The only thing you're right about here is that some of the "Silver Peddlars" are to be taken with a grain of salt.Fed/IMF/ECB are ALL controlled by the BIS. Period…end of story. Do your research.
I've found that some of the most brainwashed persons on this planet are from the Southern Hemisphere. They're bred on an island where most info comes from 2-3 sources, and they do mostly what their governments tell them to do. They've been bred/culled into a specific "group think" paradigm. There are some that have broken free for the most part (Arthur R…God love him!), but the majority have a very hard time thinking outside the box.
Do your research on the specific organizations that you brought forth. Try to understand there's "man behind the curtain" that is controlling those organizations. Go up to the search section and type Drkrbyluv, or Strabes, and become educated.
One thing that's hard for me to rationalize with the escalating "shortage enthusiasm" stories are the continuing discounts to NAV of the couple of hard-asset ETFs that I watch. Its only a couple of data points, but I'm seeing PSLV now trading back down to a discount of -0.18% to NAV (it was modestly at a premium a few days back) and CEF much worse at -1.82% to NAV. CEF was trading at no premium a few days back as well.
Now both of these vehicles are much more thinly traded than the GLD/SLV pair - about 5-10% of the daily volume - but it does perplex me a bit. If we're running out of good delivery bars, why isn't PSLV going into premium.
HAA quotes silver good delivery bars (1000 oz) at $0.63 over spot, which pencils out to a 2.5% premium. That doesn't strike me as end-of-the-world premium levels.
HAA quotes gold kilo bars for a 2.3% premium. Seems a trifle high. Kilo bars are popular in asia - a moderately rich friend of mine has a small stack of them sitting in a vault. They have kilo-sized futures contracts, and he took delivery and stuffed them into his safe deposit box.
Since I am long silver, I'd really like to see one of those commercial signal failures - or that COMEX default we're all expecting to happen Any Day Now, but right now shortages seem confined to retail. All the stories about customers not getting their gold are definitely exciting, yet we're not seeing confirmation in the premiums at PSLV/CEF and the premiums at HAA seem modest.
Maybe someone has already said this, but I wish someone would start taking a accurate reading of the phsyical price of silver and gold and publish it on a daily basis. This actually wouldn't be that hard to do. For instance, if you wanted a reading of the coin shops (perhaps more than this), all you'd need do is create a sample frame of all the shops. Then do a probabality sampling to select and poll a small percentage of the shops. The shops could post their current buy and sell price for key items like silver eagles or whatever at the end of each day. Calculate the mean and put it up on a site with Kitco-like charts to boot. This would give you current physical price within a certain margin of statistical error. This is what is needed to eliminate the hegemony of the spot price. If I had more time I might take that on. Maybe someone at PP would take this on? That might really increase traffic to the site. A lot of people would stop looking at the spot price I do believe. Just a thought.
[quote=Jim H]How do you know for sure that there is not stress below in the supply as well?
[/quote]
The major industrial users would complain.
Amyway, the onus is on those making claims of silver shortages to prove it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But they will not do that as a fake silver shortages are very profitable.
You know, if someone did do the little project suggested above, you ultimately wouldn't even need the spot price and the "premium". Just hey, what's the buy and sell. At that point the physical would really disconnect from the paper. That couldn't happen right away as things are too linked to that spot price, but that's the idea; and it may be a first step to undermining the paper market.
Also, in regard to probability sampling: you could publish the range, the mean, the median, and do all sorts of other things too. A stratified sampling of the dealers, for instance, might allow it to be broken out by region or country etc.
Wouldn't the coin dealers (or whoever) be interested in this information - enough to participate anonymously? I think maybe so.
I can tell you one thing, If I could see those numbers on a daily basis, I'd be looking at them - and I probably wouldn't be as moved by the relatively crazy BS in the paper markets. Except as a guide to trading mining stocks, I'd probably stop looking at that spot price and the kitco chart altogether. I'd look at the real physical price. I'm almost inspiring myself to do the project.
