from The Daily Bell
Hillary Clinton Did Not Really Jeopardize National Security, Despite Accusations
Gold and Silver Continue to Sizzle as Timing Is Right
More Fakery: The Ozone Hole Is Supposedly Healing But There’s Always Been One
New Bio Evaluates Bush, Who Shouldn’t Have Had So Much Power
No Email Charges for Hillary in a Series of Polarizing News Reports
by Mark St.Cyr
Mark St.Cyr
I keep hearing that the “Chicken Little’s” are once again being proved wrong. We keep being shown chart, after chart, after chart, after chart how the market recovers from perilous sell-offs. This is expressed as “proof” the “market” doesn’t want to go down, and has legs to vault ever higher.
Cause for concern is being dismissed by the hordes of next in rotation fund managers, economists, Ivory Tower academics, or Nobel Laureates as they themselves stampede to any available cameras, microphones, or keyboards that will quote them as saying “See…all that worrying is for naught. And expressing anything other is strictly for the gloom and doom crowd.” Which they then will triumphantly state: “Which has been wrong over, and over, and over again.”
by Ryan Griggs
Mises.org
In a video making the rounds in social media last week, conservative author Mark Dice performs a series of man-on-the-street interviews to show how most Americans have no idea what Independence Day commemorates. The punch line comes at the end when Dice finds a young woman who can quote the document that he apparently thinks we commemorate on Independence Day. She says a few lines out loud and then Dice high-fives her.
Among the thousands of comments under the video, viewers left comments such as “let that young blonde woman run for President.” and “she made me cry.”
Unfortunately, the document the woman was quoting was not the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776. She was quoting the Constitution of 1787.
by Keith Weiner
Silver Seek
On Wednesday through Friday, the price of silver spiked massively. It ended the week about $2 higher than the previous week. The last time we recall silver price action like this was about 3 years ago, in August 2013. That one week, the price rose about $2.50. Before that was a week in August 2012, with a price gain of about $2.70. Previously, January 2012, +$2.50. Earlier was Oct 2011, +$4. The biggest was in April 2011, +$4.20.
Looking beyond this week, the whole of year 2016 looks like a parabola to us.
by Bob Bauman
The Sovereign Investor
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
from Zero Hedge
Just two weeks after we exposed the fact that Hillary Clinton’s official calendar is “missing” a lot of entries, more ‘illegal’ allegations are being exposed from her reign as Secretary of State.
In a deposition last week, NYPost reports that Hillary Clinton’s cloests aide – Huma Abedin – revelaed that her boss destroyed at least some of her schedules as secretary of state — a revelation that could complicate matters for the presumptive Democratic nominee, who, along with the State Department she ran, is facing numerous lawsuits seeking those public records.
Technical analyst Jack Chan charts major buy signals for gold, silver and oil.
by Jack Chan
The Gold Report
Our proprietary cycle indicator reached 100% this week, which is the highest level ever. It cannot go higher, but prices can remain firm at current levels.
[…] Gold in on a new major buy signal.
[…] Silver is also on a new major buy signal.
Summary
A bull market in gold and silver is now confirmed, but for risk management, we shall wait for the next cycle bottom to begin accumulating positions for the long term.
from Casey Research
Editor’s note: The markets and our offices are closed for the holiday. So for today’s Dispatch, we’re featuring a recent essay from Bonner Private Portfolio editor Chris Mayer, one of the best stock pickers in the business.
Chris has a track record you might not believe… Over the 10-year period from 2004 through 2014, he outperformed the book value of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) by 2-to-1. And he beat the S&P 500 over 3-to-1.
Below, Chris explains the two things you need to keep in mind if you want to be a successful investor…
by Mike ‘Mish’ Shedlock
Mish Talk
Brussels has rules on budget deficits, widely ignored by Spain, France, Greece, and historically even by Germany.
Brussels also has new rules on bank bailouts. Four times Brussels refused Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s request for a state sponsored bailout of Italian banks because it’s against the rules.
Renzi threatens to go ahead anyway. And if he does, who can stop him?
by Richard (Rick) Mills
Ahead of the Herd
As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information
Californication is a brilliant 1999 song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Many of the lyrics reference the often insane, unrealistic, impossible dream images Hollywood sells to the world.
“Space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement.”
Quantifornication is the term I coined for what the Federal Reserve is selling to the world – the unrealistic, insane fiat dream that the monetary policy employed by the Fed can fix the predicament we are in.
by David Kranzler
Investment Research Dynamics
It depends on how cynically you want to look at this but I think the most cynical interpretation is the correct interpretation. – IRD on SGT Report
The Government is going to “herd” retirement funds into funding U.S. Treasury debt. – SGT Report
About 12 years ago I said to friends and colleagues that the elitists would hold up the system with printed money for as long as it took to sweep every last crumb of middle class wealth off the table and into their pockets. If you don’t have enough spare cash laying around to buy your own Federal level politician, you’re middle class by definition.
by Jeff Nielson
Bullion Bulls Canada
The price of silver popped above $20/oz (USD) last night. Woo-hoo! Silver is “rallying”, and happy days are here again. Really? How soon we forget.
[…] Look at the chart above. Can anyone see a rally?
In the spring of 2011; the price of silver was pushing $50/oz, and that price was still just a fraction of any reasonable, fair-market value. Then we had the Great Take-Down. The price of silver was smashed all the way down to the $20/oz level by the middle of 2013, in a series of massive (and illegal) plunges in the bankers’ paper-silver market.
At that point, the $20/oz level became the floor for the silver market, for a full year, until the middle of 2014, when the bankers began steadily grinding the price of silver (and gold) lower again.
Metal leaps to levels last seen in July 2014
by Victor Reklaitis
Market Watch
Silver futures aren’t taking it easy during the Independence Day holiday.
September silver SIU6, +4.25% is leaping 4.4% to $20.45 an ounce on Monday. The contract even briefly traded as high as $21.23 an ounce, according to FactSet data.
The metal has touched levels last seen in July 2014, as shown in the chart below.
[…] August gold is gaining Monday as well, but it’s only up about 1%.
Analysts say silver and gold are both benefiting from haven demand as investors worry about the U.K.’s June 23 vote to leave the European Union. And silver isn’t just a safety play in the Brexit unrest.
by Huileng Tan
CNBC.com
Gold prices may hit all-time highs in the next 18 months amid low to negative global bond yields, said a fund manager on Monday, joining a chorus of bullish calls on the safe haven commodity.
Despite being a non-interest bearing asset with holding costs, gold was attractive in the current climate where there was little trust in the establishment and its policies as demonstrated by the June 23 referendum in the U.K. when voters chose to leave the European Union, said Swiss Asia Capital’s Singapore managing director and chief investment officer, Juerg Kiener.
The continued cratering of bond yields has also blunted the advantage fixed income instruments held over their shiny counterpart.
by Tim Wallace
Telegraph.co.uk
Three former Barclays traders have been found guilty of conspiracy to defraud after a three-month trial at Southwark Crown Court.
Jay Merchant, Jonathan Mathew and Alex Pabon were all accused of attempting to manipulate interest rate benchmark Libor between June 2005 and September 2007, and were found guilty by the jury.
They will join Peter Johnson, another former Barclays trader who previously pleaded guilty, in court on Wednesday for sentencing.
The jury failed to reach a verdict on two other defendants, Stylianos Contogoulas and Ryan Reich.
by Karl Denninger
Market-Ticker.org
Approximately 71% of the 34 million 17-to-24-year-olds in the U.S. would not qualify for military service because of reasons related to health, physical appearance and educational background, according to the Pentagon.
The ineligible typically includes those who are obese, those who lack a high school diploma or a GED, convicted felons, those taking prescription drugs for ADHD and those with certain tattoos and ear gauges, the Wall Street Journal reports, though some requirements can be waived.
