Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Calm Before the Storm

Gold and silver were in the usual capping mode today, although silver managed to finish the week on a slight gain.

I am liking silver more and more here, and am not adverse to some small buys at regular intervals with a longer term time horizon. Nibbles, if you will.

Today was all China and Greece. China rallied so everyone had a good day. I think this is just the end of Act I, and direct your attention to the comparison of the Shanghai Composite and the Nasdaq in the dot.com bubble.

As for Greece, we had florid headlines about 'Tsipras is destroying Greece' today.  

Greece is playing a rough hand, and more than anything else, playing for time.  What else does one think they would have gotten out of the Berlin blockheads, a fair deal, a workable solution?   Hah! 

Why should that happen now, when the crony capitalists have been pushing so hard for deprivation first,  and then privatization and a general looting of productive assets next?   This is a well-established pattern. 

I think this was laid out in a pretty straightforward manner a couple of weeks ago. But the sturm und drang is certainly diverting, especially the German hubris and the Greek negotiation tactics.   You cannot adequately follow the game unless you understand the objectives.

The drama in gold and silver is now laid bare for all to see.   Anyone who doubts the rigging in the precious metals is not to be taken seriously anymore.  

I really wish I could understand the intended endgame a bit better, at least as it stands in the minds of the gold pool and the silver market riggers. Where do they think they are going with this?

I think I know what the other side expects to do.  They know the price manipulation will eventually run out of steam.  All such operations invariably do so.   And in that aftermath market forces that have built up with take the pricing higher by multiples.   I am not saying that there will be any sort of an overthrow.  Like Greece, the rest of the world asks for reasonable, livable terms.

Yellen's speech today was held at the City Club of Cleveland, which is one of my old haunts.  I used to have lunch there almost every Friday, some years ago, and attended some notable speakers who said exciting things.   Yellen was certainly not among them.

The Fed wants to raise rates for their own policy purposes and will do quite a bit to get a fig leaf to cover what is at bottom a self-serving act from a generally insular and self-serving crew of technocrats in the service of kleptocrats, the Banks and their political praetorians.

The real solutions are fairly simple, but will not happen because there are such powerful interests allied against them.  And they have managed to delude a vocal portion of the populace by feeding them a steady diet of slogans, sociological phantoms for children, and economic hoo-haw.

Financial reform and wage growth, with more certainty in the big variables of healthcare costs and retirement plans is key to a sustainable and organic recovery. 

The way things are arranged now, hiring even a single person is a 'step function' because you are not only signing them up for a wage, but for benefits that can vary all over the place and represent a burden for a new or small business.

 Gee, I wonder what a developed country would do.  Oh yes, the US started on the path for a sane solution in this matter in the 1930s and the New Deal, but alas, were hijacked along the way.

Single payer healthcare and a robust social security system, taking the matter out of the hands of individual businesses who look for ways to cheat and cut corners would be more cost effective and much more workable.   

 

And much easier then to get business to pay a living wage to a national workforce in which essential items like healthcare were not wild cards and the feeding grounds of healthcare and insurance monopolies that add roughly 50 percent overhead to the costs.

 

And finally there is the matter of tax loopholes and multinational tax cheating to consider.

And for the love of God:   break up the Banks.

But the sine qua non is campaign finance reform.  The current system of soft bribery for the political class makes a progressive democracy ineffective in the face of big money and crony capitalism.

Oh well, interesting times.   It is a good phrase for the day.

Have a pleasant weekend.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Dog Days

The markets were surprisingly quiet today despite the rally back up in the tightening loop in US stocks.

The news was a snooze, except for China and Greece.

China is enjoying a bit of a bounce, which is highly consistent with the comparison to the Nasdaq dot com bubble graph which I compared it to last week.

As for Greece, I think the progress of the talks is about what one would expect.

Next week will be more of the same.

Have a pleasant weekend

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Some Group Is Sitting On These Markets

"Gold is looking like the dog that just did not bark -- but not uniquely so. Most safe-haven assets are looking distinctly lackluster, including the VIX index. Either 5,000 years of safe-haven buying has just become bunk, or there is a desire to portray what is evidently a financial and economic crisis as nothing to be concerned about."

Ross Norman, Sharps Pixley


“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

At least in my judgement, the precious metal markets are being consistently rigged.

I believe the reason that they are being rigged is that the financiers have convinced the political class that this is a necessary action in order to prevent a panic, a run on the dollar and the bonds, and a seepage of critical funds into an unproductive investment as compared to equities for example.

We are just defending what is ours, right? And what is ours is the global dollar hegemony.

This is really just another excuse for looting, picking both the global public pockets and the Treasury's.

