Turd Ferguson: The Inexorable March Higher for Precious Metals

Turd Ferguson is a funny guy.

But there's one thing this irreverent, acerbically goofball forecaster is stone-cold serious about: the need to build personal exposure to the precious metals.

For him, it's a straightforward mathematical certainty that the global economy must collapse under the weight of the excessive (and exponentially compounding) credit amassed over the past several decades. The debt is simply too large to be serviced.

As a growing number of analysts (including Chris) are predicting, Turd sees the replacement of the world's current monetary regimes as the endgame to this story. And he believes we are watching that endgame unfold in real-time now.

In this interview with Chris, Turd discusses his reasons why gold and silver offer the best prospect for preserving wealth through the coming devaluation of world currencies, despite his strong conviction that the markets for these metals are heavily price-manipulated.

In fact, it's precisely due to this manipulation that Turd is able to predict short-term price movements in gold and silver as confidently as he does:

Believe me, if you looked at my trading account and looked at my success in trading corn, or soybeans, or crude, or something like that: I make choices just as badly as the average guy. The reason why I am successful in forecasting gold and silver is because they are manipulated.

Because once you understand that the bullion banks, particularly JPMorgan in silver, are in there trying to stack the deck in their favor, then you use some simple technical analysis. And you begin to see where they're going to act, where they're going to place some sell orders to try to start cascading waterfall selling by tripping stocks. It's not real hard. I mean, its pretty basic stuff. But once you admit to yourself that if this does take place, it makes forecasting where price is going pretty easy…

We see this quite often where the prices of gold and silver – they decline rather sharply after hours, after COMEX trading hours, on the Globex because volume is so thin there. A little bit of money thrown at the market – any new paper shorts can have a rather dramatic impact…

And that is where the manipulation has a lasting impact. And you can't get that money back… And it takes a whole bunch of new buy orders, a whole bunch of new speculative longs and commercial longs to come in and bid it back up to where it was before that raid. And so, they're always going to be in there. Again, I guess the ultimate question is at who's behest are they doing this? But, nonetheless, they're in there controlling price, managing the assent, if you will, to create this illusion that there's still confidence in the dollar, that all is well. And that it's okay to go buy a new car.

Turd sees the precious metals as a true barometer of the dollar's devaluation as the Fed pursues its policy of negative real interest rates – which is challenging for the average consumer to see, when the dollar may strengthen on a relative basis versus other fiat currencies and the government-published CPI is artificially low. In his opinion, the government is well aware of the signaling function of the PMs, and therefore feels it needs to manage their ascent in as drawn-out and orderly a process possible in order to prevent the frogs in the pot (i.e., the citizenry) from noticing that the water is getting a lot hotter.

The important mission here, in Turd's mind, is to realize that the economic reality we have come to accept as "normal" is over, and to take protective action. And once you have done so, to try to help those around you wake up to that fact – a major challenge, as most people don't want to think about it, and the entrenched status quo powers are aggressively marketing that 'return to normalcy' is just around the corner:

The last thing I would add to that, Chris, and one that's challenging, and I'm sure you've seen this too in working with your subscribers is where we are headed is unlike anywhere where we've been, at least in recent memory. I mean, there may be some octogenarians out there that remember what it was like before the Great Depression and during the Great Depression and before World War II. But it's a world like that where we're headed to.

All I've ever known, all my friends and family, even my parents really have ever known is this hegemonic United States that was the world power, and provided the world's reserve currency. And we could print as much as we wanted to, and then export the inflation to all the other poor staff that had to – took our dollar. And so we bought their cheap stuff. And those days are over, and it's a really hard concept.

If you haven't had personal experience with something else, it's a really hard concept to get your arms around. That the United States isn't going to be this huge economic and military superpower. Just because it always has been doesn't mean that it always will be. And as we talked about, the numbers and the fundamentals suggest that it's not always going to be.

And so you got to kind of prepare yourself that tomorrow's not going to be like today, that we're in a new paradigm. And try to intellectually figure out, okay, how do I survive and prosper in this new world knowing that it's coming? And that's what we try to do. I know that's what you try to do. And it's our job, Chris, to try and help as many as we can.

Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Turd Ferguson (runtime 47m:19s):

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"Turd Ferguson" is the proprietor of TF Metals Report. Turd approaches the subject of PMs (precious metals), the markets, and the economy with a certain amount of irreverence. Even though he deals with serious subjects, he doesn't take himself too seriously.

"Turd Ferguson" was a licensed securities "professional" for nearly twenty years. Disgruntled by the fraud known as "financial planning," he retired to a career as a serial entrepreneur in 2008. Though otherworldly in his ability to forecast price movements, The Turd is NOT a soothsayer, a psychic or a witch. After all these years, he simply has a decent understanding of the forces at play in the precious metal "markets."

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