Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

    “A lot of people just can’t imagine that the government would fix the gold price. And yet, in full view, the government fixes the bond price, and the banks fix the LIBOR rate. So why is it people can’t comprehend that the government would fix the price of gold (laughter ensues)?”

    “And you have to ask yourself, who would short gold in a rising gold market? In the physical gold market the demand for gold rises consistently. Investors would ride the rise in gold. Do investors go in and short a bull market in stocks? Not unless they want to get wiped out. So why would they short a rising gold market unless the purpose is to stop the rise?

    So it’s obvious that they are fixing the price of gold because we hear every day that there is more physical demand for people who actually want the metal....

    “We hear reports that central banks are starting to acquire and accumulate gold using their dollars, and lightening their dollar load.

    So if the demand for physical possession is strong, why would you short gold in the paper market, unless you are trying to hold down the rise of its price? When the price of gold hit $1,900 a year or two ago it told the Fed that they can’t fix the price of bonds if the world perceives the dollar deteriorating at such a rapid rate in terms of the price of precious metals.

    If the dollar is deteriorating there (against gold), people also know that the value of assets denominated in dollars are also deteriorating. So the Fed was worried that they would lose control of the bond price and interest rates because of the erosion in the dollar price of gold. That is the origin of this policy. The (heavy) shorting appeared then, and they broke up what was a very consistent and strong rise for over a decade.

    If you look at the chart you see there is a very sharp increase, and then it drops down a little bit and is kind of capped. So it’s an obvious manipulation.”

    Eric King: “Dr. Roberts, as the former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, you brought up the dollar there, as you watch the massive creation of money, what are your thoughts on that?”

    Dr. Roberts: “You can’t retain a stable exchange value of your currency while you print it in enormous quantities. So, at some point it has to shake the confidence of the rest of the world in the dollar as the reserve currency.

    We already know about efforts to move away from the use of the dollar as the reserve currency. We know the BRIC’s are making agreements to resolve their trade balances with one another in their own currencies. That’s Russia, China, Brazil, South Africa, India. It covers most of the geography of the world.

    There are reports that Japan and China, despite their disputes over islands, are working to conduct their trade in their own currencies. As the use of the dollar as the reserve currency for transactions or as a store of value declines, then the demand for dollars declines, so its exchange value in currency markets declines.

    The Federal Reserve can print all of the money it needs in order to support bond prices, but printing dollars doesn’t support the dollar price. And the Fed has not the power to print foreign currencies with which to support the dollar price. So the dollar is the vulnerable spot in the Fed’s policy management, and the popping of the bubble is likely to come from the dollar.”

    “I can point out three giant bubbles that threaten the remains of the American economy ... When these bubbles pop, the consequence is obvious: The wipeout of the remaining wealth from bond and stock collapses, and a very strong domestic inflation from the rise in the import prices.”

    “The United States is now an import dependent country. It doesn’t produce its own manufactured products, clothes, shoes. These import items dwarf the import of oil or energy. So what is the potential for happening when these bubbles burst is widespread unemployment, and a rapid increase in inflation, before which the economic policy has no known solution.

    ... It is frightening, and it shows the extent to which the economic policy of the United States is misused in support of four or five big banks that are ‘too big to fail’ ... We now have one bank, JP Morgan, which has derivative exposure equal to the (entire) world’s GDP....

    “Unless these derivatives all net-out in some way, the bank (JP Morgan) has no way of covering its exposure ... When you have your top policymakers so utterly incompetent, well, then you are going to be in a huge mess ... So they’ve gone from one crisis to putting in place the foundation of a much bigger crisis.

    There is no way for them to avoid it unless people think that dollars can be printed indefinitely without any effect on the value of the dollar. But of course the demand for dollars is not growing in keeping with the supply. So we have a potential massive crisis waiting to happen, but you can never predict what sets something like that off.”

    Eric King: “Why are you coming out and speaking like this? It seems a very dangerous time and place in history to be so vocal.”

    Dr. Roberts: “I don’t want everything to go to ruin. What kind of social or political stability would you have if you have large numbers of people out of work and rising prices? You are talking about massive problems.

    Nothing and no one would be safe anywhere. This type of situation is extremely dangerous. The world has never seen it before. There are no economic policy solutions. You can’t deal with it by cutting spending because you already have high unemployment.

    How are you (the Fed) going to contain the inflation? Are you going to jack interest rates up and wreck what little is left of the economy? The whole thing is a disaster waiting to happen. And they (mainstream media and government officials) avoid it. There is no talk about it. It’s so obvious. How can you not see it? And yet they never mention it. So I just feel compelled. It’s my responsibility to mention it.”

    http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldne..._Collapse.html

  • #2
    Re: PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

    Originally posted by don View Post
    ...The Federal Reserve can print all of the money it needs in order to support bond prices, but printing dollars doesn’t support the dollar price. And the Fed has not the power to print foreign currencies with which to support the dollar price. So the dollar is the vulnerable spot in the Fed’s policy management, and the popping of the bubble is likely to come from the dollar.”...

    ...There is no way for them to avoid it unless people think that dollars can be printed indefinitely without any effect on the value of the dollar. But of course the demand for dollars is not growing in keeping with the supply. So we have a potential massive crisis waiting to happen, but you can never predict what sets something like that off.”...
    Well, we can't claim we weren't warned:

    "We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power."
    -- Alan Greenspan (prior Chairman of the Federal Reserve US Central Bank), appearing before the Senate Banking Committee on February 15, 2005, in response to Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island on the topic of funding Social Security --

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

      Re PCR: I'm envisioning EJ's facepalm.

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

        Originally posted by pianodoctor View Post
        Re PCR: I'm envisioning EJ's facepalm.
        As usual, I'm missing something. Care to elaborate?

        Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

        Comment


        • #5
          Re: PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

          The speculation of gov't gold price fixing based on no evidence as opposed to EJ's well-researched analysis on why the price of gold is behaving as it is.

          Comment


          • #6
            Re: PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

            Originally posted by pianodoctor View Post
            The speculation of gov't gold price fixing based on no evidence as opposed to EJ's well-researched analysis on why the price of gold is behaving as it is.
            I thought this line in the interview was hilarious:

            "...If you look at the chart you see there is a very sharp increase, and then it drops down a little bit and is kind of capped. So it’s an obvious manipulation.”

            I am not much of a chartist, but there are a bazillion examples of the same chart pattern for different commodities and companies over time...so the manipulators of the market are pretty busy...

            Comment


            • #7
              Re: PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

              Originally posted by pianodoctor View Post
              The speculation of gov't gold price fixing based on no evidence as opposed to EJ's well-researched analysis on why the price of gold is behaving as it is.
              I don’t care for Paul Craig Roberts and find his commentaries to be a little too reliant on emotional and conspiratorial assertions (something I am at times also susceptible to doing). My opinion though on his style and approach doesn’t preclude manipulation of the gold price as a possibility. I just think he does a poor job of articulating the mechanisms being used, if in fact they are being used.

              In Lords of Finance, Liaquat Ahamed discusses the explicit gold market price manipulation by FDR. I know that was then, this is now, the markets are different and so on and so forth. It doesn’t mean it isn’t happening now or couldn’t happen, even on the margin and when desired, perhaps for short periods of time.

              Heck, some expected responses to stopping a run are predicated on policy established price levels of gold. Is it that irrational to contemplate some manipulation along the way to something more blatantly explicit?

              Comment


              • #8
                Re: PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

                Not irrational per se but what good are guesses and speculations? One can always make some kind of plausible argument for just about anything. Litigators on the 'wrong' side of a legal case do it every day. Debaters on the 'wrong' side of a debate do it every day. (Of course both sides can be 'wrong', too.) Politicians. On and on. You can do it. I can do it. But it's not valuable or useful information. It doesn't get us anywhere. Need signal, not noise.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Re: PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

                  Originally posted by pianodoctor View Post
                  Not irrational per se but what good are guesses and speculations? One can always make some kind of plausible argument for just about anything. Litigators on the 'wrong' side of a legal case do it every day. Debaters on the 'wrong' side of a debate do it every day. (Of course both sides can be 'wrong', too.) Politicians. On and on. You can do it. I can do it. But it's not valuable or useful information. It doesn't get us anywhere. Need signal, not noise.
                  Thanks for the response pianodoctor, I generally agree with your statements.

                  I don’t have proof of gold market price manipulation so I’ll just say I agree with you that signal is better than noise and that anything can be debated from multiple sides. I’ll also say that debating for the sake of it without offering new information is useful only briefly in so much as it can lead to different avenues of investigation (much more interesting). Beyond that it is speculation driven debate, maybe more fun over drinks and in a broader conversation on the state of the world (not nearly as interesting).

                  That said, many non conspiracy oriented analysts, on this site and others, have made the case for each of the following being true.

                  Markets currently being overtly manipulated…
                  1. US Treasury market/interest rate market
                  2. US Real Estate market
                  3. Most major currencies
                  4. PIGS sovereign debt markets
                  5. As a result of the above, the US and many other equity markets
                  6. At one point, LIBOR
                  7. Some make a compelling case the IMS itself has evolved into a manipulation of sorts.
                  Manipulation of consumer perceptions and confidence is standard operating procedure by governments and media as is the existence of government managed stability funds.
                  I’m just asking the question, is it so farfetched to suggest possibility of gold market price manipulation.

