Gold World News Flash |
- An Update on Gold
- Royal Canadian Mint Precious Metal Coins a Hit with Investors and Collectors
- Jim’s Mailbox
- Alert! US Dollar Crash has Begun!
- $12,000 Gold, $50,000 Gold & The Trade Of The Decade
- The Gold Price Gained $18.80 Today Closing at $1.303.20
- Jim Willie: The Gold Standard is Coming. IT WILL SHAKE THE WORLD.
- Faber, von Greyerz interviewed at King World News
- Koos Jansen: Deposit insurance changes will boost gold demand in China
- Gold Price Manipulation – Jay Taylor Interview
- China Still Gold Crazy, Chris Marchese
- The Gold Price Gained $18.80 Today Closing at $1.303.20
- Christine Lagarde Is Clueless: 70 Words Of Pure Keynesian Claptrap
- Visualizing The Collapse Of Chicago's Middle Class
- Guest Post: The Screaming Fundamentals For Owning Gold
- The Shocking Truth About The Deindustrialization Of America That Everyone Should Know
- Deflating the Deflation Myth
- Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Pop Go the Weasels - Thank You To Zerohedge et al.
- Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Pop Go the Weasels - Thank You To Zerohedge et al.
- James Rickards : U.S. Dollar Is Headed for a Collapse Worse Than 2008
- TF Metals Report: Can the deniers deny this?
- Contrarian Gold Stocks
- The Disturbing Truth Behind Your Next Income Tax Return
- $12,000 Gold, $50,000 Gold & The Trade Of The Decade
- Ukraine Preface, the Emerging Dynamics Of Petro-Yuan Standard
- Faber suspects gold is manipulated; Martenson itemizes the case for owning it
- Gold Prices Surge as US Jobs Data Slip, But China's Demand "Tracks 2012, Needs Drop"
- Gold Prices Surge as US Jobs Data Slip, But China's Demand "Tracks 2012, Needs Drop"
- Gold Prices Surge as US Jobs Data Slip, But China's Demand "Tracks 2012, Needs Drop"
- "What Yellen Says Matters to Gold": Frank Holmes
- "What Yellen Says Matters to Gold": Frank Holmes
- Alasdair Macleod: China is taking far more gold than Western analysts think
- Ex Nihilo, Nihil Fit
- Ex Nihilo, Nihil Fit
- Silver Bullion Coin Sales Soar In March, Gold Coin Sales Slump – Are Coin Buyers Stupid?
- If Reflation Is Here, Then Gold Is Your Ultimate Hedge
- Latest 'London Gold Pool' will collapse as first one did, Barron tells KWN
- Pakistan rejects IMF's call to sell its gold reserves for FX cash
- Tocqueville's Hathaway praises anti-trust lawsuit against London gold fix banks
- China To Cause Massive Collapse Of Second London Gold Pool
- Koos Jansen: GOFO is negative again, indicating a new rise in gold
- ALERT -- CHINA DUMPS $46.7 BILLION IN U.S. BONDS
- Infographic - Unearthing The Worlds Gold Supply
- The Gold Price Eased Off $6.10 Today Closing at $1,284.40
- The Gold Price Eased Off $6.10 Today Closing at $1,284.40
- U.S. To Pay Off Public Debt 5747 Years At 100 Dollars Per Second
- Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Non-Farm Payrolls Tomorrow
- Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Non-Farm Payrolls Tomorrow
- Rickards: Collapse of International Money System - Not Apocalypse, But a Change
- Rickards: Collapse of International Money System - Not Apocalypse, But a Change
| Posted: 05 Apr 2014 12:00 AM PDT by Jordan Roy-Byrne, TheDailyGold:
First lets take a look at the Gold bear analog chart. This includes the major bears of the past 35 years, excluding a super long (1987-1993) bear that was very mild in its price decline. The Gold bear analog isn't quite as black and white as the previous analogs shown for Silver and the gold stocks. One could look at this chart and surmise that the bear has longer to go while others could say it has gone far enough and deep enough already. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Royal Canadian Mint Precious Metal Coins a Hit with Investors and Collectors Posted: 04 Apr 2014 11:18 PM PDT The Royal Canadian Mint has a rich history, striking its first gold sovereign coin back in 1908. The Mint began production of the world renown Canadian Gold Maple Leaf in 1979 and introduced the 99.99% pure Silver Maple Leaf in 1988. Investor demand for both the gold and silver Maple Leafs has remained strong year [...] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 Apr 2014 10:28 PM PDT Jim, As Middle East talks collapse, there is more pressure on Kerry and O to have "successful" talks re: Syria, Iran and Ukraine. Only China and Russia can ensure the other talks are fruitful. This diplomatic shift will not go unnoticed by Saudis and others. CIGA Craig Kerry hints Middle East peace talks are close... Read more » The post Jim’s Mailbox appeared first on Jim Sinclair's Mineset. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Alert! US Dollar Crash has Begun! Posted: 04 Apr 2014 10:23 PM PDT US COLLAPSE Critical Alert! Dollar Crash has Begun! The US Dollar is literally being smashed right now. Countries like China are rapidly moving away from the US Dollar into other assets such as gold. People are investing outside of this monopoly and it will ultimately be the end of the... [[ 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! ]]  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| $12,000 Gold, $50,000 Gold & The Trade Of The Decade Posted: 04 Apr 2014 10:18 PM PDT Dear CIGAs, On the heels of another wild trading week, today a 42-year market veteran spoke with King World News about the coming chaos that investors around the world need to brace for, as well as $12,000 gold, $50,000 gold and much more. Below is the incredibly powerful piece by Egon von Greyerz, who is... Read more » The post $12,000 Gold, $50,000 Gold & The Trade Of The Decade appeared first on Jim Sinclair's Mineset. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Gold Price Gained $18.80 Today Closing at $1.303.20 Posted: 04 Apr 2014 10:01 PM PDT
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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Jim Willie: The Gold Standard is Coming. IT WILL SHAKE THE WORLD. Posted: 04 Apr 2014 09:55 PM PDT from Silver Doctors:
The Iran sanction workarounds are to serve as the prototype for gold trade settlement. Shanghai will set the oil price in Yuan terms. China will insist on making oil payments in their own Yuan currency. Russia will service the oil demands to Europe and Asia. The Saudis will comply with Yuan payments and any other major currency in payment. OPEC will fade while the NatGasCoop will rise under Gazprom leadership Europe is caught in the middle, but will eventually turn to Yuan and Ruble payments for oil shipments. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Faber, von Greyerz interviewed at King World News Posted: 04 Apr 2014 09:13 PM PDT 11:10a ICT Saturday, April 5, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Newsletter writer Marc Faber tells King World News today about a couple of surprising markets he finds highly prospective: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/4/4_The... And Swiss gold fund manager Egon von Greyerz tells KWN he sees the United States entering a hyperinflationary period: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/4/4_%24... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Jim Sinclair to hold gold market seminar in Toronto on April 26 Mining entrepreneur and gold advocate Jim Sinclair's next gold market seminar will be held from 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday, April 26, at the Pearson Hotel & Conference Centre at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, 240 Belfield Road, Toronto. For details on tickets, please visit Sinclair's Internet site, JSMineSet.com, here: http://www.jsmineset.com/2014/04/01/toronto-qa-session-announced/ Join GATA here: Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference Committee for Monetary Research and Education http://www.cmre.org/news/spring-meeting-2014/ Canadian Investor Conference 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: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Koos Jansen: Deposit insurance changes will boost gold demand in China Posted: 04 Apr 2014 08:42 PM PDT 10:40a ICT Saturday, April 5, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Gold researcher and GATA consultant Koos Jansen today publishes commentary from a Chinese investment house arguing that new restrictions on bank deposit insurance in China are likely to increase investor demand for gold. The commentary is headlined "Deposit Insurance System Will Increase Physical Gold Demand in China" and it's posted at Jansen's Internet site, In Gold We Trust, here: http://www.ingoldwetrust.ch/deposit-insurance-system-will-increase-physi... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Buy metals at GoldMoney and enjoy international storage GoldMoney was established in 2001 by James and Geoff Turk and is safeguarding more than $1.7 billion in metals and currencies. Buy gold, silver, platinum, and palladium from GoldMoney over the Internet and store them in vaults in Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, taking advantage of GoldMoney's low storage rates, among the most competitive in the industry. GoldMoney also offers delivery of 100-gram and 1-kilogram gold bars and 1-kilogram silver bars. To learn more, please visit: http://www.goldmoney.com/?gmrefcode=gata Join GATA here: Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference Committee for Monetary Research and Education http://www.cmre.org/news/spring-meeting-2014/ Canadian Investor Conference 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: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT Silver mining stock report for 2014 comes with 1-ounce silver round Future Money Trends is offering a special 18-page silver mining stock report about how to profit with the monetary and industrial metal in 2014, and it comes with a free 1-ounce silver round. Proceeds from the report's sales are shared with the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee to support its efforts to expose manipulation in the monetary metals markets. To learn about this report, please visit: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gold Price Manipulation – Jay Taylor Interview Posted: 04 Apr 2014 08:25 PM PDT from HardAssetsAlliance: In this episode, Andrew Duncan speaks with Jay Taylor about gold price manipulation, how China and silver might be linked, and alternative investments to gold. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| China Still Gold Crazy, Chris Marchese Posted: 04 Apr 2014 08:00 PM PDT from silver investor.com: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Gold Price Gained $18.80 Today Closing at $1.303.20 Posted: 04 Apr 2014 08:00 PM PDT
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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Christine Lagarde Is Clueless: 70 Words Of Pure Keynesian Claptrap Posted: 04 Apr 2014 07:04 PM PDT Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog, The world's official economic institutions are run by people who believe in monetary fairy tales. The 70 words of wisdom below from IMF head Christine Lagarde are par for the course. She asserts that a new jabberwocky expression called "low-flation" is the main obstacle to higher economic growth in Europe and the DM areas generally and that it can be cured by more central bank money printing.
