Italy’s Unemployment Rate Unexpectedly Hits Record High 13.2%

Jon

The string of unexpectedly bad news in the eurozone continues unabated as Italian Unemployment Rate Rises to Record, Above Forecasts.
The unemployment rate rose to 13.2 percent from a revised 12.9 percent the previous month, the Rome-based national statistics office Istat said in a preliminary report today. That’s the highest since the quarterly series began in 1977. The median estimate of seven economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for an unemployment rate of 12.6 percent in October.
The youth unemployment rate for those aged 15 to 24 rose to 43.3 percent last month from 42.7 percent in September, today’s report showed.

This post was published at Global Economic Analysis on November 29, 2014.

Weekend Reading & Soul Searching

Jon

Below are four posts for your reading pleasure. Enjoy. –Jerome
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MOPE
Submitted by JY896 on June 21, 2012 – 11:45pm.
Don’t buy. Sell. Get out of PMs. We are all fools for listening to charlatans who are misguided/deluded at best, and probably trying to rip us off. The fiat system will survive, as it always has throughout history. Paper money in hand is a great rainy-day option, but we really all should be rushing to the ironclad safety of bank deposit and that old ultimate safe investment – Treasury bonds. There is no manipulation of the metals, let alone the global financial markets. Even if there were such a thing, those behind it are surely too powerful to stand against — hang your head, stay on your knees and pray for mercy. The global economy will work its way through this rough patch, like it always has. There are no constraints of resources, capital, capable workforce or anything else standing in the way — prosperity will soon be here again. We simply have not given central banks and our outstanding civil servants in government leadership — not to mention the stalwart pillars of finance and industry — enough time. We’ve been faithless, nay, downright antagonistic toward our benefactors and rightful guardians.
Why didn’t you say so before? When it might have helped? Where, oh where were you here:

This post was published at TF Metals Report on November 29, 2014.

That Hot US-EU Trade Deal? Destroys 600,000 EU Jobs – Study

Jon

Cutting wages – bad as that is – does not necessarily translate into the creation of new jobs, debt-crisis countries in the EU periphery have shown. But then, who would win in the TTIP?
By Don Quijones, freelance writer, translator in Barcelona, Spain, and editor at WOLF STREET. Mexico is his country-in-law. Raging Bull-Shit is his modest attempt to scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media.
In a 1994 interview with Charlie Rose, the British billionaire financier James Goldsmith delivered a stark, eerily prescient warning of the state the world would be in today if it succumbed to the freer borders and more centralized, corporate-owned governance envisaged by trade regimes such as NAFTA and GATT (the predecessor to the World Trade Organization).
Goldsmith was spot on about just about everything, from the threats posed by derivatives – then in their infancy – to the risks of industrializing agriculture throughout the developing world [You can watch the full interview here]. Yet his warnings went unheeded, as laments the U. S. economist and former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts:
Sir James called it correct, as did Roger Milliken. They predicted that the working and middle classes in the US and Europe would be ruined by the greed of Wall Street and corporations, who would boost corporate earnings by replacing their domestic work forces with foreign labor, which could be paid a fraction of labor’s productivity as a result of the foreign country’s low living standard and large excess supply of labor.

This post was published at Wolf Street on November 29, 2014.

Federal Reserve Confirms Biggest Foreign Gold Withdrawal In Over Ten Years

Jon

A week ago, when we reported that in a stunning move, the “Dutch Central Bank Secretly Withdrew 122 Tons Of Gold From The New York Fed“, and when looking at the NY Fed’s monthly reports of gold deposits by foreign entities, we observed that “we can see that while the 5 tons outflow in 2013 was most likely Germany, the recent surge in gold repatriation from Liberty 33 was the Netherlands. That said, only 77.5 tons of NY deposits gold has been officially repatriated through September, which means the October update, when it comes out, will be a doozy.” Yesterday, the long anticipated October update of “earmarked gold” held on deposit at the NY Fed was released, and sure enough it did not disappoint. Declining in dollar value from $8.305 billion to $8.248 billion, this was the equivalent of 42 tonnes of gold being withdrawn, in the process reducing net gold located in the vault of JPMorgan the NY Fed to 6,076 tonnes. The 42 tonnes withdrawal was also the biggest single monthly redemption from the NY Fed since 2001.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 11/29/2014.

Ted Butler Quote of the Day 11-29-14

Jon

It does remain to be seen if JPMorgan and/or the other eight largest COMEX shorts will add new short positions aggressively on the next silver price rally, but if that occurs at least we should be able to see it in future reports. Highlighting the importance of JPMorgan’s involvement in any future silver short selling, without JPM joining in, I doubt the big eight would succeed in capping prices as they have on every past occasion. And considering the swirl of negative news surrounding big banks influencing commodity prices, it’s hard for me to imagine JPMorgan not beating it out of Dodge City and quitting their manipulative control of silver to the downside. If JPMorgan (or the big eight) do cap silver prices ahead, I promise not to be anywhere near as polite as I’ve been to these crooks until now.

Aside from the radical transformation of JPMorgan from being the world’s largest silver short to possibly the largest long in history, the recent double cross of the raptors (the smaller commercials who were net long) is remarkable in its own right. The forced sale of more than 12,000 net contracts by around 8 to 10 raptors over the past few weeks has probably knocked those traders out of silver permanently considering the estimated size of their losses (over $200 million). There is no doubt these 12,000 contracts would have been sold on the next silver rally and now that is impossible. Mathematically, this greatly increases the burden on the 8 big shorts if they intend to cap the next silver rally. These 8 big shorts, with or without the collusive cooperation of JPMorgan, will have to sell many more contracts short than they would have had the raptors not been double crossed.

I admit that my reasoning could turn out to be wrong, but I believe the increased short selling burden of the Big 8 will persuade them not to even try, or alternatively, if they do try, they may fail in their manipulative intent.

A small excerpt from Ted Butler’s subscription letter on 11-26-14.

  More precious metals news & information available at
Ed Steer’s Gold & Silver Daily.

Gold And Silver – For Elites, All The World’s A Stage, Including China And Russia

Jon

While the Shakespearean reference, from As You Like It, compares the world to the seven ages of man, it can also be applied to the way in which the Rothschild formula for gaining control of a nation’s money supply ultimately leads to that nation’s total subjugation to the elites. It is the elite rent seeking who control the world, and that will not change in the lifetime of anyone reading this, perhaps even for several successive generations to follow.
‘Rent seeking’ is defined as those who spend wealth on influencing a nation’s government in order to increase one’s wealth without creating new wealth. Think of it more as a transfer of resources from any faction in favor of gaining control of those resources to those who have the power to influence. It is an inherently unfair redistribution mostly accomplished by manipulating disadvantageous competition, abetted by those who are in a position to bring about such change. Rent seeking through lobbying efforts is an easy example. The fascist corporate model in the US today, like Monsanto and its mandated use of GMOs is another, almost always at the expense of everyone else.
Think of the Rothschild system of moneychangers gaining control over a nation’s money supply and its government as the highest rent seeking template. China and Russia are about ready to enter that web. Last week, we posited that both countries are likely to be the next world leaders over which the Rothschild system will eventually prevail, [ see Is The Golden Rule Broken? starting around the 11th paragraph.] What prompted that tangent thought was when Putin stated a few months back that he thought it important that the IMF be respected.
Just a few weeks ago, Putin met with Christine Legarde, managing director of the IMF, while the two were in Bejing. Shortly after, while in Brisbane for the G20 Summit, Chinese president Xi Backs Higher IMF Standards. While surprising that the two seemingly anti-NWO stalwarts would be cozying up to the ‘enemy’ is actually not so surprising.

This post was published at Edge Trader Plus on November 29, 2014.

