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• Imminent death of silver fix sets off hunt for alternative
• First Indian gold refiner approved to join LBMA standard
• Your No. 1 Duty In Today's Economy
• Week In FX Americas - Assets Close Out With No Interest
• Amazingly Deceptive Headlines, Part 1
• What does Modi’s victory mean for gold in India?
• Controversial post: This could be the real reason behind the crisis in Ukraine
• Golden triangle foreshadows major breakout
• CME Group cuts Gold, Silver margins
• CME Group cuts Gold, Silver margins
• Gold & Silver Trading Alert: Important price-volume link
• Top Official Coin Sales: Market Overwhelmingly Chooses Silver (By 102 to 1!)
• Not a climate for gold slump - Phillips
• Mid-tier gold miner Centamin plans initial dividend this year
• This small gold stock could hold the discovery of the decade. It's "on sale" right now.
• Professional Silver Stealth Buying Underway In Futures And ETFs
• Modi win renews calls for gold import regime to end
• The "Chinese Gold Vortex" is happening now. This is what you need to know.
• Marijuana Legalization in America is Destroying Mexican Drug Cartel Business
• Bitcoin, gold and silver: Bail-ins and capital controls loom
• Alasdair Macleod: Technical analysis vs. value in gold
• Bhutan key route for gold smuggling into India
• Jim Willie: Germany Preparing Gold-Backed Nordic Euro!
• Bitcoin, Gold And Silver As Bail-ins and Capital Controls Loom
• Porter Stansberry: Why I'm giving away my 12 all-time greatest secrets
• AGW deniers are genocidal maniacs
• Was Silver In a Bubble in 2011?
• Big players still holding onto their gold to a degree
• Wrapping The Week
• Gold ETF to make physical delivery
• U.S. Mint Sells More Silver Eagles In A Week Than Gold Eagles Over Past Three Years
• Has the Bear Market Returned? Maybe
• Modern Central Banks’ Business Is Misunderstood by The People
• Bernanke the Sophist: The Deception Behind QE
• It’s The Equanomy Stupid
• Gold drops to below $1,300 an ounce
• Gold drops to below $1,300 an ounce
• Links 5/16/14
• Eric Sprott: Gold Shortage Coming, Data Shows
• Greenspan: Taxpayers on the Hook to Rescue JPMorgan in Crisis
• Geithner Still Can't Explain Lehman
• Modi's Thatcherite talk cannot restore India's flagging fortunes
• Four King World News Blogs/Audio Interviews
• China: Gold Demand Drops 30% During May Day Break
• Eric Sprott: Gold Shortage Coming, Data Shows
• Mike Kosares: So how goes the war on gold?
• Koos Jansen: Are the London gold vaults running empty?
• World top 20 silver producers – countries and companies
• Big players still holding onto their gold to a degree
• Gold Oscillates Around 200 Day Average

Imminent death of silver fix sets off hunt for alternative Posted: 16 May 2014 06:01 PM PDT The LBMA asks benchmark users what they want to see in place of the silver fix, soon to be gone.

First Indian gold refiner approved to join LBMA standard Posted: 16 May 2014 02:57 PM PDT MMTC-PAMP has become the first Indian gold refiner to join the LBMA's good delivery list, joining 70 other refiners.

Your No. 1 Duty In Today's Economy Posted: 16 May 2014 01:02 PM PDT As I wrote in "Getting an $80 Million Salary to Not Work," a couple of weeks ago, directors at companies throughout the America economy are voting for obscene pay packages for management. I don't think there's a magic number for executive compensation, but most of us know out-of-whack pay packages when we see them. The recently voted bags of gold for Coca-Cola (KO) executives fit that description. Americans are drinking less soda due to the shift away from sugary drinks. And Coca-Cola is a slow-growth behemoth in our economy. Yet, the compensation to executives called for issuing hundreds of millions of options for shares that would dilute current shareholders by more than 7% over the next four years. Added to previously un-exercised options, the total hit to Coca-Cola shareholders was more than 13%, which could be upward of $13 billion. You would think this sort of plan would cause outrage

Week In FX Americas - Assets Close Out With No Interest Posted: 16 May 2014 12:47 PM PDT By Dean Popplewell US Consumer Sentiment slips in May Equities and Bonds price action the start of a reversal? Yellen and FOMC on traders radar In relative term, the markets are ending the week on the quiet side, especially after the much-craved volatile scenes witnessed in forex on Thursday. Even weaker data produced stateside cannot seem to convince the dollar index to penetrate its tight range a day after threatening to spike higher. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment saw weakness in early May, with the headline dropping back to 81.8 from 84.1. Last month's print was the highest in 10-months, while this month's preliminary is still the second highest of the year. Digging deeper into the report showed the index of current conditions took the hardest hit, down to 95.1 from 98.7 (lowest in six-months). The expectations index slipped to 73.2, which is still the second highest in nine-months.

Amazingly Deceptive Headlines, Part 1 Posted: 16 May 2014 12:46 PM PDT Reporters and their editors (and the corporations that employ them) have the power to shape readers’ perceptions by, for instance, choosing what fact to put first in a story or which expert to quote in what context. But the most powerful tool is the simplest: the headline. Because many people read only that, and many others have their perception of an article shaped by the first words they see, this sentence fragment is frequently as important as everything that comes after. Consider this, from the Associated Press: Foreign Holdings of US Treasury Debt Hits Record Foreign buyers of U.S. Treasury securities increased their holdings in March to a record high. The Treasury Department said Thursday that total foreign holdings rose 1 percent to $5.95 trillion from $5.89 trillion in February. China, the largest foreign buyer of Treasury debt, reduced its holdings by less than 0.01 percent to $1.27 trillion. Japan, the second-largest buyer, cut its holdings 0.8 percent to $1.2 trillion. Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, major oil exporting nations and Caribbean countries involved in banking all increased their holdings. Meanwhile, Russia shed almost 21 percent of its holdings in March following international tensions over its move to annex part of Ukraine. Russia controls $100.4 billion worth of U.S. Treasury securities, or just 1.7 percent of all foreign holdings. The United States and Russia have imposed sanctions on each other after parts of the Crimean Peninsula with ethnic and political ties to Russia began an attempt to secede from Ukraine in late February. Foreign demand for U.S. Treasury securities is expected to remain strong this year, aided by more borrowing certainty with a congressional agreement to suspend the debt limit until March 2015. Now, let’s tease out a few facts: Trading powers China and Japan cut their Treasury holdings, while superpower wannabe Russia dumped fully one-fifth of its dollar-denominated debt. Meanwhile, Belgium and Luxembourg and a few others more than made up the slack, enabling the Associated Press to open with a glowingly-positive message (foreign investors love dollars!). The truth appears to be something else entirely. How could Belgium and Luxembourg (total combined population 12 million) buy enough US debt to offset Russia dumping 21% of its Treasuries? The answer is that it’s highly unlikely they would do this in a single month unless they’re part of an under-the-table deal between Western powers to hide the fact that major holders of dollars appear to be losing faith in the currency and/or bridling at US foreign policy arrogance. So the cover-up is the real story, and a more honest headline would feature Belgium’s purchases and the reasons for this shift in dollar ownership. “Russia sells Treasuries while Belgium buys; analysts wonder why” would be both more honest and more provocative without being sensationalistic. But of course it would also be asking a difficult question, which is apparently no longer the media’s job.

What does Modi’s victory mean for gold in India? Posted: 16 May 2014 12:38 PM PDT While Narendra Modi may be pro-gold in principle, there are doubts whether there will be any quick major gold policy changes following his BJP party's Indian election victory.

Controversial post: This could be the real reason behind the crisis in Ukraine Posted: 16 May 2014 12:23 PM PDT From Washington’s Blog: In a long – but fascinating – article, Pando’s Mark Ames explains that the West totally misunderstands Putin. He’s not trying to build a Greater Russian empire or trying to counter the power of the West for some humanitarian reason. Rather – says Ames – Putin’s actions in Ukraine, his persecution of the band Pussy Riot, his anti-gay crusade, and his crack-down on alternative websites are all part of a Nixon strategy of appealing to Russia’s “silent majority” who despise Moscow’s liberal class: Every hack knows that “all politics is local” — but we rarely apply this adage to understanding the politics of the rest of the world. *** The forgotten ugly truth is that Putin came to office with the enthusiastic support of Russia’s liberals — the St. Petersburg (neo)liberals, and also many of the most prominent Moscow intelligentsia liberals. *** The important thing to remember is this: Russia’s liberal intelligentsia and its big city yuppie class is small in numbers, outsized in influence and importance…. and hated by the rest of Russia. *** Russia has the worst wealth inequality in the world. Most living Russians still remember the Soviet era, when wealth inequality was so minute it was measured in perks rather than yachts. That’s what the Russians mean when they tell pollsters they preferred the Soviet Union days and rue its collapse. Lazy hacks interpret those polls as proof that Russians are still evil empirelings, for the sheer evil joy of having a Warsaw Pact to boast about. Rather than the obvious: Russians lived longer and easier under Soviet rule, then started dying off by the millions as soon as capitalism was introduced, when poverty exploded and they found themselves in the most unequal country on earth. [And it's not just Russians: In a Gallup poll late last year, a majority of Ukrainians said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was more harmful (56 percent) for Ukraine than beneficial (23 percent).] To an outsider, these are all problems that need solutions. But to a political animal like Putin, this huge pool of human resentment and nostalgia is a potential power base: Russia’s Silent Majority.  *** Putin’s surprise decision in 2007 naming as his Kremlin successor a Petersburg liberal, Dmitry Medvedev, showed how important the liberal/yuppie demographic was in Putin’s political calculations …. His choice of the liberal, well-liked Medvedev was not simply because Medvedev didn’t threaten Putin; he also reflected a Russia that liberals wanted: cultured, civilized, European, raised in an elite central district in St. Petersburg. For awhile it worked; many liberals and big city yuppies were impressed, pleased, and harbored hopes that Medvedev could be won over to their side, seeing him as naturally one of theirs. Keeping the big city liberals happy, or at the very least from turning against him, remained a key plank of Putin’s politics. That fantasy — that Medvedev was anything but Putin’s yes-man, or that his Kremlin perch mean that Russia was now plausibly European, was shattered for good in late 2011, when Putin announced that the jig was up: He was switching places with Medvedev and moving back into the Kremlin, and the only thing remaining was for Russia to rubber stamp his decision with a ritualistic vote.  That domestic political calculation changed in December 2011, when tens of thousands of young Muscovites took to the streets in the “manager class revolution,” protesting Putin’s crude way of re-installing himself in the Kremlin. They were outraged at the way Putin made fools of them — all those years, Putin had insisted Russia was “civilized” and democratic in its own Russian way — part European, part Russian — which is exactly what the “manager class” needed to hear and to believe. They travel a lot to the West. It’s hard to explain just how existentially important those trips to the West are to the “manager class.” *** But when Putin made that announcement that he was switching seats with Medvedev, the awful reality hit home to the urban “manager class” that they’d been duped. And they were outraged. **** The outrage was over the humiliation of having your despot shove his despotism in your bourgeois face. The New York Times headlined their story: “Boosted By Putin, Russia’s Middle Class Turns On Him.” *** Putin lost the crucial big city yuppie class. They’re gone for good. There are a lot of ways an autocrat in a nominally democratic country can respond to that. Putin has chosen a new politics appealing to the Russian Silent Majority, and that means appealing to their resentments, heating up the culture wars between liberal Moscow and the slower, fearful masses in the rest of those eleven time zones. To exploit the huge differences between the Moscow liberals and yuppies opposed to Putin, and the rest of the country that resents them. The Silent Majority has waited at least two decades for payback, and now it’s on, and it’s not pretty. It’s why Putin targeted Pussy Riot. We Westerners loved them; they were heroes to us, brave punk rock babes fighting the Man and getting jailed for being punk. In our world, that’s cool. But in Russia, Pussy Riot was completely despised by nearly everyone, across class and regional lines. One poll after they were jailed showed only 6 percent of Russians supported Pussy Riot; the poll could not find a single respondent who said they respected the jailed band members.  By exploiting Russian disgust for Pussy Riot and equating the opposition movement with Pussy Riot, Putin was able to conflate the liberal opposition with a decadent, alien art troupe whose purpose seemed to be to humiliate Russia and mock their culture. Nixon couldn’t have dreamed up a more perfect symbol of his opponents. The Nixon Strategy also explains why, after all these years, Putin suddenly targeted Russia’s gays for a vicious culture war campaign. In the Russian Red States, the violent, cruel state-managed homophobia — in which a leading TV anchor told his audience that gays’ hearts and organs should be burned and buried deep underground — was red meat, an acknowledgment at last that Russia’s Silent Majority matters. And the more Moscow yuppies and Westerners berated Russia for attacking gays, the more the Silent Majority identified with the Kremlin. ***  What he’s doing is shoring up his new political base while tightening the screws on whatever remained of liberal freedom in Russia, taking control of the Internet, seizing control of the handful of opposition online media sites, and ramping up the culture war against liberals, gays, the decadent West… The fact that we, the U.S. and EU and a few billionaires, funded violent regime change groups in bed with west Ukraine fascists and Russophobes has only made Putin’s domestic job easier. You can see it in the aftermath of the Odessa fire massacre that killed over 40 pro-Russian separatists: It shut up even Navalny. *** So if Putin is neither the defiant counterweight hero or the neo-Stalinist imperialist, but rather playing a Russian version of vicious Nixon politics, what should the West do? That’s easy: Stay the Hell out of Russia’s way for awhile…   More on Russia and Ukraine: "De-Dollarization": Russia could be on the verge of dealing a "massive" blow to the U.S. Casey Research: How Russia could take down America… without firing a single shot Ron Paul: What does the U.S. really want in Ukraine?

