By Simon Grey, on January 3rd, 2012
As demonstrated in this example of mechanization:
I’m in Chicago at my Mom’s place for Christmas, and over dinner last night we were talking about Race Against the Machine and the steady pace of automation (because what else do I talk about these days?). She and her husband Gene told me that the Walgreens in their neighborhood didn’t have any human cashiers any more.
I told them they must be mistaken. I’ve seen plenty of self-checkout stations, but they’ve always been accompanied by at least one human cashier to accommodate customers who for whatever reason — unfamiliarity, techno-fear, the desire to chat, whatever — don’t want to deal with a machine. I assumed the same would be true at this Walgreens. Mom and Gene were adamant that it was 100% self-checkout, so we got bundled up and walked over to get the straight dope.
They were right and I was wrong. There are six NCR self-checkout kiosks at the entrance / exit, and no cashiers at all there. There are human cashiers at the photo lab and the pharmacy and customers can take their purchases to these two locations if they want, but at the main checkout area you can’t get rung up by a person any more.
This goes back to something I wrote about a month ago. The tendency in the free market is for labor to become of an increasingly higher order. Note that this is not an immutable economic law so much as an ex post observation. There is no reason to believe that this trend will continue, save for the purpose of thought experiments.
At any rate, the historical trend demonstrates two things. First, as intellectual capital increases, humans have a tendency to mechanize labor. The cotton gin and mechanical harvester are early examples, and the robotic assembly line and aforementioned cashier are more recent examples. The problem with machines, though, is that for all of their advantages they still aren’t perfect. They generally need maintenance of some sort and occasionally fail. Fixing machines, for the time being, requires human involvement.
This problem is generally solved first by increasing pay for those skilled at maintaining and repairing machines and then eventually simplifying the operation and maintenance of said machines so as to tap into unskilled labor (which the machines initially replaced). Basically, then, machines are a net benefit in the long run because they enable humans to capitalize on a broad set of intellectual capital via higher order labor. As such, one need not be a Luddite for economic reasons, as the market generally does a good job of solving the problem of labor displacement.
By Christopher Briem, on December 13th, 2011
If you are not paying attention to the niche news about what is happening within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), you probably should be.
There is a bit of mixing different geographies in this, but here is data I pull when I extract data by occupation across all regions in the US with measurable employment in two of the most specialized occupations out there: Nuclear Engineers and Nuclear Technicians. Added together and ranked by absolute employment counts the graph below is what I get. In sheer numbers these are not huge anywhere, but they are the core and proxies for the far larger establishments that rely on these workers. So you see why any hiccup in the nuclear industry will have impacts here as much as anywhere.
By Simon Grey, on November 28th, 2011
It is a widespread problem: the article reports survey results showing that 83 percent of manufacturers reported a moderate or severe shortage of skilled production workers. The shortages include such categories as machinists. Wages for skilled labor are rising, in some cases at double-digit rates.
Unskilled labor is complementary to skilled labor. If skilled labor cannot be hired, there is no demand for unskilled labor. Some firms report that the inability to hire needed workers is their greatest impediment to growing their business.
Malinvestment in labor markets is the counterpart to malinvestment in capital goods. Higher education is a bubble, and colleges churn out graduates with degrees that have no application in the workplace. Student borrowing to acquire such degrees is malinvestment in the same way that constructions loans to build homes in Las Vegas was malinvestment.
On-the-job training is mostly inevitable in virtually every business because employers do tend to want some core processes done a certain way. Yet, many employers often expect job applicants to be as smart as the person they’re replacing. This seems rather foolish, as careerists generally amass a large amount of very specific information related to their specific jobs. When they retire, they’re going to take their very specific knowledge base, and no other applicant is going to be able to replicate that on day one.
Now, the current college bubble does tend to distort the labor market since those possessing college are nominally qualified for certain careers and jobs. Unfortunately, the college bubble has led to the very unfortunate side effect of dumbing down curricula, and thus graduates, making it more difficult for employers to tell who is actually qualified for certain jobs.
But, beyond that, a highly educated labor market is going to have certain (inflated) requirements for the jobs they wish to accept. For example, college-educated labor market participants are not going to be particularly likely to work as unskilled labor, nor are they ass willing to work for low wages in exchange for job experience and knowledge. (And who can blame them? They’ve been told their whole lives that they should go to college so they can have high-paying high-status jobs.)
