Gold World News Flash

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• Technical chart shows silver price about to leap towards $100 an ounce
• 2013 US Gold Production Down 128,602 Oz – USGS
• Brave New Deviant World
• Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets Sees Gold Rally Ahead – Similar to 2005-2008
• Precious Metals, Blind Men and Golden Elephants
• Decreasing crop variety threatens global food security
• Santacruz Silver Mining Ltd. (TSXV:SCZ) Follow-Up #3
• Yuan Tumbles To 11-Month Lows As China Home Price Growth Slows
• Ukraine won't move market as much as paper gold disparity, Hathaway says
• LOUIS FARRAKHAN -- The U.S Dollar Is Worthless. Its Time To WAKE UP!
• The Gold Price Backed Down $6.10 Today Closing at $1,372.90
• The Gold Price Backed Down $6.10 Today Closing at $1,372.90
• Goldman Has Some German Stocks To Sell You
• David Morgan: Gold and Silver Free Markets Will Take Over At Some Point
• This Event Is Going To Shock People Around The World
• Fed's insolvency signals last days of the 'money bubble,' Turk says
• Will Renewed Indian Demand Drive Gold Prices much Higher? Revised ?dramatic difference!
• Financial Times: Gold pricing scrutiny widens
• Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Must Be an FOMC Week
• Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Must Be an FOMC Week
• No Way to Kill the Copper Price
• Tangible Versus Financial Assets: The Great Migration
• Embry notes counterintuitive action in gold amid Ukraine's disintegration
• Russia Vows To Switch To Other Currencies Over US Sanctions Threat – Glazyev
• Affordable Health Care from a Near-Death Experience
• West Controlling Markets To Keep Confidence From Collapsing
• Jeffrey Lewis: Precious metals, blind men, and golden elephants
• The Stars (And Thousands of Russian Troops) Are Aligned For Higher Gold Prices
• Gold Prices Spike After Crimea Vote, Retreat 1% from 6-Month High as EU Imposes Sanctions on Russia
• Why I’d Still Stay Away from Bitcoin
• Can Gold and Interest Rates Move Higher at the Same Time?
• Gold Price Moves Into Important Fibonacci Zone
• Doug Casey’s 9 Secrets for Successful Speculation
• Gold Arbitrage and Backwardation: Gold as a Commodity
• China Slowdown "Dampening Silver Price" After Solar Default Despite Crimea Speculation
• Rick Rule: Which Companies Will Bring in the Green?
• Rick Rule: Which Companies Will Bring in the Green?
• Three Breakouts in Gold and Silver Stocks
• Jeff Christian: It's Not Just Gold—Computerized Trading Being Used to Manipulate All Markets
• Time to Buy China?
• Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Gold Continues Higher as Miners Outperform

Technical chart shows silver price about to leap towards $100 an ounce Posted: 18 Mar 2014 12:30 AM PDT by Peter Cooper, Arabian Money: If the double bottom established by gold last year is good for the gold price it is outstandingly good news for silver. The latest technical chart from guru Clive Maund establishes a clear upward bounce towards $100 an ounce silver is in prospect. He comments: 'On this chart we see that, despite the severity of the reaction of the past three years, silver never broke down from its long-term uptrend, which now looks set to reassert itself with a vengeance after a fine base pattern has formed at a classic juncture, in a zone of strong support just above the support line of the long-term uptrend. Read More @ ArabianMoney.com

2013 US Gold Production Down 128,602 Oz – USGS Posted: 18 Mar 2014 12:00 AM PDT by Dorothy Kosich, MineWeb.com Preliminary 2013 annual U.S. gold production was 231,000 kilograms (7,426,822 troy ounces), down 4,000 kg (128,602 troy ounces) from 235,000 kg (7,555,425 troy ounces) from full-year 2012, the U.S. Geological Survey recently reported. Gold was produced at about 50 lode mines, a few larger placer mines (all in Alaska) and numerous smaller placer mines in Alaska and in the western states. The USGS estimated that 1,140 persons were directly employed in U.S. gold mining, down from 1,673 persons in 2012. Commercial-grade fine gold came from about 24 producers, the USGS estimated. Read More @ MineWeb.com

Brave New Deviant World Posted: 17 Mar 2014 11:05 PM PDT Read the Latest News About: Gold    Silver    Economy    Central Banking Consider our economic world from two perspectives: The Deviant... {This is a content summary only. Click on the blog title to continue reading this post, share your comments, browse the website, and more!}

Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets Sees Gold Rally Ahead – Similar to 2005-2008 Posted: 17 Mar 2014 09:40 PM PDT by Lawrence Williams, MineWeb.com Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets analysts Dan Rollins in Toronto and Jonathan Guy in London have come up with a detailed analysis of the gold market over the next few years comparing it with the big ETF driven gold price rally of 2005-2008. Over this period, gold doubled in price from $450 to $900, and while the analysts are not putting exact price predictions into their prognostications, nor coming up with a precise timescale, the implication is there in their research that this could lead to a big gold price increase in the medium to long term. Read More @ MineWeb.com

Precious Metals, Blind Men and Golden Elephants Posted: 17 Mar 2014 09:28 PM PDT Silver-Coin Investor

Decreasing crop variety threatens global food security Posted: 17 Mar 2014 08:20 PM PDT by Jonathan Benson, Natural News: Industrial agriculture that focuses on growing just a few isolated crops in large supply rather than an array of diverse crops on a smaller scale is threatening the global food supply in ways that might shock you. A new report by the agricultural research organization CGIAR has found that entire food systems are threatened with collapse by chemical-intensive monoculture, a corporate farming model that is rapidly spreading throughout the Third World. Trust.org reports that, over the last 50 years, many developing countries have shifted away from traditional agriculture models in favor of Western methods. Read More @ NaturalNews.com

Santacruz Silver Mining Ltd. (TSXV:SCZ) Follow-Up #3 Posted: 17 Mar 2014 07:52 PM PDT THREE PROMISING SILVER PROJECTS IN MEXICO WITH THE FIRST IN COMMERCIAL PRODUCTION. TARGET OF 2M AGEQ PRODUCTION FOR 2014. Santacruz is a Mexican focused silver company with · a producing project (Rosario), · two advanced-stage projects (San Felipe and Gavilanes) and · an early-stage exploration project (El Gachi). The corporate objective is to become a mid-tier silver producer

Yuan Tumbles To 11-Month Lows As China Home Price Growth Slows Posted: 17 Mar 2014 07:21 PM PDT It would appear that the widening of the daily trading bands (we discussed last night) are having a directional effect on USDCNY as the devaluation continues on the back of forced carry-trade unwinds. At 6.19, CNY is its weakest in 11 months (2.5% weaker than its lows in January) and the last 2 months have seen by far the biggest weakening in the currency on record. This 'implied' easing is modestly supporting the stock market and copper for now (though we suspect that is more spillover from risk-on squeezes post-Ukraine). While Goldman and BofA are adamant that widening the bands will not mean a change in trend overall, it seems clear that hot money is outflowing and driving a trend change anyway as corporate bond prices are not rising and home-price appreciation is slowing in the major cities.   USDCNY drops 100 pips to 6.19 - lowest in 11 months...   Via The FT, China's decision to squeeze speculators out of its currency is causing pain for local companies and individual investors.   http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230328780457944405144...   ...   China is attempting to reduce the amount of money flowing into the country from foreign investors looking to profit on a rise in the yuan. The government sees this cash as inflating asset prices and making the economy more vulnerable to financial shocks.   But the currency's decline is having a broader impact, particularly on Chinese companies that had placed bets on an appreciating yuan, traders and analysts say.   These companies have placed such bets in recent years to guarantee steady revenue from exports as the currency's value climbed steadily against the dollar.   Many companies borrow money to make these trades, magnifying gains when the yuan rises but opening them up to big losses if the currency falls.   With the yuan down 2% against the dollar this year, more of the bets are losing money, said Geoff Kendrick, head of Asian currencies and rates at Morgan Stanley.   ...   He estimates that paper losses on one popular way companies hedge their yuan exposure and individual investors bet on the yuan, through what is known as target redemption-forward products, have hit $2.3 billion, on contracts valued at $150 billion.   ...   "In the past, when the [yuan] had a clear one-way trend, it used to be really easy for corporates. But now, with two-way volatility it becomes very tricky for them to manage," he said. "It's going to be a very different market from here."   ...   For now, most of the losses remain on paper because investors and companies haven't yet sold their positions. However, banks are asking both corporate and individual clients with losing bets to pony up more collateral, traders in Hong Kong say. Banks also are advising companies to restructure their investments around weaker levels for the yuan, a cheaper alternative than completely unwinding millions of dollars of the products, which were originally designed to help companies hedge against gains in the yuan.   While the recent declines likely aren't big enough to trigger a stampede out of the yuan, the added volatility in the exchange rate may give some investors pause.   ...   "If the currency appreciation is no slam dunk anymore…part of the attraction of owning Chinese equities and bonds is being erased," said Greg Anderson, global head of foreign-exchange strategy for BMO Capital Markets, a subsidiary of BMO Financial Group. "The result will probably be less foreign portfolio investment in China."   ...   "Some hedge funds are closing up positions,"... Even a small drop in the yuan could trigger big losses. Many investors are vulnerable if the yuan weakens to 6.20 to the dollar And with home price appreciation slowing, perhaps thinsga re moving a little too fast for the PBOC to manage?