Golden triangle foreshadows major breakout Posted: 16 May 2014 12:21 PM PDT If we see a bullish breakout above the top of the triangle and the 50-day MA next week, Gold could quickly rise to the top of the triangle at $1,330.

CME Group cuts Gold, Silver margins Posted: 16 May 2014 12:02 PM PDT For the main 100-ounce Comex gold futures contract, CME Group is lowering the initial margin for establishing a new speculative position to $6,600 from $7,150. The maintenance margin for existing speculative positions, as well as all hedge positions, will decline to $6,000 from $6,500.

CME Group cuts Gold, Silver margins Posted: 16 May 2014 12:02 PM PDT For the main 100-ounce Comex gold futures contract, CME Group is lowering the initial margin for establishing a new speculative position to $6,600 from $7,150. The maintenance margin for existing speculative positions, as well as all hedge positions, will decline to $6,000 from $6,500.

Gold & Silver Trading Alert: Important price-volume link Posted: 16 May 2014 12:02 PM PDT Gold, silver and mining stocks caught up in terms of the reaction to the previous dollar's move

Top Official Coin Sales: Market Overwhelmingly Chooses Silver (By 102 to 1!) Posted: 16 May 2014 12:00 PM PDT In 2013, the top 5 official silver coin sales topped 98 million oz. The U.S. mint came in first place by selling 42.6 million Silver Eagles, while Canadian Maples came in second at 28.2 million oz followed by 14.5 million Philharmonics, 8 million (est) Silver Pandas and 5.3 million in Australian Kookaburra's, Koala's and Lunar [...] The post Top Official Coin Sales: Market Overwhelmingly Chooses Silver (By 102 to 1!) appeared first on Silver Doctors. Check out these similar articles: Gold Coin Sales Decline In August, Silver Coin Demand Remains Robust Gold & Silver Maple Leaf Sales Increase Massively in 2013! Canadian Silver Maple Leaf Sales Shatter All Records

Not a climate for gold slump - Phillips Posted: 16 May 2014 11:54 AM PDT Julian Phillips, of the Gold Forecaster, argues the economic environment, without strong growth in sight, moderates downward pressure on gold.

Mid-tier gold miner Centamin plans initial dividend this year Posted: 16 May 2014 11:45 AM PDT Centamin, operator of the Sukari gold mine in Egypt, has given an indication of the size of dividend it is planning to start paying to shareholders in the current year.

This small gold stock could hold the discovery of the decade. It's "on sale" right now. Posted: 16 May 2014 11:40 AM PDT By Louis James, Chief Metals & Mining Investment Strategist, Casey Research: Sell in May and go away? Precious metals tend to exhibit a seasonal pattern to their price trends, with summer weakness that leads to strength in the fall. Add to this the fact that mineral exploration in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Canada, enters a sort of hibernation during winter months and then reawakens in the spring. With winter drill programs already announced, we typically see less news flow starting about now until well into the summer. These variables combine to exacerbate the “sell in May and go away” conventional wisdom regarding the broader stock markets, as many brokers and promoters in our sector take their holidays during these relatively quiet months. Sometimes, even with stable or rising metals prices, shares in great companies can drop over the weeks and months just ahead, simply due to the lack of Push. Here at Casey Research, we call this Shopping Season, and it seems to have arrived early this year. It is never safe, however, for metals speculators to head for the Bahamas and ignore the market for months; there’s always the possibility of a sudden black-swan event that kicks precious metals into a higher gear earlier than expected. Further, individual companies can and do buck the trends all the time. That’s especially so if they’re working on a discovery that could deliver game-changing results at any time, working in a country where water doesn’t freeze in January, or working underground, where seasons are irrelevant. And I’d like to introduce you to one of those companies today. But What If Prices Go Lower? Imagine that you were offered a brand-new Ferrari 458 Italia at a 75% discount during an economic downturn. Even those not into high-maintenance cars would have to think about it—it could potentially be a very profitable trade. Now suppose you bought the car, garaged it, cared for it, waited for the car market to turn around—and then the market got even worse for a while, and you saw the same car offered for 50% less than you paid for it. While you might regret that you didn’t time the bottom right, would you conclude that the Ferrari was worthless? I think you can see where I’m going here. Unless desperately short on cash for some extremely urgent need, nobody would sell our hypothetical Ferrari at a great loss; they’d simply wait out the downturn, no matter how long or painful. Whatever else might change, the Ferrari remains a Ferrari. Just as, whatever else happens in the economy, an ounce of gold remains an ounce of gold. And yet, when it comes to the best-of-the-best gold stocks in the junior mining sector, investors seem increasingly willing to make the mistake of dumping valuable companies, simply because they are on sale. The error here is confusing price and value—and recognizing such errors before the market does is the essence of successful speculation. Sales are for buying. A solid company with a deeply undervalued asset and all the cash needed to correct that mis-valuation is exactly the sort of bargain we like to buy during Shopping Season. That’s the kind of opportunity I have for your consideration today. Regardless, and whether or not you buy the stock I recommend below, I hope you’ll read the case and watch the story as it evolves, to see if I’m right about the company. Pretium Resources (PVG, US$7.24, PVG.TO, C$7.92, US$785.4 million market cap) The Pretium story is simple: a group of serially successful geologists have made an extraordinarily large and spectacularly high-grade discovery in an area called Valley of the Kings, which is part of the company’s flagship Brucejack gold project in mining-friendly Canada. We’re not talking about grams of gold per tonne (g/t) here, or even ounces, but kilos of gold per tonne in many drill intersections. And we’re not talking about a small, rich “sweet spot,” but a monster gold system with more than 6.6 million ounces of gold in Proven & Probable mining reserves, averaging 13.6 g/t gold, within 13.6 million ounces of gold in all resource categories, averaging 20.5 g/t gold. There are 1.7 million more ounces at the project’s West Zone. Both zones are wide open for expansion—and are adjacent to 35 million ounces of bulk-grade gold in Pretium’s Snowfield gold project (which itself is adjacent to Seabridge Gold’s 63.9-million-ounce bulk-grade KSM deposit). To give you an idea how rare a bird this is, a recent report shows 26 gold deposits larger than one million ounces—just 26 in the entire world—that have more than 10 grams of gold per tonne of ore. There are only 11 such deposits above 15 g/t, which the Valley of the Kings zone beats, if you consider its 8.7 million ounces of Measured & Indicated gold averaging 17.6 g/t. To count publicly reported gold deposits that are both larger and higher grade than Pretium’s Valley of the Kings, you only need one finger. That’s right: just one. Pretium’s Valley of the Kings is the richest gold discovery in the last 10 years, and one of the richest in recorded history. But that’s just the beginning. A deposit this rich will pay for many faults and still make for a highly profitable mine, but there are many questions to answer before one can say so. Is there a lot of mercury, arsenic, or other toxic elements in the mix? Is there a national park or endangered species living on top of the deposit? Is the local government likely to steal the mine if one builds it? I don’t have space in this column to deliver an entire “Casey 8 Ps” analysis of the company, but the questions above have been thoroughly addressed in the company’s June 2013 feasibility study. That study is being updated in view of the company’s late 2013 bulk sample, which produced almost 50% more gold than the company’s estimates predicted. Pretium also discovered more gold veins when it went underground for the bulk sample, and is incorporating those and other new discoveries into its mine plan. Nevertheless, and despite what is a somewhat aggressive—at the moment—gold price assumption of $1,350 per ounce, the study yields some terrific results, including: After tax net present value (NPV-5% discount) of $1.8 billion After tax internal rate (IRR) of return of 35.7% Project finance payback in 2.2 years Mine life of 22 years, at an annual rate of 425,700 oz. per year All-in sustaining cost of $508 per oz. Critical point: even at an unrealistically low $800 gold price, the project still makes money (IRR of 13.7%). In short, this project has all the signs of a world-class, high-margin gold mine in the making, at a rate of production large enough to make Pretium of interest as an acquisition target for any of the world’s major gold producers. That’s particularly important today, because one of those major producers, Goldcorp (GG, G.TO), just lost out in a bidding war over Canada’s Osisko Mining (OSK.TO). Goldcorp has shown its appetite for acquiring large, world-class assets while prices are down, and it has a good $3 billion in working capital to pursue them. It’s hard to imagine a more attractive takeover target than Pretium—and if that happens, these shares could easily jump 20% to 30% in a day. That’s no exaggeration; just look at Osisko’s stock chart, and you’ll see that it jumped more than 20% when Goldcorp made its offer last January and is close to doubling since then. But the beauty of the situation is that Pretium doesn’t need to get bought out in order to hand us a major win; the company is fully funded for this year’s work advancing the project, and even has a little cash flow coming from a small amount of (very high-grade) mining allowed under its exploration permit. Given the exceptionally high rate of return on investment the Brucejack project boasts, we think the company will be able to obtain bank and other financing to build the mine and become a highly profitable mid-tier gold mining company. Investors who buy now win either way, which is why this company is one of those listed in our special report, 7 Must-Own Mining Stocks for 2014, which you get free if you try a risk-free subscription to the International Speculator today. You can read all the details about Pretium in that report, but there’s one more thing I should tell you, in case you decide not to subscribe; there’s a reason besides gold’s correction that these shares are selling for less than half of what they were a couple years ago. It’s quite the drama, actually; last October, one of Pretium’s consulting engineering firms (a highly respected firm in its field) quit the job abruptly. On the way out, they basically said that the Brucejack resource estimate was bogus—that the deposit wasn’t really there! That’s pretty extreme, but even more extreme was the consultants saying that, based on their statistical analysis, the Valley of the Kings bulk sample then under way should be stopped, being a waste of time and money. Management and a second consulting firm that made the resource estimate calculations (also highly respected) said they wanted to see the proof in the pudding of the bulk sample. And a good thing, too, because their view was fully validated by the bulk sample; instead of the 4,000 ounces the bulk sample was originally estimated to produce, the sample actually yielded 5,865 ounces of gold—and that in a toll mill in Montana, not optimized for Brucejack ore. Of course, that took time to show, and before the company could prove its point, a ridiculous number of ambulance-chasers announced class-action lawsuits on behalf of shareholders, and the whole circus took this formerly $17.92 stock all the way down to $3.10. Now, I have known management at Pretium for many years, and was dead certain they were not faking their deposit, so I doubled down. (Yes, I personally own shares in the company; I bought them after recommending the stock to subscribers, and I am not allowed to sell them before giving subscribers a chance to do so first.) Many International Speculator subscribers were able to buy shares close to the $3 mark and have more than doubled their money on those investments since then. Because I was right: the bulk sample results vindicated management—and added a significant amount of cash to the till. The company is back in the race today. But it’s not too late to build a position in this great company with the discovery of the decade in hand. Due to gold’s continuing fluctuations, the shares are still selling for not much more than they were at IPO—before the company made its record-smashing Valley of the Kings discovery. Remember; a Ferrari is a Ferrari, value is value, and when you can buy a high-margin $1.8 billion asset for $785 million (or US$7.24 or C$7.92 per share), that’s a bargain. To find out more about Pretium and our six other 7 Must-Own Mining Stocks for 2014, I encourage you to subscribe to the International Speculator today. Remember that you have three full months to check out our newsletter, and if you’re not happy with it, cancel any time within those three months for a full refund. Or, if you decide to just buy or watch the stock to test us out, that’s fine too; I sincerely hope you’ll make a bunch of money, and come back for more.   More from Casey Research: Casey Research: Forget what you've heard about "green energy"… Europe could soon be desperate for oil Casey Research: What you need to know about the bear market in silver Casey Research: How Russia could take down America… without firing a single shot

