"In the run up to the end of the year during December, a remarkable sight emerged across Germany - long lines of customers queuing up outside the country’s precious metals shops and gold dealer showrooms.

Was it seasonal gift buying by Germany’s citizens, a population well-known for its love of physical precious metals? Or perhaps the onset of panic about negative interest rates in Europe’s largest economy?
As it turns out, panic it was, but of a different type, with the long lines triggered by the realization that from 1 January 2020, new national legislation was to take effect that would dramatically reduce the threshold on anonymous buying of precious metals from the existing €10,000 limit (US$ 11,150) to a far lower limit of €2000 (US$ 2,230), all under the guise of money laundering prevention.

With a staggering 9,000 tonnes of gold held by the German population, 55% of which is in the form of physical gold bars and gold coins and the rest in gold jewelry, Germany's citizens are savvy about gold and are active savers and investors in the yellow precious metal. Add to this the fact that the German bullion market is one of the most sophisticated and developed in the world, supporting an extensive set of industry participants from banks and gold refineries, to nationwide gold dealers and distributors, to smaller regional and local bullion retailers.”

Panic buying  - "We are being overrun."

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"The overwhelming majority of Americans will support the president—the Democrats have put their head in a noose while standing over a trap-door. The consequences are predictable.

The Democrats have stumbled into yet another beartrap in their unanimous objection to President Trump’s order to kill the world’s leading terrorist, Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. The same misdirected solicitude that caused the Washington Post to describe ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, after he was driven to suicide by U.S. special operators, as an “austere cleric” has elevated Soleimani to the status of an Iranian General MacArthur.  

The Democratic presidential candidates agree that Soleimani was a nasty man, but all the principal active candidates—Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren—have embraced the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, in which Iran undertook not to develop a full nuclear-tipped long-range missile capability for 10 years. Under this agreement the United States released approximately $150 billion of frozen Iranian assets, which substantially have been squandered in underwriting the terrorist acts and infiltrations supervised by the late Soleimani—especially by the Iranian-sponsored terrorist organizations Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthi in Yemen."

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"The only thing nearly as enlightening (and time-consuming) as reading David Collum’s epic Year In Review is listening to him and Chris Martenson discuss its highlights. So strap in, grab some eggnog, and listen to this year’s recap:

We are so close to a financial crisis now that we may be way, way past the fail-safe.

We’ve got all these unfunded liabilities that we have to pay or face the consequences of — and they are fantastically enormous.

The pensions are all underfunded — at the top of a financial asset price bubble, mind you.
Social Security is a disaster. And we’re promising so much medical help for everyone that is now profoundly expensive.

There are so many things out there that are unmoored. The Fed is unmoored. The digital world is taking us to this digital gulag, in my opinion — I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic.

I think we’re heading for very, very bad places."

Click this link to listen to Chris Martenson’s interview with David Collum.