by Andy Hoffman, Miles Franklin:

In 1989, as a college sophomore, I switched my major from biology to finance. Immediately, I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, and read the “C” section every day for the next ten years, without missing a day. That is, until I got sick of its CNBC-like economic and financial market cheerleading, in the first sign of a burgeoning mistrust of the financial media, that has led to today – when, on a worldwide basis, I have become one of its most well-known detractors. This, and the the entirety of the “mainstream media” – which, in sum total, has been commandeered by the “Deep State”; i.e., the politicians, bankers, corporate titans and billionaires who have literally bought the system – and subsequently, turned it into a playground of money printing, market manipulation, and propaganda, that has brought the global economy to the brink; and with it, unprecedented misery for “the 99%” not privy to their manipulations.

The average fiat currency has lost more than half its purchasing power in the past decade alone, whilst the “1%” on the receiving end of such ill-begotten – and thankfully, ill-fated – monetary and insider trading excesses – are enjoying “dotcom valuations in a Great Depression Era,” in everything from stocks, to bonds, and residential real estate. The former two categories of which, the 99% own little or none of; and the latter of which, is driving home ownership (and rental) costs to unprecedented highs – in absolute prices, and relative to the average Joe or Jane’s increasingly dwindling savings.

In fact, the blatancy of Central bank “monetization” has become so blatant, that even with the Fed (for now) absent from the QE Ponzi – at least, per its official policy – global Central bank bond monetization is at an all-time high, at roughly $250 billion/month. This, excluding stock monetizations by the Central banks of Japan, Switzerland, and Israel, to name a few, of who knows how many additional billions. In fact, as I laid out in painstaking detail earlier this month – it’s not unreasonable to conclude that the Swiss National Bank, on its own, has done as much “equity QE” on the U.S. market as the Fed itself! This, from a Central bank that in late 2014, begged its citizens to vote down the “Save our Swiss Gold” referendum, because it needed the “flexibility” to rig markets – like the Euro/Franc peg, which it abandoned just three weeks later.

Since entering the Precious Metals sector in May 2002 – exactly 15 years ago – it took mere weeks to realize it was rigged. This, as I was just starting to realize that the stock market, too, was being commandeered – in the wake of the obvious “PPT” influences in the wake of 9/11, and the Worldcom and Enron collapses of 2002. And by PPT, I mean the “President’s Working Group on Financial Markets”; inadvertently deemed the “plunge protection team” by disgruntled former Clinton advisor George Stephanopoulos, exactly one week after 9/11.

“Well, what I wanted to talk about for a few minutes is the various efforts that are going on in public and behind the scenes by the Fed and other government officials to guard against a free-fall in the markets….perhaps the most important, the Fed in 1987 created what is called the Plunge Protection Team, which is the Federal Reserve, big major banks, representatives of the New York Stock Exchange and the other exchanges and they have been meeting informally so far, and they have a kind of an informal agreement among major banks to come in and start to buy stock if there appears to be a problem. They have in the past acted more formally… I don’t know if you remember but in 1998, there was a crisis called the Long-term Capital Crisis. It was a major currency trader, and there was a global currency crisis. And they, with the guidance of the Fed, all of the banks got together when it started to collapse and propped up the currency markets. And, they have plans in place to consider that if the markets start to fall.”

Yes, the PPT – created in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, at the behest of the Fed’s brand new printer-in-chief Alan Greenspan; to supplement the long-standing, and far shadowier “Exchange Stabilization Fund”; around since 1933, with a mandate, altered as of 1970, a year before the gold standard was abandoned, “allowing the Secretary of the Treasury, with the approval of the President, to deal in gold, foreign exchange, and other instruments of credit and securities.” In other words, the “U.S. headquarters” of the Cartel tasked with suppressing gold (and silver) prices to maintain “confidence” in history’s largest, most destructive fiat Ponzi scheme – spearheaded by its “supreme leader,” the Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland, whose even shadowier activities rarely come to light; as they did during December 2011’s “Operation PM Annhilation II.” When, with dollar-priced gold threatening to surge back to the all-time high achieved before September 2011’s “Operation PM Annihilation I” raid, the following headline coincided with an equally vicious paper PM raid at – yep, you guessed it, 10:00 AM EST – just after the ECB “unexpectedly” reduced interest rates.

MARKET SOURCES REPORT BIS, BOE & FEDERAL RESERVE WERE SELLING GOLD AFTER IT POPPED TO SESSION HIGH AT GMT 1335 – MNI NEWS via BLOOMBERG

The headline was subsequently taken down by MNI, one of Germany’s largest media organizations – and none of the entitities mentioned so much as commented on it – as clearly, it was clearly “swept under the rug” once the intended PM damage was done. And wouldn’t you know it, neither the Fed, the U.S. Treasury, nor the Bank of England have since reported a reduction of so much as an ounce of their so-called “reserves?” You know, the “reserves” that have essentially never been audited, and never will.

Read More @ MilesFranklin.com