International Forecaster Weekly

That the German people seem to be better informed about the evils of the Fed than Americans may be surprising... but there may be a logic to it. After all, this is the country where a growing grassroots movement called “Repatriate Our Gold” arose in 2012 to force the Bundesbank to announce that they would indeed repatriate 674 tons of their gold holdings at the New York Fed by 2020.

How pipelines will determine economics and geopolitics in the next decade...  Confused? Overwhelmed? Dizzy? Don't worry, you should be. In fact, if any of this makes sense to you you might want to consider becoming a consultant, because there are plenty of politicians, foreign policy analysts, geopolitical commentators and others whose radar these stories don't even appear on.

...Average investors are taking money out of stocks even as the bull market continues apace. Global investment in stocks is down even as the major indices are hitting record highs. What gives? Where is this money coming from?

...even at $20,000/ounce, 8,200 tons of gold is only worth $5.7 trillion-about one-third of the $17 trillion in cash allegedly being held offshore.  Anyone holding that $17 trillion would know he had only a 30% chance of redeeming his fiat dollars for gold and so would try to instantly send his fiat dollars into the US trying to beat all other competitors.

There is one economy for the rich and wealthy, those who can afford to invest in the big hedge funds and sock away large amounts of money every month, and the very poor who continue to see their income decline in real terms year after year.

If you're beginning to get the sense that there are actually two completely separate economies out there, then you're on the right track. How else are we supposed to read the entire story of this post-Lehman “recovery”?

How much faith can we really put in these numbers, anyway. Once again we got a peek behind the curtain at how these numbers are really made this week when the Institute of Supply Management (ISM) that assembles the US PMI data had to correct their number not once but twice.

Bilderberger 2014. Why should we care about these meetings? So a couple of deals get made between the old boys club members. What else is new?

Black market revenues now in European GDP statements. Drugs and prostitution now figure in Italian GDP. Marnie Le Pen and far right parties stun euro elections. US retail correction. Reforms in China no reform at all.

Indeed, there have been many examples of whistleblowers leaking secrets from inside these seemingly impenetrable organizations, and sometimes all it takes is the gumption to walk into a meeting that you weren't invited to.

The retail woes are of course just one sign in an ever increasing list of signs that the economy is by no means ticking along and that the markets aren't ready for the Fed to take off the quantitative easing training wheels from the economy.

Sometimes these wildcards are medical phenomena like human hibernation that have very limited application at this point, and sometimes they are much bigger discoveries or even random events that completely change the course of human history.

...the Fed admits they don't know what they're doing, but also that they can't stop doing it for fear the markets will collapse. With all of that being said, many might be relieved to know that the Fed is winding down their easing operations and have already “tapered” down to a mere $45 billion a month of funny money injection...

Data sharing agreement between nations, Alibaba IPO, Bitcoin boulversations, housing bubbles, black holes, and Hannah Bernard's weekly market update feature this week in world market review.

So what's really happening? As we've talked about numerous times in these pages, the spot price of gold is highly distorted by the manipulations that take place in the highly-leveraged paper gold market. Sorting out the physical demand from the paper buying makes it easier to understand just how much faith investors really have in the yellow metal.