Professional Silver Stealth Buying Underway In Futures And ETFs Posted: 16 May 2014 11:35 AM PDT Silver has suffered as a market pariah this year, dragging along doggedly near major lows. Investors have seemingly abandoned it to chase the Fed's general stock market levitation, an affliction plaguing most of the alternative investment realm. But rather provocatively, silver buying remains quite strong even in this dreary sentiment wasteland. This stealth buying will likely explode once gold starts running. After silver plunged 35.6% in 2013 and hit 2.8 year lows, it's easy to understand why it remains deeply out of favor today. With the Fed's extreme money printing and jawboning dramatically catapulting general stocks higher, mainstreamers forgot about alternative investments, including silver. But for the brave contrarians who would rather buy low than buy high, silver remains an incredibly alluring investment. Just this week the Silver Institute, the world's premier authority on this metal for decades, reported all time record high worldwide physical silver

Modi win renews calls for gold import regime to end Posted: 16 May 2014 11:25 AM PDT The questions on many observers minds is: Will he? And if he does dispense with import restrictions, when?

The "Chinese Gold Vortex" is happening now. This is what you need to know. Posted: 16 May 2014 11:06 AM PDT From Henry Bonner in Sprott’s Thoughts: Eric Sprott, Founder and Chairman of Sprott Asset Management, said recently that he expects a “significant re-rating of the gold price” due to high physical demand from China and India, coupled with a gold supply shortfall. The effect, which he calls the “Chinese Gold Vortex,” is rapidly taking physical gold from West to East. When the West runs out of gold, the price should go much higher, he believes. I recently spoke with him on the phone about his near-term views. Hello Eric, what do you see happening today in the metals markets? Eric Sprott: I am very excited about developments in the gold and silver markets today. I have been speculating since late 2012 that Western central banks could be running out of gold. I put the sell-off in gold and silver in 2013 to the fact that the Western banks needed a way to generate physical gold supplies. As the metals prices went down, there was a lot of liquidation of gold which increased the supply by an estimated 900 tonnes last year. Let’s look at the figures. The annual supply of gold is around 4,300 tonnes. 3,000 tonnes come from mining and the other 1,300 tonnes or so from recycled material. In 2013, an additional 900 tonnes came onto the market from ETFs that were being liquidated – a supply increase of around 21%. Quite frankly, I believe this was all orchestrated in order to create this supply. During the time when the price was knocked down, a tsunami of buying started. India bought 336 tonnes from April to June of 2013. I’m sure that the central bankers went to the Reserve Bank of India and said: “You’ve got to stop people from buying gold.” Of course, the Reserve Bank of India went on to create rule after rule to try to stop people from buying gold. They managed to get monthly imports of gold down to around 20 tonnes from its normal imports of around 80 tonnes per month. Obviously, those official numbers leave out smuggling, which probably makes up a very large amount of gold imported into India. At the same time that Indians were buying, the Chinese were jumping in, too. The mine supply, excluding China and Russia which tend not to export any gold, is only around 190 tonnes per month. You had Indians buying 50 tonnes and China buying 90 tonnes – that does not leave much left over for the rest of the world. Blogger Koos Jansen, from In Gold We Trust, says that Chinese demand alone last year was 2,000 tonnes. So demand has far outstripped supply. There is also interesting news coming from Dubai concerning this supply/demand imbalance. A group there is building a gold refinery that can process 1,400 tonnes of gold per year. Well, the current refining capacity in the world is around 6,000 tonnes. Somebody is going to add another 20 percent of capacity. The supply falls far short of that at only 4,300 tonnes. Why is this refining capacity so much higher than the official supply of gold? I believe that the volume of gold being exchanged must therefore be much higher than the official number of 4,300. To me, it’s just another piece to the puzzle, and it all points to central banks surreptitiously supplying gold to China. Gold from central banks, held in LBMA-sized bars, is being recast into kilogram-sized bars, which are preferred in Asia. It all points to this: gold is flooding out of central banks in the West and into Asia’s coffers. Another piece to the puzzle is Germany’s current effort to repatriate its gold supposedly held by the U.S. So far, it has only received 5 tonnes back from the U.S. Treasury. They’ve asked for 300 tonnes back over 7 years. That would imply around 3.6 tonnes per month. It’s worth noting that the U.S. is supposedly the largest holder of physical gold in the world. Its books should contain 1,500 tonnes held for Germany and 8,100 metric tonnes of its own. So why have they only delivered 5 tonnes over the last year? We now get monthly data from Switzerland about where its gold imports come from. In February, 114 metric tonnes came from the UK – a country which does not produce any gold. So where did that gold come from? Who did it belong to? The most obvious answer would be the Bank of England, or ETF holdings. Data from the U.S. offers a similar problem. The U.S. Geological Survey showed that the U.S. exported 80 tonnes of gold in January. The U.S. only mines 20 tonnes a month, and imports another 20. So where did the extra 40 tonnes of exports come from? Who supplied it? The answer is most likely the U.S. Treasury. The whole reason for Western central banks, particularly the U.S. to supply gold to Asia is to suppress the price of physical gold. Most people realize that low interest rates and printing money will eventually be very bad for the U.S. dollar. One thing that would tip people off to imminent danger to the U.S. dollar would be a much higher gold price. Keeping gold’s price low is just part of the financial policy. All this money printing is designed to help the U.S. address its massive obligations, which include its current debts and off-balance sheet obligations of around 80 trillion dollars. Their annual revenues are only around 2.8 trillion dollars and their expenditures are 3.5 trillion. Everyone knows there’s no way they can afford to keep going and cover their obligations. This leaves money printing to cover the gap. Ultimately, we will find out the extent of manipulation in the gold market when someone finally fails – most probably the U.S. running out of gold to supply the market. And I don’t think we are far off here. Do you think that there is merit to the argument that other sources of gold exist that could explain how so much gold is being delivered to China? Such as smuggling or clandestine exports through the shadow banking system in China? Well, I don’t think that is likely. The Chinese government controls all exports of gold and since they are a net buyer, they probably would not allow any exports. The amounts of gold involved are so large that clandestine sources seem unlikely. There is only one government in the world that even owns 4,000 tonnes – that’s the U.S., supposedly. I think it comes down to the powers that be simply trying to keep things under control. The dollar is coming under extreme pressure here, and it looks to have broken down here, in fact. That should have people going into gold. The U.S. GDP growth, which was expected to be around 0.1%, will probably be revised even lower for the first quarter of 2014. I do not believe that any economic recovery is really occurring, because the middle class is simply being routed. We are seeing no real wage gains and inflation is well beyond reported CPI numbers, which are just a joke. In the real world, we all know inflation is much higher. There’s no rational explanation, in my opinion, of where the gold is coming from apart from central banks. What do you see happening in the broad stock market? Are we in a bubble phase? Will problems in the general stock market cause people to rush into the dollar? Well, there’s going to be a point where countries will have to assess each of the currencies on their own merits. As you know, I live in Canada, and I can assure you that when I look at the data that the U.S. supplies, the dollar will lose a lot of value. I am sure that countries like China and Russia would look at the same data and come to the same conclusion. China and Russia look like they could already be turning their backs on the dollar. Brazil and India have complained about the printing of money and the disastrous effects on currencies. They could also be turning their back on the dollar. I am not so sure that the dollar will remain in the same high esteem as the market has historically given it. In the broad stock market, things have not started to change just yet, but we are starting to see some cracks appear. Housing numbers have been quite weak. We’ve seen tech stocks come under attack. Some of the major banks have warnings on their trading levels going forward. Those stocks seem to be breaking. So the generals are coming under pressure. I’m not sure when a decline will start happening, but I feel safe in predicting that within 24 months, the value of these stocks will be much lower than today. I don’t think it’s nearly as safe as the banking interests would tell you. How do you think that the situation in the Ukraine might affect gold? Well, I imagine that people in the area – in countries like Romania or Bulgaria, or in the Ukraine itself – would be thinking about putting some of their money in gold right now. Obviously it does bring people into the gold market. I prefer not to fall back on these sorts of possibilities as reasons to own gold. These are ‘black swans’ for gold. I prefer to focus on the physical shortage argument for owning gold, because I believe the case there is black and white. The means and motive for suppressing the price of gold are well-known. And the physical will win the day. Now, gold will benefit from black swans – a war, governments going broke or the recession getting worse. These could happen, but things are changing in the precious metals markets regardless of these events. Do you believe that the physical shortage argument applies to platinum and palladium as well? Absolutely. In fact, I find the case for platinum and palladium even more compelling than anything else right now. When you think that the top supplier of these metals is Russia, and that the second biggest is South Africa, which is on strike, I find it surprising that the price of platinum and palladium has not exploded. I also see what goes on in the paper markets, however. The commercials are taking on an increasing short position in both of these metals, which is pushing the metals lower. A recovery in platinum and palladium would certainly help all precious metals move higher, including gold and silver. I think that there’s a great case to be made in platinum and palladium. What do you make of the lawsuits taking place in New York over alleged gold manipulation? I’ve been very closely involved in the news surrounding these lawsuits. I’ve read through the court cases, and spoke with some of the lawyers involved before the suits were filed to see what kind of work they had done. Knowing what the prize could be, these lawyers have put a lot of effort into creating a bona fide class action case. If the suit is authorized, we will be able to go look through records and find out, for instance, who sold 100 percent of the annual supply of silver in one day and 50 percent of the gold supply in one day. The way I see it, where there’s smoke there should be fire. I think that these are not frivolous lawsuits. As many as 20 firms showed up in court two days ago to press for the classification as a class-action lawsuit. There should be a lot of money and power directed at getting this thing to court. Based on the data that we have looked at, there will be some revelations. I would point back to the comment by Germany’s regulator, BaFin, who said that possible manipulation in gold could be worse than LIBOR. I am actually surprised by the massive sums that are traded each day in gold. The gains to be made by gaming the system are very substantial – we’re talking billions of dollars, and the fixing process appears to be a complete joke. When the Chairs of the committee to fix the price of gold in London got together, about four or five people knew where the price was going to be post-fixing. They were probably the same people doing all the trading around it, including the derivatives trading, which is an easier way to make money because it is a much bigger market. I hope that the proceedings take place and that we are able to see evidence of who was doing what in these markets over the last 10 years. Eric Sprott has more than 40 years of experience in the investment industry. After earning his designation as a chartered accountant, Eric entered the investment industry as a research analyst at Merrill Lynch. In 1981, he founded Sprott Securities (now called Cormark Securities Inc.), which today is one of Canada’s largest independently owned securities firms. In 2001, Eric established Sprott Asset Management Inc. He is Chairman and President of Sprott Inc., a publicly-traded company based in Toronto, Canada with over $7 billion in assets under management.   More on gold: How you can buy gold at a BIG discount today Master trader Clark: The next major gold rally is starting now Is the gold bull market over? Read this and decide for yourself.

