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From King World News:
Paul Craig Roberts: The entire U.S. gold hoard is now gone
Former U.S. Treasury official Dr. Paul Craig Roberts told King World News the entire United States gold hoard, including gold supposedly held at the Fed for other countries, is now gone. This is very bad news for Germany and other countries which have trusted the Fed to safely store their gold. Excerpts from the interview:
Eric King: Dr. Roberts, I know you’ve seen the report on Bloomberg about Germany supposedly being happy with storing their gold at the New York Fed. It seemed to be a propaganda piece. What was your take when you saw that?
Paul Craig Roberts: Clearly what that means is that the United States doesn’t have the gold and cannot deliver it – and has forced Germany to come to terms with that, and to stop asking for it since it can’t be delivered … And so they [the U.S.] have told their puppet state [Germany] to shut up and come up with a different statement that they are content to leave [their gold] with the Fed. Perhaps they had to bribe them or give them other advantage. But, essentially, they have stopped any German agitation for the return of their gold because it can’t be returned.
King: What are the implications of that for other countries that have gold stored at the Fed? Because it’s outrageous they are not returning Germany’s gold.
Roberts: The implications are nobody will get it back. People in the gold market have suspected that the Fed used up all of the U.S. gold trying to suppress the price of gold over the years. And then after they ran out of U.S. gold, they started using all the gold left with the Federal Reserve on trust.
So [the Fed] used the German gold. I suspect that is true because what we have seen in recent years, especially since gold peaked at [roughly] $1,900 an ounce in 2011, we have seen more and more reliance on dumping huge amounts of naked gold shorts on Comex during hours in which there is no trading, in order to knock the gold price down and suppress it.
So they protect the dollar from quantitative easing by shorting the paper gold market, the futures market. If they still had stocks of gold that they could lease to bullion dealers to sell on the market, they would still be using that technique.
So I assume that the gold stocks ran out some time in 2011 because since that time they are mainly controlling the gold price with naked shorts during market periods when trading is light or non-existent. So I think it’s a safe conclusion that the supply of gold bullion available to U.S. authorities is almost non-existent.
King: We had an interview with Chris Powell and he was talking about the fact that there is so much paper gold in the market. He said there is all this paper gold held by Germany, held by other countries, held by the bullion banks. According to Powell:
At some point countries are going to ask for delivery and the squeeze is going to be infinitely worse than it was in 1968 and 1971 because of all this imaginary paper gold which is out there that can’t possibly be delivered. The central banks will realize that there are going to be bullion bank catastrophes – that the squeeze is going to take down certain banks that are naked short and that the Western central banks no longer have the metal to back up the bullion banks, as they usually do. At that point all hell will break loose in the gold market and we will see what William Kaye has described as the greatest short squeeze the world has ever seen.
Is Chris Powell correct?
Roberts: Yes. I think the worst part of the catastrophe will be the flight from paper currencies. And they won’t be able to get into gold because the Chinese will have it all. (Laughter ensues). So it could be even worse than Chris said.
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From King World News:
4 billion people say commodities run coming
Rick Rule, president and CEO of Sprott U.S. Holdings, Inc., explains why he still has great faith in a commodities boom.
“Four billion people worldwide are becoming fairly rapidly more rich, albeit from a low basis,” Rule says. “They aspire to the same standard of living you and I have, and that’s a material standard of living. This idea that the secular bull market in raw materials has somehow run its course is preposterous because it ignores mathematics and demographics, and you have to travel to see that.”
Rule’s interview is excerpted at the KWN blog here:
Also at KWN, fund manager Stephen Leeb explains why he thinks China will be driving gold, silver and oil prices much higher.
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From King World News:
European banks in big trouble
Swiss gold fund manager Egon von Greyerz tells King World News about serious trouble in the European banking system, the world’s shift away from the U.S. dollar, and the likelihood that more money creation will only collapse currencies. Von Greyerz’s interview is excerpted at the KWN blog here:
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From Yahoo News:
London’s scandal-hit gold price fixing under spotlight
London’s century-old process for fixing gold prices, tainted by a rigging scandal and attacked by critics as old-fashioned, goes under the spotlight in key talks aimed at modernizing the process.
Analysts said that the market price of gold, which is driven by investment and jewelry demand, could climb as a result of an overhaul.
Buyers and sellers of the precious metal meet in London to discuss the setting of the global benchmark, which affects the flow of billions of dollars worldwide every day.
The World Gold Council will host an eagerly awaited forum with retail and central banks, exchanges, mining firms, refiners, traders, and other industry groups, while Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) watchdog will attend as an observer.
The benchmark gold price is set by four banks at 10:30 a.m. London time and 3 p.m. via teleconference.
The banks – Britain’s Barclays and HSBC, Canada’s Scotiabank, and Societe Generale of France – are all members of the Gold Fixing Co. and agree on the price twice daily. Germany’s Deutsche Bank pulled out of the panel this year.
The process begins with the so-called spot price of gold, which is based on the current market rate of contracts for physical delivery of the metal.
The four banks must then declare whether they are interested in buying or selling at this level. The price can fluctuate depending on the balance of supply and demand, and settles on a so-called “fixing.”
