Last Precious Metal Post
I left the best (by many measures) for last.
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).
Last week:
Gold $1745.20
Silver $25.35
Platinum $1205.00
Palladium $2700.00
Rhodium $27,000.00
This week:
Gold $1777.50
Silver $26.05
Platinum $1207.00
Palladium $2834.00
Rhodium $28,200.00
SIlver and platinum have been pretty steady. Palladium continues steadily climbing. Rhodium continues to bounce around like a yo yo. Iridium (not shown) has moved from $6000 to $6250. And gold is actually doing fairly well, breaking out of its range on the up-side.
I will have more to say about the gold market below.
Gold
Gold is the last precious metal on our list of nine.
To summarize/review, the precious metals are numbers 44-47 in the table below (ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, and silver), followed by the group right below them, 75-79 (rhenium, osmium, iridium, platinum, and gold).
It’s a nice tight group. Why isn’t 43 (technetium) on the list? Well, largely because technetium basically doesn’t exist. It’s naturally radioactive with a two million year half life. That means however much you’ve got right now, half of it will be gone in two million years. And since it has been 4500 million years since the earth formed, it has been 2250 half lives. If the entire world had been made of solid technetium when it started, that would have been 6 x 1024 kilograms of Tc. And since ten half lives is enough to reduce the amount to 1/1024 {a number which we should name after Fauxcahontas) of what it was before–which we’ll round to 1/1000th, it would only take eighty half lives to be left with six kilograms of technetium. From the weight of the earth down to six kilograms in 160 million years; you can probably guess how much is left after the remaining 2,170 remaining half lives: zero, zilch, nada, nichevo, nichts. The last atom would likely be gone after only about another 200 million years. (99 grams of Tc-99 consists of 6 x 1023 atoms of the stuff, that’s 1/60th of the 6 kilograms. You’ll notice how similar that number is to the number of kilograms the earth masses…so basically, just repeat the same time interval as before and it’s down to a handful of atoms, shortly after that, it’s all gone.)
We can make technetium ourselves (and a vanishingly small amount exists from uranium atoms fissioning in nature, but these aren’t left over from the formation of the earth). When you pile enough of it together to be visible…it’s a gray metal, just like all of its neighbors. I imagine if it weren’t radioactive, it’d be a useful alloy metal, perhaps a bit pricey, like silver. Or maybe not; I’m basing that last bit on the fact that rhenium (75) is a precious metal, and that’s because rhenium has no natural ores. But if technetium were around, it might have ores and rhenium could piggyback on it, just like hafnium (72) piggybacks on zirconium (40). So who knows?
But the larger point is, for a metal to be a precious metal, it first has to actually exist. So technetium, though it looks like it should be part of the precious metal “block” of the periodic table…isn’t. In both senses of that word.
But back to gold (79).
Gold has been known for thousands of years. Perhaps longer. And that’s because it sometimes shows up as a nugget. It didn’t have to be smelted to be discovered, unlike (say) iron, which never shows up as a native element on earth, though sometimes our ancestors got a free sample from a meteorite.
So our distant ancestors might well have found gold before they discovered any other metal. [Of the ones that had to come out of ores, copper is probably easiest to obtain. Besides being rarely (but not quite never) found native, some of its ores will release the copper if you heat them over an ordinary fire.]
Ancient Egypt used plenty of gold. In fact it was more common there than silver was; as near as we can tell, three ounces of gold were required to buy one ounce of silver in Ancient Egypt, oh say 2000 BCE. No, that’s not a typo. Egypt simply didn’t have much silver in it, and they didn’t know it was more common elsewhere. Certainly they figured that out as civilization spread throughout the Mediterranean and Near East and they learned more about the rest of the world.
Gold is heavy (dense)–it was the densest thing known back then, far more so than lead. Lead weighs almost twelve times its volume in water. Gold weighs 19.3 times its volume in water. But gold looks fantastic and lead is…meh. About the only thing you can do with lead is use it for weights. Even its use as bullets is primarily due to its weight–it has good momentum–followed by its relative softness and ease of melting and casting.
But gold can be used for jewelry, and was. Not only that, it would never tarnish nor rust nor corrode. Gold coins that have been on the bottom of the ocean for centuries still shine. So it became a symbol for purity and incorruptibility, unlike most politicians. Even modern chemistry has found few things that attack it. (This is largely true of the other precious metals as well, but they are Johnny-come-latelies in our minds. Gold got there first.)
So gold began to be prized in its own right.
Gold and silver are the only two of the nine precious metals whose main use is simply to be. They’re not valuable because of some industrial application, like the PGMs and rhenium are. They’re valuable because they are gold and silver, and their main use is to be formed into blocks and kept on a shelf somewhere.
Even back in the day when men were men and money was money, when gold was used as coins, the point of the coin was to be a certain amount of gold.
Although gold is used in jewelry, most gold today is in the form of 400 ounce bars that sit in bank vaults. I think I linked this video once before; I’m going to do it again.
