And now a word from our bouncer . . .

ThomWatch

The call from Wall Street came


TIBURON, Calif. -- I am still incubating. We all are.

In April, I got lucky. I got to ask a campaigning Sen. Barack Obama a question. The query came at a price. I had to pay to get into the fundraiser, which was just up the California freeway from our home. Our son, all of 12, got in for free and ate most of the early season strawberries dipped in dark chocolate.


No worries. The sweets were good and the day was bright after a brief drizzle. The home was a Kentfield mansion. The crowd was pumped, about 350 of them, maybe more. The two of us did not get bounced, and the boy got to sit on the lawn, snapping shots of the Senator with a throwaway instant camera. One of those photos is here. Others are elsewhere.

I do not mind paying the price when I have tough choices to make. I no longer carry a press badge, you see, so unlike the several times I got to ask then-retired President Gerald Ford a question, or a campaigning Rev. Jesse Jackson, or a stumping Walter Mondale, or Arizona's Bruce Babbitt, I had to pay for admission.

Fair enough.

Sen. Obama addressed the crowd for about 40 minutes, maybe a bit more. Everyone there probably wanted to ask a question. This was when he was going head-to-head with Sen. Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. Sen. Obama could only take four or five questions at most.


On the way in, the boy, Skylar, had asked me whether I was going to try to ask a question or shake hands with the candidate. At the time, I said I did not think so. Those days of thrusting a hand in the air, hopping on toes to get the attention of the guy or gal on stage, on deadline, dreadline more like it, those days were over.


But something came over me toward the end. This was when the press, if you recall way back to the primaries, the press were making a big deal about the candidate, as potential commmander-in-chief, taking an early morning call from an admiral or a general.


Stupid, but the press has to run with something I suppose.

Anyways, time for one last question. I hit the bid, shot hand in air, jumped, waved and got The Call. By the way, this was not to impress our boy, whose front-wn seat was on the grass a foot or two from the podium. I am not even sure Skylar, the boy, even could see me through the crowd. Let alone hear my question.

"Senator, Senator, what kind of answer are you going to give when the call from Wall Street comes?" was what I got out, in the nick of time. "Given the mortgages unraveling all over the place and the fact very few businesses can get a loan?"

Something like that. Want to see how I put it the next day? Go here.

Sen. Obama spent 10 or more minutes answering the question, and in the process took the audience to Asia, to Connecticut, to Washington, London, Korea and back to Kentfield, Calif.

He was reflective. He did not jump the gun and say -- remember, this was April 2008, way back when the Federal Reserve and the USA Treasury and Capitol Hill all said they would propose reforms of the banking system in about 100 days -- Sen. Obama did not say he would sack Ben Bernanke or our Treasury Secretary, Mr. Paulson.

He did not rail about the flood of overseas money that ignited cheap mortgages in the USA and Canada. Mexico even in The Day (five years ago, three years ago, 18 months ago).


Nope. Instead, he referenced the New Haven and Bishopsgate quants who triple-dip and quad-dip their money sticks into weird and funkaholic debt pools.

He did not pretend to understand it all. Them boots would be too deep to fill for even the know-it-all quants that worked their pox on paper. And Sen. Obama did not, to his (extending the pun) credit, reference the discussion he had begun a month previously, March 2008 I think it was, about the USA economy and the gargantuan IOUs we were racking up as a government and as a people. Sen. Obama understands just how devastating current account deficits and working government deficits and living off the (VISA) card can be to a nation where productivity is slowing markedly, even as we work more and more hours than ever, and jobless stats are lining up around the block.


So he reflected on that sunny April day. We could see it in his face, for real. He showed us, with his sense of being as perplexed as the next fellow, Sen. Barack Obama showed us why his law students in Chicago gave him decent to high grades. At the blackboard, he is willing to study the angles, first off the mountain of debt the USA has piled up toward the sky as the nation attempts to keep The Dream alive. Maybe late into the night this guy is at the boards. After the girls are in bed. Maybe that is why he looks so gaunt all the time ... not enough sleep, not enough chicken soup, too many docs to review on-screen in the middle of those suburban Chicago nights.