As such, the labor market is experiencing failure right now, due mostly to government intervention. The continual and sizable subsidies of college education has for many years encouraged potential labor candidates to avoid learning trades that, though low status, are somewhat easily mastered and decent-paying. The companies that are interested in hiring these sorts of people are finding quite a shortage at this point in time, causing a relative spike in wages to incentivize people to take these jobs.
One thing that companies needing low-status skilled workers could do is recruit directly from high schools by offering a job, complete with on-the-job training, for those who have an inclination for certain skills as well as the ability to learn. The colleges have failed at producing a workforce adequate to meeting the needs of the current labor market. It is therefore time for businesses to bypass them altogether.
By Ethan Zuckerman, on October 13th, 2011
The member meeting at the Media Lab features speakers from within the lab, like César Hidalgo and Joi Ito, and outside speakers – in that latter case, the invited speakers reflect César’s wonderfully idiosyncratic take on networks. One of his major collaborators is Ricardo Hausmann, director of Harvard’s Center for International Development and former Minister of Planning for Venezuela.
Hausmann argues that to succeed economically, humans have learned how to specialize. Someone who’s marvelous in one area is likely mediocre at others – consider Michael Jordan’s ill-fated attempts to play professional baseball. Some tasks require a full human’s worth of knowledge – a person-byte – to carry them out successfully. Others require much more knowledge – building a complex product like a computer might require a kilo-person byte or more – the highly specialized knowledge and skills of a thousand different people. “Modern man is useless as an individual. Making a computer is a team sport.”
By understanding how much knowledge and coordination different economies are capable of, we might understand their economic growth potential. In the US, the average employee works with 100 coworkers. In India, the average employee works with 4 coworkers. Hausmann explains that’s not coincidental – the difference in wealth and income between the nations is closely related to the ability of firms to take on complex tasks. This also helps explain recent disappointment with the limited impacts of microlending – those loans go to small firms that are limited in terms of personbytes. They’ve only got so much knowledge they can apply to producing complex and high value products.
We might characterize economies in terms of those where lots of people do very simple work – he illustrates this with a marvelous Edward Burtynsky photo of assembly line workers processing chicken in China – and those where individuals do complex things in consort, like the players within a symphony orchestra. Hausmann shows us a “map” of the world, a complex graph that represents nations and what products they produce. Most nations produce a few things, and a few produce many different things. Some products are made everywhere, while others are made in very few places.
There’s an underlying pattern to this. The nations that make only a few things all tend to make, more or less, the same things. Basically, we can divide the world into two sets of countries – those that have sufficient personbytes of knowledge to produce a wide range of goods, and those that can produce only a few simple things. The places that make everything make things that few others make. Hausmann explains that products require a specific set of personbytes to produce. When you gain additional personbytes of skill, it’s like getting new letters in Scrabble – you can produce a new set of words, but only within the constraints of the letters (skills, knowledge) you already have.
“Poor countries make few things, and things that everyone makes. Rich countries make unique things. And this is true for municipalities as well as for countries.” He shows a graph of manufacturing in Chile that looks curiously like his graph of the world – on the top is Santiago, where people manufacture all sorts of things… on the bottom “is where there’s nothing but penguins” and capacity for manufacturing is very low.
Global economics, Hausmann explains, is a little like the BCS scoring in college football. It’s not just about who you beat, it’s about who they beat as well. What do you make, and what does everyone else make? What do you make that no one else makes? What new products could you manufacture based on what you already make?
Why pay attention to this idea, the “economic complexity index”? It’s a very good tool for explaining the classic question of “Why are some countries rich and others poor?” Specifically, it explains 73% of the variances of incomes across nations. And where the predictions economic complexity theory offers differ from reality, it’s possible that reality is wrong. The index suggests that India should be richer and Greece should be poorer, which suggests that error in the index is predictive of future growth. If you want to bet on economies that are undervalued, Hausmann suggests you invest in China, India, Thailand, Belarus, Moldova and Zimbabwe. (On the last, he suggests that Zimbabwe’s main economic problem is a single persistent individual, but that there are many personbytes of knowledge ready to produce goods once the political situation changes.)
