There is a blizzard moving into the northeastern US this evening.
It may affect tomorrow's trade in equities.
I had put a decent short position on in the closing minutes of 31 December. I have taken most of that off the table here and now.
I am long gold and silver bullion.
To my mind, prices were pushed to some short term extremes for the year end
tape painting.
I tend to agree with much of
Ted Butler's recent analysis titled
2013: The Year of JP Morgan. If it becomes publicly available I will link to it. For now it is by subscription only.
Ted thinks that JP Morgan is the major mover in the Comex gold market, executing market corners first to the short and then to the long side over the course of 2013.
They most likely have some privileged knowledge of the market structure and official policy, and perhaps even semi-official support in this, if nothing else than by indirect acquiescence, or turning a blind eye if you will.
Below is a recent video about gold buying in India. China, southeast Asia, and the Mideast offer similar stories, except that the governments there are not trying to restrict purchasing to please the West.
To the extent that any
very serious people take note of this, it is to ignore it, and then deride it. History shows that those who represent fading and unsustainable regimes tend to ignore what is happening, then turn stridently against any opposition to their will by both words and actions. And finally, they lose.
There are some very good reasons why China and India and quite a few of the new emerging economies are seeking safe havens from the dollar. It is not because 'they hate our freedom.' It is not because 'they are ignorant of modern economics.' It is not because 'they are a bunch of gold bugs.'
It is because the Western financial system is become a shell game of frauds, and remains largely unreformed, run by and for insiders. Recognition of a fraud first arises at the periphery.
And the dollar has become a major vehicle for exporting these frauds to the rest of the world through the mispricing of risk and the brazen manipulation of price discovery in so many financially related markets. How can anyone continue to deny this?
If you do not understand this, you can understand little of what is going on now, and will understand little of what may likely happen over the next few years. I would expect there to be quite a bit of disinformation put forward about it.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, sometimes it is difficult to get a man to understand what his career path and his wallet encourages him not to see.
Sometimes, but thank God not always, when flawed characters face a crisis they start
breaking bad. And overcome thereafter by greed and the will to power, they do not know when it is time to stop. And so they hurl themselves over into the abyss, and take a number of good people with them.
"Who are you talking to right now? Who is it you think you see? Do you know how much I make a year? I mean, even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it.
Do you know what would happen if I suddenly decided to stop going into work? A business big enough that it could be listed on the NASDAQ goes belly up. Disappears! It ceases to exist without me...
You clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No! I am the one who knocks."
Walter White, Breaking Bad
