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Given the increasingly politicized interplay (cancer) of central bank policy and so-called free market price discovery, it’s becoming increasingly more important to track the actions of central bankers rather than just traditional market signals alone.

Like it or not, the Fed is the market.

Toward this end, we’ve had some substantive fun deciphering the past, current and future implications of “forward guidance” from our openly mis-guided crop of central bankers, most notably Greenspan, Bernanke and Powell.

But let’s not forget Janet Yellen.

As we see below, translating Yellen-speak into blunt speak tells us a heck of a lot about the future.

The Open and Obvious Debt Crisis

Back in 2018, Janet Yellen (former Fed Chairwoman and current Treasury Secretary, eh hmmm) along with Jason Furman (current Biden economic advisor) observed in a Washington Post Op-Ed that, “a U.S. debt crisis is coming, but don’t blame entitlements.”

As I like to say, “that’s rich.”

As in all things economic, the motives and thinking coming out of DC are largely political, which means they are self-serving, partisan and predominantly disastrous.

As for translating Yellen’s political-speak into honest English, the motives for this 2018 warning were two-fold: 1) Yellen and Furman were making a partisan attack on Trump’s then $1T budget proposal, and 2) Yellen actually believed what she said and that the US was indeed careening toward “a debt crisis.”

In fact, we were already in a debt crisis in 2018, a crisis which has simply risen to much higher orders of magnitude in the three short years since Yellen’s “warning” was made.

Stated otherwise, Yellen will get her debt crisis. It’s ticking right in front of her.

Tracking the Debt Trail

Ironically, the most obvious metrics of the current and ever-expanding debt crisis began just months after Yellen’s infamous Op-Ed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Everything is On Fire

May 20, 2021

EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE

“Everything is on fire” – Heraclitus (535-475 BC)

What Heraclitus meant was that the world is in a constant state of flux. But the big problem in the next few years is that the world will experience a fire of a magnitude never seen before in history.

I have in many articles and interviews pointed out how predictable events are (and people). This is particularly true in the world economy. Empires come and go, economies boom and bust and new currencies come and without fail always go. All this happens with regularity.

A GLOBAL FIRE IS COMING

But at certain times in history, the fire will be cataclysmic. And that is where the world is now.

Explosive fires have started everywhere already. Stock markets are on fire and so are property markets, as well as bond and debt markets. The problem is that fires are initially explosive but always end up implosive.

So right now we are in the explosive phase of the fires with markets all going parabolically exponential or should it be exponentially parabolic!

We are now at the end of a secular bull market in the world economy which on a global level has reached extremes never seen before in history.

Never before has the world seen an explosive fire of this magnitude, fuelled by uber-profligate money printing and credit expansion by central and commercial banks.

We have talked about inflation running wild and it is not just happening in stocks. Property markets are literarily exploding, especially the high end. We see this all over the world and not just in the US. In the UK for example, HSBC stated that March saw the highest number of mortgages EVER issued…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Keep It Simple: Gold vs. a Mad World

May 11, 2021

Keep It Simple: Gold vs. a Mad World

Psychologists, poets and philosophers have written for centuries that many who have eyes refuse to see, and many who can think, refuse to think clearly–all for the simple reason that some truths, like the sun, are just too hard to look straight into.

Or as others have said more bluntly: “Truth is like poetry—everyone [fricking] hates it.”

When it comes to bloated markets, debt orgies and helicopter money, the rising fun of such “stimulus” is embraced, yet the template for its equally market-tanking, social-destroying and currency-debasing consequences are simply ignored.

The same is true when it comes to the “great inflation debate,” which is simply no longer a debate but a neon-screaming reality playing out in real time and growing more pernicious before eyes otherwise blinded by calming Fed-speak and bogus inflation scales.

Each passing day, the evidence of the inflationary cancer beneath the smiling surface of our still rising markets and “recovering/opening” economy increases, and thus, like it or not, the inflation topic just won’t and can’t be over-stated enough.

In short: Here I go again with the inflation thing…

From the Grocer to Buffet: Inflation is Obvious

Extreme US “stimulus,” vaccine rollouts, Europe’s eventual reopening, and rising commodity costs are accelerating the inflationary tailwinds which everyone from grocery store clerks and home builders to Warren Buffet can no longer deny or ignore.

As facts rather than theories confirm, commodity prices have surged from steel to copper, or corn to lumber while precious metals steadily rise against COMEX price fixers, CPI lies and other unsustainable boots to the neck of a coiled gold market positioned for big moves into late 2021 and beyond.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The $2.3 Quadrilliion Global Timebomb

April 19, 2021

THE $2.3 QUADRILLION GLOBAL TIMEBOMB

Credit Suisse is hours from collapse and the consequences could be a systemic failure of the financial system.

