http://www.silverdoctors.com/latest-raid-sends-gold-to-1580-silver-to-28-50/#more-22409
and.......
http://www.caseyresearch.com/gsd/edition/cnbcs-santelli-gets-it-paper-gold-suppresses-the-price-of-real-gold/
LATEST RAID SENDS GOLD TO $1580, SILVER TO $28.50
After a brief 2 day reprieve Tuesday and Wednesday, your regularly scheduled COMEX gold and silver raid is back, with
and.......
http://www.caseyresearch.com/gsd/edition/cnbcs-santelli-gets-it-paper-gold-suppresses-the-price-of-real-gold/
¤ YESTERDAY IN GOLD & SILVER
The gold price came under slow but steady selling pressure the moment that the metal began to trade in the Far East on their Wednesday. This rate of decline continued until exactly 12:30 p.m. in New York...and at the point, the selling pressure intensified a bit...and in just a few minutes, the gold price was back below the $1,600 spot price mark...where it traded for the rest of the Comex and electronic trading sessions.
The high tick was at the open on Tuesday night in New York...and the low price tick [$1,591.30 spot] was printed about fifteen minutes before the Comex close on Wednesday afternoon.
Gold closed at $1,596.30 spot...down $18.40 on the day...giving back almost its entire gain from Tuesday. Gross volume was pretty heavy at 196,000 contracts.
The silver price was down a bit over 20 cents by shortly after 9:00 a.m. Hong Kong time on their Wednesday...and it stayed there until about 9:40 a.m. in New York. From that point it came under more selling pressure...and its low price tick [$28.77 spot] came around 3:00 p.m. Eastern time, before recovering a bit into the 5:15 p.m. electronic close.
Silver finished the Wednesday session back under the $29 spot price mark at $28.98...giving up all its gains from Tuesday, plus a few pennies more. Net volume was pretty heavy...around 57,500 contracts. I would guess that most of that would be spread trades in the new front month for silver, which is May.
The dollar index opened at 81.85 on Wednesday morning in Far East trading...and hung around that price until 11:00 a.m. Hong Kong time. From the high tick [81.90] the index headed lower...hitting its nadir [81.50] just after 4:00 p.m. in New York, before recovering a hair into the close. The index closed at 81.56...down 29 basis points from Tuesday. Obviously there was no correlation between the dollar index and the precious metals once again.
* * *
The CME's last Daily Delivery Report for February showed no delivery activity. For the month as a whole, there were 13,070 gold contracts posted for delivery within the Comex-approved depositories...and in silver it was 454 contracts, which is pretty impressive for a non-delivery month in that metal.
First Day Notice numbers for 'Day 1' of the March delivery month showed that 1,383 gold and 799 silver contracts were posted for delivery on Friday within the Comex-approved depositories. In gold, it was all JPMorgan Chase as short/issuer, with 1,150 contracts from their client account...and an additional 233 contracts from their proprietary [in house] trading account. It was Canada's Bank of Nova Scotia as the biggest long/stopper with 1,327 contracts.
There were three short/issuers in silver. Canada's Bank of Nova Scotia with 440 contracts, Jefferies with 239 contracts...and ABN Amro with 120 contracts. The biggest long/stopper by far was JPMorgan Chase with 496 contracts...355 in their in-house trading account and 141 in their client account. In second place was Credit Suisse with 152 contracts...and in distant third was Jefferies with 68 contracts...plus a dozen or so small players on the long/stopper side.
Yesterday's Issuers and Stoppers Report is definitely worth spending a minute of your time on...and the link is here.
Over at GLD, there was more metal withdrawn again yesterday. This time it was 360,101 troy ounces. But over at the SLV ETF, they reported that an authorized participant added 483,345 troy ounces.
The new short positions in both SLV and GLD for mid-February were posted on theshortsqueeze.com Internet site very late last night Eastern time. It showed that the short position in SLV increased by 14.13%...a bit over a million shares/ounces...and the naked short position in SLV now sits at 8.33 million ounces, or 2.44%. In the grand scheme of things, this is an insignificant amount...but still shouldn't be allowed to exist nonetheless.
The short position in GLD declined by 3.12%...which represents a hair under 600,000 shares, or about 60,000 ounces. The new short position in GLD now sits at 19,415,500 shares. This represents 4.80% of the outstanding shares in GLD...a not-so-insignificant amount.
The U.S. Mint had a tiny sales report yesterday, as they only sold 2,500 ounces of gold eagles...and nothing else.
Over at the Comex-approved depositories on Tuesday, they reported receiving 1,067,045 troy ounces of silver...and shipped 15,533 troy ounces of the stuff out the door. The link to that activity ishere.
I must have been asleep at the switch about a week ago, as I forgot about the monthly update of gold reserves by The Central Bank of the Russian Federation. This update occurred on February 20th...but better late than never, I suppose...and I thank Nick Laird for his most excellent chart. The bank added another 400,000 troy ounces of gold to their monetary reserves in January.
* * *
selected news and views items.....
Stalling for Time: Greek Reform Effort Slows to a Crawl
The troika is back in Athens this week and with all eyes on Italy, Greece feels it has little to fear. But important reforms have stalled and the government's belt-tightening efforts seem paralyzed. Politicians are playing for time and hoping for fresh money.The troika mission has returned to Greece, but this time things are different. No front page headlines are warning about new painful demands made by Greece's international creditors, no government officials are pleading for unity in the three-party coalition in support of unpopular measures. And there is no overhanging fear of a long drawn-out process of evaluation, full of innuendos about a catastrophic default or euro-zone exit.