Ukraine won't move market as much as paper gold disparity, Hathaway says Posted: 17 Mar 2014 05:57 PM PDT 9p ET Monday, March 17, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Tocqueville Gold Fund manager John Hathaway today tells King World News that he doesn't attribute much market influence to the confrontation between Russia and the West over Ukraine. He's more interested in the disparity between paper gold and the real stuff. Hathaway adds that only gold seems to offer much of an alternative to the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. His interview is posted at the King World News blog here: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/3/17_Th... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc. ADVERTISEMENT Safe and Private Allocated Bullion Storage In Singapore Given the increasing risks in financial markets, it is more important than ever to own physical bullion coins and bars and to store them in the safest vaults in the world in the safest jurisdictions in the world. Gold advocates Jim Sinclair and Marc Faber have recommended Singapore. Now, with GoldCore, you can own coins and bars in fully insured, segregated, and allocated accounts in Singapore with the ability to take delivery. Learn more by downloading GoldCore's Essential Guide To Storing Gold In Singapore: http://info.goldcore.com/essential-guide-to-storing-gold-in-singapore And for more information call Daniel or Sharon at +44 203 0869200 in the United Kingdom or at +1 302 635 1160 in the United States. Or email them at info@goldcore.com. Join GATA here: Mines and Money Hong Kong Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre Monday-Friday, March 24-28, 2014 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China http://www.minesandmoney.com/hongkong/ Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference AT&T Performing Arts Center Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House 2403 Flora St., Dallas, Texas Saturday, May 31, 2014 http://stansberrydallas.com/ Canadian Investor Conference 2014 Vancouver Convention Centre West 1055 Canada Place, Vancouver, British Columbia Sunday and Monday, June 1 and 2, 2014 http://cambridgehouse.com/event/25/canadian-investor-conference-2014-inc... * * * 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: http://gata.org/tshirts 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: http://www.gata.org To contribute to GATA, please visit: http://www.gata.org/node/16

LOUIS FARRAKHAN -- The U.S Dollar Is Worthless. Its Time To WAKE UP! Posted: 17 Mar 2014 05:32 PM PDT Few economic analysts truly understand the underlying fundamentals of the global economy and their impact on the workings of the world. Fewer still are willing to share that knowledge with the general public and advise others on how to shield themselves against a destabilization of the system... [[ 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 Backed Down $6.10 Today Closing at $1,372.90 Posted: 17 Mar 2014 05:08 PM PDT Gold Price Close Today : 1372.90 Change : -6.10 or -0.44% Silver Price Close Today : 21.249 Change : -0.135 or -0.63% Gold Silver Ratio Today : 64.610 Change : 0.123 or 0.19% Silver Gold Ratio Today : 0.01548 Change : -0.000029 or -0.19% Platinum Price Close Today : 1467.80 Change : -1.20 or -0.08% Palladium Price Close Today : 776.20 Change : 3.15 or 0.41% S&P 500 : 1,858.83 Change : 17.70 or 0.96% Dow In GOLD$ : $244.63 Change : $ 3.80 or 1.58% Dow in GOLD oz : 11.834 Change : 0.184 or 1.58% Dow in SILVER oz : 764.61 Change : 13.32 or 1.77% Dow Industrial : 16,247.22 Change : 181.55 or 1.13% US Dollar Index : 79.510 Change : 0.007 or 0.01% Silver and GOLD PRICES both backed down today, gold $6.10 (0.44%) to $1,372.9 and silver 13.5 cents (0.063%) to 2124.9c. These are not gigantic changes, although the GOLD PRICE rushed into new high for the move with a lower close might possibly become a key reversal if it closes lower tomorrow. Silver did close below its 20 DMA at 2140c, but that's subject to oft whipsawing. Maybe silver and gold prices are merely wringing out the safe-haven enthusiasm. The gold price would have to fall to its 20 DMA at $1,342 to signal anything more than usual fluctuations. Bigger question is whether the SILVER PRICE is contradicting gold's rally, or merely lagging as it often does. If silver is non-confirming, then gold could find trouble ahead. I am still buying the price dips, although I'll give this one a day or so to sort itself out. That bull market may be dissembling, trying to shake off the most riders possible. I won't be sending y'all a commentary on this Friday because I am going to the Upcountry Literary Festival at the University of South Carolina at Union in Union, South Carolina. They have invited me to read from At Home in Dogwood Mudhole, on Saturday, 22 March 2014. My 25 minutes in the sun runs from 9:20 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. Last year Susan and I enjoyed a delightful time there from a wide variety of writers. If you make it, be sure to say hello to us. I won't be saying ne'er a word about silver and gold on stage. I reckon you buy the rumor and sell the news. Putin's coup in Crimea was might near accomplished with the secession referendum over the weekend. The Crimeans who voted chose to secede from Ukraine and go with Russia. That appears to be a done deal, so perhaps now the entire issue will evaporate, boiling off in steam from hot politicians. That attitude seems to have sucked the safe-haven money out of the yen today, perhaps out of gold, and blown it back into stocks. I'm not so sure. Contemporary politicians are just as moronic as those of 1914, so plenty capable of starting a devastating war. I can only pray they don't succeed. Speaking of secession, how come they can do that in Crimea but we can't do that in Tennessee? After all, the US has been the promoter of "national self-determination" since Woodrow Wilson. I reckon that US enthusiasm depends on who's seceding from whom. Once the US seizes a country fair and square, they ain't forward to give it back. Ask the Hawai'ians. Yen fell most on losing that safe-haven money, down 0.375 to 98.29 cents/Y100. Left behind a nasty exhaustion gap, which likely puts the cap on the Yen for some time. Like Freddy Kruger, the euro has come back, even if its chainsaw is a mite dull. Technically it's headed for $1.4500, but what's "technical" to a central-bank-manipulated scrofulous fiat currency? Higher the euro climbs, more heat it puts on European manufacturers, mostly German. US dollar is poised on a precipice, but rose 7 basis points today (0.09%) to 79.51. Should the dollar not reverse, it could suffer a blood-curdling fall from here. The casino was re-opened and blowin' and goin' on Wall Street today. Dow shot up 181.55 (1.13%) to 14,247.22, a tinch over the 20 Day Moving Average (16,245.88). Dow remains in a downtrend until it crosses above 16,588.25, the December high. MACD flashed a sell signal last week, which flasheth still. S&P500 leapt 0.965 (17.7) to 1,858.83, also above the 20 DMA (1,855.25). Needs to jump over $1,875 to beat the present downtrend. After last week's big drops the Dow in Metals rose today on metal's weakness and stock strength. Neither stands in any near peril of reversing trend upward. Dow in Gold ended the day up 2.25% to 11.88 oz (G$245.58). Dow in Silver hit its 200 DMA Friday but bounced up today and even ran above its 20 DMA (759.45 oz). Went home today 2.42% higher at 766.74 oz (S$991.34 silver dollars). Why do I report these prices in gold dollars and silver dollars? Either because I'm crazy, or because I'm trying to wean y'all off thinking in filthy fiat money and into real money. Also, measuring the Dow in gold gives us one unchanging measure of the Dow since it began in 1885. Argentum et aurum comparenda sunt -- -- Gold and silver must be bought. - Franklin Sanders, The Moneychanger The-MoneyChanger.com © 2014, 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 Backed Down $6.10 Today Closing at $1,372.90 Posted: 17 Mar 2014 05:08 PM PDT Gold Price Close Today : 1372.90 Change : -6.10 or -0.44% Silver Price Close Today : 21.249 Change : -0.135 or -0.63% Gold Silver Ratio Today : 64.610 Change : 0.123 or 0.19% Silver Gold Ratio Today : 0.01548 Change : -0.000029 or -0.19% Platinum Price Close Today : 1467.80 Change : -1.20 or -0.08% Palladium Price Close Today : 776.20 Change : 3.15 or 0.41% S&P 500 : 1,858.83 Change : 17.70 or 0.96% Dow In GOLD$ : $244.63 Change : $ 3.80 or 1.58% Dow in GOLD oz : 11.834 Change : 0.184 or 1.58% Dow in SILVER oz : 764.61 Change : 13.32 or 1.77% Dow Industrial : 16,247.22 Change : 181.55 or 1.13% US Dollar Index : 79.510 Change : 0.007 or 0.01% Silver and GOLD PRICES both backed down today, gold $6.10 (0.44%) to $1,372.9 and silver 13.5 cents (0.063%) to 2124.9c. These are not gigantic changes, although the GOLD PRICE rushed into new high for the move with a lower close might possibly become a key reversal if it closes lower tomorrow. Silver did close below its 20 DMA at 2140c, but that's subject to oft whipsawing. Maybe silver and gold prices are merely wringing out the safe-haven enthusiasm. The gold price would have to fall to its 20 DMA at $1,342 to signal anything more than usual fluctuations. Bigger question is whether the SILVER PRICE is contradicting gold's rally, or merely lagging as it often does. If silver is non-confirming, then gold could find trouble ahead. I am still buying the price dips, although I'll give this one a day or so to sort itself out. That bull market may be dissembling, trying to shake off the most riders possible. I won't be sending y'all a commentary on this Friday because I am going to the Upcountry Literary Festival at the University of South Carolina at Union in Union, South Carolina. They have invited me to read from At Home in Dogwood Mudhole, on Saturday, 22 March 2014. My 25 minutes in the sun runs from 9:20 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. Last year Susan and I enjoyed a delightful time there from a wide variety of writers. If you make it, be sure to say hello to us. I won't be saying ne'er a word about silver and gold on stage. I reckon you buy the rumor and sell the news. Putin's coup in Crimea was might near accomplished with the secession referendum over the weekend. The Crimeans who voted chose to secede from Ukraine and go with Russia. That appears to be a done deal, so perhaps now the entire issue will evaporate, boiling off in steam from hot politicians. That attitude seems to have sucked the safe-haven money out of the yen today, perhaps out of gold, and blown it back into stocks. I'm not so sure. Contemporary politicians are just as moronic as those of 1914, so plenty capable of starting a devastating war. I can only pray they don't succeed. Speaking of secession, how come they can do that in Crimea but we can't do that in Tennessee? After all, the US has been the promoter of "national self-determination" since Woodrow Wilson. I reckon that US enthusiasm depends on who's seceding from whom. Once the US seizes a country fair and square, they ain't forward to give it back. Ask the Hawai'ians. Yen fell most on losing that safe-haven money, down 0.375 to 98.29 cents/Y100. Left behind a nasty exhaustion gap, which likely puts the cap on the Yen for some time. Like Freddy Kruger, the euro has come back, even if its chainsaw is a mite dull. Technically it's headed for $1.4500, but what's "technical" to a central-bank-manipulated scrofulous fiat currency? Higher the euro climbs, more heat it puts on European manufacturers, mostly German. US dollar is poised on a precipice, but rose 7 basis points today (0.09%) to 79.51. Should the dollar not reverse, it could suffer a blood-curdling fall from here. The casino was re-opened and blowin' and goin' on Wall Street today. Dow shot up 181.55 (1.13%) to 14,247.22, a tinch over the 20 Day Moving Average (16,245.88). Dow remains in a downtrend until it crosses above 16,588.25, the December high. MACD flashed a sell signal last week, which flasheth still. S&P500 leapt 0.965 (17.7) to 1,858.83, also above the 20 DMA (1,855.25). Needs to jump over $1,875 to beat the present downtrend. After last week's big drops the Dow in Metals rose today on metal's weakness and stock strength. Neither stands in any near peril of reversing trend upward. Dow in Gold ended the day up 2.25% to 11.88 oz (G$245.58). Dow in Silver hit its 200 DMA Friday but bounced up today and even ran above its 20 DMA (759.45 oz). Went home today 2.42% higher at 766.74 oz (S$991.34 silver dollars). Why do I report these prices in gold dollars and silver dollars? Either because I'm crazy, or because I'm trying to wean y'all off thinking in filthy fiat money and into real money. Also, measuring the Dow in gold gives us one unchanging measure of the Dow since it began in 1885. Argentum et aurum comparenda sunt -- -- Gold and silver must be bought. - Franklin Sanders, The Moneychanger The-MoneyChanger.com © 2014, 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.

