COMMENT: I saw you in front of the Bank of England. Then within a matter of days, the pound crashes. You may not be a household name but you are in the circles that matter. So did you orchestrate the reverse trend in the pound?

OD

REPLY: No! The pound crashed simply because it was on schedule. My mere presence in London did not signal the end of the pound rally. I was there for some very important meetings with clients regarding other matters, not to help the Bank of England sell the pound. I do get rather tired of being blamed for everything. What you fail to grasp here is that there are very few of us with international experience. Local economists do not cut it and it seems that nobody else with hedge fund experience who has actually traded billions of dollars when a billion used to be a lot of money is around for consultation. They were trying to make another documentary about such things and nobody else was willing to appear because they feared to speak publicly about the fate of the Euro.

I get called because I tell the truth. I do not twist my view to what they want to hear just to get paid like some actor putting on a show. It is what it is. I have intimate knowledge of many aspects because when they were creating the Euro the commission in change all attended our WEC in London that year. I have been called into just about every crisis since the mid-1970s.

You cannot get in the door if you have ANY conflict of interest. I no longer manage money so there is no concern about insider trading that I will profit from the info from a closed-door meeting. It is as simple as that. I also sign confidentiality agreements to ensure that sensitive names and positions are not disclosed.

I did NOT meet with the Bank of England to orchestrate the shift in trend in the pound. The markets are bigger than me, and bigger than the Bank of England and ALL the central banks combined. Remember the Louvre Accord? That is when the central banks came out and tried to stop the decline in the dollar going into 1987. NEWS FLASH!!!! They failed! So, what happened? They called me again since I was the one warning them in 1985 they would unleash volatility.

Everyone knows my work. You cannot manipulate an individual market because we are all connected. Capital flows around the global financial system like a bottle on the ocean current.

I am called by governments and institutions, not for my OPINION, but because the computer is the only thing in the world that monitors the entire political-economic landscape and has a proven track record for almost 40 years.

You cannot manipulate any market beyond the normal channel of daily noise. You cannot make gold rise or fall if it is out of sync with the rest of the world. Those who keep poisoning the minds of people on that do so because their theories are wrong and have been since 1971

Argentina has just raised interest rates to 40% trying to support the currency. I have explained many times that interest rates follow a BELL-CURVE and by no means are they linear. This is one of the huge problems behind attempts by central banks to manipulate the economy by impacting demand-side economics. Raising interest rates to stem inflation will work only up to a point and even that is debatable. The entire interrelationship between markets and interest rates has three main phase transitions and each depends upon the interaction with CONFIDENCE of the people in the survivability of the state.

PHASE TWO: Raising interest rates will flip the economy as Volcker did in 1981 ONLY when they exceed the expectation of profits in asset inflation provided there is CONFIDENCE that the government will survive as in the USA back in 1981 compared to Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Russia during 1917 or China back in 1949. In other words, if the nation is going into civil war, then tangible assets will collapse and the solution becomes assets flee the country.

In the case of the USA back in 1981, the high interest rates worked because we were only in Phase Two where there was no civil war or revolution so the survivability of the government did not come into question. Hence, Volcker created DELATION as capital then ran away from assets and into bonds to capture the higher interest rates. Then and only then did rates begin to decline between 1981 into 1986 reflecting the high demand for US government bonds, which in turn drove the US dollar to record highs and the British pound to $1.03 in 1985 resulting in the Plaza Accord and the creation of the G5 (now G20).

So many people want to take issue with me over how the stock market will rise with higher interest rates. It is a BELL-CURVE and you better begin to understand this. If not, just hand-over all your assets to the New York bankers now, go on welfare and just end your misery.

Here are charts of the Argentine share market the currency in terms of US dollars. You can see that the stock market offers TANGIBLE assets that rise in local currency terms because assets have an international value. Here we can see the dollar has soared against the currency and the stock market has risen in proportion the decline in the currency. I do not think there is any other way that is better to demonstrate the BELL-CURVE effect of interest rates than these two charts.

To those who doubt that the stock market can rise with rising interest rates, I really do not know what to say. Keep listening to the talking heads of TV and all the pundits who claim only gold will rise and everything else will fall to dust. Then we have the sublime blind idiots who never look outside the USA and proclaim the dollar will crash and burn not the rest of the world so buy gold and cryptocurrency you cannot spend and certainly with no power grid.

PHASE THREE

Is when no level of interest rate will save the day. Capital simply flees the political state for the risk of revolution or civil war means that tangible assets which are immovable will not hold their value such as companies and real estate. This is the period that Goldbugs envision. At that point, the value of everything will even move into the extreme PHASE FOUR where even gold will decline and the only thing to survive is food. There, the political state completely collapses and a new political government comes into being.

The UAE government came under tremendous pressure by the dealers that the VAT was killing their business. The government has responded dropping the VAT (Sales Tax) on gold, diamonds, and precious metals for investors. Taxing such products is, in reality, taxing money the same as if it bought bonds or stocks. Not everyone buys stocks just as not everyone buys gold. Taxing gold and not stocks is a form of investment bias

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; You have said that Brexit is good for Britain and that the financial center could never move to Paris or Frankfurt and survive. Can you elaborate on that topic for us Brits?

GS

ANSWER: It is amazing that the politicians are so clueless and the heads of the banks are far too often just talking politics. London is bigger than all the financial centers in Europe COMBINED! Because of regulation being consolidated in Britain, it even beats New York City – a fact that is often overlooked. The United States has SEVEN regulatory agencies that compete with each other for power compared to one for Britain. London still wins hands down.Neither Frankfurt nor Paris even has the infrastructure to function as London does