Getting ready for Christmas? What’s Santa got in his sack for you this year? Well, if there’s one thing you should be preparing for, then it can only be the big crash of February 2014. The signs have been there for months now and it’s definitely now on the books for February next year. Santa will be emptying his sack and it won’t be presents that will be falling from the sky as his sleigh goes whizzing past us.

Preordained Events

Stick the date in your diary, pop it on your iPad and synch it with your iPhone. Use them while you can, because they will be relics of the past most undoubtedly in the coming months. You won’t be needing anything in the future, once the financial world implodes and it is set to happen in February 2014.

If we were in 1929, this would be June 1929, just a few months before the crash happened back then. Yes, we can say whatever we like with numbers, but like cameras, there are some calculations that never seem to lie. Businesssweek’sTom DeMark, a financial analyst has put together indicators that are able to predict movements of the market with surprising accuracy. DeMark states that “the market’s going to have one more rally, then once we get above that high, I think it’s going to be treacherous. I think it’s all preordained right now”.

Some might be saying that we didn’t need a crystal ball and we had no need for mathematics either to show that. You just had to look at how the Federal Reserve has bounced the financial markets back into a false-sense of security without actually doing anything at all to change the economy. Where’s the employment, where’s the increase in industry? It’s in the past. The only thing that is there right now is the virtual prosperity of the financiers and the banks. The next US shutdown and arrival at the debt ceiling will be just in time too for the biggest crash in history and will probably be linked.

Cash in on the last rise of the financial markets before what has been set down long ago comes of age and ripens completely. After that, who knows! You’ll have to buy low and wait a long time before the markets move back up.

The chart that compares pre-1929 and today is uncannily identical. Take a look for yourself. Pooh-pooh it, refuse to see it, do whatever you wish, but the crash will be coming and it’s the banks that started it all. The government will finish it all. God bless America! Game over! Goodnight!

….continue reading HERE

After a disappointing Black Friday, the infamous post-US Thanksgiving shopping day, the success of Cyber Monday has become even more important.

US Retail Sales have been lackluster so far this year. They have definitely been less than expected when economists were forecasting much higher economic growth that would then translate into higher consumer spending.

And, despite a slowing in the growth of US Retail Sales over the last three years (see chart above), the abundance of Federal Reserve liquidity has kept the problem mostly under the rug. This has been aided by a very strong Retail Sales lobby in the US which is quick to furnish the press with their positive spin. In fact, without looking at the details, most would conclude that the last couple of years have been fantastic.

As December unfolds, expect the spin from the Retail Sales lobby to crank into high gear. The initial reports from Cyber Monday exhibit this already with no mention that it might be very difficult to make up for the disappointing Black Friday total sales.

Just like with its declining impact on unemployment, the effect that the Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing on US Retail Sales may be fading as well. Not a great foundation if US stocks are to continue their torrid pace.

The opinions expressed in this report are the opinions of the author and readers should not assume they reflect the opinions or recommendations of Richardson GMP Limited or its affiliates. Assumptions, opinions and estimates constitute the author’s judgment as of the date of this material and are subject to change without notice. We do not warrant the completeness or accuracy of this material, and it should not be relied upon as such. Before acting on any recommendation, you should consider whether it is suitable for your particular circumstances and, if necessary, seek professional advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. 

Richardson GMP Limited, Member Canadian Investor Protection Fund.

Richardson is a trade-mark of James Richardson & Sons, Limited. GMP is a registered trade-mark of GMP Securities L.P. Both used under license by Richardson GMP Limited.

Thanksgiving is now out of the way. We can move on to Christmas. And New Year’s Eve. And then 2014. And 2015. And onward into the future! 

But what’s in the future? If only we knew… 

Making predictions is tough… especially when we have no idea what to expect. 

But wait… Some of the most important things we will see in the future have already happened many times. 

Yes, dear reader… your editor is going way, way out on a very solid limb. He has identified three things that WILL happen. No doubt about it. He guarantees it. 

