A major change, Part 1

Posted on July 23, 2014 by Thundering Heard

A significant change has taken place. A pressure seems to have been lifted from members of the so-called Elites. This can be seen by two effects:

1. Some of these System Controllers are taking a look around and are none too pleased with what they see.

2. Some of them realize they can now speak more freely.

Here are some examples. The first is a set of quotes from the Chief Investment Officer of Allianz, by some metrics Europe’s largest insurer, and the third largest insurance company in the world:

The fundamental problems are not solved and everybody knows it.

Let’s hear that again:

The fundamental problems are not solved and everybody knows it.

Wow, for the last five years, one had to peruse surly blogs to hear that truth, but this is from Maximilian Zimmerer, the guy in charge of the assets for one of the 20 largest corporations in the world. He also stated that the “euro crisis is not over.” With that latter quote, he just told us that all those Euro-pols running around saying the “euro crisis is over” and “Europe has been fixed” are very mistaken and/or very full of it.

Next, someone let the Wall St Journal know that the US Federal Reserve has been railing about extreme problems at Germany’s top bank, Deutsche Bank:

In a letter to Deutsche Bank executives last December, a senior official with the New York Fed wrote that financial reports produced by some of the bank’s U.S. arms “are of low quality, inaccurate and unreliable.”

It said examiners found “material errors and poor data integrity”…The shortcomings amount to a “systemic breakdown” and “expose the firm to significant operational risk…”

So what’s the US central bank doing castigating Germany’s largest commercial bank? DB has large US operations; we showed here that half of the Fed’s money printing went to European banks, so DB probably has a lot of that cash, that is, from the Fed’s point of view, they had to bail out DB before, they don’t want to have to do it again; and, drumroll please, DB has the largest exposure to derivatives of any bank in the world. Again, what are derivatives? They are highly leveraged bets on every imaginable financial price movement. Here’s what ZeroHedge says about DB and derivatives:

Recall that as we have shown for two years in a row, Deutsche has a total derivative exposure that amounts to €55 trillion or just about $75 trillion. That’s a trillion with a T, and is about 100 times greater than the €522 billion in deposits the bank has. It is also 5x greater than the GDP of Europe and more or less the same as the GDP of… the world.

And here is that text in chart format:

So that’s Germany’s total economy in green on the left; Europe’s economy in blue in the center; and Deutsche Bank’s derivative bets in red on the right. So when it becomes clear that DB has a serious problem, it will be way too big for Germany to handle; probably way to big for Europe to handle; and possibly way too big for anyone to handle, that is, it could be game over, system down, everyone start from scratch. What the US Fed is saying is that DB’s recordkeeping and reporting is so bad that it results in “significant operational risk.” We likely won’t know till after DB goes down the tubes whether this was error or intentional obfuscation on their part. My guess is it’s probably a lot of both: their business is so huge, they have little understanding of many of its parts, some of which likely have twenty-something rogue traders putting on huge derivative bets; and they have plenty to hide.

Next, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has overtly questioned the sanity of just about all central banks and just about everyone participating in the financial markets. So why should anyone care? Perhaps you’ve been blessed during this lifetime and have never heard of the BIS. It is the organization that was described as follows on Bloomberg:

It was especially useful to the Nazis.

Though headed by an American during World War II, the BIS adhered to a priestly neutrality…in order to continue dealing with all sides in the conflict. Unfortunately, this put the institution squarely in the position of abetting Nazi terror.

The BIS accepted plundered gold and made it possible for Germany to acquire desperately needed war materiel. It even permitted Germany, once it had invaded Czechoslovakia, to confiscate that nation’s gold reserves.

I can just hear you saying: “Oh that BIS.” Anyway, from such disgusting beginnings, the BIS has continued its traditions and thereby has risen to be the central bank above all other central banks, that is, if you are the head of a major central bank in the world, you get a seat at the table at the BIS. Here it is, what some call the Tower of Basel, such a friendly-looking ~~nuclear plant cooling tower~~ place:

I’m told that if you’ve got a war to finance or a lot of drug money to launder, the BIS is your one-stop-shopping place. But I digress. In this article:

BIS Slams “Market Euphoria”, Finds “Puzzling Disconnect” Between Economy And Market

you can find the Financial Times summary of the latest BIS Annual Report:

The Bank for International Settlements has warned that “euphoric” financial markets have become detached from the reality of a lingering post-crisis malaise, as it called for governments to ditch policies that risk stoking unsustainable asset booms.

While the global economy is struggling to escape the shadow of the crisis of 2007-09, capital markets are “extraordinarily buoyant”, the Basel-based bank said, in part because of the ultra-low-rate monetary policy being pursued around the world…calling for policy makers to halt the steady rise in debt burdens around the world and embark on reforms to boost productivity.

In its annual report, the BIS also warned of the risks brewing in emerging markets, setting out early warning indicators of possible banking crises in a number of jurisdictions, including most notably China.

So there you have it, the ultimate insider organization saying what the surly blogs have been saying for years: stock and bond markets are wildly detached from economic reality, central banks are keeping interest rates too low and printing too much money, expect banks to fail all over the world, especially in places like China, etc.