Goldman Has Some German Stocks To Sell You Posted: 17 Mar 2014 04:24 PM PDT Having offloaded its short-dated Ukraine bonds to clients (recommending they buy them in size when Yanukovych was ousted for a decent loss so far), the boys from Goldman are up to their old tricks with a lorry-load of German stocks to sell you... "Year to date, the DAX is one of the worst performing indices in Europe (down 4.6% relative to the European market which is flat)... but we think the overall German market will outperform the pan-European STOXX Europe 600 index, and also highlight a list of DAX stocks that are currently Buy rated by our analysts."   Via Goldman Sachs, Year to date, the DAX is one of the worst performing indices in Europe (down 4.6% relative to the European market which is flat). A substantial part of this underperformance happened in the last two weeks as political issues surrounding the situation in Crimea and weak data out of China negatively impacted the DAX. In addition the reform agenda in Italy and continued good data from the periphery has likely steered more investors to look at recovery stories there rather than in the core. This underperformance remains modest compared to the strong performance of the second half of last year and we continue to see good upside in the DAX for three main reasons: 1) Earnings exposure to global growth recovery 2) Stronger domestic demand dynamic in Germany 3) Still attractive valuation relative to the European market Our Global Markets team also initiated today a trade on the DAX index DAX offers exposure to global growth recovery We expect the recent weakness in macro data out of the US to prove transitory and growth to pick up from 2Q. In China, while risks to our growth forecast in the near term are to the downside, our economists expect growth to improve from current levels as the year progresses. The DAX offers the highest degree of operating leverage in the European market on our estimates and therefore should benefit from the acceleration in global growth we expect. When measured as the ratio of EBIT growth to sales growth, Germany's median degree of operating leverage is 2.5x. This means that for every percentage point of sales growth one can on average expect 2.5 pp of EBIT growth. DAX offers high degree of operating leverage Source: Worldscope, Datastream, Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. In our conversations with clients, we find there are often concerns about German exposure to the weakness in emerging markets. However, when looking at sales exposure data reported by Worldscope, we don't find the DAX to be substantially more exposed to emerging markets than the broader European market. The table below details the sales exposure of Germany. Of course, sales exposure for the DAX might underestimate the true amount of exposure given the JVs of the autos companies are not included in sales exposure (autos sales are over a third of DAX total sales) and it is likely the EM exposure of the DAX is more specifically China-related. It however appears that the DAX is really more sensitive to global growth overall rather than just EM growth. This is also true when looking at the recent price action of the DAX: it outperformed the market from June 2013 even as EM underperformed (as measure by our EM exposure basket). At the time, our global leading indicator index (GLI) was in the expansion phase characterized by positive growth and positive acceleration, it has since moved to slowdown (positive growth and negative acceleration). We continue to expect a return into ‘Expansion’ later this year in line with our optimistic outlook for US growth, and therefore anticipate the current slowdown to remain mild. DAX is more exposed to global growth than just EM Performance of the DAX and our EM exposure basket (both relative to market) Geographical revenue exposure breakdown for European indices Source: Worldscope, Datastream, Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research DAX tends to outperform when growth is improving Source: Datastream, Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. Currency can also have an impact on the big German exporters and recent comments by ECB President Draghi suggest that the ECB may be becoming more focused on the issue. Draghi said in a speech last Thursday that the level of the exchange rate was "increasingly relevant in our assessment of price stability". He also said that "any material risk of inflation expectations becoming unanchored will be countered with additional monetary policy measures". Related to this, Bundesbank head Weidmann also said that "the euro exchange rate is not a policy target for us as monetary policy makers but, of course, the euro enters like other variables in our assessment of the economy". In that sense, it also affects our projections for inflation and real growth". These comments ought to be seen as helpful for the export-focused companies. That said, our FX strategists forecast the euro to be roughly flat versus the dollar over the next six to 12 months – and we don’t see the currency as a big support or hindrance to a positive call on the DAX. Indeed over the longer term there has been a slight positive correlation between DAX relative performance and the euro versus dollar exchange rate. A strong euro is often coupled with better European growth and lower risks both of which are supportive of the DAX. Short term though any signs of a weaker euro would most likely boost sentiment for the DAX, provided the trigger was not a risk-off environment. 3-month correlation DAX vs. market (weekly returns) with EUR/US$ Source: Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. Stronger domestic demand dynamic; and more resilient EPS revisions In addition to the higher gearing to an improved global growth dynamic, we also believe that domestic demand in Germany will support the relative performance of the DAX. Our economists expect German real GDP to grow by 2.0% and 2.1% in 2014 and 2015 respectively: this compares to only 0.9% and 1.2% for the Euro area. This better growth is driven by a pick-up in consumption and fixed asset investment. Recent macro data from Germany has been supportive; most recently the January Industrial Production figures released on Friday (March 14) showed continued robust growth. I/B/E/S earnings expectations have also been more resilient for the DAX than for the broader market: since the beginning of the year DAX 2014E earnings have been revised down by 1.9% while the pan-European market has seen revisions of 4.2%. Still attractive valuation relative to the broader European market As a result of more resilient earnings and underperformance year to date the DAX, which was already inexpensive relative to the European market, has become even more attractive. On a 12-month forward P/E basis, the DAX currently trades on 11.9x a 13% discount to the 13.7x the STOXX Europe 600 is on. This 13% discount is about a standard deviation away from the historical average. DAX valuation is attractive relative to the European market Source: I/B/E/S, Datastream, Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research Sector composition and what we like in Germany The operating leverage highlighted above is mostly driven by its sector composition: relative to the STOXX Europe 600, the DAX has overweights in autos & parts, chemicals and technology, and underweight in commodities and food & beverages. We favour cyclical sectors (especially those with exposure to developed market recovery) and are underweight basic resources (which the DAX has very little of) as well as relatively expensive defensives (we are underweight food & beverages). We are underweight chemicals and industrial goods & services (two sectors which are important in the composition of the DAX) but this is somewhat mitigated by two key facts which are not captured by simple sector exposure analysis. First, Bayer which is the largest stock in DAX is classified as a Chemical while the majority of its business is actually pharmaceuticals. Secondly, a large part of the industrial goods and services sector is in the electrical equipment segment on which we are less negative than the EM exposed machinery. Sector composition of European equity indices Source: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research. While we think the overall German market will outperform the pan-European STOXX Europe 600 index, we also highlight a list of DAX stocks that are currently Buy rated by our analysts. DAX Buy-rated stocks Buy* denotes Conviction List membership. Source: Datastream, Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research.

David Morgan: Gold and Silver Free Markets Will Take Over At Some Point Posted: 17 Mar 2014 03:55 PM PDT In his latest online interview, David Morgan touches on several subjects related to gold and silver. In this article, we highlight in particular the fundamental issues Morgan talks about. For more information about David Morgan’s premium service, readers are adviced to subscribe to receive a 30 day trial to The Morgan Report. Whether hyperinflation is a likely scenario: I don’t expect to see hyperinflation. I expect to see a currency crisis. A currency crisis does not necessarily mean hyperinflation although you could make the case that it might happen most of the time, Zimbabwe being the most recent example. A currency crisis is not really created by the people; it is created in the macro picture where, for instance, China stops buying US bonds, or Russia wants to dump US bonds. A massive sale in bonds drives interest rates up; as interest rates go up, bond values go down. It’s sort of a self governing mechanism that is in place in the bond market. It is somewhat deflationary. You can have the dollar continuing to decline. Hopefully it happens at a rate that we can deal with it, but it could take place in a manner that gets out of control. It that would take place, we could expect some sort of a new Bretton Woods agreement, set up during a G20 meeting where they agree to absorb the debt and come out with a new currency (there are several scenarios possible in fact). The point is that I am in the currency destruction camp, not the hyperinlfationary camp. Despite a tight gold and silver supply in 2013, the prices did not spike: A lot of these paper markets are used by the powers that be to maintain a certain price level while the physical market is doing something else. In other words, let’s say you have a lot of over the counter derivatives at a certain price point, and you knew in advance that those would be cashed in for physical, you could do that in the over the counter market, nobody would see that in the futures market, you could be able to drain the gold supply from West to East which is happening for years now. The point is that there is so much physical, even if that would be maintained for a while, it would not be maintained forever. That is the point about manipulation. Every manipulation in mankind has always come to a point because the free market is always smarter than mankind no matter how smart these people are. Whether supply and demand will balance at some point in the future and reflect in the prices: You once get to the point where these artificial prices curtail production and sooner or later someone is going to have it. The good point about silver is that once you have a physical need in the industrial sector, the investment demand could pick up, or vice versa. So investment and industrial demand can reinforce themselves. That’s something a lot of other commodities don’t have, so I am still bullish on silver. Nevertheless, it remains frustrating to see these prices where they are when we know that silver producers have an all-in cost of $25 to $27 per ounce. You need to look at least to $32 to make it profitable for silver miners to remain in business.

