facebook
back to top
News

The Gold Industry is in a Deep State of Dysfunction, Delusion and Denial - Stewart Dougherty (12/7/2017)

Logo - Sprott Money News from the Archives

July 12, 2017

In 1980, the Financial Deep State realized that there existed an extraordinary opportunity for serial plunder and profiteering: the manipulation of the gold and silver markets. They immediately mobilized to exploit it.

During the subsequent 37+ years (we are now well into the 38th), the Deep State manipulators have criminally looted the gold and silver markets, pocketing astronomical profits for themselves in the process, all of which have come from real victims on the other sides of their fraudulent trades. While literally billions of people worldwide have been financially damaged by this crime, many of them severely, not one of the perpetrators has spent so much as ten seconds in jail for the global looting spree they have conducted. This is because precious metals price fraud is a state-sponsored crime.

While in this article we will concentrate on gold from here on, the exact dynamics we describe also apply to silver. The only difference between the two is that the price carnage in silver has been far worse than it has been in gold, on a percentage basis.

As a consequence of the unrelenting gold price manipulation, gold has been thrust into two severe bear markets that have lasted for more than 27 of the past 37 years, or more than 72% of the time.

The first bear market ran from 1980 until 2001, during which the gold price was savaged from $850 to $250 in nominal dollars, a plunge of 71%. Inflation-adjusted to today’s dollars, the carnage was even worse: it collapsed from $2,674 to $344, an 87% implosion.

In 2001, in the midst of unprecedented (at the time, but far worse now) economic, financial and monetary pressures, gold embarked on a ten year rise to a nominal (although not inflation-adjusted), all-time high of $1,925. The Financial Deep State had its hands full then with other, more pressing matters (such as keeping its global financial and monetary Ponzi schemes from disintegrating), and was forced to take its eyes off of the gold ball. It is impressive what gold can do when it is freed from the chains of greed, looting, and official corruption.

By 2011, after employing its signature techniques, including rampant counterfeiting and reporting fraud, the Deep State had returned the errant financial genies to their poison bottles, and was able once again to focus its attention on its favorite, most profitable crime: precious metals price rigging.

For the 6+ years since, gold has been slammed into a second major bear market, during which its price has been crushed from $1925 to $1050, a collapse of 45%. It has recovered somewhat to $1210 at the time of this writing.

During the entire 37+ year period, and particularly during the 27+ years of outright price annihilation, the major gold miners have done precisely nothing to expand the market for physical gold via advertising, direct marketing or any of the other proven demand-creation techniques. They have also done nothing to support gold’s price in any way, or to take action against the criminal price manipulators.

The industry’s sole innovative effort during this period was to have its association, the World Gold Council, get behind a gold ETF, GLD. The management of this ETF was placed in the hands of the Financial Deep State, the exact people who have manipulated the gold price for 37+ years. Worse, the ETF was set up so that its physical reserves are immune to audit. Very few people, all of them members of the Financial Deep State, know what actually goes on behind the closed doors of the gold ETF.

GLD was supposed to open the floodgates of demand for physical gold, and resuscitate its price so that it would at least keep up with inflation, which, at the very least, is what gold is supposed to do. But this did not happen.

Inflation adjusted to today’s dollars, gold hit its all-time high of $2,674 in January, 1980. (We are using U.S. government inflation statistics, which are deliberately understated.) As of July 7, 2017, it was $1210, down 55%.

From its inflation adjusted high of $2095 in 2011, it is now down 42%. (The reason we use the 1980 and 2011 gold price highs for these comparisons is that the market was relatively free from interference at those times, and the price was heading toward its natural level in both cases. According to more than a dozen objective metrics we could cite, the current gold price is a fraction of what it should be, which means that the referenced “high” prices are actually conservative.)

As we can see, GLD has failed to deliver on its promise, most likely because any gold that might be in its inventory is used by the Financial Deep State for multiple, conflicting purposes, such as leasing and hypothecation. Such machinations would further pressure the gold price. There are numerous additional problems with the ETF from a market development standpoint, but they are beyond the scope and purpose of this article. The simple fact is that the gold industry’s singular market development innovation in nearly 40 years has been a total flop, which is proven by the ceaseless and ongoing price decimation of gold. A flop is exactly what the Financial Deep State intended and designed the ETF to be.

