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Download the Free Lear Gold & Silver Daily Today! Stay on top of the latest breaking commodities market news, coin prices, real time charts and special promotions from Lear Capital's “Lear Gold and Silver Daily” app for both iOS and Android devices . The Lear Gold and Silver Daily app is a special new benefit brought to you by Lear Capital at no additional cost.
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By Greg Hunter's USAWatchdog.com Will physical gold and silver prices ever break free of manipulation and price suppression? Renowned gold expert Andrew Maguire with Tom Coughlin, who is CEO of Kinesis that will be rolling out a gold backed currency in the fall, both say yes. So, what is it about? Coughlin explains,
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By Avi Gilburt
For those that follow me regularly, you will know that I have been tracking a set up for the GLD as a proxy for gold. I believe that the GLD can outperform the general equity market once we confirm a long term break out has begun, and I still think we can see it in occur in 2018. This week, I will provide an update to the GLD. While I have gone on record as to why I do not think the GLD is a wise long-term investment hold, I will still use it to track the market movements.
I want to start this write-up to dispel the notion of the metals being a “safe haven,” as many in the media are now parroting. I have discussed this topic many times in the years I have been writing, but I just want to set everyone straight on this issue as it rears its ugly head yet again.
Every time the media sees the metals rally when the stock market declines, they begin to parrot the ridiculous claim that the metals are a safe haven for market volatility. Anyone who makes such a claim knows nothing of market history. If they did, they would not ever make such a claim.
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Let's imagine a model in which the marketers of data distribute some of their immense profits to the users who created and thus "own" the data being sold for a premium.
It's not exactly news that Facebook, Google and other "free" services reap billions of dollars in profits by selling data mined/collected from their millions of users. As we know, If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold, also phrased as if the service is free, you are the product.
Correspondent GFB recently asked, why aren't Facebook et al. sharing a slice of the profits reaped from users' data with the users who create the data?Given the enormous data processing capabilities of these tech giants, it's certainly not a technical issue to credit each user a micro-payment when the data they create and thus "own" (since the creator of any digital product is by rights the owner of that product, including data sold to marketers) is sold.
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If targeting political extremes generates the most profit, then that's what these corporations will pursue.
As many of you know, oftwominds.com was falsely labeled propaganda by the propaganda operation known as ProporNot back in 2016. The Washington Post saw fit to promote ProporNot's propaganda operation because it aligned with the newspaper's view that any site that wasn't pro-status quo was propaganda; the possibility of reasoned dissent has vanished into a void of warring accusations of propaganda and "fake news" --which is of course propaganda in action.
Now we discover that profit-maximizing data-mining (i.e. Facebook and Google) can--gasp--be used for selling ideologies, narratives and candidates just like dog food and laundry detergent. The more extreme and fixed the views and the closer the groups are in size (i.e. the closer any electoral contest), the more profitable the corporate data-mining becomes.
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From Jim Rickards in The Daily Reckoning:
Despite the absence of any empirical support, Fed governors and staff economics persist in their reliance on the Phillips Curve, which predicts that low unemployment leads to rising inflation. U.S. unemployment at around 4% is in fact at 17-year lows.
The Fed insists that the time to tighten monetary conditions is now, before the inflation emerges.
Yet as I’ve explained many times, the Phillips Curve bears no correspondence to reality. The 1960s were characterized by low unemployment and rising inflation. The late 1970s were characterized by high unemployment and high inflation. The 2010s have been characterized by low unemployment and low inflation.
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Economic pleasant surprises are in the past, as is the buildup of the balance sheet. The future is deleveraging.
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The Return Of Gold March 8 (King World News) – Multi-billionaire Hugo Salinas Price: There is a lot of commentary going around the world, regarding Trump’s initiation of a “Trade War” to rebuild America’s industries. Trump thinks that tariffs will do the trick, and stop the rest of the world from taking unfair advantage of the US by selling their goods to the US in exchange for lots of US dollars. According to Trump, this nefarious behavior on the part of the rest of the world is causing a h-u-u-u-ge Trade Deficit, sending hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country. Trump’s view is that this is just plain “unfair”…
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So who's holding the hot potato of systemic risk now? Everyone.
