InvestorMind

Every year India spends $12 billion on purchasing oil from Iran, but now it is using gold instead of dollars. India might not be alone; China has suggested it would jump on board with India. New Delhi and Beijing account for 40 percent of the Iranian oil exports. Priya Sridhar gives us her report.

With gold, silver and oil hanging on to recent gains, today King World News interviewed Rick Rule, CEO of Sprott USA. Rule told KWN to expect that we are going to see a dramatic increase in volatility in global markets going forward. Rule discussed gold, silver and oil, but first, here is what he had to say about quiet markets: “You know, Eric, it’s amazing, given all of the turmoil in the world, how quiet markets are. My suspicion is the markets have been quieted by a huge blanket of liquidity put forward by the ECB and the Federal Reserve.” Rick Rule continues: “There is nothing that calms people down as much as liquidity, despite the fact that so much of that liquidity is counterfeit. As we’ve talked about before, we have a situation now where governments, backed by consumers, have declared a war on savers. The money you receive when you put money in the bank is nowhere near the amount of money that’s required to compensate you for inflation. As a consequence, people who ...

In this 40+ minute discussion, Jason Burack, Mo Dawoud and John Manfreda of Wall St for Main St, LLC discuss the fundamental factors driving higher oil and higher gasoline prices in the US. Factors exist on both the supply and demand side along with a devalued US Dollar. Peak, Cheap Oil and the world running out of light, sweet crude is also discussed.

The average prices of a gallon of gas and a barrel of oil are near 150-year highs. Most pundits expect them to go higher. Are you ready for $5-per-gallon gasoline? In a recent speech, President Barack Obama said: “We’re not going to be able to just drill our way out of the problem of high gas prices.” Actually, to a large extent, we can. For proof, let’s compare what’s been happening in California to the extraordinary accomplishments in North Dakota. According to the Fraser Institute’s 2011 Global Petroleum Survey, California is the worst State in the Nation for its hostility to drilling. In fact, measured against the rest of the world, California ranks 91st. Thanks to years of placating environmental extremists, California’s anti-drilling regulations make it almost impossible to drill for new oil anywhere in the State, onshore or off. As a result, its production of oil has fallen by nearly one-third in the past 20 years. As oil production has declined, so has tax revenue. Even w...

With gold at one point trading over $75 lower and silver down over $3, today John Embry told King World News this is nothing more than a temporary smash and he expects both metals to come roaring right back. Embry, Chief Investment Strategist at Sprott Asset Management, also said oil may quickly spike to a number that will literally cripple the global economy. But first, here is what Embry had this to say about silver: “This relates to the massive blowout in open interest in both gold and silver over the last few weeks. The market is always vulnerable short-term in that situation. Central planners can’t announce they are going to have constant and massive QE or everything would go to the moon. So the idea is floated around that QE3 is off the table.” John Embry continues: “The market is so volatile and you’ve had Jim Sinclair on, who I worship when it comes to this stuff, and he was discussing this volatility. He said, ‘Be ready for volatility that’s going to make you feel l...

We have been saying it for weeks, and today even the WSJ jumped on the bandwagon: the sole reason why crude prices are surging (RIP European profit margins: with EUR Brent at a record, we can only assume the ECB will pull a 2011 and hike rates in 3-4 months even as it pumps trillions in PIIGS, banks bailout liquidity)  is because global liquidity has risen by $2 trillion in a few short months, on the most epic shadow liquidity tsunami launched in history in lieu of QE3 (discussed extensively here in our words, but here are JPM 's). Luckily, the market is finally waking up to this, and just as world central banks were preparing to offset deflation, they will instead have to deal with spiking inflation, because the market may have a short memory, it can remember what happened just about this time in 2011. And the problem is that when it comes to the inflation trade, the market, unlike in most other instances, can be fast - blazing fast, at anticipating what the central pl...

Foster Gamble on Iran.

In what is likely a long overdue move, Iran has finally decided to give Europe a harsh lesson in game theory. Instead of letting Euro-area politicians score brownie points at its expense by threatening to halt imports and cut off the Iranian economy, the Iranian government will instead propose a bill calling for an immediate halt to oil deliveries to Europe . The move, with most reports citing the Iranian news agency Mehr, has come about in response to the EU agreement to impose sanctions against Iran, which were announced earlier this week. And why not? After all if Europe is indeed serious, sooner or later Iran will be cut off but in the meantime experience significant policy uncertainty, which is precisely what the flipflops on the ground need. The one thing that Europe, however is forgetting, is that all that whopping 0.8 Mb/d in imports will simply find a new buyer.Quickly. So with China, India and Russia already having bilateral agreements with Iran in place, we ar...

