Tag Archives: 6) Gold and Austrian Economics

Federal Reserve Credit Contracts Further We last wrote in July about the beginning contraction in outstanding Fed credit, repatriation inflows, reverse repos, and commercial and industrial lending growth, and how the interplay between these drivers has affected the growth rate of the true broad US money supply TMS-2 (the details can be seen here: “The Liquidity Drain Becomes Serious” and “A Scramble for Capital”)....

The Most Comprehensive Collection of Charts Relevant to Gold is Here Our friends from Incrementum (a European asset management company) have just released the annual “In Gold We Trust” chart book, which collects a wealth of statistics and charts relevant to gold, with extensive annotations. Many of these charts cannot be found anywhere else. The chart book is an excellent reference work for anyone interested in the...

A Month with a Bad Reputation A certain degree of nervousness tends to suffuse global financial markets when the month of October approaches. The memories of sharp slumps that happened in this month in the past – often wiping out the profits of an entire year in a single day – are apt to induce fear. However, if one disregards outliers such as 1987 or 2008, October generally delivers an acceptable performance....

Last week, we shined a spotlight on a crack in the monetary system that few people outside of Switzerland (and not many inside either) were aware of. There is permanent gold backwardation measured in Swiss francs. Everyone knows that the Swiss franc has a negative interest rate, but so far as we know, Keith is the only one who predicted this would lead to its collapse (and he was quite early, having written that in...

Sarah Westall Interviews Claudio Grass Last month our friend Claudio Grass, roving Mises Institute Ambassador and a Switzerland-based investment advisor specializing in precious metals, was interviewed by Sarah Westall for her Business Game Changers channel. Sarah Westall and Claudio Grass There are two interviews, both of which are probably of interest to our readers. The first one focuses on Switzerland with its...

Sales of gold products by the Perth Mint surged in September to their highest since January 2017, while silver sales more than doubled from August to mark an over two-year peak, boosted by lower bullion prices, the mint said on Wednesday. Sales of gold coins and minted bars surged 61 percent from August to 62,552 ounces last month, the mint said in a blog post. Gold sales in September rose about 35 percent from a...

Costco This is a textbook case. Well, it would be if there was a textbook that presented the dynamics of the rising and falling interest rate cycles. Costco is spending over a quarter billion dollars, to make a capital investment in chicken processing. This is not the typical entrepreneurial investment, which seeks to increase margins by serving an unserved or underserved demand. This is an investment made with...

Hammering the Spread The price of gold fell nine bucks last week. However, the price of silver shot up 33 cents. Our central planners of credit (i.e., the Fed) raised short-term interest rates, and threatened to do it again in December. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to act as if investors do not understand the concepts of marginal debtor, zombie corporation, and net present value. People believe that the Fed...

The first day of each month sees the reporting of a number of statistics about the London Gold Market by the bullion bank led London Bullion Market Association (LBMA). These statistics focus on clearing data and vault holdings data and are reported in a 1 month lag basis for clearing activity and a 3 month lag basis for vault holdings data. Therefore the latest clearing data just published is for the month of August,...

Sometimes, one just needs to look in the right place. And often in those cases, it just takes a conversation to alert one where to look. We had a call with a Swiss company this week, to discuss gold financing for their business. They reminded us that there is a negative interest rate on Swiss francs. And then they said that a swap of francs for gold has a cost. That is, the CHF GOFO rate is negative (the dollar based...