The sole use of all that gold is to sit in that vault and be gold.
It has been estimated that all of the gold ever mined could fit in a cube 20 meters on a side. That’s 8000 cubic meters of gold, and each cubic meter is 19.3 tonnes. Given how vague the actual number is, we might as well round that to 20 tonnes per cubic meter, and declare that 160,000 tonnes of gold have been mined throughout all history.
A “tonne”, with the extra n and silent e, is a metric ton of 1000 kilograms, very roughly 2200 pounds. 160,000 tonnes sounds like a lot, but this is gold, which doesn’t take up very much room per tonne. it would barely fill three Olympic swimming pools.
Here’s another video. It’s mostly on the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Federal Reserve System, but there’s a good bit in the middle about gold, and how it is traded.
(In fact, National Geographic has done a number of different documentaries on gold, some focusing on the lengths we go to in order to mine it, others focusing on King Tut’s treasure, and so on.)
Gold, is of course, very widely traded. It’s probably traded more than any other commodity, at least in dollar terms. And those trades are how the “spot” price I quote comes into being.
Here’s another documentary, looking more at this aspect of gold:
The spot price is sometimes derisively referred to as the price of “paper gold.”
“Paper gold?” Well, yes. You’re trading paper ostensibly tied to gold in the futures market. If you want to go buy an actual ounce of gold today, and walk away from the purchase with an actual bit of heavy yellow stuff, you will pay (on Apmex.com, as of Thursday April 15 at 8:30 PM Mountain TIme…”as low as” $1,949.29 per ounce, for an American gold eagle, a randomly chosen year.
Nearly two hundred dollars more. (And if you want just one ounce it will cost you twenty dollars more. You have to buy a hundred at a time to get the $1,949.29 price. Actually, that’s not a bad small-buyer premium; it’s usually much higher.)
You can check with your local coin shop, and more than likely they will want a little bit more. This is the real price of gold, though perhaps one should average it with the price a bullion dealer is willing to pay. Unfortunately Apmex doesn’t post their “buy” price, and neither does Kitco, they want you to call and request an offer. But I strongly suspect they aren’t paying much less than this. If so, then it’s rather unusual but you can actually sell your gold for more than spot right now.
I did find one place that would sell you a 100 gram bar (a bit over three ounces) at a rate about a hundred dollars an ounce lower than that. (And they will also buy it at that price. The catch is, you can’t sell their gold back to them in less than seven days, so you assume the risk the market will move against you.) https://www.bullionstar.com/buy/product/gold-bullionstar-100g
Why is there such a big disconnect between the “paper” price and the physical price?
“Conspiracy theories” abound, and I find them more plausible than most such theories. Most state that the price is being held artificially low. (I even attended a presentation in 2012 given by a man from GATA (Gold Anti Trust Action Committee, https://www.gata.org, and he said the “real” price should be about five thousand dollars. No doubt that man would say something even higher today.
But there are rumors galore that something really interesting is happening right now. To understand this I need to give a short, oversimplified precis of how the futures markets work.
Let’s say I promise to sell you an ounce of gold for $2000 in July. And you accept that promise. We sign a contract. I don’t even have to have an ounce of gold right now. But I had better have one by the time July rolls around or you take me to court. But I have an alternative! A couple of weeks later, someone else, call him Bob, might post an offer to sell me gold in July, at some price, and I can accept it. Now I don’t need the gold, because Bob will sell it to me just in the nick of time. If that contract was, say, for him to sell me an ounce of gold at $1980, then I just became the man in the middle, taking $2000 from you in July and pocketing $20, and giving Bob $1980. In fact, because all of these are contracts in July, the brokerage house that is keeping track of all these things can make it simple. They can simply give me $20 today, arrange for you to give them $2000 in July and to pay Bob $1980. And they’ll arrange for Bob’s ounce of gold to go to you on delivery day. I’m no longer involved, and never actually touched that ounce of gold, but I made a profit on it.
If gold had gone up instead, I would have lost money. But sometimes when the market goes badly, the best thing to do is take the loss and get out.
Notice that for me to make money, someone else has to lose it. I made $20, but you are going to pay $2000 in July for an ounce of gold that’s only worth $1980.
And if someone manages to manipulate the price the way they like it, someone else just got robbed. Wealth is not created in this kind of market; it’s transferred from a loser to a winner.
That’s basically the futures market. People are buying and selling pork bellies, silver, wheat, eggs, aluminum, or gold at some future date. And the vast majority of them are doing what I was doing…trading the contracts not because I actually care about the product, but just to hopefully make money when the price moves the right way. In fact, because all of the trades happen on a floor, with a broker doing the actual trade, you have no idea you bought your gold from Bob, or who I am. That’s kept track of by the commodity exchange.
In reality gold is traded in contracts for a hundred ounces (on some exchanges) or a kilogram (~32 ounces) on other exchanges. And sometimes there are so many contracts out there that the aggregate total of the contracts is bigger than many countries’ bank vault holdings. But most of this goes up in a puff of smoke about a month before delivery date as people make the opposite contract, cancel out the physical purchases, and pocket their profit (or take their beating). That chain I described from you to me to Bob is likely much shorter than the chains that develop in the futures market.