By Marin Katusa, Casey Research To many walking the planet, fracking has a seriously bad reputation. Thanks to hyperbole and misinformation, fracking opponents have convinced a lot of people that the operators who drill and then hydraulically fracture underground rock layers thumb their noses at and even hate the environment. Anti-fracking claims may be twists on reality – for example, that a legislative loophole makes fracking exempt from the America's Safe Drinking Water Act, when really this federal legislation never regulated fracking because it is a state concern. Then there's the completely absurd, such as the idea that frac operators are allowed to and regularly do inject frac fluids directly into underground water supplies. We decided to set the record straight by using facts, not playing on emotion like many of the frac-tivists do. It's important because unconventional oil and gas constitute an increasingly pivotal part of the world's energy s...

The US has slammed Iran for beginning to enrich uranium at a new underground facility southwest of the capital Tehran. The State department called it a further escalation in Tehran's violation of UN resolutions. Afshin Rattansi, journalist and author told RT that only one thing can cause the United States to push for a confrontation with Iran -- and it is not the threat of execution of one of its citizens. The answer, according to Rattansi is crude and simple. RT on Twitter http://twitter.com/RT_com RT on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/RTnews

With investors concerned about the recent plunge in gold and silver and questions about what is going to happen with Iran and the Straits of Hormuz, today King World News interviewed KWN resident expert Jim Rickards. Rickards has gained international recognition for his deadly accurate predictions regarding moves by central planners. Rickards let KWN know that the US is headed to war with Iran: “Yeah, it’s very serious, Eric, actually grave. The big thing to get right in this case is that Iran will not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, period. That’s just not going to happen. Now we know they (Iran & its allies) are pushing towards it and so there is going to be a train wreck.” Jim Rickards continues: “The Obama administration has pursued diplomacy very vigorously. My view is it has failed. (The other possibility) would be a regime change. I say the war has already begun. There’s a lot of sabotage, there have been assassinations, strange things blowing up, rebellio...

In this video Chris Martenson, economic analyst at http://chrismartenson.com and author of 'The Crash Course', explains why he thinks that the coming 20 years are going to look completely unlike the last 20 years. In his presentation he focuses on the so-called three "Es": Economy, Energy and Environment. He argues that at this point in time it is no longer possible to view either one of those topics separately from one another. Since all our money is loaned onto existence, our economy has to grow exponentially. Martenson proves this point empirically by showing a 99.9% fit of the actual growth curve of the last 40 years to an exponential curve. If we wanted to continue on this path, our debt load would have to double again over the next 10 years. By continually increasing our debt relative to GDP we are making the assumption that our future will always be wealthier than our past. He believes that this assumption is flawed and that the debt loads are already unmanag...

If you think the drop in oil prices recently from around $114 in early May to around $100 a barrel today is a signal that we've seen the last of high oil prices, think again. The drop in oil prices was due to several factors. The increase in margin requirements for silver spooked investors and immediately sold oil. Also, the strengthening of the US Dollar has cause oil to get cheaper in US Dollar terms. However, we should not forget that oil is a commodity that is used up everyday. One of the biggest importer of oil is China. China's demand for oil has increased 400% in the last 20 years and it is estimated that China will use more oil than the US by 2020. What's triggering the demand for oil in China is the number of cars being bought by its citizens. The annual growth rate in demand for cars is between 30 to 40%. Only 10% of China's population own cars right now. That's a huge growth market. I found this chart showing a comparison of the demand for oil by ...

If you've been keeping up with the silver prices, you may have noticed it went down a lot (23%) in the last two days alone. Silver hit a high of $47.015 on May 2nd and today, May 5, it's trading at around $36.35. If you're wondering why silver has gone down so much so fast, part of the reason was because of the announcement by the Commodity Exchange Inc (Comex) which is owned by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) to increase the margin requirements for silver futures effective at the end of today (Thursday) and another one due on Monday, May 9, 2011. They only announced the new margin requirement late Wednesday, May 4, 2011. This made a lot of investors withdraw from the market or sell some of their holdings to meet the new margin requirements. Another reason is the pullout of gold and silver by Hedge Fund manager George Soros . If someone is selling that much gold and silver, the prices is bound to go down. Whenever they report a fund manager do something like ...