Quick take on oil’s collapse, gold’s drop and worries about an oil-driven credit collapse

Jon

We all know that the major central banks around the world are on the same page when it comes to inflation: They want it higher. One member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, Yves Mensch, went so far as to suggest that Europe’s central bank might buy gold in an effort to ratchet up the inflation rate.
Today OPEC decided to take no action to stem the glut of oil depressing the price in global markets. The oil price is the chief driver of price inflation, thus with OPEC showing little interest in propping up the price, deflation starts to dominate market thinking. Thus the drop in various currencies – a miserable day for the British pound (the BoE is trying desperately to create inflation in the UK) – and the drop in gold.
CNBC ran a headline asking Could the oil collapse cause the next credit crisis? ‘It’s not just the Saudis who could get much poorer from the oil price free fall,’ says CNBC. ‘Everyone could suffer if the collapse triggers a wave of defaults through the high-yield debt market, and in turn, hits stocks. The first to fall: the banks that were last hit by the housing crisis. Why could that happen? Well, energy companies make up anywhere from 15 to 20 percent of all U. S. junk debt, according to various sources.’

This post was published at GoldSeek on 28 November 2014.

What happens when 100 million Americans are not in the labor force? More pressure is being added on the one-third of working Americans supporting two-thirds of the population.

Jon

It is hard to believe but we have over 92 million Americans not in the labor force. I’ve paid close attention as to how the media presents this group and they usually attribute it to older Americans retiring. The problem with this narrative is that it gives the impression that many have the means to retire and also, that many of these are older people. That is not true. Many older Americans are dropping out and fully relying on Social Security so they do not fall into a life of financial destitute. Many others including younger workers are oscillating in and out of the low wage economy. This entire shadow group which is getting close to one-third of our nation is largely discounted in the media. The unemployment rate looks fantastic because every month, we have more Americans simply being erased off the financial ledger. At this current rate, we will have 100 million Americans not in the labor force by 2020.
The race to 100 million
Whenever I tell people that one-third of working Americans are supporting two-thirds of the country they find the figure hard to believe and full of hyperbole. Unfortunately this is the reality of the current situation. We can break down the figures and get a better perspective. Math is math after all.
Here is the population broken down:

This post was published at MyBudget360 on NOV 28 2014.

The Environment: Depleting Resources – Crash Course Chapter 23

Jon

When we wander over to the third E in this story – the Environment – we note two things: both the increasing demand of exponentially more resources being extracted from the ground and exponentially more waste being put back into various ecosystems.
Because we are trying to assess here whether we can justify ever-increasing amounts of money and debt, for now let’s just concern ourselves with the resources we take from the natural world to support our global economy.
Oil is not the only essential resource that is fast becoming more expensive to produce, harder to find, or both. In fact, we see an alarming number of examples depletion of critical resources that almost exactly mirror the oil story.
First we went after the easy and or high quality stuff, then the progressively trickier, deeper and or more dilute stuff.
The bottom line is this: we, as a species, all over the globe, have already mined the richest ores, found the easiest energy sources, and farmed the richest soils that our Environment has to offer.

This post was published at PeakProsperity on November 28, 2014.

Black Friday: A Pavlovian Mental Disorder – Now Medicated by ‘Cyber Monday’

Jon

Yes, it’s ‘that time of year’ and that means we get another annual dose of America’s twin obsessions – those who partake in Black Friday madness, and those who enjoy watching it.
I used to think it was all just part of the human herd mentality – just another twisted expression of crowd dynamics, but there is a lot more to it than that.
For better or for worse, Black Friday is officially part of Americana, but it’s roots go much deeper than many will care to admit, and it’s still a work in progress whose evolution began with the Founding Fathers and is now tossing and turning inside the giant digital half-pipe known asthe internet.

