Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The Precious Metals Sector

It might help to put what's going on right now into context.   The entire sector is in a massive price correction that is almost a mirror image of the one in 2008.  The percentage drops for gold, silver and the HUI top to bottom are almost identical to the percentage drop of each in 2008.

Whether or not this is the bottom is anyone's best guess.  But when this sector turns around, all hell will break loose on the upside.  The BIG difference between now and 2008 is that now, individuals are buying aggressively physical gold and silver bullion coins on every price drop.  Back then all individual/retail buyers of gold/silver disappeared for quite some time.  An even bigger difference is that China is now buying an amount of gold that is equal to the global monthly mining output.  Back then China was not really a factor.  When this turns, the physical shortages that are developing and will become apparent will shock most people.

What makes this whole a ordeal a complete joke is that the reason given for gold's demise is the end of QE.  Well, how come the stock market keeps going higher?  QE has created an absolute monster of a bubble in the stock and housing markets.  It will end badly.

My colleague, who has about 35 years of experience in the financial markets, commented earlier today that "you can smell desperation in these markets - desperation to beat down the metals and desperation to prop up stocks.."   He is correct.  One big problem for them is that Treasury bond market is leaking uncontrollably.  Bernanke - in a comment that absolutely floored me but received almost no acknowledgement from the spin-meisters on financial tv - admitted that he's "puzzled" by the higher interest rates since QE3 commenced.  "Puzzled?"  Hmmm - that's not a good admission for this hubristic little troll who crawled out of Princeton's ivory tower to re-write the laws of economics.

They're desperate alright.  This is a mirror of 2008, only the hidden catastrophe coming at us in the global financial system is going to be far worse than what hit in 2008.  China's financial system is insolvent and Italy is on the verge of a complete derivatives-fueled financial nuclear melt-down.  Comically - yes it's funny - the U.S. Too Big To Fail banks are exposed to both of those situations via off-balance-sheet derivatives.  They may be short Italy and China via off-balance-sheet OTC derivatives, but try collecting when the other side defaults.  AIG/Goldman x 10.

Please read the following commentary from Patrick Heller.  I don't often read his commentary because it reiterates a lot of what I already know.  But this particular commentary from him does the best job I've seen of summing up the current situation with the precious metals sector:   Gold Drop: An Opportunity?

Unfortunately, this cartoon embodies everything about our current state of affairs in this country vs. what it used to be like:

(sourced from jsmineset.com, click on chart to enlarge)


31 comments:

  1. Dave, not that I really disagree with your main points, but one thing you said "The BIG difference between now and 2008 is that now, individuals are buying aggressively physical gold and silver bullion coins on every price drop. Back then all individual/retail buyers of gold/silver disappeared for quite some time."

    Whenever I analyze a "price", whether for a currency, commodity, company or house, I ask myself "who is the market, how many are they, how much money do they have, how motivated are they to buy, what alternatives do they have".

    So the price rose in 2008 (after the long decline during which nobody bought) and all the buyers still had cash, they came to buy. Now maybe they are all buying, and then who is there left to buy to support the higher prices? Is it possible that anyone who can buy is now buying, and when prices stop going down and go up slightly the bids will stop?

    Just saying, your comments and correction welcomed please.

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    1. Dude, I welcome and cherish disagreement - too bad our Government doesn't.

      Right now may 2-3% - AT MOST - of the public is buying physical. When the worm turns, imagine what happens to physical demand if that percentage moves just to 5%. Then imagine pension funds go from almost 0% to 5% - and not GLD but physical.

      As I stated, this will get violent to the upside.

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    2. Don't want to sound like I am talking up my position..(of course I am)but if i look at Treasuries,Equities,Real Estate or Corps, I do not want to own any of them in this ridiculously manipulated market. I am taking my lumps with a "rope a dope" mentality.This is playing out pretty fast.

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  2. The Public is NOT buying PM, and won't until the stock markets collapse. Why catch a falling knife when you can make serious cash + dividends on most of the Dow!?!
    This will continue until they catch on that rates are going much higher, which are poison for stocks and bonds (and a game-changer for PMs.) Give it another year or two and worrying over this week's drop will seem silly.

