Gold World News Flash |
- The New Case for Gold — James Rickards
- Chernobyl Meltdown Vs Fukushima Multiple Meltdowns
- Is This The End Of The U.S Dollar? Geopolitical Moves “Obliterate U.S Petrodollar Hegemony “
- LOL – Kitco: Geologist Says “Buy gold, not silver”
- Gold Price Closed Down $4.20 or -0.34%
- China Copies the West: Implements Mercantilism to Prop Up Powerful Interests
- Is Bitcoin About To Soar?
- Global Gold Market Is Changing – SGE 上海黄金交易所
- 47% Of Americans Can't Even Come Up With $400 To Cover An Emergency Room Visit
- Pimco Economist Has A Stunning Proposal To Save The Economy: The Fed Should Buy Gold
- These SEC Insider Emails Reveal Why No Bankers Have Gone To Jail
- Are stars aligned for gold revaluation -- and is GATA finished?
- The United States of Insolvency
- 100 Years of Mismanagement
- The Impossibility of a Soft Landing
- Jim’s Mailbox
- RON PAUL: DOLLAR COLLAPSE, POLITICAL CORRUPTION, & PROTECTING LIBERTY
- Peter Schiff : Last Warning To America - Dollar Will Collapse 100% In 28 May 2016
- Riksbank Announces the End of QE
- Gold and Silver are on the Cusp of a Massive Rally!
- Gold, Silver Blow Off in Progress but 'Launch Phase' Confirmed
- Dollar FMQ update
- Harry Dent: Stock Market 70% Crash By Late 2017 – Gold $400-$800
- Stocks, Dollar, Oil and Gold - What a Difference a Couple of Months Makes
- Don’t Cross the Streams
- Big Week For Silver
- President Trump? President Clinton? Gold Up in Both Scenarios
- Stocks or US Dollar About to Enter a Bear Market
- Silver Price Breakout, Shanghai Gold Exchange, Bitcoin and the Web Bot - Video
| The New Case for Gold — James Rickards Posted: 22 Apr 2016 12:00 AM PDT from GordonTLong: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chernobyl Meltdown Vs Fukushima Multiple Meltdowns Posted: 21 Apr 2016 11:00 PM PDT from MsMilkytheclown1: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Is This The End Of The U.S Dollar? Geopolitical Moves “Obliterate U.S Petrodollar Hegemony “ Posted: 21 Apr 2016 09:40 PM PDT by Mac Slavo, SHTFPlan:
It seems the end really is nigh for the U.S. dollar. And the mudfight for global dominance and currency war couldn't be more ugly or dramatic. The Saudis are now openly threatening to take down the U.S. economy in the ongoing fallout over collapsing oil prices and tense geopolitical events involving the 9/11 cover-up. The New York Times reports:
China has been working for years to establish global currency status, and will strengthen the yuan by backing it with gold in moves clearly designed to cripple the role of the dollar. Zero Hedge reports: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| LOL – Kitco: Geologist Says “Buy gold, not silver” Posted: 21 Apr 2016 08:20 PM PDT by Jeff Nielson, Bullion Bulls:
Part of the problem is self-created: the ludicrous/corrupt “gold/silver price ratio” which has resulted from their propaganda. Not only are both gold and silver priced at absurdly low levels, but the price of silver is much more absurd, thus it only requires relatively small sums of capital (in aggregate) to deplete supplies.
Silver is currently being PRODUCED at a mere 6:1 ratio versus gold. It exists at only a 17:1 ratio. Yet in terms of investment demand, it is being consumed at a 50:1 ratio, and priced at (now) a 75:1 ratio. Understand how/why the consumption ratio is a direct function of the price ratio. Anything that is under-priced will be over-consumed. This is simply a tautology of markets, and something which I have explained many times in the past. Shorting (which drives down prices) DESTROYS MARKETS, while long investing BUILDS MARKETS. Silver: Shorting Consumes, Investing Conserves Silver has been radically under-priced for decades, and thus radically over-consumed for decades, thus stockpiles must be near depletion, thus the bankers are WORRIED. They have locked themselves into an absurd price ratio which them claim is justified, but which guarantees the depletion of silver inventories at a radical rate. This is why they pull out ever suit-stuffer they can find to try to discourage people from putting their cash into silver — and thus getting the most ‘bang for their buck’. But there is a second reason to scoff at this propaganda. Look at the supposed “expert” telling us to buy gold, not silver: aGEOLOGIST. What expertise does geology bring to markets. NONE, not even metals markets. You wouldn’t ask a farmer for investment advice on agricultural stocks and commodities, because he only has (limited) understanding of supply — and no expertise (whatsoever) regarding demand. It is like looking at something with one eye: “depth perception” is impossible. The Shill trotted out by Kitco has no expertise on the subject for which he is giving advice, and his “credentials” are false credentials, since they have no relevance to the analysis being presented. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gold Price Closed Down $4.20 or -0.34% Posted: 21 Apr 2016 07:32 PM PDT
My friend Catherine Fitts came over for supper once and brought me a bag of buttons she used to hand out as Assistant Secretary of Housing: NO WHINING. I suggest Congress' best use of tax dollars right now would be to buy 175 million NO WHINING buttons & hand one to every other person in the US of A. Are y'all sick of whiners whining about how they didn't get this or that or how put upon they are because somebody somewhere in the Universe looks down on 'em? Ought to say the same thing to 'em my wife Susan used to say to our seven kids: "Is it bleeding or is the bone sticking out? If not, go back and play." 21 August 2016 probably was the day when stocks turned down. They failed today twice at the unchanged line, then sank, sank, sank beneath the waves, deeper & deeper all day -- glurg! Was today a government holiday? Wonder why no Nice Government Men stepped in at 3:30 to jack up the market? Probably their coffee break. On disappointing earnings news the Dow rolled downhill 113.82 (0.63%) to 17,982.45. Owch! Hurts morale it couldn't hold on above 18,000. S&P500 tumbled 10.92 (0.52%) to 2,091.48. By the way that little down-tweak today sufficed to break that rising wedge's bottom boundary on the Dow & S&P500 charts. Portentous, that. I missed catching y'all up on Crony Capitalism in Operation. Goldman Sachs came out day before yesterday, the last of the big five to report, & announced much lower earnings. What happened? Why in the Crazy Crap Shoot that is today's stock market, Goldman stock rose, along with the bank stocks index ($BKX). Sure, makes sense to me. Today though that BKX hit its 200 day moving average, which I surmise from the way the BKX shrunk back was made of Kryptonite. Another reason to suspect stocks have turned down. At the same time, the Gold:BKX spread turned up. (It's a fraction, remember, with Gold on top and BKX on bottom. Further BKX falls, higher the fraction climbs.) Also neglected to mention a few days ago Goldman paid the yankee government $5 billion to cure its wrongdoing in the mortgage bubble debacle that launched the 2008 financial crisis. It sure pays for capitalists to have cronies in Washington. D'y'all notice that hyperactive Obama "Justice" department jes' never could get motivated to send any HUMAN PERSON to jail, let alone bankers? Corporations, which have no body to jail and no soul ot damn, are lashed with "civil fines" that claw back a pitiable pittance of what they stole by fraud. And no hot breath of a prosecutor ever fogs the necks of CEOs & their ilk. It's nice to have cronies running the "Justice" system. In all fairness, 'twould have been the exact same outcome if the other crony party had been in power. From Credit Mobilier to the Whiskey Ring to Teapot Dome to the 1980s S&L Crisis, Republican hogs are just as adept at sticking their snoots in the trough as Democratic ones. Wild day in markets, thanks again to the stabilizing influence of central banks. ECB's head felon, Mario Draghi, held a press conference announcing the ECB's interest rate intentions. ECB did nothing, kept interest rates low. No new "stimulus" measures were announced. Whenever I see that word "stimulus" it reminds me of somebody wanting to dose a passed out drunk with whiskey as a "stimulant." Their stimulants won't work any better for the economy central banks have made puking drunk with debt. I don't know what folks in currency markets expected, but the US dollar index tanked from 94.6+ about 5:00 a.m. right down to 93.92 just before 9:00 a.m., then even a little faster bounced up to 94.70 by 11:00. However, it ended the day up only 11 basis points (0.12%) at 94.58. That brought it up enough to touch, but not hold, the 20 DMA at 94.67. Y'all look, http://schrts.co/OkJ5UT Every one of those big range days (all but one big losses) with blue arrows were caused by central bank announcements. Dollar index is stalking the lip of a volcano, & if it gets lower than 93 - 92.50 will fall over into the molten lava. Situation won't clear until the dollar index either closes above 95.20 or below 92.50. Think on the market proverb: double bottoms hold, triple bottoms don't. This is the dollar index' third touch below 94. Silver fell only 4.5¢ (0.3%) to 1708.6¢ while gold fell $4.20 (0.3%) to $1,249, but those closes don't near about tell the story of the havoc central banking wreaked in metals markets today. Silver advanced and reached 1771.5¢ (or 1778¢, according to whom you believe) about 11:a.m. About 12:00 (Eastern) it plunged within an hour to 1675¢, then turned and climbed above 1700¢, finishing at 1708.6¢. Chart's here, http://schrts.co/CqZ2b5 Who do you listen to? On the Comex chart today marked a key reversal's first half: trade into new high territory with a lower close. However, that doesn't show on the end of day chart, which closed higher. Volume last three days has been huge, and hugest today. Yet the RSI is way overbought, as is are the MACD and Rate of Change. I mention in passing that today fulfilled my 1765¢ target based on a breakout from the trading channel. Gold chart is right here, http://schrts.co/ZWY4A4 Gold likewise bounced up and down. About the same times it fell from a $1,272.40 high to a $1,244.40 low. Challenging that last high at $1,264.70 & failing looks puny to poisoned. Gold's indicators have fallen way behind silver's. RSI is stuck in mid-range, barely positive. MACD is barely positive. Rate of Change the picture of sloth. All you can say is, Gold's just hanging on. As with silver, so gold's Comex chart shows a key reversal's first half, but not the End of Day chart. Ratio fell again today, from 73.154 to 73.101. Not much, but fell. Reached my first target at 72.50 yesterday. Seems a lot to ask for, more gold & silver gains immediately, without any rest. On 21 April 1836 General Sam Houston, a Tennessean, leading an army larded with Tennesseans, defeated Mexican General Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto in a fight that lasted only 18 minutes. The Texians captured Santa Anna next day, and later he signed a peace treaty withdrawing the Mexican army. In effect, the Battle of San Jacinto established Texas' independence. Aurum et argentum comparenda sunt -- -- Gold and silver must be bought. - Franklin Sanders, The Moneychanger The-MoneyChanger.com © 2016, The Moneychanger. May not be republished in any form, including electronically, without our express permission. To avoid confusion, please remember that the comments above have a very short time horizon. Always invest with the primary trend. Gold's primary trend is up, targeting at least $3,130.00; silver's primary is up targeting 16:1 gold/silver ratio or $195.66; stocks' primary trend is down, targeting Dow under 2,900 and worth only one ounce of gold or 18 ounces of silver. US $ and US$-denominated assets, primary trend down; real estate bubble has burst, primary trend down. WARNING AND DISCLAIMER. Be advised and warned: Do NOT use these commentaries to trade futures contracts. I don't intend them for that or write them with that short term trading outlook. I write them for long-term investors in physical metals. Take them as entertainment, but not as a timing service for futures. NOR do I recommend investing in gold or silver Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs). Those are NOT physical metal and I fear one day one or another may go up in smoke. Unless you can breathe smoke, stay away. Call me paranoid, but the surviving rabbit is wary of traps. NOR do I recommend trading futures options or other leveraged paper gold and silver products. These are not for the inexperienced. NOR do I recommend buying gold and silver on margin or with debt. What DO I recommend? Physical gold and silver coins and bars in your own hands. One final warning: NEVER insert a 747 Jumbo Jet up your nose. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| China Copies the West: Implements Mercantilism to Prop Up Powerful Interests Posted: 21 Apr 2016 07:00 PM PDT from The Daily Bell:
China is run by a communist party but its policies are increasingly mercantilist and reminiscent of European and US strategies. Whether the world is run out of Washington or Beijing, the economic, political and military approach is increasingly similar. China is in better shape financially than the West because of its central bank's emphasis on buying and retaining gold. China probably has at least several thousand tons of gold stored on the mainland, though officials will only admit to around 1,000 tons.
