Gold World News Flash |
- Central Banks, Gold & the Currency Market, Part I
- Central Banks, Gold & the Currency Market, Part I
- The Historical Gold Standard | Robert P. Murphy
- Demand For Physical Gold Far Outstrips the Annual Mine Supply
- New Life For Metals & Mining
- John Williams & Chris Waltzek
- Bernanke's Legacy: A Record $1.3 Trillion In Excess Deposits Over Loans At The "Big 4" Banks
- Options Market Forecasting Future Gold Price Action Direction
- Hathaway – Gold Price To Super-Spike As Physical Flees West
- Swiss Gold Coins Are Ready To Change The World
- Gold & Silver Are Real Money: Rich Dad’s Kiyosaki
- What If Nations Were Less Dependent on One Another?
- Dramatic spike in gold will resolve disconnect between paper and metal, Hathaway says
- JIM ROGERS 2014 PREDICTIONS - Global FOOD PRICES to RISE, GOLD MANIPULATION, CHINA & More
- Talk show host Glenn Beck examines Fed's concoction of imaginary gold
- Enjoy it While it Lasts
- Shortage Of Gold Bars Develops In London - Follow The Money
- Shortage Of Gold Bars Develops In London - Follow The Money
- Gold Elliott Wave Analysis: Corrective Wave
- Gold Prices "Due Retracement" as Deflation Skirts US, Eurozone
- Get Ready for Subprime Mortgage Crisis 2.0, Collapse in U.S. Housing Market Coming...
- Too Gloomy on the Economy?
- Too Gloomy on the Economy?
- Gold Prices Bottoming, "Long-Term Buy": CPM's Christian
- Gold Prices Bottoming, "Long-Term Buy": CPM's Christian
- Contrarian's Gold Miner Chartbook
- Contrarian's Gold Miner Chartbook
- What Stock Sectors Outperform When the U.S. Dollar is Rising?
- 50 Years of LBJ's War on Poverty
- 50 Years of LBJ's War on Poverty
- The Gold Bull Market Story In 10 Charts
- 6 Of The Most Fascinating Charts You Will Ever See
- Robert P. Murphy - Basics of Economics An Introduction of The Free Market - The Historical Gold Standard
- The Gold Price Closed at $1,238.30 Down $7.10
- The Gold Price Closed at $1,238.30 Down $7.10
- French Government Hikes Gold Taxes
- Subscription Services
- GOLD Elliott Wave Technical Analysis
- Gold Breaks Downtrend, Sort Of
- Swiss Gold Coins Are Ready To Change The World
- COMEX Registered Gold Stocks At Record Low Level
- Precious Metals: Hedges In Inflationary Or Deflationary Depressions
- 'Great Western Gold Robbery' about to end, Fitzwilson tells KWN
- Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - JPM Holds the Whip Hand on the Comex - Buy Signal
- Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - JPM Holds the Whip Hand on the Comex - Buy Signal
- Life After Quantitative Easing
- Another Chinese analyst says gold is crucial to his country's economic security
- Economic Collapse 2014 - Jim Rickards on the Fed's tapering
- TF Metals Report: Fun with GLD
- Central Bank Gold, 2014 and Beyond
| Central Banks, Gold & the Currency Market, Part I Posted: 16 Jan 2014 10:04 AM PST What centrals banks want and get in FX are as different as what they do and say about gold... CENTRAL BANKS, which in essence are the arbiters of the value of money and control the liquidity of currencies, are always at odds with the foreign exchange markets, writes Miguel Perez-Santalla at BullionVault. Central banks wish they could mandate exchange rates, and that they would maintain their stability once set. However, they cannot – not since the Bretton Woods agreement fell apart four decades ago, leaving each economy's performance to speak to the value of a currency. Increased free trade between countries is well known as the single most important positive action when initiating a scheme of prosperity. But as our world grows smaller through communication, the value of goods and services become that much more knowable, and the balance of payments between countries, which play a significant role of the value of a currency, are reported regularly. The study of free trade will show that it equals growth for the participants, but it also brings fluctuation of values. So it is free markets that truly determine value. Yet, there needs to be trust and transparency for markets to function. In the news of late, in the major Western economies, we have seen what almost appears to be a wildfire of legislation and investigation targeting trade. The principal targets have been the trading rooms of the banks. For many decades the largest trading businesses in all the money markets, the banks shared their currency profits with their shareholders and employees. Then came the recession, caused in no small way by manipulation of the money markets by central banks depressing interest rates, and by government intrusion into existing banking policies. In the case of the USA, those were the Federal Reserve and US Congress. The same Fed and Congress now sending an armada out investigating every trading action taken by a bank and extending their reach across international borders. The catalyst for this attack on the banks trading rooms is really the failure of CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) to perform as sold. One of the primary causes of the financial crash leading to the Great Recession, CDOs were instruments created by the banks and securities firms backed primarily by mortgage securities, as well as other "stream of income" investments, which could be packaged together to create something that looked like a fixed-income bond and sold to investors. These CDOs were later revealed to rely on subpar value instruments, and yet had received high ratings from independent agencies. Mortgages had been made during the boom under government pressure to lend to under-qualified (subprime) borrowers, so they could purchase a home under the low interest rate regime imposed by the Federal Reserve. During this period, gold became increasingly attractive to investors as they realized which of their other assets were rated trustworthy but were not. Gold became a stand-out answer to this financial crisis. The advent of ETFs (exchange traded funds) in gold and easier access to privately owned and secured bullion due to the internet helped many people to diversify and participate in an alternative asset that is never subject to central bank or government creation or direction. It is not even possible to misrepresent the value of commodity gold, as is possible with securities such as CDOs (due to the rating agencies) or stock market equities (due to misreporting or outright malfeasance by management). Though the CDO collapse was caused in great part by the machinations of the investment banks we must be cautious not to become overzealous in our search for justice and retribution. I am not defending the banks or their trading rooms. I am defending the principle of our freedom to trade and risk. Without risk there are no rewards. If we marginalize banking activity, and kill the ability to trade, we then diminish supply and demand for goods and services and this will hurt in the long run. Yes, banks and trading houses took unjust actions prior to the collapse of the economy, and they contributed to the Great Recession. A multitude of other reasons also applied, however, to which the same governing parties at the Fed and Congress were themselves party. In the end we must avoid swinging the pendulum too far. Or else it may cut off our heads. |
| Central Banks, Gold & the Currency Market, Part I Posted: 16 Jan 2014 10:04 AM PST What centrals banks want and get in FX are as different as what they do and say about gold... CENTRAL BANKS, which in essence are the arbiters of the value of money and control the liquidity of currencies, are always at odds with the foreign exchange markets, writes Miguel Perez-Santalla at BullionVault. Central banks wish they could mandate exchange rates, and that they would maintain their stability once set. However, they cannot – not since the Bretton Woods agreement fell apart four decades ago, leaving each economy's performance to speak to the value of a currency. Increased free trade between countries is well known as the single most important positive action when initiating a scheme of prosperity. But as our world grows smaller through communication, the value of goods and services become that much more knowable, and the balance of payments between countries, which play a significant role of the value of a currency, are reported regularly. The study of free trade will show that it equals growth for the participants, but it also brings fluctuation of values. So it is free markets that truly determine value. Yet, there needs to be trust and transparency for markets to function. In the news of late, in the major Western economies, we have seen what almost appears to be a wildfire of legislation and investigation targeting trade. The principal targets have been the trading rooms of the banks. For many decades the largest trading businesses in all the money markets, the banks shared their currency profits with their shareholders and employees. Then came the recession, caused in no small way by manipulation of the money markets by central banks depressing interest rates, and by government intrusion into existing banking policies. In the case of the USA, those were the Federal Reserve and US Congress. The same Fed and Congress now sending an armada out investigating every trading action taken by a bank and extending their reach across international borders. The catalyst for this attack on the banks trading rooms is really the failure of CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) to perform as sold. One of the primary causes of the financial crash leading to the Great Recession, CDOs were instruments created by the banks and securities firms backed primarily by mortgage securities, as well as other "stream of income" investments, which could be packaged together to create something that looked like a fixed-income bond and sold to investors. These CDOs were later revealed to rely on subpar value instruments, and yet had received high ratings from independent agencies. Mortgages had been made during the boom under government pressure to lend to under-qualified (subprime) borrowers, so they could purchase a home under the low interest rate regime imposed by the Federal Reserve. During this period, gold became increasingly attractive to investors as they realized which of their other assets were rated trustworthy but were not. Gold became a stand-out answer to this financial crisis. The advent of ETFs (exchange traded funds) in gold and easier access to privately owned and secured bullion due to the internet helped many people to diversify and participate in an alternative asset that is never subject to central bank or government creation or direction. It is not even possible to misrepresent the value of commodity gold, as is possible with securities such as CDOs (due to the rating agencies) or stock market equities (due to misreporting or outright malfeasance by management). Though the CDO collapse was caused in great part by the machinations of the investment banks we must be cautious not to become overzealous in our search for justice and retribution. I am not defending the banks or their trading rooms. I am defending the principle of our freedom to trade and risk. Without risk there are no rewards. If we marginalize banking activity, and kill the ability to trade, we then diminish supply and demand for goods and services and this will hurt in the long run. Yes, banks and trading houses took unjust actions prior to the collapse of the economy, and they contributed to the Great Recession. A multitude of other reasons also applied, however, to which the same governing parties at the Fed and Congress were themselves party. In the end we must avoid swinging the pendulum too far. Or else it may cut off our heads. |
| The Historical Gold Standard | Robert P. Murphy Posted: 16 Jan 2014 10:00 AM PST from The Victory Report: |
| Demand For Physical Gold Far Outstrips the Annual Mine Supply Posted: 16 Jan 2014 09:52 AM PST by David Schectman, MilesFranklin.com:
The banks and hedge funds are in this to make money. This is NOT how you make money. It is highly unlikely that anyone interested in profit dumps this many contracts at one time, to cause a fall like this. I suppose you could argue that a hedge fund or bullion bank could deliberately set off a flood of long liquidations by hitting all the stops on the way down and then swoop in and buy the contracts at the lower price, but anyway you analyze it, manipulation is manipulation and it is not legal. But the regulators are asleep on the job. |
| Posted: 16 Jan 2014 09:45 AM PST from silver investor.com: |
| Posted: 16 Jan 2014 09:40 AM PST from GoldSeekRadiodotcom:
John Williams & Chris Waltzek on GoldSeek Radio John Williams takes issue with the official “economic recovery” mantra; his ShadowStats.com unemployment rate is over 23%, still at deep recession levels. He expects hyperinflation as soon as 2014, sending gold and silver skyward – his favorite investment class. Click Here To Listen |
| Bernanke's Legacy: A Record $1.3 Trillion In Excess Deposits Over Loans At The "Big 4" Banks Posted: 16 Jan 2014 09:40 AM PST The history books on Bernanke's legacy have not even been started, and while the euphoria over the Fed's balance sheet expansion to a ridiculous $4 trillion or about 25% of the US GDP has been well-telegraphed and manifests itself in a record high stock market and a matching record disparity between the haves and the have nots, there is never such a thing as a free lunch... or else the Fed should be crucified for not monetizing all debt since its inception over 100 years ago - just think of all the foregone "wealth effect." Sarcasm aside, one thing that can be quantified and that few are talking about is the unprecedented, and record, amount of "deposits" held at US commercial banks over loans. Naturally, these are not deposits in the conventional sense, but merely the balance sheet liability manifestation of the Fed's excess reserves parked at banks. And as our readers know well by now (here and here) it is these "excess deposits" that the Banks have used to run up risk in various permutations, most notably as the JPM CIO demonstrated, by attempting to corner various markets and other still unknown pathways, using the Fed's excess liquidity as a source of initial and maintenance margin on synthetic positions. So how does the record mismatch between deposits and loans look like? Well, for the Big 4 US banks, JPM, Wells, BofA and Citi it looks as follows.
What the above chart simply shows is the breakdown in the Excess Deposit over Loan series, which is shown in the chart below, which tracks the historical change in commercial bank loans and deposits. What is immediately obvious is that while loans and deposits moved hand in hand for most of history, starting with the collapse of Lehman loan creation has been virtually non-existent (total loans are now at levels seen at the time of Lehman's collapse) while deposits have risen to just about $10 trillion. It is here that the Fed's excess reserves have gone - the delta between the two is almost precisely the total amount of reserves injected by the Fed since the Lehman crisis.