Symbolically speaking, Black Friday got off on a poor foot to begin with, plagued with negative undertones, and hence, it’s been long-destined for a place in the waste heap of American culture. The term ‘Black Friday’ was originally coined by both the Philadelphia and Chicago police departments to describe the mayhem that was unleashed by the first Friday afterThanksgiving Day, as waves of shoppers hit the pedestrian ways and roads, causing traffic accidents and occasional violence. It’s interesting how the cultural herd managed to make the term work though, given that previous ‘black days’ were reserved for catastrophic stock market crashes, on Black Thursday (1929) and Black Monday (1987).
During the 1980’s, mega shopping mall culture became the dominant consumer experience, and melted in with the Gordon Gekko inspired, ‘me, me’ culture, where society was told to abandon anything that was old, stop saving money, extend your reaching distance, get into debt, and euphorically embrace the here and now. Today’s ‘big box’ stores are really eighties mall culture on steroids – more intense, with everything from A-Z condensed under one umbrella.
It stands to reason – that when you squeeze that many people into concentrated areas, and then add in the incendiary element of artificial scarcity, you can expect a certain amount of violent incidents. This is taken to a whole other level when individual outbursts give way to crazed crowds rushing the entrance of a big box, overwhelming security guards and staff, like a riot scene…

This post was published at 21st Century Wire on NOVEMBER 29, 2014.

Retail Sales Declining – Hello European Deflation

Jon

Governments are pretty much brain-dead in their vain attempts to manipulate the economy. They think that lowering interest rates will ‘stimulate’ the economy and cause people to borrow. That has never worked because people respond to the trend and function in anticipation. The root driving force is rather straight forward. Why is there an inflationary bubble? People anticipate that prices will continue to rise so they buy now for it will only be more expensive tomorrow. Japan saw a surge in retail sales the month before the consumption tax rate increase. People are not as stupid as government suspects.
In reverse, constantly lowering interest rates is feeding the deflation. It not merely reduces income for the elderly making savings pointless, but it has been reflected in the decline in retail sales. Why buy today when tomorrow will be cheaper?
Reuters has reported: ‘Special Report: Why Italy’s stay-home shoppers terrify the euro zone’ What is fascinating is that we can read reports like this, yet both the academic community and the political community will not change their theories. Reuters quoted:
‘People aren’t stocking up because they know prices will be lower in a month’s time,’ says Santambrogio, chief executive of Vege, a Milan-based association covering 1,500 supermarkets and specialist stores. ‘Shoppers are demanding steeper and steeper discounts.’
It is really hard to comprehend that in this pretend science called economics, we never investigate HOW something functions, but how to manipulate the economy to compel it by force to do as we desire. Any people think our analysis investigating how things function is somehow off the beaten-path.

This post was published at Armstrong Economics on November 28, 2014.

Italy’s Temporary “Glass Half Full” Insanity

Jon

Yesterday it was the French, with record high unemployment and record low bond yields. Today, it is the turn of the Italians as the unemployment rate rose to 13.2% – the highest since records began – as bond yields continue to plumb new “lower rates will spur lending which will spur economic growth which will create jobs” lows…
As Bloomberg reports,
Renzi said today’s increase in the unemployment rate is partly due to more people starting to look actively for a job. The so-called ‘discouraged’ workers who are not looking for work are not counted in the Istat jobless data.
‘Unemployment data are worrying,’ said Renzi, whose comments on the sidelines of an event in Catania were broadcast by SkyTG24. ‘We cannot deny the problems out there, still we shouldn’t see the glass half empty either.’
Is this worrying?

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 11/28/2014.

The Crash Course – Chapter 23 – The Environment – Depleting Resources

Jon

The following video was published by ChrisMartensondotcom on Nov 28, 2014
Why scarcity will define the future.
When we wander over to the third E in this story – the Environment – we note two things: both the increasing demand of exponentially more resources being extracted from the ground and exponentially more waste being put back into various ecosystems.
Because we are trying to assess here whether we can justify ever-increasing amounts of money and debt, for now let’s just concern ourselves with the resources we take from the natural world to support our global economy.
Oil is not the only essential resource that is fast becoming more expensive to produce, harder to find, or both. In fact, we see an alarming number of examples depletion of critical resources that almost exactly mirror the oil story.
First we went after the easy and or high quality stuff, then the progressively trickier, deeper and or more dilute stuff.
The bottom line is this: we, as a species, all over the globe, have already mined the richest ores, found the easiest energy sources, and farmed the richest soils that our Environment has to offer.

