by Jeff Clark, Senior Editor, Casey’s Gold & Resource Report

“There’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll have a mania in gold. And because the gold and especially silver markets are so tiny, the rush into them will be like trying to push the contents of Hoover Dam through a garden hose. Our positions will go absolutely ballistic.” –Doug Casey, September 2009

Dear Readers,

Elmer Sutton’s eyebrows shot up when he saw the ad proclaiming gold stocks might make you wealthy.

It sounded like the perfect solution for his stock portfolio, loaded with investments going nowhere. He vaguely recalled hearing a little about gold, but if what the ad said was true, he thought he could make a killing.

So he called the broker and made an appointment for the next day. The broker seemed very knowledgeable and took the time to explain why he felt gold stocks were one of the best investments right now. He said this was not a get-rich-quick scheme, but that if you stuck with it, you could see potentially enormous profits. It sounded good. Elmer wrote a check for $2,500, and the broker bought three gold stocks for him.

The very next day, gold took a big drop and his spankin’ new gold stocks sold off hard. Not only that, there were riots in South Africa, where one of the companies was located. Elmer was instantly disgusted. He was losing money yet again. This time, however, he’d play it smart and get out before he lost it all – something his wife made sure he understood – so he hastily called the broker and told him he wanted his money back.

“Elmer, you can’t do that,” the broker told him. “This isn’t Woolworth’s.”

“I’m not buying them!” he yelled to the broker and slammed the phone down. Elmer wanted out, and that was that. He wasn’t about to lose any more money in the stock market.

Three years later, long after he’d forgotten about that broker, newspaper headlines were screaming about gold. Everyone at the party Elmer attended the night before was talking about how well their gold stocks were doing. His co-workers bragged about the good deals they were getting buying gold and silver coins. Everyone was talking about precious metals.

Elmer panicked; he didn’t want to be left behind. He scrounged around the house until he found the original confirmations of the trade he’d broken with “that broker”: 1,500 shares of Grootvlei at 35¢, 500 Anglo American at $2.50, and 1,000 Leslie at 50¢. He grabbed his newspaper and saw that Anglo was up 500% since then, and the others were paying dividends – this year alone – totaling more than he would have paid for his shares in 1976.

As the newspaper went limp in his hands, he had a vague recollection of the broker he met with and quickly tracked down the phone number. “I want to buy some gold stocks,” he breathlessly panted to the secretary answering the phone. She said the broker wasn’t in, and that while they would be happy to buy a stock for him, they were actually recommending investors sell their gold stocks.

Elmer couldn’t believe it. How ludicrous! Everyone he knew was buying, and he was personally acquainted with many people who were getting rich. He pushed on. “Look, everyone’s into gold right now. It’s on the front page of the paper, for crying out loud. So I want to buy some gold stocks right away.”

“That’s fine, sir, but I think you should talk to the broker first,” the secretary replied. “We really don’t recommend you do that.”

“I don’t care!” Elmer screamed, which he didn’t mean to do, but panic was setting in. “What’s this clown’s name anyway?”

“Doug Casey,” she replied.

Please Don’t Crowd the Emergency Exit

This true story explains how Doug Casey bought gold stocks at the very bottom of the market, as he took on those abandoned shares from Elmer. But today’s lesson underscores what Doug Casey saw back in the late 1970s: there’s certain to be a rush into gold and silver, and buying before Main Street catches gold fever is the only way to play this trend.

Because when Midas fever hits, prices will explode to the upside, for both the metals and the stocks. How do we know that?

First, let’s look at gold. If we added up all the gold ever mined on the planet, its total value would equal no more than $5 trillion at today’s prices. Yet, look at how this compares to the debt and bailouts and other monetary mischief of current governments…

*MZM (Money of Zero Maturity) is a measure of the liquid money supply in the economy. It consists of coins and currency, checking accounts, savings deposits, and money market funds.
**Year to date figures.

