Large numbers of 1892-S double eagles were shipped from San Francisco to overseas destinations to settle large accounts in foreign trade during this era. In recent times, many of those coins have been repatriated to this country in response to ever-increasing collector demand. However, most of those specimens show signs of rough shipping and storage. Today, this issue can be easily located in lower Mint State grades, bur examples in MS65 condition are rare, and finer coins are virtually unobtainable. The PCGS population is just 19 with 5 (MS65+ examples) graded higher.
Offered at $20,700 delivered
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There are a multitude of false assumptions out there on what the collapse of a nation or “empire” looks like. Modern day Americans have never experienced this type of event, only peripheral crises and crashes. Thanks to Hollywood, many in the public are under the delusion that a collapse is an overnight affair. They think that such a thing is impossible in their lifetimes, and if it did happen, it would happen as it does in the movies – They would simply wake up one morning and find the world on fire. Historically speaking, this is not how it works. The collapse of an empire is a process, not an event.
This is not to say that there are not moments of shock and awe; there certainly are. As we witnessed during the Great Depression, or in 2008, the system can only be propped up artificially for so long before the bubble pops. In past instances of central bank intervention, the window for manipulation is around ten years between events, give or take a couple of years. For the average person, a decade might seem like a long time. For the banking elites behind the degradation of our society and economy, a decade is a blink of an eye.
In the meantime, danger signals abound as those analysts aware of the situation try to warn the populace of the underlying decay of the system and where it will inevitably lead. Economists like Ludwig Von Mises foresaw the collapse of the German Mark and predicted the Great Depression; almost no one listened until it was too late. Multiple alternative economists predicted the credit crisis and derivatives crash of 2008; and almost no one listened until it was too late. People refused to listen because their normalcy bias took control of their ability to reason and accept the facts in front of them.
There are a number factors that cause mass blindness to economic and social reality. First and foremost, establishment elites deliberately create the illusion of prosperity by rigging economic data to the upside. In almost every case of economic crisis or geopolitical disaster, the public is conditioned to believe they are in the midst of a financial “boom” or era of “peace”. They are encouraged to ignore fundamental warning signs in favor of foolish faith in the system. Those people that try to break the apathy and expose the truth are called “chicken little” and “doom monger”.
In the minds of the cheerful lemmings a “collapse” is something very obvious; they think they would know it when they saw it. It’s like trying to teach a blind person about colors; it’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult to get all these Helen Kellers to understand that what they perceive is not the whole reality. There’s a vast world hidden from them and they have no concept of how to observe it.
Crash events are like stages in the process of collapse; they create moments of clarity for the blind. However, they are also often engineered to benefit the establishment. There’s a reason why the elites put so much energy into hiding the real data on the state of the economy, and it’s not because they are trying to keep the system from faltering by using sheer public ignorance. Rather, a crash event is a tool, a means to an end. As Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. warned after the panic of 1920:
“Under the Federal Reserve Act, panics are scientifically created; the present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figure a mathematical problem…”
Central bankers and their cohorts manipulate economic data and promote the false notion of a boom before almost every major crash because they WANT to ambush the populace. They WANT to create panic, and then use it to their advantage as they rebuild and mutate the system into something unrecognizable only decades ago. Each consecutive crash contributes to the collapse of the whole, until eventually the society we once had is barely a distant memory.
This process can take decades, and the US has been subject to it for quite some time now. Once again in 2019 we are seeing the lie of an “economic boom” being perpetuated in the mainstream. The public was growing too aware of the danger and had to be subdued. More specifically, conservatives were growing too aware. The sad thing is that the boom propaganda is most prominent today among conservatives, who are desperately trying to ignore the fundamentals in an attempt to defend the Trump Administration.
The same people who were pointing out the economic bubble under Obama are now denying its existence under Trump. Trump himself argued that the markets were a dangerous economic fraud created by the Federal Reserve during his campaign, yet once he was in office he flip-flopped and started taking full credit for the bubble. What is mind boggling to me is that many people, even in the liberty movement, still choose to dismiss this behavior in favor of worshiping Trump as some kind of hero on a white horse.