As for the location of the remainder of the Fed-created excess reserves? Why it is held by none other than foreign banks operating in the US. So what does all of this mean? In a nutshell, with the Fed now tapering QE and deposit formation slowing, banks will have no choice but to issue loans to offset the lack of outside money injection by the Fed. In other words, while bank "deposits" have already experienced the benefit of "future inflation", and have manifested it in the stock market, it is now the turn of the matching asset to catch up. Which also means that while "deposit" growth (i.e., parked reserves) in the future will slow to a trickle, banks will have no choice but to flood the country with $2.5 trillion in loans, or a third of the currently outstanding loans, just to catch up to the head start provided by the Fed! It is this loan creation that will jump start inside money and the flow through to the economy, resulting in the long-overdue growth. It is also this loan creation that means banks will no longer speculate as prop traders with the excess liquidity but go back to their roots as lenders. Most importantly, once banks launch this wholesale lending effort, it is then and only then that the true pernicious inflation from what the Fed has done in the past 5 years will finally rear its ugly head. Finally, it is then that Bernanke's legendary statement that he can "contain inflation in 15 minutes" will truly be tested. Which perhaps explains why he can't wait to be as far away from the Marriner Eccles building as possible when the long-overdue reaction to his actions finally hits. Which is smart: now it is all Yellen responsibility. |
| Options Market Forecasting Future Gold Price Action Direction Posted: 16 Jan 2014 09:36 AM PST Boris Mikanikrezai writes: I discuss how the gold options market is pricing calls and put to gauge traders’ sentiment and figure out whether gold option traders are biased for downside or upside price action. Let's use risk reversals to assess the future evolution of precious metals. The risk reversal in options market can be defined as the implied volatility on call options minus the implied volatility on put options, both with the same delta and maturity. |
| Hathaway – Gold Price To Super-Spike As Physical Flees West Posted: 16 Jan 2014 09:36 AM PST Dear CIGAs, With continuing volatility in the gold and silver markets, today one of the great veterans of the gold world sent King World News an absolutely extraordinary piece which lays out the roadmap for a dramatic spike in the price of gold. There are also 5 unbelievable charts included. Below is the outstanding piece... Read more » The post Hathaway – Gold Price To Super-Spike As Physical Flees West appeared first on Jim Sinclair's Mineset. |
| Swiss Gold Coins Are Ready To Change The World Posted: 16 Jan 2014 09:20 AM PST from Gold Silver Worlds:
Let's get to the point: Switzerland is in a unique position, thanks to its direct democratic rights, to legalize, via a popular initiative, the introduction of constitutionally protected private gold coins. The constitution shall be amended as follows: |
| Gold & Silver Are Real Money: Rich Dad’s Kiyosaki Posted: 16 Jan 2014 08:40 AM PST from KitcoNews: |
| What If Nations Were Less Dependent on One Another? Posted: 16 Jan 2014 08:34 AM PST Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via Peak Prosperity, Autarky is more than a ten-dollar word for self-sufficiency, as it implies a number of questions that “self-sufficiency” alone might not. Autarky vs. Self-SufficiencyThe ability to survive without trade or aid from other nations, for example, is not the same as the ability to reap enormous profits or grow one’s economy without trade with other nations. In other words, 'self-sufficiency' in terms of survival does not necessarily imply prosperity, but it does imply freedom of action without dependency on foreign approval, capital, resources, and expertise. Freedom of action provided by independence/autarky also implies a pivotal reduction in vulnerability to foreign control of the cost and/or availability of essentials such as food and energy, and the resulting power of providers to blackmail or influence national priorities and policies. Where self-sufficiency might suggest a binary state – you’re either self-sufficient or you’re not – autarky invites an exploration of which parts of one’s economy and political order are self-sufficient and which ones are critically dependent on foreign approval, capital, resources, and expertise. In terms of military freedom of action, some nations are able to commit military forces and project power without the aid or approval of other nations. These nations have military autarky, though they might be entirely dependent on foreign countries for critical resources, capital, expertise, etc. In this case, though their military may be self-sufficient in terms of capabilities (power projection, control of airspace, etc.), any dependency in other critical areas introduces an element of political, financial, or resource vulnerability should the key suppliers disapprove of a military action. These vulnerabilities impose often-ambiguous but nonetheless very real limits on freedom of action. The key take-away from this brief overview is that autarky has two distinct states. One is absolute: i.e., Can a nation grow, process, and distribute enough food to feed its population if trade with other nations ceased?, and the other is relative: Is the we-can-feed-ourselves self-sufficiency of the subsistence-survival variety that requires great sacrifice and a drastic re-ordering of national priorities and capital? Or is it relatively painless in terms of national sacrifices and priorities? Clearly, relative autarky invokes a series of trade-offs: Is the freedom of action and reduction in vulnerability gained by increasing autarky worth a national re-ordering of values, priorities, and capital, and quite possibly broad-based, long-term sacrifices? There is an additional issue raised by autarky: Is the self-sufficiency a matter of being blessed with abundant resources, or is it the result of conscious national policy and resolve? Autarky as PolicyConsider petroleum/fossil fuels as an example. Nations blessed with large reserves of fossil fuels are self-sufficient in terms of their own consumption, but the value of their resources on the international market generally leads to dependence on exports of oil/gas to fund the government, political elites, and general welfare. This dependence on the revenues derived from exporting oil/gas leads to what is known as the resource curse: The rest of the oil-exporting nation’s economy withers as capital and political favoritism concentrate on the revenues of exporting oil, and this distortion of the political order leads to cronyism, corruption, and misallocation of national wealth on a scale so vast that nations suffering from an abundance of marketable resources often decline into poverty and instability. The other path to autarky is selecting and funding policies designed to directly increase self-sufficiency. One example might be Germany’s pursuit of alternative energy via state policies such as subsidies. That policy-driven autarky requires trade-offs is apparent in Germany’s relative success in growing alternative energy production; the subsidies that have incentivized alternative energy production are now seen as costing more than the presumed gain in self-sufficiency, as fossil-fueled power generation is still needed as backup for fluctuating alt-energy production. Though dependence on foreign energy has been lowered, Germany remains entirely dependent on its foreign energy suppliers, and as costs of that energy rise, Germany’s position as a competitive industrial powerhouse is being threatened: Industrial production is moving out of Germany to locales with lower energy costs, including the U.S. (Source) The increase in domestic energy production was intended to reduce the vulnerability implicit in dependence on foreign energy providers, yet the increase in domestic energy production has not yet reached the critical threshold where vulnerability to price shocks has been significantly reduced. Assessing the Trade-OffsThis highlights the critical nature of the autarchic thresholds of systemic costs and freedom of action. Above a difficult-to-define threshold, the trade-off required to increase self-sufficiency to the point of being meaningful is too high in sacrifice or cost to the economy or society; the trade-offs required aren’t worth the gain in freedom of action and self-sufficiency. Put another way: Below a difficult-to-define threshold, an increase in self-sufficiency does not yield either lower or more reliable economic costs, nor does it decrease the nation’s vulnerability to blackmail, price shocks, etc. In other words, though dependence always has potentially negative consequences, it can also be cheaper, more convenient, and more profitable than autarky. The diffused benefits of autarky are often overshadowed by the presumed burdens of increasing self-sufficiency. But this trade-off can be illusory. Though the status-quo players benefiting from dependence on foreign markets, trade, and capital will shrilly claim that the nation is doomed should their foreign-derived profits be sacrificed in favor of increasing autarky, a desire for more autarky often pushes the economy and society into a highly positive and productive search for greater efficiencies and more productive uses of capital. Is the sacrifice needed to reach self-sufficiency as steep as presumed, or is a new order of efficiency enough to meaningfully reduce dependence on foreign resources and capital? A Thought-Experiment in American AutarkyIf we look at America’s consumption of fossil fuels and its dependence on oil imports to feed its consumption, autarky forces us to ask: Exactly how difficult would it be to lower consumption enough to eliminate the need for imported oil? Would the economy suffer a death-blow if vehicle, heating, and appliance-efficiency standards were raised, and business travel declined in favor of telecommuting and teleconferencing, etc.? The answer of those profiting from the status quo is, of course, “Yes, the U.S. will be fatally harmed if energy consumption declines,” but the reality is that such creative destruction of wasteful inefficiencies and consumption is the heart of free enterprise and the rising productivity that creates widespread prosperity. If the U.S. had listened to the 1970s-era defenders-of-the-status-quo doomsdayers, who claimed that environmental codes and higher energy-efficiency standards would doom the nation, the U.S. economy would in fact be doomed by the absurdly inefficient energy consumption of that era. The U.S. economy has remained vibrant and productive precisely because the defenders-of-the-status-quo doomsdayers lost the political conflict between the forces of improved efficiency and productivity and the defenders of the inefficient, wasteful, and diminishing-returns status quo. There is one other element in the calculus of dependence, vulnerability, and freedom of action implicit in any discussion of autarky. Despite the rapid increase in production of oil and gas in the U.S., America remains dependent on imports of oil. But not all foreign sources of oil, capital, expertise, etc. are equal; some suppliers may be stable, close allies, and share borders and standards of trade (for example: Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.), while others may be distant, unstable, and unreliable. In other words, autarky may not be worth the cost if a nation is dependent on stable, close neighbors, but the value of autarky rises very quickly when a nation’s survival is dependent on distant, unstable nations with few ties other than the profitable export of resources. Though a survey of America’s relative dependence and self-sufficiency would require a book, let’s look at a few charts to get a taste of America’s declining dependence on foreign-supplied oil. Declines in consumption have the same effect in terms of reducing dependency as do increases in domestic production. Has the U.S. economy imploded as miles driven have declined? Or has the increased efficiency this implies boosted productivity?
U.S. imports of petroleum have declined:
U.S. domestic crude oil production has increased:
U.S. natural gas production has risen:
The U.S. oil/gas rig count is still far lower than the peak in the 1980s:
There are many issues raised by these charts, including the sustainability of increased production, the possibility of further declines in consumption, policies that affect production and consumption, and so on, but similar charts of grain, capital, expertise, goods, etc. would help to fill out the complex set of issues raised by declining consumption and increasing domestic production and productivity. In finance, dependence can mean dependence on other nations for capital and/or profits. What is the consequence of rising autarky for an economy such as America’s that is heavily dependent on foreign markets and trade for the stupendous profitability of its corporations? In Part II: The Consequences of American Autarky, we will discuss this and other ramifications of America’s rising autarky. America’s ability to project power and maintain its freedom of action both presume a network of diplomatic, military, and economic alliances and trading relationships which have (not coincidentally) fueled American corporation’s unprecedented profits. The recent past has created an assumption that the U.S. can only prosper if it imports oil, goods, and services on a vast scale. Could the U.S. shift production from overseas to domestic suppliers, and reduce its consumption of oil and other resources imported from other nations? Click here to access Part II of this report (free executive summary; enrollment required for full access).
