Clint Siegner

Absent a complete reversal in monetary policy and a push back toward zero percent interest rates, the banks are going to have a very hard time competing. Another wave of bank failures may not be far away.

There isn’t a vestige of the free market left when it comes to the country’s financial sector. Central control goes way beyond the fact that the Federal Reserve has been fixing the price of money (interest rates) for the past few decades.

The crisis in banks is front and center. Americans are watching a demonstration on how to take a crisis in confidence and make it worse. Many Americans have already lost trust in the FBI and DOJ. They don’t trust Janet Yellen and other bureaucrats in Washington, and they don’t trust Wall Street bankers.

It would now be no surprise to many if a big city went dark tomorrow. It seems the unthinkable is becoming more and more thinkable as time goes. This raises questions for investors who want to protect themselves from rising risk factors.

Regal Assets, a somewhat prominent gold and silver dealer in southern California, is in serious trouble based on news released last week. Tyler Gallagher, the firm’s high-flying owner, has reportedly vanished…

The U.S. has provided Ukraine nearly $100 billion in weapons, cash, and humanitarian assistance. The sanctions imposed on Russia may be even tougher now than during the Cold War. Despite these things, investors in the U.S. don’t seem to be paying much attention to rising geopolitical risks

Joe Biden entered the Oval Office with relatively low approval ratings. The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, an economy in decline, rising consumer prices, and potential scandals simmering in the background haven’t helped his approval ratings over the past two years.

The bureaucratic assault on the First Amendment is part of a larger movement to end personal liberty. The ultimate goal may be to assume financial control over the populace through implementation of a central bank digital currency

Precious metals did well compared to other assets in 2023, but not as well as many goldbugs expected given the highest price inflation in decades. The anemic price action was another indication of artificial forces in the markets and broken price discovery.

The dysfunctional U.S. Mint makes tens of millions of them each year. But unlike well-run private mints, these government bureaucrats are incapable of or unwilling to address their production and sourcing stumbles, so demand for silver Eagles continues to outstrip supply.

Physical gold and silver will never become worthless. This fact does not make for much of a marketing pitch. But given recent events, this is a more important feature than it looks: Americans, and investors around the world, live in an age of collapsing confidence in institutions.

Bitcoin has potential, but not as a substitute for gold. And not as a government-regulated get-rich-quick asset for people to gamble on in Wall Street’s rigged casinos…

The Federal Reserve finally stopped referring to inflation as “transitory” earlier this year and got serious about trying to control the painful rise in prices it has caused. Officials have jacked the Fed funds rate up by 3 percent since March.

Physical bars continue to drain from COMEX and London warehouses. Larger investors who hold deliverable bars aren’t throwing in the towel and dumping them back into the market. Instead, they continue to stack, much like retail investors buying the smaller coins, rounds and bars.

People fighting for liberty, limited government, and honest money may have an unlikely ally according to Tom Luongo of the Gold, Goats N Guns blog. He recognizes a split in the monolithic powers running the world. Commercial banks may not be on board with the effort to establish a socialist world government.

The Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act passed both houses of Congress and is now on its way to the White House. The politicians responsible for multi-trillion-dollar federal deficits and an out of control Fed planning to “reduce” inflation by spending another $700 billion they don’t have…

The federal criminal trial of JP Morgan executives Michael Nowak, Gregg Smith, and Jeffrey Ruffo began on July 8th. These senior bankers are accused of running a years-long scheme to manipulate precious metals prices through what is known as “spoofing.”

Over the weekend, leaders of the G-7 nations announced formal sanctions on the import of gold from Russia. That move is expected to be largely symbolic because the LBMA and Western refiner volunteered to ban imports shortly after the war began.

The wave of investors buying physical gold and silver over the past two years has certainly impacted the markets. Retail demand for coins, rounds, and bars is now multiples of what it was prior to the COVID outbreak and the 2020 presidential election…

No doubt Biden administration officials are urging the Fed to assure Americans their central bank is taking decisive action. So far, however, there isn’t much reason to believe Esther George and her comrades are planning to do much more than talk.

The globalists are preparing to roll out Central Bank Digital Currencies. If they can convince people to adopt this next evolution of fiat money, they will attain a level of information and control that prior generations of central bankers only dreamt of.

To many market watchers, it appears cheating continues unabated. The Department of Justice and the federal regulatory bureaucracies tasked with enforcing fair markets have only imposed a small amount of accountability for illicit trading practices.

Last week, the U.S. Mint reported sales of 426,500 ounces in gold coins during the first quarter of 2022 – up 3.5% from the first quarter of 2021 and the highest in 23 years! In fact, March sales for the U.S. Mint was its best since 1999.

Recent news has been full of ominous developments for the dollar; Russia and China have already established trade without need for U.S. dollars signing a treaty in 2019 which provides for using their national currencies in trade. U.S. sanctions on Russian exports will only increase non-dollar trade between those Eastern powers.

Americans get fed a lot of BS when it comes to price inflation. Prices in the U.S. are rising faster than they were in the late 1970s when gasoline shortages triggered an economic crisis. Today, supply chain disruptions and exploding prices are also nearing crisis levels.

Americans are waking up to some uncomfortable truths. One of these is the fact that government bureaucrats and the corporate media regularly lie about what is going on in the world. The real inflation numbers may be close to double what’s reported officially. Alternative data sets are out there, but, predictably…

Americans who own only conventional assets, such as stocks and bonds, but now many are thinking about when to cash out and which assets will be best to hold as they hunker down. So far, the investor flight to safety has been modest, but portfolio de-risking is now set to grow and will stocks remain available?

Mints and refiners who produce bullion rounds and bars have struggled to keep up. The industry has not been immune from labor and supply shortages faced by most businesses. The result has been higher premiums and wider bid/ask spreads for silver.