Editor’s note: Mark Leibovit is one of the investment world’s top-rated gold timers, and helps investors anticipate and benefit from both the ups and the downs of the precious metals markets with his Leibovit VR Gold Letter (available to WND readers at a huge discount).
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From CMI Gold & Silver:
$50,000 gold?
Jim Sinclair recently predicted $3,200-$3,500 gold by 2020 and “emancipated gold” hitting $50,000. Because of Sinclair having made some really accurate calls in the past, his prediction caused quite a stir in the gold community. Even Ron Paul commented and gave reasoning why Sinclair’s predication is not preposterous.
Watch Ron Paul talk about the possibility of $50,000-an-ounce gold:
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From King World News:
James Turk interview: Record-breaking gold backwardation shocking banks & shorts
As global markets continue to see some wild trading, James Turk told King World News that the record-breaking backwardation in the gold market has literally shocked the shorts and the banks, especially those short of the physical metal. Turk predicted this will create a mind-boggling move to the upside in both gold and silver.
Turk: "There are so many economic distortions throughout the world today, no wonder so many people are totally confused about what to do with their money. The central planners are hard at work pursuing policies that are destructive to markets. They do not understand or are completely oblivious to the fact that their constant interventions are perverting economy activity.”
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From Mineweb.com (London):
Hugely outnumbered: Western gold bears by Asian gold enthusiasts
Alasdair Macleod of GoldMoney made the interesting – but in retrospect, patently obvious – comment that gold buyers and sellers in the West are hugely outnumbered by a traditionally gold hoarding community in Asia. And as Asian economies develop, this gold-oriented (carefully chosen word!) community is expanding rapidly as is its purchasing power.
The average Western gold investor, seller or trader just doesn’t view gold the same way as, say, the Indian or Chinese citizen does. The former may keep a proportion of its gold as a safe-haven investment, but much tends to be traded, while in the East there has been huge trust in gold over time and it is viewed perhaps as a pension as well as a protector against hard times.
In India, for example, gold is traditionally given to young couples when they get married and added to on anniversaries, etc., as time progresses and thus builds up – but is only ever sold in extreme circumstances. It is not seen as a regularly tradable investment as it is in the West, but a permanent bastion of wealth. It is thus seen as the best, and most reliable (inflation-proof) form of money.
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From GATA.org:
Hong Kong-based fund manager William Kaye tells King World News that more smashing of the gold price seems unlikely because it would unleash unquenchable demand for real metal that isn't available.
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From The Wall Street Journal:
Tocqueville's Hathaway says London probe could scare off investors
Investigations into the London gold fix could scare institutional investors away from the metal, according the head of one of the world's largest investors in gold and precious metals mining shares.
"We as money managers in the space have been hurt more not by the price action but by the feeling among investors that [London pricing] is just too weird, too inexplicable," said John Hathaway, who oversees $2 billion in gold investments for Tocqueville Asset Management.
“Prices have to go up and down but if it’s a rigged game, then you’re not going to get big pension funds, etc., getting involved. They’ll say, ‘Boy this thing is too spooky for us to invest in,’” Mr. Hathaway told The Wall Street Journal at the Dubai Precious Metals Conference, one of the world’s largest gatherings of gold investors.
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From Mineweb.com:
Gold manipulation – ex-U.S. Treasury top gun tells us how and why
Former Reagan-era U.S. Treasury Assistant Secretary Paul Craig Roberts has just published an interesting article on his website which not only states categorically that the gold price is indeed manipulated by the U.S. Fed and its bullion banking allies, but how the price control is achieved, together with illustrative charts. Now Roberts may have his own agenda to push, but as a former U.S. Treasury insider – even if of a different era – he should indeed know what he is talking about and his words should be taken seriously by gold bull and bear alike as his views are relevant to those in all gold-related camps. Read his article: “The Federal Reserve has no integrity.”
In brief, Roberts and his associate Dave Kranzler assert that the Fed has had to resort to this practice in order to protect the value of the U.S. dollar from its effective reduction in value through its Quantitative Easing policy. In order for the Fed to effectively support the reserve status of the U.S. dollar by pushing it higher when it starts to drop, it has also had to prevent the price of gold from rising as this is seen globally as something of a bellwether for the dollar. If the gold price rises, the dollar is seen as getting weaker and vice versa.
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From CoinWeek.com:
Pat Heller: U.S. has rigged precious metals markets for 80 years
Writing for Coin Week, Patrick Heller of Liberty Coin Service in Lansing, Mich., provides a brief history of the U.S. government's mechanisms of surreptitious market intervention.
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From Mineweb.com (London):
Silver being left behind in latest gold price surge – but don’t despair!
Silver was left behind as gold surged, but despite some adverse analytical comment the overall picture may be rather more positive.
So, why is silver behaving in this manner? The short answer is China. Silver in reality should perhaps trade as an industrial commodity rather than as an investment-grade precious metal – at least that is what most of the bank analyst pundits would say. Now the major bank analysts will tell you that silver should be trading in a similar market pattern to copper – the benchmark industrial metal. But they also seem to lose sight of the fact that the production scenarios for silver and copper are very different. Copper – so GFMS tells us – is heading into a significant surplus this year and prices may well weaken further. However silver is primarily mined as a byproduct from gold mining (where production is likely to be flat) and even more importantly from lead and zinc mining where most projections see production falls over the next couple of years as some major mines come to the ends of their lives with few, if any, similar sized projects due to start up. It’s a very different scenario!
There are actually very few primary silver mining operations – and in truth some of these should be really considered as base metal mines with strong silver values.
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From ZeroHedge.com:
All hail the Draghi Put: The global bond market is now well and truly broken, by David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget for President Ronald Reagan
The evil of modern central banking can nowhere better be seen than in this week’s mad stampede into $4 billion of Greek bonds. The fact is, Greece is not creditworthy at nearly any coupon yield, but most certainly not at the 4.75 percent sticker that was attached to the offering.
After a 20 percent contraction, the Greek economy has been literally eviscerated – with not much left except tourism, yogurt plants and a 27 percent unemployment rate. It has an impossible debt-to-GDP ratio of 170 percent, and worse still, almost all of that debt is owned by EC institutions and the IMF. And the claim that Greece’s fiscal affairs have turned for the better is really preposterous.
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From King World News:
2014 will be year of reckoning for U.S., by Paul Craig Roberts
Former U.S. Treasury official, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, warned that 2014 will be a dangerous year of reckoning for the United States. Dr. Roberts also warned a collapse is coming that will be so powerful it will overrun the Exchange Stabilization Fund and other measures now in place by central planners to protect against such catastrophic market events.
Roberts: “The people who are saying that the Ukraine crisis will cause a flight to safety and a rise in the dollar’s value are overlooking the main impact of the crisis in the Ukraine which comes from Washington’s threat of sanctions against Russia. And the Russian government replied to this threat by announcing that they were simply leaving the dollar-based payment system ...
“If they (Russia) are not in that system, sanctions cannot apply to them. So they have announced that they have entered into a barter trade with Iran to take 500,000 barrels of oil, and they are going to sell this oil for rubles, gold, or for the currencies of their BRIC trading partners – China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
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