China

Bitcoin just topped $4400 for the first time since in over 3 weeks and has now erased all of the plunge losses from Jamie Dimon's "it's a fraud" and China's shuttering of all local exchanges.

It didn't take long for the world of crypto-currencies to shrug off Jamie Dimon's self-tighteous denigration of the decentralized currency that could directly 'disrupt' his cash cow businesses; and furthermore, as The South China Morning Post reports, China's bitcoin market alive and well as traders defy crackdown.

Nearly two years after we first observed that Vancouver's soaring real estate market is nothing but a bubbling melange of criminal Chinese oligarch "hot money", desperate to get parked offshore in any piece of real estate, but mostly in British Columbia regardless of price, a new multi-year investigation has uncovered extensive links - including money laundering and underground banking - between China's criminal underworld and British Columbia drug and casino cash and VIPs, as well as their connections to China, Macau and the notorious triads.

China Catalyst To Send Gold Over $10,000 Per Ounce?

Jim Rickards is on record forecasting $10,000 gold.

But is China about to provide the catalyst to send gold even higher? And by how much?

Today, we fare forth in the spirit of speculation… follow facts down strange roads… and arrive at a destination stranger still…

China — the world’s largest oil importer — struck lightning through international markets recently.

According to the Nikkei Asian Review, China has plans to buy imported oil with yuan instead of dollars.

In a sign that China's ongoing attempts to delever (and decelerate) the economy may have gone a bit too far, on Saturday morning China’s central bank announced a targeted reserve requirement ratio (RRR) cut, its first since February 2016 and which will go into effect in 2018, in an attempt to boost lending to struggling smaller firms and energize China's lacklustre private sector, Xinhua reported. 

If you are a precious metals investor then you may be wondering why the price of gold and silver has been slammed in recent weeks... amid ever-increasing nuclear armageddon rhetoric, storms, quakes, floods, and a central bank (that is notoriously bad at forecasting) about to attempt to do something with its balance sheet thathas never been achieved...

The answer is surprisingly simple... China's Golden Week Holiday.