Silver Manipulation Quiz

Bix Weir

1) Which monetary metal is the MOST manipulated on a daily basis by the banking cabal?
a) Gold
b) Silver
c) Platinum
d) None of the above

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2) The definition of the "US Dollar" as first defined in the Coinage Act of 1792 is equal to:
a) 1 oz of Silver based on the average weight of a worn Spanish Peso.
b) Three hundred and seventy-one grains and four sixteenth parts of a grain of pure, standard silver.
c) 1/20 oz of .999 fine $20 St. Gaudens Gold Coin
d) 23.22 grains (1.505 g) of gold

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3) Why did Warren Buffett sell all of his physical silver holdings in the 1st quarter of 2006?
a) He thought silver was overvalued and wanted to lock in a profit
b) He did not think the future of silver was bright
c) He swapped it to buy gold
d) He handed it over to the banking cabal when they blackmailed him.

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4) What is the real Silver to Gold ratio in above ground supplies?
a) 50-1 (50x more silver than gold)
b) 20-1 (20x more silver than gold)
c) 1-1 (same amount of silver as gold)
d) 1-5 (5x more gold than silver)

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It's 1980 Again

Mises Daily: Tuesday, February 07, 2012 by Doug French

Floyd Norris writes for the New York Times that it's 1980 all over again.
Discussion of gold has gone from nonexistent a decade ago to the question of whether its price is in bubble territory, and now a policy question in the Republican primary. Ron Paul has been stumping for a return to the gold standard for decades, and the populace has finally caught up.
The issue resonates with young people who worry about a dire future with a dollar crash and nationwide poverty. The gold issue is hot enough that Newt Gingrich has promised to appoint a gold commission, with The Case for Gold coauthor Lewis Lehrman and Jim Grant as cochairman.
When Ronald Reagan went through the gold commission charade in 1981 to satisfy a campaign promise of studying the gold standard question, Lehrman cast one of two dissenting votes on the commission that voted in favor of maintaining the fiat money status quo. The other "no" vote came from Ron Paul himself. As Murray Rothbard explained,

The gold standard was the easiest pledge to dispose of. President Reagan appointed an allegedly impartial gold commission to study the problem — a commission overwhelmingly packed with lifelong opponents of gold. The commission presented its predictable report, and gold was quickly interred.

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The Fed's Quasi-Fiscal Policies

 Mises Daily: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 by David Howden 

The policies that the Fed embarked on in late 2007 are a sharp departure from the old way of performing monetary policy. In fact, it is difficult to state that the Fed is any longer in the business of traditional monetary policy — understood in the United States as aiming for low inflation and smoothed output volatility. A new breed of monetary policies better referred to as "quasi-fiscal" policies has become the norm.
The Fed's policies have a fiscal flair to them for two reasons.
First, no longer are output and inflation the primary concerns. The Fed has framed any reference to inflation over the past four years in the context of either:

1. the low levels of price inflation erasing inflationary fears from pursuing unorthodox monetary policies, or
2. the threat of deflation, thus creating the "need" for monetary expansion to ward off its ill effects.

Inflation has not been a direct concern in the sense that the Fed's role is to control it. Instead, it has been viewed as a constraint on Fed policies to pursue other ends.

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Why Is Global Shipping Slowing Down So Dramatically?

If the global economy is not heading for a recession, then why is global shipping slowing down so dramatically?  Many economists believe that measures of global shipping such as the Baltic Dry Index are leading economic indicators.  In other words, they change before the overall economic picture changes.  For example, back in early 2008 the Baltic Dry Index began falling dramatically.  There were those that warned that such a rapid decline in the Baltic Dry Index meant that a significant recession was coming, and it turned out that they were right.  Well, the Baltic Dry Index is falling very rapidly once again.  In fact, on February 3rd the Baltic Dry Index reached a low that had not been seen since August 1986.  Some economists say that there are unique reasons for this (there are too many ships, etc.), but when you add this to all of the other indicators that Europe is heading into a recession, a very frightening picture emerges.  We appear to be staring a global economic slowdown right in the face, and we all need to start getting prepared for that.
If you don't read about economics much, you might not know what the Baltic Dry Index actually is.
Investopedia defines the Baltic Dry Index this way....

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Buying Gold in Uncertain Times

Bill Bonner 

Dow down slightly yesterday. Oil falling further below $100. And gold still going up.