                  At the end of the day, it hardly matters to me. I still hold the belief that ultimately the manipulations give way to expressions of reality both in the financial markets and economic structures. It may just be a while.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Re: PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

                    I started looking carefully at gold in 1998, three years before buying in. In those days only gold bugs talked about gold. They became anxious and angry whenever the gold market wasn't going their way, which was most of the time for the three years I observed them, and the previous 17 years before that.

                    Starting in 2001 their fortunes changed but the habit of blaming price declines on government manipulation did not. For long stretches, such as in 2006, the gold price either moved sideways or fell. Each time the gold bugs cried "Manipulation!" Each time the gold price took off again.

                    Governments can manipulate bond prices for years on end by buying and selling bonds. They can manipulate exchange rates the same way, by buying and selling bonds denominated in various currencies. But governments cannot manipulate oil prices, at least not for long. The oil market is simply too large. You could say it is the only market bigger than governments.

                    With the exception of the period of the rise of the FIRE Economy from 1983 to 2001, gold and oil prices are strongly correlated through the IMS. Gold and oil never diverge for long.


                    The flat gold price trend since 2011 is related to the USD oil price. No manipulation, unless one views ~$125B per year in oil E&P by private oil companies in the U.S. since 2010 as a covert U.S. government plan to manipulate gold prices.

                    We're pumping a lot of oil just now. But not to worry, all that means is that we're burning it up even fast than we would have if 100s of billions had not been invested, the oil price was higher, and we were motivated to conserve it.

                    Gold bugs need to learn to relax and enjoy the PCO show. Early innings.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Greenspan on the Yen?

                      Originally posted by GRG55 View Post
                      Well, we can't claim we weren't warned:

                      "We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power."
                      -- Alan Greenspan (prior Chairman of the Federal Reserve US Central Bank), appearing before the Senate Banking Committee on February 15, 2005, in response to Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island on the topic of funding Social Security --
                      I'd say Japan is in a similiar pickle. Their deficits are huge, and no end in sight.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Gold, Oil, IMS insurance

                        Gold and oil track well in EJ's chart.

                        But the idea of Gold as insurance against IMS breakdown is somewhat different than gold as oil proxy.
                        The ideas would not make all the same predictions. EJ has put off the IMS breakdown until 2019, so the insurance premium has gone down.

                        The ideas are related to some extent--Bretton Woods broke down because the US started importing oil and the French cashed in their dollars for gold.

                        Roberts left out some evidence: Volcker claiming that Gold was the enemy. (though this is not widely known). Gold is taxed at the high rate of "collectibles". EJ has said the government does not want you to own gold. It was illegal to own gold for 40 years. So these are arguably pieces of a "manipulation" policy.

                        Roberts idea that you could not manipulate bond prices without affecting gold prices is correct. It is related to Gibson's Paradox or Gresham's law, depending on how you look at it. Manipulation of nominal bond prices upwards (by printing money to lower rates) causes currency devaluation, which will cause gold and oil prices to go up.

                        The USD has a respite because competing currencies (yen, euro) are a mess, and also because of debt deleveraging.

                        He rightly points out the significance of regional currency blocks reducing demand for USD, creating inflationary pressure.

                        I'd agree that the chart argument is absurd. I feel that way about most chart arguments.
                        Last edited by Polish_Silver; March 17, 2013, 08:29 PM.

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Re: Gold, Oil, IMS insurance

                          Originally posted by Polish_Silver View Post
                          Gold and oil track well in EJ's chart.

                          ....
                          Roberts left out some key evidence: Volcker claiming that Gold was the enemy. (though this is not widely known)

                          Roberts idea that you could not manipulate bond prices without effects on gold has legs.

                          It is related to Gibson's Paradox or Gresham's law, depending on how you look at it.
                          and one gets the idea that maybe there's something else in play


                          Originally posted by EJ View Post
                          ....With the exception of the period of the rise of the FIRE Economy from 1983 to 2001, gold and oil prices are strongly correlated through the IMS. Gold and oil never diverge for long.


                          The flat gold price trend since 2011 is related to the USD oil price. No manipulation, unless one views ~$125B per year in oil E&P by private oil companies in the U.S. since 2010 as a covert U.S. government plan to manipulate gold prices.

                          We're pumping a lot of oil just now.....
                          and The Question becomes - why just now, like, as in: all of a sudden (since 2010, aside from the frakgas phenom)

                          like its been said: nothing cures high prices, like high prices - and it would/should be easy to wonder (investigate) why the spikes in the oil market immed preceded the plunges - but methinks there something else in play (other than hanky-panky in the comex) - why do i get the feeling that its about taking (political) pressure off the giant sucking sound of The Only Energy Ace in The Hole we - that would be The US - that we have/had since the 1970's - esp NOW, when it looks like china is about to eat our lunch for us in that area, as well (seeing as We, The People paid thru the nose to invent/develop it, owned the technology OUTRIGHT, as well as a nearly inexhaustable supply of the raw material) - and A True Alternative that would not only FREE US from endless war over oil, with endless budget deficits to pay for it, BUT INSTANTLY CREATE MILLIONS OF HIGH PAYING JOBS IN THE PROCESS???

