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Written in August of 2011, this article continues to be an important guideline to understanding Gold and Silver prices, and the efforts of Banksters to manipulate these competing forms of monetary exchange to the US Dollar.  Good stuff.  And i did write Brandon a proposal for a mobile application connecting PayPal to the Storage Vault Depositories he sites in this article (based on the GOLD app design i provided to Tino in 2008). excerpt: China Competes With The Comex As of this summer China now has its own Comex, called the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange. The exchange opened for trade on May 18th (the CME's incredible margin hikes in silver began only weeks before, which suggests to me that they were trying to preempt the positive effects the HKMEX would have on metals). The HKMEX moved into action only five months after the Chinese Pan American Gold Exchange was instituted. The exchange issues its own ETF's in gold and silver. These securities, though, are not based on leverage or derivatives like most Comex based ETFs. The bottom line; the Comex global monopoly on commodities trade is over: How To Break The Barrier Methods for smaller investors to fight back against the market manipulations of large banks have been sparse, and often limited to desperate appeals to the CFTC and the government, who are bought and paid for, and who have no intention of ever stopping global financiers from dragging their unwashed behinds across the face of the planet. Relying on bureaucrats to mend the wounds they themselves encouraged or inflicted is foolhardy, to say the least. Top down solutions are NOT an option now, and I'm not sure if they ever were. This leaves us with only one other choice; to fix the problem with our own hands from the bottom up. This is, of course, easier said than done… In the case of silver manipulation, what we are faced with is an unprecedented effort to subvert and suppress an alternative system so that the mainstream system can continue to

Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.

"While the FT promptly retracted an article on precisely the topic of gold manipulation from earlier this week (recorded for posterity here), Bloomberg appears to not have had the same "editorial" concerns and pressures, and today released an article once again slamming the final conspiracy theory that while every other asset class is manipulated, gold is in a pristine class of its own, untouched by close-banging, price fixing traders or central bankers, and reports that "the London gold fix, the benchmark used by miners, jewelers and central banks to value the metal, may have been manipulated for a decade by the banks setting it, researchers say." Of course, over the past 5 years we have reported time and again how official gold manipulation started in earnest some time in the 1960s (who can forget the "reshuffle club") but we will start with a decade. Here is what BBG finds: Unusual trading patterns around 3 p.m. in London, when the so-called afternoon fix is set on a private conference call between five of the biggest gold dealers, are a sign of collusive behavior and should be investigated, New York University's Stern School of Business Professor Rosa Abrantes-Metz and Albert Metz, a managing director at Moody's Investors Service, wrote in a draft research paper.   "The structure of the benchmark is certainly conducive to collusion and manipulation, and the empirical data are consistent with price artificiality," they say in the report, which hasn't yet been submitted for publication. "It is likely that co-operation between participants may be occurring."   The paper is the first to raise the possibility that the five banks overseeing the century-old rate -- Barclays Plc, Deutsche Bank AG, Bank of Nova Scotia, HSBC Holdings Plc and Societe Generale SA -- may have been actively working together to manipulate the benchmark. It also adds to pressure on the firms to overhaul the way the rate is calculated. Authorities around the world, already inv

Excellent discussion of where the Republican Party stands in relationship to the destruction of the dollar and new interest in linking the dollar to GOLD.  Good stuff.  Personally i'm in the Ron Paul camp, hook, line and sinker. excerpt: "In the ferment within today's Republican Party, the gold standard has become almost the centrist position. On the left would be those who favor a system of discretionary activism in which brilliant technocrats, such as Ben Bernanke at the Fed, use their judgment in setting interest rates. A bit to their right would be advocates of a rule, such as John Taylor's rule linking interest rates to various conditions, or one that requires the Fed to target the price of gold but stops short of defining the dollar in terms of specie. In the center would be advocates of a classical gold standard, in which a dollar is defined as a fixed amount of gold. These include, among others, Mr. Lehrman, James Grant of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, publisher Steve Forbes, economist Judy Shelton, and Sean Fieler of the American Principles Project. A bit further to the right would be partisans of the Austrian school of economics, including Rep. Paul. He advocates less for a gold standard than for an idea of Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel laureate who came to favor what he called the denationalization of money and a system centered on private coinage and currency that would compete with government-issued money. Further right are purists such as the radical constitutionalist Edwin Vieira Jr., who would simply price things in weights of gold or silver. A good bit of overlap exists among the camps, but Congress has come alive to all points on this spectrum. Rep. Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who is vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, is seeking to pass the Sound Dollar Act, which would end the Fed's mandate to keep unemployment down, instead having the central bank focus only on stable prices. Rep. Paul is pressing the Free Competition in Curr