In fact, China just announced that it would create its own price fix for gold to compete with prices set in London. Additionally, the price fix will not be convertible to dollars. But China's debt driven economic policies at the federal level are just as reckless as US policies, or European ones, as we can see from this latest article posted at Bloomberg. More:
Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service both chopped China's long-term credit rating outlook to negative last month. Expanding sovereign debt and a lack of market reforms prompted the downgrade. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 21 Apr 2016 06:23 PM PDT Back on September 2, 2015 when bitcoin was trading at $230, we laid out the simplest and most fundamental reason why, irrelevant of one's ideological persuasion with "alternative" or digital currency - bitcoin would soar.
For now only a small fraction of the eligible potential Chinese bitcoin users have emerged. Even so, bitcoin is now double the price where it was when we wrote the above forecast. But what if just like every other market, fundamentals only matter to a certain extent, and what is far more important is the algos scanning for patterns and creating self-fulfilling chartist prophecies. In other words, what if the Bitcoin technicals are far more important? Then we may be about to see a major breakout to the upside. As Dan Eskola writes, "a large move in bitcoin" is imminent. He explains why: A "Bullish Pennant" is a buy indicator. It exists here since the price action in October 2015 was bullish. Since then the prices have stabilized somewhat but have not sold off or broke out higher. Bitcoin prices are searching for direction.
The long term chart also shows some common characteristics.
Fundamental analysis is great, technical analysis is easy. The following fundamental bullish factors indicate that the prices for Bitcoin are headed higher.
I believe the market participants that price Bitcoin use technical analysis because it is easy and fundamental analysis is difficult. I believe that Bitcoin prices will move higher for the rest of 2016. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Global Gold Market Is Changing – SGE 上海黄金交易所 Posted: 21 Apr 2016 06:00 PM PDT from Junius Maltby: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 47% Of Americans Can't Even Come Up With $400 To Cover An Emergency Room Visit Posted: 21 Apr 2016 06:00 PM PDT Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog, If you had to make a sudden visit to the emergency room, would you have enough money to pay for it without selling something or borrowing the funds from somewhere? Most Americans may not realize this, but this is something that the Federal Reserve has actually been tracking for several years now. And according to the Fed, an astounding 47 percent of all Americans could not come up with $400 to pay for an emergency room visit without borrowing it or selling something. Various surveys that I have talked about in the past have found that more than 60 percent of all Americans are living to paycheck to paycheck, but I didn’t realize that things were quite this bad for about half the country. If you can’t even come up with $400 for an unexpected emergency room visit, then you are just surviving from month to month by the skin of your teeth. Unfortunately, about half of us are currently in that situation. Earlier today someone pointed me toward an excellent article in The Atlantic that discussed this, and I have to admit that The Atlantic is one of the last remaining bastions of old school excellence in journalism that you will find in the mainstream media. Of course I don’t see eye to eye with them on a lot of things philosophically, but there are some really hard working journalists over there. The article where I found the 47 percent figure comes from The Atlantic, and it is entitled “The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans“. It was authored by Neal Gabler, and he says that he can identify with the 47 percent of Americans that don’t have $400 for an unexpected emergency room visit because he is one of them…
To me, this is yet more evidence that the middle class in America is dying. Last year, it was reported that middle class Americans make up a minority of the population for the very first time in our history. But back in 1971, 61 percent of all Americans lived in middle class households. So what happened? Well, the big corporations started shipping millions of good paying manufacturing jobs overseas. Millions of other good paying jobs were replaced by technology, and the competition for the good jobs that remained became extremely intense. During the good times, the U.S. economy still created new jobs, but most of those jobs were low paying service jobs. At this point, a majority of American workers have jobs that would be considered low paying. In fact, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year according to the Social Security Administration. And once you account for inflation, the truth is that our incomes have been going down for years. According to a study that was released by Pew Charitable Trusts, median household income in the United States decreased by 13 percent between 2004 and 2014. That isn’t “progress” any way that you slice it. If you go all the way back to 1970, the middle class took home approximately 62 percent of all income in the United States. Today, that number has fallen to just 43 percent. So the fact that 47 percent of Americans can’t even pay for an unexpected emergency room visit is not exactly a surprise. To be honest, a whole host of other surveys have come up with similar numbers. Here is more from Neal Gabler…
What all of these numbers tell us is that the middle class is disappearing. I tend to compare it to a game of really bizarre musical chairs. With each passing month more chairs are being pulled out of the circle, and those members of the middle class that haven’t fallen into poverty yet are just hoping that a chair will still be there for them when the music stops. Even during the “Obama recovery”, we have seen poverty in America absolutely explode. In fact, some brand new numbers just came out that are quite startling. The following comes from another author for The Atlantic named Gillian B. White…
To underscore this point, let me just run five quick facts about the growth of poverty in this country by you…
That last number really gets me every time. How can “the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet” have more than a million homeless children? This is one of the reasons why I hammer on our ongoing economic collapse over and over and over. It is affecting real families with real children that have real hopes and real dreams. This is not the way our country is supposed to work. It is supposed to be “the land of opportunity”. It is supposed to be a place where anyone can live “the American Dream”. But instead it has become an economic wasteland where the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world is being systematically eviscerated. So no, the U.S. economy is not doing “just fine” – anyone that tries to tell you that lie is simply peddling fiction. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Pimco Economist Has A Stunning Proposal To Save The Economy: The Fed Should Buy Gold Posted: 21 Apr 2016 05:59 PM PDT Back in December 2014, just before the ECB officially launched its initial phase of QE in which it would monetize government bonds, Mario Draghi was asked a very direct question: what types of assets could the ECB buy as part of its quantitative easing program. He responded, "we discussed all assets but gold." The reason for his tongue in cheek response was because over the prior few weeks speculation had arisen that gold could be part of the central bank's asset purchases after Yves Mersch, a member of the ECB executive board and former Governor of the Central Bank of Luxembourg, said on November 17 that "theoretically the ECB could purchase other assets such as gold, shares, ETFs to fulfill its promise of adopting further unconventional measures to counter a longer period of low inflation." Mario Draghi promptly shot down that idea. But according to a provocative paper released by none other than Pimco's strategist Harley Bassman, Yves Mersch's inadvertent peek into what central bankers are thinking, may have been on to something. In "Rumpelstiltskin at the Fed", Bassman goes down the well-trodden path of proposing Fed asset purchases as the last ditch panacea for the US economy, however instead of buying bonds, or stocks, or crude oil, Bassman has a truly original idea: "the Fed should unleash a massive Fed gold purchase program that could echo a Depression-era effort that effectively boosted the U.S. economy." He is of course, referring to FDR's 1933 Executive Order 6102, which made it illegal for a citizen to own gold bullion or coins. Americans promptly sold their gold to the government at the official price of $20.67, with the resulting hoard of gold was then placed in Fort Knox. The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 raised the official price of gold to $35.00, a near 70% increase. It also resulted in an implicit devaluation of the US dollar. As Bassman points out, over the three years from January 1934 to December 1936, GDP increased by 48%, the Dow Jones stock index rose by nearly 80%, and most salient to our topic, inflation averaged a positive 2% annually, despite a national unemployment rate hovering around 18%. In short, a brief economic nirvana which was unleashed by the devaluation of the dollar confiscation of gold. In fact, we have frequently hinted in the past that another Executive Order 6102 is inevitable for precisely these reasons. However this is the first time when we see a "respected economist" openly recommend this idea as a matter of monetary policy. Bassman says that the Fed should "emulate a past success by making a public offer to purchase a significantly large quantity of gold bullion at a substantially greater price than today's free-market level, perhaps $5,000 an ounce? It would be operationally simple as holders could transact directly at regional Federal offices or via authorized precious metal assayers." What would the outcome of such as "QE for the goldbugs" look like? His summary assessment:
And before Krugman accuses Bassman of secretly being on our payroll, this is how Pimco's economist defends his unorthodox idea:
We agree, if for no other reason than everything central banks have done and tried in history has been a disastrous mistake, leading to either huge asset bubbles or massive busts, which in turn have needed even more spectacular bubbles to be reflated and so on. As such, the one thing that central banks should do is that which they are "genetically" against - purchasing the one asset class which is their inherent nemesis, the one Ben Bernanke said had value only because of "tradition": Gold. Of course, all of the above assumes Americans would be willing to sell their gold to the Fed at any prices, but as Bassman finally lays it out, it is worth finding out. Janet, are you listening? * * *