Disappointingly, my dream last night stopped there. So unfortunately I didn’t experience what actually happened.

As I warned in last week’s article on Archegos and Credit Suisse, investment banks have created a timebomb with the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives monster.

A few years ago, the BIS (Bank of International Settlement) in Basel reduced the $1.5 quadrillion to $600 trillion with a pen stroke. But the real gross figure was still $1.5q at the time. According to my sources, the real figure today is probably over $2 quadrillion.

A major part of the outstanding derivatives are OTC (over the counter) and hidden in off balance sheet special purpose vehicles.

LEVERAGED ASSETS JUST GO UP IN SMOKE

The $30 billion in Archegos derivatives that went up in smoke over a weekend is just the tip of the iceberg. The hedge fund Archegos lost everything and the normal uber-leveraged players Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Nomura etc lost at least $30 billion.

These investment banks are making casino bets that they can’t afford to lose. What their boards and top management don’t realise or understand is that the traders, supported by easily manipulated risk managers, are betting the bank on a daily basis.

Most of these ludicrously high bets are in the derivatives market. The management doesn’t understand how they work or what the risks are and the account managers and traders can bet billions on a daily basis with no skin in the game but massive potential upside if nothing goes wrong.

DEUTSCHE BANK – DERIVATIVES 600X EQUITY

But we are now entering an era when things will go wrong. The leverage is just too high and the bets totally out of proportion to the equity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Disoreder Will Come–As Confucious Warned

April 5, 2021

DISORDER WILL COME – AS CONFUCIUS WARNED

When bubbles burst, we will discover how very few superior men there actually are – as defined by Confucius:

“The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved.” – Confucius

Superior man can exist at many different levels in society, not necessarily linked to money or investments. There will be many people without money who are prepared at an intellectual or psychological level. These people are probably the happiest since sadly many wealthy people worry about their money all the time rather than enjoy it.

In this piece I am talking primarily about preparedness in relation to one’s wealth.

PS Important Postscript at the end of the article.

FOCUS ON WEALTH PRESERVATION

The investors we meet in our business are people who are risk averse and therefore very much focus on wealth preservation. These investors buy physical gold because they are concerned about the excessive risks in markets. They want to protect and insure their wealth against unprecedented financial and currency risk. Like ourselves, these investors consider physical precious metals, stored outside a fragile banking system, as the ultimate form of wealth preservation.

But investment gold represents less than 0.5% of world financial assets. This means that a minuscule percentage of investors insure their wealth in gold. This is clearly surprising bearing in mind that over 5,000 years gold is the only money that has survived.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Egon von Greyerz, gold switzerland, inflation, risk, gold, precious metals, wealth, financial bubble, bubble, currency, banking system

Things That Make Me Go Hmmm: Inflation, Crypto, Command Economies and Gold.

March 29, 2021

Things That Make Me Go Hmmm: Inflation, Crypto, Command Economies and Gold.

Over the years I’ve written almost ad nauseum about the crazy I see (and saw) around me as a fund manager, family office principal and individual investor.

The list includes: 1) an entire book on the grotesque central bank distortions of free market price discovery, 2) the open (and now accepted) dishonesty on everything from front-running Musk tweets and bogus inflation reporting to COMEX price fixing, 3) the insanity of 100-Year Austrian bonds or just plain negative-yielding bonds going mainstream, 4) the open death of classic capitalism and the rise of economic feudalism, 5) asset bubble hysteria seen in everything from BTC to Tesla; 5) rising social unrest, 6) the serious implications of Yield Curve Controland the gross mispricing of debt that has midwifed the greatest credit binge/bubble in recorded history, and 7) the ignored power of logical delusion that so characterizes the madness of crowds in the current investment era.

In short, there a great deal of things which, as our advisory colleague, Grant Williams, would say: Makes me go hmmm.

Speaking of exceptional team advisors at Matterhorn Asset Management, Ronni Stoeferle recently had a compelling discussion with the equally brilliant, and hitherto deflationary thinker, Russell Napier.

Among the many compelling take-aways from that discussion is the fact that Mr. Napier is now turning inflationary.

As we’ll see below, this broader and structural inflationary pivot, now undeniably on the horizon, has massive (and positive) implications not only for precious metal ownership, but also the very structure of the financial world going forward (negative).