Now there is not a shred of credible evidence that prolonged low CPI inflation causes workers to produce less, businesses to invest less or entrepreneurs to invent less. Since these are the fundamental ingredients of economic growth on the free market, the question recurs as to why Keynesian Kool-Aid drinkers like Lagarde (and the huge staff of IMF economists she lip-syncs) apparently believe that eroding the value of savings by say only 1% per year vs. 2% will "suppress demand and output". Obviously, even they can't believe that falling prices alone cause "demand" to falter. After all, the price of flat-screen TVs, iPads and iPhones have plunged during the past several years, but demand has soared. During the past 27 months, for example, Apple's revenues have surged from $29 billion to $58 billion per quarter. And its not just tech gadgetry, either. Wal-Mart has been driving down the price of furniture, toasters and house-paint for years now, but it has never once complained that its revenue growth–which has been relentless for decades—-has been impaired because its customers are holding-off for even lower everyday prices next period. Indeed, at the product and commodity level the "low-flation" notion is positively ridiculous. US auto sales of 17 million annually in 2005 plummeted to about 11 million by 2009, but that was due to falling incomes and impaired credit status among marginal car buyers. During that period auto prices were not falling but steadily rising. In general, the old rules have not been repealed: demand flows from income; income follows production; rising prices except among the most inelastic commodities tend to discourage demand; and falling prices tend to stimulate it. Only in the Keynesian world of regression model aggregates do we get a polar-reversal. There, baskets of prices (i.e. price indices like the CPI) which are rising somewhat slower than trend allegedly cause that mysterious ether called "aggregate demand" to falter. Needless to say, the professors have never identified the transmission mechanism whereby the consumer's logical behavior to buy more goods with falling prices at the micro-level— causes the sum of all consumers to defer spending in the face of weakening inflation at the aggregate level for the entire basket of goods and services. No time needs be spent on puzzling about this conundrum because the missing link is easy to see. The mysterious Keynesian ether is simply credit expansion in excess of income growth. That happened for about four decades prior to the financial crisis, and it did goose GDP as measured by the "spending and income" accounts published by the government's statistical mills. Designed by primitive Keynesians in the 1930s and 1940s these ledgers were a marvel of aggregation, cross-walks and accounting identities, but, alas, they suffered from a irremediable flaw. Namely, the GDP accounts contained no balance sheets; it was all about flows which meant that there was no history, and that each quarterly accounting period was a fresh start. As it happened, the US economy fresh-started its way straight up a parabolic debt-to-income curve after the 1970s. The aggregate credit market debt-to-national income ratio had been stable at 1.5X for nearly a century, but climbed nearly continuously to 3.5X by the eve of the financial crisis in late 2007. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, this extra two turns of debt amounts to about $30 trillion of incremental debt burden. In the household sector, the debt ratchet was equally dramatic. With each new business cycle, household debt climbed to a new plateau. It ultimately rose from 80% of wage and salary income in 1970 to a peak of 210 percent in 2007—before falling back slightly to about 180% at present owing to the liquidation of unsustainable or defaulted mortgage and credit card debt. The short of it is that we have hit peak debt, and the one-time ratchet to spending based on rising debt ratios is over. The Keynesians never saw this coming because their DSGE models never saw a balance sheet—let alone the de facto LBO which occurred on the nation's aggregate balance sheet over the past 40 years. And so they persist in insisting that more of the square peg of debt be pounded into the fully saturated round hole of income. That's the essence of the mad money printing being undertaken by all of the world's major central banks. Keynesian policy-makers at these central banks labor to once again levitate demand in the time-worn manner, but fail to see that the credit transmission channel of monetary policy was a one-time expedient, and that it is now exhausted and done. After nearly five years of failing to achieve "escape velocity", therefore, they now desperately need an explanation for that failure, and have simply invented one: "low-flation". It goes without saying that this particular variant of the Keynesian catechism is especially dangerous. It gives the central banks a license to define and redefine "optimum" inflation—a figure that is already creeping up from 2% toward 3% and even 4% among some of the more aggressive doves. Since the phony inflation numbers published by the government mills–riddled as they are with imputed rents, geometric means and hedonic adjustments— will always fall short of these arbitrary inflation targets, the central bankers have essentially invented a pretext for endless monetary expansion. Unfortunately, that means that the Wall Street finance channel will be injected with ever more juice for the carry trades until the resulting financial bubbles reach their natural asymptote and come crashing down once again. The scary thing is that the world is being run by central bank, IMF and national government apparatchiks, who, like Christine Lagarde, are clueless about the fact that momentary doctrines such as "low-flation" are simply made-up claptrap. Too be sure, the Keynesian recipe for the debt elixir was not always this specious. Once upon a time this Keynesian RX was at least quasi-honest because the debt magic was held to operate mainly through fiscal policy. According to the great thinker, the masses had an unfortunate habit of saving too much—-so the solution was for the fiscal authorities to sop-up these fetid pools and cycle them back into the economy through government deficits. In turn, these fiscal booster shots in the form of transfer payments, public works, war equipment and even holes dug and refilled would generate fiscal multipliers—that is to say, money borrowed from society's stagnant savings pool and spent by recipients of government outlays would become new income to shovel suppliers and food vendors, who would re-spend their proceeds and fuel a virtuous cycle of growth. Moreover, this type of prosperity from the issuance of government bonds and bills was to be pursued aggressively until the macro-economy had absorbed every single idle worker and capital resource, and had thereby achieved a Keynesian nirvana called "full employment". Only then was the borrowing to stop, allowing the budget to swing into full-employment surplus. At that point, the macro-economic bathtub would be full to the brim and the elixir of debt would have done its job. It didn't work out that way. Johnson's "guns and butter" fiscal policies caused the macroeconomic bathtub to flood, unleashing a decade of the Great Inflation. Unemployment dropped below 4% for 40 months running in the late 1960s, giving rise to virulent wage pressures that fueled an inflationary cost spiral. Likewise, the excess domestic demand feed by the Keynesian doctors of the Kennedy-Johnson White House spilled over into the international market, inducing a massive inflow of imports and current account deficits. Soon there was a monetary crisis. Nixon then pulled the plug on the gold-backed money that J.M. Keynes had designed at Bretton Woods, thereby permitting Milton Friedman's monetary wise men to run the nation's central bank by the seat of their pants. In time, the excess savings hobgoblin disappeared–with the US household savings rate falling from 11 percent to barely 3%, but that didn't matter. The Keynesian baton had already been passed to the Greenspan era central bankers. As suggested above, the latter proceeded to fuel massive credit-driven expansion until balance sheets were fully exhausted. At the end of the day, therefore, the grand Keynesian idea of the debt elixir has now been reduced to mindless money printing by the central banks. And the myth of excess savings and under-consumption has been reduced to something even worse—bureaucratic slobbering about "low-flation". | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Visualizing The Collapse Of Chicago's Middle Class Posted: 04 Apr 2014 06:30 PM PDT As Daniel Kay Hertz explains, the goal of these maps is not merely to depress you (you're welcome!), but to suggest just how dramatically the reality of Chicago's "two cities" has changed over the last few generations, how non-eternal its present state is, and that a happier alternate reality isn't just possible, but actually existed relatively recently.
Daniel Kay Hertz goes on to note, he feels relatively comfortable telling the story of how Chicago came to be so segregated by race; but is much humbler about his ability to explain this, except inasmuch as the ever-widening ghetto of the affluent could not exist without, yes, radically exclusionary housing laws. ... One last piece: the obvious and immediate reaction to these maps is to see them as a direct consequence of rising income inequality. There is some truth to that, but the researchers from which much of this data came have already discovered that income segregation has actually risen faster than inequality. So that's not the end of the story. Anyway, here you go: the disappearance of Chicago's middle-class and mixed-income neighborhoods since 1970, measured by each Census tract's median family income as a percentage of the median family income for the Chicago metropolitan region as a whole.
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| Guest Post: The Screaming Fundamentals For Owning Gold Posted: 04 Apr 2014 06:20 PM PDT Submitted by Chris Martenson via Peak Prosperity,
IntroductionIn 2001, as the painful end of the long stock bull market finally seeped into my consciousness, I began to grow quite concerned about my traditional stock and bond holdings. Other than a house with 27 years left on a 30 year mortgage, these paper holdings represented 100% of my investing portfolio. So I dug into the economic data to discover what the future likely held. What I found shocked me. It's all in the Crash Course, in both video and book form, so I won't go into that data here; but a key takeaway is that the US is spending far more than it is earning, and supporting that gap by printing a whole lot of new money. By 2002, I had investigated enough about our monetary, economic, and political systems that I came to the conclusion that holding gold and silver would be a very good idea. So I poured 50% of my liquid net worth into precious metals, and sat back and waited. So far so good. But the best is yet to come... unfortunately. I say 'unfortunately' because the forces that are going to drive gold higher in current dollar terms are the very same trends that are going to leave most people, and the planet, much worse off than they are now. Part 1: Why Own Gold?The reasons to hold gold (and silver), and I mean physical bullion, are pretty straightforward. So let’s begin with the primary ones:
Monetary RiskBy ‘monetary recklessness,’ I mean the creation of money out of thin air and the application of more liquidity than the productive economy actually needs. The central banks of the world have been doing this for decades, not just since the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. In gold terms, the supply of above-ground gold is growing at 1.7 % per year, while the money supply has been growing at more than three times that yearly rate since 1960:
Over time, that more than 5% growth differential has created an enormous gap due to the exponential 'miracle' of compounding. Now this is admittedly an unfair view, because the economy has been growing, too. But money and credit growth has still handily outpaced the growth of our artificially and upwardly-distorted GDP measurements by a wide margin. Even as the economy stagnates under this too-large debt load, the credit system continues to expand as if perpetual growth were possible. Given this dynamic, we continue to expect all the resulting extra dollars, debts and other assorted claims on real wealth to eventually show up in prices of goods and services. And since we live in a system where money is loaned into existence, we also have to look at the growth in credit, as well. Since 1970 the US has been compounding its total credit market debts at the astounding rate of nearly 8% per annum:
