At the present time – and these are only my own thoughts, informed by a good analyst who does not stand accused of genius – gold (and silver) has been thrown into a spin by the MFC Global collapse. The theft of precious metals and cash from MFC Global and/or MFC-associated customer accounts has caused a loss of trust.

Effectively, the paper market in precious metals (i.e. derivatives of all kinds, including the futures market) has been seriously wounded. Factor 1: People who had cash and unencumbered metal assets in their MFC-related accounts had them stolen, so they don’t have the funds to hedge/invest/speculate further. Factor 2: More importantly, even those hedgers/investors/speculators not directly affected by MFC Global’s criminality now see that their assets are similarly at risk from other operators.

Bottom line: many people who have been in paper metals are reducing their risk by going to cash – or what’s seen as a cash equivalent, US Government debt. Treasuries are a whole other story … did you know that in the Great Depression, the vast majority of monetary losses were incurred in the bond market, not the sharemarket? Just another way that our rulers manipulate us, through a suppression of historical understanding both monetary/financial and political.

Stansberry’s operation does some excellent analysis at times. It is also a commercial operation.

Stay away from precious metals paper markets. Buying some silver coins (non-numistamic, i.e. just for its spending-money qualities) might be useful for punters like us. Pay in cash and wear a hat (cameras everywhere and everything is recorded in the surveillance state; buying physical silver or physical gold or survival food will mark you out as a potential terrorist – or patriot, which is considered to be the same thing by US authorities these days).

I’ve run across this site “by accident” just now and saw your comment. I’m not a religious person, but over five years of intensive study of investment markets and related issues (which means everything, in what has become a finance-driven world) I’ve been compelled to the realisation that the alleged conflict between spirituality and science does not exist. It is a fabrication by “scientists” – they’re actually technologists – who have found their religion in rabid atheism.

The only validity is not in science’s understanding at any particular point in time, but in the scientific method. Science’s understanding is always subject to revision, as further evidence becomes available. Stephen Hawking, say, is incapable of admitting that essential truth in relation to spirituality, although he must understand it somewhere in that brilliant but tortured mind.

Prayer is something that interests me, if prayer is seen as a clear formulation of a wish or desire that is communicated “upwards” for non-personal advantage. I am not capable of this at the moment, because my mind is not clear. I hope to come to it.

On December 15, I sent the following message to some friends and you might find something useful in it. It is minus the charts at Marty Chenard’s stocktiming.com because they won’t reproduce here. (The charts were publicly available, not paid subscription.)

Best of luck
Malcolm
…………..
subject line: a few risks at the moment
message:
If China is going, Australian and other markets will follow…

Marty Chenard (see charts from November 15 and December 12 below) is a conservative-style investor/adviser whose objectives/motivations are outlined in a personal story at his site, as I’m pretty sure I mentioned in 2007. His analytical skills, including the use of self-developed tools, are impressive. His technical forecasts for the Shanghai Composite Index (SCI) were borne out in 2007/08.

Wednesday’s action in the SCI was weak http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=000001.SS+Interactive#symbol=000001.ss;range=5d;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=candlestick;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=1;logscale=on;source=; and according to Chenard’s analysis there’s only another day for this to turn around. Otherwise, the hopes of a Santa Claus rally to end the year are finished. The current S&P500 chart is very reminiscent of the action towards the close of 2008.

An important factor at the moment is MF Global, where the theft of cash in investors’ accounts is having/will have an effect on confidence/trust similar to the sacrifice of Lehman Brothers in 2008. See this at Zero Hedge: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/entire-system-has-been-utterly-destroyed-mf-global-collapse-presenting-first-mf-global-casualty The Lehman loss of trust caused a bank run; it would be advisable to have enough cash on hand (not at the bank) to cover your needs for a few weeks, just in case. Sure, there’s a government guarantee of bank accounts here, but that might not be enough if there’s a shutdown of the banking system in, say, the US.

This comment http://www.moneymorning.com.au/20111203/the-secret-aussie-bank-run-is-a-sign-to-buy-gold.html/comment-page-3#comment-61031 at an Australian website I happened to be visiting the other day – I try not to waste my time and don’t comment often, but sometimes can’t help myself! – has at the end a reference to googling “Alf Field keynote speech”. This will bring up a link to a report at the site of Jim Sinclair, who has been mentioned previously. Please note that if the Shanghai Composite takes a dive and there’s a margin-call-driven liquidation of assets in world markets, gold could suffer as well. There were analyses around some weeks back that the low in gold could be as far down as $US1400. I’m not in a position to jump in yet, so I haven’t been following the gold market (or other markets) closely.

I hope that you will continue to leave comments like this one because they are encouraging a lot of people out there. Yes, times are hard, but as JD has shown us if you have faith and keep on fighting then things can turn around.

My hope has been that this site would not only be about how bad things are, but that it would also be used to encourage one another to make it through the storms.

Thanks for helping to encourage so many people.

Michael

2012 is special in that it is an election year. So we will get glittering daily promises from the same tired political hopefuls and action groups. Depending on the issue, political trolls of various stripes will trot out statistics showing how good things really are or can be even though nobody seems to exactly be experiencing the proffered goodness or following the pretzel logic justifying the solution offered. “Ignore your lying eyes. Listen to what I’m telling you…”

Even now we are getting the cherry picked “better than expected” Christmas spending numbers, a soothing balm for those January blues and maybe a reason to celebrate a little more on New Year’s Eve. We will soon have the ridiculous and hopeful buildup to the Olympics which will play to individual beliefs that despite the hard evidence all around, that somehow optimism is warranted and that we can all reach for that gold. 2012 will be an especially tough year for the truth to be heard amongst all the noise.

Try a refugee crisis on a Biblical scale. Try a foriegn invasion. Try a breakup of the USA into smaller nation states. Try World War Three. And maybe Four.

We’ll be lucky, lucky, lucky if the ONLY thing that happens to us is a great Depression. Compared to us, our grandpas in 1929 were much, much better off. They had it easy just having to worry about the Dustbowl and soup lines.

You want to know how a guy like Hitler was able to convert an entire nation of people to be purveyors of the most vile and evil ideology created on Earth in the past 1000 years?

Just sit back and watch, because it’s going to happen again. In America.