Gold World News Flash |
- Gold and Silver Price Bear Market- Phase III... The Strategy
- Gold Price Crash Through Key Support, Crude Oil in Freefall
- Silver Price Breaks Long-term Support Likely to Drop Further
- Financial Destruction & Why This Fairy Tale Will End In Disaster
- Gold and Silver Supply and Demand 2 Nov
- GREAT RECAP OF WHERE WE ARE NOW: Even Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan Says QE Failed, Gold is Good Place to Put Money
- Silver Update: Stupid Loans
- The Zombie System: How Capitalism Has Gone Off The Rails
- US Hospitals Nowhere Near Ready for Ebola
- Chris Martenson interviews Ted Butler about commodity price suppression
- FBI To Probe Accounting Fraud At Multi-Billion REIT
- Robert Fitzwilson: Central bank intervention may explain gold's drop
- What About Gold Now?
- Support for Swiss gold referendum falls in latest poll
- Gold Market Update
- Gold Price, Dow Stock Market Index and VIX Analysis
- Correspondence: Is all this market rigging real? Is GATA?
- Gold mines can't produce at current low prices, Maison Placements' Ing says
- Gold Investors Weekly Review – October 31st
- Silver Eagle Sales Climb 87% Higher in October
- The Reinvention of Alan Greenspan
| Gold and Silver Price Bear Market- Phase III... The Strategy Posted: 02 Nov 2014 09:57 PM PST This is part 1I of an essay by Plunger (Burt Coons). He is an extraordinary market historian and an associate with Rambus Chartology. Precious Metals Bear Market- Phase III The Strategy (Part III) We ended our last essay, entitled "Phase III , Apocalypse Now" http://goldtadise.com/?p=342329 with the question has your market guru been advising you to buy all the way down from the highs of 2011? If so, don't you think its time to reexamine your premise. Well, if you have maybe you are ready to adopt a different strategy so as to survive the final phase III of this precious metals bear market. This final part 3 essay lays out a suggested game plan to both survive the bear and to transition to the next bull market in the PMs. I want to remind all readers that I am not anti gold. In fact, I am a long term hard money advocate who in fact is anti fiat money, however I prefer to lose my opinion over losing my money thus I am not attached to dogma and I strive to be objective while analyzing markets rather than apply my own ideology to fit the market. Part one can be read here: http://goldtadise.com/?p=341672 |
| Gold Price Crash Through Key Support, Crude Oil in Freefall Posted: 02 Nov 2014 09:36 PM PST Gold finally crashed key support at last year's lows on Friday, which was a very bearish development that has opened up the prospect of an immediate severe decline at least to the strong support in the $1,000 area. Such a decline will have grave consequences for the Precious Metals mining industry, whose costs have risen sharply in recent years, and is expected to lead to a massive wave of company failures, as many who have been "hanging on by their fingernails" finally lose the fight and disappear over the cliff. This will eventually lead to an acute gold supply shortage, which will be exacerbated after the dollar's deflation panic "swan song" rally is done, and the dollar is then pushed off its perch as the global reserve currency by the actions of China and Russia (and others) working in concert to bring it down. This will lead to a massive resurgence in gold and silver and to the stocks of mining companies who weather the imminent Great Cull going ballistic. |
| Silver Price Breaks Long-term Support Likely to Drop Further Posted: 02 Nov 2014 09:19 PM PST Silver finally broke down from its long-term uptrend late last week, which was a very bearish development that has opened up the risk of an immediate severe drop. As with gold, silver looks set to enter a cycle of company failure and mine closure leading to an eventual production shortfall, which, coupled with a falling dollar after its current deflation induced "swan song" rally has played out, leads in turn to sharply rising prices and a spectacular rally in the stocks of companies who have managed to survive the imminent Great Cull. |
| Financial Destruction & Why This Fairy Tale Will End In Disaster Posted: 02 Nov 2014 09:02 PM PST  As the world continues to move into uncharted territory, today a 40-year market veteran sent King World News a fantastic piece discussing financial destruction and why this fairy tale will end in disaster. He also discusses gold, silver, oil, and what investors should be doing in this dangerous environment. Below is what Robert Fitzwilson, founder of The Portola Group, had to say in this exclusive piece for King World News.This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Gold and Silver Supply and Demand 2 Nov Posted: 02 Nov 2014 08:22 PM PST by Keith Weiner
Woe unto the gold speculators, and a curse laid upon the house of silver. At least, that's how it may feel. In more clinical terms, the gold price fell from $1,230.90 to $1,172.59, or $58.31. The drop this week was 4.7%. The price closed the week below the level set after the crash of 2013, which was $1180 (by the way, an intraday dip). The gold price has never closed a day below $1188 since 2010. The silver price fell from $17.17 to $16.13. $1.04 is 6.1%. It's never been lower in years, except briefly in 2010. On April 9, we said:
We got hate mail. In the first place, one would hope that people don't shoot at messengers. We are of the firm belief that gold and silver are money, and the paper issued by the Fed is not. At the same time, we argue that this view is not a trading strategy. For trading, we look to market data. Second, we were right. While other analysts called every blip with renewed forecasts of $50 and $250, the silver price has spoken. It had a false breakout in June, and has been falling steadily since then. It has traded with a 15 handle this week. Incredibly, the fundamental price we calculate for silver is still below the market price. To see the fundamentals, read on… First, here is the graph of the metals' prices. The Prices of Gold and Silver