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| Dramatic spike in gold will resolve disconnect between paper and metal, Hathaway says Posted: 16 Jan 2014 08:33 AM PST 11:30a ET Thursday, January 16, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: With commentary and charts posted at King World News, Tocqueville Gold Fund manager John Hathaway explains why he believes that "the resolution of the disconnect between paper and physical gold will be a dramatic upside repricing of the real thing": http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/1/15_Ha... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT A Personal Touch in Buying Precious Metals If you've not secured your allocation of precious metals and numismatic coins, 2014 may be the last year to get them at affordable and undervalued prices. With huge amounts of gold leaving the West for Asia, the future availability of precious metals is very much in doubt. All Pro Gold has competitive pricing on all bullion and numismatic products -- and offers prompt delivery too. Long-time GATA supporters Fred Goldstein and Tim Murphy are glad to answer any questions or concerns about acquiring the monetary metals. All Pro Gold has an extensive electronic library of articles from the world's top market analysts. Learn more at www.allprogold.com or write to Fred and Tim at info@allprogold.com or telephone them at 1-855-377-4653. Join GATA here: Vancouver Resource Investment Conference http://www.cambridgehouse.com/event/vancouver-resource-investment-confer... GATA Reception in Vancouver Mines and Money Hong Kong http://www.minesandmoney.com/hongkong/ * * * Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT Jim Sinclair plans seminars in Asheville and Austin Gold advocate and mining entrepreneur Jim Sinclair will hold his next market seminars from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday, January 25, at the Clarion Inn Asheville, 550 Airport Road, Fletcher, North Carolina, and from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday, February 8, at the Austin, Texas, Airport Hilton. Advance registration is required. Details for the Asheville seminar are posted at Sinclair's Internet site, JSMineSet.com, here: http://www.jsmineset.com/2014/01/07/north-carolina-qa-session-venue-conf... Details for the Austin seminar are posted at JSMineSet.com here: http://www.jsmineset.com/2014/01/02/austin-texas-qa-session-confirmed/ |
| JIM ROGERS 2014 PREDICTIONS - Global FOOD PRICES to RISE, GOLD MANIPULATION, CHINA & More Posted: 16 Jan 2014 08:30 AM PST JIM ROGERS 2014 PREDICTIONS - Global FOOD PRICES to RISE, GOLD MANIPULATION, CHINA & more JIM ROGERS Gold has had a nice runup for over a decade now, but it has taken a beating this year.The yellow metal is currently trading at three-year lows.We reached out to commodities expert Jim... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.GoldSilverNewsBlog.com or http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| Talk show host Glenn Beck examines Fed's concoction of imaginary gold Posted: 16 Jan 2014 08:15 AM PST 8:16a ET Thursday, January 16, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: U.S. talk show host Glenn Beck last week commented extensively on what seems the inability of the German Bundesbank to repatriate much of its gold supposedly vaulted at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Beck notes that the situation implies the "rehypothecation" of gold -- the concoction of a vast imaginary supply. While Beck's program probably won't tell followers of GATA anything they don't know, it shows that suspicion of gold price suppression is spreading quickly now, as Beck quotes the German financial journalist Lars Schall's dogged questioning of the Bundesbank, publicized first by GATA, over the Bundesbank's assertion that Germany's gold bars at the Fed were melted and recast before being returned: http://www.gata.org/node/13458 The segment of Beck's program about the German gold is 20 minutes long and can be viewed at his program's Internet site here: http://www.video.theblaze.com/media/video.jsp?content_id=31293951 CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Jim Sinclair plans seminars in Asheville and Austin Gold advocate and mining entrepreneur Jim Sinclair will hold his next market seminars from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday, January 25, at the Clarion Inn Asheville, 550 Airport Road, Fletcher, North Carolina, and from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday, February 8, at the Austin, Texas, Airport Hilton. Advance registration is required. Details for the Asheville seminar are posted at Sinclair's Internet site, JSMineSet.com, here: http://www.jsmineset.com/2014/01/07/north-carolina-qa-session-venue-conf... Details for the Austin seminar are posted at JSMineSet.com here: http://www.jsmineset.com/2014/01/02/austin-texas-qa-session-confirmed/ Join GATA here: Vancouver Resource Investment Conference http://www.cambridgehouse.com/event/vancouver-resource-investment-confer... GATA Reception in Vancouver Mines and Money Hong Kong http://www.minesandmoney.com/hongkong/ * * * Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT A Personal Touch in Buying Precious Metals If you've not secured your allocation of precious metals and numismatic coins, 2014 may be the last year to get them at affordable and undervalued prices. With huge amounts of gold leaving the West for Asia, the future availability of precious metals is very much in doubt. All Pro Gold has competitive pricing on all bullion and numismatic products -- and offers prompt delivery too. Long-time GATA supporters Fred Goldstein and Tim Murphy are glad to answer any questions or concerns about acquiring the monetary metals. All Pro Gold has an extensive electronic library of articles from the world's top market analysts. Learn more at www.allprogold.com or write to Fred and Tim at info@allprogold.com or telephone them at 1-855-377-4653. |
| Posted: 16 Jan 2014 06:26 AM PST The practical lessons to be understood include: (1) a 0.4% yielding CD may be just the place to wait now, (2) no government (or aligned) official is worth listening to on these points, (3) the closer we get to the credit collapse ... Read More... |
| Shortage Of Gold Bars Develops In London - Follow The Money Posted: 16 Jan 2014 06:22 AM PST It appears as if that old adage that a rumor can't be confirmed as being true until its been officially denied several times applies to the London gold bar market, as it was reported last night by a London Metals Exchange reporter that premiums on "good delivery" bars are now above the spot price of gold, something which is rarely observed in London: Gold Bar Shortage In London Asian and Middle Eastern Central Banks and investors are hoarding an enormous amount of the 400 ounce LBMA "good delivery" bars that make London the largest physical gold trading market in the world. As the price of gold was aggressively manipulated lower by the Federal Reserve and its agent bullion banks since mid-2011, eastern hemisphere sovereign, Central Bank and investment buying - especially the Chinese - intensified. With negative "gold forward" rates having been negative for a predominant part of the last half of 2013, I was wondering when a shortage of London bars would be reported. A negative "gold forward" rate means that the entity (bullion bank) who is borrowing or leasing the bars today in order to deliver them into buyers will pay more today for the ability to take delivery of bars now than it would cost to buy them for delivery in the London "forward" market - i.e. anywhere from a month to a year from now. A rare premium for deliverable bars means a shortage of bars for immediate delivery - directly to buyers not using an intermediary like a bullion bank - has developed (as opposed to the GOFO rate, which applies to the brokerage firm intermediaries making markets in bars and who lease gold needed for delivery from Central Banks to deliver into the buyers who are buying from them). We know that gold being drained from Comex warehouses and the GLD Trust ETF is being used to make good on deliveries into Asia's voracious appetite for deliverable gold. Unless the Federal Reserve (Bank of England and ECB) can tap into new sources of above-ground gold stocks, we could well begin to see delivery defaults. Over and above the reports of gold shortages from traders and market professionals, there have been other signs of a developing gold bar shortage for several months. Recall the stunt Goldman Sachs pulled about two months ago when it reported in the press that it had reached an agreement with Venezuela to lease Venezuela's physical gold - the gold Venezuela had repatriated in order to safekeep it under its own watch just two years ago. That news item dropped by Goldman turned out to false. Same for the report that Cyprus was going to sell its gold reserves to help pay for its bail-in. That report proved to be false as well. I always believed that these reports reflected nothing more than desperation by the big bullion banks like Goldman and JP Morgan - as agents for Fed - to get their hands on gold that could be delivered to Asian buyers who demand delivery. Same for the fact it the U.S. refused to give Germany back its gold being held by the Fed as requested and instead agreed to a suspicious deal to ship back part of Germany's gold over seven years. While I'm sure plenty of skeptics from Australia to New York to will issue well-crafted rebuttals to the view that there is now a shortage of physical gold in London and New York, the report last night that big buyers are paying a premium to get their hands on immediately on physical gold confirms the obvious. Money speaks a lot louder than words in the world of finance - follow the money... |
| Shortage Of Gold Bars Develops In London - Follow The Money Posted: 16 Jan 2014 06:22 AM PST It appears as if that old adage that a rumor can't be confirmed as being true until its been officially denied several times applies to the London gold bar market, as it was reported last night by a London Metals Exchange reporter that premiums on "good delivery" bars are now above the spot price of gold, something which is rarely observed in London: Gold Bar Shortage In London Asian and Middle Eastern Central Banks and investors are hoarding an enormous amount of the 400 ounce LBMA "good delivery" bars that make London the largest physical gold trading market in the world. As the price of gold was aggressively manipulated lower by the Federal Reserve and its agent bullion banks since mid-2011, eastern hemisphere sovereign, Central Bank and investment buying - especially the Chinese - intensified. With negative "gold forward" rates having been negative for a predominant part of the last half of 2013, I was wondering when a shortage of London bars would be reported. A negative "gold forward" rate means that the entity (bullion bank) who is borrowing or leasing the bars today in order to deliver them into buyers will pay more today for the ability to take delivery of bars now than it would cost to buy them for delivery in the London "forward" market - i.e. anywhere from a month to a year from now. A rare premium for deliverable bars means a shortage of bars for immediate delivery - directly to buyers not using an intermediary like a bullion bank - has developed (as opposed to the GOFO rate, which applies to the brokerage firm intermediaries making markets in bars and who lease gold needed for delivery from Central Banks to deliver into the buyers who are buying from them). We know that gold being drained from Comex warehouses and the GLD Trust ETF is being used to make good on deliveries into Asia's voracious appetite for deliverable gold. Unless the Federal Reserve (Bank of England and ECB) can tap into new sources of above-ground gold stocks, we could well begin to see delivery defaults. Over and above the reports of gold shortages from traders and market professionals, there have been other signs of a developing gold bar shortage for several months. Recall the stunt Goldman Sachs pulled about two months ago when it reported in the press that it had reached an agreement with Venezuela to lease Venezuela's physical gold - the gold Venezuela had repatriated in order to safekeep it under its own watch just two years ago. That news item dropped by Goldman turned out to false. Same for the report that Cyprus was going to sell its gold reserves to help pay for its bail-in. That report proved to be false as well. I always believed that these reports reflected nothing more than desperation by the big bullion banks like Goldman and JP Morgan - as agents for Fed - to get their hands on gold that could be delivered to Asian buyers who demand delivery. Same for the fact it the U.S. refused to give Germany back its gold being held by the Fed as requested and instead agreed to a suspicious deal to ship back part of Germany's gold over seven years. While I'm sure plenty of skeptics from Australia to New York to will issue well-crafted rebuttals to the view that there is now a shortage of physical gold in London and New York, the report last night that big buyers are paying a premium to get their hands on immediately on physical gold confirms the obvious. Money speaks a lot louder than words in the world of finance - follow the money... |
| Gold Elliott Wave Analysis: Corrective Wave Posted: 16 Jan 2014 06:15 AM PST Gold has turned bearish at the start of September, after the break through the rising trend line of a corrective channel. We knew at the time that it was an important signal for a change in trend, which means that bearish price action is back ... Read More... |
| Gold Prices "Due Retracement" as Deflation Skirts US, Eurozone Posted: 16 Jan 2014 05:52 AM PST GOLD PRICES drifted in "another slow" session, dealers said Thursday morning in London, moving in a $4 range below $1240 per ounce as market-talk focused on a growing "threat" of deflation. Asian stocks closed flat on the day, and European shares were unchanged near 6-year highs. Shanghai gold premiums slipped to $13 per ounce, down from a 6-month high of $18 early last week, ahead of the peak household gold-buying season of Chinese New Year. "With inflation running below many central banks' targets," said Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund late Wednesday, "we see rising risks of deflation, which could prove disastrous for the recovery." The 17-nation Eurozone today reported a drop to 0.8% for annual inflation in 2013. Consumer price inflation in the US was then reported at 1.5% overall, rising to 1.7% as analysts forecast when food and fuel are excluded from 2013's data. "The ECB may loosen monetary policy even further" if consumer prices tip into deflation, says a commodities and gold-price note from Commerzbank, "and the Fed may scale back its bond purchases more slowly." "We are only one short recession away from outright deflation," reckons Albert Edwards, global strategist at French investment and bullion bank Societe Generale. Stock markets have yet to react, however, because investors believe both that the recovery is "self-sustaining" and that the Fed and ECB would increase their money-printing to reverse any deflation in prices, he says. "[But] in the same way investors believe, axiomatically, that [more quantitative easing] will drive up equity prices, they believed exactly the same thing of commodities until 2012," says Edwards, noting the one-third drop in industrial metals over the last 3 years. Gold prices fell by more than 30% between the US Fed announcing QE3 in September 2012 and the start of its "tapering" – finally reducing its $85 billion of monthly money creation – in December 2013. "The short-term uptrend [from $1182 on New Year's Eve] still looks constructive" for gold, reckons Wednesday night's note from Scotia Mocatta, "so long as $1218 holds." But "all precious metals are due a retracement," says one Singapore trading desk, pegging nearby support for gold prices around $1225. Silver tracked gold prices Thursday morning, slipping and then rallying from $20.00 per ounce. The government of Spain – where consumer prices just escaped deflation in 2013, rising 0.3% on official data – meantime raised €2.7 billion in new 3-year debt ($3.6bn) for a yield below 1.6%, the lowest in at least 10 years according to Bloomberg data. US Treasury bonds – a favored "deflation trade" for money managers when consumer prices fell in 2008-2009 – also rose in price today, nudging the annual yield offered to creditors down to 2.87%. Early posting of today's Treasury data last night showed China holding a record $1.32 trillion of US government bonds at end-November, ahead of Japan's $1.19trn. Latest data from Federal Reserve say the US central bank held $2.21trn of US government securities a week ago. Gold prices are "likely to remain under pressure," says ANZ Bank in its daily commodities note, "against a backdrop of a stronger US Dollar [and] rising US 10-year bond yields." But today's weak US inflation data "may add upward pressure on gold," counters Standard Bank, "especially in the light of the weak US employment data last week." |
| Get Ready for Subprime Mortgage Crisis 2.0, Collapse in U.S. Housing Market Coming... Posted: 16 Jan 2014 05:17 AM PST Forget what you are hearing about stiffer mortgage lending requirements. It’s not true. Real estate expert Fabian Calvo says, “If you can fog up a mirror or you have a pulse, they will give you a home loan. That’s what they have done with the car loans, and that’s what they are doing with housing loans.” The so-called new rules do not have any down payment credit score requirement. Zero percent down loans are going to make a very big comeback. According to Calvo, “After the mid-term election, you’re going to see no-money-down loans just really roar back. It’s all part of the pump and dump I’ve been telling you about for well over a year.” |
