Anti-Trump accusations and rhetoric stimulating gold price

(January 11, 2017 - by Lawrie Williams)

No wonder the gold price has been surging given all the uncertainties surrounding the almost-here Trump Presidency.  Nine days and counting until The Donald assumes office.

Firstly let me say that I would not have voted for Donald Trump had I been a US citizen, but the subsequent antagonism from the Democratic, Luvvie and Security communities appals me.  The man has been elected and all Americans should stand behind him for good or bad, and the unprecedented accusations which appear to have been orchestrated by America’s anti-Russian neocons have the potential for leading to the breakdown of the U.S. democratic system.  No future Presidential Election will ever be the same.

From a neutral point of view the accusations being thrown around on Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails and now the suggestion that the Russian security services possess incriminating information and data relating to The Donald’s past, as much suggest misinformation by his domestic opponents rather than the Russians.  (Any ‘proof’ of the accusations appear to be of the order of ‘we are the security agencies and what we claim should be proof enough’ – just like Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction maybe!?) One suspects that if any organization possesses such information then it’s as likely to be the U.S. security services as the Russians – perhaps more so.  If such information exists, and it is gradually leaked, then that to this observer’s mind would likely point the finger at the domestic security community opposed to Trump’s closer ties with Russia, which seem to be one of the key moves on his early foreign policy agenda.

Confrontation with Russia has been the American position (and vice versa) since the end of the Second World War.  Much of the huge American Defense industry has been built on the back of a potential military engagement between two of the world’s superpowers – otherwise known as the arms race.  There is an absolutely enormous amount of money and numbers of jobs riding on the preservation of this antagonistic status quo.  A continuing ‘cold war’ between the U.S. and Russia is good – some might say essential – for the U.S. economy.  And given the USA has a far stronger economy than Russia, then it is far more in U.S. interests for this situation to continue than it is for Russia.

The older I get the more cynical I get regarding stated ‘facts’ by those who, in my youth, I would never have questioned.  Virtually everyone has some kind of hidden agenda.  I see it everywhere.  In gold conferences speakers will, for example, often present as ‘fact’ what are in reality just their own opinions and theories to cast doubt on the veracity of figures supporting, say Chinese or Indian demand, SGE withdrawals, COMEX futures manipulations, to name but a few which other analysts will themselves have suggested as factual. 

Politicians are the worst of all in this respect – one only has to listen to claims and counter-claims during the U.S. Presidential election run-up, or ahead of the Brexit vote in the UK to understand that one side or the other – or usually both – is blatantly lying, or being exceedingly ‘economical with the truth’.  And these claims are being made by people who are supposedly pillars of our society. 

Why should the security services, or even an outgoing or incoming U.S. President be any different?  They all have their own agendas and prejudices.

But this time around the anti-Trump rhetoric has been, as mentioned above, unprecedented in its vitriol and whether this has come about from sore losers, or those making a pre-emptive strike before being unceremoniously dumped out of office by the incoming Administration, or just with their own political axes to grind, it is hard to judge.  I’m sure Donald Trump has episodes in his past he would rather keep hidden – as do most of those who run for high office – but what we are seeing now is inherently destabilizing for the U.S. with the Presidential Campaign having been so contentious leaving huge numbers more than prepared to believe the worst about the incoming President, and others perhaps feeling he can do no wrong and that any past indiscretions are irrelevant.

We are thus heading for the most divisive U.S. Presidency in history – we have already expressed doubts that it will run its full term – and that is bound to influence both domestic and foreign policy decisions bringing some proposed moves, good and bad, to an early demise.  This has to be bad for the equity markets and good for gold – unless, again as we have noted before, equity markets collapse to such an extent that gold is brought down with them (as in 2008) in the search for liquidity.  But if this is the case then it is gold which will recover quickest, and probably surge to new heights as it did from late 2008 right through to August 2011.  (Opinion – not fact!)