Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Gold Fix, Gold Rigging

Gold fell back to test its 50 DMA in light trade today, and silver followed.

There was a little movement in and out of the Comex warehouses on Friday, but nothing of significance.

This is a holiday shortened week in the US, and trading will be even lighter than usual in the first part of this week thanks to winter storm Janus. Janus as you may recall is the two-faced Roman god of transitions, beginnings and endings. He might very well be the god of choice for politicians in the modern era as well.

I am not so enthusiastic that the discovery and investigation of the London Gold Fix, which is much talked about these days and rightly so, will result in a meaningful reform in the precious metals markets, because it is taking away all the attention from the New York futures gold rigging, a daily fixing of the gold and silver prices by a few powerful players. It certainly presents a regular pattern of hit the price in the morning, and then let it recover overnight.

February is shaping up to be an interesting month for our first active delivery month of the year.  With a record low deliverable inventory at the Comex, and potential claims running in the 100+ to 1 level, one might anticipate higher prices to bring more supply to meet demand.  But these days gold is often a synthetic trade, highly leveraged to reality at the extremes and beyond, and that makes the market open to significant volatility, and a possible dislocation to the upside.

Have a pleasant evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues

Markets were lightly traded as the adults hit the road early, and most of the kiddies were released from school at midday, as winter storm Janus pounded the northeastern US with high winds and an expected 8-14 inches of snow.

This gave the sagging SP 500 and chance to finish in the green, although VIX ticked up a little. This is a holiday shortened week in the States, and the economic news calendar is also light.

This will end. Badly, for quite a few people.

Have a pleasant evening.

Wm. K. Black: JP Morgan's Frauds Are Epic, Unprecedented, NSA Scandal a PR Disaster

"It turns out we were not just spying on terrorists, we were spying on the general population of the world...They decided they had to do something politically to curtail this because they are getting terrible publicity, and they’re getting terrible publicity not just in the United States...This turned into disaster in terms of public relations for the United States and in terms of diplomatic relations...

CEO Jamie Dimon has presided over the largest financial crime spree in world history. . . . It depends on how you count it, but it is more than a dozen, and more in the range of 15 major felonies that either the United States investigators have found, state investigators have found or foreign governments have found...JP Morgan’s frauds are epic in scale, unprecedented in world history...

The system is ungovernable... It has already largely imploded.”

William K. Black

Read the excerpts and see original interview here.

It is not that the system is ungovernable. It is that the system is ungovernable by morally ambivalent politicians, all of whom are caught in a credibility trap.

And the world is watching.

Weekend Reading: Carroll Quigley on Tragedy and Hope

 

 I own a first edition copy of Carroll Quigley's book, 'Tragedy and Hope' and I have read it, and have always found it, and the history behind the work, to be interesting.

Quigley was a mentor to Bill Clinton as a student at Georgetown, and was instrumental in obtaining Clinton's Rhodes scholarship.

Here is a pdf version of the article by Kevin Cole which is the substance of this video below:
Professor Carroll Quigley and the Article that Said Too Little

I would have preferred if the audio did not contain annoying background music and if the narrator had spoken a bit more slowly.