Rumpelstiltskin at the Fed Though it seems incredibly farfetched, a massive Fed gold purchase program could echo a Depression-era effort that effectively boosted the U.S. economy. As our title alludes, I am about to spin a monetary policy fairy tale, a fantasy that could certainly never occur … except for the small detail that it's happened before. First I must remind you there are only two avenues out of a debt crisis – default or inflate – and inflation is just a slow-motion default. Thus in the darker days of the global financial crisis, the U.S. Federal Reserve set sail on a monetary experiment tangentially suggested by late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, the original coiner of the phrase "helicopter money." (Ben Bernanke borrowed this clever construct in his famous November 2002 speech, "Deflation: Making Sure 'It' Doesn't Happen Here.") The notion was simple: Increase monetary velocity via financial repression to create inflation, depreciate nominal debt and deleverage both the public and private economies of the U.S. The toolkit of financial repression would include, but not be limited to, near-zero overnight interbank borrowing rates, massive asset purchase programs (also known as quantitative easing or QE), term surface restructuring (known as Operation Twist) and good old-fashioned jawboning, in this case taking the form of distant forward guidance. Notwithstanding various political exhortations, there can be little doubt the Fed's aggressive monetary policies after the collapse of Lehman Brothers were quite effective in cushioning the macro economy from the financial turmoil. Would the economy have cured itself without the Fed? We can't prove a negative, but up until China allowed the devaluation of the yuan last August and Japan implemented negative interest rates in January, the Fed's "Plan A" was working reasonably well. But we do not operate in a vacuum, and various monetary machinations from the eurozone, Japan and China are now working in concert to export deflation to the U.S. This is quite worrisome as it may well hinder the U.S. economy from reaching the Fed's target inflation level (2%) and escape-velocity economic growth. Thus did Fed Chair Janet Yellen, in her most recent visit to Congress, tentatively start to explore a "Plan B" (which looks like Plan A on steroids) that includes, if only in theory, the barest remote possibility of a negative interest rate policy (NIRP). There are a host of reasons PIMCO believes NIRP would be not only ineffective, but also possibly harmful to the U.S. economy, and these have been detailed by CIOs Scott Mather and Mihir Worah. But this does raise the question as to whether the Fed has indeed reached the bottom of its toolkit. Many things are possible, at least in theory, including the famous helicopter drop. Another option is to resurrect a plan that was actually implemented (with great success) 83 years ago. The real fairy taleFrom shortly after the October 1929 stock market crash to just before Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933, U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) declined by nearly 43%; during a similar timeframe, consumer prices declined by nearly 24%. Employing what can only be described as force majeure politics, in April 1933 the U.S. government issued Executive Order 6102, which made it illegal for a citizen to own gold bullion or coins. Lest they risk a five-year vacation in prison, citizens sold their gold to the government at the official price of $20.67. This hoard of gold was then placed in a specially built storage facility – Fort Knox. The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 raised the official price of gold to $35.00, a near 70% increase; positive results were almost immediate. Over the three years from January 1934 to December 1936, GDP increased by 48%, the Dow Jones stock index rose by nearly 80%, and most salient to our topic, inflation averaged a positive 2% annually, despite a national unemployment rate hovering around 18%. Such a pity that these halcyon days were soon sullied as the government tightened financial conditions (both fiscal and monetary) from late 1936 to early 1937, which many point to as the precipitant of the Dow's 33% decline. Additionally, the 1938 calendar reported a 6.3% decline in GDP and a 2.8% deflation in consumer prices. (Many suspect it is the fear of a 1937 redux that motivates the Fed to contemplate additional extraordinary actions, including NIRP.) So in the context of today's paralyzed political-fiscal landscape and a hyperventilated election process, how silly is it to suggest the Fed emulate a past success by making a public offer to purchase a significantly large quantity of gold bullion at a substantially greater price than today's free-market level, perhaps $5,000 an ounce? It would be operationally simple as holders could transact directly at regional Federal offices or via authorized precious metal assayers. Admittedly, this suggestion is almost too outrageous to post under the PIMCO logo, but NIRP surely would have elicited a similar reaction a decade ago. But upon reflection, it could be an elegant solution since it flips the boxes on a foreign currency "prisoner's dilemma" (more on this below). Most critically, a massive gold purchase has the potential to significantly boost inflationary expectations, both domestic and foreign. Asset or currency?While never an officially stated policy, there has been a slow-moving, low-intensity currency war taking place over the past decade. The U.S. was the first mover, implementing QE in 2009, which had the effect of depreciating the trade-weighted U.S. dollar (USD) by 16%. Japan was next, implementing "Abenomics" in 2012; this helped depreciate the yen (JPY) versus the USD by over 30% in eight months. Europe went last when Mario Draghi followed through on "whatever it takes" in 2014; the euro devalued versus the USD from peak to trough by 24%. China had pegged the yuan to the USD to help maintain a stable trading environment, however, the increasing value of their currency against their other trading partners was hindering growth, and thus the motivation for a slight realignment last August. The problem the world's major economies now face is that any attempt to depreciate their currencies to improve the terms of trade must effectively come out of the pockets of their partners; this creates a classic prisoner's dilemma. Thus the interesting twist of a Fed gold purchase program. Warren Buffett famously railed against the shiny yellow metal in 2012 when he noted all the gold in the world could be swapped for the totality of U.S. cropland and seven ExxonMobils with $1 trillion left over for "walking-around money." His point was that these assets can generate significant returns while owning gold produces no discernable cash flow. While this observation is certainly true, the rub is that this is not a fair comparison since gold is not an asset; rather, it should be considered an alternate currency. Pundits often describe the five factors that define "money":
By this definition, gold is certainly a form of money, and to Mr. Buffett's point, one also earns no cash flow on paper dollars, euros, yen or yuan. Raising expectationsA massive Fed gold purchase program would differ from past efforts at monetary expansion. Via QE, the transmission mechanism was wholly contained within the financial system; fiat currency was used to buy fiat assets which then settled on bank balance sheets. Since QE is arcane to most people outside of Wall Street, and NIRP seems just bizarre to most non-academics, these policies have had little impact on inflationary expectations. Global consumers are more familiar with gold than the banking system, thus this avenue of monetary expansion might finally lift the anchor on inflationary expectations and their associated spending habits. The USD may initially weaken versus fiat currencies, but other central banks could soon buy gold as well, similar to the paths of QE and NIRP. The impactful twist of a gold purchase program is that it increases the price of a widely recognized "store of value," a view little diminished despite the fact the U.S. relinquished the gold standard in 1971. This is a vivid contrast to the relatively invisible inflation of financial assets with its perverse side effect of widening the income gap. In coda I would respond to the argument that a central bank cannot willfully create inflation – I disagree; it just depends upon how hard one tries. There are plenty of examples ranging from Weimar Germany to Zimbabwe where central banks have unleashed uncontrolled hyperinflations. The more interesting question is not whether the Fed can create a 15% to 20% price spiral, but rather can they implement policies that will result in a somewhat gentle and controlled 2% to 3% inflation rate that will slowly deleverage the U.S. debt load while simultaneously increasing middle class nominal wages. Many people will rightfully dismiss the gold idea as absurd, as just another fanciful strategy to print money; why not just buy oil, houses or some other hard asset? In fact, why fool around with gold; why not just execute helicopter money as originally advertised? I would answer the former by noting that only gold qualifies as money; and as for the latter, fiscal compromise on that order seems like a daydream in Washington today – don't expect a helicopter liftoff anytime soon. Let's be honest; most people thought NIRP was just as nonsensical a few years ago, yet it has now been implemented by six central banks with little evidence it is effective. And while a gold purchase program should qualify as a fairy tale, what is unique here is that it actually occurred with a confirmed positive effect on the U.S. economy. So when the next seat for a Fed governor becomes available, I would nominate Rumpelstiltskin … just a thought. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| These SEC Insider Emails Reveal Why No Bankers Have Gone To Jail Posted: 21 Apr 2016 05:07 PM PDT Back In April 2010, the world was stunned when in what would be the first major case dealing with the fallout from the endemic fraud prevalent during the last housing and credit bubble, the SEC charged Goldman Sachs and Paulson with securities fraud over the infamous Abacus CDO, which was subsequently featured in Michael Lewis' Big Short book and movie. There was also hope that for the first time, bankers - ostensibly from the company that does "God's work" - would go to prison. None of that happened, and instead just a few months later Goldman walked away with a $550 million slap on the wrist, while a young Goldman banker, French citizen Fabrice Tourre, who was in his late 20's when Goldman was quietly colluding with Paulson to package a "time bomb" CDO it knew would explode in just a few months, was the only Goldman banker prosecuted. In 2013, Fabrice Tourre, a low-ranking trader, was found liable for violating securities laws and ordered to pay more than $850,000. He also avoided prison time and is now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago. He was the only banker who was named in the entire Abacus fraud, something which we laughed at long and hard in 2010 because according to the SEC, this meant the 20-year old was the mastermind behind all of Goldman wrongdoing; nobody else at the firm was aware of what had been going on. But what was most appalling and what made it clear that the SEC is a captured organization, was not only that no other banker at Goldman was named, but that absolutely everyone avoided prison time setting a disastrous precedent which demonstrated that when it comes to criminal liability, Wall Street will henceforth have a permanent get out of jail free card. Earlier today, ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger published a story that looks at the evolution of the SEC's collapse, and how from a regulatory agency meant to defend investors, it instead mutated into a captured, crony, revolving door (whose employees all too frequently end up working for the same companies they should be prosecuting) farce, whose only purpose is to protect criminal bankers from prison while handing out paltry fines which ultimately are paid by the company's shareholders while management walks away free. Eisinger tells the story of one SEC lawyer, perhaps the last SEC lawyer with a conscience, James Kidney, who joined the agency in 1986. "He was thirty-nine at the time, having first worked a stint as a journalist. The "steam was elevated" at the agency when he started there, he said. Young lawyers were expected to go after the big names, and they did: the junk-bond king Michael Milken, the insider trader Ivan Boesky, the investment banker Martin A. Siegel."
