James Turk: Massive Amount of Money Will Flow Into Gold

There is so much uncertainty prevailing these days, it is natural to move into physical gold. It’s safe-haven properties have been proven over thousands of years. The attraction of owning a safe asset is appealing as the financial risks grow. People are waking up to the fact that another bust in the credit cycle is long overdue. What’s more, the Federal Reserve is bringing that day closer by raising interest rates, which for now has kept the US dollar steady.

An Important Bull Market Indicator

It worth noting that gold has been rising even though the US Dollar Index has remained above 95. That is comfortably above its critical support around the 94-to-93.50 area. So gold is moving higher against all currencies, which is an important bull market indicator. And silver is trading okay as well. Silver has not been strong enough to say that it is leading the precious metals higher, which is what I would like to see. But it is keeping up with gold. In fact, the gold/silver ratio has declined slightly from its high last month.

This Catalyst Will Create A Massive Upside Surge In Gold & Silver

Watch the 81 area. If the gold/silver ratio breaks below that level, then there is a good chance that silver will start leading. When that happens, the precious metals often start accelerating to the upside. I am expecting that the next few months will be good ones for the precious metals, Eric. The odds of that outcome increase if silver can hurdle above resistance at $15.

- Source, King World News, read more here

James Turk: This Catalyst Will Create A Massive Upside Surge In Gold and Silver

“The evidence is mounting, Eric, that the precious metals have turned the corner and are heading higher…

“Today in particular saw something very important – upside follow through. Gold rose 1.4% last week, and instead of falling back, gold had a good move up again today.

Upside follow through like this has been lacking for months. Its absence has discouraged gold bulls, which in turn resulted in selling pressure. As a consequence, and as we can see in the following chart, gold has been in a downtrend since early this year when it was unable to break above the $1,350 area.

Gold Has Broken Solidly Out Of Downtrend Channel

What we are seeing now is buying pressure. Support under $1,200 looks solid. Dips are well bid, and that result is not surprising...

- Source, King World News, Read More Here

US Dollar Weakening, Despite Interest Rate Increases

That is one ugly looking chart. Higher interest rates would mean a strong dollar, not the weak-looking one pictured in this chart. Not only is the dollar forming a huge top, its short-term moving average is rolling over, making it look like the dollar is going to fall off the edge of the table if support at current levels breaks. So maybe what this chart is telling us is that the Fed won’t be raising interest rates on Wednesday. Maybe the underlying buying pressure in the precious metals is also telling us the same thing. Regardless, any plan by the Fed to stop or even just delay any interest rate increases they have already telegraphed to the market will be very bullish for gold and silver.

Big News To Create Metals Spike?

So here are the big questions at the moment, Eric: Is this slow boil developing in the precious metals just a head-fake? Or are we at the beginning of a big upward jump in precious metal prices? Let’s see what happens on Wednesday, but this dollar chart and others are giving us the footprints of clairvoyant insiders. It looks like they have already been preparing for a few weeks that the Fed will not raise interest rates. That would be big news because it is contrary to what is expected, and big surprises like this cause volatility.

A Long Awaited Breakout

Here is what to watch: For several weeks now gold has been in a trading range of roughly $1,185 to $1,215. So gold needs to break out of that range. Let’s see if it prints $1,220, which could be the first step of a long awaited breakout.

- Source, James Turk via King World News

A Major Gold and Silver Short Squeeze May Unfold On This Stunning Announcement

“The summer doldrums in the precious metals are over, Eric. Markets are heating up, and increased volatility across the board is likely as we move toward the end of the week…

First, Comex options expire tomorrow. October is not normally a big delivery month, so it should be relatively easy for the central planners and their friends in the big banks to control precious metal prices leading up to expiry like they have done so many times in the past.

Metals Short Squeeze?

Yet we saw good buying in the precious metals today, which resulted in noticeable upside pressure that moved the metals higher after their soft start in the morning in Europe. They moved back toward the top of their trading range, particularly silver. That raises some interesting questions. Are the bullion banks about to be overpowered by the buying coming into the precious metals? Or is it that the bullion banks are now on the long side and the hedge funds short, as some have speculated? If so, are the hedge funds about to be blindsided by a short squeeze in the precious metals?

There are more questions than answers at the moment, Eric, but look at what is happening to oil. It gives us a hint as to why the precious metals are turning higher. WTI is just a chip-shot away from its recent high of $74, which was a 4-year high. And over here in Europe, Brent crude is flirting with $80 a barrel, which is also right at a 4-year high. Rising crude oil prices provide solid evidence that inflation is creeping higher.

All of this is important, but the big news hits the wire on Wednesday afternoon. That’s when I expect the real volatility to start. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday is widely expected to announce another interest rate increase, but I have my doubts. Despite its claim to be independent, the Fed is fanatically political. For that reason, it does not raise interest rates too close to an election.

So is the Fed ready to risk the President’s ire by raising interest rates with the mid-term election looming? Maybe the answer lies in this chart of the Dollar Index...

- Source, James Turk via King World News

Apocalypse, Or Not?

Members of the American libertarian movement, particularly extremist preppers, are often associated with a belief that a complete breakdown in society is the only outcome from government economic policies and will lead to complete social disintegration. At the centre of their concerns is monetary destruction, with other issues, such as the erosion of personal freedom and the right to bear arms, important but peripheral. 