This Event Is Going To Shock People Around The World Posted: 17 Mar 2014 03:54 PM PDT Today a 42-year market veteran spoke with King World News about Ukraine, China, and an event that is going to shock people around the world. John Hathaway, who is one of the most respected institutional minds in the world today when it comes to gold, and whose fund was awarded a coveted 5-star rating, also warned investors that the U.S. dollar is in a great deal of trouble. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Fed's insolvency signals last days of the 'money bubble,' Turk says Posted: 17 Mar 2014 01:42 PM PDT 4:40p ET Monday, March 17, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: The Federal Reserve is holding on its books many assets of little actual value compared to their nominal value, GoldMoney founder and GATA consultant tells King World news today. It's so bad, Turk says, that the Fed's ratio of liabilities to assets is 73 to 1. This ratio of insolvency, Turk says, is a manifestation of the last days of the "money bubble." His interview is posted at the King World News blog here: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/3/17_Th... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc. ADVERTISEMENT How to profit with silver -- and which stocks to buy now 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... Join GATA here: Mines and Money Hong Kong Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre Monday-Friday, March 24-28, 2014 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China http://www.minesandmoney.com/hongkong/ Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference AT&T Performing Arts Center Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House 2403 Flora St., Dallas, Texas Saturday, May 31, 2014 http://stansberrydallas.com/ Canadian Investor Conference 2014 Vancouver Convention Centre West 1055 Canada Place, Vancouver, British Columbia Sunday and Monday, June 1 and 2, 2014 http://cambridgehouse.com/event/25/canadian-investor-conference-2014-inc... * * * 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: http://gata.org/tshirts 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: http://www.gata.org To contribute to GATA, please visit: http://www.gata.org/node/16 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

Will Renewed Indian Demand Drive Gold Prices much Higher? Revised ?dramatic difference! Posted: 17 Mar 2014 01:30 PM PDT Gold Forecaster

Financial Times: Gold pricing scrutiny widens Posted: 17 Mar 2014 01:27 PM PDT With an Introduction from Zero Hedge: "We look forward to learning all about it by the staunch defender of fair and efficient gold markets, the Financial Times. Which is why, just in case, we have saved this article too. You never know when the FT will pull down this article or that, simply for breaching the taboo topic of gold price manipulation, something the Bank of England, we are confident, will be very interested in as well." ... ... For the full commentary: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-17/ubs-investigated-gold-manipulat... * * * Gold Pricing Scrutiny Widens By Neil Hume and Xan Rice Financial Times, London Monday, March 17, 2014 The global regulatory scrutiny of benchmarks is shifting from interest rates and foreign exchange to commodities. In particular, the focus on bullion looks set to intensify following Friday's admission by UBS in its 2013 annual report: that a review of its foreign exchange operations has been widened to include its precious metals business. In the report, the Swiss bank said: "Following an initial media report in June 2013 of widespread irregularities in the foreign exchange markets, UBS immediately commenced an internal review of its foreign exchange business, which includes our precious metals business." It added: "A number of authorities also are reportedly investigating potential manipulation of precious metal prices. UBS has taken and will take appropriate action with respect to certain personnel as a result of its ongoing review." ... ... For the full story: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c43709a8-ad9c-11e3-9ddc-00144feab7de.html ADVERTISEMENT How to profit with silver -- and which stocks to buy now 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... Join GATA here: Mines and Money Hong Kong Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre Monday-Friday, March 24-28, 2014 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China http://www.minesandmoney.com/hongkong/ Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference AT&T Performing Arts Center Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House 2403 Flora St., Dallas, Texas Saturday, May 31, 2014 http://stansberrydallas.com/ Canadian Investor Conference 2014 Vancouver Convention Centre West 1055 Canada Place, Vancouver, British Columbia Sunday and Monday, June 1 and 2, 2014 http://cambridgehouse.com/event/25/canadian-investor-conference-2014-inc... * * * 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: http://gata.org/tshirts 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: http://www.gata.org To contribute to GATA, please visit: http://www.gata.org/node/16 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

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Must Be an FOMC Week Posted: 17 Mar 2014 01:16 PM PDT

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Must Be an FOMC Week Posted: 17 Mar 2014 01:16 PM PDT

No Way to Kill the Copper Price Posted: 17 Mar 2014 12:51 PM PDT Russia's military actions add a significant risk markup to gold and silver and will alter energy markets for many years to come. It's investable, for sure. Spot gold, for example, was selling at $1,371 this morning. Silver was selling at $21.39. To paraphrase comedian Tina Fey making fun of political figure Sarah Palin, I think that a lot of people can see Russia from their window now. Just look for the exhaust smoke from the tanks. Really, in case you're not old enough to know about these kinds of things, Russians don't fool around. Russians don't surrender. Russians don't retreat. Not without a fight. Not these Russians. We're in a different world than not long ago. So what do you need to worry about? Let's begin with hard numbers, such as… the price of copper over the past month. Note the obvious recent decline. While gold and silver prices have risen — courtesy of Putin's Army — red metal is getting cheaper. The price drop has spooked investors. It's worth worrying about. What does it mean when copper moves from the $3.25 range in mid-February to below $3 last week? That's 9% or so to the downside. It matters, but still… how does it fit into the longer term? After all, different things happen for different reasons. Let's back up and look at the one-year copper price chart. Current copper prices near where they were last summer during the metals meltdown. It certainly wasn't the end of the world last summer, but the price excursion took many a mining share price into the depths as well, you'll recall. (Ugh, how can you forget?) Then again, after the summer doldrums, we had a fall recovery, an end-of-year sell-off and then a January recovery. Which gets back to the basic questions: What does the latest copper move mean? What's the broad investment signal? When I look at these charts in the wake of the copper price decline of the past month, I have to ask both sides of the question. Are we at an ephemeral price point? The bottom side of a bouncing-ball cycle? And is this a harbinger of more positive things to come? Or will copper prices fall further, taking share prices along for the ride? If anyone has a copy of The Wall Street Journal from next month, let me know. On the negative side of things, mainstream news puts much of the blame for declining copper prices against China. In other words, per legacy media, we're moving toward that big China crash that we've all expected for so many years. It certainly didn't help that a tiny Chinese solar company defaulted on a bond issue a little more than a week ago. That hit the markets like news of a new global bird flu pandemic. Even worse than bird flu, perhaps, we have news like this, from the British newspaper The Guardian: "Premier Li Kequiang told lenders to China's private-sector factories they should expect debt defaults as the world's second-largest economy encounters 'serious challenges' in the year ahead." Uh-oh. Serious challenges? That sounds… serious. While China is "slowing down," its government is going to build more stuff — roads, bridges, airports, etc. Recall that old saying, "Buy the rumors, sell the news." Well, we're now well past "rumors" of the Chinese economic correction. This "news" is about serious Chinese problems. Loans will default, says one of the top guys in China — where top guys are not known to speak intemperately. Indeed, over the years, many Chinese companies have bought up physical copper just to store in warehouses. That is, they don't bend wire or melt metal. They use copper as loan collateral, to get around lending restrictions. Now we're in a quandary. Declining copper prices mean that many Chinese firms will write down the value of their copper inventory. Thus, many Chinese companies will face loan calls that they can't repay. Just like the man said: Whoops. With this in mind, I don't blame anyone for getting nervous and hitting the stock market sell button. As in… go to cash and sit on the sidelines for a while. As a newsletter editor, I'm not officially issuing "sell" news, but my caution is that there's no shame in booking gains, husbanding cash and avoiding losses. Still, is it totally gloom and doom? Here's another paragraph from that same Guardian article above: "Figures this week revealed that Beijing is copying the Japanese tactic of ramping up public infrastructure spending to replace the steep slowdown in private-sector investment. Fixed asset investment, a measure of government spending on infrastructure, expanded 17.9% during the first two months of 2014, the National Bureau of Statistics said." That's a horse from a different stable, right? While China is "slowing down," its government is going to build more stuff — roads, bridges, airports, etc. That, and expand the military budget by over 12%, which implies buying equipment and electronics. So perhaps there's still hope for the red metal and other components of the periodic table? It gets back to that question of where are we within the cycle? Let's step back a bit further. For all the chest-thumping over the recent copper price decline, the metal is still trading in a range that has held up for three or more years. Here's the chart going back to the 2009 post-crash recovery. So, yes, things could be better for copper. Then again, things could be much worse, considering… Perhaps things aren't that bad. Of course, we don't live in Ukraine. Regards Byron King for The Daily Reckoning P.S. In today’s issue of The Daily Reckoning email edition, I gave readers an exclusive invite to a special online event, where I plan to reveal a very unique and potentially very lucrative investment strategy — something I call becoming "Texas rich in 60 days". Just one small benefit of being a Daily Reckoning email reader. If you didn’t get it, you’re missing out on a wealth of great investment advice and special offers just like this one. Sign up for FREE, right here, to make sure you never miss another opportunity.

Tangible Versus Financial Assets: The Great Migration Posted: 17 Mar 2014 11:00 AM PDT Excerpted from The Money Bubble, by James Turk and John Rubino. Wealth comes in many forms, but only two general categories: tangible and financial. Tangible wealth is made up of real, physical things like buildings, farmland, oil wells, commodities, etc. These things can be seen and touched, and – crucially – they don't have counterparty risk. That is, no one else has to make good on a promise for a tangible asset to have value. Financial assets like bank deposits, insurance policies, bonds, and annuities do have counterparty risk, which is to say they depend on someone else's promise. A bank deposit, for instance, only has value if the bank is willing and able to produce that money when the account holder requests it. And a piece of paper currency is only valuable if the government manages the money supply properly. The part of the economy represented by industries that deal primarily in financial assets is known as FIRE, for finance, insurance, and real estate (real estate in this case referring to mortgages and other property loans that are packaged and traded). Equities, because they represent ownership shares in public companies, can be either tangible or financial depending on the underlying company. A share of Exxon Mobil stock is a tangible asset because oil wells are real, while a share of Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase would be financial because a bank's wealth is primarily in the form of loans and other financial instruments. Over long periods of time these two asset categories tend to move in and out of favor, with tangible assets being more prized in hard, uncertain times when preservation of capital is paramount and counterparty risk is suspect, and financial assets being favored when times are good and people have grown to trust major financial institutions and governments to keep promises and generate big returns. One of the keys to successful money management is to understand which category is ascendant and therefore the more profitable/safe place to be. During a boom, one should own financial assets until they become relatively-overvalued (as they did in 1929, 1968, and 2000), then shift into tangible assets and own them until they become overvalued (1947 and 1980). As this is written in late 2013, the world is at one of these inflection points, perhaps the biggest ever. As the following charts illustrate, during the expansion of the credit bubble that began after World War II Americans gradually became more and more optimistic about the future and more trusting of banks and governments. Because the good times seemed likely to continue, using other people's money to achieve one's ends came to be seen as increasingly reasonable and wise. Debt expanded and finance (i.e. the debt industry) became an ever-more important part of the economy, while manufacturing in particular and tangible assets in general became relatively less important. The FIRE economy doubled as a percent of GDP between 1947 and 2008 while manufacturing fell by nearly two-thirds. For investors, the standard portfolio of stocks, bonds and dollar cash was a great way to build wealth, with very little long-term downside risk. That faith was shaken by the crash of 2008, which should have marked the end of the post-WWII cycle of credit expansion and ushered in a mass-migration out of finance and into tangible assets. Instead, the world's fiat currency managers upped the ante, cutting interest rates to zero and flooding the system with newly-created currency in an attempt to re-inflate the financial bubble. They handed the biggest banks effectively-unlimited amounts of free money, and the banks, reluctant to lend so soon after their near-death experience, simply deposited their excess reserves with the Fed, earning a small but risk-free return. Illustrating just how much money the banks were given, even with this hyper-conservative investment strategy, the industry reported record profits in 2013. And within the banking industry it was the major banks, as the recipients of most of the Fed's largesse, which reaped most of the rewards. In 2013, the 1.5 percent of banks with the largest asset bases earned about 80 percent of the industry's profits. Big-bank stocks, meanwhile, were among the best performers of the post-crash bull market. The debt monetization experiment had succeeded in lengthening what was already an extreme pendulum swing towards financial assets. So now the question becomes, will the monetary authorities be able to push the pendulum further, or was the financial asset recovery of 2009-2013 the last gasp of a dying trend? By now you know that we're firmly in the latter camp. The expansion that began after World War II has produced extraordinary amounts of debt, leverage and complexity, from a financial standpoint achieving "peak" everything. Finance has no further to go, and the great migration out of financial assets and into tangible things is about to begin, on a scale commensurate with the historically-unprecedented size of the post-WWII credit bubble. Read more here.

