Authored by James Rickards, originally posted at The Telegraph,
For a century, elites have worked to eliminate monetary gold, both physically and ideologically.
This began in 1914, with the UK’s entry into the First World War. The Bank of England wanted to suspend convertibility of bank notes into gold. Keynes counselled wisely that the bank should not do so. Gold was finite, but credit elastic.
Any time a Fed president, governor or chairman trots out the trite cliche that the Fed is "apolitical" we can't help but laugh for one simple reason: not only is the Fed not apolitical, but is very closely ideologically tied with whichever party promotes deficit spending which by definition is inflationary: more deficits mean more debt, means more opportunity for the Fed to show off its "inflation" creating skills; and in a Keynesian world, a stable 2% inflation is the lubricant that drives and stabilizes the financial system - the Fed's true mandate.
In a brutally frank and painfully honest first quarter operational update, Halliburton president Jeff Miller poured freezing cold water all over the "oil is stabilizing, and everything is going to be awesome" narrative. After explaining that the firm has laid off one-third of its global employees, and pointing to the collapse in sequential revenues across every business unit, Miller exclaimed: "What we are experiencing today is far beyond headwinds; it isunsustainable."
When it comes to the US manufacturing sector which as a result of the oil sector collapse recently entered a recession, for years it was the US auto industry which was presented as a shining example of how "things can go right" and how US manufacturing workers have benefited when year after year domestic auto production rose and recently hit a record high annualized production rate.
"The market is moving so quickly, yesterday felt just like the stock market in June last year before the crash," warns one Asian trader reflecting on the chaotic rush of Chinese speculators into the industrial metals commodities market Echoing the frenzy that fueled China's parabolic stock market rise (and subsequent collapse), Bloomberg notes one local China broker admits "we’ve seen a lot of people opening accounts for commodities futures recently," adding rather ominously, "the great ball of China money is moving away from bonds and