This only reinforces my theory that the system is due for another major engineered crash event, and that the ongoing collapse of the US is soon to accelerate. Each case of economic calamity in modern history was preceded by peak delusional optimism and peak greed. When the people traditionally most vigilant against crisis suddenly capitulate and claim victory, this is when reality strikes hardest. This is when the establishment triggers yet another controlled demolition.
In order to determine how long an empire will last, one has to take into account the agenda of the elites that control its institutions. As long as they are in key positions of power within the system and as long as they can inject their own puppet politicians, they will have the ability to influence the collapse timeline of that system.
Can they prolong and stave off crisis? Yes, for a short while. However, once the machine of a crash has been set in motion the best they can do is slow down the Titanic; they cannot change its path towards the iceberg. And frankly, at this point why would they? I hear it argued often that the elites are going to “keep the plates spinning” on the economy and that they don’t want to lose their “golden goose” in the US economy. This reveals an naivety among skeptics of the true agenda.
Firstly, the elites have a highly useful political puppet in the form of Donald Trump; he is useful in that he inspires sharp national division, and, he is a self proclaimed conservative champion and nationalist. If the elites did not trigger a crash under Trump, then this would give the public the impression that conservative ideals and national sovereignty works. This is the opposite of what they want. Why would globalists that want the erasure of nation states and the creation of a centralized socialist “Utopia” seek to make conservatives and nationalists look good? Well, they wouldn’t.
The only concern of the banks is that they do not take the blame as their engineered collapse of the old world order hits the public with increasingly painful consequences. These consequences are already becoming visible.
The next major crash has begun in the form of plunging fundamentals, and far too many conservatives are placing their heads in the sand for the selfish sake of proving the political left wrong. Declines in US manufacturing, US freight, global exports and imports, mass closures in US retail, as well as all time highs in consumer debt, corporate debt and national debt are being shrugged off and rationalized as nothing more than “hiccups” in an otherwise booming economy. The Fed’s repo market purchases, barely keeping up with demand from liquidity starved corporations are also not being taken seriously.
Conservatives and analysts are going to have to forget about supporting Trump, a Rothschild owned proxy, and start acknowledging reality once again. The only question now is, will the elites allow the crash to spread further into mainstreet and strike markets before or after the 2020 election?
As noted above, to predict the timing of a collapse in a nation or empire, one has to examine the agendas of the elites that dominate its institutions. We can gain some sense of timing from the public admissions of globalist organizations like the IMF and the UN. Each has announced the year 2030 as a target date for the finalization of globalization, a cashless society and sustainability goals. This means that the elites have around ten years to create a crisis and then “solve” that crisis with globalism.
Ten years is a narrow window, and if the elites intend for conservatives to take the blame for the next crash, they will have to initiate it soon. They may not have a choice anyway, as the chain of dominoes was already been set in motion by the Fed in 2018 with its liquidity tightening policies.
We can also gauge timing of a collapse to a point by understanding the common tactics the establishment uses to hide what they are doing. Generally, when a collapse is about to accelerate the elites use crisis events as cover to distract the public and produce scapegoats. In my article ‘Globalists Only Need One More Major Event To Finish Sabotaging The Economy’, I outlined three potential distractions that could be used in the near term, and if any of these events took place, then people should watch for the collapse to move faster. Two of these events now appear imminent: The first being a war with Iran, and the second being a ‘No Deal’ Brexit.
Finally, we can take into account the globalist need for a scapegoat, and it appears that conservatives and nationalists are their target for blame. This leaves less than one year for a crisis event if Trump is intended to leave the White House in 2020, or less than four years if he is intended to stay in for a second term. Keep in mind that A LOT can happen in a single year, and a second Trump term is certainly not guaranteed yet.
But why create a collapse in the first place? Crash events allow the establishment to consolidate control over hard assets as poverty forces the population to sell what they have to survive. This poverty also creates fear, which makes the public malleable and easier to control. Each new crisis opens doors to political and social changes, changes which end in less freedom and more centralization. Collapse is a succession of crashes leading to a complete erasure of the original society. It’s not a Mad Max event, it’s a hidden and insidious cancer that takes over the national body and warps it into a wretched form. The collapse is complete when the nation either breaks apart, or is so damaged for so long that no one can remember what it used to look like.
What we are witnessing today is the beginning of a new crash, and the final phases of a collapse of our way of life. The economic boom narrative among conservatives is a farce designed to trick us into complacency. The bubble that we warned about under the Obama Administration has been popped under the Trump Administration. Nothing has changed in the ten years since the 2008 crash except that the motivation for keeping the crash hidden is quickly disappearing.
Crashes are inevitable, but collapse is only possible when the public remains unprepared. Our civilization and its values are under attack, but they can only be destroyed if we stay apathetic to the threat and refuse to prepare for their defense. We must adopt a philosophy of decentralization. We need localized and self sufficient economies, as well as a return to localized production. Beyond that, we have to prepare for the eventuality of a fight. The fate of the US economy has already been sealed, but the people who are destroying it can still be stopped before they use the collapse to force society into subservience. We have to offer security, we have to offer alternatives to the “new world order” and we have to remove the globalist threat permanently.
Make no mistake, we are living in the midst of an epoch moment; the outcome of collapse depends on us and our reactions. This is not the task of the next generation, it is a task for our generation. We do not have another couple of decades to take the danger seriously. The plates are not spinning, they have already dropped.
‘I think this market is fully valued and not undervalued, but I don’t think it’s overvalued’, says Jeremy Siegel
Courtesy of Market Watch by Mark Decambre
‘Actually, one of the dangers is that people could be throwing risk to the wind and this thing could be a runaway. We sometimes call that a melt-up and produces prices too high and then if there’s a shock, you come down to Earth and that could impact sentiment.’ Jeremy Siegel
That is Jeremy Siegel, professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, expressing what he perceives as one of the biggest market risks in 2020, in an interview with Barron’s Group’s Market Brief, which aired on Monday.
The Wharton professor who forecast that the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.40% would see 20,000 at the end of 2015 says that market fundamentals are sufficient to support the recent run-up in U.S. equity benchmarks but worried that euphoria, or a meltup, could take stocks to unsustainable peaks.
That said, he thinks, we’re not quite at the juncture yet.
“I think this market is fully valued and not undervalued, but I don’t think it’s overvalued,” Siegel told Market Brief, pointing to low interest rates fostered by the Federal Reserve and signs of a detente between Beijing and Washington on the tariff front, as reasons for his fairly positive outlook.
The academic’s comments come as markets briefly faced selling pressure, with the Dow, the S&P 500 index SPX, -0.27% and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.01% on the verge of producing a second straight decline , until bouncing back, following a U.S. airstrike on Friday that killed Iranian Major Gen. Qassem Soleimani, escalating Middle East tension that could ripple across the globe.
Siegel, however, says that he’s not expecting the Iranian developments to derail the domestic market or economy unless Mideast tensions flare up considerably more this year.
The U.S. is “much less impacted by oil shocks than we were years ago,” the professor said. “I suspect minimal economic impact from this,” adding that he believes that Saudi Arabia would also come into pump additional oil to deflate the price of crude, which has soared in the past two sessions after Soleimani’s assassination. West Texas Intermediate oil for February delivery CLG20, -0.96% was trading at a roughly seven-month high, gaining 0.5% on Monday.
See: As tensions mount with Iran, should you be worried about rising oil prices?
As for his longer-term view, Siegel said he’s looking at a more modest gain for stocks compared against last year’s powerful annual rally. “I’m looking for a zero to 10% increase in prices this year.”
In 2019, the Dow ended the year up 22.3%, its best year since 2017, while the S&P 500 saw its best year since 2013, gaining 28.9%. The Nasdaq also had its loftiest annual performance in six years after rallying 35.2% in the year.
