Yesterday, JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the US, reported record earnings of $8.5 billion for the fourth quarter and roughly $35 billion for the full year. These are net profits, after all expenses and costs are subtracted from gross revenues. It is no understatement to call JPMorgan a profit-generating machine.
My interest in the bank, of course, comes from the perspective of gold and silver. The connection is that JPMorgan is the largest player, by far, in all aspects of gold and silver. Always among the top players in the gold and silver space for decades, what pushed JPMorgan to the very top was its takeover of Bear Stearns in 2008 which resulted in JPM taking the place of Bear as the largest short seller in COMEX gold and silver futures. Full Story
By: Gary Christenson, The Deviant Investor - 16 January, 2020
The S&P is over-bought and ready to fall, perhaps hard. Silver prices have languished since April 2011, broke out in mid-2019 from an eight-year downtrend, and are in position for a rapid rise during 2020 – 2025.
The downside risk for the S&P 500 is much larger than downside risk in silver. Upside potential in the S&P 500 is minimal, while silver’s potential is huge.
Time will tell the strength of the reversal. During the past 50 years Fed liquidity injections have supported a rise in the S&P by a factor of 32. Silver has risen less than a factor of 10.
Since the 2008-2009 bottoms, silver is up by a factor of 2, while the S&P is up by nearly a factor of 5.
Don’t bet against the power of the Fed to levitate paper and debt markets. But don’t delude yourself into believing the Fed is powerful enough to boost the S&P forever. Bond yields will rise someday, perhaps violently. Silver prices will exceed all-time highs.
In 2009 who believed the S&P would exceed 3,000 by 2019? It did. In 2019 who believes silver will pass $100 per ounce by 2029? It will. Full Story
I said back in 2003 that the Fed would print money and monetize debt until the elitists had swept every last crumb of middle class wealth off the table and into their own pockets before letting the system collapse. The bank bailout in 2008 and now the bank/hedge fund bailout is an example of this wealth transfer process. The only question that remains in my mind is whether or not the current bailout operation will be the last “sweep.” Full Story
By: Stefan Gleason, Money Metals Exchange - 15 January, 2020
The U.S. Treasury Department announced Monday that China is no longer on a list of countries deemed to be “currency manipulators.” The timing was awfully convenient, coming just ahead of an expected Phase One trade deal between the two powers.
Nobody actually believes China has stopped manipulating the value of its yuan versus the U.S. dollar.
But the Trump administration is apparently willing to accept a certain degree of currency rigging in exchange for other concessions on trade. Full Story
The battle continued in 2019, and rarely has the disparity been this sharp.
And what do we mean?
Well, on one hand, you have real physical gold. This is gold that you store yourself or at a trusted vaulting company. This is gold that you can actually hold in your hands. This is the gold that is demanded at record levels by central banks around the globe.
On the other hand, we have pretend gold. This is the domain of the bullion banks. They offer futures contracts, unallocated accounts, and ETFs...all as an alternative to the real thing and as a way of increasing the total supply of "gold" in what amounts to a modern day alchemy. Full Story
Gold, meanwhile, had its best year since 2010, climbing as much as 18.31 percent. The yellow metal’s role as an exceptional store of value shined brightly in the second half of the year when the pool of negative-yielding debt around the world began to skyrocket, eventually topping out at around $17 trillion in August. On the news last week that Iran launched a counterstrike against U.S.-occupied military bases in Iraq, the safe haven briefly broke above $1,600 an ounce for the first time since April 2013.
In the past two decades, gold has helped investors limit market volatility and portfolio losses. Between 2000 and 2019, the precious metal’s average annual price was down in only four years. Put another way, gold was up on average in four out of every five years—a remarkable track record. Full Story
The New Year has started off with a bang with some volatile moves this past week for oil and gold in particular and new all-time highs once again for the stock markets. All this despite the threat of war, impeachment, slowing economies and massive debt. January is a leader month in many ways as there is the “January Barometer”. We look at what it is and its remarkable performance. As well we look at what is known as the “Early Warning System”, the first five days of January and its record in predicting the market. With the market up during the early period does that bode well for the year? We also examine the effects of war on stock markets. Well war is business and no surprise that markets tend to do well but not right away.
We return with a full report covering usual topics such as our recession watch spread. As well we have our “chart of the week” looking at the history of how long it takes stock markets to recover from stock market collapse such as we witnessed during the 2008 financial crisis. To make it fair we used inflation-adjusted markets rather than nominal.
We are off to an interesting start for the year. And with impeachment, elections, threats of war and more it promises to be an interesting year. But will it perform as well as it did in 2019 a year that delivered excellent returns? There is an old saying that in an up market like this everyone should make money. But how well do you do when the music stops? Full Story
Everything's going up. Okay? So everything's going to continue to go up. The banks are going to throw up roadblocks. We've already got 800,000 contracts of open interest Comex gold. So, I don't know how far gold will go. $1,650? Maybe if it kind of gets rolling, it can go to $1,750 this year. That'd be a pretty good year from where we are. Where I think the real interest should be, for people that want to either have some fun, make some trading fiat currency that then they can buy more physical metal, that kind of thing ... I mean start looking into whether or not you have exposure to the mining shares, not just the big companies, but the medium juniors and the explorers, that kind of stuff, because as global asset managers, who have all this cash, and they're always looking for a place to go. Once the GDX, the DDXJ, the HUI begin to make new highs versus 2016, the floodgates are going to open and money's going to come pouring into the sector and it all has to pass through a little tiny funnel because there's only so many places it can go. Full Story
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