Interest rates are not fixed. And the Fed can’t suppress them forever. Nobody has repealed the interest rate cycle. 

So, expect rates to go up. 

When? 

Hey, you want an awful lot from a free publication, don’t you? Isn’t it enough to give you a guaranteed future event? 

We can also tell you that when it happens, there will be hell to pay. Here’s Michael Snyder at Global Research: 

At this point, we have painted ourselves into a corner by accumulating so much debt. We simply cannot afford to have rates rise significantly. 

For example, if the average rate of interest on US government debt rose to just 6% (and it has been much higher than that at various times in the past), we would be paying more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt. 

But it wouldn’t be just the federal government that would suffer. Just consider what higher rates would do to the real estate market. 

About a year ago, the rate on 30-year mortgages was sitting at 3.31%. The monthly payment on a 30-year, $300,000 mortgage at that rate is $1,315.52. 

If the 30-year rate rises to 8%, the monthly payment on a 30-year, $300,000 mortgage would be $2,201.29. 

Does 8% sound crazy to you? 

It shouldn’t. 8% was considered to be normal back in the year 2000.

No paper money standard has ever survived a complete credit cycle. Certainly not with a central bank on the job! 

Higher interest rates, bitcoin, a credit crisis, a central bank miscalculation – something will bring it down. Something always does. 

Bitcoin? Maybe. Bitcoin hit the $1,000-per-unit mark on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. My sons followed it over the weekend. 

“Hey, I made $1,000 last night,” said one. “Bitcoin went up $100.” 

“Yeah, and I’m thinking of cashing out and buying an old car,” said another. 

Bitcoin hit $1,230 on Sunday. A bitcoin hedge fund is up 5,000% – which could be the best performance of any hedge fund in history. 

Bitcoin will probably bite the dust sometime soon. That’s the trouble with new technology. There’s always newer technology – and maybe a better bitcoin. 

Meanwhile, the dollar has been in a gentle decline since July. Someday, the decline won’t be so gentle. It will be brutal. Then investors will suffer huge losses as dollar-denominated assets sink. 

Here’s more from Global Research: 

The death of the dollar is coming, and it will probably be China that pulls the trigger. […] 

As the global economy trembled before the prospect of a US default last month… China’s official Xinhua news agency called for a “de-Americanized” world. 

It also urged the creation of a “new international reserve currency… to replace the dominant US dollar”. 

So why should the rest of the planet listen to China? 

Well, China now accounts for more global trade than anyone else does, including the US. 

China is also now the number one importer of oil in the world.

At this point, China is even importing more oil from Saudi Arabia than the US is. 

China now has an enormous amount of economic power globally, and the Chinese want the rest of the planet to start using less US dollars and to start using more of their own currency. The following is from a recent article in the Vancouver Sun: 

Three years after China allowed the yuan to start trading in Hong Kong’s offshore market, banks and investors around the world are positioning themselves to get involved in what Nomura Holdings Inc. calls the biggest revolution in the $5.3 trillion currency market since the creation of the euro in 1999. 

And over the past few years we have seen the global use of the yuan rise dramatically. […] 

International use of the yuan is increasing as the world’s second-largest economy opens up its capital markets. In the first nine months of this year, about 17% of China’s global trade was settled in the currency, compared with less than one percent in 2009, according to Deutsche Bank AG.

The US can still send its ships and bombers to stir up hornets’ nests wherever it pleases. But someday the hornets will develop a deadly sting. 

Or maybe the empire will just go broke. 

Who knows? Every empire has to find a way to exterminate itself. The US will be no exception. 

This last event could be the most exciting. Falling interest rates and collapsing currencies can be fun to watch, provided you’re not standing directly beneath them. But a falling empire? The imperial warriors typically bring down a lot of innocent bystanders along with them. 

But don’t worry. Be happy. Hold onto your gold. 