We are interested in the changing equilibrium created when some market participants are accumulating hoards and others are dishoarding. Of course, what makes it exciting is that speculators can (temporarily) exaggerate or fight against the trend. The speculators are often acting on rumors, technical analysis, or partial data about flows into or out of one corner of the market. That kind of information can't tell them whether the globe, on net, is hoarding or dishoarding. One could point out that gold does not, on net, go into or out of anything. Yes, that is true. But it can come out of hoards and into carry trades. That is what we study. The gold basis tells us about this dynamic. Conventional techniques for analyzing supply and demand are inapplicable to gold and silver, because the monetary metals have such high inventories. In normal commodities, inventories divided by annual production can be measured in months. The world just does not keep much inventory in wheat or oil. With gold and silver, stocks to flows is measured in decades. Every ounce of those Next, this is a graph of the gold price measured in silver, otherwise known as the gold to silver ratio. It rose a full point, or 1.4%. Our original call back in 2013 (when the ratio was around 52, and most analysts were calling for it to fall) was 60 and maybe 70. We later updated that to 70 and maybe higher. Most recently, we updated it to 75 and maybe 80. Early Friday morning, the ratio hit 73.96. The Ratio of the Gold Price to the Silver Price
For each metal, we will look at a graph of the basis and cobasis overlaid with the price of the dollar in terms of the respective metal. It will make it easier to provide terse commentary. The dollar will be represented in green, the basis in blue and cobasis in red. Here is the gold graph. The Gold Basis and Cobasis and the Dollar Price
Look at that run up in the dollar. It's impressive! As recently as Oct 20, the price of the dollar was under 25mg gold. Now it's over 26.5mg. Along with this rise in the dollar price (which most people think of as the fall in the gold price), has been a rise in the scarcity of gold. We now have a substantial positive cobasis—i.e. backwardation—in gold. We calculate a fundamental price of gold some $48 over the market price. This does not mean that the price couldn't drop further, but it does tend to apply an upward pressure to prices. Now let's look at silver. The Silver Basis and Cobasis and the Dollar Price
The dollar rose even more sharply in silver. It was 1.81g silver at the end of last week, and now 1.93g. In July, it was 1.45g. The cobasis is up sharply, and December silver is now also quite backwardated. There are some key differences between silver and gold, which we shall not elaborate here. Thus we calculate the fundamental price in silver at $0.77 below the market price. In most of the little price moves in the past few years—do we dare assume it's the new This week, the metal became a little scarcer but the price fell more than a little. Don't be fooled that the price drop was caused by high frequency trading, low integrity manipulation, or zero clothing shorting of futures. It was caused by selling of futures and, just as importantly, physical metal.
© 2014 Monetary Metals |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2014 08:20 PM PST from Marco Janssen: |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2014 07:25 PM PST from BrotherJohnF: Released to subs on 10/24/14 |
| The Zombie System: How Capitalism Has Gone Off The Rails Posted: 02 Nov 2014 07:00 PM PST Authored by Michael Sauga, originally posted at Der Spiegel, Six years after the Lehman disaster, the industrialized world is suffering from Japan Syndrome. Growth is minimal, another crash may be brewing and the gulf between rich and poor continues to widen. Can the global economy reinvent itself? A new buzzword is circulating in the world's convention centers and auditoriums. It can be heard at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund. Bankers sprinkle it into the presentations; politicians use it leave an impression on discussion panels. The buzzword is "inclusion" and it refers to a trait that Western industrialized nations seem to be on the verge of losing: the ability to allow as many layers of society as possible to benefit from economic advancement and participate in political life. The term is now even being used at meetings of a more exclusive character, as was the case in London in May. Some 250 wealthy and extremely wealthy individuals, from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt to Unilever CEO Paul Polman, gathered in a venerable castle on the Thames River to lament the fact that in today's capitalism, there is too little left over for the lower income classes. Former US President Bill Clinton found fault with the "uneven distribution of opportunity," while IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde was critical of the numerous financial scandals. The hostess of the meeting, investor and bank heir Lynn Forester de Rothschild, said she was concerned about social cohesion, noting that citizens had "lost confidence in their governments." It isn't necessary, of course, to attend the London conference on "inclusive capitalism" to realize that industrialized countries have a problem. When the Berlin Wall came down 25 years ago, the West's liberal economic and social order seemed on the verge of an unstoppable march of triumph. Communism had failed, politicians worldwide were singing the praises of deregulated markets and US political scientist Francis Fukuyama was invoking the "end of history." Today, no one talks anymore about the beneficial effects of unimpeded capital movement. Today's issue is "secular stagnation," as former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers puts it. The American economy isn't growing even half as quickly as did in the 1990s. Japan has become the sick man of Asia. And Europe is sinking into a recession that has begun to slow down the German export machine and threaten prosperity. Capitalism in the 21st century is a capitalism of uncertainty, as became evident once again last week. All it took were a few disappointing US trade figures and suddenly markets plunged worldwide, from the American bond market to crude oil trading. It seemed only fitting that the turbulence also affected the bonds of the country that has long been seen as an indicator of jitters: Greece. The financial papers called it a "flash crash."