Next, speaking of bank failures, the EU, US, and UK (I think an appropriate pronounceable acronym for this particular axis of evil is EUUSUK) have decided to “show us their feelings” about bank bailouts and have come clean about their attempt to get all countries to go along with their scheme to replace bank bailouts with bail-ins, through which, if you have money in a bank that fails, they are going to steal a bunch of your money to save the bank, like they did in the test case, Cyprus:

Bank Of England Leads Push For Deposit Confiscation – Japan, China, Russia Against Bail-Ins

They are pushing all major countries to go along with this plan for an obvious reason: Let’s say you are a global corporation or a gazillionaire and can place your money in whatever countries you choose. Why would you keep your money in countries where you could lose a lot of money in a bail-in? You wouldn’t be such a fool, of course, you’d move that money to safer countries, or into safer forms such as gold. However, the EUUSUK axis is being brutally honest here about their intent. Perhaps people living within the axis will be helped by the reluctance of the Asians and Russians to go along with this draconian plan to continue saving reckless banks by theft from regular people; but I doubt it.

Let’s call it a day and save more of this new-found realism and truth-telling for Part 2.

A brief comment on the metals

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Thundering Heard

This is strictly an opinion piece, I will not try to prove my case with links, charts, and so forth. An attempt to prove the case would be seriously lengthy, a project for which I don’t currently have the time and which I doubt most would want to read.

There is a very bright golden light on the horizon for precious metal prices, but that light is on the horizon (let’s say the first half of August), not right here. In other words, I think prices will drop first before they start rising in a serious way. I see four separate price, time, and trend patterns that include an expectation that price falls first before it takes off to the upside in a big way. And these patterns are supported by the seasonal pattern for gold which shows prices typically falling in the Summer and then turning up sometime in August.

So for anyone who has savings to deploy in the metals, the setup is ideal: you should get lower prices over the next couple of months for your buying, with an expectation that your buying will be followed by the start of a major price rally, that is, the prices available over the next several weeks should be quite a bargain.

For those of you who bought your metals years back–hopefully at prices that are still well below where they are now–and who have no additional buying power, you’ll need to be patient here, but as implied above, a price drop dead ahead will be an elegant completion of major recognizable patterns (based on four entirely different types of calculations) that have an exceedingly high probability of being the end of this general price downmove that started in late 2011. These patterns all clearly indicate that the bull market in metals that started early in this century still has many years to run, and that the best upward price movement is definitely still ahead of us.

Of course this could all be wrong if some huge war breaks out, in which case prices could go up and never look back. But if things are allowed to work out with “only” the normal amount of accelerating instability that is the most important trend of our time, then these reliable price, time, and trend patterns are likely to complete as outlined above. In any case, no matter what, prices should turn up for good later in the Summer.

This post is an attempt to keep emotions out of the precious metals picture so that as many of us as possible own some when we will all truly need them down the road. (I am serious about the word need; my repeated posting about gold and silver has nothing to do with an “investment scheme” to get rich quick or with having the “right asset class in your diversified portfolio,” I am talking about what people will soon need.) As their propaganda on this topic and their dirty tricks clearly show, the Powers That Were want you to get emotional and make the mistake of avoiding or selling physical metals so that they can accumulate more metals for themselves at low prices. I’m hoping that everyone who reads Thundering Heard is well prepared to fend off, or even capitalize on, their tricks.

Get ready for “socially beneficial discrimination” on the internet

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Thundering Heard

If the Obama administration’s FCC (the US Federal Communications Commission) has its way, the web sites of rich companies and large corporations will work fabulously on the web, and the sites of everyone else will work poorly or not at all. What better way to enshrine the status quo than by giving available internet bandwidth to rich corporations and denying it to everyone else. What better way to grace our minds with only the “right” opinions and news, and to censor dissent, inconvenient content, and those pesky “conspiracy theories” that keep turning out to be true.

That’s what the FCC is proposing: the end of what’s called Net Neutrality, under which all web sites have equal access to internet bandwidth. Obama repeatedly stated his support for Net Neutrality while campaigning, but I guess he has forgotten that for some reason, which is odd since here is a quote from January 2014:

In late January 2014, Obama appeared in a Google Hangout session as part of a “virtual whistle-stop tour.” In response to a Net neutrality question, he said: “It’s something that I’ve cared deeply about ever since I ran for office, in part because my own campaign was empowered by a free and open Internet and the ability for citizens all across this country to engage and create and find new ways, new tools to mobilize themselves. A lot of that couldn’t have been done if there were a lot of commercial barriers and roadblocks. So I’ve been a strong supporter of Net neutrality.

The problem is that, in typical revolving door fashion, the Obama administration has stacked the upper echelons of the FCC with people formerly paid by internet service providers and who are known attackers of Net Neutrality, such as:

Daniel Alvarez, an attorney who has long represented Comcast through the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP. In 2010, Alvarez wrote a letter to the FCC on behalf of Comcast protesting net neutrality rules, arguing that regulators failed to appreciate “socially beneficial discrimination.”