One of the greatest con jobs of the past 9 years is the status quo's equivalence of risk and volatility: risk = volatility: so if volatility is low, then risk is low. Wrong: volatility once reflected specific short-term aspects of risk, but measures of volatility such as the VIX have been hijacked to generate the illusion that risk is low.
But even an unmanipulated VIX doesn't reflect the true measure of systemic risk, a topic Gordon Long and I discuss in our latest program, The Game of Risk Transfer.
The financial industry has reaped enormous "guaranteed" gains by betting against volatility. As volatility steadily declined over the past two years, billions of dollars were reaped by constantly betting that volatility would continue declining.
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From Jim Rickards at The Daily Reckoning:
Yesterday, the Fed released the minutes from its January Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting.
The minutes revealed that most members expect higher economic growth ahead, indicating that “further gradual policy firming would be appropriate.”
Stocks initially rallied when the report was released, since it didn’t appear to raise fears of rapidly rising inflation. It seemed to indicate only a gradual path of rate hikes. The Dow surged 300 points after the report came out.
But the bond market took the report with more urgency. The bond market indicated the Fed might be more aggressive, possibly raising rates as many as four times this year. Yields on the 10-year Treasury spiked to 2.95% — a four-year high.
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“The endlessly compelling notion that risk has magically vanished as the result of financial sorcery is now i
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US federal taxes have been cut for corporations and most households. Foreign investors are piling into US stocks. Surely this is all great news? Not so fast
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By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
Money manager Michael Pento says recently rising interest rates are signaling big trouble for the economy. Pento contends, “There are so many things that can go wrong with rising interest rates. First of all, you have to understand that the permabulls that you hear on CNBC will tell you there is nothing wrong with rising interest rates. It is a symbol of growth. If you look at industrial production and retail sales for January, they were negative. So, rising rates are occurring, not because of growth, they are caused by insolvency concerns. That is the key metric here, and they are credit risks and insolvency concerns.”
Who is insolvent? Pento says, “Europe is insolvent. The United States is insolvent. . . . We have $21 trillion in debt. That’s seven times our revenue. So, we are technically insolvent. You haven’t seen anything yet because as interest rates rise, debt service expenses rise. . . . Certainly, beyond a shadow of doubt, the Bank of Japan is insolvent.” ...
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Banks in many EU countries still have huge amounts of dodgy debts on their balance sheets. In some places, it’s clear that the financial crisis never ended.
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It feels like were at the point in the “correction” cycle in which the mining stocks are reluctantly going lower. I also believe that aggressive hedge funds looking to buy at this level are trying to push the stocks down in early trading in order to induce remaining weak hands to sell in their bids. Tuesday (March 20th) is a perfect example. Several of the stocks I own were hammered early and then snapped-back during the course of the day. As an example, USAU opened at US$1.84 but was slammed down to $1.75. It rebounded to close down only 2 cents at $1.80. This was despite sideways movement in gold after gold was hit in early morning trading.
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March 25 (King World News) – Egon von Greyerz: “Is this it? Is the bull market finished and are the good times really over? Well, they very well could be. We are looking at a world which is rotten to the core, a world that is built on debt which will never be repaid. And a debt which is artificially supporting $100s of trillions of assets and quadrillions if we include derivatives. The supposedly most powerful economy in the world (the US) is now so indebted that it needs to fight the whole world in all kinds of different wars for its survival, with the latest being a trade war…
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The Great Fantasy
John Williams of shadowstats.com has a long-term tradition of trying to hold US government data reporting agencies and financial presstiutes accountable, but as in every aspect of US reporting fantasies prevail over reality. For example, according to the Federal Reserve and the presstitute financial press, US inflation is less than 2 percent. Here is the Chapwood index, based on actually going out and purchasing items in the inflation basket: http://www.chapwoodindex.com As for the great consumer economy we hear about, here are the IRS statistics of the distribution of wage earners by level of net compensation: https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2016 50 percent of wage earners had net compensation less than $30,534 in 2016. The rich are a tiny percent of the population and cannot sustain a consumer economy.
