NightBlogger

Source: The Jerusalem Post
Iran, Russia and Qatar discussed the formation of an OPEC-style cartel of gas exporting countries, Iranian Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari said on Tuesday. Nozari spoke on state TV Tuesday after a joint meeting with his Qatari counterpart Abdulla Bin Hamad al-Attiya and the head of Russia’s Gazprom Alexei Miller. He said the three parties decided to further discuss the cartel at the next meeting of their foreign ministers. The idea of formation of the gas cartel was first raised by Iran when then-president of Russia Vladimir Putin visited Teheran in 2007.

Ron Paul talks about Fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s testimony in front of the House Financial Services Committee yesterday. Our economy faces enormous difficulties and one of the biggest culprits is the inflation tax for which the (privately owned) Federal Reserve is largely responsible.

International Forecaster Weekly
Markets in peril of coming down, Inflation threatens to destroy consumers, bonds without a market are worthless, the bane of a privately owned central bank, truckers threaten action, hedges blow up, Bush spreads manure on White House Lawn.

The “sucker’s rally” in the general stock markets took a big-time sucker punch from the cartel as the short-covering from the rolling over of gold futures from June 08 to August 08 kept upward pressure on the price of gold, which finished up $26.50 for the week, as silver joined the party by adding $1.31 per ounce. The cartel has now expended 550 Dow points of market-crashing power to drain liquidity from the specs to put pressure on precious metals. This latest bout of “yellow fever” was not the result of another super-yen appearance out of the Japanese bankers’ closets because the yen traded in a fairly tight range all week of about 1.5 yen per dollar and per euro, although there was the usual correspondence of down days with a stronger yen and up days with a weaker yen. More