Gold World News Flash |
- Where Did 110 Tonnes of CME Hong Kong Gold Go?
- No Silver Shortage, Huh? …Now QSB Suspends Sales As DEMAND Crushes Supply
- China Stock Rout "Rocks" Property Market: "Massive" Cancellations Expected
- ABSURD, TOTAL JOKE: China Increases “Official” Gold Reserves By a Mere 604 Metric Tonnes
- Paul Craig Roberts: Greece's Lesson For Russia
- Central bank interventions overwhelm markets, Pento tells KWN
- All Hail Our Banking Overlords!
- How Student Loans Create Demand For Useless Degrees
- Was Greece Set Up To Fail?
- The Economy Has Never Recovered And The Collapse Is Around The Corner
- Jade Helm: Is The U.S. Military Invading Texas?
- Peter Schiff : We're All Slaves To The Federal Government
- At KWN, China's gold reserves announcement ridiculed by Leeb, von Greyerz, Maguire
- TEXAS GOLD BACKED BANK - New Texas Bank to Challenge The Federal Reserve Fiat Currency System
- Market rigging cited in gold discussion with O'Byrne, Eliseo, Suchecki, Stoeferle
- Tocqueville's Hathaway summarizes and updates the gold suppression scheme
- Weekend Update July 17
- Gold And Silver – Without Either, You Will Be Greeced
- Why Pensions Are A (Big) Black Swan
- Gold and Silver Record Shorting
- Shanghai Gold Exchange Sees 61.8 Tonnes Withdrawn In Eighth Largest Week Ever - Talk To the Hand
| Where Did 110 Tonnes of CME Hong Kong Gold Go? Posted: 18 Jul 2015 07:00 PM PDT from Perth Mint:
The figures above are pretty representative of the average balances held by these three since the contract started trading. It is interesting that the Hong Kong warehouses have never reported any registered stock – it is all eligible. Compared to the CME's US warehouses however, the 874,893 ounces of gold held within the Hong Kong warehouses is only 10% of the US stock of 8,751,688. I hadn't given the Hong Kong contract or its warehouses much thought until Ronan Manly, who writes for BullionStar, drew my attention to this submission by the CME to the CFTC "self-certifying the listing of a Gold Kilo Futures contract". |
| No Silver Shortage, Huh? …Now QSB Suspends Sales As DEMAND Crushes Supply Posted: 18 Jul 2015 07:00 PM PDT by SGT, SGT Report.com: Several SGT report readers alerted us to this one: Quality Silver Bullion announced this weekend that at least for the immediate future, they are no longer taking any more new orders for PHYSICAL silver or gold. In a market where properly hedged precious metals dealers care not about that daily price fluctuations in precious metals, profiting only from the thin markup above spot plus cost premium, this is an interesting development. Because no matter how well any company hedges against price fluctuations, how does one sell product one does not have?
QSB goes on to say “This situation is not unique to QSB.”
As Bill Holter, Rob Kirby, Eric Dubin, Andy Hoffman, The Doc, Bix Weir, The Wealth Watchman and Chris Duane have told us in numerous interviews, thanks to the endless paper silver supplied by the criminal banking cartel led by JP Morgan, Citi and HSBC, the price of silver is likely to go lower and lower until there is NO PHYSICAL SUPPLY available at ANYTHING CLOSE TO THE BANKSTER MANIPULATED PAPER PRICE. We’re not there yet, but we may be getting close. As our friend Charles Savoie recently penned for SGT Report, Absolutely There is a SHORTAGE of Raw Material Silver Charles wrote: Mint shortages are caused only by blank shortages you say. You know how long this has been going on? In any natural market, manufacturing capacity adjusts to enable transformation of raw material into finished product so that demand is matched with supply. Absolutely there is a shortage of raw material silver. If the housing market were booming, and the timber was available for conversion into lumber but sawmills were of inadequate capacity, the market would add sawmill capacity. Silver blanks are no different in that sense than lumber. There is a silver shortage which is why Dow Chemical, Du Pont, Ferro Corporation and Tiffany & Co. recently abandoned their long term memberships in the Silver Users Association. They hope to sidestep scandal when the blowup transpires. The short profile in COMEX silver is a billboard that someone fears a higher silver price more than they fear the grave. Unlike cartel paper, the demand for PHYSICAL silver bullion is real. As I wrote in July 13th,
So, as KWN headlines often scream, the price of silver should shoot far higher at any minute, right? In a “normal” market a collapse of supply in the face of surging demand would cause the price of an asset to surge higher until supply and demand equilibrium have been reached. However, we are unlikely to see that in the case of silver. Because this is no normal market. In fact, as Charles Savoie has so brilliantly exposed in his Silver Squelchers series, the silver market is the most manipulated market in the history of mankind. Think about that as you search for PHYSICAL silver to buy at sub $15/ounce prices. |
| China Stock Rout "Rocks" Property Market: "Massive" Cancellations Expected Posted: 18 Jul 2015 06:15 PM PDT To be sure, we've had our fair share of laughs at the expense of China's newly-minted day traders. Back in March, Bloomberg highlighted a study which suggested that some 31% of new investors in China's equity markets had an elementary school education or less. Shortly thereafter, we began to look at data from the China Securities Depository and Clearing Co which showed that millions of new stock trading accounts were being created in China every single month. Once reports began to come in from the front lines of China's inexorable equity rally, it became clear that (to say the least) not everyone pouring money into the SHCOMP and The Shenzhen was what you might call a "seasoned" investor. From there, all it took was the suggestion from Bloomberg that in some cases, Chinese housewives had traded in the crochet kit for technical analysis and the race was on to see who could come up with the most entertaining characterization of China's day trading hordes. Although the mainstream media has been careful not to be terribly explicit in their ridicule, the increasingly hilarious pictures of bemused Chinese grandmas staring at ticker tapes that have appeared atop WSJ and Reuters articles betray the fact that everyone, everywhere sees the humor in a multi-trillion dollar stock bubble driven by margin-trading hairdressers. Admittedly, all of the above was even more amusing on days when Chinese stocks closed red, as it became quickly apparent that many Chinese investors might not have fully appreciated the fact that stocks can go down as well as up.
