US Financial Television, a Crash Call, and Year-To-Date Stock Market Performance

Larry Kudlow was just ranting on Bubblevision that we should put tough economic sanctions on China to punish them for hacking our computer systems. The US certainly doesn't do anything like that.   And they cannot push back because they need to keep buying our debt, since they have no other choice.   Its remarkable.  Every time he opens his mouth.  He must have a lot of it stored up.

Speaking of shams, nonsense, and hypocrisy, here are the Year-To-Date stock market returns.

The Dow Industrials is for the tourists, the SP 500 for stock robots, the NDX for tech weenies, and the Russell 2000 tells the tale of the broad market.

Jim Rickards apparently made a 'crash call' yesterday, with quite a bit of timing wiggle room, fwiw.

I don't like to forecast financial crises, because the timing is often very difficult.  But I was able to forecast the tech crash and the housing crash, but not the exact timing.  And playing a rigged and robotized market is not easy, even when you have the trend right.

NAV Premiums of Certain Precious Metal Trusts and Funds

As a reminder you should be able to 'right click' on any of my pictures and charts and select open in new tab or window to open them in a full screen original size.

Silver is still a bit weak historically in comparison to gold.

The PSLV premium is a bit enthusiastic as it is often wont to do. Their cash level is quite low at about .155% of assets suggesting that they will do a shelf offering of shares to raise cash levels once silver shows some market strength.  That shelf offering generally knocks the premium down about two or three hundred basis points.  I am surely not the only person with an eye to the spreads.

Sunday Evening: Pictures From the Appalachian Trail This Weekend

Here are some casual pictures taken while hiking the Appalachian Trail along the Kittatinny Ridge in New Jersey this weekend.    The leaves are just starting to turn, a bit late this year.  The ridges of the eastern Appalachians are the remnants of ancient mountains, deeply marked and scoured by glaciers. 

 

At some points on the trail the peak of this particular ridge is quite narrow, affording views in all directions.  At other points it broadens to encompass dense forest and glacial lakes.

 

I am particularly fond of the Trail as it passes along the Blue Ridge Mountains through the Shenandoah Valley National Park.  The Appalachian Trail Conservancy is headquartered in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia.   The AT runs as a continuous hiking trail for about 2,180 miles from Springer Mountain, Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine.  That is a hundred miles further than the walking distance from London to Istanbul.

Age has rounded the ridges of the eastern Appalachians as they pass through New Jersey into rolling lines of stone running parallel to the north northeast.  

 

It is from the escarpment of the first Watchung Ridge furthest east that Washington directed the movements of his troops as he cut off the retreat of General Howe to New York City in 1777.

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur

Sunfish Pond on the Kittatinny Ridge

North West To the Delaware River

South to Blairstown, NJ

The One Percent's Plots to Overthrow Democracy

The Great Depression, the conflicts that tested the Republic to its foundations, and the struggle to maintain the commitment to freedom and democracy against powerful interests.

The highly decorated Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testified in 1934 that he had been recruited by the representatives of powerful industrialists who asked him to bring the Bonus Army back to Washington and take the government over by force from then President Franklin Roosevelt.  This was a scheme that was known as The Business Plot.

The American Liberty League

These wealthy business people were not prosecuted and the incident was quietly swept aside in the interest of domestic confidence and peace.

 

 

If Not At Home, Then the Establishment of Oligarchy Abroad

 

After the failure to overturn democracy in the US, some in the American 'One Percent' became powerful supporters and business associates of Mussolini, and even of the German Third Reich.  This business relationship continued long after the criminal brutality of these regimes had become quite obvious to all civilized people.  

 

Their involvement in the rise and promotion of fascist ideology seems to have been largely forgotten.

Greenwald: Why Privacy Matters, and the Endowment of Individual Rights and the State

 

Privacy is the space that defines the will of the individual, which sets the area that says, 'this is mine, because this is me.'

 

Privacy is the 'outer skin' of the self.

I may wish to share my space to varying degrees with family, friends, and acquaintances. If I have the good sense I may even wish to open my heart and live in a continuing act of worship and companionship with my Creator.

 

But that choice to conform myself to His will and open my thoughts and heart to Him, is mine. This is a gift that is hard to comprehend, but which grants us the intimacy of His love, rather than objectification as a possession, or a thing to be owned.

It is His most supreme condescension that He grants us the power to resist, to say no, to be other and apart from Him if we so choose. He makes us the sovereigns of a portion of His being, and says, you are free. And in His caring for another grants us a soul of our own. This is the essence of our being, and the wellspring of our existence.

What kind of love is in thrall to the beloved, which has no choice, no self identity that it may give to another, freely? What are we to an all-powerful God, except that which He has granted to us, forever, as ours alone and ours to give?

