By Bob Chapman
TheInternationalForecaster.com

On Friday from the Bilderberg conclave at Davos, appointed European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi proclaimed that Europe had averted financial disaster and cited the improvement in euro zone markets in recent weeks. He said it was the ECB’s duty to guard against deflation as well as inflation. The fact of the matter is that he and his friends at the Fed arranged a currency swap of $1 trillion of which the ECB dispersed $660 billion to 523 EU banks, at 1% interest for three years. He also cut interest rates twice and extended loans for 1 to 3 years. Mr. Draghi could be expected to take the easy Anglo-American way out. He is fully Illuminati trained and that is where his orders emanate from.

He continued about how the conclusion of a fiscal pact, the ESM, the European Stabilization Mechanism, where budgets and fiscal spending policies would be determined by unelected, Treasury appointees, who have been officially immunized by the EU government. Mr. Draghi makes no note of these qualifications and forgets to let us know that in this new ESM pact all the nations lose their sovereignty.

As yet, after a month, there is no evidence that the funds had reached the real economy. The banks that just received the funds at 1% interest have been depositing them at ¼% interest with the ECB. They have not lent to each other because bankers say they do not trust each other. What a sad state of affairs. In addition to the above the ECB now accepts loan collateral of much lower quality than previously was approved. As you can see there were a lot of facts Mr. Draghi deliberately left out.

Now the banks have to use these funds to refund old and new debt and lend to keep the economies afloat. They also have to play their parts in keeping the six problem nations afloat.

Concerning the subject of Greece we were told last Friday a deal would be announced but nothing has happened as yet. The outlook is grim and the fundamentals are terrible. We won’t rehash Greece, because we have been over it so many times. We will wait to see what this week brings.

The Portuguese economy is falling deeper into austerity. Bank lending has fallen by the most on record. It fell $6.5 in December the biggest monthly decline since December 197, when the ECB began collecting data. Portugal, if they’ like to recover, should be using the LTRO funds to make loans to small and medium sized companies.

The Kiel Institute for the World Economy says Portugal would have to have a budget surplus of 11% of GDP annually. If they had 2% growth, which is a tall order, it would need a 56% haircut on its debt to get back on a sustainable path to recovery.

Gold finally out of that early on mess, finally had a good month, up just under 10%. That is the best January since 1980. We remember January 1980 well – it was the final month of the gold rally. Oddly enough the shares topped out in June with gold trading at $680 to $720. We would like to say that the 3 gold and silver suppressions of this past 2011 and 2012 has pointed out in stark relief that the US government has been very actively manipulating gold and silver prices, legally, since 1980. We mention this because short-term charts are terribly distorted and for us you cannot use them. The advocates are out again with their charts and believe we hope they are right. As usual as they have been, they will be wrong. They’ll soon call for reversal and as they do gold and silver will go higher.

After having loaned the ECB $1 trillion they now tell us we’ll receive QE 3. In fractional banking that could be $10 to $20 trillion. Any substantial part of those funds are used and monetized you’ll see some stunning inflation.

Election is in view and employment is not improving. The Fed has pledged that it is prepared to provide for further monetary accommodation. Inflation is headed higher, not lower. All that money and credit will influence inflation. Yes, the EU, US and UK economies will be flat this year and probably slightly higher. What we are doing with QE 3 and other types of stimulus is just extending the game.

If everything is fine why did the US Mint sell 114,500 ounces of American Gold Eagles with still two days left in January to accommodate buyers? Maybe the total will be 145,000, the largest sale in 1½ years. It’s because people do not trust their economies and their governments that is why and they are buying gold and silver coins to protect themselves. They only have to look at the Republican Presidential primaries where votes are stolen by computer, dead people vote and Ron Paul doesn’t get a chance to state his case. Our government is a criminal syndicate. All those American gold and silver buyers know this, and that is why they want gold and silver coins, not fiat dollars.

Finally we are starting to see money managers, hedge funds, and others getting more bullish on gold. This should lead to short covering in gold and silver and the shares.

