Switzerland

Moves will be made to ban physical cash in the coming months.

The U.S. dollar is looking good worldwide and, in fact, so is gold - it’s just that, at present, the dollar is in the number one spot. But, unlike gold, the dollar is at risk. U.S. debt has placed it in a precarious position from which it will most certainly fall. The dollar is not a truly strong currency; it is essentially, “the best looking horse in the glue factory.” It will be the last to go, but it will indeed go. We may have a bit of time before that happens. Whether it’s measured in months or years, we can’t be certain. A gold mania is not imminent, but we believe it is inevitable.

The Western gold space has learned a great deal about the Chinese gold market and global gold flows, though we’re always left with loose ends. For example, the issue regarding PBOC gold purchases; how much gold do they truly have and where was it bought? Does the PBOC buy 400-ounce Good Delivery (GD) bars in London and covertly transports these gold bars to its gold vaults in China mainland, or are the Good Delivery gold bars shipped to Switzerland, refined into 1 Kg 9999 gold bars, sent forward to the Chinese mainland where they’re required to be sold through the SGE gold exchange and from where they can be bought (in clear sight) by the PBOC.

Neoliberal economics is blind to reality and serves to justify the destruction of the economic prospects of the Western World. It remains to be seen if Russia and China can develop a different economics or whether these rising superpowers will fall victim to the “junk economics” that has destroyed the West. With so many Chinese and Russian economists educated in the US tradition, the prospects of Russia and China might not be any better than ours. The entire world could go down the tubes together.

"...there’s an enormous and growing disconnect between the cash and physical markets for gold. This is exactly what we would expect to precede a major market-shaking event based on a physical gold shortage."

The best position for a tyrant or tyrants to be in, at least while consolidating power, is tyranny by proxy. That is to say, the most dangerous tyrants are those the people do not recognize: the tyrants who hide behind scarecrows and puppets and faceless organizations. The worst position for the common citizen to be in is a false sense of security and understanding, operating on the assumption that tyrants do not exist or that potential tyrants are really just greedy fools acting independently from one another. Being the clever tyrants that they are, the members of the central banking cult hope you are too stupid or too biased to grasp the concept of conspiracy. If you cannot identify the agenda, you can do nothing to interfere with the agenda.

The fallout from the emissions scandal that triggered a harrowing plunge in Volkswagen's shares and now threatens to derail the German economy continues as Detusche Bank delivers a sobering assessment, the Green party blames Berlin, BaFin lanches an investigation, and the town of Wolfsburg panics.

In short, the next round of the great crisis is beginning.  It will take time to unfold, but we have reached Peak Central Bank Intervention. When Central Banks loosen policy and the markets fail to respond, you're in the End Game.

"There is a chance that the Fed, like a number of central banks in recent years, may find it impossible to escape the effective lower bound to which policy rates were cut during the dark days of the crisis some seven years ago."

Non-bombasitc overview of the investment climate.  No, the sky is not falling.  This is not the end of days.  

"As interest rates go more negative, market participants will have increasing incentives to make payments quickly and to receive payments in forms that can be collected slowly. This is exactly the opposite of what happened when short-term interest rates skyrocketed in the late 1970s: people then wanted to delay making payments as long as possible and to collect payments as quickly as possible.... if interest rates go negative, we may see an epochal outburst of socially unproductive—even if individually beneficial—financial innovation."

While the U.S. has never had a truly free economy, the new study makes it evident that Americans have far less economic freedom and opportunity than they did in the year 2000. Now that economic conditions are even worse in the U.S. than they were before, a culture of extreme economic control has taken over and exacerbated the growing recession - one that history may end up redesignating a depression.

Our current monetary system is the root cause of many evils of today. Let’s take war, a topic we discussed in this article, as an example. Without a monetary system that creates currency out of thin air, most of the wars that we have had and still have would simply not be financeable. This system is controlled by a few, who change the rules to their own benefit. And as we have seen they use their privileges to finance wars and to bribe politicians. By holding your wealth in precious metals you are rejecting the current system and also protecting yourself from “financial tyranny”. This includes: capital controls, expropriation, bail-ins, bailouts, negative interest rates, market manipulation on a wide scale and massive paper currency fluctuations.

In today's centrally planned world, the proliferation of NIRP means that nothing is sacred - not even a Swiss bank account...