In the good old days of the China stock rally (so, around two months ago), down days were few and far between and the outright confusion that reigned in the wake of a rare close lower served as a much needed comic interlude for the slow motion train wreck unfolding in the Aegean and, on the weekends, at various Euro summits. However, once the unwind began in China's CNY1 trillion backdoor margin lending channels, we couldn't help but feel slightly sorry for the millions of Chinese who quickly went from bewildered to dejected after watching their life savings evaporate over the course of a brutal three week sell-off that totaled more than 30% on some exchanges. Due to significant retail participation and due to the fact that the equity mania had served as a distraction for a nation coping with decelerating economic growth and a bursting property bubble, some (and we were among the first) began to suggest that the broader economy, and indeed, social stability, may be at risk in China if stocks continued to fall. The extent to which this suggestion represented a real concern (as opposed to the ravings of a tin foil hat fringe blog) was underscored by the extraordinary measures China adopted in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding and later by several sellside strategists who began to warn about possible spillovers into the real economy. Now, with Beijing still struggling to restore the stock bubble, the first signs of knock-on effects are beginning to emerge. Here's Nikkei with more:
So no, the damage isn't "contained" and indeed it's somewhat ironic that the first place the contagion is showing up is in China's property market. What's particularly interesting here is that one argment for why the collapse of China's equity bubble would not spill over into the real economy revolved around the fact that the majority of Chinese household wealth is concentrated in real estate. "Ultimately, we think the impact of the sell-off in Chinese equities on the real economy will be relatively limited. This is because equities are only 10% of household wealth (at peak; just over 5% at the turn of the year)," Credit Suisse noted last week. If, however, what Nikkei says about the knock-on effect in property is true, it could put further pressure on an already fragile housing market. On that note, we'll close with the following excerpt which is, ironically, from the same Credit Suisse note cited above.
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| ABSURD, TOTAL JOKE: China Increases “Official” Gold Reserves By a Mere 604 Metric Tonnes Posted: 18 Jul 2015 05:55 PM PDT from SilverDoctors: With Metals Smashed This Week and Gold Closing the Week at Bear Market Lows, The Doc & Eric Dubin Cover All the Action, Discussing: |
| Paul Craig Roberts: Greece's Lesson For Russia Posted: 18 Jul 2015 05:30 PM PDT Submitted by Paul Craig Roberts,
Greece’s lesson for Russia, and for China and Iran, is to avoid all financial relationships with the West. The West simply cannot be trusted. Washington is committed to economic and political hegemony over every other country and uses the Western financial system for asset freezes, confiscations, and sanctions. Countries that have independent foreign policies and also have assets in the West cannot expect Washington to respect their property rights or their ownership. Washington freezes or steals countries’ assets, or in the case of France imposes multi-billion dollar fines, in order to force compliance with Washington’s policies. Iran, for example, lost the use of $100 billion, approximately one-fourth of the Iranian GDP, for years simply because Iran insisted on its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Russian journalists are asking me if Obama’s willingness to reach a deal with Iran means there is hope a deal can be reached over Ukraine. The answer is No. Moreover, as I will later explain, the deal with Iran doesn’t mean much as far as Washington is concerned. Three days ago (July 14) a high ranking military officer, Gen. Paul Selva, the third in about as many days, told the US Senate that Russia is “an existential threat to this nation (the US).” Only a few days prior the Senate had heard the same thing from US Marine commander Joseph Dunford and from the Secretary of the Air Force. A few days before that, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff warned of a Russian “hybrid threat.” Washington is invested heavily in using Ukraine against Russia. All the conflict there originates with Washington’s puppet government in Kiev. Russia is blamed for everything, including the destruction of the Malaysian airliner. Washington has used false charges to coerce the EU into sanctions against Russia that are not in the EU’s interest. As Washington has succeeded in coercing all of Europe to harm Europe’s political and economic relationships with Russia and to enter into a state of conflict with Russia, certainly Washington is not going to agree to an Ukrainian settlement. Even if Washington wanted to do so, as Washington’s entire position rests on nothing but propaganda, Washington would have to disavow itself in order to come to an agreement. Despite everything, Russia’s president and foreign minister continue to speak of the US and Washington’s EU vassal states as “our partners.” Perhaps Putin and Lavrov are being sarcastic. The most certain thing of our time is that Washington and its vassals are not partners of Russia. The Wolfowitz doctrine, the basis of US foreign and military policy, declares that the rise of Russia or any other country cannot be permitted, because the US is the Uni-power and cannot tolerate any constraint on its unilateral actions. As long as this doctrine reigns in Washington, neither Russia, China, nor Iran, the nuclear agreement not withstanding, are safe. As long as Iran has an independent foreign policy, the nuclear agreement does not protect Iran, because any significant policy conflict with Washington can produce new justifications for sanctions. With the nuclear agreement with Iran comes the release of Iran’s $100 billion in frozen Western balances. I heard yesterday a member of the Council for Foreign Relations say that Iran should invest its released $100 billion in US and Europe companies. If Iran does this, the Iranian government is setting itself up for further blackmail. Investing anywhere in the West means that Iran’s assets can be frozen or confiscated at any time. If Obama were to dismiss Victoria Nuland, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power and replace these neoconservatives with sane diplomats, the outlook would improve. Then Russia, China, and Iran would have a better possibility of reaching accommodation with the US on terms other than vassalage. Russia and China, having emerged from a poorly functioning communist economic system, naturally regard the West as a model. It seems China has fallen for Western capitalism head over heels. Russia perhaps less so, but the economists in these two countries are the same as the West’s neoliberal economists, which means that they are unwitting servants of Western financial imperialism. Thinking mistakenly that they are being true to economics, they are being true to Washington’s hegemony. With the deregulation that began in the Clinton regime, Western capitalism has become socially dysfunctional. In the US and throughout the West capitalism no longer serves the people. Capitalism serves the owners and managers of capital and no one else. This is