Running Out of Ammunition Politicians and business leaders everywhere are now calling for new growth initiatives, but the governments' arsenals are empty. The billions spent on economic stimulus packages following the financial crisis have created mountains of debt in most industrialized countries and they now lack funds for new spending programs. Central banks are also running out of ammunition. They have pushed interest rates close to zero and have spent hundreds of billions to buy government bonds. Yet the vast amounts of money they are pumping into the financial sector isn't making its way into the economy. Be it in Japan, Europe or the United States, companies are hardly investing in new machinery or factories anymore. Instead, prices are exploding on the global stock, real estate and bond markets, a dangerous boom driven by cheap money, not by sustainable growth. Experts with the Bank for International Settlements have already identified "worrisome signs" of an impending crash in many areas. In addition to creating new risks, the West's crisis policy is also exacerbating conflicts in the industrialized nations themselves. While workers' wages are stagnating and traditional savings accounts are yielding almost nothing, the wealthier classes -- those that derive most of their income by allowing their money to work for them -- are profiting handsomely. According to the latest Global Wealth Report by the Boston Consulting Group, worldwide private wealth grew by about 15 percent last year, almost twice as fast as in the 12 months previous. The data expose a dangerous malfunction in capitalism's engine room. Banks, mutual funds and investment firms used to ensure that citizens' savings were transformed into technical advances, growth and new jobs. Today they organize the redistribution of social wealth from the bottom to the top. The middle class has also been negatively affected: For years, many average earners have seen their prosperity shrinking instead of growing. Harvard economist Larry Katz rails that US society has come to resemble a deformed and unstable apartment building: The penthouse at the top is getting bigger and bigger, the lower levels are overcrowded, the middle levels are full of empty apartments and the elevator has stopped working.
'Wider and Wider' It's no wonder, then, that people can no longer get much out of the system. According to polls by the Allensbach Institute, only one in five Germans believes economic conditions in Germany are "fair." Almost 90 percent feel that the gap between rich and poor is "getting wider and wider." In this sense, the crisis of capitalism has turned into a crisis of democracy. Many feel that their countries are no longer being governed by parliaments and legislatures, but by bank lobbyists, which apply the logic of suicide bombers to secure their privileges: Either they are rescued or they drag the entire sector to its death. It isn't surprising that this situation reinforces the arguments of leftist economists like distribution critic Thomas Piketty. But even market liberals have begun using terms like the "one-percent society" and "plutocracy." The chief commentator of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, calls the unleashing of the capital markets a "pact with the devil." They aren't alone. Even the system's insiders are filled with doubt. There is the bank analyst in New York who has become exasperated with banks; the business owner in Switzerland who is calling for higher taxes; the conservative Washington politician who has lost faith in the conservatives; and the private banker in Frankfurt who is at odds with Europe's supreme monetary authority. They all convey a deep sense of unease, and some even show a touch of rebellion. If there is a rock star among global bank analysts, it's Mike Mayo. The wiry financial expert loves loud ties and tightly cut suits, he can do 35 pull-ups at a time, and he likes it when people call him the "CEO killer." The weapons Mayo takes into battle are neatly lined up in his small office on the 15th floor of a New York skyscraper: number-heavy studies about the US banking industry, some as thick as a shoebox and often so revealing that they have enraged industry giants like former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, or Stan O'Neal in his days as the head of Merrill Lynch. Words of praise from Mayo are met with cheers on the exchanges, but when he says sell, it can send prices tumbling. Mayo isn't interested in a particular sector but rather the core of the Western economic system. Karl Marx called banks "the most artificial and most developed product turned out by the capitalist mode of production." For Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, they were guarantors of progress, which he described as "creative destruction." But financial institutions haven't performed this function in a long time. Before the financial crisis, they were the drivers of the untenable expansion of debt that caused the crash. Now, focused as they are on repairing the damage done, they are inhibiting the recovery. The amount of credit ought to be "six times faster than it has been," says Mayo. "Banks now aren't the engines of growth anymore." Mayo's words reflect the experience of his 25 years in the industry, a career that sometimes sounds like a plot thought up by John Grisham: the young hero faces off against a mafia-like system. He was in his late 20s when he arrived on Wall Street, a place he saw as symbolic of both the economic and the moral superiority of capitalism. "I always had this impression," says Mayo, "that the head of a bank would be the most ethical person and upstanding citizen possible."
The Blackest of Boxes But when Mayo, a lending expert, worked for well-known players like UBS and Prudential Securities, he quickly learned that the glittering facades of the American financial industry concealed an abyss of lies and corruption. Mayo met people who recommended buying shares in technology companies in which they themselves held stakes. He saw how top executives diverted funds into their own pockets during mergers. And he met a bank director who only merged his bank with a lender in Florida because he liked boating in the Keys. What bothered Mayo most of all was that his employers penalized him for doing his job: writing critical analyses of banks. He lost his job at Lehman Brothers because he had downgraded a financial institution with which the Lehman investment department wanted to do business. Credit Suisse fired him because he recommended selling most US bank stocks. Only when the real estate bubble burst did the industry remember the defiant banking analyst, who already saw the approaching disaster even as then-Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann issued a yield projection of 25 percent. Fortune called him "one of eight people who saw the crisis coming." The US Congress called on him to testify about the crisis. Today Mayo writes his analyses for the Asian brokerage group CLSA and they still read like reports from a crisis zone. Central banks have kept lenders alive with low interest rates, and governments have forced them to take up additional capital and comply with thousands of pages of new regulations. Nevertheless, Mayo is convinced that "the incentives that drove the problems … are still in place today." Top bank executives are once again making as much as they did before the crisis, even though the government had to bail out a large share of banks. The biggest major banks did not shrink, as was intended, but instead have become even larger.
