Oikonomika Blog

Ron Paul: The Movie

2011-12-26T21:44:00.000+02:00

An Introduction to Austrian Economics with Israel Kirzner

2011-12-23T09:31:00.000+02:00

Israel Kirzner is an Austrian economist and one of the world's foremost experts on Ludwig von Mises's methodology and thought.
Here he speaks at a Future of Freedom Foundation event on December 21, 1996 and provides a good general overview of Austrian Economics, touching on the concepts of imperfect knowledge, the origin of entrepreneurial motive, spontaneous order, and the "fatal conceit" of attempting to centrally plan economic orders.

Road Map to Sound Money: A Legislative Hearing on H.R. 1098 and Restoring the Dollar

2011-09-17T22:03:00.000+03:00

Professor Antal Fekete outlines the gold-suppression, bond-support scheme

2011-09-12T13:00:00.000+03:00

In a two-part essay posted at 24hGold, the economist Antal Fekete provides a compelling interpretation of the gold price suppression scheme, which is also a scheme for the support of U.S. government bonds.
Fekete writes:

"The government has the following desiderata:
1) To have a floor below the bond price.
2) To have a ceiling above the gold price.
"Indeed, without such a floor and ceiling, the bluffing epitomized by check-kiting could be called, and the international monetary system would unravel.
"To promote these desiderata, the bond and the gold markets are manipulated. It is true that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve prefer not to play a direct role in it. Speculators are induced to do it for them through the lure of risk-free profits.
"Simply put, the role of the derivatives market is to make phantom bonds available to buy, and phantom gold available to sell, for the benefit of speculators. It is no problem to make speculators want to buy phantom bonds. They have the incentives. They know that the Federal Reserve is going to buy, rain or shine. This offers a risk-free opportunity for profits. All the speculators have to do is to pre-empt Federal Reserve purchases -- that is, to buy beforehand. So let them.
"The tricky part is how to make speculators want to sell phantom gold. This problem is solved by setting up a gold mine as a front, beefing it up as the world's largest gold-mining concern, and letting it introduce a phony hedge plan."

Fekete adds:
"Clandestine government policy to manipulate the bond and gold markets is revealed by statistics on the number of outstanding contracts in derivatives, showing an inordinate open interest in bonds on the long side and in gold on the short side. Neither has any rhyme or reason to exist, in view of the underlying economic reality. What is more, the long interest in bond and short interest in gold derivatives are increasing exponentially, far outpacing the amount of bonds in existence and the amount of gold available for delivery.
Moreover, there is an extreme concentration of derivatives in the hands of three or four firms -- namely, concentration of long bond and short gold positions."

Part I is headlined "When Atlas Shrugged: The Lure and Lore of Risk-Free Profits" and it is at 24hGold HERE

Part II is headlined "When Atlas Shrugged: Gibson's Paradox and the Gold Price" and it is at 24hGold HERE

King World News Weekly Metals Review

2011-09-11T11:33:00.000+03:00

The King World News weekly precious metals review finds Bill Haynes of CMI Gold and Silver reporting a quiet week on the retail front but futures market analyst Dan Norcini shaking his head at brazen intervention in the gold market by central banks.

You can listen to their commentary at the King World News Internet site HERE

Egon von Greyerz talks to James Turk

2011-09-01T01:00:00.000+03:00

James Turk interviews Matterhorn Asset Management's Egon Von Greyerz (one of the most brilliant minds in precious metals today) on the importance of owning physical gold (and silver of course) OUTSIDE the banking system.

Mystery and Intrigue in the Gold Market

2011-08-20T16:01:00.000+03:00

Mystery and Intrigue in the Gold Market

By Mark Leibovit

Liebovit VR Gold Trader

Monday, August 15, 2011

Politicians, governments, media, etc. seem to overlook the true value of precious metals and try to deter individuals from owning them. This has been going on for centuries. Most recently, the United States government prohibited American citizens from owning gold between 1933 and end of 1974.

They continue to mislead people into believing that paper currencies are the real wealth. We hear from the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, that gold is not money, just "tradition." Despite Bernanke's comments, gold is indeed a currency that competes with government-issued currencies and helps determine not only the value of those currencies but also the level of interest rates and the value of government bonds.

Do they inject this propaganda to take attention away from what the central banks are actually doing with gold and the price of gold? Are they really overlooking or ignoring the true value of gold, or is this smoke and mirrors in front of what they are actually doing?

The gold-exchange standard protected citizens from hyperinflation and other abuses of monetary policy. President Nixon ended the gold-exchange standard on August 15 1971, which meant the end of direct convertibility of the dollar to gold. This removed the restrictions put on governments and central banks as to what they could do with the money supply.

Central banks want to continue to expand the money supply but not face the consequences. They seek ways to force down the price of gold because the price of gold is an indicator of central bank monetary policy.

How do the central banks continue to increase money supply while trying to keep the price of gold down?

The most common policy is to lease gold to a specialized group of insiders known as bullion banks. The central banks call this leasing, but it is operationally a form of gold sales.

The central bank leases gold at well under 1 percent per year to bullion banks. Bullion banks then sell the gold into the private market, take the money, and invest it in government bonds or other investments that pay far more than 1 percent per year.

That gold is gone. To get the gold back, the central banks would have to demand payment in gold by the bullion banks. The bullion banks could not repay this gold without going into the gold market and purchasing it. This would drive up the price of gold. It would bankrupt the bullion banks.

So central banks do not require the bullion banks to repay the gold the bullion banks borrowed. The central banks simply roll the loans over, year after year, and the bullion banks invest the money they get from selling the gold. These central bank sales are not recorded as sales by the central banks. The public remains oblivious.

The central banks maintain the fiction that they still own the gold. They report their holdings of gold as not having changed. But from an economic standpoint, the gold is gone and there is no possibility of central banks will ever get it back from the bullion banks.

Another way central banks and governments battle investors in gold is to announce from time to time that they are contemplating the sale of gold. This scares some gold investors, who sell. By threatening to sell gold, central banks are attempting to push down the price of gold.

The latest example of this came at the G20 meeting on April 2. An announcement was made that the International Monetary Fund would make available special drawing rights (SDRs), which serve as money for central banks. To raise some of this money, the IMF was to sell some of its gold. That was the official announcement.

The IMF has been threatening to sell gold for years. To do this takes a majority vote of the member nations of the IMF. It is clear that the member nations are willing to allow the IMF to do this. Previously, this was not clear.

Why would a central bank or the IMF say in advance that it planned to sell a large portion of its gold holdings? When a large holder of commodities is going to sell into the open market, he does not announce this in advance. His goal is to maximize the money he gains by the sale of the asset. If he warns the world how much he plans to sell and over which time period, this will depress the price if the sale constitutes a significant quantity.

It is economically irrational for a seller of commodity to say in advance how much he plans to sell. I say "economically irrational" on the assumption that the goal is to make a profit. But if the goal is not to make a profit but rather to harm people who hold a particular commodity as an investment, the announcement makes good sense.

A rising price of gold warns the public that the government's tax policies and the central bank's monetary policies cannot be trusted.

How do we believe our governments when they tell us that precious metals have no real value even as foreign governments and foreign banks continue to buy billions of dollars of the metals and some are even buying mining companies and mines to ensure continued supply?

In April 2009 China announced that its gold reserves had increased by 76 percent, from 600 tonnes to 1,054 tonnes. For the previous six years China had been reporting to the IMF only 600 tonnes. Had China acquired those 454 new tonnes only in the past year? Experts believe that China acquired those 454 new tonnes over at least several years, largely by purchasing the production of China's own fast-growing gold mining industry.

Global financial institutions continue to create paper contracts not backed by the physical metals. Is this their way to show plenty of supply in order to keep prices down so that they can continue to accumulate the bullion?

In 2000 CPM Group, a commodities market research, consulting, asset management, and investment-banking firm) released a document stating, "With the start of the London Bullion Market Association's release of monthly trading data, the market has become aware that 100 times more gold and silver trade hands each year, just in the major markets, than is produced or used. Some market participants have wondered aloud how 10 billion ounces of gold could trade via the major markets each year, compared to 120 million ounces of total supply and demand, while roughly 100 billion ounces of silver change hands, compared to around 628 million ounces of new supply."

Years ago GATA disclosed that the IMF, the leading compiler of official gold reserve data, allowed member nations to count gold they had leased, gold that had left their vaults, as if it was still in their vaults. The effect of this accounting fraud was to deceive the gold market into thinking that central banks had much more gold left with than they really did.

While the major gold and silver exchange-traded funded frequently report their metal holdings, studies by GoldMoney founder James Turk and former GATA board member Catherine Austin Fitts and her lawyer, Carolyn Betts, suggest that this data is unreliable too. For the major ETFs won't disclose exactly where their metal is, and indeed their prospectuses say it's OK for the ETFs not even to know where their metal is kept among custodians and sub-custodians.

And the custodians for the major gold and silver ETFs are, perhaps not so coincidentally, also the two major international banks that report having the biggest short positions in gold and silver, short positions that give these banks and metal custodians a powerful interest in suppressing the price of the assets they supposedly are holding for investors who want those assets to rise in value.

The biggest so-called "physical" gold market in the world is the one run by the London Bullion Market Association. The LBMA publishes statistics on how much gold and silver is traded by its members. But these statistics show spectacular volumes, more metal than could possibly exist. Of course much of this metal could be sold and resold back and forth many times every day. But an expert in that market, Jeffrey Christian of the CPM Group, acknowledged at the March 25 hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as he had acknowledged in that explanatory report published in 2000, that the London bullion market is actually a fractional-reserve gold banking system built on the presumption that most gold buyers will never take delivery of their metal but rather leave it on deposit with the LBMA members from whom they bought it.

"Why is gold such a mystery? Why is it, along with silver, kept such a mystery? It's because the two precious metals are not only money but, from the point of view of free individuals, the best sort of money, less susceptible to what governments see as the most desirable quality of money -- the susceptibility to control by government and particularly its susceptibility to devaluation. You can print or otherwise issue gold and silver derivatives to infinity, but not the metals themselves."

What will this do to the price of gold and silver when the holders of these paper-backed securities realize that the actual supply does not meet the demand, that they will not be able to receive the bullion they paid for? We are already seeing the results of the increased demand as the price of gold continues to move higher.

* * *

Ron Paul's Urgent Warning!

2011-07-27T12:21:00.000+03:00

Counterfeit Gold Standards by Gary North

2011-07-23T17:29:00.000+03:00

....this is another must read by Gary North!
With this latest commentary, Gary North is dismissive of gold standard advocates, starting with Ralph Benko of The Gold Standard Now project, whose latest essay (http://www.gata.org/node/10159), as North writes, describes a "counterfeit" gold standard.
North's commentary can be reached at Lew Rockwell's Internet site here: "Counterfeit Gold Standards"

The Gold Standard Institute journal

2011-07-15T21:33:00.000+03:00

The July edition of the journal of the Gold Standard Institute leads off with an essay by financial writer Louis Boulanger, who argues that while people may ignore reality, they do so at great peril, as there is no guarantee that reality will ignore them.

Boulanger concludes that the Internet revolution is moving sovereignty away from the state and back toward individuals -- which is, of course, the moral claim for ensuring that the precious metals trade freely as independent currencies. May it come to pass in our time.

You can find the July edition at the Gold Standard Institute's Internet site HERE

Gold: the secret weapon in the worldwide financial war

2011-07-09T20:57:00.000+03:00

A "full-scale financial war" is raging around the world and gold is the secret weapon, geopolitical analyst James G. Rickards tells King World News today.

Rickards says China's new gold exchange is retaliation for the refusal of the United States to restrain paper currency and help control inflation. He agrees that the exchange has the potential to explode demand for gold.

As for the proposal for Switzerland to create a "parallel" gold-backed franc, Rickards says it would create a massive case of Gresham's Law, where everyone would dump the unbacked franc for the gold-backed franc. Indeed, Rickards says, the first country that goes to a gold-backed currency will have the only currency anyone wants, the strongest currency in the world. Swiss legislators, he adds, can't possibly understand the global implications of the proposal.

Holes in the fiat currency dike are popping out all over the place, Rickards says, and in the face of the collapse of their paper currencies, governments will either have to convert their currencies to gold or resort to unprecedented coercion, outlawing gold or punitively taxing it and imposing capital controls.

As usual Rickards has thought things through far more extensively than most analysts. You can listen to his interview at the King World News Internet site HERE

Erste Bank Gold Report

2011-07-04T23:15:00.000+03:00

Erste Group Bank's new report on gold as an investment and currency, written by Ronald-Peter Stoeferle and published today, may be the most comprehensive and profound of its type. Its major conclusions include:

Negative real interest rates are the main driver of the gold price and will continue to be powerfully supportive.

The arguments supporting a return to some form of gold standard are strengthening.

Government debt burdens could be sustantially eased by a higher gold price.

There is no "bubble" in gold, as the public is hardly invested in it and has little interest in it.

Increasing dependence on government transfer payments for the public's income works against restoring solvency to government.

Many paper pledges of gold cannot be fulfilled by real metal, a point credited to GATA.

The report concludes, in part:

"Given that the majority of debt has neither been written off nor paid off but simply transferred, the problem of excessive debt is still waiting to be resolved. There has been no deleveraging, only an adjustment of booking entries from the private to the public sector. The quantitative easing has left monetary stability short on credibility, and it will be very difficult to remedy this situation. In this fragile environment gold will continue to thrive."

ErsteGroupGoldReport-07-04-2011

Global Economic Collapse...

2011-07-02T13:10:00.001+03:00

Let's not miss the forest for the tree. The tree is Greece. Wonder who the forest is?..

Gold standard back?

2011-05-24T14:25:00.000+03:00

Richard Russell: the only true standard of value

2011-04-24T22:33:00.002+03:00

The Only True Standard of Value

from Richard Russell's Dow Theory Letters

April 20, 2011 -- The dollar is doing just what the Fed wants it to do -- it's sinking, sinking and sinking more. Sadly, the great American public doesn't understand what's happening, and if they were told they couldn't care less. Of course, what the public does notice is the painful result of the dollar's bear market. The result is seen every time Joe six-pack and his wife hit the neighborhood super-market. The rising prices are a shocker.

And if the price of your favorite cold cereal has not been raised, there is less of the cereal in the box. Then when Joe has to fill up the buggy to get home, he groans as he sees the gasoline tab. "Sixty bucks to fill up this lemon. I'm going to get a motorized bike," growls Joey. "This country is going to hell in a hand-basket."

The US has been getting away with spending more than it takes in, ever since World War II. It's a process that isn't sustainable, and if a process is unsustainable it will end. The US's habit of spending more than it's paying for has finally hit a brick wall. The wall is the demise of the famous "Yankee dollar." In order for the US to live over its head, it must borrow.

Half of the US's borrowing comes from foreign sources. And that's a problem. The fiat US dollar has no fixed value. It's worth must be measured against other currencies. "The dollar is worth so much in relation to the Brit pound -- or the dollar is worth so much in terms of the euro." Our foreign creditors, many of whom are loaded with dollars, keep a sharp eye on the comparative value of the dollar, and they're now frightened and mulling over the credit-worthiness of the US. The recent warning from the S&P rating agency heightened our creditors worries about both the US and the dollar.

The disgraceful battle between Obama and the Democrats vs. Paul Ryan and the Republicans is further raising the fears of our creditors. With commodity inflation now out in the open, Fed head Bernanke has a problem. His absurd defense is to refer to "core inflation" (without the cost of food and energy). Bernanke announces to the world that there's "no inflation," and besides if there is inflation the Fed can end it any time they want.

What Bernanke and the Fed can not control is the tell-tale price of gold.

As I write the battle is on to keep June gold from closing above 1500. Yesterday June gold hit an intra-day high of 1500, but can it close there? "Ah," Bernanke must be thinking, "If I could only control the price of that damn gold."

Yesterday, as I looked at my computer, and I could see the fierce struggle that was going on as gold whipped up six dollars, then five minutes later it is up a dollar-fifty. There must be a powerful contingent (perhaps backed by the Fed) that is desperate to keep the price of gold DOWN and below 1500. But alas for the Fed, gold is traded internationally across the face of the

planet and 24 hours a day. Gold is out of the hands of the Fed and Goldman Sachs, and it trades everywhere and where it wants.

This year I've been telling my subscribers to think in terms of two concepts:

(1) Think in terms of avoiding losses (rather than thinking in terms of building fat profits).

(2) Think in terms of PURCHASING POWER. Are you gaining or losing purchasing power?

For ten years I've advised my subscribers to climb aboard the great bull market in gold. Early subscribers who have followed my advice now have huge paper profits, many have become millionaires, others have been able to retire on their gold positions. Even new-comers have benefited from their belated investments in gold.

Over the last 12 months, the dollar price of gold is up 31.32 percent. Gold is the only true standard of value. The value of everything else must be measured in terms of gold. "How many ounces of gold does it take today to buy a new Ford?" "How many ounces of gold did it require to buy a new ford in 1932?" It costs a lot more (in dollars) to buy a new Ford today. But how many ounces of gold does it cost to buy a new Ford today compared with the ounces required in 1932 to buy a new Ford? What has changed, gold or the dollar? Gold hasn't changed, what has changed is the dollar, which has lost purchasing power.

The US public is rapidly being educated about money and gold. Ads are appearing almost daily in the newspapers, telling readers how and why to buy gold. The ads are being confirmed by the rising price of gold. The public is finally "getting it". I've been in this business since 1958, and I've seen a lot of advisory services come and go -- a lot! What I notice is that there are a number of fairly new advisories that are climbing (entering) on the back of the gold bull market. These advisories are sending out mass mailings to the public -- educating them on the fact of the dying dollar and the Fed's plan to solve the debt problem by diminishing the purchasing power of the dollar. As Lincoln put it, "You can't fool all of the people all of the time." Clueless as the American populace is, they are finally learning about gold, something that their great grandparents took for granted.

In terms of gold: Assessing real estate values in terms of gold. At its peak, the housing market in March 2007, the median US home price was $262,600, which was equivalent to 340.6 ounces of gold. Today's median income price is $186,100 or 109.2 ounces of gold. So in terms of real money, gold, the US median home price has lost 47% since 2007.

Applying the same measurements to the Dow, from the end of 2001 to the end of 2008 an investment in the Dow would have lost 81% of its purchasing power in terms of gold (statistic courtesy Larry Edelson of the outstanding "Uncommon Wisdom" advisory).

The great and harsh lesson of history now stares Americans in the face -- no fiat currency in history has ever survived. This fact underscores the growing panic to get out of dollars and out of all fiat currencies.

This emphasizes the irony of those who are rushing into dollars or dollar denominated bonds and blue-chip stocks on the thesis that these are "safe havens." It's a rush out of dollars to get into other forms of dollars. What's happening now is on a greater scale than has ever occurred before in the history of mankind. It's going to hit the current generation of Americans like a whirlwind. It will be historic in its intensity and destructiveness.

The great gold rush of 1849 opened up the American West. This gold rush of the early 2000's will open up the eyes of Americans to the danger of the Federal Reserve and fiat money.

Below in log scale -- one of the greatest and most significant bull markets in US history.

Below, the Dow over the exact same period.

Richard Russell

Gerald Celente and Max Keiser ....at large!!

2011-04-22T12:42:00.000+03:00

***

Gold Coin Value Guide

2011-04-20T17:27:00.003+03:00

Here's an excellent guide for those looking for up-to-date gold and silver coin (US and foreign) face or melt (pure metal spot price) values: Coinflation.com

Impeach Bernanke! - An open letter to Congressman Ron Paul of Texas

2011-04-09T15:13:00.001+03:00

April 6, 2011,

Dear Dr. Paul:

There are serious questions about the legality of Quantitative Easing. You are among the few who are well-qualified and well-placed to get to the bottom of it.

Most people believe, and the media confirm them in that belief, that the Fed can legally create dollars ‘out of the thin air' in any quantity, and can do with them as it pleases. This may well be the pipe dream of Dr. Bernanke who is quoted as saying that the U.S. government has given the Fed a tool, the printing press, to stop deflation — but it hardly corresponds to the truth. The Fed can create new dollars only if some stringent legal conditions are satisfied, and then, it can only dispose of them in certain ways prescribed by law.

Contrary to a statement of Dr. Bernanke, made before he became the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Fed, he could not drop freshly printed dollars from a helicopter, no matter how many reasons for such an action he may be able to cite. Another thing the Fed is not allowed to do legally is to purchase Treasury paper from the U.S. Treasury directly. It must be purchasedindirectly through open market operations. If you don't put the Treasury paper through the test of the open market before the Fed is allowed to buy it, the presumption is that the market would reject it as worthless, or would take it only at a deep discount. The law does not allow the F.R. banks to purchase Treasury paper directly from the Treasury because that would make money creation through the F.R. banks a charade, reserve requirements a farce, and the dollar a sham.

If that were the only problem with Quantitative Easing, it would be bad enough. But there is something else that is even more ominous. The fact is that the Federal Reserve banks can purchase Treasury paper only if they pay with F.R. credit that has been legally created.

F.R. credit (F.R. notes and F.R. deposits) is legally created if it has been issued in accordance with the law. The law says that F.R. credit must be backed by collateral security at the time of issuance, usually in the form of an equivalent amount of U.S. Treasury paper. The procedure is as follows.