why US income inequality is now as bad or worse than during the “robber baron” era of the 1920s. The 1930s regulation that made capitalism a functioning economic system has been repealed. Today in the Western world capitalism is a looting mechanism. Capitalism not only loots labor, capitalism loots entire countries, such as Greece which is being forced by the EU to sell of Greece’s national assets to foreign purchasers. Before Putin and Lavrov again refer to their “American partners,” they should reflect on the EU’s lack of good will toward Greece. When a member of the EU itself is being looted and driven into the ground by its compatriots, how can Russia, China, and Iran expect better treatment? If the West has no good will toward Greece, where is the West’s good will toward Russia? The Greek government was forced to capitulate to the EU, despite the support it received from the referendum, because the Greeks relied on the good will of their European partners and underestimated the mendacity of the One Percent. The Greek government did not expect the merciless attitude of its fellow EU member governments. The Greek government actually thought that its expert analysis of the Greek debt situation and economy would carry weight in the negotiations. This expectation left the Greek government without a backup plan. The Greek government gave no thought to how to go about leaving the euro and putting in place a monetary and banking system independent of the euro. The lack of preparation for exit left the government with no alternative to the EU’s demands. The termination of Greece’s fiscal sovereignty is what is in store for Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and eventually for France and Germany. As Jean-Claude Trichet, the former head of the European Central Bank said, the sovereign debt crisis signaled that it is time to bring Europe beyond a “strict concept of nationhood.” The next step in the centralization of Europe is political centralization. The Greek debt crisis is being used to establish the principle that being a member of the EU means that the country has lost its sovereignty. The notion, prevalent in the Western financial media, that a solution has been imposed on the Greeks is nonsense. Nothing has been solved. The conditions to which the Greek government submitted make the debt even less payable. In a short time the issue will again be before us. As John Maynard Keynes made clear in 1936 and as every economist knows, driving down consumer incomes by cutting pensions, employment, wages, and social services, reduces consumer and investment demand, and thereby GDP, and results in large budget deficits that have to be covered by borrowing. Selling pubic assets to foreigners transfers the revenue flows out of the Greek economy into foreign hands. Unregulated naked capitalism, has proven in the 21st century to be unable to produce economic growth anywhere in the West. Consequently, median family incomes are declining. Governments cover up the decline by underestimating inflation and by not counting as unemployed discouraged workers who, unable to find jobs, have ceased looking. By not counting discouraged workers the US is able to report a 5.2 percent rate of unemployment. Including discouraged workers brings the unemployment rate to 23.1 percent. A 23 percent rate of unemployment has nothing in common with economic recovery. Even the language used in the West is deceptive. The Greek “bailout” does not bail out Greece. The bailout bails out the holders of Greek debt. Many of these holders are not Greece’s original creditors. What the “bailout” does is to make the New York hedge funds’ bet on the Greek debt pay off for the hedge funds. The bailout money goes not to Greece but to those who speculated on the debt being paid. According to news reports, Quantitative Easing by the ECB has been used to purchase Greek debt from the troubled banks that made the loans, so the debt issue is no longer a creditor issue. China seems unaware of the risk of investing in the US. China’s new rich are buying up residential communities in California, forgetting the experience of Japanese-Americans who were herded into detention camps during Washington’s war with Japan. Chinese companies are buying US companies and ore deposits in the US. These acquisitions make China susceptible to blackmail over foreign policy differences. The “globalism” that is hyped in the West is inconsistent with Washington’s unilateralism. No country with assets inside the Western system can afford to have policy differences with Washington. The French bank paid the $9 billion fine for disobeying Washington’s dictate of its lending practices, because the alternative was the close down of its operations in the United States. The French government was unable to protect the French bank from being looted by Washington. It is testimony to the insouciance of our time that the stark inconsistency of globalism with American unilateralism has passed unnoticed. |
| Central bank interventions overwhelm markets, Pento tells KWN Posted: 18 Jul 2015 05:27 PM PDT 8:25p ET Saturday, July 18, 2015 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Writing for King World News today, fund manager Michael Pento says there is no free market left anywhere on the planet today, just central bank interventions, and so technical and fundamental analysis of markets has become bogus. Pento concludes: "The abrogation of markets leads to stagflation, economic collapse, and chaos. Economic freedom and prosperity are rapidly being replaced by the edicts of autocrats, which is eviscerating the middle class. Sadly, this is the fate of the entire developed world." Pento's commentary is posted at the King World News Internet site here: http://kingworldnews.com/governments-leading-world-to-economic-collapse-... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Direct Ownership and Storage of Precious Metals Goldbroker.com is a precious metals investment company that enables investors to own and store gold directly in their own name (no mutualized ownership) in Zurich and Singapore. Goldbroker's clients are not exposed to any counterparty risks. They own gold and silver in their own names (the ownership certificate cites the name of the investor and serial number of his bars) and they have storage accounts opened in their own name as well. So Goldbroker.com's storage partner knows the exact identity of each investor. Goldbroker.com doesn't store in the name of its clients; rather, Goldbroker's clients store personally. All investors have direct access to their gold and silver bars. Goldbroker.com was launched in 2011 so that investors would avoid any counterparty risk when investing in physical gold and silver. Goldbroker.com is listed among GATA's recommended monetary metals dealers: To invest or learn more, please visit: Join GATA here: New Orleans Investment Conference http://noic2015.eventbrite.com/?aff=gata The Silver Summit and Resource Expo 2015 http://cambridgehouse.com/event/50/the-silver-summit-and-resource-expo-2... Support GATA by purchasing recordings of the proceedings of the 2014 New Orleans Investment Conference: https://jeffersoncompanies.com/landing/2014-av-powell Or by purchasing DVDs of GATA's London conference in August 2011 or GATA's 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: |