Gold, Peace, and Prosperity is the title of Ron Paul's essay for a "modern" gold standard.  According to Paul, such a standard would end the relentless boom-bust cycle, and maintain the value of King Dollar.  However, King Dollar would have to be founded on a monetary standard that eschews government tampering. Paul begins his treatise by pointing out that "Congress alone is responsible for inflation, and Congress alone can stop it."  Which means that the old scapegoats - OPEC, greedy CEOs, labor unions - are not the real cause of inflation.  To support his contention, Paul relates a story told by Marco Polo in his travels through China.  As Paul states, "Abuse of paper money led to the expulsion of the Mongol dynasty from China." Bretton Woods - in 1944 - supposedly established a new gold exchange standard.  In Paul's opinion, Bretton Woods was "nothing more than an international Federal Reserve System."  And of course, it didn't do anything but cause more inflation.  Then on August 15, 1971, President Nixon "closed the 'gold window.'"  This was the beginning of "managed fiat currency." Paul states that since 1971, the price of gold has increased "more than twentyfold."  The trade deficit has increased by 1146%, and the Consumer Price Index has increased 79%.  Due to these imbalances, he concludes that the dollar is dead.    Rather than pronouncing the Last Rites over the dollar, followed by a mournful funeral and weeping and wailing, Paul views the death of the dollar as an opportunity.  "The time is ripe for the institution of a trustworthy monetary system."  And it's not all that difficult.  The way to stop inflation is to "stop inflating the money supply."  Paul then cites the three main reasons politicians, bankers, etc., desire inflation:  greed, power, and a way to pay the government's bills without raising taxes sky-high.  The answer - the only alternative - to inflation is

"During 2015 the attack on bullion prices has intensified, driving the prices lower than they have been for years. During the first quarter of this year there was a huge upward spike in the quantity of precious metal derivatives. If these were long positions hedging the banks' Comex shorts, why did the price of gold and silver decline? More evidence of manipulation comes from the continuing fall in the prices of gold and silver as set in paper future markets, although demand for the physical metals continues to rise even to the point that the US Mint has run out of silver coins to sell. Uncertainties arising from the Greek No vote increase systemic uncertainty. The normal response would be rising, not falling, bullion prices. The circumstantial evidence is that the unregulated OTC derivatives in gold and silver are not really hedges to short positions in Comex but are themselves structured as an additional attack on precious metal prices. If this supposition is correct, it indicates that seven years of bailing out the big banks that control the Federal Reserve and US Treasury at the expense of the US economy has threatened the US dollar to the extent that the dollar must be protected at all cost, including US regulatory tolerance of illegal activity to suppress gold and silver prices."

the gold standard is the foundation of any economy desirous of being a Camelot.  In that sense, then, Gold is a plea for a return to sanity - the gold standard. The book is presented in three parts.  Part One takes a look at the history of money, what it is and how it works.  Part Two examines the history of America's money, from Colonial silver through the 1930s and into the Reagan administration and the Greenspan years.  The third part of Gold discusses recent currency crises around the world, including Japan, the Asian crisis of the 1990s, Russia, China, Mexico and Yugoslavia.

"Pieces of Eight." It is a two-volume treatise on the monetary powers of the Constitution. Now out of print, it has become a kind of cult classic, selling on the Internet for hundreds of dollars a set. It addresses questions that, with the value of the dollar having collapsed to 1,200th of an ounce of gold, are suddenly timely. What is a dollar? How did it become our money of account? What powers in respect of money were given to the federal government in 1787? What disabilities, or prohibitions, are in the Constitution? How have we managed to get so far from the law as the Founders wrote it? And what can be done to bring us back from the brink? The title of the book comes from the nickname for the coin the Founding Fathers were referring to when, in the Constitution, they twice used the word "dollars." Its definition was codified in the Coinage Act of 1792, which provided for minting gold and silver coins and defined a dollar as having "the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current, and to contain three hundred and seventy-one grains and four sixteenth parts of a grain of pure, or four hundred and sixteen grains of standard silver." Mr. Vieira speaks for a school of thought-it goes back to James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and comes together today in, among other places, the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education-that reckons such dollars, and their free-market equivalent in gold, are the only constitutional money in America. Lately he has been arguing for the establishment by the states of separate monetary systems. The authority to do so is in Article 1, Section 10, of the Constitution, which prohibits the states from making "any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts."

No Holds Bared Capitalism  .... Mr. Casey of Casey Research recommends that the USA immediately default on the national debt; bring home all military troops immediately and close oversees military bases;  Close the Federal Reserve!  Move to gold/silver backed currency.  Abolish praetorian federal agencies - immediately.  The rich are in position to bribe and elect toady politicians.  the socialist policies cement the poor and middle class to the bottom.  These programs are designed to keep them poor and dependent.  The middle class saves in dollars, and those savings are being systematically destroyed by the enormous debt of social, military and regulatory spending that is infused with corruption from top to bottom.   Financial advice to the middle class?  Get into GOLD and other hard assets.  Cut back standard of living before inflation and unsustainable government programs and promises cuts it back for you. Is Doug long on US equities and assets?  GOLD!  It's the dollar that is being destroyed.  Stocks are very expensive now.  Casey is thinking of buying USA real estate.  Not Bonds.  Even at $1800 per oz, Gold is still good.  Mining stocks are cheap relative to GOLD, but watch for bubble in these stocks.  Life changing moment: 1971 - Harry Brown's book "How to Profit from the coming Devaluation".  Buy GOLD.  "Crisis Investing" book by Casey in 1978.  Advice?  Skip college.  Minds cluttered with false concepts and a ton of debt.  

