Tag Archives: Precious Metals

A tragedy… get the hankies out! ? [PT] The Instability Problem Bitcoin is often promoted as the antidote to the madness of fiat irredeemable currencies. It is also promoted as their replacement. Bitcoin is promoted not only as money, but the future money, and our monetary future. In fact, it is not. Why not? To answer, let us start with a look at the incentives offered by bitcoin. We saw a comment this week, which is...

A tragedy… get the hankies out! ? [PT] The Instability Problem Bitcoin is often promoted as the antidote to the madness of fiat irredeemable currencies. It is also promoted as their replacement. Bitcoin is promoted not only as money, but the future money, and our monetary future. In fact, it is not. Why not? To answer, let us start with a look at the incentives offered by bitcoin. We saw a comment this week, which is...

Three years after we first identified the former head of UBS's gold desk in Zurich as someone directly implicated in the rigging of precious metals prices, Bloomberg reports that Andre Flotron, a Swiss resident, was arrested while visiting the U.S., according to people familiar with the matter. Having been "on leave" since 2014, it appears Andre's hope that he was gone but "keen to return in due time" are now up in smoke.   As Bloomberg reports, Flotron was...

See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango.  Fundamental Developments There were big moves in the metals markets this week. The price of gold was up an additional $21 and that of silver $0.30. Will the dollar fall further?As always, we are interested in the fundamentals of supply and demand as measured by the basis. But first, here are the charts of the prices of...

See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango. Forking Incentives A month ago, we wrote about the bitcoin fork. We described the fork: Picture a bank, the old-fashioned kind. Call it Acme (sorry, we watched too much Coyote and Road Runner growing up). A group of disgruntled employees leave. They take a copy of the book of accounts. They set up a new bank across the...

Waiting for the Flood We have noticed a proliferation of pundits, newsletter hawkers, and even mainstream market analysts focusing on one aspect of the bitcoin market. Big money, institutional money, public markets money, is soon to flood into bitcoin. Or so they say. We will not offer our guess as to whether this is true. Instead, we want to point out something that should be self-evident. If big money is soon to come...

- Click to enlarge By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at If you were rich, successful, and intelligent – which often, not always, go hand in hand together – where would you live? The last time I was in the Rockies, I remember thinking to myself. You know what, if it weren’t for the fact it’s so damn far from the beach I could actually live here. It’s really quite lovely....

See the introduction and the video for the terms gold basis, co-basis, backwardation and contango.  Fundamental Developments The price of gold dropped two bucks, and silver two cents. However, it was a pretty wild ride around the time when some information came out from our monetary masters at their annual boondoggle at Jackson Hole. We will show some charts of Friday’s intraday action, below. The overseers of the...

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at If you were rich, successful, and intelligent - which often, not always, go hand in hand together - where would you live? The last time I was in the Rockies, I remember thinking to myself. You know what, if it weren't for the fact it's so damn far from the beach I could actually live here. It's really quite lovely. Bite-your-hand-to-stop-you-from-crying-out-loud-lovely and if, like me, you're a sucker for snowboarding, then it's pretty hard to be...

How We Got Used to Fiat Money Most false or irrational ideas about money are not new. For example, take the idea that government can just fix the price of one monetary asset against another. Some people think that we can have a gold standard by such a decree today. This idea goes back at least as far as the Coinage Act of 1792, when the government fixed 371.25 grains of silver to the same value as 24.75 grains of...