Marijuana Legalization in America is Destroying Mexican Drug Cartel Business Posted: 16 May 2014 10:45 AM PDT Given the DEA's historic relationship with the Sinaloa cartel, and the agency's fury over legalized marijuana, it almost seems like the DEA wants to crush the legal weed market in order to protect the interests of their cartel friends. Almost. Not almost, that is exactly what they want to do. "The DEA doesn't want the [...] The post Marijuana Legalization in America is Destroying Mexican Drug Cartel Business appeared first on Silver Doctors. Check out these similar articles: FBI: Mexican Drug Cartel Funneled Money Through BofA Business Insider: Ron Paul is Destroying the Global Economy By Constraining Bernanke 19 Shocking Examples Of How Political Correctness Is Destroying America

Bitcoin, gold and silver: Bail-ins and capital controls loom Posted: 16 May 2014 10:32 AM PDT Bitcoin is becoming and will become an alternate means of exchange and important form of payment.

Alasdair Macleod: Technical analysis vs. value in gold Posted: 16 May 2014 10:31 AM PDT GATA

Bhutan key route for gold smuggling into India Posted: 16 May 2014 10:26 AM PDT Bhutan has emerged as the key transit point for gold smuggling into India.

Jim Willie: Germany Preparing Gold-Backed Nordic Euro! Posted: 16 May 2014 10:00 AM PDT Europe is the grand prize.  And it's always been the grand prize. Well, due to NATO and World War II considerations, the United States is pretty much captured, colonized, integrated Europe. That's about to change. I think Europe is going to turn its attention eastward. They have a parade of gold-backed currencies coming.  It's not [...] The post Jim Willie: Germany Preparing Gold-Backed Nordic Euro! appeared first on Silver Doctors. Check out these similar articles: Finland preparing for euro breakup Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Euro Bailout in Doubt as Hysteria Hits Germany British Embassies Preparing for Collapse of the Euro!

Bitcoin, Gold And Silver As Bail-ins and Capital Controls Loom Posted: 16 May 2014 09:32 AM PDT gold.ie