Embry notes counterintuitive action in gold amid Ukraine's disintegration Posted: 17 Mar 2014 10:10 AM PDT 1:08p ET Monday, March 17, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Sprott Asset Management's John Embry today remarks to King World News about the counterintuitive trading in the gold market as international tensions rise over Ukraine's disintegration: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/3/17_We... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc. ADVERTISEMENT How to profit with silver -- and which stocks to buy now 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... Join GATA here: Mines and Money Hong Kong Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre Monday-Friday, March 24-28, 2014 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China http://www.minesandmoney.com/hongkong/ Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference AT&T Performing Arts Center Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House 2403 Flora St., Dallas, Texas Saturday, May 31, 2014 http://stansberrydallas.com/ Canadian Investor Conference 2014 Vancouver Convention Centre West 1055 Canada Place, Vancouver, British Columbia Sunday and Monday, June 1 and 2, 2014 http://cambridgehouse.com/event/25/canadian-investor-conference-2014-inc... * * * 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: http://gata.org/tshirts 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: http://www.gata.org To contribute to GATA, please visit: http://www.gata.org/node/16 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

Russia Vows To Switch To Other Currencies Over US Sanctions Threat – Glazyev Posted: 17 Mar 2014 10:07 AM PDT Dear CIGAs, Here is the Voice of Russia’s commentary on the petro Dollar. Russia vows to switch to other currencies over US sanctions threat – Glazyev Russia can dodge any proposed US sanctions by switching to other currencies and creating its own payment system, Putin's economic advisor Sergei Glazyev said Tuesday. A senior Kremlin official... Read more » The post Russia Vows To Switch To Other Currencies Over US Sanctions Threat – Glazyev appeared first on Jim Sinclair's Mineset.

Affordable Health Care from a Near-Death Experience Posted: 17 Mar 2014 09:00 AM PDT I’ll never forget the day I become obsessed with finding the very best health care solutions for people. It was Dec. 31, 2002… and I thought I was going to die. My wife and I were in Bangkok, Thailand, visiting her family. Like a fool, I drank the water, and got a bacterial infection that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies. After vomiting to the point of complete dehydration, I was rushed to the ER. Not knowing what to expect (it was Thailand, after all) I was scared beyond belief. But what happened next shocked me… The hospital was state-of-the-art. From what I could tell lying on my back, I could have been in Johns Hopkins, Massachusetts General or the Mayo Clinic. After just a ten minute wait, I was admitted to a private room. The doctor on call spent almost 30 minutes with me. He administered an IV pump to replenish fluids, and medication to ease the pain… and there I lay for four hours. The experience was as good, if not better, than anything I’d ever seen here in the states. And here’s the most shocking thing… The bill amounted to just $16 dollars! On my way back home, I had a hare-brained idea — I’d start a business showing Americans how to receive quality health care at the world’s lowest costs. So I did. Since then I’ve shown more than 10,000 Americans how to get world class surgical procedures for approximately 15-20% of what it would normally cost Americans. It really isn’t that difficult when you consider the soaring prices of surgery in the U.S. I’ve seen the cost of knee replacements go from $35,000 to $50,000. Heart surgeries that used to cost $80,000 in 2003 have skyrocketed to $120,000 today. Unfortunately, it’s all types of surgery that will soon be even more expensive. As full implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) approaches, every doctor, research professional and health administrator I talk to tells me the same thing: Obamacare is going to reduce the quality of care and cost you more… in some cases a lot more. If you’re a 40 year old living in California, for example, you can expect to pay as much as 116% more in premium payments under the ACA. And ABC News reports that “the overwhelming majority will see double-digit increases in their individual health insurance markets.” And they named it the “Affordable” Care Act? This is why I’ve become a board member of the Laissez Faire Club. To find and share new ways to protect the health of your family and get affordable world class health care exactly when you need it. Here’s one solution I’ve uncovered that you can take advantage of today. Skip Your Doctor’s Office the Next Time You Need Bloodwork… For years I was fortunate to have comprehensive health insurance through my wife’s employer. Then in early 2011, my health coverage ran out when my wife’s engineering position was terminated as a result of a leveraged buyout. After a short stint on COBRA, I researched the private insurance market for my family. However, I quickly learned that no private insurer would cover me because I had been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Now for the first time in my adult life I found myself uninsured. But what I learned next was even more valuable than gold. By simply approaching my health care as I would buy a new TV or refrigerator, I was able to save close to $400 on my blood work. And you can too. One morning, I called my doctor’s office to get my thyroid prescription refilled. (My condition requires me to regularly measure my thyroid hormone level.) The receptionist said I needed to see my doctor. She would then provide me with the lab work request form for my Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) panel. Since I had no insurance, I asked the receptionist what it would cost me. She said the first visit would be $98, the lab work would cost around $400, the follow up visit is another $98 to interpret the lab report and fill the prescription. All together it would have cost me $596 for a “simple” refill of my medication. I sat stunned in silence. Then I started thinking. Based on my business experience, there had to be a less expensive way. All I had to do was find it. Within an hour I succeeded. Private MD Labs provides confidential laboratory testing and personal medical information direct to the public. Their model empowers you to take charge of your own health and assist you in the prevention and early detection of disease. And you don’t need a physician’s referral to use them. You simply request the test you need on their website and pay directly with a credit card. No insurance company is involved to unnecessarily drive up costs. I quickly found the test I needed on their website and clicked on it. To my amazement, the total cost for the test and lab work was only $49! Just 15% of the $400 I would have paid to my doctor for the same exact work. Two hours later I received an email which contained my lab work request form with a doctor’s signature contracted through Private MD Labs. Along with the form they sent a list of labs near me to have my blood drawn. The following day I drove to one near my house. My results arrived 24 hours later. The old, expensive way usually took three-five business days to get my lab results. When I explained to my doctor how I did this, her jaw dropped. She had never heard of this service before. As for me, I was thrilled. I received faster service. It cost me less. And the savings covered a full season of my son’s soccer dues. This is just one solution to the coming health care mess. And just one I’ve uncovered since I’ve joined the Laissez Faire board. As things continue to get bad, it’s these types of solutions that will give you the best chance to escape the worst parts of the law. It’s these types of solutions I’m looking for every day. Sincerely, Jud Anglin for The Daily Reckoning Ed. Note: Jud has compiled a handful of incredible ways to get affordable, first-class health care into a new free report. You can get exclusive access to it by signing up for the FREE Laissez Faire Today email edition, right here. Article posted on Laissez Faire Today

West Controlling Markets To Keep Confidence From Collapsing Posted: 17 Mar 2014 08:27 AM PDT Today a man who has been involved in the financial markets for 50 years spoke warned King World News readers that the West is controlling markets in order to keep confidence from collapsing. He also discussed gold, and the dangerous situation facing China, Russia, and Ukraine. Below is what John Embry had to say. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Jeffrey Lewis: Precious metals, blind men, and golden elephants Posted: 17 Mar 2014 08:01 AM PDT 11a ET Monday, March 17, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Jeffrey Lewis of Silver Coin Investor today elaborates on the failure of financial journalism to get relevant about the monetary metals markets. His commentary is headlined "Precious Metals, Blind Men, and Golden Elephants" and it's posted at Silver Coin Investor here: http://www.silver-coin-investor.com/Precious-Metals-Blind-Men-and-Golden... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc. ADVERTISEMENT Safe and Private Allocated Bullion Storage In Singapore Given the increasing risks in financial markets, it is more important than ever to own physical bullion coins and bars and to store them in the safest vaults in the world in the safest jurisdictions in the world. Gold advocates Jim Sinclair and Marc Faber have recommended Singapore. Now, with GoldCore, you can own coins and bars in fully insured, segregated, and allocated accounts in Singapore with the ability to take delivery. Learn more by downloading GoldCore's Essential Guide To Storing Gold In Singapore: http://info.goldcore.com/essential-guide-to-storing-gold-in-singapore And for more information call Daniel or Sharon at +44 203 0869200 in the United Kingdom or at +1 302 635 1160 in the United States. Or email them at info@goldcore.com. Join GATA here: Mines and Money Hong Kong Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre Monday-Friday, March 24-28, 2014 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China http://www.minesandmoney.com/hongkong/ Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference AT&T Performing Arts Center Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House 2403 Flora St., Dallas, Texas Saturday, May 31, 2014 http://stansberrydallas.com/ Canadian Investor Conference 2014 Vancouver Convention Centre West 1055 Canada Place, Vancouver, British Columbia Sunday and Monday, June 1 and 2, 2014 http://cambridgehouse.com/event/25/canadian-investor-conference-2014-inc... * * * 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: http://gata.org/tshirts 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: http://www.gata.org To contribute to GATA, please visit: http://www.gata.org/node/16

The Stars (And Thousands of Russian Troops) Are Aligned For Higher Gold Prices Posted: 17 Mar 2014 08:00 AM PDT Concern over China’s economy along with safe haven demand spurred by events in the Ukraine pushed gold and silver prices sharply higher last week and, dependent upon Sunday’s secession vote in Crimea and Russia’s response, this could continue. Gold notched fresh six-month highs, but the price drivers have been more than [...]