| All Hail Our Banking Overlords! Posted: 18 Jul 2015 04:15 PM PDT Submitted by Chris Martenson via PeakProseprity.com, You really have to be paying attention to see what’s truly going on these days. The keepers of the system, that is the banking elites, now openly control everything -- though you'd never know that by listening to the media. Consider this:
How generous of the finance ministers of all those EU member states to agree to a “bridge loan” that will help Greece "keep its finances afloat". This should provide the people of Greece with a bit of breathing room, right? Maybe access to their bank accounts (finally!), perhaps? No, not at all. Here’s what the entirety of the “”loan”” will go towards instead:
Ummmm…that “money” will not ever go anywhere near Greece. This is all merely electronic window-dressing for entirely esoteric bookkeeping purposes. Servers will blink at one location in Europe as digital 1s and 0s are transmitted to another. The electronic balances at the ECB and the IMF will change, but not much else. The people of Greece will see none of it. Nor will they see their bank accounts unfrozen. This act of banker "largess" is, of course, of, by, and entirely for the bankers. It has nothing to do with Greece or its people, about whom the banker class cannot care less. But, they hide this disdain under and increasingly thin and condescending veneer of graciousness. Take, for example, the recently-announced 'generosity' of the powers that be -- that is, the banking powers that be -- which will permit the long suffering depositors to…*cough*…deposit more money into the banks:
Obviously, the only rational response of anybody in Europe watching this charade of theft continue would be to sell gold, right? (which has happened vigorously ever since the Greek crisis began) Because, you know, nothing says “confidence” quite like selling your gold so you can then park that money in a bank that may not let you withdraw it again. Of course, we here at Peak Prosperity hold to the view that everything, and we mean everything, in our ””markets”” is stage-managed. And that especially includes gold. The central banks are demanding and commanding complete fealty to their story line, no exceptions tolerated. We are at that all-or-nothing moment in history when everything either works out perfectly or it all falls apart. Savers have to be punished so debtors can be saved. Why? Because if debtors are rescued, that makes it possible for more debts to be issued in the future.. And why is that important? Because the banking system needs ever more loans in order to survive. Why do we slavishly feed a banking system that is rapacious, insatiable and always threatening calamity whenever it doesn’t get exactly everything it wants, when it wants it? That is a question nobody in power is willing to address. Why not? Because there's no good reason to do it -- unless you're a bank, or one of the many proxy agents (like politicians) receiving kick-backs from the banks. We have a banking system that feeds on the blood, sweat and tears of the public. But the public's collective output is no longer ‘enough’ to subsidize everything that central planners have promised. So with a stagnating/shrinking pie – surprise! – the group that writes the rules, the banks, has decided that they should be the ones to get as much of it as possible. Naturally, this will not work for very long. History is replete with examples why it can’t. Just consider the root meaning of “bankrupt” which has an interesting history:
To “break the banker’s table” means to smash the money lender’s physical place of business after they have taken or lost all of your wealth. It’s speaks of an act of anger by the betrayed. And that’s where the banking system finds itself again and again over time, for the exact same reasons all through history -- today being no different in anything but scale and complexity. ConclusionYou have to read past the headlines today because they quite often say exactly the opposite of what’s actually happening. Like today’s description spinning GE’s 2Q, $1.38 billion earnings loss as a 5% rise in profits. The bankers and financiers are badly overplaying their hands, again, and people are starting to catch on to the scam. Real wealth is tangible things produced with tangible effort. Loans made out of thin-air 'money' require no effort and are entirely ephemeral. But if those loans are used to acquire real ownership of real assets, then something has been exchanged for nothing and one party is getting screwed. That’s what has just happened in Greece. And expect it to happen increasingly elsewhere, as Charles Hughes Smith and I recently discussed in this week's excellent Off The Cuff podcast. If you had asked me ten years ago if there was any chance of Greece becoming a failed state within a decade, I would have said ‘No, no chance.’ But here we are. In ten years, I suspect, we’ll be marveling over all the other failed states as the rot proceeds from the outside in. Again, Charles does a wonderful job articulating why in his recent report More Sovereign Defaults Are Coming. There’s simply too much debt and too little cheap oil for there to be any other trajectory to this story. Boneheadedly, our leadership is so out-of-touch that their best response to this set of predicaments is to sacrifice the populace of an entire developed nation (for generations to come) just to keep the status quo stumbling along for a bit longer. We need to all prepare for the inevitability that, as the rot proceeds, the people of Greece will not be the only casualties of the banks' attempts at self-preservation. They'll try to throw all of us under the bus before taking any losses themselves. |
| How Student Loans Create Demand For Useless Degrees Posted: 18 Jul 2015 03:15 PM PDT Submitted by Josh Grossman via The Mises Institute, Last week, former Secretary of Education and US Senator Lamar Alexander wrote in the Wall Street Journal that a college degree is both affordable and an excellent investment. He repeated the usual talking point about how a college degree increases lifetime earnings by a million dollars, “on average.” That part about averages is perhaps the most important part, since all college degrees are certainly not created equal. In fact, once we start to look at the details, we find that a degree may not be the great deal many higher-education boosters seem to think it is. In my home state of Minnesota, for example, the cost of obtaining a four-year degree at the University of Minnesota for a resident of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Manitoba, or Wisconsin is $100,720 (including room and board and miscellaneous fees). For private schools in Minnesota such as St. Olaf, however, the situation is even worse. A four-year degree at this institution will cost $210,920. This cost compares to an average starting salary for 2014 college graduates of $48,707. However, like GDP numbers this number is misleading because it is an average of all individuals who obtained a four-year degree in any academic field. Regarding the average student loan debt of an individual who graduated in 2013, about 70 percent of these graduates left college with an average student loan debt of $28,400. This entails the average student starting to pay back these loans six months after graduation or upon leaving school without a degree. The reality of this situation is that assuming a student loan interest rate of 6.8 percent and a ten-year repayment period, the average student will be paying $326.83 every month for 120 months or a cumulative total re-payment of $39,219.28. Depending upon a student’s job, this