Porter Stansberry: Why I'm giving away my 12 all-time greatest secrets Posted: 16 May 2014 09:26 AM PDT From Porter Stansberry in The S&A Digest: What if I could give you the 12 greatest secrets I’ve ever discovered in my nearly 20-year career in finance? What if, with these few secrets, you could get nearly all of the benefits of the tens of thousands of hours we’ve spent – my entire team – studying the world’s financial markets? What if you could get the absolute best ideas and strategies any of my analysts have ever discovered? What if these ideas and all of the supporting information were boiled down for you into a dozen 30-minute presentations that were delivered in person, where you were able to ask questions to improve your understanding? What if you were able to walk away with all of the information you would ever need to manage your savings successfully for the rest of your life? I’m not going to hold you in suspense. That’s exactly the promise we’re going to deliver on at this year’s S&A Alliance meeting. Hang on. This isn’t an advertisement. I’m not going to ask you buy anything. As I always do on Fridays, I’m writing to give you the information I’d want if our roles were reversed. We’re beginning to plan the curriculum for our big annual subscriber meeting. I want to share with you one of the big secrets we plan to unveil – whether you can afford to come or not. I’m doing this for two reasons. For one, I really want you to have this information, which is one of the greatest things I’ve discovered in all of finance. You won’t have to pay me another penny to get it, either – it’s down below, as you’ll see. More important, I’d simply like to give you a sample of the incredibly valuable information we’re capable of delivering. I want a chance to show you why a one-time fee of around $15,000 for a lifetime membership into this group of subscribers is such a stupendous bargain. The sample below isn’t just a stock tip. As I know many of you will recognize, it’s a much, much more valuable roadmap to making thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars. On the other hand, I also know that for many of you, the thought of paying that much money for anything is anathema. But this isn’t cable TV. This is not the kind of information most people will ever have. And I can prove it. Just keep reading… I recently attended a meeting that featured a presentation by Jonathan Gray. Chances are very good that you’ve never heard of him. He is, in my opinion, the single greatest financier of my generation. In 1992, when he was just barely 20 years old and right out of college, he joined Blackstone Group. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this financial-services company, it’s the world’s leading private-equity investment group. These guys are the very best of the very best. They’re not just the smartest guys in the room… they’re literally the smartest guys in New York. Gray’s ascent at Blackstone was uninterrupted. Only about 10 years after he joined the real estate group there, he was named co-head of the group. In 2011 his title was formalized – Global Head of Real Estate. This made Gray the most powerful real estate investor in the world at barely 40 years old. I’ve met dozens of highly successful investors and businessmen during my career – billionaires and people so wealthy that they have no idea what they’re really worth because they just have too much stuff all around the world. (Here’s a hint: if you’re really, truly rich, you don’t end up on Forbes‘ list. Being really, really rich means you can afford to stay totally private.) Even so, no one I’ve ever met in person comes close to impressing me as much as Jonathan Gray. He spoke to our group for nearly an hour – without any notes. He knew every relevant fact and factor affecting his billions of real estate investments, which are spread around the world from malls in Brazil to office parks in London. Honestly, the discussion was effortless for him, despite the dozens of questions, the complexities, and unbelievable number of data points involved. I’ve always surrounded myself with polymaths – people of extraordinary IQ and ability. Just spend an afternoon with my analysts. Or have lunch one day with Doug Casey. These folks all have 12-cylinder minds. I’m not easily impressed with raw intelligence. I’m never impressed with a title or someone who’s clawed their way up the corporate ladder. I know what that entails. But I have never, not once in my entire life, been more impressed by any other capital manager than I was by Jonathan Gray. If you know me at all, that should mean something to you. Gray explained that he was interested in solving a huge problem for investors – the need for safe income. And he was interested in providing capital to a market (commercial real estate) that is regularly starved of capital. Gray spent years observing and thinking about the mortgage REIT sector. And so have we. In fact, we’ve been recommending mortgage REITs (like Annaly, for example) for more than a decade. These “virtual banks” buy residential mortgage securities – most of which are guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Thus, they typically take little or no capital risk. And by leveraging their investments eight or 10 or 12 times, they can provide very high yields for investors – typically 10%-plus annually. Sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it? We thought so, too. As I mentioned, we’ve recommended these at various times over the years. Following the bond market collapse in 2008, I tried to convince a major national bank to partner with us to create a “captured” mortgage REIT just for the benefit of our subscribers, because I knew the returns would be exceptional. I wasn’t able to get the deal in place before the markets soared, thanks to the Fed’s intervention, which began in March 2009. Jonathan Gray did something even smarter… Gray realized that the primary “fly in the ointment” for these firms was the pre-payment risk they took. When interest rates decline, the value of their mortgage investments fall, because many homeowners refinance and pay off their existing mortgages. This causes huge problems for mortgage REITs that own tens of billions of existing mortgage securities. The other – smaller – problem was the mismatching duration of mortgage REIT financing versus the duration of their assets. It can be hard to finance the purchase of a long-lived asset (like a 30-year mortgage) with financing that expires in the short term. There’s always a risk that you won’t be able to “roll your debts,” and thus, most mortgage REITs could be forced to sell assets into a weak market at a bad time. Gray solved both of those problems. First, he decided to only own mortgages on commercial real estate. These loans can’t be prepaid without a significant penalty and typically cover only relatively short-term durations. (Seven years is the nearly universal standard.) While such loans aren’t technically guaranteed, the buildings they’re held against are always worth far more than the note and the owners of large commercial buildings are always extremely creditworthy. If he was reasonably diligent, Gray could build an extremely safe portfolio of commercial mortgages, featuring conservative loan-to-value ratios, great locations, wealthy owners, and plenty of rental coverage (strong tenants). Barring the end of the world, these loans wouldn’t go bad and they wouldn’t be paid off early. To finance the purchase of such assets, Gray insisted that all of his loans feature adjustable rates. That made getting matching duration financing simple: both his mortgage portfolio and his leverage financing have exactly the same duration and exactly the same adjustable interest rates. Thus, Gray captured the “spread” between what borrowers pay for commercial mortgages (typically 6%-8% annually) versus what it costs him to borrow. And thanks to the Federal Reserve, Gray is able to get financing at a very, very low cost. The result is a world-class portfolio of $2.6 billion worth of commercial mortgages, that’s producing nearly $400 million in interest income annually. It’s held using a conservative amount of equity and around $1.6 billion in debt – all with matching durations and floating rates. The financing will cost around $50 million this year. Gray is, therefore, making close to $350 million this year simply by applying his mind to a problem all investors have been trying to solve. I can’t stress enough… he’s doing this in a way that’s as safe as anything you could ever do in real estate. The average loan-to-value ratio in his portfolio is just over 60%. Thus, for Gray to lose a penny, all of his loans would have to default at the same time. The collateral value would have to fall by 40% or more, given that Gray also has $1 billion in equity in this deal to serve as a reserve. I almost can’t imagine a scenario where this deal goes bad. None of this would matter to you, of course, if I told you that this was a private meeting… and a private deal. To invest, you would have to come to our meeting and meet Jonathan Gray. You’d have to be invited to invest. You’d have to be very, very rich, etc. But that’s not the situation at all… You see, when I began to plan our S&A Alliance meeting for this fall and we began to brainstorm the 12 greatest secrets at S&A Research, it was Jonathan Gray who first crossed my mind. I know for a fact that our research into mortgage REITs has long been among the most valuable information we published of any kind. I know that our subscribers have used that information – for more than a decade – to park capital into safe and high-yielding securities. I’ve met subscribers who have told me time and time again that Annaly (to use one example) has paid them hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years (or even more). But I have to say… the mortgage REIT that Jonathan Gray created is the best income secret I’ve ever heard. It solves the two biggest problems of the mortgage REIT sector: interest rates and loan duration. It does so in an elegant and lucrative way. Meanwhile, it pays no taxes and distributes nearly all of its profits every quarter to investors. Now… what if I told you that anyone could buy Gray’s new commercial mortgage REIT? It trades every day on the stock market. It’s currently yielding around 7%. I consider it the highest-quality 7% yield available anywhere. There are all kinds of reasons why you would never find this situation on your own. First, you don’t know Gray. You’ve probably never even heard of him. Second, the corporate entity that became his new mortgage REIT was the shell of a failed real estate investment trust that collapsed in 2008. Looking at the stock’s price chart, you’d never buy this thing. It fell from $500 per share to almost nothing. But that was before Blackstone had anything to do with it. The point is… for anyone with between $250,000 and $20 million to invest, information like this is not only worth a one-time payment of $15,000… it’s the bargain of a lifetime. And the story of Blackstone Mortgage Trust (BXMT) is merely one of the 12 secrets we plan to unveil at our meeting. There’s no reasonable way to expect you’ll ever get this kind of information anywhere else… and certainly not 12 secrets of this caliber in one setting. If you’re already a member of the S&A Alliance and you’re not able (or willing) to travel, don’t worry. We will broadcast the presentations live on the Internet to all S&A Alliance members. We will also send you notes detailing each presentation. So you don’t have to travel to get the information… But you do have to join our group. Even so, I’d encourage attending. There are nuances you won’t pick up unless you’re there. And there’s nothing like meeting our analysts and contacts face-to-face if you want to judge their abilities for yourself. What are the other 11 big secrets? Well, they’d hardly be secrets if I told you right now. But I will tell you this… We’re going to extract the core information and best ideas from each of the newsletters we publish. This will not only be the best meeting we’ve ever held… my goal is to make this the best investment conference that’s ever been held. I want to do something legendary. Again, the only way to be invited is to join the S&A Alliance. For more information, feel free to call my friend and head of sales Michael Cottet (888-863-9356) or speak to any member of his team. Like I said, the ticket to join costs around $15,000. Pay once and enjoy all the benefits for the rest of your life. If you don’t think it’s worth it, please don’t bother haggling with us. There’s really nothing more I can do to roll out the red carpet for you. Or as I like to say: “horse, meet water.” P.S. I’ve just learned that daily oil production in Texas now exceeds 2 million barrels a day. Production continues to expand rapidly. You might recall that several years ago, I predicted that the U.S. would soon surpass every other crude oil producer in the world. That was back in the old “Peak Oil” days. Well, as of right now, Texas alone is the world’s largest producer of crude oil outside of Saudi Arabia. Maybe now more of you will believe me: the U.S. will soon be the world’s largest producer of crude oil, by a wide margin. And… one of the big secrets we’re going to reveal at our upcoming S&A Alliance meeting is where I believe we will find our next biggest well. Hint: it’s not in a shale field.   More from Porter Stansberry: Stansberry Radio Interview Series:  This is how Porter Stansberry really built his fortune Porter Stansberry: A major correction is coming. Here's what to do… Porter Stansberry: Don't trade a single dollar until you've checked these three boxes

AGW deniers are genocidal maniacs Posted: 16 May 2014 09:20 AM PDT RT @sinoceros Confused about what's causing that Antarctic "collapse"? Answer in 7 pictures: http://t.co/I8NoOJZOn8 pic.twitter.com/gXCfFuApMu — Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) May 16, 2014

Was Silver In a Bubble in 2011? Posted: 16 May 2014 09:15 AM PDT Using the 144 week moving average data, the silver peak (weekly closing data) in early 1980 was 10.4 standard deviations above the norm. The April 2011 peak was 4.12 standard deviations above the norm. The current price for May 2014 is about 0.75 standard deviations BELOW the norm. Current 144 week moving average of the [...] The post Was Silver In a Bubble in 2011? appeared first on Silver Doctors. Check out these similar articles: Gold Bubble? Demand Data Continues To Show No Bubble Gold Trader: "Stock Market May Crash 10-20% In Next 5-10 Days, Will Create Setup For Bubble Phase In Gold" Gold Down Further 2% – Chorus of 'Gold Bubble' Callers Such as Roubini Out in Force Again

Big players still holding onto their gold to a degree Posted: 16 May 2014 09:02 AM PDT John Paulson maintained his stake in the SPDR Gold Trust in Q1 and George Soros raised his stake in Barrick and gold mining companies ETFs.

Wrapping The Week Posted: 16 May 2014 08:46 AM PDT It has been a crazy and busy week. Rallies followed by selloffs. News that seemingly has no effect. What else is new? Just the same old, same old for gold and silver. However, the longer-term charts indicate that this is all is coming to a head, very soon. read more

Gold ETF to make physical delivery Posted: 16 May 2014 08:04 AM PDT The Merk Gold Trust holds gold bullion as allocated "London Bars" vaulted in London. OUNZ shareholders own a pro-rata share of the gold held by the Trust.

U.S. Mint Sells More Silver Eagles In A Week Than Gold Eagles Over Past Three Years Posted: 16 May 2014 08:00 AM PDT The U.S. Mint just updated their Silver Eagle sales figures for May, and it was a whopper.  Since the beginning of last week, the U.S. Mint sold 1.939,500 million Silver Eagles.  This is a big number.  Total for the month of May is already at 3,262,000 oz. It took one week for the U.S. Mint [...] The post U.S. Mint Sells More Silver Eagles In A Week Than Gold Eagles Over Past Three Years appeared first on Silver Doctors. Check out these similar articles: US Mint Sells 4.8 Million Silver Eagles in 1 Week! US Mint Sells 8.2 Million Silver Eagles Over First 17 Days of 2013 Production! U.S. Mint Nearly Sells Out Of Its Weekly Silver Eagle Allocation In Two Days!

Has the Bear Market Returned? Maybe Posted: 16 May 2014 07:32 AM PDT Gold Scents

Modern Central Banks’ Business Is Misunderstood by The People Posted: 16 May 2014 07:00 AM PDT Central banks are the officially assigned agents of sovereign governments for the ongoing business of demonetizing whatever currency is in circulation, or in the possession of the people.  The business is to reduce the value of circulated money by increasing it's quantity covertly, and the newly issued money is then used for the governments unstated [...] The post Modern Central Banks’ Business Is Misunderstood by The People appeared first on Silver Doctors. Check out these similar articles: Central Banks' Demand For Gold Quadrupled In 2nd Quarter GATA Discovers 1999 IMF Report Stating 80 Central Banks Lent Over 15% of Official Gold Reserves Jim Grant: The Fed Needs to Get Out of the Central Planning Business & Stop Manipulating the Economy