Here we have QE 3 in the works as we predicted months ago. We said it would consist of the Fed buying the banks garbage so they have cash to follow the Fed’s orders. Those orders will be to buy Treasuries, Agencies and to make loans to small and medium companies. Before the Fed bought $1.4 trillion of this paper, mostly MBS and CDO’s. We never found out what the Fed paid for previous purchases and we won’t this time either. This is another gift the Fed, or should we say taxpayer gives the to the banks. What we are seeing in Europe and again shortly here is another stuffing of the system with money and credit. The Fed is headed down the road of no return and they know exactly what they are doing. That is playing money and credit creation to the bitter end. Historically no central bank has had the power to do this. If played out to the end we have to expect hyperinflationary depression, which will end in a deflationary depressionary collapse. This will destroy the value of the US dollar and its purchasing power. The entire system will probably collapse to a great extent including perhaps 60% of commerce, 40% to 50% unemployment, and the end of the financial system and resorting to bartering, the social support system and government. They will all collapse, so you had better prepare for it. All this will be expedited if Ron Paul is not elected our next president. If he were to be elected he could short-circuit many programs and policies that are destroying our nation.

The moves by the elitist Fed via the ECB to cover-up the monetary and financial chaos in Europe and in the US via QE 3 is in part political. Political in France and toward the next elections. France is a nightmare for the elitists and obviously those in power want Obama returned. He having done everything asked of him.

As we predicted last fall that QE 3 will come in the form of another bank bailout. This time it will be the clearing of toxic bonds from the banks’ books, which was done by buying $1.4 trillion in these bonds previously. We expect $800 billion to $1.3 trillion this time around. The disbursement of these funds should last 12 to 18 months. These moves were in part responsible for our change in GDP for the US this year from minus 1½% to 2% to plus 1½% to 2%.

In the latest out of Europe, Germany is pushing Greece to relinquish control over its budget policies to a euro zone “budget commissioner,” who would be able to veto domestic fiscal decisions, similar to the powers they want to grant to the ESM.

German logic is if further funds are not dispersed, Greece cannot threaten its members with default, but will have to accept outside fiscal control with funs. The game being paid by Germany is dangerous and could lead to immediate default. In addition any deal made in February by the PASOK government is subject to change in two months by a new election victor and party in charge. The German position is dumb and ultimately won’t work.

The Greeks are not going to like or accept the German demands. There will be demonstrations and the new policies may go nowhere. From the Greek side, when you have lost almost everything there is little more to lose. Unfortunately, we predicted all this but few were listening.

After putting the present regime in power 25 years ago in Iran the US has had nothing but problems, the latest and most important has been the sale of oil in currencies other than the US dollar. Asked many times, Iran refuses to comply. This is the main reason the US and Europe are so aggressive in pursuing Iran. Underneath it all it is all about petrodollars. This is why Iraq was destroyed and Libya as well. The US could not tolerate Iraq selling oil in euros. Anyone who steps out of line gets zapped, no matter who it is. At the IMF a year ago director Dominique Strauss-Kahn called for a different currency to, a new world currency, to end the dominance of the dollar. As a result he was set up in a hotel in NYC for rape. We immediately pointed out this was a bag job and so it was, but it got him out of his IMF job, he couldn’t run for the French presidency and they destroyed his reputation. This shows you how far and even further the US Illuminists will go to protect their oil monopoly and fixed oil payments in US dollars only. Strauss-Kahn is a top Illuminist and they still destroyed him. If the dollar becomes only one of many currencies in which oil is sold, the dollar will then collapse. For the US, the barn door has closed, but the farm animals are already loose.

At Davos this past week the US Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, urged the euro zone to boost its cache of bailout cash and protect Italy and Spain against the threat of a market rout. At the same time the new IMF leader Christine Lagarde urged Greece and its creditors to agree on cutting debt burdens.

What we see here is a request for more funds. The Fed just did a swap, a loan, for $1 trillion for the ECB in behalf of 523 EU banks. Obviously it wasn’t enough and obviously they would rather borrow from the ECB and the Fed rather than go the fractional route. We will see more money spilled but never really enough.

While these events ran paramount on Friday night, while most everybody was enjoying themselves, Fitch cut Italy’s rating 2 notches to A minus. Joining the group n being downgraded we saw the same medicine applied to Spain, Belgium, Slovenia and Cyprus.

Last week the Dow fell 0.5%, S&P was little changed, the Russell 2000 gained 1.8% and the Nasdaq 100 rose 1.0%. Cyclicals rose 0.8%; utilities were unchanged; transports gained 1.2%; consumers fell 0.4%; banks fell 1.4% and broker/dealers fell 3.0%; high tech rose 0.3%; semis fell 0.2%; Internets fell 0.3% and biotechs rose 5.4%. Gold bullion rose $72.00, the HUI Gold Index rose 9.4% and the USDX fell 1.6%.