amount can be a substantial monthly financial burden for the average graduate. All Degrees Are Not of Equal ValueUnfortunately, there is no price incentive for students to choose degrees that are most likely to enable them to pay back loans quickly or easily. In other words, these federal student loans are subsidizing a lack of discrimination in students’ major choice. A person majoring in communications can access the same loans as a student majoring in engineering. Both of these students would also pay the same interest rate, which would not occur in a free market. In an unhampered market, majors that have a higher probability of default should be required to pay a higher interest rate on money borrowed than majors with a lower probability of default. In summary, it is not just the federal government’s subsidization of student loans that is increasing the cost of college, but the fact that demand for low-paying and high-default majors is increasing, because loans for these majors are supplied at the same price as a major providing high salaries to its possessor with a low probability of default. And which programs are the most likely to pay off for the student? The top five highest paying bachelor’s degrees include: petroleum engineering, actuarial mathematics, nuclear engineering, chemical engineering and electronics and communications engineering, while the top five lowest paying bachelor’s degrees are: animal science, social work, child development and psychology, theological and ministerial studies, and human development, family studies, and related services. Petroleum engineering has an average starting salary of $93,500 while animal science has an average starting salary of $32,700. This breaks down for a monthly salary for the petroleum engineer of $7,761.67 versus a person working in animal science with a monthly salary of $2,725. Based on the average monthly payment mentioned above, this would equate to a burden of 4.2 percent of monthly income (petroleum engineer) versus a burden of 12 percent of monthly income (animal science). This debt burden is exacerbated by the fact that it is now nearly impossible to have student loan debts wiped away even if one declares bankruptcy. Ignoring Careers That Don’t Require a DegreeMeanwhile, there are few government loan programs geared toward funding an education in the trades. And yet, for many prospective college students, the trades might be a much more lucrative option. Using the example of plumbing, the average plumber earns $53,820 per year with the employer paying the apprentice a wage and training. Acknowledging the fact that this average salary is for master plumbers, it still equates to a $20,000 salary difference between it and someone with a four-year degree in animal science while having no student loans as a bonus. Outside of earning a four-year degree in science, technology, engineering, math or, accounting with an average starting salary of $53,300, nursing with an average starting salary of $53,624, or as a family practice doctor on the lower end of physician pay of $161,000, society might be better served if parents and educators would stop using the canard that a four-year degree is always worth the cost outside of a few majors mentioned above. Encouraging students to consider the trades and parents to give their children the money they would spend on a four-year college degree to put a down payment on a house might be a better use of finite economic resources. The alternative of forcing the proverbial square peg into a round hole will condemn another generation to student debt slavery forcing them to put off buying a home or getting married. Loans Drive Overall DemandThe root of the problem is intervention by the federal government in providing student loans. Since 1965 when President Johnson signed the Higher Education Act tuition, room, and board has increased from $1,105 per year to $18,943 in 2014–2015. This is an increase of 1,714 percent in 50 years. In addition, the Higher Education Act of 1965 created loans which are made by private institutions yet guaranteed by the federal government and capped at 6.8 percent. In case of default on the loans, the federal government — that is, the taxpayers — pick up the tab in order for these lenders to recover 95 cents on every dollar lent. Loaning these funds at below market interest rates and with the federal government backing up these risky loans has led to massive malinvestment as the percentage of high-school graduates enrolled in some form of higher education has increased from 10 percent before World War II to 70 percent by the 1990s. Getting a four-year degree in nearly any academic field seemed to be the way in which to enter or remain in the middle class. But just as with the housing bubble, keeping interest below market levels while increasing the money supply in terms of loans — while having the taxpayer on the hook for a majority of these same loans — leads to an avalanche of defaults and is a recipe for disaster. |
| Posted: 18 Jul 2015 01:45 PM PDT Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog, An entire economy is being deliberately suffocated, and all in all it’s just total madness. Quiet madness, though (update: and then the riots broke out..). Two things I’ve been repeatedly asked to convey to you are that:
* * * * Then: I was reminded of something a few days ago that has me thinking -all over- ever since. That is, to what extent has Greece simply been a set-up, and a lab rat, for years now? I’m not sure I can get to the bottom of this all in one go, but maybe I don’t have to either. Maybe the details will fill themselves in as we go along. One Daniel Neun wrote on Twitter, in German, translation mine, that:
The political and media narrative has consistently been that Greece “unexpectedly” and “all of a sudden” in late 2009, when a new government came in, was “found out” to have much higher debt levels than “previously thought”. And then had to appeal for a massive bailout. Obviously, Neun’s version is quite different. His doesn’t look like just another wild assumption, since he names a few sources, among which this from Kathimerini dated January 22, 2013: Greece’s Statistics Chief Faces Charges Over Claims Of Inflated 2009 Deficit Figure
As well as this from Greek Reporter dated June 18 2015: The 2009 Deficit Was Artificially Inflated, Former ELSTAT Official Tells Greek Parliament
A view from the ground was provided earlier today by my friend Dimitri Galanis in Athens when I asked him about this:
And then I saw a piece by former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich yesterday: How Goldman Sachs Profited From the Greek Debt Crisis
Note: when Reich says that “..Goldman wasn’t an innocent bystander: It padded its profits by leveraging Greece to the hilt..”, he describes a tried and true Wall Street model. This is how investment firms like for instance Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital operate: take over a company, load it up with (leveraged) debt, strip its assets and then throw the debt-laden remaining skeleton back unto the public sphere. In this sense, the Troika and its Wall Street connections function as a kind of venture/vulture fund with regards to Greece. Nothing new, other than it’s never been perpetrated on a European Union country before. So what do you think: was Greece set up to fail from at least 6 years ago, has it all been a coincidence, or did they maybe just get what they deserve? Here’s a short timeline.
