Economic Crisis News 2015-07-17

Silver Shortage Update

Despite production costs exceeding silver spot price for primary silver miners, silver continues to slide, down to under 15 dollars Thursday. Common silver rounds are delayed until August or listed as out of stock on two major online retailers Provident Metals and APMEX. On Ebay the cheapest listings for silver stand at over 17 dollars per ounce making for a minimum 2 dollar premium. Back in 2008, some premiums were 100% when silver reached a bottom of 8 dollars per ounce making a physical price around 16 dollars divergent from the manipulated paper price.

Oil & Gas Prices

California drivers are feeling the pain, with gas price rising week after week despite oil price moving lower to $51 for WTI and $57 for Brent Crude. The poor management of roads in the state and even nationwide have caused some Federal legislators like Representative Larsen to call for a 15 cent increase in the gas tax which hasn’t been increased since 1993. Federal transportation funding expires July 31st after the two month patch passed in May ends. California itself has been debating increasing the state gas tax a further 21% even though it was already raised in January 2015.

Supposedly due to temporary disruptions with large oil refineries in southern California, the south part of the state is experiencing gas at up to 1 dollar over the price in the rest of California. Los Angeles & Long Beach area increased 50 cents per gallon in one week up to $5 a gallon. Statewide the average is only 3.72 per gallon but that’s a dollar over the nationwide average of 2.77.

The shale industry is still here in the US despite companies operating at a loss and accruing more and more debt. The reserves left are only estimated to last less than 10 years. Countries like Poland, Algeria, Australia, Colombia, Russia and Mexico have yet to explore much of their shale reserves. Even Saudi Arabia has plans for domestic shale investment and development.

Watch Oil Wars volume one and two to see the problems the American shale industry are facing with such low oil prices.

Stock Market Rally

The Dow is now once again up for the year, closing at 18 thousand 1 hundred 20 thursday. Compared to the all-time high reached May 19th at 18 thousand 3 hundred, it’s only down one percent, an amount that could easily occur in a single trading day with how the market behaves lately. The S&P closed just half a percent shy of it’s all-time high.This is surprisingly bullish for such great turmoil happening in Greece and inevitably Europe.

Greece

Wednesday Greece’s parliament voted in favor of an austerity bill; paving the way for a third bailout to the heavily indebted country. Ahead of the vote violent protests erupted in their capital of Athens. Yahoo News says almost 13 thousand people were rallying in opposition to the austerity deal. Conditions of the deal seem worse for the Greek people than a similar referendum the public voted ‘NO’ on just over a week ago. The German Finance Minister said yesterday that Greece could be better off outside the Eurozone.

ISIS Tape

Last weekend there was a video released purported to be recovered from a John McCain staffer’s laptop depicted a film studio filming a fake beheading by ISIS. This is something alternative media has been reporting since last year.

Jade Helm

Conspiracy Theorists favorite craze ‘Jade Helm’ is finally officially underway in the Southwestern United States. It’s still unknown what’s going on at multiple walmarts inside the area where the operation is taking place. On July 15th there were multiple cellphone outages further stirring fears. The motto “Mastering the Human Domain” is quite ominous and documents showing the development of artificial intelligence to control troop deployment seems part of the training. One scenario however flips the fear on it’s head that Jade Helm could be a cover for the mass arrest of the criminal corrupt in power such as the Bush/Cheney war machine powers and those dubbed to be pushing for a “New World Order.” Let’s hope nothing bad or maybe some good comes from the whole operation.