The F.R. bank seeking to expand credit takes its Treasury paper, owned outright and free from encumbrances, and posts it as collateral with the Federal Reserve agent who will then authorize the issuing of credit. In other words, if the F.R. banks do not have the unencumbered Treasury paper in their possession, then they cannot create additional credit legally.

There is some evidence that the F.R. banks do not have F.R. credit available to make the kind of purchases Dr. Bernanke is talking about as part of his Quantitative Easing. Nor do they have unencumbered Treasury paper in sufficient quantity that they could post with the F.R. agent for authorizing the issue of additional F.R. credit.

The point is that the process of posting collateral first, and augmenting F.R. credit afterwards must under no circumstances be reversed. What the F.R. banks cannot legally do is to buy the Treasury paper first with unauthorized F.R. credit, post the paper as collateral, and justify the illegal issuance of credit retroactively. Nor can they borrow the bond from the Treasury, post it as collateral, and pay for the bond retroactively.

This is an important limitation separating the regime of market-based irredeemable currency from the regime of fiat money involving outright monetization of government debt — the graveyard where the Continental dollar, the assignat, the mandat, the Reichsmark, and the Zimbabwe dollar (among countless others) rest.

At any rate, retroactive authorization of F.R. credit, if that's what the Fed is up to, would be a violation of both the letter and spirit of the F.R. Act. It would mean converting the dollar into outright fiat money through the back door, bypassing Congress. It would show absolute bad faith on the part of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Dr. Ben Bernanke, who certainly knows what the law is. Such a blatant violation of the law would make him totally unfit for the powerful office he occupies. It would call for his immediate and dishonorable discharge by the President, pending Congressional investigation of the matter.

The various violations of the law of which the Fed is accused point to a concerted effort to remove the shackles the law has put on the money spigots lest crooks help themselves to the public purse. These violations are not isolated incidents. They are aiming at the corruption of the monetary order of the nation and the world. Moreover, they would ultimately figure prominently among the causes of the financial instability the world has been suffering from since 1971 and, more recently, since 2008.

Without understanding this fundamental truth, all talk about stabilizing the monetary system and reining in the runaway budget deficit is an exercise in futility.

Yours very sincerely,

Antal E. Fekete

Note: an identical letter has been sent to Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana.

Richard Russell: Gold. Out in the Open

2011-03-26T23:03:00.001+02:00

Out in the Open

Clipping from Richard Russell's "Dow Theory Letters"

March 24, 2011 -- "There is only one certainty regarding paper money -- the longer you hold it, the less it will buy in terms of real goods or real money -- gold." Richard Russell.

Yesterday was a banner day for the precious metals. Gold closed at an all-time high in terms of dollars. Silver moved into the 37 dollar zone for the first time since the precious metal bull market of the 1970s (today it's above 38 dollars an ounce!).

But there's a big difference between the current precious metals bull market and the bull market of the 1970s. The 1970 bull market drew tremendous interest (I was there). Everybody I knew (even the gold haters) were watching that bull market with keen interest, particularly during the wild "blow off" days of the late 1970s, when silver was rocketing higher -- rising every day by "limit up."

In comparison, today's huge precious metal bull market is greeted with yawns, that is, if it is greeted at all. I've been calling the current gold/silver market the "great stealth bull market." Ask the average man or woman on the street what's happening to precious metals, and they'll give you a blank stare and maybe a "Duh." Ask them if they own any gold or silver, and they'll give you a sheepish "Nah."

Gold (April) closed on March 2 at 1437.40, a record high. On March 9 silver closed at 36.04, highest since 1981. Yesterday both marks were bettered. Where's the excitement, where's the interest, where are the articles in the newspapers?

Time to study the chart below. As I've been saying, gold in its advance has periodically tested its 150-day moving average over the past few years (150-day MA is shown as the blue line on the chart). Note that on the most recent "correction," gold didn't even test its 150-day MA. When I saw this, I realized how powerful the forces under gold were.

Gold is now "out in the open" with no overhead resistance and no overhead supply. So far the bull market advance since 1999 has been steady, quiet, and orderly. Except for its spectacular slow and relentless climb, there's been no excitement in the gold bull market.

I don't think this is going to continue. Somewhere ahead the precious metals bull market is going to turn wild and speculative. Only one phenomenon will serve to create this excitement. That phenomenon is HIGHER PRICES. The public can resist anything in markets except steadily rising prices.

As for steady higher prices and excitement, I suspect that silver is about there. As for gold, maybe not yet. But somewhere ahead gold is going to catch fire. That will be the time when the great American public will decide that they have to have some gold, maybe just a coin or two, or maybe just a few shares of GLD -- but that time is coming.

Question -- As a new subscriber what should I do?

Answer -- Buy a position in GLD or SGOL or SLV. Assume a conservative position, one that you can sit with.

Question -- "What about older subscribers? What should we do?"

Answer -- Never mind timing this bull market. It can't be done, even by Goldman. You can add to your gold position. If possible, buy some one-ounce gold coins. One advantage of coins is that you're probably not going to trade them in and out. Sit tight with your coins, Put them in a place that's difficult to get at; in that way it will be a nuisance to sell them, even if you're tempted to.

***

Richard Russell

James Turk interviews Hugo Salinas Price on silver and sound money

2011-02-16T22:22:00.001+02:00

GoldMoney founder James Turk interviews Hugo Salinas Price, president of the Mexican Civic Association for Silver, about silver's potential to return as money and about sound money generally in a 22-minute video

James Turk: Silver is Approaching Stage Two of its Bull Market

2011-02-15T20:25:00.000+02:00

Back in April 2007, I wrote about the three stages that appear in every bull market, and more to the point, that gold was approaching the end of stage one. Gold back then was still trading around $690, and therefore well below its then record high of $850 reached in January 1980. My view was that “gold looks ready to make a new all-time high. When that happens, stage two begins. There will not yet be widespread excitement about gold in the next stage, because that won't occur until stage three. But when gold makes a new record high, and particularly after it breaks into a 4-digit price, people will begin paying attention.”

I wrote a follow-up article in November 2009 entitled Welcome to Stage Two of Gold's Bull Market, just two months after gold broke above $1,000. Focusing on the change in prevailing sentiment, I noted how differently gold was being treated. "During the first stage of a bull market, the media and most investors alike focus on past issues, rather than future potential. Over the past decade one consequently heard all the reasons not to own the gold…But there is a notable difference in this stage compared to stage one. Look how many people are writing and talking about gold. Gold has moved from apathy and neglect – stage one characteristics – to growing attention. But importantly, instead of embracing gold and analyzing it to determine relative value, today’s attention is one of widespread disbelief and skepticism that gold can climb higher. These are exactly the responses one should expect to emanate from stage two." I concluded by noting that at some unpredictable point in the future, gold will enter stage three "when gold no longer is relatively good value."

I did not make any mention of silver in the above two articles. It too has three stages, but silver is still mired in stage one, which began in February 1991 after silver had collapsed to $3.50. It was an astounding 93% decline from its January 1980 peak of $50. But as we can see on the following chart, $3.50 was silver’s low, and its price has been rising ever since.

This chart shows a massive accumulation pattern, marked by the green lines. This pattern is a story of strong hands and weak hands, specifically, of silver moving to the former from the latter.

From its $50 high in January 1980 to its $3.50 low in February 1991, the weak hands were shaken out. At that point, the accumulation by strong hands – who were buying because the recognized that silver was an exceptional bargain – became the dominant force. Their buying power was stronger than the selling pressure of the weak hands, and the price of silver responded by starting to climb. It was classic stage one action, but here’s the important point.

Silver is still in stage one. It won’t advance into stage two until $50 is exceeded, just like gold did not enter stage two until its previous high of $850 was hurdled.

I expect that silver will exceed $50 this year, which is a point of view I first mentioned in my outlook for 2010.

Admittedly, I was a little early with my forecast about when gold would enter stage two. So perhaps I will again be early by forecasting that silver will enter stage two of its bull market this year. Regardless of the accuracy of my timing, one thing is clear. Because it is still in stage one, silver remains good value.

....lest we forget!

2011-02-11T01:04:00.000+02:00

Eric Sprott: Gold Tsunami

2011-02-08T22:05:00.000+02:00

by Eric Sprott & David Franklin

Ignoring real estate, most people invest their hard earned money in paper things. Stocks, bonds, annuities, insurance - it's all paper, and it sits nicely in our bank accounts and shows up on our computer screens. Halfway across the world, investors in China and India have never trusted paper investments as a store of value - and they're converting their hard earned paper money into gold and silver bullion. Not that this is anything new. It isn't. But the scale and speed with which they are accumulating precious metals IS new, and it's driving the fundamentals that we believe will lead to higher prices in 2011.

Demand for the metals is literally exploding in Asia, and it's creating shortages of physical bullion around the world. The statistics are extraordinary. China, the world's largest gold producer, now requires so much of the precious metal (in addition to what it already mines) that it imported over 209 metric tons (6.7 million oz) of gold during the first ten months of 2010. This represents a fivefold increase from the estimated 45 metric tons it imported in all of 2009.¹

According to the World Gold Council, Chinese retail demand for gold increased by 70% from October 2009 to September 2010, representing a total of 153.2 tonnes of gold imports. Yet, over the same period, the demand for gold jewelry rose by only 8%.² There is a clear trend developing for Chinese investment in gold as a monetary asset, and China is buying so much gold for investment purposes that it now threatens to supercede India as the world's largest gold consumer. Chinese demand in 2010 is expected to reach approximately 600 tonnes, just behind India's 800 tonnes.³ To put that in perspective, 2010 world mine production is forecasted to be 2,652 tonnes, which means China and India could collectively lock-up over half of global annual production.

Even more surprising is the increase in Chinese demand for silver. Recent statistics show that silver imports have increased fourfold from 2009 to 2010. In 2005, the Chinese exported just over 100 million oz. of silver.⁴ In 2010, they imported just over 120 million oz. This represents a swing of 200 million+ oz. in a market that supplied a total of 889 million oz. in 2009 - a truly tectonic shift in demand!⁵

We are seeing widespread evidence of major shortages of physical gold and silver bullion across the globe. The Perth Mint recently stated that: "Demand for our coins and medallions is strong, but the biggest demand is coming from banks and traders looking for kilo bars."⁶ Three weeks ahead of Chinese New Year, Asian dealers were reporting premiums in mainland Chinese gold exchanges of $23 per ounce.⁷ Even Jim Cramer has acknowledged the current shortage in minted US gold coins, stating on his CNBC television show in December that: "As someone who tried to buy U.S. coins in December, there was a real scarcity. My dealer reportedly just couldn't get any coins - tried to sell me Australian bullion. Said there was a shortage. Very telling."⁸

While Chinese New Year celebrations typically drive gold demand in the month of January, there are stronger forces at work here. The Chinese are fighting the resurgence of inflation. To protect their wealth, the populace is turning to gold and silver as a store of value. Precious metals ownership is a relatively new phenomenon in China, where Chinese citizens have only been able to purchase gold freely within the last ten years. Ownership restrictions were lifted in 2001 when the Chinese central bank abolished its long-term government monopoly over gold. The Shanghai Gold Exchange was then created in October 2002 to replace the People's Bank of China's gold purchase and allocation system, thus ushering in a new era of gold investment in China.⁹ Investor interest in precious metals has increased dramatically since then, and new investment products are making gold more convenient to purchase and easier to own.

One such program recently caught our eye and speaks to the new era of gold investment within China. On April 1, 2010, the World Gold Council and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) issued a press release announcing a strategic partnership.¹⁰ Though seemingly innocuous, this press release introduced a completely new investment product for Chinese investors: The ICBC Gold Accumulation Plan ("ICBC GAP"). ICBC GAP allows investors in mainland China to accumulate gold through a daily dollar averaging program. The minimum investment required is either 200 RMB per month or 1 gram of gold per day (equivalent to approximately US$42).¹¹ Customers may renew the contracts at maturity, convert them into cash or exchange them for physical gold. The accounts are perfect for investors who want to accumulate gold over the long-term. While gold accumulation plans exist in Japan, Switzerland and other countries, this is a first for mainland China. Kudos to the World Gold Council for their efforts in setting up and promoting the program.

The most significant fact related to the ICBC GAP program is how fast it has captured the investing public in China. One million accounts have already been opened since the program launched on April 1st, resulting in the purchase of over 10 tonnes of gold thus far. According to press releases, the ICBC GAP plan was taken up by a mere 20% of total depositors at ICBC, and was only launched in select Chinese cities during the test phase. The ICBC bank just happens to be the largest consumer bank on earth with approximately 212 million separate accounts. If we apply some realistic assumptions and arithmetic, it's easy to imagine how large this program could potentially become.

Suppose, for example, the ICBC GAP plan were expanded to cover all ICBC depositors, and also expanded to the next four largest Chinese banks. Let's further assume that the gold purchases within the plan enjoyed the same rate of growth as the test phase mentioned above. If we add all these numbers together, it results in gold purchases of an extra 300 tonnes of gold per year, or over 10% of the estimated 2010 global gold production.

The implications of this burgeoning Chinese demand for the gold market are immense. If these predictions prove accurate, the ICBC GAP plan could become the single largest buyer of physical gold on the planet. Considering that the program has only been launched in one Chinese bank thus far, imagine if it were extended to other institutions or other large gold consuming countries such as India, Russia or Turkey?

Speaking from Japan, the head of the World Gold Council recently commented on the early success of the ICBC GAP plan in China: "Here in Japan, it has taken over 10 years for the gold-savings account industry as a whole to reach 700,000 accounts. It is impressive that only one Chinese bank can exceed that level so easily, within one year, without PR or active marketing in-branch." The World Gold Council does their own arithmetic on how much gold the Chinese can consume: "In 2009, per capita gold consumption in China was 0.33 grams, up from 0.17 grams in 2002." Based on this data total Chinese gold consumption could range from 1,000 tonnes per year or more.¹² This implies that the Chinese could consume almost half of the gold produced globally on an annual basis.

The ICBC Gold Accumulation Plan and other alternate methods of investing in gold have the potential to overwhelm current supply in the gold market. If a similar program were launched for silver accumulation, in the same dollar terms at current prices, it would consume over half of the silver produced each year! In Asia, only physical gold and silver will do and unlike the supply of treasury bills, bonds or paper currencies, the supply of physical gold and silver is undoubtedly finite.

We believe Asian demand for physical gold and silver is akin to a tsunami. While precious metals prices have corrected on the paper exchanges, the inflation resurgence in Asia is quietly driving new, unforeseen levels of physical demand for the metals. While the world continues to float on a sea of paper, this massive wave of physical demand silently threatens to crash into the physical gold and silver market, potentially wiping out tangible supply.

_______________________________

1. Hook, Leslie. (December 2, 2010) China's gold imports surge fivefold. Financial Times. Retrieved on January 31, 2011 from:

http://www.gold.org/download/rs_archive/WOR5797_Gold_Invest_Report_China_Web.pdf

2. D'Altorio (December 30, 2010) China's Gold Rush. Investment U. Retrieved on January 31, 2011 from:

http://www.investmentu.com/2010/December/chinas-gold-rush.html

3. Pearson, Madelene. (January 12, 2011) Gold Imports by India Likely Reached Record, WGC Says. Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved on January 31, 2011 from:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-12/gold-imports-by-india-likely-reached-record-wgc-says.html

4. (December 2, 2010) Gold Imports by China Soar Almost Fivefold as Inflation Spurs Investment. Bloomberg. Retrieved on January 31, 2011 from:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-02/china-gold-imports-jump-almost-fivefold-as-inflation-outlook-spurs-demand.html

5. The Silver Institute. Demand and Supply in 2009. Retrieved on January 31, 2011 from:

http://www.silverinstitute.org/supply_demand.php

6. Campbell, James (January 12, 2011) Unrelenting demand for gold below $1400 - Perth Mint. Retrieved on January 30, 2011 from:

http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page103855?oid=118307&sn=Detail&pid=102055

7. Ash, Adrian (January 12, 2011) Shanghai Gold Premium Hits $23/Oz, China Opens 1 Million Gold-Savings Accounts. London Gold Market Report. Retrieved on January 31, 2011 from: http://www.resourceintelligence.net/shanghai-gold-premium-hits-23oz-china-opens-1-million-gold-savings-accounts/14715

8. CNBC: Buy this pause in gold's bull run, "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer advises. Retrieved on January 31, 2011 from:

http://www.blanchardonline.com/investing-news-blog/econ.php?article=1697&title=CNBC:_Buy_this_pause_in_gold%27s_bull_run%2C_%22Mad_Money%22_host_Jim_Cramer_advises

9. China Gold Report: Gold in the Year of the Tiger. The World Gold Council (March 29, 2010). Retrieved on January 31, 2011 from: http://www.gold.org/download/rs_archive/WOR5797_Gold_Invest_Report_China_Web.pdf

10. World Gold Council (April 1, 2010) World Gold Council and ICBC Enter into Strategic Partnership to Promote China's Gold Market. Retrieved on January 31, 2011 from: http://www.gold.org/download/pr_archive/pdf/ICBC_MOU_010410_pr.pdf

11. World Gold Council. (December 16, 2010) World Gold Council and ICBC launch first gold accumulation plan in China. Retrieved on January 31, 2011 from:
http://www.gold.org/download/pr_archive/pdf/2010-12-16_ICBC_GAP_release.pdf

12. Ash, Adrian (January 31, 2011) Gold Shorts Beware China's Million-Strong Gold Savers. Forbes. Retrieved on January 2011 from:
http://blogs.forbes.com/greatspeculations/2011/01/13/gold-shorts-beware-chinas-million-strong-gold-savers/

Crash JP Morgan Buy Silver - The Movie

2010-12-07T09:33:00.000+02:00

Crash J.P. Morgan, Buy Physical Silver!

2010-12-03T09:24:00.000+02:00

QE for ....dummies!

2010-11-13T19:10:00.000+02:00

Harry Schultz: 8 of November, a Day to Remember

2010-11-10T08:40:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, Nov 8, 2010, was a day I've awaited for 40years, since President Nixon shut down the last vestiges of the gold standard. Yesterday, at last, a respected member of the ruling classes called for a discussion to readopt a modified global gold standard as a lynchpin for the monetary system. Robert Zoellick, World Bank President and a former US Treasury official, says a new system is needed (as called for in HSL for 20 years), using 5 main currencies, with gold as the international reference point for future currency values. He wondrously said "Although textbooks may view gold as the old money, markets are using gold as an alternative monetary asset today." I couldn't have put it better and in fact I have put it in those exact words, as has Jim Sinclair and a number of free market analysts.

RZ said "The development of a monetary system to succeed Bretton Wood II launched in 1971, will take time. But we need to begin." Amen, Mr Z and thank you! Also, thanks to the Financial Times for making this the leading page one headline story, despite their traditional aversion to gold. Ethics won! This story broke in the early AM Nov 8th and halted a correction that began in the gold price, after which gold rose to a new high. The story freaked out ruling politicians around the world who despise gold because it acts as a governor on government spending. After Nixon closed the gold window, government spending and deficits rocketed, as the data charts prove, from that exact moment. Germany, the US Fed, and Trichet of ECB all patted Mr. Z on the head, but said it's not practical.

What would you expect them to say dear reader? They will fight a gold-linked system, but in the end they will give in, because the system is dying, fast, as the gold price reflects. How good a new system will be, whether it will have only a symbolic link or a strong one, can't be guessed today, nor how soon. The gold price will tell us. My prediction on Bloomberg TV in Paris a few years ago was that "Gold will force a system change when gold hits $1,650, but that it might need $2,000 to bring a change." That may still come true, because, as you see in the press today, most political leaders tried to discount Mr Z's brave, but wise recommendation.

I shall frame this FT front page and hang it on a wall. It was a watershed day.

Harry Schultz

Keynesian Economics vs. Austrian Economics

2010-11-06T02:54:00.000+02:00

Professor Fekete: Is There Life After Sudden Death of the International Banking System?

2010-10-30T14:46:00.001+03:00

Is There Life After Sudden Death of the International Banking System?

Dr. Antal Fekete

The debate on the Real Bills Doctrine (RBD) within the sound money movement is important because the international banking system, financing world trade as well as domestic trade, is facing its greatest challenge in all history. Indeed, it may succumb to the sudden death syndrome, and all efforts to resuscitate it may fail. Worse still, banks have by now acquired such a bad name, and they have earned such a universal hatred for their role in the global destruction of capital and of individual savings, that any new financial institution in whose name the word "bank" figures may be rejected out of hand by the people, should anyone try to make a fresh start in the banking business after the collapse.

Banking systems have been wiped out before under both deflationary and hyper-inflationary conditions. But there were always at least some banks that survived the cataclysm, namely, banks of countries that have stayed the course of financial rectitude and did not listen to the siren song of zero interest and perpetual debt. Countries that continued to observe the sanctity of contracts anchored in gold. Today the entire world entrusted its fortunes to the dinghy of global fiat money. If the dinghy is smashed to pieces on the reefs, not a single bank will survive.

Under these circumstances detractors of the RBD will discover that the singing the praise of "100 percent reserve" will bring no comfort. It will not save the skin of their pet banks. They will not be trusted any more than the fractional reserve banks, so called, will. The RBD, nothing less, will have to come to the rescue and make the survival of people possible.