To SNB Head Thomas Jordan: Please Stop Politicizing The Gold-Initiative Debate With Propaganda

Jon

A thoughtful paper was submitted by M. Pryce. Below are the first four pages as well as the conclusion, readers are recommended to read the entire document which is embedded below.
On 23 November, the head of the SNB Mr. Jordan took his opportunity of speaking at the Ustertag commemoration to politicize the debate regarding the Save Our Swiss Gold initiative, which is scheduled this weekend at the polls on 30 November. This politicizing of debates by central bank officials has all become too common in recent times. The duty of public officials of national monetary institutions should be to offer a balanced, informed and un-biased assessment of the pros and cons for the general public to make up their mind. Instead, what we frequently get is a series of biased statements from these officials that are more akin to propaganda and fear mongering.
The passage in question is the one where Mr. Jordan calls the gold initiative ‘unnecessary and dangerous’.
He goes on to say that, ‘The initiative is dangerous because it would weaken the SNB. The connection between a minimum share and a ban on selling which it embraces would very greatly restrict our monetary policy room for manoeuvre, since the SNB only retains its full capacity to act when it is in a position to adjust its balance sheet to monetary policy requirements – in other words, if the SNB can expand or shrink it – without any restrictions. The value of this flexibility in reality has been impressively demonstrated in the past few years by two measures which allowed us to avert substantial damage from our country. First, the SNB supported the country’s biggest bank by establishing a stabilisation fund, thereby stabilising the Swiss financial system. Second, it combated the massive overvaluation of the Swiss franc by introducing a minimum exchange rate of CHF 1.20 to the euro. With the minimum share of gold and the selling ban demanded by the initiative, enforcement of measures like these would have been very much more difficult. Consequently, the initiative would make it considerably harder for us to intervene with determination in a crisis situation and fulfil our stability mandate. For this reason, the gold initiative could result in worse money instead of better money, totally in contradiction to the intentions of the originators.’ [Highlighted sections are mine] Central Bank credibility or Propaganda and Fear mongering Let us put aside the validity of these arguments for a moment. Taken at face value, the message from the highest official at the SNB is that the gold initiative is both dangerous and that it could result in worse money. And this is precisely where the problem lies; there is no balanced, informed or un-biased debate of the pros and cons. These statements are thrown in as a given where in reality the precise choice of words is better suited to political propaganda and fear mongering, period.
From a public official that should know better, these cannot be seen as anything other than sound-bites intended to swing the perception of the general population that is not generally expected to have a deep understanding about the workings of his or her country’s monetary system. After all, which member of the public would want to vote in favour of an initiative that is labeled as, both dangerous and that could result in worse money. Well, the answer should be obvious. However, there is far more to it than that as I will attempt to explain.
The intended result can be read from the news headline of the Englishspeaking news website, The Guardian. Presto, job done!:
‘Fears that ‘dangerous’ Switzerland referendum could spark gold rush’

This post was published at GoldSilverWorlds by Taki Tsaklanos /November 2 14.

