The Economy a Few Weeks Later, No Surprises

Time flies! But not much has changed since my last post. Exactly as I predicted, Gold and Silver are flying high. Silver is about to pierce $27 per ounce and gold is rapping at the door of Room 1400! ROOM SERVICE!

The "Tea Party" means absolutely nothing, as doesn't the GOP house takeover. None of these professional politicians save Ron Paul (Rand is a chump, bought and paid for by TPTB by the way) will do ANYTHING to A) Audit the Fed B) Stop the bleeding of the defecit in trillions and rising or C) Quit bailing out "too big to fail" who also always seem to be friends of the highest in high places, cronyism at its best.

I hate to be pessimistic, but all I can say is the world financial system is about to implode and gold and silver are the only things I can see that will hold some value while the paper currencies become worthless under the weight of endless money printing.
Besides maybe drinking water and a year's supply of dehydrated foods?

Banks on the Brink? Foreclosures halted all over the place!

I have been fascinated by the news of the past few days. Major banks including GMAC/Ally Bank and now Bank of America, the huge behemoth mega-mortgage maker (they took over bankrupt Countrywide a couple years ago), have had to stop all foreclosure cases in the US due to allegedly fraudulent practices of not having verified actual mortgages on the properties they are foreclosing. It seems there is this huge problem with the mortgages having been bundled into this securitized investment stuff that brought down AIG and Lehman, and this electronic "proof" of a particular home mortgage is not enough for judges to rule on when foreclosures come before them. Tens of thousands of foreclosures have been halted nationwide.

One analyst I read regularly, Harvey Organ, says that this will be the death knell of many major banks, and even our whole system, as now the "assets" that make up the collateral for all the mortgages on the books of these banks is gone, unavailable, "Kaput!" as Lily von Schtoop would say.

I don't know how bad it will be, but I sure as heck wouldn't want to be a shareholder in a US bank that holds a lot of bad mortgage exposure. It seems that the new world order has become very disorderly for the banker types, I hope they don't bring the honest people down with them!

Hmmm, I wonder what the price of gold, silver, platinum and palladium will do THIS week?

Bush Tax Cuts Ending January 1st!

The craziest thing that I have witnessed since working full-time doing lots of income tax returns (30 years) is the way the G W Bush tax cuts that came in about nine years ago have a built-in expiration on 1/1/11. Not only does it scare me that the writers of our laws might be into Numerology, and no, those laws are NOT written by our elected officials, but the difficulty of planning when tax laws expire can be kind of scary too!
Reagan's tax cuts came in and got altered, but they did not have an expiration date like the Dubya cuts do.

Almost all tax brackets are rising in 2011. The 10% bracket will be 15%, 25% goes to 28%, up to the top 35% going to 39.6%. Capital gains rates currently 0% and 15% jump back up to 10% and 20%.

Death taxes, which are technically gone for 2010, go wayyyy back up in 2011 for persons with over $1 million is net assets. I am not recommending suicide, but some families might be hit hard by the new, not kindler gentler inheritance tax rates starting with those dying in 2011.

Some planning for this bump in rates can be done. If you know you will be selling a capital asset at a large gain, generating that gain in 2010 could save tax over the same gain in January 2011.

Credits help tax bottom lines so much, but some good ones are going down. The child tax credit, now worth $1,000 per child under 17, goes down to $500. Lots of other goodies will decrease or disappear.

Now bear in mind that the current Democratic congress is indicating that most of these tax benefits won't be expiring....they will be preserved for families making under $250,000 per year. That is all well and good, but keep in mind that the preserving may just be a one-year-at-a-time extension, and the same expiration threats will just be moved forward a year at a time.

Stay tuned, I promise an update on Obamacare, but to be honest, that huge mess which had no business being passed is so confusing I am still trying to get my head around all the provisions. Too bad our elected officials didn't read it!

Shortcuts to Impressing your Friends

I sometimes feel like a walking trivia book. For some reason, I have a very good memory for trivial facts, though I have a tough time with names and I lose my keys often! But I can tell you that with a few simple web visits on a daily basis I learn a lot! So I herewith give you my two favorite things to read every day, for starters, and maybe you can get some quick knowledge from these goldmines of knowledge too.

www.rense.com - A giant "link" place where the only news you really need to know is listed down the right side by "most recent" and down the left by topic: i.e. Gulf Disaster, Economy Disaster, every disaster you could ever want! Plus he throws in very interesting stories, for instance I just read a Time magazine article from 1942 he linked, where 42 mental patients in Oregon died when a cook used Flouride (RAT POISON, you know, the stuff they add to water supplies) by mistake instead of baking powder in the eggs, the patients started falling and dying, how sad! But without rense.com i don't think I could have found that!

Harvey Organ's Daily Gold and Silver Blog - Just google Harvey Organ Gold and it will pop up, every day he dissects the fraudulent metals markets, and he also includes the most important few financial stories of the day, almost every day.....you have to learn about the fixed metals markets, it could be the easiest money ever available to be made, but hurry as the lid could blow any day and gold will be $5,000/oz and silver $200/oz or who knows?

Enjoy these sites, and the promised tax update is coming, I promise, as soon as my works slows down a little more!

Tax Update will have to wait! You need to read this!

I am working on a post summarizing the new tax laws heading our way 1/1/11. But in the meantime, I found a great article which does agree with what my research has made me suspicious of...I would feel derelict in my duties to you if I didn't share this article.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article22354.html

In a nutshell, the banks of the world are broke, "kaput" as Lily von Schtupp would say! We are in for a disaster, and the only way to hold any wealth will be gold and silver in my humble opinion.
I do hope that articles like this are wrong, but when you print trillions of dollars and the economy still stinks two years later, something has gone very wrong!
I promise a tax update when I get back from the long weekend!

The Smartest Investing Outfit on the Planet (Not)

Welcome to "Taxes on the Cutting Edge." I was going to start this site off with a summary of current events, like Bush tax cuts slated to end, and Obamacare tax nightmares slated to start, but I just HAD to make this first post something you'll never forget!
I had read where the firm Goldman Sachs (yes THAT one, revolving doors to the White House, Rubin, all those guys from the bailout of '08 and all that) has made a profit every day of the year of 2010 with their trading....every day, not 90%, but EVERY stinkin' day! Well anyone who has invested, or traded, or heck gambled at Gold Country knows that it is VERY DIFFICULT to be right EVERY DAY!
Well, lo and behold, my research has turned up an amazing and should I say sinister explanation for their "good fortune" and "brains" over at GS. They have a supercomputer that DWARFS the NYSE computers. It is located in the nuclear-bomb-proof basement in the same place as the NYSE puters. This supercomputer which I will just call "The Monster" for lack of time to pull out my thesaurus sees every order on every exchange that comes in from everywhere, and it "front-runs" these orders to give GS the edge on any trade anywhere in the world! Remember that day in May when the Dow dropped 1,000 points like nothing? And they blamed it on some "fat-fingered" guy somewhere making a typo? Well that was the Monster doing its thing, it does it automatically, and it can wreak havoc on the markets.
So next time you are deciding to buy 10 shares of Apple to prop up your sagging 401(k) or IRA, remember, some rich dude's computer is seeing your order before it gets executed, and if it so desires, it will make you pay, say 263.50 per share instead of 263.25, and it just made $2.50 off Mr Main Street!
My next post will be much more subdued, unless I get the itch again to get under the PTB's (Powers that be's) skin!