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The weakness with this US Dollar DX index is that it is highly weighted to the developed economies of Europe and Japan. As such it may not reflect erosion of dollar purchasing power vis a vis the BRICs, and external measures such as gold, oil, and silver. It may be masked by the mutual weakness of central banks all inflating their currencies in unison.
This is what the Federal Reserve desires: to repair its economy and unpayable debts by expanding its monetary base while exporting much of the negative effects of such monetary inflation to the rest of the world, keeping things relatively stable to maintain confidence in their paper. And this is why the central banks attempt to control the price of less manageable currencies such as gold and silver. Silver is the most problematic because its supplies are difficult for the banks, as they have none of their own, and the world has largely depleted its discretionary strategic stockpiles of this metal. Long term price suppression breeds underinvestment and the inevitable shortages of real goods.
The support levels are as marked and fairly obvious. With the dollar index around 76.28 today it is threatening to break down out of the chart formation. Lateral support around 74 and 71 is fairly strong.
Rather than rallies through economic vitality and recovery, the dollar rallies have been marked by relative declines primarily in the euro on their sovereign debt problems. It is almost like a couple of drunks leaning on each other for support, except that the US is picking the Eurozone's pockets while they do it.
What has been hidden will be revealed.
The Independent - UK
Saudis Mobilise Thousands of Troops to Quell Growing Revolt
By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent
Saturday, 5 March 2011
Saudi Arabia was yesterday drafting up to 10,000 security personnel into its north-eastern Shia Muslim provinces, clogging the highways into Dammam and other cities with busloads of troops in fear of next week's "day of rage" by what is now called the "Hunayn Revolution".
Saudi Arabia's worst nightmare – the arrival of the new Arab awakening of rebellion and insurrection in the kingdom – is now casting its long shadow over the House of Saud. Provoked by the Shia majority uprising in the neighbouring Sunni-dominated island of Bahrain, where protesters are calling for the overthrow of the ruling al-Khalifa family, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is widely reported to have told the Bahraini authorities that if they do not crush their Shia revolt, his own forces will.
The opposition is expecting at least 20,000 Saudis to gather in Riyadh and in the Shia Muslim provinces of the north-east of the country in six days, to demand an end to corruption and, if necessary, the overthrow of the House of Saud. Saudi security forces have deployed troops and armed police across the Qatif area – where most of Saudi Arabia's Shia Muslims live – and yesterday would-be protesters circulated photographs of armoured vehicles and buses of the state-security police on a highway near the port city of Dammam.
Although desperate to avoid any outside news of the extent of the protests spreading, Saudi security officials have known for more than a month that the revolt of Shia Muslims in the tiny island of Bahrain was expected to spread to Saudi Arabia. Within the Saudi kingdom, thousands of emails and Facebook messages have encouraged Saudi Sunni Muslims to join the planned demonstrations across the "conservative" and highly corrupt kingdom. They suggest – and this idea is clearly co-ordinated – that during confrontations with armed police or the army next Friday, Saudi women should be placed among the front ranks of the protesters to dissuade the Saudi security forces from opening fire.
If the Saudi royal family decides to use maximum violence against demonstrators, US President Barack Obama will be confronted by one of the most sensitive Middle East decisions of his administration. In Egypt, he only supported the demonstrators after the police used unrestrained firepower against protesters. But in Saudi Arabia – supposedly a "key ally" of the US and one of the world's principal oil producers – he will be loath to protect the innocent.
So far, the Saudi authorities have tried to dissuade their own people from supporting the 11 March demonstrations on the grounds that many protesters are "Iraqis and Iranians". It's the same old story used by Ben Ali of Tunisia and Mubarak of Egypt and Bouteflika of Algeria and Saleh of Yemen and the al-Khalifas of Bahrain: "foreign hands" are behind every democratic insurrection in the Middle East.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mr Obama will be gritting their teeth next Friday in the hope that either the protesters appear in small numbers or that the Saudis "restrain" their cops and security; history suggests this is unlikely. When Saudi academics have in the past merely called for reforms, they have been harassed or arrested. King Abdullah, albeit a very old man, does not brook rebel lords or restive serfs telling him to make concessions to youth. His £27bn bribe of improved education and housing subsidies is unlikely to meet their demands.
