I hope this essay provides some food for thought. It is not my intention to insult or belittle anyone, but using humor and cold logic, to help people understand an abstract topic with many counterintuitive principles. The ultimate goal is...
It has been an increasingly brutal ride for gold and silver, beginning around late March and accelerating through April. The gold price was over $1600 and on Monday April 15, it fell below $1350, a loss of $250. Silver did...
With all the discussion on the Internet, some of it confusing, we thought a picture would be worth a thousand words.
Backwardation is when there is a profit to decarry the metal. This is the simultaneous sale of metal in the...
Far too many people believe that gold serves no useful purpose. I am therefore publishing this response to The 10 Minute Gold Standard: It’s Much Easier than You Think by Nathan Lewis. Mr. Lewis, a professed advocate of the gold...
Since late January, the February gold contract has been in backwardation. This means that one could make a profit by simultaneously selling a gold bar and buying a February contract. One would still have one’s gold plus a little extra. ...
The title of the following video clip is Would Returning to Gold Standard End Currency Wars? Obviously, countries which use gold as money would have to accept the fact that gold cannot be devalued. This would be a huge improvement over...
Why wouldn't oil or wheat or land or bonds work as money?
To understand why, think of simpler example: manufacturers money-off coupons. To anyone buying the product, the coupon is worth its face value. So why don't coupons circulate as a...
This article is a follow-up to Part II. I expound upon a point I touched on, and also address some questions raised by readers.
First, let’s look at an update of the open interest numbers as of Feb 6. Gold’s open...
In Part I of this article, we looked at arbitrage between the physical metal market and the futures market. We saw that there are arbitrageurs who straddle the spread between these markets, who don’t care about price but about the difference...
It’s curious, isn’t it? So-called “paper gold” (a futures contract) has a price that is not only very close to physical gold, but it remains locked to it. This is despite the fact that “paper gold” is reviled in the...