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  3. I agree with the the comments here. Still bullish, but bloodied at the moment. Not only is the public not buying, but the hedge funds are dumping along with just about everyone who own's paper metal. Something needs to happen to turn this tide toward buying. What exactly this will be and when is a guess. Dave, your confidence is reassuring. It is just painful to watch stocks continue to rise while metals collapse.

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  4. Dave, here in Western Canada all 1oz gold products have disappeared this week; J&M Coin in Vancouver sold-out this morning (after selling 900ozs Au Mon and Tues). The largest dealer in Calgary (Albern) also out of stock, as are most smaller dealers in Calgary, Kelowna, etc. I stood around a Kelowna coin shop for an hour this afternoon; 4 ppl walked in for gold, two walked out with 10oz NTR silver bars and/or unrecognized silver rounds (he other two walked out with nothing). Steve

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  5. Dave, have you ever estimated how much gold is still at Uncle Sam's disposal? Venezuela repatriated 160 tonnes of gold and it took about 4 months. Then Germany said it would repatriate 300 tonnes of gold and it would take seven years. If you keep the prices of gold or silver artificially low, you will create huge demand for physical. I think in order to satisfy the demand, gold stored for foreign central banks and IMF is used. How much gold do you think they still have? The 7 years' repatriation seems to tell us that their ammo is limited.

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  6. I can see physical Gold shortages but in Silver? Don't see it happening until the bubble burst, Gold becomes dried up and extinct, and then there's the "Great Silver Rush", cleaning everything off the shelves.

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  7. These are the times that try men's souls, especially the souls of gold and silver owners. With the smackdown in prices everyone is asking "When will gold and silver go up?". Instead we should be asking "With all of the buying going on in India and China, WHY did gold and silver go down in the first place?"
    The demand is there, more silver eagles have been sold this year than ever before, yet the price goes down...WHY???

    As the price goes down, mines in South Africa face shutdown since at current prices it isn't worth digging gold out of the ground and selling at a loss.

    The shorting of gold and silver seems like it will never end, much like the housing bubble, the dot com bubble and the junk bond bubble seemed destined to last forever, until they all came to a crashing end.

    The talk of taper and QE winding down gave the stock market and commodities markets a panic attack, what do you think will happen if QE ever really ends? (It Won't be pretty)

    With the government running deficits of over One Trillion dolllars a year, every year, then owning gold and silver should be looked as NOT an investment but as financial insurance. If you have life insurance do you cancel the policy because you feel healthy? No, you keep the policy and pray you never need it. The same goes for the gold and silver you own, you buy it, put it away, ignore the fluctuations of the market and treat it as a financial insurance policy, something you don't touch unless you have a financial emergency.

    I have lived through the hard times for gold and silver, in the 1990's, when the metals had no where to go but down, I lived through the slow rise of gold and silver in 2006 when the metals bears all growled "gold over $850? In your dreams". Gold and silver are in the smackdown phase once more, it is time to just put away/lock away your gold and silver and hang tight as the Crimex beats the stuffing out of precious metals and wait for the bounceback.

    Has the world's economic ills been cured?

    Are interest rates for CD's four per cent or better?

    Is the eonomy booming?

    If not, then just hold the gold and silver you have, add to your amounts as best you can, because we have all had to sit through this play "Metals Massacre" and we all should know the ending by now (It is identical to the play "London Gold cessPool" where gold owners won out in the end).

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  8. "The luster is wearing off Nevada’s gold.

    Gold prices last week fell below $1,300 an ounce for the first time in two-and-a-half years, and the price is down more than $600 from its record high in the fall of 2011.

    The decline in price has led to the first hints of a coming contraction in the mining industry. Perhaps the most telling sign of an industry slowdown is the announcement by Newmont Gold Corp. ­— the second-biggest gold producer in Nevada — two weeks ago that it will lay off one-third of its operations staff at its Colorado headquarters to counter rising production costs and price volatility.

    Omar Jabara, group executive for Newmont’s corporate communications team, says the reduction reflects the company’s decision to shift the focus of operations at its corporate headquarters to strategy and governance. Jabara says that though Newmont has not yet finished working through new operating models for its Nevada properties, the company expects workforce reductions at many of its mines and ore-processing facilities.

