|
“Passivity is fatal to us. Our goal is to make the enemy passive. … Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.” Mao Tse-tung, proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic of China, 1949 Circumstantial evidence is mounting high that there is something seriously wrong with the amount of gold reportedly owned by the United States government, or more precisely, the American people. After nearly two generations of being brainwashed into believing that gold is a meaningless relic, western citizens have lost all concept of gold’s crucial monetary importance. If it turns out that the United States does not, in fact, possess and own the gold it claims to, the monetary, fiscal, economic, and humanitarian fallout will be unprecedented in its destructiveness. Unfortunately, the people have no idea what is at stake. The largest corporation in the world, by far, is the United States government. No other corporation has anything even close to its $3.4 trillion in annual revenues, and $4.4 trillion in annual expenses. And no other corporation has ever suffered multiple annual losses exceeding $1 trillion dollars, nor could it have, as such losses would have financially annihilated it. To be able to print money at will and without limit, as USG, Inc. can do, has blinded it to the powerful beast called Consequences that is slowly and methodically hunting it down. USG, Inc. employs thousands of accountants, many of whom work at the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO prepares detailed budgets, one of which looks forward thirty years, and then extrapolates the numerical trends for an additional forty-five years, for a total forward horizon of 75 years. The 2015 report examines USG, Inc.’s projected performance until the year 2090. According to that report, not only will USG, Inc. lose money every single year for the next 75 years, the losses will actually accelerate each year and total more than $300 trillion. In 2047 alone, the deficit is estimated to be $5.3 trillion, on a cash accounting basis. On an accrual accounting basis, it will be far worse, if USG, Inc. even makes it to that point in its current state, something we find it difficult to envision. It is arithmetically impossible for the dollar to avoid destruction in such a scenario. It should be no surprise that USG, Inc.’s finances are such a disaster, because for the past generation and longer, the CEOs of USG, Inc. have never in their lives held real jobs in the productive economy, other than GW Bush’s brief stints as a member of an oil and then a baseball investor group, which is not the kind of real job we mean. Instead, these CEOs have all been professional politicians, who by definition do not contribute to the real economy, but rather, feed upon it. This pattern was about to repeat itself in 2016, with the Deep State’s planned installation of Hillary Clinton into the CEO role at USG, Inc. Clinton, too, has never in her life had a real job in the productive economy, and has precisely zero experience managing anything even beginning to resemble a massive corporation with millions of employees and projected $1+ trillion, accelerating annual losses extending as far as eyes can see. This is exactly what the Deep State wanted: a corrupt, financially clueless, ideological figurehead, who would be oblivious as they ramped up the looting of USG, Inc. to a new level of rapaciousness while she was busy hectoring the nation’s producers and taxpayers about their deplorable selves. It is this looting that is the precise reason why USG, Inc. is now drowning in losses and debt, and is strategically paralyzed. While anyone with any common sense would immediately understand that it would be ridiculous to expect that someone with zero education, training or experience in engineering could oversee the design of a spacecraft capable of landing on Mars, or that someone with zero medical education, training or experience could successfully conduct brain surgery, for some unfathomable reason, people think that someone with zero business education, training or experience can successfully manage the world’s largest corporation. USG, Inc.’s catastrophic financial results demonstrate the regrettable stupidity of that thought. We previously termed the current United States operating system as one of “crony communism,” whereby the cronies have free rein to steal the nation’s current and retained earnings (the private wealth), while the people are progressively immiserated in communistic helplessness and squalor. The election of HRC would have finalized the crony communist revolution that Obama unleashed with all his might. During the campaign, Trump claimed that the 2016 election provided the American people their “last chance” to turn the nation around. The key word was “chance;” he offered no guarantees, because he knew that the situation hung on a thread. In an upset, Trump won, and for the first time in decades, an actual businessman is now the CEO of the world’s largest corporation. Imagine that. Unfortunately, he inherited a situation so fractured and poisoned fiscally, monetarily, politically and societally that his turnaround task is virtually impossible, no matter how genuine his efforts might be. Whether or not one agrees with Trump’s policies or style, he is now talking to the American people and the world about business topics that previous, politician USG, Inc. CEOs totally avoided, given their desire and incentive to preserve the status quo: the astronomical trade deficit; the need to bring back offshored jobs; the critical importance of reviving manufacturing; the staggering national debt; NATO’s getting a free defense ride at U.S. taxpayers’ expense; the need to slash strangulating regulations; skewed, unfair trade deals; the urgent need for GDP growth; the untenable condition of the nation’s infrastructure; the need to get massive illegal immigration, which comes at an