InvestorMind

The legendary investor says the country's hefty debt load will make the coming recession worse than the 2008 downturn. The Fed is only making the situation worse. Original source

James Rickards is a hedge fund manager in New York City and the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis from Portfolio/Penguin. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesGRickards While America claims to be a class-free society, the opposite often seems to be the case. Americans are obsessed with social status in all its forms whether based on celebrity, artistic or athletic accomplishment, or just plain money. Although royalty is not legal in America, our economic royalty including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are as highly regarded as any English duke or earl. When it comes to status, we don't look just at the size of one's bank account, we make distinctions based on the nexus of money and social standing. This leads to contrasts such as "old money" and "new money" with the former connoting generations of life on country estates and Ivy League credentials while the latter is something flashier. The Astor family have been wealthy for over 200

Over the past four weeks, the prices of gold and silver have experienced a major decline once each week. Last week, the suppression occurred on Friday, April 13 during the last 15 minutes of COMEX trading, between 1:15 and 1:30. How is it possible to identify this event as a manipulation rather than just the actions of a free market? Unfortunately, that is becoming quite easy to detect. Significant price moves resulting from market developments rarely occur in a vacuum. If investors were worried about falling demand for commodities, you would see price declines in a number of industrial metals as well as precious metals. If investors perceive a greater likelihood of another round of quantitative easing, the value of the dollar would tend to drop as US stock markets rise with gold and silver prices. Last Friday, there was no particular news that should have led to a major impact on gold and silver prices. There were no sympathetic moves in other markets in conjunction with the

On the heels of the release of the Fed statement and the Bernanke press conference, today King World News interviewed Bill Fleckenstein, President of Fleckenstein Capital, to get his take on the situation. Fleckenstein told KWN the economy will roll over, Europe will go into the abyss and the Fed will be forced to ease. He also described the Fed as “idiots” and said they are completely wrong about what they are saying: “Let’s take a step back for a second. Who are these people? They’re the same idiots that never saw anything coming. So whatever they think they see or whatever they want to talk about is meaningless because they are probably wrong about what they think.” Bill Fleckenstein continues: “For this five minutes they think the economy is okay, and it isn’t. They seem to think Europe’s kind of okay, and it’s not. So the next thing you know they will have to realize they are not so right about being sanguine and then they will have to do a U-turn. How is that any d

With continued volatility in global markets, 40 year veteran, Robert Fitzwilson wrote this exclusive piece for King World News. Fitzwilson is founder of The Portola Group, one of the premier boutique firms in the United States. Here are Fitzwilson’s observations: “In our opinion, the beginning of the dot-com bubble started with the Netscape IPO in the mid-1990s. Prior to Netscape, companies had to have a track record of earnings and cash flows before going public. It was normal to receive a prospectus or two per week prior to the Netscape IPO. Afterwards, it became a flood, almost a daily occurrence to have prospectuses arrive at our research department.” Robert Fitzwilson continues: “Bubbles occur when perception achieves escape velocity from reality. Asset values routinely oscillate between over- and under-valuation. Indeed, in normal times, the only way to “outperform” is to have an iron stomach and solid conviction (to buy when everyone is selling and to sell when there is a

Whenever gold is in a longer term sideways pattern as it is now for nearly seven month, a lot of smaller investors loose their patience and doubt their investment. Therefore we enjoy offering to you today a very powerful talk with Egon von Greyerz, founder and managing partner of Matterhorn Asset Management and GoldSwitzerland. Egon strongly reminds us the real important things, investors shall always focus on… Egon von Greyerz talks to us about unlimited money printing done by the central banks, why governments and political leaders are in an officially denial and what a deflationary implosion would really mean. Von Greyerz, born in Sweden and living in Zurich, Switzerland, has his view from in- and outside his own country. He therefore is a real professional source to discuss the current situation in Switzerland and if it is still save to store one’s physical gold in this country. Original source