The system lurched into crisis this year when Barclays was fined more than L26 million ($45 million, E33 million) by the FCA after an ex-trader at the troubled bank admitted attempting to manipulate the gold price.
Barclays is among several banks that were fined billions of dollars by regulators for foreign exchange rigging, prompting a broad review of how global financial benchmarks are set.
Critics argue the gold-price fixing process is also open to abuse.
The process is little changed since its creation on Sept. 12, 1919, when the Gold Fixing Co.’s five founders – including NM Rothschild & Sons – agreed on one single daily price fix in British pounds.
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From SprottMoney.com:
Central bank policy is failing and metals are firming, Sprott says
Central bank policy is failing to revive economies, in the United States part-time jobs are replacing full-time jobs, and the monetary metals are standing up well against enormous shorting in the futures market, Sprott Asset Management CEO Eric Sprott tells Jeff Rutherford of the Sprott Money News weekly market wrapup. It’s 8 minutes long and can be heard here.
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From SilverSeek.com:
COMEX – Why it’s corrupt
By Ted Butler
It is one thing to label the world’s most important precious metals exchange as the most corrupt; but perhaps quite another to prove it in terms beyond reasonable doubt. First, let me be clear in what I am asserting – the Commodities Exchange Inc., COMEX, owned and operated by the CME Group, has come to control and manipulate the price of gold and silver, as well as copper, for the sole benefit of certain exchange insiders, most prominently JPMorgan.
Through corrupt trade practices, the COMEX has stolen and captured the pricing mechanism for gold, silver and copper away from the influence of actual supply and demand fundamentals. Replacing the law of supply and demand as the price determinant, the COMEX has substituted a private club run by a few large traders who, in turn, dictate prices to metal producers, consumers and investors. The federal commodities regulator, the CFTC, is complicit in the price capturing, but the prime culprit is the CME Group. Ironically, it is data from the CME and published by the CFTC that prove price manipulation on the COMEX.
Because the price control of the COMEX is continuous, if silver prices are manipulated, as I allege, the manipulation is in effect whether prices are falling or rising. Gold prices surged 4 percent on June 19 and silver by 5 percent in the single largest one-day price rally in months. Government data, in the form of past and future Commitments of Traders Reports demonstrate conclusively not only why prices exploded on that day, but also why gold and silver prices were lower into the price explosion.
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From King World News:
Celente: West desperate to keep Ponzi alive as gold is gone
On the heels of the U.S. dollar falling to the key psychological level of 80, the top trends forecaster in the world tells King World News the West is desperate to keep the Ponzi scheme that is the current financial system alive because the gold is now gone. Here is what Gerald Celente, founder of Trends Research, had to say:
Every week, between Bloomberg and CNBC, you are going to read some experts saying why gold is going to decline because they are into the Ponzi scheme (that is the current financial system). So they want people to keep playing the Ponzi scheme, to keep their money in currencies that aren’t worth the paper it’s not printed on, and stay away from gold …
First, before I go into that, let’s go back and put this together: You just heard [the Fed’s] Bullard say that interest rates are going to go up in the first quarter of 2015. When interest rates go up, that’s going to ostensibly strengthen the dollar, but that’s only in theory.
And even if the dollar does get strength, it will only be temporary because when interest rates go up, the economy goes down. When the economy goes down they are going to have to come up with another stimulus program. As I mentioned, you have negative interest rates right now in the ECB.
Let’s go back now to China and their gold fiasco [the missing gold]. Number one, read the Trends Journal’s Top Trends for 2014. One of them is ‘Global Chinatown.’ Money is flowing out of Hong Kong from groups with assets in the tens of billions of dollars that are coming to the states and investing. I know this firsthand.
Number two, I don’t believe that the central banks believe that there is [any] gold [left] – just look at what happened with Germany. Two years ago Germany was looking to repatriate their gold and they [the Fed] were saying, ‘You can get it back by 2020.’ What, are they carrying it over by carrier pigeon, piece by piece? You can get this stuff in a day. I believe the central banks are all in the same Ponzi scheme and they know that the gold isn’t there.
And going back to the comments comparing the late 1960s and early 1970s with now, I remember it very well. I was buying gold throughout the 1970s. I made my first buy of gold at $187.50. I got in a little late but I got in anyway. Nobody knew what was going on back then – very few people. The point being, no, there weren’t all these paper trades. You only had the United States and a couple of people in Europe and Japan playing the markets back then. Remember, the Hunt Brothers manipulated the silver market, that’s how thinly traded these things were.
So now you have these massive amounts of paper trades going on, not to mention all of the ETFs, and where is all the gold? I believe the gold doesn’t exist [to back up these financial instruments], as many people believe it doesn’t exist. After all, if it existed – Germany is not a third world nation – they should be able to get their gold back any time they want, and they can’t get it [even a tiny portion of their gold] back until 2020. And by the way, the only government that demanded it back was Venezuela, and you saw what happened to Hugo Chavez. Whether it was an act of mother nature or an act of a madman, Chavez isn’t around any longer, but they got the gold back.
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