Is economic complexity actually measuring another phenomenon, like education? Probably not. We can look at investment in education and economic growth, and education appears to correlate more weakly than economic complexity. He suggests we look at Ghana, which has invested heavily in education since 1975, and Thailand, which hasn’t invested as heavily. Ghana hasn’t moved far from a largely agricultural economy, while Thaliand has moved from producing jute and sugar to becoming a major manufacturing center. They’ve accumulated many personbytes even if they didn’t invest heavily in education.
This raises a tricky question – how do you become a watchmaker in a country without watchmakers? The answer is that you move from what you currently produce to products that require only a fractional increase in personbytes, from one product space to a closely related one. The question for economic success may be how close you are to good products from what you already know how to make.
I find Professor Hausmann’s theory fascinating, in part because I’ve had the chance to play with the gorgeous visualizations César has built of economic progress in different parts of the world based on economic complexity. What I still don’t understand is how Thailand kicked Ghana’s butt economically. How do you get from jute to microcircuitry? And why couldn’t Ghana get from aluminum production to more complex manufacturing. Looking forward to reading his papers and understanding a bit more, as the core concept of complexity is a very compelling one.
By Simon Grey, on March 30th, 2011
Cohen’s book proceeds as follows. First, he has us imagine a camping trip among friends. Food and goods are shared freely. Everyone abides by (purportedly) socialist principles of community and equality. Everyone does his part. No one takes advantage of anyone else. No one free rides. Everyone contributes. Everyone shares.
After a while, people begin to act like capitalists (as Cohen understands realistic capitalistic behavior). Harry demands extra food because he is especially good at fishing. Sylvia demands payment when she finds a good fishing spot. Leslie demands payment for her special knowledge of how to crack nuts. Harry, Sylvia, and Leslie refuse to share without extra payment. Morgan, whose father left him a well-stocked pond 30 years ago, gloats over having better food than the others.
The fundamental flaw in this argument is that there is an assumption of scalability, which simply means that socialism, which works well on a small scale, should also work well on a large scale. Unfortunately, this assumption is simply incorrect.
In the first place, socialism requires a large degree of knowledge in order to be systemically efficient. When one is dealing with a small number of people (e.g. a family), it is possible to have a large degree of knowledge without necessarily possessing a large amount of knowledge. When more people enter the people, the degree of knowledge necessary remains the same while the absolute amount of raw knowledge required increases correspondingly (e.g. 60% of 10<60% of 100). As the famous Dr. Sowell has remarked, “economic decisions are about tradeoffs, not absolutes.” This principle applies to determining which economic system should be used.
In the second place, socialism requires that actors within a system be close in proximity. It is difficult to ensure that all producers are producing enough if they are scattered over a large geographic area. It is also difficult to determine who isn’t pulling their weight if people are not close in social proximity as well, which simply means that people who aren’t “close” to one another, in a platonic sense, are not likely to know what the others do.
Again, these two factors play a significant role in determining which system to use. For small-scale societies, like the nuclear family, the socialist system makes more sense, for the absolute knowledge demands are low, and proximity is near. This, then, is a very economical way of determining how to distribute production and resources, based on the specific skill sets and desires of the individuals working within the small-scale society. In fact, socialism naturally lends itself to a system of informal barter.
Socialism is not, however, well-suited to a large-scale society. The knowledge demands are simply too great for one person, or even a large number of persons. And since large-scale societies also require large amounts of land for sustenance, there is then not enough proximity to reinforce the necessary social norms, leading to a significant free-rider problem. Capitalism (or, more accurately, the free market) solves this problem through the division of labor, which requires only that system participants pay attention only to those things which are directly related to their interests, thus solving the knowledge problem and, to some extent, the proximity problem.
The break-even point for these systems is unknown, but I am willing to bet that the system size strongly coincides with Dunbar’s number. At any rate, it should be obvious that advocating wide-scale socialism based on the success of small-scale socialism is as foolish as advocating small-scale capitalism based on the success of large-scale socialism. Note: I use the word “capitalism” interchangeably with “free market” in this post, simply for the sake of syntactical brevity.
By Winton Bates, on December 23rd, 2010
 Most of Deidre McCloskey’s important new book serves to establish that if we want to explain the industrial revolution we need to explain why so much innovation occurred in England from the late 18th century and through the 19th century. She suggests that we should dismiss attempts to explain the industrial revolution in terms of such factors as thrift, accumulation of capital (physical or human), transport, geography, natural resources, the slave trade, business organization, imperialism, eugenics and even foreign trade.
