from AwakenWithJP
Americans Cut Back as Income from Wages & Salaries Hit Record as 10 Million People Still out of Work: Weirdest Economy Ever
by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Meanwhile, away from the stock market mania…
Income from wages and salaries that consumers earned in December ticked up to a new record, as high earners and executives were making lots of money working from home though 10 million other people, mostly lower income, had lost their jobs; and income from unemployment insurance for those less lucky ones jumped. But spending on goods fell again as Americans cut back after the binge, and spending on services remained at dismal levels.
A Silver Squeeze Primer
A special free, public Sunday podcast.
by Craig Hemke
TF Metals Report
Please listen to, tweet, retweet and forward this free podcast recorded today as a public service for all interest in silver and the brewing silver short squueze.
As you know, we stand at the start of what could be an historic week in the precious metals. There is a growing grassroots movement to tackle the Bullion Banks and put an end, once and for all, to their fraudulent fractional reserve and digital derivative pricing scheme. We’ll have more on this current system in the days ahead but, for today, this podcast was recorded with three goals in mind:
No Good Reason to Be Short
by Ted Butler
Silver Seek
The current short position in COMEX silver is mostly held by 8 major financial firms. We can only guess who they are because their identities are protected. According to the COT reports, the biggest 4 are short nearly 60 thousand contracts and the next 4 are short nearly 20 thousand contracts. That’s a total of 400 million silver ounces. Annual mining production of silver amounts to less than 800 million ounces. The short position in silver dwarfs any other commodity. Furthermore, it is concentrated in a few hands and thus open to manipulation. Over the years, this shorting strategy has proven to be lucrative as the big shorts would buy back their short positions on price drops. Recently, the Justice Department and the CFTC punished JPMorgan, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and Scotia Bank with a deferred criminal prosecution agreement for the practice of spoofing which meant they were often putting in fake sell orders to spark a price drop.
You Will Be Made to Believe Implausible Things
by Clarice Feldman
American Thinker
In George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984, he said, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
To guide you along this path, I bring to your attention implausible things you are expected to believe this week.
1. Things that are not graft.
Outrageously generous book deals to present and former officials.
The Obamas’ $65 million book advances still lead the way to the most lavish, though the notion that even Democrat politicians’ relatives, like Chelsea Clinton, would offer ghostwritten pap worth anything is something you just have to believe.
The Latest Updates from Martin Armstrong – 2021.01.31
The Stock Market, Fatally Wounded by the Truth, Will Stumble and Crash
by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
It didn’t have to be this way, but this is the reality we must now face: truth is fatal to fraud, and our entire financial-political system is a fraud.
The stock market has just been punctured by the thin blades of truth. It is fatally wounded but nobody dares notice. The wounds are barely visible, but the internal damage is mortal. The stock market is already stumbling and will soon crash.
The banquet’s participants ignore the faltering market because the rules are we never reveal the truth, or acknowledge it, or discuss it, no matter how obvious, because truth is fatal to fraud. So the stock market’s vital signs are in freefall but the conversation remains upbeat and light: stimulus, rapid growth in the second half, etc., all the patter of a carefully constructed illusion that fraud is forever as long as the truth never comes out.
Alas, the truth has emerged from the shadows, despite the silence of the insiders and the financial media. Here are the truths that have emerged like karmic genies:
I Told You So – In March of 2020
by Karl Denninger
Market-Ticker.org
Back in March of 2020 I told you point-blank that the sequencing of Covid-19 and bat coronaviruses in public repositories made quite clear the probability of Covid-19 being an accidental release from Wuhan was extremely high.
Why?
1. The sequencing was too close and the changes not in places where it was likely to happen by random chance.
2. The alleged animal source was at its closest to Wuhan 600 some miles away; bats do not range that far.
3. The specific changes that made the virus much more infectious than the original SARS and the alleged precursor all magically appeared at once and this is about as likely as my being hit by an asteroid while going to get my mail. Typical evolutionary changes in viruses are gradual; you do not have a 10x greater infection risk pop up all at once in the wild.
4. Somehow that bat virus and the animal(s) carrying it had to get all the way to Wuhan without infecting anyone or anything else, a statistical anomaly that is wildly beyond reasonable random chance.
GameStop Promoter Keith Gill Was No “Amateur” Trader; He Held Sophisticated Trading Licenses and Worked in the Finance Industry
by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
Yesterday evening, CNN’s Erin Burnett told millions of viewers that it was “amateur traders” who had taken on the powerful Wall Street hedge funds to pump up the share price of GameStop. The New York Post also called Keith Gill, the man who initiated the frenzy in GameStop shares, an “amateur investor.” This characterization of Gill fits with the broader mainstream media narrative that this is an exciting David versus Goliath story. Unfortunately, the facts keep getting in the way of that narrative.
Wall Street On Parade has confirmed that Keith Patrick Gill, a man holding highly sophisticated licenses to trade and supervise others on Wall Street, is the same man using multiple identities to promote GameStop on social media platforms. Gill, and a member of his family, have confirmed to other media outlets that Gill used the identity of DeepF***ingValue on Reddit’s WallStreetBets message board to promote GameStop and that he used the identity of Roaring Kitty on his YouTube channel and Twitter page to help engineer a short squeeze against the hedge funds that were betting the price of GameStop would fall.
