from Bill Still
Gold: The Ultimate Insurance
by James Rickards
Daily Reckoning
In my ZIP code of Darien, Connecticut, it’s not unusual to bump into a billionaire every now and then.
When I ask what they own, they’ll start to list stocks and bonds of various types. At that point in the conversation, I’ll interrupt and say, “You don’t own stocks; you own electrons.”
Most wealth today is in digital form recorded on hard drives and transferred through routers and servers in dispersed locations. What if those servers were hacked and your electronic wealth were erased? Where would you go to get it back?
If you think this can’t happen, guess again.
Fresh Mainstream Nonsense on Gold Demand
by Pater Tenebrarum
Acting Man
They Will Never Get It…
We and many others have made a valiant effort over the years to explain what actually moves the gold market (as examples see e.g. our article “Misconceptions About Gold”, or Robert Blumen’s excellent essay “Misunderstanding Gold Demand”). Sometimes it is a bit frustrating when we realize it has probably all been for naught.
[…] This was brought home to us again in a recent missive posted at Kitco, which discusses an RBC research note on gold. In a way, it is actually quite funny. The post at Kitco is titled “Gold’s ‘One-legged’ Rally Is Cause of Concern”.
We can assure you it is not of “concern” to us. But we did wonder why the rally was supposedly “one-legged”, so we decided to read on.
Scenes From The Venezuela Apocalypse: “Countless Wounded” After 5,000 Loot Supermarket Looking For Food
from Zero Hedge
Over the last several years we have documented with clockwork regularity Venezuela’s collapse into failed state status, which was cemented several weeks ago when news hit that “Venezuela had officially run out of money to print new money.” At that point the best one could do was merely to step back and watch as local society and civilization turned on itself, unleashing what would ultimately turn into Venezuela’s own, sad apocalypse.
Last night we showed what Caracas, looks like this week:
There’s a ‘Very Dangerous Situation’ Taking Place in the Comex’s Gold Vault
by Byron King, the Daily Reckoning
Business Insider
Something big is happening with gold. Over the past few years, if you bought and owned gold and gold mining shares, it’s been frustrating with gold prices in the doldrums of 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012. That’s four years of downside correction. But, that was then, and this is now. Let’s discuss what’s happening and nail down some serious opportunity …
Follow the money and right now money is moving into gold and select miners. In fact, there’s so much interest in “paper” gold that physical supply has utterly broken down. As in … crashed and about to burn in a roaring fireball!
This is critical. The amount of physical gold in storage in Comex versus the number of registered “owners” against each ounce is nuts.
Chinese Government Now Fretting about Auto Industry
by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Commercial Vehicle Overcapacity at Catastrophic Levels.
Overcapacity weakened the US auto industry before the Financial Crisis, and destroyed it during the crisis, with two of the Big Three automakers, some of the biggest component makers, and numerous smaller component makers going bankrupt. It was during the bankruptcy process that the industry restructured, laid of hundreds of thousands of people, shuttered and shed plants, mauled creditors, destroyed stockholders, and finally got rid of overcapacity.
Blockbuster Story – How Hedge Funds Invest Heavily in Washington D.C.’s Culture of Corruption
by Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg
Earlier today, Ryan Grim and Paul Blumenthal published a blockbuster piece in the Huffington Post, titled: The Vultures’ Vultures: How A New Hedge-Fund Strategy Is Corrupting Washington.
It details the secretive world of the dark money groups representing mercenary hedge funds in their insatiable quest for more and more money. In many ways, it’s merely a microcosm of America in 2016. A culture in which ethics has become so irrelevant, it isn’t even a nuisance; it simply never factors into the equation.
The first few paragraphs set the stage perfectly:
Here’s What Treasury Yields Tell Us About the Stock Market’s Next Move
Will ultra-low Treasury yields pull down the stock market?
by Ellie Ismailidou
Market Watch
After a dismal start to the year, stocks logged an impressive springtime run that in the third week of April landed the S&P 500 SPX, -0.85% and the Dow industrials DJIA, -1.05% about 1% from all-time highs.
Yet even as stocks reversed course, the Treasury market didn’t exactly follow suit. Demand for Treasurys has not subsided and Treasury yields, which move inversely to prices, remain close to the nearly three-year lows reached on Feb. 11. On Friday, the 10-year benchmark yield TMUBMUSD10Y, -2.84% closed at 1.705%, only 50 basis points above the Feb. 11 lows. The S&P was near 2,046 Friday, well above the 1,829 it closed at on February 11.
Treasury prices soared at the beginning of the year, as global stock markets tumbled and frightened investors flocked to haven assets, mainly government debt. But, as the following chart shows, since Feb. 11, the 10-year yield did not match the S&P in its rebound.
