In a Democratic world as well as in undemocratic nations the political and social consequences of deflation are considerably worse than those of inflation. But the concept of inflation is poorly understood. In today’s world it is thought of as simply rising prices due to shortages. In economics there are several forms of inflation that appear in different circumstances. Full Story
Copper is sometimes referred to as "Dr. Copper," because the metal is used in so many industrial applications and is essential for many different sectors of the economy, from infrastructure to housing to consumer electronics. That usually makes its price action a good indicator of the state of the global economy. Full Story
After the US Supreme Court inexplicably redefined Obamacare to uphold its constitutionality, politics are very much back in the news. And with the all-important US elections only 4 months away, it’s only going to get worse. Interestingly, the state of the US stock markets heading into voting is likely to both predict and heavily influence the outcome. The markets’ impact on Americans’ collective psyche is vast. Full Story
The Hera Research Newsletter is pleased to present an incredibly powerful interview with Steve Forbes, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media. The company’s flagship publication, FORBES, is the leading business magazine. Combined with international and licensee editions, FORBES reaches more than 6 million readers worldwide. The Forbes.com website is a leading destination for senior business decision-makers and investors with more than 30 million unique visitors per month. Full Story
Those that fret about the bailout policies of yesterday need not worry. If, and more likely when, the sovereign bushfires turn into raging infernos the dangerous dalliance with interventionist policies seen after the 2008 crisis will with hindsight look tame. Quite frankly, the financial world is broken, and the only fix from policy-land is to borrow and print. Full Story
Gold’s price has risen because of the abuse and mismanagement of our monetary and currency systems - throughout history, gold has always shone the brightest when trust breaks down, confidence falls and fear climbs. Central banks money printing is out of control - gold’s price will continue, has to continue, too rise in value against all depreciating paper currencies. Gold is up about seven times from its lows more than a decade ago. What’s the upside from here? Full Story
By: The Gold Report and Brian Sylvester - 6 July, 2012
China may be investing billions elsewhere to locate new mineral deposits, but Geologist Noel White believes there are huge discoveries yet to be unearthed within its borders. In this exclusive interview with The Gold Report, White, an independent geological consultant with Enargite in Brisbane, Australia, says China's history and politics have slowed development of its mining at home. Full Story
And it is not just in the Silver markets that Central Bank (and their Mega-Bank Factota The Cartel [see Note 2] as we characterize it) Interference is the Main Mover. Years ago we, and a few others before us, said that Mega-Bank Intervention was a Main Mover in many Markets, including, periodically, the Precious Metals Markets. And so it remains today. Full Story
Something very interesting took place in the first three months of 2012. Last year, the United States was a net importer of gold during the first quarter. However this year, the U.S. became a huge net exporter of gold during the same time period. This information was acquired from the latest USGS Gold Mineral Industry Surveys. Full Story
The NFTRH bullish stance (Dumb Money Sold in May and Went Away) from late May has proven correct. I write that even as I confess to having had moments of doubt about my own analysis in a noisy June that saw US and global policy maker jawbones (and actions) going into hyper drive. Full Story
By: The Energy Report, Marshall Berol, and Malcolm Gissen - 6 July, 2012
Malcolm Gissen and Marshall Berol, co-managers of the Encompass Fund, are bemused at the characterization of their fund as a "Ron Paul" portfolio, but they do not deny it. Their faith in hard assets—gold, silver, uranium, antimony, other strategic metals—and resource equities—oil and natural gas—remains firm. But investors, they say, need patience and a long-term perspective to prosper. Read more in this exclusive Energy Report interview. Full Story
How much higher might Europe’s latest dog-and-pony show push stocks, bullion and oil? All three soared on news last week that bailout funds can now be plowed directly into sovereign debt without the pretense that the money be used to stimulate “growth.” It’s tempting to say that the markets got it right, discounting Europe’s apparent lurch toward promiscuous, no-strings-attached, American-style monetization. That would surely be inflationary, right? Full Story
Few observers make the connection, but the current LIBOR scandal is a middle inning of two important events. The first is the demise of the Western banker leadership crew. The executives from the most powerful banks will be last to be deposed, all sharing an ethnic strain. The second is the open fracture of the Western financial system. Over the past few years, to be sure a great many people have grown tired of Jackass descriptions of corruption within the banking sector and financial system in general. Well, hear this: TOLD YA SO! Full Story
Alone in the Mogambo Bunker Of Solitude (MBOS), I crouch like a cornered rat in, as expected, the corner of the darkened room, hunched over a pizza-stained keyboard nestled behind crates of ammo, where I peck out my usual Hysterical Mogambo Tirade (HMT), which I have to do because when I confront people face-to-face at the stupid mall or at the stupid grocery store -- to give them the exact same information! -- they get all huffy! Cops are suddenly everywhere! Guns! Tazers! Pepper spray! Lawyers! Full Story
WHY AREN'T young people protesting against bailouts? Younger adults are usually pretty quick to protest injustices, but they're strangely quiet on financial rescues. Few of them seem able to join the dots and see that bailouts are clobbering them hardest. Full Story
In my latest book, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy - How to Save Yourself and Your Country, I devote a full chapter to the merits of the historical gold standard and reasons to reinstate it. What I did not mention and few investors notice is that central banks are already returning to gold as the ultimate safe haven asset. I believe this change in policy, combined with continued inflation of Western currencies, is creating a stable floor for the gold price and an even brighter upside potential. Full Story
The above gold chart it is using a 15x3 box/reversal size or 45 points. What that means is that unless the price decline is at least $45 one does not need to record a down move or in this case put in an O. The same occurs on the upside. Since the chart does not reflect time the above chart was actually started back in 1980 and is up to today. Thirty two years compressed into one simple chart. But it does tell a story. Full Story
Historically gold has made its significant gains, relative to other assets (as well as nominally), not during inflation, but during deflation (Note: I am using the terms inflation and deflation very loosely in this case). These significant gold rallies historically occur when value flees instruments such as stocks and certain commodities. Full Story
Let’s start by stating that the title of this essay refers to the current situation on the gold market – not to the long-term fundamental picture. In fact, up to this day, no paper currency has survived in its original form while gold has been used as money since time immemorial. Every fiat currency since Roman times has ended in devaluation and eventual collapse, of not only the currency, but often of the host economy. Full Story
In conclusion it appears as if the gold sector is gradually coming to the end of the recent bear market, given the technical evidence and severely bearish sentiment. A top in paper assets (the dollar and bonds) would probably be the final nail in the coffin for this gold correction. Full Story
It is my opinion that regardless of Europe’s never-ending debt problems and the United States’ slow GDP growth, the copper market appears tight to balanced for the short-term. Therefore, I expect its price to be range-bound near current levels. If it happens to re-test or drop below the spiky $3.05 bottoms in the fall of 2011, high-cost production will come off, Chinese speculators are likely to buy en masse, and I would expect a rapid rebound. Full Story
News of a "monster" natural gas find in British Columbia has one again highlighted that North Americans need to make a choice. Do we want to keep the huge volumes of natural gas that have been discovered in recent years across the continent landlocked and transportable only by pipeline, or should we develop the infrastructure that will enable us to transport this fuel to the gas-hungry markets of Asia? Full Story
In the wake of my last commentary on the horrendous Supreme Court decision upholding Obama's health care plan, several people have pointed out that I erred in saying that the income tax is a "direct tax." While it is technically correct that the Court ultimately declared it to be an excise, not a direct tax, it is important to understand how it arrived at that opinion and why the decision has no practical relevance to the way the tax has been enforced. Just as it has done with Obamacare, the Court concocted a technically constitutional pathway to allow the government to collect a tax in a blatantly unconstitutional manner. Full Story
While various media outlets and “analysts” try to claim that the EU summit was somehow a success and that Europe’s issues are solved, the fact remains that Europe is out of money. And I mean TOTALLY out of money. Full Story
The gold community has had to endure a substantial amount of pain over the past 10 months, but that situation appears to be coming to an end very quickly. For a closer look at the gold chart, please click here now. Note the flag-like pattern that has formed. The price movement isn’t quite vertical enough to call this a full flag, but it is still very bullish. Friday is “jobs report day”. Gold can gyrate wildly in the days leading up to the release of that report. Note the HSR present at about $1590. If there is a sell-off, I would expect strong buying to occur in the $1575-$1590 area, but you need to be mentally prepared to handle anything that happens. Overall, the short-term gold chart looks very bullish. Full Story
The Good – Most of the good is found among the metals themselves and in particular gold and silver. What can only be described as the “stealth bull market of the 21st century” because despite returns well ahead of most other asset classes most Americans still have little or no real exposure to them, gold and silver still have very strong fundamentals long-term. Full Story
Major peaks in the gold market tend to follow major shifts in the monetary backdrop -- from a high to a low monetary inflation rate -- with a lag of more than two years. It probably happens this way because it takes years for the effects of a large increase in the money supply to ripple through the economy. In other words, the markets and the economy will still be reacting to a period of rapid/accelerating money-supply expansion for more than two years after the monetary trend has reversed. From a practical standpoint this is useful information because it pegs the second half of next year as the earliest time for a major gold peak. Full Story