Gold Prices Spike After Crimea Vote, Retreat 1% from 6-Month High as EU Imposes Sanctions on Russia Posted: 17 Mar 2014 07:30 AM PDT GOLD PRICES retreated 1.1% from a new 6-month high in late Asian and London morning trade Monday, holding around $1378 per ounce as the European Union imposed sanctions against Russia over the weekend's vote in Crimea to leave Ukraine.   At least 75% of the 1.5 million people invited to vote did so on Sunday, local officials said, with 95.5% of those voting to join Russia.   The EU has yet to name the 21 Russian and Ukrainian nationals targeted by its travel bans and asset freezes.   European stock markets rose, as did the Russian Rouble.   US Treasury bond prices slipped, nudging 10-year interest rates up to 2.67%.   Crimea's vote "is keeping gold's safe haven bid intact," reckons Joni Teves, precious metals analyst at Swiss bank UBS, "as tensions with the West continue.   "Gold's direction from here will depend on how the situation plays out over the coming days and weeks."   Gold prices have now risen 4.2% in the 3 weeks since Ukraine's elected president Yanukovych fled Kiev on Sunday 22 February.   In the 7 weeks prior to that, gold prices rose 10.1% based on London Fix prices.   "The FOMC Statement will be the main US highlight this week," says RBC Capital Markets, pointing to Wednesday's decision from the Federal Reserve – widely expected to see another $10 billion tapering of the central bank's monthly QE money creation scheme.   "Recently [the gold futures market] added open interest, volume and better moving averages," says George Gero at RBC. "So funds may be reluctant to pare positions now."   Speculators betting on higher gold prices through US Comex futures and options last week raised their net long position to the highest level in 13 months, according to data from US regulator the CFTC.   Equal to 491 tonnes of metal at last Tuesday's close, the spec net long in mid-2013 hit 14-year lows below 100 tonnes equivalent.   "From these levels," says Jonathan Butler at Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi, "gold prices could retrace all the way up to the late August 2013 high of $1434."   But "beyond the near term," counters London market-making bank Barclays, "we do not expect this safe-haven bid to linger.   "Gold prices will likely move lower as a result," says the note, "especially if USD-supportiveness emerges" from economic data.   The US Dollar today fell 1.5 cents to the Euro from Friday's 1-week highs, despite new data showing marked growth in US industrial output last month.   The Dollar had earlier pushed the Chinese Yuan down to its lowest level since spring 2013 at CNY 6.17, after Beijing doubled the currency's permitted range for daily trading.   Prices on the Shanghai Gold Exchange, which invariably trade at a premium to London settlement, extended their discount to more than $8 per ounce as the Yuan fell.   "The SGE has been in heavy discount in recent days," notes Swiss refining and finance group MKS's Asian desk, "but surprisingly has had little impact over spot gold prices."   With this month's bond default by a solar panel company putting China's silver demand in question, "The doubling of the Yuan trading band," says Reuters, "points to much greater downside risk in a currency that many investors have treated as a one-way appreciation bet for years."   Silver prices spiked less aggressively than gold Monday morning, but fell harder to bounce off $21.20 per ounce – the same level silver was trading at in mid-February.

Why I’d Still Stay Away from Bitcoin Posted: 17 Mar 2014 07:16 AM PDT Mohammad Zulfiqar writes: “I think the stock market is getting into the overbought territory. Gold is due for a pullback. To be honest, I don’t see many opportunities out there other than bitcoins.” These were the words of wisdom from my good old friend Mr. Speculator. While most have forgotten about the virtual currency, Mr. Speculator thinks there’s an opportunity.

Can Gold and Interest Rates Move Higher at the Same Time? Posted: 17 Mar 2014 07:07 AM PDT Can the gold price be fundamentally related to some other economic variables? Can we use those variables successfully in trying to predict the future price of gold? Is gold highly correlated with any of those variables? Last year a very insightful and interesting working paper was published in the webpages of the National Bureau of Economic Research by Claude Erb and Campbell Harvey. The paper is mostly about gold being perceived as either a safe haven or an inflation hedge. After a while it sparked various discussions about gold not being what it is thought of. And rightly so. As we have already mentioned many times in the Market Overviews, gold is not historically an inflation hedge device which will protect you against possible inflation. Of course the special case for the gold price could be a hyperinflationary scenario.

Gold Price Moves Into Important Fibonacci Zone Posted: 17 Mar 2014 04:42 AM PDT Gold is at the highs once again, testing 1380-1400 area where we see some important Fibonacci levels that could react as resistance in this week. An updated count now shows a five wave move in wave (c) of C that is in final stages after recent break out of a running triangle in subwave four.

Doug Casey’s 9 Secrets for Successful Speculation Posted: 17 Mar 2014 04:34 AM PDT Dear Reader, The issue uppermost on my mind as I write today is the trouble I see ahead for my dear friends in Ukraine. My fears for my former students in the country are a personal matter, however, so I won’t dwell on that. What’s common to us all is that the situation could impact us as investors, even though few of us have any direct exposure to companies or assets in the region. The tension itself is a bullish factor for gold, but there’s much, much more at stake, even if the conflict does not turn into an actual war between East and West. I’m sorry to say that I do expect war in Crimea, but I do not expect the West to get directly involved. The fallout of open war with Russia is just unthinkable for Europe, and almost as costly and destructive for the US. But it would be foolish for anyone to imagine that Russia will not respond to the sanctions US lawmakers are proposing in response to the Crimean vote yesterday. Those responses could hit the EU hard, given Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, and that affects China, the US, and all of us as participants in the global economy. The bigger threat, however, could be the economic consequences of a successful Russian effort to dethrone the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Confidence in the USD is the linchpin of the confidence game the Fed has been running for years. If US dollars lose their privileged global reserve-currency status, it could precipitate wholesale dollar dumping by foreigners who are said to hold many times more dollars than are in circulation in the US. And that could be the proverbial “it”—the spark that ignites a collapse in the purchasing power of the USD, leading to Doug Casey’s long-predicted Greater Depression. I’m not predicting what will be, but I do see the world edging closer to the abyss than it has been since those panicky days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. As I’ve said before; in today’s shaky global economy, we are all speculators now—and those who know it have an advantage over those who do not. Perhaps, then, this is a good time to review some of the lessons I’ve learned from Doug, because if there’s anyone best prepared to ride out the storm and to speculate on it successfully, it’s Doug Casey. Whatever happens next, I hope you find my story and the summary of what I’ve learned from Doug to be of value. Sincerely, Louis James Senior Metals Investment Strategist Casey Research Rock & Stock Stats Last One Month Ago One Year Ago Gold 1,381.95 1,318.60 1,590.70 Silver 21.44 21.42 28.81 Copper 2.94 3.26 3.54 Oil 98.89 100.13 93.38 Gold Producers (GDX) 27.73 26.35 37.25 Gold Junior Stocks (GDXJ) 44.62 44.04 66.32 Silver Stocks (SIL) 14.53 14.53 18.08 TSX (Toronto Stock Exchange) 14.227.66 14,054.76 12,799.91 TSX Venture 1,033.64 996.35 1,112.61 Doug Casey's 9 Secrets for Successful Speculation Louis James, Chief Metals & Mining Investment Strategist When I started working for Doug Casey almost 10 years ago, I probably knew as much about investing as the average Joe, but I now know that I knew absolutely nothing then about successful speculation. Learning from the international speculator himself—and from his business partner, David Galland, to give credit where due—was like taking the proverbial drink from a fire hose. Fortunately, I was quite thirsty. You see, just before Doug and David hired me in 2004, I’d had something of an epiphany. As a writer, most of what I was doing at the time was grant-proposal writing, asking wealthy philanthropists to support causes I believed in. After some years of meeting wealthy people and asking them for money, it suddenly dawned on me that they were nothing like the mean, greedy stereotypes the average American envisions. It’s quite embarrassing, but I have to admit that I was surprised how much I liked these “rich” people—not for what they could do for me, but for what they had done with their own lives. Most of them started with nothing and created financial empires. Even the ones who were born into wealthy families took what fortune gave them and turned it into much more. And though I’m sure the sample was biased, since I was meeting libertarian millionaires, these people accumulated wealth by creating real value that benefited those they did business with. My key observation was they were all very serious about money—not obsessed with it, but conscious of using it wisely and putting it to most efficient use. I greatly admired this; it’s what I strive for myself now. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The reason for my embarrassment is that my surprise told me something about myself; I discovered that I’d had a bad attitude about money. This may seem like a philosophical digression, but it’s an absolutely critical point. Without realizing that I’d adopted a cultural norm without conscious choice, I was like many others who believe that it is unseemly to care too much about money. I was working on saving the world, which was reward enough for me, and wanted only enough money to provide for my family. And at the same instant my surprise at liking my rich donors made me realize that—despite my decades of pro-market activism—I had been prejudiced against successful capitalists, I realized that people who thought the way I did never had very much money. It seems painfully obvious in hindsight. If thinking about money and exerting yourself to earn more of it makes you pinch your nose in disgust, how can you possibly be effective at doing so? Well, you can’t. I’m convinced that while almost nobody intends to be poor, this is why so many people are. They may want the benefits of being rich, but they actually don’t want to be rich and have a great mental aversion to thinking about money and acting in ways that will bring more of it into their lives. So, in May of 2004, I decided to get serious about money. I liked my rich friends and admired them all greatly, but I didn’t see any of them as superhuman. There was no reason I could not have done what any of them had done, if I’d had the same willingness to do the work they did to achieve success. Lo and behold, it was two months later that Doug and David offered me a job at Casey Research. That’s not magic, nor coincidence; if it hadn’t been Casey, I would have found someone else to learn from. The important thing is that had the offer come two months sooner, being a champion of noble causes and not a money-grubbing financier, I would have turned it down. I’m still a champion of noble causes, but how things have changed since I enrolled in “Casey U” and got serious about learning how to put my money to work for me, instead of me having to always work for money! Instead of asking people for donations, I’m now the one writing checks (which I believe will get much larger in the not-too-distant future). I can tell you this is much more fun. How did I do it? I followed Doug’s advice, speculated alongside him—and took profits with him. Without getting into the details, I can say I had some winning investments early on. I went long during the crash of 2008 and used the proceeds to buy property in 2010. I took profits on the property last year and bought the same stocks I was recommending in the International Speculator last fall, close to what now appears to have been another bottom. In the interim, I’ve gone from renting to being a homeowner. I’ve gone from being an investment virgin to being one of those expert investors you occasionally see on TV. I’ve gone from a significant negative net worth to a significant nest egg… which I am happily working on increasing. And I want to help all our readers do the same. Not because all we here at Casey Research care about is money, but because accumulating wealth creates value, as Doug teaches us. It’s impossible, of course, to communicate all I’ve learned over my years with Doug in a simple article like this. I’m sure I’ll write a book on it someday—perhaps after the current gold cycle passes its coming manic peak. Still, I can boil what I’ve learned from Doug down to a few “secrets” that can help you as they have me. I urge you to think of these as a study guide, if you will, not a complete set of instructions. As you read the list below, think about how you can learn more about each secret and adapt it to your own most effective use. Secret #1: Contrarianism takes courage. Everyone knows the essential investment formula: “Buy low, sell high,” but it is so much easier said than done, it might as well be a secret formula. The way to really make it work is to invest in an asset or commodity that people want and need but that for reasons of market cyclicality or other temporary factors, no one else is buying. When the vast majority thinks something necessary is a bad investment, you want to be a buyer—that’s what it means to be a contrarian. Obviously, if this were easy, everyone would do it, and there would be no such thing as a contrarian opportunity. But it is very hard for most people to think independently enough to risk hard-won cash in ways others think is mistaken or too dangerous. Hence, fortune favors the bold. Secret #2: Success takes discipline. It’s not just a matter of courage, of course; you can bravely follow a path right off a cliff if you’re not careful. So you have to have a game plan for risk mitigation. You have to expect market volatility and turn it to your advantage. And you’ll need an exit strategy. The ways a successful speculator needs discipline are endless, but the most critical of all is to employ smart buying and selling tactics, so you don’t get goaded into paying too much or spooked into selling for too little. Secret #3: Analysis over emotion. This may seem like an obvious corollary to the above, but it’s a point well worth stressing on its own. To be a successful speculator does not require being an emotionless robot, but it does require abiding by reason at times when either fear or euphoria tempt us to veer from our game plans. When a substantial investment in a speculative pick tanks—for no company-specific reason—the sense of gut-wrenching fear is very real. Panic often causes investors to sell at the very time they should be backing up the truck for more. Similarly, when a stock is on a tear and friends are congratulating you on what a genius you are, the temptation to remain fully exposed—or even take on more risk in a play that is no longer undervalued—can be irresistible. But to ignore the numbers because of how you feel is extremely risky and leads to realizing unnecessary losses and letting terrific gains slip through your fingers. Secret #4: Trust your gut. Trusting a gut feeling sounds contradictory to the above, but it’s really not. The point is not to put feelings over logic, but to listen to what your feelings tell you—particularly about company people you meet and their words in press releases. “People” is the first of Doug Casey’s famous Eight Ps of Resource Stock Evaluation, and if a CEO comes across like a used-car salesman, that is telling you something. If a press release omits critical numbers or seems to be gilding the lily, that, too, tells you something. The more experience you accumulate in whatever sector you focus on, the more acute your intuitive “radar” becomes: listen to it. There’s nothing more frustrating than to take a chance on a story that looked good on paper but that your gut was warning you about, and then the investment disappoints. Kicking yourself is bad for your knees. Secret #5: Assume Bulshytt. As a speculator, investor, or really anyone who buys anything, you have to assume that everyone in business has an angle. Their interests may coincide with your own, but you can’t assume that. It’s vital to keep in mind whom you are speaking with and what their interest might be. This applies to even the most honest people in mining, which is such a difficult business, no mine would ever get built if company CEOs put out a press release every time they ran into a problem. A mine, from exploration to production to reclamation, is a nonstop flow of problems that need solving. But your brokers want to make commissions, your conference organizers want excitement, your bullion dealers want volume, etc. And, yes, your newsletter writers want to eat as well; ask yourself who pays them and whether their interests are aligned with yours or the companies they cover. (Bulshytt is not a typo, but a reference to Neal Stephenson's brilliant novel, Anathem, which defines the term, briefly, as words, phrases, or even entire books or speeches that are misleading or empty of meaning.) Secret #6: The trend is your friend. No one can predict the future, but anyone who applies him- or herself diligently enough can identify trends in the world that will have predictable consequences and outcomes. If you identify a trend that is real—or that at least has an overwhelming amount of evidence in its favor—it can serve as both compass and chart, keeping you on course regardless of market chaos, irrational investors, and the ever-present flood of bulshytt. Knowing that you are betting on a trend that makes great sense and is backed by hard data also helps maintain your courage. Remember; prices may fluctuate, but price and value are not the same thing. If you are right about the trend, it will be your friend. Also, remember that it’s easier to be right about the direction of a trend than its timing. Secret #7: Only speculate with money you can afford to lose. This is a logical corollary to the above. If you bet the farm or gamble away your children’s college tuition on risky speculations—and only relatively risky investments have the potential to generate the extraordinary returns that justify speculating in the first place—it will be almost impossible to maintain your cool and discipline when you need it. As Doug likes to say; it’s better to risk 10% of your capital shooting for 100% gains than to risk 100% of your capital shooting for 10% gains. Secret #8: Stack the odds in your favor. Given the risks inherent in speculating for extraordinary gains, you have to stack the odds in your favor. If you can’t, don’t play. There are several ways to do this, including betting on People with proven track records, buying when market corrections put companies on sale way below any objective valuation, and participating in private placements. The most critical may be to either conduct the due diligence most investors are too busy to be bothered with, or find someone you can trust to do it for you. Secret #9: You can’t kiss all the girls. This is one of Doug’s favorite sayings, and though seemingly obvious, it’s one of the main pitfalls for unwary speculators. When you encounter a fantastic story or a stock going vertical and it feels like it’s getting away from you, it can be very, very difficult to do all the things I mention above. I can tell you from firsthand experience, it’s agonizing to identify a good bet, arrive too late, and see the ship sail off to great fortune—without you. But if you let that push you into paying too much for your speculative picks, you can wipe out your own gains, even if you’re betting on the right trends. You can’t kiss all the girls, and it only leads to trouble if you try. Fortunately, the universe of possible speculations is so vast, it simply doesn’t matter if someone else beats you to any particular one; there will always be another to ask for the next dance. Bide your time, and make your move only when all of the above is on your side. Final Point These are the principles I live and breathe every day as a speculator. The devil, of course, is in the details, which is why I’m happy to be the editor of the Casey International Speculator, where I can cover the ins and outs of all of the above in depth. Right now, we’re looking at an opportunity the likes of which we haven’t seen in years: thanks to the downturn in gold—which now appears to have subsided—junior gold stocks are still drastically undervalued. My team and I recently identified a set of junior mining companies that we believe have what it takes to potentially become 10-baggers, generating 1,000%+ gains. If you don’t yet subscribe, I encourage you to try the International Speculator risk-free today and get our detailed 10-Bagger List for 2014 that tell

