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The week of October 23-28th saw gold gain some 6.8%, trading as high at $1751.99 on Friday before falling back a few dollars at the close of trading in New York.
This past week saw rallies in all the precious metals. Silver, after looking down the abyss of sub-$30 trading on the morning of 10/21/11, promptly began a sharp move upwards, gaining some 17% in those same six trading days, closing close Friday well above the $35 mark.
Paradoxes prevailed in metals market – markets saw copper up some 14.2% in an optimistic week’s time. But not all was rosy in the world of industrial metals: iron ore prices tumbled some 19% as Chinese end-users stayed away from that market. Chalk up the contrast as a sign of the times.
Whereas gold had been moving in correlation with equities markets for much of the past few months, the action over the past few weeks seems to indicate that the parallel price action of stocks and gold was, at least for the time being, winding down.
James Steel, a precious metals analyst at HSBC, was quoted in this weekend’s (10/29-30/11) Financial Times:
“If gold is decoupling from risk assets, as we believe may be the case, we would expect a shift to gold resuming a more traditional role as a safe-haven asset.”
All trading activity seems to have been driven by developments in Europe, a situation that can accurately be described as an ongoing fiscal crisis. Solutions? Well, quite a bit of the discussion centered on holders of Greek bonds putting their heads on the chopping block, all the better to receive a 50% ‘haircut’ in the value of their holdings.
But, wait – it’s Halloween and things get even grislier than that, at least according to Clive Maund, in his “Gold Market Update” from October 30th:
“No politician wants to end up with his head adorning the railings of some public building, and thus - possibly spurred into action by the video of the grisly end of Colonel Gaddafi - European leaders started to display qualities normally totally alien to them last week, in particular unity and resolve and a rare sense of urgency, in dealing with the acute crisis facing Europe. It did not go as far as statesmanship, however, because that would involve actually dealing with the root causes of the crisis, although with the best will in the world it's too late for that, so instead, predictably, they decided to fall in line with the tried and tested US solution to all economic problems, which is to print money and sell more debt - if they can find anyone dumb enough to buy it, that is, and a nice touch later in the week was the sight of a European representative going cap in hand to meet people with real hard cash in their pockets, the Chinese. In short, they decided to "kick the can down the road" like everybody else….
….Needless to say, the news that Europe is set to wholeheartedly embrace the economic principles of the likes of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and refill the punch bowl with a gusto set the markets ablaze. Markets love inflation, hate deflation - they love unlimited liquidity and an expanding money supply - so what if money loses its value? - that's only a problem for the little guy shopping for food and gas.”
There. That’s enough of that scary story, don’t you think? Anyway, happy Halloween to one and all.
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