A tyrannical State, which has no virtuous restraint, by its very definition wishes to insert itself into this private space, not as a gracious God who grants us the will to either open or close the most private recesses of our heart to Him, but rather to take by force that which marks our individuality. It would be as a god, but on its own perverse and darker terms. It seeks to possess, uncaring, which is the opposite of love.

 

Privacy and the primacy of the individual is no gift from the State, but a recognition of what has been defined as 'an inalienable right' precisely because it is not granted by the State, but something higher, superior to an earthly power.

Surveillance, on an indiscriminate and massive scale by an increasingly intrusive State, is not a benign act in the cause of homeland protection.  It is not an excess of zeal among well meaning bureaucrats.  It is the very definition of statism.

It is an act of the will to power of the State over the individual, to claim that last bastion of privacy that marks the least amount of space that a person may occupy as their own. And it is relentless in its jealousy, expediency and ownership.  It asserts the supremacy of power, and takes all power to itself.  

 

The violation of the individual is not incidental to the establishment of a tyranny.  It is essential. 

"If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective and eternal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity.  

From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable. ”

Benito Mussolini, Diuturna

It is the State's way of asserting that all that we have, all that we are, all that we may do or think, belongs to them at their unquestioned discretion and expediency.

 It is the will to power, and the way of earthly death. And we who belong to the Lord can have no part of it, for He is ours and we are His. He calls us by name, and we hear His voice.

 

Statists of both the left and right seek to elevate the State to an unnatural priority over all things free and individual, since individual choice is inseparable from any notion of freedom. Therefore they must subordinate the individual to the expediency of the State not only in so called 'emergencies' but over time as a matter of their continuing policy.

 

One sees this theme of the primacy of state sanctioned organizations over people today. This is the basis of the 'corporatism' that seems so bizarre, but that we are already seeing creep into our legal judgements.

 

Therefore Corporations will have the rights of people and beyond.  They are relatively free of the most important civic obligations, and are granted privileges and perquisites beyond the individual.   Under a statism that claims the definition of all value as its prerogative, some are more equal than others, and justice is by definition at the discretion of the State.

Not to belabor the point, but as an aside this is why Alan Greenspan said that all Statists react to gold with an almost hysterical antagonism. Gold, having no counterparty risk, has been historically regarded as a natural and independent measure of economic value and store of wealth.   

China Acquired 2000 Tonnes of Gold In 2013, Almost Double World Gold Council Estimates

Dornbusch's Law:   The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.

Dr. Rudi Dornbusch

The lack of intelligent coverage by the media for this sea change in global asset allocations is remarkable.

Koos Jansen has been doing some terrific work in this area.

I have some suspicions about where the gold bullion that is leaving the Western funds and ETFs is going.

Gold is moving steadily from West to East. When the reckoning comes, it may be terrific.

SGE Chairman: 2013 Chinese Gold Demand Was 2000 tonnes

By Koos Jansen

Published: 10-10-2014 18:23

This is the final blow for the ones who still couldn’t comprehend, after all evidence presented, the amount of Chinese non-government gold demand in 2013.   At the LBMA forum in Singapore June 25, 2014, one of the keynote speakers was chairman of the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) Xu Luode. In his speech he made a few very candid statements about Chinese consumer gold demand, that according to Xu reached 2,000 tonnes in 2013. In contrast to the Word Gold Council (WGC) that states Chinese gold demand was 1,066 tonnes in 2013. Xu's speech has now finally been translated and published in the LBMA magazine The Alchemist #75.

Xu's statements once again confirm what I have been writing for months. SGE withdrawals equal Chinese wholesale demand:

import + mine + scrap = total supply = SGE withdrawals = wholesale demand

Let's go through a couple of quotes from Xu:

Data on China’s gold imports has not previously been made available to the public. However, gold has historically been imported through Hong Kong, and Hong Kong is highly transparent, disclosing details such as the number of tonnes of gold imported on a monthly basis. Last year, China imported 1,540 tonnes of gold. Such imports, together with the 430 tonnes of gold we produced ourselves, means that we have, in effect, supplied approximately 2,000 tonnes of gold last year. 

The 2,000 tonnes of gold were consumed by consumers in China. Of course, we all know that the Chinese ‘dama’ [middle-aged women] accounts for a significant proportion in purchasing gold. So last year, our gold exchange’s inventory reduced by nearly 2,200 tonnes, of which 200 tonnes was recycled gold. 

Again, we can read the simplified equation (for 2013):

import (1540t) + mine (428t) + scrap (229t) = SGE withdrawals (2197t)

I recommend that you read the entire article here.