Fundamental Developments: Physical Gold Scarcity Increases
Last week, the price of gold rose $25, and that of silver $0.60. Is it our turn? Is now when gold begins to go up? To outperform stocks?
Something has changed in the supply and demand picture. Let’s look at that picture. But, first, here is the chart of the prices of gold and silver.
Gold and silver priced in USD – the final week of the year was good to the precious metals. As an aside: January is the seasonally strongest month for silver. [PT]
… Something Wicked this Way Comes
Last week the price of gold went up $18, and that of silver 6 cents. Looking at the ongoing stock market drop, someone asked us if this is “it”. So far in Q4, the stock market (S&P 500) has now lost more points than in any quarter during the great financial crisis (though so far less as a percentage). Is this it, will gold hit $10,000?
S&P 500 Index, daily – an unseemly slipping on the banana peel. [PT]
Sally Forth and Speculate on my Behalf!
Last week, the price of gold was down ten bucks and silver four cents. Someone on Twitter demanded if we didn’t find it odd that the biggest sovereign debt bubble has managed to inflate a bubble in virtually every asset price except for gold.
Snapshot from a recent Goldbugs Anonymous meeting. Why, oh why have you failed to bubble my asset, dear fellow speculators? [PT]
A Rocky Road
The price of gold rose $26, and the price of silver rose $0.44. And bitcoin fell $560. Somebody should look into if the Fed and the Plunge Protection Team and the Bitcoin Banks are in cahoots to sell bitcoin naked-short…
No PPT for Bitcoin – after breaking a long-standing lateral support level, the cryptocurrency went into free-fall. You may notice the little remark in the annotation at the top of the chart: we believe BTC is highly likely to continue to lead the stock market, as it has done since the turn of the year. This is because both markets are under the sway of the same driver, namely rapidly weakening money supply growth. [PT]
The Last Thing to be Left Standing – Alas, Not Yet
The price of gold was about unchanged this week, whereas that of silver fell another nine cents. All Serious Right Thinking people agree that the world does not need gold. Indeed our monetary system produces Great Moderations that are totally unlike the incredible volatility of the gold standard era. They wish they could kill all memory of gold as money.
Ben Bernanke, the inventor of the “Great Moderation” fairy tale, somehow felt compelled to explain in 2012 “why the world will never see another gold standard”. One day this will probably turn out to have been an unwise deployment of the word “never” – since is not exactly known for the accuracy of his forecasts, regardless of their time horizon. Although he dismissed gold as an unimportant residual of tradition, the very central planning agency he led at the time for some reason does keep quite a bit of gold under lock and key behind a 140 ton steel door, both for itself and similar agencies domiciled abroad. [PT]
Battles for Civilization
A major theme of my work — and raison d’etre of Monetary Metals — is fighting to prevent collapse. Civilization is under assault on all fronts.
Battling the barbarians at the gate… [PT]
The “Risk Asset” Dip Not Worth Buying is on its Way
The prices of the metals rose, gold by +$11 and silver by +$0.25. The question on everyone’s mind (including ours) is: what will cause a change in the gold price trend, or what will make gold go up in a large and durable way? And that leads to another way of looking at this question.
Here is a very good technical reason to adopt a constructive attitude toward gold despite the fact that its nominal price in USD terms is seemingly not going anywhere of late. By remaining fairly stable in recent weeks, gold is rising relative to the S&P 500 index (SPX). In other words, the purchasing power of gold is increasing – and not only relative to the stock market. Similar trend changes can be observed elsewhere (e.g. in gold vs. industrial commodities). We will soon discuss this in greater detail. [PT]
Degrees of Urgency
Monday was Veterans Day, a bank holiday in the US. The prices of gold and silver dropped $23 and $0.61 respectively. “But isn’t gold supposed to go up when…?”
Warren Buffet and Aragorn discuss what to do with the gold. Aragorn wants it, because he knows that even if it’s not today, “that day” will come. [PT]
The Last to Go
Terry Goodkind wrote an epic fantasy series. The first book in the series is entitled Wizard’s First Rule. We recommend the book highly, if you’re into that sort of thing.
An image from the title page of Terry Goodkind’s best-selling fantasy epic “Wizard’s First Rule”. We’d be at bit wary of standing around on that stone-slab bridge to be honest. [PT]
While Not Saving The Planet, Let Us At Least Have A Good Time
The price of gold went up seven bucks, and that of silver rose eight pennies.
For many people, the attraction to gold and silver began with a desire to protect themselves from the monetary train wreck of 2008. That often grew into a sense that gold is the solution to that problem.
The post 2008 GFC monetary train wreck: US true broad money supply is expanded by more than 153% in a mere decade, as the Fed takes over “money creation duties” from a banking system reluctant to expand credit further. [PT]
Aiming for Knowledge and Better Decision-Making
The price of yellow metal went up nine bucks last week. And the price of silver three rose cents, which is back to where it was two weeks earlier. We need to rant, and promise to tie it back to the prices of the metals. We have written these past several weeks about the fact that the franc has been rendered useless. Owning a franc does nothing for you, other than to trade to the next person at hopefully a higher price.
When the money of the realm becomes literally useless as money – the charts and data example above shows excerpts of what happened in Germany from WW1 to the hyperinflation blow-out of 1923. In the end, one simply could no longer use the Reichsmark as a medium of exchange. [PT]
You Actually Can Eat Gold, But Its Nutritional Value is Dubious
“You can’t eat gold.” The enemies of gold often unleash this little zinger, as if it dismisses the idea of owning gold and indeed the whole gold standard. It is a fact, you cannot eat gold. However, it dismisses nothing.
Over-the-top garnish: Gold leaf-laced donut (reportedly costs $100), gold-laced cakes, sushi roll with gold leaf (according to Japanese lore, eating it is supposed to bring luck), gold-cake eater in Dubai. Nutritional value of the gold leaf is zero, but at least it isn’t toxic. So yes, one can eat gold, but it won’t relieve hunger pangs. We would like to point out here that absolutely no-one is trying to eat bank note-laced cakes. [PT]
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