The style of the exposition suggests, at times, that Deidre may not suffer fools gladly (or has a wicked sense of humour): ‘If someone claims that foreign trade made possible, say, economies of scale in cotton textiles or shipping services she owes it to her readers (as I have already said twice: I wish you would pay attention) to explain why the gains on the swings are not lost on the roundabouts. Why do not the industries made smaller by the large extension of British foreign trade end up on the negative side of the account?’ (p 221).
Well, I’m not sure Deidre, perhaps there is a link between international trade, specialization and scale economies – but you may have discussed that possibility somewhere else in the book when I wasn’t paying attention. In any case, I agree with you that innovation must have been a lot more important than scale economies.
I was a little more concerned that I didn’t see any recognition of the possibility, as discussed in Eric Jones’ recent book (reviewed here), that clustering of manufacturing in the north of England – as a result of trade and specialization within England – provided an economic environment conducive to subsequent innovations. Perhaps middle class enrichment resulting from trade and specialization could also help to explain why the bourgeois revaluation occurred when and where it did. (The bourgeois revaluation is the greater approval of the middle classes – and of innovation and markets – that began to occur in thought and talk in Holland and England three centuries ago.)
My main concern, Deidre, is that in attempting to clear the field prior to sowing a new crop of ideas (or the old ideas you want to propagate anew) you may be inadvertently slashing and burning some other ideas that are worth preserving. This applies, in particular, to the relationship between institutional change and economic performance as discussed by Douglass North (‘Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance’, 1990). I agree with you that North could not have been correct in attributing the industrial revolution to more secure property rights following the Glorious Revolution. There is, however, more to institutional change than more secure property rights. I reject your attempt to dismiss appeals to institutional change as ‘still another attempt to reduce one of the greatest surprises in human history to a materialist routine’ and to claim that changes in institutions did not have much to do with the industrial revolution (p. 354).
In fact, evidence that you cite in your book seems to conflict with your claim that changes in institutions – the rules of the game – had little to do with the industrial revolution. You acknowledge that ‘the norms of antibourgeois aristocrats and clerics did discourage innovation’ (p. 267). You also suggest: ‘Had the Ottoman or the Qing empires or the Japanese Shogunate admired trade and innovation sufficiently to overcome their worries about the maintenance of state power – encouraging innovation and having a go rather than crushing it – then they, not the Europeans, would have come first’ (p. 371). You note that in France and Spain in the 18th century a nobleman caught engaging in commerce could be stripped on his rank’ (p. 387) and that in France it was necessary to apply to the state for permission to open a factory (p. 395).
I think your true position may be that bourgeois dignity and institutions (economic freedom) are both important in explaining the industrial revolution. This comes through fairly clearly when you write: ‘By adopting the respect for deal-making and innovation and the liberty to carry out the deals that Amsterdam and London pioneered around 1700, the modern world was born’ (p. 397). In such passages you seem to be offering an encompassing theory incorporating both bourgeois dignity and institutional change.
So far so good. I can understand that ideology (an amalgam of perceptions and values) influences the climate of opinion toward commerce and innovation which in turn influences both informal institutions (conventions and codes of behaviour) and formal institutions (regulations, laws, constitutions) which may or may not provide a climate conducive to innovation. Is that all there is to understand?
Perhaps not. The missing element is a sense of personal identity. As you say: ‘In truth, the agent wants to act because she attributes meaning to her life … She is a human with an identity, not a Max U calculating machine like grass or bacteria or rats’ (p. 307).
That gets me thinking again about identity economics – the idea of George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton that people gain utility when their actions conform to the norms and ideals of their identity (which I first discussed here). Even a person with great potential to be innovative might find that difficult if the norms and ideals of their identity dictated that any attempt to innovate would be futile. If we start thinking in terms of identity economics, however, we might have to question the sub-title of your book – perhaps economics can explain the modern world after all.
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By Winton Bates, on October 29th, 2010
Somewhere in Africa more than 100,000 years ago, a phenomenon new to the planet was born. A Species began to add to its habits, generation by generation, without (much) changing its genes. What made this possible was exchange, the swapping of things and services between individuals. That gave the Species an external, collective intelligence far greater than anything it could hold in its admittedly capricious brain. Two individuals could each have two tools or two ideas while each knowing how to make only one. … In this way, exchange encouraged specialization, which further increased the number of different habits the Species could have, while shrinking the number of things that each individual knew how to make. Consumption could grow more diversified, while production grew more specialized (Matt Ridley, ‘The Rational Optimist’, 2010: 350).
