© Unknown
A tectonic shift may be taking place throughout the global markets, but you wouldn't know it from watching CNBC. When the tremors start, there'll be a rush to safe haven, which begs that fundamental question:
paper or metal?The Cycles Roll OnOn an almost predictable, totally certain cyclic basis, financial market crises throw up one pat question,
with only one pat answer. What does the survival of our current finance, monetary and economic system depend on? It depends on people preferring fiat money more than gold.
From the moment in 1971 when US president Nixon "broke the link with gold", the dollar floated free and made the cyclic attempts to demonetize gold a permanent feature of the financial market system, and the collateral cause of its regular and cyclic crises. To be sure, the banksters operating this permanent rearguard action fighting reality are not going to tell us when the next "reset" will happen - but it will be soon.
After the dollar was taken off the gold standard in 1971, bankers had to run harder and faster to keep fiat money assets performing better than precious metals, and during the cyclic crises they have to take off the gloves to beat down the rising value of gold against declining fiat money.
Usually presented as a permanent struggle to only bolster and save the US dollar, it in fact concerns all fiat moneys and all financial assets and instruments. Related parts of the struggle include the permanent need to lie about inflation and "positively influence inflation expectations" now featuring the prevention of deflation from eating away confidence, on the other side of the mirror.
UK Gold Dump
© Rex/AlamyGordon Brown pushed ahead with the sale of Britain's gold despite serious misgivings at the Bank of England, it is believed.
As we know, extreme and laughable action is regularly taken, during cyclic crisis periods, to "destroy gold and save fiat". The UK's Gordon Brown, when finance minister at the turn of the century in 1999-2002 embarked on a no-holds-barred and officially proclaimed selling spree of UK gold reserves, when gold prices were at their lowest in 20 years. Brown was following the US Fed's strategy of pushing down gold prices by announcing the sales. There was no interest in "getting a good price" for gold, only the intention of bringing down its price as low as possible.
In less than 3 years over 17 auctions, Brown dumped about 400 tons of gold.
This was the trigger moment for a long and rabid growth of equity and commodity prices, in fact of any financial asset that could be invented and traded. The "historic low" for gold at the turn of the century ran back-to-back with what Wall Street veteran financial lawyer Jim Rickards called the "derivatization of financial markets", the creation of untold massive quantities of tradable paper which as Rickards says are "used to manipulate underlying physical markets such as oil, copper and gold" as well as equities, currencies, interest rates and anything else which can be traded. Soon, the market became much too big to beat, but also asphyxiated and drowned itself in paper.
As Rickards has many times described along with other experts, saving fiat and destroying gold opened the door to an exponential growth of both the size and variety pf what are politely called "off-balance-sheet instruments" hidden by all the major banks and impossible to quantify let alone monitor. And at all times able to implode.
Comment: While this Western ally arrests journalists, the Syrian 'regime' did everything it could to let them report freely in Syria, despite bandits roaming the country and despite journalists' tendency to report the official Western line that a 'revolution' was taking place there.