What the end of Net Neutrality means is that companies can pay internet service providers for priority handling of internet traffic to and from their web sites, thus guaranteeing that their web sites perform better than those who are unable or unwilling to pay for such prioritization of their internet traffic. And you can be sure that it won’t be long before the government steps in directly with prioritization orders. “Socially beneficial discrimination.” They’ll probably even create a bogus court for it like the FISA court that rubber-stamp approves all government requests for spying.

In what I think is a first for Thundering Heard, I recommend that US citizens sign the petition for Net Neutrality at the White House web site. Yes, you have to create an account there to sign a petition, but if the petition garners 100,000 signatures, it forces the White House to publicly respond to the petition. Let’s force the administration to go public regarding a promise that Obama has repeated for years.

Here is a more extensive and excellent article on the topic by Mike Krieger:

Say Goodbye to “Net Neutrality” – New FCC Proposal Will Permit Discrimination of Web Content

Actual democracy

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Thundering Heard

How often do you hear of a referendum where there is huge voter turnout and 90% vote in favor? We just saw two, both with the theme of secession:

Crimeans vote in referendum on whether to break away from Ukraine, join Russia

Crimean election Spokesman Mikhail Malyshev said the final result was 96.77 percent to rejoin Russia and 2.51 percent against.

That was with an 83% voter turnout.

Venice votes to split from Italy as 89% of the city’s residents opt to form a new independent state

In Venice, 73% of eligible voters cast ballots. The last time even 60% of voters turned out for a US Presidential election was 1968.

And it’s fairly clear that, despite attempts to quash it by the national government, Catalonia will vote to secede from Spain on November 9:

Spain Says Catalonia Can’t Vote for Independence, But Catalans Will Go Ahead Anyway

Last September 11, Catalonia’s national day, hundreds of thousands of Catalans formed a vast human chain across the region to call for independence.

According to a site that tracks all of the current wars on the planet, there are 33 other states working to gain independence from their national government. That’s in addition to the 534 militias-guerrillas and separatist groups who are actively fighting their own national government in 60 countries.

Perhaps people are just a bit tired of the confiscation of a huge chunk of their earnings by massive government bureaucracies that: use that money to spy on their own citizens; pass laws that clearly favor their interests over the interests of the people, including laws that apply to regular citizens but not to the lawmakers; jail people for stealing $500 from a convenience store but give rich cronies like Jon Corzine a free pass when they try to steal a billion dollars; start wars ruining countless lives and costing trillions of dollars, indebting current and future generations, wars that very few people want:

Americans Think the Afghanistan War Was a Mistake, Just Like All the Other Wars Since 1950

It took two years or less for public opinion to turn on the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.

that pad their own salaries when regular people are struggling, as shown here:

When benefits such as health care and pensions are included, the federal compensation advantage over private workers is even larger, according to the BEA data. In 2012, federal worker compensation averaged…74 percent more than the private-sector average.

that create trade agreements such as the TPP, written in secret by corporate lobbyists, covered here by Bill Moyers:

The Top Secret Trade Deal You Need to Know About

that continue playing global power games while people in the US lose basic services:

US Prepares To Provide A Billion To Ukraine As Detroit Plans Mass Water Shutoffs Over $260 Million

Oh how, as we all know all too well, this list could go on and on. The more the powermongers try to centralize all control, the more they are creating resistance as people rightfully try to bring real governance back to their communities. Charles Hugh Smith has been doing some excellent writing recently on how the huge lumbering centralized structures created by government are a very poor match for the complexity (and speed, I would add) of today’s world (The Incompetence of the Federal Reserve and Deep State Is Unavoidable):

The incompetence of these organizations is not a reflection of the competence or intelligence of their managers–it is the intrinsic consequence of their limited control of complex systems. If the system has reached the point of being ungovernable, even the most brilliant and experienced managers will fail because it’s not the managers who are incompetent, it’s the organization itself that is incompetent.

I consider this move toward secession to be trend, not anomaly. Expect acceleration. In these votes for secession, people are getting just the smallest taste of actual democracy, so–and this is the true anomaly in today’s world where the political process has been captured by large corporations known as political parties, giving many people the correct idea that their vote counts for little or nothing–the turnouts are huge and the votes decisive.

I would go even farther: Today’s political process is intentionally designed to funnel the beautiful and brilliant energy of people’s good will–via voting where the choices are poor, monetary contributions, letter-writing campaigns, emotional attachments to issues and politicians, etc–into a black hole of ineffectiveness so the power elites can exercise ever-increasing control. They will fail spectacularly.

A Cycle that Says “Get Ready”

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Thundering Heard

There haven’t been many posts here lately, in part because it looks to me like we are on the precipice of major changes. So I’ve been spending some time finalizing my own preparations in terms of food (backup supplies and the infrastructure for growing more), electricity, water, and so forth. (Hint, hint.) Many think (hope?) that The Powers That Were can keep this all going for years. With the clear acceleration of infighting among the elites, to me that seems like a very bad bet.