Two-year T-bills fell 3 bps to 0.21%, as 10-year notes fell 13 bps to 1.89%. German 10-year bunds rose again.

The Freddie Mac 30-year fixed rate mortgage rates rose 10 bps to 3.98%; the 15′s rose 7 bps to 3.24%. The one-year ARM’s were unchanged at 2.74% and 30-year fixed rate jumbos were down 4 bps to 4.46%.

Fed credit expanded $1.5 billion to $2,905 trillion, which is up 20.1% yoy. Fed foreign holdings at Treasuries and Agencies rose $14.4 billion to $3.406 trillion. Custody holdings for foreign central banks rose $55 billion yoy, or 1.6%.

M2, narrow, money supply rose $8.0 billion to a record $9.763 trillion. That is up 10.2% yoy.

Total money market fund assets fell $14.7 billion to $2.679 trillion.

Commercial paper rose $3.4 billion to $971 billion. That is down $17 billion from a year ago, or 1.7%.

A “gold rush” swept through China during the week-long Lunar New Year holiday this year, with demand for precious metals and jewelry surging since the Year of the Dragon began.

Sales of gold, silver and jewelry rose 57.6 percent during the week-long holiday at Caibai, one of Beijing’s best-known gold retailers, according to data released by the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) on Saturday.

Other jewelry stores across the country also saw sales boom during the period, with customers favoring New Year-themed gold bars, gold ingots and other types of Dragon-themed jewelries.

“Long treasured by Chinese, gold is no longer owned only by a privileged few, but has become a new investment channel open to all,” said Guan Qiang, assistant manager at Caibai.

The Spring Festival gives people a chance to preserve and present gold as gifts, offering hopes that it will increase in value and not be impacted by inflation, Guan said.

During the week-long holiday, which lasted from January 22 to 28, the sales volume in Caibai and Guohua, another of Beijing’s top gold retailers, reached about 600 million yuan ($95.28 million).

The figure showed a 49.7-percent increase over that of last year’s Spring Festival, said a report released by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Commerce.

Caibai began selling gold bars as investment items during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, but the trend of buying gold or silver bars during the Spring Festival has really taken off in the past two years, Guan said.

For Guan and his colleagues, the Spring Festival rush was an exciting but exhausting experience, as customers flooded the store and surprised clerks with their purchasing enthusiasm.

“With customers crowding and rushing in, we did not even have time to eat and drink,” said a sales clerk at the gold bar counter surnamed Li.

She said each shop assistant had received hundreds of customers per day and wrote several times more orders than on ordinary days.

“You can hardly even see the gold bars, necklaces and pendants in the display case. People seem crazy about gold, snatching it up more like a ‘cheap cabbage’ than such a precious metal,” said Beijing resident Miao Miao.

“You have to quickly decide whether to make a purchase, or it will be taken away by others.”

Miao was shopping for a pair of gold bracelets to give to her granddaughter as a gift for the New Year.

“When my daughter was born in 1984, we had no means or savings to buy her one as a keepsake. We can finally realize this dream by sending it to her daughter,” Miao said.

However, Chinese do not value gold only in only sentimental terms. The precious metal is also expected to maintain or increase its value, as evidenced by the surging investment demand seen around the country, insiders have said.

“To most Chinese, gold is more convenient to cash in than other investment instruments. Despite common investment risks, the price of gold is clear and easy to judge,” said Guan.

Compared to unpredictable investments, such as those in the stock market or housing sector, gold is cherished more by Chinese for its increasing value as an asset as well as the unlikelihood that it will be affected by inflation, Guan said.

China is expected to overtake India as the world’s top gold consumer in the next few years. Strong demand for investments in gold and jewelry will have driven China’s total gold demand to 750 metric tons in 2011, according to the World Gold Council.

Despite the record-high price of gold, the demand for investments in gold and jewelry has continued to soar, with the market expected to reach about 955.2 metric tons by 2020, thanks to a growing middle class and a more affluent society, said Binghai, director of the Shanghai Gold & Jewelry Trade Association.