More importantly, Kidney provided Eisinger "with a cache of internal documents and emails about the Abacus investigation" which demonstrate conclusively just how "captured" the securities regulator truly is. Kidney was assigned to take SEC's investigation against Goldman (and Paulson) and bring the case to trial. But, as Eisinger writes, "tight away, something seemed amiss. He thought that the staff had assembled enough evidence to support charging individuals. At the very least, he felt, the agency should continue to investigate more senior executives at Goldman and John Paulson & Co., the hedge fund run by John Paulson that made about a billion dollars from the Abacus deal. In his view, the SEC staff was more worried about the effect the case would have on Wall Street executives, a fear that deepened when he read an email from Reid Muoio, the head of the SEC's team looking into complex mortgage securities." This is where the email trail proving the SEC should be immediately disbanded and its tasks handed off to an impartial, third-party, ideally private agency, begins: Muoio, who had worked at the agency for years, told colleagues that he had seen the "devasting [sic] impact our little ol' civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing." In this case, Muoio is referring to career criminals who have violated securities laws on countless ocasions, but for whatever reason, he believes that bringing justice to these "real people" is the "least favorite part of the job." Incidentally bringing justice to criminals is the only part of his job, but he believes they deserve a chance because they have "done one bad thing."
To be sure, Kidney has criticized the SEC publicly in the past, and the agency's handling of the Abacus case has been previously described, most thoroughly in a piece by Susan Beck, in The American Lawyer, but the documents provided by Kidney offer new details about how the SEC handled its case against Goldman. As ProPublica writes, the SEC declined to comment on the emails or the Abacus investigation, citing its policies not to comment on individual probes. In a recent interview with me, Muoio stood by the agency's investigation and its case. "Results matter. It was a clear win against a company and culpable individual. We put it to a jury and won," he said. Kidney, for his part, came to believe that the big banks had "captured" his agency — that is, that the SEC, which is charged with keeping financial institutions in line, "had become overly cautious to the point of cowardice." He is right. ProPublica writes that soon after he joined the case, Kidney believed that the evidence the SEC staff had assembled justified charges against more people and he argued for, at the very least, an investigation of higher-level executives.
Specifically, Kidney - just like us 6 years ago - could not understand why SEC staffers were reluctant to investigate Tourre's bosses at Goldman or anyone at Paulson. Charging only Goldman, he said, would send exactly the wrong message to Wall Street. "This appears to be an unbelievable fraud," he wrote to his boss, Luis Mejia. "I don't think we should bring it without naming all those we believe to be liable." His boss, and virtually everyone else at the SEC, disagreed. This is what happened next:
Not only was SEC employee Reid Muoio against persectuing bankers, he was actively working against the case.
Kidney pressed the team to take what he thought were obvious investigative steps. He had been told by a staff attorney in the group that Muoio had vetoed the idea of calling Paulson to testify, and the agency hadn't subpoenaed Paulson's emails initially, relying mainly on the voluntary disclosure of documents. "We didn't get subpoena power until late in the investigation," a staff attorney acknowledged to Kidney in an email sent late in August of 2009.
And that right there is the smoking gun strawman: ignore the "one off" crime because most of the fraud took place because someone was really just too stupid to know otherwise. Even if that someone worked for the firm which prides itself on having a more strict acceptance ratio than Harvard, and where figuring out how to outsmart everyone else on Wall Street, not to mention Congress and Main Street, is a key ingredient of successfully advancing to partner level. Kidney pressed on and pushed the agency to bring charges against Egol, Tourre's superior at Goldman, arguing that the SEC should at least interview him. According to Kidney, Muoio once again hindered the investigation and dismissed the idea, saying that the agency knew what Egol would say. "That's a cardinal sin in an investigation,'' Kidney said that he told Muoio. "You can't assume what somebody will say." Kidney also wanted to go after those who made the most money on the Abacus fraud: John Paulson and more importantly, the person who invented the trade that made John Paulson a billion dollars, Paolo Pellegrini. In late October of 2009, Kidney circulated a long memo arguing that the SEC should consider charging Paulson & Co., John Paulson himself, and Paolo Pellegrini, who was the hedge fund executive who worked on the Abacus deal. "Each of them knowingly participated, as did Goldman and Tourre, in a scheme to sell a product which, in blunt but accurate terms, was designed to fail," Kidney's memo said. "In other words, the current pre-discovery evidence suggests they should be sued for securities fraud because they are liable for securities fraud." Once again, Muoio intervened: Some of Kidney's colleagues initially supported his idea to pursue scheme liability, but Muoio seemed to think that doing so would hurt the agency's solid but narrower case against Goldman. "I continue to have serious reservations about charging Paulson on our facts,'' Muoio wrote. "And I worry that doing so could severely undermine and delay our solid case against Goldman." He was, of course, referring to the "case" in which not a single Goldman banker would be charged criminally, and only a 20 year old trader would see a civil lawsuit filed against him. Muoio's viewpoint, again, prevailed. * * * Muoio, defended himself to ProPublica, and in an interview with Eisinger dismissed Kidney's complaints. "I cannot imagine any basis for claiming 'regulatory capture,' given that I have never worked in industry or finance and given the cases I have made, including very significant cases against banks, auditing firms, companies and senior executives," he said. Well, the basis is the glowing trail of evidence that Muoio, and the SEC, are clearly corrupt, and only a society that is too stupid, or too captured itself, is unwilling to accept it. Kidney, clearly the only lawyer at the SEC with any integrity did not give up:
And then, a miracle happened: someone at the SEC actually did their job and on January 29, 2010, after months of investigation and debate, the SEC provided a Wells notice to Jonathan Egol. Once again, enter banker defendant #1, SEC employee Reid Muoio:
And then another familiar name emerged:
Ah yes, our good old friend, Robert Khuzami, star of such posts as SEC Whistleblower Blows the Whistle on Revolving Door Fraud (Khuzami: You're Outed), Circle Jerk 101: The SEC's Robert Khuzami Oversaw Deutsche Bank's CDO, Has Recused Himself Of DB-Related Matters, the same Khuzami who was General Counsel of one of the the most criminal banks in the world, Deutsche Bank, during the time when Deutsche Bank Hid $12 Billion In Losses To Avoid A Government Bail-Out, In the matter of SEC litigation against DB, Khuzami had no choice but to recuse himself. Against Goldman, however, he made it clear whose interests he protects:
Kidney had lost. "He was offered the job of handling the expert witnesses for the trial but knew what that meant — that he was getting demoted. He declined." And just like that, the only person who actually fought to put criminal bankers behind bars was kicked out of the SEC. He retired in 2014 after becaming disillusioned. Upon retiring, in 2014, he gave an impassioned going-away speech, in which he called the SEC "an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors." * * * As for Goldman, on July 15, 2010, the SEC settled with Goldman for $550 million. Goldman Sachs did not admit any wrongdoing. The SEC wrung an apology out of the bank, which the agency perceived as scoring a victory that critics called inadequate. It would be the only SEC action brought against the bank for its actions in this corner of the mortgage securities markets just before the meltdown, although a Senate investigation uncovered questionable behavior related to other Goldman mortgage securities. The Justice Department recently settled a case with Goldman that charged that the bank had misrepresented mortgage-backed securities. The bank had to pay on the order of $5 billion. The Justice Department did not charge any individuals. To this day, not a single banker has gone to prison for crimes during the last credit bubble. * * * In the conclusion to the Propublica piece, Kidney reflected on why the SEC has so miserably failed in its mission.
And why is that? The answer, of course, came from the very top. In this case Eric Holder who admitted on the record that banks are simply "Too Big To Prosecute"
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| Are stars aligned for gold revaluation -- and is GATA finished? Posted: 21 Apr 2016 02:54 PM PDT 6p ET Thursday, April 21, 2016 Dear Friend of GATA and Gold: Today Zero Hedge posts a couple of items suggesting that central banks are intervening surreptitiously in the markets even more lately to avert deflation or that they should intervene more -- items suggesting an end to gold price and commodity price suppression as central bank policy. The first item is from an anonymous commodity trader who can see no other explanation for the recent rally in commodities: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-20/one-commodity-trader-writes-wha... ... Dispatch continues below ... 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: Such speculation is plausible since, as Eric Scott Husander, the founder of the market data firm Nanex in Winnetka, Illinois, disclosed in 2014, CME Group, operator of the major futures markets in the United States, has been offering volume trading discounts to governments and central banks for secretly trading all major futures contracts on CME Group exchanges and counts governments and central banks among its customers: http://www.gata.org/node/14385 http://www.gata.org/node/14411 The second item at Zero Hedge reports a paper by an analyst for bond house Pacific Investment Management Co., Harley Bassman, advocating that the Federal Reserve should start buying gold to stimulate the economy by devaluing the dollar, as the U.S. government undertook devaluation against gold in 1934: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-21/pimco-economist-has-stunning-pr... Bassman's paper is posted in the clear at PIMCO's Internet site here: https://www.pimco.com/insights/viewpoints/viewpoints/rumpelstiltskin-at-... Such thoughts evoke the paper published in 2012 by the American economists and fund managers Paul Brodsky and Lee Quaintance speculating that central banks were surreptitiously redistributing the world's gold reserves and aimed, upon the scheme's completion, to revalue the monetary metal substantially upward to reliquefy themselves, a paper GATA often has called to your attention: http://www.gata.org/node/11373 Indeed, the idea of an upward gold revaluation to avert debt deflation was also broached in a 2006 paper by the Scottish economist R. Peter W. Millar, called to your attention by GATA the following year -- -- and even by a former member of the Federal Reserve Board, Lyle Gramley, during an interview with Business News Network in Canada in 2008. Though BNN seems to have removed the video of the interview, your secretary/treasurer transcribed the relevant passage when he called it to your attention here: For several reasons your secretary/treasurer long has been inclined to believe that gold price suppression would be followed by an official gold revaluation. First, of course, as Millar noted in 2006 and as Bassman notes now, official gold revaluations have happened before. Second, because official market intervention to suppress prices always causes shortages eventually, that being the lesson of the collapse of the London Gold Pool in March 1968: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Gold_Pool And third, because central banks and governments could not survive any steady erosion of their currencies in favor of gold; their currencies would become vulnerable to quick collapse. As a result central banks and governments would have to get in front of the inevitable and make it seem like their doing and thereby preserve the impression that they remain in control. So if the stars are aligned for an official revaluation of gold, will this nullify GATA's work? Not at all. For as much as the GATA's research long has implied a huge and uncoverable short position in gold underwritten by central banks and thus a much higher price for the monetary metal, and as much as GATA may be placed in the camp of "gold bugs" and gold investors, GATA's objectives have not really been a higher gold price. Rather, GATA's objectives have been free and transparent markets in the monetary metals and commodities; limited, accountable, and democratic government; fair dealing among the nations; and an end to imperialism, whose primary mechanism in recent decades has been currency market rigging, just as it was the primary mechanism of Nazi Germany's exploitation of occupied Europe during World War II: http://www.gata.org/node/10457 http://llco.org/hitlers-beneficiaries-2005-by-gotz-aly/ It will gain the world little if gold's upward revaluation merely begins another, more sustainable round of gold and commodity price suppression and the undermining of free and transparent markets and democracy by central banks and governments, free and transparent markets and democracy being the great engines of human progress and liberty. That's why the questions GATA raises are likely to remain compelling, though we may despair of their ever getting posed by mainstream financial news organizations and market analysts: -- Are central banks trading the gold and commodity markets surreptitiously, directly or through intermediaries, or not? (Of course they are, and GATA has summarized much of the documentation of this trading here -- http://www.gata.org/node/14839 -- though it can never be addressed by people who suppose themselves respectable.) -- If central banks are trading the gold and commodity markets surreptitiously, directly or through intermediaries, is it just for fun -- for example, to see which central bank's trading desk can make the most money by cheating the most investors -- or is it for policy purposes? -- If central banks are trading the gold and commodity markets surreptitiously, directly or through intermediaries, is this trading for the traditional purposes of defeating a potentially competitive world reserve currency, or have these purposes expanded? -- If central banks, creators of infinite money, are surreptitiously trading a market, how can it be considered a market at all, and how can any country or the world ever enjoy a market economy and democracy again? CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer Support GATA 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 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: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The United States of Insolvency Posted: 21 Apr 2016 01:59 PM PDT This post The United States of Insolvency appeared first on Daily Reckoning. This much I have learned about debt after 40 years of writing and study: It is better not to incur it. Once it is incurred, it is better to pay it off. America, we have a problem. We owe more than we can easily repay. We spend too much and borrow too much. Worse, we promise too much. We conjure dollar bills by the trillions — right out of thin air. I won't insist that this can't go on, because it has. I only say that it will eventually stop. I don't know the date, but I believe that I know the reason. It will stop when the world loses confidence in the dollars we owe. Come that moment of truth, the nation will resemble Chicago, a once prosperous polity now trying to persuade its once trusting creditors that it is actually solvent. To understand our financial fix, put yourself in the position of the government. Say you earn the typical American family income, and you spend and borrow as the government does. So assuming, you would earn $54,000 a year, spend $64,000 a year and charge $10,000 to your already slightly overburdened credit card. I say slightly overburdened — your outstanding balance is about $223,000. Of course, MasterCard wouldn't allow you to run up that kind of tab. At an annual percentage rate of 15%, the cost to service a $223,000 balance would absorb 62% of your pretax income. But the government is different from you and me (and Chicago). It has a central bank. The Federal Reserve is the government's Monopoly-money machine. It sets some interest rates and influences many others. It materializes dollars. It regulates — now regiments — the nation's banks. It pulls levers to make the stock market go up. Congress is the source of the Fed's power. The Constitution is the source of Congress's power. The parchment enjoins Congress to coin money and regulate the value thereof. The founders viewed money as a scale or yardstick, something that measures value. The Fed views money as a magic wand, something that creates value. Dollars aren't so much minted these days. Rather, they issue from the Fed's computers in billowing digital clouds. The cost of producing them is only the energy expended on tapping the keys. The Fed emits these electronic greenbacks to attempt to control the course of economic events. It's a heaven-sent monetary system for a big-spending government. You may struggle to pay that midteens rate on your outstanding credit card balance. The Treasury gets by paying an average of just 1.8% on that portion of the debt, held by savers and investors both here and abroad. Defined in this way, we owe $13.9 trillion. The $19 trillion figure ticking upward on the famous National Debt Clock adds the debts the government owes itself. (How does this pseudo bookkeeping work? The Social Security Administration takes in — temporarily — more than it pays out. With the surplus it buys Treasury bonds. The bonds enlarge the debt clock's debt.) It's not so important that the government pays itself on time. What is important is that the government pays its public creditors on time. So cast your eyes on the exact numerical rendering of that slightly smaller sum: $13,903,107,629,266. It is unmanageable. One can assume that the creditors trust the currency in which they expect to be repaid. I wonder why, and for how much longer. The Fed once fought inflation. Now it actually sets out to cause it — about 2% a year is the target. Striving to inflate, it presses down interest rates and rustles up new dollars. From the nation's 18th-century founding until 1971, the dollar was defined as a weight of gold or silver. Americans did business with paper, of course. But these commercial bills and banknotes were convertible into monetary bedrock, the precious metals. The expression sound as a dollar derives from the ring of a gold piece when you plunked it on a counter. Sound money coincided with balanced budgets. Government borrowings climbed in wartime and subsided in peacetime. The pattern was disarranged by depression in the 1930s and war in the 1940s. It was broken by the Johnson Administration's guns and butter and entitlements programs in the 1960s. Richard Nixon administered the coup de grâce on Aug. 15, 1971, when he announced that the dollar would derive its value from the say-so of the government. The Fed could print as many green bills as the traffic would bear. Many applauded that sea change, then and later. Easy money rarely fails to please — at first. It buoys stocks, bonds and commercial real estate. House prices jump, and car sales zoom. Politicians, noticing how a bull market fattens public pension funds, ratchet up the benefits they promise to retirees (a fact that state and federal pensioners are encouraged to remember on Election Day). Periodically, the buzz wears off. What remains is a hangover of debts and promises. The proliferating dollars facilitate heavy borrowing. Ultra-low interest rates mask the cost. I don't ask that we return to some long-lost fiscal and monetary Eden. None has ever existed, even in America. Crises and business cycles are always with us. I merely observe that sound money and a balanced budget were two sides of the coin of American prosperity. Then came magical thinking. Maybe you had a taste of modern economics in school. If so, you probably learned that the federal budget needn't be balanced — it's nothing like a family budget, the teacher would say — and that gold is a barbarous relic. To manage the business cycle, the argument went, a government must have the flexibility to print money, to muscle around interest rates and to spend more than it takes in — in short, to "stimulate." Oh, we have stimulated. Between the fiscal years 2008 and 2012 alone, federal deficits totaled $5.6 trillion. The public debt nearly doubled in the same span of years, to $11.2 trillion. The Federal Reserve tickled $1.6 trillion in new digital dollars into existence. True, our Great Recession proved no Great Depression, but the post-2008 recovery is the limpest on record. A thin cheer went up in January when the deficit (calculated over the 12 preceding months) weighed in at a mere $405 billion, the lowest over any 12-month period since 2008. Only $405 billion. It's not so much, as Washington strums its calculators. Let us pause to reflect that a billion is a thousand million, and that a trillion is a thousand billion — or, alternatively, a million millions. It's a measure of the fix we're in that the billions hardly seem worth talking about. It's tomorrow's trillions — the ones we've grandly promised to pay ourselves — that lie at the heart of the problem. The granddaddy of far-off commitments was Social Security, which dates from the 1930s. Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s and the Affordable Care Act in 2010 duly followed. The debt, as big as it is, is the measure of past spending in excess of tax receipts, a pattern of bad fiscal habits that traces its intellectual roots to John Maynard Keynes and has its dollars-and-cents origins with Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society. What awaits us and our children and their children is the unpaid tab of the future. You can't blame people for not paying attention. America has forever defied the doomsdayers. The very language of government debt is calculated to tranquilize the critical mind. We speak of the Department of the Treasury rather than the Department of the Debt. (There's no net treasure in the Treasury.) We say entitlement instead of taxing Peter to pay Paul and Social Security trust fund when we mean just another ordinary government account at the Department of Debt. (There is no trust fund because there is no division of assets, no accounts containing funds earmarked for you, the citizen, who so faithfully "contributed" your payroll taxes.) Today's miniature interest rates constitute another form of public sedation. You'd suppose the doubling of the debt would jack up the cost of servicing the debt. Nothing of the kind. As the debt has doubled, the rate of interest has halved. In 2007, we owed $5 trillion and paid an average interest rate of 4.8%. Net interest expense: $237 billion. In 2016 we'll owe $14.1 trillion and pay the average interest rate I already mentioned: 1.8%. Net interest expense: $240 billion. It's a wonder we didn't think of this financial perpetual-motion machine about a thousand years ago. Debt per se is neither good nor bad, though less is usually better than more. How it's priced and how it's used are what tips the scales. If chocolate cake cost a penny a slice, the best of us would be tempted to break our diets. Well, government debt is priced at less than 2%, and Washington fell off the wagon years ago. The public debt will fall due someday. (Some of it falls due just about every day.) It will have to be repaid or refinanced. If repaid, where would the money come from? It would come from you, naturally. The debt is ultimately a deferred tax. You can calculate your pro rata obligation on your smartphone. Just visit the Treasury website, which posts the debt to the penny, then the Census Bureau's website, which reports the up-to-the-minute size of the population. Divide the latter by the former and you have the scary truth: $42,998.12 for every man, woman and child, as I write this. In the short term, the debt would no doubt be refinanced, but at which interest rate? At 4.8%, the rate prevailing as recently as 2007, the government would pay more in interest expense — $654 billion — than it does for national defense. At a blended rate of 6.7%, the average prevailing in the 1990s, the net federal-interest bill would reach $913 billion, which very nearly equals this year's projected outlay on Social Security. We always need protection against cockeyed economic experimentation. Once a national consensus on money and debt furnished this protective armor. Money was gold and debt was bad, Americans assumed. Most credentialed economists today will smile at these ancient prejudices. Allow me to suggest that our forebears knew something. Keynes himself would recoil at 0% bank-deposit rates, chronically low economic growth and the towering trillions that we have so generously pledged to one another. (All we have to do now is earn the money to pay them.) How do we escape from our self-constructed fiscal jail? According to the Government Accountability Office, unpaid taxes add up to more than $450 billion a year. Even so, according to the Tax Foundation, Americans spend 6.1 billion hours and $233.8 billion each tax season complying with a federal tax code that runs to 10 million words. Are we quite sure we want no part of the flat-tax idea? An identical low rate on most incomes. No deductions, no H&R Block. Impractical? So is the debt. So is the spending, and the promises to spend more down the road. We need to stop the squandermania. How? By resuming the principled fight that Vivien Kellems waged against the IRS during the Truman Administration. It enraged Kellems, a doughty Connecticut entrepreneur, that she was forced to withhold federal taxes from her employees' wages. She called it involuntary servitude, and she itched to make her constitutional argument in court. She never got that chance, but she published her plan for a peaceful revolution. She asked her readers — I ask mine — to really examine the stub of their paycheck. Observe how much your employer pays you and how much less you take home. Notice the dollars withheld for Medicare, Social Security and so forth. If you are like most of us, you stopped looking long ago. You don't miss the income that you never get to touch. Picking up where Kellems left off, I propose a slight alteration in payday policy. Let each wage-earning citizen hold the whole of his or her untaxed earnings — actually touch them. Then let the government pluck its taxes. "Such a payroll policy," wrote Kellems in her memoir, Taxes, Toil and Trouble, "is entirely legal and if it were universally adopted, in six months we would have either a tax revolution or a startling contraction of the budget!" Black ink, sound money and the spirit of Vivien Kellems are the way forward. "Make America solvent again" is my credo and battle cry. You can fit it on a cap. The post The United States of Insolvency appeared first on Daily Reckoning. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 21 Apr 2016 12:57 PM PDT This post 100 Years of Mismanagement appeared first on Daily Reckoning. There must be some dark corner of Hell warming up for modern, mainstream economists. They helped bring on the worst bubble ever… with their theories of efficient markets and modern portfolio management. They failed to see it for what it was. Then, when trouble came, they made it worse. Lost From the Get-GoBut instead of atoning in a dank cell, these same economists strut onto the stage to congratulate themselves. "The Greatest Depression that could so easily have happened in 2009 but did not is the tribute that the world owes to economics." Wrote Arvind Subramanian in The Financial Times. We were lost from the get-go, trying to interpret the sentence. It is as tangled and puerile as the staggering conceit behind it. Then, Mr. Subramanian sets up the stage props:
He then brushes off the Queen's very sensible question:
Of course, the record doesn't show that the crisis eluded prognostication; any dope could have seen it coming. But the prognosticators who had contributed so mightily to the crisis had blinded themselves with their own claptrap. Still, Mr. Subramanian figures that they "vindicated" the profession in the way they responded to the crisis.
It probably wasn't the point he intended to make, but the Fed does resemble the Soviet era Gosbank – manipulating, meddling, and micro-managing the economy toward destruction. Led by a ScalawagMeanwhile, Congress is doing some Soviet style management too; it is now owner of the nation's largest automobile company and its largest insurance business: "They took their cue from the writings of the academic scribbler of yore – Lord Keynes – and provided massive public demand for goods and services where private demand had collapsed…" We were still gasping for air when, on the 30th of December, columnist Martin Wolf called upon Keynes' ghost again. He, too, shuddered to think how horrible things would have been if the financial authorities had not taken resolute action:
Is there any doubt that Keynes was a scalawag? Civilization flourished for thousands of years before anyone made a living as an economist. Crises came and went. In the 19th century, for example, there were panics followed by depressions in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893. Not one of the depressions seemed worthy of the "great" modifier. Hundreds of banks failed. Civilization didn't seem to care. The rich and powerful took their lumps along with everyone else; most people enjoyed watching them go down. Business went on. Now, almost a hundred years later, it is worth only 3 cents. And only 16 years after economists took their positions at the Federal Reserve came a depression worse than anything the nation had ever seen – at least, it was worse after government economists finished with it.In 1913, on Christmas Eve, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, setting up America's central bank. Only then did economists get their hands on the economy's throat. The dollar was worth about the same thing it had been worth 100 years before. The Great Depression may have been an accident, but the debasement of the dollar certainly was not. It was a matter of policy. Economists, led by Keynes, had the idea that they could spur the economy forward by creating phantom demand – in the form of additional units of purchasing power. The gold standard stood in the way; it was abandoned like a bad neighborhood. First, temporarily, then partially, then, in 1971, completely. The first consumer credit boom came in the '20s… leading to the Great Depression. By the 1980s, 50 years later, Americans had lost their residual fear of debt. Consumer credit boomed again. Then it bubbled. Economists didn't understand what was going on. They rarely do. But they had created a hundred-year flood of consumer debt. Now, they congratulate themselves; households sink… but civilization floats. Regards, Bill Bonner P.S. Be sure to sign up for The Daily Reckoning — a free and entertaining look at the world of finance and politics. The articles you find here on our website are only a snippet of what you receive in The Daily Reckoning email edition. Click here now to sign up for FREE to see what you're missing. The post 100 Years of Mismanagement appeared first on Daily Reckoning. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Impossibility of a Soft Landing Posted: 21 Apr 2016 12:30 PM PDT This post The Impossibility of a Soft Landing appeared first on Daily Reckoning. While the robo-traders play tag with the chart points, it is worth considering how it will all end. After all, at today's close the broad market (S&P 500) was valued at 24.3X LTM earnings per share. That is, valuations are in the nosebleed section of history, but financial history has tumbled into the sub-basement of future possibilities. Stated differently, every first year spread-sheet jockey knows that what drives LBO models and NPV calculations is the assumed terminal year growth rate. Get imaginative enough about the possibilities out there, and you can come up with a swell return on today's investment even if the next few years look a little rocky—-or even alot so. So never mind that earnings have fallen five straight quarters and at $86.53 per share are now down 18.5% from their September 2014 LTM peak. Also ignore the fact that this quarter will be down 10% and that there is no rational basis for a rebound any time soon. But somewhere behind the robo-machines which line the casino there is a corporals guard of carbon units buying what Wall Street is dumping. And whether they know it or not, at 24.3X they are betting on one whopping big terminal growth rate on the far side of the deflationary turmoil now afflicting the global economy. Here's the thing, however. The current deflationary wave is not a one-time detour which will pass in due course. Per the above analogy, we do not have merely two years of bad numbers in a 10-year LBO model with a robust terminal value at the end. What we have, instead, is merely the initial shock waves from the actions of central banks which are trashing the joint. Lurking on the other side, therefore, is unfathomable risk, not extraordinary growth. In a word, the stock market is not worth even 15X its current earnings or 1300. At length, the carbon units out there catching today's bouncing dead cats will thank their lucky stars if their losses are only 40% from here. The historical dead-end ahead is dramatically evident in the case of the BOJ and its lunatic detour into NIRP. And Japan is only following central bank policies recommended by Keynesians from the West and which are being followed, except for small nuances of degree, by the ECB and the Fed as well. The very last place on earth that can afford negative interest rates, however, is Japan. It's an old age colony lapsing toward fiscal bankruptcy. In hardly a few years it will desperately need buyers for its government bonds who don't count their wealth in yen. Yet Kuroda-san has just reiterated to the Japanese parliament that he can go deeper into NIRP if necessary or buy more securities under QEE——even if that turns out to involve upwards of $50 billion per year of ETFs in lieu of scarce Japanese government bonds. And "scarce" is hardly an adequate term. The BOJ is now buying more than 100% of Japan's new fiscal debt issues, and those in turn account for nearly 50% of current spending. Yet after the madmen at the BOJ have purchased their monthly quotas, there are few bonds left to be found.
