A decade after the last crisis, is another housing bubble brewing in North America? Los Angeles-based real estate investor Nick Halaris travels to two of the continent’s hottest markets – Vancouver and Seattle – to find out.
By speaking to many different types of people at the center of those markets, Nick develops a 360-degree view of both cities. This allows him to draw his conclusion –and to leave viewers with an even more important question.
Former teacher, homeschooler, and author of "Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children,"
Alex Newman visits Finance and Liberty and Reluctant Preppers for the first time to warn us that our children and our liberty are in peril. "The education fight — between those who want to provide solid schooling in the three R’s and other subjects and those who want to change kids’ core beliefs — is culminating.
There is a silent struggle raging right now upon which the future of America and her liberties depends — literally. At its core, the struggle revolves around who will be responsible for children and their upbringing.
Ultimately, there are only two options: parents or government. Right now, government appears to be winning. It is gaining ground with each passing generation, and with each passing day, through the public education system.
But if luminaries of the Left get their way, this is only the beginning. The end goal goes far beyond education and touches every aspect of life."
“The Fed Is In Some State Of Panic Over Something That Is Not Entirely Clear” - Bill King. IMF warns “normalization of rates may be more difficult than previously envisioned” “Not QE” is in high gear, $7.5 billion in one day. Elizabeth Warren promises to tax wealth.
It’s QE4ever, Baby! The Fed’s latest move back into quantitative easing took a quantum leap in a single day with last week’s rush announcement of major permanent money injections to begin this Tuesday. Since the Fed adamantly denies it is doing what it is doing — going back to quantitative easing (because they legally have to deny it) — we could just call it the Fed’s new quantitative mechanics.
If we must avoid the term quantitative easing, as some writers are insisting we should, I’ve come up with the new term from the definition of quantum mechanics in which, objects have characteristics of both particles and waves and there are limits to the precision with which quantities can be measured (the uncertainty principle)…. Quantum mechanics gradually arose from theories to explain observations which could not be reconciled with classical physics.
Thus, quantitative mechanics, seems to fit the Fed’s latest move, though I think I’ll just stay with QE4ever since it follows QE3. The Fed certainly exhibits great uncertainty about about the principle size of its new quantitatively massive injections of money. You’ll see in all the quotes below how large each dose will be and how long these emergency operations that are not an emergency will continue. All of it put in terms that are hard to quantify because they are always preceded with “at least.”
The money that matters will be created out of nothing yet will, “at least,” match previous rounds of QE in size. Like things in quantum mechanics that can be in two places in the same time or seem to be two different kinds of things at the same time, the new QE that isn’t QE is also not an emergency response, even though it had to be decided on, announced and started before the next Fed meeting arrives later this month. Though the Fed says it not easing, I will lay out below how it is easing in every respect. In short, it looks exactly like the old quantitative easing and functions exactly like the the old QE, so it Q-uacks like a duck and is a duck. The Fed says it is not because it has a different motivation, as if I care what their motivation is.
It was, after all, a simple question that sparked my interest in silver from the start. Some 35 years ago, my now-departed friend and mentor, Israel Friedman, challenged me with a question that took me a year to answer. Actually, “challenged” is not the right word, either back then or today. Izzy simply asked a question to which he had no real answer of someone he thought might be able to answer. In a real sense, the question conveyed a degree of respect, in that Izzy only asked me because he thought I might have an answer. It is with that same degree of respect that I ask for answers to my own questions today.
Back then (1985), Izzy asked me why I thought silver was priced so cheaply (around $5/oz) in the face of universal awareness that the world was consuming more silver than was being produced (mining plus recycling); a deficit consumption pattern that had existed for more than 45 years to that point. Simply put, a deficit consumption pattern is the single most bullish condition possible for any commodity, yet silver appeared to be immune from the law of supply and demand.
Of course, silver had run up to $50 five years earlier, thanks largely to the Hunt Brothers, and Izzy had played that run better than just about anyone, buying at $4 and selling at $40. But that was then (1980) and this was now (1985) and silver was again as low as it had been when Izzy first bought it in the mid-1970’s. Since he had already mastered the silver market, I was a bit perplexed why Izzy was even asking me to answer his question, but I could see he was asking because he valued my opinion – it was less a challenge and much more a seeking of the right answer. In that circumstance, I was not about to offer some off the top of my head flippant answer and I told Izzy I would think about it.
As it turned out, I thought about the answer for more than a year, because Izzy’s question was so darned good – why silver was so cheap in the face of the most bullish supply and demand circumstances possible for any commodity. The answer, of course, was that silver was artificially depressed in price due to excessive and concentrated short selling in COMEX futures – the same answer that explains silver’s depressed price to this day. Quite ironically, Izzy did not accept my answer for a number of years (because I don’t think he was expecting it), but eventually came to embrace it fully, coming to coin terms like “slicing the salami” (the practice by which the commercials get the technical funds to buy or sell) and “full pants down” (an overrun of the big commercial shorts).
Since I believe that much general good came from Izzy asking me his question so many years ago, I would like to use that same approach now to solicit an answer to a question that has bothered me for the past eight and a half years. I do think I know much of the answer (which I’ll provide), but I would like to hear what others have to say since it’s something rarely discussed. I’ll state the facts which can be easily verified and ask you to come up with an answer to the question of why so much silver is being physically moved in and out from the COMEX silver warehouses?
