The Oil Drum

106 comments on DrumBeat: June 2, 2006

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IFeelFree on June 2, 2006 - 2:17pm

If central banks around the world are going to diversify out of the U.S. dollar, an interesting question is where will they put their money? It seems likely that some portion of the money will go into gold. Even if there is a deflationary collapse (not likely, in my opinion) gold will probably hold up reasonably well, as people may seek a safe haven. If there is inflation, we may see a repeat of the 1970s, except that gold could go much higher.

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tate423 on June 2, 2006 - 2:32pm

Someone posted a gold article detailing the argument between is gold money or a store of value? With 6.5 Billion people on the planet how many have to assume that gold is worth more than my fiat money to make me want gold too? There will be demand for gold.

Markets are irrational. Gold is the worst. According to many models is follows a random walk and you can not predict the price necessarily like a security with pro forma cash flows. So instead many times you have to hold on to your fundamentals and wait to be proven right. That can be a problem though as you may be right about the end point, but wrong about when. Many times it's about playing the people. In the case of the dollar, I think it's a high stakes game of chicken as many around the world are starting to get nervous about the worlds largest economy.

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enviro attny on June 2, 2006 - 9:49pm

In regards to precious metals, there was a very strange announcement by NYMEX today.

http://www.nymex.com/press_releas.aspx?id=pr20060602a

The New York Mercantile Exchange, Inc. today announced that the COMEX Division has eliminated price fluctuation limits for all COMEX contracts beginning with the NYMEX ACCESS® session on Sunday, June 4 for trade date June 5.

This change was made in order to better facilitate the core functions of price discovery and hedging provided by COMEX products.

This is one of those announcements, like the M3 reporting announcment, that only makes sense if something very, very funny is going on. If I had a little more tin foil in my hat, I would say that this means that the PTB are going to crash the market for PMs in order to eliminate their shorts, then scoop up all remaining gold and silver in storage. Eliminating the price limits would allow this to happen almost instantly and prevent the general public from participating. I am sure, however, that thinking is insane and they are really making the change "in order to better facilitate the core functions of price discovery and hedging", whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.

Keep an eye on gold and silver Sunday at 7 when the ACCESS trading starts. It might be interesting.