Let’s make this chart very clear. Of the $5 trillion in gold ever mined…

• The U.S. government has thrown over twice as much at the economy in the past 12 months.
• The U.S. debt is more than double this amount so far this year.
• Total global government bailouts are almost four times larger (and this is a conservative figure; one estimate puts it at $24 trillion).

I intended to include annual gold production as one of the comparisons, but the chart isn’t big enough and neither is your monitor: 2008’s global gold production equaled about $73 billion, and to make that figure discernable on the chart would require the Global Bailouts bar to hit the ceiling above your head. That’s how small the gold market is.

The implications are undeniable: when the greater public rushes into gold – whether in response to inflation, dollar woes, war, whatever – the price will be forced up by an order of magnitude.

[For an elegant and profitable way to own bullion gold, check out this website.]

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Dollars

While physical gold will protect our wealth, it’s the gold stocks that can potentially make us wealthy.

Once again, to get a sense of the Lilliputian size of the gold industry, I compared it to several other leading industries and stocks.

The value, as measured by market capitalization, of all gold producers around the world is less than Walmart’s. Every gold stock would need to nearly double just for the industry to match ExxonMobil. The oil and gas industry is about 12 times bigger.

When your neighbors and relatives and co-workers and friends all start clamoring to buy gold stocks, the pressure on prices will be enormous, rocketing our positions upwards.

Meanwhile – and admitting we’re first and foremost gold bugs – the picture for silver is even more dramatic. The potential for silver stocks is jaw-dropping.

If the gold industry is tiny, then silver’s $9 billion market cap makes it a nano industry. The entire silver industry is over 21 times smaller than gold’s! If gold explodes, silver will go supernova.

Consider these macro-facts about a micro-market and what they reveal about silver’s enormous potential:

• There are over 200 companies in the S&P 500 with a market cap larger than the entire market of silver producers
• There are five times more gold stocks than silver.
• Total silver production in 2008 was valued around $10.3 billion (at today’s prices). That represents just 1.5% of the $700 billion bailout last year, and 0.006% of the current U.S. monetary base.
• Of the 20 largest silver producers, only five actually call themselves a “silver” company, due to the fact that about 73% of all silver mined is a byproduct of other metals mining.

Any flood into the silver market would overwhelm it. In other words, the rise will be stunning. While it’s not going to happen tomorrow, I strongly suggest you get on board before that rocket ship takes off.

Just putting these charts together stirred my feelings of restlessness, making me anxious for the mania in precious metals to arrive. But the timing is not up to us. Be patient, because if you’re invested in gold and silver and the respective, high-quality stocks, you’re on the right side of this trend.

Had you bought gold, say, four years ago, when it was around $450/oz, you’d be sitting on a nearly 130% gain. But you could have made up to three times as much with even the most conservative precious metals investments – large- and medium-cap gold and silver producers. It’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon. Click here to find out more.

By Phil of Phil’s Stock World

$2.5 Trillion – That’s the size of of the global oil scam.

It’s a number so large that, to put it in perspective, we will now begin measuring the damage done to the global economy in “Madoff Units” ($50Bn rip-offs).  That’s right – $2.5Tn is 50 TIMES the amount of money that Bernie Madoff scammed from investors in his lifetime, yet it is also LESS than the MONTHLY EXCESS price the global population is being manipulated into paying for a barrel of oil.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, TOT, Shell, DB and Societe General founded the Intercontinental Exchange in 2000.  ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws.  The exchange was set up to facilitate ”dark pool” trading in the commodities markets.  Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se.  They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.

A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate “round-trip” trades.  Round-trip” trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company.  This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple.

“Traders of the the ICE core membership (GS, MS, BP, DB, RDS.A, GLE & TOT) wouldn’t really have to put much money at risk by their standards in order to move or support the global market price via the BFOE market. Indeed the evolution of the Brent market has been a response to declining production and the fact that traders could not resist manipulating the market by buying up contracts and “squeezing” those who had sold oil they did not have. The fewer cargoes produced, the easier the underlying market is to manipulate.” – Chris Cook, Former Director of the International Petroleum Exchange, which was bought by ICE.

