Gold added about five bucks to its price from the time that trading began in the Far East Thursday…and the London a.m. gold fix. Then from there, it gave back seven dollars going into the p.m. gold fix…and after that, it gained over eight dollars until half past lunchtime in New York. Then a really serious seller showed up taking nine bucks off the price between then and the close of electronic trading in New York. It was pretty choppy trading all around…and it was obvious that every rally ran into serious resistance. The same could be said for silver. But according to the usual New York gold commentator [who is not Dennis Gartman, by the way], volume in gold was heavy…estimated at 140,658 contracts…”which involved a 21.6% surge in the last half-hour. The presence of such determined buyers and sellers during the floor session is unusual.”

Wednesday’s open interest in

Everything was swell in gold and silver when I went to bed early on Friday morning. I was hoping that when I got up four hours later, that both metals would be much higher in New York trading. They were…until 8:40 a.m…and that was that. From there, gold and silver basically closed on their lows of the day. And for whatever reason, gold was not allowed to close above $940 again. That’s the third day in a row. Silver however, closed above $14 by a magnificent seven cents!

From the start of the trading day on Friday morning in the Far East…and until noon in New York…the dollar lost about 70 basis points. And from the start of precious metals trading in the Far East, gold and silver basically rose as the dollar fell. That relationship ended almost as soon as the New York bullion banks showed up for work.

The lousy

Everything was swell in gold and silver when I went to bed early on Friday morning. I was hoping that when I got up four hours later, that both metals would be much higher in New York trading. They were…until 8:40 a.m…and that was that. From there, gold and silver basically closed on their lows of the day. And for whatever reason, gold was not allowed to close above $940 again. That’s the third day in a row. Silver however, closed above $14 by a magnificent seven cents!

From the start of the trading day on Friday morning in the Far East…and until noon in New York…the dollar lost about 70 basis points. And from the start of precious metals trading in the Far East, gold and silver basically rose as the dollar fell. That relationship ended almost as soon as the New York bullion banks showed up for work.

The lousy

In early Tuesday trading in the Far East, gold didn’t do much of anything until shortly before 11:00 a.m. in the morning in Hong Kong. From that point, gold got sold off about $8 in an hour. Not a lot, but a pretty big move for the usually quiet Far East market. As it turned out, that was the low for world gold for the day. A quick retest of that price at 3:00 p.m. in Hong Kong…and gold was on its way higher…and the US$ much lower. This lasted through London trading, but ran into the usual brick wall at the Comex open in New York. Once the London p.m. gold fix was in at 3:00 p.m. [10:00 a.m. in New York]…down went the price.

This didn’t last long, and minutes before London closed for the day, a rally began that lasted almost until the end of Comex trading…and

Today’s Notes reads more like a John le Carre novel than an investment newsletter. But bear with us. It tracks one of the most fascinating news stories you’ve never heard of.  The news reports are maddeningly sketchy. And the mainstream media is doing a damn good job of not reporting the story.

But it’s clear the arrests by Italian authorities of two “Japanese-looking” men allegedly attempting to smuggle $134.5 billion worth of US bearer bonds across the Swiss border is the biggest financial crime in history. And one with major implications for America’s economic security.

For those of you who don’t know, a report surfaced on Monday, June 8, on an obscure Vatican-sponsored news website, AsiaNews.it, that Italy’s financial police (Guardia Italiana di Finanza) had “seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland.”

According to the report, these

I don't typically like spending a lot of time on stories that have more coverage by blogs than actual news outlets, but this one is really too juicy to pass up and it also continues our ongoing conversation about the dollar's prominence as a global reserve currency. Two men were recently stopped by Italian authorities while trying to cross the border into Switzerland with a fake-bottomed suitcase containing $134.5 billion worth of US Treasury bonds. That's right - billion with a B. Let's take just a moment to review which of the United States' various creditors even hold that much US debt. According to the latest data from the US Treasury Department, this is what we have to work through April of this year:

China ~ $763.5 billion Japan ~ $685.9 billion Caribbean Banking Centers ~ $204.7 billion OPEC ~

old was taken down a few dollars in Sunday night trading by the bullion banks in New York…but once Sydney and Hong Kong opened for the day, gold [and silver] returned to the plus column. Gold saw its highs moments before Hong Kong closed…and silver shortly after…in early trading in London. From there, both metals got slowly sold off. The real action didn’t start until the Comex open, where every rally attempt in either metal…but gold in particular…got sold off by a not-for-profit seller.

With oil up, the US$ down…and the CRB making a major upside move…$1,000 gold was a 12″ putt. But it was obvious [at least to me] that someone didn’t want that to happen…at least not yesterday. Platinum and palladium were both up almost two percent.

The open interest numbers for Friday’s big up day in both gold and silver were

The tiny double bottom that occurred shortly after the close of Comex trading on Wednesday afternoon may have been the low in gold for this move. Both were ever so slightly below $900. From there, gold rose gradually until about an hour after the London a.m. gold fix on Thursday morning. Then it declined gently until shortly after the London p.m. fix was in. From there, away it went…until a not-for-profit seller showed up in after-hours Globex trading in New York and capped the little price spike that occurred at 3:30 p.m. New York time.

Silver’s antics were the same as gold’s, although the price action was more exaggerated. Silver began to rise once the London a.m. gold fix was in…then declined until shortly after the London p.m. fix…and then, it too, was off to the

Fed up with the homeowner bailout?

You can actually do something about it.  And I don’t mean write your congressman or buy a bumper sticker.

You can stop paying your own mortgage, free of fear that you’ll be kicked out of your home, provided you play it right.

And that’s not me making the suggestion.  In fact, it was all over the place just last fall.

You say you missed it?  You find the suggestion morally offensive?  Just hang with me a bit.

In October Peter Schiff wrote an op-ed for the San Diego Union-Tribune titled, simply enough, “Stop Paying Your Mortgage.”

After supposedly bailing out the fat cats on Wall Street, no politician wants to be accused of evicting struggling families. Once you understand this, all of your anxiety should melt away. Why pay your mortgage if foreclosure is off the table, and if you know that lower payments, and possibly

I have two objections to this crap, one being that the People’s Daily is wrong; the United States did NOT ‘plunder’ anybody; rather, the U.S. just took advantage of a bunch of ignorant rubes and hustled them out of their money!

My Puny Mogambo Mind (PMM) is actually retreating into a little Mogambo Inner Bunker (MIB) of its own, and I find that I avoid looking at what is happening at the hands of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, as all of this money is going to show up in an explosion of prices, including food and energy, and that is when societal hell breaks loose and it’s, “Game Over, Player One.”

So I was doing a pretty good job of evading things, and I had finally relaxed enough to pry open one corner of my mouth in which a straw could be inserted so that I might