    James Hesketh, Atna’s president and chief executive officer, says soft gold prices and limited access to capital led to the change in operational strategy. Atna had been working on a plan to substantially increase gold production by developing an underground mine at the Pinson site that would have cost upwards of $72 million. However, Atna began to reshape its plans as gold began tumble.

    “Some of the mining systems we were utilizing made more sense at a high gold price than they do at a low gold price,” Hesketh says. “We have to step back and really modify the way we are approaching it to reduce costs.

    Atna’s new focus is mining ore that already has been developed and re-screening surface stockpiles to remove waste. Atna had been milling its sulfide ores under a toll agreement at Veris Gold’s Jerritt Canyon roaster and selling its oxide ores to Newmont. Those agreements still are in place, albeit at lower volumes, Hesketh says."

    http://www.foxreno.com/news/news/state-regional/states-mining-industry-pulls-reins/nYTxN/

    [Here's another angle: what if the push to squash PM's down is a deliberate act to get the mines to cut production or shut down. This would make less Gold on the market so that, when it does shoot up, it will even be worth more since there will be so little of it. The stock market/housing "bubble pop" will make millions of investors destitute so, if any PM's were around, they wouldn't have enough money to buy (let alone any credibility to get any), leaving only the rich to swoop it all up. A great way to wipe out the competition. I may be going out on a limb here but it just seem like this is what's happening. The crooks in this global game know that they are creating bubbles and they are going to be covering their asses when they pop. They didn't get hurt in 2008 crash and they won't this time, either. They still get up in the morning and go to the same job, doing the same things that caused the last crash, instead of being in prison.]

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  9. Dave,
    I am reaching my limit with this. Lose sleep and anxious with how much I am down especially in the mining stocks. My mood has gone from impatient to flat out depressed given the large majority of my assets in precious metals.

    What is your best guess when things will turn around and back to where we were at the start of the year or so? Later this year? Next year? Several years? Many years?

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    1. You're not alone, believe me. I don't know when this will turnaround, but when it does, it will run with a vengeance. I lived through a correction like this in 2008. Percentage-wise it was as equally painful but look how quickly it rebounded. I doubt we'll repeat exactly like that, BUT back then China was barely on the physical-buying radar screen, the American public was not touching silver eagles (now they're on a record sales run-rate) and JPM never was net long Comex gold, like they are now. We'll see, but nothing has changed in the fundamentals that support the metals. If anything the fundamentals have gotten stronger

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    2. FYI, hyperinflation occurs when a currency collapses. Currency collapses happen overnight - see Germany November 13, 1923, et. al. The dollar is going to collapse, but as Hemingway says in reference to how you broke, it happens slowly then all at once. That's when hyperinflation happens.

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  10. "Productivity Paradox: productivity and employment and median income used to grow together then they started separating in the late 1990s.

    We’ve spent some time looking at different kinds of robotics. For instance, our friend Rodney Brooks has a company called Rethink Robotics. We play with a robot called Baxter, and it works for less than $4 an hour, and can do a lot of basic, routine manual tasks. And the big advances there were improvements in vision; sensory systems, more generally; touch; relatively fine motor control; and it can work more autonomously than other robots.

    Innovation has never been faster. And in fact, if you look at the underlying statistics, productivity growth is doing pretty well. Productivity levels are at an all-time high, and in the 2000s, productivity growth was faster than it was in the 1990s, which was a great decade.

    On the other hand, you have the median worker doing worse. And the median household and the median worker in the United States have lower incomes today than in 1997. What’s more, the employment-to-population ratio has fallen; it’s almost like falling off a cliff. And similar things are visible in the OECD1 statistics for nations around the world. And that is exactly the great paradox of our era.

    Now, the way that we came about to resolve that was to make a key observation, and that is that there is no economic law that says that technological progress needs to benefit everybody, or even that it needs to benefit a majority of people. It’s entirely possible for technology to advance, to make the pie bigger, and yet for some people to get a smaller share of that pie.

