Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Pigtocracy Falling - The Field Is Won

"Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific."

Roger Babson

"I rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government; and I shall work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall go to this unjust claim. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that 'Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'"

Susan B. Anthony

"Son Roper, I thank our Lord the field is won."

Sir Thomas More

There was a lot of pushing and shoving in the gold and silver markets today.

 

Very little was actually done at the Comex, except for the usual posturing.

 

Speaking of posturing, the ECB tried to get tough on Greece today, and cut off credit to them because of their failure to reform, and also has disallowed Greek debt to be held as collateral in its banks.

 

Greece is a very small country.  Some think that because of this they have a poor bargain position.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  They have a very powerful bargaining position, but it is a bit too binary. 

 

They can default and pull out of the EU and the euro and declare their own sovereign currency.  They can also cut trade deals with Russia for whatever imports they may need.

 

This would shake the ECB and its financial institutions to their foundations.  And it would set a pattern that has them terrified.

 

That is the long and short of it.

 

I suspect we will see a lot of posturing and jawboning, like a dance, as part of this negotiation.  This is why they make their statements public, because that is their intent.  It is noise.  Noise is no use if you intend it to be heard, but then make it in a soundproof room.

 

The really serious discussions may be non-verbal, but certainly not documented and will not be publicized before their time.  If someone has ever been involved in a very serious political or international negotiation, this is how it is done, if the parties involved are serious adults.

I have done it.  And many times I have assisted our side in assessing the moves and the thinking of the other parties, and sorting out the wheat from the chaff in any statements.  I am sure Greece and the EU have a back channel.   And if not then I may have greatly over-estimated the Europeans.

What is curious to me is where the US is on this.  And do not think for a minute they are not involved and have not expressed an opinion and preference.  With the ongoing proxy war in the Ukraine and Syria between the US and Russia, they are almost certainly keeping a close eye on the potentially pivotal role of Greece.   For now most of us only have access to US thinking through their rather clumsy propaganda they put out through their attendant news sources and organizations.

If both parties act responsibly, there will be a settlement here somewhere in between their 'positions' that allows each party to save face, and hold to whatever principles they tend to uphold.

 

And if not, it will be rather messy.

 

There is quite a bit of posturing going on in the precious metals markets now as well.  The paper tigers in New York and London are swirling the edge of the abyss, falling further behind the paper-to-physical ratio.  

 

A couple readers took me to task for saying that there might be a big reset on the price of the metals, with the exchanges having to declare force majeure.  Their point was that the Comex does not need to do this in order to compel a cash settlement. 

 

I would have to go back and read it, because I had thought I was referencing both New York AND London.   But that does not matter, because the main point was not that there would be a forced cash settlement, but rather that like MF Global the terms of the settlement would be dictated by the exchange. 

 

I am not saying that there would be a cash settlement offered at the current market price in dollars.  Rather, there would be a take-it-or-leave-it cash offer at whatever price the exchange decided.  And it could be substantially below the 'market price' for physical bullion, some pre-dated price.  And it may involve the nullification of some arrangements. 

 

When the game unwinds unexpectedly and with some violence, I have found the insiders who run the game to be rather expansive in their efforts to limit their own losses, and those of their friends, and to re-arrange the rules as they wish under some legal pretext of extraordinary circumstances, even if it was something they did that caused them. 

 

Surely you remember what JPM did with regard to customer money and physical assets in the aftermath of MF Global.  And that was just an isolated incident.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Stocks Ignore Bad ADP Employment, Sell off on ECB

Stocks tried to shake off some pretty bad macroeconomic numbers from this morning. I have included a chart of them below.

However, the stock market's rally was dumped hard as the ECB announced into the close that they would no longer allow banks to accept Greek debt as collateral.

 

More on this in the gold and silver commentary above.

Stocks pretty much went off on the lows. This market has the resilience of meringue, and all the character of a cotton candy soufflé.

 

Without QE I am struggling to see how stocks can keep scaling their lofty heights, especially with the wheels starting to fall off the real economy.  And they are, despite the puffery from the Fed and the sell side of the Street, the paid strategists whose primary strategy is to keep you 'fully invested.'

 

Some incident will occur, and then the truth will be revealed, and non-related parties properly scapegoated for spoiling our great and glorious Recovery.  We are the world, we are exceptional, we cannot fail.

 

The elite will lie, and the people will pretend to believe them.  Heck about 20 percent of the American public will believe almost anything if it is wrapped with the right prejudice and appeal to passion.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Same Old Schemes, Ending Badly

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard warned Tuesday regulatory changes haven’t solved the too-big-to-fail problem in banking, adding that he’d support a break-up of the biggest banks in the U.S.

“It’s naive to think that macro prudential tools as they exist today are sufficient” to tackle new bubbles without notable help from Federal Reserve interest rate policy, Mr. Bullard said. He was referring to the suite of tools the Fed and other agencies have to intervene in a targeted fashion when authorities believe financial markets have become unstable.

WSJ, Bullard Calls For Breaking Up Nation's Biggest Banks

 

Robert Johnson recognizes that rampant inequality could be the death of us all. “People need to know there are possibilities for their children, that they will have the same opportunity as anyone else,” he said at Davos. Johnson continued, “There is a wicked feedback loop. Politicians who get more money tend to use it to get even more money.”

That’s the money they get from the plutocrats who pull their strings; in the past three elections alone, the financial sector has given $256 million to Republicans and $153 million to Democrats.

USA Today recently editorialized, “Wall Street got its swagger back not long after the bailout, which is no surprise.  Its culture is built on greed and ego.  What is more surprising is how quickly Congress again became Wall Street’s errand boy.”

