In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Wolf Richter discuss:

• Commodity Carnage
  • Not just due to a strong dollar
• Argentina Is Faltering
  • Its currency is collapsing (yet again)
• More Trouble In Turkey
  • Threatening the EU banks who loaned it billions
• The Real Threat
  • Asia is where the real damage will occur

Recorded last week, Wolf Ricther explains why the real Emerging Market contagion risk lies not in Turkey, or Venezuela or Argentina or Brasil -- but in Asia.

Click to listen to a sample of this Off the Cuff Podcast or Enroll today to access the full audio as well as all of PeakProsperity.com's other premium content. » Read more

Executive Summary

• The West is extremely vulnerable to financial and currency de-stabilisation through precious metals
• Access to energy supplies will be the real weapon used in the battle over Ukraine (and future geo-political wars)
• Why sanctions against Russia will not succeed
• The East is mobilizing to become less dependent on the West

If you have not yet read Is Part 1: Ukraine: A Perspective from Europe available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Russia’s strategy towards Ukraine appears to be to ensure NATO is excluded from Ukrainian territory, the irony being that if NATO members hadn’t interfered with Ukrainian politics in the first place the current crisis would not have occurred. As it is, at a minimum she will seek to secure Donetsk and Luhansk and force the Kiev government to drop any ambitions to join the EU economic bloc.

The fact that NATO is divided between on the one side the US and UK plus all its ex-communist members and on the other the great European welfare states, requires there to be two distinct levels of Russian strategy. They must not be confused with each other, one macro and the other micro.

Macro-Geopolitics Linked To Gold

At the higher level there is the geopolitical clash with the US. This is not just a matter of Ukraine, but it is rapidly becoming the Shanghai Cooperation Council versus America. The US is also embroiled in territorial disputes between its allies and China over mineral rights in the South China Sea. The Middle-East now sells more oil to China than the US, and by leaving the US sphere of influence will fall increasingly under the SCO’s spell. Presumably, America has woken up to the threat to its hegemony from the powerful alliance that is the SCO, together with the loss of Pakistan and India into that sphere of influence. It goes further: even Turkey, a long-standing NATO member, plans to defect to the SCO, apparently a personal project of Recep Erdoğan, the recently re-elected Prime Minister.

American-initiated actions against Russia will probably be kept by Russia and the SCO in this big-picture context. It will be treated as an attack against an SCO member, speeding up integration and trade agreements designed to exclude the US dollar as a settlement medium. In this context the SCO members already appear to have agreed on the need to increase gold ownership as an undefined part-solution to replace the US dollar as the currency standard. In other words, the rush to acquire above-ground gold stocks will continue, and China through her refiners is processing and keeping increasing quantities of African-sourced gold as well as her own which would otherwise have gone to the West.

The Russian central bank has been adding to her monetary gold reserves and officially now has more than China (though China is known to have substantial holdings of bullion not currently declared as monetary reserves). All mine output is likely to be absorbed by the State. Russia has continued to build her gold reserves at a time when it could be argued by western analysts that she needs to hold on to all her foreign currency, given the prospect of escalating sanctions. The truth is that... » Read more

Executive Summary

• Large players (and likely price manipulators) now have incentive for precious metals prices to rise
• Investor demand for bullion remains at record highs
• Competition for bullion from the East continues to heat up
• Central banks buy more bullion as Comex inventories deplete
• The key signs to know when it will be time to sell your gold & silver

If you have not yet read Part I: Is Gold at a Turning Point? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Manipulation

Much has been written across the Web (including here at PeakProsperity.com) about whether or not the precious metals markets are manipulated in price by big players (major multi-national banks such as JP Morgan). Without delving into the many arguments on both the pro and con sides, Chris and I are of the opinion that sufficient data exists to convince a reasonable observer that price manipulation in the PM markets is indeed real, or, at the very least, highly probable. (For those remaining doubters out there, have a look at the evidence here, here, and here, and let us know if you have a rational, non-manipulative explanation.)

One of the most glaring signs of likely manipulation has been the massive short positions that a small number of large banks (JP Morgan being the most prominent among them) have held for many years, particularly in the silver market [measure positions as % of world silver production]. And not only were these unlimited positions allowed, but this cabal of banks was allowed to naked-sell PMs short (i.e., sell metal without actually owning it first). On the other side of the coin, the long side, position limits were enforced, and there was no similar ability to buy more metal than one could pay for. This imbalance of rules certainly provides the mechanism by which PM prices could be artificially jockeyed more easily to the downside. In this context, a decline from the high $40s to the low $20s looks more understandable.

Well, a very important part of this story has just shifted. The CFTC (Commodities Futures Trading Commission) publishes a monthly report illustrating the positions taken in Comex Futures Contracts

After nearly ten years of being net short in Comex gold futures, U.S. banks have been recently decreasing those short positions, and – for the first time since 2004 (with the exception of a single month in 2008) – they have flipped to become net long gold in May (see bottom chart below)... » Read more