by Clint Siegner
Silver Seek

The Silver Institute released its 2024 World Silver Survey

last week. According to the data, silver demand outstripped supply in 2023, for the fifth year in a row.

The deficit was just over 142 million ounces. And the forecast for 2024 indicates that the annual production shortfall will nearly double to 265 million ounces.

Silver prices have finally begun playing some catchup to gold. Perhaps speculators in the futures market have finally begun paying attention to fundamentals like supply and demand.

The overall supply deficit is corroborated by another data point. COMEX vault inventories of silver are also in decline.

Continue Reading at SilverSeek.com…

from ITM TRADING, INC.

by Karl Denninger
Market-Ticker.org

One has to wonder from the USSC arguments the other day.

Legal experts said the Biden administration was “on the ropes” in Tuesday’s oral arguments at the Supreme Court in a case questioning whether a Jan. 6 rioter can be charged with a federal “obstruction” crime, which carries implications for former President Trump.

On Tuesday, Jeffrey Green, lawyer for Joseph Fischer – who is one of more than 300 people charged by the Justice Department with “obstruction of an official proceeding” in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol – argued that the federal statute shouldn’t apply and that it had only ever been applied to evidence-tampering cases.

Biden’s DOJ has “repurposed” the SarBox law, in short, to bring the most-serious of felony charges in the Jan 6 cases, and has won many convictions on those charges. They also form the basis of the most-serious charges against Trump himself.

What’s also interesting is that in 2019 the OLC issued an opinion — which was never “formally” put into practice — that the law didn’t apply in this sort of situation at all. I was unaware of that but the case process that led to the Supremes hearing the case has brought that into the forefront.

Continue Reading at Market-Ticker.org…

from Gregory Mannarino

by Kristina Wong
Breitbart.com

A gag order that severely limits what former President Donald Trump can say publicly about a case where a Democrat district attorney is seeking to put him in jail was the focus in court on Tuesday as part of the business records trial he faces in Manhattan.

Democrat District Attorney Alvin Bragg accused Trump of violating the gag order 11 times for allegedly attacking witnesses and other members of the court — even if they have attacked him.

[…] New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the case and who imposed the gag order, could fine Trump up to $11,000.

As examples of attacks, Bragg’s team cited in an April 1 filing some of Trump’s posts on Truth Social, including one in which Trump called on Merchan to recuse himself from the case, and called him “biased and conflicted.”

Continue Reading at Breitbart.com…

from Dr. Steve Turley

In the Jim Crow South, businesses fought racism—because the rules denied them customers.

by John Stossel
Reason.com

Capitalism and racism go together?

I hear it all the time.

“Racism is intricately linked to capitalism,” says famous Marxist Angela Davis. “It’s a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place.”

“Anti-racist” activist Ibram X. Kendi says, “In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.”

This is just silly.

In my new video, Swedish historian Johan Norberg explains how free markets discourage racism.

Continue Reading at Reason.com…

from Kitco NEWS

by Olivia Murray
American Thinker

Thought you’d seen the stupidest of the “green” movement? Think again, because here come “green” locomotives; here’s what Nick Pope at the Daily Caller News Foundation reported yesterday:

The Biden administration could allow California to implement a rule designed to push green locomotives, but a growing list of stakeholders are warning that the regulation would severely impact the state’s economy and the national rail industry.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could soon determine whether it will allow the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to move forward with a state regulation that would ban the use of locomotives that are more than 23 years past their manufacturing date unless they run using zero-emissions technology, according to Progressive Railroading.

Now, as far as I can tell, “zero-emissions” locomotives are battery-powered trains; here’s this from a report by Alex Luvishis and published by a locomotive outlet last year:

Continue Reading at AmericanThinker.com…

from WallStForMainSt

by Craig Hemke
Sprott Money

Over the past two years, whenever it has come up, I’ve sought to remind interviewers of the most significant financial action of 2022. After the political events of this past weekend, it’s time to discuss this again.

Of course you’ll recall the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February of 2022. This was the most important geopolitical event of that year, and the ramifications continue to metastasize in 2024.

However, the most important financial event of 2022 occurred in early March of that year when the United States and the European Union combined forces to:

Continue Reading at SprottMoney.com…

from AwakenWithJP

Ideologically captured

by Steve Watson
Modernity News

Scientific American has published a piece claiming that “misinformation,” such as the notion that there are only two sexes, is “being used against transgender people” and in order to target “gender-affirming medical care.”

The article states that there are three types of “misinformation,” and they are “oversimplifying scientific knowledge, fabricating and misinterpreting research, and promoting false equivalences.”

[…] The piece asserts that “Many of the arguments against trans rights center on the idea that transness itself is not legitimate—that there are just two sexes, period.”

There are only two sexes though.

Continue Reading at Modernity.News…

from Fleccas Talks

by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
PaulCraigRoberts.org

Someone sent me an article from something called Patriot Alerts, “Morgan Stanley Sounds Alarm On ‘Death Of US Dollar.’”

