Tag Archives: 6a) Gold & Monetary Metals

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. … physical silver is scarcer than gold.” This corresponds to the peak where we have drawn an arrow on the gold-silver ratio chart. Soon after we said that, the ratio moved down about 5% (i.e. in favor of silver). And now we see a similar pattern in the ratio of the...

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. … physical silver is scarcer than gold.” This corresponds to the peak where we have drawn an arrow on the gold-silver ratio chart. Soon after we said that, the ratio moved down about 5% (i.e. in favor of silver). And now we see a similar pattern in the ratio of the...

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”. Or it makes all employers obtain government permission for a long and growing list of things, and then denies permission arbitrarily and...

Gold leads the way Last week we wrote about the gold to silver ratio. Our points were that it measures the price of one metal against the other, just as we use the dollars per ounce to measure daily metals prices, and just as we use ounces per Corvette to measure purchasing power preservation. Also, we discussed the range of movement that silver has around gold over the past fifty years.  We laid out notes for when to buy silver against gold, and when not to. The...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]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 was well...

In our post on August 11 titled End of an ERA: The Bretton Woods System and Gold Standard Exchange, we discussed the significance of then-President Nixon’s action of closing the gold window thereby ending the Bretton Woods Monetary system. Under the Bretton Woods monetary system, central banks could exchange their US dollar reserves for gold. This also ended the gold fixed price of US$35 per ounce. This week we explore the two questions that concluded last week’s...

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. This bad decision is the latter, a desperate attempt to avoid the consequences of previous bad decisions. Tricky Dicky’s Catastrophe Richard “Tricky Dicky” Nixon...

The following article was written by Keith Weiner, CEO of Monetary Metals, as a counterpoint to this article, POINT: Should the US Return to the Gold Standard? No It was originally published at InsideSources, here: COUNTERPOINT: Is the Gold Standard the Economists’ Punching Bag? In many gyms, there is a punching bag in the corner. When someone feels frustrated or wants to show off, he can hit it. The gold standard is the punching bag in the economists’ gym. In an...

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. Some of these sources were very quick to assert that the drop was caused by naked selling of gold futures...

In our July 29 post titled How Gold Stacks Up Against Stocks, Property, Commodities and Big Macs! we showed readers charts of gold as a ratio to other assets and products. We discussed that gold competes with crypto and stocks for the investment dollars. It was clear that gold as a ratio of the S&P 500 Index and of the broader MCSI World Equity Index show that gold is ‘relatively cheap’ compared to these measures. But then we showed that this wasn’t the...