And that brings us back to January 25 2015. And eventually to Thursday, July 16 2015. What have the bailouts achieved? Well, the Greek economy is doing worse than ever, and the people are poorer than ever. Both have a lot more bad ‘news’ to come. So says the latest bailout imposed on Tsipras at gunpoint. To go back to 2009, if the Elstat people who testified -multiple times- before the Greek Parliament were right, there would have been either no need for a bailout, or perhaps a much smaller one. Which, crucially, would not have required IMF involvement. It therefore doesn’t look at all unlikely that Greece was saddled with an artificially raised deficit, and that the intention behind that, all along, was to get the Troika ‘inside’ for the long run. So the country could be stripped of all its assets. The bailouts needed to be as big as they were to 1) successfully make the international banks ‘whole’ that had lent as much as they had into the Greek economy, 2) get the IMF involved, 3) and absolve the notorious -and cooperative- domestic oligarchy from any pain. And make all the usual suspects a lot more money in the process. The added benefit was that it was obvious from the start that the Greeks would never be able to pay the Troika back, and would be their debt slaves for as long as the latter wanted, giving up all their treasured possessions in the process. Or, alternatively, it could all have been a terribly unfortunate coincidence. It would be a curious coincidence, though. |
| The Economy Has Never Recovered And The Collapse Is Around The Corner Posted: 18 Jul 2015 11:42 AM PDT The Economy Has Never Recovered And The Collapse Is Around The Corner with Today's Guest: Jason Burack The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts , futurists , visionaries , free investigative journalists , researchers , Whistelblowers , truthers and many... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| Jade Helm: Is The U.S. Military Invading Texas? Posted: 18 Jul 2015 11:39 AM PDT 7 states, 8 weeks and 1200 soldiers. Is America's military exercise, more than just training drill? Is the U.S Government preparing to invade Texas? The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts , futurists , visionaries , free investigative journalists ,... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| Peter Schiff : We're All Slaves To The Federal Government Posted: 18 Jul 2015 09:30 AM PDT Alex Jones talks with Peter Schiff about the Civil War and they break down how what really came out of it wasn't the liberation of the slaves, but the turning all of America into one big federal plantation. The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts ,... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| At KWN, China's gold reserves announcement ridiculed by Leeb, von Greyerz, Maguire Posted: 18 Jul 2015 08:35 AM PDT 11:34a ET Saturday, July 18, 2015 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: In interviews with King World News, fund managers Stephen Leeb and Egon von Greyerz and London metals trader Andrew Maguire ridicule Friday's announcement by China about its gold reserves, which, they maintain, are much greater than announced. The interviews are posted here: http://kingworldnews.com/andrew-maguire-egon-von-greyerz-and-stephen-lee... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Silver Coins and Rounds with Employee Pricing and Free Shipping Grab your Silver Starter Kit at cost from Money Metals Exchange, the company named "Precious Metals Dealer of the Year" by industry ratings group Bullion Directory. Simply go to MoneyMetals.com and type "GATA" in the radio box at the top of the page. This special silver offer contains 4 ounces of silver coins and rounds in the most popular 1-ounce, half-ounce, and 10th-ounce forms. Claim yours now, because GATA readers get employee pricing and free shipping. So go to -- -- and type "GATA" in the radio box at the top of the page. Join GATA here: New Orleans Investment Conference http://noic2015.eventbrite.com/?aff=gata The Silver Summit and Resource Expo 2015 http://cambridgehouse.com/event/50/the-silver-summit-and-resource-expo-2... Support GATA by purchasing recordings of the proceedings of the 2014 New Orleans Investment Conference: https://jeffersoncompanies.com/landing/2014-av-powell Or by purchasing DVDs of GATA's London conference in August 2011 or GATA's 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: |
| TEXAS GOLD BACKED BANK - New Texas Bank to Challenge The Federal Reserve Fiat Currency System Posted: 18 Jul 2015 08:30 AM PDT The State of Texas is setting up a gold-backed bank that will allow depositors to bypass the controversial Federal Reserve System and its fiat currency in banking and commerce, according to the state representative who authored the recently enacted law. Under the measure, passed overwhelmingly... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  |
| Market rigging cited in gold discussion with O'Byrne, Eliseo, Suchecki, Stoeferle Posted: 18 Jul 2015 08:10 AM PDT 11:10a ET Saturday, July 18, 2015 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: An hour-long discussion about world market conditions and gold, conducted this week, includes GoldCore's Mark O'Byrne, ABC Bullion's Jordan Eliseo, the Perth Mint's Bron Suchecki, and Incrementum's Ron Stoeferle, and manipulation of the gold market is a major topic. The discussion is linked from GoldCore's Internet site here: http://www.goldcore.com/us/gold-blog/global-precious-metal-roundtable-gr... CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer ADVERTISEMENT Free Storage with BullionStar in Singapore Until 2016 Bullion Star is a Singapore-registered company with a one-stop bullion shop, showroom, and vault at 45 New Bridge Road in Singapore. Bullion Star's solution for storing bullion in Singapore is called My Vault Storage. With My Vault Storage you can store bullion in Bullion Star's bullion vault, which is integrated with Bullion Star's shop and showroom, making it a convenient one-stop-shop for precious metals in Singapore. Customers can buy, store, sell, or request physical withdrawal of their bullion through My Vault Storage® online around the clock. Storage is FREE until 2016 and will have the most competitive rates in the industry thereafter. For more information, please visit Bullion Star here: Join GATA here: New Orleans Investment Conference http://noic2015.eventbrite.com/?aff=gata The Silver Summit and Resource Expo 2015 http://cambridgehouse.com/event/50/the-silver-summit-and-resource-expo-2... Support GATA by purchasing recordings of the proceedings of the 2014 New Orleans Investment Conference: https://jeffersoncompanies.com/landing/2014-av-powell Or by purchasing DVDs of GATA's London conference in August 2011 or GATA's 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: |
