- The global economy is one huge debt Ponzi. Ponzis require ever-increasing inputs of their energy source in order to maintain the appearance of solvency. For Madoff, that meant more suckers giving him their cash to "invest". In the case of the Great Global Debt Ponzi, the energy source is debt of every kind (trust based economics).
- No Ponzi ever lasted forever. It will not be different this time, period.
- Every Ponzi requires several factors in order to continue to run: human nature, greed of the patsies, financial ability of the patsies to participate (you can't shake down someone who has nothing and no ability to borrow), a cover story of some sort that can be sold and above all confidence in the con men running the show.
- Ponzis tend to collapse suddenly as the sheeple figure out en masse that they are headed for the slaughter house. As everyone heads for the door at once, only those already standing near the exits (or those who left early) get out whole. Everyone that remains for the collapse will lose some or all of their at-risk wealth.
- The engine of the debt Ponzi is fractional reserve banking which is hyper-enabled by operating on top of a fiat currency system. In short, there is literally no value in the system. It's all promises and no reserves.
- Gold is money and nothing else is. Silver is a reasonable substitute at times but silver is also an industrial metal and so its scarcity is volatile based on industrial needs. Real money is not volatile like that.
- Because gold is the only real money on the planet, only gold has the power to call fiat currency a fraud. Period. Price rises of ANY other commodity can be blamed on the greedy farmers, the greedy Arabs (I guess we should attack them for being so greedy, yeah?), droughts, floods, supply chain interruptions, etc. But gold is not of any significant use to man today for anything except the purpose of money and for that purpose there is and never was anything better nor even close.
- Because gold draws attention to the con it is the enemy of the con men. For the past 40 years bankers have been telling us that gold is a risky investment, gold is for fools, gold is for extremists, gold is not money, you don't earn anything on savings kept in gold and that a gold standard is a "barbarous relic". At the same time, they all hold thousands of metric tonnes of gold in their vaults and the dollar price of gold has significantly outpaced any stock market "returns". When the con men pay debts, they never pay in gold. They always pay with printed paper. For some reason nobody wants to part with their gold. Do as I say and not as I do.
And so we are seeing this today as Deutsche Bank ("DB") has put out a report entitled "Gold, adjusting for zero". Now pay attention if you want to really understand something that only 1 in 10,000 understand today. Lots of people are waking up to the con of fiat currency. But few people understand that the real engine of inflation and then deflation is fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking allows con men to create credit from thin air and loan it into the economy as if it were money. This is how the banking cartel rips us off. The new money drives up the prices of everything (more buying power chasing the same amount of production will do that!). Loans thus continue to get larger and larger and banks continue to rake in more and more profit in the form of fees and interest that generally are sold as a percentage of the financing, not as a flat rate fee. Thus, the bigger the loans, the bigger the income without even doing more paperwork to earn it. This is an obvious scam!
Fiat currency just makes it easier for bankers to leverage up their credit production. Why? Because credit offered by banks is supposed to be backed by collateral of some sort. These are called bank reserves. Fiat currency allows banks to carry paper in their vaults (or numbers in their computers) as if they are of actual value instead of something someone just conjured up from thin air. So fiat currency really enables fractional reserve banking by allowing leverage on top of vapor but make no mistake: the real culprit of economic dishonesty is fractional reserve banking.
Read the article and gather this fact: DB isn't talking about going back to a gold standard for the fun of it or because they suddenly turned honest. They are talking about it because their profits are crashing. The confidence in the fractional reserve scam is collapsing and it means zero growth (more importantly, negative "growth" if they were honest - credit deflation). Ability to originate new loans on top of impaired assets such as house notes, securities, government bonds and other overpriced/certain-to-default "assets" is waning.
The con men thus need a "new" reserve asset on top of which they can make loans in order to keep the scam of fractional reserve banking alive. If they don't do something, the whole thing will collapse within a few years. At best, the con men will be out on the street with no skills to speak of. At worst they will be hanged by angry mobs in the street for their complicity in the collapse of the global economy which would lead to riots, starvation and civil wars. Bottom line, the con men need a confidence injection into their scam. Gold is not an impaired asset. Everyone knows that gold never went bankrupt. Gold is something that people will accept as the basis for continuing on with the fractional reserve banking scam. They will do this even if they know it is a scam if only to avoid the consequences associated with a massive deflationary Ponzi collapse (again, civil unrest or even civil war are the historical wages of letting the Ponzi collapse). This, and only this, is why scum bag bankers are suddenly interested in gold. PERIOD. They have not one Troy ounce of honesty between any of them but they are very smart and they know it is time to change tactics.
With all of this in mind, think about what would be best for the bankers and you will know how to position yourself. In other words follow the moneymen because until the people finally decide to wipe them out (which will happen someday but perhaps not in my lifetime), the moneymen are leading the global herd. Thus, if you know what's good for the moneymen then you know where they must head in order to get that goodness they seek for themselves. Know this and you can be 2 steps in front of them for once in your life instead of always feeling like you are the last one to the party.
