Stocks Sent Sideways; In Laughable Move to Suppress Gold's Price, CME to Begin Offering 1-ounce Gold Futures Contacts In January

There was nothing unusual about Monday's declines on the major indices, except maybe that the Dow lost ground for the fifth time in the last six sessions and that Wednesday of last week - the only day the Dow finished on the upside - produced an all-time high.

That sequence may indicate to some that Wednesday's record was an outlier, to others, signs of a near-term top, and to some, nothing in particular. It's safe to say that with stocks in a supreme bubble, nobody really has a handle on where it's all headed, especially those who think they know, the experts at Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch, or even your favorite stock picker.

Expectations for a rosy future in stocks can almost always be found somewhere on Wall Street. The latest prognostications for the year 2025 are hovering around S&P at 7000, implying a gain of around 15% for the coming year, a number that would be a disappointment when compared to this year's gain of 27% on the S&P.

It may be a little too early to say so, but stocks are likely to bounce around quite a bit before heading to the peaks in 2025. There's ample room for a sizable pullback, likely in the first and second quarter, setting up a scenario for a late run to year-end targets. Timing may be everything in the coming six to 18 months of investing.

Longer term, who knows? Stocks can go much higher if bubble economics prevails, but odds are that the Fed will continue to cut interest rates to a point at which inflation just can't be held back any longer. On that point - rate cuts - the Fed's current pathology seems to fly in the face of the market predictors' paradise scenario, the one in which stocks fly to the moon and everybody retires rich.

We'd all love that to be the case, but the realists probably know better.

Gold's move on Monday and again this morning is telling a different tale, approaching $2,700 with gusto and even getting to it just moments ago on the COMEX. Oddly enough, with gold apparently on more people's minds than just central bankers, the CME has announced the launch of a 1-ounce gold futures contract on January 13, 2025, pending regulatory approval, i.e., SEC's valued rubber stamp.

Jesse Columbo of MoneyMetals.com analyzed some of the issues such a contract offering would entail, the most pronounced being that the contract calls for cash settlement. Nobody exercising such a contract would be able to redeem it for physical metal. As such, it's just another diversion away from the ultimate hedge against everything in the Federal Reserve wonderland of fiat currencies, physical possession of gold bullion.

Thus, offering a gold futures contract on 1-ounce of gold that is not redeemable in gold is just more speculative misdirection from the likes of CME, COMEX, LBMA, and their friends at the Federal Reserve, none of whom want to see people buying and - perish forbid - hoarding gold when their chief function in the world of finance is to keep the mighty U.S. dollar as the pre-eminent store of value.

It's actually laughable. Only retards with limited cash on hand, or other retards with lots of money seeking to distort the true value of an ounce of gold (brokers, dealers, other proxies for the Fed) would bother with these contracts for "paper gold."

Anybody who wants to own an ounce of gold can just go to one of the many online dealers, or eBay, or their local coin shop and buy a coin, a round, a bar of gold. It's that simple.

The only conclusion as to why the CME would expand its offerings of gold futures in smaller denominations would be to lure in speculators and riggers who don't actually want to own gold at lower margins. When gold goes to $3,000, or $5,000 or $10,000, will the CME then begin offering 1/4-oz contracts, 1/10th-oz contracts?

Bet on it.

If you're the type of person who doesn't see the value of holding assets with no counter-party risk - gold, silver, other tangible assets - then continue dabbling in stocks, options, derivatives, and other time-and-money wasters.

But, if you don't trust the people on Wall Street, the Fed, the government, and maybe your neighbors who have three cars, a 401k, and dine out three times a week, then maybe physical possession of gold and silver is for you.

Anybody with less than three eyes can see, in a world built on debt, fiat currencies and fractional reserve banking, where gold and silver prices are headed.

Ultimately, it's wealth protection. In other words, "good as gold."

At the Close, Monday, December 9, 2024:
Dow: 44,401.93, -240.59 (-0.54%)
NASDAQ: 19,736.69, -123.08 (-0.62%)
S&P 500: 6,052.85, -37.42 (-0.61%)
NYSE Composite: 20,006.26, -101.53 (-0.50%)