exorbitant cost to taxpayers, under control; and all the rest. Beyond those issues, Trump’s most important job responsibility is to restore the American spirit. Under Obama’s crony communist revolution, euphemized as his so-called “fundamental transformation of America,” a fraud he dared not call by its true name given that it was such an overt and pernicious attack on everything the vast majority of the people of this nation stand for, believe in and want, the citizens started to do, in droves, what they always do when subjected to totalitarian control: check out and shut down. GDP and retail sales stagnated, and the economy progressively ground down. Stores closed and business owners gave up. And by the millions, the people retreated into the dead-end dependency of welfare, Food Stamps and Medicaid, while homelessness, tent city and under-bridge community numbers skyrocketed. Not coincidentally, opioid addiction, the ultimate surrender to despair and suicide, became a national epidemic. Which is exactly what the crony communist profiteers wanted: an increasingly helpless, hopeless, addicted and compliant populace that could be controlled by the actual “crumbs,” Ms. Pelosi, of subsistence government pigeon feed scattered upon the ground for the citizens to peck at. As the Dutch thinker, Ronald Bernard, so incisively realized: “All the misery in the world is a business plan.” Trump has said that his proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum are more than a matter of financials; they are also a matter of national security, because “if you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country.” This is thematically identical to the statement he has repeatedly made about illegal immigration: “If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country.” This notion of “country” is vital, and particularly so when it comes to a nation’s monetary reserves. To steel and borders, we would add that, “if don’t have gold, you don’t have country.” Mr. Trump is knowledgeable about gold. In fact, on January 29, 2016, he sealed a deal with Apmex, one of the nation’s largest gold dealers, for a 10 year lease of the 50th floor of “The Trump Building” located at 40 Wall Street in New York City. Significantly, at the signing ceremony, Apmex CEO Michael Haynes paid Mr. Trump the $200,000 lease deposit in gold bars. In a statement, Mr. Trump said: “It’s a sad day when a large property owner starts accepting gold instead of the dollar. The economy is bad, and Obama’s not protecting the dollar at all. … If I do this, other people are going to start doing it, and maybe we’ll see some changes.” Later, Trump’s press office amplified his statement by saying that “Mr. Trump has been bullish on gold due to his concerns about the value of the dollar.” These statements demonstrate that Mr. Trump has more than a casual understanding of gold. It is well-known that China, Russia and Turkey, among many other smaller nations, are steadily, and in the case of China, massively adding to their gold reserves. In fact, the governments of China and Turkey publicly encourage their citizens to buy gold, while Russia leads by example with its steady and well-publicized sovereign purchases. Gold is important to these nations for reasons that are well thought-out, forward-thinking and strategic. On August 21, 2017, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin breezed into Kentucky for a visit. That morning, he spoke to members of the Louisville Chamber of Commerce, and announced, with no advance warning to the press, that after his speech, he was headed to the Fort Knox Gold Bullion Depository to check things out. Laughingly, he said to the audience, “I assume the gold is still there. It would be quite a movie if we walked in and there was no gold.” After a short visit and cursory inspection, during which only one of the numerous Fort Knox lockers said to hold the American people’s gold was opened and eyeballed, and a few bars were handled,” Mnuchin concluded his visit and then tweeted to America and the world, “Glad gold is safe.” The insouciance of his tweet was stunning. [IRD Note: the gold remaining in Ft. Knox is largely for ceremonial display; most of the gold has been moved to what is dubiously called “deep storage” at West Point. It’s never been independently confirmed that gold actually exists or, if it does, to what extent the Fed has leased or hypothecated the gold to be used in support of the use of futures and LMBA forwards by Fed-member banks to help suppress the market clearing price of gold]. The supposed U.S. gold hoard was last audited in 1953, sixty-five years ago. The nation’s debt at that time was $266 billion, inflation adjusted. Today, it is nearly $21 trillion, or seventy-nine times greater. In 1953, the nation owned 20,000 tonnes of gold, an amount that plunged to 8,133 tonnes by 1974 [at least according to the numbers reported by the Fed]. From 1974 until now, the hoard has supposedly remained unchanged at 8,133 tonnes, despite the fact that the country’s fiscal situation has disintegrated with, in addition to the rapidly approaching $21 trillion in debt, more than $180 trillion in federal unfunded contingent liabilities; additional trillions in unfunded corporate and municipal, county and state government pensions; and annual trillion dollar plus deficits on a hockey stick trajectory projected for the next 75 years. And yet, we are asked to believe that despite the fact that 11,867 tonnes of gold were sold and shipped between 1953 and 1974, generally strong economic years for the United States, not one ounce has been sold in the 44 year period from 1974 until now. Not one ounce has been used, for example, to guarantee China, Japan and other sovereign nations’ multi-trillion dollar investments in U.S. Treasury securities; not one ounce has been used to even fractionally settle the nation’s massive, persistent, multi-trillion dollar