Piggybank

Dominic Frisby talking to Ross Norman (albeit before the Iran attack)
Interesting reading

 
At least, I didn’t think that the price action was particularly abnormal until I spoke to my mate Ross Norman of Metals Daily yesterday. We had a long chat, and he is very concerned about what is going on. He thinks something big is afoot. I have to say, when it comes to gold price action, I bow to Ross. He has been at the coalface all his life. Current prices are a long way from traditional buyers, he says.
 
In the 1970s, the Hunt Brothers accumulated extraordinary amounts of silver so that by 1979 they had nearly cornered the market. The silver price famously rose from $11/oz in September 1979 to $50 in January 1980. It then collapsed all the way back to $11 and below. The Hunt brothers were charged with manipulating the market and eventually filed for bankruptcy.
Obviously, the gold market is many times bigger than silver was, but Ross thinks that this price action is not normal and that there is a huge - perhaps even Hunt-Brother-huge - options trade somewhere behind it. I’ve spoken to others at the LBMA and the World Gold Council and they think the same. 
 
A normal gold market would have corrected after this week’s "strong inflation data prompted the dollar and 10-year Treasury yields to rally, casting strong doubts about a June Fed rate cut,” he told me. Gold ignored it.
The buying is not coming from physical demand in the West. That has "absolutely cratered." "US Mint sales of gold eagles in March 2024,” for example, “are down 96% year on year." ETFs have been seeing net outflows, especially with the listing of the bitcoin ETFs, and "shed 15% of their total holdings." Chinese demand is hot, but that is offset by weaker than usual Indian demand. "Flow of gold to Asia is currently 'good but not exceptional' ... and therefore not sufficient to propel gold to current levels." Global Central Bank purchases have also eased. In any case, central bank buying tends to be much more measured, unless a bank is buying in a hurry.
He discounts the idea that a sovereign state is behind the move, maybe a BRICs nation along the ongoing 'de-dollarization story'. "They tend to buy on the benchmark (or fix), and these purchases are not. For a move of this scale, we would have expected physical transfer amounting to several hundred tonnes - and there is no evidence of that." London physical gold holdings are actually up a little.
A lot of people are scratching their heads about this.
What about the options market? While there have been some large trades on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange with high strike prices, they are "not really sufficient to drive the market much higher." So that just leaves the murky world of Over-the-Counter (OTC) Markets, which "seems to have been corroborated today by the LBMA data. Someone has evidently made a monumental bet on the gold market via the OTC options market."
Golden bean counters at the LBMA are crunching the data, as I write, also trying to figure out what is going on. As this is the OTC market, we don't know "precise volumes, strike prices, or expiry dates ... all we know is it appears to be extremely significant in size. A well-known hedge fund did precisely this back in the early 2000s with enormous success." I'm hearing numbers as big as 50-100 million ounces. That would be 1,500 - 2,500 tonnes. China's entire official holdings, to put those figures in context, and many times the UK's. Huge, if true. 
Here's the thing, when those calls expire, the gold market, as Ross says, "will quickly discover gravity." We just don't know when
       
 

Don't panic, guys, don't panic!

Anyone here ?