Really, the only point of yours that I would argue with is that the idea of tightness in supply down to the mine level is somehow an extraordinary claim. My own suggestion would be that, if the current level of investment demand, which was kicked off by the price dump, keeps up for any extended period of time… that this will in fact lead to pressure on supply all the way down the chain. Why do I say this?You are correct to say that industrial demand is, by a large majority, the main source of demand for Silver (see Silver institute numbers here; http://www.silverinstitute.org/site/supply-demand/
By this dataset, coin demand is 13.5% of overall demand. For now, industrial demand is much greater than is demand for Silver as a monetary metal.
But… The Silverinstitute data also shows a supply:demand balance at present… .which means that if one user (like coins) were to change dramatically, without another dropping by an offsetting amount… then there is an overall supply problem in the markets, right?
What has happened to demand recently?
In Mexico, Silver demand via coin sales tripled; http://silverdoctors.com/physical-silver-demand-explodes-in-mexico-more-silver-sold-in-past-2-weeks-than-entire-q1/
In general, coin demand seems to be 2x higher than normal… the main question is, will this be sustained? If it is sustained, it will represent a significant imbalance between supply and demand all the way down the supply chain.
Finally, it is important to understand that things are not exactly wonderful on the mine supply side of the equation. Aside from current pricing being at or near the breakeven level for most mines, which does not exactly engender more supply… A large landslide has taken out 16% of the US Silver production, possibly for years;
http://silverdoctors.com/10-of-us-annual-silver-supply-just-vaporized/#more-25002
I wrote this yesterday;
Remember how after the fact, it became apparent that the smart money had come in and out of the Cyprus banks prior to the officially announced banking haircut crisis? Well.. that is what is happening right now, in front of your eyes, with the GLD. The big, smart money knows that GLD is fractionally reserved.. and they know that if they wait until the end of this game.. the point at which fractionally reserved Gold breaks down and the emperor is exposed as having no clothes... why, then they will only get pennies on the dollar in the form of cash settlements, in an environment where real, physical Gold in hand suddendly becomes worth many times more. Smart money is pulling their physical out of GLD by cashing in their shares.. leaving the smaller, dumb money shareholders holding the "paper" bag.Fitzwilson is now saying the same thing
There is no question that a form of a bank run on gold is occurring all over the world....If we are having a run on the gold and silver by the small percentage of investors at this point, what happens to availability and prices if even a small incremental addition from individuals and institutions occurs? The bottom line is I believe we are about to find out the answer to that question shortly.”
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2013/4/30_World_Changing_Events_%26_The_Global_Run_On_Gold_And_Silver.html
You have been warned. Technical analysis of charts will not tell this story.
Mike Krieger thinks this is extraordinary… and a harbinger of the coming break between physical and paper.
Might the commercial signal failure be coming soon?
Mike's comment;
- Terrence Duffy, President and Executive Chairman of CME Group Inc,. on Bloomberg TV yesterday (April 29, 2013)I’m actually still in a state of shock that the head of the CME Group would make such an observation and in such blunt terms. I mean the guy admits that volume on his exchanges suck, yet basically claims paper gold (one of their marquee products) is becoming irrelevant. In my mind there are two likely explanations for this. 1) This is how he has started to feel personally and he is loading up on physical gold rather than his company’s paper products and would like some cover if that is ever unearthed. 2) This is what people close to the gold market are telling him and he’d rather make it clear he understands that paper is paper and gold is gold and that there is a big difference. So “caveat emptor” if you are hanging around the COMEX.
His comments on gold come in at the 0:40 mark. Simply stunning.
Well, if KWN says a bank run on gold is going on all over the world, it must be true. Let's see what else they are saying over there:
STUNNING GOLD SHORTAGES AS PONZI SCHEME COLLAPSES & MORE
LBMA DEFAULT, ENSUING PANIC, GOLD DELIVERIES, CHINA & MORE
CENTRAL PLANNERS RISKING ALL HELL BREAKING LOOSE, GOLD & MORE
INCREDIBLE GLOBAL GOLD & SILVER RUSH TRIGGERS KEY TARGETS & MORE
The people at KWN live in a somewhat different universe. Now to be fair they were in on gold from the very beginning, so who am I to ding their little red wagon. But up to now, there's been no good time to sell gold, and one guy (Jim Sinclair) has recently called for gold to reach $50,000/ounce.
Here's a thought experiment. IF you believe gold is going to $50k/ounce, don't feel even a moment of stress about buying gold now. Wait for that 50 day moving average to lift above the 200. That's because if you buy here at $1470, or you wait for (perhaps) $1650, it will make no difference because your endpoint is so ridiculously high, and from a trader's viewpoint, buying the uptrend is safer (because the bottom is already in) rather than buying into a downtrend (catching the falling knife) which could go on for longer than you might imagine.
As I said, its just a thought experiment.
Right now price of PM is behaving pretty well so my sense is, its a decent opportunity to pick more up at a discount, assuming you don't pay outrageous premiums. I've never dealt with HAA but they do seem to have decent premiums - although I am not sure what the rest of the fee structure might look like. Again, you can get PSLV at a very slight premium right now - less than 1%. When you feel like exchanging that for the real thing, sell the PSLV and buy your coins which (hopefully) will have reduced premiums as manufacturing catches up with demand. And if an LBMA/COMEX default occurs, PSLV's premium should blow out enough to compensate you for not having the coins.
Gold/PM miners are also beginning to show signs of a bottom - signs, mind you, $HUI needs to break above 295 for a relatively high risk buy (stop around 260) and a lower risk buy might be after $HUI closes above that 50 MA (around 330) for a couple of days. GDX looks similar. I'll also feel better when the GDX:$GOLD ratio stops dropping, and the $GOLD:$SILVER ratio stops rising. Right now miners are risky, because if gold starts to drop again, those miners will make another leg down.
Is that really your best argument against the idea that there is great underlying stress in the physical Gold market… it was on KWN so it must be bluster? I realize that the "matrix", i.e. the market, is not telling you that physical Gold stocks are being raided via the recent price action… and I wouldn't expect it to until after the market breaks… after the black swan has flown. For now, we read the tea leaves. First off, I realize that Kingworldnews is all pump, all the time. This does not mean that one can impugn every guest that is interviewed on the blog. I especially figured that since Fitzwilson is a trusted past PP.com commentator and recommended porfolio advisor, and a Stanford MBA, that my quoting him, even from KWN, would not attract too much ridicule. See here; https://peakprosperity.com/search/apachesolr_search/fitzwilson
At the same time, you avoided offering any alternative interpretation of the issues I raised, namely that there appears to be a "run on the bank" going on in some of the physical stores that we can see (Comex inventory at 5-year lows, GLD continuously puking Gold since the beginning of the year… another 2.14 tonnes today). Aside from myself and Fitzwilson, Dave from Denver said this yesterday;
In fact, what we are now seeing is the final stages of the paper gold/silver bullion market, which has grown at a parabolic rate over that last 13 years, and includes Comex futures, LMBA forward contracts, OTC derivatives - which is an even bigger paper market than the Comex - leased gold claims/contracts and warehouse receipts. At some point there will be an even bigger "run on the bank" by those looking for delivery of the physical gold/silver that they have been "assured" is sitting in their "trusty" bank custodian vault. I know for myself that I have seen enough from the JPM's of the world to not trust anything they do or say. I think a lot more people are finally coming to that same conclusion. At some point there will be a complete collapse of trust in the paper monetary system and the price of gold/silver will really go parabolic, as the masses realize all at once - and far too late I might add - that everything that was rumored over the last 13 years about paper gold, gold leasing, etc is actually true. link: http://truthingold.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-global-fractional-paper-bullion_6103.htmlI believe the real arbitrage with Gold is not that it will go up another $100 or $200 or $300 dollars as more dollars and yen and pounds are printed.. but rather that it will go up a whole lot more when the fractionally reserved nature of the Gold stores, even many of those thought to allocated, are finally exposed. Most of the Cyprus bank account holders never saw it coming.. but in retrospect, the smart money left their tracks (as you showed in the charts that accompanied CHS' piece on the subject) as they got out of the way of the coming storm. One could certainly argue that I am wrong.. but I think I see the tracks of the smart money again here.. just as before... getting their physical out of the way before the Corzining begins. On the subject of PSLV/PHYS.. these would be fairly obvious places to grab physical once the market gets tight. I have actually been tracking the PSLV and it has not lost shares in the last 10 days.. I will note the PHYS share count in my spreadsheet (don't know any data feed for this) and begin to track that as well.