Gold Arbitrage and Backwardation: Gold as a Commodity Posted: 17 Mar 2014 04:26 AM PDT This is an excerpt from “The journal of The Gold Standard Institute” released by the Gold Standard Institute USA. In Part I, we discussed the concept of arbitrage. We showed why defining it as a risk-free investment that earns more than the risk-free rate of interest is invalid. There is no such thing as a risk-free investment, and in any case economics must be focused on the acting man rather than theoretical constructs. We validated that arbitrage arises because the market is constantly offering incentives to the acting man in the form of spreads. Arbitrage is the act of straddling a spread. Arbitrage will tend to compress a spread. The spread will narrow, though not to zero because no one has any incentive to make it zero. In Part II, we looked at the question of whether gold is a currency. The answer cannot be provided by the symbol naming committee at Bloomberg. Gold is indisputably money, and it may be used in the occasional transaction today. The reason for considering it as a currency was to look at contango and backwardation simply as states of gold having an interest rate that is lower or higher, respectively, than the dollar. However, as we concluded in Part II, there is no proper interest rate in gold. The gold lease rate is closer to being a discount rate than an interest rate. In this final Part III, we look at the fact that gold is a tangible commodity. While the question of whether gold is a currency is important, and it's good to think about philosophical concepts such as arbitrage, let's not forget that gold is a material good. It can be held in the hand, it can be bought and sold, and it can be warehoused. Warehousing is an important innovation. Did you ever wonder how people coordinate their actions over many months between wheat harvests? How is it possible that farmers, bakers, financiers, and consumers could somehow work out a mechanism in the free market to store grain at the time of the harvest and release it throughout the year? The fact that this occurred is amazing. Wheat is not only available out of season, but its price does not gyrate radically (at least no more than every other price these days, as the failing dollar goes off the rails). It does not crash when the grain is harvested and it does not skyrocket as the grain stocks are consumed later in the year. Obviously, a warehouse suitable for storing grain is necessary. However, without another innovation the warehouse won't be able to solve the problem. It is necessary but not sufficient. The innovation of the futures market is also necessary. Today, we think of futures market as a venue to speculate on the price of something, such as wheat. If we expect the price to rise, we go long a futures contract. To bet on a falling price, we could go short. Speculators indeed play an important role in the market. They drive prices up, when they expect goods to be scarce, which prevents overconsumption and running out. They also drive prices down, when they expect a glut, which encourages consumption before stockpiles overflow. The futures market evolved to fulfill the needs of two other actors. The producer of a good—the farmer in the case of wheat—wants to lock in a price at which he can make a profit. If, in March when he is making his decision of what crop to plant, the price of wheat is $6 per bushel, he can sell wheat futures and lock in a price of around $6 immediately. This removes the risk of an adverse price move. It may also help him obtain financing to produce the wheat. On the other side of the trade, there is a bakery that wants to secure access to wheat and to hedge the risk that the price could rise. The bakery can buy wheat futures. The speculator is not able to deliver, or take delivery of, any goods. By contrast, the producer and consumer intend to exchange wheat and cash. The farmer intends to deliver wheat when he harvests it. The bakery intends to take delivery when he needs it to bake bread. One other actor is necessary to make this market work. The warehouseman arbitrages the spread between wheat in the cash market and wheat in the futures market. Suppose that cash wheat is selling for $5 during the harvest season, but January future wheat is selling for $6. The warehouseman can simultaneously buy spot and sell January, pocketing $1. He stores the wheat until delivery in January. The warehouseman has no exposure to the wheat price. This is a really important idea. He is a specialist in knowing when to store wheat, not in speculating on the price. If the warehouseman were forced to take price exposure, there would either not be warehousing, or the cost of warehousing would have to rise dramatically to cover the price swings. If the warehouseman has no exposure to price, what does he have exposure to? On what does he make his money? He has exposure to the spread between the cash or spot market, and the futures market— called the basis. In our example, this was $1. If the price of wheat in the futures market is greater than the price in the spot market, this is called contango. In a contango market, if the warehouseman has space for more wheat, he will add wheat to his warehouse. Putting wheat into the warehouse for delivery under contract later is called carrying it. This works in the other direction, too. If the price in the spot market is higher than in the futures—called backwardation—then the warehouseman will sell wheat in the spot market and buy back the futures he shorted. Selling wheat and buying back the futures contract is called decarrying. If there is contango and the basis is rising, then we can be sure that more wheat is going into warehouses. If there is backwardation and the basis is falling, then we know that wheat is leaving the warehouses. This can continue until there is no more wheat in the warehouses. It is worth mentioning what one must have in order to take these arbitrages. To carry wheat, one must have money. With current credit conditions, this is not much of a constraint. One must also have extra warehouse capacity. To decarry it, one must have wheat. This makes for a lopsided set of risks to the basis. The basis isn't going to rise much above the cost of credit plus storage costs, because in normal circumstances warehousemen have access to credit and warehouse space (in some commodities, space can be a problem such as crude or natural gas). Consider the other direction. Suppose you drove a truck up to a grain elevator town two days before the harvest. Workers have the equipment partially disassembled and they're cleaning it, getting ready for the trucks that will soon be coming off the farm fields. You hop out and go over to a group of elevator operators chatting on the edge of the parking lot. You ask them how much to fill up your truck with wheat, right now? They begin to laugh, so you take out a wad of $100 bills. They stop laughing and stare at you and eventually one of them says $20 a bushel. He reminds you that if you can sign a contract to take delivery in a month, the price is $7. Clearly, just days before the harvest, no one has any extra wheat. If you pay that $20, he will make a phone call and a truck halfway to some bakery in another county will turn around. That bakery will end up getting paid more money to be idle for a week than it would have made by selling bread. This is a case of extreme backwardation (exaggerated to make a clear point). Think of backwardation as being synonymous with shortage. This is a pretty strong statement, so let's look at the proof. If there was no shortage of wheat, then why isn't someone decarrying it? The markets do not normally offer you a risk-free profit that grows day by day. If, for example, IBM shares traded in NY for $99 and for $101 in London, then someone would buy in NY and sell in London and keep doing it until the prices were brought together. Arbitrage acts to compress the very spread from which it derives its profit. In our example, no one is taking the wheat decarry arbitrage because no one has any wheat left over. While, as we saw above, there is a limit to how high the basis can go, there is no limit to how low. The scarcer the good, the lower the basis could fall. One other thing is worth noting before we proceed. With the advent of the futures market, the price of a good that's produced seasonally but consumed all year need not fluctuate much due the time of year. Price fluctuation would harm producers or consumers. What can fluctuate harmlessly is the basis spread. What does this have to do with gold? Virtually every ounce of gold ever mined in thousands of years of human history is still held in human possession. The stocks to flows ratio—inventories divided by annual production—is measured in decades for gold, but months for wheat and other regular commodities. This means that there is no such thing as a glut in gold, and no such thing as scarcity. Gold is not produced seasonally, and it is not consumed. There should not be a futures market in gold. It exists as a perverse byproduct of the regime of irredeemable paper money. It would not exist in a free market, which would have a robust global market for gold lending. Right before the harvest, the wheat market can go into backwardation because no one has any wheat to decarry. It is truly scarce. In gold, backwardation should not be possible. There is always enough gold in existence, to decarry and eliminate any backwardation. And yet, there has been an intermittent gold backwardation since December of 2008. It has become typical for each futures contract to go into backwardation as it headed into expiration, and I have coined the term temporary backwardation. Gold backwardation is incredible. Like a unicorn, it should never be seen! All of this gold just sitting around, and the owners stare at their screens and don't take the bait. It's a risk free profit, according to the conventional view. And yet gold is becoming scarcer, at least to the market. All of those gold owners are choosing to let their gold sit idle, not earning anything at all, rather than trade away their bars for futures contracts. It's not possible to understand this phenomenon with mathematical models. Sure, you can measure the basis and use it to model all sorts of things, but to understand the big picture you have to take a step back. You have to see the forest and that means backing away from that tree for a minute. Perhaps one of the biggest news items pertaining to gold as I write this is the ongoing situation regarding Germany's gold. Germany asked for the Federal Reserve to give back a quantity of their gold over a period of 7 years. And by the end of 2013, the Fed had delivered too little, and was falling behind even that leisurely pace. I won't speculate on what's happening, but I do want to point out what the Germans are thinking. They don't trust the Fed. They didn't trust the Fed in the first place, which is why they pressured the Bundesbank to ask for the gold to be shipped to Germany. The Fed's apparent failure to deliver only deepens their convictions that they were right not to trust the Fed, and of course increases the distrust of many observers around the world too. Many in the online gold community want to see Germany get their gold, but are concerned that they won't. They have themselves taken possession of their own gold. They urge everyone to take his own gold in the form of coins or bars out of the banking system, and hold it at home or someplace that's safe and secure. This is the process of gold withdrawing from the market. It is an inexorable trend towards permanent backwardation. One ignores this at one's peril. It cannot be dismissed by the assertion that gold is a currency. Whether or not gold has a rate of interest, and whether this rate is above or below LIBOR has no bearing here. Gold is a physical commodity. Its owners are removing it from the tradable markets, squirreling it away in nooks and crannies where they feel it's safe. This is not merely a phenomenon of differing interest rates. Real metal is being moved in the real world, and everyone would do well to understand why, and what it means. Trust is collapsing, and for good reason. The foundation of the global financial system is the US Treasury bond. It is backed by nothing more nor less than the full faith and credit of a government with exponentially rising debt, and which has neither the means nor intent to repay. If you don't trust that the US government can pay, then you can't trust a bank deposit because the bank uses the Treasury as their asset. If you can't trust a bank, then you can't trust a gold futures contract. It is in this light that one must view gold backwardation. In wheat or any other ordinary commodity, there is sometimes a state of shortage. When that occurs, anyone with the commodity can make a risk-free profit by decarrying it. However, there is no such thing as a shortage of gold. There is a shortage developing—a shortage of trust. Decarrying gold does incur a risk. One may be giving up good metal for bad paper, and never be able to reverse the swap. Unfortunately, with the collapse of trust comes the collapse of coordination of economic activity. The disappearance of gold from the monetary system will have momentous consequences. This is why I founded the Gold Standard Institute USA to promote the gold standard, and reverse this trend before it reaches the end. About the author: Dr. Keith Weiner is the president of the Gold Standard Institute USA, and CEO of Monetary Metals where he write on the basis and related topics. Keith is a leading authority in the areas of gold, money, and credit and has made important contributions to the development of trading techniques founded upon the analysis of bid-ask spreads. Keith is a sought after speaker and regularly writes on economics. He is an Objectivist, and has his PhD from the New Austrian School of Economics.

