This post was published at GoldSilver (w/ Mike Maloney)
Weekly Update — Forget the Russians – It’s the Federal Reserve Seeking to Meddle in Our Elections
This post was published at RonPaulLibertyReport
Russia Bought 31 Tonnes Of Gold And What This Means – World Gold Council
JIM WILLIE – China and Russia are Ready to Global Reset
How Much Death and Destrution Awaits Us in 2018?
The New Year is one full of economic, political, and war threats.
Among the economic threats are stock, bond, and real estate markets artificially pumped up by years of central bank money creation and by false reports of full employment. It is an open question whether participants in these markets are aware that underlying reality does not support the asset values. Central banks support stock markets not only with abundant liquidity but also with direct stock purchases. The Japanese central bank is now one of the largest owners of Japanese equities. Central banks, which are supposed to provide economic stability, have created a massive fraud.
Throughout the Western world politics has degenerated into fraud. No government serves the public’s interest. (See: ) Except for some former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, European governments have defied the will of the people by admitting vast numbers of refugees from Washington’s wars and others pretending to be refugees. The European governments further imperil their citizens with their support for Washington’s rising aggression toward Russia. The universal failure of democratic politics is leading directly to war.
This post was published at Paul Craig Roberts on December 30, 2017.
Seven Things that Drove Gold News in 2017
On Dec. 31, 2016, the price of gold stood at 1,156.00. Today, it is knocking on the $1,300 mark. The yellow metal is on track to gain about 12% in 2017, its best year since 2010. Gold has made these gains despite a number headwinds that we would expect to put a significant drag on gold.
Here are seven major themes that have driven gold news over the past year.
Geopolitical risk
Over the last year, we’ve talked a lot about geopolitical risk. Could turmoil around the world now be the new normal?
Some analysts think so.
The focus has primarily been on tensions between the US and North Korea. But there have been plenty of other risk factors popping up around the world, including ongoing uncertainty about Brexit, the secession movement in Catalonia, war in the Middle East, terror attacks, tensions between the US and Russia, various elections, a coup in Zimbabwe, and more. On top of that, outside of the US, a lot of people think Americans should be looking at the geopolitical risks right here at home due to political divisions and uncertainty in Washington D. C.
This post was published at Schiffgold on DECEMBER 29, 2017.
Stocks and Precious Metals Charts – Nativity
“American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington.
Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans.
Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton’s defeat. Then everything changed.”
Jackson Lears, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Russian Hacking, London Review of Books
Stocks wobbled sideways, sliding out stealthily on light volumes, into the new year.
Gold and silver managed to extend their rally off the NfP-FOMC short term bottom.
This post was published at Jesses Crossroads Cafe on 27 DECEMBER 2017.
Russia and China Lay Economic Foundation Based on Golden Rule
One of the many themes we support at The Daily Coin is the constant progress happening across the emerging markets, especially the nations involved the Eastern economic alliances like BRICS, BRI, SCO, EAEU and the like. These nations under the direction of China or Russia or a combination are laying the groundwork to be the driving force of the 21st Century and beyond.
We also continually report on gold moving from Western vaults to all points East. Most recently we discussed Kazakhstan and the importance of this nation both from a geographical position as well as natural resources like gold, rare earths and a wide variety of other elements within the borders of this growing nation.
Gold always has our attention as the rules/laws surrounding gold have not changed. While most people, especially in the West, have forgotten these rules that does not mean they have changed or been overturned.
One law that has stood the test of time is the golden rule – he who has the gold makes the rules. We also like the fact that JPMorgan, the man not the bank, stated in a congressional hearing that ‘gold is money and everything else is credit’. These two rules/laws working in conjunction with one another make for a formidable alliance. When you have natural rules/laws working together and nations begin forming alliances using these rules/laws as a foundation the rest of the world should take notice, but alias the Western world is more focused on ‘russia did it’ than what Russia is actually doing.
This post was published at GoldSeek on Monday, 25 December 2017.
2018 could be the year for gold
We approach 2018 having seen the seeds planted in recent years for a monetary revolution. They include the massive world-wide expansion of credit and debt since the last credit crisis, and the advent of potentially disruptive cryptocurrencies. Geopolitical shifts of tectonic scale have occurred, hardly noticed by the ordinary person. That was until now. We are now on board a train which is gathering speed towards its buffers: the end of dollar hegemony and its potential collapse.
It might take a few years yet to get there, but the speed of our train is dependant to a large degree to how the engine’s boiler is stoked by America through her isolationist plans. It is very hard to see how the dollar cannot decline significantly with America’s autarkic trade policies, benefiting gold.
Geopolitics are likely to become more prominent in 2018, risking an upset of the precarious balance in what amounts to an ongoing financial war. Upset that balance, and chaos results. President Trump threatens to do just that by formally identifying China and Russia as America’s main adversaries in his National Security Strategy, released only this week.[i] The document repeatedly casts China and Russia as geopolitical villains seeking world domination, and America as the world’s saviour.
This post was published at GoldMoney on December 21, 2017.
Another Russian Zombie Bank Topples on Friday
‘It turned into a lender which financed its owners’: Central Bank. It’s Friday, and another Russian bank gets taken over and most of its creditors get bailed out by the Central Bank, this time the 10th largest bank in Russia, Promsvyazbank – with the top six being state-owned banks; with number seven, Bank Otkritie, having toppled in August; with number 12, B&N Bank, having toppled in September; and with Jugra Bank having gotten its banking licence revoked in July for having falsified its accounts.
The bailout of Promsvyazbank (PSB) will require between 100 billion rubles and 200 billion rubles (between $1.7 billion and $3.4 billion), based on a preliminary estimate, said Central Bank deputy governor Vasily Pozdyshev on Friday, according to Reuters.
‘Preliminary estimates’ of bank-bailout costs have a way of morphing into bigger ones. The Central Bank, which is also the banking regulator, has already increased its estimate for the combined cost of the bailouts of Otkritie and B&N Bank to 820 billion rubles ($14 billion), but it now deems both too financially weak to continue.
This post was published at Wolf Street by Wolf Richter ‘ Dec 15, 2017.