Gold and silver getting scarce

Essentially, things are moving more slowly than I expected them to, but they are following the predicted pattern. The spot prices are completely fixed due to the fact that most “metal” being traded exists on paper only, but physical metal is getting scarce, especially since the central banks mopped up majority of it. Having in mind that only a small fraction of the population actually has physical metal, and the majority didn’t wake up and smell the coffee yet, you can imagine what will happen when the majority tries to convert their paper savings into gold and silver, only to find out that there isn’t any on the market.

In Germany, a small “gold rush” in the order of magnitude of 200 people daily per retail store was sufficient to completely exhaust the amount of metal available for sale.

Manipulated markets and war

How can you tell a certain commodity market is being manipulated? It’s when supply is restricted, demand is enormous, and the prices are not rising. It means someone, usually the huge buyers, is influencing the markets by complicated and marginally legal means in order to keep the prices affordable for themselves. In my opinion, that’s what we have been seeing in the precious metals market in the last few months. The central banks and other big players have been buying unprecedented quantities, including the future production, and the prices have been dropping. I have a pretty good idea how some of it is being done, and even I am quite shocked at the amount of fuckery involved.

Also, we are approaching the upper limit of my prediction, because 3 months ago I said I expect the thing to blow up in the time interval of 15 days to 3 months. This was based on the expectation that the American stock market is in a hugely unstable bubble, that the central banks and other buyers will quickly exhaust the physical metal supply and this will in turn collapse the unbacked paper market, which worked thus far only because the bluff hadn’t been called. In the mean time, the fed has been printing money like crazy, and it’s been going into the American stock market, basically trying to prop it up in order to stabilize the house of cards. Also, overnight borrowing by the banks is huge, which indicates serious liquidity issues. In essence, the visible metal prices seem to invalidate my prognosis, but I think it’s just a matter of time before this house of card collapses, and I’m actually not in a great hurry to revise my time estimates, I think we’re still on the same schedule. I’ve seen very similar patterns in 2007. Marketplace was behaving contrary to the underlying realities seemingly disproving them, until it went poof.

I’m still buying silver with all the money I can spare each month, and I still recommend it to others. If the banks are buying metal instead of paper, contrary to their long-standing custom, it means paper is going to shit. Already, bets are being made on gold exceeding $4000 by summer of 2021. Some people say someone is betting high and will probably lose money. I say somebody is betting on a certain thing in a marketplace of asshats. A major constraint on my prognosis is that this time the financial collapse will be so big, it might cause the major players to pre-empt it with a nuclear war, seeing it as a preferable option. In fact, that’s what I’ve been warning about for years already; American intentional aggravation of the geopolitical situation makes no sense in any other context. Also, America is in the overture phase of a very nasty civil war for the last 3 years, with Obama-appointed people in the intelligence agencies acting as some sort of an insurgency that is trying to negate the results of the presidential elections, sabotage the executive branch of government, and, most importantly, control the media in order to propagandize their own populace. They actually revoked a law that used to prohibit that, so that everything would be legal.

When a significant part of a nation is refusing to accept the election results, using all kinds of excuses, that’s when you know the democratic system collapsed and the country descended into banana-republic stage. The level of political discourse in America is something I am used to seeing in African shitholes, but not in serious countries. It’s basically all at the point where the sides are so far apart in fundamental issues, they can no longer be said to belong to the same civilization, let alone nation. When this war gets hot, it’s going to be worse than Bosnia and Rwanda.

Fog of war

Some generals consider only unilateral action, whereas war consists of a continuous interaction of opposites … no strategy ever survives the first engagement with the enemy.

— Carl von Clausewitz

I like Von Clausewitz and his elegant formulations of complex realities, for instance, how a well made plan isn’t likely to fail just because the “fog of war” happens to obscure your vision and you see only chaos, gossip and misinformation. You have to trust that you made a good soufflé, put it in the oven and wait for it to rise. Changing the recipe, checking before time and second-guessing yourself are of no use.

That’s how I see the current situation. I trust that I had read the situation well, that I made all the right moves that were possible for me in the given circumstances, and there’s really no point in bouncing off walls like a ping-pong ball. The situation where you wait for the outcome, and the reality apparently contradicts your assessment and actions is not only not new to me, but I saw it in a movie “The Big Short”, about the 2008 collapse of the real-estate mortgage market and the guy who saw it coming, bet everything on the collapse, and the market kept rising, at which point he thought, “what if the entire market is so inherently broken and controlled, that they can do this indefinitely, or at least long enough for me to run out of money?”

The answer is, of course, that there is only so much you can do. The soufflé is in the oven, and it’s either going to rise, or it’s not. There’s not a damn thing you can do about it at that point, as Benjamin Sisko’s father would say.

Metal

Gold is rising. Silver is rising faster. The comments by most experts assume it’s business as usual event in response to the sanction war between USA and China, and to some degree the negative-yield bonds and QE threat. They are not wrong, strictly speaking, because we haven’t seen anything yet. This is the equivalent of Bitcoin rising from $150 to $200. Technically speaking it’s rising, however…