In short, the inflation topic is not just an academic topic nor fodder for podcasters and economic tenure-seekers—it’s a critical signal of the repressive financial world staring us straight in the eyes today and heading toward ever-more financial repressions tomorrow.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Matthew Piepenburg, inflation, financial repression, gold switzerland, central banks, money printing, credit expansion

The Fed’s Most Convenient Lie: A CPI Charade

March 10, 2021

The Fed’s Most Convenient Lie: A CPI Charade

Despite a penchant for double-speak that would make a politician blush, the Fed tells us that its primary focus is unemployment not inflation.

Let me remind readers, however, that an openly nervous Mr. Powell came out in the summer of 2020 with a specific, as well as headline-making, agenda to “allow” higher inflation above the 2% rate.

This “new inflation direction” ignored the larger irony that the Fed had been unsuccessfully “targeting” 2% inflation for years before changing verbs from “targeting” to “allowing.”

Such magical word choices reveal a critical skunk in the Fed’s semantic wood pile.

If, for example, the Fed was honestly “targeting” inflation to no success for years, how could Powell suddenly have the public ability to then “allow” more of what he failed to achieve before, as if inflation was as simple to dial up and down as a thermostat in one’s home?

Dishonest Inflation Reporting

The blunt answer is that the Fed, in sync with the fiction writers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), reports consumer inflation as honestly as Al Capone reported taxable income.

In short: The Fed has been lying about (i.e. downplaying) inflation for years.

As we’ve shown in many prior reports, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) scale used by the BLS to measure U.S. consumer price inflation is an open charade, allowing the BLS, and hence the Fed, to basically “report” inflation however they see fit—at least for now.

If, for example, the weighting methodologies hitherto used by the Fed to measure CPI inflation in the 1980’s were used today, then US, CPI-measured inflation would be closer to 10% not the reported 2%.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Sisphean Printing Will Kill Dollar & Bonds

February 28, 2021

SISYPHEAN PRINTING WILL KILL DOLLAR & BONDS

Understanding four critical but simple puzzle pieces is all investors will need to take the flood that leads to fortune.

Why then will the majority of investors still take the wrong current and lose their ventures?

Well because investors feel more comfortable staying with the trend than anticipating change.

Understanding these four puzzle pieces will not just avoid total wealth destruction but also create an opportunity of a lifetime.

The next 5-10 years will involve the biggest transfer of wealth in history. Since most investors will hang on to the bubble markets in stocks and bonds, their wealth will be decimated.

As Brutus said in Julius Caesar by Shakespeare:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea we are now afloat.
And we must take the current when it serves.
Or lose our ventures.”

FOUR PUZZLE PIECES TO CLARITY

So what are the four puzzle pieces that will lead to either fortune or misery.

They are:

1. Stocks
2. Currencies
3. Interest rates
4. Commodities

Just put these 4 pieces together and the conundrum of the direction of markets and the future of the world economy will be very clear.

But sadly most investors will find it difficult to join up the 4 pieces.

ETERNAL PRINTING

Have governments and central banks conditioned investors to eternal happiness by their profligate policies?

Yes, they most probably have. But happiness in this case is ephemeral and will end in “miseries”.

Central banks are now caught in Sisyphean task of printing money to eternity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Institutional Demand Will Drive Gold Ever Higher

September 18, 2020

INSTITUTIONAL DEMAND WILL DRIVE GOLD EVER HIGHER

Embrace uncertainty has long been one of my personal mottos. Because from this moment on, everything is uncertain whether it is your personal health, the stock market or the economy. Sure, we work with probabilities and the most likely is that the sun will rise tomorrow again and that I won’t die today. But we are now at a point in history when trend extrapolation is going to be not only precarious but also both foolish and impossible.

END OF A MAJOR CYCLE

That we are at the end of a major economic and social cycle is totally clear in my mind. But cycles don’t end overnight, if the world isn’t hit by a massive meteorite or nuclear bomb. Whether we are at the end of a 300 year cycle or a 2,000 year cycle, only future historians can tell the world. What is clear, at least to me, is that the end of this cycle started in 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window. Since then global debt has gone up exponentially and now we are in the very final stage of the cycle. This end of the end, that we are now in, was first evidenced by gold turning up at the beginning of this century.

This significant trend change in gold that started 20 years ago was a clear indicator that we are now seeing the end of the fiat money system. Even though manipulated through a corrupt paper market, gold still reveals the deceitful actions of governments and central banks. There is no better evidence than the fall of fiat in this century.

