From European Bull to Bear
Guest post by Peter Tchir.
I have clearly had another change in sentiment on the outlook for assets in Europe. At the height of the crisis I was an unabashed bull. The timing of this Bloomberg TV interview couldn’t have been better, but in general the bull case was based on 3 things
· Not doing anything was risking catastrophe and a Eurozone wide banking run, followed by a freeze in economic activity
· That the Spanish bank bailout deal would progress and had been designed to get banks up and running in a timely manner
· Prices already reflected much of the risk and little of the upside
From the moment of the “whatever it takes” speech, where Draghi clearly answered my How Dumb is Draghi question, European markets rallied.
The Spanish bank bailout seemed to be running slower than I would have liked, nothing was getting done in Greece, but at least Draghi seemed determined to follow up on his promise (or threat if you were short). His first ECB after the big pronouncement was a bit of a dud, but he said enough to keep the markets happy.
Spain – same same
Stiglitz reminds us again.
“If you don’t do that, you have this adverse dynamic: the weak countries get weaker and the whole system falls apart,” Stiglitz said today in an interview in Geneva. “And this has to be done fairly quickly” because in a couple of years, “there won’t be any money in Spanish banks.”
Full video below.
Manipulation of the Gold Price & the Crash of Paper Gold
Guest post via GoldSilverWorlds.
There is much discussion these days as to whether the price of gold is being manipulated. The answer is simply “yes.”
It is likely that most potential gold investors would agree that the major financial institutions have theability to influence the gold price. They would also agree that to do so would be of benefit to those institutions. Yet, many investors still have difficulty making the final leap to agree that, if the institutions can manipulate the gold price and, by doing so, will profit from it, they will actually manipulate the price. Odd, as this would seem to me to be the easiest of the three premises to accept.
However, there are also many investors who do believe that manipulation exists. From time to time, investors have commented to me, “I don’t know how they’re going about it, but I’m sure it’s being done.”
This view suggests that the method of manipulation is difficult to understand.
Much of the manipulations that financial institutions perform are complex and confusing to those who are not involved in the industry, and this is intentional. The muddier the waters, the less transparent the activities are.
So, let’s take away the detail and express one common method of gold price manipulation in simple terms:
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