KWN is giving readers and listeners globally an exclusive sneak peak into Gerald Celente’s Spring Trends Journal. Gerald Celente is founder of Trends Research, and the man many consider to be the top trends forecaster in the world. Celente also discussed some extraordinary firsthand accounts from the Nazi era during World War II. Here is what Celente had to say: “In this Trends Journal we outline, step by step, how our Constitutional rights are being abrogated. (George) Orwell would have loved this one. What has happened is the Attorney General has just instituted new guidelines.” Gerald Celente continues: “They are now allowed to be listening to what we are saying right now, listen on your cell phone, watch every stroke of the keyboard that you make. Everything that you say and do, they are now watching you, and have the right to do so under these new guidelines for five years, even if you are no threat at all. What they have done is they’ve put in these algorithms to det

The government of Iceland has forgiven the mortgage debt for much of its population. This nation chose a very different way of stopping the crisis from the rest of European countries. It decided to hear the requests of the population and to put politicians and bankers on the bench of the accused three years after their financial excesses would sank one of the most prosperous economies in 2008.

Welcome to Capital Account. Hedge funds and investors have reportedly been puzzled by weird movements in credit markets. According to the Wall Street Journal, markets have been rattled by one trader with deep pockets being called the "London Whale" who it's believed works for JP Morgan. It just goes to show how individuals and firms can move markets. Today, we'll talk about manipulation in the gold and silver markets with Mike Maloney, of GoldSilver.com. He believes that manipulation is going on (contrary to the words of Blythe Masters, who spoke with CNBC yesterday, affirming that JP Morgan is simply "hedging" it's silver positions with large open shorts), but that rather than being a bad thing for individual investors, simply presents an opportunity for buying more metal and cheaper prices. This is something that the state of South Carolina failed to grasp in a recent report it conducted, in which it found that the price of gold and silver is manipulat

THRIVE is an unconventional documentary that lifts the veil on what's REALLY going on in our world by following the money upstream -- uncovering the global consolidation of power in nearly every aspect of our lives. Weaving together breakthroughs in science, consciousness and activism, THRIVE offers real solutions, empowering us with unprecedented and bold strategies for reclaiming our lives and our future.

Gold as world currency reserve may seem, at this point, to be a bit far fetched but in fact it is closer than you think. Over the past few decades the US dollar has somehow been positioned as the world reserve currency despite the fact that no one in the world voted on it being so. And if they had, would they have favoured the US dollar over any other currency. Right now no currency looks at all stable enough to be considered a world reserve currency least of all the US dollar. This is beginning to be recognized by other countries now attempting to seek other methods of trade. The US government does not take too kindly having a replacement. Take Iraq for example. Back in 2000 Saddam Hussein stated he wanted to trade Iraq’s oil for Euros* and bypass the USD as a medium of exchange and we all know what happened a few short years later. History is repeating itself now with Iran. Having been locked out of using the reserve currency by the denial of the Swift banking system**, Iran is

Silver is trading in yet another Bear Pennant and one that is really a “helper” pattern to its Pipe Top, slightly larger Bear Pennant and bearish Rising Wedge. Both the Pipe Top and Rising Wedge patterns are confirmed at $34.90 and $34.25 per ounce, respectively, for targets of $30 and $26 per ounce while the Bear Pennant reconfirms at $32.50 per ounce for a target of $27.50. Silver’s newest bearish aspect confirms at $31.65 per ounce for a target of about $30 per ounce as well. Most bearish about silver’s chart, however, is its Descending Trend Channel that will try to pull silver down toward its bottom trendline at some level between $22 and $24 per ounce. Unless silver reverses quickly back above $34.50 per ounce or so on a Falling Wedge in development, all of these bearish elements in silver could work quickly with it seeming likely that the totality will cause silver to fall as much as 30%. Should this occur, it will have more than proven that silver is set to go sub-$30

The stock market is overreacting to what the Federal Reserve didn't say about quantitative easing in the minutes from its March meeting, bond king Bill Gross told CNBC Wednesday. "It's much ado about nothing or much ado about a little," the founder of Pimco said. "We should think of the Fed as like a chess game where some of the pieces are more important than others," likening Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to the king, San Francisco Fed governor Janet Yellen to the queen and New York Fed chief William Dudley to the castle, with the rest of the governors the knights. "You have a story when some of these major pieces, one of the three, basically concedes and says, 'Check mate.' But we haven't seen that," Gross said. "Until that happens this wordsmithing...is relatively unimportant." The Fed minutes released Tuesday showed central bank policymakers less keen to launch a fresh round of monetary stimulus as the U.S. economy impr