Alan Greenspan

Citi claims gold is a 6000-year-old bubble, perhaps Mr. Buiter has not seen this chart?

Nobel Prize Winning Economists, Federal Reserve Chair and Other Top Experts: War Is BAD for the Economy

“Ordinary people are unnerved about how money works in a bottomless cyber space. Gold seems tangible, clear and timeless”

Endless War Is the Agenda

With gold already moving today on rumors of an increasingly positive tone towards Switzerland's referendum on the Gold Initiative, Axel Merk notes that it appears widely misunderstood and discusses implications for gold, the Swiss franc and Switzerland as a whole. "Gold is the people’s money, not the government’s money to splurge...gold is a store of value that ought to back the currency in circulation." Ultimately, people should never rely on their government to pursue a gold standard, but consider pursuing their own, personal gold standard.

‘Gold wars’ are intensifying with just 16 days left to polling day in the Swiss Gold Initiative.  If the Swiss vote to revert to having 20% of currency reserves in gold, the Swiss National Bank will be forced to make huge purchases of gold bullion. Switzerland  and its ‘Gold Initiative’ would contribute to driving the price of gold higher - likely in the short term and contributing to higher prices in the long term. Understanding the important recent past and what has led to the forthcoming Swiss Gold Initiative is important and why we look at it today. This context is all important and is essential reading for all who wish to understand the key issues in the debate, for all who invest in and own gold internationally and for all Swiss people.

It appears the rumors are true. Islamic State is set to become the only 'state' to back its currency with gold (silver and copper) as it unveils the new coins that will be used in an attempt to solidify its makeshift caliphate. ISIS says the new currency will take the group  out of "the oppressors' money system."

It appears the terrorist organization known as Islamic State has been watching the fiasco of fiat money and reading Alan Greenspan and Ron Paul. As The Daily Mail reports, ISIS wants to introduce its own currency and plans to bring back solid gold and silver dinar coins in an attempt to solidify its makeshift caliphate. Around 1500 years after the Dinar was first introduced - made from pure gold and silver - ISIS plans to implement the change within a few weeks, changing changing from regular dinars and Lira to golden dinars and silver dirhams.

Last week, we brought to the public's attention a controversial 'missing' section from the official transcript of Alan Greenspan's interview last with the Council of Foreign Relations where he dared utter his honest opinion that, "Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency. No fiat currency, including the dollar, can match it." Well, it turns out the reason for the practically heterical section's omission was "a glitch in the live stream" and CFR has apologized and posted the full transcript. Interesting coincidence that this gold-loving, Bernanke-denying section was the only one to be hit by the 'glitch', we are confident it's mere coincidence...

The risks unleashed by central bank funding of massive carry trades, policy-driven devaluations and currency crises have yet to manifest. When they do, we'll rediscover why traders consider the FX market the 800-pound gorilla that stomps on the stock and bond markets without even noticing the squishing sound.

"This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard." - Who Said It?

For some reason, the Council of Foreign Relations, where ex-Fed-Chief Alan Greenspan spoke last week, decided the following discussion should be left out of the official transcript. We can perhaps understand why... as Gillian Tett concludes, "comments like that will be turning you into a rock star amongst the gold bug community."

"... the admissions of financial danger by internationalists, the sharp drop in stocks at the beginning of fall, the reversal of the political theater, and the fact that mainstream investors now recognize the illegitimacy of the markets yet continue with the scam anyway, signals the last gasp of the global economy. I expect increasing market instability from this point on, as well as numerous geopolitical distractions which will be blamed for the fiscal chaos. Needless to say, the coming storm is a deliberately engineered one, meant to achieve very specific goals, including a fearful and panicked populace, easy to manipulate as the system goes off the rails for the last time."

"Nobody can predict how long governments can get away with fake growth, fake money, fake financial stability, fake jobs, fake inflation numbers and fake income growth. Our feeling is that confidence, especially when it is unjustified, is quite a thin veneer. When confidence is lost, that loss can be severe, sudden and simultaneous across a number of markets and sectors."

"The situation is universal, a consequence of incompetent leaders and careless (or ignorant) citizenry."

“On October 15th 2014, if only for a few short minutes, market forces broke out and the failure of central bankers was briefly evident... There is a very simple lesson that when the markets finally break through the manipulation they move to price in deflation and not inflation. This is key because it means financial repression has failed.” These days, you don’t tend to hear the words ‘failure’ and ‘central bankers’ in the same sentence (unless the topic happens to be Zimbabwe). But perhaps the omniscience and omnipotence of central bankers is somewhat overstated.