Incalculable Risks New accounting rules were passed, but financial managers can still hide the value of their receivables and collateral behind nebulous terms like "transaction" or "customer order." Bank balance sheets, British central banker Andrew Haldane said caustically, are still "the blackest of boxes." Before the crash, investment banks gambled with derivatives known by acronyms like CDO and CDS. Today Wall Street institutions try to get the upper hand with high-frequency trading, with their Dark Pools and millisecond algorithms. Regulators fear that high-frequency trading, also known as flash trading, could create incalculable risks for the global financial system. When analyst Mayo thinks about the modern banking world, he imagines a character in the Roman Polanski film "Chinatown," California detective Jake Gittes. The man solves one corruption case after another, and yet the crime level in Los Angeles doesn't go down. "Why is that?" he finally asks another character, who merely replies: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." It's the same with the banking industry, says the analyst. Individual institutions aren't the problem, he explains. The problem is the system. "The banks are Chinatown," says Mayo, "and it is still the situation today." The little village of Wimmis lies in an area of Switzerland that still looks quintessentially Swiss, the Bernese Oberland, or Highlands, where Swiss flags flutter in front yards. The local tanning salon is called the "Sunne Stübli" (little sun room) and under "item five" of the latest edition of the town's "Placard Ordinance," posted outside the town administration building, organizations must secure their public notices "with thumbtacks" and "not with staples." Everything has its place in Wimmis, as it does in Markus Wenger's window factory. The business owner, with his thinning hair and crafty eyes, is the embodiment of the old saying, "time is money." He walks briskly through his production building, the size of a football field, passing energy-saving transom windows, energy-saving patio doors and energy-saving skylights, which can be installed between solar panels, also to save energy, a system Wenger developed. "We constantly have to think of new things," he says, "otherwise the Czechs will overtake us." Wenger could pass for a model businessman from the regional chamber of commerce were it not for his support for a political initiative that's about as un-Swiss as banning cheese production in the Emmental region. Wenger advocates raising the inheritance tax. For decades, Switzerland was based on a unique form of popular capitalism, which promised small craftsmen as many benefits as those who worked in high finance. Switzerland was the discreet tax haven for the world's rich, while simultaneously laying claim to Europe's highest wage levels -- a Rolex model of the social welfare state. But the country's established class consensus was shattered by the excesses of the financial crisis -- the $60 billion bailout of its biggest bank, UBS, and the millions in golden parachutes paid out to executives so that they wouldn't go to the competition after being jettisoned by their companies. Since then, a hint of class struggle pervades Swiss Alpine valleys. A series of popular initiatives have been launched, initiatives the financial newspapers have labeled "anti-business." To begin with, the Swiss voted on and approved a cap on so-called "rip-off salaries." Another referendum sought to impose a ceiling on executive compensation, but it failed. A proposal by Social Democrats, Greens and the socially conservative EVP, to support government pensions with a new tax on large inheritances, will be put to a referendum soon.
'The Wealth of Medieval Princes' Income isn't the problem in Switzerland, where the gap between rich and poor is no wider than in Germany or France. The problem is assets. No other country has as many major shareholders, financiers and investors, and in no country is as much capital concentrated in so few hands. The assets of the 100 wealthiest Swiss citizens have increased almost fivefold in the last 25 years. In the Canton of Zürich, the 10 richest residents own as much as the poorest 500,000. When a Swiss business owner died recently, his two heirs inherited an estate worth as much as all single-family homes and owner-occupied flats in the Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden. Wealth has become so concentrated in Switzerland, says the former head of the Zürich statistics office, that it "rivals the wealth of medieval princes." The government benefits hardly at all from this wealth. The Swiss tax authorities recently collected all of 864 million Swiss francs (€715 million) in inheritance tax, and this revenue source is unlikely to increase anytime soon. To attract wealthy individuals, the cantons have reduced their tax rates to such low levels that even estates worth billions can be left to the next generation without being subject to any taxation at all. In the past, the Swiss were fond of their quirky high society, whose lives of luxury in places like Lugano were as spectacular as their bankruptcies. But now, a large share of the super-rich comes from the financial industry, and even an upright window manufacturer like Markus Wenger is often unsure what to make of the demands coming from his high-end customers. A homeowner recently asked Wenger if he could gold-plate his window fittings. And when he was standing in an older couple's 500-square-meter (5,380-square-foot) apartment not long ago, he found himself wondering: How do they heat this?
A Dangerous Path Wenger is no revolutionary. He likes the market economy and says: "Performance must be rewarded." His support for a higher inheritance tax is not as much the result of his sense of justice, but rather a cost calculation that he explains as soberly as the installation plan for his windows. This is how Wenger's calculation works: Today he pays about €8,000 a year in social security contributions for a carpenter who makes 65,000 Swiss francs (€54,000). But the Swiss population is aging, so contributions to pension insurance threaten to increase drastically soon. Doesn't it make sense, he asks, to exact an additional, small contribution from those Swiss citizens who hardly pay any taxes at all today on their rapidly growing fortunes? For Wenger, the answer is obvious. But he also knows that most of his fellow business owners see things differently. They are worried about an "attack by the left" and prefer to support their supposed champion, Christoph Blocher, the billionaire spiritual head of the Swiss People's Party. Only recently, Blocher convinced the Swiss to limit immigration by workers from other European countries. Now Wenger expects Blocher to launch a new campaign under the motto: "Are you trying to drive our business owners out of the country?" There is more at stake than a few million francs for the national pension fund. The real question is whether wealthy countries like Switzerland should become playthings for their elites. Wenger sees the industrialized countries embarking on a dangerous path, the path of greed and self-indulgence, and he believes Blocher's party is the most visible expression of that. Blocher is pursuing a "policy for high finance," says Wenger. "He is fighting on behalf of money." The entrepreneur from the Bern Highlands has no illusions over his prospects in the upcoming conflict with the country's great scaremonger. The Swiss are likely to vote on the inheritance tax initiative next year. "In the end," Wenger predicts, "the vote will be 60 to 40 against us."