Mike Maloney recently appeared as a guest on the 'Hidden Forces' podcast with Demetri Kofinas. Demetri is a good friend of Mike, and has actually appeared as our own guest in Episodes 2 and 8 of Hidden Secrets Of Money.
During this one hour interview Mike recalls his early battles with dyslexia and how it became a gift in disguise.
Along with his thoughts on the current state of the markets, Mike details his first steps as an entrepreneur... leading all the way up to the foundation of Gold Silver.
When Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy ten years ago on Friday, the question on everyone’s minds was simple: “Who’s next?” If a pillar of Wall Street worth hundreds of billions of dollars just months before couldn’t be trusted with the public's money, then nowhere was safe.
Panicked investors rushed for the door, banks refused to lend to each other, and money market funds began to collapse. “I describe it as an economic Pearl Harbor,” Warren Buffett, the legendary investor of Berkshire Hathaway, told VICE News. “It was something we hadn’t seen before. Even the 1929 panic was nothing like this.
I mean, the system stopped.“ Buffett had a front row seat to the global crisis even before the Bush Administration took up the struggle. He had been approached by Lehman’s CEO Dick Fuld for emergency capital earlier in the summer, and after it failed, he found himself courted by other teetering investment banks desperate for capital.
His $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs saved the firm, and netted him billions. He credits the Bush administration, led by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, with helping to prevent a second Great Depression. “When they realized the gravity of what was happening, we were having a run on the United States, maybe a run on the world, they stepped up,” Buffett said.
He’s not convinced, however, that the financial community's takeaway from its brush with financial Armageddon will prevent future disaster.
“Humans will continue to behave foolishly and sometimes en masse. And that doesn’t change. We get smarter but we don’t get wiser," Buffett said.
The Agenda welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, who over the past decade and a half has made his name as a columnist, activist and author.
He's been a vociferous public critic of presidents on both sides of the American political spectrum, and his latest book, 'America, the Farewell Tour,' is nothing short of a full-throated throttling of the political, social, and cultural state of his country.
Gold prices should be targeting as high as $1,650 to $1,700 an ounce by the first quarter of next year, but fundamental events need to be pushing the yellow in the right direction...
Desperation continues at the Fed. They're expanding their balance sheet (again), but denying that it's QE, despite the fact that they've added almost $200 billion to their balance sheet in just a matter of days. Fed Chair Powell is also out-and-about pretending that everything is just fine.
Central planners always box themselves into a corner. Neither lies, nor more counterfeiting can fix the troubles they've created.
I’ve lived through a few coups. They’re insane, random, and terrifying, like watching sports, except your political future depends on the score.
The kickoff begins when a key official decides to buck the executive. From that moment, government becomes a high-speed head-counting exercise. Who’s got the power plant, the airport, the police in the capital? How many department chiefs are answering their phones? Who’s writing tonight’s newscast?
When the KGB in 1991 tried to reassume control of the crumbling Soviet Union by placing Mikhail Gorbachev under arrest and attempting to seize Moscow, logistics ruled. Boris Yeltsin’s crew drove to the Russian White House in ordinary cars, beating KGB coup plotters who were trying to reach the seat of Russian government in armored vehicles.
A key moment came when one of Yeltsin’s men, Alexander Rutskoi – who two years later would himself lead a coup against Yeltsin – prevailed upon a Major in a tank unit to defy KGB orders and turn on the “criminals.”
We have long been spared this madness in America. Our head-counting ceremony was Election Day. We did it once every four years.
That’s all over, in the Trump era.
On Thursday, news broke that two businessmen said to have “peddled supposedly explosive information about corruption involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden” were arrested at Dulles airport on “campaign finance violations.” The two figures are alleged to be bagmen bearing “dirt” on Democrats, solicited by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman will be asked to give depositions to impeachment investigators. They’re reportedly going to refuse. Their lawyer John Dowd also says they will “refuse to appear before House Committees investigating President Donald Trump.” Fruman and Parnas meanwhile claim they had real derogatory information about Biden and other politicians, but “the U.S. government had shown little interest in receiving it through official channels.”
For Americans not familiar with the language of the Third World, that’s two contrasting denials of political legitimacy.
The men who are the proxies for Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani in this story are asserting that “official channels” have been corrupted. The forces backing impeachment, meanwhile, are telling us those same defendants are obstructing a lawful impeachment inquiry.
This latest incident, set against the impeachment mania and the reportedly “expanding” Russiagate investigation of U.S. Attorney John Durham, accelerates our timeline to chaos. We are speeding toward a situation when someone in one of these camps refuses to obey a major decree, arrest order, or court decision, at which point Americans will get to experience the joys of their political futures being decided by phone calls to generals and police chiefs.
My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president...
Is gold entering a D wave correction before it begins its next rise? The FED are restarting the printing presses and expanding the balance sheet 'soon' in response to funding issues.
Silver detaches from gold, has a reversal begun in the white metals?
The need for the Fed to shove billions into the repo market to keep that market’s interest rate near the Fed’s target shows the Fed is losing its power to control the price of money.