So I found this post from Deflation Land to be interesting in terms of us being right on the cusp of major changes:

Why I stopped worrying and learned to love the currency collapse

“For the past 300 years, the historical pattern has been for the era marked by a century to continue into the following century by fourteen or fifteen years.

“Let me explain. Everyone knows that the 19th Century, its uprightness, its optimism and sense of purpose, the halcyon days of British Empire, came to an end with World War I, starting in 1914 and building to a nasty crescendo by 1916. The 20th Century had arrived, and it had some real horrors in store for us.

“But if we return back another hundred years, we notice that the 18th Century ends in 1815 with the final defeat of Napoleon, that final project of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution. With the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, we have a new Europe along the lines of Metternich’s plan, and the 19th Century at last is here.

“In 1713 and 1714, we have the Treaties of Utrecht, Baden, and Rastatt, bringing an end to the era of Spain as a major power, and the rise of the Habsburgs. Louis XIV dies in 1715, after reigning for 72 years. The Baroque period is over, and we are now firmly in the 18th Century.

“We still live in the 20th Century…We still live in an era of Pax Americana, the old republic very much a strained and tired Empire now, with the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

“That is going to change.

“The next task for History is to dismantle the untenable structures and institutions put in place by late Modernity, which have been extended now as far as they can go. Our debt-based monetary system will collapse, our unbacked fiats will be worthless. The debts and unmeetable obligations will all default.

“There are ironies and great contradictions as the former home and hope of Liberty becomes viciously unfree and increasingly despotic. Our leaders no longer govern, but try instead to rule us — they are less legitimate with each passing day, their laws corrupt or worse. They are nearly finished, and will be swept away with the tide.

“Just as in 1914, the internationalist system will break down, dashing the hopes of the would-be first-world nations. We will probably have a pretty good war as well, or many local ones worldwide. These transitions tend to involve war.”

* * * * *

Combine the above with the Wheeler War Cycle and other war cycles discussed here, and it looks like our current faux stability–in which the gears of government and the economy grind on and on with little progress in any direction–will, within months, be a memory. The full Deflation Land article is here.

An Important Whistleblower Event in the Metals

Posted on September 15, 2013 by Thundering Heard

The news came out Friday at 2:00pm (circled on the chart below) that two JP Morgan employees have submitted to the government strong documentary evidence about how JP Morgan illegally manipulates prices in the precious metals markets:

Morgan Whistleblowers Confess Bank Manipulates Gold & Silver

As you can see on this chart of Friday’s price action in gold from Kitco.com, those few traders who remained at their posts late Friday afternoon thought this was a big deal, and they ran the price of gold up $20 in the final three hours of trading:

They are right. This is a big deal. Why?

1. The last time compelling evidence of JP Morgan’s price suppression of the metals emerged into public view was March, 2010 when London trader Andrew Maguire told everyone that he had submitted hard evidence to the government about such manipulation, including sitting with them and showing them in real time just when and how the manipulation is carried out:

It was no coincidence gold didn’t look back from that day and it moved up over $800, from under $1,100, to (over) $1,900. And silver moved up (an astonishing) $33, from under $17, to almost $50 in the same (time) period.

Someone tried to run Maguire down with a car two days later; he was hit by that car, but survived.

2. Many people have supplied evidence of manipulation of the metals to the US government agency that is supposed to take action about such crimes, the CTFC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), but none, at least not that I know of, were employees of JP Morgan with direct inside information.

3. The CFTC has stonewalled the evidence received to date by staging an investigation of these allegations. The problem is, it’s been in progress for almost five years now. They haven’t taken a single action from this “investigation.” And why should they? Anyone known by Wall St to support such an action would be prevented from entering the “revolving door” and getting a cushy and highly-paid job at one of the Wall St firms as soon as their CFTC gig is over. And it is more than highly likely that the government itself is in collusion regarding the suppression of metals prices, so how can a lesser known agency point out that the US Treasury and Federal Reserve are involved in the scheme. But what was revealed Friday was that the CFTC received the data from the Morgan employees more than a year ago, in June 2012, and still they have taken no action. This will substantially increase pressure on the agency to take at least some sort of public action.

4. Allegations of price suppression in the metals markets have long been greeted as conspiracy theory by the mainstream despite the fact that government participants from the infamous Gold Pool of the 1960s admitted that they manipulated the gold price on a regular basis, though as with almost all government people, they only admitted to this after retirement or posthumously. But with so many conspiracy theories recently being shown as conspiracy fact, and with JP Morgan getting caught in multiple illegal actions over the last few years, it is now getting tougher for anyone to claim that Morgan is not acting illegally in any market in which they participate.

The “paper gold” market (futures, options, ETFs, etc.) has been used for years to manipulate prices in the physical gold market, so much so that increasing demand for physical gold is often met by a falling paper gold price, turning all economic theory of supply and demand upside down.

The Powers That Be of the USA will do whatever they can to maintain what is rightly called the “exorbitant privilege” of having the US Dollar as the world reserve currency, which enables the US to print money to purchase real goods from the rest of the world. Part of their strategy has been to suppress the price of the precious metals to mask the deteriorating value of the Dollar. Another aspect is to keep the price of the metals very volatile to scare people out of the metals; they want to make the metals look unstable and the Dollar look comparatively stable.

Last year, the State of South Carolina considered adding gold as an investment to the state’s coffers and rejected the idea because their research showed that the precious metals are a manipulated market so they could not trust the metals as an investment. The state treasurer told the legislature this:

“Similar to other commodities, the value of gold and silver is determined by supply and demand, as well as speculation. The Federal Reserve, London Bullion Market Association, JP Morgan Chase, and HSBC Holdings have practiced fractional-reserve banking and engaged in naked short selling causing artificial price suppression.“

So this testimony from JP Morgan employees is a major step toward gold and silver trading freely without government interference. No matter how old you are, gold has traded freely during your current lifetime for at most a few months at a time on a couple of rare occasions. If you hang in here for awhile longer, you will see it trade freely. And its price will be, to quote a great friend, magnificent.

A Tale of Two Countries

Posted on August 14, 2013 by Thundering Heard

I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time…making expiation for itself and wearing out…
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

In 2005, economist Raghuram Rajan, 42 years old at the time, delivered a speech at the annual meeting of the crowned heads and elder statespeople of central banking telling them how those in attendance were brewing up a wicked credit crisis. After the speech, former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers led the charge against Rajan, describing himself as “someone who finds the basic, slightly Luddite premise of this paper to be largely misguided.” According to Bloomberg:

Summers also said “while I think the paper is right to warn us of the possibility of positive feedback and the dangers that it can bring about in financial markets, the tendency toward restriction that runs through the tone of the presentation seems to me to be quite problematic.”

We all know now that Rajan was right and Summers, who had spent several years helping to tear down any restrictions on the gambling and deception by Wall St banks, was wrong in many ways.

India just made Rajan–who clearly saw the financial crisis coming and had the courage and intelligence to publicly state his case to those who were aiding and abetting it–the new head of India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India. And Obama is considering appointing Summers–who aided and abetted the ongoing financial crisis mightily and who didn’t see it coming–the next head of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve. Summers is also infamous for abruptly resigning as the President of Harvard after losses in the endowment fund, his public statement that women are unable to learn science and math as well as men, and a no-confidence motion from the faculty.

Obama’s alternate candidate for the next head of the Federal Reserve is said to be Janet Yellen. She testified to Congress that she didn’t see the financial crisis coming either. Yellen was in charge of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 through 2010. So she was one of the top regulators presiding over the ramping up of the deranged lending that supported the real estate bubble in her territory that included California, Nevada, and Arizona.

So India has appointed someone with a track record of getting economic things right, and who is willing to risk career to state truth about a seriously dysfunctional status quo. And the US is poised to appoint someone who not only got it wrong about the financial crisis, but who, it could easily be argued, was on the team of architects who helped to create it. Worse still, Summers and Yellen have been in positions of financial power since and have done little to solve those architectural problems that still plague the system. My guess is that they have resisted real solutions.

One would think that Obama would prefer to appoint someone like Rajan, who had seen the financial crisis coming. But that is not the way things work in the US. Those who saw it coming would be similar to Rajan in clearly pointing out the structural problems in the US system, and that would seriously step on the toes of the rich and powerful. That is not tolerated at this time in the US.

And this is not limited to the financial sphere. Obama just appointed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to head a commission to review the practices of the NSA despite the fact that Clapper lied at a Senate hearing in March, telling the Senate that the NSA does not collect the phone records of millions of Americans. He has since apologized for his lie. But how can such a person be expected to objectively review the practices of the NSA? Clearly, this is strictly political theater.

India has its problems. In Rajan’s first speech on the job, he went right after the corruption that is plaguing India’s economic system. India, a nation on the rise, is trying to solve its problems. The US, on the other hand, looks like it has no intention of arresting its own decline.

Pathetic Beating of War Drums

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Thundering Heard

There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.

Hell’s bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?
–1935, Major General Smedley Butler, War Is A Racket

Since the story broke around May 13 that the US Department of Justice collected the phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors for months in revenge for their printing a story about the CIA that the Administration did not like, the Administration has faced an avalanche of scandal. What did they expect? Directly attacking the press with a massive wiretapping operation? The press was rightly furious. Many boycotted the off-the-record press conference (how’s that for twisting language and taking oxymoronics to new depths, an “off-the-record press conference”!) held by Attorney General Eric Holder to explain how they really weren’t doing any harm with all those wiretaps. Sure.

They pushed the press too far. It inspired at least a small number of those who claim to be journalists to live up to their name and unleash the avalanche: the IRS targeting political enemies, the admission that the War on Terror is permanent, that Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress under oath, that the US collects millions of personal phone records from telecom companies, that they collect everyone’s internet activities shown here and here, that the US is drawing up a list of targets for cyber warfare, that the US “hacks everyone everywhere”, and so forth. What a month!!!

So now what do we get? The distraction supreme: War! They’ve conveniently and officially decided that Syria has used chemical weapons (“weapons of mass destruction”) and so now the public discussion will be: what weapons will be sent, where will warships be placed, how many “advisors” are needed, when will a no-fly zone be implemented, and so forth. Haven’t we seen this script before? Didn’t they actually make movie like that? A war would nicely dominate the news. The assumption is that people are stupid and they’ll forget about the illegalities and theft of freedoms from the previous paragraph, and they’ll allow the country to get sucked into yet another war.

Well, are we that stupid? Are we going to let them sucker us into another war that profits the very few and kills the many? In the name of the many? Paid for by the many?

Let’s review some history here. In 1935, the most decorated US war hero up to that time, Marine Corp Major General Smedley Butler, published the amazing pamphlet War Is a Racket, perhaps the best summary ever of what war is really for: Profit! They taught us all that in school, right? Sure.

As Butler predicted in 1935, they were preparing for war, which turned out to be World War 2. After that war, They saw that it would be impossible to keep up that level of intensity forever, so They came up with the Cold War and regional war. That keeps the weapons procurement process going big time for the defense companies, and keeping all those ships and jets and trucks running around the world at somewhere between 700 and 1,000 bases worldwide brings huge profits for the energy cartel.

They succeeded in having a very profitable regional war in Korea. Following that war, US President Eisenhower warned about a takeover by the military-industrial complex. But few listened.

Then They wanted a regional war in Viet Nam. John F. Kennedy resisted. So They assassinated him and soon after there were hundreds of thousands of well-armed troops fighting in Viet Nam. Martin Luther King caught on to their game and started including a lot of anti-war remarks in his speeches in 1968, so They assassinated him. Robert F Kennedy showed all signs of campaigning against war, so They killed him. So then the young people who were being sent to Viet Nam and whose friends were being sent to Viet Nam started protesting that war in earnest. The Woodstock concert in 1969 was the largest peace rally ever held. Since there was no police presence there, that concert proceeded peacefully. So in 1970 They killed some of the heroes of that concert like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. And They killed four war-protesting students at Kent State University. But people still protested until the US government couldn’t take it anymore and ended its involvement in Viet Nam in 1973.

Soon thereafter, They switched most of their attention on the Middle East. The money was flowing in from oil, so They armed everyone to the teeth. Arabs versus Jews, Sunnis versus Shiites, Muslims versus Christians, dictators versus democracies, wow, what an endless platform for weapons sales and continuous regional war, which they have now achieved.

The question for all of us is: if we let them create a larger war in Syria, clearly, won’t Iran be the next stop? And will the Iran war go beyond regional, will that one go nuclear, will that be World War 3?

Will They be satisfied with the steady profits from Their successful creation of continuous regional war, or are They greedy for something much larger?

Folks, our so-called leaders are not going to put a stop to this. They know that the leaders who tried to put a stop to it got killed for their efforts. So our “leaders” will either be the paid salespeople for war or they will stand aside and let others play that role. Either way, the political honchos are not going to stop this. People have to stop it. We have to stop it.

They know we can stop it. That’s why They have to resort to such elaborate hoaxes and false flag attacks to drag people into these wars. So let’s not fall for it. Let’s peacefully put a stop to it.

Update on Metals, Deposit Confiscation, and Capital Controls

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Thundering Heard

…one goal is to get to the point where all market participants understand with certainty that if a large SIFI (systemically important financial institution) were to fail, the losses would fall on its shareholders and creditors…
–Governor Jeremy C. Stein, US Federal Reserve Board, Regulating Large Financial Institutions, speech at a conference sponsored by the International Monetary Fund, April 17, 2013

* * *

“Bank creditors,” as it happens, is a class of people that includes bank depositors. Everything about the rhetoric of banking is designed to obscure this. You deposit money in your bank account…But what you’ve really done is loaned the money to the bank…
—Slate.com

A big price drop in the precious metals. So let’s see, on Thursday, April 11:

CEOs of biggest U.S. banks to meet with Obama on Thursday

and the big selling in metals took place on Friday, April 12 and Monday, April 15. No chance of any causation in that correlation. Nah. Move along. As Leslie Nielsen said, “Nothing to see here.”

Anyway, with all that selling, there must be lots of inventory of coins around. That’s what they teach in Econ 101, right? That if a price is plunging, it’s because people are dumping large quantities of that item onto the market.

But there isn’t lots of inventory. Inventory is very tight, sold out in many cases. Delivery lead times are out to five or six weeks, and that’s if you can even place an order for what you want. Big-volume dealers like Tulving.com are entirely out of one-ounce silver coins minted by any country, and they have been since April 15. You can scroll down this page at their web site to see how many items they normally sell are currently sold out.

And these people make a living buying and selling lots of coins. They really want to do a lot of business. And they are happy to buy right now, but they can’t sell lots of items because there aren’t any available.

This scramble to buy physical bullion coins is going on worldwide.