So, the immortal words of Hans und Frans, "hear me now and believe me later" (look it up on Youtube if you don't get it ; ): Bankers want to create a lot of credit. This means they need a big pile of reserves in order to fraudulently, fractionally reserve (AKA leverage) on top of. The US has ~ 8k metric tonnes in round numbers of gold (supposedly). That's roughly 250 million Troy Oz. If that sounds like a lot of gold, consider the fact that the US has 330 million people. That not even close to 1 Troy oz per person... At today's market prices, it's only worth about 460 billion dollars. If that sounds like a lot, consider that our annual deficit for the past several years has been well over $1 trillion per year. Existing US government debt on the books is pushing $16 trillion. Total government obligations are well north of $50 trillion (unfunded social security, medicare and other Ponzi promises) and some estimates are north of $100 trillion. $460 billion is a drop in the bucket.
When these paper Ponzi promises come due there has to be enough currency to pay for them. Whether in paper form or just accounting entries (more debt), the fractional reserve system has to somehow account for it all. Trust me, with a gold standard based on only $460 billion, the banks are not going to be able to produce enough fractional reserve credit to cover all of the debts because at the same time they will be forced to maintain lower reserve ratios. It was fiat currency that enabled ridiculous reserve ratio expansion to balloon from the historical 10:1 ratio to 32:1 in the forensic case of Bear Stearns to the 70:1 ratio of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. When we return to some form of gold standard those ratios must come down.
Putting it all together, the only way to create the needed amounts of fractional reserve currency in the new system will be to value the reserves very highly. $1800 per Troy oz gold is not nearly high enough. Not even close! I won't sit here and try to predict the eventual gold price that will be needed for the bankers to continue their fractional reserve Ponzi. But it's pretty obvious that they are already planning on using gold as the reserve basis for their next artificially induced wave of "gowth" (which is elite-speak for growth of fraudulent, credit based money supply...). Again, refer to my prior post where I pointed out that gold is currently treated as a lowly tier 3 asset which means that only 50% of its market value can be used for fractional lending calculations today but that it is going to tier 1 status whereby it will become legal to use 100% of its value for loan generation purposes going forward. The bankers are clearly setting us up, step by step for the return of gold as a major basis of our fractional reserve Ponzi. As other asset classes collapse, they will be forced to (kicking and screaming the whole way) acknowledge gold as the premier reserve asset upon which they will run their fractional reserve lending scam. They will not desire this. They will require it. It's either that or go find another job where you can get paid without having to add any economic value. Those with eyes to see it will rest assured that it will lead to much higher gold prices in the fullness of time.
Here's another tidbit for you to ponder. Everything goes in cycles. One day the entire concept of fractional reserve lending will collapse because it is a fraudulent, something-for-nothing scam. That could be decades from now or right around the corner. It all depends on the mood of the herd. But everything that happens that is a step closer to honesty will only result in higher valuation of all things that are honest. Gold is honest. If, in order to gain more confidence in the collapsing scam, fractional reserve ratios are limited then it represents a step closer to honesty. Thus, it will increase the value of gold.
Another example: Greenspan legalized the nightly "sweeping" of checking accounts into long term savings (and unsweeping the next day) in order to reclassify your monthly food and rent money as if these funds were long term investable savings which banks could use as reserves in their fractional lending scam. If that law is repealed then it will represent in another step back toward honesty and any move toward honesty will be positive for gold. Why? Because with smaller reserves to lend upon the bankers will have to create a story that will increase valuation of the good reserves that they do have which will be gold. They won't want to do this but they will be left with no alternative.
Another example: Glass-Steagall dissallowed investment banks from handling the money of people who just wanted to use a bank for savings. Greenspan repealed this in order to give more reserves to the banking system so that it could leverage up on top of a larger reserve base (AKA "growth"...). If Glass-Steagall 2.0 is put into place then it will result in another step back toward honesty and thus another step up for the valuation of honest money which is gold. The mechanism is the same: bankers will always need more reserves to make more loans which drives their definition of "growth". But killing the concept of sweeps and reintroduction of Glass-Steagall take reserves away from banks. Bankers don't want to do these things but the sheeple (especially retiring boomers) are awakening and they will make the politicians do it. These "lost" reserves must be replaced by something or for sure the system will collapse. Period. As DB says, gold is the only thing on the horizon that can do this.
And now for my final point (finally): forget what you heard about deflation being bad for gold. That is a myth. All of the reserve reduction mechanisms I stated above are in fact deflationary. Why? Because they effectively reduce the amount of credit that bankers can produce and credit is BY FAR the biggest component of monetary inflation (a fact which, again, very few people understand). At the same time, I've argued that gold will benefit from all of these deflationary acts. The reason is exactly what Mish said: gold is money and everyone rushes into money. I will add that the banks must lead the run away from paper assets into real money because they need hard assets to serve as reserves for their something-for-nothing fractional reserve scheme that they owe their completely out of line wealth and prosperity to.
Here's another hint for you about gold not going down as a result of credit deflation: when people who don't know anything about how money actually works or how the economy works past the drivel they hear on CNBC are commenting on gold going down as a result of deflation then smart people will consider the opposite to be most likely. The herd is never right at major inflection points. The "common knowledge" is eventually exposed to be what it really was all along: misleading propaganda. When the people who are afraid of gold today at $1800/oz suddenly desire to go "all in" at very substantially higher prices, that is when I will be looking to buy things of value with my gold such as income producing assets like rental property, etc. There's a time to save and a time to spend. Right now it's time to save.