| Tocqueville's Hathaway summarizes and updates the gold suppression scheme Posted: 18 Jul 2015 07:55 AM PDT 10:55a ET Saturday, July 18, 2015 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: In his new gold strategy letter, Tocqueville Asset Management's senior portfolio manager, John Hathaway, updates and summarizes the central bank gold price suppression scheme, which is getting more obvious every day with the counterintuitive behavior of the markets. Hathaway writes: "We and others have commented at length about the contradictions between the markets for paper (synthetic) and physical gold. The declining price of paper gold quotes in NY and London doesn't square with worldwide physical flows that reflect demand far in excess of mine production. It appears to us that gold positions traded in London and New York among bullion banks, high-frequency traders, hedge funds, and commodity traders constitute highly levered derivatives with only distant and notional relationships to the physical substance. The power of synthetic gold markets (COMEX in New York and over-the-counter in London, in conjunction with the London Bullion Market Association fix) to determine gold prices could start to ebb as physical gold migrates to Asian financial centers. ... Dispatch continues below ... ADVERTISEMENT We Are Amid the Biggest Financial Bubble in History; With GoldCore you can own allocated -- and most importantly -- segregated coins and bars in Switzerland, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Switzerland, Singapore, and Hong Kong remain extremely safe jurisdictions for storing bullion. Avoid exchange-traded funds and digital gold providers where you are a price taker. Ensure that you are outright legal owner of your bullion. If you do not own segregated bullion that you can visit, inspect, and take delivery of, you are exposed. Crucial guides to storage in Singapore and Switzerland can be read here: http://info.goldcore.com/essential-guide-to-storing-gold-in-singapore http://info.goldcore.com/essential-guide-to-storing-gold-in-switzerland GoldCore does not report transactions to any authority. Safety, privacy, and confidentiality are paramount when we are entrusted with storage of our clients' precious metals. Email the GoldCore team at info@goldcore.com or call our trading desk: UK: +44(0)203-086-9200. U.S.: +1-302-635-1160. International: +353(0)1-632-5010. Visit us at: http://www.goldcore.com "China has built an institutional infrastructure in the form of the Shanghai Gold Exchange, shortly to be merged with the Hong Kong Gold Exchange, which will facilitate settlement of international transactions in physical, not synthetic, gold, as described by Yao Yudong in his recent LBMA presentation. We expect an increasing percentage of gold transactions to be denominated in renminbi. "The well-documented disappearance of bullion from Western vaults may mean that credit required for transactions in synthetic gold -- that is, some sort of claim on underlying physical gold -- will become increasingly difficult to obtain. ... "Evidence of possible stress on this system of credit links between physical gold and derivatives may have been revealed by the first-quarter Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) report, which showed that JPMorgan's commodities derivative contracts (less than one year) exploded from $131 million to $3.8 trillion in just one quarter -- a staggering and unprecedented change. "The mystery deepens because the OCC for the first time inexplicably obfuscated the reporting categories by eliminating the separate, long-standing category (at least 10 years) for gold by including it together with foreign exchange. This curious retreat from transparency by the OCC suggests to us attempted deception. By whom and for what reasons we can only speculate. "For our part, it makes us wonder whether we are witnessing the final moments of a second, more sophisticated version of the 1960s London Gold Pool (the 'Gold Pool'), a scheme organized by the U.S. and European governments to suppress the free-market gold price to camouflage the growing adverse fundamentals for the U.S. dollar. ... "A bit of history is instructive here: The collapse of the 1960s Gold Pool, the aforementioned secret and collusive effort by seven central banks to keep a lid on the gold price, preceded a most difficult decade for financial assets. A lesson to be learned from the 1960s is the unpredictability of government actions, their inherently anti-free-market nature, and the unintended consequences that can arise from them. "The Gold Pool was, in retrospect, a clumsy attempt by Western democracies to disguise the deteriorating fundamentals of the U.S. dollar stemming from the Vietnam War, rising inflation, and the weakening balance of payments. The dollar had been pegged to gold at $35/ounce since the end of World War II, a number that proved too low in light of the changing fiscal realities for U.S. sovereign credit caused by the escalation of the Vietnam War and the introduction of large scale welfare policies under the umbrella of the Johnson administration's 'Great Society' initiative. "In retrospect, the scheme was clumsy because the manipulation of the gold price was accomplished by the exchange of physical gold for dollars held by foreign creditors who saw the writing on the wall. The objective of the Gold Pool was to disguise reality. In the long run, that price-suppression scheme did not work. The failure of the Gold Pool of course