In Australia:

Golden times for Perth Mint

The volume of business that we’re putting through is way in excess of double what we did last week,” Treasurer Nigel Moffatt said, without giving precise figures. “There’s been people running through the gate.”

In Japan:

As global price slumps, “Abenomics” risks drive Japan gold bugs

But on Tuesday, buyers outnumbered sellers by a wide margin. At Ginza Tanaka, the headquarters shop of Tanaka Holdings, gold buyers waited for as long as three hours for a chance to complete a transaction.

In India:

India’s Response To The Gold Sell Off: A Massive Buying Frenzy

In China:

Chinese Gold & Silver Exchange Society Runs Out of Gold…Importing from Switzerland and London

Now we discover that the Chinese Gold & Silver Exchange Society has essentially sold out of gold bullion, and must wait until Wednesday for shipments to arrive from Switzerland and London.

Gold Buying Frenzy Continues: China, Japan, And Australia Scramble For Physical

In the US:

US Mint Sells Record 63,500 Ounces Of Gold In One Day

According to today’s data from the US Mint, a record 63,500 ounces, or a whopping 2 tons, of gold were reported sold on April 17th alone, bringing the total sales for the month to a whopping 147,000 ounces or more than the previous two months combined with just half of the month gone.

Bullion Shortages Develop As Retail Demand Skyrockets

…on Monday there was such chaos in the markets that some of the larger wholesale dealers had to shut down at various times because of the massive demand on the buy side… Gold and silver buyers are still outpacing sellers by a stunning 50 to 1. There were premium increases on everything bullion related. The wholesalers are now telling us four to six weeks on silver maple leafs, and wholesalers quit taking orders on one ounce silver rounds.

In Canada and Europe:

Massive Run On Physical Gold & Silver At UBS & Scotiabank

At the Bank of Nova Scotia in Toronto the gold window has been absolutely swamped. I have confirmed there were people lined up in droves recently for multiple-hours at a time to buy gold and silver bars and coins….

“I then confirmed with UBS today in Zurich, Switzerland, that they are experiencing exactly the same thing. They told me people are waiting in long lines for bullion related bars and coins. The physical market is incredibly tight…

In Switzerland:

Refiners Can’t Keep Up With Massive Global Gold Demand

If you look at our company, as just one example, we did not have one single seller in the last few weeks.

So during this takedown in gold and silver there wasn’t one single seller, only buyers….

If we turn to the Swiss refiners, Eric, the premium over spot for physical gold is rocketing. Swiss refiners are unable to keep up with the demand for immediate delivery. They are working flat out, including the weekend, and still can’t keep up.

The Swiss refiners are seeing global demand coming in from everywhere, especially from the Middle-East and the Far-East. So, again, this proves that the artificial manipulation of paper gold has nothing to do with the physical market.
–Egon von Greyerz, Matterhorn Asset Management

So, with all that buying interest in real physical gold and silver, why has the price been falling? Because the two largest trading venues on the planet for metals, the LBMA (London Bullion Market Assoc.) and the COMEX in the US, are the places where the price of gold is currently set. And 99% or more of the trades there that are said to be related to gold are not for the physical metal, they are futures contracts that are traded for cash, not physical gold. In other words, these are very large trading casinos. But like the banks, they are fractional reserve systems. In other words, if everyone who had a futures contract for gold actually wanted physical gold for their contract, there would not be anywhere near enough gold to go around. Even supporters of the LBMA admit there is maybe 1% physical gold backing all these contracts. So that’s even more leverage than is used at most banks. A lot more.

Monday, April 15 was a good example. Andrew Maguire–an LBMA trader and whistleblower who the Powers That Be ran down, but did not kill, with a car in 2011 right after Andrew gave testimony on silver price manipulation to the authorities—reported that on Monday, there was a period during which 155 tons of gold was sold on the LBMA in one hour. I can tell you for sure that no one who owned or was the custodian for 155 tons of physical gold would sell it in a panic into a falling market. This was selling of futures contracts that will be settled in cash. They have little or nothing to do with physical gold. People in charge of 155 tons of real gold do not sell in a panic. If they wanted to sell—and such a thing would be quite unusual these days when even central banks are net buyers of physical gold—they would do so carefully, trying to get the best price. They would sell on days when the price was rising, not falling. This is the way anyone with a strong profit motive sells, they hire good traders to sell over time when they can get the best price. They do not panic dump their holdings regardless of price.

In fact, Maguire reports that central banks picked up 55 tons of physical gold during that one hour period when 155 tons worth of paper gold contracts were sold.

Here are Maguire’s comments about Monday, April 15.

At some point, this charade will fall apart. The price of physical gold will separate from the price quoted in these paper instruments. This is already visible when one needs to buy coins at a premium above the spot price of the metal. During these smashdown selloffs (we’ve seen these before in 2006 and 2008), the premium above the quoted spot price for physical gold and silver rises, sometimes to as much as 50% above the spot price if you want prompt delivery. During those periods, the price for physical coins is not the quoted spot price, it is the spot price plus the premium, and that price can be substantially higher. These are the indications of the separation of the paper and physical gold and silver prices to come.