As we pointed out in detail in a previous article (“The Traitors Aiding and Abetting the Deep State’s Dirty, Dying War on Gold”), gold is the world’s pre-eminent and most historic consumer product.

At the same time, gold is unique in the history of global consumer commerce in that its price is set neither by its producers nor its marketplace.

Instead, the price of gold is falsely concocted by a corrupt, criminal, immoral, conscienceless, thieving, money-addicted set of Wall Street, Washington, D.C., City of London and Basel, Switzerland central and commercial bank schemers, cheats, and parasites. In other words, by the lackeys and footmen of the Financial Deep State.

While the Fed and other Deep State puppets have floated subtle memes that there is a noble purpose behind the control of gold, such as to support the dollar and preserve confidence in their (disintegrating) financial and monetary system, these are nothing but contrived and coagulated lies designed to cover up the biggest financial crime in history. (In a previous article, “Gold and Silver Price Manipulation: The Biggest Financial Crime in History,” we outlined how this multi-decade crime has netted its perpetrators more than $1 trillion in profits, while also resulting in trillions of dollars being stolen from billions of owners of gold and silver worldwide, the majority of whom are of humble means. (For example, Indian villagers whose savings are held in the form of gold and silver jewelry.) Extraordinarily rich people who steal from the humble and poor are particularly sick in the head, and this is the kind of theft we now see everywhere we look, thanks to the raging epidemic of state-orchestrated, totally non-prosecuted financial criminality.

All the while, the major mining executives have not publicly uttered a single complaint about or done one thing to stop this price fraud. They act as if everything is just fine. Of course they do: they receive exorbitant, structured, no-lose compensation packages, while their shareholders get screwed to the wall and the global holders of gold in all forms get robbed blind.

As Shakespeare’s King Lear pointedly said to his daughter Cordelia, “nothing will come of nothing.” That is exactly what the world has received in the way of support from the pompous, overpaid, senior executive bureaucrats and freeloaders of the mining industry, who have done nothing to defend their product as it has been systematically discredited and disgraced: Nothing.

The gold industry throughout the broadly-defined “west” is suffocating to death under the phony price compression. It is not just gold’s price that is dying; demand is, too. Who in their right mind wants to save or invest in an item whose price is maniacally tossed around like a rag doll, cannot even keep up with inflation over time, and is completely psychotic and unpredictable?

The Financial Deep State is, of course, delighted by its success in making a laughing stock of gold, particularly as compared with virtually every other asset class in the world, including baseball cards and vintage Herme’s handbags, all of which have soared in price. The destruction of gold sentiment has always been its main objective, from the very beginning. It is a required co-factor in the FDS’s most ambitious, corrupt, ruthless and money-hungry agenda ever: its scheme to eliminate cash. The profits the “cashless society” scam will suck out of the people’s pockets will be so astronomical and mind-blowing that they will make the mere $1 trillion stolen from the precious metals market look in comparison like a noble act of FDS self-restraint, and a tip they might toss to a caddy. We will see looting in the tens of trillions of dollars, which will financially bomb mankind back to the Stone Age.

Many gold pundits would like us to believe that gold will always be the King of Money, no matter how devastated its price becomes. But the evidence proves otherwise. Over time, all manner of things have served as money, or currency: cows, sheep, camels, clam shells, cowrie shells, bronze ingots, copper replicas of cowrie shells, metal tools, deerskin, you name it. And all of them have faded away like Ozymandias, the one-time King of kings who is now just dust amidst sand. Today, in the United States, it is estimated that 99.5% of the citizens own no physical gold whatsoever in monetary or investment form. For that massive cohort, gold is already completely irrelevant. Though the numbers in Europe are somewhat better, the overall situation is similar throughout the west: mass non-ownership.

Of course, any real and talented, as opposed to fake and incompetent industry executive would contemplate that number with awe and excitement. Today, it is virtually impossible to find anywhere in the world a consumer market that is 99.5% non-penetrated. For any business executive who actually knows what he or she is doing, this is like having a license to shoot fish in a barrel. How can one miss?