Bernanke the Sophist: The Deception Behind QE Posted: 16 May 2014 05:27 AM PDT Bernanke’s legacy: a deceptive case for a failed policy. Sophistry: the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving. The Federal Reserve’s core policy of quantitative easing (QE) is based on a deceptive but appealing argument voiced by former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke. Longtime correspondent Harun I. explains the fallacy of Bernanke’s case for QE. Most times I leave people to their flawed ideas because in most cases, it is not what you believe that is most important but that you live in congruence with your beliefs. But this came up in conversation the other day, and since this belief is affecting us all, it must be examined. Bernanke in 2001: “The conclusion that deflation is always reversible under a fiat money system follows from basic economic reasoning. A little parable may prove useful: Today an ounce of gold sells for $300, more or less. Now suppose that a modern alchemist solves his subject’s oldest problem by finding a way to produce unlimited amounts of new gold at essentially no cost [emphasis is mine]. Moreover, his invention is widely publicized and scientifically verified, and he announces his intention to begin massive production of gold within days. What would happen to the price of gold? Presumably, the potentially unlimited supply of cheap gold would cause the market price of gold to plummet. Indeed, if the market for gold is to any degree efficient, the price of gold would collapse immediately after the announcement of the invention, before the alchemist had produced and marketed a single ounce of yellow metal." I pointed out what should have been obvious: There is nothing limitless and therefore nothing can be made in unlimited quantity. And since whatever material is being used in the conversion is not unlimited, it is now subject to the scarcity laws of supply and demand. For example, if lead was successfully converted to gold, lead, which exists in limited quantities will appreciate in value. Lead would have to supply the demand for its current use and now the conversion of gold which still has many important uses. Effectively, lead becomes the new money. I went on: Didn't we learn this lesson from ethanol? Corn is something we consume or use as feed for livestock. The second we decided to divert that output to our gas tank, its price appreciated. In the next paragraph of Bernanke the Sophist's speech, I will interject some clarification (in the interest of calling a thing what it is). What has this got to do with monetary policy? Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press [deficit spending, borrowing money at interest from banks it is supposed to regulate] (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars [destroy the value of labor: force the same expenditure of calories for fewer calories in return] as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation [by forcing people to work the same or harder for less], or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services [he is kind enough to state it plainly right here: reduce the value of labor (energy expended)], which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services [forcing people to work the same or harder for less]. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending [force people to work the same or harder for less by deficit spending, borrowing money at interest (which becomes a perpetual debt) from banks it is supposed to regulate] and hence positive inflation. The implied conclusion is that to increase productivity (have stable prices and full employment) we must decrease the ability to buy products. Or, to have a normal and vibrant economy we must decrease living standards. Great. We can all be chuffed to bits that he's cleared that up. In 2001, Bernanke the Sophist explicitly laid out the blueprint for too many promises. The Bail-In was already stated as policy over a decade ago. Why is everyone so surprised about the growth the wealth gap? Why is there so much angst directed at the wealthy? It is government policy to reduce purchasing power. If I am hired as a fiduciary, my first duty to protect my client's wealth, to make sure his $50 million buys as much ten years from now as it does today. He doesn't really care about becoming more wealthy. Governments hate this because they need that purchasing power. In general, the poor and middle class have no means to escape government's exponentially growing need for revenue, nor do they understand the subtleties with which government bleeds them of their purchasing power. As I have stated, the effects of Bernanke's (the Fed) (and government's) rather specious reasoning are already causing the disintegration of this "system". It never mattered what pill was chosen (green or red). Illusions, the red pill, are necessarily ephemeral. We can never get around the physical laws of nature that bind human activity and therefore bind human interaction. Thank you, Harun, for this explanation of Bernanke’s legacy: a deceptive case for a failed policy.

It’s The Equanomy Stupid Posted: 16 May 2014 04:14 AM PDT As the debate over accounting for everything from a resource-based economy, to gold in the vaults, to Thomas Piketty’s numbers rages on, who wants to be the first person to step up and have their carbon footprint measured?  In the blockchain, there’s no question about the accuracy of the measurement and like Larry Summers says… you’ll have to “side(chain) with history” whether you like it or not. http://tradewithdave.com/?p=21053

Gold drops to below $1,300 an ounce Posted: 16 May 2014 04:14 AM PDT Gold prices dropped to below $1,300 an ounce level on Thursday as selling off in the aftermath of some stronger-than-expected U.S. economic data.

Gold drops to below $1,300 an ounce Posted: 16 May 2014 04:14 AM PDT Gold prices dropped to below $1,300 an ounce level on Thursday as selling off in the aftermath of some stronger-than-expected U.S. economic data.

Links 5/16/14 Posted: 16 May 2014 03:55 AM PDT New Paltz Students Find $40K in a Couch The Little Rebellion (JW) World Health Statistics 2014: Large gains in life expectancy WHO Galapagos in ‘emergency’ over stranded petrol tanker BBC Even Tiny Amounts of Radioactive Food Made Caterpillars Become Abnormal Butterflies Smithsonian The Neuroscientist Who Wants To Upload Humanity To A Computer Popular Science Dracula’s Bran Castle is up for sale Sidney Morning Herald (furzy mouse) Congress moves to turn back taxes over to debt collectors WaPo. “[A]t the request of Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), whose state is home to two of the four private collection agencies that stand to benefit from the proposal.”  The FCC's Tom Wheeler now has his loaded gun. Will he use it to defend the free Internet? Pando Abramson Axed at ‘NYT’  Greg Mitchell, and What Might Leadership Change Mean for Times Readers? Public Editor, Times Global Growth Worries Climb WSJ ECB readies package of rate cuts and targeted measures Reuters Hunt for abducted Nigerian girls ‘unlikely to have happy ending’ Reuters Kidnapped Girls Become Tools of U.S. Imperial Policy in Africa Black Agenda Report Big Brother Is Watching You NSA Collection: Show Me the $$ emptywheel. Domestic financial records collection. From the Department of No! They Would Never Do That! Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden receive 2014 Ridenhour Prize for truth-telling: (transcript) Corrente A Spoonful of Sugar Fat Land Living The Biology and Genetics of Obesity — A Century of Inquiries NEJM FREEDOM FROM GIRL-COOTIES! LADYPARTS!! FREEDOM!!!: (Not) The Honest Broker Brad DeLong ObamaCare Employee of ACA contractor said she quit because lack of work KMOV. Serco. For Medicaid Patients, Access To Primary-Care May Not Be As Advertised  KHN. Film at 11. Readers, I (lambert) am aware I still have a correction to issue on ObamaCare enrollment numbers. Unfortunately, I suffered a schedule slippage and then a collapse. My bad; tomorrow. Recording seems to refute claims made by Anthem LA Times. Make sure you have a recording to back you up when they say you’re “in network.” Risk of dying in hospital increases on weekend regardless of admission day, study finds Minnesota Post UnitedHealth Leads Plan to Reveal Health Prices to Consumers Bloomberg Should health care be rationed? It already is Bangor Daily News Sanders to Host Single Payer Summit Single Payer Action. Not sure why S1782 bill needs 189 pages when HR676 needed only 30. Ukraine Workers Seize City in Eastern Ukraine From Separatists Times Ukraine: French Photographer Confirms U.S. Mercenary Presence Moon of Alabama Night of the Hunter: Family Values in American Foreign Policy Empire Burlesque They're lying about Ukraine, again: Primitive prejudice, stupidity and the reflexive compliance of the New York Times Salon (YY) Russia and Ukraine gas talks stall FT Second Anniversary of Colombia Pact Spotlights Administration’s Failed Promise of Labor Rights Improvements, Now Recycled to Defend TPP Negotiations with Vietnam amid Worker Riots Eyes on Trade Xi's Southeast Asia Strategy Tested by Vietnam Protests Bloomberg Vietnam Protests: More Than Just Anti-China Sentiment Council on Foreign Relations Sticky goings-on in Teflon Thailand South China Morning Post Ouster of Thai PM Complicates Key U.S. Partnership in Southeast Asia World Politics Review. Stay away, Obama! Ukraine, over there! Stay away! India Counts 551 Million Votes as Modi Projected to Take Power Bloomberg Egypt’s Revolution Can Be Saved Bloomberg Class Warfare Boeing conducted unfair practices against U.S. engineers: labor board Reuters. What could go wrong? Discouraged Workers Bloomberg Getting Pfired isn't Phunny The Confluence. Pharma. Lunch with the FT: Tim Geithner Martin Wolf, FT. Still pushing the Big Lie that TARP made money, and old boy Wolf, sadly, doesn’t call Geithner on it. More: "’Most people thought I came from Wall Street,’ [Geithner] says. I agree.” Funny, I thought the New York Fed, “a private institution owned by member banks” that performs banking functions, and of which Geithner was President, was located at 33 Liberty Street, down there on the nether tip of Manhattan. Did I not get the memo? Against against commodification (markets in everything) Marginal Revolution. I’m gonna bill for this link. So the complete Bell Journal is online and I am not going to blog it The Yorkshire Ranter. Techies take note! The girl who sparked Brown v. Board of Education Waging Nonviolence Antidote du jour: See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