 Ridley’s bold claim is that human progress can be explained mainly in terms of exchange and specialization. Eric Jones, a scholar who has written extensively on the history of human progress, considers that Ridley makes the case very well, based ‘on the few knowns of early pre-history’. Jones also considers that Ridley gets the story of the industrial revolution ‘mostly right’ (Review in ‘Policy’, Spring 2010, 26 (3)).
The weight that we can place on exchange and specialization as explanations of human progress depends importantly on the extent to which advance of knowledge and innovation can be attributed to exchange and specialization. It is possible to go some distance in explaining technological progress as a consequence of specialization. As Bill Easterly points out in his NYT review, however, many breakthroughs come from creative outsiders who combine technologies generated by different specialties.
Ridley mentions that government actions of various kinds in different countries have often inhibited innovation, particularly the introduction of new products and new ways of doing things that threaten the survival of established patterns of production. The implication is that freedom is a necessary condition for progress comes through clearly in Ridley’s recent contribution to Cato Unbound:
‘I am saying that there have always been liberals, who want to be free to trade in ideas as well as things, and there have always been predators, who want to extract rents by force if necessary. The grand theme of history is how the crushing dominance of the latter has repeatedly stifled the former. As Joel Mokyr puts it: “Prosperity and success led to the emergence of predators and parasites in various forms and guises who eventually slaughtered the geese that laid the golden eggs”. The wonder of the last 200 years is not the outbreak of liberalism, but the fact that it has so far fought off the rent-seeking predators by the skin of its teeth: the continuing triumph of the Bourgeoisie’ (p. 252).
I can’t help thinking that this sounds more like rational pessimism than rational optimism. According to Ridley, the industrial revolution is largely a story about coal – and progress since then has been possible mainly because of abundant cheap energy from fossil fuels. He notes that his optimism wobbles when he looks at the politics of carbon emissions reduction and the potential this has to load economies with further rules, restrictions, subsidies, distortions and corruption (p. 347).
Cartoon by Nicholson from “The Australian” newspaper: http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au/
The optimistic note on which Ridley ends his book comes from his view that innovation is such an evolutionary, bottom-up phenomenon that it will continue as long as exchange and specialization are allowed to thrive somewhere in the world.
In the end, it would seem that the gains from innovation, exchange and specialization all depend on liberty – liberty is the key to human progress.
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By Trace Mayer, on May 5th, 2010
The transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age is resulting in a sea change between protection and extortion. As the world gets increasingly complex the result is a diminishing ability to extort while at the same time tools of protection are getting cheaper and more powerful. The arbitrary walls are coming down. 
SPECIALIZATION
I was sitting in trial today observing Bill Rounds, co-author with me of How To Vanish.com, as he was questioning a witness. This particular case is an example of complex business litigation that has been up and down the appellate ladder many times. The subject matter is fairly esoteric and even worse the law is unsettled. While unrelated to the case, the plaintiff is a world renown surgeon.
During questioning by Bill’s opposing counsel a funny scene happened. Bill stood up and the judge remarked, “Sustained.” The court reporter stopped and asked, “Was there an objection?” The judge replied, “No, but Mr. Rounds stood up and the coming objection is sustained.”
INCREASING COMPLEXITY
Those 5-8 seconds in the court transcript are but the faintest traces of an incredibly complex thinking process that the two attorneys and judge understood and applied which was backed by hundreds of pages of code and cases. Yet, I am almost sure that neither the surgeon nor the jury even knew there was a virtual ping-pong match being played.
But for the attorneys and judge the surgeon’s work is equally incomprehensible. And the work of engineers, architects, computer scientists, etc. are equally indecipherable to those outside the circle. Such is the modern world that is multiplying in complexity.
Everywhere complexity is increasing from the tadpole in the pond to the manmade computer operating system. But manmade complexity that is beneficial for humanity takes work. Bridges do not design and build themselves. As humanity has progressed so likewise has the economy from hunting and gathering to plows and silos to railroads, satellites and spaceships.