I have never been able to persuade my detractors to debate my theory on the sole reasonable premise that the merits or demerits of the RBD can only be assessed in a context where banks are completely absent. Ludwig von Mises described such a scenario prevailing in Lancashire before the Bank of England opened its branch office in the city of Manchester. The absence of banks did not frustrate the growth and flourishing of the wool trade, the staple industry of the region at the time. Weaver-on-clothier bills, spinner-on-weaver bills, woolman-on-spinner bills circulated as cash in the local economy. The absence of banks could hardly be a handicap in any vibrant community eager to make most of its endowment and potential. It wasn't in Lancashire.

I have lived in Newfoundland for forty years and had the opportunity to study the monetary conditions in the "outports", as the isolated small fishing villages scattered along the rugged coastline are known where boats carrying fresh supplies and buying up the catch call only a couple of times a year. People in the outports had no use for the word "bank": they have never heard of, much less seen one. Pre-confederation Newfoundland was a dominion of Britain (same as Canada) with its gold and silver coinage. Among others, they had the distinctive $2 gold and 5¢ silver piece. There was a perennial shortage of coins. The shortage did not rule out trade. People wanted to eat, get clad, shod, and keep themselves warm in winter. Coin circulation was substituted by real bill circulation. Unlike on the continent, in the outports real bills were of small denomination. They were not called real bills either. They were called "chits" drawn by the fishermen on the local fish processor when they delivered their catch on the wharf. Chits would circulate from hand to hand. You could buy supplies from the local store against payment in chits. You could pay for the repair of your nets, and the lumberman was happy to supply you with firewood if you offered him chits in payment. Maturity date on the chits was dove-tailed with the arrival of the next cargo boat bringing in fresh supplies. The captain of the boat would pay in gold and silver coins for the catch, so the fish processor could meet the demand for coins when redeeming his chits.

My detractors theorize that prices would be lower in the absence of real bills circulation. They conclude that clearing devices are inflationary as they "reduce the demand for gold". This theorizing is just as idle as trying to find out how much carting would cost if the carter shunned the cart and started carrying heavy loads on his own back once more. Guess what: this question could never be answered. No carter would undertake carting on his own back after the wheel has been invented! Likewise, real bills would step into the shoes of money whenever gold coins were in short supply. Like it or hate it: the wheel has been invented.
The debate on the RBD is dismally lowbrow. It uses terms totally inappropriate in the present situation, such as supply of and demand for gold, the equilibrium price of gold, and the like. Participants of the debate are utterly unprepared for the event when all offers to sell gold against irredeemable paper currency are abruptly and simultaneously withdrawn. To deal with the present financial crisis and its aftermath we have to develop the prerequisite linguistic tools. In this effort Carl Menger's work is the only help we have. Menger had no use for the language of equilibrium analysis. According to him what makes gold special among marketable goods is its unsurpassed liquidity. This means that the spread between the asked and bid price of gold increases more slowly than that of any other marketable good, as ever larger quantities are thrown on the market. This is the property that makes gold superbly qualified to play the role of the ultimate extinguisher of debt: the asset into which all credit instruments must mature if the credit system is to last.

In a sense credit can still be said to mature into gold, albeit at a variable price. But if the gold basis goes negative and stays negative, in other words permanent backwardation of gold strikes, it will herald the advent of Armageddon. The overwhelming majority of working economists don't see that gold still plays an indispensable role in the credit system. The U.S. Treasury bond market has a sine qua non adjunct in the gold futures market. Without it bonds would be irredeemable: they would be promises maturing into more promises. But once permanent gold backwardation strikes, the prop of gold futures is removed, and the U.S. Treasury bond market will succumb to the sudden death syndrome. For the time being it is supported by speculative demand, but the demise of the gold futures market will make the bond speculators scurry for cover.

As long as confidence in the monetary system is unimpaired, gold will be widely available and the credit system will work properly. Increasing unavailability of gold indicates the threat of a breakdown of the credit system. Gold is going into hiding. Watch for the day when it will not be for sale at any price. When this happens, the credit system and along with it trade will collapse. It is not a matter of equilibrium or the lack of it. It is a matter of life or sudden death.

Detractors of the RBD do a great disservice to society when they try to force their narrow parochial and cultist viewpoint, the quantity theory of money and the supply/demand equilibrium theory of price, on everybody at a time when the problem is the relentless drying-up of liquidity. What we need is a theory of hoarding to supplement the theory of marketability. The theory of interest describes how gold is exempted in part from serving as a medium for saving. There is a complementary theory: that of discount, describing how gold is exempted in part from serving as a medium of exchange. That economy is best where gold is hoarded least. In such an economy gold is not needed in the cash balances of traders and, for that reason, is widely available to serve as the ultimate extinguisher of debt.

Time has long since passed when bickering about the number of angels that can simultaneously dance on the point of a needle has added anything material to our knowledge. Fractional reserve banking is a red herring. Tinkering at the edges with 100 percent reserve requirements leads nowhere. You will never understand RBD if you try to approach it through abuses of banks. What needs to be explained is why real bills can circulate on their own wings and under their own steam — banks or no banks.
Real bill circulation will start spontaneously after the total prostration of the world's banking system. Yes, there is life after the sudden death of the banking system. People are not going to commit collective suicide at the altar of fiat currencies. People want to live. They will use whatever little gold is available to them to trade by drawing real bills against the production and distribution of goods they want to consume. It will be a repetition of the miracle at the end of the Middle Ages, when the bill of exchange was invented in Italian city-states such as Florence, Venice and Genoa. It will happen again. The world will do very well with real bills and without banks, thank you very much.

When contract law will once again reach the level of highest respect, and promises to pay gold can once again be believed, banks may once again be in vogue. When that day dawns, the best earning assets of the new banks will be real bills drawn on consumer goods in most urgent demand maturing into gold coins. The criterion by which banks are judged is not going to be the prohibition against less than 100 percent gold reserves. It will be the prohibition against borrowing short in order to lend long.

Source: "The Daily Bell"

Sprott's Embry on King World News: the fun is just beginning!

2010-10-29T19:43:00.000+03:00

Sprott Asset Management's chief investment strategist, John Embry, covers many topics related to gold and silver in a 14-minute interview today with Eric King of King World News, which you can listen to at the King World News Internet site here:

http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2010/10/29_John_Embry.html

Or try this abbreviated link:

http://bit.ly/bQKZSR

Securitized Mortgage Debt: The Shot That Will Kill Many Financial Entities

2010-10-12T05:23:00.000+03:00

Securitized mortgage debt is going to be the final shot that kills all kinds of financial entities in the Western world. The biggest holder of this putrid junk is pension funds....

Jim Rogers: "It's A Given" That Gold Will Exceed $2000

2010-10-10T16:52:00.000+03:00

No matter what, gold (and especially silver) are going much higher, said Rogers in a recent CNBC interview:
"If the world economy gets better I'm going to make money in commodities," Rogers said.

"If the world's economy doesn't get better I'm going to make money in commodities, because (the Fed is) going to print money."...

Why is gold and silver price going to rocket even further?

2010-10-06T20:20:00.000+03:00

Collateralized debt obligation is now effectively worthless because the collateral behind the debt can no longer be collected. The banks cannot go and get it.

Let’s say you have 10 mortgages at $1 million a piece, the sum total of those mortgages are $10 million. So, the banks took the 10 mortgages and bundled them together into a collateralized debt obligation or CDO with a face value of $10 million.

They then sold that new entity that they created to an investment group of some sort, a pension fund, hedge fund, etc. promising them a yield of let’s say 7%. The sales pitch would emphasize the fact that this CDO was backed by real collateral. In the event of loan defaults by the borrowers, the banks would tell the buyer of the CDO that the collateral behind the loan could be sold to recapture any potential losses on the part of the purchaser.

Everything seemed to work fine until the defaults began and the foreclosure process kicked into high gear. The foreclosure process has exposed fatal flaws in the system and the flaw is that the banks cannot prove clear ownership of the mortgage.

Consequently, they are then barred from foreclosing on the property. Because they can no longer foreclose on the properties, the CDO is now effectively worthless.

The hedge funds and the pension funds cannot now sell these CDO’s on the open market, so how are they going to recover their original investment? Perhaps you may say that won’t be a problem because these instruments were insured. The problem is now the credit default swap or the insurance policy that was purchased to protect against default assumes that the insurer has the financial wherewithal or resources to make good on the claim.

If there were only a small number of these problem CDO’s this would not be an issue. But as the number of the foreclosures continue to skyrocket, and more and more banks are prohibited from seizing the collateral behind the property, the sheer magnitude of the number of claims presented to the insurer will overwhelm their balance sheet.

In effect what you have is an insurance company which doesn’t have enough money to pay off the claims. Compounding the problem is the fact that the CDO’s and credit default swaps related to these claims form a mass network of interdependence. This then ripples through the entire system and creates a domino effect which can cause the failure of entities creating the next financial crisis.

Ultimately the Federal Reserve will be asked to step in and buy up the now worthless CDO’s and put those on its balance sheet. In order to do this the Federal Reserve will have to engage in massive quantitative easing, taking onto its balance sheet the worthless CDO’s in exchange for newly issued treasuries.

This of course will have a horrific effect on the US Dollar which is why gold and silver are heading much higher.

Dan Norcini (JS Mineset)

Rob McEwen expects gold to reach $5,000

2010-09-26T23:38:00.001+03:00

Rob McEwen, CEO of U.S. Gold and creator of Goldcorp, may be too soft-spoken and cautious ever to be caught wearing a tin-foil hat, but in a brief interview broadcast yesterday with TheStreet.com's Alix Steel he forecast a gold price of $5,000 per ounce....

Jim Willie on Max Keiser's TV: is LBMA in for a heart attack?

2010-09-20T22:18:00.000+03:00

...there's not much to add to this (3 part) interview of Jim Willie -editor of "The Golden Jackass"- speaking to Max Keiser on the coming LBMA naked shorts "Grand Heart Seizure", as an un-named handful of BIG GOLD PLAYERS (most probably Chinese and Arabs) are demanding PHYSICAL DELIVERY, thus boosting prices up.

Until there's no more metal left for delivery, and then....

Enjoy:

Gold glitters for Sprott

2010-09-18T19:47:00.000+03:00

By Barry Critchley,
Financial Post · Saturday, Sept. 18, 2010

The price of gold is at record levels, yet investors still believe it is set to move higher. That's the only logical interpretation to draw from the news that Sprott Physical Gold Trust, formed this year to hold bullion, has rounded up at least $280-million of new investment dollars in its latest financing. (The other interpretation: The lemmings theory is at work.)

That financing, done by way of an overnight marketed deal, was announced after the markets closed on Thursday and priced before the markets opened yesterday.

The result: The issuer sold 24.5 million trust units at $11.37 per unit. The units were sold at a 10¢ discount to the closing price the day the deal was announced. The issuer has a rule that the "net proceeds of the offering will be greater than 100% of the most recently calculated net asset value per unit of the trust prior to the pricing of the offering."

According to its website, the fund's NAV was $10.87, which means the units traded at a premium. The underwriters -- RBC Capital Markets and Morgan Stanley -- were given the option to sell another 3.675 million units. The units closed yesterday at $11.30.

That gold continues to rise is no surprise to Eric Sprott, the founder of Sprott Asset Management. Almost two years ago, he said that, "in the sea of financial assets and currencies that are being decimated the world over, the one true safe haven continues to be gold."

So far, that view is working out. This week's deal is the second since Sprott Physical Gold went public this year. In its IPO, the issuer raised US$442.50-million via the sale of 44.25 million units at US$10 per unit. In May, it followed up with a US$279.45-million deal via the sale of 24.84 million units at US$11.25 per unit.

Sprott isn't the only issuer to gather up investor interest in physical gold.

In May, the Central Fund of Canada closed the sale of 25.3 million units at U.S.$14.85 per share, for gross proceeds of US$375.7-million. It too has a pricing rule: It must be non-dilutive and accretive for the existing shareholders. The issuer invested most of the proceeds "in gold and silver bullion in international banker bar denominations." After that deal, it

owned 1.5 million fine ounces of gold and 75.2 million ounces of silver.

Last November, it raised US$230.2-million via the sale of units priced at US$13.56 a time. The units closed yesterday at US$16.14. In 2009, Central Fund completed four offerings that raised a total of US$701.6 million. Central GoldTrust has also been active. In June, it raised US$280.2-million, with all the proceeds being invested in gold bullion. (The ompany owns 604,676 fine ounces of gold bullion and 6,156 ounces in gold certificates.) As with Central Fund, the price of the units is "non-dilutive and accretive for the existing unitholders."

In 2009, it closed two issues, one for US$38-million in January and another for US$200.2-million in May.

Egon Von Greyerz: Gold Entering a Virtuous Circle

2010-09-07T20:13:00.000+03:00

GOLD ENTERING A VIRTUOUS CIRCLE

By Egon von Greyerz
September 7, 2010

Fundamental and technical factors for gold are now in total harmony and gold is entering a virtuous circle that will drive the price up at its fastest pace since this bull market started in 1999.

It is a fact that gold in US dollars (and many other currencies) has gone up 400% in eleven years or 16% per annum annualised.
It is a fact that the US dollar has declined 80% in value against gold since 1999.
It is a fact that the dollar and most other currencies have gone down 98-99% against gold since 1913 when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was created.
It is also a fact that the Dow Jones (and many world stock markets) has declined over 80% against gold since 1999.
It is a fact that gold has made a new all time monthly closing high in dollars in August 2010.

Gold trend

We expect gold to start a substantial rise now which will continue for 5-10 months before any major correction. Gold’s technical picture is extremely strong with a continuous rising pattern of higher highs and higher lows with the steepness of the curve increasing. From much higher levels we are likely to see a correction that could last up to a year before the next rise which will last several years before we see a significant peak. Once gold has topped we do not expect the same kind of decline as after the 1980 peak since gold is likely to become part of a future reserve currency. At that point gold will be a solid but unexciting investment with very little upside potential. But that is likely to be a few years away.

For the full article please click the following link: GoldSwitzerland Market Update

September 2010

Egon von Greyerz

GoldSwitzerland.com / MatterhornAssetManagement.com

Robert Kientz: Gold, silver market suppression failures flash buy signal

2010-09-01T09:53:00.000+03:00

Gold and Silver Market Suppression Failures Flash Buy Signal

"I am writing this in a 5-part series. The first three parts will document in as much detail as space allows the methods and actors involved in the historic and current price suppression of the gold market.

The fourth piece will tell you how to profit from gold, and the fifth from silver. These last two parts are really how to survive it first, and then profit from it. I say this because the gold market is an economic signal that cannot be ignored, no matter how much the powers that be want you to. If the powers that be are trying this hard to suppress this invaluable economic signal, then this is one ominous sign that we are in for a large economic ‘adjustment’ period.

Each piece will be released on consecutive days. Please be patient as the story is gradually told. I endeavored to put as much information here as to make this a solid basis for gold (and silver) market investment analysis, and not a typical ‘one-off’ chart and recommendation piece ..."

A series of essays that has begun to be posted at Seeking Alpha by Robert Kientz, an auditor and former broker and currency market analyst, is worth looking up at the Seeking Alpha website.
The essays are titled "Gold and Silver Market Suppression Failures Flash Buy Signal". You can find the first of the series HERE, and the second one HERE ...

Richard Russell: my take on gold

2010-08-29T23:42:00.002+03:00

Here's a short extract from from Richard Russell's Dow Theory Letters reiterating his position and strong commitment in gold's generational bull market:

August 25, 2010 -- Dennis Gartman is an experienced commodity trader. Dennis has been very cautious about gold; he “sort of “ likes gold, so he calls himself a “gold agnostic.” For this reason it’s most interesting to read what Dennis says about gold in today’s report.

“Turning, then to gold and other metals, prices turned sharply for the better yesterday as the world rushed out of equities and looked for any safe harbors that were available. Certainly the rush to the Swiss franc was obvious, as noted above, and so too the rush into sovereign debt securities. But frankly, the rush was on to gold once again. We remain long what we have referred to as an ‘insurance’ position in gold, but we own it in terms of EUROs and /or of British pounds sterling, otherwise we remain an agnostic. To assuage our friends who are gold-bug-leaners, we shall not be short of gold. Nothing likely shall ever turn us manifestly bearish of it. But for the moment we are simply hard upon the sidelines, owning only this small ‘insurance’ position and comfortably in that position.

“Might we be enticed back to the bullish side of the market eventually? Of course we might. If the situation in the global equities markets became dire, we might move from agnosticism to ‘faith.” If we were to see the monetary authorities throwing caution to the wind and massively explode their balance sheets, we might be enticed away from our agnosticism to ‘faith.’ If the political situation were to become untoward, and patently uncomfortable, we’ll throw our agnosticism into a heap and join the gold market faithful. But until then, agnosticism works for us.”

Russell response — I can understand Gartman’s caution. Dennis is an old-time trader, and he’s seen a lot of traders get killed by taking huge and wrong positions.

My own position is that gold is in a clear and obvious primary bull market. These situations come along maybe two or three times in a lifetime. I was convinced back in 1999 that the bear market in gold had ended with gold selling at 256. In the year 2000 they were literally giving gold mining shares away. At that time gold shares were so ridiculously cheap that I told subscribers that they should buy these stocks (many selling for just a few dollars a share) and hold them as perpetual warrants.

At the same time I told my subscribers to start buying bullion one-ounce coins and “put ‘em away.” I’ve suggested that my subscribers do the same thing ever since.

I know bull markets, and I’ve never seen or experienced a primary bull market that didn’t end with a third speculative phase—this is the time when a bull market “blows its top”. I feel certain that the current huge bull market in gold will do the same.

But I have other reasons for being bullish about gold. Gold is the only real Constitutional money. The fiat paper that we’ve been using as money is only money because our government says “it’s money.” If the US government told you that printed paper was real money and legal for the payments of all debts, would you believe them. Well, you already have believed your government.

But I maintain that the truth will out, and that fiat paper is a fraud that will be found out. When that happens and people realize that they have been hoodwinked by their government, there will be such a rush (including both fear and greed) for gold that it will make the recent tech mania look like conservative investing.

As I write at midday, Dec. gold is up over nine dollars. Gold has been up 8 out of the last 10 days. As the months go by, we are pressing ever-closer to the speculative phase of the gold bull market. That will be something and even terrifying to see.

I am pleased to say that many of my older subscribers are now in the process of getting rich on their gold holdings. I’ve said over and over that one of the most difficult things to do in investing is to get in early on a primary bull market and ride the bull through to the latter part of its final speculative third phase.

The market seldom gives you the chance to get rich. This gold market has defied the odds and allowed its early followers and believers to get rich.

Anyway, that’s my take on gold and why you should own it and why you should follow my advice.

Richard Russell

Kitco's Jon Nadler still can't make up his mind about central bank gold price manipulation

2010-08-28T04:35:00.003+03:00

Here's a special case of split identity in the person of Kitco's analyst Jon Nadler and a brief story of gold price manipulation, as reported by GATA:

"How does Kitco senior gold market analyst Jon Nadler get away with it?

Interviewed Thursday morning by TheStreet.com's Alix Steel, Nadler dismissed complaints that central banks and their agents, bullion banks, collude to suppress the price of gold. As he did at the Vancouver resource investment conference in June (http://www.gata.org/node/8717), Nadler insisted, "There's no vested interest on anybody's part to suppress prices here."

You can find Nadler's comment to TheStreet.com here:

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10760375/1/top-5-reasons-gold-prices-move.html

But just a few hours later, interviewed about gold on the "Trading Day" program of Business News Network in Canada, Nadler remarked that a gold price of $5,000 would signify "disruptions on a major scale" and a price like that is "something that the central bankers of the world have decided probably not to allow to happen."

You can find Nadler's interview with BNN here:

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip341191

So if central banks have no interest in suppressing the gold price, why should they decide not to allow gold to reach $5,000? Indeed, why should central banks care about the price of gold at all?

Of course the answer is well documented in history. Indeed, the modern history of gold is almost entirely a matter of central bank price manipulation and suppression, because gold is a currency that competes with central bank currencies and profoundly influences interest rates and the price of government bonds.

Much of the modern history of gold has been outlined well by Bill Buckler, publisher of The Privateer financial letter, particularly in regard to the London Gold Pool of the 1960s and the gold dishoarding by the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury Department in the 1970s, two acknowledged mechanisms of price suppression. You can find The Privateer's outline here:

http://www.the-privateer.com/gold2.html

And at least four chairmen of the Federal Reserve maintained or expressed interest in suppressing the gold price.

-- William McChesney Martin Jr., the longest-serving Fed chairman, kept in his archive a detailed plan, dated April 1961, for surreptitious government intervention to rig the currency and gold markets to support the U.S. dollar and to conceal, obscure, or falsify U.S. government records and reports so that the rigging might not be discovered. This document remains on the Internet site of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Along with some explanatory commentary it can be located here:

http://www.gata.org/node/7096

-- In June 1975 Fed Chairman Arthur Burns wrote a seven-page memorandum to President Ford about controlling the gold price through foreign policy and defeating a free market in gold. That memorandum can be found here:

http://www.gata.org/files/FedArthurBurnsOnGold-6-03-1975.pdf

-- In November 2004 former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker published an excerpt from his memoirs in the Nikkei Weekly in Japan in which he regretted that central bank intervention was not undertaken to suppress the price of gold during a currency revaluation in 1973. Volcker wrote: "That day the U.S. announced that the dollar would be devalued by 10 percent. By switching the yen to a floating exchange rate, the Japanese currency appreciated, and a sufficient realignment in exchange rates was realized. Joint intervention in gold sales to prevent a steep rise in the price of gold, however, was not undertaken. That was a mistake." The excerpt from Volcker's memoirs can be found here:

http://www.gata.org/node/8209

-- And former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has acknowledged or remarked favorably about central bank intervention to suppress the gold price a number of times, including during the May 1993 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee. According to the minutes of the meeting, Greenspan said: "I have one other issue I'd like to throw on the table. I hesitate to do it, but let me tell you some of the issues that are involved here. If we are dealing with psychology, then the thermometers one uses to measure it have an effect. I was raising the question on the side with Governor Mullins of what would happen if the Treasury sold a little gold in this market. There's an interesting question here because if the gold price broke in that context, the thermometer would not be just a measuring tool. It would basically affect the underlying psychology." You can find the May 1993 minutes of the FOMC meeting here:

http://www.gata.org/node/8208

GATA has compiled so much more evidence of central bank manipulation of the gold market here:

http://www.gata.org/taxonomy/term/21

Given the U.S. government's fierce secrecy about gold -- GATA has had to sue the Fed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for access to the Fed's gold records, including gold swap agreements the Fed acknowledges having with foreign banks -- we seldom can be sure of what central banks are doing in the gold market at any particular time. But central bank interest in controlling the gold price -- what Nadler keeps denying -- is the gold market's first and overwhelming fact.Any analysis that denies this is disinformation. And any analyst who denies and acknowledges it on the same day to different news organizations must be very confident that they're not paying attention and not inclined to do any research. Unfortunately Nadler probably has that much right."

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer

Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

Adrian Douglas: The imminent failure of the second London Gold Pool

2010-08-19T17:08:00.002+03:00

Manipulative selling of gold on the daily London PM fix has failed to suppress the gold price since April 2009, when China announced that it surreptitiously had accumulated a large gold reserve over the previous five years, GATA board member Adrian Douglas disclosed today in a statistical study. Since then, Douglas finds, ever-increasing dumping of gold in London by central banks and their bullion bank agents has been having less and less effect on the gold price. He concludes that the second "London Gold Pool" -- a clandestine one, unlike the first -- is imminently facing a collapse identical to the collapse of the first as physical gold demand overwhelms the ability or the desire of the market riggers to provide the necessary metal. Douglas' study is titled "The Failure of the Second London Gold Pool" and you can find it here.

Adrian Douglas: The imminent failure of the second London Gold Pool

Egon von Greyerz interview on CNBC Squawk Box Europe

2010-08-19T15:24:00.000+03:00

Egon von Greyerz: There Will Be No Double Dip

2010-08-16T21:23:00.003+03:00

The world economy will soon go into an accelerated and precipitous decline which will make the 2007 to early 2009 downturn seem like a walk in the park. The world financial system has temporarily been on life support by trillions of printed dollars that governments call money. But the effect of this massive money printing is ephemeral since it is not possible to save a world economy built on worthless paper by creating more of the same. Nevertheless, governments will continue to print since this is the only remedy they know. Therefore, we are soon likely to enter a phase of money printing of a magnitude that the world has never experienced...

Egon Von Greyerz: There Will Be No Double Dip

Adrian Douglas: Gold market isn't 'fixed'; it's rigged

2010-08-14T23:33:00.000+03:00

GATA board member Adrian Douglas has studied the morning and afternoon "fixing" of the gold price by the major London trading houses and concludes that it is just as much a price-suppression mechanism as the London Gold Pool of the 1960s admittedly was. Douglas' analysis is titled "Gold Market Is Not 'Fixed,' It's Rigged" and you can find it here:

Adrian Douglas: Gold market isn't 'fixed'; it's rigged

Gold council CEO helps The Economist put investors to sleep

2010-08-07T19:15:00.001+03:00

Aram Shishmanian, the CEO of the World Gold Council speaks to Economist on gold's purpose, market volatility and the dynamics of demand in China and India. He remarked that Indian women hold twice as much gold as the tonnage reported held by the U.S. Treasury Department. Shishmanian added that Indian women don't sell their gold, though maybe the WGC will contrive a scheme through which they can lease it to the exchange-traded fund GLD.

The Economist's interview with Shishmanian may be most remarkable for avoiding discussion of currency market issues even as the currency markets are cracking under the strains of national insolvency and market intervention. With industry leadership like this, gold's triumph over the crookedness of the central banking system is assured in about a thousand yearzzzzz....

Adrian Douglas: The LBMA joins the gold squeeze cover-up

2010-08-04T02:01:00.000+03:00

The LBMA joins the gold squeeze cover-up

The London Bullion Market Association has just taken the highly unusual step of blocking access to statistics relating to the trading activities of its member bullion banks. This information has been available to the public since 1997 but as of this week it is available only to LBMA members. (Seehttp://www.lbma.org.uk.)

I have recently written a series of exposes of the LBMA (see References 1-4 below) using the association's own data to show that the LBMA's bullion banks are operating on a "fractional reserve" basis. My analysis indicates that the bullion banks are holding only 1 real ounce for about every 45 ounces of gold that they have sold, a reserve ratio of just 2.3 percent

At the March 25 public hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission on precious metals futures markets I cited the LBMA's own statistics to label the "unallocated gold" accounts of the bullion banks as a Ponzi scheme. (See Reference 3 below.) There were bullion bank representatives at the hearing but no one expressed an objection. That hearing was videotaped and posted at the CFTC's Internet site but the bullion banks have not made any public statement rebutting what I said. In fact at that hearing Jeffrey Christian, CEO of the CPM Group, acknowledged that what is widely called the "physical market" is in reality a largely "paper market" trading gold and silver as if they are financial assets and not physical metals. Christian stated that 100 ounces of paper gold are traded for every 1 ounce of physical gold.

When the LBMA first made its trading statistics available in January 1997, observers and analysts were shocked. (See Reference 5 below.) No one could reconcile the statistics with other market data, nor comprehend how the bullion banks could be trading on a net basis more than 240,000 tonnes of gold annually while the global mine output was only 2,400 tonnes. Over the years the furor over these statistics had subsided until the end of 2009, when I commenced writing about my studies, showing that the statistics can be reconciled with other market data if the bullion banks are operating a fractional-reserve bullion banking operation with a recklessly low reserve ratio. I have also shown how the price of gold is suppressed because 45 ounces of demand are being diluted to result in purchase of only 1 ounce of real metal. If instead all 45 ounces were to be sourced and purchased, the gold price would be multiples of the current price.

Typically when people are exposed in a scandal their first reaction is a cover-up. The most notorious examples of this are the Nixon administration, when it doctored the Watergate tapes, and Arthur Anderson, which shredded millions of pages of documents relating to audits of Enron Corp.

The LBMA has now commenced a cover-up with respect to the gold trading activities of its member bullion banks, withdrawing statistics from the public domain.

This appears not to be the only cover-up going on in the gold market.

For years the International Monetary Fund has made great fanfare of its mere contemplation of selling some of its gold, and actual sales by the IMF have been widely publicized. Since February the IMF has been surreptitiously selling large tonnages of gold each month, but these sales now are to be found only by digging through the IMF's financial statements, and even there the recipients of the gold are not disclosed. (See Reference 6 below.) One has to wonder why the IMF now is trying to fly under the radar with its gold sales.

Similarly it was recently discovered that the Bank for International Settlements didn't feel it necessary to announce its involvement in the largest gold swap in history, 346 tonnes. (See Reference 7 below.) The BIS swaps instead were discovered only because a market analyst dug through the footnotes of the bank's financial statements.

These developments have all the hallmarks of cover-ups.

In June the LBMA trading statistics showed that in May 2010 the average net daily trading in gold by LBMA member banks jumped a massive 50 percent from the month before to 24 million ounces each day from 16 million ounces each day. That translates to $7.5 trillion annually. If an operation is running on a razor-thin fractional reserve basis, such step changes are often fatal.

It appears that a run on the bullion banks has commenced.

There is a cover-up of back-door injections of liquidity of physical gold, and the LBMA now is trying to conceal trading information.

There has been much debate about how investors, politicians, and regulators didn't see the 2008 financial crisis coming, and lack of transparency was cited as a key reason. Clearly those who have been manipulating the gold market are trying to skulk deeper into darkness. They have a lot to hide.

Investors could have been blindsided by the events of 2008, but anyone who misses the writing on the wall about what's going on in the bullion markets is just foolish. The bullion banks have sold far more metal than they can deliver, and more and more customers are asking them to deliver. This has led to back-door bailouts and cover-ups.

Anyone who has "unallocated" bullion should be very concerned. The LBMA itself describes owners of "unallocated bullion" accounts as "unsecured creditors." That means that the account holder has no collateral or title to any bullion.

Bullion bank unallocated account agreements require the bank only to settle in cash for non-performance. That means when the physical squeeze that is evolving takes gold and silver prices to multiples of the current price, holders of unallocated metal accounts will not get any bullion, nor will they be compensated at the prevailing market price.

I interpret the LBMA's move to secrecy as a sign that the opportunity to get real metal is closing fast.

----

References:

1. Adrian Douglas: Proof of Gold Price suppression -- Gold and the U.S. Dollar:

http://www.gata.org/node/8844

2. Adrian Douglas: Price Suppression Follows Inevitably from Fractional-Reserve Gold Banking:

http://www.gata.org/node/8820

3. Adrian Douglas: It's Admitted to the CFTC: London Gold Market Is a Ponzi Scheme:

http://www.gata.org/node/8478

4. Adrian Douglas: Jeff Christian's CPM Group Explains How to Make Paper Gold:

http://www.gata.org/node/8627

5. The Grand LBMA Expose: A Collective-Mind Analysis:

http://www.gold-eagle.com/gold_digest/baron907.html

6. Adrian Douglas: IMF Can't Explain Gold Sales Now Without Revealing Squeeze:

http://www.gata.org/node/8607

7. Adrian Douglas: Mysterious BIS Gold Swaps Are Likely a Bullion Bank Bailout:

http://www.gata.org/node/8803

-----

Adrian Douglas publishes the Market Force Analysis letter (http:/www.MarketForceAnalysis.com) and is a member of GATA's Board of Directors.

* * *

Crisis: Is it all part of a plan...?

2010-07-19T23:47:00.000+03:00

The following excerpt is from the weekly missive of a brilliant Dow Theory market newsletter titled: "The Stock Market Barometer".

It looks at today's economic and financial woes from a truly free minded point of view.

If what you read feels right to you, why not take a subscription to enjoy the real McCoy!

"Sooner or later you have to ask yourself how you got into this predicament and I’ve come to the conclusion that it was all part of a plan, a plan that took a century to play out and cut far deeper than anyone ever could have imagined. To say it was sinister is an understatement. How do you set out to steal the wealth of an entire nation, and not just any nation, but the richest most powerful nation in the world? America was founded by a group of men who were the Socrates of their generation; men of wealth and position who rejected the threats and orders of their leaders because the leaders were fundamentally flawed. So they rebelled, and they won. The republic they formed was not perfect, but it was better than any that had come before. The foundation they laid allowed the United States to become the richest and most powerful nation in the world within a very short time of 137 years, and it did so with a relatively small government, no central bank, and no income tax. It also led to the formation of the largest middle class the world has ever seen, and it was a middle class that was educated.

By 1913 the US possessed the finest public school system in the world, from kindergarten to university, and it helped produce the Ford’s, Edison’s, and Wright brother’s that turned the world on its ear. Life in the US was difficult but it offered benefits and the promise of something better. That’s what caused hundreds of thousands of people to immigrate to the US from 1875 to 1915 as the word spread about America. Great minds who sought freedom of thought came to the US and made great contributions. By comparison the United States now imports Jamaican gangs and Mexican drug dealers, and all the corruption that comes with it.

Did you know that the drug dealers pay out millions of dollars a year to lobbyists in order to ensure that the US never legalizes drugs! They are illegal, pay no taxes, corrupt our system, make no contribution what-so-ever, and yet they have more influence on Congress than you or I do. Is that a great country or what?

Although I can’t prove it, I believe that once the Fed and income tax were implemented in 1913, someone sat down and decided that a nation of thinkers was no longer desirable because they would be too hard to control. Instead what was needed was a nation of mules needed to pull the cart of civilization. Until the early part of the 1900’s the purpose of education was derived from the Latin word educo, meaning to draw out from within. Slowly that began to change and was replaced by a giant babysitting service that produced a slave mentality enhanced by years carrot-and-whip grading. Original thought was frowned upon. You read a book or listened to a lecture and then vomited that back onto a piece of paper, and the best grade went to the student with the best memory. No thinking required. To ensure the illusion of education, quotas were introduced requiring degrees to become mandatory. In order to distract the masses so they wouldn’t know what they were missing, television was introduced with an almost infinite amount of channels. Sports became the end all for many so you could live vicariously through your team. Then came the X-boxes and the video games; all designed to dumb down the masses. Caesar threw bread to the masses at the Coliseum, giving them blood sport and just enough sustenance so they wouldn’t notice the Empire crumble around them.

In order to control an uneducated mass you need a big bureaucracy and that’s why government has expanded so much in the US over the last thirty years. Don’t ever think that Big Brother is there to protect you, Big Brother is there to control you, and if he can’t control you he will suppress you. If you resist he will use “extreme prejudice”. He will try to scare you into submission by telling you that your security is in jeopardy, thereby convincing you to give up little bits and pieces of the freedom that so many Americans fought and died for 200 years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Madison were rolling over in their respective graves as they see what we’ve done with their work. The US Constitution has been so disemboweled that what passes for the law of the land today would be unrecognizable to them, and therein lays the problem. How are you going to take back what you threw away? This question goes beyond markets and money, and involves your basic freedom. As things get worse in the US people are going to become upset, they’ll want to assign blame while those in charge will not want to relinquish their grip on power. Conflict will result as the courts will not recognize your rights under the US Constitution. That as I see it is where we are headed and we are now so far down that road that there is no turning back."

Darryl Schoon: The End-Game and The Illusory Gold Bubble

2010-07-18T19:26:00.003+03:00

The End-Game and The Illusory Gold Bubble

Darryl Robert Schoon

When the end-game began, gold was $35 per ounce. Today, gold is $1200. When the end-game is over, gold will be far higher.

Midway through 2010 we are approaching the end of the end-game, the resolution of the monetary imbalances that began in 1971. For more than 2500 years, gold was money: but, in 1971 that changed. After 1971, money was no longer connected to gold. For the first time in history, money had no intrinsic value.

After the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1945 until 1971, the world’s currencies were anchored to the US dollar which was convertible to gold. Thus, directly or indirectly, all currencies could be exchanged for gold; but on August 15,1971 the US cut the ties between the US dollar and gold; and all currencies became fiat.

It was as if someone removed a pin from the axle of international commerce when the US dollar was no longer convertible to gold. Previously, the US dollar was linked to gold, and other currencies were linked to the dollar. Everything was stable. It is no longer so. Once the pin connecting gold and paper money was removed, everything changed. The axle of international commerce began to vibrate and lately it’s been getting much worse. The fear is that the wheels are now about to come off.
- Page 9, How to Survive the Crisis and Prosper in the Process

THE BEGINNING OF THE END-GAME

The cutting of ties between money and gold set in motion the extreme monetary instability that was to characterize the 1970s. In 1960, the US prime rate was 5 %. At the end of the decade, the rate was 6.75 %. But when money became fiat in 1971, US rates became extremely volatile, vacillating between 4.50 % and 21.50 % during the next ten years.

In my article America at the Crossroads and the War on Gold, I pointed out the role of former Fed chairman Paul Volcker in destabilizing the monetary system. Believed by most to be a “hard-money hero”, Volcker was, in fact, the very opposite.

Volcker, as under-secretary of the Treasury in 1971, played a critical - and largely unknown role - in the removal of gold from the international monetary system and is therefore responsible for much of the monetary chaos which has since ensued:

From 1969 to 1974 Mr. Volcker served as under-secretary of the Treasury for international monetary affairs. He played an important role in the decisions leading to the U.S. suspension of gold convertibility in 1971, which resulted in the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. read here.

Appointed as Chairman of the Federal Reserve by President Carter in 1979, Volcker was at the helm when inflationary forces he had earlier unleashed almost destroyed the US economy in 1979-1981.

Volcker’s draconian raising of interests rates in 1980 was necessary to quell the inflationary fires he had lit in 1971; and although successful, Volcker’s role is not dissimilar from others who put out fires they themselves start.

THE END-GAME ACCELERATES

While it was Paul Volcker who set the end-game in motion, it was Alan Greenspan, his successor at the Fed, who would greatly accelerate the process by putting US financial markets beyond the reach of government regulators.

Volcker was replaced by Greenspan as Fed Chairman because Volcker wouldn’t dismantle existing financial regulations as desired by the Reagan White House and Wall Street investment banks. As Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz later explained:

Paul Volcker, the previous Fed Chairman known for keeping inflation under control, was fired because the Reagan administration didn't believe he was an adequate de-regulator.

In Alan Greenspan, Wall Street got the Fed chairman they wanted, someone who would provide them with an unending flow of central bank credit and who would turn a blind eye as to what they would do with it. Alan Greenspan was Wall Street’s wet dream come true.

During his 19 year tenure as Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan ushered in an era of loose credit producing massive profits for Wall Street along with two of the largest bubbles in history, the US dot.com and US real estate bubbles.

Greenspan with consummate political timing resigned as Fed Chairman just before his extraordinary credit bubble collapsed. However, a third, even larger bubble which Greenspan nurtured, still has yet to burst. This is the government bond bubble, by far now the largest bubble in history

The enormous government bond bubble was “Fed” by the excessive issuance of credit made possible by the removal of gold from the monetary system, thereby allowing governments to freely borrow what they had just printed.

Once Volcker controlled the fires of runaway inflation in 1980/1981, the issuance of government credit and debt exploded upwards under Greenspan’s tenured aegis at the Federal Reserve.

This soon-to-be fatal rise in US debt would not have been possible had the US dollar been tied to gold. This is why both bankers and governments who profit and live by debt oppose a return to the gold standard or any attempt to again tie their currencies to gold.

…a gold standard and a redeemable currency…enables a people to keep the government and banks in check. It prevents currency expansion from getting ever farther out of bounds until it becomes worthless…

Professor Walter E. Spahr, Chairman of the Department of Economics, NYU, 1927-1956

Banker John Exter, present when Volcker cut the ties between the US dollar and gold, later commented on the consequences of Volcker’s historic decision: The final link between the dollar and gold was broken. The dollar became nothing more than a fiat currency and the Fed [and especially the banks] were then free to continue monetary expansion at will. The result..was a massive explosion of debt

Today, the debt is due and owing and repayment is increasingly in doubt. Economics isn’t rocket science. It’s cause and effect and since the introduction of debt-based money, the primary cause of economic expansion has been credit.

The consequence of credit is its deadly effluvia, debt; and when the issuance of credit can no longer service or roll-over constantly compounding debt, parcus nex, economic death, otherwise known as the end game, ensues.

The enormous amount of government debt - total sovereign debt now totals $34 trillion dollars - can never be repaid. The end of the end-game will come when investors collectively realize this is so. That realization has not yet happened. When it does, for most it will be too late.

THE ILLUSORY GOLD BUBBLE

Some believe gold is a bubble. It is not. The price of gold, however, tracks a bubble and that is why it is mistaken for one.

WHICH ONE’S THE BUBBLE?
THE RULER OR THE BUBBLE?

The real bubble is government debt, not gold. Government debt is a bubble that hasn’t yet burst; one that has grown even more rapidly in the last two years as almost all nations went far deeper into debt after the 2007/2008 global collapse.

..sovereign debts grew by almost 30% in just two years. Sovereigns became the majority of worldwide debt. Several countries doubled their debts from 2007 to 2009 (BIS data) read here.

This recent meteoric rise in government debt has been matched by a corresponding rise in the price of gold. When government borrowing rose after 2007, the price of gold also rose, from $700 to $1200 per ounce, almost precisely tracking the rise in government debt.

(Click on image to enlarge)

…the ballooning size of the US Treasury’s debt, which hit a record $12.8-trillion last month, has been a steady linchpin supporting the historic rally in the gold market over the past decade. As a general rule of thumb, every $1- trillion of fresh debt issued by the Treasury equates with a $125 /ounce increase in the price of gold. As long as the Fed and G-20 central banks continue to peg ultra-low interest rates, - and G-20 governments continue to flood the debt markets with huge quantities of IOU’s, - it translates into monetization, and the trajectory for the gold market would stay bullish. www.sirchartsalot.com

When the government debt bubble bursts - and it will - gold will not collapse as will bonds and other paper IOUs. When it happens, the collateral damage to the US dollar and fiat currencies may well be fatal and the price of gold - the only safe haven in such times - will explode upwards.

The recently revealed Bank of International Settlement 382 ton gold swap is evidence of gold’s value in such times. Hinted at by Julian D.W. Phillips in his insightful article, Gold Is Back As Money, Michael J. Kosares connected the dots in his post, BIS Swap Signifies A Threat To Europe, Not To Gold, by pointing out that the swap was probably conducted with Portugal.

