Richard Mills's Contributions

The Federal Reserve was conceived and given birth by an unholy alliance of American and British bankers. The FED buys U.S. debt with money printed from nothing, then charges U.S. taxpayers interest. The US government pushed through the federal income tax amendment, restarted an income tax on Americans to pay the interest to the FED and reorganized the IRS to collect the monies – the interest - “owed” to the FED from its citizens.

The two most common methods used by companies to return "excess" cash to their shareholders are dividends and stock buybacks – stock buybacks are currently favored. S&P Indices data shows 305 S&P 500 companies purchased their shares in the first quarter of 2011 – at a cost of $89.8 billion.

BCG Consulting says China is expected to become the world's second largest consumer market by 2015 and by 2020 China’s consumer consumption nation-wide will amount to 22 percent of total global consumption, behind only the U.S. at 35 percent.

The Chinese government, in an effort to maximize exports and minimize US imports, prints their Yuan to buy dollars. This prevents their currency from rising and the dollar from falling. Then it loans those same dollars back to America by buying US debt.

The Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act and retaliatory tariffs in other countries did exacerbate the collapse in global trade, but foreign trade was just a small part of overall US economic activity and originated from, mostly, the agricultural and resource extraction (mining, logging) sectors.

The Earth's climate has been continuously changing throughout its history. From ice covering large amounts of the globe to interglacial periods where there was ice only at the poles - our climate and biosphere have been in flux for millennia.

The elimination of domestic nuclear sources of energy means Germany will simply have to import more electricity from abroad – either in the form of nuclear power from France and the Czech Republic, coal from Poland or natural gas from Russia. Going down this path has consequences that reach far beyond Germany’s borders.

The Puna plateau sits at an elevation of 4,000m, stretches for 1800 km along the Central Andes and attains a width of 350–400 km. The Puna covers a portion of Argentina, Chile and Bolivia and hosts an estimated 70 - 80% of global lithium brine reserves.

A critical or strategic material is a commodity whose lack of availability during a national emergency would seriously affect the economic, industrial, and defensive capability of a country.

The rare earths are a group of 17 elements comprising Scandium, Yttrium, and the Lanthanides. The Lanthanides are a group of 15 (Cerium, Dysprosium, Erbium, Europium, Gadolinium, Holmium, Lanthanum, Lutetium, Neodymium, Praseodymium, Samarium, Terbium, Thorium, Thulium, Ytterbium) chemically similar elements with atomic numbers 57 through 71, inclusive.

Macro-outlook for copper, including infrastructure spending, foreign demand, and increasingly scarce supplies worldwide.

World fisheries are in a state of collapse – caught between plagues of jellyfish, overfishing, nutrient pollution, bioaccumulation of toxics in marine mammals, carbon emissions turning our oceans acidic, the oceans phytoplankton declining by about 40 per cent over the past century, dead zones, garbage patch’s, increasing ocean temperatures and changing currents - our entire marine food chain seems to be in peril.

For most of human history we’ve been consuming resources at a rate lower than what the planet was able to regenerate. Unfortunately we have crossed a critical threshold. The demand we are now placing on our planets resources appears to have begun to outpace the rate at which nature can replenish them.

According to The Economist, between 2000 and 2010, six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies where in Sub-Saharan Africa. The only BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) country to make the top ten was China which came in second behind Angola – the fastest growing country in the world.

When looking for a dominant investment theme the approach I take involves looking at global or big picture conditions. I study trends, read the news, basically watch and listen to what’s going on in the world. What I’m looking for is something so powerful, so dominant, it’s going to be my guide to where I invest – I focus on the factors that I think will drive headlines going forward.

Over the next fifty years, as we add another 4.5 billion people to the world’s population, global demand for food will increase almost 70% if population growth predictions are correct.

The global death rate has dropped almost continuously since the start of the industrial revolution - personal hygiene, improved methods of sanitation and the development of antibiotics have all played a major role.

The approaching storm I wrote about in last year’s article The Rising Cost of Survival has certainly struck many countries with a vengeance. I thought it would be an appropriate time to revisit. In 2008, a spike in food prices resulted in food riots around the world. The recession brought prices down while record crops allowed some stockpiles to be rebuilt and gave us a respite from the turmoil.

In 1751, Axel Fredrik Cronstedt of Sweden attempted to extract copper from the mineral Kupfernickel - today called niccolite. To his surprise instead of copper, he got a silvery white metal he started calling nickel. The name nickel comes from the German language and means Old Nick – which is a name Germans use for the devil – so nickel is “Old Nicks copper” or the “Devil’s copper.”

Current Federal Reserve System chairman Ben Bernanke believes a simple recession was turned into the Great Depression by the Federal Reserve of the day not doing enough while the money supply contracted 31 percent between 1929 and 1933.