The Deformation of Capitalism He was the face of the Reagan revolution, a young man with large, horn-rimmed glasses and thick hair, wearing a suit that was too big for him as he sat next to the hero of conservative America. As former President Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman was the architect of the biggest tax cut in US history and the propagandist of the "trickle-down" theory, the Republican tenet whereby profits earned by the rich eventually benefit the poorer classes. Thirty years later, Stockman is sitting on a Chesterfield sofa in his enormous mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, an affluent suburb of New York, where the stars of the hedge fund industry conceal their tasteless mansions behind red brick walls and jeeps owned by private security companies are parked on every street corner. Stockman is wearing a green baseball cap and a black T-shirt. It's a sunny early fall morning, but the mood in the brightly lit rooms is strangely somber. The rooms are empty, there are boxes stacked in the corners and a servant is wrapping the silverware in the dining room. Stockman is moving to New York, into an apartment he has already rented in Manhattan. But it isn't entirely clear whether he is only moving to be closer to TV studios and newspaper editors, or if the move signifies a departure from his previous life. It was a life that took him through the executive suites of Washington politics and the US financial industry, a life that has placed Stockman in an almost unparalleled position to recount the aberrations of American capitalism in the last three decades. "We have a financialized, central-bank dominated casino," he says, "that is undermining the fundamentals of a healthy growing capitalist economy," he says. Ironically, Stockman was the one who wanted to reshape that society, back in the 1980s, when Reagan made him the organizer of his shift to so-called supply-side economics. Like the actor-turned-president from California, Stockman believed in free markets, low taxes and reducing the role of government.
The First Mistake But Stockman also believed in hea |
| US Hospitals Nowhere Near Ready for Ebola Posted: 02 Nov 2014 07:00 PM PST by Jonathan Benson, Natural News:
Reporters from the AP conducted surveys to assess the sentiment among healthcare workers about how prepared their hospitals are for Ebola, and how they personally feel about the disease. Most emphasized worry about how an outbreak would be handled, especially due to the fact that many hospitals and emergency rooms are already struggling with capacity issues in day-to-day care situations, or they lack of proper training about how to handle deadly viruses. As expected, many medical workers also say they would likely avoid treating Ebola patients for their own safety. Several nurses and a handful of American doctors working abroad have reportedly contracted Ebola within the past several months, despite wearing the recommended safety equipment. This is a major concern in the medical field, as frontline caretakers consider their overall risk of becoming infected. |
| Chris Martenson interviews Ted Butler about commodity price suppression Posted: 02 Nov 2014 04:56 PM PST 7:56p ET Sunday, November 2, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Silver market rigging whistleblower Ted Butler, interviewed by Peak Prosperity's Chris Martenson, explains how the rigging of the commodity markets with derivatives has suppressed commodity prices, including the prices of the monetary metals, even as central banks have been inflating the prices of financial assets. The interview is headlined "Ted Butler: The Silver Nightmare Will Be Over Soon," is 47 minutes long, and is posted at Peak Prosperity here: http://www.peakprosperity.com/podcast/88558/ted-butler-silver-nightmare-... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Buy precious metals free of value-added tax throughout Europe Europe Silver Bullion is a fast-growing dealer sourcing its products from renowned mints, refiners, and distributors. Because of a legal loophole that will close soon, you can acquire the world's most popular bullion coins free of value-added tax throughout the European Union. You can collect your order in person at our headquarters in Tallinn, Estonia, or have it delivered in any of the 28 EU countries. Europe Silver Bullion is owned and operated by North American and European experts in selling, storing, and transporting precious metals. We have an extensive product inventory of silver, gold, platinum, and palladium, and our network spans the world. Visit us at www.europesilverbullion.com. Join GATA here: Mines and Money London http://www.minesandmoney.com/london/ Vancouver Resource Investment Conference http://cambridgehouse.com/event/33/vancouver-resource-investment-confere... * * * Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: |
| FBI To Probe Accounting Fraud At Multi-Billion REIT Posted: 02 Nov 2014 04:37 PM PST While the Fed and the BOJ were by far the biggest news of the past week, explicitly admitting that the world simply can not exist without one central bank passing the monetization torch to someone else, a surprising, and scare for its shareholders, development took place when REIT American Realty Capital Properties, with a then-market cap of over $10 billion, announced, under the cover of the Fed ending QE3, that it had overstated its adjusted funds from operation, a cash flow key metric used by REITs, from the first- and second-quarters of 2014.As the WSJ reminds us, while the amount of money involved, some $23 million, was "relatively small", the irregularities resulted in the resignation of the company's chief financial officer, Brian Block, and chief accounting officer, Lisa McAlister.The result: a crash in the stock that wiped out nearly 30% or nearly $4 billion in market cap. A bigger question of course is why did a multi-billion dollar company feel compelled to lie about what on the surface is peanutes, and what other lies plague the company's cash flow and income statements, not to mention its balance sheets. That, and also because there is never just one lack of cashflow cockroach, one wonders which other REITs have been systematically overstating their financial health. We may learn soon, because as Reuters reports the Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting the investigation along with prosecutors from U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara's office in New York, the sources said. Further details of the probe could not be learned.
