The gold standard is kaput, once and for all.
http://video.ft.com/v/1484287534001/...e-basket-case-
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The gold standard is kaput, once and for all.
http://video.ft.com/v/1484287534001/...e-basket-case-
Yeah sure, whatever you say.
All hail Skol, the peoples lost prophet.
Pressure starting to get to you is it? If I owned lots of gold I'd be feeling dejected too, given that the DJIA is 25% ahead of gold in the last 6 months.
In AUD DJIA is about 32% ahead, so how much gold have you got?
I've got zero, you show me yours and I'll show you mine.
Pressure?
Nope, just another day reading planet Skol.
I only have a small footing in the market at moment skol, so perhaps I am not the adventure man you should be haggling with but more so somebody whom is fully invested.
Remember, I dont care if gold goes up or down, or even sideways, it just does not matter to me.
Just trade what you see and if you can, try to be at peace with yourself and everybody that is around you.
Bernanke's QE silence a blow to gold price.
By Jack Farchy in London
Studious avoidance of the subject disappoints
Rarely could two words – or the failure to mention them – have had such an impact.
For gold investors, who had set their hearts on a fresh bout of “quantitative easing”, Ben Bernanke’s studied avoidance of the subject last week came as a considerable disappointment. In the hours after the chairman of the Federal Reserve spoke, bullion prices tumbled almost $100 an ounce.
The 5 per cent fall, gold’s largest daily drop in more than three years, has triggered a nervous reappraisal of the precious metal among some investors: how strong can the fundamentals of the market be, they ask, if a non-denial from the Federal Reserve chief can have such a marked impact?
The nervous shake-out has continued this week with gold on Tuesday dipping below its 200-day moving average, a technical indicator closely watched by traders, for the first time since mid-January to touch a low of $1,664 a troy ounce.
“When things get back to normal, then we’ll be back to looking at jewellery demand and mine supply,” says James Steel, precious metals strategist at HSBC in New York. “But right now, Fed policy is highly influential in determining the gold price.”
Mr Bernanke’s role as the pacesetter of the gold market is nothing new. His hint of a second round of QE at a speech in August 2010 helped trigger a 15 per cent rally over the following four months. The Fed’s promise in August last year to keep rates on hold for two years provided the momentum for gold to rally to its nominal record $1,920 a troy ounce in September.
Nonetheless, the extent of last Wednesday’s fall and the decline in prices since then, has surprised many investors and analysts. After all, Mr Bernanke did not rule out a third round of quantitative easing – QE3 – he simply avoided reference to it.
“There are hints that rates at the zero bound are no longer sufficient reasons for the gold price to move higher,” says Tom Kendall, precious metals analyst at Credit Suisse. “More QE is wanted.”
That creates a problem for gold bulls: improving data on the US economy make a QE3 look less likely.
The sharp drop in price on Wednesday was exacerbated by a single large sell order, with traders speculating that a large hedge fund could be behind the selling.
More fundamentally, however, Wednesday’s price tumble revealed the lack of interest in gold from some of its most important supporters.
While investor positioning in Comex gold futures had by last Tuesday risen to the most bullish level in five months, bankers say that macro hedge funds, often at the leading edge of investor interest in the metal, have stayed out of the market this year.
Edel Tully, precious metals strategist at UBS, says that “there is a general hesitancy to put on any strategic trades.”
Moreover, the physical gold market has been quiet. Although the recent price drop has awakened some interest, demand from both India and China – the two largest consumers of physical gold – has been slack so far this year, traders say.
“The market had gone stale,” says Ms Tully. “Physical demand was deadly quiet in the lead-up to Wednesday.”
For all that few investors are abandoning their longer-term bullish view on gold. The reason? Naturally, it’s all about the Fed.
The US central bank’s financial crisis firefighting actions – cutting rates to zero and launching two rounds of quantitative easing – have succeeded in pushing inflation-adjusted interest rates to record lows in the US.
Jeffrey Currie, head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs, points out that US real rates, as measured by 10-year inflation-protected Treasuries, have historically traded in a tight correlation with gold.
In recent months that correlation has broken down. “The financial markets are pricing in a very different easing environment from the gold price right now,” he says. “Gold is already undervalued relative to its fundamentals, so it doesn’t need more QE to go higher.”
That bullish thesis is underpinned by the Fed’s move in January to extend its pledge to keep rates on hold to late 2014.
Many analysts and investors believe the eventual shift to monetary policy tightening by the Federal Reserve will mark the end of gold’s decade-long rally, which has lifted prices from less than $300 an ounce in 2001 to almost $2,000 last year.
By promising to keep rates at zero until 2014, therefore, the Fed has pushed back the gold price peak, which many analysts had expected to come in late 2012 or early 2013.
“The consensus within the Fed to extend the zero interest rate policy to beyond 2013 does, all other things being equal, imply an extension of the gold bull market,” says Philip Klapwijk, head of metals analytics at Thomson Reuters GFMS, a leading precious metals consultancy.
“Maybe in the short term QE3 matters,” agrees a gold specialist at a large hedge fund. “The more important thing is that rates are on hold and I don’t think that is going to change.”
Here is one for the Skol side of the fence
http://www.businessinsider.com/austr...#ixzz1oaEOgy1X
Hey JB,
I see JP Morgan has passed its test with flying colours, increased its dividend and is gonna buy back $12 billion in stock.
If my memory serves me correctly weren't you peddling some kind of scenario that JP Morgan was gonna go bust because of their shorting gold, right?
The goldbugs were buying 'physical' to send JP Morgan to the wall, looks like JP won.
On February 23rd, 2009, Obama said his administration would address the rising debt. He said “I refuse to leave our children with a debt they cannot repay.” Hello! We can’t pay it off now and there is never any proposal to pay anything off.-M Armstrong
http://www.inflateordie.com/files/Fl...03-01-2012.pdf