No inflation?

(Note:  I wrote this last night.  This morning I found a great post from James Turk on Eric King's blog: "I’m often asked by people when do I think they should sell their gold? I tell them this time around it’s going to be easy because you are not going to sell your gold, you’re going to spend it. In other words, gold will once again become currency.” Here's the LINK  Turk expresses the same view I have about the dollar, which is that it will sooner or later plummet quickly into worthlessness)

Hmmmm....this week is going to be a light posting week for me.  I moved apartments and I'll be skiing Wednesday.  I wanted to mention that a continual source of irritation for me is the pervasive commentary and economic analysis pointing to a strengthening economy based on an improving job market, higher wages and low inflation.  What planet are these people from?  Every labor market-related headline data is based on heavily manipulated, faulty data.  All you have to do is read through the details and footnotes of the reports to see that.  If the labor market is improving, how come the long term jobless benefits number AND the number of people on food stamps increases nearly every week?

And how about inflation.  I just paid $3.45/gallon for gasoline.  In late November I was paying 2.80 for the same octane from the same gas station.  That's a 23% increase.  Fortunately for me my gasoline expenditure is not yet a meaningful portion of my weekly income.  But for many millions in this country it is.  And it's not just gasoline.  All of my utility plus cable bills are increasing and so is my weekly food tab.  All you have to do is look at any commodities index chart to see that inflation is accelerating.  Ditto for the comments coming from any company that produces human necessities.  All of these so-called economic and Wall Street experts have to either be complete idiots or psychopathic liars to not see the accelerating trend in price inflation. 

And one of the biggest sources of inflation is the inflation of the Government spending deficit:  The federal government posted its largest monthly deficit in history in February, a $223 billion shortfall.  Here's the article, which was reported by several media sources:  LINK  Despite the rhetoric, the Obama Government will continue the growth of deficit spending and the growth in outstanding Treasury debt.  It is true that drastic cuts in spending will hurl our system into a nasty economic contraction.  But the alternative will make the eventual and inevitable economic bust even worse.  The dollar will collapse and everyone holding only paper currency will be pauperized (is that a word? lol). 

One of my best friends in NYC called me today asking for the best source to buy silver from.  I sent him to Tulving and told him to put as much as he can into silver and gold.  All of the major coin dealers are running thin on sovereign-minted silver coins and soon the premiums will be even higher.  I tried to convince him to cash out of some of his IRA and buy even more metal, but he can't get his mind around the idea of paying the penalty and taxes.  Of course, the alternative will be a mandatory force-feeding of Treasury annuities by the Government, which will eventually seize everyone's retirement plans and exchange the assets for worthless Government paper (not mine, I cashed out of mine slowly over the past 5 years and moved most of it into gold and silver that is held outside of the system).  Hopefully over the next several months I'll be able to convince my friend to start converting his IRAs into gold/silver.

In nearly 10 years of doing exclusively this sector, I've never seen gold/silver remain so resilient to the constant attacks of the big bank bullion cartels. Having traded all aspects of this sector during this time, it makes it difficult to not take profits and wait for a pullback. But we don't even have stops on our positions right now because all that will accomplish is to get stopped out by the volatility and then be left contemplating chasing the price higher in order to re-enter positions.  We are daytrading the volatility and making some nice trading profits, but we put everything back in place before the market closes each day.  My best advice for playing this market if you are unable to spend time trading it is to put on a thick pair of blinders and hold on tight!