How widespread are “round-trip’‘ trades? The Congressional Research Service looked at trading patterns in the energy sector and this is what they reported: This pattern of trading suggests a market environment in which a significant volume of fictitious trading could have taken place. Yet since most of the trading is unregulated by the Government, we have only a slim idea of the illusion being perpetrated in the energy sector.

DMS Energy, when investigated by Congress, admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were “round-trip” trades.   That means 80 percent of all of their trades that year were bogus trades where no commodity changed hands, and yet the balance sheets reflect added revenue.  Remember, these trades are sham deals where nothing was exchanged.  Duke Energy disclosed that $1.1 billion worth of trades were “round-trip” since 1999. Roughly two-thirds of these were done on the InterContinental Exchange; that is, the online, nonregulated, nonaudited, nonoversight for manipulation and fraud entity run by banks in this country. That means thousands of subscribers would see false pricing. Under investigation, a lawyer for J.P. Morgan Chase admitted the bank engineered a series of “round-trip” trades with Enron.

You can chart the damage done by Goldman Sachs and their gang of thieves by by looking at commodity pricing pre and post ICE.  Before ICE, commodities followed a more or less normal growth path that matched global GDP and was always limited in price appreciation by the fact that, ultimately, someone had to take delivery of a physical commodity at a set price.

ICE threw that concept out the window and turned commodity trading into a speculative casino game where pricing was notional and contracts could be sold by people who never produced a thing, to people who didn’t need the things that were not produced.  And in just 5 years after commencing operations, Goldman Sachs and their partners managed to TRIPLE the price of commodities.

Goldman Sachs Commodity Index funds accounted for $60Bn out of $100Bn of all formula-managed funds in 2007 and investors in the GSCI lost 15% in 2006 while Goldman had a record year.  John Dizard, of the Financial Times calls this process “date rape“ by Goldman Sachs as the funds index rolls cost investors 150 basis points of return annually ($9Bn on the Goldman funds) but GS, under the prospectus, is able to “manage our corresponding position,” which means that it has to deliver a price at the end of the roll period. If Goldman can cover that obligation at a better price, they will, and GS pockets the difference.  This is why we see such wild moves in the day’s before rollover, there are Billions riding on GS hitting their target every month…

It is not surprising that a commodity scam would be the cornerstone of Goldman Sach’s strategy.  CEO Lloyd Blankfein, rose to the top through Goldman’s commodity trading arm J Aron, starting his career at J Aron before Goldman Sachs bought them over 25 years ago. With his colleague Gary Cohn, Blankfein oversaw the key energy trading portfolio.  According to Chris Cook:  ”It appears clear that BP and Goldman Sachs have been working collaboratively – at least at a strategic level – for maybe 15 years now. Their trading strategy has evolved over time as the global market has developed and become ever more financialised. Moreover, they have been well placed to steer the development of the key global energy market trading platform, and the legal and regulatory framework within which it operates.”  According to Cook:

It appears to me that what has been occurring in the oil market may have been that – through the intermediation of the likes of J Aron in the Brent complex – long term funds have been lending money to producers – effectively interest-free – and in return the producers have been lending oil to the funds. This works well for as long as funds flow into the market, or do not withdraw in quantity, but once funds withdraw money from the market, there is a sudden collapse in price.

A combination of market hype, the opacity of the Brent Complex and the relatively small scale of trading of the benchmark BFOE crude oil contract enabled the long run up in prices, and several observers believe that the dramatic spike to $147.00 per barrel was the specific outcome of the collapse of SemGroup, which that company’s management subsequently blamed mainly on Goldman Sachs.

