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Reuters reports:

Top gold consumer China launched a yuan-denominated gold benchmark on Tuesday, in an ambitious move to exert more control over pricing of the metal and influence in the global bullion market.

The benchmark is a culmination of efforts by China over the last few years to reform its domestic gold market, attempting to gain a bigger say in the bullion industry, long dominated by London where the global spot benchmark price is set.

As the world's top producer, importer and consumer of gold, China has baulked at depending on a dollar price in international transactions, and believes its market weight should entitle it to set the price of gold.

ZeroHedge continues:

The mechanics of the Shanghai fix are comparable to those of London: the benchmark price will be set twice a day based on a few minutes of trading in each session. The London benchmark, quoted in dollars per ounce, is set via a twice-daily auction on an electronic platform with 12 participants.

The 18 trading members in the yuan price-setting process includes China's big four state-owned banks, foreign banks Standard Chartered and ANZ, the world's top jewelry retailer Chow Tai Fook and two of China's top gold miners.

So I just wrote a super-long comment and tricked myself into wanting to share this tidbit as well (but it had no business being over there).

Monospaced because you'll know. Meant to be less than 80 characters wide so if it breaks oddly on your screen you might want to try scaling down the page (whatever browser you use probably does its own thing but [Ctrl]+[-] usually does the trick for me, [Ctrl]+[+] to go back up and [Ctrl]+[0] to get back to default size).

It's already dark.
You're eaten by a Grue.
But this is not the end.

You wake up in darkness.
You are a Grue.
You have always been.

To your left you see the path to the hole.
In front of you is a smoothened black wall with darker flecks of beautiful
  chondrite.
To your right is the path towards the Greylands and further beyond the cursed
  Hurt.
Behind you is your den.

Health: 15(15) Agility: 13(15) drowsy Hunger: 8(15) Lethality: 46(55)
/* hunger 15 gives slavering status */
(L)eft (F)ront (R)ight (B)ack (G)urgle (I)nventory | command:i

Inventory:
a: Extremely sharp fangs, +15 consume, Cursed (in mouth)
/* cursed can not be removed unless blessed... good luck with that :) */
b: Razor claws, +10 slice, Cursed (on hands)
c: A thick blindfold, +11 darkness, Unknown

(U)se (R)emove (D)rop (P)ut (M)ore (S)top looking at inventory | command:_

Maybe it's a bit misleading to call it fiction, or what I'm actually trying to say: feel free to turn it into what it portrays itself to be (and that isn't fiction, or not fiction in the usual sense of prose).

As reported by CBS Local:

“What I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that there are — there’s classified, and then there’s classified,” Obama told Fox News. “There’s stuff that is really top-secret, top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state, that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source.”

As written on a Reuters blog by Peter Van Buren last year:

Employees at the highest levels of access are expected to apply the highest levels of judgment, based on the standards in Executive Order 13526. The government’s basic nondisclosure agreement makes clear the rule is “marked or unmarked classified information.”

In addition, the use of retroactive classification has been tested and approved by the courts, and employees are regularly held accountable for releasing information that was unclassified when they released it, but classified retroactively.

Back on the Fox via CBS story:

“There isn’t a president who’s taken more terrorists off the field than me, over the last seven-and-a-half years,” Obama explained to Fox News. “I’m the guy who calls the families, or meets with them, or hugs them, or tries to comfort a mom, or a dad, or a husband, or a kid, after a terrorist attack. So let’s be very clear about how much I prioritize this: this is my number one job.”

The below is from an article I stumbled across while reading about the Wikileaks release of IMF transcripts.

The author, Paul Mason does offer some suggestions as to resolving the below situation, but I don't feel they deal with the issues described either, so have not included that part of the article.

Primarily this is because of the assumed benevolence and efficiency of an expanding government in creating a less complex financial system. Solutions to those kind of issues take us back far beyond the last 25-30 years of 'neoliberalism' as used as the frame of reference for Mason's article. Those topics are the sort of things that lead back to the era of the central banking's rise to power as unaccountable institutions and their shareholders that have control of the money supply, distribution and creation.

I do feel however that it is a decent introduction into the systemic problems that have massive implications for global, national, local economies and markets.

Neoliberalism is broken because four things that enabled a “heroic period” of growth, stability, global development and technological innovation have turned against the dynamism of the system as a whole.

The first is FIAT MONEY. If you detach money from both metals and real economic activity, and incentivise money creation as the driver of growth, then growth will happen; and financial complexity will increase; and asset wealth will begin to take over from wealth derived from productivity. And if you — as we did in the last 15 years — create a derivatives market several times the size of the economy, you create a finance system that must — by logic — at some point become too big for the physical economy that’s supporting it.