How Gold Gets to $10,000/Oz.
by Bill Bonner
Daily Reckoning
Is gold a commodity, an investment, or money?
The answer is…
Gold is a chameleon. It changes in response to the environment.
At times, gold behaves like a commodity. The gold price tracks the ups and downs of commodity indices.
At other times, gold is viewed as a safe haven investment. It competes with stocks and bonds for investor attention.
Weekend Edition: Doug Casey on Making a Crisis Your Friend
from Casey Research
Editor’s note: In yesterday’s Dispatch, we showed you how investing in depressed markets can lead to gigantic returns. It’s the core idea behind Casey Research founder Doug Casey’s most successful strategy…one that has made him more wealth than the average person can spend in 20 lifetimes.
Below, in an interview conducted by Crisis Investing editor Nick Giambruno, you’ll hear from Doug himself on why this strategy works…and how it’s helped him build his fortune over the years.
—————
Nick Giambruno: Doug, you’re one of the foremost authorities in the world on the topic of crisis investing. Tell us a bit about your background on this topic.
The Week in Review: May 14, 2016
by Mises Institute
Mises.org
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest job numbers last week and the results were disappointing. Mark Thornton described the numbers as “disturbing,” noting that, outside of the service sector, many “sectors of the American economy are negative in terms of job growth.” Going through the numbers, Ryan McMaken highlighted the troubling stat that 1 in 6 young American men are either jobless or in jail — the tragic consequences of minimum wage hikes and the absurd war on drugs. Of course an additional source of pressure comes from the relentless manipulation of our monetary system, contributing directly to current declines in median income.
Gold And Silver Continue To Scaling The Wall Of Worry
by David Kranzler
Investment Research Dynamics
At the beginning of this week, almost every so-called gold market analyst was predicting a wash-out in precious metals because of the huge bullion bank short being reported in the COT report. A few of us believe that character of the market has changed and paper market price manipulators are losing traction – for a lot of reasons.
This week shows that the banks covered a portion of their shorts and the hedge funds and little guys sold down longs and increased their shorts. This information may be largely irrelevant. Interestingly, in data I’ve parsed and presented in a previous blog post, the beginning of two of the best gold/silver rallies since 2001 occurred at a time when the bullion banks held their biggest short position in gold futures (expressed as a ratio of total open interest).
Commercial Short Positions In Silver Hit All-Time Highs! Gold Shorts Near All-Time Record!
from King World News
On the heels of some fierce trading this week in the dollar, gold and silver, below is an extremely important update on the war that is raging in the gold and silver markets.
The following charts are from Jason Goepfert at SentimenTrader.
Commercial Short Positions In Gold Near All-Time Highs
King World News note: Below you can see the commercial hedgers have added aggressively to their short positions in the gold market this week. There was very little change in commercial short positions reported for this week (see 10-year chart below). That does not mean that the price of gold cannot continue heading significantly higher in the short-term, but it does raise a caution flag.
Durable Good and Bad
by Kurt Kallaus
Financial Sense
Another Tale of Two Words
Our personal background expertise exposes us to the materials sector of manufacturing. We produce the tools and heavy duty machines for many industries all over the globe. In our parochial servicing of global demand, we continue to see a recession-tinged slowing of demand. Shrinking profit margins and rising employee terminations in our customer segments are signs that buyers have no room for normal capital expenditures. Our discussions with corporate leaders in other consumer-oriented fields share that sales and profitability are exceeding expectations. Taking the economic pulse can be as diverse as the health of the doctors in contrast with the patients they treat.
Global Catastrophe Imminent: “Asteroids, Robots and Engineered Viruses Will Kill Millions”
by Mac Slavo
SHTF Plan
There is yet more confirmation that near-certain doom is headed for planet earth, and could kill or disrupt the lives of everyone on the planet.
And there’s reason to think it could be in our lifetimes.
A study commissioned by Oxford University identified possibly-imminent catastrophe from asteroids, AI, volcanoes, nukes/EMP or manufactured/weaponized disease sweeping the planet.
And yet we’re the conspiracy theorists…
According to the Daily Mail/Press Association:
Kuroda-San in the Mouth of Madness
by Pater Tenebrarum
Acting Man
Deluded Central Planners
Zerohedge recently reported on an interview given by Lithuanian ECB council member Vitas Vasiliauskas, which demonstrates how utterly deluded the central planners in the so-called “capitalist” economies of the West have become. His statements are nothing short of bizarre (“we are magic guys!”) – although he is of course correct when he states that a central bank can never “run out of ammunition”.
The mental state of BoJ governor Haruhiko Kuroda may be even more precarious though. As Marketwatch reports, he recently gave an interview to German financial newspaper Börsen-Zeitung, in which he inter alia threatened even more BoJ intervention: