Mark M. Rostenko: From Sovereign Strategist to Call of the Wilderness

WN: Shortly before you quit the business you railed at what you called the obvious manipulation of the gold market. Do you still believe that gold is being manipulated?

Honestly, I don’t pay enough attention anymore to give you a definite response one way or the other.  But just based on price activity, I’d have to say if it is, the manipulators have lost their grip.  Every once in a while I stumble upon comments, articles from the old die-hard “gold and silver are being manipulated” crew and wonder why they’re still beating that drum.  I mean, ultimately, who cares?  Gold has gone from  $255 to nearly $1400 – you either took my advice, bought it low and sold it high or you’re sitting on the sidelines complaining about manipulation.  What’s the point?  The market does what the market does, manipulated or not.  You can participate or you can cry about it.  Riding the trend is what puts money in the bank;  a couple of bucks and prattling on about manipulation might get you a cup of coffee.

WN: You frequently said “no one is bigger than the market”, do you still believe that?

Absolutely, assuming a relatively “free” market and a sufficient time frame.  In the shorter-term, well-financed forces like governments can effectively control particular markets, but in the longer-term, the market always wins, assuming the market is allowed to operate.

WN: The Global Financial Crisis is frequently explained away as a failure of “free markets” or “runaway capitalism”. Do you buy into that explanation?

No.  How can you explain anything with something that doesn’t exist?   We don’t have genuinely free markets and capitalism is merely an ideal to which we pay much lip service.  Were markets truly free, they’d accurately reflect the fact that the U.S.A. is essentially bankrupt (owing more money than it could ever possibly service).  They’d have tanked and we’d be in the process of rebuilding and regrouping rather than handing out corporate welfare checks to greedy, inept swine (read: “bankers”) and racking up still more debt.

The Global Financial Crisis is the inevitable and unavoidable result of excessive debt and borrowing within a false monetary system which persists in the delusion that pieces of multi-colored paper printed at whim and backed by the full faith and sagging credit of scumbags I wouldn’t trust to fill my bird feeder, let alone manage entire nations, is in fact “money.” Debt is NOT money, debt is NOT wealth.  We’ve been living beyond our means for a very long time, the dying machine requiring regular and ever-larger infusions of still more debt.  But the chickens have finally come home to roost.  And oh, how they’ll roost…