And once the FBI is ready done with ARCP, there are a whole lot of other "successful" real estate companies that are probably comparably rife with fraud. Because what ARCP has done is precisely the same as all those other "successful" roll ups have engaged in over the past few years : American Realty Capital Properties, which went public in 2011, is one in a web of investment companies and brokerages that have been rapidly built up over the past seven years by real estate investor Nicholas Schorsch.
Some did raise red flags...
... which ironically is precisely the same that Bill Ackman-darling Valeant has been doing as well. One wonders when that particular house of cards will implode under its own (hollow) cash-free, non-GAAP weight? Whenever it doe, one can be sure that the FBI will be on the scene... just after the fraud is revealed for all to see. But the biggest question is when precisely will the FBI conduct a criminal probe in an accounting scandal before it becomes public and before thousands of shareholders are wiped out? Of course, that would mean admitting that the whole premise of "earnings" and "cash flow" is as credible and realistic as the "fundamental" case for the S&P at just why of 2050, or 19x "earnings." |
| Robert Fitzwilson: Central bank intervention may explain gold's drop Posted: 02 Nov 2014 03:28 PM PST 6:30p ET Sunday, November 2, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Official economic data is mainly "fairy tales," fund manager Robert Fitzwilson tells King World News today, adding, in regard to recent market action: "None of what happened in the metals and energy markets makes any sense. You should not have plunging prices when demand is surging and supply is tenuous or evaporating. It is probably a combination of official policy as well as the momentum-driven investment world in which we find ourselves. Central banks can trigger these smashes and backstop their proxies against loss. But a potent part of the cascading declines in these markets has to do with the impact of the algorithms, the machines, and the mechanics of stop-loss orders." Fitzwilson's commentary is posted at the KWN blog here: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/11/3_Fi... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Buy metals at GoldMoney and enjoy international storage GoldMoney was established in 2001 by James and Geoff Turk and is safeguarding more than $1.7 billion in metals and currencies. Buy gold, silver, platinum, and palladium from GoldMoney over the Internet and store them in vaults in Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, taking advantage of GoldMoney's low storage rates, among the most competitive in the industry. GoldMoney also offers delivery of 100-gram and 1-kilogram gold bars and 1-kilogram silver bars. To learn more, please visit: http://www.goldmoney.com/?gmrefcode=gata Join GATA here: Mines and Money London http://www.minesandmoney.com/london/ Vancouver Resource Investment Conference http://cambridgehouse.com/event/33/vancouver-resource-investment-confere... * * * Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2014 02:01 PM PST Nick Migiliaccio has asked the question, "Why Is Gold Treated So Badly" in this article from him. His point is that gold prices are set in US Dollars primarily on the COMEX, and those prices are... {This is a content summary only. Click on the blog title to continue reading this post, share your comments, browse the website, and more!} |
| Support for Swiss gold referendum falls in latest poll Posted: 02 Nov 2014 11:40 AM PST From Reuters ZURICH, Switzerland -- Support for a proposal to prohibit the Swiss National Bank from selling any of its gold reserves has waned, according to a poll published on Friday by the free Swiss newspaper 20 Minuten. ... The poll showed 38 percent of respondents were in favour of the initiative, down from support of 45 percent in a poll in the paper last week. Some 47 percent of those survey opposed the proposals, while 15 percent remained undecided. The authors of Friday's poll said the survey was conducted online on Oct. 27 with 12,491 voters. Results were then weighted by voter demographics, geography, and other political variables in order to better represent the Swiss voting population. Still, the method of polling is seen as less reliable than that of Berne-based research and polling institute gfs.bern, which published a survey last Friday showing the gold initiative had the support of 44 percent of the public. ... ... For the remainder of the report: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-2815635/Support-Swiss-g... ADVERTISEMENT Sinclair's Next Market Seminar Is Nov. 15 in San Francisco Mining entrepreneur and gold advocate Jim Sinclair will hold his next market seminar from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, November 15, at the Holiday Inn at San Francisco International Airport in South San Francisco, California. Admission will be $100. For more information and to register, please visit: http://www.jsmineset.com/2014/10/10/san-francisco-qa-session-announced/ Join GATA here: Mines and Money London http://www.minesandmoney.com/london/ Vancouver Resource Investment Conference http://cambridgehouse.com/event/33/vancouver-resource-investment-confere... * * * Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2014 11:21 AM PST Clive Maund |
| Gold Price, Dow Stock Market Index and VIX Analysis Posted: 02 Nov 2014 07:25 AM PST Gold Gold hit new lows in October so the bears are growling. Popular consensus seems to be they will continue to dominate the short term landscape. I suspect a bear trap has been set and they are about to be gored by the bulls. Let's take a look beginning with the monthly chart. |
| Correspondence: Is all this market rigging real? Is GATA? Posted: 02 Nov 2014 07:00 AM PST 10:12a ET Sunday, November 2, 2014 Dear GATA: I have to ask you something, as you may be among the few people I can trust. (At least I think you are people and not an Internet-derived scam.) Am I imagining everything that's happening or have I just been brainwashed into believing it? Are the things that people like Andrew Maguire, Eric Sprott, and Egon von Greyerz say really true and factual or just hearsay and nonsense? I can't believe my eyes -- and no regulators or others in authority are doing anything about it. Is this all a dream? Thousands of futures contracts dumped in the middle of the night to smash gold down? Are you real? Is the stuff GATA has dug up and archived real? I'm so mad I could strangle somebody. Please tell me this is all a joke and to walk away. This is almost worse than Nazi Germany. -- D.C. * * * Dear D.C: Yes, the totalitarianism here is far more effective because it is largely surreptitious. Years ago I wrote that if the United States occupied South Africa militarily and stole everything and