Jim, I've heard about a COMEX default over there at KWN (I really do go there weekly to get my dose of All Gold All The Time) for the past 5 years. Most of the guests over there say the same sort of thing. They're all smart people. They were right about the gold trade, but they've been wrong for a very long time about the imminent default. Could the stopped clock be right this time? Yes, it could. Am I going to start hyperventillating at the imminent prospect? Only when I see some actual evidence of it happening.
Believe me, if I saw evidence, I really would start hyperventillating!
If I were a retail coin dealer, and I had carefully hedged my inventory through short silver & gold contracts so that my inventory was neutral to the price of the underlying metal, this increase in premiums would be Christmas Come Early for me. They'd be pure profit. And the more excited my customers got over this event, the more money I'd make. Do retail coin dealers hedge their inventory? That, I don't know. That's what I would do - so I could make sure to be able to pay the rent and not take a 20% loss if gold & silver happened to "take a dip." As a "full disclosure" sort of thing, that's one question I would ask.
I don't think a default will be a lightning bolt from the clear blue sky, just like Cyprus wasn't such an event if you were really paying attention. I'd pick HAA premiums as one of my measurements, and currently, they don't look very far out of alignment, especially given all the current fuss.
Likewise, a banking system Cyprus-style issue won't happen overnight either. The pressure builds up slowly over time. We'll have warning. (Most likely candidate: Slovenia - smart money continues to flee). Unless of course it happens because of some exogenous event like a massive solar event, or a nuclear (EMP) attack.
I really wish I had underlying raw timeseries of GLD share counts as well as COMEX inventory. If you know where I could find them, I'd promptly come up with some charts. My thesis is, the inventory aligns nicely with the price of gold so that rather than predicting an imminent default, they were simply predicting a lower metal price. Then again, if the inventory continues down as the metal price bounces, that becomes more interesting.
But at the current rates of decline, we'll have time to see it all coming.
You see, I do agree that at some point such a default will occur. The tracks of the smart money are out there, we just have to find them. I believe premiums are one such track. I don't think the big guys will start taking delivery from PSLV, they'll just buy the shares in preference to SLV and/or other PM vehicles, which will cause the premiums of PSLV/PHYS to rise.
Here's a trade that should work flawlessly if GLD/SLV actually end up defaulting and not having any gold or silver in them. It's very simple.
Long PHYS / short GLD
Long PSLV / short SLV
Its basically a PSLV/PHYS premium trade, and you're hedging out any risk in the move of the metal itself.
The risk to this one is that Eric Sprott goes out and does a secondary offering and is actually able to get the underlying metal, which he has done repeatedly, which ends up hammering the premium back down to flat again. Which is another reason I tend to look at this default talk with a decent amount of skepticism. So far, the ones making money from the default talk are the people selling us our gold.
Inspired by Jim's constant search for the truth, I tracked down where I can find all sorts of data about GLD. If you care, you too can do this; you can find it in a massive CSV file here: http://www.spdrgoldshares.com/usa/historical-data
I theorized that dropping tons in GLD seemed to align more or less with the move in the price of gold itself. So with my shiny new data, I constructed a chart tracking price of gold vs tons in GLD. They really did track pretty closely, with GLD tons dropping right along with the price - right up until the day after the crash, when GLD tons continued down, while the price of gold bounced. And since then, the number of gold tons has continued to drop! My new page has the details:
http://mdbriefing.com/gold-rumors.shtml
This certainly seems to me to be something interesting! Channeling the mythbusters, I'd have to say this myth: possibly proven!