| Posted: 16 Jan 2014 02:16 AM PST Reasons to be cheerful despite the dangerous error of "economy as engine"... METAPHORS are powerful, writes Tim Price of PFP Wealth Management on his ThePriceOfEverything blog. Words and images matter, because they point to fundamental beliefs. John Maynard Keynes, in his article 'The Great Slump of 1930', spoke of the economy as a "delicate machine", and the idea of the 'economy as engine' has long been popular with traditional economists. One of the great corrective insights of the Austrian economic school is that the economy is not an engine and it cannot be modelled. It cannot be modelled because it is us – the economy comprising the essentially infinite interactions of billions of people. So perhaps the most dangerous fallacy frames the very nature of our economic and financial system the wrong way. Garbage in; garbage out. The damage wrought by bureaucrats and their economic aides who believe that pulling this imaginary lever and pressing that imaginary switch can direct the path of something as tremendously complex as the economy is then compounded by the actions of those unelected bureaucrats as they transform the order of the free market into the chaos of a planned economy. Misguided actions have undesirable consequences. Make time, if you can, to watch this 2013 investment review from Century Management. For all the problems and financial distortions caused by overconfident central bankers and hopelessly indebted governments, Arnold Van Den Berg manages to convey a wonderfully balanced and even optimistic assessment for the US economy (and by extension for much of the world). A hat-tip to Jonathan Escott for bringing it to our attention. Van Den Berg highlights, for example, the impact of fracking on the domestic energy market; an Egyptian fertilizer company recently established a plant in the US where natural gas prices are now cheaper than in the Middle East. He also alludes to the advances in 3D printing, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and robotics. As an example of the latter two trends, he points out that in July last year, the US Navy landed an unmanned fighter jet on the aircraft carrier USS George H.W.Bush:
We're probably guilty of having historically focused more on the threats to economic wellbeing. Van Den Berg puts these into context. Over the last 40 years, the US has experienced:
The US, in other words, has always had problems. As he puts it, the way you invest in such an environment is "to invest in assets that benefit from the growth in the economy which eventually comes". Between 1978 and 2013 the annualised returns of different asset classes were as follows:
Source: Century Management 2013 Review That history of returns is all very well, of course, but it has practical limitations, because starting valuations matter. Both the US stock and bond markets were objectively cheap at the beginning of the period, which accounts in large part for the magnitude of their returns. Neither market is objectively cheap today (although there are equity markets in other parts of the world that are, our favourites being Asia and Japan). And across each asset class, the past has little useful to say to us about the future. Even if those returns do have predictive value over the medium term, they are powerless in the face of investors' behavioural responses to any sharp short-term falls in value. The medium term has a tendency to be forgotten when losses are incurred in the short run. Probably the major reason for our recent focus on the negatives is that what we perceive as the single biggest negative factor influencing asset markets – the price-distorting influence of the most aggressive monetary stimulus in world history by the world's central banks – has the potential to be an existential problem for the financial system itself. Or as Ronald-Peter Stoeferle and Mark Valek put it in their latest Incrementum chartbook, Monetary tectonics:
The inflation / deflation debate and its associated money creation has certainly been the motive force behind asset price evolution for the past five years. Incrementum nicely depict this tug of war, as shown below.  Source: Incrementum Whether we like it or not (and we certainly don't like it), the sad truth is that an unelected monetary bureaucrat, Janet Yellen, is now responsible for the fate of your life savings. She's not entirely alone – she has the company of Mark Carney, Mario Draghi and Haruhiko Kuroda. Through a combination of stealthy mission creep and abject unaccountability on the part of elected politicians, central bankers have been allowed to go "all-in" in their pursuit of anti-deflationary policies. How you regard US equities, UK property, Eurozone debt, and for that matter pretty much any financial asset will be a function of what you anticipate central bank governors will do, and in turn whether those policy actions will be "successful" (given that the ultimate success of monetary policy is pretty sketchily defined given the scale of it in money terms). Human beings have a weakness when it comes to authority. The Stanford Prison Experiment showed that given sufficient latitude, otherwise ordinary people are at risk of developing genuine sadistic tendencies. Stanley Milgram's experiments in 1961 showed that when faced with a man in a white coat and a clipboard, otherwise ordinary people are willing to give other people possibly fatal electric shocks. Summarising his work, Milgram wrote:
For Philip Zimbardo at Stanford, authority was a regular Joe given the uniform of a prison guard. For Stanley Milgram, authority was a man in a white coat. For us today, authority is Janet Yellen. Now Janet Yellen may be privately a nice person, but in her institutionalised form she is, like Messrs Carney, Draghi and Kuroda, at risk of becoming an economic agent in a terribly destructive process. The multi-trillion Dollar question is whether the Fed (and its peers) can remove some of the extraordinary stimulus they've provided to markets without crashing them and the real economy around them. Or indeed whether, in response to falling markets, that stimulus returns in even more extraordinary form, making the resultant crash presumably even more severe. Asset diversification was largely a bust last year, because stocks were pretty much the only financial asset that went up. We held stocks, but (with the benefit of hindsight) evidently not enough. Investors may not yet be sufficiently aware of the devilishly fraught nature of current markets and their dependency on decisions made by a handful of monetary "engineers". The figures are certainly staggering. As Grant Williams points out,
There's a process, and there's an outcome. We control our investment process, but not its outcome (certainly not in the short run). Despite diversification "not working" in 2013, it still strikes us as the only logical response to a monetarily out-of-control world. And the other logical policy response, when it comes to equity investing, is to focus exclusively on Graham & Dodd-style deep inherent value. Anything else can and will end in tears, and possibly quite quickly. |
| Posted: 16 Jan 2014 02:16 AM PST Reasons to be cheerful despite the dangerous error of "economy as engine"... METAPHORS are powerful, writes Tim Price of PFP Wealth Management on his ThePriceOfEverything blog. Words and images matter, because they point to fundamental beliefs. John Maynard Keynes, in his article 'The Great Slump of 1930', spoke of the economy as a "delicate machine", and the idea of the 'economy as engine' has long been popular with traditional economists. One of the great corrective insights of the Austrian economic school is that the economy is not an engine and it cannot be modelled. It cannot be modelled because it is us – the economy comprising the essentially infinite interactions of billions of people. So perhaps the most dangerous fallacy frames the very nature of our economic and financial system the wrong way. Garbage in; garbage out. The damage wrought by bureaucrats and their economic aides who believe that pulling this imaginary lever and pressing that imaginary switch can direct the path of something as tremendously complex as the economy is then compounded by the actions of those unelected bureaucrats as they transform the order of the free market into the chaos of a planned economy. Misguided actions have undesirable consequences. Make time, if you can, to watch this 2013 investment review from Century Management. For all the problems and financial distortions caused by overconfident central bankers and hopelessly indebted governments, Arnold Van Den Berg manages to convey a wonderfully balanced and even optimistic assessment for the US economy (and by extension for much of the world). A hat-tip to Jonathan Escott for bringing it to our attention. Van Den Berg highlights, for example, the impact of fracking on the domestic energy market; an Egyptian fertilizer company recently established a plant in the US where natural gas prices are now cheaper than in the Middle East. He also alludes to the advances in 3D printing, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and robotics. As an example of the latter two trends, he points out that in July last year, the US Navy landed an unmanned fighter jet on the aircraft carrier USS George H.W.Bush:
We're probably guilty of having historically focused more on the threats to economic wellbeing. Van Den Berg puts these into context. Over the last 40 years, the US has experienced:
The US, in other words, has always had problems. As he puts it, the way you invest in such an environment is "to invest in assets that benefit from the growth in the economy which eventually comes". Between 1978 and 2013 the annualised returns of different asset classes were as follows:
Source: Century Management 2013 Review That history of returns is all very well, of course, but it has practical limitations, because starting valuations matter. Both the US stock and bond markets were objectively cheap at the beginning of the period, which accounts in large part for the magnitude of their returns. Neither market is objectively cheap today (although there are equity markets in other parts of the world that are, our favourites being Asia and Japan). And across each asset class, the past has little useful to say to us about the future. Even if those returns do have predictive value over the medium term, they are powerless in the face of investors' behavioural responses to any sharp short-term falls in value. The medium term has a tendency to be forgotten when losses are incurred in the short run. Probably the major reason for our recent focus on the negatives is that what we perceive as the single biggest negative factor influencing asset markets – the price-distorting influence of the most aggressive monetary stimulus in world history by the world's central banks – has the potential to be an existential problem for the financial system itself. Or as Ronald-Peter Stoeferle and Mark Valek put it in their latest Incrementum chartbook, Monetary tectonics:
The inflation / deflation debate and its associated money creation has certainly been the motive force behind asset price evolution for the past five years. Incrementum nicely depict this tug of war, as shown below. Source: Incrementum Whether we like it or not (and we certainly don't like it), the sad truth is that an unelected monetary bureaucrat, Janet Yellen, is now responsible for the fate of your life savings. She's not entirely alone – she has the company of Mark Carney, Mario Draghi and Haruhiko Kuroda. Through a combination of stealthy mission creep and abject unaccountability on the part of elected politicians, central bankers have been allowed to go "all-in" in their pursuit of anti-deflationary policies. How you regard US equities, UK property, Eurozone debt, and for that matter pretty much any financial asset will be a function of what you anticipate central bank governors will do, and in turn whether those policy actions will be "successful" (given that the ultimate success of monetary policy is pretty sketchily defined given the scale of it in money terms). Human beings have a weakness when it comes to authority. The Stanford Prison Experiment showed that given sufficient latitude, otherwise ordinary people are at risk of developing genuine sadistic tendencies. Stanley Milgram's experiments in 1961 showed that when faced with a man in a white coat and a clipboard, otherwise ordinary people are willing to give other people possibly fatal electric shocks. Summarising his work, Milgram wrote:
For Philip Zimbardo at Stanford, authority was a regular Joe given the uniform of a prison guard. For Stanley Milgram, authority was a man in a white coat. For us today, authority is Janet Yellen. Now Janet Yellen may be privately a nice person, but in her institutionalised form she is, like Messrs Carney, Draghi and Kuroda, at risk of becoming an economic agent in a terribly destructive process. The multi-trillion Dollar question is whether the Fed (and its peers) can remove some of the extraordinary stimulus they've provided to markets without crashing them and the real economy around them. Or indeed whether, in response to falling markets, that stimulus returns in even more extraordinary form, making the resultant crash presumably even more severe. Asset diversification was largely a bust last year, because stocks were pretty much the only financial asset that went up. We held stocks, but (with the benefit of hindsight) evidently not enough. Investors may not yet be sufficiently aware of the devilishly fraught nature of current markets and their dependency on decisions made by a handful of monetary "engineers". The figures are certainly staggering. As Grant Williams points out,
There's a process, and there's an outcome. We control our investment process, but not its outcome (certainly not in the short run). Despite diversification "not working" in 2013, it still strikes us as the only logical response to a monetarily out-of-control world. And the other logical policy response, when it comes to equity investing, is to focus exclusively on Graham & Dodd-style deep inherent value. Anything else can and will end in tears, and possibly quite quickly. |
| Gold Prices Bottoming, "Long-Term Buy": CPM's Christian Posted: 16 Jan 2014 02:07 AM PST Gold and silver "have paid their dues". Whereas stocks are very high, and bonds are suicidal... JEFFREY CHRISTIAN is managing director of precious metals and commodity research consultancy, the CPM Group in New York. Here he talks to Hard Assets Investor about his 2014 outlook for gold and silver prices, plus central-bank demand Hard Assets Investor: Last year was rough and rocky for the precious metals, for all the metals groups in fact. What do you see this year, in 2014? Jeffrey Christian: Well, in 2013, we were telling people to be short. So we were kind of happy campers last year. And what we're telling people now is we think 2014 is going to be the year where we see the prices bottom out. Not necessarily run away to the upside. But we expect that, by the end of the year, gold prices and silver and platinum and palladium will all be higher than they are now, and that gold equities also will be a lot stronger. HAI: So is the bottom fundamentally, in this mid-$1100-1200 price range in gold? Jeffrey Christian: We think the bottom is probably around $1180, which is what we saw in late June, and then we saw it again in December. And we think it'll be tested again. There are clearly a lot of people out there who think it's going to break with a spike down to $1100 or maybe even $1000. But we've had two tests. And every time you see the price down that low, there's a lot of demand that's coming in. So I wouldn't be surprised to see gold prices hold at $1180 now. HAI: Looking at the charts, that $850 print in gold in 1980 lasted as the all-time high all the way to 2007. Isn't there a chance it would go back down there again, and that $850 acts as the new support? Jeffrey Christian: Technically, you could say that could be a support level. But I think there's a lot more fundamental support, much higher, in terms of investors who don't look at price charts, but look at the overall economy. And I think you're seeing is a lot of people are still interested in gold. If you look at the numbers, last year investors bought nearly 30 million ounces of gold. Now that was off from about 40 million ounces of gold in 2011 and 2012. So about 25% reduction in the amount of gold that investors were buying on a net basis. But that's 30 million ounces of gold investment. That's an enormous amount of gold for investors to buy. And a lot of those guys were buying expressly because the price fell from $1680 at the beginning down to $1180, $1200, $1280. HAI: What category of investors? Would that be individual investors? Institutions, more or less, have pulled back. Jeffrey Christian: Well, on the investor side, we divide it up into different areas. And there are some institutions and some individuals who have bailed. But there are also some institutions that either had gotten out, taken their profits, in some cases went short, and now they're going long again. And there are a lot of family offices and individuals who were buying gold. So I don't think it divides down institution versus individual. What it divides down is that there are shorter-term opportunistic investors and momentum traders who were buying in 2007 to 2011. And they were selling in 2011 to 2013. They're out of the market now. They did their buying, they did their selling. They're gone. And you have other investors, institutions as well as individuals, who are longer-term investors, who look at the market, and they say, from a long-term perspective, none of the problems that caused 2008 have been fixed. Some of them are worse. There's 100 percent chance that we'll have another economic crisis. It's just a matter of timing. So, from a longer-term perspective, I want to buy. Within that group, you find two different groups. One is, I'm not a genius, I'm just going to buy gold. And the other group is more opportunistic. And they've been waiting to see how low the price of gold goes. So you've seen a lot of investors who want to buy gold on a long-term basis, but they're waiting to see the gold price stop falling and start rising. HAI: What about central banks? Jeffrey Christian: Central