The press duly reported nearly the same quote from representatives of all of the banks. Yes, reps from those same banks that met with Obama on April 11. “Gold has lost its safe haven status. “ “Gold is no safe haven.” And on and on. They should have dressed them up in silly costumes and they could have danced and sang together, at least that would have been entertaining.

So why do they want to scare you out of, or away from, gold and silver? Two main reasons:

First, so that you cough up your goods so they can buy them on the cheap.

Second, when they go to “Cyprus” your accounts, that is, when they want to confiscate some of your money, they want it easily available with a few keystrokes. Confiscating gold and silver coins would be inconvenient at best, dangerous at worst.

Do you think “they’ll never do that here”? Here is the overall order of events in Cyprus:

1. On Feb 10, the Financial Times published the plan for the confiscation of depositor money in Cyprus called Radical rescue proposed for Cyprus.

2. On Feb 11, the Central Bank of Cyprus posted a letter shown at this link saying that the Financial Times article was incorrect, that confiscating depositor money was against the constitution, etc.

3. In mid-March, the confiscation of depositor money was announced.

4. The Cyprus parliament voted against it.

5. The central bank of the EU overruled the Parliament of Cyprus and went ahead with the confiscation. So democracy and the constitution were thrown out the window along with the promises.

On the day after the confiscation, the new head of the EU finance ministers, Jeroen Dijsellbloem, gave not one, but two interviews in the mainstream press in which he said the Cyprus bank resolution was a new template for such actions. From Reuters:

A rescue programme agreed for Cyprus on Monday represents a new template for resolving euro zone banking problems and other countries may have to restructure their banking sectors, the head of the region’s finance ministers said.

The rest of the EU and IMF politicians nearly had a baby on the public stage. For the next three weeks, all they would say was that Cyprus was not a template. We should have put them in a chorus line too. Even Dijsellbloem tweeted that he didn’t say what he said.

But then a member of the US Federal Reserve Board, Governor Jeremy C. Stein, said that if a Too Big to Fail bank failed, that private investors and creditors would have to bear the losses. His speech was on April 17, well after the Cyprus event wherein depositors were ruled as “creditors” of the bank. These people choose their words carefully. I hope everyone out there listens to them carefully.

And it’s worth remembering this: In the US, for example, the bank insurance fund held by the FDIC has $25 billion. That’s the amount insuring $9 trillion worth of deposits. So that’s 370 times more deposits than the amount in the insurance fund. And the insured banks have an additional $297 trillion in exposure to derivatives. So that’s almost 12,000 times more than the amount in the insurance fund. Very safe and sound, eh? Now you know why the authorities have just hinted that banks won’t be simply bailed out anymore; people’s deposits will be bailed in. Just remember, they’ve put you on notice now that you need to determine whether or not your bank is safe. People who spend their whole lives trying to do that can’t figure out which banks are truly safe anymore, but so what, you are now supposed to be able to do that. You can see a chart of the FDIC situation here. And you can find out a little about the safety of any US bank at the Safe and Sound section here. I am not aware of what is available publicly available for bank analysis in other countries.

Also part of the Cyprus event were strong restrictions on how much money a person could take out of Cyprus, the dreaded capital controls. This is also part of the template. When that happens, people are stuck in their own currency even if it tumbles mercilessly in value. When people tried to switch their money into the electronic currency Bitcoins because it recognizes no borders, it doubled the price of Bitcoins in a few weeks. TPTB then smashed down the price of Bitcoins as well, to show people that there is “no safe haven.”

Throughout history, currency devaluations, capital controls, and asset confiscations are denied until after they have happened. Governments typically say, “Sorry, we didn’t want to do that, but we had no choice.” You need to either anticipate them or be a connected government crony. Here’s a chart of monthly deposits into and withdrawals from the Cypriot banking system. The large withdrawals in January and February show the strong likelihood that some people were given advance notice:

Most people were not given advance notice; if the time comes, you and I will be in that group.

Lots of people are showing that they understand. As the stories above show, people were waiting in line for metals at these prices across the globe. We have seen this play before. Sometimes the elites smash down the prices of metals. Did I see it coming? Nope. Can they do it again? Yep. But as the rising price of gold over the last 12 years proves, they can’t push it down too far. If they do, the Asians and regular people will end up owning all of the gold. And the banksters won’t like that at all since they know the financial (per)version of the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

Lots of regular people on the planet take these price smashes as a gift. I think these people are smart.

Here is Jim Sinclair’s latest comment on the topic: The US Will Be Cyprused & We Will See $50,000 Gold.

And the recently-released video The Secret World of Gold, while not perfect, has Andrew Maguire briefly explaining how gold and silver prices are manipulated, and brings up the interesting question of whether there is any real gold (and not just gold-plated tungsten bars) at the US gold depository at Ft Knox. Channeled information agrees that Ft Knox is empty of real gold. It will be a very interesting day when the world finds out about that.

Thundering Heard

Toward Clarity in this Time of Major Transition

Tag Archives: The Powers That Were