Illegal foreign dark money... Runaway corruption and collusion at all levels of government and banking...
Shoddy contractors perpetrating hazardous deception with impunity as crony inspectors wink and look the other way...
Olympic athletes dropping like flies in a village built over industrial toxic waste...
A real-estate bubble reaching nosebleed heights of distortion, while dragging innocent investors to their ruin, threatening thousands of residents with illness/ risk of death/ and financial failure...
A looming national banking collapse capable of triggering a global financial pandemic... Sound like the stuff of trashy paperback detective novels?
Think again: it’s not fiction, but the very real and present danger beneath one of the world’s most famous real-estate markets.
And it’s showing literal cracks ready to come crashing down on all of us. Australian investigative realtor and whistleblower Edwin Almeida visits Reluctant Preppers for the first time to break open a national scandal of easy-money fueled corruption creating a massive public health hazard and arming a financial time-bomb.
Will this threat start the collapse of the sky-high Australian real estate market, and a domino-effect of bank failures? Is this a black swan hatching as we speak?
Why are we looking at an interest rate cut as the DOW is sitting at all time highs in the longest bull market in history? Is the rate cut purely politically motivated?
The US Dollar index remains in a rising channel, nowhere near the all time highs, again begging the question as to why a rate cut is on the table?
The pound is now almost 1:1 with the US Dollar… possibly there is international pricing pressure for competitive purposes?
We look back at the last week of gold price movements alongside silver price movements in 2019. We’ll review the gold to silver ratio and platinum to palladium ratio movements.
Boris Johnson is now the British Prime Minister implies a hard Brexit later this year…
Finally a deal has been met with the federal budget, ensuring no shutdown, but raising spending levels by $320 billion above the limits previously set.
There's many examples of the Federal Reserve making bad predictions and being wrong for a long time now and it's causing panic, confusion, chaos and desperation that is building up.
It looks like we are about to get a weaker US dollar. Why is a weak dollar coming, and how can we prepare for it?
With gold? With silver? Join James Anderson and Half Dollar as they discuss several reasons for owning gold & silver, and why now is the time to get prepared.
I have always secretly wanted to work at a precious metals bullion dealer.
I love gold GC00, +0.42%. And silver and platinum. I love them philosophically, and I also just like shiny rocks. But if you think about it, trading metals is a really weird business.
Say you are bullish on silver and want to speculate on it, thinking it will appreciate in price. You can buy an ETF, yes, or you can buy silver miners, but the most straightforward way to invest in silver is just to buy coins or bars.
The most popular coins come from the U.S. Mint, but you can get coins from other countries, too. The most popular silver bars for retail investors are the 100-ounce bars, which are typically manufactured by one of a few silver refiners. Asahi is the new standard, after Johnson Matthey sold its gold and silver refining operations to them.
Anyway, you can go to a bullion dealer, tell them you want a 100-ounce bar, and they will charge you the spot price of silver per ounce, times 100 ounces, plus a small markup.
So you buy it, and now you have a shiny rock. It is satisfying to have shiny rocks, especially the 100-ounce silver bars, which make you feel like a baller.
But the shiny rocks don’t do anything. You aren’t going to use them to sew a button, wash your car or paint your ceiling. They just sit there. You hold them for a while, and if the price goes up, you are supposed to sell them.
But most people don’t sell them, and then the price goes back down, and they end up in an estate sale, and the dealer buys them back at a discount. Paraphrasing Warren Buffett, someone watching from Mars would be scratching their heads. There really is nothing more useless in the world than a shiny rock. But we love ’em...
Jason received more information about China's real estate bubble from one of his mainland China sources including some anecdotes about how owners of houses don't want renters.
Ronald discusses the potential for trust problems within the banking system and why these types of issues can happen quite quickly. His annual report "In Gold we Trust" looks at the problems looming in the financial sector.
Trust in the political system, media, and science all appear to be crumbling at the moment. However, trust in the economy and the U.S. dollar remains reasonably stable.
A monetary u-turn is coming, which will likely bring a recession to many countries. What will central banks do to mitigate this, and it seems likely they will counter this with more quantitative easing.
Both silver and gold have seen a strong week as silver now sits above $16.20 and gold rests at $1440.00. Learn how the price movements of the white metals have impacted ratio opportunities for precious metals investors.
We will cover the price movements of gold, silver, platinum, palladium, the US Dollar Index, Euro Index, and DOW in this week's Golden Rule Radio.
Macroeconomic analyst Rob Kirby lays out what is coming and says, “When the dollars start coming home, there will be inflation.
We have seen the rejection of U.S. debt, but the dollars are being recycled into other things like Bitcoin and equities. There is going to come a point where the dollars are going to come home to America, and people are going to start demanding real stuff.
I can envision a day when there might be a domestic dollar and an international dollar, and there might be two values assigned to the domestic and international dollar.
Whether this happens or not, the purchasing power of the dollar is going to be diminished as the story about the “missing” $21 trillion gains traction around the world.”