This desperate drive for continuous compounding growth in money and credit is a principal piece of evidence that convinces me that hard assets, of which gold is perhaps the star representative for the average person, are the place to be for a sizeable portion of your stored wealth. Negative Real Interest RatesReal interest rates are deeply negative (meaning that the rate of inflation is higher than Treasury bond yields). This is a forced, manipulated outcome courtesy of central banks that are buying bonds with thin-air money. Of course, the true rate of inflation is much higher than the officially reported statistics by at least a full percent or possibly two, and so I consider bond yields to be far more negative than your typical observer. Historically, periods of negative real interest rates are nearly always associated with outsized returns for commodities, especially precious metals. If and when real interest rates turn positive, I will reconsider my holdings in gold and silver, but not until then. That's as close to an absolute requirement as I have in this business. Dangerous PoliciesMonetary policies across the developed world remain as accommodating as they’ve ever been. Even Greenspan's 1% blow-out special in 2003 was not as steeply negative in real terms as what Bernanke engineered over his more recent tenure. But it is the highly aggressive and ‘alternative’ use of the Federal Reserve balance sheet to prop up insolvent banks and to sop up extra Treasury debt that really has me worried. There seems to be no way to end these ever-expanding programs, and they seem to have become a permanent feature of the economic and financial landscape. In Europe, the equivalent is the sovereign debt now found on the European Central Bank (ECB) balance sheet. In Japan we have prime minister Abe's ultra-aggressive policy of doubling the monetary base in just two years. Suffice it to say that such grand experiments have never been tried before, and anyone that has the vast bulk of their wealth tied up in financial assets is making an explicit bet that these experiments will go exactly as planned. Chronic DeficitsFederal fiscal deficits are seemingly out of control and are now stuck in the $1 trillion range. Massive deficit spending has always been inflationary, and inflation is usually gold/silver friendly. Although not always, mind you, as the correlation is not strong, especially during mild inflation (less than 5%). Note, for example, that gold fell from its high in 1980 all the way to its low in 1998, an 18 year period with plenty of mild inflation along the way. Sooner or later I expect extraordinary budget deficits to translate into extraordinary inflation. Banking System RiskReason #3, insurance against a major calamity in the banking system, is an important part of my rationale for holding gold. And let me clear: I’m not referring to “paper" gold, which includes the various tradable vehicles (like the "GLD" ETF) that you can buy like stocks through your broker. I’m talking about physical gold and silver because of their unusual ability to sit outside of the banking/monetary system and act as monetary assets. Literally everything else financial, including our paper US money, is simultaneously somebody else’s liability. But gold and silver bullion are not. They are simply, boringly, just assets. This is a highly desirable characteristic that is not easily replicated. Should the banking system suffer a systemic breakdown, to which I ascribe a reasonably high probability of greater than 1-in-3 over the next 5 years, I expect banks to close for some period of time. Whether it's two weeks or six months is unimportant; no matter the length of time, I'd prefer to be holding gold than bank deposits. During a banking holiday, your money will be frozen and left just sitting there, even as everything priced in money (especially imported items) rocket up in price. By the time your money is again available to you, you may find that a large portion of it has been looted by the effects of a collapsing currency. How do you avoid this? Easy; keep some ‘money’ out of the system to spend during an emergency. I always advocate three months of living expenses in cash, but you owe it to yourself to have gold and silver in your possession as well. The test run for such a bank holiday was recently tried out in Cyprus where people woke up one day and discovered that their bank accounts were frozen. Those with large deposits had a very material percentage of those funds seized so that the bank's more senior creditors, the bondholders, could avoid the losses they were due. Most people, at least those paying attention, learned two things from Cyprus:
Re-monetization PotentialThe final reason for holding gold, because it may be remonetized, is actually a very big draw for me. While the probability of this coming to pass may be low, the rewards would be very high for those holding gold should it occur. Here are some numbers: The total amount of 'official gold,' or that held by central banks around the world, is 31,320 tonnes, or 1.01 billion troy ounces. In 2013 the total amount of money stock in the world was roughly $55 trillion. If the world wanted 100% gold backing of all existing money, then the implied price for an ounce of gold is ($55T/1.01BOz) = $54,455 per troy ounce. Clearly that's a silly number (or is it?). But even a 10% partial backing of money yields $5,400 per ounce. The point here is not to bandy about outlandish numbers, but merely to point out that unless a great deal of the world's money stock is destroyed somehow, or a lot more official gold is bought from the market and placed into official hands, backing even a small fraction of the world's money supply by gold will result in a far higher number than today's ~$1,300/oz. The Difference Between Silver and GoldOften people ask me if I hold goldandsilver as if it were one word. I do own both, but for almost entirely different reasons. Gold, to me, is a monetary substance. It has money-like qualities and it has been used as money by diverse cultures throughout history. I expect that to continue. There is a slight chance that gold will be re-monetized on the international stage due to a failure of the current all-fiat regime. If or when the fiat regime fails, there will have to be some form of replacement, and the only one that we know works for sure is a gold standard. Therefore, a renewed gold standard has the best chance of being the ‘new’ system selected during the next bout of difficulties. So gold is money. Silver is an industrial metal with a host of enviable and irreplaceable attributes. It is the most conductive element on the periodic table, and therefore it is widely used in the electronics industry. It is used to plate critical bearings in jet engines and as an antimicrobial additive to everything from wall paints to clothing fibers. In nearly all of these uses, plus a thousand others, it is used in vanishingly-small quantities that are hardly worth recovering at the end of the product life cycle -- so they often aren't. Because of this dispersion effect, above-ground silver is actually quite a bit less abundant than you might suspect. When silver was used primarily for monetary and ornamentation purposes, the amount of above-ground, refined silver grew with every passing year. After industrial uses cropped up, that trend reversed, and today it's thought that roughly half of all the silver ever mined in human history has been irretrievably dispersed. Because of this consumption dynamic, it's entirely possible that over the next twenty years not one single net new ounce of above ground silver will be added to inventories, while in contrast, a few billion ounces of gold will be added. I hold gold as a monetary metal. I own silver because of its residual monetary qualities, but more importantly because I believe it will continue to be in demand for industrial uses for a very long time, and it will become a scarce and rare item.
Part 2: Supply & Demand Are Shockingly Out Of BalanceGold DemandGold demand has gone up from 3,200 tonnes in 2003 to 4,400 tonnes in 2013, and that's even with a massive 800 tonnes being disgorged from the GLD tracking fund over 2013 (purple circle, below):
(Source) Note the dotted red line in this chart: it shows the current level of mine production. World demand has been higher than mine production for a number of years. Where has the additional supply come from to meet demand? We'll get to that soon, but the quick answer is: it had to come from somewhere, and that place was 'the West.' A really big story in play here is the truly historic and massive flows of gold from the West to the East, with China being the largest driver of those gold flows. ChinaAlasdair McLeod of GoldMoney.com has assembled the public figures on China's cumulative gold demand which, notably, do not include whatever the People's Bank of China may have bought. Those are presumably additive to these figures unless we are to believe that the PBoC now purchases its gold over the counter and in full view (which they almost certainly do not). Using publicly available statistics only, it's possible to calculate that in 2013 China alone accounted for more than 2,600 tonnes of demand, or more than 60% of total demand or, as we'll soon see, almost all of the world's total gold mine production:
(Source) Of course China has a lot of money to spend, a long and comfortable relationship with gold as a legitimate asset to hold, and has to be very pleased by the repeated bear raids in the western markets that drive the price of gold down, even as gold demand has surged to record highs as a consequence of these lower prices. Of course the big risk in all that Chinese demand for gold is that China may stop buying that much gold in the future for a variety of reasons. One could be that the Chinese bubble economy finally bursts and people there no longer feel wealthy and so they stop buying gold. Another could be that the Chinese government reverses course and makes future gold purchases illegal for some reason. Perhaps they are experiencing too much capital flight, or they want to limit imports of what they consider non-essential items. Who knows? I do know that Chinese demand has been simply incredible and, keeping all things equal, I expect that to continue, if not increase. IndiaIndia, long a steady and traditional buyer of gold, saw so much buying activity as a consequence of the lower gold prices that the government had to impose controls on the amount of gold imported into the country, even banning imports for a while:
(Source) Central BanksAnother factor driving demand has been the reemergence of central banks as net acquirers of gold. This is actually a pretty big deal. Over the past few decades, central banks have been actively reducing their gold holdings, preferring paper assets over the 'barbarous relic.' Famously, Canada and Switzerland vastly reduced their official gold holdings during this period (to effectively zero in the case of Canada), a decision that many citizens of those countries have openly and actively questioned. The UK-based World Gold Council is the primary firm that aggregates and reports on gold supply-and-demand statistics. Here's their most recent data on official (i.e., central bank) gold holdings:
(Source) Note that the 2009 data is lowered by slightly more than 450 tonnes in this chart to remove the one-time announcement by China that it had secretly acquired 454 tonnes over the prior six years, so this data may differ from other representations you might see. I thought it best to remove that blip from the data. Also, the data for 2012 and 2013 must also be lacking official China data because the last time they announced an increase in their official gold holdings was in 2009. In just 2013 alone, the gap between China's apparent and reported gold consumption was over 500 tonnes and the Chinese central bank, for a variety of reasons, is the most likely candidate to have absorbed such a quantity. If true, then China alone increased its official reserves by more than the rest of the world combined in 2013. The World Gold Council puts out what is considered by many to be the definitive source of gold statistics, which are the source data for the above chart. I do not consider the WGC to be definitive since their statistics do not comport well with other well reported data, but let's first take a look at what the WGC had to say about gold demand in 2013:
(Source) The big story there, obviously is that investment demand absolutely cratered even as jewelry and coins and bars rose to new heights. And nearly all of that investment drop was driven by flows out of the GLD investment vehicle. That is, gold was chased out of the weak hands of mainly western investors and into the strong hands of Asian buyers who wanted physical bullion and jewelry. This huge drop in total demand, led by plummeting investment demand, fits quite well with the 15% price drop recorded in 2013. So the WGC tells a nice coherent story so far. But the problem with this tidy story is that it simply does not fit with the above data about China's voracious appetite for gold, let along India's steady demand and rising demand in Europe, the Middle East, Turkey, Vietnam or Russia. The summary of the fundamental analysis of gold demand is
Now about that supply... Gold - SupplyNot surprisingly, the high p | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Shocking Truth About The Deindustrialization Of America That Everyone Should Know Posted: 04 Apr 2014 06:03 PM PDT Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog, How long can America continue to burn up wealth? How long can this nation continue to consume far more wealth than it produces? The trade deficit is one of the biggest reasons for the steady decline of the U.S. economy, but many Americans don't even understand what it is. Basically, we are buying far more stuff from the rest of the world than they are buying from us. That means that far more money is constantly leaving the country than is coming into the country. In order to keep the game going, we have to go to the people that we bought all of that stuff from and ask them to lend our money back to us. Or lately, we just have the Federal Reserve create new money out of thin air. This is called "quantitative easing". Our current debt-fueled lifestyle is dependent on this cycle continuing. In order to live like we do, we must consume far more wealth than we produce. If someday we are forced to only live on the wealth that we create, it will require a massive adjustment in our standard of living. We have become great at consuming wealth but not so great at creating it. But as a result of running gigantic trade deficits year after year, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions upon millions of jobs, and America is being deindustrialized at a staggering pace. Most Americans won't even notice, but the latest monthly trade deficit increased to 42.3 billion dollars...
