CNN Tells its Readers How to Stay Poor
Pinkin D. asked CNN’s blog (he should by now know not to ask CNN anything, considering their relations with the consciousness wing of the Pentagon) “how do i purchase silver in physical form or stock?” Although Pinkin refers to physical bullion first, CNN runs with the question, pushing its loyally brainwashed followers (that is, segments of its readership), towards stock:
CNN.Money The easiest way to buy silver is to invest in certain exchange-traded funds such as iShares Silver Trust (SLV) and ETFS Silver Trust (SIVR). These funds track the price of silver on the open market, with each share typically backed by a specific amount of physical silver held in trust by the fund manager. Because they can be instantaneously bought and sold on the market, ETFs lend themselves to trading.
CNN off-the-bat steers the reader away from bullion, by calling exchange traded funds “the easiest way to buy silver.” What CNN does not offer is that, in an age of re-hypothecation and double-entry book keeping (with one of the books being smudged), these products are just as easy to lose.
CNN then goes onto discuss American Silver Eagle’s and Canadian Silver Maple Leafs as possibilities for physical. To their credit, this one paragraph is pretty fair, describing that these coins are available for purchase.
So, for one paragraph, CNN gets its pretty right, before launching into this balderdash about physical silver:
But Rich Checkan, chief operating officer of Asset Strategies International, a Rockville, Md.-based company that deals in precious metals, explains that the coins’ extra liquidity comes at a cost. He notes that silver bars are typically marked up 5% over the spot price of silver, but the more tradable bullion coins are often marked up 16% or more because they are more expensive to fabricate. (Shares in silver ETFs can trade at a premium to, or discount from, the value of the metal backing them up; SLV, for example, recently traded at a premium of 0.13%. The ETF has an annual expense ratio of 0.5% of assets.)
Paper over beauty, CNN seems to be suggesting. Even with a premium of 5%, anybody who follows the silver market knows, this margin can be regained by an investor within a week or much less.
Checkan advises the purchaser to buy from major mints approved by the London Bullion Market Association, a trade group that represents the wholesale gold and silver bullion market. These are Johnson Matthey, Engelhard, and Sunshine, for example. CNN goes with the run of the mill solutions for buying bullion like Checkan’s firm, American Precious Metals Exchange (banking at JP Morgan and housed in an old Federal Reserve Building) or Kitco.
CNN continues with its hit-piece of silver:
Yet Checkan notes that there are drawbacks of owning physical silver. Many investors don’t want to deal with the added costs and inconvenience of arranging secure storage for the bars or coins and insuring them. To help investors avoid those logistics, some financial institutions offer silver certificates of ownership which entitle the holder to a certain quantity of actual silver stored in a vault. One program worth considering: the Perth Mint Certificate Program (PCMP), the world’s only government-guaranteed bullion storage program.
Holding silver is soo inconvenient when every day the goods in the grocery stores are going up in price demonstrating their inverse of the fiat currencies stuffed down our throats for our forced labor. And, in an age of financial decadence, we can trust third and counter party institutions to hold onto our goods. Yeah right!
Dear CNN,
Your reign is over. The Silver Vigilantes will undermine your old power over consciousness, and alternatives will persist and grow. This is our world now.