The NY Fed’s Index of Coincident Economic Indicators shows how putrid the economic ‘bounce’ is for New Jersey. NYC, due to the trillions poured into Wall Street bounced well but is now rolling over. The bounce of NYC obviously helped NY State, but that bounce was modest and is also rolling over.

US Q4 GDP increased 0.7%, 2.8% annualized; 3% was expected. However, consumption increased only 2%. Inventory growth contributed 2 percent points to the 2.8% growth! Real final sales rose 0.8%.

The Commerce Department greatly boosted GDP by lowering the GDP deflator to only 0.39% from Q3′s 2.56%. This created 2.16% more GDP q/q…Using CPI to deflate GDP would have produced negative GDP.

The absurdly low GDP Deflator also greatly overstates income, which increased only 0.8%…Government spending declined 4.6% in Q4 and 2.1% for 2011 due to massive defense cuts. This is the biggest decline since 1971…Part of the surge in inventory could be inflation.

Consumer Metric Institute: If the highly positive swing in the inventory number is real, it is certainly not sustainable and when combined with actual consumer spending the numbers themselves would be prima facie evidence that manufacturers over-corrected in anticipation of huge holiday spending. Such an over-correction should lead to reversals in the coming quarters. On the other hand, if the swing is an artifact of firming commodity prices it is just a further indication that the headline number is hopelessly noisy subject to erratic phantom movements as the BEA’s “deflaters” struggle to track pricing changes.

And lastly, the volatility of the inventory parts of the BEA’s equation continue to distort the headline number enough to render it useless as a source of genuine economic information. In the best of times the inventory data provided by the BEA is late and incomplete, but it is necessitated by the need within the BEA’s equations to reconcile the production based manufacturing portions of their equation to the consumption based consumer portions. Because of that it is both partly plugged (at least in the monthly and quarterly updates) and highly susceptible to fluctuations in pricing levels.

In short, this report is disturbing because of how the headline number masks real and troubling weakness in the more substantive details

The PCE number was the most-understated and worthless, regularly-followed inflation number the Fed could come up with, shy of the “core” PCE deflator, net of food and energy, which Mr. Bernanke traditionally has been fond of touting.

GDP for 2011 increased only 1.7%. US Debt increased almost 9% in 2011; the Fed’s balance sheet increased over 20%. $1.22 Trillion of US Treasury debt and QE2.0 and Operation Twist II produced about $260B of GDP.

How many times can this occur before an implosion occurs?

Employment in Alabama has surged since July 2011; however this has caused great controversy.

Alabama’s unemployment rate has dropped more than any of its bordering states according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to the data, Alabama’s unemployment has dropped by 1.9% since July 2011 when the rate reached its high for the year at 10% unemployment…

The legislature passed a handful of measures that were touted as ways to recruit industry to Alabama.

They included tax incentives for companies to relocate to Alabama and a law aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration which was sold as an economic development bill… [The bill passed in June]

by Ron Paul
Infowars.com

The Federal Reserve’s interest rate price-setting board, the FOMC, met last week. They will continue to set the federal funds rate at well below 1%, and plan to keep it low until the end of 2014. That’s a year and half longer than they planned when they met just last month. Chairman Bernanke says they are keeping interest rates so low for so long because the economic outlook warrants it.

The fallacies in their reasoning would be amusing if they weren’t so dangerous. The Fed wants to keep the price of money at essentially zero – in other words “free” – to boost the economy. But the boost they are attempting won’t get here for another three years. That’s not a recovery. And we’ve already tried this tactic. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place: with interest rates artificially low for a very long time.

Free money doesn’t stimulate growth, as Japan’s two lost decades clearly show. Artificially low interest rates only serve to punish saving, distort market signals, and cause further malinvestment. They also do nothing to address the only real solution to our economic woes: liquidation of the bad debt that hangs around the neck of the world’s economy, preventing recovery. Artificially low interest rates merely ensure that we remain a debt-financed consumer economy guaranteed to end up with a weaker economy and higher prices.

What baffles me even more is that two decades after the collapse of Soviet planning and decades more since the U.S. and economists purportedly rejected the idea of price setting, we find nothing wrong with the Fed setting the price of money. We all agree it is a bad idea to have a board saying the price of wheat should be $250 a ton today, or carpenters wages should be $25 an hour until the end of 2014. But we are perfectly comfortable with having a board set the price of one half of every transaction in our economy. And our markets are supposedly free.

