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Dark Days For The Realists
We are referred to (mostly in derisive tones) as "gold bugs", but a much more useful label would be "realists". During the Crash of '08, almost none of the mainstream, market and economic "experts" got things right - and (by their own admission) were "totally surprised" by events. Conversely, almost every gold commentator was right about the Crash of '08 (and thus none of this community of realists was "surprised"). Ironically, this has resulted in much of the mainstream media perverting these previous events by depicting gold-bugs as being "vultures", who are somehow "hoping" for more calamities - merely to "help their own investments". In logical terms, this is much like "blaming" Noah for the great, biblical flood, because he was the one who prudently built an ark. In other words, the logical flaw which is being propagated and perpetuated by the media propaganda-machine goes like this: gold-bugs are people who "love gold", and thus "hope" for calamities, in order to reap a windfall on their obsessive investing. The reality is almost the mirror-opposite of this myth. What links all self-professed "precious metals investors" is that we all see a confluence of economic and social events which are guaranteed to result in economic catastrophes, which (in financial terms) will be roughly parallel to the biblical flood - which Noah couldn't prevent, but he could act to help to save many innocent victims. Having seen what is coming, it is equally obvious what the only certain means of preserving one's wealth will be, in the years ahead. As precious metals commentators, we don't create the gold (and silver) which we encourage the citizens of all nations to accumulate (unlike the 'paper bullion' created by bankers). However, in a sense we are "building an Ark", through making concerted efforts to pierce the veil of propaganda, and warn the hundreds of millions (if not billions) of average people (and innocent victims) of what lies ahead, and how they can protect themselves through investing in and holding precious metals. To further demonstrate that gold-bugs don't "hope" for disaster, we need only look at the rising forecasts for the price of gold, by the commentators in this sector. Analysts who were originally targeting a long-term "peak" for the price of gold in the $1,000/oz to $2,000/oz range have now, almost unanimously, raised those forecasts to the $3,000/oz to $5,000 - if not much higher. If anything, precious metals commentators have been guilty of our own "optimism": a belief that governments wouldn't willingly continue this lemming-like rush to debt-defaults, and global inflation - on a scale that has never been seen in human history. Alternately, we hoped/believed that the citizens of these countries would have understood the folly of their "leaders", and used the ballot-box to eject all politicians intent upon suicide-by-debt. Sadly, precious metals commentators have proven to be overly optimistic in both those regards. While we see events (and the disasters they portend) as being far more obvious than even a year ago, our attempts to warn (and educate) the greater public have largely fallen on deaf ears, the consequence of a media propaganda-campaign (centered in the U.S.) more intense than anything seen in the world since the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. While U.S. puppet-politicians feign a desire to bring "stability" to markets, and the economy as a whole, the agenda of their Wall Street puppet-masters is entirely different. "Volatility is the friend of the investor," so goes the old, market cliché. However as with most market-truisms, such principles are only valid in free-and-open markets, not the blatantly rigged-casinos which the United States now passes off as its "equity markets". What we see in the U.S. is a veritable "orchestra" of fraud. The media propaganda-machine moves stocks up (and occasionally down) with its inane game of "beat expectations", whereby fundamentals are entirely ignored, in favor of whether "the number" beat a "prediction" from a group of anonymous "experts" (which most retail investors will have heard for the first time only after the "statistic" is announced). Then there are the U.S. "ratings agencies", who literally sell their rubber-stamp ratings to market vendors seeking to sell their products to investors, and (in the case of the Wall Street fraud-factories) even allow some of these companies to supply their own "models" for rating their own products. Then there is the fraudulent system of accounting enacted in the U.S. in 2009, mere days ahead of Wall Street "reporting season", when the insolvent U.S. big-banks would have been forced to report massive losses - if not their own insolvency. While the benefits of the legitimized fraud inherent in new U.S. accounting rules primarily benefit the Wall Street Oligarchs, all U.S. corporations can make use of the new "mark-to-fantasy" provisions. Then there is the inevitably fraudulent nature of the "trading algorithms", which Wall Street and its other bankster-allies use to lead all the 'mice' who rely upon such algorithms (now a majority) around by the nose, like real-life "Pied Pipers". Two recent events clearly established the magnitude of this manipulation. First there was the open boast by several Wall Street fraud-factories that they had made "profits" on their (in-house) "proprietary trading" every day, for an entire quarter. Almost no sooner had those boasts left the smug lips of these con-men-in-expensive-suits, when their system of manipulative algorithms suddenly blew-up in their faces. This was because U.S. equities had been manipulated to such a ridiculously over-valued level that yet another U.S. asset-bubble was destined to burst. Incredibly, Wall Street asked for and received a "do over", where tens of thousands of legitimate trades