RichGB,

I am confident I speak for everyone here when I say every one of your posts is eagerly followed up. You are a valued and respected source of new ideas and data. We all thank you.

I will be a keen follower of your blog, but sincerely hope you will still help us here with our thinking and formulating.

Have a great New Year.

It has been quite a good Christmas, probably because I spent very little and will go in to the New Year no poorer than last year.

I hope your Christmas was a good one too.

Sorry about the large number of randomly selected off-the-topic postings. I know this is particularly irritating to people trying to continue a thread here, and buries their own contributions. I will soon have my own blog up and running and have a place to run riot with unrestrained excitement with any topic I wish. This should impose more discipline on my future postings to your blog … maybe.

Did you do something to offend google's spam software in some previous life or something? Why always your posts?

Hope you had a great Christmas.

… and the price of copper has hit an all-time high: see HERE.
This is not necessarily a bad thing because all that aluminium we've been putting conscientiously in the recycling bins will gain some new applications as copper becomes too expensive.

Hi Golem
I appear to have lost a posting. Is it trapped in your spam folder?

Rich, that's surreal dude! I promise I won't peep again.

I went travelling with a friend to Mongolia recently. Check out the gateway of Ernot.

Mark – I do know some people bought into the property myth and spent their time watching the bloody dire location, location, location. I didn't and most of my friends didn't. We bought because where I live it is actually cheaper than renting. My three bed semi costs me less a month to pay a mortgage on than a two bed flat round the corner would cost to rent. And that is with my rate being over six percent.

I also don't think this is a homeowners versus savers etc situation. I am sick of reading savers ranting about bailed out home-owners costing them their savings – its divide and rule – homeowners are in effect helping bail the banks out right now as they are paying way over the low base rate in interest.

The current low base rate is NOT to aid homeowners as the retail banks are not passing that rate on – it is to save the banks and help them re-capitalise. The average variable mortgage is three points higher than the base rate and the fixed mortgage average is four points higher. Many homeowners are paying rates of five and six percent!

So if rates go up to help savers, without the retail banks being tackled for their usury then millions of homeowners and small businesses will go to the wall.

This is the difficulty for the central bank and it is reflected in the wider economy. We don't seem to have proper inflation – we have some price bubbles – and they are in the really important stuff like fuel and food, but house prices are deflationary and wages are stagnant and unemployment is rising – so it looks more like stagflation – but it isn't quite that either.

The nearest thing I have seen to describe it is hyper-stagflation. And it IS as scary as it sounds. But even that doesn't seem right – its strange economic times we live in.

I think two things are at the root cause of it – the banks and finance sector and there ongoing behaviour and oil prices.

NOt many people mention the oil situation but I think it is paramount.

amazing pictures @

http://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-chinese-ghost-cities-2010-12?slop=1#slideshow-start
"The hottest market in the hottest economy in the world is Chinese real estate. The big question is how vulnerable is this market to a crash.
One red flag is the vast number of vacant homes spread through China, by some estimates up to 64 million vacant homes.

We've tracked down satellite photos of these unnerving places, based on a report from Forensic Asia Limited. They call it a clear sign of a bubble: "There’s city after city full of empty streets and vast government buildings, some in the most inhospitable locations. It is the modern equivalent of building pyramids. With 20 new cities being built every year, we hope to be able to expand our list going forward."

happy christmas everyone !

Accompanying declining populations in the industrialised areas are drops in taxation, which affects those municipal bonds we've been talking about. Maybe some US towns will have no choice but to become ghost towns, making the municipal bonds worthless.