Portugal envolvido em nova fuga de dados. Mais de 16 mil milhões de passwords expostas

[Karamba]

São pessoas vulgares, que procuram "velhas modas", que mais cedo ou mais tarde voltam a estar na moda, para ganhar "algum"

Vale a pena dar umas voltas por alguns sites BEAR que abundam na net. Por vezes encontram-se coisas giras para além dos habituais comentários sobre o ouro.

Este texto que aqui deixo é dum tipo que já prevê o colapso (já muito badalado) do mercado imobiliário em Inglaterra e nos States (se assim fôr, acaba por alastrar por todo o mundo)

Mas é como digo, no meio daquela mistela, há coisas engraçadíssimas.

Este tipo que escreve este artigo,.... começa pelo menino Jesus (eheh)
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GOLD was one of the gifts that the three wise men gave to the infant Jesus at his birth, or so Christians believe, and since this is the Christmas season, it is worth giving a thought to why they chose this element (along with frankincense and myrrh) to honour their Saviour.

It was not so much that they wished to make him a gift of material riches - to match the spiritual gifts he brought - as their desire to offer a symbol of unchanging physical value. In this sense, gold still has a message for us at Christmas time.

This remarkably indestructible and malleable metal does not create speculative wealth: it stores value. Anyone who doubts this should consider the fact that the same-sized piece of gold will buy today more or less what it would have bought a hundred years ago, and probably a thousand years ago. This, surely, is comforting thought when so many 'asset bubbles', promising fabulous riches to the greedy and credulous but ending in bitter loss and disappointment, come and go.

The Christmas message that all this brings is that there is no instant wealth to be gained without paying a price later, and that what is of enduring value is worth more in the end than easy riches. Yet most people continue to pursue the dream of instant wealth that asset inflation promises but so rarely produces. Cupidity and stupidity, it seems, march hand in hand through the ages and no one seems to be interested in, or capable of, stopping their progress.

If spiritual advisers cannot save men from their own folly, secular authorities may also feel justified in abdicating responsibility for the task. Lately, all but a few of the more responsible among central bankers have argued that there is little or nothing they can do to prevent or treat asset bubbles, and that it is more dangerous to attempt intervention than to let the phenomenon run its course. Yet, this seems to be a lame and self-serving argument - one that is as bankrupt intellectually as it is morally.

As investment adviser William Thomson noted in a recent commentary: 'Financial history is littered with periods wherein a population took leave of its collective senses and indulged in delusions of ever-expanding wealth.'

The prospect of riches has 'usually turned into a mirage and a generation has been scarred by the experience'. Asset bubbles 'bring in their wake a very considerable economic cost and it should be the goal of policymakers to understand causes and effects better if these costs are to be contained at a manageable level'.

This is certainly true, and history offers many case studies. Right from the time of the Dutch tulip craze in the 17th century when, as Mr Thomson again notes, 'supposedly rare bulbs were traded at such increasingly ludicrous prices that some good burghers were willing to trade the family farm for a single bulb', the financial landscape has been littered with bubbles.

Britain had more than its fair share during the railway and canal financing era of the 19th century, as did the United States with railroad speculation and the opening up of the West, and then came the electric power boom with its attendant busts.

If we are inclined to smile at the greed and credulity of such early speculators, we should remember that the great IT bubble in the US and elsewhere less than a decade ago saw equally greedy and credulous investors clamouring to buy shares in companies that in many cases had never shown a profit and yet were selling at skyrocketing prices.

Tokyo's bubble economy in the late 1980s saw speculators clamouring to buy land which have since fallen in price by nearly 100 per cent, and stocks that have crashed by nearly 75 per cent. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 was to some extent the result of an asset bubble too.

Even as these words are written, Britain appears to be poised upon the verge of a massive collapse in property prices, one that will bring in its wake great distress for the countless thousands that have mortgaged themselves to the limit, and beyond, in order to get a 'foot on the ladder' that leads to nowhere.

An unsustainable boom in house prices also appears to be building in the US where, as in Britain, speculators have shifted their myopic sights from the stock market to the property market.

What are policymakers doing about all these? Nothing. Supposedly intelligent economists argue that all a central bank can reasonably do is to focus on the price of goods and services and to wait until asset inflation impacts these (through rising rents, for example, or the secondary 'wealth effect' that asset inflation has upon current prices) before acting.

This reasoning would be laughable were it not so lamentably irresponsible. It is akin to saying that a dangerously rising river should be ignored until it bursts its banks.

Worse, some policymakers (including US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan) have taken to arguing that without the liquidity bubble that the US experienced throughout much of the 1990s, much of the technological innovation that took place in the IT sector during that time would never have happened.

It is true that the promise of wealth offers an incentive to entrepreneurs but the cost in terms of collateral damage to the investment community at large does not need to be so great. This is quite simply a failure by regulators to moderate market excess - they too bow down nowadays before the 'magic of the market place'.

Which brings us back to gold. Its price has soared by some 25 per cent in US dollar terms in recent months, and there is a tendency to attribute this to the threat of war in Iraq. US President George W Bush's military adventurism in the Middle East is certainly one factor but the surge in the price of gold also appears to point to something more fundamental - a sense of unease with the whole edifice of markets upon which paper wealth is created, and the desire for a safer refuge. The gift of the three Wise Men is as welcome today as it was two thousand years ago.