Looking even longer term, Siegel is forecasting that the Dow may hit 40,000 in the next four or five years, unless something derails the market’s bull run.
“One could say we are four or five years away from Dow [40,000],” he speculated.
Markets likely to remain volatile amid expectations for intensifying Middle East conflict
Iranians hold anti-U.S. banners during a demonstration in Tehran on Friday, following the killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Major General Qasem Soleimani in a U.S. strike on his convoy at Baghdad International Airport.
Courtesy of MarketWatch by William Watts
Consider it a wake-up call.
Stock market investors shouldn’t panic, but intensifying U.S.-Iran tensions bring home the potential for geopolitical turmoil to make for more volatile price action in 2020 after a blockbuster 2019 rally, investors, analysts and economists said.
Oil prices jumped Friday, while investors dumped equities and piled into haven assets like gold and Treasurys in a knee-jerk reaction to a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad that killed a top Iranian military commander. Tehran vowed to retaliate — and most observers expect them to follow through.
Here’s what market participants should keep in mind:
Things could get choppy
“We came into this year calling for a continuation of the equity bull market, but with a single-digit return profile and elevated volatility,” said David Donabedian, chief investment officer at CIBC Private Wealth Management, in an interview.
And with the U.S.-Iran conflict unlikely to be a “one-and-done” event, the effect on oil and other markets is unlikely fade quickly as it did in September after an attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure that was widely blamed on Iran, he said.
Short-term market volatility is almost entirely driven by policy or geopolitical uncertainty, said Brian Levitt, global market strategist at Invesco, in a Friday note.
“This time will likely be no different. We expect that uncertainty may persist in the near term as markets await potential retaliation from Iran and disruption in the global oil markets,” he wrote.
Room to fall
Stocks ended 2019 on a tear, with major U.S. indexes logging a series of records in December and following through with another set of records on the first trading day of 2020 on Thursday.
On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.38% ended with a loss of 233.92 points, or 0.8%, at 28, 634.88, but off session lows. The S&P 500 SPX, -0.24% gave up 23 points, or 0.7%, to close at 3,234.85, while the Nasdaq Composite finished at 9,020.77, a loss of 71.42 points, or 0.8%. Stocks began Monday with moderate losses.
Friday’s decline didn’t even erase Thursday’s gains, but even bullish analysts warned that overbought conditions and expectations Iran will indeed retaliate leave scope for a pullback and increased volatility.
The 2019 stock market rally wasn’t confined to the U.S., with the MSCI World Index rising 12% since early October, said analysts at ING, in a Friday note.
“ And the big rally in risk assets in December certainly looked like a play on the 2020 story – benign conditions, a trade truce and more money printing in G3 economies. Were events in the Middle East to escalate severely, overweight positioning in risk assets could easily trigger a 7%-10% correction in global equity markets,” they wrote.
Not your father’s oil shock
Middle East tensions mean worries over the threat to the world’s oil supply. And while a wider conflict with Iran could create havoc, the potential economic pinch isn’t the same as it was in past decades.
“Our reliance on fossil fuels to generate economic growth has come down substantially over the years. It’s not the ‘70s,” Donabedian said.
It would take a “significant and sustained” jump in oil prices — for example, West Texas Intermediate crude trading above $75 a barrel for an extended period — to begin to raise serious questions about the sustainability of the economic recovery, he said.
In addition, the U.S., thanks to the shale boom, is now a global oil exporter. The growth of the domestic fossil-fuel industry means that higher oil prices are less of a drag on the U.S. economy.
Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Economics, in a Friday note, observed that domestic U.S. oil production runs at almost 13 million barrels a day, while consumption is at 21 million barrels a day.
But while that should mean higher oil prices would depress economic growth, recent experience suggests otherwise. That’s because in the shale area, oil-sector capital expenditures are “acutely sensitive” to prices, even in the short term, he said, in a note.
“When oil prices collapsed between spring 2014 and early 2016, the ensuing plunge in capital spending in the oil sector outweighed the boost to consumers’ real income from cheaper gasoline and heating oil, and overall economic growth slowed markedly,” he said. “This story played out in reverse when oil prices rebounded in the three years through spring 2018, and economic growth picked up even as consumers’ real incomes were hit.”