Portugal, whose gold reserves equal (or rather equaled) 382 tons, badly needs to refinance its debt and when investors no longer trust sovereign bonds, gold is far more preferable as collateral than a government’s promise to repay.

Note: In the swap, the BIS most likely used commercial banks as intermediaries in order to disguise central bank use of gold as financial collateral.

The European debt crisis marks the beginning of the end of the government debt bubble. Only a false sense of confidence is now supporting sovereign bond markets. In the spring of 2010 that confidence was shaken; and, someday, it will disappear entirely.

We live in interesting times. We are in the end-game.

Buy gold, buy silver, have faith.

John Embry: U.S. dollar's collapse inevitable

2010-07-10T01:04:00.001+03:00

Sprott Asset Management's chief investment strategist, John Embry, writes for Investor's Digest of Canada that collapse of the U.S. dollar is almost inevitable and gold is about to reassert itself as money in a shocking way.

The headline on Embry's commentary is "U.S. Dollar's Collapse Inevitable" and you can find it at the Sprott Asset Management site HERE

Erste Bank: In Gold we Trust

2010-06-30T03:16:00.002+03:00

Here you will find Erste Bank's latest report on gold. It deals with topics like e.g. gold price manipulation, covering among other things the prominent whistleblower Andrew Maguire, the distinction between physical and paper gold, gold outsparkling other assets for the 9th consecutive year, gold remonetisation, why gold is not in a bubble and many others.

You can read it here or download it in glorious pdf...

2010-06-21 IE Special Report GOLD

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Gold reclaims currency status as global system unravels

2010-06-21T00:02:00.002+03:00

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The Telegraph, London

Sunday, June 20, 2010

We already know that the eurozone money markets seized up violently in early May as incipient bank runs spread from Greece to Portugal and Spain, threatening the first big sovereign default of our era. Jean-ClaudeTrichet, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), talked days later of "the most difficult situation since the Second World War, and perhaps the First."

The ECB's latest monthly bulletin gives us some startling details. It reveals that the bank's "systemic risk indicator" surged suddenly to an all-time high on May 7 as measured by EURIBOR derivatives and stress in the EONIA swaps market, exceeding the strains at the height of the Lehman Brothers crisis in September 2008. "The probability of a simultaneous default of two or more euro-area large and complex banking groups rose sharply," it said.

This is a unsettling admission. Which two "large and complex banking groups" were on the brink of collapse? We may find out in late July when the stress test results are published, a move described by Deutsche Bank chief Josef Ackermann as "very, very dangerous."

And are we any safer now that the EU has failed to restore full confidence with its E750 billion (L505 billion) "shock and awe" shield -- that is to say after throwing everything it can credibly muster under the political constraints of monetary union? This is the deep angst that lies behind last week's surge in gold to an all-time high of $1,258 an ounce.

The World Gold Council said on Friday that the central banks of Russia, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, and Venezuela have been buying gold, and Saudi Arabia's monetary authority has "restated" its reserves upwards from 143 to 323 tonnes. If there is any theme to the bullion rush, it is fear that the global currency system is unravelling. Or, put another way, gold itself is reclaiming its historic role as the ultimate safe haven and benchmark currency.

It is certainly not inflation as such that is worrying big investors, though inflation may be the default response before this is all over. Core CPI in the US has fallen to the lowest level since the mid-1960s. Unlike the blow-off gold spike of the Nixon-Carter era, this rally has echoes of the 1930s. It is a harbinger of deflation stress.

Capital Economics calculates that the M3 money supply in the US has been contracting over the past three months at an annual rate of 7.6 percent. The yield on two-year Treasury notes is 0.71 percent. This is an economy in the grip of debt destruction.

Albert Edwards from Societe Generale says the Atlantic region is one accident away from outright deflation -- that ninth Circle of Hell, "abandon all hope, ye who enter." Such an accident may be coming. The ECRI leading indicator for the US economy has fallen at the most precipitous rate for half a century, dropping to a 45-week low. The latest reading is -5.70, the level it reached in late-2007 just as Wall Street began to roll over and crash. Neither the Fed nor the US Treasury were then aware that the US economy was already in recession. The official growth models were wildly wrong.

David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said analysts are once again "asleep at the wheel" as the Baltic Dry Index measuring freight rate for bulk goods breaks down after a classic triple top. The recovery in US railroad car loadings appears to have stalled, with volume still down 10.5 percent from June 2008.

The National Association of Home Builders' index of "future sales" fell in May to the lowest since the depths of slump in early 2009. RealtyTrac said home repossessions have reached a fresh record. A further 323,000 families were hit with foreclosure notices last month. "We' re nowhere near out of the woods," said the firm.

It is an academic question whether the US slips into a double-dip recession or merely grinds along for the next 12 months in a "growth slump." For Europe, nothing short of a sustained global boom can lift the eurozone out of the deflationary quicksand already swallowing up the South.

Spain had to pay a near-record spread of 220 basis points over German Bunds last week to clear away an auction of 10-year bonds, roughly what Greece was paying in March. Leaked transcripts of a closed-door briefing to the Cortes by a central bank official revealed that Spanish companies have been shut out of the capital markets since Easter. Given that the Spanish state, juntas, banks, and firms have together built up foreign debts of E1.5 trillion, or 147 percent of GDP, and must roll over E600 billion of these debts this year, this is a crisis unlikely to cure itself.

By their actions, investors show that they do believe the EU can be relied upon to back its rescue rhetoric with hard money, and for good reason. Germany's coalition risks breaking up at any moment, fatally damaged by popular fury over the Greek bailout. Far-right populist Geert Wilders is suddenly the second force in the Dutch parliament. Flemish separatists have just won the Belgian elections in Flanders. The likelihood that an ever-reduced group of German-bloc creditors facing disorder and budget cuts at home will keep footing the bill for an ever-widening group of Latin-bloc debtors in distress is diminishing by the day.

Fitch Ratings said it will take "hundreds of billions" of bond purchases by the ECB to stop the crisis escalating. Since Bundesbank chief Axel Weber has already deemed the first tranche of purchases to be a "threat to stability," it is a safe bet that Germany will fight tooth and nail to prevent such a move to full-blown quantitative easing. The bloodletting along the fault-line between Teutonic and Latin Europe will go on, as the crisis festers.

Yet the markets are already moving on in any case. They doubt whether the EU's strategy of imposing of wage cuts on half of Europe without offsetting monetary and exchange stimulus can work. Such a policy crushes tax revenues and risks tipping states into a debt-deflation spiral, as if everbody had forgotten the lesson of the 1930s.

Greece's public debt will rise from 120 percent to 150 percent of GDP under the IMF-EU plan. There is a futile cruelty to this. As Russia's finance minister Alexei Kudrin acknowledges, a Greek "mini-default" has become inevitable.

EU president Herman Van Rompuy confessed that EMU lured countries into a fatal trap. "It was like some kind of sleeping pill, some kind of drug. We weren't aware of the underlying problems," he said.

What he has yet to admit is that the north-south imbalances built up since the euro was launched -- indeed, because the euro was launched -- cannot be corrected by further loans from the north or by pushing the south into depression. The political fuse will run out before this reactionary and self-defeating policy is tested to destruction.

* * *

Gerald Celente on The Gary Null Show: Brace for Armageddon

2010-06-06T18:17:00.000+03:00

Not recommended for people with heart complaint

Richard Russell: Sell Everything Liquid, You Won't Recognize America By The End Of The Year

2010-05-19T20:16:00.001+03:00

Here's the last bell ring from the old sage of the markets, the venerable Richard Russell:

"..Do your friends a favor. Tell them to "batten down the hatches" because there's a HARD RAIN coming. Tell them to get out of debt and sell anything they can sell (and don't need) in order to get liquid. Tell them that Richard Russell says that by the end of this year they won't recognize the country. They'll retort, "How the dickens does Russell know -- who told him?" Tell them the stock market told him. That's pretty intense!

Update: By popular demand, here's more on what he sees in the market. The gist is that the markets recent gyrations are telling him that the economy is in trouble:

And I ask myself, "Am I seeing things? The April 26 high for the Dow was 11205.03. The Dow is selling as write at 10557 down 648 points from its April high. If business is even better than expected, then why is the Dow down over 600 points? And why, if there were 674 new highs on the NYSE on April 26, were there only 20 new highs on Friday, May 14? And if my PTI was 6133 on April 26, why is it down 17 points since its April high?

The fact is that I've been seeing deterioration in the stock market ever since early-April, and this in the face of improving business news. The D-J Industrial Average is composed of 30 internationally known top-quality blue-chip stocks. These are 30 of "America's biggest companies." If Barron's is so bullish on the future of America's biggest companies, then why isn't the Dow advancing to new highs?

Clearly something is wrong. But what could it be? Much as I love Barron's, I trust the stock market more. If I read the stock market correctly, it's telling me that there is a surprise ahead. And that surprise will be a reversal to the downside for the economy, plus a collection of other troubles ahead.

About Dow Theory -- First, we saw the recent April highs in the Averages. Then we saw a plunge in both Averages to their May 7 lows -- Industrials to 10380.43, Transports to 4298.12, next a short rally. If ahead, the two Averages turn down and violate their May 7 lows, that would be the clincher. Such action would signal the certain resumption of the primary bear market.

Just as for years I asked, cajoled, insisted, threatened, demanded, that my subscribers buy gold, I am now insisting, demanding, begging my subscribers to get OUT of stocks (including C and BYD, but not including golds) and get into cash or gold (bullion if possible). If the two Averages violate their May 7 lows, I see a major crash as the outcome.
Pul - leeze, get out of stocks now, and I don't give a damn whether you have paper losses or paper profits!.."

....what more is there to say?

Egon von Greyerz: Alea Iacta Est (the die is cast)

2010-05-19T08:57:00.002+03:00

ALEA IACTA EST

by Egon von Greyerz – Matterhorn Asset Management

Yes this is it! We have crossed the Rubicon and events in the world economy are now likely to unfold in a totally uncontrollable fashion. Clueless governments still don’t understand that it is their ruinous actions that have created a credit infested and bankrupt world. They will continue to prescribe the same remedy that caused the problem in the first place, namely more credit and more printed money. The consequences are clear; we will have hyperinflation, economic and human misery as well as social unrest.

When will the world finally begin to understand that we have reached the point of no return and that “the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries” (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar). Sadly, we are probably not very far from that point. It is already starting to happen in many countries.

The latest EU and IMF package of $ 1 TRILLION (Euro 750 billion) is yet another futile attempt by governments to abolish poverty by printing paper. Let’s be absolutely clear, this money does not exist and the EU governments are hoping by declaring such a large amount that they can con the Wolfpack speculators. At this point the EU has just picked a large round figure of out the air. But when their bluff is called by the Wolfpack and the next attack happens, EU governments will after initial huffing and puffing start printing unlimited amounts of paper.

So the world is now on its road to ruin and there is no action, no leader and no new amount of printed money that can save the world or prevent a hyperinflationary depression.

Never in history has the world been in a situation when virtually all industrialised countries are bankrupt. Therefore there is no precedent for what will happen in the next few years. What we can be quite certain about is that events will happen in a seemingly random pattern and that it will be impossible to forecast where the next crises will start.

But although we will not be able to predict in what order events will take place, we can expect much of what is outlined below to happen.

Wolfpack attacks

Already back in 2007 we warned about the very high risk of the CDS (credit default swap) market. This is now one of the primary instruments used by the Wolfpack (expression coined by the Swedish Finance Minister Borg). The Wolfpack, speculators with enormous fire power such as hedge funds and investment banks, use the CDS market to attack any weak financial sector, be it a country, a bank or a company. The combination of the leverage of the CDSs and the massive capital available to the Wolfpack makes it possible for them to bring down or badly maul whatever they attack. It was not the Wolfpack that caused the problem in for example Greece but they can bring down a weak victim quickly and profit immensely and immorally from it.

There are so many weak potential victims that the Wolfpack can attack and they will start with the most vulnerable ones like, Portugal, Spain and Ireland etc. But when the time is right they will also attack the US and the UK.

So in the coming year we will see country after country coming under attack from the Wolfback which will lead to acceleration in money printing and higher interest rates.

Iceland – Ireland – Greece – Who is next?

The EU support package of $ 1 trillion is supposed to be sufficient to protect the rest of Europe from another Greek tragedy. The dilemma with such a massive EU commitment is that no government expects to have to pay the money out. If they did the voters in the respective EU countries would throw out their government. Why should the German people, who are also having hard times, pay for the Greeks, Portuguese or the Spaniards, especially since these loans will never be paid back.

Greece is bankrupt but is still taking on additional EU loans of € 140 billion. In addition, their austerity measures are supposed to bring the deficit down from 12% of GDP today to 3% in a few years time. But who can be so stupid as to lend to a bankrupt nation which will sink into the Ionian and Aegean Seas in the next few years. With massive cuts in government expenditure, with major falls in output, with unemployment rising fast, with tax revenues collapsing how can Greece possibly be expected to improve the economy and pay a high interest rate on their exploding debt? In addition, as long as they have the Euro they will be totally uncompetitive. So if they couldn’t manage their economy in the so called good times, it is absolutely guaranteed that they have no chance of surviving in bad times. So Greece will default and so will Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, the UK, the US and many more. But before that there will be the most colossal worldwide money printing exercise which would have used up most of the trees in the world but for electronic fiat money.

So, if virtually bankrupt nations don’t cut their deficits, they will definitively go under and if they try to cut, they will also go under due to collapsing output and tax revenues and colossal debts. Thus whatever actions governments take or don’t take, they are damned.

The table below shows debt as a percentage of GDP for various OECD countries. The official debts (in red) are massive and unlikely to ever be repaid in real money. Total debts (grey bars) include unfunded liabilities such as pensions and health care. Spain has the lowest total debt to GDP of 250%. Germany and the UK have around 400%, the US over 500% and Greece over 800% debt to GDP. These figures are absolutely astronomical and prove that most governments in the world will be totally incapable of repaying their debts or funding the pensions or medical care which they have committed to. It doesn’t matter however much governments cut expenditure or raise taxes, all these countries are insolvent and nothing can save them.

^[1]

The world must permanently readjust

Most governments still believe that deficit spending and money printing is the solution to all their problems. Because the world economy’s expansion in the last 100 years and particularly in the last 40 years has been primarily based on credit and not real growth, governments live under the false impression that money printing will work this time too. But we have reached the point when investors will no longer buy worthless government debt that will never be repaid with real money. We will first go through a period when governments issue and buy their own debt thus monetising the debt or print money. This will be the hyperinflationary phase. Thereafter the world will realise that none of the government debt and very little of the bank debt will ever be repaid. Credit will then implode and so will also the assets financed by credit. Eventually there will be a new monetary and financial system and the world will start afresh. The adjustment period will be very long and will involve economic and human misery, leading to social unrest and major political change. It will be a horrible experience for the world during this extended period of adjustment. But it will be like a forest fire that clears out the deadwood and creates the conditions for strong new growth. Once the new era starts it will therefore be from a very much lower level and individuals will be rewarded for hard work with little or no social security safety net. Credit will only be granted for sound capital investment projects, not for consumption or speculation. Ethical and moral values will return and the golden calf will not be worshipped. But before that, the period of readjustment will be very long and extremely difficult for the whole world.

Hyperinflation

For several years we have predicted that hyperinflation is the most likely outcome of the economic predicament that the world is in. But it is unlikely to be a straightforward hyperinflationary period. Precious metals will be the primary beneficiaries of hyperinflation. Certain commodities, especially food and energy, will also go up in price. But most assets that have been financed by the credit boom will go down in real terms. This includes property, stocks and bonds. In hyperinflationary money these assets could still go up in price. If someone who earned $ 50,000 per annum in real money now earns $ 5 million in newly printed money, his house will probably also go up in nominal terms. But in real terms property prices will decline massively. There will be no credit available and interest rates will be very high, probably at least 15-20% so very few people will be able to buy a house.

Hyperinflation will destroy many currencies so paper money will definitely reach its intrinsic value which is zero. Gold and silver will virtually be the only assets that will protect investors fully against the destruction of money.

^[2]

The next leg of the debt crisis is here

In our February newsletter “Sovereign Alchemy will Fail” we discussed the Sovereign Time Bomb and we are now experiencing the initial small explosions with Greece as the first victim. The $1 trillion EU/IMF rescue package was never intended to be more than a headline figure. EU governments were hoping that this would frighten the Wolfpack away. But so far this has failed. The Euro went up 4 cents when the package was announced but is now down to new lows again. How can anyone take a massive rescue package seriously when most of the countries making the commitments are bankrupt themselves? Spain and Italy have committed tens of billions each. And they are the ones that will be attacked by the Wolfpack next.This is the bankrupt saving the bankrupt. The IMF has no money but is dependent on its members of which the US is the biggest contributor. And they are bankrupt too. The UK, which is not in the Euro Zone and which has a worse budget deficit than Greece, contributed £15 billion. The new UK government is planning to cut a massive £ 6 billion of costs out of its next year’s budget which will bring major hardship. But as a last act, the outgoing labour government committed £15 billion which if paid out will never be repaid. The whole thing is a total farce. Governments commit trillions to rescue banks and sovereign states but cannot even make budget cuts of a few billion in their own countries. This shows that the world economy and the world financial system is being run by morons who only have their own self interest in mind and do not understand the consequences of their ruinous actions.

When the $1 trillion EU rescue package was announced, the US simultaneously offered European banks dollar Swap facilities (dollar loans) of a minimum $500 billion but probably much more. In addition the US Fed also injected at least $500 billion into the US banking system. These actions make it clear the banking system is under tremendous strain similar to 2008. But this is just the beginning. Things will get a lot worse.

Gold

In 2002 we advised investors to put up to 50% of their liquid assets into gold when the price was $300. To us it was crystal clear that the mountain of debts and derivatives would never be repaid with normal money but would be inflated away by money printing and this is what is now happening. The media are now talking about a bubble in gold and comparing to the 1980 top at $850. Let us be very clear, although gold has gone up 5 times since the 1999 bottom at $250, it is nowhere near its peak. Adjusted for real inflation (as per shadowstats.com) the 1980 gold peak in today’s prices corresponds to around $7,200 today. So gold could easily go up 6 times from the current price of $1,220 and still be within normal parameters.

^[3]

There are many factors that will contribute to gold’s rise from here (in addition to money printing):

Gold production is going down.
Neither Comex (the futures exchange), nor the bullion banks would be able to deliver more than a fraction of the physical gold for which they have outstanding commitments.
Central banks and the IMF probably don’t hold even half of the 30,000 tons that they claim they have. Most likely, at least 15,000 tons (6 years gold production) have been sold to suppress the gold price.
The precarious financial system will lead to a total distrust of paper gold including most of the ETFs which have no physical gold.

The four factors above will lead to the most massive surge in the gold price. There will be nowhere near sufficient gold to satisfy demand at current prices. We had been expecting gold to start its acceleration in March 2010 and this is exactly what is happening. We expect the move to be relentless during most of this year with very few major corrections but with high volatility. Moves of $100 in one day could easily happen.

So gold is likely to make a top in the next few years between $5,000 and $10,000. But if we get hyperinflation the price could go exponentially higher like in the Weimar Republic when gold reached DM 100 trillion per ounce in 1923. Will gold experience the same type of correction when is has peaked as happened after the 1980 peak? Probably not, because gold is likely to be a part of a new monetary system that will be created when the current one has collapsed.

The table below illustrates the total destruction of paper money against gold in the last 100 years and shows how many ounces of gold that $1,000 bought at various times. In 1910, $1,000 bought 40 oz of gold at $25 per oz. Today in 2010, $1,000 buys 0.80 oz of gold at $1,230 per oz. This is a massive decline of 98% in the value of the dollar measured in real terms in the last 100 years. The next significant year is 1971 when Nixon abolished the convertibility of dollars to gold. It was this disastrous decision that opened the floodgates for the credit and money creation that we are experiencing currently. The dollar is down 97% since then. But even if we take more recent years, the purchasing power of the dollar measured in gold has declined catastrophically. Since the 1999 gold low, the dollar has declined by 80% against gold and since 2002 (when Matterhorn Asset Management recommended major gold investments) by 76%.

^[4]

Virtually all currencies show similar declines in value against gold in the last 100 years. This is the clearest evidence of governments and central banks defrauding their people of their hard earned money. Where will it end? It will end when the dollar and many other currencies reach their intrinsic value of ZERO. That time is not far away.

Matterhorn Asset Management AG
Bahnhofstrasse 28a
CH 8001 ZURICH
Switzerland
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matterhornassetmanagement.com

Doubts about gold ETFs broadcast today on two major networks

2010-05-15T10:04:00.000+03:00

Within a half hour of each other today the leading business television networks in North America reported doubts that gold exchange-traded funds either have the gold they claim to have or can get enough real gold to meet likely demand.

The first doubt was expressed on CNBC in the United States, where market analyst Rick Santelli comments at 5:30 into this segment:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1494145732&play=1

The second doubt was expressed on BNN in Canada, where reporter Niall McGee commented at length:

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip302139

There seems to be growing consensus in favor of what GATA long has been urging gold and silver investors to do: to take possession of their metal or make certain that any custodian has got it in allocated and audited form, especially since the custodians of the largest gold and silver ETFs are also the biggest gold and silver shorts, a grotesque and unacknowledged conflict of interest:

http://www.gata.org/node/8600

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer

Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

Antal Fekete: The New Austrian School of Economics

2010-05-14T11:00:00.008+03:00

What follows is tantamount to a historical manifesto that could signal a new era for world economics and modern society as a whole. It is Professor Fekete's proclamation of a truly viable way out of today's global economic impasse a.k.a. "The Greatest Depression".