The second problem is FINANCIALISATION. Neoliberalism is the first mode of capitalism in which the capitalists decided they could not tolerate organised labour. The resulting collapse in wage bargaining power, aided by the doubling of the number of salaried workers in the world in 25 years, means wages have stagnated in the developed world. If you then replace wages as the driver of consumption with mass access to credit you create a mechanism whereby the collapse of an investment bank in Manhattan can empty a pub in Lambeth the next day.

The third problem is the GLOBAL IMBALANCES. By neoliberalism I mean the whole global system: the system whereby the USA borrows, China lends; the USA consumes; China produces. During the pre-2008 boom everybody suddenly got very worried about the imbalances, because the gross financial imbalance in the world economy was clearly the source of excess money that allowed cheap money plus financialisation. The 2008 collapse, in this sense, was a partial correction — but it still leaves the entire world economy trapped within the more fundamental imbalance — which has grown: the large cross-border holdings of unpayable debt, increasingly yielding negative returns, and destined to be wiped out in a spectacular cathartic moment.

The fourth problem is FALLING PRODUCTIVITY. This is a multicausal secondary effect of the other problems:
- stagnant wages make it easier to open a coffee shop than invent a new process or machine
- the boom-bust cycles seriously mis-allocate capital, funneling it towards speculation rather than innovation
- consumption driven by cheap lending requires the creation of millions of bullshit jobs so that people can remain on the edge of the credit system, not excluded from it

Stagnant wages combined with cheap money policies in the face of every cyclical downturn creates, in the space of 20 years, three spectacular boom-bust cycles. In the first it was equities that were overvalued; in the second it was securitised financial instruments based on housing; in the third it is government debts. So that when you come later in your careers to write the history of these 20 years I predict you will remember the dotcom crash for Enron; the 2008 crash for Lehman Brothers; the next crash for China.

Each of these crashes wipes some more value and dynamism out of the economy. The dotcom crash destroyed the company pensions system; the 2008 crisis put the banking system on permanent life support, plunged an entire generation into lifetime debt, and took a chunk out of the welfare state; the next crash will involve debt write downs paid for out of the savings of ordinary people.

The outcomes? One, that the system holds together and the world’s households, workers and consumers are forced to pay, over a lifetime of indebtedness and low wages, for the dysfunctionality of the system. But you’ve seen this weekend the limits of that, with the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith. The entire 6-years fiscal framework of the British government has been founded on an arbitrary cap on welfare spending that one of the toughest conservatives of his generation found impossible to implement.

Duncan Smith faces the same problem Xi Jin Ping faces, and the hapless mandarins of the Republican and Democratic centre ground face. People are mad as hell and won’t take it much longer.

Carney, Draghi, the Banks of China and Japan are all engaged in one last round of monetary easing, but they are flashing up the warning cards: unless some kind of structural reform or debt write-off happens, monetary policy is running out of steam.

In 1990 Paul Romer formulated the basic challenge of information technology. Digital information has a near zero reproduction cost and under conditions of a free market and competition its price will fall close to zero. The non-rivalry inherent in information goods means that, once produced, they are abundant.

You can only maintain price, and therefore the price mechanism, by accepting something neoclassical economics says should be impossible: the permanent existence of market distortions: monopolies, patents, copyrights, the capture of positive externalities by corporations.

So when iTunes has 95% market share of online music the price of a track is 99p irrespective of supply, demand or quality. The price is set by Apple’s monopoly pricing power and both the producer and consumer must take the downside of an essentially rent-seeking monopolistic distribution platform.

The only problem is, competition and innovation will happen, so now we have Spotify: £9.99 a month for all the music you can listen to. If you want to make the minimum wage as a solo artist you need 1,500 plays on iTunes, but you need 1.1 million plays on Spotify.

Once you can reproduce someting via “command C, command V” you are in a post-marginalist world. Because the tenet of marginalism is that everything economic is scarce, and that anything abundant is beyond the frame of economic thinking.

Put simply: information corrodes the price mechanism and the defensive walls — monopolies, IP, encryption etc etc — are always corroded. If you don’t believe me look up the market share of a company called Blackberry.

That’s problem number one. The second challenge is: information corrodes the link between hours of work and wages. It makes high-value work modular, driven by targets; and it makes low-value work difficult to place a market value. Millions of people’s wages in the developed world are determined not by the market but by an artificial floor placed under them for the purposes of a) social cohesion b) inclusion in the financialised consumption system.

Challenge number three is we already have a growing, dynamic post-market sector. Wikipedia — a £3bn minus sign on the global advertising economy, powered by 27,000 regular writers, produced for free, consumed for free; Linux, which runs the top 500 supercomputers in the world; Apache which runs half of all web servers. And numerous quietly spectacular good enough tools and solutions produced and maintained for free.