Maybe he's a Mets fan. (Oh yeh, Cubbies.)

At the close of the Senator's chat with his audience, Skylar and I more or less toasted the remaining fried won tons sitting across the loan, I mean lawn, on the buffet table. Maybe not worth the price of admission, but then, what is these days? No oversized prawns pinned to an ice sculpture.

Yet I had gotten, if not a definitive answer to the Wall Street-plea question, at least a sense that this economy, this Wall Street I had reported on for so many years, is a sore spot that requires a jug of Ibuproferen.


USA President George W. Bush, I believe, and his cabinet, are giving the economy (and the war and Social Security and health insurance and terrrorism and ...), the White House is giving all this as much of their predawn hours as they can. Of that I am sure. The current White House has devoted days of discussion, months maybe all told during 8 years of office, to the nation's headaches. But its time is up, and the number of folks out of work or facing a deflation of their assets, well, let me put it like so: I think any great candidate, and Sens. Obama and McCain are both worthy, any great candidate will give the matters before them more thought than you and I and our boy can imagine.


I rarely write about elections and politics, mostly because as you see here, I have little, so so little, to add to any of the public policy gestalt that wangles its way across our desks during big election years. I tend to stick to my corduroys, which include outstanding food, fair value in money markets and my backstroke at the Strawberry Pool. Eternal life is up there, too, which is why I swim.

Still, Sen. Obama clearly has demonstrated he is willing to study the complexity of debt markets, and derivatives ... and sovereign funds ... and Big Oil. Maybe, just maybe, he is the president who will unplug the currency exchange system that is almost bound to unravel if America's dollar, and other nations' currencies, command far less buying power than one can imagine in coming years.


Maybe that means a return to a gold standard. Gold as money. I don't know.

I do know the fried won tons were good, the chocolate strawberries were good, and I look forward to hearing more back-and-forth about the global economy in coming debates.


I am still incubating, and so are we all, I guess. And hey, the White Sox are still in the mix. (No longer; next year, Junior!)

-- Thom in Tiburon

For more ThomWatch, please go to Thom's library: click it.

ThomWatch: Coin of realm WANTED!

ThomWatch
Public bids for coins of realm


By Thom Calandra
thomcalandra.com

TIBURON, Calif. -- Ordinary folks' demand for sovereign gold coins is creating a chain-supply demand for mintable gold strip and large ingots, making it possible that gold exploration companies' fortunes are on the verge of turning positive.

Gold coin dealers in Canada and the USA say they are seeing an uptick in demand for the coins, which many governments mint and sell to the public as legal currency. So are folks such as James Turk, an economist who owns and operates GoldMoney, an Internet service that uses gold and silver grams as spending currencies. "Our business has been growing since inception, but we have noticed an uptick recently," Turk told me Monday morning. "July and August are normally slow months, but they were near records this year." Turk says.

The quantity of the company's gold grams on deposit and stored as LBMA bars in London and Zurich increased 34 percent at the end of August vs. a year ago. Silver ounces rose 101 percent in the same time span.

The USA Mint suspended sales of its America Buffalo one-ouncer, whose sales are up 53 percent from a year ago, because of demand that put the screws to its supply of gold strip. Some nations' mints, such as Canada's, are faring better because they manaufacture their own gold strip and do not rely on outside suppliers.

More first-hand reports Monday from ThomWatch, all first hand:

• "Demand for gold coins has risen hugely," Kilu Capital Management's Nathan Lewis in Connecticut tells me. Lewis's latest book, GOLD: THE ONCE AND FUTURE MONEY, makes a case for gold as a replacement for soverign currencies. "I note that Dennis Gartman (a popular mainstream market commentator) said he recently bought gold coins for his own possession. Probably not one or two either. I think that Jeremy Grantham -- certainly not a gold guy -- recently said he started buying, too."
  
• Van Simmons, a friend who runs David Hall Rare Coins in Newport Beach, Calif., tells me Monday: "I haven't seen an uptick per-say due to the shortage, I have seen an uptick due to the price of gold being so volatile, If gold goes down everyone decides to wait, If it has a big day I get tons of calls." Simmons also says, "The main shortage has been in the supplies of silver and platinum."
  
