How Minnows Eat Whales

‘As paper currencies lose value, owing to increased supply, smart investors will look to something that cannot be made out of thin air at the whim of desperate politicians and central bankers. Precious metals – gold, silver, platinum, palladium etc. – are of finite quantity and arguably the most effective anti-inflation measure.’

– Gold ... Beans ... AK-47 ... (Article 58, 21 Mar 2013)

Almost eight years have passed since I wrote that article. In the meantime, neither my mind nor the prices of precious metals (with the exception of palladium) have changed much. Banks and other financial institutions have gone to extreme, and often criminal, lengths, to suppress these prices on commodity exchanges to fool the world into believing that fiat (government) currency was, and is, maintaining its ‘value’. This is, of course, a monumental deception. Fiat currencies, particularly US dollars and Euros, have been printed – counterfeited, to be more truthful – so that traditional markets, and those institutions that profit greatly from them, do not collapse.

This precious metal price suppression has suited new retail (small) investors just fine. Anyone wise to the price manipulation has spent the past decade investing in bullion on the cheap, in the belief that true price discovery cannot be suppressed indefinitely. It has always been the case that, eventually, like balloons no longer being able to be held underwater, the prices of metals would shoot upward. All it would take was for someone to figure out how to force the release button.

The day of release, and hence price discovery, could be imminent. Until recently, a gaming company, GameStop, had been struggling on the stock market. Its share price had been decreasing, and hedge funds had heavily ‘shorted’ its stock – i.e. bet on its unit price continuing to fall. Having access to vast funds, these ‘whales’ have been able to manipulate the price downward and secure huge profits.

However, since the financial crash of 2008, when criminal financial institutions were bailed out by governments fleecing captive taxpayers, the playing field has changed. Retail investors now have mass social media and improved market access. In other words, they are armed to the teeth. It was, therefore, only a matter of time before they became organized and learned how to play the game. That time has arrived.

Having discovered how hedge funds were profiting from ‘shorting’ GameStop, millions of retailers, going by the name of Wall Street Bets, and using the Reddit website (Figure 151.1), forced the stock price upward, leaving the whales facing unexpected losses. To stop those losses accumulating, the whales had no choice but to buy the stock to ‘cover’ their ‘short’ contracts. This, of course, pushed the price up further, compelling other whales to buy, which pushed it up even further. This positive feedback loop is called a ‘short squeeze’. Within days, the GameStop stock price had, against the market fundamentals, skyrocketed. One hedge fund, in particular, was facing disaster. David was not slaying Goliath; he was gleefully kicking the shit out of him, after years of callous, casual bullying.

Figure 151.1: All you need is a smartphone.

Copyright © 2021 Brent Lewin

What followed next, however, was criminally abhorrent. For reasons as yet unproven, the principal online trading platform, Robinhood, acted to prevent further buying. The platform would permit selling – either profit-taking by retailers or loss-covering by whales – but the stock price was prevented from rising any further. It is widely believed that desperate hedge fund managers had pressurized the referee, Robinhood, to blow the whistle before they ended up wallowing in their own blood. Class action lawsuits are, as I write, being prepared by lawyers acting for thwarted retailers. Robinhood has betrayed its legendary namesake and deserves to be held to account.

Retail investors may be bruised by this affair, but they live to fight more vulnerable opponents. Since the GameStop ‘game’ came to a premature end, they have set their sights on the silver market. This is, unlike that of gold, a relatively small market and its market price could, therefore, be moved with relative ease. They could, in concert, force it multiples higher and wreck a few whales in the process. The whales, naturally, are aware of their novel predicament. If they continue to short silver so energetically, the silver price will rocket and they will risk ruin. If they back off, the price will rise anyway. To use chess parlance, the whales’ king is there to be checked. It surprises me only that it has taken retailers so long to figure out how best to position their own pieces (Figure 151.2).

Figure 151.2: The irrepressible Anthony Pompliano, a.k.a. ‘Pomp’, is an American military veteran and the founder of Morgan Creek Digital, which is concentrated on cryptocurrencies and other blockchain assets. He identifies succinctly both the injustices of traditional financial markets and also exposes their Achilles heel.

Copyright © 2021 CNBC

The silver market could take off in the coming weeks and months. If every retailer bought just a few silver coins (Figure 151.3) – approximately £30 (40 US$) per troy ounce – they would break the corrupt system. A Canadian commodities expert called John Embry, of Sprott Management Inc., pointed this out a decade ago, yet hardly anyone was listening then. Millions are listening now.

