Commentaries

Even though this summer was a sentiment wasteland for the precious metals markets, right now feels like a close second.

In the financial markets, gold is usually ascribed to the commodities category. In this group of assets you will find your good old friend, silver, along with several others metals like platinum, palladium, copper etc.

Recently, gold and silver’s performance wasn’t what precious metals investors had expected, even though it seems that this turbulence is just temporary – fundamentals are great with the Fed promising to print even more money and continuous reports on rising demand for gold and its shrinking supply.

Yesterday we saw substantial declines in the whole precious metals sector (the only important exception was palladium that actually managed to close higher after a huge price drop earlier during the day) even though the Fed announced Wednesday that it would continue its monthly purchases of $85 billion in Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

Gold price below $1,700? But the Fed have just doubled QE, isn’t gold supposed to go up?

We follow up on our essay on gold and the dollar collapse from December 4, 2012. In that essay, we speculated what could happen with gold if the U.S. defaulted on its debt in real terms.

I saw a YouTube video published by Nick Barisheff recently (not an endorsement), which details his argument for hyperinflation and $10,000 oz. gold. While I don’t doubt the possibility of $10,000 oz. gold, I’m highly skeptical of the possibility of hyperinflation in the United States and Europe. The reason is simple: Money today is not what money was 50 or … Continue reading

According to a recent comment by a well-respected analyst, one of the problems with using gold as money is that the supply of gold could experience large swings due to changes in mine production.

With our dear monetary leaders only two days away from bestowing upon us their latest financial wizardry, we should be aware of the money supply dynamics in play.  This week FOMC will either ramp the production of printed money, hang back and play coy while letting the existing $40 billion in MBS carry the load … Continue reading

Source: Brent Cook, Exploration Insights  (12/4/12) “Grassroots exploration by the juniors will be virtually dead next year (tough to raise money on concepts and soil anomalies) and aggressive drilling will be seriously curtailed (tough to raise money if you miss).”   In our Nov. 11 Exploration Insights letter (see excerpt below) we discussed the dismal state … Continue reading