Rates

We often talk in these pages about the difficult situation facing Europe’s southern countries, but the financial crisis is also affecting countries that are considered sound and that have a good reputation. This is the case with Austria, facing difficulties with its banking sector.

In this article, I will look at the importance of India in the gold market. In India, gold is religion. India's love affair with gold is timeless, spanning centuries even millennia.

Mario Draghi came out with several announcements on June 5 which have been very well received by pundits. These measures are supposed to encourage banks to make loans to businesses and, thus, help in sustaining the recovery. Let’s see what these measures really entail.

We cannot understand today’s gold market without understanding the role China and, in a different way, India play in it. The gold market in general is very opaque and the Chinese one, in particular, is even more. In this article, I will look at China’s role in the gold market.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) just published a statistical study on the amount of derivatives worldwide at the end of 2013, and they reach the astronomical amount of $710 Trillions ($710,000,000,000,000).

With the help of a few graphs, going from the very long term to the short-term, let us look at gold and silver’s performance since the beginning of the 19th century.

The mechanism used to determine the price of gold and silver, the London fix, is under pressure and China, of course, wants to take advantage of this situation to have more to say on the way precious metals prices should be determined in the future.

There always is this media noise, constantly repeating itself, about optimistic growth predictions, but only real results should count, and they are not good at all.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Germany’s central bank would accept a move by the ECB in June if the outlook on inflation warrants it. The Buba now is siding with the general assumption that we have to fight deflation risks by turning on the printing press.

They say that gold is a geopolitical metal. Gold is real money with no counterparty risk and, furthermore, an excellent wealth preserver in time and space. Like fiat currencies (dollar, euro, yen, Yuan etc.), gold’s price is also influenced by political events, especially those having an internat...