An indication of the seriousness of the revolt against the Saudi royal family comes in its chosen title: Hunayn. This is a valley near Mecca, the scene of one of the last major battles of the Prophet Mohamed against a confederation of Bedouins in AD630. The Prophet won a tight victory after his men were fearful of their opponents. The reference in the Koran, 9: 25-26, as translated by Tarif el-Khalidi, contains a lesson for the Saudi princes: "God gave you victory on many battlefields. Recall the day of Hunayn when you fancied your great numbers.
"So the earth, with all its wide expanse, narrowed before you and you turned tail and fled. Then God made his serenity to descend upon his Messenger and the believers, and sent down troops you did not see – and punished the unbelievers." The unbelievers, of course, are supposed – in the eyes of the Hunayn Revolution – to be the King and his thousand princes.
Like almost every other Arab potentate over the past three months, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suddenly produced economic bribes and promised reforms when his enemy was at the gates. Can the Arabs be bribed? Their leaders can, perhaps, especially when, in the case of Egypt, Washington was offering it the largest handout of dollars – $1.5bn (£800m) – after Israel. But when the money rarely trickles down to impoverished and increasingly educated youth, past promises are recalled and mocked. With oil prices touching $120 a barrel and the Libyan debacle lowering its production by up to 75 per cent, the serious economic – and moral, should this interest the Western powers – question, is how long the "civilised world" can go on supporting the nation whose citizens made up almost all of the suicide killers of 9/11?
The Arabian peninsula gave the world the Prophet and the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans and the Taliban and 9/11 and – let us speak the truth – al-Qa'ida. This week's protests in the kingdom will therefore affect us all – but none more so than the supposedly conservative and definitely hypocritical pseudo-state, run by a company without shareholders called the House of Saud.
Special thanks to 24hourgold. This interactive chart can be viewed here.
I wonder how much of this silver being sold is leased out from unallocated accounts and holdings in ETFs.
How unfortunate for the silver shorts that the bankers lack a ready supply of bullion from the central banks. Most national stores of silver in the west have already been depleted.
Gold bullion, however, is still available from those central banks who lease their gold to the bullion banks, where it is then sold into the private market, and is afterward carried on the national accounts as bookkeeping entries.
This scheme has been promoted by some of the TBTF banks for many years as a means of providing a steady income for the central bankers and their Treasuries on their 'idle resources.' Lease us your gold, and we will pay you a percent or two for it in paper.
What Mubarak and other dictators in history past have done using cargo planes, trucks and trains, the western bankers may have done over a period of time using computer entries and their cronies in the central banks: plundering the national treasuries of Europe, quietly and over time. And it was not stored in salt mines and lake bottoms, but sold in plain sight.
Won't the people be surprised if they find how much of their gold is gone, and how it was used to deceive them while their other assets were stolen using phony paper. Do you think there will be reparations made, and justice done?
They will most likely try to ignore it and dismiss it, claim that it is not needed and we are better off without it. And then they will buy it back, but at what prices? And what so called patriots will be their willing stooges and accomplices in theft, again.
Watch how they weave their arguments over the misappropriated social trust funds and pensions, bank bailouts, and subsidies to the corporations and monied interests to see what their methods will be. This debt is sovereign, a matter of national interest if not sacred honor, and so must be paid whatever the cost. But that debt to those people, well, the money is gone, so too bad for them. Sacrifices must be made, and we will choose who makes them based not on the law or justice, but on the principles of crony capitalism, which are always for private benefit of the few.
What a scandal! And irony indeed if this banking fraud is exposed not by the virtuous West, but by China and the BRICs, and their unwillingness to go along with the scheme.
But this could not be true. Banks do not do this. It would be like their presenting forged documents, concealing evidence, and committing blatant perjury to take people's homes in their very own courts!
But this is merely rhetorical speculation and conspiracy theory of course, because the theft could never pass undisclosed with all the independent audits, transparency, oversight, and accountability in the central banking system. Surely the people have a good account of the amount, number, and quality of every bar that they own from an impeccable source which they control. Uh, there have been no such audits or accountability, the system is necessarily opaque? Oh. We are shocked, shocked, that the gold is gone and the private banks cannot replace it. The smartest minds told us it was a good plan, an excellent idea. The US pressured us to do it to support the dollar. How could we have known that people would demand these barbarous relics again. Do they not understand monetary theory? They are to be ridiculed1
And now all that is left is running the bluff, and playing for time, looking for an opportunity to deflect the issue to something, someone else.