One word of caution however. GLD Tons appears to be a bit of a lagging indicator, in that, first price of gold drops, and then GLD Tons drops after. It is possible Gold Tons will rally along with the price of gold, but after some delay. So since it has only been two weeks, so we'll have to watch this one and see how things unfold.
And, we have some time. At its current pace of 2 tons per day, it will be 540 business days before GLD runs out of gold.
This chart will update every day.
Thank you for the new chart. One conundrum that Harvey Organ posits is this; Why does GLD puke Gold sometimes… yet SLV not puke Silver? If you could go the extra yard and create a similar series for SLV, and maybe create an SLV inventory vs. GLD inventory overlay… it would be even more way cool IMO. My understanding is that SLV has puked almost no Silver over the last few months. Harvey thinks that SLV does not puke Silver because it is so highly fractionally reserved at this point that it literally cannot. It could be this, or it could be that the strength of the forces that draw Gold out of GLD (expiring CB lease arrangements?) are much greater than those at work in the Silver market. Or, it could be that, regardless of the fact that Silver in small coin and bar form is harder to get than similar Gold, the true underlying state of the Gold market is much more dire than the true underlying state of Silver in terms of supply vs. demand, allocated liabilities vs. true inventory.
Jim -I'm glad you like the new chart. I really am all about the evidence. If I run across any evidence of a "gold bank run" you can be sure I'll publish it. And if you run across any, I'm happy to help analyze it.
GLD has this great csv file I can download that has data back until the beginning of time (i.e. 2004-11-18) for GLD. I just need that same datafile for SLV and you can have your chart. Alas, I looked, and was unable to find one for SLV.
I'm not sure why they'd have it for GLD and not SLV - perhaps one is more popular than the other.
As for why SLV behaves differently than GLD - its just my opinion, but I don't think physical silver is as popular as store of value outside the US. The guys at HAA could confirm this for us. So if there really is a "bank run" going on, it may be in gold worldwide, and in silver within the US in coin/small bar form only. And the US silver bar/coin buyers aren't really enough to move the worldwide SLV needle too far.
Well its a theory anyway.
[quote=davefairtex]Inspired by Jim's constant search for the truth, I tracked down where I can find all sorts of data about GLD. If you care, you too can do this; you can find it in a massive CSV file here: http://www.spdrgoldshares.com/usa/historical-data
I theorized that dropping tons in GLD seemed to align more or less with the move in the price of gold itself. So with my shiny new data, I constructed a chart tracking price of gold vs tons in GLD. They really did track pretty closely, with GLD tons dropping right along with the price - right up until the day after the crash, when GLD tons continued down, while the price of gold bounced. And since then, the number of gold tons has continued to drop! My new page has the details:
http://mdbriefing.com/gold-rumors.shtml
This certainly seems to me to be something interesting! Channeling the mythbusters, I'd have to say this myth: possibly proven!
One word of caution however. GLD Tons appears to be a bit of a lagging indicator, in that, first price of gold drops, and then GLD Tons drops after. It is possible Gold Tons will rally along with the price of gold, but after some delay. So since it has only been two weeks, so we'll have to watch this one and see how things unfold.
And, we have some time. At its current pace of 2 tons per day, it will be 540 business days before GLD runs out of gold.
This chart will update every day.
[/quote]
Dave,
Again, very nice work.
I have an hypothesis for us to consider:
It may not be true that a GLD redemption or acquisition by GLD always represents real gold hitting the physical market.
Here's the thinking:
What if we start here with the knowledge that several tens of millions of ounces of real gold have been leased by central banks, with 20 million ounces being the lowest possible estimate I have obtained from a consummate WS insider. So 20 million on the low end, maybe 50-80 million on the high end.
A gold lease from a central bank, as I now understand it, involves an extensive 30 page contract with the respective central bank applying all sorts of terms and conditions and whatnots many of which pertain to the idea that the gold in question may be leased, but not actually moved from the proximate physical location.
For reference, at the time I penned this, the one year lease rate was just 29 skinny basis points.