Bulls remain bold
While analysts see scope for volatility and a near-term pullback, so far events haven’t been enough to turn bulls into bears.
“Historically, regional geopolitical happenings are not the events that end business and market cycles,” said Invesco’s Levitt, noting that market returns, on average, have been positive 12 months after spikes in economic uncertainty, as measured by a widely followed index (see chart below).
“The larger market narrative of slow growth, benign inflation globally, generally accommodative monetary policy globally, and equities still attractive relative to bonds, has not changed. In our opinion, the backdrop for equities and other risk assets remains favorable,” he said.
The United States Assay Office of Gold ceased coinage operations at the end of 1853, making way for the opening of the San Francisco Mint in 1854. The new branch mint was unable to start coining immediately, with needed improvements to the facility taking precedence. As usual, the West Coast was in dire need of gold coinage, so the private firm of Kellogg & Company filled the void by striking twenty dollar gold pieces in February, 1854. The coinage was readily accepted in commerce, since both John G. Kellogg and G.F. Richter were former employees of the U.S. Assay Office. The coin offered here looks noticeably more lustrous and eye-appealing in hand.
Offered at $18,975 delivered
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The San Francisco Mint struck large numbers of double eagles throughout the second half of the 19th century and 1877 was certainly no exception. However, the coins were released into circulation at, or near, the time of issue. They were used to settle large accounts in both foreign and domestic trade, and few high-quality examples were saved for numismatic purposes. Accordingly, most examples seen today are heavily bag-marked specimens recovered from European holdings or worn circulated pieces that fulfilled their intended function in the hard money economy of the Western United States. The 1877-S is a rare issue at the MS63 grade level, and finer coins are very rare. The PCGS population is just 32 with 7 higher.
Offered at $12,475 delivered
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The Philadelphia Mint was the sole producer of double eagles in 1912 and the issue was exported to a certain extent in overseas trade transactions, although a number of coins also circulated domestically and were used in local trade with Canada. There are hundreds of AU-level examples known, and rare pieces are seen in XF and even VF grades. Uncirculated survivors usually come with bag-marks. The bulk of the Mint State population grades only MS62 and MS63 — many of these coming from European hoards — although pieces are frequently seen at auction in the lower-population grade of MS64. The one offered here displays lovely, satiny surfaces and gorgeous color. The population is only 9 with 2 examples (both MS66+) graded higher.
Offered at $54,050 delivered
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The 1928 is the final date in the Saint-Gaudens double eagle series that is generally available in high grade, making it a popular type coin. The finest pieces are in MS67 and MS67+, and these are conditionally scarce. Nonetheless, they are among the most affordable Saints available to collectors in this grade, as few other issues in the series claim a collectible population in Superb Gem condition. Only 8 have been graded higher by PCGS – all MS67+ examples.
Offered at $15,525 delivered
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Type One Reverse. Many collectors are unaware there are two varieties of S/CC Trade dollars from 1875. This is the more frequently encountered one and the variant that is much easier to see with the second C widely spaced from the S. Most collectors opt for this variant for the very reason of its visibility, not to mention the extreme rarity of the other variety and need for a high-powered loupe. After the S/CC was first discovered in 1965 it was quickly noticed just how scarce it was in better grades. It is much scarcer than the 1875 S-mint or the CC-mint, especially in strictly Uncirculated condition. In hand, this specimen exhibits obvious cartwheel luster on each side. Tied with one other for highest graded by NGC.
Offered at $10,925 delivered
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This, the 1801 BD-2 die marriage is well known as the single most plentiful early eagle variety, with examples readily available in all grades through Choice Mint State. As such, it is the first choice of type collectors who desire a single representative of the Heraldic Eagle type, and it is also the first choice of date collectors who seek a single example of the 1801 ten. In hand, the coin is brighter than it appears in our images.
Offered at $12,650 delivered
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