Mike Riess issued a study of “Modern Market Manipulation” in which he describes how GS, MS, DB et al have systematically created an environment that rewards those who manipulate the system, robbing the poor to send the money up they company ladder in exchange for record bonus payouts, which (by design) are the majority of their traders’ salaries:

Before the ‘80’s, there were just us traders. “Rogue” traders arrived on the scene with the large institutional participants, both private and public. Today’s companies and government marketing boards are large enough for senior management to distance itself from controversy, including market manipulation.

In a competitive, amoral environment, middle managers in these mega-organizations have the authority to hijack an institution’s reputation and the financial clout to manipulate the market—and they do. As long as they succeed, they enjoy promotions and perks and, sometimes, the fruits of embezzlement. If the manipulation unravels, the company denies any knowledge and hangs the rogue out to dry. We’ve seen this over and over again, most recently with D’Avila and Codelco, Hamanaka and Sumitomo, Leeson and Barings and Tsuda and Daiwa Bank.

The CFTC’s definition of manipulation is:

A planned operation that causes or maintains an artificial price

Unusually large purchases or sales in a short period of time in order to distort prices

Putting out false information in order to distort prices.

In mid-2008 it was estimated that some $260 billion was invested in the Brent energy markets on the ICE while the value of the oil actually coming out of the North Sea each month, at maybe $4 to $5 billion at most.  NYMEX trading follows a similar path with 258,000, 1,000-barrel contracts open for December delivery (258M barrels), which were traded 327,000 times yesterday alone yet, at the end of the period, less than 40M barrels of oil will actually be delivered as that is the total capacity at Cushing, OK – where NYMEX contract deliveries are settled.  Every single one of those traders know it is not even possible for 80% of the contracts they are trading to be fulfilled – its a joke, but the joke is on YOU!

Over the course of an average month at the NYMEX, 5 BILLION barrels of oil will be traded, with a fee being collected on every single transaction which is ultimately passed down to US consumers, yet less than 40M barrels will actually be delivered.  That is just 8 tenths of 1 percent of actual demand for the product that is being traded – 99.2% of the oil transaction fees being paid by the American people do nothing more than create fees for the traders and record profits and bonuses for the trading firms!

Index Speculators have now stockpiled, via the futures market, the equivalent of 1.1 billion barrels of petroleum, effectively adding eight times as much oil to their own stockpile as the United States has added to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the last five years.  Today, in many commodities futures markets, they are the single largest force.  The huge growth in their demand has gone virtually undetected by classically-trained economists who almost never analyze demand in futures markets.  As money pours into the markets, two things happen concurrently: the markets expand and prices rise. One particularly troubling aspect of Index Speculator demand is that it actually increases the more prices increase. This explains the accelerating rate at which commodity futures prices (and actual commodity prices) are increasing.

Before ICE, the average American family spent 7% of their income on food and fuel.  Last year, that number topped 20%.  That’s 13% of the incomes of every man, woman and child in the United States of America, over $1Tn EVERY SINGLE YEAR, stolen through market manipulation.  On a global scale, that number is over $4Tn per year – 80 Madoffs!  Why is there no outrage, why are there no investingations.  Well the answer is the same – $4Tn per year buys you a lot of political clout, it pays to have politicians all over the world look the other way while GS and their merry men rob from the poor and give to the rich on such a vast scale that it’s hard to grasp the damage they have done and continue to do to the global economy.

CIBC Chief Economist, Jeff Rubin issued a report last year that blames the current recession on high oil prices, saying defaulting mortgages are only a symptom.  According to Rubin, these higher oil prices caused Japan and the Eurozone to enter into a recession even before the most recent financial problems hit. Higher oil prices started four of the last five world recessions; we shouldn’t be too surprised if they started this one also:

Oil shocks create global recessions by transferring billions of dollars of income from economies where consumers spend every cent they have, and then some, to economies that sport the highest savings rates in the world.  While those petro-dollars may get recycled back to Wall Street by sovereign wealth fund investments, they don’t all get recycled back into world demand. The leakage, as income is transferred to countries with savings rates as high as 50%, is what makes this income transfer far from demand neutral.

