The Divergence Between Debt and Gold

There is little doubt that gold is 'money' in the de facto, if not official, sense. It has been so for at least two thousands years, if not longer.

In a policy regime in which the Western central banks wish to quietly devalue their currencies in concert, it would be awkward to allow gold to speak embarrassing truths.

I would like to think that now, unlike ten years ago before almost every market was shown to be manipulated and sometimes on a global scale, that a concerted effort to discredit the message that gold carries would not be beyond their capability. They certainly have the motive.

As you may recall, in 1985 Larry Summers and Robert Barsky wrote a paper on Gibson's Paradox showing the linkage between prices and interest rates, and more specifically the price of gold under a gold standard.  With the price of gold going higher, it would be much more difficult to manage longer term interest rates lower, he asserts.

We are not under a gold standard at this time.  But with the turning of central bank purchasing towards gold in 2006, with a substantial boost from Asian reserves acquisitions, the fears of the Western central bankers became paramount.  Once again, they 'stared into the abyss.'

I caution that correlation is not causation.  But it is more likely where there are independent linkages, fundamental reasons that support the linkage as it were.

And I also remind the reader that divergence and convergence run in cycles. And convergence tends to return, and often does so with a vengeance.

Brace yourselves, not so much for patience while under determined financial repression, but for the time coming when the failed schemes of today's financial engineers collapse from exposure, a challenge from the East, or from sheer exhaustion.

This chart is from the data wranger Nick Laird at Sharelynx.com.

David Cay Johnston: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

This helps to explain why there will be no sustainable recovery. 

It is a matter of un-official policy.

David Cay Johnston: The Monopolists Rule

“You will even read about an insurance company owned by one of America’s most admired billionaires [Buffett] that asked a paralyzed man to die because the cost of keeping him alive was cutting into the insurer’s profits.”

“No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge customers, shortchange workers and erect barriers to fair play. A big reason is that so little of the news, which informs us about the world around us, addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward.”

David Cay Johnston

 

Third World America.

Scottish Independence, and the Growing Divide Between the Privileged Classes and the People

What interested me the most in this article is not so much the information it provides on the campaign by the British establishment against the Scottish vote for independence, or the eager participants from the American members of the Anglo-American power clique as well.

Rather it is for the light that this article sheds on the behavior of the enablers of the Anglo-American establishment in the corporate media and the academy, and how rarified their experience of the daily lives of the people has become. It seems almost to be due to an imbalance of character and a fashionable failure of the national perspective. Understandable for the generation that proclaims, 'greed is good.'

As David Brin has remarked, 'It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.'

I hope that whatever the result the vote turns out well for the people of Scotland. They will certainly have problems to encounter, and hardships as a people to overcome. As will we all.

There is a distance growing between the elite classes in America and England and the great majority of the people. It is palpable in the economic policies in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

I am always surprised by how little those pampered princes and princesses within the Beltway or Westminster seem to understand about their own people.  What a caricature the communication and occasional interactions between them has become. Such distance breeds both mistrust and fear. It is becoming a cultural divide. And not just for the leadership itself, but for their vast assemblage of courtiers and sycophants who act as viceroys and interpreters for them.

It does not bode well for the future.

The Guardian

How the media shafted the people of Scotland

Journalists in their gilded circles are woefully out of touch with popular sentiment and shamefully slur any desire for change

By George Monbiot

Tuesday 16 September 2014 15.03 EDT

Perhaps the most arresting fact about the Scottish referendum is this: that there is no newspaper – local, regional or national, English or Scottish – that supports independence except the Sunday Herald. The Scots who will vote yes have been almost without representation in the media.

There is nothing unusual about this. Change in any direction, except further over the brink of market fundamentalism and planetary destruction, requires the defiance of almost the entire battery of salaried opinion. What distinguishes the independence campaign is that it has continued to prosper despite this assault.

 

In the coverage of the referendum we see most of the pathologies of the corporate media. Here, for instance, you will find the unfounded generalisations with which less enlightened souls are characterised. In the Spectator, Simon Heffer maintains that: “addicted to welfare ... Scots embraced the something for nothing society”, objecting to the poll tax “because many of them felt that paying taxes ought to be the responsibility of someone else”.

 

Here is the condescension with which the dominant classes have always treated those they regard as inferior: their serfs, the poor, the Irish, Africans, anyone with whom they disagree. “What spoilt, selfish, childlike fools those Scots are ... They simply don’t have a clue how lucky they are,” sneered Melanie Reid in the Times. Here is the chronic inability to distinguish between a cause and a person: the referendum is widely portrayed as a vote about Alex Salmond, who is then monstered beyond recognition (a Telegraph editorial compared him to Robert Mugabe).

 

The problem with the media is exemplified by Dominic Lawson’s column for the Daily Mail last week. He began with Scotland, comparing the “threat” of independence with that presented by Hitler (the article was helpfully illustrated with a picture of the Führer – unaccompanied, in this case, by the Mail’s former proprietor)...

 

Read the entire article in The Guardian here.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Straining

"The first item on my agenda would be to restore democracy to the United States of America by overturning this disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

Why do I put that issue first? Why not health care, why not jobs?  Because if you end up with a Congress or with governors or legislatures who are beholden to the billionaire class, we are never going to make progress on any issue that impacts working families.

And in my very strong opinion — and I speak to you as chairman of the veterans committee in the Senate — I do not believe that people fought and died for democracy so that billionaires can buy elections.”

Bernie Sanders

A number of people have remarked upon the ballooning open interest in the silver market on the Comex. When the number of open contracts goes higher on a down movement in price, that is more indicative of short selling than of longs selling their contracts and closing them out, obviously.

I also hear that there was a remarkably large expansion in the inventory of SLV the other day, causing some of wonder at the source of all that silver.

It is difficult to understand what is true and what is not in these markets. And that in itself ought to give you some concern about their veracity.

This decline in character is sad. But this too shall pass.

Have a pleasant evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Within Striking Distance of a New Dow All Time High

"Do you know what you are singing about? You are singing of brotherhood, but in your face you look like you hate everyone. That will show in your music."

Arturo Toscanini

Stocks were in rally mode today as Wall Street looks forward to tomorrow's FOMC decision. Because of the weaker economic data, there were more hopes that the decision would not contain any hawkish language.

I expect the taper to continue on schedule. I do not think that the Fed will do anything new just yet.

After the bell the President tried to reassure the American people that the ebola outbreak in Africa would not spread to US shores, and if it did, it would be quickly quarantined.

Geopolitical risk was apparently off the table today.

It is hard to be too cynical about these markets. Alibaba is on the way.

Have a pleasant evening.