banks, by and large, fall into that same category. There's been a handful of central banks that have been large significant buyers of gold since 2008-2009. They pulled back sharply – China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, the Philippines, a couple other countries. And they've pulled back in 2013 from buying, as the price fell. They haven't lost an interest in adding gold to their reserves. What they're doing is they're waiting to see how low the gold price falls before they start buying again. HAI: But won't central banks wait until the price gets back to $1900 per ounce? They make great contrarian indicators. Jeffrey Christian: The Chinese central bank, all of the gold they bought, they bought below $1000. So they're still, what, $300 to the good, $200 to the good. HAI: We can say for sure that market sentiment and psychology has definitely flipped around from wild bullishness and optimism. There's clearly been just a chill on the outlook. And that's the time you want to buy, right? Jeffrey Christian: I'm very proud of the fact that in January 2012 we issued a sell recommendation at $1800 gold. And the consensus was, universally, that it was going over $2000 to $2400 or $3000. I'm very proud of the fact that we got that right. And now, we're saying we think that the low is in. This is a good place for long-term investors to buy. And universally, on the Street, people are talking about $1000 gold. I have absolutely no problem running contrary to them. Because those guys, they come up with their research by drawing a line on the chart. Prices are falling; therefore, I'm bearish. Prices are rising; therefore, I'm bullish. They don't look at the fundamentals. They have no clue what's going on in the mining sector, what's going on in fabrication demand, let alone investment demand of central banks. HAI: Let's talk about silver, which also got hit pretty hard last year. Same sort of scenario there – a bottoming process? Jeffrey Christian: Bottoming process, but we're probably more bearish on silver. We think there's a lot of metal hanging over that market. And investors may be a little bit harder to come back into silver. So we think that the silver price has reached its bottom or is close to its bottom. But we don't necessarily see it rising for the bulk of 2014. Maybe '15 or '16 before we start seeing that price rise. HAI: So long-term, investors still should have a positive outlook, both metals? Jeffrey Christian: I think so. You don't want to put all your money into gold and silver. But if you look at it, the stock market is very high and very top-heavy. The bond market is suicidal to be long. And gold and silver, they've paid their dues. The prices are way off from their 2011 peaks. They probably represent good long-term buys for a portion of your portfolio. |
| Gold Prices Bottoming, "Long-Term Buy": CPM's Christian Posted: 16 Jan 2014 02:07 AM PST Gold and silver "have paid their dues". Whereas stocks are very high, and bonds are suicidal... JEFFREY CHRISTIAN is managing director of precious metals and commodity research consultancy, the CPM Group in New York. Here he talks to Hard Assets Investor about his 2014 outlook for gold and silver prices, plus central-bank demand Hard Assets Investor: Last year was rough and rocky for the precious metals, for all the metals groups in fact. What do you see this year, in 2014? Jeffrey Christian: Well, in 2013, we were telling people to be short. So we were kind of happy campers last year. And what we're telling people now is we think 2014 is going to be the year where we see the prices bottom out. Not necessarily run away to the upside. But we expect that, by the end of the year, gold prices and silver and platinum and palladium will all be higher than they are now, and that gold equities also will be a lot stronger. HAI: So is the bottom fundamentally, in this mid-$1100-1200 price range in gold? Jeffrey Christian: We think the bottom is probably around $1180, which is what we saw in late June, and then we saw it again in December. And we think it'll be tested again. There are clearly a lot of people out there who think it's going to break with a spike down to $1100 or maybe even $1000. But we've had two tests. And every time you see the price down that low, there's a lot of demand that's coming in. So I wouldn't be surprised to see gold prices hold at $1180 now. HAI: Looking at the charts, that $850 print in gold in 1980 lasted as the all-time high all the way to 2007. Isn't there a chance it would go back down there again, and that $850 acts as the new support? Jeffrey Christian: Technically, you could say that could be a support level. But I think there's a lot more fundamental support, much higher, in terms of investors who don't look at price charts, but look at the overall economy. And I think you're seeing is a lot of people are still interested in gold. If you look at the numbers, last year investors bought nearly 30 million ounces of gold. Now that was off from about 40 million ounces of gold in 2011 and 2012. So about 25% reduction in the amount of gold that investors were buying on a net basis. But that's 30 million ounces of gold investment. That's an enormous amount of gold for investors to buy. And a lot of those guys were buying expressly because the price fell from $1680 at the beginning down to $1180, $1200, $1280. HAI: What category of investors? Would that be individual investors? Institutions, more or less, have pulled back. Jeffrey Christian: Well, on the investor side, we divide it up into different areas. And there are some institutions and some individuals who have bailed. But there are also some institutions that either had gotten out, taken their profits, in some cases went short, and now they're going long again. And there are a lot of family offices and individuals who were buying gold. So I don't think it divides down institution versus individual. What it divides down is that there are shorter-term opportunistic investors and momentum traders who were buying in 2007 to 2011. And they were selling in 2011 to 2013. They're out of the market now. They did their buying, they did their selling. They're gone. And you have other investors, institutions as well as individuals, who are longer-term investors, who look at the market, and they say, from a long-term perspective, none of the problems that caused 2008 have been fixed. Some of them are worse. There's 100 percent chance that we'll have another economic crisis. It's just a matter of timing. So, from a longer-term perspective, I want to buy. Within that group, you find two different groups. One is, I'm not a genius, I'm just going to buy gold. And the other group is more opportunistic. And they've been waiting to see how low the price of gold goes. So you've seen a lot of investors who want to buy gold on a long-term basis, but they're waiting to see the gold price stop falling and start rising. HAI: What about central banks? Jeffrey Christian: Central banks, by and large, fall into that same category. There's been a handful of central banks that have been large significant buyers of gold since 2008-2009. They pulled back sharply – China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, the Philippines, a couple other countries. And they've pulled back in 2013 from buying, as the price fell. They haven't lost an interest in adding gold to their reserves. What they're doing is they're waiting to see how low the gold price falls before they start buying again. HAI: But won't central banks wait until the price gets back to $1900 per ounce? They make great contrarian indicators. Jeffrey Christian: The Chinese central bank, all of the gold they bought, they bought below $1000. So they're still, what, $300 to the good, $200 to the good. HAI: We can say for sure that market sentiment and psychology has definitely flipped around from wild bullishness and optimism. There's clearly been just a chill on the outlook. And that's the time you want to buy, right? Jeffrey Christian: I'm very proud of the fact that in January 2012 we issued a sell recommendation at $1800 gold. And the consensus was, universally, that it was going over $2000 to $2400 or $3000. I'm very proud of the fact that we got that right. And now, we're saying we think that the low is in. This is a good place for long-term investors to buy. And universally, on the Street, people are talking about $1000 gold. I have absolutely no problem running contrary to them. Because those guys, they come up with their research by drawing a line on the chart. Prices are falling; therefore, I'm bearish. Prices are rising; therefore, I'm bullish. They don't look at the fundamentals. They have no clue what's going on in the mining sector, what's going on in fabrication demand, let alone investment demand of central banks. HAI: Let's talk about silver, which also got hit pretty hard last year. Same sort of scenario there – a bottoming process? Jeffrey Christian: Bottoming process, but we're probably more bearish on silver. We think there's a lot of metal hanging over that market. And investors may be a little bit harder to come back into silver. So we think that the silver price has reached its bottom or is close to its bottom. But we don't necessarily see it rising for the bulk of 2014. Maybe '15 or '16 before we start seeing that price rise. HAI: So long-term, investors still should have a positive outlook, both metals? Jeffrey Christian: I think so. You don't want to put all your money into gold and silver. But if you look at it, the stock market is very high and very top-heavy. The bond market is suicidal to be long. And gold and silver, they've paid their dues. The prices are way off from their 2011 peaks. They probably represent good long-term buys for a portion of your portfolio. |
| Contrarian's Gold Miner Chartbook Posted: 16 Jan 2014 02:03 AM PST Gold miner stocks are doing so badly, they're fast becoming a "contrarian dream"... DOUG CASEY's most notable characteristic as an investor is his highly successful contrarian nature, writes Jeff Clark, senior precious metals analyst at Casey Research. It's how he bagged some of his biggest wins – not just doubles and triples, but 10- and 20-fold returns. There's only one way to realize these kinds of gains: You must buy when the asset is out of favor. Buying an investment that has already run up is at best chasing momentum and at worst a portfolio wrecker. So, what's the greatest contrarian investment today? Consider this pictorial data…  At the end of 2013, the sector with the highest level of pessimism, as measured by SentimenTrader, was the gold industry. It actually registered "zero" in mid-December. Meanwhile, price-to-earnings ratios of the 15 largest gold producers are at their lowest level in 14 years, and less than half what they were when the bull market got under way in 2001.  The ratio of gold to the S&P 500 Index is currently at 0.66, its lowest level since the market meltdown of 2008.  The next chart, from our friend Frank Holmes at US Global Investors, measures gold's 60-day percent change in standard deviation terms. It shows the metal's actual gain or loss in relation to its average price change – and it's never been this low.  Another chart from US Global Investors demonstrates that last year's decline in the Philadelphia Gold and Silver Index (XAU) was the greatest on record, and further, that consecutive annual declines are rare. The XAU is one of the two most-watched gold stock indices in the world, and in 30 years it's never had a losing streak of more than three years.  Also, JPMorgan noted last week that speculative positions in gold (defined as net longs minus shorts) dropped to record lows at the end of 2013. (Source: Zero Hedge)  Finally, the XAU/gold ratio is at its lowest point in history, and the HUI/gold ratio – the other major gold stock index – shows that gold stocks are now cheaper than they've been since the beginning of this secular bull cycle in 2001.  Of course, just because something is cheap today doesn't mean it will soar tomorrow. But given gold's historical role as money, butted up against monetary recklessness today, the outcome seems all but certain. As Casey editor Kevin Brekke recently put it:
And right now, some of the most successful resource speculators and investment pros are seeing the early hallmarks of a turnaround in the gold sector – which makes this the best time to invest in the yellow metal as well as top-quality, undervalued gold mining stocks. New to the gold miner market? This free 2014 Gold Investor's Guide, a Casey Research special report, gives you all the basics. |
| Contrarian's Gold Miner Chartbook Posted: 16 Jan 2014 02:03 AM PST Gold miner stocks are doing so badly, they're fast becoming a "contrarian dream"... DOUG CASEY's most notable characteristic as an investor is his highly successful contrarian nature, writes Jeff Clark, senior precious metals analyst at Casey Research. It's how he bagged some of his biggest wins – not just doubles and triples, but 10- and 20-fold returns. There's only one way to realize these kinds of gains: You must buy when the asset is out of favor. Buying an investment that has already run up is at best chasing momentum and at worst a portfolio wrecker. So, what's the greatest contrarian investment today? Consider this pictorial data… At the end of 2013, the sector with the highest level of pessimism, as measured by SentimenTrader, was the gold industry. It actually registered "zero" in mid-December. Meanwhile, price-to-earnings ratios of the 15 largest gold producers are at their lowest level in 14 years, and less than half what they were when the bull market got under way in 2001. The ratio of gold to the S&P 500 Index is currently at 0.66, its lowest level since the market meltdown of 2008. The next chart, from our friend Frank Holmes at US Global Investors, measures gold's 60-day percent change in standard deviation terms. It shows the metal's actual gain or loss in relation to its average price change – and it's never been this low. Another chart from US Global Investors demonstrates that last year's decline in the Philadelphia Gold and Silver Index (XAU) was the greatest on record, and further, that consecutive annual declines are rare. The XAU is one of the two most-watched gold stock indices in the world, and in 30 years it's never had a losing streak of more than three years. Also, JPMorgan noted last week that speculative positions in gold (defined as net longs minus shorts) dropped to record lows at the end of 2013. (Source: Zero Hedge) Finally, the XAU/gold ratio is at its lowest point in history, and the HUI/gold ratio – the other major gold stock index – shows that gold stocks are now cheaper than they've been since the beginning of this secular bull cycle in 2001. Of course, just because something is cheap today doesn't mean it will soar tomorrow. But given gold's historical role as money, butted up against monetary recklessness today, the outcome seems all but certain. As Casey editor Kevin Brekke recently put it:
And right now, some of the most successful resource speculators and investment pros are seeing the early hallmarks of a turnaround in the gold sector – which makes this the best time to invest in the yellow metal as well as top-quality, undervalued gold mining stocks. New to the gold miner market? This free 2014 Gold Investor's Guide, a Casey Research special report, gives you all the basics. |
| What Stock Sectors Outperform When the U.S. Dollar is Rising? Posted: 16 Jan 2014 01:59 AM PST Starting in 2013, markets appear to be moving into a new stage. The U.S. dollar bottomed in 2008 and the S&P 500 emerged from over a decade of consolidation and deep declines. Though the future action of the U.S. index is too early to forecast, there are strong similarities to happened in 1980. |
| 50 Years of LBJ's War on Poverty Posted: 16 Jan 2014 01:55 AM PST Happy birthday to futility, waste, and unintended consequences... IS IT TIME for a ceasefire in the War on Poverty? asks Bill Bonner in his Daily Reckoning. The unemployment numbers which came out last Friday were worse than expected. Only 74,000 jobs added. Meanwhile, the 'labour force participation rate' has gone from 66% to 62%...a loss of about 5 million. That's about 100,000 a month. In December, more people left the job market than entered it. So, the 'unemployment rate' went down. The bad news had little effect on stocks...Investors thought it was good news, but they weren't quite sure. On one hand it seemed to guarantee more EZ Money from the Federal Reserve...on the other, it looks like the economy really is weaker than commonly thought. Gold shot up $17. Gold may have put in another bottom around the $1200 level...but we'll wait to find out for sure. Meanwhile, the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty came and went last week, without much notice. No flags flying. No speeches. Veterans on both sides took their money and kept quiet. But that didn't stop hands from wringing, hearts from bleeding, and bellies from aching. So, the war goes on. But as in many other of the feds' wars, we don't know which side we should be on. We've got nothing against poverty. Then again, we've got nothing against wealth either. People should be able to decide for themselves what they want out of life. But during the Lyndon Johnson administration the rich got the idea that they should exterminate poverty...or at least gain a political advantage by appearing to try. So it was that on the 8th of January 1964, LBJ declared war:
That was 50 years and $20 trillion ago. Jesus Christ warned us that eradicating poverty wouldn't be easy. "The poor will always be with you," he said. So far, it looks like he was right. The poor are still with us. About the same number of people, relative to the rest of the population, are poor today as were poor then. But wait. It depends on how you define 'poor'. And what we take from the article in the Wall Street Journal, by Robert Rector, is that the 'poor' are too rich for their own good. The feds spend $9,000 a year per poor recipient. That, and other sources of revenue, give the typical poor person a rather rich life. According to Rector, he...
