To date, the price of gold and silver have followed a very similar trading path that was taken by the metals in early 2016, with gold and silver bottoming in mid-December and staging a strong rally through mid-January.  Technically, as our Shadow of Truth guest Craig “Turd Ferguson” Hemke point s out, all of the stars were aligned for a take-down of the gold price using paper derivative gold.

These “stars” include:  January contract trading expiration, February options contact expiration, an “overbought” technical condition and the upcoming FOMC meeting and employment report next week.  ALL of these variables are factors which are used to help the bullion bank gold cartel take down the price of gold and silver using the paper gold derivatives traded largely without enforcement of the regulations in place in New York and London.

But now the market is set up for an upside surprise.  Contrary to recent “alternative facts” media reporting, India has continued consuming a lot of gold on a daily basis. This includes legal kilo imports, dore bar importation (subject to a lower import duty than kilo bars) and smuggling, the latter of which is estimated to be as high as 300 tonnes per year now.  The “authorities” in the media who track gold into India fail to account for dore bar flow and smuggling.

In addition, a favorite false narrative of the World Gold Council, Bloomberg and Reuters is that gold imports into China slowed down at the end of the year because of import restrictions put on gold by the Government.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The “fake news” reports are based on imports into Hong Kong, which are publicly reported by Hong Kong authorities.  But a few years ago China began to allow gold imports through Beijing and Shanghai, which is not reported, specifically to obscure the true amount  of gold flowing into China.

But it’s easier to build a false narrative around easily observable data rather than look for the greater truths intentionally hidden from public purview.  As it turns out, nearly 100 tonnes of gold were delivered onto the Shanghai Gold Exchange on the last trading day before China closes shop for the Chinese New Year celebration.  Of course, if any of that gold flowed through Beijing or Shanghai, it would go unaccounted for by the entities listed above that only account for gold going from Hong Kong into China.

We at the Shadow of Truth are forecasting a better year for the metals in 2017 than in 2016. We invited Turd Ferguson on the show for lively two-part discussion of the factors that will drive the metals higher:

Part 1:

Part 2: