China, Gold and War
The following is excerpted from an article entitled Who’s the Sucker at the Global Gold Poker Table? It talks about China being the "sucker" that will ultimately get stuck with worthless dollars. That just gives me the warm fuzzies knowing that we are pissing off somebody that can blow us to smitherines anytime they like and not feel any moral regret for doing so! Heck, they could send just a few billion soldiers over here and still have several billion to spare! In fact, a good war might serve to alleviate some of their overpopulation problems.

Bottom line is this.... if you are gonna play poker and you are gonna cheat, why pick on the biggest, baddest dude at the table that already hates you?


Who’s the Sucker at the Global Gold Poker Table?
I really did have the occasion to talk to some government officials about gold and it was very interesting. The World Gold Council does an excellent job of compiling statistics on official gold holdings, but a lot of the countries there do not report to the World Gold Council.

There is about 30,000 tons of official gold, but some of the Middle-Eastern countries don’t report or they show up at very low levels and you kind of roll your eyes a little bit. I was giving a presentation (to one of those country’s officials) on gold using the (official) data and I said, ‘You guys don’t show up on my radar screen here. I have a feeling there’s a lot more gold around here than anyone is willing to admit.’

They all sort of looked at each other and smiled and so without saying so in so many words I was led to believe there was a lot more gold out there than what shows up in the official statistics....

When asked how those officials from the Middle-Eastern countries view paper money, Rickards responded, “Well, the way I would put it, Eric, it is a joke, but they are in on the joke. They understand the vulnerability of it. They understand the gaming of it and the way paper money is used to transfer wealth from people who don’t really understand it to those who do and are in a position to manipulate it.

But it’s ok if you are in on the joke. You know the old saying, ‘If you are in on a poker game and you don’t know who the sucker is, you’re the sucker.‘ There are always 3 or 4 players who will gang up on one guy and strip all of his chips away. Right now, China is the sucker, they are the ones who have $3 trillion of paper. Nowhere else to go, not enough gold, don’t know what to do and they are completely vulnerable to the United States.

That’s beginning to occur to them and maybe their behavior will change going forward. But the Arabs understand this, they went through this in the ‘70s. They had recourse, they said, ‘Nixon, you want to cut the value of the dollar by 20%? Fine, we’ll quadruple oil prices, your move.‘

In other words they were able and continue to be able to protect themselves from dollar devaluation simply by increasing the price of oil. Then they get the paper money and they buy gold. So they are in on the joke, let’s put it that way. They don’t have any more confidence in paper money than I do, but they continue to participate in it because they benefit from it because they are natural resource players.

China is not a natural resource player in terms of exports, that’s where they are vulnerable and again, they have not diversified their reserves.”