Thursday , 28 March 2024

Big Banks Blatantly “Harvesting” Your Money! Got Physical Gold? (+3K Views)

When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating or rigging them,27106 we’re screwed. This “harvesting” of our money in ever-more-creative and hard-to-detect ways is not just stealing by reaching a hand into our pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever is in our pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy – Space Age stealing – and it’s only just coming into view.

[The original article, as written by John Rubino (www.dollarcollapse.com), is presented below in a slightly edited ([ ]) and abridged (…) format by the editorial team at  munKNEE.com (Your Key to Making Money!) to ensure you a fast and easy read.]

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has once again put the world’s major hard news organizations to shame by describing, in comprehensible terms, the pervasive corruption at the heart of the financial system. Below are his concluding paragraphs from a much larger article that everyone with money at risk in a bank, brokerage account or business should read in its entirety.

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

After scandals involving libor and, perhaps, ISDAfix, the question that should have everyone freaked out is this: What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere.

From…gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we’re forced to trust….That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities – jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it.

The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities.

All of these benchmarks based on voluntary reporting are now being looked at by regulators around the world, and God knows what they’ll find….When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating them, we’re ….ed.

…The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It’s not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever’s in your pocket worth less.

This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing – and it’s only just coming into view.

Some thoughts: Knowing what we now know about the big banks, the idea that precious metals are not manipulated is absurd — which explains, if an explanation is needed — why the paper and physical markets are diverging. Paper gold is at the mercy of the manipulators, while physical gold is immune to them – and is in fact a threat to them. An ETF like GLD is emphatically not the same thing as a gold eagle in hand.

With the political and judicial systems now wholly-owned subsidiaries of the big banks, and not being able to trust dollars or euros or yen, buying physical gold and silver and storing it outside the financial system…. might be an individual’s last effective weapon against an emerging meta-government “run by and for the people” as profiled in Taibbi’s article….

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Related Articles from the munKNEE Vault:

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3. What’s Happened – and Will Continue to Happen – to the Value of the U.S. Dollar

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4. Peter Schiff: The Federal Reserve is Now 100% Committed to the Destruction of the Dollar

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