CENTRAL BANKS ARE PANICKING

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Humpty Dumpty System is Irreparable

July 15, 2020

HUMPTY DUMPTY SYSTEM IS IRREPARABLE

What does it take to break the global financial system? Well, we obviously know what it takes since the system is already broken. Broken by debts, broken by deficits, broken by a fractured financial system, and broken by false markets as well as fake money.

So just like Humpty Dumpty, the system has already had a big fall. But the world still believes that this is all a fairytale with a happy ending. No one wants to recognise that Humpty is totally broken and irreparable.

NO ONE CAN PUT HUMPTY TOGETHER AGAIN

All the king’s men, in the shape of the Fed and other central banks plus governments, are desperately trying to put Humpty back together again. The problem is that the glue just won’t stick. Already back in 2007-9 and thereafter, massive amounts of glue were applied in the form of unlimited money printing and credit creation. The problem was that a remedy in big quantities serves no purpose if the quality is poor.

Fortunately for the king’s men, nobody realised that they worked with inferior material. Equity markets only care about quantity and there certainly was enough glue or printed money. So it has been all about quantity or printing a lot of worthless money. Why else would it be called QE or quantitative easing?

HOCUS POCUS ACTIONS

QE is one of these Hocus Pocus words, invented by TPTB (the powers that be), which sounds important and mysterious. But for us normal mortals it should be called MP or money printing. That’s all it is, but since money printing sounds quite crude, the Fed and Co think they can get away with a posh word which nobody understands. All QE stands for is printing money in great quantities.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Can Too Big For Fed & ECB

June 24, 2020

CAN TOO BIG FOR FED & ECB

There are lies, damned lies, and economists. Whether these economists work for the government or a bank, they spend all their time on the computer extrapolating current trends with minor adjustments.

If you want to understand the future, don’t spend your life preparing and constantly revising an Excel sheet with masses of economic data. Collective human behaviour is extremely predictable. But not by spreadsheet analysis but by studying history.

HISTORY IS A BETTER FORECASTER THAN ECONOMISTS

There just is nothing new under the sun. So why is there so much time and money wasted around the world to make economic forecasts that are no better than a random job by a few chimps?

Instead, give some lateral thinkers a few history books and let them study the rise and decline of the major empires in history. That will tell them more about long term economic forecasts than any spreadsheet.

After a 50 year decline of the US economy and the dollar, we still hear about the V-shaped recovery being imminent.

On what planet do these people live who believe that a world on the cusp of an economic and social collapse is going to see a miraculous recovery out of the blue.

This is the problem with a system that is totally fake and dependant on constant flow of stimulus even though it has zero value. Most people are fooled and believe it is for real.

ALL EMPIRES END WITH COLLAPSING CURRENCY AND SURGING DEBTS

We are now in the final stages of the end game. The end of the end could be extended affairs or they could be extremely quick. Most declines of major cycles are drawn out and this one has lasted half a century. During that time the dollar is down 50% against the DM/Euro and 78% vs the Swiss franc. And US debt has gone up 65x since 1971 from $400B to $26T. A collapsing currency and surging debts are how all empires end.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

History Tells Us to Own Gold When Central Banks Run Out of Control

June 20, 2020

HISTORY TELLS US TO OWN GOLD WHEN CENTRAL BANKS RUN OUT OF CONTROL

“Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” happen with regular intervals as Charles Mackay wrote about. It seems that the world experiences more delusions and madness than truth and sanity.

The pattern is always the same. The economy is never in equilibrium but moves in cycles of boom and bust. If these cycles were allowed to take their natural course, they would move up and down in a steady rhythm without reaching extremes at the top or bottom.

GOVERNMENTS’ PRIME OBJECTIVE IS TO BE REELECTED BY BUYING VOTES

But human psychology and hunger for power prevent these natural cycles from taking place. Most leaders, whether they are kings or presidents, all have fear of failure combined with illusions of grandeur. As the economy peaks and the good times come to an end, they know that the best chance of not being ejected is for the good times to continue. Today’s leaders’ primary objective is to hang on to power by buying votes.

And how can they buy votes when the economy is turning down and the coffers are empty? Easy! You just print money out of thin air, as I discussed in my article a couple of weeks ago. The Romans did it, and so did the French, the Brits, Germans, Argentinians, and everyone else.

PRICES DON’T GO UP – VALUE OF MONEY GOES DOWN

Initially, when a country prints money to extend the prosperity, nobody notices that it is fake. After all, they are still called dollars or pounds. But gradually things become more expensive. The popular interpretation of increasing prices is calling it inflation. Nobody actually notices or understands that it is not prices going up but the value of the money going down as more and more which has zero value is issued.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Don’t Wait For the Storm to Pass–Learn to Dance in the Rain!