    And in essence, that’s what’s been happening, especially over the past 10 or 15 years. Historically, productivity and employment and median income have all grown together. And I recently wrote an article called “The Great Decoupling” where you see how these trends map each other all through the 20th century, and then they start separating in the late 1990s, in particular. So from that data, it does appear that we’re in a new era, in the sense that these technologies are behaving differently.

    In fairness, technology has always been creating jobs, and it has always been destroying jobs. Go back to 1800 when on the order of 90 percent of Americans worked on farms. Now it’s less than 2 percent. Of course, all those people didn’t just become unemployed. As technology automated threshing, those jobs were replaced by new jobs. Henry Ford helped create the auto industry. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and many others helped create the computer industry, and numerous other occupations rose up that we never could have thought of before. And so people moved from one area to another.

    You’d like to see that happening again now. But the data show that it just isn’t happening as fast. We’re having the automation and the job destruction; we’re not having the creation at the same pace. There’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to find these (people who lost their jobs) new jobs. It may be that machines are better than that."

    http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/charting_technologys_new_directions_a_conversation_with_mits_erik_brynjolfsson

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  11. I see the mon$ter $16.7Trillion dollar US Debt bomb ticking like mad.I see another buying op for gold,to good to be true.I see a US stockmarket &housing market on borrowed time,and hot air.

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  12. Misrepresented, foolishly handled, misconstrued, ill advised, misleading, unprofessionally demonstrated.
    All of these words lend themselves to the actions being carried out by the Central banking system and U.S. government regarding the slamming actions of gold and silver prices of late.

    However this drilling down the paper price action should come as no surprise to anyone who has been in the knowing of what physical gold and silver REALLY defines itself as.

    Do you remember the "Golden" rule ? Physical gold and silver owes nothing to no one ~ no debt ~ Nada ! It has no where to go but $ up $ when the jig is up, and by all indications , you guessed it, that's soon.

    On the other hand the dollar has got massive debt tied to it.

    These jackasses who are playing the price slamming games right now hacking away at the prices know this and for that very reason consider physical G&S a direct threat to their demise ! You can't get any more motivational then that !!
    Let's just say that the events being played out are right on time.

    Enjoy stacking !

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  13. Hey Dave, this TLux in Atlanta. To Michael Jackson's last paragraph above; I have thought along similar lines as to where the Miners will end up in the low price environment and reached a similar conclusion. The low metal prices will bankrupt these companies. Their assets will be auctioned off by the trustee. These assets will end up on the balance sheets of banks, etc. Then, and only then will the price of gold (be allowed to) rise. The rising price of these assets repair the balance sheets and voila, healthy banks. I'm simplifying, of course, and the financial engineering required and precision timing required to execute the is quite sophisticated, but I'm curious 1) how you see the future for these companies whose products cost more to produce than the sales price, 2) how long these companies can hold out in such an environment (entirely based on cash reserves and defensive posture, I suppose) and 3) what happens to their assets when the companies reach their end state.

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    1. My understanding of the mines here in Nevada is that they could just shut down all operations and wait it out till PM's start rising. Don't know if this hold true as Nevada produces 80% of the Gold in the US and Harry Reid is suppose to be a very good friend of theirs. The job losses and loss of tax revenue would kill this state if they were to shut down or go under as its the only industry bringing in any kind of monies (except the power company but that's because they have jacked up the rates).

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  14. Risk of 1937 relapse as Fed gives up fight against deflation
    The US Federal Reserve has jumped the gun. It has mishandled its exit strategy from quantitative easing, triggering a global bond rout that it did not anticipate, and is struggling to control.

    The American Nobel fraternity likes to accuse our own George Osborne of holding such views. This is calumny. Britain's fiscal tightening is a calibrated 1pc of GDP each year, and it is offset by £375bn of QE. The Osborne view and the BIS view have nothing in common.

    One thing is certain, if such a nihilist cocktail of BIS contraction were imposed on the world in its current condition, it would kill recovery altogether, throw millions more out of work, and probably extinguish a few democracies along the way. Hungary is half gone already.