Eric Sprott: Gold Shortage Coming, Data Shows Posted: 16 May 2014 02:26 AM PDT "It seems that we're in some sort of holding pattern" ¤ Yesterday In Gold & Silver The gold price didn't do a whole heck of a lot during Far East or morning trading in London on their Thursday.  Of course that all changed at 8:30 a.m. EDT, 10 minutes after New York began to trade, because within a minute or two "da boyz" and their HFT algorithms peeled a bit more than ten bucks off the price.  Then, when the gold price rallied back above the $1,300 spot price mark, they were waiting to sell it back down again---and from there it did nothing for the remainder of the day. The CME Group recorded the low and high ticks as $1,290.90 and $1,307.30 in the June contract. Gold finished the Thursday session at $1,296.80 spot, down $8.90 from Wednesday's close.  Net volume was a third heavier than Wednesday volume at 131,000 contracts. Silver was under a bit of selling pressure during Far East and morning trading in London---and by the time the HFT boyz showed up in New York, it was already down about 15 cents from Wednesday's close.  And by the time they were through, the price was down another two bits---and the subsequent rally met the same fate as the subsequent rally in gold.  The silver and gold charts look almost identical. The high and low ticks were recorded at $19.835 and $19.43 in the July contract, an intraday move of two%. Silver closed yesterday at $19.460 spot, down 28.5 cents from Wednesday's close.  Net volume was very high once again.  This time it was 46,000 contracts, a few thousand contracts higher than Wednesday's volume. Platinum got sold down about $15 during the Wednesday trading session, with most of the loss occurring during the New York trading session.  So, what else is new? Palladium was down about five dollars during the Far East and London trading session---and the not-for-profit sellers added another $11 to that loss during the New York session. The dollar index closed around the 80.06 mark in late New York trading on their Wednesday afternoon---and then spent the first nine hours of the Thursday trading session a small handful of basis points above the 80.00 mark.  But minutes before the London open, a rally developed that peaked out at 80.32 shortly after 8:30 a.m.---and by 11:30 a.m. EDT it had hit its 79.95 low, but struggled back to close at 80.04---virtually unchanged on the day. The engineered price decline in gold and silver started almost at the same moment as the dollar index began heading south. The gold stocks opened down a bit---and then headed lower once the not-for-profit sellers drove the gold price back below the $1,300 spot price mark for the second time.  Most of the loses were in minutes before noon EDT---and the shares did nothing after that, but did finish just off their lows.  The HUI closed down 1.65%. The silver equities also sold down a bit, before heading quietly lower, hitting their low tick around 2 p.m. EDT.  After that they rallied a bit into the close.  Nick Laird's Intraday Silver Sentiment Index closed down 2.61%. The CME Daily Delivery Report showed that 4 gold and 51 silver contracts were posted for delivery on Monday within the Comex-approved depositories.  Once again it was Jefferies as the only short/issuer---and the stoppers were "all the usual suspects" as well---taking a few each. The link to yesterday's Issuers and Stoppers Report is here. Surprisingly enough, an authorized participant added 57,781 troy ounces of gold to GLD yesterday---and as of 9:30 p.m. EDT yesterday evening, there were no reported changes in SLV. Joshua Gibbons, the "Guru of the SLV Bar List" updated his website with the latest weekly report from ishares.com---and this is what he had to say:  "Analysis of the 14 May 2014 bar list, and comparison to the previous week's list---1,921,808.2 troy ounces were removed (all from Brinks London). No bars were added or had a serial number change." "The bars removed were from Johnson Matthey (0.5M oz), Handy Harman (0.2M oz), Hoboken (0.2M oz), Rand Refinery (0.2M oz), and 28 others.  As of the time that the bar list was produced, it was overallocated 234.2 oz.  All daily changes are reflected on the bar list.  The bars withdrawn were unusual, in that there were bars from so many refiners." I'm curious about that, as well.  The link to Joshua's website is here. There was no sales report from the U.S. Mint yesterday But California reader Jon DeWeese heard back the U.S. Mint yesterday about the big changes in April silver eagle sales.  If you remember, April sales got revised downwards from 4,590,000 to 3,569,000.  Here was the mint's reply:  "Thank you for contacting the United States Mint.  The difference in the Silver Eagles sales figures was due to a system glitch, which has been corrected.  We appreciate your interest." One again there were no reported changes in gold over at the Comex-approved depositories on Wednesday.  It was a different story in silver, of course, as nothing was reported received---and 814,273 troy ounces were shipped out the door for parts unknown.  The withdrawals were from HSBC USA and CNT.  The link to that activity is here. Nick Laird sent me a couple of charts in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, but I'd already hit the send button on yesterday's column, so they had to wait for today's missive. The first chart is the 5-year Intraday Average Silver Price Movements---and all three fixes, both gold fixes along with the noon London silver fix, are points of interest on his chart.  Also note the high tick of the day comes an hour before the London open---which is the same time as the high tick for gold on its 1-year intraday chart. Here's the same chart, except it shows only the last 12 months, just to give you and idea how things have changed as the price management scheme comes ever closer to its ultimate demise.  It doesn't look at lot different, does it?  But the difference between the 5-year gold and 1-year gold intraday charts is quite striking, but not so much with silver. I have the usual number of stories for a mid-week column---and the final edit, as always, is up to you. ¤ Critical Reads Greenspan: Taxpayers on the Hook to Rescue JPMorgan in Crisis Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said JPMorgan Chase & Co. is akin to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because taxpayers would shoulder the burden of its rescue in an emergency, rather than let it collapse. JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank, is an example of implicit government guarantees not measured in the nation’s official public-debt statistics, Greenspan, 88, said Wednesday at a forum in Washington organized by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The reality is that the government would prop up many financial firms and other companies if needed, he said. “JPMorgan is a Fannie Mae-, Freddie Mac-type of institution, because they are indeed too big to fail, and taxpayer monies will come in behind them to hold them up if necessary,” said Greenspan. He sat on New York-based JPMorgan’s board before his appointment to Fed chairman in 1987. Well, dear reader, I would guess that part of the rescue would involve bailing JPM out of it's grotesque and obscene short-side corners in the Comex silver, platinum and palladium markets---which will be partially offset by their gains in their long-side corner in the Comex gold market.  This marketwatch.com story from early yesterday morning is courtesy of Nick Giambruno, the senior editor over at the InternationalMan.com Internet site.  It's worth reading. Geithner Still Can't Explain Lehman One of the most puzzling aspects of the financial crisis was the zig-zag-zig by the U.S. authorities, who saved Bear Stearns from bankruptcy, then let Lehman Brothers fall off the cliff only to rescue AIG a day later. After plowing through the first half of Tim Geithner's book "Stress Test," I'm none the wiser. Geithner, who was at the helm of the New York Federal Reserve during the meltdown and then became President Barack Obama's Treasury secretary in its aftermath, has no time for "moral hazard fundamentalists" who object to bailouts for banks. "The truly moral thing to do during a raging financial inferno is to put it out," he argues. So why didn't he throw buckets of dollars on Lehman when it was blazing away? After saying his book isn't meant to cast him as the Cassandra of the financial crisis, Geithner tries to convince us that he was ahead of the curve from the moment he arrived at the Fed. "Even though the financial sector seemed healthy, I talked about the systemic risks in almost every speech I delivered as New York Fed President." That talk failed to translate into action. Let's see---little Timmy lied his ass off in public life on this issue---and followed it up by doing the same in his book.  The real reason that Bear Stearns wasn't allowed to fold was because of [according to Ted Butler] the obscene and grotesque short positions that they held in the Comex futures market in silver and gold---and as a result of the margin calls they were getting on these positions, they were forced to declare bankruptcy.  If these positions had to be covered as a result of that bankruptcy, it would have driven the silver price to some fantastic 3-digit number in a short covering rally that would have set the world on fire.  Ditto in gold---and that's when JPMorgan was asked to ride to the rescue--and that's also why JPMorgan's short position in silver blew out by many hundreds of percent in the August 2008 Bank Participation Report.  Case closed. This op-ed piece by Mark Gilbert, showed up on the Bloomberg website at noon EDT yesterday---and it's also worth your time---as this story is directly related to today's first story.  It's the first offering of the day from Roy Stephens. Gundlach: We Could Be on the Verge of 'One of The Biggest Short-Covering Scrambles of All Time' DoubleLine Funds' Jeffrey Gundlach warns that we may be on the edge of a big bond market rally that could see yields tanking. "If we go down [more] on Treasury yields, we will see one of the biggest short-covering scrambles of all time," said Gundlach on Wednesday in San Diego. This quote is being reported by FA Mag's Dan Jamieson from the Altegris Investments strategic investment conference. Coming into 2014, almost no one predicted the 10-year Treasury yield would tumble to the levels we're seeing today. But bond fund manager Jeff Gundlach did. This news item showed up on the businessinsider.com Internet site yesterday afternoon EDT---and it's the second offering in a row from Roy Stephens. E.U. officials plotted IMF attack to bring rebellious Italy to its knees The revelations about EMU skulduggery are coming thick and fast. Tim Geithner recounts in his book Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises just how far the E.U. elites are willing to go to save the euro, even if it means toppling elected leaders and eviscerating Europe’s sovereign parliaments. The former U.S. Treasury Secretary says that E.U. officials approached him in the white heat of the EMU crisis in November 2011 with a plan to overthrow  Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s elected leader. "They wanted us to refuse to back IMF loans to Italy as long as he refused to go," he writes. Geithner told them this was unthinkable. The U.S. could not misuse the machinery of the IMF to settle political disputes in this way. "We can't have his blood on our hands". This absolute must read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard offering was posted on the telegraph.co.uk Internet site on Thursday sometime--and I found it in a GATA release yesterday.  And I'll say it one more time, it's a must read. Political battles risk paralysing new E.U. parliament With the rise of euroscepticism on both the political left and right, simply retaining the current level of European integration during the next EP mandate will be a victory, says a veteran Brussels-based E.U. lobbyist. Thomas Tindemans, head of Hill & Knowlton in Brussels, suggests that the changes in the next parliament will be such that previously technical discussions on legislation could be replaced by ideological disagreements on fundamental EU principles. Noting that both extremes of the political spectrum are "fundamentally against the EU", Tindemans says: "If they can form important groups, if they can get rapporteurs, committee presidencies then you'll have a whole other debate." This story, filed from Brussels, was posted on the euobserver.com Internet site yesterday morning Europe time---and it's courtesy of Roy Stephens once again. Deutsche Bank Sells Vegas Casino for $1.73 Billion Deutsche Bank AG is cutting itself free of The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas resort and casino, saying it's selling the swanky but unprofitable high-rise complex on the Strip to Blackstone Real Estate Partners VII for $1.73 billion. The German investment bank said in a statement Thursday that the cash deal remains subject to regulatory approvals. The bank had intended to sell the property from before it even opened in 2010 and had placed The Cosmopolitan in a separate bank division devoted to winding down or selling unwanted investments. Blackstone, which owns $81 billion in real estate assets globally and describes itself as the largest opportunistic real estate investment manager in the world, is in the business of buying underperforming property and re-selling it after making improvements. It owns nearly 1,000 homes in Nevada and the upscale Hughes Center office complex in Las Vegas, as well as a small portion of casino company Caesars Entertainment Corp. This AP story from yesterday found a home over at the abcnews.go.com Internet site---and I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for his first offering of the day. Slovak PM: Russia says gas to Europe will stop if Kiev does not pay Russian President Vladimir Putin has informed multiple European states that Moscow will not supply gas to Europe through Ukraine as of June 1 if Kiev does not pay its bills, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said on Thursday. Fico, speaking to reporters after meeting NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the most pressing threat facing Slovakia was the question of deliveries from Russia that pass through Ukraine. "Today, multiple member states including Slovakia were informed by President Putin that as of June 1, if Ukraine does not pay for supplied gas, it will not be supplied to the European territory," Fico said. This Reuters story, filed from Bratislava, was posted on their Internet site late yesterday morning EDT---and I thank Casey Research's own Louis James for passing it around yesterday.  It's definitely worth reading. Russia Dumps 20% of Its Treasury Holdings as Mystery "Belgium" Buyer Adds Another Whopping $40 Billion Back in mid-March, there was a brief scare after the start of the Ukraine conflict, when Fed custody holdings plunged by a record $104.5 billion (if promptly bouncing back the following week), leading many to believe that Russia may have dumped its Treasurys, or at least change its bond custodian. We noted that we wouldn't have a definitive answer until the May TIC number came out to know for sure how much Russia had sold, or if indeed, anything. Moments ago the May TIC numbers did come out, and as expected, Russia indeed dumped a record $26 billion, or some 20% of all of its holdings, bringing its post-March total to just over $100 billion - the lowest since the Lehman crisis. But as shocking as this largely pre-telegraphed dump was, it pales in comparison with what Zero Hedge first observed, is the country that has quietly and quite rapidly become the third largest holder of US paper: Belgium. Or rather, "Belgium" because it is quite clear that it is not the country of Belgium who is engaging in this unprecedented buying spree of U.S. paper, but some account acting through Belgian custody. Make that an unprecedented $381 billion because as we just learned "Belgium" bought another $40 billion in March! This Zero Hedge news item showed up on their Internet site early yesterday afternoon EST---and I thank reader M.A. for sending it along. Russia: Moving away from international rating

Greenspan: Taxpayers on the Hook to Rescue JPMorgan in Crisis Posted: 16 May 2014 02:26 AM PDT Greenspan: Taxpayers on the Hook to Rescue JPMorgan in Crisis Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said JPMorgan Chase & Co. is akin to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because taxpayers would shoulder the burden of its rescue in an emergency, rather than let it collapse. JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank, is an example of implicit government guarantees not measured in the nation’s official public-debt statistics, Greenspan, 88, said Wednesday at a forum in Washington organized by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The reality is that the government would prop up many financial firms and other companies if needed, he said. “JPMorgan is a Fannie Mae-, Freddie Mac-type of institution, because they are indeed too big to fail, and taxpayer monies will come in behind them to hold them up if necessary,” said Greenspan. He sat on New York-based JPMorgan’s board before his appointment to Fed chairman in 1987. Well, dear reader, I would guess that part of the rescue would involve bailing JPM out of it's grotesque and obscene short-side corners in the Comex silver, platinum and palladium markets---which will be partially offset by their gains in their long-side corner in the Comex gold market.  This marketwatch.com story from early yesterday morning is courtesy of Nick Giambruno, the senior editor over at the InternationalMan.com Internet site.  It's worth reading.