The Fed policies of low interest rates, Operation Twist, and rounds of quantitative easing are all attempts to keep the economy alive artificially. But the 12 FOMC participants cannot manage the economy any better than the bureaucrats of the Soviet Union. The policies haven’t worked. They won’t work. Real economic recovery cannot come until we liquidate the bad debt, until we eradicate the poor decisions we made over the last decade, and start with a sound foundation. It is time we acknowledge the truth of the Fed’s activities: they are merely using fancy words for price setting.

Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon was correct in the 1920s when he said “liquidate everything.” That’s what we did in the severe depression of 1920-21, and we recovered so quickly it is never even talked about. We didn’t take his advice after the 1929 crash, and ended up with the Great Depression. We are committing the same mistakes, destined to live in this Great Recession for a decade or more—it has already been four years, the Fed says it will be at least three more! It’s time we start rethinking what the Fed’s policies are really doing to our economy, because obviously, by their own admission, they haven’t helped.

James Hall
GCN Live.com
February 1, 2012

The first lesson of international business is that the monopolies that drive the commercial trading system only hold loyalty to the god of capital. Making money means retaining a profit on trading transactions of business companies. The notion of MAKING MONEY means something very different to the financial empires that speculate on currencies, commodities, bonds and equities. When the two worlds come together to celebrate the common interest of their pirate culture, the Davos port of call, is a necessary winter holiday.

No doubt, the world’s financial outlook is still bleak. The needed measures and will to repudiate the ill gained debt bubble, that has much of the world facing insolvency, is a taboo alternative. The proverbial can that cannot be kicked far enough down the road of postponement keeps the party going for a little while longer. The life style of the super wealthy accustomed to flying into the Alpine village on Gulfstream V’s, hardly relate to the plight of people eating cat food. No surprise, this is the reality that escapes normal reporting.

However, what happens when the EU collapses and nation-states return to their own national currencies? The cardinal rule of the financial buccaneers is to keep the serving of the interest on the debt instruments that they hold as assets, paid by their captive debtors.

When the Fox Business Channel sends a Warren Buffet “groupie” like Liz Claman to cover this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, you know you will get soft interviews and approving reporting. The same can be said of the coverage by most of the financial media. Watching questions at a press conference usually provided a strong sucking sound coming from the journalists in a desperate hope to gain favor among the titans of financial business.

It is refreshing to read in The Economic Times an account about Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron. His slamming of the eurozone as uncompetitive and branding a planned transaction tax “madness”, strays from the strategic objectives of the financial elites. The financial speculation leveraged by the City of London brought the UK to the brink of collapse. Nevertheless, as a lone voice that squelches a retooled “Tobin Tax”, Cameron deserves credit. He may just be serving his own domestic political interest, but any opposition to refloating the debt with another round of additional taxes, is a positive. Even if he falls far short with true systemic solutions, the road to global taxation needs derailing.

Cameron scornfully dismissed French-led plan:

“Even to be considering this at a time when we are struggling to get our economies growing is quite simply madness,” he declared.

”Of course it’s right that the financial sector should pay their share. In the UK we are doing exactly that through our bank levies and stamp duty on shares. And these are options which other countries can adopt.”

The legally protected financial bandits are dedicated to the extraction of even higher taxes in order to rollover maturing obligations. As the EU economy falters and shatters, who will bail out the bankrupt economies? The answer may not exist. John Quelch, the dean of the Shanghai-based China Europe International Business School offers the following assessment in Forbes,

“Last year at Davos, there was wishful thinking about China. Surely China would stumble on its relentless path to economic superpower status, and give the West some breathing space to reboot and revitalize?

When people mature in their economic understanding, the harsh reality hits them. The criminal elites who designed this perverted global monetary system actually benefit with a total collapse of the nation states. A total implosion of world markets will not bring down the crooks that already own most of the choice global assets.

Davos is not about advancing productive international business. It is about plotting the next global crisis that drives the plutocrats to demand control that is even more draconian and punitive. Trade often brings mutual benefits when the marketplace operates with balance and equilibrium. However, when cartels dominate commerce and transnational corporatists force monopolistic restraints upon competing enterprises, the net result dampens alternative markets.

The way to view the business practices of the authoritarian model of the privileged Davos cabal is to see their relationships and overlapping confederations as a filtering system that expels any opposition to their long-term plans for both economic and political domination.

