Sprott Money's blog

For the past quarter century; the most effective “stimulus” for the U.S. economy has been a fall in gasoline prices. This is no great surprise, given that the United States had been the most gas-guzzling nation on the planet – and by a wide margin. But times have changed!

A regular reader recently raised a subject (on our Forum) which should be a frequent topic of discussion in our ultra-corrupt societies, but isn’t: usury. Everyone knows the meaning of the word: lending money at “excessive” or “exorbitant” rates of interest. Yet few of us ever contemplate its significance.

• Be prepared!

The Russian economy continues to suffer. The absolute desolation of the oil market effectively destroyed the economy in Russia, which is incredibly dependent on the commodity. Job’s have been lost, the standard of living has collapsed and now the once proud Russian bond, is being attacked.

Standard and Poors, what some call, “the international credit watchdog” slashed Russian debt to BB+, one step below what the markets consider investment grade.

With a sane (and apparently honest/legitimate) government achieving election in Greece, the past six years of European “bail-out” fraud is about to be fully exposed. Indeed, the recent history of Greece, alone, is little more than a road-map of fraud, conclusively illustrated by a concise summation of events.

a) In 2009 and early 2010, the ECB “bailed-out” Greece on several occasions – and then it immediately went bankrupt, defaulting on 75% of its national debt.

The Jefferson Airplane sang about truth and lies nearly 50 years ago.

“When the truth is found to be lies

And all the joy within you dies…”

Restating their insight to make it relevant to our global delusions about real money – gold and silver – and the much less real money we call dollars, euros, pounds, yen and so forth:

When the truths we want to believe are clearly lies,

Then CONFIDENCE in our currency dies…

Three consecutive days of oil prices rising and suddenly all is well again. This is the extremely short sightedness that the markets possess. The bottom callers have come out in droves, screaming that prices will only move higher from here, but will they?

There is a possibility that oil prices may of hit a near term low, and will likely stabilize in the $40 to $45 per barrel range. However, the reasons for the recent rise in oil prices that market pundits have been expressing are simply not true.

Many previous commentaries have detailed the mounting crises faced by the One Bank in its own paper-bullion markets. Invariably, these “crises” are 100% self-created. This is easily illustrated by reviewing a few of its current (increasingly serious) problems.

1) No one has seen the 10,000+ tons of gold which the U.S. government claims to have been storing (on behalf of itself, and other nations) for roughly 60 years.

2) The reason why no one has seen this gold is that most of it does not exist, and of the small fraction that remains, any audit would reveal that every bar had been pledged to numerous (dozens of?) owners.

In 1913 the US national debt was less than $3 Billion, gold was real money, and a cup of coffee cost a nickel.

By 2015 the US national debt had increased to over $18,000,000,000,000 ($18 Trillion), the gold standard was called a “barbarous relic,” most currencies had devolved into fiat paper and digital symbols backed by insolvent governments, and a Grande soy cinnamon latte, double pump, triple shot, extra hot, with sprinkles cost about five bucks.

It becomes easier and easier to translate the propaganda of the One Bank (delivered by its messengers in the Corporate media) because the patterns of behavior of this crime syndicate continue to become more blatant/obvious.

The One Bank does not want to see any ‘defections’ amongst the member-states of the EU (i.e. any splintering of this totalitarian entity). The obvious reason for this is that the EU has morphed into a monetary straitjacket, as a single banking entity (the ECB) controls the printing presses of all EU states. To grasp the significance of this; we need merely refer back to the words of Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744 – 1812), the original patriarch of the Rothschild clan, and architect of the One Bank.

In this exclusive interview, Rob Kirby share his views on precious metals, the manipulation of various markets, the inevitable collapse of the U.S. dollar, currency wars, derivatives and more…

Rob Kirby spent the majority of his career working in financial markets where he honed his skills and knowledge on precious metals, foreign exchange markets, interest rate derivatives, and government and bond markets. He’s also become one of the most sought after writers and speakers in his discipline and writes for many respected online publications including Le Metropole Cafe, Financial Sense, Silver Doctors, and Safe Haven. His website, kirbyanalytics.com, has become a valuable resource of knowledge to those seeking the truth about financial markets.

The world is running out of oil. Peak Oil is a reality, all that is open to debate is how fast production will drop off, and how quickly the world will simply run out of oil. The lack of certainty is due to the fact that (as with everything else) we can’t trust the “official” numbers fed to us, with respect to either global production or global reserves.

The quick-and-easy way to categorize the retail sector of the U.S. economy would be to use the metaphor of “falling off a cliff”. However, such a characterization would be overly simplistic. A more accurate analogy would be to consider someone sliding halfway down the side of a mountain – and then falling off a cliff. This represents the retail sector of the largest “consumer economy” the world has ever seen.

The U.S. government is already bankrupt. This is old news to anyone who has been following the number-crunching of individuals such as former Reagan economic advisor, Professor Lawrence Kotlikoff. The U.S. government, the greatest debtor in the history of the world, claims that it is about to (finally) raise interest rates, which have been permanently/fraudulently frozen at 0% for now over 6 years.

Making New Year “predictions” used to be an automatic, beginning-of-the-year exercise, to the point where readers generally expected such pieces from the pundits they follow. However, it is an activity which has died-out somewhat, a casualty of our propaganda-saturated Wonderland Matrix.

When all that we can see around us is nothing but fiction and illusion, all events appear to be arbitrary – since we are unable to observe cause-and-effect. By definition; arbitrary events cannot be predicted. Thus these New Year’s “predictions” have become a Fool’s Game, and having been burned once (several times?), most commentators have reached the similar conclusion that this is an exercise in futility.