03/10/11 via: Score Board –Percentages –Year-To-Date — (some of these may surprise you).
Fuels
Crude Oil (bbl)……………+14.9
Ethanol (gal)……………+7.7
Heating Oil (gal)……………+18.4
Natural Gas (mm btu)……………-12.3
Unleaded Gas (gal)……………+20.1
Metals
Gold (oz)……………+0.4
Silver (oz)……………+15.3
Platinum (oz)……………+1.7
Copper (lb)……………-2.6 — this could be ominous.
Palladium (oz)……………-2.3
Richard Russell has made his subscribers fortunes. One of the best values anywhere in the financial world at only a $300 subscription to get his DAILY report for a year. HERE to subscribe.
Richard Russell: $6,000 Gold
In his latest letter to subscribers, author of Dow Theory Letters Richard Russell said he expects $6,000 gold sometime during the bull market in the yellow metal, which celebrated its 10th consecutive up year in 2010.
“Today while gold is within a few percentages of its record high, I’m asked how high I think gold can climb,” Russell wrote in his latest letter to subscribers. “My retort is, ‘Wrong question, the real question is how low can fiat or irredeemable money fall?’”
“This time, gold has, so far, only multiplied five times — from 255 to 1430. If gold was to repeat its 1970 performance and multiply 24 times, it would rise to over 6,000.”
The octogenarian and author of the longest-running investment newsletter (since 1958) appears reinvigorated about his outlook for the gold price following his prescient call of a dangerous event lurking somewhere around the world that could cause the fait accompli demise of an already teetering U.S. dollar.
“This year might even be a black swan year,” Russell predicted at the beginning of 2011. “Certain events are now in place, events that have never been seen before in human history. We are dealing with debts so monstrous, so huge, that most people can’t fathom them. The Muslim community is huge, and it has moved heavily into many European nations. The radical Muslims intend to express their world leadership. Dictators in North Korea and Burma and Iran and Africa are no longer safe in that they can no longer keep their populations ignorant and in slavery.”
“There is a huge disparity between the wealthy and the poor. The poor greatly outnumber the wealthy. This has all the ingredients for revolutions in the age of instant and world-wide communication,” he stated.
All the makings of a “black swan” event are in place for 2011, he concluded.
Spot on. Civil unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria, as well as the civil war, in the case of Libya, erupted into motion nearly overnight in early February. Threats of oil delivery disruptions from a closing of the Suez Canal and the civil disobedience contagion, which has now spread to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, has sent oil prices soaring along with monetary metals, gold and silver.
On Feb. 24, Japan-based Nomura Securities said $220 oil is possible in the event of a temporary shutdown of oil production in Saudi Arabia. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress that a sustained oil price shock to the U.S. economy would derail any hopes of a full recovery, which, to investors, can be interpreted to include a recovery of a struggling dollar.
Conspicuously, the dollar, the aged king of safety in times of heightened uncertainty, has dropped during the ongoing events in the Middle East. A declining dollar during the most turbulent geo-political events in the Middle East since the October 1973 Yom Kippur War troubles Russell.
Telling his subscribers to move into gold as far back as 2000, Russell has recently taken a much more urgent tone with his followers regarding his concerns of the U.S. currency and the virtues of holding the ultimate form of money, gold, during this period of uncertainty.
“Swap your dollars for physical gold or CEF, GLD, or SGOL,” Russell pleaded with his subscribers in his Jan. 25 missive. “In other words, do as China and Russia and many other nation are now doing — get out of your dollar assets.”
“I realize that what I’ve written above may seem outlandish to many subscribers. Outlandish?” Russell continued. “Then you tell me how the U.S. is going to finance a national debt of $13.9 trillion (some say the real debt is over $50 trillion). The fact is that we now BORROW just to pay the interest on the national debt. Treasury is moving the debt to ever-shorter maturities, hoping that the current zero interest rates on short debt will ease the situation. But with bonds sinking, rates are now rising, so what’s the answer?”
Adding a potential of another oil shock to the U.S. economy—which already cannot even service public debt interest payments—with a sea change of negative sentiment regarding the dollar as a safe haven currency is too much for Russell to see a chance of its survival as the hegemonic reserve currency of the global banking system.