2009 was an incredibly interesting year both politically and financially, as both arenas are inextricably intertwined, though on the surface, the leaders from these respective industries often bicker and admonish one another for public show, while smiling and shaking hands behind closed doors. Uncovering this complex and hidden connection almost always requires much deeper digging than is ever executed by mass media financial journalists, who often seem more intent on fawning to banking interests rather than revealing the smallest speck of truth to the public. No doubt there were many huge stories sprinkled throughout 2009.
The scientific community presented very strong evidence that the carbon-emission propelled theory of global warming is nothing more than a scam of global governments to tax and rob their citizens to replenish their near-bankrupt coffers and again, the public became privy to the nefarious marriage of politicians and bankers. On the political scene, elite bankers propelled Barack Obama into the Presidency in the United States by carefully managing his image to the public as a “savior”. In 2009, it became patently clear that Barack will be as much a “savior” for the American people as former Mexican President Vicente Fox was for the Mexican people — which is another way of saying that Barack’s actions are his “tell” that he will undoubtedly maintain the status quo and that no substantive change will occur under his watch.
GATA and Zero Hedge printed many documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests that exposed past US Treasury and US Federal Reserve coordinated gold price suppression schemes, thus vindicating the loony gold bugs that had cried “gold price suppression!” for years. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone printed a scathing indictment of Wall Street leviathan Goldman Sachs’s business practices that included one of the greatest financial journalism metaphors in history when he called Goldman the “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
And is often the case when journalists draw back the curtain and expose the dirty truths of the cowardly Wizards, the Wizards retaliate not by offering any intelligent rebuttal of their criticisms, as none exists, but with hollow accusations of conspiracy specifically designed to deflect attention away from the well-constructed arguments of their critics. Thus, when Goldman responded with their own counter-accusations of Taibbi’s work as “an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories“, the only words that entered my mind were “predictable as clockwork”. When belittlement of their critics in the absence of substantive counter-arguments failed to produce results, Goldman turned to manipulation of religion as its preferred means to win back the public’s favor. CEO Lloyd Blankfein announce to the world that Goldman was doing “God’s work”, a boast as arrogant and unintelligent as US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s claim, earlier in 2009, that he “saved the world.” Thus, it was only fitting that our spectacularly interesting 2009 would conclude with a long anticipated lawsuit filed by GATA against the US Federal Reserve that “seek[s] a court order for disclosure of the central bank’s records of its surreptitious market intervention to suppress the monetary metal’s price.” The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and targets Fed records involving gold swaps, exchanges of gold with foreign financial institutions.
For those that refuse to acknowledge the second phase of this monetary crisis that is brewing on the horizon and that will commence in 2010-2011, I can only say, “Tighten your panties, Dorothy, because the trip down the rabbit hole is about to go way deeper than you can ever fathom” — meaning that the progression of the second phase of this monetary crisis is going to trigger Orwellian visions that nobody will enjoy.
Many people that depended upon fundamental analysis to guide their investment decisions in 2009 were caught reacting to, instead of staying two steps ahead, of this year’s global stock market behavior. Since I founded maalamalama in 2006, I’ve always stated that our method that provides our investment guidance will always consist of fraud analysis, then fundamental, and then technical, in that specific order, a formula that has produced positive returns and enormous out-performance of all major global market indexes for three years in a row now. To this end, we present a window into our mindset and psyche that is a list of our most popular blog articles of last year.
How the (Grinch) Bankers Stole Christmas
The Coming Blowback of Banking Fraud
The GLD and SLV: Legitimate Investment Vehicles or Not?
Why the Current US Dollar Chart Tells a Drastically Different Story than the World’s Financial Pundits
Gold and Economic Freedom, Reinterpreted for the 21st Century
Hundreds of Millions May Face Starvation in the Next 5-10 Years
How the Financial Elites Enronized America
How an Unsound Global Monetary System Creates Boom/Bust Cycles
8 Reasons Why the Obama Administration Will Not Solve this Crisis by the End of 2009
The Biggest Stock Market Scam of the Century is Being Unleashed — But Will it Succeed?
The US Dollar Vulnerable to a Steep Decline Now
JS Kim is the Founder & Chief Investment Strategist of maalamalama, a fiercely independent investment research & consulting firm that rejects all ties to the commercial investment industry.