The Only Way To Stop The Empire

Jon

The final days of US empire are fast approaching. Perhaps its end will pass slowly and gradually, or perhaps the event will unfold rapidly and catastrophically. Maybe chaos will break loose, or maybe its demise will be organized well and proceed smoothly. This nobody knows, but the end of empire is coming as surely as day follows night and sun follows rain. Overexpansion, overreach and over-indebtedness will take their toll – as all past empires have discovered. Empires are like bacteria in a Petrie dish; unthinking, unseeing, unfeeling, they expand until they run out of food or contaminate their environment with their waste, and then they die. They are automatons, and they just can’t help it: they are programmed to expand or die, expand or die, and, in the end, expand and die.
What does the empire feed on? It feeds on money and fear; your money and your fear, both obtained with your cooperation. It is bigger now than when it faced an actual adversary in the Soviet Union. Russia is no adversary; all it wants is to be a normal country, at peace with the world. But the empire won’t let it, will it? It must create enemies. Who are our enemies? According to the authors of endless war they are North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Islamic terrorists. Are any of them actually capable of threatening the US? Well, yes, but they are all quite easy to deter. But the plan of the authors of endless war is not to deter them; it is to back them into a corner with political instability and sanctions, while whipping up the population on both sides into fear-filled frenzy.
We all know that the US military-industrial complex has become a self-perpetuating and uncontrollable organism, just like Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us in 1961. Everyone knows the phrase and Eisenhower’s warning – it is part of our collective memory. At a trillion dollars a year and growing, with over 1000 bases ringing the planet, it has expanded far beyond what Eisenhower could have imagined in his worst nightmare. We can’t say we didn’t know: he warned us. After the National-Socialist episode in Germany, many good Germans voiced regrets at not speaking up, claiming that they didn’t know what was being done in their name. But we do not have that excuse: we all knew all along.
Nor was it the first time we were warned. General Smedley Butler told us before, in 1933, and his words are still with us, posted online. Why is it that everyone, generals included, suddenly gain wisdom immediately upon reaching retirement? Butler offered an explanation: his ‘mind was in suspended animation while serving as a soldier and following orders.’ In 1933 Butler told us that he ‘was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.’ He said:

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 11/28/2014.

Guyana Gold

Jon

South America has been a major beneficiary of the 2000s gold bull, party to some big discoveries by the mining companies flocking there. Some of these discoveries have already been developed, with top-three producers Peru, Brazil, and Chile for example seeing their collective gold output increase by 25% since 2001. And some are in the pipeline, with production on the horizon.
These pipeline projects come in all sizes and are scattered across the continent. Naturally there are many located within the borders of the top three. But many reside elsewhere, including such exploration hot spots as Argentina and Colombia. One of South America’s finest development-stage projects belongs not to the aforementioned major countries though. It resides in Guyana, a small sparsely-inhabited nation that many folks are unfamiliar with.
The few people who have heard of Guyana are the ones who recollect a key event in modern US history. But I’m sure the Guyanese aren’t thrilled that the event defining their country was the infamous Jonestown massacre, an ordeal that involved the only-ever assassination of an active-duty US congressman.
Also in the US, reality-TV junkies recently got familiarized with Guyana as the backdrop for a season of Discovery’s wildly popular show Gold Rush. In 2013 Guyana produced in the neighborhood of 450k ounces of gold, mostly from small-scale mines. If the artisanals could do it, so could Gold Rush star Todd Hoffman and team right?
Hoffman’s team failed miserably, producing only enough gold to pay the cab fare back to the airport. Though this failure was mostly self-induced, and entertaining, viewers did get to witness the challenges of mining in a dense tropical rainforest. Guyana’s artisanal miners, known locally as pork-knockers, must work very hard to scrape the gold out of the ground.
Guyana’s artisanal success has attracted more than greenhorns like Todd Hoffman though. It has garnered commercial attention from larger mining companies seeking to find the source deposits. These geologically savvy companies see the big picture of what Guyana has to offer. They understand the prolific Guiana Shield, and its propensity to host greenstone belts full of near-surface mineral deposits highly concentrated with gold. And most importantly, they recognize how vastly underexplored this country truly is.
Aptly named Guyana Goldfields is one company willing to take on Guyana’s challenges in order to score a source deposit. Founder and current Executive Chairman Patrick Sheridan was an early mover into this country, with his team commencing exploration back in the mid-1990s. And their watershed event was the 1998 procurement of the Aurora project.
Gold mineralization was actually discovered at Aurora over 100 years ago. It even saw a bit of mining in the middle of the 20th century, to the tune of approximately 100k ounces. But it didn’t really see any modern exploration until right before Guyana Goldfields took over.
It took several years to build up some exploration momentum considering the state of the gold market around the turn of the century.

This post was published at ZEAL LLC on November 28, 2014.