were canceled - simply because Wall Street had ended up on the losing side. Let me repeat this: the crooked operators of these rigged-casinos were allowed a "do-over" on their own, rigged games - simply because they were on the losing side, on one day. Now, after Wall Street has been allowed to reposition itself on the short side, U.S. markets are being walked-lower by the Pied Pipers - to whatever level it will take before they can start (safely) manipulating prices higher again (the day after Wall Street goes "long"). The idiots and parrots who comprise most of the "journalism" community respond to these incredible outrages with nothing but confusion, incomprehension, and the mildest of criticisms about the most rampantly fraudulent markets in the history of human commerce - markets so fraudulent that the "Plunge Protection Team" rarely has to officially manipulate them (which probably explains why the PPT was 'asleep behind the wheel' when Wall Street's trading algorithms suffered their meltdown). Even as we hear of a new law-suit or criminal investigation into the Wall Street financial crime syndicate on a near-daily basis, these career-criminals are still allowed to maintain complete control over U.S. equity markets. Confirming that awareness of what is taking place around us is waning rather than growing are the most-recent U.S. "consumer confidence" numbers. As I wrote in July of last year, this absurd "survey" of the general public lost any meaning it had as an actual indicator of "confidence" when the U.S. government severed all connections with reality in its reporting of official, government "statistics". Whether we are talking about jobs-reports, housing-reports, GDP-reports, deficit-reports, inflation-reports and almost any/every other major government "statistic", the numbers fed to the general public (and the general investment community) are so detached from reality that they literally bear no resemblance to the same statistics of only twenty years earlier. Thus, this "statistic" now only measures the effectiveness of government propaganda. As most readers are aware, a U.S. economist (John Williams) has devoted an entire web-site to re-calculating U.S. statistics, using the same methodologies which the U.S. government used a generation ago (before rampant 'doctoring' began). His analysis leads to three consistent conclusions: U.S. government statistics are fraudulent, the U.S. economy is heading for a "hyperinflationary depression", and precious metals represent the best "protection" from this calamity. Despite this bleak scenario, we are told by the propaganda-machine that U.S. "consumer confidence" rose to its highest level in more than two years, early this month. As I wrote previously, with this "statistic" actually only measuring "consumer gullibility", what it signifies is that the lies spun by Wall Street, and broadcast by its propaganda-machine have been increasingly effective - rather than the fiction from these charlatans losing its grip on peoples' minds. Keep in mind that this consumer confidence survey was taken before the latest meltdown in U.S. markets - which was caused by yet another "propaganda offensive" by the U.S. media against European debt markets. What Wall Street puppet-masters realized at the end of last year was that their fraudulent, pro-U.S. propaganda was insufficient, by itself, to keep enough of the money of market-chumps in U.S. bond and equity markets simultaneously - and without a large and continuing supply of chump-money, Wall Street's Ponzi-scheme paper-empire must inevitably collapse. Thus, Wall Street's economic terrorists finally began using their "financial weapons of mass destruction" on European debt-markets, through the inherently fraudulent form of "insurance" known as "credit default swaps". We have already seen Goldman Sachs use credit default swaps as a predatory weapon, to 'rape' AIG for more than $10 billion in windfall profits...and when Goldman Sachs had effectively bankrupted the world's largest insurance company, what followed was the world's largest bail-out, where ex-Goldman Sachs CEO, Hank "Bazooka" Paulson was allowed to skim more than $10 billion out of the government Treasury, in order to pay-off Goldman's scams (with taxpayer money), at 100-cents-on-the-dollar. We have also seen the banksters use these weapons to scam each other, on other occasions. Regular readers will recall my commentary on the law-suit by Citigroup, to collect on a credit-default swap which had been "insured" by Morgan Stanley. Even after liquidating the so-called "collateral" which supposedly "backed" this insurance, Morgan Stanley was faced with a 300:1 pay-out against what it had received to provide the CDS. That anecdote summarizes the whole, $60 trillion global credit default swap market, an unregulated market with a nominal value equal to 100% of global GDP. This is phony "insurance", where the "insurers" have no possible way to pay-off on any significant quantity of these "swaps" and where the pay-off from fraudulently causing these CDS contracts to blow-up is so huge that it's enough to make even a greedy Wall Street banker salivate. As I wrote back in February (see "U.S. Economic Terrorism the NEW Winning Trade"), the first "target" of U.S. economic terrorists was Greece, and as I also suggested at that time, Spain was a likely next target. The denials of the Wall Street terrorists are (depending on one's perspective) hilarious and/or despicable. "We're not manipulating European CDS markets," they protest, "It's the 'fear' which is causing the European CDS markets to blow-up." What the Wall Street propagandists always fail to include with their "explanation" is that it is five months (and counting) of around-the-clock U.S. fear-mongering by the U.S. media which created this "fear". That this was both a deliberate and malicious propaganda-campaign can be demonstrated with a number of facts.
