by Andy Hoffman, Miles Franklin:

Growing up in New York, my ideal “date” was to take a girl on the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan, take a subway to Greenwich Village, and browse the hippest counter-culture stores – like Flip, the Antique Boutique, Astor Place Hair-cutters, and Tower Records. When in Tower Records, I’d often hear extremely unique music playing, and buy it on a whim – tape cassettes, not CDs. Two such records, circa 1985, were Bryan Ferry’s “Boys and Girls” and Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene” – which is why it was so cool to see both coming to Denver this summer, enabling me to see two people whose albums I have so thoroughly worn out, I know every syllable of every song.

Later this summer, I’ll see Bryan Ferry – who just happens to be coming the day the Rockies play my Mets, setting up what will likely be a very exhausting day of traveling to and from Downtown. And last night, I saw Jarre; who, at age 68, is amidst the first North American tour of his four-decade-plus career. A Frenchman, he is one of the world’s most famous New Age musicians; who, despite his age, was as energetic, youthful, and entertaining as anyone I’ve seen. The accompanying light show was breathtaking; and my wife, who had never even heard of Jarre, said it was one of the best shows she’d ever seen. And best of all, his message of independence, revolution, and strength – as evidenced by his tribute to Edward Snowden – made the show as inspiring as it was entertaining.

On that positive note, let’s move on to what I see as an equally positive development; given that fiat currency, a root cause of a significant amount of the world’s evils, past and present, is in the early stages of a vast, crippling attack that will destroy its rapidly weakening grip on humanity further; and eventually, totally and permanently.

In yesterday’s “historic market manipulation setting the stage for catastrophe,” I summarized how global market rigging is getting so egregious, everyone is starting to talk about it. Tuesday, legendary investor Asher Edelman, whom Gordon Gekko himself was modeled after, said “I don’t want to be in the market because I don’t know when the plug is going to get pulled…(as) the government’s ‘plunge protection team’ is the only thing propping up the current market rally.” Whilst yesterday, Bloomberg analyst Richard Breslow espoused that “people love the Plunge Protection Team conspiracy theory when looking at equities. Well that’s exactly what is happening in bonds, right out in the open.”

Perhaps someone should tell him that by definition, suppressing interest rates is fixed income “plunge protection.” However, what he is clearly suggesting – as I have, since October 2014’s “end of QE – LOL,” is that the Fed engages in as much covert bond monetization as it does overt; in the same manner that said equity PPT – i.e., the President’s Working Group on Capital Markets – is as active covertly as the Chinese, Japanese, and Swiss “national teams” are overtly. I mean geez, look at the past two days of Shanghai Equity trading. Wednesday, after China was downgraded by Moody’s, to just two notches above junk status; and Thursday, after Chinese commodity prices crashed, the Yuan surged, and the potentially horrific ramifications of said downgrade – on the nation’s unparalleled, parabolically-rising debt – came to light. Yes, the “dead ringer” that has become as ubiquitous in China since its own “point of no return” two years ago, as it has been in the U.S. for at least five years.

Come to think of it, here’s the U.S. PPT in action on four of the last five trading days; with the fifth being not much different, via what I deem a “variations thereof” algorithm. Don’t worry about collapsing new and existing home sales; plunging manufacturing, retail sales, and wholesale data; a skyrocketing trade deficit – despite a plunging dollar; exploding political scandals; and the potential for World War III to break out at any moment. Or Obamacare imploding whilst the Trump Administration is powerless to “repeal and replace it”; a new “budget” with not a chance in hell of passing – as an historic “debt ceiling” fiasco awaits in the near-term; the potential for a Greek default in July, a Catalonian secession in September, a Brazilian civil war, and countless other PiMBEEB events. This, as Precious Metals are subjected to the same, relentless “attack algorithms” every day, despite every imaginable “outside market movement” moving in their favor – such as falling Treasury yields, and a plunging dollar. To the point that shortly, anyone who doesn’t acknowledge such blatant government intervention is going to be labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”

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