Sounds pretty good, right? Yes, but there's more to life than creature comforts. And in attempting to exterminate material poverty, the feds created a new kind of poverty that is far worse. In the '80s and '90s, your editor lived in a war zone, a 'ghetto' in Northwest Baltimore. There, too, there was plenty of money at least, there was enough to buy gadgets and drugs. Everybody had a TV. And everybody had alcohol and drugs. There was a whooping party whenever the welfare checks arrived. But it was not a very nice place to live. When you pay people not to do much...that is what they do. And then, after doing so little for so long, they can do nothing else. The Druid Hill area of Baltimore, where we lived for about 10 years, was the front lines in the War on Poverty. Few people had jobs. Instead, they just hung around. Idleness begat disorder. And trouble...In personal lives, family lives, and the life of the community. People slept at all hours...and stayed up late at night partying. Children were poorly tended to, often out on the street in the middle of the night. The sidewalks were strewn with trash, and dangerous. Gunshots were frequent. Violent deaths were not uncommon. The red and blue lights of the gendarmes were never far away. It had its charms. One of our neighbours had murdered another man in a drug dispute. He seemed like a nice fellow, at least as long as you didn't get him too mad. He and a few others formed a kind of glee club, singing the Motown hits, until they passed out drunk. They could get drunk every night because they didn't have to get up to go to work in the morning. The work world imposes order. You have to get up in the morning. You have to get along with your co-workers. And you have to get the job done. Mother necessity is a powerful civilising force. Take her out of a community and the place goes to Hell. Marriage, too, comes with civilising requirements. You have to get along with your spouse. You have to learn to live together. You have to take responsibility for other people...and cooperate to get the job done. But there were almost no marriages and no jobs in Druid Hill. Why? The War on Poverty made them unnecessary. You didn't need to have a job to support yourself. And you didn't need to get married to support your children either. The feds would do it. And Mr.Rector notes the consequences:
The War on Poverty? The poor would be better off without it. |
| 50 Years of LBJ's War on Poverty Posted: 16 Jan 2014 01:55 AM PST Happy birthday to futility, waste, and unintended consequences... IS IT TIME for a ceasefire in the War on Poverty? asks Bill Bonner in his Daily Reckoning. The unemployment numbers which came out last Friday were worse than expected. Only 74,000 jobs added. Meanwhile, the 'labour force participation rate' has gone from 66% to 62%...a loss of about 5 million. That's about 100,000 a month. In December, more people left the job market than entered it. So, the 'unemployment rate' went down. The bad news had little effect on stocks...Investors thought it was good news, but they weren't quite sure. On one hand it seemed to guarantee more EZ Money from the Federal Reserve...on the other, it looks like the economy really is weaker than commonly thought. Gold shot up $17. Gold may have put in another bottom around the $1200 level...but we'll wait to find out for sure. Meanwhile, the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty came and went last week, without much notice. No flags flying. No speeches. Veterans on both sides took their money and kept quiet. But that didn't stop hands from wringing, hearts from bleeding, and bellies from aching. So, the war goes on. But as in many other of the feds' wars, we don't know which side we should be on. We've got nothing against poverty. Then again, we've got nothing against wealth either. People should be able to decide for themselves what they want out of life. But during the Lyndon Johnson administration the rich got the idea that they should exterminate poverty...or at least gain a political advantage by appearing to try. So it was that on the 8th of January 1964, LBJ declared war:
That was 50 years and $20 trillion ago. Jesus Christ warned us that eradicating poverty wouldn't be easy. "The poor will always be with you," he said. So far, it looks like he was right. The poor are still with us. About the same number of people, relative to the rest of the population, are poor today as were poor then. But wait. It depends on how you define 'poor'. And what we take from the article in the Wall Street Journal, by Robert Rector, is that the 'poor' are too rich for their own good. The feds spend $9,000 a year per poor recipient. That, and other sources of revenue, give the typical poor person a rather rich life. According to Rector, he...
Sounds pretty good, right? Yes, but there's more to life than creature comforts. And in attempting to exterminate material poverty, the feds created a new kind of poverty that is far worse. In the '80s and '90s, your editor lived in a war zone, a 'ghetto' in Northwest Baltimore. There, too, there was plenty of money at least, there was enough to buy gadgets and drugs. Everybody had a TV. And everybody had alcohol and drugs. There was a whooping party whenever the welfare checks arrived. But it was not a very nice place to live. When you pay people not to do much...that is what they do. And then, after doing so little for so long, they can do nothing else. The Druid Hill area of Baltimore, where we lived for about 10 years, was the front lines in the War on Poverty. Few people had jobs. Instead, they just hung around. Idleness begat disorder. And trouble...In personal lives, family lives, and the life of the community. People slept at all hours...and stayed up late at night partying. Children were poorly tended to, often out on the street in the middle of the night. The sidewalks were strewn with trash, and dangerous. Gunshots were frequent. Violent deaths were not uncommon. The red and blue lights of the gendarmes were never far away. It had its charms. One of our neighbours had murdered another man in a drug dispute. He seemed like a nice fellow, at least as long as you didn't get him too mad. He and a few others formed a kind of glee club, singing the Motown hits, until they passed out drunk. They could get drunk every night because they didn't have to get up to go to work in the morning. The work world imposes order. You have to get up in the morning. You have to get along with your co-workers. And you have to get the job done. Mother necessity is a powerful civilising force. Take her out of a community and the place goes to Hell. Marriage, too, comes with civilising requirements. You have to get along with your spouse. You have to learn to live together. You have to take responsibility for other people...and cooperate to get the job done. But there were almost no marriages and no jobs in Druid Hill. Why? The War on Poverty made them unnecessary. You didn't need to have a job to support yourself. And you didn't need to get married to support your children either. The feds would do it. And Mr.Rector notes the consequences:
The War on Poverty? The poor would be better off without it. |
| The Gold Bull Market Story In 10 Charts Posted: 16 Jan 2014 01:47 AM PST This is a guest post by Nick Laird, who is the founder of Sharelynx.com, the largest source of precious metals related data on the world. Sharelynx is recommended for both the professional investor but also the precious metals enthusiast. In this article, Nick Laird shows the gold market as it is today in ten charts. The charts tell a story, and Nick did an excellent job visualizing the storyline. He combines chart analysis with the futures market structure and COMEX gold stocks. Astonishingly, all data points confirm the same direction: the gold bull market is in the process of resuming its uptrend. The banks are long gold:
They are withdrawing supplies:
They are holding back supplies:
Cots are positions perfectly for a bull run to start:
Pivot point time – double bottom:
Silver double bottom:
Time to breakout & soar:
Time to get out of it’s funk:
Never been a better buy:
Just bounced off one of it’s most oversold phases:
|
| 6 Of The Most Fascinating Charts You Will Ever See Posted: 15 Jan 2014 09:01 PM PST  On the heels of continued volatile trading in global markets to start 2014, today a man out of Europe who has been extremely accurate with his calls on the gold market sent King World News a fantastic piece which includes 6 of the most fascinating charts you will ever see. KWN readers around the world will want to view these remarkable charts from Ronald-Peter Stoferle of Incrementum AG out of Lichtenstein.This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Posted: 15 Jan 2014 07:43 PM PST The Historical Gold Standard | Robert P. Murphy Excerpted from Lecture 1 of "Basics of Economics: An Introduction to the Free Market." The history of the gold standard was a failed one obviously. How can you have such a standard succeed when the people who control the gold are the same people... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.GoldSilverNewsBlog.com or http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| The Gold Price Closed at $1,238.30 Down $7.10 Posted: 15 Jan 2014 07:41 PM PST Gold Price Close Today : 1238.30 Change : -7.10 or -0.57% Silver Price Close Today : 20.13 Change : -0.15 or -0.73% Gold Silver Ratio Today : 61.5 Change : 0.10 or 0.16% Franklin didn't publish commentary today, if he publishes later it will be available here. Argentum et aurum comparenda sunt -- -- Gold and silver must be bought. - Franklin Sanders, The Moneychanger The-MoneyChanger.com © 2013, The Moneychanger. May not be republished in any form, including electronically, without our express permission. To avoid confusion, please remember that the comments above have a very short time horizon. Always invest with the primary trend. Gold's primary trend is up, targeting at least $3,130.00; silver's primary is up targeting 16:1 gold/silver ratio or $195.66; stocks' primary trend is down, targeting Dow under 2,900 and worth only one ounce of gold or 18 ounces of silver. or 18 ounces of silver. US $ and US$-denominated assets, primary trend down; real estate bubble has burst, primary trend down. WARNING AND DISCLAIMER. Be advised and warned: Do NOT use these commentaries to trade futures contracts. I don't intend them for that or write them with that short term trading outlook. I write them for long-term investors in physical metals. Take them as entertainment, but not as a timing service for futures. NOR do I recommend investing in gold or silver Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs). Those are NOT physical metal and I fear one day one or another may go up in smoke. Unless you can breathe smoke, stay away. Call me paranoid, but the surviving rabbit is wary of traps. NOR do I recommend trading futures options or other leveraged paper gold and silver products. These are not for the inexperienced. NOR do I recommend buying gold and silver on margin or with debt. What DO I recommend? Physical gold and silver coins and bars in your own hands. One final warning: NEVER insert a 747 Jumbo Jet up your nose. |
| The Gold Price Closed at $1,238.30 Down $7.10 Posted: 15 Jan 2014 07:41 PM PST Gold Price Close Today : 1238.30 Change : -7.10 or -0.57% Silver Price Close Today : 20.13 Change : -0.15 or -0.73% Gold Silver Ratio Today : 61.5 Change : 0.10 or 0.16% Franklin didn't publish commentary today, if he publishes later it will be available here. Argentum et aurum comparenda sunt -- -- Gold and silver must be bought. - Franklin Sanders, The Moneychanger The-MoneyChanger.com © 2013, The Moneychanger. May not be republished in any form, including electronically, without our express permission. To avoid confusion, please remember that the comments above have a very short time horizon. Always invest with the primary trend. Gold's primary trend is up, targeting at least $3,130.00; silver's primary is up targeting 16:1 gold/silver ratio or $195.66; stocks' primary trend is down, targeting Dow under 2,900 and worth only one ounce of gold or 18 ounces of silver. or 18 ounces of silver. US $ and US$-denominated assets, primary trend down; real estate bubble has burst, primary trend down. WARNING AND DISCLAIMER. Be advised and warned: Do NOT use these commentaries to trade futures contracts. I don't intend them for that or write them with that short term trading outlook. I write them for long-term investors in physical metals. Take them as entertainment, but not as a timing service for futures. NOR do I recommend investing in gold or silver Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs). Those are NOT physical metal and I fear one day one or another may go up in smoke. Unless you can breathe smoke, stay away. Call me paranoid, but the surviving rabbit is wary of traps. NOR do I recommend trading futures options or other leveraged paper gold and silver products. These are not for the inexperienced. NOR do I recommend buying gold and silver on margin or with debt. What DO I recommend? Physical gold and silver coins and bars in your own hands. One final warning: NEVER insert a 747 Jumbo Jet up your nose. |
| French Government Hikes Gold Taxes Posted: 15 Jan 2014 06:10 PM PST GoldBroker |
| Posted: 15 Jan 2014 05:52 PM PST For more information on subscription services offered at munKNEE dot.com click on one of the buttons below Nu Yu’s MarketSectorTA offers: The post Subscription Services appeared first on munKNEE dot.com. |
| GOLD Elliott Wave Technical Analysis Posted: 15 Jan 2014 04:06 PM PST Last analysis expected more downwards movement from both the main and alternate wave counts. This is what has happened. I am swapping over the main and alternate wave counts because the alternate has a better more typical fit. Read More... |
| Gold Breaks Downtrend, Sort Of Posted: 15 Jan 2014 04:00 PM PST It turns out that they are both true, but only if viewed from the proper perspective. The price plot of gold as priced in dollars is still below the declining tops line which dates back to late August 2013. |
| Swiss Gold Coins Are Ready To Change The World Posted: 15 Jan 2014 02:42 PM PST This article is reprinted from the latest Journal Of The Gold Standard Institute. "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" was the famous question that Steve Jobs asked PepsiCo's vice president John Sculley to win him for his company. We ask you the same question to win you for the Swiss Gold Coin Initiative. It is a project with historic potential, fully developed and ready for one or several visionary investors to make it happen. Let's get to the point: Switzerland is in a unique position, thanks to its direct democratic rights, to legalize, via a popular initiative, the introduction of constitutionally protected private gold coins. The constitution shall be amended as follows:
I spare the distinguished readers of this journal the arguments of why gold is the best known hedge against the dangers in today's paper money regime. Less well known are the obstacles in today's gold market. In Switzerland, for example, the federal government has the monopoly for minting coins which means the private production of gold coins is illegal. The last government made gold coins, the "Vrenelis", were manufactured in 1949. They cost about 220 Dollars per coin and their buying generally requires professional advice. Even more serious is that the tax exemption for gold as an investment is regulated in an ordinance and ordinances can be changed relatively easily. As long as the ownership of gold is, according to ProAurorum, limited to 13% of the Swiss population, a sudden tax on gold would leave 87% of the population unaffected and therefore likely unconcerned. At the same time the tax exemption for gold is an essential precondition for gold to serve as an investment hedge. The Gold Coin Initiative will remove these obstacles and allow the private production of simple and practical gold coins. The smallest size will be regular metal coins with 0.1 gram gold in their center, available for about 5 Dollars, which will open up a new dimension in accessibility to the gold market. The new coins will be standardized, suited for daily use and readily available, even from ATM's. With their introduction it may be expected that ownership of gold increases from 13% of the population to 99%. This is decisive because only when the great majority of the population has an interest in it is the taxfree status of gold guaranteed in a democracy! The initiative not only has advantages but at the same time no disadvantages. The reason ultimately lies in the fact that technically we are just facilitating the already existing gold trade and anchoring the also already existing tax exemption in the constitution. There are no costs and no risks to the public and the taxpayer. To illustrate the potential benefits let's take a look into the future, let's say three years after the acceptance of the initiative. Today, that is, three years after adoption of the initiative, gold coins are as familiar to the Swiss as Euros and Dollars. Small savers diversify their investments with gold as easily as only specialists and big savers used to. Gold coins serve as part of investment plans, as presents and kids once again love to save in piggy banks. Pension fund clients may choose to save up to 10% in physical gold coins, in life insurance contracts up to 20% can be selected. On the international level large scale investors value the constitutionally protected tax exemption for gold coins. Insurance companies offer life insurance policies with gold coin annuities and their VIP clients can tour the gold storage facilities. Banks plan to issue debit cards, gold bonds and international commercial contracts in gold. Swiss Gold Coins are produced for the whole world and foreign gold producers are building Swiss subsidiaries. A new high tech industry is developing around the technology to prevent forgery through new alloys, holograms and even microchips for large coins, in cooperation with the jewelry and watch industry. Marketing departments and artists love to issue coins with innovative designs, tourist regions and hotels use gold coins sold exclusively on site as an additional unique selling point. The highly visible and popular gold coin souvenirs are appearing all over the world and are causing grass root "bottom up" political pressure in other countries to introduce Gold Coins as well, while the manufacturing and financial industries there are putting on pressure "top down". The Swiss experience has shown that Gold coins are used not as a medium of exchange, but as an additional "safe haven" alternative for investors. Gold coins will therefore not be monetary competition for the Central Bank's independence. In the special Swiss case the National bank was even helped in its fight for a less volatile exchange rate by the gold coins function as a safe haven alternative to the Swiss Franc. These are only rough sketches of already foreseeable developments while we may expect that reality will far surpass them. Who would have thought, for example, that the opening up of the airwaves for personal communication, the “democratization of the walkie-talkie” so to speak by the mobile telephone would simultaneously lead to SMS to mobile Skype apps, and Twitter? Reality has in that case far surpassed even the imagination of science fiction writers and it is quite possible that the “democratization of Gold” will lead to similarly surprising innovations. Conclusion: The Swiss Gold Coin Initiative is a unique, politically realistic and potentially far reaching reformation of the monetary system. The next step is the collection of 100 000 signatures in Switzerland. To get started requires about the same number Dollars Considering the dangers in today's paper money system and in view of the anticipated benefits of the initiative its realization is not only a urgent opportunity, but a moral obligation for whoever can contribute to it. More information under www.goldfranc.org Author: Thomas Jacob | President Gold Franc Association |
| COMEX Registered Gold Stocks At Record Low Level Posted: 15 Jan 2014 02:34 PM PST The latest statistics on the COMEX gold stocks show that the amount of gold in the "Registered" category is at a record low level. Gold has been draining away at an astonishing speed in 2013 and the trend seems to continue in 2014. In particular, the gold stock in the "Registered" category went from 2.6 million ounces to 0.42 million a year ago, which is a sharp fall of 85%. Chart courtesy: Sharelynx.
From an historical perspective, the "Registered" gold stock is at levels not seen since 2002, the period of time when the current bull market started.
A lot has been written, especially in the blogosphere, about this trend, and there has been a lot of speculation about the outcome. Some are of the opinion that the COMEX is about to default. What most tend to forget, however, is to look at the total picture. First, the "Registered" category is just one of the two categories at COMEX, the other one being the "Eligible" category. The "Eligible" gold stock level shows a totally different picture, which is visible on the following chart (chart courtesy: Sharelynx).
Before continuing, let's have a look at the difference between the two COMEX categories. BullionVault has provided a useful definition: When acceptable bars are brought into an exchange-approved warehouse they become “eligible” for settlement of gold futures contracts traded on the exchange. So at this point, the owner of the bars may deliver them onto the exchange, and warehouse receipts are created. That is when the gold bars become “registered” stocks. Eligible gold stocks may or may not ever become registered stocks. Why? Because the warehouse is still a warehouse and the owner may simply want to vault their metal securely, before using it to meet demand elsewhere – for manufacturing, or from investors in another marketplace, such as Asia. This eligible gold may belong to an investor, a refiner, a hedge fund, a bank or producer. Many times these people are holding the metal for their end customers. And it may move at any time, and is much more flexible than the warehouse receipts that are registered stocks. We reached out to one of the veterans in precious metals markets and investing, David Morgan, founder of what we consider the most qualitative precious metals investment newsletter "The Morgan Report", to get his view on the above trends. First, what does it mean when "Registered" stocks continue their downtrend and end up near zero while there is plenty available in the "Eligible" category? It suggests the dealers are running out of inventory and so far whomever “owns” the gold in the eligible category is not (at this point) willing to place it into the registered category. Further thinking implies that the strong hands hold the eligible and the dealers are becoming venerable to a squeeze. Second, what does this trend mean in the context of the COMEX futures market which already reached extremes lately, i.e. commercials net long currently vs speculators lowest net long position ever? Based on historic data, David Morgan believes it usually means the commercials win and the speculators in the "specs" category (i.e. trading funds) lose. This has been proven again and again, it is a function of when contracts are closed or “settled”. The Futures market is a zero sum game, someone wins someone loses, it is that simple. The trading funds on a net basis – lose! Therefore, the current “set-up” implies that gold will go higher and even if some of the eligible gold is held by the commercials it most likely would not come into the market until higher prices are obtained. Third, how could it affect the bifurcation we already see today in the gold market, in particular the fundamentally different dynamics in the “paper market” vs “physical market”? Here it gets interesting as it touches the key premise (read: speculation) whether this trend could spell a default of the COMEX exchange and, hence, the whole fractional gold system. David Morgan thinks it is very unlikely that the COMEX (run by the CME) will run out of physical metal to deliver. But in the hypothetical case that it would happen, we could see a couple of scenarios:
The latter statement brings up the question what to look for as the end of the paper market setting the price for the physical market? There are too many variables to know exactly where to focus as far as the physical market showing stress:
We know physical reality trumps the paper paradigm — what we don’t know it exactly how and when it will occur, but we certainly are closer than ever before!
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| Precious Metals: Hedges In Inflationary Or Deflationary Depressions Posted: 15 Jan 2014 02:08 PM PST Fractional reserve banking and central banking began their reign of destruction upon our financial world a few centuries ago. Politician's greed and need for control over people have been ever-present. Their mutual interests created an unholy union from which were born two progeny. Call them Fire and Ice. Call them Inflation and Deflation. This is their story – simplified and sanitized. FRACTIONAL reserve banking allowed banks to loan out considerably more currency than was received from depositors – this increased the supply of currency in circulation. If demand for currency did not increase proportionally then each currency unit was devalued and prices increased. The first child born of the unholy union – Fire – destroyed the purchasing power of the currencies in the world financial systems. (Inflation was created via fractional reserve banking instead of the usual debasing coinage or printing paper.) Do you remember gasoline selling for $0.15 per gallon? Why does it cost 20 times as much now? The fires of inflation have destroyed most of the value of the currency unit – each dollar in circulation. Because of government greed, its need for power over people, and every politician's desire to meddle and spend, government granted bankers the power to create and control currency, monetize debt, fix interest rates, and so much more. Central Banking was born. In return government could spend in excess, borrow from bankers, members of the legislature collected handsomely from the banking community, national debts expanded, and interest expense paid on those debts grew to outrageous levels. Politicians, their friends, favored industries, and bankers won, while most others lost. For a personal perspective, how much interest have you earned on your savings since 2008? Does it seem like you lost and bankers won? Have your after tax wages increased proportionally with your expenses since 2008, since 2000, since 1971? Probably not! But it gets worse. After Fire – Inflation – has burned through the purchasing power of the currency units, then Ice – Deflation – the second child, destroys most of the remaining debt based assets. Ice is cold; he contracts monetary systems. Ice – deflation – creates central banker nightmares and becomes the second phase of financial destruction for the people. If you loan me $1,000,000 then you believe you have an asset – my debt to you. But if I can't or won't pay, what is that asset worth? Probably close to zero. The monetary system and your assets have deflated by approximately $1,000,000. Bankers inflated the quantity of currency in the system while Fire consumed much of its value, but when the reckoning occurs, most of the remaining debt based assets must be revalued down. Ice finished the destruction. Fire and Ice: Inflation and Deflation! If a government owes $17 Trillion to various people, other governments, agencies, pension plans, and corporations, and that government must borrow merely to pay the interest on the $17 Trillion, some might call that government insolvent. Ponzi finance will not continue forever. From a brilliant essay by Jeff Nielson: When Deflation Becomes Hyperinflation. "As the debts go higher and higher (which can only end in a deflationary crash); we see the money-printing accelerating at least as quickly, if not faster (which can only end in hyperinflation)." If the $17 Trillion in debt grows to say $50 Trillion in debt, is it still "all good?" What about $170 Trillion in debt? And while the debt is growing, Fire is consuming much of the purchasing power of the currency. Inflation grows until the forces of Ice overwhelm the system and the $17 Trillion or $170 Trillion in debt is revalued. Perhaps the inevitable deflation pushed the value down to a much lower value, or perhaps to zero. How much are $17 Trillion in bonds and notes worth if interest rates triple? How much is it worth in real purchasing power if it can't be repaid without "printing" the dollars for repayment? Eventually we arrive at economic depression – when the economic sins of the past are realized, when debts are paid or defaulted, when the reckoning occurs. Central bankers, politicians, and owners of debt based assets HOPE the reckoning will be delayed a little longer. But the day of reckoning does come. Enron, MFGlobal, Zimbabwe, Weimar Germany, Argentina, and 100 other collapses and hyperinflations are NOT exceptions. Fire and Ice. Inflation and Deflation. Inflationary depression, deflationary depression, one before the other, or simultaneously? Will we burn in the Fire of inflation or freeze in an Icy deflationary depression? Or will our politicians make it "all good" forever? The Case for Fire – Inflationary Depression:
Jeff Nielson: "… we have the hyperinflationary spiral, as exponential money-printing inevitably leads to the only mathematically possible outcome. Any item produced in infinite quantities, and at zero cost must be worthless, as an elementary proposition of logic/arithmetic." The Case for Ice – Deflationary Depression:
Jeff Nielson: "… hyperinflationary money-printing cannot prevent a debt-default implosion. If this was true; then we would have never seen any sovereign nation go bankrupt. Deadbeat nations would simply keep printing, and printing, and printing their worthless paper until they became 'solvent'." Our monetary systems and our personal assets are besieged by both Fire and Ice. Jeff Nielson: "The hyperinflationary depression first predicted by John Williams is not merely a plausible scenario. It is an absolutely inevitable fate." OR, DON'T PLAY THE GAME IN A WORLD OF FIRE AND ICE! You decide what your future will include. Gold and silver have been a store of value for 5,000 years. Call them real money, or a store of value, or monetary energy, or safety, or insurance. The Chinese, Indians, Russians and many others are choosing gold and silver instead of paper. They fear both Fire and Ice. The western world depends upon paper assets as we pretend Fire and Ice are under control, while we ship massive quantities of western gold to the east where it is better understood and appreciated. Fire and Ice have little impact upon gold and silver. Gold and silver were money long before the unholy union of fractional reserve banking and government unleashed Fire and Ice upon our world through inflating paper currencies and deflating debt. It is time to protect our financial future with gold and silver – Fire and Ice resistant assets.
