Whatever

"The last duty of a central banker is to tell the public the truth" - Alan Blinder, 1994 on the PBS Nightly Business Report

An old colleague and I agreed back in 2002 - back when we were one of the few who were openly discussing how corrupted and bankrupt the U.S. was - that we would eventually see things happen in this country that would blow our minds.  As if to perceive just how rotten to the core the U.S. political and economic system was back then wasn't enough in and of itself to be considered mind-blowing, we knew worse was in store. 2008 and the unbelievable use of billions in taxpayer money to bail out the banks from their bad bets was bad enough.  But to then watch the upper management of the banks take that bailout money and distribute a lot of it as bonus money to employees was horrifying.  But I guess what's really mind-blowing is that the America public just sits there and takes it.  It's the equivalent of being raped by an HIV-infected criminal and then say, "whatever."

Yesterday was close to be mind-blowing.  The Fed somewhat unexpectedly announced that it would partially reduce its monthly money printing program starting in January.   The truth there is that the Fed has been printing more than $85 billion per month when you factor in the fact that it takes interest earned on the bonds it has bought and turns around and buys more bonds from the banks.  So the actual "taper" event is somewhat of a deception.  But then Bernanke gets in front of the media and states that the economy is improving.  Let's see, Caterpiller announced today that it's global sales plunged 12% in November;  Boeing announced that it lost a $4.5 billion jet order from Brazil because of NSA spying;  existing home sales for November were released and if you look beyond the headline nonsense, you'll find sales in November vs. November last year dropped 4% and from October to November this year sales plunged nearly 13% - I'll have more on this later but please note that mortgage rates have been dropping, so the NAR cover story of higher rates is total b.s.  There were some other negative surprises released today as well.  How's that look for Bernanke's dishonest report on the condition of the U.S. economy?

But don't take it from me, if you think Bernanke means well - he doesn't - here's an excerpt from the widely read King Report:

In his press conference Bernanke reiterated the FOMC Communique’s false narrative that persistently low inflation could harm the economy. We cannot believe that Fed academics still believe in the economic alchemy that holds that economic growth is related to inflation. Fed academics, like Soviet apparatchiks, have purged the economic history of the Seventies, Eighties and late Nineties in order to maintain the promiscuous credit policies that keep big banks and big government functioning.

The market action after the FOMC statement was equally as absurd.  Here's another comment from The King Report:

 Please note that the initial response to Fed tapering drove the S&P 500 below and important technical level (or two) and someone immediately appeared to rescue stocks by driving SPHs higher. We have warned incessantly that this scheme has occurred repeatedly since the financial crisis of 2008.

The Fed and the Government have unleashed an unprecedented amount of manipulative control over the markets - all of them, not just the precious metals market.

Perhaps Bernanke's greatest lie was when he stated under oath in front of Congress that he didn't understand gold and that Central Banks hold it merely out of tradition.  If that's the case, Benjamin Shalom Bernanke, how come the Fed spends hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees fighting every Freedom of Information Act inquiry seeking to see the Fed's files with regard to its gold activities?

The truth is the Fed is absolutely terrified by gold.  When the price starts to move up like it did from 2008 to 2011, it signals to the world that something is wrong.  The Fed has spent considerable time and resources since September 2011 working to keep the price of gold as low as possible.  More on this soon, as I'm working on an article about this.  But the fact stands that what is occurring right now and has been occurring in varying degrees for decades is the extreme manipulation of gold for the purpose of defending the U.S. dollar's reserve currency status.

And if Benjamin Shalom Bernanke and Janet Louis Yellen - both Old Testament adherents - can stand in front of the public and lie about that, then they must answer to a different higher authority than most Americans...yep, whatever.