Tag Archive: Basic Reports

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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Gold Price Smashdown vs Gold on Fire

2021-08-11

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2021-08-11

No sooner did we write Silver Rorschach Test, than the price of gold flash-crashed, or was smashed down. On Sunday afternoon in Arizona—i.e. Monday morning in Australia and Asia—the gold price dropped sharply. Gold bug sources claim that the drop was $100, but as we can see from the price graph included in this report, the actual crash itself was about $70.

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Motivated Reasoning About Silver

2021-07-27

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2021-07-27

Gold Basis, Co-basis and Dollar Price
We’re seeing the argument, again, that silver stocks are being consumed in solar panels, medical applications, and of course, electronics. This argument has a certain temptation. After all, the standard assumption is that value is inversely proportional to quantity. Purchasing power is widely believed to be 1 / N (N is number of units of currency issued).

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Basel III’s Effect on Gold and Silver

2021-07-13

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2021-07-13

There is sometimes a tendency to confuse ends and means. For example, in traveling through an airport there is extensive inspection of passengers. Before you are allowed to board an airplane, you must go through a process that is intrusive and increasingly invasive.

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Inflation or Lockdown Whiplash?

2021-06-29

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2021-06-29

Mainstream analysis sees rising consumer prices, and looks for a monetary cause. Also, when it sees an increase in the quantity of dollars, it looks for rising consumer prices. It is a fact that the quantity of what the mainstream calls money (i.e. the dollar) has risen at an extraordinary rate.

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What the Heck Just Happened to the Price of Gold and Silver?!

2021-06-22

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2021-06-22

Gold Basis and Co-basis and the Dollar Price
The price of gold (and silver) was on a tear in April and May. Then some sideways action. And then this week, thud. On Twitter, a popular meme is that the banks smashed the price by selling futures contracts, though there was no selling of gold bars. Let’s just say that if the price of an August contract fell by $120, while the price of a gold bar held steady, there would be a backwardation of around 40%!

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Resetting the Federal Debt

2021-06-08

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2021-06-08

Federal Debt: Total Public Debt, 1970 - 2020
According to the US Treasury, the federal government owes $28.2 trillion. It crossed the “28” threshold on the last day of March. The debt was just under $25 trillion at the end of April a year ago. There’s no question it’s growing at a faster and faster pace, and now there’s the excuse of Covid to spend more.

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A Deeper Dive Into Silver

2021-06-03

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2021-06-03

Silver Basis and Co-basis and the Dollar Price
The prices of the metals hit their lows by the end of April. Gold traded for around $1,685, and is now over $1,900. Silver was around $24, and is now over $28. These are big moves (though of course nothing like bitcoin).

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The Truth about the Silver Squeeze

2021-04-27

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2021-04-27

Silver Basis and Co-basis and the Dollar Price
Some recent videos about the silver market are generating more buzz than we have seen in a while. They make several points, but the main one is that there is a global shortage of silver. This assertion stands in contradiction to the fact that the silver price has dropped. As of the date of the first of these videos, it had dropped around 10% from its level just a month earlier.

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The Fedcoin is Coming, 8 March

2021-03-09

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2021-03-09

Before we talk about Fedcoins, let’s look at the old school non-digital, non-blockchain, coin. Gold. And silver. Since January 4, the price has dropped about $244. And the price of silver has fallen about $4. Are these buying opportunities? Or the end of the brief gold bull market of 2020 (i.e. Covid)?

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Reddit Residue on Silver, 3 February

2021-02-04

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2021-02-04

Silver Spot vs Mar Basis, February 03
The price of silver is going up and down like a yo-yo. On Sunday and into the first part of Monday, the price skyrocketed on news that Reddit was touting the metal. But as the data clearly showed, the price was not driven up by retail buying of physical metal.

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Ruh Roh Silver

2021-02-03

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2021-02-03

Silver spot vs Mar Basis, February 2
Sometimes you can count on the manipulation conspiracy theorists to get it exactly wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, nor halfway wrong. Not even mostly wrong. Totally wrong, backwards.

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That Precious Metals Rumor Mill, 30 November

2020-12-01

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2020-12-01

Gold Basis and Co-basis and the Dollar Price
We are hearing rumors this week of a shortage of the big silver bars, the thousand-ouncers. No, we don’t refer to bullion banks saying this. Nor big dealers, who are happy to sell us as many of these as we can buy. Nor our peeps in high places (we don’t claim to have any such peeps).

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Yes, Virginia, There Is An Alternative, 11 November

2020-11-12

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2020-11-12

Gold Basis and the Dollar Price
On Monday the dollar had a ferocious rally, moving up from 15.87mg gold to 16.77mg and from 1.21g silver to 1.32g. In mainstream terms, the price of gold dropped about a hundred bucks, and the price of silver crashed $2.20.

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