    It would cause debt trajectories to explode, and therefore prove self-defeating on its own terms. The ultimate outcome would be a chain of sovereign defaults and bank crashes. This is one way to achieve a cathartic debt jubilee and wipe the slate clean, I suppose, but by stone age methods, with stone age results. The US whittled down the debt burdens left from the Second World War (120pc) by gentler means, and so did the UK (200pc).

    The BIS is, of course, right to warn that QE as currently implemented is fuelling asset bubbles, with junk bond yields falling to record lows, and a new rush into "covenant lite" debt for leveraged buy-outs. But it recoils from the awful implication of its analysis - awful for the BIS and central banks, that is - which is that other forms of QE should be found to inject stimulus directly into the veins of the economy, such as building roads or nuclear power stations.

    Takahashi Korekiyo pursued just such a radical expirement in the early 1930s, turning the Bank of Japan into an arm of the treasury and forcing it to fund government spending until the economy was on its feet again. It worked like a charm. Neville Chamberlain tried a lesser variant in Britain, with success. The US Treasury took over the Fed in the 1940s.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10144451/Risk-of-1937-relapse-as-Fed-gives-up-fight-against-deflation.html

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  15. I keep reading about how the physical market has disconnected from the paper market. If the demand for physical metals is so high, why are the miners collapsing? They should be able to sell their physical product for whatever price they need if physical demand is so high. I own physical and mining shares right now, and neither seems to be able to catch a decent bid.

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  16. Secrets and Lies

    Every credit has its debit, every positive its negative. So for every secret there must be a lie, and every lie must be kept secret.

    This is the currency of power today. Fiat truth.

    We are not allowed to have any secrets any more. And yet those who insist they must know the truth about us, who spy upon us to extract our secrets, tell us. in return, only lies.

    It is a dangerous, corroding imbalance of power, because lies, like debts, compound.

    Living the lie

    We all know the famous Goebbels quote,

    “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

    From Sadam’s weapons of mass destruction and missiles that could hit us in just 40 minutes of sexed up bullshit, to the stress tests that show us every bank is perfectly solvent and however many billions they launder they are never guilty and no one goes to goal because they are too big to fail and too connected to even question.

    The eye of providence looks out and approves of what is done – Annuit cœptis.

    But who does the all seeing eye, that sits atop the pyramid of power on the mighty dollar bill, work for now? Is it really you and me? That is what we are told to believe. But is it true? I think there are too many secrets but few of them are yours and mine.

    The private dealings of the ordinary citizen are considered suspect and must, we are told, be rooted out. The secrets and outright lies of the corporate and governmental worlds, however – they are confidential. They are protected – behind razor-wire threats of legal action and closed door tribunals of hand picked experts.

    http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2013/06/secrets-and-lies/

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  17. Deception by Derivative

    But they are often weapons of mass deception.

    For some derivatives, a desire for deception is the only reason they exist. That deception can allow those who own derivatives to evade taxes or accounting rules. It can allow activity that might otherwise be illegal, were it not called a derivative, or that would face regulation if it were labeled what it truly is.

    Sometimes, banks use derivatives they create to help their clients deceive the public. Other times, they enable the banks to deceive those clients.

    The latest revelation of deception by derivative came in Italian government documents leaked this week to two European newspapers, La Repubblica and The Financial Times. The Financial Times said it appeared that Italy had used derivatives in the 1990s to allow it to make its budget deficit seem smaller, thus enabling it to qualify for admission to the euro zone. The report said it appeared those derivatives, now restructured, might be exposing Italy to a loss of 8 billion euros ($10.4 billion).

    La Repubblica noted that the director general of the Italian Treasury Department at the time, Mario Draghi, is now running the European Central Bank.
    Responding to claims that his bank and Citibank had made “disguised loans” to Enron, a JPMorgan Chase executive told a Senate hearing in 2002 that “the prepaid forwards were undoubtedly financing, as all contracts are that involve prepayment features, but every financing is not a loan.” He said the bank had properly accounted for them, but “the manner in which Enron accounted for them” was of no concern to the bank. It was, instead, “a matter for Enron and its management and auditors.”
    That was not the way the banks saw it when they were seeking the business. “The evidence,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, “revealed them to be nothing more than sham transactions designed to obtain, as one of the banks continued to tout on its Web site, ‘financial statement friendly financing.’ Like so many of the other deals at Enron, the apparent motive was to portray a false image of the company’s financial health.”