Regards,

Bill

• A “chemical” perpetual motion machine?
• Drilling for Nat gas at the dump… and turning garbage into gold…
• Plus: The end of everything… and the 7 wealth accelerators of the next decade.

There should be no surprise that landfills are being drilled to install pipes to collect methane (natural gas) from the decay of trash. And it should come as no surprise that a similar collection process is occurring in municipal wastewater treatment plants by placing domes over aeration tanks to capture methane produced by anaerobic bacteria that help consume the waste. But methane is laden with carbon. It’s not as bad as gasoline, but it still adds a lot of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Now comes a clever professor at the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus, and his group of affable graduate students, to design and build a machine that converts human waste directly into cheap clean energy — something that’s close to the chemical version of a perpetual motion machine.

The device is a unique and nanotechnology-tweaked combination of two unusual fuel cells that have never been combined before. One is called a microbial fuel cell (MFC). That’s most of what you see in the photo above. It’s a two-chambered device (thus the two bottles) with a cathode and an anode and a cation exchange membrane in between. 

The left side of the cell is filled with water and the right side with sewage. It turns out that wastewater contains special bugs — called electrogenic bacteria — that eat hydrocarbons and carbohydrates in the sewage and produce excess electrons in the process.

“Wastewater has a complex community of bacteria. Only one or two produce electrons,” says Yat Li, associate professor of chemistry at the Santa Cruz campus. “When they produce these electrons, they need to get rid of them. We help them do that.” The resulting MFC he and his graduate students designed is essentially a wet battery.

Behind the microbial fuel cell in the photo above is a photoelectrochemical cell (PEC) filled with water that sucks up the electricity from the MFC and off-gasses hydrogen by passing a current through the water, a process known as electrolysis. 

And that’s the trick of it. 

Electrolysis is a great way to produce carbon-free hydrogen for fuel. When you burn hydrogen in a stove or auto engine, for example, the only byproduct is water vapor — no carbon dioxide. But electrolysis takes a hefty input of electricity, so making hydrogen that way is normally expensive and inefficient.

“Our approach is to use sunlight to power the process,” as well as those electron-making bacteria in the MFC, says Li. His PEC creates electricity by using nanotechnologies to make large-surface-area electrodes that are photo-reactive. “You could call it artificial photosynthesis.”

The process is incredibly synergistic because both a microbial fuel cell and a photoelectrochemical cell normally need a jump-start of electricity to begin working. But in Li’s machine, both the MFC and the PEC can jump-start each other. Both can work as a battery for the other. And both are capable of producing hydrogen gas. It’s kind of like a “push me-pull you” of energy.

The only thing that needs to be added from time to time is sewage. And there’s a bonus — the wastewater becomes cleaner in the process. There’s also no loss or gain of electrons in the circuit — the electricity flows from the anode in the MFC to the platinum electrode in the PEC and across to the titanium dioxide electrode in the PEC to the carbon cathode in the MFC and then back to the anode in the MFC — a continuous electrical circuit.

Next, Li and his crew, working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — and its wastewater — will scale up this 100 ml lab project to a 40-liter bottle. “One of the questions we have to address is whether this scales up linearly,” Li says. “Do we have to change the electrodes or the membrane? The surface area of the electrodes, which we can magnify with nanotechnologies, is very important to making this scale up.”

Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists take note: The technology is certain to get the attention of a number of companies trying to get cheap fuel from landfills and wastewater, but so far the process is not licensed. 

We will be watching for those developments. 

In the meantime, to see a delightful video from Dr. Li about how an MFC works, simply click on this link.

Regards,

Stephen Petranek

Note: As 2013 winds down, you’re going to be bombarded by all manner of “what to look for in 2014” predictions. Allow us to simplify things for you… 

We predict: “The End of Everything”

Over the next 10 years, 7 key moments could change everything you know about your health, wealth and prosperity.

Don’t miss your chance to discover these 7 mega-events for yourself. 

Watch this short video for all the details.

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