Gold and Silver Recap: Falling Prices

Another Precious Week in the Market

So who’s buying on the dips then?  Gold, silver and platinum prices are all down – mainly from Friday.

But have thy really gone down?  After all, the reason that we’re being given is that the dollar’s not weakening any more.  So what’s really happening, gold going down or the dollar going up?  Temporarily up.

Gold is essentially a short on all the currencies in the world, so it does pay us to look at what those currencies are doing.  For a while it seemed that they were only agreed on one thing, they were going to get to the bottom first.  Even the British Conservative government, that relishes its tough spending talk, has said that it is monetarily expansive.

So gold can’t help but go up.  Let’s not treat it as some speculative metal that people hold when the entire world is going crazy (although it helps when the world is going crazy) but look at it as a currency among others, but one that can not be printed.

So gold is bound to get in a bit of trouble when the industrial countries decide to get serious about printing out money.  If competitive devaluation is really over then so is gold, for the next few years.  But who are we kidding?  Competitive devaluation will be there until inflation starts hitting.  Then it will be too late.  And the central banks will be buying gold as well.

Speaking of which, South Korea is starting to buy gold.  It’s all a bit odd, these Asian countries with massive foreign currency reserves (and South Korea is only the fifth largest) speaking about buying gold.  If China loses faith with the dollar, then it could get hairy.  The dollars prospects, that is, not China.

Silver has been the purer precious metal play and so almost doubled gold’s fall.  This is despite China suggesting that it will cut back on its exports by as much as 40%.  Jim Rogers, the man who first opened the eyes of many investors to commodities, has also come out as a big bull on silver.

So the dark horse is palladium, which declined the least of the metals this week.

Palladium is like platinum in that most of the production is in either the Russian Federation or South Africa. But unlike platinum, Russia has been in a price fixing operation, by buying stocks of the metal in lean times and has been offloading it.  Well these stocks are drying up.  Just like central bank stockpiles of gold started to about five years ago.  And we all know what happened then.