    That “friendly financing” came at an extra cost, of course. In reality, the banks charged Enron a fee for enabling it to deceive. Those same banks ended up losing a lot of money when Enron collapsed. How could the banks have guessed that a customer that would pay them to aid in lying would be less than honest in dealing with them?

    And how did that differ from a loan? Functionally, not very much, in all probability. But if you call something a derivative you can often get away with keeping it off your balance sheet — or putting it on the balance sheet in a misleading way. If the Financial Times report is right, the deal made Italy’s reported budget deficit smaller just when the country needed that to join the euro zone.


    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/business/deception-by-derivative.html?

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  18. Dave, with all due respect, you've been wrong and I wouldn't blame your followers and investors if they tuned you out completely, though they'd be wrong to do that as well.

    You have predicted Weimer style hyperinflation. Where is it?

    You have predicted we are on the path toward $7,000 gold. When, and in what universe?

    You have rightly said you don't know where the bottom is, but you still predict that "all hell will break loose" in the next violent rally. I ask, "from what level, to what level"? Again, you don't know the answer, and no one else does either.

    Gold is a speculation, pure and simple. It was a $400 speculation when GLD IPO'd, did very well for many years due to the "story" that you and other true believers (I hate to use the term "gold bugs") spun about currency debasement and other disasters awaiting down "the road". Guess what? Gold went up to $1900 because of a bubblelicious speculation through the GLD and other ETFs. It's the paper gold that drove the price, which is why the physical demand for gold cannot save us now. It's too small. It's dwarfed by comparison to the ETF market, which drives price.

    This is so much like the explosion and bursting of the dotcom bubble, and you can't even fathom that analogy. Back then, hypsters on CNBC would sing the virtues of "eyeballs" and the "paradigm shift" to the "new economy" stocks, i.e. the dotbombs. Every 10-15 years, a new sexy story is sold to a bunch of suckers. You've been sucked in and have sucked others into your gold mania.

    Will return at $700 per ounce. And then I'll ride the "ten-bagger" to $7,000, LOL. Hopefully, you'll still be solvent and have capital to do the same at that time.

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    1. Au contraire, I'm not wrong. Silver was at $4 in 2001 and gold $275. You can't name me one fucking asset class that has given any investor the return that gold and silver have since 2001 as of today.

      I'm not wrong about hyperinflation either, just early.

      That's fine if you want to think commetators like me are wrong, but it's just short-sightedness. Gold will exceed $7000/oz eventually.

      Why don't you grow a penis and some balls and start your own blog and let's see what you got.

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  19. At this point holding gold feels like being Custer at Little Big Horn. The cartel holds the numbers. The manipulation and the Psychological beat downs on the public thru mainstream media, add to the downward momentum. I don't think gold will recover for at least 2 or 3 years and that will be after gold bottoms at around $800 or $900. The cartel can keep this game going for quite a while. Remember they are "BULLION BANKS" and they are not going to let go of their control without a fight.

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  20. Oh Ye of little faith !
    So you think that physical gold and silver is connected to the hip of some popularity contest !?

    This price slamming of the PAPER gold and silver was baked into the cake a number of years ago. If you can't stand the heat , get out of the kitchen and if you're in paper ,for Pete's sake , GET OUT OF IT AND INTO PHYSICAL !!!

    Physical silver has a fantastic future. Without it civilization would not exist.
    If anything it will be one of the main ingredients that will help mankind advance.

    So keep the chin up and keep moving forward !

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  21. Snowden Coverage
    If U.S. Mass Media Were State-Controlled, Would They Look Any Different?
    After Snowden made it out of Hong Kong to Russia, New York Times journalist and CNBC talking head Andrew Ross Sorkin expressed his frustration: “We’ve screwed this up, to even let him get to Russia.” By “we,” he meant the U.S. government.

    Last time I checked, Sorkin was working for the Times and CNBC, not the CIA or FBI.