shipped it out of the country, at least South Africans would see and understand what was happening to them and who was doing it. But rig the currency markets and you accomplish the same looting and hardly anyone can figure it out. ... Dispatch continues below ... ADVERTISEMENT Silver mining stock report comes with 1-ounce silver round Future Money Trends is offering a special 18-page silver mining stock report about how to profit with the monetary and industrial metal in 2014, and it comes with a free 1-ounce silver round. Proceeds from the report's sales are shared with the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee to support its efforts to expose manipulation in the monetary metals markets. To learn about this report, please visit: As for the Nazis, their looting of occupied Europe was conducted mainly not as we imagine, by force of arms, but through the rigging of the currency markets. See -- http://www.gata.org/node/13644 -- which has the following passages. * As it turns out, controlling the currency markets generally long has been the most efficient mechanism of imperialism. There is much history of this. Rigging the currency markets was the primary mechanism by which Nazi Germany expropriated occupied Europe during World War II. Expropriation by force of arms was actually only a small part of the Nazi conquest. The rigging of the currency markets -- that is, the gross distortion of exchange rates in Nazi Germany's favor -- turned every citizen of an occupied country into an agent of the occupation every time he used money. This currency market rigging directed all production in the occupied countries into Nazi Germany and blocked any return flow of production. It enabled Nazi Germany to run without consequence the same sort of fantastic trade deficit run in recent years by the United States. The United States learned all about the Nazi expropriation of Europe through currency market rigging because it was documented by the November 1943 edition of the U.S. War Department's monthly intelligence letter, Tactical and Technical Trends: http://www.gata.org/node/10457 Nazi Germany's manipulation of currency markets is also described in detail in the 2005 history "Hitler's Beneficiaries" by Gotz Aly: http://llco.org/hitlers-beneficiaries-2005-by-gotz-aly/
GATA knows Sprott, Maguire, and von Greyerz and they are all serious and credible people. But they don't know any more than GATA does how much real metal is available to the central banks for use in suppressing the gold price and how much they are willing to lose. And now that central banks are surreptitiously active in all futures markets and able to create infinite amounts of money and deploy it secretly everywhere -- http://www.gata.org/node/14385 http://www.gata.org/node/14411 -- defeating them may take decades longer. But eventually the rest of the world will pull the plug on the system, having recognized that it exploits them. I may not live to see that day but younger people might. Note that the bombing of the gold market last week as described by Maguire's interview at King World News -- http://www.gata.org/node/14643 -- did not happen in the middle of the night, as some bombings do, but at the market open in London. This sudden mobilization of huge amounts of paper gold in the futures market, like the sudden mobilization of huge amounts on April 12 and 15, 2013, wasn't retail trading -- it was plainly an intervention by a central bank or group of central banks. The only encouragement I can give people in this respect is that the central banks no longer care about getting caught, that they now have to risk showing themselves to achieve their market-rigging objectives, which suggests that their position has gotten more desperate. The regulators can do nothing when these market manipulations are undertaken by governments directly or through intermediaries. In both the United States and United Kingdom the government is specifically authorized by law to intervene secretly in any market in the name of defending the currency. In the United States the authorized agency is the Treasury Department's Exchange Stabilization Fund. In the United Kingdom it's the Treasury's Exchange Equalization Account. Originally, back in 1934, when it was established, the ESF was authorized to trade only in gold and gold derivatives. Its enabling legislation, the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, was amended in the 1970s to authorize secret trading by the government in anything. http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/international/ESF/Pages/esf-inde... Governments figured all this out a long time ago and prepared accordingly to achieve absolute power over their people and other nations. But not one person in a million outside government has a clue about it. So GATA has a lot of work to do and we must press on even as many of our friends fall away in despair. And yes, we're real, even if it's not quite as much fun as it used to be. CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer Join GATA here: Mines and Money London http://www.minesandmoney.com/london/ Vancouver Resource Investment Conference http://cambridgehouse.com/event/33/vancouver-resource-investment-confere... * * * Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: |
| Gold mines can't produce at current low prices, Maison Placements' Ing says Posted: 02 Nov 2014 06:01 AM PST 9a ET Sunday, November 2, 2014 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Mining analyst John Ing of Maison Placements in Toronto, interviewed by King World News, says that gold mine production is likely to diminish substantially with the current low prices. (Like most gold mining executives, he doesn't add that people who are willing to accept mere certificates in place of metal will not need any metal at all.) But, Ing adds, China and Russia are taking whatever metal the West is selling, and in recent years peak short positions on the futures markets like the current one have preceded dramatic price increases. An excerpt from Ing's interview is posted at the KWN blog here: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/11/2_St... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT USAGold: Coins and bullion since 1973 USAGold, well known for its Internet site, USAGold.com, offers contemporary bullion coins and bullion-related historic gold coins for delivery to private investors in the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It is one of the oldest and most respected names in the gold industry, with thousands of clients and an approach to investment that emphasizes guidance and individual needs over high-pressure sales tactics. The firm's zero-complaint record at the Better Business Bureau makes it an ideal match for the conservative, long-term investor looking for a reliable contact in the gold business. Please call 1-800-869-5115x100 and ask for the trading desk, or visit USAGold.com. USAGold: Great prices, quick delivery -- all the time. Join GATA here: Mines and Money London http://www.minesandmoney.com/london/ Vancouver Resource Investment Conference http://cambridgehouse.com/event/33/vancouver-resource-investment-confere... * * * Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006: http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt: Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009: http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal Help keep GATA going GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at: To contribute to GATA, please visit: |