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Alas, fakery isn't actually a solution to fiscal/financial crisis.. This chart of "debt securities and loans"--i.e. total debt in th
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As we get ready to kickoff trading at the start of a new week, today the man who has become legendary for his predictions on QE and historic moves in currencies, told King World News that this ticking time bomb that represents a staggering 1,070-times all central bank gold will unleash the next global crisis.
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Should this surprise anyone?
An interesting study by a Phd candidate at the University of Chicago is being released which shows a statistically high incidence in taxi trips between the NY Fed and big NY banks clustered around FOMC meetings:
Mr. Finer writes that “highly statistically significant patterns in New York City yellow taxi rides suggest that opportunities for information flow between individuals present at the New York Fed and individuals present at major commercial banks increase around” meetings of the interest-rate setting FOMC.
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts sent me an article by Catherine Austin Fitts and asked if I had read it. The article is titled, “The State of America’s Pension Funds.” The article is worth reading, though I believe Ms. Fitts underestimates significantly the degree to which political and Wall Street criminality – along with money management incompetence – has infected and destroyed the U.S. pension system – both public and private. Furthermore, I believe she errs in her believe that the pension crisis can be fixed.
I’ve re-posted below my view of the looming pension system melt-down that I shared with Dr. Roberts.
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by Nomi Prins:
Markets were up again big today and volatility was down. But we haven’t seen the last of rising volatility, nor of the central banks’ attempts to thwart it. This week, new Fed Chair Jerome Powell will be giving his first congressional testimony, and you can be sure that markets are waiting on his words with bated breath. Before his testimony, the Fed will be releasing its Monetary Policy Report, which will also give an indication to the direction of Fed policy. Because these will be his first official comments as Fed chair, Powell will want to both make a personal mark and make sure markets don’t panic over his remarks. I believe he will temper his comments to neutralize any negative market impact the report could have. ...
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If a currency can't be converted on demand into the underlying commodity, it's not "backed by oil," it's just another form of control fraud.
The broke and broken country of Venezuela appears to be the first nation-state to issue a cryptocurrency token (the petro) as a means of escaping the financial black hole that's consuming its economy: Maduro Launches Oil-Backed Crypto "For The Welfare Of Venezuela".
For context, here is a chart of the black market (i.e. real-world) value of the Venezuela's fiat currency, the bolivar: a 100,000 bolivar note is worth somewhere around 40 cents USD (US dollar), i.e. near zero. (Venezuela maintains a fantasy-official USD/bolivar exchange rate that has no relation to the actual purchasing-power value of Venezuela's fiat currency.)
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The central banks'/states' power to maintain a permanent bull market in stocks and bonds is eroding.
There is nothing natural about the stability of the past 9 years. The bullish trends in risk assets are artificial constructs of central bank/state policies. As these policies are reduced or lose their effectiveness, the era of artificial stability is coming to a close.
The 9-year run of Bull-trend stability is ending as a result of a confluence of macro dynamics:
1. Central banks are under pressure to reduce, end or reverse their unprecedented monetary stimulus, and the consequences are unpredictable, given the market's reliance on the certainty that "central banks have our back" is ending.
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The tragedy is so few act when the collapse is predictably inevitable, but not yet manifesting in daily life.
That chill you feel in the financial weather presages an unprecedented--and for most people, unexpectedly severe--winter of discontent. Rather than sugarcoat what's coming, let's speak plainly for a change: none of the promises that have been made to you will be kept.
This includes explicit promises to provide income security and healthcare entitlements, etc., and implicit promises that don't need to be stated: a currency that holds its value, high-functioning public infrastructure, etc.
Nearly "free" (to you) healthcare: no.
Generous public pensions: no.
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Click through for the rest of Jim's post and the chart.