Gold Falls 3% in an Hour Following Bernanke Comments, Iran Trading with Bullion as “Universal Currency”

WHOLESALE MARKET Gold Bullion prices dropped 3.2% to $1727 per ounce in less than an hour Wednesday afternoon in London, after US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke appeared before Congress.

Higher gasoline prices are “likely to push up inflation temporarily while reducing consumers’ purchasing power,” Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee.

Bernanke’s comments “eased speculation the central bank is moving closer to providing more monetary stimulus,” news agency Bloomberg reports.

The Fed chairman added however that the Fed’s policymakers judge “that sustaining a highly accommodative stance for monetary policy is consistent with promoting both objectives” of the Fed’s mandate, namely price stability and employment.

Earlier in the day, gold prices hovered around $1785 an ounce Wednesday morning London time, while stocks and commodities were also broadly flat following the European Central Bank’s latest attempt to boost the liquidity held by the continent’s banks.

Silver bullion meantime hit $37.36 per ounce, its highest level since last September, though they too fell following Bernanke’s comments.

“The next target [for silver] is $39.78, the September 2011 high,” says the latest technical analysis from gold bullion dealing bank Scotia Mocatta.

Click below to continue reading:

via Gold Falls 3% in an Hour Following Bernanke Comments, Iran Trading with Bullion as “Universal Currency” – Buy Gold Online with the Bullion Vault – GoldSeek.com.

Living In A QE World | The Big Picture

All Central Bank Balance Sheets Are Exploding Higher, Or Engaged In QE

The degree to which central banks around the world are printing money is unprecedented.

The first eight charts below show the balance sheets of the largest central banks in the world. They are the European Central Bank (ECB), the Federal Reserve (Fed), the Bank of Japan (BoJ), the Bank of England (BoE), the Bundesbank (Germany), the Banque de France, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) and the Swiss National Bank (SNB). Noted on the charts are significant events or growth rates.

Shown is the size of each respective balance sheet in its local currency. Note that all are exploding higher as every chart goes from the lower left to the upper right. Most are still making new all-time highs. If the basic definition of quantitative easing (QE) is a significant increase in a central bank’s balance sheet via increasing banking reserves, then all eight of these central banks are engaged in QE.

Click below to continue reading:

via Living In A QE World | The Big Picture.

The Federal Reserve’s Explicit Goal: Devalue The Dollar 33%

This is very troublesome for those planning to live on a fixed income long term.  This type of planned devaluation is a structured default on government obligations like social security payments.  It is also a blatant  transfer of wealth(ie tax) from the savings and wages of the people  to the Federal Reserve and the government.  What is worse, is the the planned 2% rate of inflation is based on Core Inflation, which omits the impact of food and energy, where most inflation frequently occurs.  This type of systemic criminal behavior on the part of the Federal Reserve is another reason to own gold, silver and other commodities as a way to opt out of this insidious transfer of wealth and it’s destructive impact on the middle class. 

JT

The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) has made it official: After its latest two day meeting, it announced its goal to devalue the dollar by 33% over the next 20 years. The debauch of the dollar will be even greater if the Fed exceeds its goal of a 2 percent per year increase in the price level.

An increase in the price level of 2% in any one year is barely noticeable. Under a gold standard, such an increase was uncommon, but not unknown. The difference is that when the dollar was as good as gold, the years of modest inflation would be followed, in time, by declining prices. As a consequence, over longer periods of time, the price level was unchanged. A dollar 20 years hence was still worth a dollar.

But, an increase of 2% a year over a period of 20 years will lead to a 50% increase in the price level. It will take 150 (2032) dollars to purchase the same basket of goods 100 (2012) dollars can buy today. What will be called the “dollar” in 2032 will be worth one-third less (100/150) than what we call a dollar today.

Click below to continue reading:

via The Federal Reserve’s Explicit Goal: Devalue The Dollar 33% – Forbes.

Fed pledges low rates till kingdom come! What it means …

Last week, I discussed how the European Central Bank has lost its marbles, launching its own version of quantitative easing. I dubbed it “QE-E.”

I also said that QE accomplishes almost nothing for the “real” economy, even if it juices asset markets. And sure enough, we got more proof of that this week (details to follow!).

Well, this week it was the Federal Reserve’s turn at the podium and what happened? Policymakers didn’t launch an official QE3 program. But they did promise to keep short-term interest rates low through late 2014 … up from a previous pledge of 2013.

Not only that, the Fed also said it would continue with its “Operation Twist” policy of selling shorter-term Treasuries and buying longer-term ones. The goal? Hold down long-term interest rates.

Noted bond fund manager Bill Gross of Pimco dubbed it “QE2.5.” All I could do was shake my head!

Click below to continue reading:

via Fed pledges low rates till kingdom come! What it means … — Money and Markets.

Fed To Markets: Buy Gold And Silver

The Fed just spoke. Here’s a slightly edited transcript:

Blah blah blah … the economy has been expanding moderately … blah blah blah boilerplate inanity blatant lie … the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability ….

To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with the dual mandate, the Committee expects to maintain a highly accommodative stance for monetary policy. In particular, the Committee decided today to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that economic conditions–including low rates of resource utilization and a subdued outlook for inflation over the medium run–are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through late 2014.

This of course comes as no surprise to anyone. But seeing it in print had exactly the impact you’d expect. Stocks erased their early losses, the dollar tanked, and precious metals soared. With good reason. It is now the stated policy of the US government to have negative real interest rates for years to come (eons in trader-time).