was resolved by the suspension of dollar/gold convertibility in 1971. When free-market gold trading resumed in 1974, the gold price rose by nearly 20 fold over the next eight years. "The present-day magnitude of fiscal and monetary irresponsibility in our view exceeds the precedent of the 1960s by multiples. It is only fitting that the elaboration and complexity of disguise required to beautify the underlying realities would be proportional. Government intervention via price suppression (interest rates, currencies) or price inflation (financial assets) seems to pervade all financial markets. Why should gold be exempt? "At some basic level, all investors are aware of the gold price. Unruly behavior by the metal could render the 'Truman Show' dysfunctional. Allowing free-market expression of gold prices may have been seen as a serious risk at the highest policy levels. The strong rise of the gold price amidst liberal doses of QE post-2008 through 2011 would have been a note discordant with an otherwise happy fable. Gold strength might confirm what many investors suspect: QE and ZIRP have failed to produce economic growth and may well have jeopardized future prospects for a return to solid economic footing. "We hypothesize that, having learned from the misadventures of the 1960s, the policy elites, well-versed in the practice of financial engineering and market manipulation, would have seen no need to dump stocks of government gold reserves onto the market, 1960s style, to keep the price in check. Instead, synthetic gold, sourced in pyramids of credit extended to bullion bankers by central banks with little or no claim on physical substance, have provided a more efficient, better-camouflaged form of intervention. COMEX synthetic gold and related over-the-counter derivatives are traded in macro strategies implemented by hedge funds, high-frequency trades, and commodity funds in pair trades with interest-rate, currencies, equity futures, or even more exotic offsets. The volumes traded are huge, and bear little resemblance to actual flows of physical metal. "We suspect that shorting gold has come to seem like a riskless proposition as long as there is confidence in the Fed. Synthetic gold is the perfect substance for a carry trade: an easy borrow with very low carrying cost and little upside basis risk. Such a hypothesis, in our opinion, does much to explain the incongruity of a declining gold price while fundamentals for paper currency, and the U.S. dollar in particular, obviously deteriorate; while demand for physical gold has exceeded new mine supply for several years running; and while above-ground 400-ounce .995-gold bars located in London, New York, and other financial capitals (in cohabitation with speculative trading activity in paper markets) have steadily dwindled and disappeared into Asian financial centers reformulated as .9999 kilo bars." Hathaway's letter is posted at the Tocqueville Internet site here: http://tocqueville.com/insights/tocqueville-gold-strategy-2Q15-partII CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer Join GATA here: New Orleans Investment Conference http://noic2015.eventbrite.com/?aff=gata The Silver Summit and Resource Expo 2015 http://cambridgehouse.com/event/50/the-silver-summit-and-resource-expo-2... Support GATA by purchasing recordings of the proceedings of the 2014 New Orleans Investment Conference: https://jeffersoncompanies.com/landing/2014-av-powell Or by purchasing DVDs of GATA's London conference in August 2011 or GATA's 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: 18 Jul 2015 07:25 AM PDT By Everett Millman, head content writer at Gainesville Coins, a leading gold and silver distributor. ABSTRACT: The major, immediate risks for the global economy seemed to reach "risk-off" status this... {This is a content summary only. Click on the blog title to continue reading this post, share your comments, browse the website, and more!} |
| Gold And Silver – Without Either, You Will Be Greeced Posted: 18 Jul 2015 06:49 AM PDT Step back for a moment and absorb what just transpired in the ongoing Greek tragedy that refuses to go away. Greece, with no possibility of ever repaying its fictitious debts to the EU, and the EU, in all of its greed and avarice, for no wisdom is to be found within that body of elite-pushing bureaucrats, it determined that the best and ONLY solution for debt-laden Greece was to LOAN MORE “MONEY.” Need anything more be said about what is going on in European politics? |
| Why Pensions Are A (Big) Black Swan Posted: 18 Jul 2015 06:36 AM PDT When talk turns to what might derail today’s debt-driven “recovery,” the big names and easy stories get most of the attention: China with its soaring debt, volatile equities and heavy-handed intervention; Japan with its stratospheric debt and science fictiony demographics; Greece, which needs no explanation; the developing countries with their weak currencies and mountain of dollar-denominated debt. And of course America’s triple bubble of stocks, bonds and derivatives. |
| Gold and Silver Record Shorting Posted: 18 Jul 2015 06:29 AM PDT The miserable summer for precious metals grinds on, with both gold and silver limping along near major lows. Such dismal price action has exacerbated the extreme bearishness long plaguing this sector, sparking even more capitulation. But this incredible weakness will be short-lived, as it was driven by American futures speculators’ record short selling. That will soon reverse into guaranteed, proportional buying. In all markets including precious metals, price is rightfully considered the most-important fundamental signal. Prevailing price levels are set by free-market buying and selling until supply and demand meet. And gold and silver prices are exceptionally weak, with these despised precious metals slumping down to challenge major new 5.2-year and 5.4-year lows this week. So their fundamentals must be bearish, right? |
| Shanghai Gold Exchange Sees 61.8 Tonnes Withdrawn In Eighth Largest Week Ever - Talk To the Hand Posted: 17 Jul 2015 05:32 PM PDT |
In March 2015 the CME launched a gold kilobar futures 
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