What is most interesting is the movement in the price of gold. It seems to be heading up again – almost no matter what else is happening.

So, let’s look at what might be going on…

If investors sensed a recovery…they would expect banks to lend more freely…people to shop more freely…and prices to rise.

This would raise consumer prices; the price of gold should go up.

But if the market sees growth and inflation ahead, why is oil slipping? And why is the Baltic Dry Index – which measures shipping prices – at a 25-year low? And how come last month’s employment figures were disappointing? And why aren’t stock market prices going up?

Most important, if the economy is really recovering, why is the 10-year note yielding only 1.82%? And what about the long bond? Shouldn’t it be trading at a yield higher than 3%?

And how come house prices fell over the last year…and the last month?

And how come incomes are falling?

Or, to look at it from the opposite point of view, how is it possible for a real recovery to take root in the hard, barren soil of falling house prices and slipping consumer earnings?

But if the economy is not improving…then there should be no increase in inflation…and no pressure on the price of gold, right?

Maybe investors don’t anticipate a recovery at all. Maybe they’re buying gold because they see the economy getting worse, not better. We associate a rise in the price of gold with inflation. But gold is much more versatile than we think. It protects your wealth when paper money loses its value. It also protects your wealth when paper money gains in value. It protects you when you are right…and when you are wrong.

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France/Greek rescue Attempts/Bernanke speaks:Gold and Silver rises/Manufacturing Leaving Japan

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen:

The bankers decided in the wee hours of the morning that it was necessary to raid silver and gold However as soon as Bernanke spoke this morning, the metals skyrocketed when the world realized that we are going to have zero interest rates to infinity. Gold finished the comex session up 23.60 dollars to $1746.40 and silver rose by 45 cents to $34.17. Gold and silver equity shares languished with despair today as they refused to join into the fun. This is the bankers signal that another raid is imminent. Our crooks are at it again.

Let us head over to the comex and assess trading and amounts of precious metals standing.
The total gold open interest at the comex rose by 631 contracts despite a mini raid yesterday. Again this accomplished nothing as the bankers were hoping to shake some gold leaves from the tree. They will try again tomorrow as long as Bernanke will not open his mouth. The front delivery month of February saw its OI fall 20 contracts from 1083 to 1063. We had 3 delivery notices yesterday so we thus lost 17 contracts to cash settlements. If players have plucked 100% of the contract price it would be unheard of for them to roll. They would have done it 2 weeks earlier or so. For many years, almost 100% of the front month deliveries were done in the first 2 days. Now we are witnessing it takes the entire month to settle upon our longs. This is why I know that Blythe is in there offering cash settlements to roll to a future month instead of the longs taking physical from the comex. The next big delivery month is April and here the OI remained relatively constant at 238,227 dropping by about 600 contracts. The estimated volume at the gold comex came in at 160,390 contracts, which is quite low compared to last year. The confirmed volume yesterday was 144,803 which is also quite low.

The total silver comex OI rose by 898 contracts to 105,438 from 104,540. It is starting to break out of its narrow band width of OI trading. This, no doubt will be a concern to our bankers. They do not want to see enthusiasm building up in either of our two precious metals. The front options expiry month of February saw its OI fall from 81 to 53 for a loss of 28 contracts. We had 67 delivery notices so we thus gained 39 contracts of additional silver standing and thus lost nothing to cash settlements. I knew early this morning, that the bankers needed silver elsewhere as only 14 contracts were standing last night. They took whatever silver they had and sent it off to places that needed it like London England, the physical capital of the world.
Demand for both metals were huge over there. The demand is also huge here if you look at the sales by the mints in both Canada and the USA. In 3 weeks we will be coming up to first day notice for the March silver contract. With today's reading, the OI dropped only 249 contracts from 45,083 to 44,834 so we did not experience any rollovers today. Thus the volume is increasing in the silver comex and it may not be just the HFT traders. Someone may want to get a greater piece of the physical silver offered at any comex location possible.
The estimated volume today at the silver comex continues to rise coming in at 62,071. The confirmed volume yesterday was a touch lower at 49,044 contracts.

