Net Asset Value of Certain Precious Metal Funds and Trusts

Canadian Stock Exchanges Closed Today

As a reminder the Canadian Stock Exchanges are closed today for their national holiday Civic Day.

So if your junior miners are not 'performing' today the fact that they are not trading on their primary exchange may very well be the reason.

Butler: JP Morgan "Covering Its Silver Shorts Like Crazy"

JP Morgan holds a massive short position in silver, some of which it is said to have inherited as a concentrated speculative position from Bear Stearns. Retreats from such overextended positions are never easy, and therefore never straightforward. Having such a position can be very profitable in the short term since it gives one remarkable control over the paper price of a commodity, paricularly if the regulators are willing to turn a blind eye to certain trading practices.

If it is indeed reducing its oversized short positions, JP Morgan will undoubtedly attempt to 'smack the price' on occasion even as it covers, to prevent the specs and hedge funds from taking too much leash to the long side. This will help to prevent them from provoking a disorderly rout and, God forbid, a 'short squeeze.' In these managed markets, the major players tend to respect each other's turf, so one has to wonder who might take them on.

The 'deadline' if any that they might face is prospective position limits to be imposed and more transparent reporting required by the CFTC. Given the past history, it is most likely that JPM will not be overly inconvenienced by them in the short term. Ted has always been the optimist with regard to regulatory reform and willingness to 'do the right thing.' I also believe this will happen, but slowly. Still, it does seem as though the darkest hour is always before the dawn, and the last few weeks have been disheartening for the metals bulls, as demonstrated in the sentiment indicators.

Let's see what happens in the market and take our cues from that.

"JP Morgan Chase, the big short in the silver market, is "covering like crazy," silver market analyst Ted Butler remarks in his weekly interview with Eric King of King World News.

Butler thinks that both silver and gold turned around this week and he wonders whether, in light of the new financial regulation law, MorganChase will ever come back to shorting silver so much.

Butler also is very encouraged by the comments of Commissioner Bart Chilton of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the promise of position limits in the precious metals markets." Chris Powell, GATA

You can listen to the interview with metals analyst Ted Butler at the King World News Internet site here.

The Committee to Defraud the World

"To say now that 'No one knew' or 'I was mistaken' or 'I was just doing as I was told' is another in a series of lies and deceptions that have supported one of the greatest frauds in the history of the world.

But this is not history. This episode of [MBS] fraud is still playing itself out now. And to fail to understand the depth and breadth of this madness is to place oneself in peril, and in the power of those who are twisting the Western economic and political system even now to satisfy their lust for wealth and power. You are only successful if you can keep what you kill.

This might have been an innocent policy error if it did not involve a transfer of wealth on a massive scale, followed by cover ups, denials, and a control fraud that exists even today.

But it also involved literally thousands of collaborators and enablers, from mainstream media people, economists, analysts, and other thought leaders to politicians and regulators who saw that it was to their advantage to at least passively support this scheme which they knew very well was a fairy tale, a fraud, class warfare by a new name, but were able to hide their own guilty consciences behind self-serving rationalization and the shield of plausible deniability.

History, and hopefully the justice system, will sort this all out. It is difficult, even now, to get one's mind around the enormity of it. This is its most powerful weapon. Who could be such monsters, so amoral, so destructively sociopathic? Future generations will regard it as an episode of madness, driven by a few people in a tight circle of self-reinforcing thought, people with remarkably similar cultural and educational backgrounds, driven by a consuming lust for power, that were able to dupe and delude an entire nation made vulnerable by propaganda, a co-opted press, and apathy.

In the meanwhile all the great mass of people can do is to watch, and wait, and seek to protect themselves from these ravening wolves grown increasingly desperate, as their arrogance comes to a tragic fall. They can vote out incumbents, but the parties choose the candidates, and too often they resemble competing crime families of special interests more than pillars of a representative government, saying one thing to get elected and doing another thing once in office.

It is difficult, even now, to get one's mind around the enormity of it.  This is its most powerful weapon.  Who could be such monsters, so amoral, so destructively sociopathic?  Future generations will regard it as an episode of madness, driven by a few people in a tight circle of self-reinforcing thought, people with remarkably similar cultural and educational backgrounds, driven by a consuming lust for power, that were able to dupe and delude an entire nation made vulnerable by propaganda, a co-opted press, and apathy.

This is when hubris is at its height, and the few feel they have everything to gain and nothing to lose, if only they can gain more power, and therefore become more ruthless. They are trapped in a cycle of fear and greed. The fear provokes the lies and the cover ups, but the greed promotes the extension of the fraud and the theft, requiring even more lies and cover ups. [cf. credibilty trap] 

The operative word is 'over reach,' in a classic late stage Ponzi scheme. This will undoubtedly add to the confusion as the truth is assaulted by the big lie. The last vestiges of polite society are often shed as the downfall reaches it final conclusion, at the end, when all is revealed, at last. And so there will be great danger."

The Committee To Save the World
John Hathaway
July 2010

Eleven years ago, the cover of Time Magazine (right) featured Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Lawrence Summers posing heroically over the headline: “The Committee to Save the World.”

The sidebar was: “The inside story of how the Three Marketeers have prevented a global meltdown—so far.” The reverent tone of the 2/15/99 article strikes a note of discord in the sour investment climate of today. The article gushed: “In the past six years the three have merged into a kind of brotherhood………What holds them together is a passion for thinking and an inextinguishable curiosity about a new economic order that is unfolding before them..” In today’s less exuberant world, the picture, the headlines, and the content of the article are laughable and mildly irritating.

The “brotherhood” perfected the recipe of papering over market crises with layers of
debt financeable only by negative real interest rates. Their passion for thinking about the new economic order gave birth to capital markets more akin to casinos than rational allocators of capital. In the words of Ambrose Evans Pierce: “Central banks were the ultimate authors of the credit crisis since it is they who set the price of credit too low, throwing the whole incentive structure of the capitalist system out of kilter, and more or less forcing banks to chase yield and engage in destructive behaviour.”

Subsequent iterations and mutations of world saving committees have become routine. The committee of Jean Claude Trichet, Angela Merkel and IMF Managing Director Strauss-Kahn attempted to rescue the euro, the euro zone, and by extension, the global financial system. Their effort came a scant two years after Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, and Ben Bernanke teamed up to rescue the mortgage market and the U.S. banking system. The price of these two bailouts alone exceeds $2.6 trillion and still counting.

In a December 23, 2007 Op-Ed piece penned for the NY Times, Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw wrote: “The truth is the current Fed governors, together with their crack staff of Ph.D. economists and market analysts, are as close to an economic dream team as we are ever likely to see.” Two years later, the number of those who still believe in the magical powers of policy making leadership has plummeted....

Read the rest here.