There is another important factor left out of this research train of thought however; and that is ‘cost of production’. We have to be careful to get this right or we could end up comparing apples to oranges. Therefore to complete this line of reasoning we have to consider the profitability factor. Cash costs are confusing across the industry because they are not standardized. Royalties and other factors vary from company to company and lease to lease. Full Story
Spain may have the best soccer team, but it lost control of its banking system. That’s good news: the success of the Eurozone summit is not about money, but about process. For the first time in months, it appears there’s a sensible path forward. For the budding euro rally to continue, actions must follow words; regardless, however, there will be investment opportunities, but don’t count on the U.S. dollar to carry the day. Full Story
Ken Booth has been involved in the mining industry for 30 years and sees the past two decades of quiet, stable growth that Cambodia has enjoyed out of the world's economic spotlight as an opportunity for investors. The once ignored country has highly prospective geology, an emerging exploration services industry and a mining-friendly legal framework. In this exclusive interview with The Gold Report, Booth discusses why Cambodia should not be ignored by investors seeking first mover advantage. Full Story
By: The Gold Report and Henk Krasenberg - 2 July, 2012
Henk J. Krasenberg, analyst and founder of the European Gold Centre and author and publisher of the GOLDVIEW newsletter, sees no lack of potential among small-cap equities, especially for investors willing to look beyond the U.S. borders. In this exclusive Gold Report interview, Krasenberg counsels patience because "you have to wait for the development." Full Story
Some would say that the gold to silver price ratio is meaningless. Others debate whether it will revert back to historic values maintained at a level mandated by law or policy, or if it will be based on actual above and below ground supply. Above ground investment grade silver is reversed, with five times more gold, while estimates indicate that nine times more silver than gold remains to be mined. Full Story
Last week supporters of Federal Reserve transparency had a major victory when the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform passed my Audit the Fed bill, HR 459 unanimously with all major audit provisions intact. This clears the way for a House floor vote expected sometime in late July, and with a whopping 263 cosponsors, the chances of it passing have never looked better! Full Story
As we enter Round 15, give or take a couple, of the heavyweight battle between economic laws and the (not so) Great Keynesian experiment at Normandy and elsewhere in Euroland, one must really begin to wonder what exactly the outcome will be in social terms. There is one point in the entire goings on that has been mentioned by several other analysts in covering the big picture of what ails the financial world that needs more attention and that is aggregate demand. Full Story
The European Union is a creation of global elitists, the Bilderberg et al, in pursuit of their long-term goal of a world government. Whether this is a good thing or not depends in large part on whether politicians in positions of great power can be trusted to behave fairly and responsibly. In deciding if this is the case you have plenty of empirical evidence to assist you in making up your mind, based on their activities and antics of the past several years and their consequences for the global populace. Full Story
The Hera Research Newsletter is pleased to present the following insightful interview with John Embry, Chief Investment Strategist of Sprott Asset Management LP, where he plays an instrumental role in the corporate and investment policy of the firm. Mr. Embry, who is a world renowned expert on the gold market and on gold and precious metals mining shares, currently focuses on the Sprott Gold and Precious Minerals Fund. Mr. Embry has researched the gold sector since 1963 and has more than thirty years of industry experience as a portfolio management specialist. Full Story
By now, everyone has seen the chart of Homestake Mining and its bull market run from 1924 through 1935. Hence, there is no need to repost it. In this editorial, Frank Barbera shows a handful of charts of gold stocks and gold stock indices during the Depression era. US Gold producers apparently bottomed in 1929 while the Financial Times Gold Index bottomed in 1931. The time to buy the gold stocks was when deflation set in. More recently, the time to buy gold stocks and physical (Gold or Silver) has coincided with fears of deflation. Full Story
It's been almost a decade since I co-authored with Ed Easterling of Crestmont Research some research in this letter that later became chapters five and six of Bull's Eye Investing. Although the ten-year anniversary of the book is actually 2013, the current vulnerabilities in the markets encouraged us to revisit the material a bit early, to prepare you for what lies ahead. Reflecting back to yesteryear gives us the opportunity to assess the accuracy of our insights. Full Story
Explosive rallies like the one we saw on Friday are opportunistic, launched to milk the last ounce of buying power from ostensibly positive news – in this case, word that Europe had come up with yet another plan to deal with its financial crisis. Of course, the very word “milk” implies that there were agents working behind the scenes to stage-manage the rally. This is not exactly correct, although it is close enough to the truth to stand scrutiny. Here’s how it works. Full Story
Gold closed in New York at $1,598.70, up $20. Asia took it back down to $1,592 ahead of London’s opening, while the euro stood at €1: $1.2516, holding Friday’s gains. Gold had risen 17 showing strength in all the main currencies over last week. The gold Fix was set at $1,596.25 and in the euro €1,263.256. Ahead of New York’s opening, gold stood at $1,591.20 and in the euro, €1,261.76 while the euro was at €1: $1.2611. Full Story
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