    When a huge swath of the country is on the side of the guy-on-the-run and not the government, it’s much easier to see that there’s nothing “objective” or “neutral” about journalists who so closely identify with the spy agencies or Justice Department or White House.

    The standard exclusion of dissenting views – panels often span from hawk (“he’s a traitor who needs to be jailed”) to dove (“he may have been well-intentioned but he needs to be jailed”) – offers yet another reason why young people, more libertarian in their views, have turned away from these outlets. Virtually no one speaks for them. While a TIME poll found 53 percent of respondents saying Snowden did “a good thing,” that was the sentiment of 70 percent of those age 18 to 34.

    I teach college journalism classes about independent media. New developments like WikiLeaks and independent bloggers like Glenn Greenwald may scare the wits out of establishment media, but they sure don’t scare young people or journalism students.

    As media employees at elite outlets have grown cozier with their government and corporate sources (Sorkin is famously close with Wall Street CEOs), they exhibit an almost instinctual antipathy toward those adversarial journalists who challenge powerful elites day after day.

    Look at the reactions of some top mainstream journalists to Greenwald, who built up a big readership as a solo blogger before moving his blog to Salon and then the Guardian, where he broke the Snowden/NSA stories. I know several journalism professors who view Greenwald as one of the world’s best journalists. He’s known as accurate, thorough, well-documented and ethical.

    It was Sorkin, the New York Times guy, who declared on CNBC that maybe Greenwald should be arrested: “I told you this in the green room – I would arrest him [Snowden] and now I’d almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, who’s the journalist who seems to be out there, almost, he wants to help him get to Ecuador.”

    http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/27/snowden-coverage/

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  22. “JP Morgan We Know How You Intend To Screw the American People”

    Published on Jun 27, 2013

    Alicia Cerretani gives a quick update from Washington D.C. where LaRouchePAC organizers delivered the message to members of congress and others on Capitol Hill: "JP Morgan, We Know How You Intend To Screw The American People."
    http://youtu.be/9_kiBvf_WY4

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  23. Dave, what's the purpose of the "tapering" talk? Aren't they afraid that treasuries may get sold off and stock markets may collapse?

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  24. An Empire of Fraud and Deception
    The US Government – operating today under the control of an international banking cartel/mafia – is running a global empire whose sole aim is to exploit the many for the benefit of the few. But because the people won’t be exploited willingly, you have to control them. Now, sure, you can use chains and whips like the good ol’ days, but then the slaves won’t be as productive and may even revolt if exploited too much. Indeed:


    "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free"

    --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    So massive lies and deception such as – it’s a “free society” governed by rule of law, it’s a democracy, the government is there to serve and protect you, you have a right to privacy, you can be a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet too if you just.work.hard.enough., etc. – are used to first sedate the people and then they are raped and pillaged using the biggest deception of them all – the currency. Whether it is secret surveillance on a global scale, wars based on false pretenses, luxurious summits, Bilderberg conferences, massive transfer of wealth from poor to the rich – all of that is enabled by paper money – the US Dollar.

    http://www.gekkosblog.com/2013/06/the-great-comex-paper-gold-dump-online.html

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  25. The Fed Is Now Taking Over The Entire Treasury Market 20 bps Per Week

    But that's not the bad news: the bad news, at least for Bernanke, and why the Fed has no choice but to taper is monetizations (however briefly as following the next market crash Bernanke or his replacement Larry "Mr. Burns" Summers will be right back in) is that since the Treasury is about to print less paper (recall: lower budget deficit, if only briefly), and the Fed is monetizing the same relative amount of paper, the Treasurys in the private circulation book get less and less, as more high quality collateral is withdrawn by the Fed.

    This is precisely what the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee warned against in May. This is also precisely why the Fed's "data-dependent" taper announcement is pure and total hogwash: the Fed knows it can't delay the delay (pardon the pun) of Treasury monetization as doing so only risks even further bond market volatility as less Treasury collateral remains in marketable circulation, and as liquidity evaporates with every incremental dollar purchased by the Fed instead of by the private sector.


    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-28/fed-now-taking-over-entire-treasury-market-20-bps-week

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