So the 10-year government bond is trading at negative 13 basis points. It has become so scarce that there is occurring a comical chase for yield in what remains of the Japanese government bond market. To wit, in order to find "positive" yield Japanese institutional investors are racing out towards the very end of the yield curve, where they are scooping up 40-year bonds at a yield of just 29 basis points. That's just plain hideous. Here is what the old age colony on the Pacific Rim looks like 40 years from now. Already baked into the demographic cake is a40% reduction in the size of Japan's working age population. Japan's current working age population of 75 million is already staggering under the weight of current taxation and high living costs. But when it reaches just 45 million by 2060 the math will become prohibitive.
In other words, the cult of ultra-low interest rates and the specious Keynesian axiom that prosperity can always be had with more debt is literally destroying Japan's capacity for rational governance. In fact, what Japan needs is just the opposite of NIRP—–that is, high interest rates and unusually strong rewards for deferral of current consumption. In preparation for its built-in demographic time bomb, for example, Japan's politicians should be running fiscal surpluses. And they might be far more inclined if they faced the proverbial posse of bond vigilantes, not a herd of desperate bond managers chasing 29 basis points of yield into financial oblivion. Likewise, Japan's households should be salting away extra-ordinary amounts of savings, but just the opposite has occurred. By 2015 Japan's famed high rate of household savings, which had been nearly 20% in the early 1980s, had hit the zero bound.
So at some point not too far down the road Japan Inc. will need to borrow from foreigners, but there will be no takers at 29 basis points for 40 year debt owed by a an old age home that was once a nation. In short, Japan's financial system is virtually guaranteed to collapse, making trillions of government debt worthless, among much other carnage. Yes, the BOJ might even cancel the trillions of JGBs it holds when the crisis becomes desperate in some Keynesian rendition of the Debtors Jubilee. But that's just the point—-the mayhem on the other side does not bespeak a world in which terminal growth rates merit a 24.3X multiple. Indeed, when Japan becomes the first to default from too much Keynesian goodness, no sovereign bond on the planet will be investible at anything near today's absurdly low yields. So the embedded losses in the world's bond markets are already in the tens of trillions. The ridiculous state of Japan's government bond market is explained more fully in a nearby post, yet there is nothing extraordinary about it. It's all part of the daily fare emanating from all points on the planet. Another such dead-end is found in the story on the mother of all payables stretches now happening in the Red Ponzi. Struggling under $30 trillion of unpayable financial debt accrued during what amounts to a historical heartbeat of frenzied borrowing, China's businesses are now coping with the inexorable morning-after deflation by means of a time-tested maneuver of last resort. To wit, they are attempting to pay their bankers by stiffing their suppliers. As shown below, payables now average an incredible 192 days in China's business system. And that's why its whole house of cards is likely to collapse with a bang, not a Beijing managed whimper. At some point, this daisy chain of billions of unpaid claims will far exceed even the capacity of China's state-deputized bankers and its growing fleet of paddy wagons to keep in line.
Indeed, this surge in payables has two untoward implications. The first is that the myth of Beijing's capacity for omniscient and unfailing economic governance will be shattered. All along, it has been a case of mistaken identify—–a failure by Wall Street propagandists of "growth" to understand that doping out trillions of credit through a state controlled banking system merely funds recordable spending and delivers fixed assets; it does not generate efficient growth or sustainable wealth. But the red suzerains of Beijing are already proving in spades that when the music of credit expansion finally must stop, they will have no clue about what to do or capacity to execute if they did. In that respect, it now appears that in the first quarter China's banking system generated new credit at a $4 trillion annual rate or nearly 40% of GDP. In turn, China's so-called "iron rooster" was given a new lease on life as a result of even more artificial demand for capital investment and infrastructure that is already massively overbuilt. Accordingly, during March, China's steel production hit an all-time high, causing prices to temporarily rise, and closed mills to re-open. So much for the credit restraint promised by China's central bank and for the 150 million tons of capacity closures announced by the apparatchiks in Beijing a few months back. In lashing itself to Mr. Deng's printing presses, the Chinese communist party made a pact with the financial devil. But now it is far too late to stop the Ponzi, meaning that another central bank driven debt implosion is fully scheduled and waiting to happen. And it won't be contained within the boundaries of the Middle Kingdom. In a post we entitled "Red Ponzi Imploding—-How It Will Turn The EM Into A Wasteland", author Douglas Bulloch explained,
Only the most dunderheaded bull could argue that the US economy is decoupled from the entirety of China and the great EM supply chain which has feasted on its excesses. But for want of doubt, just consider its implications for another deflationary Q1 earnings announcement from this morning. To wit, Coca-Cola (KO) reported that Q1 sales were down 4% from prior year and that's Coke's 12th quarterly sales decline in the past 13 quarters. Likewise, net income fell by more than 5%. But KO is not trading at 27X earnings because the punters think America's aging baby-boomers are going to suddenly reacquire a yearning for Coke. Instead, it trades at current nosebleed levels because they believe that the inhabitants of China and the EM in their billions will get hooked on KO's sugary fizz. Needless to say, even a hint that the great China/EM credit boom of the last 20 years is rolling-over into a deflationary slump would swiftly drain the fizz out of the KO stock price. That's because what lies beneath is deflationary financial results flattered by the wildly inflationary PEs now extant in the casino. During the last four years, Coke's sales and net income have steadily declined. Yet its PE has surged from an already hefty 17X to 27X. That is, going backwards it generated $50 billion of higher market cap.
As we said, mind the terminal growth assumption. The warning signs are everywhere that what lies on the other side is not a world of 24.3X valuations. Regards, David Stockman P.S. Be sure to sign up for The Daily Reckoning — a free and entertaining look at the world of finance and politics. The articles you find here on our website are only a snippet of what you receive in The Daily Reckoning email edition. Click here now to sign up for FREE to see what you're missing. The post The Impossibility of a Soft Landing appeared first on Daily Reckoning. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 21 Apr 2016 09:43 AM PDT Jim/Bill, The minute NY opens, someone (Fed?) sells $2 billion on paper contracts… to stem a MASSIVE overnight rally that took gold up $23 and Silver up $ .70. The danger in that play is… they have to buy back the shorts at some point! If the price recovers later today on bargain hunting, you... Read more » The post Jim’s Mailbox appeared first on Jim Sinclair's Mineset. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| RON PAUL: DOLLAR COLLAPSE, POLITICAL CORRUPTION, & PROTECTING LIBERTY Posted: 21 Apr 2016 09:35 AM PDT IN THIS INTERVIEW: - Presidential elections are meaningless ►0:58 - Who are the "Powers that Be" ►3:28 - Economic collapse ahead - the Fed is panicking ►5:41 - Why is the Fed not audited? ►7:21 - Your role in protecting liberty ►8:58 The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks... [[ 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 : Last Warning To America - Dollar Will Collapse 100% In 28 May 2016 Posted: 21 Apr 2016 09:16 AM PDT peter schiff : Last Warning To America - Dollar Will Collapse 100% In 28 May 2016 The dollar collapse will be the single largest event in human history. This will be the first event that will touch every single living person in the world. All human activity is controlled by money. Our wealth,our... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit http://www.newsbooze.com or http://www.figanews.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Riksbank Announces the End of QE Posted: 21 Apr 2016 08:45 AM PDT This post Riksbank Announces the End of QE appeared first on Daily Reckoning. And now… today's Pfennig for your thoughts… Good day, and a tub thumpin’ Thursday to you! Front and center this morning. The big event today is the European Central Bank (ECB) meeting that is taking place as my fat fingers fly across the keyboard! Like I saw earlier this week, regarding the ECB meeting, I really don’t see Draghi, doing anything new and exciting at this meeting. Yes, I’m sure he’ll drag the standard old lines out and march them down the street, like: “Should we need to, there’s more stimulus that can be added.” The euro is holding its own going into the ECB meeting, after getting sold yesterday as the day went along. The two currencies that hold their collective breaths every time the ECB meets, the krone and krona (Norway and Sweden) walk on eggs and try to get through the ECB meeting without having to react positively or negatively. (Mostly negatively) And it’s no different today, especially for the Swedish krona, which had just dealt with the Riksbank stating that their QE was going to end. But the krona rally going on could very well get scalped should ECB President Mario Draghi decide to talk incessantly today. Well, the real movers today are the price of oil, and the precious metals. So, let’s start with oil. The price of oil jumped $4 in the last 24 hours on the news that the U.S. Production dropped to a 17 month low, and the Iraqi Deputy Oil Minister, said that there will be an OPEC production meeting next month. And once again the hopes of a production freeze will rise. But I just don’t see it happening folks. These oil producing countries have been cheating on oil production for years, why would they want to freeze production? Yes, to get the price back up, but I think they are comfortable with making up the difference with volume. I say that with tongue in cheek, and hopefully you got the joke… After all my talking about how there was a shortage of silver, and how it was going to eventually be the thing that lights a fire under silver to get it going in the right direction again, things are coming around, and silver is outperforming the other precious metals. Don’t look now but silver has $17 handle again! Year to date, silver is up more than 25%, while gold is up a respectable 18.74%, and platinum has really begun to push the metals appreciation envelope. All this