April 2, 2020

DON’T WAIT FOR THE STORM TO PASS – LEARN TO DANCE IN THE RAIN!

Whoever doesn’t learn to dance in the rain will struggle to survive the virtually non-stop storms that the world will experience in the next few years. The abrupt downturn in the global economy, triggered but not caused by coronavirus, came as a lightning bolt out of the blue. Thus, most people are paralysed and will fall helplessly as the world unwinds 100 years of mismanagement and excesses, caused primarily by bankers, both central and commercial.

2006-9 WAS JUST A REHEARSAL

I have for years warned about the enormous risks in the financial system that inevitably would lead to a collapse. As the bubble continued to grow for over ten years since the 2006-9 crisis, very few understood that the last crisis was just a rehearsal with none of the underlying problems resolved. By printing and lending $140 trillion since 2006, the problem and risks weren’t just kicked down the road but made exponentially greater.

So here we are in the spring of 2020 with debts, unfunded liabilities and derivatives of around $2.5 quadrillion. This is a sum that is impossible to fathom but if we say that it is almost 30x global GDP, it gives us an idea what the world and central banks will have to grapple with in the next few years.

THERE WILL BE NO V OR U RECOVERY

No one should believe for one moment that once CV is gone we will experience a V shaped recovery. There will be no V, there will be no U and nor will we see a hockey stick recovery. What few people understand, including the so called experts, is that there will be no recovery at all. An extremely rapid decline of the world economy has just started and will be devastating in the next 6-12 months, whether CV ends soon or not.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Demise of the Financial System is Imminent

March 18, 2020

THE DEMISE OF THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM IS IMMINENT

“Next five years is not about winning but surviving.” This is the headline of an article I wrote in early August 2019. At that point I was primarily thinking of economic survival. But now the world is facing multiple threats and multiple failures. As I have already stated, the Coronavirus is not the cause of global market crashes but the catalyst.

But even if I have been totally certain that the world will see an economic collapse greater than any crisis for 100s of years, this is the worst catalyst that anyone could have expected. Yes, a global virus was always one of the potential risks but of all triggers, this one was certainly the most unwelcome and horrible.

CORONAVIRUS IS FAR MORE SERIOUS THAN THE WORLD REALISES

Before I talk about markets and gold further on in this article, I will mention some of the horrific effects that are now hitting the world due to Coronavirus. Just to summarise that my market views haven’t changed. Stocks will go down by at least 90% from here and gold will surge to levels that few can imagine.

No one knows the extent of people affected by the CV. China has never given us the real figures. And the rest of the world hasn’t got a clue where they stand. Every country thinks they are in control of the situation until they panic. Outside of Asia, poor Italy got it first and there we have seen an exponential growth of the number of people affected. And still, in Italy like in most other countries, they haven’t got a clue how many people have been infected.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Dollar–From Bohemia to Bust

February 12, 2018

THE DOLLAR – FROM BOHEMIA TO BUST

Virtually no investor studies history and the few who do always think it is different today. The most important lesson is that people never learn. If they did, they wouldn’t be invested in a stock market that on any criteria is now at a bubble extreme. And they wouldn’t be invested in a global debt market which has grown exponentially in recent decades and which will become worthless in the next few years as debtors default. Nor would anyone hold paper money which is down 97-99% in the last 100 years and which is guaranteed to soon fall the final bit to take the value to zero.

The history of money clearly illustrates that “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more it changes, the more it is the same thing). The most constant factor in the history of money is the cycle of boom and bust or euphoria and despair. Cycles are part of nature just like the change of seasons.

But throughout history, mankind has always believed that they know better than previous generations and can eliminate the cycle of boom and bust. This is what the British prime minister Gordon Brown proudly declared before the economy collapsed in 2007. And the Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Paul Krugman, also believes that eternal prosperity can be generated by creating endless debt and printing unlimited money.

But history has time and time again turned hubristic know-it-alls into humbled has-beens.

FOR 6,000 YEARS GOLD HAS OUTLIVED ALL CURRENCIES

Whenever mankind has deviated from sound money, the consequences have without fail been catastrophic. The only money which has survived since it first came into use around 6,000 years ago is gold. All other money has been destroyed by greed and economic mismanagement. I believe I have quoted Voltaire for over 20 years and will continue to do so: “Paper Money Eventually Returns to its Intrinsic Value – ZERO”.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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