Some few people do actually buy a gold contract…and actually want the gold.
And this is what has been going on. The value of the contracts is in the mid $1700s per ounce right now. (Even though it’s a 100 ounce contract, the price is quoted per ounce.) Some people, wanting to buy gold and saying $1950 is bullshit when the spot price is about $200 less, are actually going into the futures market, buying a contract at $1750, and saying, “for delivery” which means “Oh and by the way I really do want the gold.”
Over the last couple of years, people have done this perhaps five to ten times as much as usual.
And what do they get? Do they get the gold?
No. At least, not immediately. They get a piece of paper saying that somewhere in a vault in New York or perhaps Delaware, there’s 100 ounces of gold with their name on it. And if they sell the gold via a contract, they are selling the piece of paper.
Which would have its advantages. You don’t have to worry about keeping it in your house and hoping no burglar ever finds it. Or putting it in a safe deposit box and hoping we don’t have a repeat of FDR’s gold heist.
But how do you know that brick of gold actually exists and isn’t the same block of gold some other poor dumb bastard is holding the paper for? In other words, does that piece of paper have a specific piece of gold allocated to it, and no one else?
You can order that vault to actually send you your gold, comma dammit. But they’ll make it painful. It take a lot of work to get this done, and pay who knows how much for shipping. Personally, rather than trust them to ship it to me when I suspect they’d rather pretend to lose it and give me paper money instead, I’d say, “Let me come pick it up.” (For an item worth almost $200,000 I’d make the road trip.) But they probably have rules against that.
There are signs of desperation in the brokerages. People are now being told their contract is good for a 1/4 ownership share in a 400 ounce bar. Which basically makes it impossible for you to actually lay hands on your gold. But at least if they can bring in a bunch of those bars, the paper actually means something.
Apparently last year, over 100 tonnes of gold had to be delivered. I don’t know whether it got physically delivered or people just wanted the receipts, but apparently someone was watching and they had to make sure those receipts were actually covered. Over 100 tonnes. That’s more gold than many major countries have in their central banks’ vaults!
If the commodity exchanges don’t have it in those vaults in Delaware and New York, they have to go get some. Last year about this time, apparently this did happen. They scrambled, but were able to cover it. And no doubt someone had to pay big bucks for gold right now. A lot of people are suspicious that a lot of gold isn’t where it claimed to be, and maybe it’s true. In some cases, a central bank might have leased its gold to someone who then turned around and sold it as jewelry. Meaning the gold is on your earlobes instead of in some vault somewhere, and they won’t be able to get it back. And who knows how many central banks leased their gold to cover this panic?
This sort of thing is apparently continuing to go on. Perhaps that is why you, you little person, you Deplorable proletarian, can’t buy one lousy ounce at the spot price.
If this trend continues, we might actually run out of physical gold; a lot of vaults presumed full will have to be opened and found empty, and futures markets might implode very scandalously. Gold might find its true price, which would make GATA very happy. As well as anyone who has the physical stuff, either in numismatic gold coins or current bullion bars and coins. If you’re holding a piece of paper, on the other hand, then you will be screwed. If you’re lucky some central bank might make “money” out of thin air to pay you for the gold you never actually owned but thought you did.
Or this could be a conspiracy theory in the bad sense of someone just making shit up and marketing it.
But if you think all of this is true, well: Don’t be that person holding a piece of paper. Get actual gold. And suck up the $200 premium over the price of “paper gold” if you have to.
I’ve got some links, some a bit older than others. I am not quite sure what to make of the combined set….are they having trouble now, or not? A lot talks about last year, when they apparently had to scramble to cover over 100 tonnes of deliveries…but they succeeded. Or at least it looks that way. Did someone just hang onto 100 tonnes of paper gold?
Here’s a website that describes the delivery process as it shows that over a hundred tonnes of gold was purchased through the commodities markets about a year ago:
https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/ronan-manly/the-curious-case-of-comex-gold-deliveries/
Here are a couple of websites talking about this sort of thing–some of them talk of huge deliveries last year but they managed to cover them.
I can’t quite figure out when this next one was actually written. The charts at the top say yesterday (April 16, 2021). But a lot of the text seems to be suggesting 2017.
And OMG, here’s SGT report (who ever heard of them?), from back in September.
As one final note, silver is also, similarly, unrealistically priced on the spot (paper) market, an indication that similar things may be happening there. The American Numismatic Association’s magazine, The Numismatist, ran an article this month (or perhaps last month) by one of their frequent contributors asking if there was some way we could derive a real “spot” price for silver that has nothing to do with the paper commodities market. I’m sure he’d say the same thing about gold if asked.
If you invest in precious metals, remember: Physical over Paper. Get your hands on the actual stuff. If you can’t drop it on your foot, don’t bother.
And Joe Biden didn’t win.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!