Michael Winship, The Super-Rich Can't Hide From the Rest of Us

If called on their bets, the Comex cannot come up with the bullion to answer it, except at much higher prices.  And I am talking about many hundreds of dollars higher, probably into the 2,000 range, unless they can get the government/judiciary to allow them to declare some favorable sort of force majeure as they did in the case of MF Global.

 

The only real doubt in my mind is how badly leveraged the New York and London crowd are, and how many cross claims exist for each ounce of physical metal.  I suspect it is worse than I think.

 

Kyle Bass said the same thing, so let the apologists, the little Lord Haw Haw's, dismissively chew on that one. 

 

It is a scam.  It is tolerated by the kleptocracy.  Remember this when the time comes.  They know.

The regulators and the Fed and the Congress are turning a blind eye to the corruption because they can, no one calls them on it, and it suits their very personal preferences.

 

The BRICS are calling the Anglo-American banking cartel's bluff, one bar of bullion at a time.

 

That is the situation in a nutshell.

 

Tick tock.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - The Financial Sector Is a Subsidized Money Machine

Just 10% of Americans own 91 percent of the nation's stocks and mutual funds, according to economist Edward Wolff. Most of the remainder is held by a "middle class" that is steadily losing ground. The bottom 60% is almost entirely shut out.

Stock owners, some of whom made billions of dollars last year, can defer their income taxes indefinitely, pay a reduced capital gains tax when they decide to cash in, or pass on the capital gains tax-free to their heirs.

Making money is all a game to the super-rich -- redistribution toward the top, trickle-down delusions, tax avoidance, and even, for some of them, dabbling in criminal activities.

Paul Buchheit, Super Bowl For the Rich

Chipotle beat on earnings but missed on revenues and a few growth measures. That's a refrain you will hear quite often in these days of dodgy GAAP rules and accounting antics. The priced-for-perfection stock was down 5 percent after hours.  Who knows if it will stick.  It's all a game.

Factor orders missed by a mile this morning.

Oil has rallied back over 50. It is not clear what this means exactly since the price discovery process is badly broken by leveraged speculation.  Hey, weren't we just here about six years ago?

I suspect there was a steep overshoot to the downside that can be attributed to 'gamesmanship.'

 

S&P 'settled' for 1.4 Billion for its active participation in the massive mortgage fraud perpetrated by Wall Street.  It was just a cost of doing business. 

There will be another financial crisis, and another attempt to bail out the perpetrators by their shrine maidens in the Congress. 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

NAV Premiums of Precious Metal Trusts and Funds - Why There Is No Recovery

 

Another 7,285 ounces of gold bullion were redeemed from the Sprott Physical Gold Trust.

My friend Arby had an interesting observation.  I have not checked it out specifically.  I thought Australia was in second place, but I have not looked at the latest figures for 2014.

 

But if the numbers are generally right, which they seem to be, it gives us some idea of the magnitude of what is going on.

US 52 WEEKS gold mine production 2014 (estimate from Mineweb) ... ...    210 tonnes

China first 3 WEEKS gold imports 2015 (calculated by Koos Jansen)      .... 202 tonnes

The largest producer of gold is China, second Russia, third USA.

The two largest producers are net importers of their world leading mining output.  The third largest producer is a net exporter.

 

And then there's Australia, but I'm not sure that they even know what they're doing as one of the attendant nations.

 

No matter what the exact numbers and who makes the most, gold is flowing from West to East. 

Anyone who does not understand this is missing one of the most dramatic monetary phenomena of this century.

I wonder who will blink first in this 'suicide squeeze.'  Because that is what this latest gold pool is becoming.

Speaking of monetary phenomenon, the professor of numbers and all things housing Tony Sanders notes that Mortgage Bonds Have Underperformed the Worst Since 2008 on Refi Risks.

 

As part of a different discussion, I noticed the other week that the Fed stepped up purchases of agency mortgage debts considerably since they 'ended QE' and own a boatload of them.

 

Janet and Bill Dudley must be running handcarts up and down Wall and Broad Streets telling the Banks to, 'bring out your dead.'

 

Fan and Fred buy them, and the Fed buries them.   With nothing going to the people whose homes are being foreclosed.   

And finally,  Zerohedge reminds us this morning that the numbers indicate that the biggest flows of capital into the US equity markets are from.. wait for it... companies using their profits to buy back their own stocks, by far.

 

So the Fed is using its ability to print money to buy bad debts from the Banks which they created to cheat their customers, and companies are using the outsized profits they are obtaining through government subsidies and underpaying their workers to buy back their own stock and enrich their upper management. 

 

And as Wall Street On Parade reminds us this morning, the corporatized media, owned by a handful of corporations, is cheerleading all this, and is very much captured by the crony capitalist culture.

 

And people wonder why there is no recovery.  Who says they want one, when this new normal is paying off for a privileged few so well.  And they get to buy even more of the remaining productive assets on the cheap.

 

That's trickle down stimulus, par excellence.

 

Related:  The Big Lie:  5.6% Unemployment

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - NonFarm Payrolls Friday

Gold was hit early on during quiet trade, and then regained most of its losses intraday.

A late hit in quiet after hours trade took it back down a bit.

Silver held up quite well.

 

There was not all that much of interest going on with the Comex other than blatant price shoving.  They must be trying to work down the February open interest. 

 

The Comex is becoming increasingly irrelevant to precious metals.

 

There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls Report on Friday.

When the going gets tough, the privileged lie, then cheat, then deny everything, and then finally panic and accuse everyone else of undermining them out of jealousy for their well deserved success and impeccable qualities.

 

I doubt they will learn from their folly on their own.  Most sociopaths and narcissists have a huge blind spot when it comes to realistic self-assessment.  And they flock to finance, politics, and positions of power, especially in a kleptocracy.  Which is what we have here in the States today.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

Even Children Who Are Homeless Have Dreams