Please read it carefully...

THE NEW AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

Antal E. Fekete
aefekete@hotmail.com

The Hungarian Connection

The Austrian School of Economics dates its beginnings back to the publication in 1871 of a slender volume: The Principles of Economics (Grundsätze der Volkwirtschaftslehre) by Carl Menger. The adjective "Austrian" was meant to be derogatory, introduced by economists of German school of historicism to ridicule Menger's idea of basing economic science on axiomatic foundations, on the pattern of logic and mathematics. The root of the word "Austrian" is "East", so the connotation of "Austrian economics" is "oriental economics" - a kind of voodoo economics.

German economists could just as well have said "Austrian-Hungarian economics", since Hungary lies even further East than Austria, plus the fact that in 1871 Austria-Hungary was a dual monarchy, the two countries sharing not only a monarch but also many important political, economic, scientific, cultural institutions and traditions.

The Hungarian connection is dramatically revived by an unfortunate split in the rank and file of Austrian economists that took place in the 21st century. I have run conferences at the Martineum Academy in Szombathely, Hungary in the Austrian tradition and in the spirit of Carl Menger. I published course outlines under the aegis of the now defunct Gold Standard University on my website www.professorfekete.com. For my efforts I have been roundly denounced by parochial "American Austrians" at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. I consider this split most unfortunate at the most critical time, when the international monetary system shows signs of advanced senile dementia as well as of physical disintegration. This could have been a most opportune time for students of the gold standard to close ranks, join forces, and demand a return to the only monetary system that makes for economic stability, for peace and prosperity. They should have put their quibbles aside and offer a common platform and blueprint showing the world how it could be done. It was not meant to be.

Because of the urgency of the moment I have decided to make a fresh start and to establish a new school, proudly naming it the New Austrian School of Economics in Budapest, Hungary, where I live. My first act in doing so is to extend a sincere offer of cooperation to the American Austrians as soon as they are ready to look at Adam Smith's Real Bills Doctrine as a valid theory which is very much in the spirit of Menger.

The Quantity Theory of Money

It is a great pity that as a young man Ludwig von Mises embraced the Quantity Theory of Money, and has never during his long life been able to extricate himself from its clutches. For this reason he was alienated from Adam Smith's Real Bills Doctrine, the latter being an implicit refutation of the former. In spite of this flaw I still consider him the greatest economist of the 20th century. But the mortmain of Mises cannot be allowed to guide us in the 21st century when the Quantity Theory of Money is so spectacularly self-destructing, as witnessed by the Second Great Depression that started 80 years after the first, in 2009.

Cleansing of the Temple

The Real Bills Doctrine of Adam Smith states, in essence, that short-maturity bills of exchange drawn on goods in most urgent demand and moving fast enough to the ultimate gold-paying consumer, are capable of spontaneous monetary circulation, without any impetus or props from the governments or the banks. Indeed, bill circulation is possible in the absence of any banks at all. Such a system of financing production and trade sans banques could rise from the ashes of the regime of irredeemable currency before our very eyes. In the first decade of our century the governments and the banks have totally discredited themselves in the public's view as they have run the ship of the world's monetary system onto the rocks. Should the bankers have the temerity to show up after the shipwreck in order to set up shop, people will rise and chase them out - just as Jesus chased out the money changers in the famous scene "Cleansing of the Temple" (Mark 11:15-19; Matthew 21:12-17; Luke 19:45-48; John 2:12-25).

The scriptural teaching, confirmed by all four evangelists, is clear. Social cooperation is still possible in the absence of banks. It was a fatal mistake to ban the spontaneous circulation of bills maturing into gold from financing world trade - thereby promoting the bankers' dishonored promises to pay, and their never maturing but ever burgeoning debt, to the status of money.

Victors disallowing real bill circulation in 1918

The international gold standard did not collapse during the 1930's because of its inner contradictions - as schools inculcate the idea into all students. The truth is that the victorious powers inadvertently caused the collapse of the gold standard (with a 13-year lag) by disallowing its clearing system, the international bill market, to reopen for business after the cessation of hostilities in 1918.

The victors did not want to abolish the gold standard per se. After all, Britain returned to a gold bullion standard at the original parity of the pound sterling in 1925. The victorious allies acted vindictively. They just wanted to punish Germany over and above the provisions of the peace treaty. They forced the world into the straitjacket of bilateral trade, essentially a barter system that had evolved during the war. They refused to entertain Germany's post-war revival, given the benefits of multilateral world trade, epitomized by the international bill market as it operated before 1914. In effect, the victors wanted to perpetuate the wartime blockade of Germany in peacetime. Never mind that this also punished their own people. In their opinion it was a small price to pay for security. Little did the victorious powers realize that they were sounding the death knell for the gold standard. In a complex trading world such as that of the twentieth century the gold standard could hardly survive if it is castrated by cutting off its clearing system, bill circulation. The idea that the world could be coerced to embrace a system barring multilateral trade is akin to the idea that people could be forced back to barter by abolishing money.

History has borne out the truth of this observation. During a period of five years, from September 1, 1931, when Britain, to September 27, 1936, when Switzerland reneged on their domestic and international gold obligations, all other governments have similarly defaulted on their solemn promises to pay their creditors in the form of a fixed quantity and quality of gold. In some countries, so in the United States, draconian regulations were put into effect making the possession of gold a criminal offence in 1933. Such extreme measures had only one explanation: vindictiveness - even to the extent of hurting your own citizens and violating your own Constitution in the execution of an insane monetary policy. Government economists, university professors, financial writers and journalists have "forgotten" to raise the question whether such extreme and vindictive interference with the world's production and distribution of goods and services would ultimately have some untoward effects, even war, as a repercussion. Not one of them thought of suggesting that the legal tender status of bank notes should be declared unconstitutional through an international treaty - as the paramount measure to secure the preservation of world peace.

A Century of Legal Tender

The "forgotten questions" are belatedly being asked now. The present great financial crisis is not the outcome of some recent errors of commission or omission. Its ultimate cause goes back 100 years, to 1909. That was the year when France and Germany, in short succession after one another, enacted legal tender legislation making the note issue of the Bank of France and the Reichsbank legal tender in their respective jurisdictions. Without legal tender bank notes an all-out war could scarcely be fought. Members of the officer corps and procurers of munitions would demand remuneration in the gold coin of the realm. That could have put a speedy end to the war that started in 1914.

The real cause of the great financial crisis that started in 2009 is the inadvertent destruction of the gold standard a hundred years ago through the introduction of legal tender bank notes before World War I, and the vengeful decision to bar the international bill market after. It was these measures that have given rise to the corrosive regime of irredeemable currency, floating exchange rates, gyrating interest rates, and forever growing perpetual debt - a monetary arrangement never before globally embraced.

100 percent Gold Standard (so called)

I am an old man, two years shy of four score. I was looking forward to enjoying the quiet pleasures of retirement. However, the present world crisis calls me out of retirement. I feel it is my duty to do what I can to prevent a disaster, to wit, the establishment of the 100 percent gold standard (so called) and letting it run as the fall guy in a mission that is condemned to fail, as Britain's return to the gold standard was in 1925.

Britain's gold standard of 1925 failed because it did not have a clearing system and so it utterly lacked elasticity that only self-liquidating credit, embodied by real bill circulation could impart to the monetary system. It was doomed to failure from start. The 100 percent gold standard (so called) would repeat the mistake the British made in 1925. Another failure of the gold standard would set the world back another hundred years. In the meantime there would be trade wars, most likely leading to another world war. Our civilization would be put in harm's way.

The Theory of Discount

The 100 percent gold standard (so called) would also deprive the world of the benefits of the discount rate, this sophisticated and versatile instrument to regulate the economy. The economic triumph of the one hundred-year period from 1815 through 1914 is the triumph not only of the gold standard, but also of self-liquidating credit, the bill market, and the discount rate (as distinct from the rate of interest). During that triumphant period such economic maladies as chronic trade imbalance, structural unemployment, foreign exchange crises, unbridled increases in public and private debt were quite unknown. The world economy was on an even keel, delicately balanced by self-correction through the mechanism of the discount rate.

In the 19th century no sharp distinction could be made between "surplus" and "deficit" countries due to the self-correcting mechanism of the discount rate. It would have been unthinkable that balances of pound sterling would keep piling up in one country (as dollar balances do now in China), causing great disruptions in world trade, and leading to the dismantling of whole industries in the deficit countries.

Instead, surplus countries would experience an automatic fall, deficit countries an automatic rise in the discount rate. This would immediately induce a flow of short-term capital from the surplus countries to the deficit countries in the form of consumer goods in the most urgent demand. There is no better way, known to man, to satisfy the world's multifarious and fast-changing needs using the world's scarce resources most economically and efficiently, to the best advantage of all. This great mechanism of economic adjustment, capable of preventing structural unemployment and chronic imbalances in the world economy, the discount rate, was thoughtlessly thrown away by the victorious allies when they decided not to allow the reorganization of the international bill market for reasons of vindictiveness in 1918.

Open the Mint to Gold!

The secret of solution to the great financial crisis of our day is that governments should open the Mint to gold. This means restoring the individuals' right to convert their gold at the Mint, without limit, into the gold coin of the realm free of seigniorage charges. They should also have the right to melt down, hoard or export the gold coin of the realm as they see fit.

The significance of the opening of the Mint to gold is that it would convert idled gold into "gold on the go". Circulating gold coins would revive world trade as nothing else could. Gold locked up in government and private vaults is a curse putting the world economy in a bind (in addition to being a stupid economic waste of a unique scarce resource that has no substitute).

The Most Misunderstood of Metals

Gold is the most misunderstood metal in human history, because of the economists' failure to distinguish between its dynamic and static aspects in representing values. Economists have blithely assumed all along that the value of gold is the same whether it flows freely from one hand to the next, or whether the movement of gold is obstructed, in the worst case arrested, by the government (soon to be aped by banks and individuals). Yet the truth of the matter is that "gold on the go" is far more valuable than "gold locked up". Golden Ages of history were periods characterized by "gold on the go". Man trusted man, and men trusted their governments. Promises to pay gold were routinely made and kept. Gold was paid out without hesitation because men and governments were confident that they can get it back on the same terms any time of their own choosing. Above all, during the Golden Ages of history there was peace because goods and services could be more readily obtained through trade than through theft or conquest.

By contrast, under our present system wherein gold is concentrated in government and private hoards, there prevails a great distrust and widespread misery. Above all, there is perpetual war as goods and services could be more readily obtained through theft and conquest than through voluntary trade.

In rejecting gold our statesmen have rejected reason. Their guilty conscience is shown by their neurotic fear of an open debate on the gold question, and by the fact that they deny academic appointments to solid gold standard men, treating them as if they were cranks. Politicians are wont to erase the very thought of gold from the public consciousness.

The Best Unemployment Insurance Known to Man

The combination of a gold standard with bill trading would produce an economic miracle in the world far greater than the economic miracle of Ludwig Erhardt's Germany in 1949. The curse of trade deficits would disappear. Even if a country suffered a great natural disaster, say, the total loss of its annual crop, trade deficit would not necessarily follow. The discount rate would immediately shoot up in the stricken country. That country would be the best place in the world on which to draw bills. This would instantaneously generate a flow of short-term capital in the form of consumer goods in most urgent demand. No country would ever need to go to other governments begging for charity. Surplus countries would be prompted to expel gold in response to greater demand as demonstrated by the higher discount rate abroad.

Structural unemployment would disappear as it would be prevented before it became chronic by the higher discount rate in areas of falling employment. The higher local discount rate would generate an influx of finished and semi-finished goods from the surrounding areas. The processing and the distribution of these goods would create as many new jobs as necessary. The best "unemployment insurance" known to man is "gold standard plus bill trading". This is how the world economy worked before 1914; this is how it would have worked after 1918 had the victorious powers had the intelligence to allow multilateral trade and real bill circulation to make a comeback.

Hands-off Treasury Bills

All the government needs to do is to open the Mint to gold and to protect real bill trading against fraud. Funds raised through the bill market are public funds that must be protected against misuse just as other forms of public funds must. Let me mention just three types of misuse: (1) drawing more than one bill on the same consignment of merchandise; (2) drawing a new bill upon the expiry of the old on the same unsold merchandise; (3) financing stores of goods in the expectation of a rise in price by drawing bills.

Bills of exchange drawn on goods in most urgent demand and moving fast enough to the ultimate gold-paying consumer are capable of monetary circulation on their own wings and under their own steam, regardless whether or not banks are standing by, ready to monetize them. But if they are, legislation should prohibit banks from borrowing short in order to lend long. In practice this means that the banks would be prohibited from rolling over short term commercial credit at maturity. Commercial banks must also be prohibited from conspiring with the drawer of the bill. Withholding stocks from trade in expectation of a rise in price must be financed by an investment bank, never by a commercial bank. The two types of banks should be strictly separated by law. Commercial banks must also be prohibited from investing in brick and mortar. In practice this means that mortgages are "hands-off ".

Treasury bills are also "hands-off", except on capital account. We know that people will want to eat and to keep themselves clad and shod tomorrow. That's what makes bills the safest earning asset. We also know that people will pay their taxes only after they have eaten, clad and shod themselves. That's why real bills as an earning asset are superior to Treasury bills.

The Curse of Senescence

The demand for gold has a component that is unknown to our generation, although it was ubiquitous a hundred years ago: the demand for yield on gold in gold. Gold used to wear two hats: if you wanted, gold was wealth; but if you wanted, gold was income. Moreover, the switch between the two was as simple as one-two-three, through the agency of the bill market. The possibility of making gold yield an income in gold is missing from the world today. The reason is the neurotic approach to gold promoted by the media and academia.

The discount earned by holding real bills to maturity is the safest way to generate an income in gold. Likewise, the safest way to convert that income back into gold is by selling real bills from portfolio.

But why is switching between gold as wealth and gold as income so important? Well, God created man and made him mortal. Also he made us subject to curse of senescence. Our capacity to generate an income is the lowest just when our need to rely on it is the greatest: when we grow old and frail. This seems unjust; but God has also given us a marvelous tool as a compensation: gold. The young man can hoard gold, maybe to adorn his wife with gold jewelry, thus converting income into wealth, so that they can turn this wealth back into income by dishoarding gold when he grows old and his surplus of income has turned into a deficit. Thus gold is man's tool to convert income into wealth and wealth into income safely. Gold is the catalyst in solving the problem of senescence. That indeed is gold's main excellence.

Exchanging income for wealth and wealth for income

The trouble is that hoarding and dishoarding gold is a laborious and time-consuming process, raising the problem of efficiency and safety. It is important for us to see that the efficiency of converting income into wealth and wealth into income can be greatly enhanced, and the time-consuming process can be telescoped into instant action, if we pass from direct to indirectconversion of income and wealth. That is to say, we pass from hoarding and dishoarding to the exchange of income for wealth and wealth for income.

The Theory of Interest

This leads us to the concept of interest. The interest rate is just the marginal efficiency of exchanging income and wealth (over the zero efficiency of direct conversion: hoarding and dishoarding). We can shape the theory of the origin of interest so as to describe the evolution of direct conversion of income into wealth or wealth into income through the agency of themost hoardable good, gold, resulting in the far more efficient indirect conversion: the exchange of wealth and income.

This closely follows Menger's familiar theory of the origin of money as the evolution of direct exchange (barter) resulting in the far more efficient indirect exchange through the agency of themost marketable good, gold.

Given the possibility of indirect conversion, that is, the exchange of income and wealth, the young man with a surplus of income but a deficit of wealth, who wants to go into business, no longer has to waste his best years to hoard gold in order to raise capital. He will seek out a congenial elderly man who has a surplus of wealth but a deficit of income. The two can go into partnership in exchanging the surplus income of the junior partner for the surplus wealth of the senior. But they can do it safely only if the God-ordained institution of the gold standard and the instrument of the gold bond have not been corrupted by do-gooder politicians, as they in fact have in inflicting the coercive regime of irredeemable currency upon the world.

Today no exchange of income and wealth is safe because we no longer have a reliable unit measuring value. This is a formidable obstruction in the way of forming new capital at a time when great capital destruction is taking place due to fluctuating interest rates. The problem of providing adequate capital for business cannot be solved satisfactorily while assuming the regime of irredeemable currency, under which the central bank can suppress the rate of interest all the way to zero - the main cause of capital destruction in the world today. It can be solved only under the regime of a gold standard, where the rate of interest is naturally stable, as shown by the stable price of the gold bond.

This is a new theory of interest that starts from the concept of the hoardability of gold and from the natural need of man to save for his old age. It enables us to see that old age security can be furnished far more efficiently through the voluntary efforts of individuals than through the coercive schemes of the government.

My Message to the Young

I have established the New Austrian School of Economics in order to spread these unorthodox ideas which are very much in the spirit of Carl Menger. Time has come to go beyond rehashing old truths: we must come up with new ideas on our own.

I hereby invite all young people who feel that regurgitating platitudes is not enough. Come to Budapest and enroll at the New School of Austrian Economics! Let's raise the torch and carry on the great work of enlightenment together! This is no time for cultism or for parochial quibblings. We must forge ahead past the stale criticism of the existing order. Armed with new ideas we are ready to act. I want to lead you and, then, I want you to lead the world!

There is no place anywhere else in the world where you can study the gold standard as it interacts with its clearing system, the bill market, and with the mechanism of the discount rate; where you can learn that legal tender legislation and the elimination of bill trading is invitation to war (first trade war, followed by shooting war); where you can learn that the starting point of the theory of interest must be gold, the most hordable commodity - except here, in Budapest, at the New School of Austrian Economics. The powers that be have expunged gold standard studies from the curriculum. As a consequence the charlatans of at our universities will never be able to come to grips with the theory of interest. There is no way to understand interest without understanding gold first. We shall recreate gold standard studies and advance it together.

See you in August when I shall deliver my first lecture series on the subject of Disorder and Coordination in Economics - Has the world reached the ultimate economic and monetary disorder?

May 12, 2010

***

Calendar of Events

European Bankers Symposium, 9-10 June 2010, Hall, Tyrol, Austria. Professor Fekete will be a keynote speaker on June 9, at 13:30. The title of his talk is: (Gold) Architecture for a New World Finance System. For more information, please see www.financetrainer.com.

ANNOUNCING THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS IN BUDAPEST. The first ten-day, 20-lecture course offered is entitled: Disorder and Coordination in Economics - Has the world reached the ultimate economic and monetary disorder? The lecturer is Professor Fekete, with the cooperation of Mr. Rudy Fritsch (Canada), Peter van Coppenolle (Belgium), and Mr. Sandeep Jaitly (United Kingdom). It will be held in Budapest, Hungary, from August 9-20, 2010. Participation is limited, early registration is advisable. For more information and registration, contact Dr. Judith Szepesvari, the wife of Prof. Fekete at: szepesvari17@gmail.com. Inexpensive dorm-type accommodation is available for students (shared bathroom, shared kitchen); a three-star hotel is next door. Extra-curricular consulting with Professor Fekete can be arranged for an extra fee.

The school is meant for all students (including beginners) interested in the Austrian theory of money, credit, and banking. Its program plans to cover the whole spectrum of Austrian economics, with special emphasis on developments that took place after the death of the greatest 20th century economist, Ludwig von Mises, including the Real Bills doctrine and social circulating capital; the theory of money, credit and banking; and the theory of interest and discount.

Completion of this course will earn participants one credit towards a four-course, four-credit program that has been submitted for accreditation to the Adult Education Accreditation Board of Hungary. Participants will receive a certificate signed by Professor Fekete. The follow-up credit courses will cover these areas:

Adam Smith's Real Bills Doctrine and Social Circulating Capital.
The Austrian Theory of Interest and Discount.
The Austrian Theory of Money, Credit, and Banking.

Some of the follow-up courses may be offered at Martineum Academy in Szombathely, Hungary, where we have had four successful conferences already in the past. A special cordial invitation is extended to all Martineum alumni and their family members and friends!

It is not well-known that Budapest is one of the foremost spas in Central Europe with a dozen or so medicinal thermal springs. Participants of the course could stay on afterwards and savor the superb spa and cultural offerings in the city. Make it a family holiday! Bring the children! Eating and shopping facilities, as well as a swimming pool are nearby. Spectacular excursions can be arranged in the surrounding hills, and boat trips on the River Danube.

www.professorfekete.com

Michael Snyder: People are realizing that LBMA system has little gold

2010-05-09T20:12:00.001+03:00

Michael Snyder, editor of The Economic Collapse blog, writes this week:

"Anyone who follows the gold market knows that big financial institutions regularly work to suppress the price of gold. In fact, one industry insider recently decided to be a whistleblower and came forward with 'smoking gun' evidence of price manipulation in the precious metals markets, but the CFTC didn't do a thing about it.

"Fortunately, the overwhelming demand for gold is now pushing the price up despite efforts to suppress it.

"In addition, once it becomes apparent that most of the "gold" that is traded in the world is not backed by the actual metal itself, the price of gold will go even higher.