For the moment, Europe is watching developments in Italy. Following the election debacle there, concerns have reawakened that the euro crisis might return. The Greek government, on the other hand, is confident that the inspection started on Monday by the troika -- comprised of officials from the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- will be over by March 10 and will approve the release of the next two tranches of bailout aid -- €2.8 billion in March and a further €6 billion in April. No one seems to fear a repetition of the drama of the previous troika inspection, which lasted a full five months.
This article appeared on the German website spiegel.de late yesterday morning Europe time...and my thanks go out to Roy Stephens once again.
Former Greek Mayor Gets Life Sentence for Embezzlement
A Greek court sentenced a former mayor to life in prison on Wednesday for embezzling about
€20 million euros - US$26.15 million - half of his city's public works budget - underlining the depth of corruption that helped tip Greece into a debt crisis.
Vassilis Papageorgopoulos was mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece's second city, from 1999 to 2010 after serving as deputy sports minister in the early 1990s.
Prosecutors began probing the city's accounts after complaints that millions of euros were missing. One of the main suspects gave evidence against the former mayor.
This New York Times story from late yesterday morning Eastern time was posted on their website late yesterday morning...and it's courtesy of Phil Barlett.
Yuan Overtakes Ruble as World Payments Currency: SWIFT
For the first time, China’s yuan has overtaken the Russian ruble for transactions in the global payment system, according to Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a financial messaging platform.
The use of the yuan increased 24 percent in January from December and 171 percent from a year ago, while that of the ruble declined 5.4 percent on the month, the Belgium-based SWIFT said in a report today. The Chinese currency accounted for an all-time high of 0.63 percent of the global payments, making it the 13th most-used currency, compared with 0.56 percent for the ruble, now the 15th most-used. The euro leads the list, followed by the U.S. dollar and British pound.
China, the world’s second-largest economy, is promoting the role of the yuan, also known as RMB, in international trading and financing as it moves to reduce the control over its currency and open up its financial markets. Trading of the yuan outside the mainland has at least doubled to $6 billion a day from a year earlier, said Charles Feng, regional head for fixed- income trading at Standard Chartered Plc. in Hong Kong, last month.
This Bloomberg story was filed from Hong Kong mid-morning Mountain time yesterday...and I thank Ulrike Marx for sending it along.
Three King World News Blogs
The first blog is with Kevin Wides...and it's titled "Key Charts Which Predict a Violent Move Higher in the Metals". Next comes Rick Rule...and it's headlined "This is How You Can Make a Fortune in Gold Right Now". And lastly is this commentary with Richard Russell. It bears the title "Gold, Silver Stocks and Collapsing Incomes".
Egon von Greyerz: Will gold soon be regulated?
Reflecting on gold vaulter VIA MAT's rejection of U.S. customers, Swiss gold fund manager Egon von Greyerz argues that Switzerland remains the safest domicile for gold holdings. Von Greyerz's commentary is headlined "Will Gold Soon Be Regulated"? and it's posted at the Gold Switzerland Internet site.
I found this story embedded in a GATA release yesterday.
CNBC's Santelli gets it: 'Paper gold' suppresses the price of real gold
CNBC's Rick Santelli today sounded like a certified tin-foil hat wearer in GATA's peanut gallery during his interview of Frank Lesh of Chicago's FuturePath Trading. "Paper gold," securitized gold, pretty much defeats the purpose of investing in gold in the first place, Santelli said, insofar as it may be hard to tell if there really is any gold behind the paper.
Chris Powell has more to say about this in a GATA release he posted yesterday...but the first reader through the door with this news item yesterday was Washington state reader S.A.
* * *
¤ THE WRAP
History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance. - James Madison
Well, the big gains in both gold and silver during the Comex trading session in New York on Tuesday, were slowly whittled away to nothing yesterday. Yesterday was also the last day to roll out of the March delivery month for gold and silver...and it's hard to tell what really transpired under the hood from a volume perspective, as month-end volume/roll-overs pretty much buried any hint of what may or may not have happened during the Wednesday trading session.
Of course the gold stocks really stunk up the place...as the HUI lost all of its Tuesday gain, and a bit more...and even though silver closed up 45 cents on Tuesday, the stocks were done on that day...and got sold off again yesterday.
Here's the 3-year Gold Miners Bullish Percent Index that Nitin Agrawal sent around late last evening...and it's really depressing to look at, but there's no point in trying to hide all the warts out there at the moment.
Tomorrow we get the new Commitment of Traders Report...and I'm expecting it be quite something to see...and I'll have comments about it in my Saturday column.
Trading volume in the Far East was pretty decent during their Thursday...and the weak attempt by gold to break above the $1,600 spot price mark got turned away the moment that London began to trade. As of 3:40 a.m. Eastern time, volume in silver is already very decent as well, with virtually all of the trading activity in the new front month, which is May. The dollar index has been chopping sideways all night.
And as I hit the 'send' button at 5:05 a.m. Eastern time, both gold and silver at one point were trading below their low price ticks they set in New York yesterday...and volumes have increased sharply since the London open. Gold volume is north of 42,000 contracts...and silver is already over 9,000 contracts. But based on the lack of price action, I'd guess a lot of this would be of the high-frequency trading variety. The dollar index, which had been down a hair before, is now up a hair.
Where we go from here...and how fast we get there...is a big unknown at the moment. We'll just have to wait and see what the new month brings...and what JPMorgan et al have in store for us.
See you tomorrow.
Mexico pushing to determine whether its gold is secure at the Bank of England - wonder if Banxico complies with the Audit " recommendation " and if so , what's in the BOE vaults for Mexico ? Do they swiftly do a Chavez and pull their gold ?
No comments:
Post a Comment