What’s stopping gold from climbing substantially higher?

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...

- Source, Kitco News

Negative Rates Won't Rescue The Fed, Nor Will Pretending That Everything's Fine

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.

- Source, Ron Paul

Mait Taibbi: We're in a Permanent Coup

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...

- Source, Matt Taibbi, read the full article here

Is Gold Preparing For A Correction? Silver Price Detaches

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?

- Source, Golden Rule Radio

Silver Fortune: Baby Boomers are Screwed in the Next Recession

To put it simply, there's even less time for Boomers, and more exposure to the next crash.

- Source, Silver Fortune

Ron Paul: Federal Reserve’s Latest Bailouts More Proof Bad Times Ahead

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.

- Source, Ron Paul

About That 13 Tons of Chinese Mayor Gold Story...

Financial Crisis, Broken Promises, and Complacency

Too many are falling into the trap of unsustainable returns, unaware that the current paradigm is shifting.

- Source, Silver Fortune

IPOs Crash & Burn, Debris Hits Housing, Office Markets

Signs are now all over Silicon Valley and San Francisco...

- Source, The Wolf Street Report

Craig Hemke: Gold and Silver Manipulation Criminal Racketeering Charges To Reach The Top?

Craig sat down with Half Dollar to discuss the DOJ's criminal indictment of 2 current (and 1 prior) gold & silver traders, the Fed's daily repo market operations, the outlook for gold & silver, and a whole lot more.

- Source, The Silver Doctors

Gold & Silver Sense America's The Last Thing On Politicians Minds?

As hundreds of D.C. politicians now spend all of their time and energy on their election or re-election campaigns, impeaching Trump or starting new wars, the US markets and economy are at great risk of burning to the ground. 

Washington fiddles while America burns? Join Mike & Half Dollar as they break-down the latest news, and participate in the conversation through the live-chat or by calling-in to the show.

- Source, The Silver Doctors

Ben Hunt: Prepare To Get Burned

Society is pretending its actions don't have consequences. It's badly mistaken. History teaches us that there is no free lunch, reminds Dr. Ben Hunt. 

And science informs us that even the most simple systems become nearly impossible to predict or control with 100% precision as time and variables change. 

But our society today is ignoring these lessons. It’s betting that the increasingly excessive distortions required to keep the status quo continuing will succeed, and come at no cost.

- Source, Peak Prosperity

Gold hits 2 week high on growth fears, palladium scales new peak

Gold rose on Monday to its highest in over two weeks as weak economic data from the euro zone stoked global recession fears and forced investors to seek refuge in bullion, while palladium soared to a record on a sustained supply shortfall.

Spot gold was up 0.5% at $1,524.71 per ounce, after hitting its highest since Sept. 6. U.S. gold futures rose 1.1% to $1,532.40 an ounce.

“The weak German PMI numbers gave a little bit of a shock to the stock market and led investors into safety like gold and silver,” said Phillip Streible, senior commodities strategist at RJO Futures.

Gold could hit $1,550 in this supportive environment of “weak interest rates, increasing geopolitical risks, no (trade) agreement with China and weak data that shows we are slipping into recession,” Streible added.

German private sector activity shrank for the first time in 6-1/2 years in September as a manufacturing recession deepened unexpectedly and growth in the service sector lost momentum, while euro zone business growth stalled, a survey showed on Monday.

Meanwhile, better-than-expected U.S. manufacturing PMI data helped stock markets pare some losses, but failed to dent gold’s upward momentum.

Investors are also keeping a close eye on U.S.-China trade ties, after a Chinese agriculture delegation cancelled their visit to U.S. farm states, adding to the uncertainty in the drawn-out dispute that has weighed on the global economy.

Adding to geopolitical tensions, U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday approved sending American troops to bolster Saudi Arabia’s air and missile defenses after the largest-ever attack on the kingdom’s oil facilities.

Meanwhile, palladium prices soared to a record high of $1,664.50 an ounce. The autocatalyst metal has risen nearly 8% or about $115 so far this month.

“People are starting to realize that auto sales and production outside of China is actually not so bad and so demand from the industrial sector is stronger that what people thought,” said Jeffrey Christian, managing partner of CPM Group.

“In addition to that, there are a lot of investors moving in that market and in such a small, illiquid market, it doesn’t take a lot of investors to drive the price higher.”

Elsewhere, silver gained 3.5% to $18.61 per ounce and platinum rose 1.8% to $962.55.

- Source, CNBC

Christine Lagarde: The Trade War Is Weighing on the Global Economy

For incoming European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, the U.S.-China trade war is the biggest threat to the global economy.

Lagarde, who has run the International Monetary Fund since 2011 and was selected in July to replace Mario Draghi on Nov. 1, said the tariffs that the U.S. and China have slapped on each other’s goods are set to shave 0.8% off global economic growth in 2020.

“That’s a massive number,” Lagarde said in an interview with CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “It’s fewer jobs. It’s less business going on. It’s less investment. It’s more uncertainty. It weighs like a big, dark cloud on the global economy.”

“I think trade — threat against trade at the moment — is the biggest hurdle for the global economy, yes, indeed,” she added.

Top trade negotiators from the U.S. and China are set to resume talks next month in Washington. The tit-for-tat tariff threats in the past year and a half have roiled financial markets and sparked concerns about a global recession.

“The longer this lingers, the more uncertainty sinks in. And if you’re an investor, if you’re an enterprise, whether small, medium size or big, you’re not going to invest, you’re going to wait. You’re going to sit and wonder where the supply chains are going to be organized,” Lagarde said in the interview that aired Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”

- Source, CNBC

World's Wealthiest Families Are Stockpiling Cash as Recession Fears Grow

Rick Stone, a former partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, sees treacherous times ahead for family offices trying to deploy cash.

The head of Stone Family Office said he doubts the bond market will provide any real return over the next decade, that equity markets will suffer a substantial drop and then be flat, and that too much venture capital and private equity money will continue to chase too few opportunities.

“It’s a very hard time for family offices to allocate money,” said Stone, 60, whose initial wealth came from class-action litigation fees.

Stone has a good vantage point on the action, since he runs the bi-monthly meetings of the Palm Beach Investment Research Group, a network of 35 family offices in Palm Beach, Florida. “The areas to invest in are fewer, and there is a lot of money looking for those spaces,” he said.

That view of the markets is shared by many of the 360 global single- and multi-family offices surveyed for the 2019 UBS Global Family Office Report, which was done in conjunction with Campden Research and released Monday. A majority expect the global economy to enter a recession by 2020, with the highest percentage of gloomy respondents in emerging markets. About 42% of family offices around the world are raising cash reserves.

‘More Caution’

“There’s more caution and fear of the public equity markets among ultra-high-net-worth investors,” said Timothy O’Hara, president of Rockefeller Global Family Office. “That has more people thinking about private investments, alternative investments or cash.”

Jeffrey Gundlach, chief investment officer of DoubleLine Capital, said this month he thinks there’s a 75% chance of a U.S recession before the November 2020 presidential election, while economists surveyed by Bloomberg in August predicted a 35% chance in the next 12 months, up four percentage points from a month earlier. Meanwhile, the World Bank cut its 2019 global forecast to the slowest since the financial crisis a decade ago...

- Source, Yahoo Finance