• Bart Kitner, who is president of Canada's gold processor and sales company Kitco Inc., tells me, "The demand for coins is unprecedented. Its hard to say by how much, but I've never seen this situation before. One-ounce gold coins are not hard to come by, but all the one-ounce silvers that are being made are all being shipped to fill back orders from weeks ago."

Lewis, the author and money manager, says large buyers of bullion are boosting prices for precious metals and the premiums that gold and silver coins can command in a rising market. "The London market is the world's most important market for institution-size gold bullion ingots. There is an AM fix and a PM fix. Basically, all the buyers and sellers get together twice a day. The PM fix is the more important one. Recently, there have been big spikes on the PM fix, suggesting major demand for 400-ounce ingots."

My ingot basket just got in. Rising demand for coins and manufactured bars of gold (and silver) will boost prospects for actual suppliers of the product as well as verifiable miners. The cream of the crop almost surely will benefit first. Virginia Mines (VGQ in Toronto and VGMNF in USA) is one of them. I find the Quebec company's leadership and operations impressive. I have interviewed André Gaumond several times. Whilst I do not own shares of Virginia Mines, I know several investors who have sizeable stakes. The company, whose shares like most speculative gold miners are suffering of late, probably deserves a look.

The growing audience for coin of the realm is set against a landscape of broken lenders, rising jobless rates and the media-labeled "credit crisis" among banks, insurers and Wall Street/London derivatives developers. My friend Chris Kitze, one of the mid-1990s Internet pioneers who actually made and saved a buck, tells me Monday: "The Chinese are pissed because they sold us all the cool consumer gear and we paid for it with wampum. Now they hold almost $2 trillion worth of U.S. Treasuries and other equities and they will get crushed along with everyone else. They are too big to move into gold. The smaller guys definitely have an advantage here. Hey, I just found a slug of unused traveler's checks. I'm heading for the bank to cash them all."

THOM CALANDRA REPORT: For many investors who profited from a meteoric rise of commodities, mining, and life sciences companies, Thom Calandra acted as a beacon. Thom helped his followers find value in a quagmire of investment choices. Yet he is not a titled investment adviser. He is, more than anything, a scribe who goes where the action is. Thom co-founded CBS MarketWatch and MarketWatch.com. As the voice of Thom Calandra's StockWatch and The Calandra Report, Thom beat bushes for prospects. He fancied $300-ounce gold before that metal became an investment rage. Thom visited numerous biomedical companies, metals mines, and even a haberdashery or two, not to mention thin-crust pizza joints across the planet in his search for profit, fashion and food. Thom's latest project, the novel PABLO BY NUMBERS, was completed in summer 2008. He and Stockhouse.com this autumn will offer a subscription report with all the bells and whistles. The service is tentatively titled Thom Calandra Report. Please stay tuned AND PRUNED to Stockhouse.com and to ThomCalandra.com for more.

Everybody Must Get Hosed (These Daze)

Extra, extra!

Pinhead wiz in miracle cure
... Shmackadabum report to debut!

TIBURON, Calif. -- Hello again, voldys.

Just a touch of type to say, several months after that wondrous visit to Colombia, that yes, I stand stubborn on El Marmato and its fab promise of gold dust. Und oy! ... as Londre's east ending tuffs lip before heaving bodies into that Thames' inky drink. Oy! I got news (at the bottom of this teeter totter pyramid).

Foist my voldys are the goldies we look to hook. Which means, morts of mine, that I (we) are getting hosed. Colombia Goldfields is getting run into the dust of its own drill holes. As the shares, like nearly all gold mining shares, like all small company shares, like all speculations these daze, lose their value in many stock markets (possible exception: Brazil), the tiny Canadian company is denied its chance at rounding up the $20 million or $25 million it desires to secure part of our storied Latin American mountain, El Marmato, crawling it be with campesinos hauling sacks of mineral-laden boulders on their worthy busted backsides.

Big breath!

