Net Asset Value Premiums of Certain Precious Metal Trusts and Funds

The premium in PSLV for silver remains historically low.

I thought the bear raid this morning was all about breaking the upward momentum in silver in order to keep gold under wraps at 1650.

More on that later in the gold and silver commentary.

The Quebec Students Strike

"But the most interesting resistance happening right now is going on in Quebec, Canada. There are, according to one representative report, over 165,000 students on strike from class out of a 495,000 student body.

Quebec is looking to increase their tuition 75% over the next several years; students responded by starting what is now the longest strike in the province's history. It's gone on even though the government has offered to make student loans a nicer, kinder form of debt, with income-contingent repayments while not budging on the tuition hikes...

The campus combines several issues into one - the privatization of public services, the dismembering of social insurance and its replacement with a regime of debt and risk-shifting, the dismantling of the primary means of social mobility with one designed to entrench inequality, which all builds towards a lack of freedom to fully develop ones talents and abilities and be full, productive citizens.

These students are right to fight this battle at the beginning, during the initials cuts. Privatization creates its own justification; the more public universities are defunded and reconceived as a private good, the less civic interest there is in defending them as a public good. And they are also fighting at the beginning of their lives, both for what kind of world they want to live in while resisting the constraints of indenture that we see when this process of privatization and debt reaches its ultimate conclusion - a path the United States is much further along."

The Quebec Students Strike - Rorty

At this time strikes and protests are more oddities, although the numbers are growing.

In time they will become a trend and will be met by even harsher repression, Mideast-style, in the US, the UK and Canada.

It sometimes seems as though the leaders of the great world powers have decided not to fight among themselves, except in controlled regional conflicts. Blood keeps the ledgers green.

Rather, they have learned to cooperate with each other, to enrich themselves and increase their personal power which has always been the goal of the predator class, by dominating and abusing their own people, engaging in financial pogroms, and preparing the way for a de facto global government and planned economy of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite.

And so we see once again the dreams of world domination, the rhetoric of privilege over law, and the perennial rise of the ubermensch. Even the victims of yesteryear seem to be getting on board, or at least their leaders are for it, hoping to get their own piece of the pie.

How soon we forget, forsaking what is lasting and important, becoming wilfully blind out of pride, fear and greed. There are those who would have a world in flames, as long as they might own the ashes, winning. And so history repeats.

SEC Charges OptionsXpress with Naked Short Selling Scam

And the fails just keep on coming.

MF Global was check-kiting (in addition to outright theft) and OptionsXpress was 'stock kiting' in some targeted and fairly impressive volumes.

Their mistake was involving the retail side of the trade.   Naked short selling and price manipulation is only permitted for professionals of TBTF institutions and  campaign contributing hedge funds.

Bloomberg
OptionsXpress Accused by SEC of Naked Short-Sale Violations
By Joshua Gallu
Apr 16, 2012 5:15 PM ET

OptionsXpress Inc. (OXPS), the Chicago brokerage acquired by Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW) last year, was accused by U.S. regulators of using sham “reset” transactions as part of an abusive naked short-selling scheme.

The company and four executives violated Securities and Exchange Commission rules in conducting trades from at least October 2008 to March 2010 designed to give the illusion of compliance with rules governing short sales, the SEC said in a statement today. An OptionsXpress customer was also accused by the SEC of participating in the alleged violations.

In a short sale, an investor borrows shares and sells them with the goal of profiting from a price decline by repurchasing at a lower price and repaying the loan. The SEC’s Regulation SHO requires brokers to close out clients’ short sales within three days and bars them from executing further bets against individual companies until previous sales have been settled.

OptionsXpress, its former chief financial officer Thomas Stern and the customer, Jonathan Feldman, are fighting the agency’s claims, which were filed in administrative court in Washington today...

OptionsXpress helped its customers buy shares while simultaneously selling call options that were essentially the economic equivalent of selling shares short, the SEC said. The purchase of shares created the illusion that the firm had satisfied the close-out obligation even though they were never actually delivered to the purchasers, according to the order.
Stock-Kiting Scheme

The transactions allowed OptionsXpress and its customers to engage in a “stock-kiting scheme” that deprived true stock purchasers of the benefits of ownership, the SEC said in its order. OptionsXpress had repeated failures to deliver stock in firms including Sears Holdings Corp. (SHLD), American International Group Inc. (AIG) and Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. (CMG), according to the order.

In January 2010, customers involved in the OptionsExpress trades accounted for an average of 48 percent of daily trading volume in Sears, the SEC said. In 2009, six OptionsXpress accounts purchased about $5.7 billion worth of securities and sold short about $4 billion of options, according to the order.

The SEC settled related claims against three OptionsXpress employees: Peter Bottini, Phillip Hoeh and Kevin Strine, according to a separate administrative order filed today. Attorneys for Strine and Hoeh declined to comment. A phone call to Steven Biskupic, a lawyer for Bottini, wasn’t immediately returned.

In resolving the action, Bottini, Hoeh and Strine agreed to cooperate with the SEC’s investigation without admitting or denying wrongdoing or paying any financial penalties.

Charles Schwab, the San Francisco-based brokerage, agreed to buy OptionsXpress for about $1 billion in stock last year, adding the retail options brokerage founded in 2000 to its equity and mutual fund offerings. The acquisition was completed in September.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts

Gold closed about where it had opened on Sunday evening, and silver closed slightly higher.

And yet the miners took a minor beating as it were.