President Obama signed an executive order last week that has gone largely unnoticed by the mainstream media. The order amended the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977 which was originally intended “to reduce the risks of life and property from future earthquakes” in all 50 states. This was before hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” became a common practice for oil and natural gas drilling. Since fracking has become more popular, earthquakes have increased from single digits in the early 2000s to 584 quakes in 2015 alone.

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The United States of America is a representative republic. Mr. Sanders does not understand which people he will be representing. The truth is that the political elite want to buy elections with illegal votes. What happens when rulers become corrupt and turn on their subjects?

David DeGerolamo

Imagine losing 20.91% of your wealth in 42 days. How you heard the one about how the market ALWAYS bounces back. Ask anyone in Japan if they would prefer to ride it out or if they would have preferred to have sold their holdings on December 31st.

What about you? How would you feel if you had lost 20% of your life’s savings in a little over a month? You already lost over 10% in the US markets.

Have you read Atlas Shrugged lately? Imagine no John Galt coming to our rescue. Which is why our forefathers put their complete faith in God.

David DeGerolamo

Gold is undervalued to the point of idiocy.  But silver?  Silver is in another universe.  And this extended GSR makes it all the worse, because when people get over the fact that there ISN’T available above ground hordes of silver anywhere close to sufficient size to deal with a new Silver bull market, we could end up with a GSR below 10 VERY QUICKLY.  Hell, just by the odd sort of crap that has evolved in the last 2 decades of this price suppression and exploding use of industrial/medical uses of silver, we’ve got a seriously explosive situation here.  Forward mine supply is crashing and it will keep on crashing even if silver rose 50% in the next 3 months because to much damage has been done and when a sector crashes and forward supply is crushed as it already started to have been crushed, it takes time for an industry reboot – no way around that even if the underlying asset recovers in a “v” shaped move.

At the very time investors start to go nuts for silver, and even with a global economic crash, the inventories of freely available silver are NOT going to meet demand for any buyer category.  Remember what happened when Ford Motor Company freaked and bought Palladium in, what was it, 2000, 1999?  I forget the year – one of those two.  But they freaked, and the market exploded as Ford bought to make sure they had enough for catalysts.  That’s a nice little metaphor.  Now, we’re going to see a scramble from all sides – investment demand and even industrial demand (because the industrial buyers are simply not going to have a choice even with a global economic depression because 450 million ounces of industrial demand is not going to zero even with a depression and the investor demand is going to go absolutely BONKERS).

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While silver is underpriced, the premise above does not take an economic collapse into account. No demand for silver means no price increase to $2000.

David DeGerolamo

h/t Cousin John

(published previously in September, 2015)

by Robert Gore

The lives of men and women who rise to the top of their fields are replete with…failure. The best hitters in baseball trudge back to the dugout six out of ten times. Basketball’s high scorers miss half their shots. Several rockets blew up before the US put a man on the moon. Only a small percentage of Edison’s experiments yielded useful inventions. Despite years of deep theorizing, Einstein never came up with a unified field theory. Doesn’t all this suggest that failure may be essential for success, and the odium with which it’s tainted undeserved?

Evolution, science, and markets are instructive. Nature throws blobs of genetic variation at the wall and sees what sticks. For every mutation that increases a specie’s chances for survival via natural selection, there are thousands that either have no effect or are detrimental.

In the same vein, science is basically a series of better errors. Somebody comes up with a theory that seems to describe reality more accurately and has more predictive power than the generally accepted theory. Everybody takes their theoretical and empirical potshots, and if the theory is still standing it becomes the standard…until somebody finds a hole in it and the progression plays out again. Logically, there can be no enshrined truths in science (other than that there are no enshrined truths), only hypotheses and theories open to question and subject to disproof, but never conclusively confirmed for time and all eternity.

American Motors, Brown Shoe, Studebaker, Collins Radio, Detroit Steel, Zenith Electronics and National Sugar Refining were all in the Fortune 500 in 1955. None of them exist today. Of that Fortune 500, only 61 were still around 60 years later. That’s economist Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” the ceaseless roiling of the competitive landscape in a healthy (i.e., capitalistic) economy that destroys some businesses and elevates others, but places none on a permanent plateau. Successful people in business know in their bones this catechism: try, fail, admit, analyze, get up, try again.

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The occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, undertaken 41 days ago with guns and threats, ended Thursday with the peaceful surrender of  four holdouts after an hourlong negotiation with the last protester.

Those taken into custody by the FBI were David Fry, 27, of the Cincinnati area, Jeff Banta, 46, of Elko, Nevada, Sean Anderson, 47, and his wife, Sandy, 48, of Riggins, Idaho. They each face a federal conspiracy charge for their role in the occupation, joining at least 12 others already arraigned on that charge.

At the final moment after the first three had walked out, Fry said he was feeling suicidal and wouldn’t give himself up. He demanded to talk to an FBI negotiator by phone as others repeatedly urged him to calm down and walk out.

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This is the best quarterly performance for Gold in 30 years…

Rob Halliday-Stein, founder and managing director of the Birmingham-based company, said takings today had already surpassed the firm’s previous one-day record of £4.4m in October 2014.

BullionByPost, which takes orders of up to £25,000 on the website but takes higher amounts over the phone, explained it had received a few hundred orders overnight and frantic numbers of phone calls this morning.

“The bullion market has been building with interest since the end of last year but this morning things have gone bananas,” said Mr Halliday-Stein. “Some London banks are placing unusually large orders for physical gold.”

London-based ATS Bullion added it had been inundated with orders for the past week. The firm has sold 4,000 gold bars and coins since February 1, a 40pc rise on the same period a year ago when it sold 1,500.

“It’s been crazy – it’s been the best week since 2012. We’ve had people queuing round the block,” said Michael Cooper of ATS Bullion, a family run firm that trades online and also from an outlet in the West End.

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What do you think will happen to the price of gold when people realize that their paper gold is worthless? Strange how people are looking like deer in the headlights now that reality is sinking in.

David DeGerolamo