Central banks

Let’s ask for ECBexit! Not to get out of the euro (and get back to manipulated national currencies... no, thanks!), but to drastically reduce the power of the European Central Bank.

One/some/several “entities” decided at 9:38 a.m. this morning that it was necessary to dump 14,315 contracts of paper gold. This is just the August contract. In total a lot more was unloaded. This represents 1.43 million ozs of gold.

The Deutsche Bank trader, David Liew, pleaded guilty in federal court in Chicago to conspiring to spoof gold, silver, platinum and palladium futures, according to court papers.

Is there gold price manipulation going on? Absolutely. There’s no question about it. Now, where is the manipulation coming from?

The best time to buy an asset is when it is unloved and undervalued like gold and silver were in the early 2000s. What few investors realise is that the current levels of gold and silver, when real inflation is taken into account, are very similar to where the metals were in 2000-2002.

Banks are definitely no longer the sanctuaries they once were. Following the threats of draining bank accounts (BRRD, Sapin Law 2), cyber threats will make headlines in the years to come.

For $1,260, an investor will get a piece of paper saying he owns 1 ounce of gold. But he is unlikely to ever see that gold.

The very real prospect of negative equity returns over the next decade alone provides a compelling case for using gold as a hedge, and investors seeking capital preservation may wish to include the metal in their asset allocation.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook are valued at $2.8 trillion. That is twice Russia’s GDP and 42% (71,000 tonnes) of all the gold ever produced.

The best time to enter is when an investment is unloved and undervalued but few have the courage to do that.