Aristotle said that “nature abhors a vacuum,” and gold is the latest proof of it. Having completely failed its owners and supporters for years, people are now beginning to reject gold and embrace cryptocurrencies, or any other investment vehicle for that matter. This is accelerating the withering trend for gold. And while we firmly believe that gold has a vital, indispensable role to play, the market is increasingly saying, “No, it doesn’t, at least not for me.” Investors vote with their feet by simply walking away, and this is what they are doing when it comes to gold. (Our gold research with millennials is sobering beyond belief, but that is a different topic.) The point is that gold demand in the west is in deep trouble and literally a fraction of its potential, but actually doing the work to fix this problem is of no interest whatsoever to the lazy and visionless gold industry fixed-compensation-package executive opportunists.

Completely oblivious and inert to what is happening right in front of their faces, gold industry executives are demonstrating that they are in a massive state of dysfunction, delusion and denial.

Are we being stern? Yes. Why? Because this has been going on for 37+ years, and their free passes expired a very long time ago. Enough is enough.

To place the gold price-rigging farce into perspective, let’s ask our good friend Mr. Satire to help us draw a parallel.

Assume that the Financial Deep State’s greed is going exponential (which it is), and that the FDS is no longer satisfied with its “mere” multi-billion dollar annual theft from the gold pits . The ugly, insatiable beast wants more.

So its denizens come up with a brilliant idea: how about we move into consumer electronics!

They have a chat with their friends at the Crimex, grease all the necessary palms in the “regulatory” community, and next thing, a new paper trading vehicle is announced: iPhones!!! Yes, the world can now trade iPhones on the Crimex, and to legitimize its new product, the Crimex announces that it has actually purchased, count ‘em, 10 iPhones which they have securely stored in their vault.

They are thrilled about the inauguration of this new money-making opportunity. And on the first day of trading, out of the blue and in a matter of seconds, they short 1 million paper iPhones, crushing the price from $850 to $250 dollars. Yet another $600 million criminally stolen from the markets, and stuffed into their already stuffed pockets.

The scheming traders want to cover their shorts, so they call Tim Cook and say to him, “We would like to order 1 million iPhones for $250 apiece.”

By the identical stupidity demonstrated for decades by the major gold miners, we are to believe that Tim Cook would reply, “Wow, that’s quite a price drop. I think we’re going to lose a bunch of money on this trade, or at best, break even. For sure, the shareholders are going to take it on the chin, because our profits will plunge if we sell iPhones for this amount. But hey, you Wall Street guys manipulate every other market on earth, why shouldn’t you be able to control the price of iPhones, too? So sure, I’ll call the people in Sales and authorize them to sell you a million iPhones at $250 each.”

The manipulators are in ecstasy. They are well on their way to solving their eternal riddle: how to create absolutely limitless wealth by doing next to nothing other than simply exploiting the hard work of others.

Emboldened, they head back to see their friends at the Crimex, with the bribed regulators in tow. And the following day, the Crimex makes another exciting announcement: they are now getting into automotive vehicles, too!

Specifically, the Crimex introduces a brand new exchange for paper GM Suburbans! And to prove the legitimacy of their new exchange, they announce that they have purchased 10 Suburbans, and stored them seven stories underground within the New York Fed’s vault. They needed to do this because they ran out of space in their own modest vault given that they had to squeeze all those 10 iPhones amongst the 35 ounces of physical gold they have on hand to support the 47,000,000 ounces currently shorted.

The first day of trading unfolds, and the Deep State decides to double down: they short 2 million paper Suburbans at 4 AM, East Coast time, on a holiday morning. As expected, the price plunges in 3 seconds from $50,000 to $25,000, giving the looters an instantaneous profit of $50 billion. Now that represents some serious Benjamins, and they’re on the phone with Mary Barra in a matter of minutes to seal the deal and protect their score. “We want to buy 2 million Suburbans for $25,000 apiece,” they announce.

Mary is floored by the demand. “Jeez, guys, how on earth are we supposed to make any money selling Suburbans for $25,000 each? Profits are going to plunge, and so is our stock price.”

