Business

Last Thursday, January 28, there was a flash crash on the price chart for silver. Here is a graph of the price action.

   The Price of Silver, Jan 28 (All times GMT)

If you read more about it, you will see that there was an irregularity around the silver fix. At the time, the spot price was around $14.40. The fix was set at $13.58. This is a major deviation.

Many silver bugs are up in arms about how unfair the new silver fix is. That’s nothing new. They were up in arms about the old one. The old one was supposedly manipulated

Two years ago, just before Michael Lewis released Flash Boys starting a sharp if brief revulsion against parasitic, predatory High Frequency Trading frontrunners, which delayed Virtu's IPO by one year, we broke down Virtu's 2013 net trading income by product line. We were not surprised to find that of the $45 million in total growth, the largest income category, US stocks growth was a tiny 5% of all, rising by $2.3 million in 2013. In fact, between EMEA, APAC and US Equities, there was very limited growth in 2013, while commodities posted an outright trading income decline.

Submitted by Robert Gore via StraightLineLogic.com,

In a recent article, “How to Defeat Your Enemies,” we maintained that governments and their people were natural enemies, and that the most powerful adversarial tactic is “getting one’s enemies to fool themselves.” The article detailed the effective use of this tactic by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The question arises: how can the American people use it against their natural adversary, the US government?

Dear Mr. Roberts, I check out your website at least twice each week. It is always most informative. Thank you. Where I live down here in far-southern Illinois the unemployment rate is upwards of sixty to eighty percent. Most individuals and families rely on food stamps or some combination of government aid. No doubt if these were taken away you would have riots in the streets. Surroundings towns are mostly destitute, with very little local commerce to speak of other than the occasional corporate franchise store ( mini-WallMarts).

Late last month, in what amounted to a tacit admission that nothing is working when it comes to pulling Japan out of its decades’ long stint in the deflationary doldrums, the BoJ adopted negative rates.