When the trade deficit increases, it means that even more wealth, even more jobs and even more businesses have left the United States. In essence, we have gotten poorer as a nation. Have you ever wondered how China has gotten so wealthy? Just a few decades ago, they were basically a joke economically. So how in the world did they get so powerful? Well, one of the primary ways that they did it was by selling us far more stuff than we sold to them. If we had refused to do business with communist China, they never would have become what they have become today. It was our decisions that allowed China to become an economic powerhouse. Last year, we sold 122 billion dollars of stuff to China. That sounds like a lot until you learn that China sold 440 billion dollars of stuff to us. We fill up our shopping carts with lots of cheap plastic trinkets that are "made in China", and they pile up gigantic mountains of our money which we beg them to lend back to us so that we can pay our bills. Who is winning that game and who is losing that game? Below, I have posted our yearly trade deficits with China since 1990. Let's see if you can spot the trend... 1990: 10 billion dollars 1991: 12 billion dollars 1992: 18 billion dollars 1993: 22 billion dollars 1994: 29 billion dollars 1995: 33 billion dollars 1996: 39 billion dollars 1997: 49 billion dollars 1998: 56 billion dollars 1999: 68 billion dollars 2000: 83 billion dollars 2001: 83 billion dollars 2002: 103 billion dollars 2003: 124 billion dollars 2004: 162 billion dollars 2005: 202 billion dollars 2006: 234 billion dollars 2007: 258 billion dollars 2008: 268 billion dollars 2009: 226 billion dollars 2010: 273 billion dollars 2011: 295 billion dollars 2012: 315 billion dollars 2013: 318 billion dollars Yikes! It has been estimated that the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every 1 billion dollars of goods that are imported from overseas, and according to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing about half a million jobs to China every single year. Considering the high level of unemployment that we now have in this country, can we really afford to be doing that? Overall, the United States has accumulated a total trade deficit with the rest of the world of more than 8 trillion dollars since 1975. As a result, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and our economic infrastructure has been absolutely gutted. Just look at what has happened to manufacturing jobs in America. Back in the 1980s, more than 20 percent of the jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only about 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs. And we have fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than we did in 1950 even though our population has more than doubled since then...
Many people find this statistic hard to believe, but the United States has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001. Millions of good paying jobs have been lost. As a result, the middle class is shriveling up, and at this point 9 out of the top 10 occupations in America pay less than $35,000 a year. For a long time, U.S. consumers attempted to keep up their middle class lifestyles by going into constantly increasing amounts of debt, but now it is becoming increasingly apparent that middle class consumers are tapped out. In response, major retailers are closing thousands of stores in poor and middle class neighborhoods all over the country. You can see some amazing photos of America's abandoned shopping malls right here. If we could start reducing the size of our trade deficit, that would go a long way toward getting the United States back on the right economic path. Unfortunately, Barack Obama has been negotiating a treaty in secret which is going to send the deindustrialization of America into overdrive. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being called the "NAFTA of the Pacific", and it is going to result in millions more good jobs being sent to the other side of the planet where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue. So what will this country look like when we lose tens of millions more jobs than we already have? U.S. workers are being merged into a giant global labor pool where they must compete directly for jobs with people making less than a dollar an hour with no benefits. Obama tells us that globalization is good for us and that Americans need to be ready to adjust to a "level playing field". The quality of our jobs has already been declining for decades, and if we continue down this path the quality of our jobs is going to get a whole lot worse and our economic infrastructure will continue to be absolutely gutted. At one time, the city of Detroit was the greatest manufacturing city on the entire planet and it had the highest per capita income in the United States. But today, it is a rotting, decaying hellhole that the rest of the world laughs at. In the end, the rest of the nation is going to suffer the same fate as Detroit unless Americans are willing to stand up and fight for their economy while they still can. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 Apr 2014 03:10 PM PDT Submitted by Chris Casey via the Ludwig von Mises Institute, The fear of deflation serves as the theoretical justification of every inflationary action taken by the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world. It is why the Federal Reserve targets a price inflation rate of 2 percent, and not 0 percent. It is in large part why the Federal Reserve has more than quadrupled the money supply since August 2008. And it is, remarkably, a great myth, for there is nothing inherently dangerous or damaging about deflation. Deflation is feared not only by the followers of Milton Friedman (those from the so-called Monetarist or Chicago School of economics), but by Keynesian economists as well. Leading Keynesian Paul Krugman, in a 2010 New York Times article titled "Why Deflation is Bad," cited deflation as the cause of falling aggregate demand since "when people expect falling prices, they become less willing to spend, and in particular less willing to borrow." Presumably, he believes this delay in spending lasts in perpetuity. But we know from experience that, even in the face of falling prices, individuals and businesses will still, at some point, purchase the good or service in question. Consumption cannot be forever forgone. We see this every day in the computer/electronics industry: the value of using an iPhone over the next six months is worth more than the savings in delaying its purchase. Another common argument in the defamation of deflation concerns profits. With falling prices, how can businesses earn any as profit margins are squeezed? But profit margins by definition result from both sale prices and costs. If costs — which are after all prices themselves — also fall by the same magnitude (and there is no reason why they would not), profits are unaffected. If deflation impacts neither aggregate demand nor profits, how does it cause recessions? It does not. Examining any recessionary period subsequent to the Great Depression would lead one to this conclusion. In addition, the American economic experience during the nineteenth century is even more telling.
Twice, while experiencing sustained and significant economic growth, the American economy "endured" deflationary periods of 50 percent. But what of the "statistical proof" offered in Friedman's A Monetary History of the United States? A more robust study has been completed by several Federal Reserve economists who found:
If deflation does not cause recessions (or depressions as they were known prior to World War II), what does? And why was it so prominently featured during the Great Depression? According to economists of the Austrian School of economics, recessions share the same source: artificial inflation of the money supply. The ensuing "malinvestment" caused by synthetically lowered interest rates is revealed when interest rates resort to their natural level as determined by the supply and demand of savings. In the resultant recession, if fractional-reserve-based loans are defaulted or repaid, if a central bank contracts the money supply, and/or if the demand for money rises significantly, deflation may occur. More frequently, however, as central bankers frantically expand the money supply at the onset of a recession, inflation (or at least no deflation) will be experienced. So deflation, a sometime symptom, has been unjustly maligned as a recessionary source. But today's central bankers do not share this belief. In 2002, Ben Bernanke opined that "sustained deflation can be highly destructive to a modern economy and should be strongly resisted." The current Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, shares his concerns:
Now unmoored from any gold standard constraints and burdened with massive government debt, in any possible scenario pitting the spectre of deflation against the ravages of inflation, the biases and phobias of central bankers will choose the latter. This choice is as inevitable as it will be devastating. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Pop Go the Weasels - Thank You To Zerohedge et al. Posted: 04 Apr 2014 01:22 PM PDT | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Pop Go the Weasels - Thank You To Zerohedge et al. Posted: 04 Apr 2014 01:22 PM PDT | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| James Rickards : U.S. Dollar Is Headed for a Collapse Worse Than 2008 Posted: 04 Apr 2014 12:46 PM PDT Tune in for an informative discussion on the fate of the U.S. dollar. James Rickards recently stressed the dollar is heading for a collapse of 90% or more. What does this mean for the global economy and your savings accounts? Fed Chairman, Janet Yellen announced in the last Fed meeting future... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.GoldSilverNewsBlog.com or http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| TF Metals Report: Can the deniers deny this? Posted: 04 Apr 2014 10:20 AM PDT 12:20a ICT Saturday, April 5, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: The TF Metals Report's Turd Ferguson today notes the tedious smashing or capping of the gold price in conjunction with the Friday announcements of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' nonfarm job payrolls report. His commentary is headlined "Can the Deniers Deny This?" and it's posted at the TF Metals Report here: http://www.tfmetalsreport.com/blog/5631/can-deniers-deny CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer 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: Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference Committee for Monetary Research and Education http://www.cmre.org/news/spring-meeting-2014/ Canadian Investor Conference 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: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT Buy precious metals free of value-added tax throughout Europe Europe Silver Bullion is a fast-growing dealer sourcing its products from renowned mints, refiners, and distributors. Because of a legal loophole that will close soon, you can acquire the world's most popular bullion coins free of value-added tax throughout the European Union. You can collect your order in person at our headquarters in Tallinn, Estonia, or have it delivered in any of the 28 EU countries. Europe Silver Bullion is owned and operated by North American and European experts in selling, storing, and transporting precious metals. We have an extensive product inventory of silver, gold, platinum, and palladium, and our network spans the world. Visit us at www.europesilverbullion.com. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 Apr 2014 09:43 AM PDT Gold stocks have lapsed back to despised status after late March’s sharp selloff. Thanks to their strong 2014 rally before that, traders were slightly warming to this abandoned sector. But despite the rekindled extreme bearishness, gold stocks remain the greatest bargain in all the stock markets. Their prices are still absurdly undervalued relative to gold which drives their profits, fantastic buys for brave contrarians. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Disturbing Truth Behind Your Next Income Tax Return Posted: 04 Apr 2014 09:38 AM PDT The least of the problems with income tax is that it takes your money. The really big problem is that the income tax takes your life. It gives the government direct access to the things you own and sets up the political-bureaucratic sector to be the final arbiter of what you can and cannot consider to be yours. Illustrating this point is the bitter news that the IRS has considered it completely legal to demand access to your email archive whenever it wants. This news came about because of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The filing unearthed a 2009 memo that stated outright: “The Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because Internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” Forget search warrants and legal processes. In the interest of getting its share, the government can have it all on demand. This assertion was made again in 2010 by the IRS’s chief counsel: The “Fourth Amendment does not protect emails stored on a server” and there is “no privacy expectation” on email. It's striking when you realize just how completely unnecessary the income tax is for the funding of government. This assertion openly contradicts a 2010 legal decision from the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals. United States v. Warshak said that the government must obtain a probable cause warrant before forcing people and providers to cough up email archives. Granted, even that’s not much protection. Government always has its “probable cause.” Good for the ACLU for making an issue of this. There will continue to be legal wrangling over this issue, which is obviously important to absolutely everyone. But at some level, it’s all beside the point. The problem isn’t the legal process that allows the government to do what it wants; the problem is that government has a hook into personal income that allows powerful people to have their way with the whole of your life. As we look back at the history, we can see that the income tax enabled a century of intrusions into our lives. It’s been 100 years of a form of imposition that no American in most of the 19th century could have ever imagined or tolerated. The income tax is what enabled Prohibition, for example. Without the ability to monitor and adjudicate how people made money, the power of enforcement would not have been there at all. (Remember that Al Capone was not convicted for bootlegging, but for tax evasion.) It is what made possible the central planning of the New Deal. The government’s presumption that it owns the first fruits of labor gave rise to wage controls and mandatory participation in the Social Security system. It allowed the central planners to push aside young workers and tell them that they aren’t allowed to be part of the workforce. It allowed the introduction of the minimum wage that continues to shut out whole sectors of society. And look what happened during World War II. The price controls on wages and salaries — made possible only because the income tax gave government a fiduciary interest — inspired companies to start offering healthcare benefits as part of the compensation package. That practice was intensified over the decades until it became mandatory. That practice is a major source of the health care problems we have today. So there we have it: There is a direct link from Obamacare today back to the income tax of 100 years ago. Just the other day, with the IRS still on the march, the elaborate lunches provided in highflying companies such as Google entered onto the radar screen. Shouldn’t these wonderful buffets be considered as compensation subject to tax? There is just something unseemly about an agency that can’t let people even enjoy a lunch without demanding a cut. Frank Chodorov, author of the masterpiece The Rise and Fall of Society, was right to call the income tax the “root of all evil.” We look back to history and are in awe that anyone ever had the full right to earn whatever money he or she wanted to and to never have to tell the government about it. But that was the way it was for the dominant part of American history. That’s the system once called freedom. It’s striking when you realize just how completely unnecessary the income tax is for the funding of government. Last year, the income tax generated roughly $1.2 trillion in revenue for the government. What if we cut back government spending by exactly that amount so that we replace the income tax with absolutely nothing? That would take us back in time to 2004. As Ron Paul would ask, was the government really too small back then? Would society really collapse if we went back to a government we had just ten years ago? So let’s face it. Yes, the government likes our money and always wants more of it. But more crucially, the government uses the income tax as a primary means of controlling not just our money, but the whole of our lives. That’s the real purpose of the income tax and why the government will fight for its preservation to the end. Right now, many Americans are sweating it out to get their taxes done in time for the filing deadline of April 15. It would be immeasurably hard without the brilliant companies that have put together software programs — updated constantly! — that make what would otherwise seem impossible rather easy. This is the type of thing that free enterprise and the private sector do. They help us to have better lives. But government? What does it do? It takes. It snoops. And it controls. Sincerely, Jeffrey Tucker Ed. Note: Make sure you never miss another article from Jeffrey Tucker or any other selected authors. Sign up for Laissez Faire Today and receive a new issue sent directly to your inbox. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| $12,000 Gold, $50,000 Gold & The Trade Of The Decade Posted: 04 Apr 2014 09:32 AM PDT  On the heels of another wild trading week, today a 42-year market veteran spoke with King World News about the coming chaos that investors around the world need to brace for, as well as $12,000 gold, $50,000 gold and much more. Below is the incredibly powerful piece by Egon von Greyerz, who is founder of Matterhorn Asset Management out of Switzerland, where he also includes 3 astonishing charts.This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ukraine Preface, the Emerging Dynamics Of Petro-Yuan Standard Posted: 04 Apr 2014 09:19 AM PDT The shocks will be many as the USDollar struggles and falls off the global financial stage in full view. The desperate maneuvers like in Syria and Ukraine should be seen as last ditch efforts to save a dying system. For two decades the USDollar has been defended by military means. Worse, for 50 years the USGovt has been a hidden nazi enclave of wicked fascists who have hidden behind their overt disdain for communism, with Kissinger the flag bearer, with Brzezinski the ideologue, with Papa Bush the executor, with narcotics and genetics and gold thefts their principal agenda. The official US support of fascist regimes includes a list of nations as long as your arm. Since 2008 when the Lehman kill was executed in order to rescue Goldman Sachs, when Fannie Mae was hidden under the USGovt roof to prevent its $trillion fraud from being exposed, and when AIG was tucked in the USFed basement closet for ample monetized rescues to patch the derivative black holes, the Anglo-American banking system has indeed been going through trials and tribulations, leading to its death throes. The climax of the banking system death process is upon us finally, the fibrillations of sudden illiquidity against the backdrop of relentless unforgiving insolvency so evident to those with eyes that function. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Faber suspects gold is manipulated; Martenson itemizes the case for owning it Posted: 04 Apr 2014 08:37 AM PDT 10:37p ICT Friday, April 4, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Newsletter writer Marc Faber tells GoldCore's Mark O'Byrne today that he's inclined to think that the gold market is being manipulated: http://www.goldcore.com/goldcore_blog/Faber_On_Gold_Manipulation_Bitcoin... And market analyst Chris Martenson has put together a comprehensive case for owning gold on a fundamental basis: http://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/85064/screaming-fundamentals-owning-g... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Buy precious metals free of value-added tax throughout Europe Europe Silver Bullion is a fast-growing dealer sourcing its products from renowned mints, refiners, and distributors. Because of a legal loophole that will close soon, you can acquire the world's most popular bullion coins free of value-added tax throughout the European Union. You can collect your order in person at our headquarters in Tallinn, Estonia, or have it delivered in any of the 28 EU countries. Europe Silver Bullion is owned and operated by North American and European experts in selling, storing, and transporting precious metals. We have an extensive product inventory of silver, gold, platinum, and palladium, and our network spans the world. Visit us at www.europesilverbullion.com. Join GATA here: Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference Committee for Monetary Research and Education http://www.cmre.org/news/spring-meeting-2014/ Canadian Investor Conference 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: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gold Prices Surge as US Jobs Data Slip, But China's Demand "Tracks 2012, Needs Drop" Posted: 04 Apr 2014 05:54 AM PDT GOLD PRICES whipped around the release of US jobs data Friday, reversing the week's previous 1.3% drop to touch $1300 for the first time in 7 sessions. After gold prices had gained $10 ahead of Wednesday's ADP version of Non-Farm Payrolls – only to slip back a day later – the metal rose sharply again this morning in London, surging to $1297 just before the official US jobs data. Gold prices then dropped and jumped again as the data showed 192,000 net new jobs for March – below February's upwardly revised figure of 197,000. "It is NFP Friday again," said Walter de Wet earlier at South Africa Standard Bank's commodity division – currently being acquired by China's ICBC Bank – "and so gold is under scrutiny." Predicting an "asymmetrical" response to the Non-Farms jobs data by gold prices – falling hard on a good number, but rallying only a little if bad – "Gold might well rally, but we expect it to fade fast," de Wet said. Because "US long-term rates expected to rise", that would raise the opportunity or financing cost of physical gold bullion or derivatives positions respectively. "Furthermore," says Standard Bank's commodities team, "Asia's physical gold demand continues to track trends seen in 2012 rather than those of 2013. We believe that demand will pick up only when prices weaken." Chinese gold demand is "soft", says Reuters, quoting "sources" who say China's licensed banks have cut their gold imports recently. "Volume has fallen quite a bit partly due to the weakness in Yuan," says one bullion bank insider. "In the last four weeks, we have seen pretty poor demand." Shanghai gold contracts closed Friday at a discount of $3.95 per ounce to London prices. Usually trading at a premium thanks to local demand, shipping and the extra costs of refining to the 0.9999 purity preferred by Asian markets, China gold prices have now extended this rare discount to international benchmarks to a full 5 weeks. Looking at US rates, "Gold prices failed to bounce higher" last week after new US Fed chair Janet Yellen "tried to dampen rate hike expectations," say ABN Amro analysts in a note. "This is a signal that investors in gold believe more monetary stimulus is unlikely and they fear higher interest rates." Forecasting a strong Non-Farms Payroll report, "Gold prices may even already drop below our end of June projection of $1250 per ounce." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gold Prices Surge as US Jobs Data Slip, But China's Demand "Tracks 2012, Needs Drop" Posted: 04 Apr 2014 05:54 AM PDT GOLD PRICES whipped around the release of US jobs data Friday, reversing the week's previous 1.3% drop to touch $1300 for the first time in 7 sessions. After gold prices had gained $10 ahead of Wednesday's ADP version of Non-Farm Payrolls – only to slip back a day later – the metal rose sharply again this morning in London, surging to $1297 just before the official US jobs data. Gold prices then dropped and jumped again as the data showed 192,000 net new jobs for March – below February's upwardly revised figure of 197,000. "It is NFP Friday again," said Walter de Wet earlier at South Africa Standard Bank's commodity division – currently being acquired by China's ICBC Bank – "and so gold is under scrutiny." Predicting an "asymmetrical" response to the Non-Farms jobs data by gold prices – falling hard on a good number, but rallying only a little if bad – "Gold might well rally, but we expect it to fade fast," de Wet said. Because "US long-term rates expected to rise", that would raise the opportunity or financing cost of physical gold bullion or derivatives positions respectively. "Furthermore," says Standard Bank's commodities team, "Asia's physical gold demand continues to track trends seen in 2012 rather than those of 2013. We believe that demand will pick up only when prices weaken." Chinese gold demand is "soft", says Reuters, quoting "sources" who say China's licensed banks have cut their gold imports recently. "Volume has fallen quite a bit partly due to the weakness in Yuan," says one bullion bank insider. "In the last four weeks, we have seen pretty poor demand." Shanghai gold contracts closed Friday at a discount of $3.95 per ounce to London prices. Usually trading at a premium thanks to local demand, shipping and the extra costs of refining to the 0.9999 purity preferred by Asian markets, China gold prices have now extended this rare discount to international benchmarks to a full 5 weeks. Looking at US rates, "Gold prices failed to bounce higher" last week after new US Fed chair Janet Yellen "tried to dampen rate hike expectations," say ABN Amro analysts in a note. "This is a signal that investors in gold believe more monetary stimulus is unlikely and they fear higher interest rates." Forecasting a strong Non-Farms Payroll report, "Gold prices may even already drop below our end of June projection of $1250 per ounce." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gold Prices Surge as US Jobs Data Slip, But China's Demand "Tracks 2012, Needs Drop" Posted: 04 Apr 2014 05:54 AM PDT GOLD PRICES whipped around the release of US jobs data Friday, reversing the week's previous 1.3% drop to touch $1300 for the first time in 7 sessions. After gold prices had gained $10 ahead of Wednesday's ADP version of Non-Farm Payrolls – only to slip back a day later – the metal rose sharply again this morning in London, surging to $1297 just before the official US jobs data. Gold prices then dropped and jumped again as the data showed 192,000 net new jobs for March – below February's upwardly revised figure of 197,000. "It is NFP Friday again," said Walter de Wet earlier at South Africa Standard Bank's commodity division – currently being acquired by China's ICBC Bank – "and so gold is under scrutiny." Predicting an "asymmetrical" response to the Non-Farms jobs data by gold prices – falling hard on a good number, but rallying only a little if bad – "Gold might well rally, but we expect it to fade fast," de Wet said. Because "US long-term rates expected to rise", that would raise the opportunity or financing cost of physical gold bullion or derivatives positions respectively. "Furthermore," says Standard Bank's commodities team, "Asia's physical gold demand continues to track trends seen in 2012 rather than those of 2013. We believe that demand will pick up only when prices weaken." Chinese gold demand is "soft", says Reuters, quoting "sources" who say China's licensed banks have cut their gold imports recently. "Volume has fallen quite a bit partly due to the weakness in Yuan," says one bullion bank insider. "In the last four weeks, we have seen pretty poor demand." Shanghai gold contracts closed Friday at a discount of $3.95 per ounce to London prices. Usually trading at a premium thanks to local demand, shipping and the extra costs of refining to the 0.9999 purity preferred by Asian markets, China gold prices have now extended this rare discount to international benchmarks to a full 5 weeks. Looking at US rates, "Gold prices failed to bounce higher" last week after new US Fed chair Janet Yellen "tried to dampen rate hike expectations," say ABN Amro analysts in a note. "This is a signal that investors in gold believe more monetary stimulus is unlikely and they fear higher interest rates." Forecasting a strong Non-Farms Payroll report, "Gold prices may even already drop below our end of June projection of $1250 per ounce." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| "What Yellen Says Matters to Gold": Frank Holmes Posted: 04 Apr 2014 03:40 AM PDT Gold prices set by real interest rates, fear & love says U.S. Global Investors CEO, Frank Holmes... GOLD PRICES really do count what US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen says about interest rates, Frank Holmes tells me in this latest gold-market interview, writes BullionVault's Miguel Perez-Santalla. He knows how gold prices work, unlike the last Fed chief, Ben Bernanke. Chief investment officer and CEO of award-winning fund manager U.S. Global Investors, in 2006 Frank Holmes was selected "Mining Fund Manager of the Year" by the Mining Journal. Co-author of The Goldwatcher: Demystifying Gold Investing, he is also a regular commentator on financial television networks CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox Business, he's been profiled by Fortune, Barron's, the Financial Times and other publications. Check Out Business Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with New York Markets Live on BlogTalkRadio Interviewing him for New York Markets Live, I asked Frank about recent comments from new US Fed chair Janet Yellen, who indicated that interest rates may or may not rise in 2015. The economy is still fragile, the future is uncertain and there were no guarantees, Yellen said in subsequent comments. What's really going on? "It's bewildering for investors," agreed Holmes. "As gold investors we look to both positive and negative interest rates. In other words, what will the government pay you over the CPI? "This time last year we were going to get negative 50 basis points against inflation in a five-year government bond. Interest rates went up, inflation went down and we went to positive 50 basis points and gold $1400. "So what Yellen says is important to the gold investor." Gold prices are also determined by supply, of course. So Frank Holmes and I discuss the latest strikes is South Africa's mining industry, and the likely impact on gold output. More crucially for prices, I wanted Frank Holmes' opinion on where demand is coming from. "Sixty per cent of the demand for gold is what I call the 'Love Trade'," he explained. "It's associated with love in areas where there is a cultural affinity for giving gold. In India, for instance, where you have 600 million consumers under the age of 25. In North America, by contrast, we associate gold with fear. "Poor government policies, imbalances between monetary and fiscal policy can cause gold prices to take off." Accessing the market leads to wildly different gold prices for "Love" versus "Fear" investors too, Frank Holmes says. "You can go to Turkey and buy a beautiful gold bracelet for 10% over the price of gold that day. If you're on Fifth Avenue to buy gold, you're going to pay a 400% markup." Hear the full interview with Frank Holmes here.
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| "What Yellen Says Matters to Gold": Frank Holmes Posted: 04 Apr 2014 03:40 AM PDT Gold prices set by real interest rates, fear & love says U.S. Global Investors CEO, Frank Holmes... GOLD PRICES really do count what US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen says about interest rates, Frank Holmes tells me in this latest gold-market interview, writes BullionVault's Miguel Perez-Santalla. He knows how gold prices work, unlike the last Fed chief, Ben Bernanke. Chief investment officer and CEO of award-winning fund manager U.S. Global Investors, in 2006 Frank Holmes was selected "Mining Fund Manager of the Year" by the Mining Journal. Co-author of The Goldwatcher: Demystifying Gold Investing, he is also a regular commentator on financial television networks CNBC, Bloomberg and Fox Business, he's been profiled by Fortune, Barron's, the Financial Times and other publications. Check Out Business Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with New York Markets Live on BlogTalkRadio Interviewing him for New York Markets Live, I asked Frank about recent comments from new US Fed chair Janet Yellen, who indicated that interest rates may or may not rise in 2015. The economy is still fragile, the future is uncertain and there were no guarantees, Yellen said in subsequent comments. What's really going on? "It's bewildering for investors," agreed Holmes. "As gold investors we look to both positive and negative interest rates. In other words, what will the government pay you over the CPI? "This time last year we were going to get negative 50 basis points against inflation in a five-year government bond. Interest rates went up, inflation went down and we went to positive 50 basis points and gold $1400. "So what Yellen says is important to the gold investor." Gold prices are also determined by supply, of course. So Frank Holmes and I discuss the latest strikes is South Africa's mining industry, and the likely impact on gold output. More crucially for prices, I wanted Frank Holmes' opinion on where demand is coming from. "Sixty per cent of the demand for gold is what I call the 'Love Trade'," he explained. "It's associated with love in areas where there is a cultural affinity for giving gold. In India, for instance, where you have 600 million consumers under the age of 25. In North America, by contrast, we associate gold with fear. "Poor government policies, imbalances between monetary and fiscal policy can cause gold prices to take off." Accessing the market leads to wildly different gold prices for "Love" versus "Fear" investors too, Frank Holmes says. "You can go to Turkey and buy a beautiful gold bracelet for 10% over the price of gold that day. If you're on Fifth Avenue to buy gold, you're going to pay a 400% markup." Hear the full interview with Frank Holmes here.
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| Alasdair Macleod: China is taking far more gold than Western analysts think Posted: 04 Apr 2014 03:18 AM PDT 5:17p ICT Friday, April 4, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: GoldMoney research director Alasdair Macleod today provides his most exhaustive analysis yet of China's gold demand and concludes that it is far greater than estimated by Western analysts and than what the Chinese government itself wants known -- so great as to make futile Western efforts to control the gold price. Macleod concludes: "For much of 2013 commentators routinely stated that Asian demand was satisfied from exchange-traded fund redemptions. But ETF sales totaling 881 tonnes covered only one quarter of the West's shortfall against China, the rest coming mostly from central bank vaults. Anecdotal evidence from Switzerland is that the four major refiners have been working round the clock turning LBMA 400-ounce bars into 1-kilo .9999 bars for China. They are even working with gold bars that are battered and dusty, which suggests that the West is not only digging into deep storage to satisfy Chinese demand at current prices, but digging a hole for itself as well." Macleod's commentary is headlined "Renewed Estimates of Chinese Gold Demand" and it's posted at GoldMoney's Internet site here: http://www.goldmoney.com/research/analysis/renewed-estimates-of-chinese-... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Silver mining stock report for 2014 comes with 1-ounce silver round Future Money Trends is offering a special 18-page silver mining stock report about how to profit with the monetary and industrial metal in 2014, and it comes with a free 1-ounce silver round. Proceeds from the report's sales are shared with the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee to support its efforts to expose manipulation in the monetary metals markets. To learn about this report, please visit: Join GATA here: Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference Committee for Monetary Research and Education http://www.cmre.org/news/spring-meeting-2014/ Canadian Investor Conference 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: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT Buy metals at GoldMoney and enjoy international storage GoldMoney was established in 2001 by James and Geoff Turk and 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 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 Apr 2014 03:13 AM PDT The S&P is at record highs. But here's what to expect when the credit bubble pops... GOLD DOWN, stocks up. The S&P 500 hit a new all-time closing high of 1,890.9 mid-week, writes Bill Bonner in his Diary of a Rogue Economist. We've been sharing economist and author Richard Duncan's outlook for the months ahead. You noticed, surely, that it corresponds with our own, at least to an important point. Duncan's key insight is that asset prices – in particular stock prices – have come to depend on excess "liquidity" in the economy. We put liquidity in quotations, because it is not clear how fluid QE money really is. Our colleague Chris Hunter has pointed out that excess reserves can't be spent in the economy...nor can banks multiply them into more loans – an issue of some debate around our offices. Still, there is no doubt in our minds that the S&P 500's new record high is largely down to QE. As long as the quantity of this liquidity exceeds the economy's uses for it (principally borrowing by the federal government and corporations) stocks have a tendency to go up. When liquidity levels fall stocks tend to fall, too. Duncan anticipates that liquidity will dive in the last quarter of this year (with less available cash and credit than the economy needs). If they haven't sunk already, stocks will go down to where they belong. But the Fed has taken a blood oath to keep the credit bubble expanding to the end of time...or until it blows up...whichever comes first. And Janet Yellen has recently revealed herself to be a remarkable personage for a central banker. (She is, after all, a disciple of the infamous Yuri Pavlovovich!) She will not stop or sidestep the trap; she will walk right into it...recklessly blundering into the biggest financial disaster of all time. Ah yes...you might as well know. There's more to Duncan's macro views – a lot more. In 1964 – half a century ago – the US had a total debt load (private and public) of $1 trillion. Today, the economy carries a debt load of $59 trillion. Did the size of the economy also grow 59 times? Is our bigger, more prosperous economy now able to support $59 trillion of debt...or more? Hardly. In 1964, annual US GDP was $656 billion. Let's see...today it is about $17 trillion. Divide $17 trillion by $656 billion and we find that GDP has gone up 26 times – not even half as much as the debt. In other words, each unit of today's economic output supports more than twice as much debt as it did 50 years ago. Put another way, twice as much of what you see today – cars, hamburgers, houses, flat-screen TVs – owes its existence to transactions that have been completed. There is a day of reckoning for every debt-fueled purchase. And if interest rates rise, the coming settlement could be extremely painful. Normally, and naturally, the amount of credit in the world is limited by the amount of savings. You can't lend someone something you don't have. And if you don't save money, you can't lend it to someone else. But a reduction in required reserves balances for banks...and a shift to an elastic currency (in 1968)...made it possible for banks to create credit ex nihilo (out of nothing) without putting any meaningful amount of money aside as reserves. (By 2007, US banks held $73.2 billion in reserves and vault cash against assets of $11.9 trillion...for a liquidity ratio of just 0.6%.) If credit growth had just kept up with GDP growth, it would now measure about $26 trillion, not $59 trillion. In a credit deflation, the difference would have to disappear. Ex nihilo it came. Ad nihilo it will go. That $33 trillion worth of spending and asset prices would go poof. The Great Depression saw GDP fall by more than 40%. The next great depression should see an even bigger drop. Unemployment reached 25% in the Great Depression. The next depression could see even more jobs lost. In the Great Depression a large percentage of the US population was still semi self-sufficient – with gardens, chickens, hogs and extensive home preserves. Today, few people could support themselves from home, even for a few days. As the Austrian School economists warned us: Any credit in excess of actual savings is a fraud. It produces a fraudulent boom, which must be followed by a bust. Eventually, the phony credit must go back whence it came. Central banks can delay it. They can't avoid it. Today, the world economy relies on this never-ending credit expansion in the US. Without it, China's economy would collapse along with the US economy. The US stock market would be chopped in half – at least. In short, it will be one godawful mess. But Duncan goes further: A credit deflation would also knock the wind out of government finances. Social security, education, welfare programs, military spending – all would be substantially impaired. "In all probability," says Duncan, "our civilization would not survive it." He believes a serious credit deflation would bring "chaos, starvation and war." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 04 Apr 2014 03:13 AM PDT The S&P is at record highs. But here's what to expect when the credit bubble pops... GOLD DOWN, stocks up. The S&P 500 hit a new all-time closing high of 1,890.9 mid-week, writes Bill Bonner in his Diary of a Rogue Economist. We've been sharing economist and author Richard Duncan's outlook for the months ahead. You noticed, surely, that it corresponds with our own, at least to an important point. Duncan's key insight is that asset prices – in particular stock prices – have come to depend on excess "liquidity" in the economy. We put liquidity in quotations, because it is not clear how fluid QE money really is. Our colleague Chris Hunter has pointed out that excess reserves can't be spent in the economy...nor can banks multiply them into more loans – an issue of some debate around our offices. Still, there is no doubt in our minds that the S&P 500's new record high is largely down to QE. As long as the quantity of this liquidity exceeds the economy's uses for it (principally borrowing by the federal government and corporations) stocks have a tendency to go up. When liquidity levels fall stocks tend to fall, too. Duncan anticipates that liquidity will dive in the last quarter of this year (with less available cash and credit than the economy needs). If they haven't sunk already, stocks will go down to where they belong. But the Fed has taken a blood oath to keep the credit bubble expanding to the end of time...or until it blows up...whichever comes first. And Janet Yellen has recently revealed herself to be a remarkable personage for a central banker. (She is, after all, a disciple of the infamous Yuri Pavlovovich!) She will not stop or sidestep the trap; she will walk right into it...recklessly blundering into the biggest financial disaster of all time. Ah yes...you might as well know. There's more to Duncan's macro views – a lot more. In 1964 – half a century ago – the US had a total debt load (private and public) of $1 trillion. Today, the economy carries a debt load of $59 trillion. Did the size of the economy also grow 59 times? Is our bigger, more