The swindlers sharply reply, “Look, that’s not our problem. The price is the price, and you can go to your computer right now and clearly see that Suburbans are priced on the Crimex at $25,000. We want our Suburbans, at that price. And as a head’s up, if you have a problem with this, then you’re going to have a problem with the FED, ECB, BIS and your Wall Street bankers, and you don’t really want that, do you?”

“Well, no, I certainly wouldn’t want to upset the FED, ECB, BIS or our Wall Street bankers,” Mary responds, ruefully. “And looking at my computer screen, I can see that you are absolutely correct: the Crimex price of Suburbans IS $25,000, so I guess there’s really nothing I can do but sell them to you for that amount. I’ll call the head of Operations and have him tell his people to start loading up the transport trucks.” She then calls Investor Relations and warns them to buckle-up. Their forward guidance was just blown to smithereens.

Does anyone reading this article really think that the executives at Apple and GM would be such complete pussies, jackasses and idiots as to roll over for a total scam like that, not just once, but thousands of times over nearly four DECADES??? Does anyone really think those corporations would give away their limited, hard-made products, for next to nothing, to a corrupt bunch of Wall Street swindlers and pukes who were illegally trying to rig their market? Does anyone honestly think that real CEOs, as opposed to clueless mining industry fakers, would sacrifice their customers and shareholders on such an altar of incompetence, stupidity, and cowardice?

Of course they wouldn’t just go along with such a shakedown. Apple and GM would hire the most talented and vicious lawyers on the planet, and they would rip the faces off the Wall Street con artists so blatantly attempting to cheat them and destroy their companies and industries. In the process, they would expose the Wall Street crooks for exactly who and what they are, once and for all.

Apple is renowned for its unprecedented stash of corporate cash, now totaling $246 billion. How did they amass so much money? By creating great products and then brilliantly marketing them at prices that would create robust profits for the corporation and its shareholders. They didn’t give anything away; they charged top dollar for what they offered, and their customers were glad to pay it, because they got good value in return.

The pathetic, mewling mining executives moan that gold is “just a commodity,” and that they have no pricing power over it. What an insult to people’s intelligence. Gold is the most beautiful form of money on earth. And virtually every human being on this planet has a need for and uses money. Far more people by orders of magnitude, in fact, than currently need or use Apple’s products. What a pitiful excuse for these overpaid freeloaders to concoct in a lame attempt to rationalize their complete lack of marketing vision, talent, and effort.

Here is a question for the Fed, Treasury, ECB, BIS, and Regulators: you people obviously condone and encourage the paper gold and silver price manipulation scam, because you’ve done absolutely nothing to stop it for nearly 40 years. Perhaps you even helped design it, in cahoots with your banker owners.

So the question is: if paper consumer products are such a great idea for society and you, why did you stop at gold and silver? Why don’t we have paper TVs, paper computers, paper houses, paper cars, paper wine, paper tires, paper mattresses, paper refrigerators, paper beds, paper pharmaceuticals, paper Huggies and paper toilet paper? Why isn’t every single consumer product paper-tradeable on the Crimex, so that Wall Street, the City and all their brethren can profiteer on every single thing that human beings need and do in their daily lives?

As acolytes of the Financial Deep State, how could you Central Tankers be so remiss as to leave so much easy money on the table, and out of your masters’ pockets? With paper everything, they and you could loot the people into oblivion. And if this opportunity is properly exploited, it could take Central Tanking to a whole new level of expansion, criminality and destructiveness.

At first, we considered that the Financial Deep State might have stopped short of Paper Everything because it would be so blatantly illegal that it would embarrass even them. But we realized that can’t be it because they couldn’t care less about petty legalities. What do professional counterfeiters care about the law?

We suspect they stopped short because they are now singularly focused on their Master Plan: the elimination of cash. That’s the Big Kahuna for the Central Tankers and Financial Deep State; the giant Hoover in the Sky that will enable them to suck inconceivable sums of the people’s money down their Midas throats. Once they have eliminated cash and forced the people’s money into their digital financial concentration camps, the people are going to suffer an endless series of service fees, transaction fees, usage fees, maintenance fees, account access fees and the like. The proverbial death by a thousand cuts.

