Kevin, If you want a visual image of how the US economy has crashed, here it is. Can you please post something about then after the PSYOP ‘DOW BREAKS 13000′ is completed?

http://goldsilver.com/dow_crashing/4-Dow-Gold.png

“In this chart I measure the Dow with money, not currency. It took almost 45 ounces of gold to buy 1 share of the Dow in 1999. Today it takes less than 19. Another way of saying it, if you sold 1 share of the Dow in 1999 you would have been able to buy 45 ounces of gold. Today if you sold 1 share of the Dow, the proceeds would only buy you 19 ounces of real money. So measured in real money, the Dow has crashed 58%.”

http://goldsilver.com/the_dow_is_crashing.php

They had to lay off everyone because they had no foreign currency left to buy the cyanide needed to process gold.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200704200685.html

But at some point, all these off-shore NZ-dollar “investors” will cash in their funny money and pull the plug. At the moment, the “investors” are onto a double payday: 8%+ interest rates AND huge forex GAINS. But what goes up must come down, and we are almost at the apex of this particular Fujiyama fun ride*.

Let’s just see how the crowd goes wild when TSHTF. As to Kevin’s original question: “Where is the outrage?” Well, I have to say that the NZ corporate media has been dumbed down so much in the last 10 years (I’ve lived in Japan since 1997, just back visiting family at the moment) I am not surprised the public is in such a general stupor. Not everybody. My guess is about 80-90%. They’ll be totally blind-sided after swallowing this sh1t for so long.

As to the coming farm foreclosures, the strong Kiwi is a contributing factor, but hugely overpriced farms recently purchased with debt were doomed anyway. Farm land prices have soared beyond all reason. Grazing land around Hastings was recently $700 an acre, before it was discovered to be ideal for varietal grape cultivation. Now it is $15,000 an acre. Perhaps this is justified due to the higher economic productivity of viniculture.

However, Waikato dairy farms have soared in price while the Fonterra payout for milk solids has been flat. This is not economically justified, especially when the costs of the imputs (fertilizer, diesel fuel) are going up. This was simply a rural speculative mania. If everything goes well, a Waikato dairy farmer now might get a 3% return on investment for a year of very hard work. It doesn’t make any sense as a business plan, not enough earnings to pay the mortgage if the farm was recently purchased with debt. On the other hand, if he actually owned the farm and sold it, he would get an 8% annual return on his money at the bank and could retire to Whitianga and go sailing. Why farm?

Many of the new rural land buyers were really land speculators, using leverage to buy the farm and hiring a share milker from Uraguay to do the work. Nothing could save this Ponzi scheme from collapse. Rural land values will have to correct to historical ratios of farm earnings, just as city rental housing prices will have to correct to a historical ratio of rental income. The farmers who bought their property over 10 years ago at sane prices will be fine, in fact they will be on the gravy train in a couple of years as farm commodity prices (finally) begin to rise.