A funny thing happened while smashing the gold and silver price...

...it doesn't seem to be working this time.

The federal reserve is running a con.   I have known it for years.  Lots of people have, but still we are still a small percentage of the population.  The fed subscribes to Keynesian philosophy.  Most people who understand that statement simply equate it to Keynes' concept that the central bank should be like a shock absorber for the economy.  However, there is a deeper meaning that I refer to.  Keyne's famously wrote about how "animal spirits" were responsible for economic peaks and valleys.  By controlling the animal spirits, a good shepherd could control the economy.

Keynes effectively understood that humans are a herding species.  He knew that artificial calm and artificial fear could be used by more illuminated minds to move the herd in an intended direction over time.  Of course the herding was to be done for the purposes of good, the central authority always knows better than the herd, you might have to steal from or kill off a few good members of the herd in order to make things better for everyone, blah blah blah.  Keynes effectively suggested that the central authorities act as a rancher to control the livestock.  People euphemistically talk about the shepherd caring for his flock but they ignore the fact that meat is served for dinner every night.  At the end of the day, the shepherd cares only for the flock to the extent that he can extract some value from it in order to support his own consumption.

Right now there are reams of evidence that the US is suppressing the price of metals. GATA even has admissions from the government that they collude to manage the price of gold.  Why?  Because gold is the only thing on the planet that can call fiat currency a fraud.  Thus, smashing down the gold price despite growing demand from China seems like good policy to them.  The goal really isn't to lower the price of gold.  The goal is to make gold look like a "risky investment".  This manipulation is intended to keep people in the dollar con as long as possible while the government just prints up trillions of dollars more each year either directly or implicitly.  The monetary base is still under 4 trillion while the federal debt is over 17 trillion.  That debt will someday have to be paid with dollars that don't even exist today (or default).  At the end of the day, creating debt is no different than printing money because at some point the money will have to be printed to pay the debt.

But the fed is running the long con.  Keynes knew that his strategies were unsustainable forever but he also knew that con men don't live forever.  So he basically advocated running the con as long as it would run because "in the end we are all dead".   Central banks have been running this long con and they have been manipulating the price of metals in order to do it.  In decades past, all they had to do was keep Americans out of gold because America had the only super economy in the world.  This was not very difficult to do because the US dollar was the world's reserve currency and that gave it incredible artificial strength.  

There is now growing evidence that the gold suppression scam is on its last legs.  India has shown continued demand for gold as it always has.  Gold is so ingrained into Indian culture going back thousands of years that this will never change.  But India is economically small relative to other global players.  The new threat to the gold con is China.  China is clear hoarding gold.  Their government told its people to hoard gold and silver a few years ago and the Chinese government has been ramping up gold imports very rapidly.  A quick Google search will show you dozens of articles on all of these topics.

However, the US economy is still the biggest in the world and it does matter still what Americans think about gold and it is clear that only a small percentage of Americans really think gold has value.  They are still starstruck in dreamland looking at megamillion dollar lotteries which serve to propagandize the importance of the dollar even as the cost of living a real life is growing far more quickly than government CPI statistics would have people believe.  It is stagnant salaries meeting a higher cost of living that is gut-punching the American middle class.

But there are signs that this is changing.  There are signs that Americans are waking up to the use of gold as money again.  The herd is finally beginning to sense the stress in the financial system despite all of the upbeat, calming words of the fake shepherd Bernanke.  Truth be told, beneath the headlines there is a growing tide of conservatism in the US.  We sense our decline.  We sense the dishonesty of our "leaders".  And we are becoming less and less shy about saying it out in the open.  When the awakening arrives it will occur rapidly not because people rapidly awakened so much as because after a long slow awakening process the eyes suddenly pop wide open and clarity seems instantaneous after waking from a dream.

I'll leave you with some interesting charts from google trends.  The search terms were "paid in gold".  As you can see, back before the global debt Ponzi had its first major slip back in 2008, there was no statistical data on this term.  Nobody was googling for it.  But even as the price of gold has gotten smashed down, the interest in getting paid in gold has only risen.  Cheap gold, it seems this time, has not tarnished the attraction for gold.  In fact, quite the opposite: lower gold prices seem to be increasing the interest in getting paid in gold.

This next trends chart is for the string "gold is money":

Now, in the interest of fairness, let it be known that we are only at the beginning of the end.  As shown by this trend chart of "federal reserve scam".  As you can see, adding trillions to the monetary base and adding massive amounts of debt have succeeded in calming the herd over the short term.  This, I think, will be short lived and the next move up in this chart is going to be a massive 3rd wave.



 And finally, the chart of "bitcoin is money".  I'll caution people that anything that moves up exponentially is likely to be a mania.  There is a flurry of interest which peters out over time and then comes crashing down.  The slow move upward in sentiment on the gold chart is how long lasting trends develop.  The chart below suggests that Bitcoin is most likely to be a flash in the pan.


 
To close, I will say again, fiat currency and fractional reserve banking are fraudulent con games.  There are a couple truisms about the end days of a con that I have written many times:

• No con ever ran forever and it won't be different this time.
• Confidence games fall apart when the con men run out of patsies; the unteachable ones have been fleeced and those who will learn get wise.
• You can't fool all the people all the time and in the end days of a con you can't fool anyone ever.
• Because of all of the above, the tricks that used to work for long period of time during the long con suddenly seem to lose their efficacy.  In fact, a point of diminishing returns is finally hit where it actually costs the con men money to keep up the facade.  Sometimes the con men are so arrogant that they cannot let it go.  They think they can save the con and so they do more of what they have always done but the losses pile up until the con men go bust.  But smart con men keep close score and when the con ceases to provide them benefit in the here and now they cut and run.  Then they go into hiding to await another opportunity to engage in criminal enterprise.