But those will just be the warm ups. A few years ago, an IMF document was leaked that spoke about the wonders, to the Deep State, of a 10% “capital levy” being imposed upon the people’s assets, without warning on a Sunday night when the banks are closed, supposedly to create “debt sustainability.” We are not making this up; this is exactly how they presented it, so you can see the kind of predatory, sneaky schemers they really are. Please note: the IMF was not talking about a plan to pay down the sovereign debt; they were talking about being able to pay the interest on it. Their paper said not one word about governments reining themselves in to reduce their surging deficits. Therefore, it is clear that the 10% capital levy will be just be one of many, because the first one won’t fix a thing.

The citizens of the United States … no, not Yellen, Fischer or the Fed; not Draghi or the ECB; not Mnuchin or the Treasury; not Lagarde or the IMF; not the BIS or any of the other supra-national institutional Central Schemers of our world … the American People are said to own roughly 261 million ounces of gold. We happen to believe that is a near certainty this gold is gone: leased, pledged, hypothecated or outright sold, and no longer owned by the people. But let’s say we’re wrong.

As we know, the U.S. federal government debt is now $20 trillion and climbing, with additional off balance sheet obligations totaling several trillion more. To this we must add the unfunded contingent liabilities, for such programs as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, federal government employee pensions, military pensions, veterans’ medical care and the like. This number is so gargantuan it is literally impossible to calculate, but we know for a fact that it is at least $150 trillion, net of all projected tax receipts. So the nation is in the hole by, at minimum, $175,000,000,000,000.00, aka $175 trillion.

If the price of gold increased by $10,000.00 per ounce this afternoon, the United States citizens’ supposed gold holding would increase in value by a mere $2.6 trillion, in other words, absolutely nothing compared to the country’s federal debt and obligations. (State, county and municipal debts and unfunded liabilities are massive and incremental.)This is just one example of why the current, criminally rigged $1,210 price of gold is not just a farce, but a reflection of the sheer, in-our-faces brazenness, smugness, and arrogance exhibited by the manipulating thieves. Their crime is absolutely blatant and they couldn’t care less, because they know that they will never be prosecuted. They are not above the law; they are the law. And then have the gall to tell us they do “God’s work.”

What will spell the end of this colossal criminal conspiracy, we do not know. But we are strong believers in the saying: “If you keep on doing what you have been doing, you will keep on getting what you have been getting.” Unless there is a groundswell uprising by the people who have been victimized by this crime, we doubt that much will change. The Financial Deep State is certainly never going to willingly walk away from the price manipulation money machine they created and operate, and that has delivered to them such astounding profits. But we believe there are things every reader of this article can do to pull some weight. You are smart (you wouldn’t be interested in gold if you weren’t; it is the world’s most intellectually challenging and fascinating market), and we do not wish to suggest what you might do. You already know what’s right for you given your particular situation. We would urge you to do those things, and to assume that many others are taking action, too. If we do not rise up, none of this is ever going to change.

Not meaning to be too cosmic on this summer day, we would like to add that we sincerely believe the War on Gold is, in fact, an epic battle between Good and Evil, and one that is genuinely Biblical. Gold is only one letter away from God, and came from Him as a gift to His people. We doubt very much that He is pleased by how it is now being so sullied by corruption, greed and rank criminality. Currently, Evil is winning the war hands down, and if it achieves a final victory, human kind can kiss its freedom goodbye as a vast new age of state-orchestrated digital serfdom and slavery begins. We can prevent that from happening, but only if we stand up and fight. The War on Gold goes far beyond the financial; it is a symbol of everything that is crucial to the sanctity of humanity. And it needs all of us to join in now, while we can.

Don’t miss a golden opportunity.

Now that you’ve gained a deeper understanding about gold, it’s time to browse our selection of gold bars, coins, or exclusive Sprott Gold wafers.

About Sprott Money

Specializing in the sale of bullion, bullion storage and precious metals registered investments, there’s a reason Sprott Money is called “The Most Trusted Name in Precious Metals”.

Since 2008, our customers have trusted us to provide guidance, education, and superior customer service as we help build their holdings in precious metals—no matter the size of the portfolio. Chairman, Eric Sprott, and President, Larisa Sprott, are proud to head up one of the most well-known and reputable precious metal firms in North America. Learn more about Sprott Money.

Learn More
about-sprott-skyline

Comments