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First foreign troops in Syria back Homs rebels. Damascus and Moscow at odds

Syrian tank on fire in Homs

British and Qatari special operations units are operating with rebel forces under cover in the Syrian city of Homs just 162 kilometers from Damascus, according to debkafile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources. The foreign troops are not engaged in direct combat with the Syrian forces bombarding different parts of Syria's third largest city of 1.2 million. They are tactical advisers, manage rebel communications lines and relay their requests for arms, ammo, fighters and logistical aid to outside suppliers, mostly in Turkey.
This site is the first to report the presence of foreign military forces in any of the Syrian uprising's embattled areas.
Our sources report the two foreign contingencies have set up four centers of operation - in the northern Homs district of Khaldiya, Bab Amro in the east, and Bab Derib and Rastan in the north. Each district is home to about a quarter of a million people.

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Massive rise in China gold imports in 2011 - policy controlling the price?

Author: Lawrence Williams
Posted: Wednesday , 08 Feb 2012

China continues to see rising gold consumption with a virtual tripling of gold imports through Hong Kong in 2011, but demand in December appears to have stuttered ahead of the Lunar New Year.

CAPE TOWN -

Official statistics showed a huge rise in Chinese gold imports through Hong Kong in 2011, reaching just under 428 tonnes, an increase of around 260%, but the effects on the gold price were probably tempered by figures which showed that December imports by this route, ahead of the Chinese New Year, were substantially lower than a year earlier at 38.6 tonnes, a fall of over 60% year on year, despite the relatively weak gold price during that month.

The increase led to the usual speculation that perhaps the rise was in part due to off-the-record purchases for official reserves with the continuing theory that China government entities are buying on dips to exert a degree of control over the price as well as raise its reserves surreptitiously. This is done by putting the purchases into a 'holding pot' which means it does not actually appear in the country's official Central Bank's gold holding figures until it is deemed politically expedient to make such an announcement and transfer the gold to its official reserves.

With China's official gold output, the world's largest, announced at around 361 tonnes, but here again believed to be perhaps rather higher than this as reported figures are reckoned to only show a part of the overall picture (although a major sector of it) - see China's gold output and demand could be far greater than ‘official' data suggest.

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Iran, The Dollar And Financial Warfare

In March, 2009, I joined a group of sixty officials from the armed forces, intelligence community, U.S. Treasury, think tanks and Wall Street at a top-secret weapons laboratory near Washington, DC to conduct the first ever war game in which the weapons were not missiles and bombs, but stocks, bonds and currencies. The Pentagon wanted to understand how adversaries could inflict harm on the United States and expand their own power using financial weapons.
My mission was to play for the China team, although I had recruited allies on the Russian and Swiss teams also. Over two days of moves and counter-moves, the Chinese and Russians played a gambit in which a new gold-backed currency created by them would replace the dollar as the medium of exchange for Russian natural resources and Chinese manufactured goods. Many of the established academic economists in the war room were appalled at the audacity of the move to gold, and some ridiculed it openly. That was then.
As a global-macro analyst, I am frequently asked if war with Iran will come and, if so, when. My answer is that the war has already begun. It's not a shooting war - yet. What the U.S. and Israel are now waging with Iran is what experts call unrestricted warfare. This is warfare that consists of sabotage, assassination, special operations, psychological operations, attacks on critical infrastructure, cyber warfare and - the most recent addition to the arsenal - financial warfare.

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In The Bullring With Gold

After prices fell 10 percent in December, many investors wondered if the bull market in gold was running out of steam. That was before Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke swooped in with a "red cape" and fired the bulls back up. Since the Fed reassured the world that interest rates will remain at "exceptionally low levels" for another two years, gold has jumped more than three percent.
UBS described the situation simply, "if investors needed a (further) reason why they should be long gold now, they got it yesterday … a more accommodative policy is a very good foundation for gold to build on the next move higher."
To gold bugs, two more years of near-zero, short-term interest rates means negative real interest rates are here to stay, and this has historically been a strong driver for higher gold prices.
Bernanke and the Fed aren't the only central bankers in the fiscal and monetary bullring. Brazil has cut its benchmark interest rate a few times and China lowered its reserve rate for banks in December. According to ISI Group, 78 "easing moves" have been announced around the world in just the past five months as countries look to stimulate economic activity.
One of the main weapons central bankers have employed is money supply, which has created a ton of liquidity in the global system. Global money supply rose 8 percent year-over-year in December, or about $4 trillion, according to ISI. I mentioned a few weeks ago how China experienced a record increase in the three-month change in M-2 money supply following China's reserve rate cut.

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Eric Sprott - Financial Sense Newshour - Silver

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