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Gold has traded between $1,228 and $1,247 so far today…as of 9:30 am Pacific, bullion is down $19 an ounce at $1,229…Silver is off 13 cents at $16.22…Copper is off a penny at $2.10…Crude Oil has gained 47 cents cents to $48.55 while the U.S. Dollar Index has rallied another one-quarter of a point to 95.59…

Large speculators pushed their heavily bullish position in Gold futures slightly higher in the most recent weekly positioning data released by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission…the decline in Gold prices since last Tuesday’s cutoff for the most recent CFTC data suggests that net length may have narrowed…

Gold fell to a 4-week low this morning as continued hawkish comments from Federal Reserve officials sent the U.S. dollar to a 2-month high against a currency basket…Gold is going to win no matter what the Fed does as investors have more confidence in the metal, a real currency, than they do in the manipulative and fickle Fed…and why should bullion investors be fearful of another Fed rate hike when the first one in nearly a decade last December was followed by Gold’s biggest quarterly price jump in 25 years?…the Fed is trying to do what no major central bank in the world has been able to accomplish since the 2008 financial crisis – maintain a rate hike cycle…they will not succeed, even if they’re able to push through another 1 or 2 hikes…

The prospect of a June rate increase, as indicated by Fed meeting minutes released last week, and a strengthening dollar have pushed Gold down nearly 4% so far in May, putting it on track for its biggest monthly decline since November…however, that has only served to help unwind temporarily overbought conditions and lay the foundation for the next wave up in bullion…

Citi Research hiked its forecasts for most commodities today, including Gold…the bank now looks for Gold to average $1,280 an ounce in the 2nd quarter, $1,300 in the 3rd, but then cool to $1,250 for Q4….Citi’s full-year average forecast is now $1,255 an ounce…

The Oregon Example Of The Attitude That’s Causing America To Lose Its Competitive Edge

The United States already has one of the world’s highest federal corporate tax rate structures in the world, a problem the next President is going to have to fix along with a host of other tax and regulatory issues that have held back American growth thanks to 8 years of horrendous policies from the Obama administration while Republicans in Congress were largely ineffective…

So what’s Oregon now contemplating?…the “punish the wealthy, punish corporate America” mentality of wacko socialists like Bernie Sanders and his many delusional followers (mostly the young who have been indoctrinated with an anti-capitalist message from left-wing professors in colleges and universities) has led to a push in that state for a massive $2.8 billion annual corporate tax hike to go on the ballot in November…if Oregonians were to vote in favor of the proposed measure, such a move would create the most aggressive tax climate for big business of any state in the nation…liberals of course will label this as being “progressive”…

Oregon’s ballot proposal comes as raising taxes on the wealthy and large corporations is at the forefront of a national debate about how to close the gaping economic disparities between rich and poor in a post-Great Recession era…rather than educating those with less money on how to become more entrepreneurial and wiser with their finances, the left’s answer is to take from the “rich” and distribute to the “poor”…socialism is a failed economic model but it seems much of the Millennial Generation has been too busy Twittering to read history (Sanders is 73 years old and should know better but he’s just a career politician and curmudgeon from Vermont)…

The proposal’s labor union backers are just one step from getting the measure on Oregon’s November ballot after submitting 130,000 signatures to state elections officials last week…they say it would tap a “tiny” portion of Oregon businesses while bringing a huge boost to cash-strapped public education, health care and senior services…the cost of going in that direction, of course, will be lost jobs, slower economic growth and higher costs for consumers…what many liberals don’t seem to understand is that the only way to maintain decent funding levels for government services is to create wealth, and the best way to accomplish that is through low taxes and a regulatory regime that doesn’t burden businesses of all sizes as it does now…

In today’s Morning Musings…

1. TSX Gold Index chart – targeting the “sweet zone” for accumulation on this pullback…

2. Canasil Resources (CLZ, TSX-V) and Orex Minerals (REX, TSX-V) drill 46 m near-surface grading 218 g/t Ag at Sandra Escobar discovery in Mexico…

3. Critical Elements (CRE, TSX-V) continues to climb after announcing $5 million bought deal to advance its Rose Lithium-Tantalum Project in Quebec…

4.  The U.S. dollar trap…

5.  Updated Silver charts – what to look for near-term and longer-term…

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