The death of the US dollar is not blamed on the Federal Reserve printing trillions of new fiat currency during the years of Quantitative Easing in order to bail out the difficulties of the 5 large banks. It is not blamed on the thoughtless US sanctions imposed on Russia, Iran, and other countries, the only effect of which is to encourage countries to abandon the dollar based system, thus causing a drop in the demand for dollars and US Treasury debt.

Instead, the dollar’s peril is blamed on Russia, China, Iran, “oil-soaked Saudi Arabia” and “our neighbor Mexico.” In other words, it is a cover-up for the Fed and Biden regime’s catastrophic mistakes.

Continue Reading at PaulCraigRoberts.org…

from RonPaulLibertyReport

by James Rickards
Daily Reckoning

The big news this weekend is that the House passed a long-anticipated $95 billion foreign aid package.

About $61 billion will go to assist Ukraine in its war with Russia. About $26 billion will go to Israel (with some humanitarian aid for Gaza) and around $8 billion will go to supporting allies in the Indo-Pacific region, most notably Taiwan.

The package will go to the Senate this week, possibly as early as tomorrow, where it’ll certainly be approved. Joe Biden will then sign it into law.

Biden desperately wanted this package to shore up his prospects in this year’s election. He can’t afford for Ukraine to collapse and suffer another foreign policy disaster like Afghanistan — not in an election year.

Continue Reading at DailyReckoning.com…

from Kitco NEWS

by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade

The Washington Post Editorial Board appears to have sipped the same kool aid as Bloomberg News.

As we’ve frequently reported in the past, Bloomberg News has spent the better part of the last decade attempting to brainwash the public into believing that the head of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, is a respected statesman of Wall Street. (See here, here, and here.) In reality, JPMorgan Chase has admitted to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts with Dimon at the helm and paid fines in the tens of billions of dollars for an additional crime wave that rivals an organized crime family.

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York, is the majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the owner of Bloomberg News. In 2016, Michael Bloomberg even co-authored an opinion piece with Dimon.

Continue Reading at WallStreetOnParade.com…

from Dr. Steve Turley

by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds

Those seeking to buy a house as shelter for their household can’t compete with the wealthy seeking assets to snap up and hoard for appreciation.

Longtime readers know I’ve been addressing housing issues from the start of the blog in 2005. Let’s start with the general context of housing in the US, courtesy of the US Census Bureau, which tracks occupancy and the number of housing units nationally: Quarterly Residential Vacancies and Homeownership, 4th Quarter 2023

All housing units 145,967,000

Occupied 131,206,000
Owner 86,220,000 59%
Renter 44,985,000 31%

Vacant 14,761,000 10%

Non-seasonal (i.e. not second homes owned by the wealthy for their recreational use) 11,177,000

Continue Reading at OfTwoMinds.com…

from Viva Frei

by Martin Armstrong
Armstrong Economics

Debanking has become a major issue in recent years as institutions feel the current government gives them leeway to discriminate against customers based on their political beliefs. This is happening throughout the Western world. Most recently, fifteen attorneys general sent a letter to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan about his bank’s “troubling financial pattern” of debanking Christians. “Bank of America has a track record of de-banking religious organizations,” the letter states, “

We are especially troubled by Bank of America’s track record of discriminating against religious ministries.” Bank of America has been banishing Christians and Christian organizations from accessing their accounts for years without penalty.

Continue Reading at ArmstrongEconomics.com…

from Mark Dice

These are the tactics that are driving the Western “markets” to eventual ruin. Is anybody in control? It seems not…

by Dr. Chris Martenson
Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity

Today I begin with a question from a subscriber asking for an explanation of how Wall Street profits from driving the price of silver down.

By answering that question, we can easily discover that the incentives within the system are for Wall Street to cram down the prices for every commodity they can. This way the producers are left with almost nothing and all the value is gained by the traders and corporations.

Hey, it’s all fun and profits until somebody loses access to critical resources because of all these raccoon-ish antics.

That day, my friends, is rapidly approaching.

Continue Reading at PeakProsperity.com…

from Liberty and Finance

by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street

This Has Been Years in the Making.

Express Inc, once a high-flying fashion retailer for the younger crowd with 542 stores in the US, and with three brands – Express, UpWest, and Bonobos – finally filed for pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy today.

Since its heyday in 2016, the company has already closed 114 stores. The store count had peaked in the fiscal year ended January 2017 at 656 stores. Now it will close another 95 Express stores and all its 12 UpWest stores, bringing the store count to about 435 stores.

Continue Reading at WolfStreet.com…

from Gregory Mannarino

from Zero Hedge

BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink’s efforts to push ‘wokesim’ or environmental, social, and governance policies across corporate America have been in reverse in recent years amid the backlash from Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and 19 state attorneys general in conservative states, including Arizona and Texas, who have been fed up with ESG-related policies hurting the economy.

Supposedly, the backlash by anti-woke activists has forced BlackRock to triple Fink’s home security spending. Financial Times says the CEO has become “a target for anti-woke activists and conspiracy theorists.”

According to FT’s numbers, the $10.5 trillion money manager spent $563,513 to “upgrade the home security systems” at Fink’s residences during 2023, on top of $216,837 for bodyguards.

Continue Reading at ZeroHedge.com…