The analogy that describes this difference is seen in the protective environments that the Davos connections operate as compared to the meager existence of the average consumer. The vast multitude is preoccupied with economic survival. This sharp contrast with the self-appointed shapers of the world financial system, know of no such constraint.

Businesses that actually produce a product or useful service never bridge the gap between practical consumable innovations and the monetary manipulators that feed off the dynamic and industrious efforts of legitimate commercial enterprises. The money interests that dominate gatherings like Davos bring little to the advancement of actual commerce. Wealth creation is different from the accumulation or theft of riches.

The insurmountable resolution of the world debt bubble is evident to everyone. Yet the banksters care little for solutions, especially since their efforts are the true cause of the coming disaster. The Chinese controlled model will not rescue the globalist trading system. What the Davos elites have in mind is to convert independent economies into subservient appendages of a top down dependent debtor society.

Lowering the standard of living for Western economies is an unpleasant fact. The masters of manipulation desire this outcome. Until society recognizes that the debt created financial system is the root cause of the next planned panic, none of us will be safe from the crony state/capitalist juggernaut.

by Dr Jeffrey Lewis
The Silver-Coin-Investor.com

Several closely watched technical factors played a substantial role in precious metals trading last week as traders noted that increasingly bullish signals of an impending rally accumulated strength.

It is our conviction that ultimately the physical market will trump paper and drive technical traders, which in term will set-off the algorithm-funds, leading to significant moves higher or as we like to frame: a return to real equilibrium.

Technical analysts pointed to a bullish potential chart pattern in silver’s price combined with a down trend line break, as well as gold’s price breaking above a key long term moving average, as supportive technical signs for the precious metals.

Furthermore, both of the recent corrective upwards trends in silver and gold prices have been reinforced by gradually increasing levels observed in their respective Relative Strength Index or RSI readings, without the rallies yet having pushed the key momentum indicator into overbought territory above the 70 level for either metal.

These observations indicate that the most recent technical rally seen in these metals since their late December lows may well have further to go.

Technical Buying Ahead of Support Sends Silver Above Important Trend Line

To start with, the price of silver continued its short term upwards trend and has managed to break — and thus far hold safely above — a significant downwards trend line that had been limiting upside price action since the intermediate peaks of September 2011.
The downwards slanting line can be drawn between the September 5th spot price peak at 43.36 and the December 8th 33.21 peak and the price action demonstrated several close tests and reversals to the downside ahead of this line before the notable break above it occurred on January 10th.

Technical analysts also noted that this trend line break was confirmed by rising trading volume observed in silver on the day of the event.

Potential Double Bottom Pattern in Silver Also Improves Technical Picture

Technical silver buying has also emerged in recent sessions due to a closely watched price reversal ahead of key support in the 26.05/15 region that could indicate the grey metal is in the process of forming a classic double bottom chart pattern with a neckline in the 35.66 region. This level also roughly corresponds to the current reading of its 200 day Moving Average.

That closely watched long term indicator — which currently reads at the $35.72 level and is showing a decidedly downward slope — still yields a bearish outlook for the grey metal. Nevertheless, a sustained break above it would improve the technical picture for silver considerably, especially due to the presence of a possible double bottom neckline in that region.

Furthermore, the computed measuring objective of a future sustained break of that double bottom neckline is $39.56 and would be projected upwards from the neckline to yield a technical target in the $45.22 region.

Gold Sustains Gains Above Key Moving Average, While Silver Still Below

Another classic bullish signal seen in the precious metals recently that has prompted significant technical buying has been the break in the price of gold above its key 200 day Moving Average. This notable bullish signal, which is further supported by a continued positive slope in the indicator, occurred initially on January 10th of this year during a supportive period of rising volume.

Although the spot gold market has since dipped below the indicator intraday, the price has thus far generally sustained gains above it on a closing basis, and the yellow metal now seems set to test a key declining trend line currently drawn at the 1688.93 level.

A break above that line would send another important bullish signal to technical traders, with a potential double bottom neckline providing subsequent resistance at the 1802.63 level supported by two key reversal lows at the 1522.55 and 1532.15 levels.

Nevertheless, silver’s spot price has yet to climb above its 200 day Moving Average that it fell sharply below in its latest managed price crash that occurred on September 22nd and 23rd of 2011.