prosperous economy now able to support $59 trillion of debt...or more? Hardly. In 1964, annual US GDP was $656 billion. Let's see...today it is about $17 trillion. Divide $17 trillion by $656 billion and we find that GDP has gone up 26 times – not even half as much as the debt. In other words, each unit of today's economic output supports more than twice as much debt as it did 50 years ago. Put another way, twice as much of what you see today – cars, hamburgers, houses, flat-screen TVs – owes its existence to transactions that have been completed. There is a day of reckoning for every debt-fueled purchase. And if interest rates rise, the coming settlement could be extremely painful. Normally, and naturally, the amount of credit in the world is limited by the amount of savings. You can't lend someone something you don't have. And if you don't save money, you can't lend it to someone else. But a reduction in required reserves balances for banks...and a shift to an elastic currency (in 1968)...made it possible for banks to create credit ex nihilo (out of nothing) without putting any meaningful amount of money aside as reserves. (By 2007, US banks held $73.2 billion in reserves and vault cash against assets of $11.9 trillion...for a liquidity ratio of just 0.6%.) If credit growth had just kept up with GDP growth, it would now measure about $26 trillion, not $59 trillion. In a credit deflation, the difference would have to disappear. Ex nihilo it came. Ad nihilo it will go. That $33 trillion worth of spending and asset prices would go poof. The Great Depression saw GDP fall by more than 40%. The next great depression should see an even bigger drop. Unemployment reached 25% in the Great Depression. The next depression could see even more jobs lost. In the Great Depression a large percentage of the US population was still semi self-sufficient – with gardens, chickens, hogs and extensive home preserves. Today, few people could support themselves from home, even for a few days. As the Austrian School economists warned us: Any credit in excess of actual savings is a fraud. It produces a fraudulent boom, which must be followed by a bust. Eventually, the phony credit must go back whence it came. Central banks can delay it. They can't avoid it. Today, the world economy relies on this never-ending credit expansion in the US. Without it, China's economy would collapse along with the US economy. The US stock market would be chopped in half – at least. In short, it will be one godawful mess. But Duncan goes further: A credit deflation would also knock the wind out of government finances. Social security, education, welfare programs, military spending – all would be substantially impaired. "In all probability," says Duncan, "our civilization would not survive it." He believes a serious credit deflation would bring "chaos, starvation and war." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Silver Bullion Coin Sales Soar In March, Gold Coin Sales Slump – Are Coin Buyers Stupid? Posted: 04 Apr 2014 01:16 AM PDT The March sales report of American Eagle bullion coins by the U.S. Mint showed a large drop in gold bullion coins while sales of the ever popular silver bullion coins soared. Sales of the American Eagle gold bullion coins in March totaled 21,000 ounces, down by 32% from February's total of 31,000 ounces and down [...] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| If Reflation Is Here, Then Gold Is Your Ultimate Hedge Posted: 03 Apr 2014 10:29 PM PDT Today’s market situation shows similarities with the reflationary periods of 1897 to 1914 and 1933 to 1939. As we all know, they ended in inflation and war. We are currently in a highly deflationary environment, and the banks are fighting this by pumping up trillions of liquidity in the system, hoping for a sustainable recover. At the same time, however, strongly opposing forces are at play destabilizing the whole globe (think of the Middle East, Africa, Ukraine). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Latest 'London Gold Pool' will collapse as first one did, Barron tells KWN Posted: 03 Apr 2014 10:27 PM PDT 12:27p ICT Thursday, April 3, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Mining entrepreneur Keith Barron, a speaker at last month's Mines and Money conference in Hong Kong, tells King World News today that Chinese sentiment about gold remains bullish and that the current reincarnation of the London Gold Pool of the 1960s will collapse as the first one did: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/4/4_Chi... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Jim Sinclair to hold gold market seminar in Toronto on April 26 Mining entrepreneur and gold advocate Jim Sinclair's next gold market seminar will be held from 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday, April 26, at the Pearson Hotel & Conference Centre at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, 240 Belfield Road, Toronto. For details on tickets, please visit Sinclair's Internet site, JSMineSet.com, here: http://www.jsmineset.com/2014/04/01/toronto-qa-session-announced/ Join GATA here: Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference Committee for Monetary Research and Education http://www.cmre.org/news/spring-meeting-2014/ Canadian Investor Conference 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: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Pakistan rejects IMF's call to sell its gold reserves for FX cash Posted: 03 Apr 2014 09:57 PM PDT Pakistan Refuses to Sell Gold Worth $2.7 Billion, IMF Says By Shahbaz Rana http://tribune.com.pk/story/688588/turn-down-pakistan-refuses-to-sell-go... ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistan has refused to sell gold worth $2.7 billion, citing national security reasons, as the International Monetary Fund pushes Islamabad to convert the precious metal into cash to build foreign currency reserves, the global lender's report revealed Friday. The report, prepared by IMF staff led by its Washington-based mission chief to Islamabad, Jeffrey Franks, also spills the beans on the "$1.5 billion gift" to Pakistan by "Saudi Arabia" -- the name Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's government has so far refused to officially share with parliament. According to the report, the State Bank of Pakistan holds more than 2 million troy ounces of monetary gold, having $2.7 billion of value at the market rate. It is not counted in gross international reserves as it is not deemed to be liquid by the State Bank of Pakistan, the IMF says. ... Dispatch continues below ... 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 The IMF and Pakistan authorities discussed what steps would be needed to make the gold more liquid, the report adds. "However, the (Pakistani) authorities stressed that they have no plans to sell gold and preferred existing arrangements for gold holdings for national security reasons." The IMF is pushing Pakistan to sell gold holdings at a time when other countries are buying the commodity as a strategic reserve. The IMF had even sold its surplus gold to India a couple of years ago. According to analysts, one reason behind the IMF's insistence could be the country's inability to build official foreign currency reserves despite being in the $6.7 billion IMF arrangement. While the IMF hinted in its report that the State Bank of Pakistan was not aggressive in building foreign currency reserves, it disclosed that Pakistan's central bank continued its efforts to build reserves by purchasing dollars from the market. The State Bank of Pakistan purchased $575 million in the last few months till March 17, the report states. The purchases may help stabilise the foreign currency reserves but are considered one of the reasons behind depreciation of the local currency against the US dollar. The rupee started appreciating only after the $1.5 billion grant from Saudi Arabia. While the federal government remains reluctant to officially disclose the name of the country that "gifted" Pakistan $1.5 billion, despite the persistent demand of the opposition, the IMF report identifies it as Saudi Arabia. A "$750 million grant recently received from Saudi Arabia" will help the Pakistani government in reducing borrowings from the State Bank of Pakistan for budget financing, the IMF said. "Reserve accumulation was also aided by an additional inflow of $750 million from Saudi Arabia," according to Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies, which is attached with the report and is jointly prepared by Pakistan and the IMF. In a footnote to the memorandum, Pakistan told the IMF that it received an initial inflow of $750 million on February 19, indicating that it would receive more money. The IMF confirmed its recent forecast of 3.1 per cent growth this year, which was revised up from an earlier 2.8 per cent. "The overall economic situation in Pakistan is gradually improving," said Jeffrey Franks. "That 3.1 per cent may still be a bit on the conservative side, so we see indicators of growth that are relatively strong considering the fiscal adjustment that has taken place," he told reporters on a conference call. For the 2014-15 fiscal year, the IMF expected Pakistan's growth to accelerate to around 3.7 percent. The IMF report said the growth was boosted by a stronger manufacturing industry thanks to an easing of Pakistan's chronic electricity shortages, despite weaknesses in agriculture. Join GATA here: Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference Committee for Monetary Research and Education http://www.cmre.org/news/spring-meeting-2014/ Canadian Investor Conference 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: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT Silver mining stock report for 2014 comes with 1-ounce silver round Future Money Trends is offering a special 18-page silver mining stock report about how to profit with the monetary and industrial metal in 2014, and it comes with a free 1-ounce silver round. Proceeds from the report's sales are shared with the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee to support its efforts to expose manipulation in the monetary metals markets. To learn about this report, please visit: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tocqueville's Hathaway praises anti-trust lawsuit against London gold fix banks Posted: 03 Apr 2014 09:06 PM PDT 12:04p ICT Friday, April 4, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Continuing his latest interview with King World News, the Tocqueville Gold Fund's John Hathaway praises the federal anti-trust lawsuit brought last week against the London gold-fixing bullion banks by the law firm of Berger & Montague in Philadelphia and the New York firm of Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart, and Sullivan: http://www.gata.org/node/13841 "The light of day is going to change the way this gold market works," Hathaway says, "and I think the result will be that supply and demand of physical gold will have a much larger influence on the direction of the price than over the last year. ... It's incredibly healthy that regulators and litigators are sticking their noses into this, and I just can't wait to see the results." Hathaway's comments are posted at the KWN blog here: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/4/3_Hat... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer 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: Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference Committee for Monetary Research and Education http://www.cmre.org/news/spring-meeting-2014/ Canadian Investor Conference 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: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT Buy precious metals free of value-added tax throughout Europe Europe Silver Bullion is a fast-growing dealer sourcing its products from renowned mints, refiners, and distributors. Because of a legal loophole that will close soon, you can acquire the world's most popular bullion coins free of value-added tax throughout the European Union. You can collect your order in person at our headquarters in Tallinn, Estonia, or have it delivered in any of the 28 EU countries. Europe Silver Bullion is owned and operated by North American and European experts in selling, storing, and transporting precious metals. We have an extensive product inventory of silver, gold, platinum, and palladium, and our network spans the world. Visit us at www.europesilverbullion.com. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| China To Cause Massive Collapse Of Second London Gold Pool Posted: 03 Apr 2014 09:01 PM PDT  Today one of the legends in the business, fresh off a trip to Hong Kong, spoke with King World News about what the Chinese are up to in the gold market, and it will surprise KWN readers. Keith Barron, who consults with major companies around the world and is responsible for one of the largest gold discoveries in the last quarter century, also predicted the collapse of what he called "London Gold Pool II."This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Koos Jansen: GOFO is negative again, indicating a new rise in gold Posted: 03 Apr 2014 08:28 PM PDT 10:27a ICT Friday, April 4, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Gold researcher and GATA consultant Koos Jansen writes this week that the one-month gold forward offered rate (GOFO) has turned negative again, indicating that gold is in more demand than dollars and, if patterns hold, a new uptrend in the price of the monetary metal. Jansen's commentary is headlined "GOFO Turned Negative Again: The Consequences" and it's posted at his Internet site, In Gold We Trust, here: http://www.ingoldwetrust.ch/gofo-turned-negative-again-the-consequences CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Buy precious metals free of value-added tax throughout Europe Europe Silver Bullion is a fast-growing dealer sourcing its products from renowned mints, refiners, and distributors. Because of a legal loophole that will close soon, you can acquire the world's most popular bullion coins free of value-added tax throughout the European Union. You can collect your order in person at our headquarters in Tallinn, Estonia, or have it delivered in any of the 28 EU countries. Europe Silver Bullion is owned and operated by North American and European experts in selling, storing, and transporting precious metals. We have an extensive product inventory of silver, gold, platinum, and palladium, and our network spans the world. Visit us at www.europesilverbullion.com. Join GATA here: Porter Stansberry Natural Resources Conference Canadian Investor Conference 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: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: ADVERTISEMENT 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ALERT -- CHINA DUMPS $46.7 BILLION IN U.S. BONDS Posted: 03 Apr 2014 07:00 PM PDT - China dumps $46.7 billion* of U.S. Treasuries ►1:00- Inflation is high; don't believe the government numbers** ►4:24- Gold and silver are insurance against a dollar collapse ►6:57- Paper currencies never last, how long will the dollar last? ►15:58Elijah Johnson is a high school senior with a... [[ 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! ]]  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Infographic - Unearthing The Worlds Gold Supply Posted: 03 Apr 2014 06:32 PM PDT Perth Mint Blog. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Gold Price Eased Off $6.10 Today Closing at $1,284.40 Posted: 03 Apr 2014 04:19 PM PDT
The GOLD PRICE eased off $6.10 (0.5%) today to close Comex at $1,284.40. The SILVER PRICE backed up 24.5 cents (1.22%) to 1978.6c. About the time of that European announcement, I reckon, about 10:a.m. anyway, silver broke down and hit the day's low at 1966c. That was a V-bottom -- somebody was waiting to buy down there. Bounced right back above 1975-1980c, but went no further. Erased Wednesday's gains and left us where we began. Not quite so with the GOLD PRICE. Gold's action today left a slightly higher low ($1,281.90) than Tuesday's ($1,277.40). Doesn't sound like much, but catches your eye on a five day chart. Line is plainly drawn: the gold price must clear $1,295. A drop below $1,277 would gainsay my interpretation that gold has either (1) seen its low for this move or (2) seen at least an interim low. We'll know tomorrow what happens, unless that lying government report skews everything. I often tilt my head in bewildered wonder at the factors and events that drive markets nowadays. Tomorrow a yankee government employment report will be issued in which they will lie shamelessly about the jobless numbers. Nobody sane believes these numbers, and the government will revise them in six weeks or so to prove they were lying in the first place. NOTWITHSTANDING those trumped up job numbers will drive markets tomorrow, as if they actually meant something, or as if the plans of a well-run, efficient business could be cast into disarray by one lying government report. It's getting so I believe everybody but y'all and me are nuts, and I ain't too sure about y'all. Didn't anything startling happen in markets today. Stocks backed off, holding their breath for that precious priceless prevarication due tomorrow. Dollar rose because the ECB mumbled some oracle, and silver and gold cringed because the scrofulous dollar rose (probably). Dow closed 16,572.55, down a miniature 0.45. S&P500 lost 2.15 (0.11%) to 1,888.77. Both broke out yesterday upside, MACD for both gave a buy signal, but if you look at that declining volume over the last year while all these new all-time highs have been made, you might have to scratch your head and wonder if stocks ain't running out of gas. The little jiggle the Dow in Gold and Dow in Silver jiggled today from stocks flattening and silver and gold dropping, frankly, just ain't worth talking about. Nothing changed. The criminals running the European Central Bank today pledged to use "unconventional measures" to -- get this, write it down, mark this -- battle "low inflation." O, shucks! We're not picking the public's pockets fast enough, so let's crank that inflation up to melt their savings and capital, and help the banks. ECB implied it would print new waves of money, but kept interest rates near zero. On that news the US dollar index (killers of hope, gobbler of savings) rose a less than spectacular 23 basis points or 0.3%. I will concede that takes it above the 05 DMA 80.31 and points it toward the 200 DMA at 80.99, and throws a leg over 80.50 lateral resistance, so the dollar should rise more. The scabby euro, on the other hand, sank away from resistance, confirmed its down trend with another lower high and lower low, and broke below its 50 DMA ($1.3734). Closed down 0.35% at $1.3719. Tugging at the reins like it wants to drop to $1.3500. And the Japanese yen --Is there any reason to talk about that? Dropped 0.04% to 96.24 cents/Y100, still a-fainting. 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 Eased Off $6.10 Today Closing at $1,284.40 Posted: 03 Apr 2014 04:19 PM PDT
The GOLD PRICE eased off $6.10 (0.5%) today to close Comex at $1,284.40. The SILVER PRICE backed up 24.5 cents (1.22%) to 1978.6c. About the time of that European announcement, I reckon, about 10:a.m. anyway, silver broke down and hit the day's low at 1966c. That was a V-bottom -- somebody was waiting to buy down there. Bounced right back above 1975-1980c, but went no further. Erased Wednesday's gains and left us where we began. Not quite so with the GOLD PRICE. Gold's action today left a slightly higher low ($1,281.90) than Tuesday's ($1,277.40). Doesn't sound like much, but catches your eye on a five day chart. Line is plainly drawn: the gold price must clear $1,295. A drop below $1,277 would gainsay my interpretation that gold has either (1) seen its low for this move or (2) seen at least an interim low. We'll know tomorrow what happens, unless that lying government report skews everything. I often tilt my head in bewildered wonder at the factors and events that drive markets nowadays. Tomorrow a yankee government employment report will be issued in which they will lie shamelessly about the jobless numbers. Nobody sane believes these numbers, and the government will revise them in six weeks or so to prove they were lying in the first place. NOTWITHSTANDING those trumped up job numbers will drive markets tomorrow, as if they actually meant something, or as if the plans of a well-run, efficient business could be cast into disarray by one lying government report. It's getting so I believe everybody but y'all and me are nuts, and I ain't too sure about y'all. Didn't anything startling happen in markets today. Stocks backed off, holding their breath for that precious priceless prevarication due tomorrow. Dollar rose because the ECB mumbled some oracle, and silver and gold cringed because the scrofulous dollar rose (probably). Dow closed 16,572.55, down a miniature 0.45. S&P500 lost 2.15 (0.11%) to 1,888.77. Both broke out yesterday upside, MACD for both gave a buy signal, but if you look at that declining volume over the last year while all these new all-time highs have been made, you might have to scratch your head and wonder if stocks ain't running out of gas. The little jiggle the Dow in Gold and Dow in Silver jiggled today from stocks flattening and silver and gold dropping, frankly, just ain't worth talking about. Nothing changed. The criminals running the European Central Bank today pledged to use "unconventional measures" to -- get this, write it down, mark this -- battle "low inflation." O, shucks! We're not picking the public's pockets fast enough, so let's crank that inflation up to melt their savings and capital, and help the banks. ECB implied it would print new waves of money, but kept interest rates near zero. On that news the US dollar index (killers of hope, gobbler of savings) rose a less than spectacular 23 basis points or 0.3%. I will concede that takes it above the 05 DMA 80.31 and points it toward the 200 DMA at 80.99, and throws a leg over 80.50 lateral resistance, so the dollar should rise more. The scabby euro, on the other hand, sank away from resistance, confirmed its down trend with another lower high and lower low, and broke below its 50 DMA ($1.3734). Closed down 0.35% at $1.3719. Tugging at the reins like it wants to drop to $1.3500. And the Japanese yen --Is there any reason to talk about that? Dropped 0.04% to 96.24 cents/Y100, still a-fainting. 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| U.S. To Pay Off Public Debt 5747 Years At 100 Dollars Per Second Posted: 03 Apr 2014 02:49 PM PDT Mountain Vision released an interesting calculation on the debt mountain. In order to make the current debt numbers more meaningful, one way to look at the debt problem is to convert it in pay off duration. If a printing machine were to print one 100 US dollar note and one 100 Euro note every second, day and night, Saturdays and Sundays, without interruption, how long would it take to print the current level of debt of America and Germany? The answer is astonishing. Knowing that there are here are 31'536'000 seconds in a year, the calculation shows how many years are required to pay off the debt (based on the pace of one 100 US dollar note per second). The underlying assumptions are that a human live on average counts 85 years and that point zero is February 4th, 2014.
But fear not, the debt crisis is contained and our central planners will do whatever it takes … And here is an interesting infographic which puts the public debt to GDP ratio in an historic perspective:
Source: Infographiclist via Mountainvision | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Non-Farm Payrolls Tomorrow Posted: 03 Apr 2014 01:15 PM PDT | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Non-Farm Payrolls Tomorrow Posted: 03 Apr 2014 01:15 PM PDT | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Rickards: Collapse of International Money System - Not Apocalypse, But a Change Posted: 03 Apr 2014 12:36 PM PDT | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Rickards: Collapse of International Money System - Not Apocalypse, But a Change Posted: 03 Apr 2014 12:36 PM PDT |
It's been a while since we looked at Gold in a vacuum. We've focused on the gold stocks as they have led the sector. We covered Silver last week. Gold is more interesting because in its current state its more difficult to draw a strong conclusion. One could look at the evidence and go either way. Today Gold is back above $1300. Is this the start of a run to and past $1400? I don't know. My gut says more range bound activity is ahead.
An important backlash is coming to the perverse USFed monetary policy. An urgent call for global action has been seen in the G-20 and BRICS nations.
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