This sort of thing seems to happen periodically, at least once per generation, and the system generally has to get washed out badly, and then reform may come. You can see a clear trend back to the early Reagan years for this particular dalliance with the overreach and madness of the moneyed interests.

Protracted market rigging tend to distort supply profoundly. And there should be no doubt that the distortions and excesses of our current round of economic quackery have caused an historic imbalance of wealth and power.  And the rigging of the gold and silver markets have badly affected the ability of supply to meet demand.

Oh well. Interesting times.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Taking Profits, Holding More Cash

 

As I mentioned the other day, this is now the kind of market where it makes sense to take profits if you have them, and hold more cash until the mispriced risks resolve themselves.  I am holding mostly cash and precious metals for myself, and am looking carefully at a couple equity plays along the lines of the precious metals, but not with any particular conviction.  This market crisis needs to resolve.

 

The biggest drivers of global risk are the collapsing China asset bubble and the inherently unstable governance of the Eurozone, manifesting as it is now in Greece, and all the uncertainty that this brings.

 

But Spain, Portugal and Italy face similar challenges.   German hubris is destroying the Eurozone which itself is not a particularly durable model of organization economically and politically. 

 

One of most difficult issues is the unreliability of the media and the political and economic class to tell the truth, particularly as the quadrennial power struggle called the Presidential elections approaches.   Spin and deception are flying hot and heavy.   And unfortunately most of the captains and crew of the ship are busy packing goods into their personal lifeboats.

 

Speaking of unsustainable, take a look at the spike in new unemployment claims and the high continuing claims number in the US economic data.   And the Fed is still biased towards raising rates, and continuing to pump the top down stimulus into a broken system.  Madness.

 

As for the Congress and the Administration, politically the US has not been this badly led for quite some time, and I vividly remember the Nixon years.  

 

So, let us protect ourselves, both financially and spiritually, with an eye towards the things that really matter.  This is really all one can do for now.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

Taibbi: Eric Holder, Wall Street's Double Agent

"Holder doubtless seriously believed at first that in a time of financial crisis, he was doing the right thing in constructing new forms of justice for banks, where nobody but the shareholders actually had to pay for crime. You've heard of victimless crimes; Holder created the victimless punishment.

But in the end, it was pretty convenient, wasn't it, that "the right thing" also happened to be the strategy that preserved Democratic Party relationships with big-dollar donors, kept the client base at Holder's old firm nice and fat, made the influential rich immeasurably richer and allowed Eric Holder himself to crash-land into a giant pile of money upon resignation.

What a coincidence! In any civilized country, it'd be a scandal. In America, though, he's just another guy selling whatever he can to get by. It was just too bad that what Holder had to sell was the criminal justice system."

Matt Taibbi, Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes In From the Cold

 

Holder was no rogue political appointee.  He was very much in the mainstream of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party, founded by the Clintons.  Obama did nothing to reform it and added Big Healthcare and Big Pharma into the corporatist money mix.

 

And so these reformers, throwing their constituency under the bus, have become the facilitators of the deep capture of our regulatory and political system in a bipartisan effort to get rich.

 

This is not to say that these are malevolently evil people by nature.  Although a few are. Most are just people, being carried along by an unsustainable tide of cynicism and personal greed that has imprinted itself on the minds of our privileged elites.  

 

They choose to commit criminal acts through a wonderful power of rationalization, in a downward spiral of moral decline.   One day they wake up and see the monstrous things they may have done, not in one grand moment in the dramatic rejection of the good, but in a thousand small choices and personal exceptions of self-indulgence. 

 

The worldview of the self-appointed elite is that now that I have gone to the right schools, said the right words, protected the right people, taken the right jobs and done the right things, now I get to cash in and get in filthy rich on easy money and the looting of the real economy.  I am finally gettin' paid.  This perverse mindset, which used to be a denizen of rural enclaves and big city bosses is becoming pervasive in Washington and New York.

 

It has all the hallmarks of the kind of dual class system that is specifically prohibited by the framers of the Bill of Rights.  But who will watch the watchers when 'everyone is doing it.'

 

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

 

COMEX Silver 'Owners Per Ounce' and the Great JPM Silver Hoard

The 'owners per ounce' for silver is trending a bit higher, thanks to the enormous open interest.

 

The most impressive hoard accumulated in recent times is the silver bullion held in the JP Morgan warehouse for 'someone.'

CNT is the big dealer in silver, using the COMEX warehouses to stage is silver wholesale business to the US government mint among others. 

 

Look at the mass of registered (deliverable) silver which they hold.  They are almost an anomaly in the paper markets of New York.  And it is CNT that is boosting the deliverable silver that keeps the 'owners per ounce' down in the face of the increasing open interest.