It’s actually worse than that; note that these statistics only refer to reported medication and issues related to it, such as ADHD meds.
What I have noted as an extremely alarming trend is the radical increase in extremely “fragile” young people when it comes to emotional stability.
by Peter G. Klein
Mises.org
I’ve said many times that the best way government can promote entrepreneurship is to get out of the way, so I can’t support the Obama Administration’s annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit, a government-sponsored meet-and-greet for prospective entrepreneurs, funders, politicians, and hangers-on. But I agree with this statement from Vivek Wadhwa:
Government efforts to promote entrepreneurship always fail because they focus on building science parks and top-down clusters. Policy makers believe that by erecting fancy buildings and providing subsidies to select industries and venture capitalists, they can create innovation hubs. This is the wrong approach; what needs to be done instead is to remove the obstacles to entrepreneurship and change the culture so that failure is accepted and experimentation is encouraged. And then entrepreneurs need to be educated and provided with mentoring, inspiration and seed funding.
from Zero Hedge
Nigel Farage, UKIP leader and passionate advocate for the UK to leave the European Union, announced unexpectedly today that he is stepping down as party leader, just days after he led a successful, and historic, campaign to Leave the European Union. Speaking in Westminster, Farage said the Brexit referendum was about Britons taking their country back, and having succeeded at that, Farage now “wants his life back.” His resignation completes the recent chaos in UK politics which has seen both the Conservative and Labour parties scramble to find new leadership in the aftermath of the Brexit vote.
by Gary North
LewRockwell.com
On this day 240 years ago, New England’s most famous independent wholesaler, John Hancock, and Congress’s stenographer, Charles Thomson, signed a parchment. We celebrate that signing annually, often by setting off low-tariff fireworks imported from China.
Most Americans know little about the background of this event. The details they recall from a high school textbook are incorrect. There is great confusion. The amount of misinformation is shocking. I am here to clear up some widely held misconceptions. (Note: I have a Ph.D. in colonial American history. I have also been involved since 1974 in direct-response marketing. As far as I know, no one else has combined these two careers.)
by Mark O’Byrne
GoldCore
Gold and silver have been the standout winners in the fallout from Britain’s decision to leave the European Union according to Bloomberg. They compiled three charts showing how “precious” Brexit is for gold and silver.
Investors seeking a haven from volatile currencies and equities pushed prices of the metals to a two-year high. With central banks pledging more stimulus to prop up markets (the Bank of England may cut interest rates within months and traders have reduced odds on the Federal Reserve raising rates), the appeal of owning non-yielding assets like precious metals has increased.
Gold has climbed 6.2 percent and silver 11 percent since the June 23 referendum, outperforming global stocks, bonds and currencies, including those also often bought as a haven.
by Ranjeetha Pakiam
Bloomberg.com
Global gold holdings have expanded by more than 500 metric tons since bottoming in January in a signal of investors’ rising concern about slowing growth, a Federal Reserve that’s probably on hold and the ructions caused by Britain’s vote to quit the European Union.
Assets in bullion-backed exchange-traded funds rose 6.6 tons to 1,959.1 tons on Friday, up from 1,458.1 tons on Jan. 6, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Holdings increased 37 tons last week as investors reacted to the U.K.’s vote, and swelled in five months out of six in the first half.
Why the elites are in a panic
by Justin Raimondo
AntiWar
There was William Galston at the European Council on Foreign Relations, listening to his fellow elitists and foreign policy honchos caviling about the rise of Donald Trump and bemoaning the fate of the European Union (EU) at the hand’s of Britain’s Euro-skeptics. As the assembled luminaries had a collective sad in their five-star hotel, wondering how the proles could’ve gotten so far out of hand, Galtson – longtime Democratic party hack, former domestic advisor to Bill Clinton, and a senior fellow at the “centrist” Brookings Institution – heard a call to arms. It was almost as if Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist and original founder and financier of the Council on Foreign Relations, had spoken to him from on high – or, rather, from below – and commanded him to spread the Word far and wide:
