The Oil Drum

I would not call Goldman Sachs a speculator participating in a "child's play". It is for real and for long.
In less than three months, many certainties as to the future were turned upside down ("inescapable" dollar-denomination, "return" to cheap oil, "peaceful" solution to the Iran/USA conflict, "sustainability" of the US real-estate bubble, US "domination" over two other key global players - China and Russia,...) and a great number of indicators now point at converging directions, all of them sources of unbalance for the current system (vertiginous rise in gold and precious metals prices, escalation of inflationary pressures, increase of the interest rates, EURUSD approaching 1.30, large amounts of central banks' reserves being switched to Euros, rise of Asian currencies, stock market and currency crises developing in various areas in the world, growing amounts of articles published in the international and national press using words such as "crash, crisis, collapse, risk, conflict, ..." ).

We are going through a "learning" phase for the system's players. Some of them properly anticipated the evolution and bet on a breakdown of dominant trends. While they still seemed marginal and irrational to the majority a few weeks ago, they now appear to have "won" when the majority has "lost" following the system's "normal" trends. This "lesson" conveys cumulative effects and soon considerably strengthens all breakdown tendencies, resulting in switching from trigger-phase to acceleration-phase. It also reinforces the conviction of the strategic players who got involved into breakdown policies (or who anticipated the breakdown), and weakens in a sustainable way all regulation capacities of the system now faced to a soon generalized crisis of confidence. Well, in the current system, one inherited from WWI and transformed by the fall of the Iron Curtain, whether it is in the financial, economic, monetary or strategic sector, everything relies on the trust granted by each of us to one central player (the US) and to the different components of its might. The passage from trigger phase  to crisys acceleration phase marks the collapse of this trust, sector by sector.