Geithner Still Can't Explain Lehman Posted: 16 May 2014 02:26 AM PDT Geithner Still Can't Explain Lehman One of the most puzzling aspects of the financial crisis was the zig-zag-zig by the U.S. authorities, who saved Bear Stearns from bankruptcy, then let Lehman Brothers fall off the cliff only to rescue AIG a day later. After plowing through the first half of Tim Geithner's book "Stress Test," I'm none the wiser. Geithner, who was at the helm of the New York Federal Reserve during the meltdown and then became President Barack Obama's Treasury secretary in its aftermath, has no time for "moral hazard fundamentalists" who object to bailouts for banks. "The truly moral thing to do during a raging financial inferno is to put it out," he argues. So why didn't he throw buckets of dollars on Lehman when it was blazing away? After saying his book isn't meant to cast him as the Cassandra of the financial crisis, Geithner tries to convince us that he was ahead of the curve from the moment he arrived at the Fed. "Even though the financial sector seemed healthy, I talked about the systemic risks in almost every speech I delivered as New York Fed President." That talk failed to translate into action. Let's see---little Timmy lied his ass off in public life on this issue---and followed it up by doing the same in his book.  The real reason that Bear Stearns wasn't allowed to fold was because of [according to Ted Butler] the obscene and grotesque short positions that they held in the Comex futures market in silver and gold---and as a result of the margin calls they were getting on these positions, they were forced to declare bankruptcy.  If these positions had to be covered as a result of that bankruptcy, it would have driven the silver price to some fantastic 3-digit number in a short covering rally that would have set the world on fire.  Ditto in gold---and that's when JPMorgan was asked to ride to the rescue--and that's also why JPMorgan's short position in silver blew out by many hundreds of percent in the August 2008 Bank Participation Report.  Case closed. This op-ed piece by Mark Gilbert, showed up on the Bloomberg website at noon EDT yesterday---and it's also worth your time---as this story is directly related to today's first story.  It's the first offering of the day from Roy Stephens.

Modi's Thatcherite talk cannot restore India's flagging fortunes Posted: 16 May 2014 02:26 AM PDT Modi's Thatcherite talk cannot restore India's flagging fortunes India’s economic model has essentially failed. Talk of matching East Asia’s growth rates has been exposed as wishful thinking. Superpower dreams are giving way to the same old reality of poverty, depleted ground water and graft. We can now see that growth averaging 8.2pc from 2004 to 2012 was an anomaly, kept alive by fiscal largesse at the top of the cycle. A torrid global boom masked all sins, itself the result of negative real interest rates in the West, the yen carry trade from Japan, China’s reserve accumulation and ultimately a flood of dollar liquidity that leaked everywhere from the US Federal Reserve. India’s manufacturing industry remains stuck at 14pc of GDP. This is a far cry from levels in Thailand (30pc), South Korea (31pc) or China (32pc), or Japan in its day, the typical threshold for catch-up economies graduating to a higher league. India has actually lost 5m manufacturing jobs over the past decade, slipping from 55m to 50m. The economic boom fizzled two years ago, ending in the sort of stagflation that bedevilled Britain in the 1970s. India’s “misery index” is back where it was a quarter of a century ago when the old Hindu Model was overthrown and the country embraced free market globalism, up to a point. The International Monetary Fund expects growth to languish at 4.6pc this fiscal year, with inflation at 10.5pc. “India has very little room to adopt counter-cyclical policies,” it said. This Ambrose Evans-Pritchard commentary put in an appearance on The Telegraph's website on Wednesday evening BST---and it's courtesy of Roy Stephens once again.  It's worth reading if you have the time.

Four King World News Blogs/Audio Interviews Posted: 16 May 2014 02:26 AM PDT Four King World News Blogs/Audio Interviews 1. William Kaye [#1]: "What The Elite Are Secretly Doing Ahead of Coming Collapse"  2. Keith Barron: "Time is Running Out to Prepare Before the Next Global Crisis"  3. William Kaye [#2]: "Full-Blown Currency Wars, Gold, World War III and Serious Panic"  4. The audio interview is with Bill Fleckenstein [Please direct any questions or comments about what is said in these interviews by either Eric King or his guests to them, and not to me. Thank you. - Ed]

China: Gold Demand Drops 30% During May Day Break Posted: 16 May 2014 02:26 AM PDT China: Gold Demand Drops 30% During May Day Break The Chinese are buying less gold this year and demand during the Golden Week holidays that began on 1 May dropped some 30% from a year ago, according to a leading bullion exchange. After an extraordinary year for gold sales in 2013, the situation is back to something like 2012, according to Haywood Cheung, president of the Chinese Gold & Silver Exchange Society. While China beat India as the biggest bullion consumer last year, the buying craze triggered by a price slump last April has not been repeated, according to Heraeus Metals Hong Kong. "Before, when they walk into a jewellery shop, they spend about HK$10,000 ($1,290), and now it's about HK$5,000 to HK$6,000," Cheung told Bloomberg, quoting estimates by the society's 171 members including HSBC Holdings and Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group, the largest listed jewelry chain. This gold-related news item was posted on the ibtimes.co.uk Internet site yesterday afternoon BST---and it's the final offering of the day from reader M.A.

Eric Sprott: Gold Shortage Coming, Data Shows Posted: 16 May 2014 02:26 AM PDT Eric Sprott: Gold Shortage Coming, Data Shows Eric Sprott: I am very excited about developments in the gold and silver markets today. I have been speculating since late 2012 that Western central banks could be running out of gold. I put the sell-off in gold and silver in 2013 to the fact that the Western banks needed a way to generate physical gold supplies. As the metals prices went down, there was a lot of liquidation of gold which increased the supply by an estimated 900 tonnes last year. Let’s look at the figures. The annual supply of gold is around 4,300 tonnes. 3,000 tonnes come from mining and the other 1,300 tonnes or so from recycled material. In 2013, an additional 900 tonnes came onto the market from ETFs that were being liquidated – a supply increase of around 21%. Quite frankly, I believe this was all orchestrated in order to create this supply. During the time when the price was knocked down, a tsunami of buying started. India bought 336 tonnes from April to June of 2013. I’m sure that the central bankers went to the Reserve Bank of India and said: “You’ve got to stop people from buying gold.” Of course, the Reserve Bank of India went on to create rule after rule to try to stop people from buying gold. They managed to get monthly imports of gold down to around 20 tonnes from its normal imports of around 80 tonnes per month. Obviously, those official numbers leave out smuggling, which probably makes up a very large amount of gold imported into India. This commentary form Eric showed up in Sprott's Thoughts---and it was posted on the sprottglobal.com Internet site yesterday.  It's definitely worth reading.

Mike Kosares: So how goes the war on gold? Posted: 16 May 2014 02:26 AM PDT Mike Kosares: So how goes the war on gold? While gold investors may be frustrated that the Western central bank gold price suppression scheme has not yet collapsed, Mike Kosares of Centennial Precious Metals in Denver writes today that gold's opponents are probably just as frustrated with the persistence of strong demand for the monetary metal. Kosares' commentary is headlined "So How Goes the War on Gold?"---and it's posted at Centennial's Internet site, USAGold.com.  I thank Chris Powell for wordsmithing the above paragraph of introduction.

Koos Jansen: Are the London gold vaults running empty? Posted: 16 May 2014 02:26 AM PDT Koos Jansen: Are the London gold vaults running empty? British gold exports, which long have been feeding Swiss refineries for reprocessing into kilobars for export to Asian markets and China particularly, collapsed 85 percent in March even as gold imports into China remain strong, gold researcher and GATA consultant Koos Jansen reported yesterday evening. This prompts Jansen to wonder if the bullion banks in London are starting to run out of metal. Jansen's commentary is headlined "Are the London Gold Vaults Running Empty?" and it's posted at his Internet site ingoldwetrust.ch in Switzerland.  I found this commentary posted on the gata.org Internet site.

World top 20 silver producers – countries and companies Posted: 16 May 2014 02:26 AM PDT World top 20 silver producers – countries and companies Only just over a week ago we published a listing of the World top 10 gold producers - countries and companies as researched by consultancy Metals Focus – and this week we are going one better with Silver with a listing of the Top 20 silver producing countries and companies as researched by Thomson Reuters GFMS, and published in its latest annual silver study for the Silver Institute in the U.S.   GFMS reported that global silver production and demand were both at all time highs in 2013, with demand exceeding supply by over 260 million ounces. Mexico remains top of the tree among silver producing nations, while Peru is reported to have moved above China into second place, but by the smallest of margins.  Further down the listing, Bolivia and Chile in 6th and 7th places both overtook Poland which is now in 8th place.  Guatemala also moved up two places in 15th place with Morocco and Turkey falling back to 16th and 17th respectively.  New entrants in the Top 20 this year were Armenia and Papua New Guinea. This very interesting silver-related news item is something that Lawrie Williams posted over on the mineweb.com Internet site yesterday---and it's definitely worth your time.

Big players still holding onto their gold to a degree Posted: 16 May 2014 02:26 AM PDT Big players still holding onto their gold to a degree Hedge fund Paulson & Co in Q1 maintained its stake in SPDR Gold Trust, the world's biggest gold-backed exchange-traded fund as bullion prices rebounded from their biggest annual loss in 32 years in 2013, while PIMCO dissolved its gold ETF investment. George Soros raised his stake in Barrick Gold Corp and gold mining companies ETFs, suggesting the big names in hedge funds took advantage of lower gold prices to increase positions in the precious metal used by many as a hedge. Investors pay close attention to the quarterly filings by Paulson and other notable hedge fund managers because they provide the best insight into whether the so-called "smart money" has lost faith in gold as a hedge against inflation and economic uncertainty. "Some institutions are stepping up to buy gold this year just like you would expect them to do when they find an asset valued at these attractive levels," said Adam Sarhan, CEO of New York-based Sarhan Capital. This Reuters story found a home on the mineweb.com Internet site early this morning British Summer Time.

Gold Oscillates Around 200 Day Average Posted: 16 May 2014 12:55 AM PDT dailyfx

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