Tag Archive: Basic Reports

Will Interest Rate Hikes Fix Inflation?

2022-06-19

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2022-06-19

Senator Elizabeth Warren and President Joe Biden claim that inflation[i] is caused by greedy corporations. And they propose to solve this problem by making the corporations pay. Whether it’s extracting a “windfall profits” tax, crushing them under even more regulation, or attacking them with antitrust enforcement, the idea is the same.

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The Silver Chart THEY Don’t Want You to See!

2022-05-16

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2022-05-16

On Thursday May 12, the price of silver fell about a buck. As with every one of these big price moves, the question is: what really happened? Below is a chart of the day’s action, with price overlaid with basis. Basis = future – spot. It is a great (i.e. the only) indicator of abundance or scarcity of metal to the market.

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Forensic Analysis of Fed Action on Silver Price

2022-05-09

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2022-05-09

The last few days of trading in silver have been a wild ride.  On Wednesday morning in New York, six hours before the Fed was to announce its interest rate hike, the price of silver began to drop. It went from around $22.65 to a low of $22.25 before recovering about 20 cents.  At 2pm (NY time), the Fed made the announcement. The price had already begun spiking higher for about two minutes.  As an aside, we wonder a bit about how they keep...

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Time for a Silver Trade?

2022-05-04

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2022-05-04

The price of silver has been going down, and then down some more. From over $28 a year ago, and over $26.50 a month ago, it’s now at a new low under $22.50. Four bucks down in a month.

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Oil, the Ruble and Gold Walk into a Bar…Part III 

2022-04-12

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2022-04-12

Part III – Gold Standards, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Gresham’s law and gold. Is it even possible to return to a gold standard today? Is Russia leading the push, or do we need something else?  

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Oil, the Ruble, and Gold Walk into a Bar… 

2022-04-05

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2022-04-05

Part I – Unpacking the narrative of how Russia is going to change the global monetary system. There is a Narrative about Russia and how it will change the monetary system. Many analysts in the gold community are promoting this story. There’s just one problem with this Narrative. It is like how Michael Crighton described the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, stating that the newspaper is full of stories explaining how “wet streets cause rain.” 

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Human Action in the Silver Market

2022-03-29

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2022-03-29

We have recently seen an increase in social media posts about the big increase in short positions by the bullion banks. What would motivate them to short a commodity during this period of inflation, much less a monetary metal when central banks are printing money with reckless abandon? And doesn’t their shorting of silver push down the price? 

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This is Not The Silver Breakout You’re Looking For!

2022-03-10

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2022-03-10

Every once in a while, one regrets not acting sooner, or not acting soon enough. In our case, we did not publish this Tuesday evening. We should have. Today the price is down, and others may also call for lower silver prices.

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Inflation and Gold: What Gives?

2021-12-21

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2021-12-21

Listen to the audio version of this article here! In the last Supply and Demand update, we discussed some different theories which attempt to explain what causes the gold and silver prices to move. We mentioned the: “…attempt to hold up a famous buyer of metal, while ignoring the thousands of not-famous sellers who sold the metal to said famous buyer.”

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What’s In Your Loan?

2021-11-23

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2021-11-23

“Real estate is the future of the monetary system,” declares a real estate bug. Does this make any sense? We would ask him this. “OK how will houses be borrowed and lent?” “Look at this housing bond,” he says, pointing to a bond denominated in dollars, with principal and interest paid in dollars.

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Perversity Thy Name is Dollar

2021-11-16

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2021-11-16

Breaking Down the Dollar Monetary System If you ask most people, “what is money?” they will answer that money is the generally accepted medium of exchange. If you ask Google Images, it will show you many pictures of green pieces of paper. Virtually everyone agrees that money means the dollar.

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Rising Fundamentals of Gold and Silver

2021-11-10

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2021-11-10

 Prices move up and down, in the restless churn of our irredeemable monetary system. There are several schools of thought whose theories attempt to describe, if not predict, the next price move.

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Why a Yield on Gold Matters

2021-11-03

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2021-11-03

Picture, if you can, a world in which gold circulates as the medium of exchange. People pay for everything, from groceries to rent, in gold. Employers pay wages in gold. Productive enterprises borrow gold to finance everything from food production to constructing apartment buildings. In other words, picture a world where there’s abundant opportunities to earn a yield on gold and finance productive businesses in gold.

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Why Isn’t Gold Going Up with Inflation?

2021-10-26

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2021-10-26

Many voices in the gold community are making a simple point. Look at the prices of oil, copper, and other commodities. They are skyrocketing. The mainstream explanation—shared by Keynesians, Monetarists, and many Austrians—is that the cause of this skyrocketing is the increase in the quantity of what is called “money”. 

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Transitory Inflation and Useless Ingredients

2021-10-05

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2021-10-05

Can you remember back to when you were two or three years old? Toddlers often think that there are little people inside the TV (or maybe this was only true when the TV was about as deep as it was wide—and maybe kids today don’t think this when looking at a 60-inch flatscreen…)

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Silver Crash Makes Silver Trash?

2021-10-01

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2021-10-01

The price of silver dropped a dollar, or over 4% on Wednesday. Some voices in the precious metals press want you to think that there is only one conceivable cause. We should coin a term for this form of logical fallacy: argumentum ad ignorantia. This is an argument of the form: “the cause must be XYZ, as I cannot conceive of anything else.”

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Gold and Silver Price Fundamentals Update

2021-09-15

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2021-09-15

Gold-silver ratio
This time, we start with the gold-silver ratio. Let’s revisit something we said on 23 August: “…the supply and demand fundamentals of silver are stronger here than they have been since the Covid crisis

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How Do They Get Away With It?

2021-09-14

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2021-09-14

Picture, if you will, a government that deliberately inflicts bad policy on the people. I know this sounds crazy, and could never happen, but please bear with me. Suppose the government criminalizes hiring someone who produces less than an arbitrary threshold. Or it forces the closure of all businesses deemed to be non “essential”.

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Where do gold and silver prices go from here?

2021-08-24

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2021-08-24

One way to look at the price of gold, is that it dropped from its high around $1,900 in early June. Another way is to zoom out, and look at the big picture. Here is a 10-year chart of gold and silver prices. For over four years, after the peak around $1,900 ten years ago (early September 2011), the price of gold moved down. By December 2015, it was just over $1,000. Then it was a sideways market until three years ago (August 2018), when the price...

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What Trick did Tricky Dicky Pull 50 Years Ago Today?

2021-08-16

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2021-08-16

Sometimes, bad luck can strike. But other times, a catastrophe comes from a series of bad decisions, each the reaction to the consequences of the previous one. On August 15, 1971, President Nixon decreed that the US dollar would no longer be redeemable for the gold owed, even to foreign governments.

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