Click below to continue reading:

via Fed To Markets: Buy Gold And Silver — DollarCollapse.com.

Fed to Maintain Rates Near Zero Through Late 2014

WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve, declaring that the economy would need help for years to come, said Wednesday it would extend by 18 months the period that it plans to hold down interest rates in an effort to spur growth.

The Fed said that it now planned to keep short-term interest rates near zero until late 2014, continuing the transformation of a policy that began as shock therapy in the winter of 2008 into a six-year campaign to increase spending by rewarding borrowers and punishing savers.

The economy expanded “moderately” in recent weeks, the Fed said in a statement released after a two-day meeting of its policy-making committee, but jobs were still scarce, the housing sector remained deeply depressed and Europe’s flirtation with crisis could undermine the nascent domestic recovery.

The Fed forecast growth of up to 2.7 percent this year, up to 3.2 percent next year and up to 4 percent in 2014, but at the end of that period, the central bank projected that the recovery would still be incomplete. Workers would still be looking for jobs, and businesses would still be looking for customers.

“What did we learn today? Things are bad, and they’re not improving at the rate that they want them to improve,” said Kevin Logan, chief United States economist at HSBC. “That’s what they concluded — ‘We’ve eased policy a lot, but we haven’t eased it enough.’ ”

Click below to continue reading:

via Fed to Maintain Rates Near Zero Through Late 2014 – NYTimes.com.

Crash Course: Chapter 8 – The Fed & Money Creation by Chris Martenson – YouTube

Crash Course: Chapter 8 – The Fed & Money Creation by Chris Martenson – YouTube.

World’s Central Banks Act to Ease Market Strains

Major central banks around the globe took coordinated action Wednesday to ease the strains on the world’s financial system, saying they would make it easier for banks to get dollars if they need them. Stock markets and the euro rose sharply on the move.

The U.S. Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England and the central banks of Canada, Japan and Switzerland were all taking part.

“The purpose of these actions is to ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity,” the central banks said in a joint statement.

Click link below to continue reading:

via World’s Central Banks Act to Ease Market Strains.

The Return of Milton Friedman Via NGDP Revenue Targeting

Milton Friedman

As an avowed enthusiast for the idea of changing central banks’ goals to nominal GDP targeting, I would be remiss in not calling attention to a new Goldman Sachs research note produced by Jan Hatzius and Sven Jari Stehn. I’m unable to link, unfortunately, but the authors argue that NGDP targeting is consistent with the Fed’s dual mandate and if implemented credibly would improve economic performance. – The Economist

Dominant Social Theme: If we could just rationalize money printing and make it scientific, it would work! Sure it would! It would! It really would!

Free-Market Analysis: Like a bad guest at a dinner party, Milton Friedman won’t go away. Now he is returning in the guise of the anonymous “Washington” writer for the Economist magazine. Just like Friedman, he has the idea that central banking can be run scientifically. In fact, it cannot.

Central banking was created to fund the British Crown’s wars and it has never been anything but a brutal and destructive force. Giving a handful of men the power to print money and monitor its price and volume is bound to cause unmitigated disasters. In fact, it has.

Booms caused by monetary stimulation inevitably give way to busts. There is no way for the hand of man to monitor money. Only the free market itself, through monetary competition and the historical evolution of gold and silver as money can do that. But that doesn’t stop the Anglosphere power elite from trying.

From our perspective, Friedman was surely a formal or at least informal agent of Money Power. The mainstream libertarian community still promotes Friedmanite “free-market” solutions and certainly his Chicago Fresh Water school, located primarily within the metaphorical ambit of the Chicago School of Economics, has been extraordinarily influential.

But we’ve never been great fans of Milton Friedman (or at least not after we became “hip” to his agenda), mostly because of his strenuous attempts to justify central banking. Money as much as war is the health of the State. In fact, states seek ownership of money to FUND wars. The control of money by the State is paramount.

Click below to continue reading:

via The Daily Bell – The Return of Milton Friedman Via NGDP Revenue Targeting.

What is money?

We spend a lot of time thinking about money, one way or another. We think about how to get our hands on it, how to keep it safe and how to spend it. When we aren’t asleep, there’s a good chance that we’re paying attention to money. But while money is never far from our thoughts, there is something curious about our relationship with it. For all that we use it to get through the day, most of us don’t know what it is.

I mean, we know what it can do. We know how much we have, more or less. We know what things cost and so we have some idea of what we can afford at any given moment. When we start thinking about the future, how long we might live and how much money we’ll need, we tend to want to think about something else. But money itself escapes our calculations. For the most part we don’t think to ask where it comes from or what it is, in itself. The advantages of having money and the consequences of having none loom so large that we seldom stop to wonder about money as such.

Today is as good a day as any to explain where money comes from and why it matters. On Thursday, the Bank of England announced another £75 billion of “quantitative easing”. If you don’t know what that means or vaguely think it has something to do with “printing money”, it is probably because you don’t know what money is. All will be revealed in what follows. OK. Are you ready to know where money comes from, to know the truth jealously guarded from the dawn of recorded time?

Money is lent into existence by banks

There’s nothing complicated going on behind the scenes. The great secret is that there isn’t really much of a secret. Yet the truth about money eludes us for most of the time.

The economist and ironist JK Galbraith once wrote that “the process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. When something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent”. Offered the unadorned truth, stripped of any technocratic flim-flam, we can scarcely believe it. It seems preposterous that money should have such humble origins, as though it is beneath money’s dignity that it should begin life at a banker’s keystroke.

Click below to read the entire article:

via What is money? – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.