                          but i guess 'job creation' must also fit certain political agendas, so why bother working on something that would be truly transformational

                          one also wonders if The End Justifies The Means -
                          politically - even if it means (another) Major Crisis thats 'too good to waste' - kinda funny who brings this one up - from all kinds of places - esp when we see Who Benefits by sabotaging the only REAL ALTERNATIVE to pumping/burning more oil/coal, with all of its in-your-face problems.

                          (and this from one who happens to think that compared to the wall st interests, that the oil patch has been far more supportive/benevolent of/for The Rest Of US, far as an energy foundation for middle class lives/lifestyles, since not everybody can drop 20-50k on the other stuff - and we wont even get into what wall st and those subsidies are costing us)
                          Last edited by lektrode; March 17, 2013, 08:20 PM.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            nuclear, democrats, etc.

                            Originally posted by lektrode View Post


                            one also wonders if The End Justifies The Means -
                            politically - even if it means (another) Major Crisis thats 'too good to waste' - kinda funny who brings this one up - from all kinds of places - esp when we see Who Benefits by sabotaging the only REAL ALTERNATIVE to pumping/burning more oil/coal, with all of its in-your-face problems.

                            (and this from one who happens to think that compared to the wall st interests, that the oil patch has been far more supportive/benevolent of/for The Rest Of US, far as an energy foundation for middle class lives/lifestyles, since not everybody can drop 20-50k on the other stuff - and we wont even get into what wall st and those subsidies are costing us)
                            I agree that the case for nuclear power is strong, especially the newer designs, some of which use thorium. But it's a big education project to get people to see how different these are than the older reactors. It's just too technical. We could have had newer designs years ago, but the political environment is horrible.

                            Those were interesting stats, indicating that there are at least some very wealthy democrats. But the real question is, whose interests do the parties' policies serve?

                            To the extent that you can find meaningful differences, the democrats seem to be a doing a straddle trade. They want to expand the welfare state, for individuals, but also corporations. Thus, they can make the case that the are "helping poor people", and at the same time cozy up to their chosen business interests. The auto & bank bailouts are good examples of that. I was surprised to find that many Obama supporters think the auto bailout was his most important accomplishment. There are guys like Krugman who come up with ecological metaphors to justify these bailout policies.

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Re: PCR on the Suppression of the Price of Gold

                              Originally posted by EJ View Post
                              I started looking carefully at gold in 1998, three years before buying in. In those days only gold bugs talked about gold. They became anxious and angry whenever the gold market wasn't going their way, which was most of the time for the three years I observed them, and the previous 17 years before that.

                              Starting in 2001 their fortunes changed but the habit of blaming price declines on government manipulation did not. For long stretches, such as in 2006, the gold price either moved sideways or fell. Each time the gold bugs cried "Manipulation!" Each time the gold price took off again.

                              Governments can manipulate bond prices for years on end by buying and selling bonds. They can manipulate exchange rates the same way, by buying and selling bonds denominated in various currencies. But governments cannot manipulate oil prices, at least not for long. The oil market is simply too large. You could say it is the only market bigger than governments.

                              With the exception of the period of the rise of the FIRE Economy from 1983 to 2001, gold and oil prices are strongly correlated through the IMS. Gold and oil never diverge for long.


                              The flat gold price trend since 2011 is related to the USD oil price. No manipulation, unless one views ~$125B per year in oil E&P by private oil companies in the U.S. since 2010 as a covert U.S. government plan to manipulate gold prices.

                              We're pumping a lot of oil just now. But not to worry, all that means is that we're burning it up even fast than we would have if 100s of billions had not been invested, the oil price was higher, and we were motivated to conserve it.

                              Gold bugs need to learn to relax and enjoy the PCO show. Early innings.
                              Two questions arise: 1) REF oil prices-availability: if the fracking technology defers the inevitable fall in oil production several years in the US; what would be the incidence of fracking when it is applied to major oil producing countries: Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Gulf States, etc.?
                              Argentina is already ramping up it´s oil-gas production by fracking, thus deferring fall in output.
                              2) the solution to electric energy mass production is photovoltaic-phototermic. The availability of sun energy is in practical terms infinite, with the exception of very highly populated countries in far North countries (are there any, by the way?).
                              Photovoltaic must be complemented with some form of accumulation. Which can be achieved by different mechanisms depending on local circumstances.

                              Comment

                              Working...
                              X