Finance 202 I guess: Paper no longer accepted ... we are shtupped. Unless someone saves the day. One of Colombia Goldfields' London-based directors,Edward Flood of Haywood Securities, tells me the company is still in talks with several potential backers. Flood hopes the company can come to terms with a lender or an investor interested in warrants without severely diluting current shareholders.

We (my family and I) have held onto all of the shares of Colombia Goldfields (CGDF on NAZ) that we own. The company's equity has lost about four-fifths of its value in the past six months. Welcome to the clobbered club. Am I in the outhouse or what?

I believe, though. I believe because I have seen El Ma ma Ma yo Ma! El Marmato, zee mountain some three hours' rough and ready drive from ciudad Medellin (Please see previous articles below.) That does not mean YOU need or have to believe. We here at Chez Thom still own the 60,000 shares that cost us about $50,000 oil-ier this year.

If it be any consolation, I noticed something today (actually Wednesday of this week) that I have not seen in many a day. Or year. The metal known as gold, dense and heavy element it is, fell in price, a double dollar amount, yet the gold miners' shares somehow rose. Perhaps the redemptions in mutual and hedge funds have slowed, thus putting the brakes on liquidation of natural resources companies?

Transphat: Zee companies are leading the way, not zee metal? We shall see next week.

So two updates from my Tiburon neck of the woods:

• The novel, PABLO BY NUMBERS for les innocents among us, is complete. Please see thomcalandra.com for more. Or not. We are taking names of those who want to read the book, which awaits publication. Simply jag me at thom.calandra (at) gmail dot com. Or thom.calandra (at) yahoo dot com. Visit this page -- PABLO BY NUMBERS: The Excerpts -- to get a gourmand's taste for the SHMACKADABUM hilarity of newsletters, beady-pied stock promoters and some of the best thin-crust pizza (con gorgonzola topping) this side of Bensonhurst.


• Beloved voldy morts oy! The udder nooze is this: I am preparing to christen a report, to be published and distributed to subscribers under the benevolent stewardship of Stockhouse.com. The idea, after ... what has it been almost five years of sabbatical? ... the idea is to paint a landscape of the globe's finest, most delectable investment/friendship/noi mangiamo opps. We'll try to produce, with delightful fanfare, what I was doing for THE CALANDRA REPORT, and I promise strict shmacka-da-bum compliance with any and all laws regarding my scrip. I also promise plenty of opportunity for everyone, including those who love fine cuisine, lots of belly laughs, yeh, und money too, always coin in the delivery I know, and I wonder more than sometimes just why. Anyway, yes, it all shall be there, and the best part (in my bookie), the first-hand reports from fields of broken corporate dreams.


• Especially (I can add bullets anytime I want on this dangy blogger), this new thing is for those who appreciate the verve and vigor of selecting what we believe will be choices that shall make a small band of subscribers more coin than those closing scenes from "The Italian Job." Oh pray it be so! We also intend to stage a series of cozy dinners and other rendenzvous with the voldy morts who have pledged to straddle the latitude of all the longitudes we hurdle in our search for what is, err, well, what is. I hope to unveil several preview issues of the as yet unnamed report on Stockhouse.com, my glorious partner and publisher with a northern exposure (offices in New York, Toronto and Vancouver, Canada). That would be later this month and early in October. The new report in its subscription glory (as in, costs money) likely will debut in very early November. Gee, just in time for the hols! And no, I have no idea yet how much it will cost, but I do intend to lobby for a price that in the first month or two will reward voldy morts who have stuck with me through thick and thin -- and I know there are almost 620 of you loyal voldys out there clanging the bell. Any ideas for a name, besides THE CALANDRA REPORT, please ring my bell, send me a note. Take the naming load off me and those fine execs up north who are paying the bills.

Nothing more to say, for now. Good morning, beloved voldy morts.

-- Thom in Tiburon (www.thomcalandra,com) ... and river rafting/fishing/spelunker doodling with zee kids this summer '08 across historic mining tracts on Northern California's American River. South Fork? Middle Fork? Oh for the fork of it I just cannot remember.