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Is Anyone Really Surprised That The System Is On The Brink Again? Phoenix Capital ResearchZero Hedge 02/04/2014 15:07 -0500 We find it truly extraordinary that anyone is surprised the financial system is under duress again. After all, what have the Central Banks accomplished in the last five years? 1) Did they clear out the bad debts that caused the 2008 collapse? NOPE 2) Did they implement structural reforms to insure another 2008 didn’t happen? NOPE 3) Did they punish fraud or corruption in any way to insure that the system was clean? NOPE So what did they do? They cut...

JP Morgan Holds Highest Amount Of Physical Silver In History Commodities / Gold and Silver 2014 Feb 05, 2014 - 06:48 AM GMTBy: GoldSilverWorlds Commodities While everyone is focused on the massive outflows in COMEX registered gold inventories and the gold ETF, GLD, it seems that an important evolution in silver is passing unnoticed. In what follows, Ted Butler, precious metals analyst specialized in COT analysis, reveals a remarkable insight in the physical silver market. Butler’s calculations show that JPMorgan (JPM) has piled up the largest holding of physical silver in modern world. Since the silver price peak in May...

Paul Singer is the manager of the $23 billion Elliott Management hedge fund. In a recent letter to investors in the fund, he expressed bearish sentiments on bitcoin, while remaining bullish on gold despite its recent fall in price. Wrote Singer: There is no more reason to believe that bitcoin will stand the test of time than that governments will protect the value of government-created money, although bitcoin is newer and we always look at babies with hope. If you want an alternative currency, check out gold. It has stood the test of thousands of years as a store of...

Stocks were battered on Monday, with investors fleeing equities after factory data cast a negative light on the economy. Article Link: Stocks unravel after factory report

I spend a lot of time browsing FR, and have noticed a lot of FReepers have a lot of knowledge/opinions pertaining to finances. There also appears to be a good number of Freepers who are about retirement age with a good conservative viewpoint. Taking into consideration current events and the steady devaluation of the dollar, my question to the experienced Freepers out there is this: Let's say you're 25, are debt free, make no car payments, earn O-2 pay and are unmarried. You don't have any retirement accounts but are apprehensive of starting an IRA or contributing to a Thrift...

This is a very educational show put on by Kin Greenhouse of "It's Rainmaking Time". She is one of the very few who eschew the soundbite driven media economy and chooses the long format, deep dive approach. While it may be too long for ADD crowd, it digs deep into a not so simple subject to foster understanding and comprehension. This was a pretty good show with an interesting cast of guests:

2014 brought a role reversal of sorts for gold and equities, with the metal higher and stocks lower, in contrast to last year’s performance. With January drawing to a close, can gold hold its gains and will equities continue to fall? Technical charts may offer some clues, analysts said. As of 1:20 p.m. EST, gold for April delivery was $18.60 lower to $1,243.60 per ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange “Gold is returning to its historic role as a safe haven as we’re seen problems globally,” said Darin Newsom, senior analyst at Telvent DTN. “Equities...

Last week, as many of gold investors may already know, we saw the largest one-day withdrawal in over a year as the JPMorgan (JPM) warehouse withdrew a stunning 321,500 ounces of gold (10 tonnes). Additionally, we also saw a large withdrawal from the Scotia Mocatta warehouse, which brings the total withdrawal for the week to almost 5% of all COMEX gold stocks. .... As investors can see, last week's action finally saw a rise in registered gold by a small 5,002 ounces. But that was paired with a huge 350,968 ounce withdrawal from eligible gold stocks - the vast majority...

Curious why over the past few months JPM has quietly been accumulating a substantial amount of eligible physical gold (even as its registered gold inventory is the lowest it has ever been at just 87K ounces since December 13, 2013 when 147K ounces of gold was withdrawn - keep that date in mind for a few minutes)? This may have something to do with it: moments ago the daily Comex gold vault report confirmed what many expected, namely that the JPM accumulation was merely in advance anticipation of major withdrawals. How major? Well, on January 23, JPM saw 321,500...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Gold futures advanced on Thursday, snapping a two-day skid with investors mulling the prospects for higher gold demand out of India as a drop in U.S. equities and a weaker dollar helped position prices for their highest close in more than two months. Gold for February delivery GCG4 +1.89% jumped $22.70, or 1.8%, to $1,261.30 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices were poised to close at their highest level since the second half of November, according to FactSet data tracking the most-active contracts.

The assumption by global depositors who have entrusted their national savings with the Federal Reserve and US Government has always been that when they request to repatriate their holdings the Fed would simply open the vault, access said assets and ship them back to where they belong. That’s exactly what Germany expected would happen last year when the country requested that the Federal Reserve return about one-fifth of their gold reserves. But that’s when things got really dicey. The Fed announced that Germany’s gold would be returned… but it would take seven years to get back home.

>A number of readers and bloggers have recently suggested there must be collusion between America and China over the transfer of physical gold from Western capital markets. They assume that governments know what they are doing, so there is a bigger game afoot of which we are unaware.The truth is that China and Western capital markets view gold very differently. You will hardly find anyone in the London Bullion Market who regards gold as money; and for them if gold is no longer money Chinese demand for it is not a monetary issue. Instead it threatens the bullion banks’ business...

The deregulation of the financial system during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes had the predictable result: financial concentration and reckless behavior. A handful of banks grew so large that financial authorities declared them “too big to fail.” Removed from market discipline, the banks became wards of the government requiring massive creation of new money by the Federal Reserve in order to support through the policy of Quantitative Easing the prices of financial instruments on the banks’ balance sheets and in order to finance at low interest rates trillion dollar federal budget deficits associated with the long recession caused...

Gold bugs, rejoice. After taking a pounding last year, gold looks set for a big rally, although chart watchers say it still needs a little push higher before it takes off. A gain of about 1.5% from current levels would take gold above a key chart level, which could spark a further rally of 13% to the August highs, technicians say, and possibly much higher. After tumbling 28% in 2013, gold futures have gained 4% so far this year. On Friday, futures were up 0.9% at $1,251.60 an ounce in recent trading, and were trading above the widely-followed 50-day moving...

Germany's blowback against gold manipulation is accelerating. Following yesterday's report that Bafin took a hard line against precious metals manipulation, after its president Eike Koenig said possible manipulation of precious metals "is worse than the Libor-rigging scandal", today the response has trickled down to Germany and Europe's largest bank, Deutsche Bank, which announced that it would withdraw from the appropriately named gold and silver price "fixing", as European regulators investigate suspected manipulation of precious metals prices by banks. As a reminder, Deutsche is one of five banks involved in the twice-daily gold fix for global price setting and said it...

China National Gold Group Corporation General Manager Sun Zhaoxue has come out and told the world media that the US is suppressing the gold price. The reason for America’s manipulation of gold is to ensure US Dollar dominance on the world stage. America has by default ended up with the world’s reserve currency and therefore gets the world to work for them in exchange for an ever increasing supply of printed greenbacks. He also went on with an excellent analysis of America’s war against Europe and the Euro using their investment banks. Another good insight from Sun Zhaoxue is that...

There's gold in them leaves! They say money doesn't grow on trees, but gold and other precious metals can accumulate in plants. Researchers recently discovered relatively high levels of gold in the leaves of a eucalyptus tree in Western Australia, before uncovering a deposit of the metal more than 100 feet beneath it. “Finding such high concentrations of gold in the foliage of this tree growing over a gold deposit buried beneath 35 meters of weathered rock was a complete surprise,” Melvyn Lintern, a geochemist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), told The Scientist. Perhaps surprisingly, it's...

Where is Germany’s Gold? The impact of Germany’s repatriation on the US dollar revolves around an unanswered question: why will it take seven years to complete the transfer? The popular explanation is that the Fed has already rehypothecated all of its gold holdings in the name of other countries. That is, the same mound of bullion is earmarked as collateral for a host of different lenders. Since the Fed depends on a fractional-reserve banking system for its very existence, it would not come as a surprise that it has become a fractional-reserve bank itself. If so, then perhaps Germany politely...

foreward by JS Kim, Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU Here is a recent correspondence from our friend Lars Schall, an independent financial journalist, and the German Central Bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank, regarding the exact whereabouts and specifications of Germany’s national gold reserve. From the correspondence below, it appears that the US Central Bank had already leased out Germany’s gold reserves in prior years and no longer has it, as the gold bars the US Central Bankers returned to Germany last year were clearly not the same ones that Germany originally deposited with them. The questions Mr. Schall’s revelations now beg is...

A few years back, at the end of 2009, I was approached on two separate occasions by people claiming to be “representatives” of a digital alternative currency format. I was, of course, intrigued by the initial proposal, being that I had been writing for some time on the concept of non-participation as a way to insulate average Americans from the dangers of our unstable fiat driven mainstream economy. Before that, I had already dealt with just about every currency alternative one could imagine; from paper scripts backed by goods, to scripts backed by time or labor, to gold and silver...