Source: "From Adam Smith to Duncan Smith" by Paul Mason of Mosquito Ridge

If you were lucky, you started out in this business writing code because you thought it was fun. You sat down with your first computer ecstatic with all of the possibilities, all of the cool things you could do by programming a computer. It was something to learn and something to master, and you thought, "Wow, this is fun. I can make a great career if I get very good a this."

-- Michael C. Feathers, Working Effectively With Legacy Code, Prentice Hall, 2013.

I suppose they call it a career because you career from disaster to disaster...

Maybe I'm the fool...
I have my set of daily comics I check in the morning, to provide me with a light chuckle. Somehow I never considered the authors as a network of interacting or cooperating people (maybe friends); if anything I would have considered them competing with each other.

The more todays April Fools of some of them caught me off guard and intrigued me:

Maybe I'm the fool... [deathbulge.com]

Maybe I'm the fool... [explosm.net]

Maybe I'm the fool... [www.mrlovenstein.com]

Any other web-comics following the same meme?

I don't sleep like other people. "What? Upside-down in a closet?" asked someone at Radio Paradise. Well no but my sleep is very irregular.

This was first noticed by the maternity ward nurses in the hospital where I was born: I didn't want to wake up for my feedings.

In general I sleep far more than other people, but for most of my life I've had the odd ability to stay awake, and to do useful work, far longer than anyone else, but then crashing for two or three days. I can't do that anymore though. If I try, I pass out.

I was having seizures for several years. I don't really know but speculate that the seizures were due to my practice of staying awake for several days at a time. I haven't had a seizure since last summer, when I started taking Trileptal. It's a modified form of Tegretol, it apparently works the same way but has a somewhat different chemical structure so as not to be so harmful to the liver.

I also have the problem that I don't get tired when it's time to sleep. A friend says "It's like dying of dehydration because you don't know you're thirsty".

Realization of my recent depression dawned upon me because I was sleeping excessively. When I get depressed I sleep to much, when I sleep too much it makes me depressed. Taking antidepressants eventually led to my recent pattern of staying awake for hours into the night, then awakening early, long before the shelter staff wakes us. At the same time, my depression has lifted.

Last week I had another first date. I met this girl on OkCupid. We met in the afternoon at a local pub and shared a meat and cheese platter. She was visibly nervous when she arrived. I found her nervousness charming, and it put me at ease. Once the nerves calmed down, we had some great conversation as we picked at the cheese and meat tray.

She is recently out of a multi-year relationship, and isn't looking to get right back into one, so she thought that dating a married person would be a good way to avoid being locked down again. We chatted about stuff and things, and wrapped it up after a couple hours. As we parted ways, we hugged and I went in for the kiss. Her lips were soft and I ended up floating back to my car.

We arranged for a second date a couple days later. We went for drinks and appetizers at a somewhat trendy restaurant downtown. She is new to non-monogamy, so I brought her a present -- a book called "The Ethical Slut". This book is considered by some as the bible for non-monogamous relationships, and as she is new to the scene, I thought it would help. We chatted, ate, drank, and eventually made it back to her place for some fooling around.

This girl has really done a number on me. I can't stop thinking about her. I can't wait to see her again.

My life would be hard to face if I had to face it alone. But I don't, I have many friends online and off. I particularly want to thank you folks here at Soylent News. Your kindness means a great deal to me.

Depressed people commonly want something they haven't got - love, money, a job, a better job. My present depression is not like that. I lost interest in everything, I sleep excessively, until a couple days ago I was vomiting after every meal, but there was nothing particularly that I wanted, whose acquisition promised to dispel this miserable rain cloud that's been following me everywhere.

Rather, I know now that time will take care of it. It always does. I don't know how much time but a bit of progress is that I went back for seconds at the Portland Rescue Mission's breakfast this morning, not because I was so hungry, but because the food tasted so good.

Actually it's been a while since food tasted good.

I was sleeping during the day at Right 2 Dream Too on Saturday, when I woke up my boots were gone. I was quite dismayed as I could not imagine being admitted to businesses barefoot, also it is still cold and wet here in Portland. But the R2D2 staff gave me a brand-new pair of shoes that someone had donated.

Tucked into my boots for "safekeeping" were my phone and my glasses.

I have a friend who helps me out with certain expenses, I can't just ask him for any amount of money but if I have something credible to spend it on he'll lend me some cash. He's going to buy me a new phone this weekend.

I don't know how I'll get new glasses. I'm not totally blind without them but it is irritating to have everything blurry.

Even all this doesn't get me down. It did at first.

Shit Happens.