big question on most gold investors’ minds is of course whether gold will drop further next week. The answer: No. Gold will not drop – but the paper-rigged, false flag COMEX price indicator very well might. So what? Who cares? Silver Is the Key In fact, the whole thing seems to be centered around silver, where a serious physical shortage is building up. For now, that is even more dangerous to the powers than gold’s rise. If you look at the Kitco chart for today, silver got slammed even harder than gold – but it also rebounded faster and higher. All of this is happening while major dealers continue to run out of silver eagles coins . Today, the financial press explains all of this away as a reaction to a”rebounding” dollar. Yeah, right. If that is so, what drove the dollar’s “recovery”, then? According to Reuters , some “positive earnings news” from Citi. So, what were the positive earnings news? Reuters doesn’t tell us. What the article does tell us is that Citi booked a 5.1 billion dollar quarterly loss! Somebody please explain to me how an over $5 billion loss engenders positive “sentiment” in the markets that the worst of the credit crisis “may be over”. I must be really stupid for not seeing that. So, to recap: Silver and gold get trounced, supposedly because of a rise in the dollar that supposedly was caused by “positive” earnings news from Citi, and that “positive” news was a $5.1 billion quarterly loss on top of a previous quarterly loss . And all of that is happening on a day on which the CME’s Globex trading platform is secretly launched in the precious metals markets, covering all time zones around the globe when NYMEX is not in session. Oh, I forgot to mention that the Dow had a 250 point bounce as well. Very interesting – but it gets even more hilarious. A MarketWatch article reports that Citi had its second quarterly loss I a row now, totaling almost $12 billion. At the same time, the reporter (if you can call him that) is brazenly stating that “investors welcomed the aggressive write-downs”, causing Citi’s stock to rally 6.5% on the news. How can that be explained? How do you manufacture a positive spin out of that? Easy. Just serve up an obscure financial analyst who is willing to say on the record that the losses were “smaller than anticipated” because his company “modeled” closer to a $20 billion loss, and – viola. good news! The Ministry of Propaganda has spoken – but investors aren’t stupid. Just read the comments posted right next to the story. Here is one: “Will it be death sentence to market, may be with this approach they can invite the inevitable earlier.” Somebody is paying attention. I would bet that 80 percent of real investors share the same perception, yet still the propaganda machine is fooling itself into believing that it can control public perception by mouthing such obvious bullcrap. The Real (Bad) News for Paper Markets: The really crucial, all-important, and revealing news is that all of this is nothing but a smoke screen to raise a plausible “explanation” for the number-one tell-tale sign of total financial collapse I have been ‘prophesying’ for months, even years, now – namely the inevitable collapse of the bond market. We are right in the beginning of it (although it looks like bonds will enjoy an engineered “recovery” of sorts on Monday). It will be followed (or accompanied) by the collapse of the stock markets and a predicted recovery in precious metals stocks that will put every market bubble the world has ever seen to shame. That is, unless the newly created Ministry of Finance locks all markets down into a Soviet-style centrally controlled economy in order to complement the already-existing Soviet-style, centrally controlled financial “news” propaganda machine. Whether or not that ends up happening depends, of course, on whether you acquiesce or not. Until then, what happened today is no threat to your wealth if you are solidly invested in physical gold and silver. Even owning gold will not protect you from this. Alex Wallenwein Editor, Publisher The EURO VS DOLLAR MONITOR Copyright © 2008 Alex Wallenwein – All Rights Reserved Alex holds a B.A. degree in Economics and a juris doctorate in Law. His forte is research. In late 1996, he began to research how money is used by some to exert political and economic control over others’ lives. In the process, he discovered that gold (along with silver) is the common man’s antidote to this effort. In writing and publishing the Euro vs Dollar Monitor, he explains the dynamics of this process and how individuals can harness the power of gold in their efforts to regain their political and financial autonomy.
…………………….Fratres, sobrii estote et vigilate, quia adversarius vester diabolus, tamquam leo rugiens, circuit quaerens quem devoret, cui resistite fortes in fide. Tu autem, Domine, miserere nobis. (1 Pet 5. 8-9), taken from the hour of Compline

As horrible as it sounds, I was rejoicing when Corzine got in a car crash FOR DRIVING 90 MPH WEAVING THROUGH TRAFFIC AND CRASHED INTO SOMEONE. Son of Bitch..