Blog

April 12, 2010 – On August 16, 1999, I recounted how legendary traders Jim Fisk and Jay Gould had profited handsomely from a massive short squeeze in gold 130 years earlier.  The opportunity they took advantage of arose because of the ongoing monetary turmoil of their day arising from the so-called “greenback”, the irredeemable fiatRead more

April 10, 2010 – Gold climbed $36.00 this past week, a substantial 3.2% weekly gain.  Importantly, gold has finally hurdled above resistance around $1140.  In fact, it literally blew right through it. It has been nearly a month since I wrote that we should “note how strong gold has been throughout this correction.”  Even thoughRead more

The shorts in gold – and particularly the shorts in silver – felt some pain today. Gold climbed $11.80 to close on the Comex at $1125.10, a 1.1% gain for the day. Silver did nearly twice as well, up 2.1% for the day and ending at $17.876, the highest in ten weeks. The gold/silver ratio fell to 62.9 from 63.6 the day before.

March 16, 2010 – Gold has been stopped time and again in its decade-long bull market by recurring hurdles that appear at an ever-higher price.  During these encounters, several things happen, most notable of which is the growing bearish sentiment in the face of a seemingly insurmountable price barrier.  We are seeing that pattern repeatRead more

The nearly $30 surge in the gold price from Friday to yesterday’s close in New York should not surprise anyone familiar with the gold price suppression scheme documented so carefully and thoroughly by GATA. For years the gold cartel has been manipulating the gold price to repeatedly feed upon those traders who are guided by black-box trend following models.

Every once in a great while, the market offers a unique opportunity to buy precious metals ‘on the cheap’. I believe today is one of those moments.

January 2, 2010 – It is time to record my outlook for 2010, but before looking forward to the year ahead, I always like to first look back at what I was expecting for this past year.  My forecasts for 2009 were driven by my overall outlook for the economy, which is captured by theRead more

December 16, 2009 – One of the best explanations of fractional reserves comes from a polemical essay written in 1995 by Murray Rothbard, one of the prominent champions of the Austrian School of Economics: “Banks make money by literally creating money out of thin air, nowadays exclusively deposits rather than bank notes. This sort ofRead more

December 13, 2009 – In my last commentary I asked “What’s next for gold?”  Answering my own question, I noted that “$1200-$1400 is a reasonable target for the end of this year, but first, it seems likely that gold will re-test support.” In fact, gold kept climbing to above $1200, so my timing was off.  OnlyRead more

Gold breaks above $1000