trade deficit that now measures $800+ billion per year; not one ounce has been used to sway foreign politicians who consistently and curiously pursue an American-dictated agenda at odds with their own national interests; and that not one ounce has been required to facilitate the largest national bailout in history, in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis. In fact, not one ounce has been needed for anything, despite the fact that USG, Inc.’s financial fortunes have collapsed since 1974. While we suppose that anything is possible, this does not appear plausible. Mr. Trump was rightfully excited when Apple Computer announced a multi-year $350 billion investment in its U.S. facilities and operations. He has been similarly pleased by far smaller U.S. investment commitments made by other corporations. To him, every investment in America is important, no matter how big or small, and rightly so, as each has the potential to create jobs and needed tax revenues. USG, Inc. is said to own 261.5 million ounces (8,133 tonnes) of gold. Mr. Trump could increase the price of gold by at least $1,000.00 per ounce in 10 seconds if he simply announced that USG, Inc. believes in gold, and that, similarly to Russia, China, Turkey and numerous other nations, plans to buy it on a regular basis. He could boost the price even more if he simultaneously announced that USG, Inc. would no longer tolerate the illegal rigging of gold’s price by the Wall Street profiteers and swindlers who have corrupted and criminalized the gold market for the past 40 years. As the supposed largest sovereign holder of gold, by far, why on earth would USG, Inc. not support its price, when it would so obviously be in its direct financial interests to do so? If gold’s price increased by $1,000 per ounce, it would result in a $261.5 billion instantaneous windfall for USG, Inc. and the American citizen shareholders who supposedly own it. This would come at no cost whatsoever to USG, Inc. or to the shareholders, other than the trivial expense of setting up the press conference. And there would be no reason for the dollar to decline simply because USG, Inc. announced that as one of its many investment initiatives, from education to infrastructure to armaments, it was also going to put money into gold, in the expectation of making a profit from it. Just has China has been doing for the past twenty years, with great financial success. $261.5 billion in profits, in 10 seconds, would be many times greater than what USG, Inc. will realize from Apple Computer’s multi-year $350 billion investment, only a small portion of which will actually trickle down to the U.S. Treasury in the form of tax revenues. So one would think there would be even more excitement about the opportunity in gold than in Apple’s planned spending. And we have not even included the significant capital gains tax revenue that would pour into USG, Inc. as a cohort of current gold investors traded their positions at a large, tax-generating profit. USG, Inc.’s persistent silence, aside from the frivolous comments and jokes made about gold by Mr. Mnuchin in Kentucky, make no common sense. But the situation is actually deeper, and worse. As those who study the gold market now know to be an undeniable, categorical fact, the price of gold has been illegally manipulated for decades by Wall Street profiteers who appear to operate with the full agreement and protection of USG, Inc. given that the manipulators are never prosecuted and that their criminal rigging operations continue unabated to this day. Therefore, while foreign nations have dumped state-subsidized, underpriced steel, aluminum and other products into the United States, which we are told is terrible for our nation, Wall Street and its City of London collaborators have facilitated the dumping of tonnes of illegally manipulated, underpriced western gold into numerous countries including Russia, China and Turkey and many others. And yet western citizens are supposed to believe that the dumping of underpriced gold, including sovereign gold, which is supposed to be the people’s gold, is somehow a brilliant gambit that should be allowed to continue. In other words, the equivalent of western government cargo planes dumping gold out of their holds onto Moscow, Beijing, Ankara and other foreign capitals is presented as a smart thing for western nations to do, and of benefit to the increasingly impoverished, crony-communized citizens of the west, whose gold it is that is being dumped offshore. Perhaps the same level of outrage that is expressed about jobs offshoring should also be expressed about gold offshoring, whose financial damage will compound over time and end up costing the nation more than the lost jobs. It is virtually impossible to fathom the idiocy of this ongoing process of foreign gold dumping. On one hand, certain foreign nations promote their strategically important industries, such as steel and aluminum, by selling their products to the United States at low prices. On the other hand, the United States and its western counterparts facilitate the sale of their sole monetary bedrock, gold, to arch foreign competitors, for a fraction of the gold’s true price given that it is illegally manipulated by the western financial elite for their own private profit. Even if a country, say China for example, loses some money selling low-priced steel to the United States, by using the revenue they generate from such sales to buy western gold at a fraction of its true price is a no-brainer deal the artistry of which even Trump would have to admire. While they might lose a few pennies per pound on the steel, they stand to earn thousands of dollars per ounce on the gold. If USG, Inc. actually owned and possessed 261.5 million ounces of gold, why would it allow Wall Street profiteers to wantonly crush its price, and directly facilitate its outflow to and enrichment of foreign countries