Tag Archive for: manipulation

Rising Rates Falling Assets, Report 30 Dec 2018

Last week, we wrote about the concept of discounting. This is how to assess the value of any asset that generates cash flow. You calculate a present value by discounting earnings for each future year. And the discount rate is the market interest rate. We said: “If the Fed can manipulate the rate of interest, […]

Standing Ready to Lease Gold, Report 18 Mar 2018

We will take another break from capital destruction, to treat a topic which has come up this week. On March 11, we said: “…central bankers do not think about gold. Granted, they once did. In the 1960’s, there was the now-infamous London Gold Pool to keep the price of gold at $35. This is endlessly […]

Open Letter to GATA

Dear GATA and Mr. Chris Powell: I am writing this in response to your article Monetary Metals’ Weiner refuses to see anything wrong in the gold market. There is a certain irony for me to read that I refuse to see. I have spent eight years studying the mechanics of the market, building a model, […]

Super-Duper-Irrational Exuberance, Report 11 Mar 2018

Think back to the halcyon days of the dot com boom. This was a time after Greenspan declared “irrational exuberance”. Long Term Capital Management collapsed in 1998, and Greenspan decided to risk propelling exuberance to a level beyond irrational. Super-duper-irrational exuberance? Anyway, Greenspan cut interest rates a few times in late 1998. Technology companies were […]

Thoughtful Disagreement with Ted Butler – Gold Basis

This article follows on from Keith Weiner’s response to Ted Butler’s Thoughtful Disagreement challenge. Below is a graph of all 130 gold contracts since February 1996, aligned by contract age in terms of number of days until expiry on the X axis of the chart and basis in percentage per annum on the Y axis. […]

Thoughtful Disagreement with Ted Butler

Dear Mr Butler: In your article of 2 October, entitled Thoughtful Disagreement, you say, “someone will come up with the thoughtful disagreement that makes the body of my premise invalid or the price of silver will validate the premise by exploding.” I will take you up on your request. You state your case in this […]

Putting the Latest Silver Crash Under a Lens

On Thursday, July 6, in the late afternoon (as reckoned in Arizona), the price of silver crashed. The move was very brief, but very intense. The price hit a low under $14.40 before recovering to around $15.80 which is about 20 cents lower than where it started. Buyers of silver are rejoicing. They can now […]

Gold and Silver Price Drop of 3 July, 2017

The price of gold dropped from $1,241 as of Friday’s close to $1,219 on the close Monday, or -1.8%. The price of silver fell from $16.58 to $16.11, or -2.9%. It is being called a gold and silver “smash” (implication being that one party or a conspiracy is doing the smashing). Our goal is to […]

What Really Happened When Gold Crashed, Monday June 26?

Let’s establish three facts up front. One, the volume of contracts traded was not “millions” (as at least one conspiracy theorist is claiming). During the 1-minute window when the price of gold dropped from $1,254.10 to a low of $1,236.50 and recovered to $1,247, 18,031 August gold contracts traded. There was negligible volume in the […]

The Anatomy of Brown’s Gold Bottom, Report 11 June, 2017

As most in the gold community know, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown announced on 7 May, 1999 that HM Treasury planned to sell gold. The dollar began to rise, from about 110mg gold to 120mg on 6 July, the day of the first sale. This translates into dollarish as: gold went down, […]