They cite history, particularly the hyperinflationary collapses, from Rome to Zimbabwe, and now Venezuela. They draw on Austrian economic theory, which fans their dislike of government and their expectation of total chaos.

Properly reasoned economic theory certainly reduces the science to one of black and white conclusions, which suits conclusion-jumpers. But the whole point of it is to explain society’s errors, so that they may be corrected. It is only by understanding the errors of state intervention and socialism, both communistic and fascist, that solutions can be found. Solutions then need to be applied, not taken into a mountain or forest retreat never to be implemented.

The real world does not work on black and white economic theories. It progresses along a muddled course, torn between statist mistakes and society’s unending patience with government intervention. Governments are the source of all wars and wealth destruction, but societies tolerate them. Philosophers have argued over this from Plato versus Aristotle onwards, and we are still here, two and a half millennia later, chewing over the same bones.

History records our philosophical chewing, and Man’s continuing conflict with and tolerances of the state. It records the rise and fall of kings, emperors, dictators and governments. Hermits and other preppers come and go, either unrecorded or, like Saint Simeon Stylites, noted as little more than historical footnotes. To future generations, prepping will almost certainly be a bygone curiosity, and humanity will continue despite government suppression.

This article is an attempt to rationalise an apparently apocalyptic future into how it is likely to evolve over the coming years. In the absence of a nuclear Armageddon, what we fear, more than anything else, is actually uncertainty and change.

Out with the old

Uncertainty and change are with us all the time. In a truly free market economy we embrace it because they are driven by our personal economic interests, and it is a continual process. But the desire for change is driven by us only in our role as consumers; as workers or businessmen facing competition for our existing labour and skills we tend to resist it. It is that side of us that a government taps into.

Modern governments, except where they are overtly mercantilist, don’t do change. Their support, indeed their reason for being, is based on anti-progressive lobbying from both establishment businesses and socialistic pressure groups. Government economists do not recognise progress, living in a stagnant world of historical statistics. Progressive change interferes with their certainties and is therefore never properly considered.

This is what the welfare states in the West have become, societies managed by anti-progressive governments, nominally responsible to their electorates, but in fact with a life of their own. The interests of governments have long since departed from those of consumers and increasingly conflict with their needs and wants. It is a process that has evolved to the current position over the last hundred years, when governments had understood their role should be strictly limited to identifiable national interests, when government employees deferred to the general public as their civil servants, and importantly, when the national currency was based on money chosen collectively by individuals.

It is therefore a much larger issue than just money. It is about the direction of political travel. For individuals it has become a prolonged road to serfdom, where power and personal freedom have been sequestered by the government from the consumer. The consumer has lost the right to keep his own income, and his preferences are now regarded by the state as subject to its control, to plan and dispose of as it sees fit.

The so-called free world was first ruled by the British and then by the Americans. The roots of both regimes were trade, protected by a government enforcing the rules of property ownership, the certainties of contract law and laws that protected individuals in their interpersonal relationships. As law-makers, governments now legislate to extend control over their peoples. And now the American government, in the name of American business, is even directing its own citizens not to buy from foreigners and is taxing them if they do so.

It is not the first time the state has interfered with our preferences in this way. The lurch into protectionism that led to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was one example, and the nationalisation policies of Britain’s post-war government another. These were errors from which a retreat proved possible. Today, the West’s democratic system has reached a point from which no ordered retreat back to free markets, to personal freedom and to governments which serve the people and not themselves, seems possible. Change will only come from the ultimate collapse of a system that promotes interests over freedom.

- Source, James Turk's Goldmoney

Rescuing the Banks is More Complicated Than Last Time

We should take notice of a joint article by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Hank Paulson last week in the New York Times iii. It was effectively an admission that there will be another financial crisis, and as such, these three men who presided over the last one must be worried that we are now heading towards the next.

They point out that some of the tools they deployed ten years ago are no longer available. The critical paragraph is the following:

But in its post-crisis reforms, Congress also took away some of the most powerful tools used by the FDIC, the Fed and the Treasury. Among these changes, the FDIC can no longer issue blanket guarantees of bank debt as it did in the crisis, the Fed’s emergency lending powers have been constrained, and the Treasury would not be able to repeat its guarantee of the money market funds. These powers were critical in stopping the 2008 panic.

Their concern is that under current legislation and regulations, a similar crisis to Lehman would increase the risk of a total collapse of the financial system, because the financial authorities have their hands tied. While there is some truth in their concerns, they might be overcome by emergency executive orders from the president.

The authors are oddly silent on the larger problem that makes a globally coordinated financial and systemic rescue much more difficult, and that is the bail-in provisions adopted by all the G20 members and enshrined in their laws. Last time, bail-outs and nationalisation of the banks were the methods deployed, and they protected both depositors and bond holders. The cost was borne entirely by the state.

Without much thought, bail-in provisions were introduced specifically to prevent the cost of future bank failures being forced on the state, and instead the costs are to be shared by bond holders and uninsured depositors. Their application to individual failures of banks not deemed systemically important financial institutions is actually superfluous, because normal bankruptcy laws are sufficient for these instances. The difficulty occurs when a potential bank failure threatens to escalate into a systemic threat. But if you bail in such a bank, by forcing losses upon bond holders and uninsured depositors, you simply escalate a systemic problem.

The three men at the center of the Lehman crisis appear to have learned little from their experience. The overriding lesson is of the futility of closing some stable doors while opening others.

- Source, Alasdair Macleod via James Turk's Goldmoney