Market Report: Small Traders Squeeze Silver
by Alasdair MacLeod
Gold Money
Gold and silver drifted lower until yesterday, when out of the blue the silver price took off, gaining 6.4% at one point. Gold went with it, rising by 1.2% before it was slammed for no change on the day. From last Friday’s close gold was unchanged at $1855 in European morning trading today, but silver was up $1.60 at $27.00.
The squeeze in silver appears to have been triggered by day-traders on exchanges such as Robinhood switching their attention to SLV, the big silver ETF, with chatrooms such as Reddit pushing the narrative. It continues this morning, with silver up 44 cents at the time of writing, and gold up ten dollars.
That a gang of day-trading individuals, often with no more than a few hundred dollars to trade, can take control of silver has far-reaching implications.
The Main Street Rebellion and the Coming Great Reset at War in the Markets
by Jeff Berwick
Dollar Vigilante
8 ways to annoy a Kanadian:
- Beaver jokes
- Accent jokes, eh!
- 51st– state jokes and saying it’s only because the US decided not to take them over that they exist at all
- Saying “how much is this in real money”?
- Any criticism against their favorite hockey team (or Canadian beer)
- Innocently asking what the Canadian army is good for…
- Implying that Kanada is a “socialist” country with socialized healthcare
- Openly and proudly professing your belief in fundamental freedom, your religion, your denial of non-binary identities, saying ‘all lives matter’, debating equality vs. equity, and admitting to being an anarcho-capitalist and loving it. Or just a run-of-the-mill kinda capitalist for that matter.
There are many, many more – but you won’t know aboot it(Kanadian pronunciation), because while Kanadians tend to be super judgmental, they are also massively passive-aggressive.
Alito ‘Not Surprised’ at Backlash After Calling Covid-19 Lockdowns ‘Constitutional Stress Test’
by Jon Brown
Daily Wire
Justice Samuel Alito said Sunday that he “was not surprised” at the backlash he faced for saying in a speech for the Federalist Society that COVID-19 lockdowns are a “constitutional stress test” that have curbed American liberty to a degree “previously unimaginable.”
In a statement published in USA Today on the 15th anniversary of his confirmation to the Supreme Court under former President George W. Bush, Alito said, “Virtually every substantive point in the Federalist Society speech was taken from one of my published opinions or an opinion I joined.”
Alito, who predicted that his comments in the September speech would be “twisted,” added, “I was not surprised by the reaction.”
As The Daily Wire reported of his speech last fall:
Biden Pentagon Signals It May Depart from Trump’s Afghanistan Troop Drawdown to Zero
by Kristina Wong
Breitbart.com
The Biden Pentagon indicated recently it may depart from the Trump administration’s peace agreement with the Taliban and leave 2,500 U.S. forces in Afghanistan beyond a negotiated drawdown date of May.
Pentagon chief spokesman John Kirby said Thursday that while the Biden administration is committed to a negotiated settlement, the Taliban is not meeting its commitments under the Trump administration’s negotiated agreement — which would see the drawdown of U.S. forces to zero in Afghanistan by May.
Kirby said at a Pentagon briefing:
The Times Wants You Consumed by Fear, Isolation, and Misery
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
The American Institute for Economic Research
There are probably multiple reasons why coronavirus cases in the US are down nearly 50% in the US in the last month.
Could be seasonal. Could be the vaccine. Could be herd immunity from natural infection.
Could be the post-holiday default to endemicity. Could be a change in the cycle threshold of PCR that generates fewer positive cases. Could be data tweaks in light of political changes.
Anyone who says he knows for sure which is dominant is pretending to know the unknowable.
Boris Johnson is Doling Out £10,000 Fines for Starting Snowball Fights During Covid-19
The United Kingdom has instituted one of the most rigorous lockdowns in the world.
by Billy Binion
Reason.com
“We live in a land of liberty,” said Boris Johnson, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s one of the great features of our lives that we don’t tend to impose those sorts of restrictions on people in this country, but I have to tell you we will rule nothing out.”
He definitely didn’t rule anything out.
The country has now instituted one of the most rigorous lockdowns in the world. Under Johnson’s guidance, those in England are forbidden from leaving their homes unless they have a “reasonable excuse,” which includes shopping for food, going to a medical appointment, attending religious services, and exercising no more than once a day.
Brian Stelter Suggests Reducing Reach of Right-Leaning Networks is Not Censorship
by Penka Arsova
LaCorte News
CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday advocated for reducing the reach of those he believes are spreading misinformation on social media, claiming it differs from censorship.
In detail: Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent and host of the network’s “Reliable Sources,” made the argument on Saturday on his show. In his speech, Stelter took issue with right-leaning networks complaining of censorship, arguing that they’re wrong. He mentioned Fox News and Newsmax and pointed out how many times each network mentioned the word “censorship.”
He specifically pushed back against claims that CNN seeks to silence Fox News and said conservative-friendly networks and some Republicans are using the censorship card because Democrats won the presidential election and secured the majority in the Senate.
He called it “patently false” and “predictable as the sunrise — Democrats win elections and then Republicans say they are being silenced.”