with which it competes, and by which it is systematically being destroyed in trade wars it has been losing for decades? We can understand Clinton, Bush and Obama not knowing the first thing about the strategic national importance of gold, and being clueless about how Wall Street has manipulated the gold market for nearly 40 years, at a profit to themselves that we have estimated exceeds $1+ trillion dollars to date. As mentioned previously, none of those persons has ever had a real job in the productive economy, or understands the first thing about competitive business tactics, capital markets, or national financial strategy. But Trump is a businessman and, as we have shown, is knowledgeable about gold. Yet while he has focused on far smaller opportunities than the enormous USG, Inc. balance sheet windfall he could engineer by simply talking up the price of gold, he does the exact opposite: he allows its price trashing and foreign dumping to continue. We can reach only one possible, logical explanation for this stance: USG, Inc. stays silent about gold, because its gold is gone, either in large part, or altogether. And even if a portion of it is still housed at Fort Knox, West Point and Denver, it is pledged to and owned by others. Therefore, if USG, Inc. were to talk up the price of gold, the financial benefits would accrue not to USG, Inc., but to its national competitors such as China, Russia, Turkey and the other governments that have strategically purchased gold in large quantities at the bargain basement prices extended to them by the private Wall Street and London City manipulators and profiteers. USG, Inc. will lose more than $1 trillion this fiscal year. To fully offset that loss, the price of USG, Inc.’s reported gold reserve would have to rise by $3,842.00 per ounce. Keep in mind, this price increase would be required to offset just one year of USG, Inc.’s deficit (aka, loss), namely that of Fiscal Year 2018. This price increase would do absolutely nothing to neutralize or ameliorate the roughly $20 trillion of pre-Fiscal Year 2018 debt, or the upcoming 75 years’ worth of $1+ trillion, steadily increasing annual deficits. The price of gold would have to increase by $4,000 and progressively more each and every year from now on just to offset USG, Inc.’s upcoming annual losses, which are currently projected to extend into perpetuity. The consequences of Gold Truth, such as it is but has not yet been revealed, are beyond sobering. If the Gold Truth is that USG, Inc. does not possess and own the gold it has promised the world it does, every last shred of monetary, fiscal, financial, economic and moral authority that USG, Inc. still possesses would be destroyed in a matter of seconds. And it is impossible to see how the U.S. dollar could survive such a revelation without plummeting. A sudden, sharp dollar revaluation would wreak havoc on the global monetary system, financial markets, and economy, and let us all hope it never happens, even though the epic mismanagement of USG, Inc. indicates that it could happen. The consequences of fiat currency destruction are currently on disturbing and heart-wrenching display in Venezuela. Many westerners look down their noses at Venezuela, as if it is some kind of freak, outlier nation whose suffering people are on a different planet from ours. But those people are not; they are here on earth, just like the rest of us. And if we are correct about our concerns that the actual gold balances at USG, Inc. are not what is being reported, the Venezuelization of the United States would become a likely, if not a guaranteed outcome. President Trump is doing his best to be the agent of change so desperately needed in the United States. [IRD Note: whether or not you agree with the way Trump is going about effecting change is another matter]. At the same time, Truth is doing its best, as it always does, to be the same: an agent of revelation and change. History conclusively proves that Truth always wins in the end. When people are ahead of a dangerous truth, they can work with and even tame it by honoring and respecting its righteousness and force. But when a dangerous truth is ahead of the people, and expresses itself on its terms and schedule, it almost always cloaks itself in fury, and metes out destruction to those who have stood in its way and dishonored it. We believe that it is vital for President Trump to now get ahead of and tell the people the truth about USG, Inc.’s gold situation, while there is still time to do so constructively. If the gold is gone, then as a national priority, USG, Inc. must figure out how to buy it back, at least to some degree. A monetary world in which China, Russia, Turkey and other nations own gold, but the west does not would yield invincible monetary and financial superiority to the west’s competitors. If the gold is there, then USG, Inc. should revel in and leverage the enormous fortune and financial opportunity it represents. Mr. President, as someone who respects and supports the work you are doing to try to turn this country around, might I, with all due respect, paraphrase and echo your own words: “If we don’t have gold, we don’t have a country either.” Originally published at http://investmentresearchdynamics.com/mr-pres...have-a-country/ Stewart Dougherty is the creator of Inferential Analytics, a forecasting method that applies to events proprietary, time-tested principles of human instinct, desire and action. In his view, forecasting methods not fundamentally based upon principles of human action are unlikely to be reliable over time. He is a graduate of Tufts University (BA) and Harvard Business School (MBA). He developed expertise in strategic analysis and planning during a 35+ year business career, has traveled to and conducted research in over 25 countries and has refined Inferential Analytics into a reliable predictive instrument over a period of 17+ years.
| | |