Figure 151.3: Silver coins are – for now – within the reach of the smallest investor. These British half crowns are 50% silver and were bought for as little as £3 (4 US$) each. An advantage of being a laboratory scientist is having access to citric acid and an ultrasonic cleaner. Old, tarnished coins can be made to shine like new. Lemon juice works, too.

Copyright © 2021 Paul Spradbery

Copyright © 2021 Paul Spradbery

Longing To Be Wrong

Two centuries ago, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) (Figure 150.1) introduced a logical concept known since as the Hegelian Dialectic.

Figure 150.1: Georg Hegel wrote: ‘To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back.’

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Last week, I came across a dog-eared old photograph. Taken in the early summer of 1982, it shows my beloved pet dog (1971-83), a smooth-haired fox terrier, lying on the back lawn. At the time, I was home alone, (supposedly) revising for school exams. Some mornings, if the weather was fine, I would tie one end of a light two-metre chain to the dog’s collar and the other to the pole of a rotary washing line. There, he would have sufficient freedom to move about within a circle with an approximate area of 12.5 square metres, with his chain, if fully extended, forming the circle’s radius (π × r-squared and all that). Most of the time, as I sat outside, reading, he would be content to lie in the sun, sniffing the breeze, moving only occasionally to drink from his water bowl.

I digress before I even begin. What links Hegel to my old dog?

The past twelve months of everyone’s life have been dominated by the so-called ‘pandemic’. This is despite the fact that, as yet, no causal link between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease diagnosed as COVID-19 has been confirmed anywhere in the world. You read that right: the SARS-CoV-2 virus has never been isolated from a purified clinical sample taken from a COVID-19 patient. (If evidence does exist, then I challenge anyone to publish it and thereby prove me wrong.) Bear in mind, also, that, throughout 2020, there was no excess overall mortality, either in the UK or worldwide. Hence, there has been no pandemic.

Why is Hegel relevant? His famous dialectic may be constructed into three stages:

1. An artificial problem or threat is contrived, and the public convinced of its existence.

2. Government demands that the public sacrifices basic rights to combat the ‘problem’.

3. Government imposes a pre-planned ‘solution’ which would not normally be acceptable.

The Hegelian strategy offers government a means to a desired end, not by enforcement (read Orwell’s 1984) but by duping the public into wanting it (read Huxley’s Brave New World). In other words, force is replaced by fraud and brainwashing (Figure 150.2). Consider what has been taken from the people in just twelve months: freedom of movement and peaceful assembly, and, via mass media censorship, speech and expression. We are told to avoid each other, isolate even when healthy, and wear pointless masks. These freedoms would never have been relinquished so readily, if at all, unless circumstances could be perceived to have become life-threatening. Only two days ago, the UK government’s deceitful advisers warned of a ‘mutant strain’ of SARS-CoV-2. How melodramatic. When pressed, they claimed that the probability of increased virulence was a whopping 50% – i.e. they had no evidence. (In fact, the Law of Declining Virulence, established by the pioneering American microbiologist Theobald Smith (1900-80), tells us that increased lethality is yet another myth, as those advisers well know.) Hence, the ‘new variant’ is bullshit.

Figure 150.2: COVID-induced insanity is the true pandemic. Here, outside a supermarket, I do not know what is more absurd: the cat queueing two metres from the door or the woman standing two metres behind the cat.

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Human liberty is balancing on a knife-edge. I outlined in Article 149 – The Digital Gulag – publicly-available plans for vaccination data to be stored as part of every individual’s digital ID. This explains the relentless, propagandized drive for universal vaccination, despite the probability of healthy individuals dying from acute respiratory disease remaining negligible. Anyone lacking the prescribed vaccination status, and thus outside State control, could be made persona non grata at the click of a mouse.

The pre-planned ‘new normal’ would be a world of universal surveillance and strict travel restrictions. (The UK government has already given away millions of pounds to companies developing so-called ‘freedom passes’.) There would also be no privacy and no independent means of monetary exchange, following the abolition of cash. The forthcoming central bank digital currency (CBDC) would be available only to those willing, or forced by poverty, to submit. Social and political resistance would be precluded via complete technocratic control by a tiny globalist minority. Furthermore, unless those in power were to relinquish it voluntarily, which would never happen, serfdom, this time, could be forever.

I am reminded of my tethered dog. Only when he lay still, passive and uninquisitive, was he unaware of his chains. Millions of people around the world, fraudulently haunted and terrified by ‘the virus’, are oblivious to the digital chains which already bear their names.

This way to the trains. This way to the showers.

Copyright © 2021 Paul Spradbery