Suppose you are a bullion bank; you borrow money (gold) at 29 basis points which means you are now short gold (because you wish to return it later at a lower price, not a higher one), hedge it out by selling gold futures long, but then you have to find a buyer for this gold of yours in order to receive your funds which you will then plow into Greek one year debt, or whatever.
Who would 'buy' gold from the lessor under these terms knowing that they 'owned' it but that it was stuck in a specified repository with a claim trail that would make a $1000/hr lawyer blush with envy?
While I have not been able to confirm this, if the answer is "GLD" then that would not surprise me in the least. Why? because I hold the view that GLD would not have been permitted by the regulatory 'authorities' unless someone thought bankers could profit through its creation by taking money from Muppets.
Of course, I cannot prove that motivation, but it fits nicely with everything of late, so I am going with it on the KISS principle until proven otherwise.
How does GLD help skim money and keep the gold price suppressed?
Easy. By directing a bunch of market demand for gold into GLD, which then just 'buys' leased gold and rolls it over term after term as a condition of 'ownership', no gold leaves the central banks vaults so the central banks are happy.
Physical gold buying pressure is taken off the open market so both the central and the bullion banks are happy because physical gold buying pressure is reduced. And the bullion banks are doubly happy because they have a compliant and willing 'customer' with real cash billing to 'buy' actual gold off of them which they in turn have borrowed for less than one third of one percent for an entire year.
Seems right tidy to me.
Now, to be clear, I don't think this represents 100% of GLD's activity, certainly there is some real buying and selling of gold on the open market, but it fits with everything else I know at this point.
Where I could be entirely wrong is in not having any insight into the actual vaulting and sub-custodial arrangements involved. I do know that the GLD prospectus names HSBC as the main vaulting custodian and that, digging deeper, the GLD prospectus indicates that HSBC names the LBMA and Bank of England as sub-custodians. After that, I lose the trail because neither the LBMA nor the BoE provide enough specificity to determine whom else might be in that chain of custodial subterfuge, er, subtlety.
Bottom line: I rather doubt that GLD is fully hoarding/dishoarding all the tonnage implied by the base data, and wonder if some of that isn't just a matter of optics meant to help one or more major players 'talk their book.'
I could buy that theory. It fits with my model of how things work. It explains why GLD can find gold so easily (Sprott frequently complained that there's no way for them to get the tonnages they want, as rapidly as they say they do) and yet still claim they really do have actual gold backing a particular number of shares.I've always thought that if push came to shove, the central banks would "repo" their gold, and your discussions with this banker and his 30-page contract certainly aligns with that. And there's always the fine print in GLD where they throw up their hands and say they aren't responsible for what sub-custodians do and if there isn't any gold backing a particular basket, the GLD shareholders are SOL, and that gives everyone cover.
So some chunk of "missing gold" is really still there in Ft Knox, its just owned by GLD currently, and if we really did an audit of the gold reserves, this operation would be exposed since GLD has coughed up actual bar numbers and any audit would reveal this. And it also explains why gold can't be sent back to Germany just yet, since it may be leased (effectively) to GLD.
And as you say, GLD really does relieve a big chunk of gold investment buying pressure, without having to actually transfer ownership of gold, since the whole operation is in "friendly" (i.e. banker) hands. And the steady stream of super-low-rate money motivates the operators of this system to keep the gold price in check - everyone is on the same side of the table.
I have to say, the longer I talk, the more compelling the story becomes. Everything is legal, it fits with everyone's known motivations, it explains a bunch of otherwise-puzzling stories, and all the bureaucrats have their asses covered.
"We are shocked, simply shocked to find out that Sub-Custodian-X actually got their gold from the Central Bank, and now they've repoed that gold and - sorry about that GLD shareholders, we were all deceived!"
Dave thinks that the April price smash itself was done for the express purpose of inducing GLD holders to sell such that one or more of the BB AP's could accrue share baskets and pull physical in order to satisfy demand from the East. The daily GLD pukes of 2, 3, or more tonnes of Gold have continued since our discussion of last week (above). In my view, Dave's explanation is most in-line with Occam's razor.
http://truthingold.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-truth-about-gold-being-drained-from.htmlexcerpt;
So where, you might ask, is all this gold going? It's not just vaporizing into thin air. Using today's price of gold, 293 tonnes is worth about $14.5 billion. If you look at that AP list above, all of them except the two hedge fund bookies are LBMA "bullion bank" market makers. Unless these bullion banks are keeping the gold for themselves - and if any of them were, it would have to show up in the footnotes of their next 10-Q - that gold is being delivered to buyers of it on the other side.
So, who would be buying this gold? Based on numerous news service reports, which often seem to never make their way into the U.S. financial media reporting, India and China combined through the end of April have imported somewhere around 700 tonnes of gold, plus or minus 100 tonnes. What's 100 tonnes among bullion bank friends when GLD still has 1,057 tonnes left? Here's one news report - actually from Bloomberg - which is calculating that China purchased around 223 tonnes of gold in March alone: LINK That is a staggering amount of gold (mostly 400 oz bars - the type of bar in GLD's vaults) when you consider that the global annual mined production of gold is around 2500 tonnes, and declining.
And here's an account out of India about the massive gold demand there in April and May:“The biggest slump in gold prices in more than three decades on April 15 spurred banks, traders and jewelers to import more than 100 tons last month, said Rajesh Khosla, managing director of MMTC-PAMP India Pvt. Purchases this month will match April’s imports, he said”And here's a refreshingly honest assessment of the situation from an Indian newspaper:The jump in Chinese physical demand also prompted some banks to ship in more supplies from London and Swiss vaults, traders said LINKIf you read that entire article, you'll see that in 2012, India/China imported more than 1/3 of the global gold production and will likely account for close to 50% this year. This is the unintended consequences for the Central Banks who are spear-heading the manipulation of the price of gold for the purposes of defending the dollar and fiat currencies. This rabid demand for 400 oz. gold bars from China/India (not to mention Russia, Turkey, Viet Nam, pretty much all of southeast Asia) goes a long way toward explaining the rumors that were circulating during February and intensified in March that the LBMA was in danger of facing a big delivery default.
I have to say, I've become fixated watching the number of tons in GLD dropping each day. Today it was -6.3 tons down. Unlike Dave in Denver I don't pretend to know what it means. But if it keeps happening, it might end up meaning something. At the current rate, GLD only has 153 business days left of gold inside its vaults. That's really not that long.
And at the very least, it makes a great chart, and something to look forward to at the end of every trading day.
http://mdbriefing.com/gold-rumors.shtml
It is a bit perplexing though. Theories abound, but its tough to rationalize them all. First, I'm told that GLD doesn't have any gold at all. But now that the number of tons is mysteriously dropping every day, I'm told that GLD actually does have gold, but the gold is being spirited away by the evil bullion banks to pay off debts. Or is this leased gold from the Fed? Or perhaps its being snatched by the bullion banks to give back to the Fed? Or perhaps its destined for Germany?
Someday we'll all find out the truth. But in the meantime, I look forward to seeing my GLD Tons chart at the end of every trading day. Hey, a guy needs a hobby, right?
[quote=davefairtex]
I have to say, I've become fixated watching the number of tons in GLD dropping each day. Today it was -6.3 tons down. Unlike Dave in Denver I don't pretend to know what it means. But if it keeps happening, it might end up meaning something. At the current rate, GLD only has 153 business days left of gold inside its vaults. That's really not that long.
And at the very least, it makes a great chart, and something to look forward to at the end of every trading day.
http://mdbriefing.com/gold-rumors.shtml
It is a bit perplexing though. Theories abound, but its tough to rationalize them all. First, I'm told that GLD doesn't have any gold at all. But now that the number of tons is mysteriously dropping every day, I'm told that GLD actually does have gold, but the gold is being spirited away by the evil bullion banks to pay off debts. Or is this leased gold from the Fed? Or perhaps its being snatched by the bullion banks to give back to the Fed? Or perhaps its destined for Germany?
Someday we'll all find out the truth. But in the meantime, I look forward to seeing my GLD Tons chart at the end of every trading day. Hey, a guy needs a hobby, right?
[/quote]Yessir.