Well I've got some low friends in high places (mountaintops) but if a military group wants your land, it's down to who's got the most firepower and cannon fodder.

Boombats wrote:Well I've got some low friends in high places (mountaintops) but if a military group wants your land, it's down to who's got the most firepower and cannon fodder.

chopjob wrote:

Boombats wrote:Well I've got some low friends in high places (mountaintops) but if a military group wants your land, it's down to who's got the most firepower and cannon fodder.

WOLVERINES!!!!!!

Paraguay in a spin about Bush's alleged 100,000 acre hideaway


Tom Phillips in Cuiab
Monday October 23, 2006
The Guardian

Meeting the new couple next door can be an anxious business for even the most relaxed home owner. Will they be international drug traffickers? Have they got noisy kids with a penchant for electronic music? As worries go, however, having the US president move in next door must come fairly low on the list.

Unless of course you are a resident of northern Paraguay and believe reports in the South American press that he has bought up a 100,000 acre (40,500 hectare) ranch in your neck of the woods.

Article continues
The rumours, as yet unconfirmed but which began with the state-run Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, have triggered an outpouring of conspiracy theories, with speculation rife about what President Bush's supposed interest in the "chaco", a semi-arid lowland in the Paraguay's north, might be.

Some have speculated that he might be trying to wrestle control of the Guarani Aquifer, one of the largest underground water reserves, from the Paraguayans.

Rumours of Mr Bush's supposed forays into South American real estate surfaced during a recent 10-day visit to the country by his daughter Jenna Bush. Little is known about her trip to Paraguay, although officially she travelled with the UN children's agency Unicef to visit social projects. Photographers from the Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color tracked her down to one restaurant in Paraguay's capital Asunción, where she was seen flanked by 10 security guards, and was also reported to have met Paraguay's president, Nicanor Duarte, and the US ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason. Reports in sections of the Paraguayan media suggested she was sent on a family "mission" to tie up the land purchase in the "chaco".

Erasmo Rodríguez Acosta, the governor of the Alto Paraguay region where Mr Bush's new acquisition supposedly lies, told one Paraguayan news agency there were indications that Mr Bush had bought land in Paso de Patria, near the border with Brazil and Bolivia. He was, however, unable to prove this, he added.

Last week the Paraguayan news group Neike suggested that Ms Bush was in Paraguay to "visit the land acquired by her father - relatively close to the Brazilian Pantanal [wetlands] and the Bolivian gas reserves".

The US presence in Paraguay has been under scrutiny since May 2005 when the country's Congress agreed to allow 400 American marines to operate there for 18 months in exchange for financial aid.

At the time many viewed the arrival of troops as a sign that Washington was trying to monitor US business interests in neighbouring Bolivia, after the election of Evo Morales, a leftwing leader who promised to nationalise his country's natural gas industry.

Yeah, the second part of the article is about misconduct involving some take-over of a Dutch bank and not really pertinent or related to the first part.

The guy is obviously in some trouble which may skew perception.

Lots of people say lots of things about this stuff but nobody really knows anything.

From the Wikipedia entry on Barton Biggs:

Correct Calls

* He called the technology bubble and recession that declined a full year before it burst. (International Herald Tribune, 10/3/1998)

[edit] Mistakes

* He said he was bullish on China just before the market went into a two-year slide.[1]

* He said he was bullish on Mexico shortly before the peso crashed in 1994.[1]

* Biggs did not see the rise in oil prices to nearly the level they came to by the summer of 2004.[3]

From Bloomberg, last March:

Barton Biggs Expects 1,000-Point Gain in Dow Average (Update2)

By Brian Sullivan and Michael Patterson

March 14 (Bloomberg) -- The decline in U.S. stocks is ``way overdone'' and the Dow Jones Industrial Average may rally 1,000 points, investor Barton Biggs said.

``We're in a financial panic,'' Biggs said during a telephone interview with Bloomberg Television from New York. ``We're setting up for a really big rally. I don't mean three or four hundred points on the Dow, I mean 1,000 points on the Dow. I don't know if we're going to get it next week or the week after. But this thing has gotten crazy and is overdone.''

Biggs, a former Morgan Stanley strategist who now runs the $1.5 billion hedge fund Traxis Partners LLC, said stock markets from Germany to Hong Kong may bottom out soon after tumbling this year. Biggs's prediction in March 2007 that U.S. stocks were near a low preceded a 16 percent rally in the Dow average during the next four months. His forecast that the Dow would climb as much as 19 percent in 2007 overshot its actual gain by almost 13 percentage points.

``We're at a really crucial point,'' Biggs said. ``This is a time to be buying stocks around the world and not to be selling them.''

The Dow average has tumbled 16 percent to 11,951.09 since reaching a record in October after the subprime-mortgage market's collapse caused $195 billion in asset writedowns and credit losses at global financial firms including Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. A 1,000-point gain in the Dow from today's close would amount to an 8.4 percent rise.

U.S. stocks plunged today for the third time this week, sending the Dow average down 1.6 percent, after Bear Stearns Cos. required a bailout from the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to avoid collapse.

``Yeah, it's scary. It's always scary at bottoms. But I don't believe the economy is collapsing,'' Biggs said. ``This is not the end of the world.''

To contact the reporters on this story: Brian Sullivan in New York at bsullivan@bloomberg.net; Michael Patterson in New York at mpatterson10@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: March 14, 2008 18:24 EDT

And from earlier this month:

Barton Biggs: Markets Ready to Roar Again

Monday, June 2, 2008 3:18 PM

Article Font Size

The worst is over for the U.S. economy and for the stock market, says Barton Biggs, once chief investment strategist at Morgan Stanley and now managing partner of a $1.7 billion hedge fund.

Biggs' Traxis Partners, although down 4 percent year to date, racked up a 25 percent increase in last year's tough economy.

"Conventional wisdom is that the market will test its lows and go lower again," Biggs told the Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.

"I'm nervous, but my intuition tells me that after this consolidation is over, the next move will be up, not down," said Biggs, who anticipates a recovery sooner than do many leading analysts.

This year's market will lack drama, Biggs believes, moving laterally across the S&P 500 in a trading range between 1,250 and 1,550.

Once some of the major problems now afflicting the economy are remedied, which should occur in the near term, according to Biggs, the market will start climbing.

To top it off — no recession, says Biggs.

I added a couple more articles to my last post. My point is simply that Biggs is not pessimistic about the U.S. economy--unless he's weighed in otherwise since the June 2 article, and also that he may not be a completely reliable source.

sunlore wrote:Lots of people say lots of things about this stuff but nobody really knows anything.

Yeah that kind of thing is real real common in these threads.

Rick Reuben wrote:

Colonel Panic wrote:Yeah that kind of thing is real real common in these threads.

Yeah, whenever you show up. Rick Reuben has been detailing trends accurately here for four years. Colonel Panic has been trying to convince people that the Federal Reserve is a public agency and kerosene fires cause steel skyscrapers to explode into dust and chopsticks. I like my track record just fine.

You are out of your mind.

Rick Reuben wrote:

SergioGeorgini wrote:

Numbskull.

Is the Federal Reserve a public agency?

Do kerosene fires turn steel skyscrapers to chopsticks and dust?

What will the price of gas, oil, and gold be next year?

What will the value of the dollar be?

Will the stock markets take a steep dive?

Come on, numbskull. We need answers.

Who cares.