There is NO shortage of oil.  OPEC alone has 6-7 Million barrels a day of spare capacity, more than the total disruption of any single country and any two countries other than Saudi Arabia could offset.  Additionaly ICE partners Total and JPM are part of the cartel that is totally skewing the global demand picture by storing 125M barrels of oil in offshore tankers.  That’s 15 days of US imports that have been “ordered” but never delivered so they show up as an extra 1Mbd of global demand, even though nobody actually wants them.  Land-based storage is also bursting at the seems, with global supplies up to 61 days of total consumption (84Mbd) up from 52 days last year.

That’s 5 BILLION barrels of oil already out of the ground, in barrels and ready to go AND THEY KEEP MAKING 86M MORE EVERY   DAY!!!  Where is the shortage?  Mainly, it is media hype pushed by “analysts” at the very firms that profit the most from high oil prices.  Goldman Sachs issues bullish opinions on oil and builds large positions in oil, while it is the cartel’s job to hide oil in off shore tankers, and then sell forward all the oil, with futures contracts, locking in the high price.  Of course they have their media hounds as well, most notably the Drudge Report. As noted by Goldmansachsrules:

Type in the word “OIL” inside the “Drudge Report” search engine. It returns 1,965 headlines with the word “OIL.” Over the last couple years, The Drudge Report has ran 1,965 headlines with the word “OIL.” Most of these articles were hosted by the worthless organizations of Yahoo, Breibart, APNews, and Reuters. The Drudge Report just creates the headline, and links it the article hosted by who ever is doing the “hyping.” Search on the word “credit crisis” and you only get 12 archived headlines. The word “bailout” yields only 268. The word “bank” returns only 568. So you have the Drudge Report hyping the oil market, because they bring it up almost 2,000 times. Unlike the “credit crisis” or “Wall Street Bailout” that actual did happen, the oil market and what did/didn’t happen between Israel/Iran is plugged 10 times more!

Of all the 1,965 articles that the Drudge Report ran with the word “OIL” in the title, most were hyping the oil market. The most notorious cases, a few times a week, were hosted by Yahoo, Breibart, and AP News. Most of these articles were plugged with the same paragraph that stated if “Israel were to attack Iran, Iran would retaliate by taking over the straits of Hormuz, the largest pathway for oil and we all know what that would do to the price of oil.

It truly takes a global village of manipulators and their lackeys to pull off a con on the scale of oil but it’s also the most profitable scam ever perpetrated on the people of this planet as they take control of a vital resource and then create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand in order to charge you an extra dollar per gallon of gas.  You don’t complain because it’s “only” $15-$20 every time you fill up your tank, but that’s what they count on and that’s where you’re wrong – it’s $20 from you and $20 from EVERY SINGLE ONE of your customers once or twice a week and $20 more dollars your employees need just to get to work.  It’s money that could be going into your business instead of a new gold bathtub for a Saudi Prince or a Goldman trader.

Global drivers consume 1.7Bn gallons of gas every single day, that $1 is $50Bn a month, a Madoff per month that is being taken away from YOU and YOUR business and the non-energy/financial businesses you invest in.  Of course we can give up and invest in those sectors (we do) but that doesn’t do much for the global economy and, even as you sit here now, not doing anything, those oil and profits have been plowed into the copper and gold markets and now the same Goldman energy cartel is bidding to take over you clean air (through Carbon Credit trading) and your clean water.

Maybe when they are charging you $80 a gallon for water and ten cents a breath you’ll want to do something about it.  I think I’ll start right now and you can too! Here is the Email address and Fax numbers for all of yor Senators, Congresspeople and Governors.  Send this article to them and let them know you’d like to see an investigation.  Take a few minutes of your time to save a few bucks on your next gallon of water!

CalculatedRisk

By Doug Hornig, Senior Editor, Casey Research

…wait until you see what’s in the cards for commercial real estate.