| Gold Investors Weekly Review – October 31st Posted: 02 Nov 2014 02:45 AM PST In his weekly market review, Frank Holmes of the USFunds.com summarizes this week's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the gold market for gold investors. Gold closed the week at $1,171.09 down $59.81 per ounce (-4.86%). Gold stocks, as measured by the NYSE Arca Gold Miners Index, fell 14.67%. The U.S. Trade-Weighted Dollar Index rebounded 1.31% for the week. Gold Market StrengthsAlthough gold premiums had fallen to below $10 per ounce earlier this week in India, they rallied on Wednesday to reach roughly $15 per ounce. The initial decline was due to the winding down of the Diwali holiday. However, the premium spiked up after rumors emerged that the Reserve Bank of India or the Ministry of Finance might impose more restrictions on gold imports. Despite declining gold prices, demand for the precious metal remains strong. In September, Chinese gold imports from Hong Kong rose to the highest level in five months as retailers increased purchases before the holiday season. In the United States, gold coin sales are heading for their first back-to-back monthly increase since January. Volume rose to 58,000 ounces as we entered the last week of the month, compared to 50,000 ounces in September. A number of gold companies reported misses on production this week. Gold Market WeaknessesInvestors should remember that U.S. elections are next week and the current administration is putting the best face possible on what has been an anemic recovery. Even Alan Greenspan noted this week that QE has failed to right the economy, but did lift asset prices. For example, while the Fed desperately sought to stimulate the housing sector, the homeownership rate in the third quarter came in at 64.4 percent, the lowest level since 1995. Furthermore, while QE has been halted, the Fed will continue to reinvest the principal payments from mortgage-backed bonds and roll over any maturing Treasury securities from its $4.5 trillion portfolio. We are living in a world of unrepayable debt, money printing, and governments buying equities to create a wealth effect – yet life goes on without a worry. This week we saw gold markets wildly affected by central bank policy makers across the world. In the United States, a more hawkish tone from the Federal Reserve, combined with the official announcement of the end of Quantitative Easing (QE), pushed gold prices down. On Friday, the Bank of Japan surprised investors with a substantial expansion in its asset purchases and a commitment to double its purchases of equities, making the central bank the single biggest holder of Japanese equities. These two events, combined with stronger-than-expected, third-quarter GDP data from the U.S., caused a selloff in gold and gold stocks this week. As a consequence of this week's announcement from the Federal Reserve, gold traders turned bearish for the first time in six weeks. A Bloomberg survey revealed nine bearish forecasts from analysts, compared to only five bullish.
Gold Market OpportunitiesCivilian wages and salaries appear to be on the rise, which is a powerful source of inflation. Higher wages, which lead to higher incomes, fuel higher demand and pull up prices. The long-awaited arrival of strong inflationary pressures in the United States appears to be on the horizon.
Related to the above point on U.S. GDP growth, the third quarter yielded stronger-than-expected results due to a substantial increase in government spending. As it turns out, 0.83 percent of the GDP gain was attributed to government spending, primarily defense spending. JP Morgan, in response to this data, reduced its forecast for fourth-quarter GDP growth from 3.0 percent to 2.5 percent, explaining that this type of increase is usually associated with payback the following quarter. Alan Greenspan has come out with interesting points on the current global economic environment. The former Federal Reserve Chairman referred to QE as a pile of tinder that hasn't been lit. Furthermore, due to the global turmoil, Greenspan stated that gold is a good place to invest money due to its value as a currency outside of government policy. In fact, he argues that gold is the premier currency, more so than the dollar.
Gold Market ThreatsDepressed oil prices are contributing to the deflationary environment. Without any catalyst to boost oil prices, gold will continue to face the headwinds from global deflation.
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| Silver Eagle Sales Climb 87% Higher in October Posted: 01 Nov 2014 09:38 PM PDT Silver Eagle sales for the month of October were the highest of the year at 5,790,000. This is up 40% versus September and a whopping 87.5% versus October of last year. With 38 million Silver Eagles sold thus far in 2014, the 2013 record of 42.7 million coins may very well be broken. |
| The Reinvention of Alan Greenspan Posted: 01 Nov 2014 09:26 PM PDT Former chairman calls Fed balance sheet a tinder box, endorses private gold ownership During the time Alan Greenspan and representative Ron Paul had their famous series of exchanges (some might have labeled them confrontations) during Congressional hearings from 1997 to 2005, the congressman made what turns out to have been a prescient observation. "My questions," he said, "are always on the same subject. If I don't bring up the issue of hard money versus fiat money, Greenspan himself does." I say "prescient observation" because here we are a decade or more later and the "new" post-Fed Greenspan sounds very much like the "old" pre-Fed Greenspan-––the one who consistently advocated gold before he became Fed chairman. |
Should pockets of Ebola suddenly begin to break out across the U.S., hospitals and acute care facilities would be quickly overwhelmed and unable to handle the massive influx of patients and those who believe that they might have the disease. An Associated Press (AP) investigation found that, generally speaking, the American healthcare infrastructure would likely collapse in the event of even a moderate Ebola outbreak, stressing the need for better preparedness.
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