GE Christenson | The Deviant Investor |
| 'Great Western Gold Robbery' about to end, Fitzwilson tells KWN Posted: 15 Jan 2014 01:53 PM PST 4:50p ET Wednesday, January 15, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Writing for King World News, Robert Fitzwilson of the Portola Group notes today's rise in gold mining shares despite a fall in the gold price and argues that "the Great Western Gold Robbery Is About to End," with share prices coming off their absurd lows. His commentary is posted at the KWN here: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/1/15_Th... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Buy metals at GoldMoney and enjoy international storage GoldMoney was established in 2001 by James and Geoff Turk and is safeguarding more than $1.7 billion in metals and currencies. Buy gold, silver, platinum, and palladium from GoldMoney over the Internet and store them in vaults in Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, taking advantage of GoldMoney's low storage rates, among the most competitive in the industry. GoldMoney also offers delivery of 100-gram and 1-kilogram gold bars and 1-kilogram silver bars. To learn more, please visit: http://www.goldmoney.com/?gmrefcode=gata Join GATA here: Vancouver Resource Investment Conference http://www.cambridgehouse.com/event/vancouver-resource-investment-confer... GATA Reception in Vancouver Mines and Money Hong Kong http://www.minesandmoney.com/hongkong/ * * * Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT How to profit with silver -- Future Money Trends is offering a special 16-page silver report with profiles of nine companies and technical analysis of their stock performance. Six of the companies have market capitalizations of less than $800 million and one company has a market cap of only $30 million. The most exciting of these companies will begin production in a few weeks and has a market cap of just $150 million. Half of all proceeds from the sale of this report will be donated to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee to support its efforts exposing manipulation and fraud in the gold and silver markets. To learn about this report, please visit: http://www.futuremoneytrends.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=376&tmp... |
| Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - JPM Holds the Whip Hand on the Comex - Buy Signal Posted: 15 Jan 2014 01:22 PM PST |
| Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - JPM Holds the Whip Hand on the Comex - Buy Signal Posted: 15 Jan 2014 01:22 PM PST |
| Life After Quantitative Easing Posted: 15 Jan 2014 01:20 PM PST In case you haven't guessed, the U.S. is on the other side of a massive spending peak that doesn't hit a trough until 2016-17. At that point, there is a surge again. Harry Dent, though, who we've been writing about over the past few days, is a pretty bearish fellow. As I noted in my essay “A Reasonable Way to Predict the Future” from yesterday, Harry Dent — author, newsletter writer, forecaster of market trends — watches demographics. And he notes there are spending peaks all over the world. After hitting a peak, economies get sleepy. At the recent Liberty Forum in St. Kitts Harry showed attendees a table called "Demographic Cliffs Around the World." Take a look. It is hard to miss the ominous 2007 date for the U.S. We're still in the soft years, demographically speaking.
"This is a fact," Harry said. "This isn't a theory. People earn and spend more money when they enter the workforce and the peak is 46… They don't peak because they run out of money. They peak because their kids get out of school. Spending then goes down. Don't you think this would have dramatic effect [on the economy]?" The audience nodded affirmatively. Harry is persuasive. Whether anyone can really make any money with this stuff, I'm not so sure. But it seems helpful to have demographics in your favor at least. Senior housing, life insurance and cruise ships — these things face pleasant odds at the demographic craps table. As people spend less, they also borrow less. This was kind of part two of Harry's talk, which focused on the fall in debt levels since the peak in 2007. "When debt bubbles burst," Harry said, "there is deflation every single time, no exceptions. Debt creates money. And when it is written off or falls, you're destroying money." This is the classic argument put forward by the deflationist crowd. Deflation, in this context, means prices overall are falling. Interest rates, too, tend to dawdle or fall. To their credit, the deflation crowd has been more or less right since 2008; at least, more so than the "government is printing money and there will be inflation" crowd. At least so far. The deflationists have two heavyweight examples in their stable. The first is the period between 1927 and 1939 in the U.S. And the second is Japan from 1989 to the present day. They are examples of the impotence of central banks in the face of a debt deflation. "Japan has been doing QE [quantitative easing] for 17 years and they have zero inflation," Harry said. In a similar way, since 2008, the Bernanke Fed also has yet to stoke inflation despite massive QE. The 10-year Treasury yields less than 3% and the gold price languishes. Perhaps we'll be the next Japan: a slow-growing economy with a lot of old people. Which may not be a bad thing — especially if you own senior housing, sell life insurance products and run a cruise ship. Well, we'll see. After the talk, people ambled outside, probably more confused than ever, blinking in the bright sun and fumbling for their sunglasses. Ah well, another rum punch and the world will make sense again. I shrugged and headed for the pool. Some big questions have no answers worth even a used movie ticket. Life is that way. As for me, I'll keep looking for cheap assets, owner-operators with good disclosures and excellent financial condition. A little demographic tail wind can't hurt, though. Regards, Chris Mayer P.S. The bottom line is America is getting older. In fact, over 10,000 Americans will turn 65 years old every day over the next 15 years. As a result, the percentage of the population over 65 will move from about 14% to 20%. Living longer creates some obvious needs. For one thing, people need to be sure they won't outlive their savings. Right now, that's a big worry. So how to meet the need to save and grow a nest egg without taking risk? I answered that question in today’s Daily Reckoning email edition – and gave readers an outline of 4 plays that could safely transform their portfolios in retirement. This is just one perk of being a reader of the FREE Daily Reckoning email edition. Each issue also comes packed with additional market commentary at least 3 specific chances to discover real, actionable investment plays. Make sure you’re getting the full experience. Sign up for the FREE Daily Reckoning email edition, right here. |
| Another Chinese analyst says gold is crucial to his country's economic security Posted: 15 Jan 2014 01:03 PM PST 4p ET Wednesday, January 15, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Gold researcher and GATA consultant Koos Jansen reports today on another leading personage in China's financial markets, Zhang Bingnan, market analyst for China Central Television and vice president of the China Gold Association, who told a financial conference in Beijing last year that gold is essential to China's economic security: http://www.ingoldwetrust.ch/zhang-bingnan-gold-safeguarding-national-eco... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT How to profit with silver -- Future Money Trends is offering a special 16-page silver report with our forecast for 2013 that includes profiles of nine companies and technical analysis of their stock performance. Six of the companies have market capitalizations of less than $800 million and one company has a market cap of only $30 million. The most exciting of these companies will begin production in a few weeks and has a market cap of just $150 million. Half of all proceeds from the sale of this report will be donated to the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee to support its efforts exposing manipulation and fraud in the gold and silver markets. To learn about this report, please visit: http://www.futuremoneytrends.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=376&tmp... Join GATA here: Vancouver Resource Investment Conference http://www.cambridgehouse.com/event/vancouver-resource-investment-confer... GATA Reception in Vancouver Mines and Money Hong Kong http://www.minesandmoney.com/hongkong/ * * * Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT Buy metals at GoldMoney and enjoy international storage GoldMoney was established in 2001 by James and Geoff Turk and safeguards more than $1.7 billion in metals and currencies. Buy gold, silver, platinum, and palladium from GoldMoney over the Internet and store them in vaults in Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, taking advantage of GoldMoney's low storage rates, among the most competitive in the industry. GoldMoney also offers delivery of 100-gram and 1-kilogram gold bars and 1-kilogram silver bars. To learn more, please visit: http://www.goldmoney.com/?gmrefcode=gata |
| Economic Collapse 2014 - Jim Rickards on the Fed's tapering Posted: 15 Jan 2014 12:30 PM PST Jim Rickards, lawyer, economist, investment banker, is a self-proclaimed gold-vigilante with over three decades of experience working in capital markets. In an interview with Boom Bust, Jim gives us his views on where the economy and monetary system are headed. He sees trouble for the current... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.GoldSilverNewsBlog.com or http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| TF Metals Report: Fun with GLD Posted: 15 Jan 2014 12:24 PM PST 3:23p ET Wednesday, January 15, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: The plundering of the gold exchange-traded fund GLD has reached astounding levels, described in detail today by the TF Metal Report's Turd Ferguson. His commentary is headlined "Fun with GLD" and it's posted here: http://www.tfmetalsreport.com/blog/5397/fun-gld CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT A Personal Touch in Buying Precious Metals If you've not secured your allocation of precious metals and numismatic coins, 2014 may be the last year to get them at affordable and undervalued prices. With huge amounts of gold leaving the West for Asia, the future availability of precious metals is very much in doubt. All Pro Gold has competitive pricing on all bullion and numismatic products -- and offers prompt delivery too. Long-time GATA supporters Fred Goldstein and Tim Murphy are glad to answer any questions or concerns about acquiring the monetary metals. All Pro Gold has an extensive electronic library of articles from the world's top market analysts. Learn more at www.allprogold.com or write to Fred and Tim at info@allprogold.com or telephone them at 1-855-377-4653. Join GATA here: Vancouver Resource Investment Conference http://www.cambridgehouse.com/event/vancouver-resource-investment-confer... GATA Reception in Vancouver Mines and Money Hong Kong http://www.minesandmoney.com/hongkong/ * * * Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT Jim Sinclair plans seminars in Asheville and Austin Gold advocate and mining entrepreneur Jim Sinclair will hold his next market seminars from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday, January 25, at the Clarion Inn Asheville, 550 Airport Road, Fletcher, North Carolina, and from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday, February 8, at the Austin, Texas, Airport Hilton. Advance registration is required. Details for the Asheville seminar are posted at Sinclair's Internet site, JSMineSet.com, here: http://www.jsmineset.com/2014/01/07/north-carolina-qa-session-venue-conf... Details for the Austin seminar are posted at JSMineSet.com here: http://www.jsmineset.com/2014/01/02/austin-texas-qa-session-confirmed/ |
| Central Bank Gold, 2014 and Beyond Posted: 15 Jan 2014 12:05 PM PST George Milling Stanley speaks on central-bank gold demand, prices and the 2014 outlook... CENTRAL BANK gold demand may slip in 2014 from recent years, says expert analyst George Milling Stanley, but the "turnaround" from the previous 20 years of selling remains remarkable. With four decades' experience of the bullion market, plus genuine "insider" contacts across the central banking world, George Milling-Stanley was head of government affairs at the World Gold Council, the mining-owned market development organization, for 15 years. Also a key member of the team which developed the idea of gold-backed Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) a decade ago, and now head of GMS on Gold LLC, he speaks here to BullionVault's New York Markets Live... More Business Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with New York Markets Live on BlogTalkRadio Looking at price, "I think gold is building a base around $1200 per ounce," says George Milling Stanley. "And let's be fair to gold – that's five times the price it was just a decade ago." Other key points discussed in this 27-minute audio include:
All told, "I think we're in for a very healthy market overall, definitely with higher prices," says George Milling Stanley, also sharing his expert view of the jewelry and gold investment markets worldwide. |
Jim Rickards says China is going to make the Singapore Gold Exchange the center for world gold trading.
"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" was the famous question that Steve Jobs asked PepsiCo's vice president John Sculley to win him for his company. We ask you the same question to win you for the Swiss Gold Coin Initiative. It is a project with historic potential, fully developed and ready for one or several visionary investors to make it happen.
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