As Kiyosaki writes in his book:  "So has there been a conspiracy?  I believe so, in a way."  He goes on to explain why he believes so, citing the lack of financial education in the school systems, the Federal Reserve Act, and Nixon's 1971 dismissal of the gold standard.  And most interestingly, Kiyosaki believes that 401(k) retirement vehicles placed the retirement money of average people in the hands of Wall Street. The first chapter of the book is entitled 'Can Obama Save the World?'  Kiyosaki's answer is no.  And apparently, Obama doesn't want to even if he could.  For he appointed Summers and Geithner, both of who played a part in repealing the Glass Steagall Act.  In other words, it's the same old same old.  Nothing has changed.  Which means that the average person needs to understand how taxes, debt, inflation, and retirement affect them.  Kiyosaki sums up the chapter by stating that once one understands the new rules of money, then one can "opt out of the conspiracy of the rich." From there, Kiyosaki moves on to explain how we got where we are.  He points the finger at the Federal Reserve Bank, which inflates the money supply, which destroys the value of savings and retirement plans.  And he makes it very clear that the rules of money changed dramatically when the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971.  For up until that time, "technically, prior to 1971, the U.S. dollar was a derivative of gold.  After 1971, the U.S. dollar became a derivative of debt." Kiyosaki proceeds to discuss what he calls 'The Invisible Bank Robbery.'  He says "since money is invisible, a derivative of debt, bank robberies by bankers have become invisible."  Two ways these invisible robberies occur are:  fractional reserve banking, which is nothing more than banks lending money they don't have; and deposit insurance, which "protects the bankers - not savers."  Then he asks a very pertinent question:  "why should an ins

Time to check in again with that first link in the last sentence, then recall: [i] that series in the Washington Times on Hillary ignoring the intelligence reports saying that Libyan government forces were not in fact massacring civilians; [ii] the interview with the guy who was the source of the "massacre" reports admitting that his only source of information on the massacres he claimed were taking place had been provided by the Libyan "rebels;" [iii] the reported role of the French government, the CIA, and future Dept. of State Ambassador Stevens (killed in Benghazi post-coup) in launching the rebellion with mercenaries provided by Qatar; [iv] Hillary suckering the Russians into not vetoing the Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya; [v] the U.S. and allies promptly exceeding that authority to serve as the mercenaries' air force in accomplishing regime change; [vi] Gadafi's death after being repeatedly sodomized with a knife; and [vii] Hillary's cackling, "we came, we saw, he died" video. That's what happens if you try to establish gold as Africa's currency. The western banksters don't like that. May the fleas of a thousand camels infest each of their armpits.   

Spot market for GOLD

Time to get your money out of the bank and into gold or silver, kept somewhere other than in a bank safety deposit box. 

Tom Woods speaking in Boulder, Co.  This video is 1 hour long, but it may be the best 1 hour ever spent!  Should be mandatory viewing for every American before they enter the voting booth.  Hayek and the Austrian Business - Economic cycle theory are fully explained and applied to historical cycles of boom and bust, with particular attention, very humurous attention i might add, to the 2001 and 2008 financial collapse. One thing puzzles me though.  I kept wondering how it is we restructure the banking system?  Killing the Federal reserve is just the start.  But how do we "free" the market balance of investment, resources and savings from the disruption of artificial or mistaken interest rates?  It seems to me that Banks have always had difficulty with the allocation of investment resources - "capital" with a K. As i listened to Tom, totally captured by his engaging presentation, the depths of his thinking, and the humorous delivery, i couldn't help but think that one way of ending the vicious cycles of interest rate buffoonery would be to end the Federal Bankster Reserve, put the currency into the hands of the US Treasury, with the States electing currency governors to control the Treasury; but fixing the interest rate of treasury currency to the value of "Lawful money" as defined in the Constitution to be that which is redeemable in Gold or Silver.  As in, the historical value of the dollar = 371.25 troy grains of silver.  The fact is, "Lawful money" is a Constitutional requirement. Today we have two kinds of dollars: fiat, or funny money, and, Lawful money.  The conversion rate between fiat dollars and Gold is once again near $1700 per ounce.  My question is; How do we derive a "Lawful Interest Rate" from the ratio of fiat to "Lawful money"?  Seems to me that for the Austrian business cycle to work, some guidance to a "Lawful Interest Rate" must be outlined.