China Slowdown "Dampening Silver Price" After Solar Default Despite Crimea Speculation Posted: 17 Mar 2014 03:28 AM PDT SILVER PRICES rose sharply late Friday, adding 2.25% for the week to Comex May silver after the London Fix came in at $21.36 per ounce – two cents lower than the previous Friday.   Still 3% lower than the high for the year above $22 per ounce achieved on February 25th, the silver price on May futures contracts – the most active month – settled at $21.413.   Although the political situation in Ukraine was seen by some analysts driving gold higher, and silver prices with it, China's weakening economy threatens the rally say others.   Ahead of Crimea's vote on splitting from Ukraine to join Russia this weekend, the iShares Silver Trust – which enables investors to "track" the silver price without owning metal – saw its holdings of metal, needed to back the value of its shares, unchanged from the week before at 10,164.47 tonnes.   Increasing a little over 1% increase since New Year, that amount equates to around 40% of annual silver mine supply worldwide.   The US Mint meantime reported their sales for March so far of Silver Eagle coins at 2.3 million ounces. Last March 2013 total sales were 3.4m.   Speculative traders in US futures have nearly doubled their bullish position on silver prices so far this year, according to the CFTC regulator's weekly Commitment of Traders report.   But open interest – the number of active contracts – fell 3.3% last week to 142,068, a drop from the recent high of activity on February 26th of 4.5%.   Silver prices are likely to trade in a range between $17.75 and $22.75 for the rest of 2014, bullion bank HSBC wrote in a new report, as the global silver surplus widens.   HSBC's analysts see the excess of silver bullion supplies over this year's demand growing to around 156 million ounces (4,800 tonnes) – around 15% of annual offtake.   Modest silver investment demand, plus steady demand from jewelry consumers, will be offset by strong supply, HSBC says.   China's poor run of data "appears to have had a negative effect upon silver," says French investment and bullion bank Natixis.   "The price of the metal [then] dropped by 2% after news of the default emerged" of Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy Science & Technology, a small solar panel company, which failed to make bond interest payments two weeks ago.   Silver paste is used in the production of solar panels. The photo-voltaic industry's silver demand consumed about 35 million ounces (1,088 tonnes) in 2013, around 8% of all industrial silver use.   China's silver imports, reckons Citigroup, are projected to fall further in 2014 thanks to a cut in "uneconomic" solar panel production capacity.   Government subsidies to the solar industry will be cut substantially, the Citigroup analysts said, removing a spur to growth.

Rick Rule: Which Companies Will Bring in the Green? Posted: 17 Mar 2014 01:00 AM PDT Thoughts turn to green on St. Patrick's Day. Rick Rule of Sprott US Holdings believes the resources bull market is about 18 months from arriving and there could be multiple promising entry points in the market this summer. But in this interview with The Gold Report, he says that this rebound may not look like the one investors are expecting and shares tips on how to spot companies that may have pots of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Rick Rule: Which Companies Will Bring in the Green? Posted: 17 Mar 2014 01:00 AM PDT Thoughts turn to green on St. Patrick's Day. Rick Rule of Sprott US Holdings believes the resources bull market is about 18 months from arriving and there could be multiple promising entry points in the market this summer. But in this interview with The Gold Report, he says that this rebound may not look like the one investors are expecting and shares tips on how to spot companies that may have pots of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Three Breakouts in Gold and Silver Stocks Posted: 16 Mar 2014 10:33 PM PDT I’ve shown you several comparison charts with the HUI, GLD and SLV that shows they all tend to breakout at roughly the same time. One can sometimes be stronger than the others but they tend to breakout at the same time. This week was no exception. All three broke out of their consolidation patterns this week. Who would have thunk it.

Jeff Christian: It's Not Just Gold—Computerized Trading Being Used to Manipulate All Markets Posted: 16 Mar 2014 05:00 PM PDT Last week, towards the end of a very lively and comprehensive roundtable discussion on gold, Financial Sense Newshour host Jim Puplava asked his guests whether they thought the gold market was being manipulated. Of the three responses, CPM Group's Jeff Christian was the most interesting

Time to Buy China? Posted: 16 Mar 2014 05:00 PM PDT Late last year, Asia Confidential made a seemingly outrageous call: that junior gold miners would likely prove the great contrarian trade of 2014. At the time, these stocks were the most hated assets on the planet.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Gold Continues Higher as Miners Outperform Posted: 16 Mar 2014 02:03 PM PDT Le Cafe Américain

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