LAST year, 22 central banks, situated largely to the east of Germany, bought the largest amount of gold since 1967 - the year that the London Gold Pool collapsed. The gold repatriations by many European countries in the last few years are another sign that we are reaching the end of four decades of monetary calm. This could bring about the largest monetary changes since the closing of the gold window by US President Richard Nixon in 1971.
The US wants its fiat dollar system to prevail for as long as possible. It has every interest in preventing a "rush out of dollars towards gold", as happened in the 1970s. Since then, bankers have tried to exercise control over the precious metal's price. This war on gold has been ongoing for almost 100 years, but gained traction in the 1960s with the forming of the London Gold Pool - whose members included the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland.
During meetings of central bank chiefs at the Bank for International Settlements in 1961, the eight participating countries agreed to make available a gold pool worth US$270 million. This was focused on preventing the gold price from rising above US$35 per troy ounce, as set during Bretton Woods, by selling official gold holdings from the central banks' gold vaults.
However, in March 1968, the pool was disbanded because France would no longer cooperate. This signalled the start of a 13-year "bull market" and sent gold to more than US$800 per troy ounce in 1980.
Today, Washington may consider it useful to bring back gold to support the US dollar. Some US insiders have even called openly for a return to the old way of doing things. Neo-conservative Robert Zoellick, the former president of the World Bank, wrote an open letter to the Financial Times in 2010 entitled "Bring back the gold standard".
A 2012 study by the Chatham House gold task force suggested that the metal could be added to the International Monetary Fund's special drawing right (SDR). One of the members of this task force was Lord Meghnad Desai, chair of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) advisers council. During a conference in Dubai he remarked: "We could ask that gold be nominated as part of the SDR. That is one thing I think is quite likely to happen. This will be easier if China increases its official gold holdings."
Beijing wants to increase its gold reserves in the shortest time possible to at least 8,000 tonnes. This would put China on a par, in terms of its gold to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio, with the US and European Union. It would open the way, should the need arise, for a possible joint US-EU-China gold revaluation to support the financial system.
Beijing must realize that the US could surprise the world with a unilateral gold revaluation. Wikileaks revealed a cable, sent in early 2010 to Washington from the US embassy in Beijing, which quoted a Chinese news report about the consequences of such a US dollar devaluation: "If we use all of our foreign exchange reserves to buy US Treasury bonds, then when someday the Federal Reserve suddenly announces that the original 10 old dollars are now worth only one new dollar, and the new dollar is pegged to the gold - we will be dumbfounded."
In recent years, there have been numerous statements demonstrating China's understanding of the "dark forces" suppressing the price of gold on Wall Street. Zhou Xiaochuan, then-governor of the People's Bank of China, revealed in a 2009 article that the Chinese recognize the hypocrisy of US policy towards gold: "After the disintegration of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the gold standard - which had been in use for a century - collapsed. Under the influence of the dollar hegemony, the stabilizing effect of gold was widely questioned; the 'gold is useless' discussion began to spread around the globe . . . Currently, there are more and more people recognizing that the 'gold is useless' story contains too many lies. Gold now suffers from a 'smokescreen' designed by the US, which stores 74 per cent of global official gold reserves, to put down other currencies and maintain the dollar hegemony." Since then, China and Russia have stopped buying US Treasuries while adding physical gold reserves.
Clearly, gold is making a remarkable comeback to the world financial system. A new gold standard is being born without any formal decision. At least, that is how Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, an influential international business editor of The Telegraph, described the ongoing efforts by countries to lay their hands on physical gold: "The world is moving step by step towards a de facto gold standard, without any meetings of G-20 leaders to announce this." OMFIF
How can I not talk about the Fed? How can I not talk about the daily jawboning? It is all around us. Every. Single. Day.
And it keeps working.
I feel like I’m being reduced to a loon conspiracy theorist documenting the very reality of it. But I’m not. From my perch I’m doing a public service doing it, because the background motivation for why it is being done reveals a deeper and disturbing truth: They are scared, they are worried and they are desperate to keep the balls in the air.
In my view it’s disingenuous to not acknowledge the real impact central banks have on markets and assess the risk implications.
Yesterday the Fed went full circus. It was stunning to watch and I suspect they made a couple of mistakes by revealing things they shouldn’t have.
Not a surprise Bullard wants to see cuts, but it was Clarida and Williams who dropped the bombs. Wait for bad data? Nah, just cut preemptively. A full abandonment of the ‘data dependency’ charade. To ‘influence markets’. Stated straight up for all to see. They are no longer even pretending.
And a stunning admission from Williams: “When you only have so much stimulus at your disposal, it pays to act quickly to lower rates at the first sign of economic distress.”
It pays to act when you have limited ammunition. A clear acknowledgement of what I’ve been outlining: The Fed, by not being being able to normalize in this cycle, is scrapping at the bottom.
So they want to intervene before things turn bad and hope this will prevent a recession. How? By blowing the asset bubble even higher.
And it worked again yesterday. Stocks flew higher, especially in after hours.
But then the New York Fed came and sheepishly claimed Williams didn’t really mean it, he was just speaking theoretically wink, wink, don’t you know.
Oh please. Nobody believes you. While futures dipped momentarily on the clarification the monkeys came back and bid stocks back up in classic magic risk free Friday fashion.
My take here for what it’s worth? This week economic data actually showed strength in the economy which is paradoxically what the Fed didn’t want to see as it weakened the argument for rate cuts in July. Stocks took the cue and sold off and the 3,000 level was gone, wedge patterns were breaking and we were at the cusp of a failed breakout after tagging the major trend lines.
So if the data kills your rate cut argument what do you do? You declare the data irrelevant and ramp up expectations for a rate cut anyways and jam stocks higher again and save pattern breaks.
Yes it is this banal, but this is precisely what happened and we can see it in the charts.
And there it is:
On Wednesday odds for a 50bp rate cut had dropped to 34%, by the time Clarida, Bullard, and Williams were done these odds had skyrocketed to 71%.
Come on. None of this is an accident.
JP Morgan now expects 12 central banks to cut rates in the next 2 months. The global easing cycle has begun. With negative rates still in place.
What’s all this really tell us? A recession is coming, they know it and they are desperate to prevent it. It also says zero rates are coming back and I suspect, in due time, negative rates. Which means markets will eventually drop despite the current efforts to jam things higher.
But a Fed desperate to jawbone markets higher, to “influence markets” is playing the most dangerous game.
A Fed admitting they have limited ammunition and are openly abandoning their data dependency mantra to stop the business cycle is an open admission of weakness. And a weak Fed may commit the worst sin a Fed can commit: Lose confidence of the market...
How we're constantly at war with our biological programming.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate". ~ Carl Jung
I love that Jung quote.
I’ve used it generously in conversation, seminars and writings throughout the years.
Initially, I assumed that the “unconscious” he referred to the place in our brains where our experiences, beliefs and memories are undetectably stored.
You know, psychology stuff: ego, subconscious, id. Old memories from childhood lurking beneath the conscious frame of reference, directing thoughts and coloring our current experiences."
Buffett became a billionaire on paper when Berkshire Hathaway began selling class A shares on May 29, 1990, when the market closed at $7,175 a share.
In 1998, in an unusual move, he acquired General Re (Gen Re) for stock. In 2002, Buffett became involved with Maurice R. Greenberg at AIG, with General Re providing reinsurance.
On March 15, 2005, AIG's board forced Greenberg to resign from his post as Chairman and CEO under the shadow of criticism from Eliot Spitzer, former attorney general of the state of New York. On February 9, 2006, AIG and the New York State Attorney General's office agreed to a settlement in which AIG would pay a fine of $1.6 billion.
In 2010, the federal government settled with Berkshire Hathaway for $92 million in return for the firm avoiding prosecution in an AIG fraud scheme, and undergoing 'corporate governance concessions'. In 2002, Buffett entered in $11 billion worth of forward contracts to deliver U.S. dollars against other currencies.
By April 2006, his total gain on these contracts was over $2 billion. In 2006, Buffett announced in June that he gradually would give away 85% of his Berkshire holdings to five foundations in annual gifts of stock, starting in July 2006.
The largest contribution would go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2007, in a letter to shareholders, Buffett announced that he was looking for a younger successor, or perhaps successors, to run his investment business.
Buffett had previously selected Lou Simpson, who runs investments at Geico, to fill that role.
However, Simpson is only six years younger than Buffett. Buffett ran into criticism during the subprime crisis of 2007--2008, part of the late 2000s recession, that he had allocated capital too early resulting in suboptimal deals. "Buy American. I am." he wrote for an opinion piece published in the New York Times in 2008.
Buffett has called the 2007--present downturn in the financial sector "poetic justice". Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway suffered a 77% drop in earnings during Q3 2008 and several of his recent deals appear to be running into large mark-to-market losses. Berkshire Hathaway acquired 10% perpetual preferred stock of Goldman Sachs.
Some of Buffett's Index put options (European exercise at expiry only) that he wrote (sold) are currently running around $6.73 billion mark-to-market losses.
The scale of the potential loss prompted the SEC to demand that Berkshire produce, "a more robust disclosure" of factors used to value the contracts. Buffett also helped Dow Chemical pay for its $18.8 billion takeover of Rohm & Haas.
He thus became the single largest shareholder in the enlarged group with his Berkshire Hathaway, which provided $3 billion, underlining his instrumental role during the current crisis in debt and equity markets.
In 2008, Buffett became the richest man in the world, with a total net worth estimated at $62 billion by Forbes and at $58 billion by Yahoo, dethroning Bill Gates, who had been number one on the Forbes list for 13 consecutive years.
In 2009, Gates regained the position of number one on the Forbes list, with Buffett second.
Their values have dropped to $40 billion and $37 billion, respectively, Buffett having lost $25 billion in 12 months during 2008/2009, according to Forbes.
In October 2008, the media reported that Warren Buffett had agreed to buy General Electric (GE) preferred stock.
The operation included extra special incentives: he received an option to buy 3 billion GE at $22.25 in the next five years, and also received a 10% dividend (callable within three years).
In February 2009, Buffett sold some of the Procter & Gamble Co, and Johnson & Johnson shares from his portfolio...