"For years, almost everyone has assumed that the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), the world's largest gold market, had actual gold to back up the massive 'gold deposits' at the major LBMA banks.

"But that is just not the case.

"People are now starting to realize that there is very little actual gold in the LBMA system.

"When most people think they are buying 'gold,' what they are actually buying are just pieces of paper that say they own gold.

"Egon von Greyerz of Matterhorn Asset Management in Switzerland recently elaborated on this point. He says that 'a lot of people who have studied it closely are convinced that there is a major shortage in physical gold at LBMA. LBMA trades around 700 tons net of gold daily. That is 25 percent of world annual production and around $6 trillion annually. To back that amount of trading on a 100-percent reserve ratio basis, it would need several years' production of physical gold, which they definitively haven't got.'"

Snyder's commentary is headlined "Has Gold Become a New Reserve Currency?" and you can find it at the Economic Collapse Blog HERE

STOP PRESS..... Intraday Dow down 1000 points!...Gold up

2010-05-07T10:02:00.000+03:00

Breaking Interview:
On a day when the DOW closed down 430 points after falling 1,000 points and gold closed up $33 to roughly $1,210, Jim Sinclair was kind enough to spend some time making sense out of what is happening in the gold and equity markets for King World News listeners.

Legendary Jim Sinclair known as Mr. Gold for his remarkably accurate timing regarding the gold bull market of the 70's is the Founder of jsmineset.com and Chairman of Tanzanian Royalty Exploration.
Please click HERE for the interview

Business Insider exposes IMF's gold cover-up

2010-05-01T21:35:00.001+03:00

At the urging of GATA and Sprott Asset Management CEO Eric Sprott, Business Insider reporter Vince Veneziani recently put to the International Monetary Fund five specific questions about the IMF's supposed gold reserves, questions similar to those put to the IMF by GATA's Chris Powell in April 2008. (See http://www.gata.org/node/6242.)

Business Insider's two most important questions may have been:

1) Exactly where is the IMF's supposed gold? and

2) When the IMF sells gold, does any real gold change hands or are such sales essentially just bookkeeping transactions among central banks?

Tonight Veneziani reports that IMF spokesman Alistair Thomson replied to Business Insider's five questions as follows: "I looked through your message; we don't have anything more for you on this."

How's that for accountability from an international governmental organization?

Veneziani concludes: "Certainly this unwillingness is only fodder for skeptical gold folks out there."

Indeed, the IMF's refusal to answer Business Insider is more evidence that the gold it has been threatening the gold market with for years is an illusion -- that the IMF has no gold at all but only a tenuous claim on the gold reserves of its member nations, nations that, the ever-more-valuable CPM Group reports today, seem not at all inclined to part with it anymore:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2746801820100427?type=marketsNews

Thus Veneziani and Business Insider have accomplished something apparently not yet accomplished by any major news organization in the world: They have put important, critical, inconvenient, and direct questions to a central banking institution. Further, Veneziani and Business Insider have been treated with contempt for doing so and have publicized the refusal to answer.

Not even The New York Times, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal have yet dared attempt such ordinary journalism in regard to central banking.

The Business Insider report is headlined "Five Questions About Gold the IMF Refuses to Answer" and you can find it HERE

Ted Butler: Worst is over for gold and silver

2010-04-24T16:45:00.000+03:00

In his weekly interview with Eric King of King World News, silver market analyst Ted Butler remarks that "the worst is behind us" for gold and silver investors dealing with the recent decline in prices; that the big silver short, JPMorgan Chase, is not increasing its short position in silver; and that investors should get out of "pooled" and unallocated gold and silver accounts and shift to accounts that identify their gold and silver bars by hallmark and serial number. The interview is not quite 13 minutes long and you can find it at the King World News Internet site HERE

New York Post: Trader blows whistle on gold, silver price manipulation

2010-04-11T22:45:00.001+03:00

Metal$ Are in the Pits

Trader Blows Whistle on Gold and Silver Price Manipulation

By Michael Gray

New York Post

Sunday, April 11, 2010

There is no silver lining to the activities of JPMorgan Chase and HSBC in the precious-metals market here and in London, says a 40-year veteran of the metal pits.

The banks, which do the Federal Reserve's bidding in the metals markets, have long been the government's lead actors in keeping down the prices of gold and silver, according to a former Goldman Sachs trader working at the London Bullion Market Association.

Maguire was scheduled to testify last week before the Commodities Futures Trade Commission, which is looking into the activities of large banks in the metals market, but was knocked off the list at the last moment. So he went public.

Maguire -- in an exclusive interview with the Post -- explained JPMorgan's role in the metals pits in both London and here, and how they can generate a profit either way the market moves.

"JPMorgan acts as an agent for the Federal Reserve; they act to halt the rise of gold and silver against the US dollar. JPMorgan is insulated from potential losses" on their short positions "by the Fed and/or the US taxpayer," Maguire said.

In the gold pits, Maguire sees HSBC betting against the precious metal's price without having any skin in the game in the form of a naked short.

"HSBC conducts an ongoing manipulative concentrated naked short position in gold. Silver is much easier to manipulate due to its much smaller [market] size," Maguire added.

"No one at JPMorgan is familiar with Andrew Maguire," said Brian Marchiony, a company spokesman. HSBC declined to comment.

Also during the CFTC hearing, Jeff Christian, founder of the commodities firm CPM Group, said that the LBMA, the physical delivery market for gold and silver in the UK, has been using leverage, which is another way to depress the price of gold and silver.

Christian said that the LBMA -- the same market Maguire trades in -- has leverage of about 100-1 on the gold bars settled on the exchange. In layman's terms, that means if 100 clients requested their bullion bars be delivered, the exchange could give only one client the precious metal.

The remaining requests would have to be settled for cash equivalent. "That is tantamount to a default on the trade," says Bill Murphy, chairman of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee.

Maguire goes further and calls it a fraud: "If you sell something you do not own, then that is fraud."

Back in 2007, Morgan Stanley agreed to settle a $4.4-million lawsuit brought by precious-metal clients, who alleged that Morgan offered to buy gold and silver and store it for the investors, but never purchased any metal and still charged them storage fees.

Morgan Stanley denied the charges at the time but "settled the case to avoid the cost and distractions of continued litigation," the firm said.

Despite gold's rise each of the last 10 years, Murphy believes the price of gold today would be closer to $2,300 an ounce if the price just moved with inflation.

Maguire believes the price should be even higher given the fear trade that would have sent prices spiking during the financial crisis in 2008-09.

Both precious metals have seen a recent spike since Maguire's e-mails became public. Gold has gained 6.5 percent to close at $1,161.55, while silver has spiked 10 percent to $18.38.

According to the e-mails Maguire sent to CFTC regulators, he was spot-on in his expectations of how the precious metals would trade on release of the January jobs report.

This message is to "confirm that the silver manipulation was a great success and played out exactly to plan as predicted yesterday. How would this be possible if the silver market was not in the full control of the parties we discussed in our phone interview?," Maguire wrote to a staff investigator after the trading day.

CFTC commissioner Bart Chilton said, "I'm appreciative of the information Mr. Maguire provided and I'm glad it was introduced into the investigation."

... High, low silver

The prices of gold and silver have been allegedly suppressed by JPMorgan Chase and HSBC, according to a London whistleblower.

Andrew Maguire, who laid out the banks' plan in e-mails to the CFTC prior to trading on the Comex on Feb. 5.

1.) From: Andrew Maguire

To: Ramirez, Eliud [CFTC]

Cc: BChilton [CFTC]

Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 3:18 PM

Subject: Re: Silver today

Thought it may be helpful to your investigation if I gave you the heads up for a manipulative event signaled for Friday, 5th Feb. Scenario 1. The news is bad (employment is worse). This will have a bullish effect on gold and silver as the US dollar weakens and the precious metals draw bids, spiking them higher. This will be sold into within a very short time (1-5 mins) with thousands of new short contracts being added.

Scenario 2. The news is good (employment is better than expected). This will result in a massive short position being instigated almost immediately with no move up. This will not initially be liquidation of long positions but will result in stops being triggered, again targeting key support levels. Kind regards,

2.) From: Andrew Maguire

To: Ramirez, Eliud [CFTC]

Cc: BChilton [CFTC]; GGensler [CFTC]

Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 3:37 PM

Subject: Fw: Silver today A final e-mail to confirm that the silver manipulation was a great success and played out EXACTLY to plan as predicted yesterday. How would this be possible if the silver market was not in the full control of the parties we discussed in our phone interview? Kind regards,

3.) Andrew T. Maguire

From: Ramirez, Eliud

To: Andrew Maguire

Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 1:29 PM

Subject: RE: Silver today Good afternoon, Mr. Maguire, I have received and reviewed your email communications. Thank you so very much for your observations.

GATA: Attack on King World News site meant to shut it down

2010-04-02T12:11:00.000+03:00

King World News today received more detail about yesterday's attack on its Internet site, which happened soon after the posting of Eric King's half-hour interview with GATA Chairman Bill Murphy, board member Adrian Douglas, and your secretary/treasurer about last week's hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The major Internet hosting company that maintains the King World News site reported to King World News: "Your hosting account is the target of a distributed denial of service attack. To protect the network resources, we have temporarily placed your Web site behind a network filter. Once the attack has ended, service will be restored to normal. ... Computers were attacking your account."

Wikipedia says a distributed denial-of-service attack "is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DDoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely."

Eric King told GATA today, "We are on one of the top grid server systems in the world, where traffic is not an issue, and this has never happened before. This was a case of an entity needing to silence the messenger."

No Internet site has given as much voice to GATA and other pro-gold and free-market advocates as King World News has, so given the scope of the attack on the the King World News Internet site, it is hard not be awfully suspicious about it.

King's interview with Murphy, Douglas, and your secretary/treasurer can be found here:

http://www.kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2010/3/31_GATA.html

Meanwhile, GATA's friend Trace Mayer, proprietor of RunToGold.com, reports that his March 28 commentary on last week's hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission --

http://www.runtogold.com/2010/03/cftc-gold-and-silver-hearing-is-old-news/

-- was followed by a similarly massive attack on RunToGold's Internet server. "To handle spikes in traffic," Mayer says, "I am on an expensive enterprise-level cloud server with a company that handles hosting for some of the big dogs, like Sony and Toyota, and my server got hammered. The site was down for 2 1/2 hours, from about noon to 2:30p PT on March 30. There were no issues with my hosting provider and it appears we have everything under control now. I have never had an issue like this before. Anyway, it looks like we have someone's attention. Keep yanking on that tail."

GATA indeed will keep yanking on that tail but our friends also risk getting bitten. We're grateful to them for that.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer

Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

Sophisticated attack disables King World News site for 2 hours

2010-04-01T11:30:00.000+03:00

Internet servers hosting the King World News Internet site, which today posted a half-hour interview with three GATA board members, were attacked and disabled tonight from approximately 8 to 10 p.m. ET.

The servers are maintained by one of the largest Internet site hosting companies in the world and one of its technicians told King World News proprietor Eric King, "We cannot figure out why this cluster of servers is being attacked." The King World News site host has maintained the site on a "grid" system of servers so that ordinary technical problems with any one server cannot disable the site, but tonight's attack was sophisticated and brought down the entire grid.

King and his family have not been attacked and one may suppose that what happened tonight at least is preferable to being rammed by a hit-and-run driver, as CFTC whistleblower Andrew Maguire and his wife were rammed in London the day after GATA disclosed at last week's hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission that Maguire had given the commission detailed warning of a manipulation of the futures market and the commission had done nothing about it.

At this hour the King World News interview with the three GATA board members -- GATA Chairman Bill Murphy, Adrian Douglas, and your secretary/treasurer -- appears to be accessible again here:

If King World News is becoming Radio Free America, this sort of thing may happen again.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

CFTC whistleblower Maguire, GATA's Douglas interviewed by King World News

2010-03-30T18:23:00.001+03:00

London metals trader and CFTC whistleblower Andrew Maguire was interviewed with GATA board member Adrian Douglas for 40 minutes Tuesday by Eric King of King World News.

Maguire explained how he came to complain to the CFTC about silver market manipulation by JPMorgan Chase traders in London and then to Douglas when the CFTC failed to call him to testify at its hearing last week on futures trading in the metals market.

You can listen to the interview at the King World News Internet site here:

Salinas Price: News from the Galaxy

2010-03-29T00:53:00.001+03:00

News from the Galaxy

23/March/2010

Hugo Salinas Price

It has been revealed to me that there is life on a planet within our Galaxy. Among the living creatures on this planet are humanoids – that is, beings that bear a great similarity to humans on this Earth, but who do not appear to be intelligent, as we humans are, but rather sub-human in their reasoning faculties.

These humanoids are at present quite busy building large structures such as bridges and tall buildings with concrete, which they invented many years ago, but without the use of reinforcing bars, or rebars, as we call them.

Of course, since we are intelligent, we know what has to be the result of their efforts: continual collapses which cause these poor humanoids great grief and disappointment.

It appears that in the remote past these creatures did use rebars in concrete constructions, but an influential politician whose name is recorded in their history as “Nicson” finally decided that concrete did not require rebars to give it tensile strength, and therefore banned their use.

At the present time their media of communication are filled with discussions on how to prevent concrete structures from collapsing, with consequent disruption of life. The situation is very distressing.

Some commentators in the editorial pages of the well-regarded newspaper “Cement Times” recommend closer supervision of the building of concrete structures; others recommend more transparency regarding building methods, while some recommend that buildings be constructed in such a way as to prop each other up, to avoid collapse. In the meantime, no formula has been found to remedy this plague of collapsing buildings.

A very few of these humanoids are mentioning the fact that when rebars were used, long before Nicson, buildings did not collapse. Scarcely any attention is given to these “rebar bugs”, as they are derisively referred to by the élite of the inhabitants, who are venerated as well-informed and expert authorities in the matter. The rebar-bugs have a spokesman who goes by the name of “Paulum”, but they seem to be fighting a losing battle against the sub-human intelligence of the majority and those wielding political power.

Rebars are regarded by the cement manufacturers’ representatives as old-fashioned and unnecessary, and in fact, as “barbarous relics”; they allege that reverting to use of rebars would hamper the economy, because it would slow down the building industry, which is thriving because buildings are collapsing daily and of course, have to be rebuilt. Besides, they argue that rebars are “too scarce”.

Indeed, it might be suspected that the “Federal Cement Manufacturers’ Association” has an interest in retaining the present mode of rebar-less construction. Their disdain for rebars speaks louder than words of their sub-human nature, for by the simple expedient of allowing the use of rebars, which they have banned completely, they would find an undoubtely efficacious remedy to the parlous situation which prevails on their planet. However, it is apparent that there is no wish to accept the application of this remedial measure on the part of the Federal Cement Manufacturers’ Association, or the “Fed” as they call it.

Such is the travail now prevailing amongst the humanoids of that remote planet. There is nothing to be done; they must be allowed to suffer. Perhaps they may, in the course of millenia, eventually acquire human intelligence.

CFTC whistleblower injured in London hit-and-run

2010-03-28T22:15:00.000+03:00

It seems that stakes in gold price suppression are higher than otherwise thought. As the video from Bill Murphy's testifying before the CFTC posted here shows, the noose around the anti-gold cabal necks is uncomfortably tightening. And they wasted no time reacting.....

Here's the latest GATA release on this issue:

"Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

London metals trader Andrew Maguire, who warned an investigator for the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in advance about a gold and silver market manipulation to be undertaken by traders for JPMorgan Chase in February and whose whistleblowing was publicized by GATA at Thursday's CFTC hearing on metals futures trading --http://www.gata.org/node/8466-- was injured along with his wife the next day when their car was struck by a hit-and-run driver in the London area.

According to GATA's contact with Maguire, board member Adrian Douglas, Maguire and his wife were admitted to a hospital overnight and released today and are expected to recover fully.

Maguire told Douglas by telephone today that his car was struck by a car careening out of a side road. When a pedestrian who witnessed the crash tried to block the other driver's escape, the other driver accelerated at the pedestrian, causing him to jump out of the way to avoid being hit. The other driver's car then struck two other cars in escaping. But the other driver was caught by police after a chase in which police helicopters were summoned.

We'll convey more information about the incident as it becomes available.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer

Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc."

Von Mises on The Gold Standard

2010-03-17T14:13:00.005+02:00

This article is excerpted from chapter 17 of Human Action: The Scholar's Edition , by Ludwig Von Mises, and is read by Jeff Riggenbach.

Men have chosen the precious metals gold and silver for the money service on account of their mineralogical, physical, and chemical features. The use of money in a market economy is a praxeologically necessary fact. That gold — and not something else — is used as money is merely a historical fact and as such cannot be conceived by catallactics. In monetary history too, as in all other branches of history, one must resort to historical understanding. If one takes pleasure in calling the gold standard a "barbarous relic,"[1] one cannot object to the application of the same term to every historically determined institution. Then the fact that the British speak English — and not Danish, German, or French — is a barbarous relic too, and every Briton who opposes the substitution of Esperanto for English is no less dogmatic and orthodox than those who do not wax rapturous about the plans for a managed currency.

The demonetization of silver and the establishment of gold monometallism was the outcome of deliberate government interference with monetary matters. It is pointless to raise the question concerning what would have happened in the absence of these policies. But it must not be forgotten that it was not the intention of the governments to establish the gold standard. What the governments aimed at was the double standard. They wanted to substitute a rigid, government-decreed exchange ratio between gold and silver for the fluctuating market ratios between the independently coexistent gold and silver coins. The monetary doctrines underlying these endeavors misconstrued the market phenomena in that complete way in which only bureaucrats can misconstrue them. The attempts to create a double standard of both metals, gold and silver, failed lamentably. It was this failure that generated the gold standard. The emergence of the gold standard was the manifestation of a crushing defeat of the governments and their cherished doctrines.

In the 17th century, the rates at which the English government tariffed the coins overvalued the guinea with regard to silver and thus made the silver coins disappear. Only those silver coins that were much worn by usage or in any other way defaced or reduced in weight remained in current use; it did not pay to export and to sell them on the bullion market. Thus England got the gold standard against the intention of its government. Only much later the laws made the de facto gold standard a de jurestandard. The government abandoned further fruitless attempts to pump silver standard coins into the market and minted silver only as subsidiary coins with a limited legal tender power. These subsidiary coins were not money, but money-substitutes. Their exchange value depended not on their silver content, but on the fact that they could be exchanged at every instant, without delay and without cost, at their full face value against gold. They were de facto silver printed notes, claims against a definite amount of gold.

Later in the course of the 19th century, the double standard resulted in a similar way in France and in the other countries of the Latin Monetary Union in the emergence ofde facto gold monometallism. When the drop in the price of silver in the later 1870s would automatically have effected the replacement of the de facto gold standard by the de facto silver standard, these governments suspended the coinage of silver in order to preserve the gold standard. In the United States, the price structure on the bullion market had already, before the outbreak of the Civil War, transformed the legal bimetallism into de facto gold monometallism.

"If one takes pleasure in calling the gold standard a 'barbarous relic,' one cannot object to the application of the same term to every historically determined institution."

After the greenback period, there ensued a struggle between the friends of the gold standard on the one hand and those of silver on the other hand. The result was a victory for the gold standard. Once the economically most advanced nations had adopted the gold standard, all other nations followed suit. After the great inflationary adventures of the First World War, most countries hastened to return to the gold standard or the gold-exchange standard.

The gold standard was the world standard of the age of capitalism, increasing welfare, liberty, and democracy, both political and economic. In the eyes of the free traders its main eminence was precisely the fact that it was an international standard as required by international trade and the transactions of the international money and capital market.[2] It was the medium of exchange by means of which Western industrialism and Western capital had borne Western civilization into the remotest parts of the earth's surface, everywhere destroying the fetters of age-old prejudices and superstitions, sowing the seeds of new life and new well-being, freeing minds and souls, and creating riches unheard of before. It accompanied the triumphal unprecedented progress of Western liberalism ready to unite all nations into a community of free nations peacefully cooperating with one another.

It is easy to understand why people viewed the gold standard as the symbol of this greatest and most beneficial of all historical changes. All those intent upon sabotaging the evolution toward welfare, peace, freedom, and democracy loathed the gold standard, and not only on account of its economic significance. In their eyes the gold standard was the labarum, the symbol, of all those doctrines and policies they wanted to destroy. In the struggle against the gold standard, much more was at stake than commodity prices and foreign-exchange rates.

The nationalists are fighting the gold standard because they want to sever their countries from the world market and to establish national autarky as far as possible. Interventionist governments and pressure groups are fighting the gold standard because they consider it the most serious obstacle to their endeavors to manipulate prices and wage rates. But the most fanatical attacks against gold are made by those intent upon credit expansion. With them, credit expansion is the panacea for all economic ills. It could lower or even entirely abolish interest rates, raise wages and prices for the benefit of all except the parasitic capitalists and the exploiting employers, free the state from the necessity of balancing its budget — in short, make all decent people prosperous and happy. Only the gold standard, that devilish contrivance of the wicked and stupid "orthodox" economists, prevents mankind from attaining everlasting prosperity.

The gold standard is certainly not a perfect or ideal standard. There is no such thing as perfection in human things. But nobody is in a position to tell us how something more satisfactory could be put in place of the gold standard. The purchasing power of gold is not stable. But the very notions of stability and unchangeability of purchasing power are absurd. In a living and changing world there cannot be any such thing as stability of purchasing power. In the imaginary construction of an evenly rotating economy there is no room left for a medium of exchange. It is an essential feature of money that its purchasing power is changing. In fact, the adversaries of the gold standard do not want to make money's purchasing power stable. They want rather to give to the governments the power to manipulate purchasing power without being hindered by an "external" factor, namely, the money relation of the gold standard.

The main objection raised against the gold standard is that it makes operative in the determination of prices a factor that no government can control — the vicissitudes of gold production. Thus an "external" or "automatic" force restrains a national government's power to make its subjects as prosperous as it would like to make them. The international capitalists dictate and the nation's sovereignty becomes a sham.

However, the futility of interventionist policies has nothing at all to do with monetary matters. It will be shown later why all isolated measures of government interference with market phenomena must fail to attain the ends sought. If the interventionist government wants to remedy the shortcomings of its first interferences by going further and further, it finally converts its country's economic system into socialism of the German pattern. Then it abolishes the domestic market altogether, and with it money and all monetary problems, even though it may retain some of the terms and labels of the market economy.[3] In both cases it is not the gold standard that frustrates the good intentions of the benevolent authority.

The significance of the fact that the gold standard makes the increase in the supply of gold depend upon the profitability of producing gold is, of course, that it limits the government's power to resort to inflation. The gold standard makes the determination of money's purchasing power independent of the changing ambitions and doctrines of political parties and pressure groups. This is not a defect of the gold standard; it is its main excellence. Every method of manipulating purchasing power is by necessity arbitrary. All methods recommended for the discovery of an allegedly objective and "scientific" yardstick for monetary manipulation are based on the illusion that changes in purchasing power can be "measured." The gold standard removes the determination of cash-induced changes in purchasing power from the political arena. Its general acceptance requires the acknowledgment of the truth that one cannot make all people richer by printing money. The abhorrence of the gold standard is inspired by the superstition that omnipotent governments can create wealth out of little scraps of paper.

"People fight the gold standard because they want to substitute national autarky for free trade, war for peace, totalitarian government omnipotence for liberty."

It has been asserted that the gold standard too is a manipulated standard. The governments may influence the height of gold's purchasing power either by credit expansion — even if it is kept within the limits drawn by considerations of preserving the redeemability of the money-substitutes — or indirectly by furthering measures that induce people to restrict the size of their cash holdings. This is true. It cannot be denied that the rise in commodity prices that occurred between 1896 and 1914 was to a great extent provoked by such government policies. But the main thing is that the gold standard keeps all such endeavors toward lowering money's purchasing power within narrow limits. The inflationists are fighting the gold standard precisely because they consider these limits a serious obstacle to the realization of their plans.

What the expansionists call the defects of the gold standard are indeed its very eminence and usefulness. It checks large-scale inflationary ventures on the part of governments. The gold standard did not fail. The governments were eager to destroy it, because they were committed to the fallacies that credit expansion is an appropriate means of lowering the rate of interest and of "improving" the balance of trade.

No government is, however, powerful enough to abolish the gold standard. Gold is the money of international trade and of the supernational economic community of mankind. It cannot be affected by measures of governments whose sovereignty is limited to definite countries. As long as a country is not economically self-sufficient in the strict sense of the term, as long as there are still some loopholes left in the walls by which nationalistic governments try to isolate their countries from the rest of the world, gold is still used as money. It does not matter that governments confiscate the gold coins and bullion they can seize and punish those holding gold as felons. The language of bilateral clearing agreements by means of which governments are intent upon eliminating gold from international trade, avoids any reference to gold. But the turnovers performed on the ground of those agreements are calculated on gold prices. He who buys or sells on a foreign market calculates the advantages and disadvantages of such transactions in gold. In spite of the fact that a country has severed its local currency from any link with gold, its domestic structure of prices remains closely connected with gold and the gold prices of the world market. If a government wants to sever its domestic price structure from that of the world market, it must resort to other measures, such as prohibitive import and export duties and embargoes. Nationalization of foreign trade, whether effected openly or directly by foreign exchange control, does not eliminate gold. The governments qua traders are trading by the use of gold as a medium of exchange.

The struggle against gold, which is one of the main concerns of all contemporary governments, must not be looked upon as an isolated phenomenon. It is but one item in the gigantic process of destruction that is the mark of our time. People fight the gold standard because they want to substitute national autarky for free trade, war for peace, totalitarian government omnipotence for liberty.

It may happen one day that technology will discover a method of enlarging the supply of gold at such a low cost that gold will become useless for the monetary service. Then people will have to replace the gold standard by another standard. It is futile to bother today about the way in which this problem will be solved. We do not know anything about the conditions under which the decision will have to be made.

***

Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian School of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises's writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that Mises called "praxeology."

See Ludwig von Mises's article archives.

This article is excerpted from chapter 17 of Human Action: The Scholar's Edition and is read by Jeff Riggenbach.

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Notes

[1] Lord Keynes in the speech delivered before the House of Lords, May 23. 1944.
[2] T.E. Gregory, The Gold Standard and Its Future (3d ed. London, 1934), pp. 22 ff.
[3] Cf. Human Action, chapters XXVII–XXXI.

Adrian Douglas: If your gold is at an LBMA bank, you may be just an unsecured creditor

2010-03-02T00:41:00.001+02:00

By Adrian Douglas

Monday, March 1, 2010

Recently I have written several articles that have discussed how much "paper gold" has been sold, principally through the unallocated accounts of the London Bullion Market Association, though there are other vehicles that achieve the same end, such as pool accounts, unbacked exchange-traded funds, futures, and derivatives, etc., but the LBMA dwarfs them all.

See:

http://www.gata.org/node/7911

And:

http://www.gata.org/node/7908

I estimate that as much as 50,000 tonnes of gold have been sold that do not exist. That is equivalent of all the gold reserves in the world that are yet to be mined -- or, put another way, 25 years of gold production.

That is the granddaddy of all short positions.

The fractional reserve operation of the LBMA is likely to be the next Madoff scandal, except multiplied by 100 -- a $5 trillion fraud as opposed to a $50 billion fraud.

Like all financial scandals before it, this one will be exposed just as surely as night follows day. Gold is unique among all commodities. It is the only commodity that is not bought to be consumed. Rather, it is purchased as a store of wealth. Because it is not consumed, the buyer does not need to take possession of his gold but can be persuaded to trust the seller to store his gold on his behalf.

This unique wrinkle allows bullion bankers to sell gold that does not exist. This allows them to make huge profits, since they have very little cost, as they don't have the inconvenience of actually having to purchase the gold before they sell it.

The consequence of this illegal activity is that it suppresses the price of gold because the "paper gold" supply has the same effect on prices that would happen if real gold had actually been supplied to the market.

Such racketeering is extremely beneficial to the central banks, which are hostile to gold because a free-market gold price would blow the whistle on their perpetual inflationary actions. A suppressed gold price makes fiat currencies appear to have higher purchasing power.

The central banks do not just turn a blind eye to the bullion banks' fraud but actively assist it; the central banks lease gold at a pittance of a lease rate to make sure there is always enough liquidity so the scam is not exposed from the bullion banks' inability to deliver real metal when asked.

There is nothing new about gold bankers selling gold they don't have. The goldsmiths invented the scheme in the 16th century. As recently as 2005 Morgan Stanley was sued for selling imaginary precious metals. Morgan Stanley even had the audacity to charge storage fees on metal that didn't exist. The firm settled the lawsuit out of court but no criminal charges were ever filed. Morgan Stanley maintained that it did nothing wrong because none of its clients had lost any money in the scam. That was innovative. I will try stealing a billion dollars from a bank and then I will pay it back the following day and see what the FBI thinks of that legal defense.

The LBMA operates a fractional reserve system. It sells much more gold than it has. The LBMA keeps on hand the amount of gold that it estimates, in the worst-case scenario, it will be called upon to deliver.

In a recent article I analyzed data from the LBMA's own Internet site that shows that a net of approximately 20 million ounces of gold are traded every day:

http://www.gata.org/node/8248"

This means that we are meant to believe that the equivalent of 25 percent of global annual gold production changes hands each day on the LBMA. On a gross trading basis this probably represents the whole of annual worldwide gold production traded every day. In dollar terms it represents $5.7 trillion of net trade annually. That is almost 60 percent of the entire U.S. economy or 10 percent of the entire global economy being traded through a handful of gold bullion banks.

It is simply mind boggling. You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a market regulator to smell something fishy. To back that level of trading on a 100 percent reserve ratio, the bullion banks would have to own almost 40 percent of all the gold ever mined. There are simply not enough London Good Delivery bars for that to be the case.

You don't have to rely on me to tell you that the LBMA is running a fractional reserve gold racket. This is from the LBMA's own Internet site:

http://www.lbma.org.uk/london/accounts"

"Unallocated Accounts

This is an account where specific bars are not set aside and the customer has a general entitlement to the metal. It is the most convenient, cheapest, and most commonly used method of holding metal.

"The units of these accounts are 1 fine ounce of gold and 1 ounce of silver based upon a .995 LGD (London Good Delivery) gold bar and a .999-fine LGD silver bar respectively. Transactions may be settled by credits or debits to the account while the balance represents the indebtedness between the two parties.

"Credit balances on the account do not entitle the creditor to specific bars of gold or silver, but are backed by the general stock of the bullion dealer with whom the account is held. The client is an unsecured creditor.

"Should the client wish to receive actual metal, this is done by 'allocating' specific bars or equivalent bullion product, the fine gold content of which is then debited from the allocated account."

There are some real peaches in this description. For example: "Credit balances on the account do not entitle the creditor to specific bars of gold or silver, but are backed by the general stock of the bullion dealer with whom the account is held."

They don't say that the bullion dealer has to hold the amount of gold he has sold, just that these unallocated accounts are backed by the bullion dealer's stock. His stock could be a thousand ounces or none at all.

Note the statement: "The client is an unsecured creditor." So this really spells out what "unallocated" means. It means that there is no gold allocated to the customer. The customer owns only an IOU for gold.

If the LBMA were running a system that had on hand 100 percent of all the gold being sold but just didn't want to assign specific bars and serial numbers, then all creditors would be secured. But the LBMA spells out that all clients are unsecured creditors. The buyers have no gold guaranteed against the IOU from the bullion dealers.

Who exactly are the members of the LBMA? The clearing members are as follows:

-- HSBC Bank USA National Association

-- JP Morgan Chase Bank

-- The Bank of Nova Scotia

-- Barclays Bank

-- Deutsche Bank

-- UBS AG

HSBC and JPMorgan Chase are the biggest short sellers on the New York Commodity Exchange. Together they own 95 percent of the over-the-counter precious metals derivatives. They are also custodians of the bullion supposedly held by the GLD and SLV exchange-traded funds, respectively, and they are clearing agents for the LBMA.

That is one fine set of credentials. These banks are so arrogant and confident that their racketeering will not be exposed that the quarterly publication of the LBMA is titled "The Alchemist."

Unlike the alchemists of the middle ages who tried to turn lead into gold, the alchemists at the LBMA turn paper into gold. (Well, gold IOUs, to be exact.)

In 2003 Graham Tuckwell, chairman of Gold Bullion Securities, made a presentation to the annual LBMA precious metals conference about his firm's new gold-backed ETF that today trades on the American Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "GOLD." The transcript of his speech can be found here:

http://www.lbma.org.uk/docs/conf2003/2e.tuckwellLBMAConf2003.pdf

In that speech Tuckwell said:

"There are three essential components of [a] listed security, in our opinion. Firstly, ownership of the gold; investors want allocated gold, not a third-party credit risk, which is what unallocated gold is. In fact, you could argue unallocated gold isn't gold; it's just a piece of paper issued by a bank, and in most cases, unsecured risk."

You have to remember that this is a speech being made in front of all the members of the LBMA. You simply can't make such a statement in front of such a crowd if it isn't true. And we know it is true because the LBMA says the same thing on its Internet site. They say their clients are "unsecured creditors."

The LBMA peddles gold promises to those gullible enough to trade off convenience against title.

Many people do not understand what fractional reserve accounting means. I will give you an example of a less important real-life case.

Commercial airlines routinely sell more seats on a flight than the airplane has. If the plane holds 200 passengers but from statistics the airline knows that on average only half the passengers with ticket show up for check-in, the airline can sell 400 seats and be confident that the plane will fly full, which increases the airline's profitability. If the airline sold only 200 tickets, the plane would fly half empty. Occasionally the airline gets caught when, say, 210 passengers check in. In such circumstances the airline offers a free night in a hotel, a first-class upgrade, and some cash for any 10 passengers volunteering to fly later or the next day. But all the people who purchased tickets believed that they were buying actual available seats, not unallocated virtual seats.

This is exactly the same situation with the LBMA; the LBMA sells more gold than it has. It knows from statistics on average how many clients will ask for delivery and that determines the LBMA's minimum stock level.

But just like the case of the airlines, this scheme is destined to be discovered. When more gold is demanded than the bullion banks can deliver, they try to lease or buy gold from central banks. If this can be done in a timely fashion, the bullion banks' clients are none the wiser. If the central banks cannot provide supply, then the bullion banks are obliged to offer premiums over the spot gold price to encourage clients to accept cash in lieu of metal.

We are hearing anecdotal stories that recently there have been cases of premiums of up to 25 percent being offered for gold buyers to settle in cash instead of metal. It would seem that the bullion banks have pushed the game too far and are on a collision course with default. In addition the central banks have dishoarded a large proportion of their gold and are not in a position to come to the rescue of the bullion banks as much as in the past.

I recently made an analysis of the Comex warehouse inventory of gold and silver in an article entitled "Alarming Trend in Comex Gold and Silver Inventory Data":

http://www.gata.org/node/8373

One of my conclusions is that in the last six months there has been a dramatic decline in the inventory held by the dealers on the Comex (the registered category), while over the same period the open interest has increased. This essentially means that each open contract has less warehouse gold or silver backing today than it did six months ago.

This is a classic reduction in reserve ratio. It is a sign that the gold cartel is running out of physical gold and silver.

This observation is supported by other data. During the last two years the U.S. mint has periodically suspended production of gold and silver coins due to shortages of bullion, and the Comex futures have displayed contracting contango and/or mild backwardation, which is indicative of physical market stress.

There is anecdotal evidence that the LBMA OTC market in London has been having difficulties in making deliveries and requiring central bank gold to do so.

There are also rumors of large premiums being offered for cash settlement in lieu of the bullion.

Sources active in the London market tell us it is difficult to find large amounts of bullion.

The central banks have stopped selling and have become net buyers of gold. Further, at the end of last year the politically connected miner Barrick Gold announced a panicked buying back of its hedges.

The clients of the LBMA are not speculators or gamblers. They have bought gold that they believe is being held in a vault for them by the LBMA members. As the suspicions about the LBMA rise, more clients will ask for delivery, which will expose this fraudulent operation.

As I wrote here earlier, I estimate that as much as 50,000 tonnes of gold have been sold that do not exist. That is equivalent to all the gold in the world that is yet to be mined, or, put another way, 25 years of gold production, the granddaddy of all short positions.

The fractional reserve operation of the LBMA is likely to be the next Madoff scandal, except multiplied by 100 -- a $5 trillion dollar fraud as opposed to a $50 billion fraud. Those holding real bullion will see the price multiply many times as the price adjusts to the supply and demand fundamentals of real metal.

There is only one way to protect yourself and to profit. You should own physical bullion. Simply don't trust intermediaries like the LBMA that purportedly sell you gold but label you an "unsecured creditor." Anyone who thinks he holds gold at the LBMA should demand delivery.

The major desirable and unique characteristic of gold is that it is no one else's liability, unlike almost every other financial asset. If you own a credit risk, like IOU gold, you have not achieved the principle objective of owning gold.

Are you a gold owner or an "unsecured creditor"?

You cannot be both.

-----

Adrian Douglas is publisher of the Market Force Analysis letter (www.MarketForceAnalysis.com) and a member of GATA's Board of Directors.

* * *

Darius Guppy: our world balances on a sea of debt

2010-02-22T19:59:00.001+02:00

"...Money breeds more money and develops a quality akin to matter – the larger the agglomerations, the greater their gravitational pull or, as the Bible puts it: “unto he that hath shall be rendered and from he that hath not shall be taken away, even that which he hath.”

Indeed, contrary to what they may tell you, the banks never really want their loans to be repaid at all. Just so long as the interest is funded it is in fact to their benefit for the capital to remain outstanding on their books as ‘assets’ and for the debts to be rolled over. Every time the IMF or World Bank extends a line of credit to some impoverished nation, are they being ‘charitable’ therefore or are they simply perpetuating the enslavement?

Second, such a system relies entirely, as do all Ponzi schemes, on the assumption of continued growth, hence its inherent instability. Once that growth is threatened the edifice collapses. Householders in Britain today will appreciate such a phenomenon – the result of ‘leverage’ - only too well: put up 10 per cent for a property and borrow the rest from the bank. That property’s value need rise by only 10 per cent and you have doubled your equity. But on the flip side that value need fall by only 10 percent and you are wiped out.

Which in turn explains precisely why a contraction of a mere 2 or 3 percent in the global economy leads not to a correspondingly minute fall on international stock markets, but to financial Armageddon.

Likewise with the banks – lend ten times more money than you possess and when the economy grows – or at least pretends to grow – Porsches galore, but when the lack of growth is exposed it requires only 11% of the loans on your books (in value terms) to be bad and you are bust. The truth is not that these institutions have suddenly become insolvent therefore, but that they were never really solvent in the first place since the assumptions on which they were founded could not apply in the real world. Simple false-accounting has meant that by rolling over their debts they have been able to keep them on their books as ‘assets’ rather than losses and forestall the evil hour.

There is an overarching name for the process I have outlined – ‘usury’ - and our predecessors from the Ancient and Medieval worlds appear to have appreciated much better than us its ultimate destination: ruin..."

Please click HERE to read the rest of this brilliant article.

The Philosophy of Liberty...

2010-02-21T16:53:00.000+02:00

...in a nutshell!!

Bill Bonner: Investing in Gold is a Move Toward Real Wealth

2010-02-20T21:17:00.001+02:00

"...Gold is inert. Lifeless. Incorruptible. But inherently shiftless. It never gets out of bed in the morning. It has never earned a penny in its entire life.

Gold won’t make you rich. It toils not; neither does it spin. Since it doesn’t hustle, it won’t increase your wealth. That’s why, in the Bible, the slave who kept his master’s wealth safe in gold got beaten. Gold won’t earn a profit. It won’t pay you a salary or give you a company car. All it will do is help keep you from getting poor. We’ve never heard of a man who had 100 ounces of gold who was poor. On the other hand, we’ve read about millions of people with stacks of paper money who couldn’t afford a cup of coffee. In our wallet, for example, is a 10 Trillion Dollar bill from Zimbabwe. A dear reader gave it to us. You could have a stack of those a foot high. You still wouldn’t be able to buy a latte at Starbucks. On the other hand, imagine you had a stack of Krugerrands or maple leafs. Well, you still couldn’t buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Because the dumb clerk wouldn’t know what it was. And if he did take the gold coin in exchange for coffee, he’d probably rush over to the mall where some sharp dealer offered to take it off his hands in exchange for PAPER MONEY!

You see, the average person has no idea what real money is. One dollar bill looks the same as another to him. And gold? He’s probably never seen gold, unless it was wrapped around his finger..."

To enjoy Bill Bonner's full article on investing and the wealth preservation aspect of owning gold please click HERE

Murray Pollitt: Farewell to all the emperors

2010-02-18T21:22:00.000+02:00

In his latest market letter, Murray Pollitt of Pollitt & Co. in Toronto, the grand and not that old man of Canadian mine finance, remarks that the world's policy makers lack the courage to accept the discipline necessary to shore up the world's finances. So, Pollitt writes:

"Our best guess is that markets, not policy makers, will determine the next monetary system. And, as much for lack of alternatives as the traditional reasons, gold will be somehow involved. Meanwhile markets will be characterized by volatility, defaults, lots of uncertainty, and a rush for the hard stuff. Before they get around to a monetary system, governments will wake up to the need for wealth creation and, since the quick fix for wealth creation is competitive devaluation, we expect governments to get at it with vigour. Shades of the 1930s."

Pollitt's commentary is headlined "Farewell to All the Emperors" and he has generously consented to GATA's posting it HERE

Annita Acavalos: I predict a riot

2010-02-18T11:48:00.003+02:00

The Greek politico-economic predicament in a nutshell!

...an excellent article by young economist and aspiring libertarian Anita Acavalos.

This is a must read in order to understand the contemporary "Greek Tragedy"...

I predict a riot

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Financial Crisis: The Second Wave

2010-02-16T09:56:00.000+02:00

National Inflation Association just released a trailer for its next documentary, tentatively titled "The Second Wave".

Sprott Asset Management warns: Beware counterfeiters

2010-01-31T20:49:00.000+02:00

Kevin Bambrough and David Franklin of Sprott Asset Management in Toronto argue in an essay just published that central banks no longer have any interest in maintaining the value of their currencies and that, as a result, gold is the only currency that can safeguard wealth.

Their essay is headlined "Beware Counterfeiters" and you can find it at the Sprott Internet site HERE