A Distortion in the Gold Market Could Make You 200% This Year
By Dan Ferris, editor, Extreme Value
Have you tried to buy gold coins or bars in the last few months? If so, you already have a good idea of the “distortion” I’m going to tell you about today. Right now, the premiums on gold bullion coins and small gold bars have shot up to as much as 15%-20%, sometimes more. That’s if you can find any to buy. The reason: “Large purchases of coins are perhaps the ultimate sign of safe-haven gold buying,” said John Reade, a precious-metals strategist at UBS. I said the same thing to a MarketWatch reporter who called me up several weeks ago to talk about gold bullion. If this were a full-on, mom-and-pop gold mania, it’d be a sign of the top. But this is different.
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Market Uncertainty to Boost Gold Investment Demand
Wall Street Journal
Global financial-market uncertainty will likely continue underpinning investment demand for gold, the primary factor that boosted overall demand for the metal to more than $100 billion last year, an industry group said Wednesday. “We’re looking for continued strong investment demand…for as long as the economy remains in pretty dire circumstances,” George Milling-Stanley, official-sector director with the World Gold Council, told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview. His comments came in conjunction with the quarterly Gold Demand Trends report released Wednesday by the WGC, a marketing organization funded by gold mining companies.
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Little Recovery in Platinum Market Owing to Crisis
Reuters
Impala Platinum (IMPJ.J), the world’s No. 2 producer of the metal, posted a 14 percent rise in headline earnings to 8.77 rand per share for the first half despite lower output, but warned of weak demand ahead. Impala Platinum’s (Implats) earnings were boosted mainly by a weaker rand against the U.S. dollar during the six months to end December, but the group said production and cost performance had been “extremely disappointing”. Total platinum production for the group fell 14.8 percent to 878,000 ounces. This lower output and ongoing inflation resulted in unit costs rising by 36.9 percent to 8,681 rand per platinum ounce, the company said.
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Silver Is Information
Gold Eagle
The collapse of banks, currencies and the markets is not a failure of Biblically sound free market capitalism, because that has never existed. Rather, the collapse is a failure of fraudulent paper money systems based on usury. Usury is not “excessive” interest. Usury is not “excessive” profits. Usury is any interest on a loan. Any interest on a loan is excessive because of the mathematical insanity of compounding interest, or exponential growth of even 1% per year. If you invested an ounce of gold at 1/3 of 1%, 6000 years ago, you’d own all 5 billion ounces of gold in the world, and if you invested it at just over 2%, you’d own about all the atoms in the entire universe, it would all be gold, and it would all belong to you.
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Gold Amid Inflation and Deflation
SafeHaven
“Inflation and deflation are both a crisis in money. Which leaves gold as a secure store of wealth against both monetary panics…” THE 1970s DIDN’T JUST curse the world with cheap German wine and the Bay City Rollers. That decade gave us soaring inflation, too. Gold’s stellar run up to $850 per ounce, rising more than 24 times over, also came in the ’70s. So gold, therefore, must deliver its strongest returns when the cost of living shoots higher. Right?
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Gold eases, but remains near 7-month high
Reuters
Gold was a touch softer on Friday continued to trade near a seven-month high over $985 marked this week as it consolidated gains before tackling new peaks. The precious metal fell a touch on Thursday on profit-taking sparked by worries that its recent rally had been overdone, but the bleak economic outlook is expected to keep safe-haven buying intact. Spot gold was trading at $972.75 an ounce by 0252 GMT, down about 0.1 percent from New York’s notional close on Thursday. This compares with it’s all-time high of $1,030.80 marked in March.
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Another Problem With The GLD ETF
By: Trace Mayer, J.D. – GoldSeek
In December I published A Problem With GLD and SLV ETFs where I briefly perused the GLD prospectus. It concluded, “For these reasons including (1) the quality of the gold is at issue, (2) no audit of the physical metal is permitted, (3) counter-party risk impregnates the investment vehicle and (4) there are strong conflicts of interest with complicit players in the central bank gold price suppression scheme; GLD and SLV appear impotent in reducing inflation or counter-party risk.”
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Investors rush into gold coins
Financial Times
nvestors in Europe and north America went on an extraordinary shopping spree for gold coins and bars in the final quarter of last year, snapping up 148.5 tonnes, a jump of 811 per cent compared with the same period in 2007, as the collapse of Lehman Brothers led a massive increase in safe haven buying. This rush into physical gold by western investors pushed global retail investment up almost 400 per cent to 304.2 tonnes, according to the industry-backed World Gold Council, which released its fourth-quarter Gold Demand Trends report yesterday.
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