scares the bejeebers out of me, for the last time we saw all this appreciation in the precious metals, the price slam hit them. And I certainly don’t want to see that again, or have to talk about it without calling the price manipulators names, and cursing till I’m blue in the face! But how about silver? Back in the day 2001 through 2011, when the metals were pushing the appreciation envelope daily, I had done some research and found that silver had outperformed gold in seven of the 10 years it was rallying. Could we be returning to those days? Need I remind you that silver is outperforming gold right now. The two star currencies this week until this morning, The Russian ruble and Chinese renminbi, are not faring so well this morning. I find the ruble move interesting and curious, as the ruble normally bounces on a line with the price of oil, and I talked above about how the price of oil soared higher by $4 in the past 24-hours. So, what’s up with the ruble? I’ll find out today, and forward a note to Chris, Mike or Frank, whomever is going to be picking up the Pfennig while I fly home tomorrow. And the Chinese renminbi? Who knows what’s going on there with the currency? The Outflows data printed last night, but they were in line with the previous month’s data and not out of line with expectations, so the large depreciation in the renminbi overnight had just be an adjustment to the large appreciations the renminbi booked up to today, this week. It’s opposites day for the Aussie and N. Zealand dollars. For the most part of the last two weeks, we’ve seen the N. Zealand dollar/kiwi outperform the Aussie dollar (A$), but today the roles are reversed. There is a whispering campaign going on right now regarding the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) and when they will cut rates again. And the consensus is fourth QTR. And they are selling kiwi now? Seems strange to me folks, but from the smallish size of the selling, one could believe it to be profit taking and not rate related selling. The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Gov. Stevens, followed up the RBA’s meeting minutes the day before with some updated information. I like this guy, and for a Central Banker he’s not so bad. Stevens slammed calls for central banks to directly pump cash into the pockets of households and governments to resurrect moribund global economic growth, warning that such “helicopter money” drops would be almost impossible to stop once they start. You’ve got to love this guy! He also took on the viewpoint of Lawrence Summers, and just for doing that he gets a Gold Star from me today! I’ve got a real treat for you today. I’ve done a lot of talking about the coming recession in the U.S. and how the train is departing for Recessionville, etc. and I know all too well, that I’ve been early with these calls before, and will probably be with this one too. And I welcome the recession. And so does publishing guru, Bill Bonner, and that’s our treat for today. Here’s Bill talking about recessions:
Yes, I thought I would talk about what I think is the coming recession, instead of the Data Cupboard today. Oh, and for those of you keeping score at home, my GDP Tracker for the first QTR GDP here in the U.S. is pointing to a 0.3% increase. Hmmm.. 0.3%? So, if we take out the “adjustment” the U.S. made last year to include R&D to GDP, first QTR GDP would print negative, and we would be well on our way to Recessionville! The problem as I see it, is that past recessions, since the turn of the millennium have been squashed by the Fed and not allowed to run their course through the economy. This, to me, is like continuing to put one more thing in a small closet, and then one day, all that stuff come crashing out of the closet. The Fed kept squashing the recessions, and putting them in the small closet. Until one day, that’s when we’ll have a Minsky moment. At last check, gold was up $14.83 this morning, and has passed the $1,250 figure again. Will gold finally take that figure out, and leave it standing in the middle of the road, in the rear view mirror? That’s the question for today and then if it does hold the line, then the question goes to tomorrow and so on. Recall, that the most recent ascent of gold past $1,250 lasted two days, and then WHACK! So, like I said above, this all scares the bejeebers out of me. Sort of like in a horror film when the person know they shouldn’t open the door, but they do it anyway! HA Longtime readers may recall me talking about how one day, the retirement benefits were going to have to be adjusted because of a lack of funding and bad management, etc. (numerous reasons).. Well, this article, which can be found on Zerohedge.com, is all about a real problem developing with the Central States Pension. Uh-Oh. You can read the entire article here, or, here’s your snippet:
Chuck again. My dad was a Teamster, and his pension was administered by the CSPF. This is one time I’m glad he’s not here any longer, so that he doesn’t have to see this happening . That’s it for today. I hope you have a tub thumpin’ Thursday! Be good to yourself! Regards, Chuck Butler P.S. Be sure to sign up for The Daily Reckoning — a free and entertaining look at the world of finance and politics. The articles you find here on our website are only a snippet of what you receive in The Daily Reckoning email edition. Click here now to sign up for FREE to see what you're missing. The post Riksbank Announces the End of QE appeared first on Daily Reckoning. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gold and Silver are on the Cusp of a Massive Rally! Posted: 21 Apr 2016 08:20 AM PDT Gold and silver have more or less confirmed they have bottomed and are ready for a multi-year rally. Their trend has not fully ‘reversed’ to the upside yet but the market breadth and internals for the precious metals sector are very bullish. My subscribers know that I am ‘bullish’ on precious metals and believe that they will be the best performing ‘asset class’ within the next three to five years for those who can only buy long (profit from rising prices). There are a few more big opportunities unfolding in other assets also but that is not what this article focuses on. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gold, Silver Blow Off in Progress but 'Launch Phase' Confirmed Posted: 21 Apr 2016 08:13 AM PDT On March 4 we reviewed the technical reasons why the gold sector was launching as opposed to blowing off. This, after articles began appearing calling the rise to that point a doomed parabolic blow off using daily charts. Those calling it a blow off were confused; silver in spring 2011 was a blow off in the terminal sense. But when a parabolic move comes off a bottom, it is an impulsive thrust to change the trend, possibly ending the bear market. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 21 Apr 2016 08:04 AM PDT Finance and Eco. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Harry Dent: Stock Market 70% Crash By Late 2017 – Gold $400-$800 Posted: 21 Apr 2016 06:22 AM PDT FRA Co-founder, Gordon T. Long is joined by Harry Dent to have a detailed discussion about the state of the global economy and how investors can be prepare themselves for the turmoils to come. Harry S. Dent, Jr. is the Founder of Dent Research, an economic forecasting firm specializing in demographic trends. His mission is “Helping People Understand Change”. Using exciting new research developed from years of hands-on business experience, Mr. Dent offers unprecedented and refreshingly understandable tools for seeing the key economic trends that will affect your life, your business, and your investments over the rest of your lifetime. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Stocks, Dollar, Oil and Gold - What a Difference a Couple of Months Makes Posted: 21 Apr 2016 06:14 AM PDT My what a difference a couple of months makes. Several months ago everyone was convinced that stocks were starting a protracted bear market. Many expected it to be even worse than the last one in 2008/09. A couple of months ago everyone was calling for 110-120 on the dollar index. A couple of months ago everyone knew that oil was going to the low 20’s or even into the teens. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 21 Apr 2016 05:56 AM PDT Gold and silver traders are no doubt on the edge of their seats as economists shake their heads (that is, the small minority of them who have noticed) as precious metals appear to be staging an impressive breakout that has been a long time in coming. It should be interesting to see where things go from [...] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 21 Apr 2016 02:57 AM PDT Perth Mint Blog. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| President Trump? President Clinton? Gold Up in Both Scenarios Posted: 21 Apr 2016 01:00 AM PDT Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton may have very little in common, but Barry Allan, vice chair of mining for Mackie Research Capital, says if either moves into the White House, the U.S. dollar will fall and gold will rise. A higher gold price bodes well for gold equities, and in this interview with The Gold Report, Allan and his colleague Ryan Hanley share the names of some of their top picks for this environment. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Stocks or US Dollar About to Enter a Bear Market Posted: 20 Apr 2016 05:11 AM PDT The first month and a half of 2016 were brutal for the U.S. equity market, as the major averages plunged over 10%. The culmination of the decline came on Feb 11th when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1.6%, and the S&P 500 decreased 1.2%. Since then, the market has managed to hobble back to its 2015 closing level, leaving major averages relatively flat for the year. But to understand where the market is heading from here we need to recognize what caused the selloff in early 2016 and what led to the recent rebound. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Silver Price Breakout, Shanghai Gold Exchange, Bitcoin and the Web Bot - Video Posted: 20 Apr 2016 05:05 AM PDT Transcript Excerpt: I did so Wednesday April 20th 2016 its 7 a.m. London time so I'm really video today I'll be talking about Bitcoin silver gold of course as well and the new Shanghai remain be denominated gold and precious metals contracts yesterday the Shanghai Gold Exchange started fix Windows yet you want or remembering denominated precious metals contracts and the EU there's been a lot of talk in the you know the Internet in the precious metals blogs that you know this is the reason why you know silver had such a great day yesterday was that almost you know like four percent at one point broke about $17 gold as well did well even though we haven't broken due to |
There are two reasons for bringing this propaganda from Basher Central to the attention of readers. First of all, there is the obvious one: attempting to discourage the People from acquiring/accumulating the Peoples’ Money. This suggests that the banksters are still more fearful regarding silver (and their depleted inventories) than gold.
China's Economic Recovery Masking Financial Risks, Fitch Says … Are We Heading Back Into China Markets Turmoil? … -Bloomberg
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