Gold and Silver Recap: Gold Still Climbs

Another Precious Week in the Market

I know that this may be a bit of a shock for a few of you, but large governments aren’t concerned about inflation.  They are so scared that any move to seriously cut down inflation will kill their economies stone dead that inflation is allowed to run wild.

The Euro may be gaining on the dollar, but that’s not the real story.  The Euro and the Dollar are a see-saw at the moment, when one starts climbing against the other, then the other will start to panic and tell the market that they are a really bad buy and go down again.  The other large currencies are also playing around.  A governor of the Bank of England has told savers to do their patriotic duty and spend their savings, while the Japanese are selling off Yen to stop the currency climbing.

But this is all a sideshow.  Competitive devaluation just means that more paper gets printed.  Sure, it has different colors and pictures, but it is still paper.  It’s the barbarous relics of precious metals where the real action is.

And gold hit another dollar record, or we should say that the dollar hit another all time gold low, on Friday.  The interference that is happening with the comparative currency values is obscuring the fact that we are going through a general inflation, and when there’s inflation then it seems like the price of gold and silver rise, because the value of the dollar as it is objectively measured is falling.  This in turn means that people want gold in order to protect their wealth and the actual price of gold starts rising.  We’re nowhere near that stage yet.  After all, how many of your work colleagues hold gold?

There’s not been much to go on with the central banks, apart from a move by Iran to sell off gold to support their currency.  The Europeans seem to have also hit a temporary halt, according to the “Central Bank Gold Agreement”, something we’ll come to at another time.

Gold may not have been on the main street radar in the same way as buying rental property was, but it has been on many investors for a while.  Silver has been rather neglected.  But silver is starting to gather steam.  It’s ratio to the gold price has gone below 60 for the first time in the last year.  It is starting to hit thirty year highs, when that mad Texan billionaire Bunker Hunt almost cornered the silver market. It’s still less than half of that crazy price ($48.70).

And platinum and palladium are also joining this devaluation party, with palladium going to a two and a half year peak, having risen 45% since May.  These are seen as great catalytic converters, and the China market is often quoted, but in the end it looks like gold and, increasingly, silver are pulling the prices of these metals up.