The pressure on the level of salaries is not going to stop any time soon.The violence of this inflationary shock is going to be felt this fall on the consumer prices. Businesses will have no choice but to pass on the dizzying rise in costs that they are experiencing to the consumer.

Since the start of this century, gold has offered a far better return than bonds. It was this outperforming of the bonds by gold that took it into its bullish phase from 2002 to 2010. The central banks intervened in 2010 to break this cycle, but we have initiated a second cycle of gold outperforming the bonds market. Gold is continuing to bring in better returns than government bonds.

In this irrational environment, it is entirely natural to see more and more investors seeking to protect their savings by means of investments such as physical gold, which is regaining a certain appeal in this climate of a headlong forward dash by the central banks.

The inflation is spreading. Is it this new risk associated with inflation that has prompted the unusual demand for physical gold in recent weeks? Gold is being seen here as a refuge from an out-of-control event linked to the new risks engendered by this inflation.

Gold and silver are yet to benefit from the rise in the prices of the other assets; they are thought of as a currency, and not as commodities. These low prices are a bargain.

Acting straight away on the rates would have an even more devastating effect on the system as a whole. This is the impasse that the central banks have now got themselves into, in their interventionist policies. Acting straight away will break the engine. That’s what the math is telling us. Gold and silver directly owned in your name or held in an allocated account (and certainly not in an unallocated one) are the only insurance policies against the upcoming breaking or malfunctioning of the engine.

The true price of gold and silver will be the one that is displayed after the shift from paper to physical. The current price reflects precisely the preponderance of the financial market over the market for real assets. But for how long?

Time is now the monetary authorities’ enemy, in contrast to the other interventionist phases in which the inflation was under control. The longer these authorities delay acting, the further the rise in prices will spread. And the longer they wait, the more the risk of an urgent intervention to break this uncontrollable cycle increases. Gold remains the ultimate investment for covering this risk of a loss of control by the central banks in the very complicated task of managing the period to come.

The sales of futures on the COMEX market, now seen almost every day, are colliding with a background trend for the purchasing of gold by the other central banks, which are starting to lose patience and want to cover themselves in relation to the risks of devaluation of their assets in terms of state bonds and currencies, which are significantly impacted by the current levels of inflation.

Like many fixed-income securities, the gold prices are completely detached from supply and demand. The mechanism for determining prices is distorted by ‘tools’ that enable the monetary authorities to alter the perception of their inflationary monetary policies.

In the last few weeks, gold has not followed the curve of the rates and there is now a decorrelation between the 10-year rates and the gold price. Since 2009, the two indices have been following one another fairly closely, and the latest gaps between the curves of these two indices have always been sealed at a short maturity in the past. The last time the rates were at this level, with a dollar as weak as this, gold was at around $1950, meaning that there is fairly sizeable potential for a further rise for gold if this catching up were to take place.

The economic actors’ confidence regarding the central banks’ ability to correct this inflation, which they deem to be transitory, is certainly not open to question today. However, without rapid and specific action by these central banks (particularly on interest rates), this patience, which is also transitory, is at risk of wearing thin. The barometer of this confidence is gold.

What was it that caused the sheer scale of this fall? Did the Fed raise interest rates brusquely and sharply, leading to a reaction like this on gold? The conclusions of the Fed’s meeting last week are far from dramatic, though. Nonetheless, they had the effect of an electric shock.

The intervention by the central banks on the markets is scrambling the message. Assets that have become at risk, in this inflationary backdrop, are being given excessive valuations. By contrast, the values that protect against the upcoming inflation are still being evaluated at very low levels. At any event, this is a very favorable backdrop for assets like gold.

The “match” between the two camps (the inflationists versus those who are convinced of the transitory impact of the rise in prices) is leading, as one would logically expect, to this very volatile phase on the gold and silver metals markets.

The price of gold rose above $1900 at the start of the week and has since stabilized around this level. It is the first time this important threshold has been reached since last January. In terms of the monthly charts, gold is in a confirmed breakout of its consolidation “flag” which will have lasted 9 months.

Faced with this brutal and disorderly rise in inflation, the Fed no longer really has a good solution open to it: either it stops monetizing the debt and provokes a financial crisis, or it carries on monetizing the debt, thereby risking a monetary crisis.

For the time being, the breakout is contained, the gold prices are relatively controlled, and the figures for inflation and the value of the dollar ought to propel gold to greater heights, something that is not the case at the moment. This control of prices comes at a cost, however. Selling paper contracts on the Comex to keep the gold price from soaring is an increasingly costly move. The bullion banks have no choice, though: they must defend their short positions at any cost.

Copper is the thermometer of inflation. Gold is the thermometer of a loss of control by the monetary authorities. Controlled inflation (the phenomenon that made copper rise so high) was manageable, up to a point...but the same cannot be said for uncontrolled inflation, which is starting to have repercussions on the real economy.

It’s as if the market were finding it very hard to discern the potential for a rise in gold right now, even though we have never before been in such favorable conditions for the precious metals sector.