Financial markets

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.

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.

The price of gold took a determined upward trajectory in the middle week of May as several U.S. indexes dropped to their lowest levels since Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party swept the national elections.

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 bottom line is gold’s sharp pullback in recent weeks was sparked by a series of gold-futures shorting attacks.

The big worry for the markets is the fact that anti-Euro candidate Marin Le Pen could potentially win.

Over the past few weeks several political and geopolitical factors goaded safe haven assets higher, providing a particularly positive environment for gold and helping to push it past this fairly important resistance.

The price of gold entered 2017’s Easter long weekend on a five-month high in response to a cascade of geopolitical events and mid-week comments by United States President Donald J. Trump.

The US owes the world 453,000 tonnes of gold which is almost 3 times all the gold ever produced in history.