The demand for gold in India and China so far this year has soared, a fact which is completely ignored by the western financial media. The ex-duty Indian gold import premiums (approximately $10 earlier this week) are quite remarkable, “as the need to import kilo bars only arises if Indian demand is not satisfied by Dore imports (which had a duty advantage of $15.52/oz this afternoon) and smuggled gold. Reports of apprehensions at Indian airports are continuing to appear, indicating that smuggling has in fact revived” – John Brimelow’s Gold Jottings, brimelowgoldjottings@gmail.com).

Brimelow also reported that 162 tonnes of gold were delivered into into Shanghai Gold Exchange on Monday this week, preceded by 79 tonnes on Friday. The Friday delivery is the largest by far that I’ve observed in watching this statistic over the last several years.

While the eastern hemisphere is busy converting fiat currency into physically delivered gold, the United States political system is becoming increasingly unstable and unpredictable, as the Trump White House, in an effort to repair the frayed relations with Russia, is under systematic attack from the Deep State.  Trump’s erratic leadership combined with the Deep State’s political terrorism will likely spark political and social chaos in the U.S.

The relentless buying strength of physical gold in the east along with the incipient instability of the U.S. are fundamental catalysts to drive the price of gold and silver a lot higher.  Furthermore, the emergence of accelerating price inflation thrown into the mix has the potential to create the “perfect storm” for higher precious metals prices.

In an earlier post I explain why now is the time to use the manipulated paper gold price take-downs as buying opportunities.  This viewpoint was vindicated during the two-day Fed Chairman staged Congressional propaganda event, which historically is a period  in which the banks slam the gold market with tonnes of paper gold in order to prevent the price of gold from signaling a message that conflicts with the economic and financial fairytale artfully spun by the Fed-head (or not so artfully, as it were, in Yellen’s case).

Gold was slammed nearly $20 just prior to and during Yellen’s hot air exhalation sessions on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday.  The catalyst was a series of paper gold volume surges on the Comex in which the NY Fed and its agent bullion banks drop a payload of gold futures on both the Comex floor and into the CME Globex trading system, targeting the stop-losses set by hedge funds that are long gold contracts.  This detonates an avalanche of selling by momentum-chasing hedge fund algos.

Subsequent Yellen’s freak show on Capitol Hill, gold promptly defied the paper market deviance and shot up $21 to a new year-to-date high.  If the deteriorating economic fundamentals manage to chew through the safety-net that has been placed beneath the stock market, a real rush into gold – physical and derivative – will be triggered.   In the meantime, the nature of the precious metals trading has shifted from shorting rallies and covering those shorts on sell-offs to buying dips and selling rallies.   Eventually the hedge fund algos will be programmed to buy dips and aggressively buy rallies.  That’s when the real fun begins, especially in the junior mining stocks…