That’s right, the next train wreck will be in commercial real estate. Couldn’t be worse than last year’s residential market crash? That remains to be seen. But it’s coming soon, probably as early as the second quarter of next year, and there’s nothing that can prevent it. The government will intervene, trying desperately to delay the day of reckoning, and may even succeed. For a while. But make no mistake about it, that train is going off the tracks no matter what.

Every part of the sector – from multifamily apartment buildings to retail shopping centers, suburban office buildings, industrial facilities, and hotels – has accumulated a huge amount of defaulted or nonperforming paper. It’s an impossible, swaying structure that cannot long stand.

Just ask Andy Miller.

Andy is one of the most knowledgeable people around when it comes to commercial real estate. Co-founder of the Miller Fishman Group of Denver, he has spent twenty years buying and developing apartment communities, shopping centers, office buildings, and warehouses throughout the country. He’s also worked extensively – especially lately – with asset managers and special servicers (those who handle commercial mortgage-backed securities, or CMBS) from insurance companies, conduits, and the biggest banks in the U.S., advising them on default scenarios, helping them develop realistic pricing structures, and making hold or sell recommendations.

It isn’t easy. Commercial real estate sales are off a staggering 82% in 2009, compared with 2008, and last year was worse than ’07. No one is selling at depressed prices, but it hardly matters as there are no buyers, either because they’re afraid of the market or can’t meet more stringent loan requirements. Two years ago, the value of all commercial real estate in the U.S. was about $6.5 trillion. Against that was laid $3-3.5 trillion in loans. The latter figure hasn’t changed much. But the former has sunk like a bar of lead in the lake, so that now between half and two-thirds of those loans will have to be written down, Andy estimates.

“If the banks had to take that hit all at once, there wouldn’t be any banks,” he says.

And it’s actually worse than that. As even average citizens became aware during the subprime meltdown, loans in recent years were bundled into exotic financial vehicles that could be sold and resold, a class generically known as conduits. These commercial mortgage-backed securities, while less well known than their cousins built upon home loans, are nonetheless ubiquitous.

Three guesses who were among the significant buyers of CMBS. If you said banks, banks, and more banks, you got it. Thus these folks are sitting not only on their own malperforming loans, but on a whole lot of everyone else’s toxic junk, too.

This is how bad conduits are: A 3% default rate last year jumped to 6% in 2009 and is expected to double again, to 12%, in 2010. An entity that takes a 12% hit to its portfolio – and this includes countless banks, pension and annuity funds, international institutional investors, and others – is in deep, deep trouble.

The real tsunami is coming, probably in the second quarter of 2010, Andy estimates. Because that’s when banks will have to start preparing for the wave of mortgages that were written near the market top and are maturing in 2011-12. Unlike home loans, commercial loans tend to be relatively short-term in nature (average 5-7 years), because – outside of apartment building loans backed by Fannie or Freddie – there are no government programs to subsidize longer-term ones. These guys mature in bunches.

According to a recent Deutsche Bank presentation, the delinquency rate on commercial loans as of the end of 2Q09 was greater than 4%. Of these, they expect that north of 70% will not qualify for refinancing. Imagine what will happen to the estimated $2 trillion in commercial mortgages that mature between now and 2013.

And even that is not the end of it. There’s a second huge wave on the way in 2015-16.

Problem is, instead of trying to meet this inevitable challenge head on, asset managers have decided to believe in such phantoms as the tooth fairy, honesty at the Fed, and an economic turnaround powerful enough to bail them all out. De Nile is not just a river in Egypt.

To be fair, it’s difficult to envision what an intelligent, aggressive response would look like, given the breadth and depth of the crisis, and the lack of resources available to deal with it. Miller recently met with a group of asset managers from a number of different, prominent banks. They reported that they’re completely overwhelmed and can’t even begin to cope with the sheer volume of problem loans on their calendar. It’s so bad that they’re now dealing with some borrowers who haven’t paid a cent in a year and a half.

What do you do if, as Andy thinks is the case, 85-90% of the entire commercial real estate market is under water relative to its financing? What happens to a property when its value drops way below the loan, a seller can’t get enough money to get out, a buyer can’t raise enough money to get in, and the bank can’t afford to foreclose? Simple. It just sits there, carried along on the bank’s books at some inflated “mark to fantasy” price that makes the institution’s balance sheet look passable. The industry even has a catchphrase for the situation: “A rolling loan gathers no moss.”

In the case of a retail store, a bankrupt tenant walks away. Andy looked at just the part of Phoenix where his firm does business and found 90 vacant big box stores, with an aggregate floor space of 8 million square feet. If Christmas season is as lackluster as cash-strapped consumers are likely to make it, there will be many others to follow.

The hotel business is terrible. Overbuilding based upon travelers who went into debt to finance lavish vacations is taking its toll on tourist destinations. At the same time, business travel has seriously contracted. Flights into Las Vegas, which caters to both, have been slashed so much that even if every seat on every remaining flight were filled and visitors stayed for an average number of days, the hotels still couldn’t break even. In industry parlance, banks are now engaged in “extend and pretend,” i.e., giving hotels three- to six-month loan extensions in the hope that things will somehow improve in the near future.

Office space is doing okay in central business districts, but not faring well elsewhere. Some estimates tab the national office vacancy rate at over 16.5%, compared with 12.6% in January 2008. It exceeds 20% in parts of Atlanta and San Diego, and in many places in between.

Multifamily apartment buildings – and the very creaky Fannie and Freddie are carrying a load of them – may be the next to topple. As values deteriorate and landlords are faced with loans coming due, there is no incentive to fix whatever goes wrong. If, for example, you have a $10 million loan maturing in two years, and the property value has declined to $6 million, why would you spend half a million to fix leaky roofs? The question answers itself. Yet, as capital spending needs are not attended to, the apartments deteriorate. Which leads to working-class tenants replaced by meth labs. Which leads to even lower property values. And so on. In the end, when the banks are forced to take possession, they will be left with either expensive repair jobs, or the cost of demolition and a total write-off.

As the overall commercial real estate crisis escalates, the banks will do the same thing they did last year: run to the government, palms outstretched.

How will Washington respond? Good question. On the one hand, further bailouts will further infuriate the public. But on the other, the political sentiment will be that allowing the banks to fail will have even more dire consequences.

The Fed has already tried to let some of the relentlessly building pressure out of the balloon through TALF (Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility). But that hasn’t worked, because TALF only backs the most senior, creditworthy bonds in a CMBS pool. Those aren’t the problem. The problem is the junior notes no one wants.

In order to increase market liquidity and get conduits moving again, the government will likely be forced to create a guarantee program similar to the FHA, Miller thinks, whereby short-term money (on the order of 5-7 years) is made available. Will that just push our problems five to seven years down the road? Quite possibly. But what is being purchased is time, the only thing left to buy. The hope, of course, is that it’s enough time – for the real estate market to stabilize, prices to return to more “normal” levels, and the world to turn all hunky dory.

Rock, meet hard place. Let all the troubled banks fail, and the consequences will range from some excruciating but short-term pain, to a plunge into full-bore depression. Prop them up with yet more newly printed fiat money, and anything from high to hyperinflation will inevitably result, along with the possibility of extending the problem well into the next decade.

Both are frightening prospects. We don’t want either, but realistically, we’re going to get one or the other. Let’s be clear, it won’t be the end of the world. However, it will be the end of the world as we know it. That makes it imperative to prepare for the new one that’s coming.

The editors of The Casey Report, supported by real estate pro Andy Miller, have been warning of the coming commercial real estate debacle since September 2008. This one’s rather easy to time – because they know when the loans will come due. And as subscribers can testify, accurately predicting big trends is the forte of Doug Casey and his expert team. To learn how you can profit from making the trend your friend, click here.