Several observations flow from the facts above. First, as I joked in that previous commentary, not only does this campaign of economic terrorism allow Wall Street predators to essentially 'blackmail' global debt markets for countless billions (trillions?) in windfall "profits", but (as designed) it makes U.S. markets (and the U.S. dollar) appear as the least-worst option for investors - like trying to get someone to date your ugly sister, by drawing mustaches on the pictures of all the other girls. Wall Street apologists will argue that European debt-problems, even Greece's debt-problems are as serious as portrayed - because of the inter-connected, overlapping nature of these mountains of debt. Such an argument is totally disingenuous. With roughly $60 trillion in total public/private debt, the interdependency of the U.S.'s debt-mountains (within its own banking system) make risks of default in Europe appear trivial, by comparison. That's why the U.S. (and only the U.S.) had to invent new, totally fraudulent accounting rules. That's why the Wall Street Oligarchs are not doing most of their scamming with U.S. CDS contracts - because it would set off a cascade of U.S. debt-dominoes which even the Oligarchs couldn't survive (despite their permanent 'funnels' from both the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve). That's why U.S. interest rates are permanently frozen at 0%, because any significant move higher would also cause the U.S. to suffer a total debt-implosion. Recall that it took an immediate, $10 trillion bail-out just to keep Wall Street (temporarily) solvent when just one of its debt-dominoes collapsed: Lehman Brothers. Wall Street economic terrorists are focusing their plundering on Europe for two reasons: they have much less exposure to such debt, themselves; and (unlike the U.S.) Europe's economies are arguably strong enough to survive these terrorists attacks. As I have pointed out on several previous occasions, European governments now understand the severity of these terrorist attacks - and are taking action in both the credit default swap and "interest rate swap" markets to bring Wall Street criminals to justice, or at least prevent further blackmail. However, either in fear of having government complicity exposed, or simply fear of these "leaders" appearing to their electorates as being grossly incompetent, the European mainstream media appear no more interested in exposing the true magnitude of these events than North American media. Consequently, there is no "joy" being experienced by myself, and many of the other serious commentators in this sector, even when gold recently hit a new, nominal high. None of us want to make a lot of money on our precious metals investments. Rather, we understand that we have been forced to protect ourselves with such investments due to the reckless and immoral actions of bankers and politicians. And when our precious metals holdings are validated by the course of future events, there will be no "joy" then either - since we already understand and appreciate the collective suffering which that implies. At best, we will experience grim satisfaction that we did what we had to do - and tried to warn all others to do the same. In contrast, the bankers gleefully steal their countless billions every year. Not only do they experience not one iota of remorse, but they have hijacked our governments and our (once) "free press" - solely for the purpose of hiding their past crimes, and facilitating new ones. Dark days, indeed... |
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As a precious metals commentator, it may seem incongruous to be in a gloomy frame of mind with the price of gold dancing around the $1200/oz-mark. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the precious metals investor in the eyes of mainstream investors, and the average citizen. 
