Good luck today and I hope the fine Canadian nurses look after you as well as us UK nurses would.  Speedy recovery and look forward to seeing you back posting when you've recuperated :)

RaRa

NOMINAL GDP TARGETING!!  FED Williams in his own words.   Not like QE2.  This is one will be OPEN ENDED.  Obviously, in this last stretch the banksters are going to try to crush gold and silver.    As of today, I am buying again.  Not sure you can time a bet much better.

Published: Monday, 23 Jul 2012 | 12:43 AM ET

The US will make little progress tackling high unemployment before 2014 unless the Federal Reserve eases policy further, one of the central bank’s leading officials has warned in the run-up to a meeting next week where the option of “QE3” will be on the table.

The comments by John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, show how the weak economy is pushing the central bank towards action to support growth.

In an interview with the Financial Times, he forecast that unless “further action” was taken, there would be a lack of progress in boosting the jobs market – where the unemployment rate has been stuck around 8.2 percent since the start of the year – over the next 18 months.

But he declined to call directly for a Fed move. “I think the argument against further action is the question of uncertainty around the effects, the costs and the benefits of doing so,” he said.

Mr Williams is regarded as close to the centre of gravity on the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, of which he is a voting member this year. The FOMC will conclude its next meeting on August 1.

A series of Fed officials, including chairman Ben Bernanke, have said the central bank will need to consider further action unless it sees progress towards lower unemployment.

Mr Williams warned of “pretty significant” downside risks to the US economy from the eurozone crisis, the looming “fiscal cliff” of spending cuts and tax increases, and the dangers of a global slowdown.

If the Fed launched another round of quantitative easing, Mr Williams suggested that buying mortgage-backed securities rather than Treasuries would have a stronger effect on financial conditions. “There’s a lot more you can buy without interfering with market function and you maybe get a little more bang for the buck,” he said.

He added that there would also be benefits in having an open-ended programme of QE, where the ultimate amount of purchases was not fixed in advance like the $600 billion “QE2” programme launched in November 2010 but rather adjusted according to economic conditions.

“The main benefit from my point of view is it will get the markets to stop focusing on the terminal date [when a programme of purchases ends] and also focusing on, ‘Oh, are they going to do QE3?’” he said. Instead, markets would adjust their expectation of Fed purchases as economic conditions changed.

Mr Williams was unexcited by the idea of cutting the rate of interest paid to banks on their excess reserves from today’s 25 basis points, another possible way to stimulate the economy, saying that the “costs and benefits are pretty small either way”.

He also questioned whether the Bank of England’s new “funding for lending” scheme, which will provide cheap funding for British banks that increase their lending to households and businesses, could be a direct model for the US.

“This is where you really have to ask yourself a question about what is broken,” he said. “In the US funding costs for a bank are generally very low.”

Very interesting and puts a small smile on my face as things come to pass that have been predicted.

I hope the rise is steady, as a sharp 'reset' will presumably encourage nationalization/windfall profits/tax increases.

Folks that own miners like me could do with a couple of years of gold beyond $2000, to allow the miners to make up lost ground and surge ahead to allow some profit taking.

Hoping your procedure goes perfectly and your healing is fast! Song for you...

Crosby, Stills & Nash - Southern Cross - YouTube

stupid to post here but maybe some can use for others.

Consider the following hypothetical scenario. Suppose that in November 2007, one had purchased physical gold (at $850 an ounce) for the first time ever, then watched it happily as it moved over $1,000 an oz by March of 2008, and then sadly as it pulled back to $850 again by May of that year. However, believing that a 15%+ correction was a sufficient enough annual correction to merit further purchases of gold, you added to your current stash by doubling down on your physical gold at $850. Only then, gold moved to an intra-day low of $681 on the Comex by the end of October, 2011, and from listening to constant media chatter that the gold bubble had burst when its price had hit $1,000 an ounce, you concluded that you missed the opportunity of a lifetime by not selling at the top of the gold bull when gold reached $1,000 an ounce. Furthermore, since you had held gold for what seemed like a long time now and the value of your gold had now dropped nearly 20%, you figured that 11-months of waiting was a long enough waiting period despite 2008 being the eighth year of the gold-bull, and you decided to sell everything at a 20% loss at $681 an ounce. Well, the only way this hypothetical scenario could have played out in real life is if you had never done any homework about the gold and silver market and had zero to very little understanding of it.

Had you just been patient enough to understand that gold and silver volatility was artificially induced by the banking cartel with the precise reason to convince you to sell gold and silver at major lows, and had you held on for just a few more months, you would be sitting on an 86% gain today instead of dooming yourself to a 20% loss. There are far more instances of such occurrences whereby people sell out of gold and silver at 20% to 25% losses than those occurrences when gold and silver buyers have the patience to sit through volatility and reap the benefits of massive legs higher that inevitably follow long periods of flat, declining, or churning prices.

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-07-23/one-personality-trait-al...

positive waves for your ride xty

Apparently, I have a great mind.    But as my wife likes to remind me, genius and philosophy doesn't pay the bills.