The Greek Crisis Will Continue

Well, of course the fundamental problem, which was very much expressed by Mr. Varoufakis, is that Greece is broke.

He said it probably three months ago now. The fact is that they are broke and have around 25 percent unemployment.

They’ve been undergoing a recession for five years. So how do you expect somebody who’s broke to pay up? Normally, when someone is broke, they go through a chapter 11 bankruptcy or something in order to get out from under debt.

So I think it’s going to be an ongoing crisis. It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the banking system. But of course it’s the banking system that the powers-that-be want to preserve. That’s because the banking system can create a domino effect where all of a sudden everyone is questioning everyone else’s credit. Also, writing down a debt would be bad because that debt is on people’s balance sheets, particularly the ECB’s.

They can pretend that there are no write-offs or put it up in some organizations where you never see the losses. But we all know that if Greece repudiates its debts, there are going to be lots of losses on those bonds. We will see how it plays out.

- Source, Eric Sprott via Proactive Investor

"I Haven't Lost any Conviction" on Gold and Silver

I have always thought that the ECB (European Central Bank) would persist in coming up with some kind of solution, because they had just under $89 billion euros in the Greek banking system and we were theoretically only talking about lending another $7.2 billion to Greece to solve the problem.

But that has gone way up in the meantime, like most estimates that countries make on the size of their difficulties.

When I look at the proposals, it just is a total wipeout for Greece. For the love of me, I can’t understand why their parliament would pass that.

I mean, the ECB is seizing $50 billion in assets. It almost looks like they want to run the banking system in the country, if not effectively run the country itself! All the reporting mechanisms go to the ECB.

I can’t believe that Tsipras would have won the “no” vote (against the bailout) and then had that happen to him.

I have always believed that Greece would have been better off just reneging on the debt because there’s no way in the world that the ECB can honestly expect to be paid back.

So we will see what happens in the Greek parliament. But I think Greece would be better with an exit and debt repudiation. With what they theoretically agreed to, it is going to be very, very difficult for the Greeks and the country to survive in that environment.

So we will see how that plays out as events unfold. Even other governments within the ECB might reject it. So there are still a lot of acts to be played.

- Source, Proactive Investor

Price of Gold and Silver are Being Suppressed & No Gold in the Treasury

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THE SILVER CARTELS HAVE CHANGED THEIR M.O.

Eric Sprott Central Planners Desperate To Keep Game Going

True News - Eric Sprott, Bill Holter and Greg Hunter

Sprott Carries No Debt

“We want to double our business in the next three years, and we can do that by offering different kinds of products,” Wilson said.

Sprott Asset Management, the unit run by Wilson, has made an offer to buy Central GoldTrust and Silver Bullion Trust via a share swap valued at about $898 million. The offer for the Canadian trusts, which buy and hold gold and silver, expires in July.

Sprott would consider opportunities similar to its proposal for the two trusts should they come up, Wilson said.

“I expect acquisitions, tuck-ins or larger,” Scott Chan, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity Corp. in Toronto, said by phone. “Sprott’s been looking at acquisitions, they have a strong balance sheet. They have the people to manage C$15 billion, they’re just half-way there.”

Sprott carries no debt and had C$119.6 million in cash and near-cash items on its balance sheet, according to the company’s first-quarter filings.

- Source, Bloomberg

Sprott Sees Assets Doubling as Braces for Bull Market End

Sprott Inc. aims to double its assets to about C$16 billion ($13 billion) in the next three years by adding consumer and technology stocks to legacy gold holdings as the equity bull market nears an end.

While the Canadian money manager is positive on U.S. and European growth, it’s also bracing for volatility as central banks raise interest rates, said John Wilson, chief executive officer of the firm’s asset management unit. He’s invested in more defensive stocks such as Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. and CGI Group Inc. that are geared towards international growth.

Canadian software provider Shopify Inc.’s 51 percent surge on its New York trading debut in May underscores the bull market’s advancing age, Wilson said.

“That’s not the start of a bull market cycle,” Wilson said in an interview in Bloomberg’s Toronto office. “That tells you where we are in the equity cycle. My best guess is we have a year or two left.”

Sprott, founded by gold investor Eric Sprott in 1981, hired Wilson in 2012 to help diversify the firm as the precious metal tumbled. Assets edged up to C$7.8 billion in the first quarter after sliding to C$6.97 billion at the end of 2013 from a peak of C$9.93 billion in 2012.

Non-resource assets now make up about 75 percent of Sprott’s actively managed funds, compared with 27 percent in 2012, the company said.

Sprott has risen 4.5 percent to C$2.55 this year, compared with a 3.1 percent gain in the Standard & Poor’s/TSX Composite Index. It’s down almost 75 percent from a 2011 peak of C$9.60.

- Source, Bloomberg

Physical Demand for Gold and Silver is Draining Supplies, New Highs and More

I Remember My First Period of Catastrophic Losses

Rick Rule of Sprott Global talks about some of his experiences in the investing world. Even the greats make mistakes from time to time.

Billionaire Eric Sprott Says Stock Market Will Crash, Not Gold

“Well, God knows when the dust settles, but what I’ve expected for a long time now is that the basic fundamentals for gold and silver will win the day. That hasn’t happened yet. It hasn’t happened because entities have financial weapons that they can use on these commodity exchanges and the physical buying hasn’t gotten to a point where we have the failure (of an exchange to deliver)….

But I think it’s reasonably predictable that we are going to have a failure. All of the demand data and the reasons for owning gold have improved. We all know that zero interest rates and printing money has not provided the answer and won’t provide the answer.

The only thing it does is it allows people to speculate on buying securities, but it’s not helping the economies. In fact, there are elements of the economy that are doing worse. The savers are way worse off today than they were before. They are forced to speculate in order to get returns. By speculating they are taking on greater risk.

But there is no recovery. You just have to take the comments of the various people at companies and they keep saying, ‘The consumer is tapped out here and it’s not likely that we are going to experience much growth.’ So how can you have stocks keep going up when there is no commensurate economic recovery?

But the framework for gold and silver and other precious metals to do well is more incredible today than it’s ever been. And you can have (crazy) readings in these (stock) markets — I’ve experienced it. Going into 1999 – 2000, everyone was buying Nasdaq stocks like crazy. Ultimately the day came when the whole index crashed by 75 percent, and that’s what I think is going to happen here. The stock market is going to crack.

- Source, Eric Sprott via King World News