But all this time there have been malefactors and nefarious individuals that seek to destroy and wield violence like a dagger focused on the economy’s heart seeking coercion instead of consent. After all, the power to destroy and inflict pain, while immoral, is power nonetheless. A power wielded by those sadists who enjoy terrorizing innocents.
PROTECTION AND EXTORTION
The irony of government is that it attempts to provide protection through extortion. And like the blackmailer or extortioner the government’s ability to tax depends on the same vulnerabilities as extortion or the Godfather’s offer that can not be refused. As the Industrial Age progressed so likewise the nation-state rose because the assets created were larger and thus the need for protection was greater. After all, the capitalists either paid off those who could leverage violence against them for extortion or paid a military force capable of defending with brute force any attempted shakedown.
But the relentless advance of technology is blunting the sharp edge of violence’s dagger. Protection is being made easier to provide while extortion is being made more difficult to carry out profitably.
Why is this? A basic mathematical law: multiplying is easier than dividing. A simple example is that 3*3*7*11*13 is much easier to solve than reducing 9,009 to its prime components.
Or another example would be encryption. I like the open-source Truecrypt and in June 2003 the US National Security Agency reviewed and analyzed the design and strength of AES-256 encryption finding it sufficient to protect classified information up to the Top Secret level.
In effect, with this free tool I can spend ten seconds encrypting a text file that can take years of focused processing power to decrypt. And just for fun perhaps it only reads “Haha if someone wasted the resources to decrypt this!” But why transmit sensitive personal or business information without such protections? After all, recently 30,000 Hotmail passwords were compromised in a security breach and posted on the Internet. An ounce of prevention using free encryption software can be worth a pound of cure repairing a stolen identity.
PROTECTION IN THE INFORMATION AGE
During the Industrial Age the leverage violence could exert was much greater and is being greatly reduced in the Information Age. Thus the scale is tipping in favor of protection and away from extortion with its attendant allocation of scarce resources through bureaucracy. The digital infrastructure is allowing the previously unseen but highly complex range of systems to be perceived; Facebook is a prime example.
Then that perception is being harnessed in extremely productive ways through multiplication; as a result the economy is following economic law and moving away from inflexible command and control systems towards spontaneous adaptive mechanisms. But government systems still dragoon resources from higher-value complex uses to lower-value primitive uses. As Frederic Lane wrote on page 383-384 of Venice, A Maritime Republic:
Every economic enterprise needs and pays for protection, protection against the destruction or armed seizure of its capital and the forceful disruption of its labor. In highly organized societies the production of this utility, protection, is one of the functions of a special association or enterprise called government. Indeed, one of the most distinctive characteristics of government is their attempt to create law and order by using force themselves and by controlling through various means the use of force by others.
From machines to microchips, factory to laptop, mass production to small teams or even the lone entrepreneur the gigantic institutions of the Industrial Age are being reduced to smaller and smaller parts. As the Information Age advances the risk of violence decreases because as the scale of an operation declines so likewise does its potential for sabotage or blackmail and the increased location independence afforded by the Internet multiplies the inherent safety an asset or individual enjoys. Despite Sulter’s proclamation at 2:08, “I want this country to realize that we stand on the edge of oblivion. I want everyone to remember *why* they need us!” But we, humanity, do not need them even if they think they can clean up some oil.
CONCLUSION
For those who rely on coercion instead of consent the transition to the Information Age is being particularly harsh to their immoral business models. They are now opposing both natural and economic law. The financial elite and political elite of America and Europe are now beginning to infight. This is resulting in the State losing legitimacy in the eyes of the masses.
While the time frame is likely far into the future, first the European Union will collapse and later the United States. But this is not uncharted territory but instead a trend of the nation-state collapsing under its own weight which started with the Berlin Wall and Russia. To avoid being collateral damage I elucidated several tips in chapter six of The Great Credit Contraction.
My next book, which I have co-authored with Bill Rounds, is currently with the publisher and hopefully will be available within a couple months. It will magnify the suggestions from chapter six and I think many will find it tremendously useful. As an old Chinese proverb says, “Of all the thirty-six ways to get out of trouble, the best way is – leave.”
DISCLOSURES: Long physical gold, silver and platinum with no interest in the problematic SLV, Streettracks Gold ETF Trust Shares or the platinum ETFs.
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