WARNING: TL:DR
Is the current gold rush sustainable?
A better question:
Are the sovereign debts of the US, EU, UK and China sustainable?
Gold is essentially the inverse of debt - when debt accelerates, gold goes up
We talk a lot about China buying gold but don't spend a lot of time fully investigating why. Is it BRICS? Is it a communist master plan of de-dollarisation? 
No, the CCP and Chinese financial system are doing it out of necessity, same as the rest of us. China has printed more money than the western world combined. The Chinese are in a desperate scramble to swap their currency for something a bit more, you know, valuable, like oil (Saudis) and gold
The local and regional banks in the Chinese system have been instructed to stack physical gold as a hedge against their property market and manufacturing sector. That's why there's a premium on physical gold in China - they don't just want it for political purposes, they need that gold for their survival
Despite the insanity going on in the USA with a POTUS more interested in pronouns than profits, it will be China's currency that goes to the wall first. When you hear commentators talk about de-dollarisation and the end of American hegemony, don't forget the studies show the USD will be the LAST currency to fail. The USD might not survive a great deal longer than other currencies but the Euro, Yen, GBP and RMB will collapse before the USD collapses. 
The concept of de-dollarisation is global, global financial collapse. Peter Schiff talks a lot about the collapse of the US but fails to provide a credible successor, other than the usual talk of currency revaluation vs metals (making gold and silver stupendously valuable like buying a mansion for a tube of silver Britannias)
Many have posted here before that the ATH for gold when adjusted for inflation is well north of $3,000. We can hit $3,000/oz without breaking sweat. 
If we use shadowstats or alternative metrics we can say the inflation-adjusted ATH is actually >$5,400:
https://www.bullionvault.com/gold-news/gold_price_inflation_010620119
We can go well beyond that with debt creation and inflation, with market expectations for debt to accelerate when the central banks cut rates. The debt burden is unsustainable. The only tool available to service that debt is to erode the real terms burden with inflation -> pump gold. It's not just sovereign debt but the robustness of corporate debt in general is starting to worry people. The commercial real estate debt component is a ticking time bomb
Rate cuts will be global. Nobody will cut before the Fed cuts unless they specifically want to encourage inflation (like Japan) or have an economic crisis, but once our global overlord flicks the switch, everybody else will likely follow. 
There is an argument for the BoE not cutting, allowing GBP to appreciate and using that as a tool to battle inflation. The penalty for that might be domestic recession and financial burden on mortgagees and borrowers, including the government itself. We'd also be living in cloud cuckoo land, identifying as a nation that can service its debts without inflation. The ugly truth is that inflation is essential to all sovereign governments due to the chronic corruption and mismanagement of previous regimes over several decades. 
If gold kept up its recent price action (adding 8%/month) for a full year then gold would be close to that $5400 inflation-adjusted ATH
Will gold keep up this pace? Theoretically it can but it would require some sort of additional catalyst IMHO
I have no doubt gold will continue to go up and the price is justified, my worry is does everybody else know this? How much of the recent price action is speculative and can be reversed vs sticky long term physical stacking?
If gold is the ultimate security, a stable store of real wealth, it's hard to justify rapid appreciations without expecting some sort of reversal. If a rapid appreciation (2.5x current price minimum) is justified then it tells us that the global financial system is close to the end times. That has all sorts of ramifications with the most likely one being a repeat of the 1930s (Great Depression - WWII)
We will get a better indicator this summer. The current price action while fun isn't of great importance. If gold continues to go up this summer then either we go to the moon when the central banks cut or it's been a paper scam, buy the rumour sell the news. A more gradual appreciation of metals is preferable to manic price action that causes global instability. High volatility does not favour us, it favours traders and the super wealthy (volatility = profit)
Gold might temporarily make you a king (Rafi Farber-style) but gold is not for getting wealthy, it is for preserving wealth

Some background information for those who still believe that there is gold in Fort Knox.

  1.   No audit has been performed at Fort Knox since 1950s. Some in the bullion industry have highlighted this and are highly sceptical that there is real stuff in the vault

  2.   Gold (400oz bars) shipped to Hong Kong, believed to have originated from the US were filled with tungsten. It was uncovered when assaying was performed and it broke the drill
 
Rob Kirby, one of my favourite market analyst who sadly passed away wrote about item #2 some years ago.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article14996.html
........ reports of 400 oz. “good delivery” bricks of gold found gutted and filled with tungsten within the confines of LBMA approved vaults in Hong Kong.
Why Tungsten?
If anyone were contemplating creating “fake” gold bars, tungsten [at roughly $10 per pound] would be the metal of choice since it has the exact same density as gold making a fake bar salted with tungsten indistinguishable from a solid gold bar by simply weighing it.
Unfortunately, there are now more sordid details to report. When the news of tungsten “salted” gold bars in Hong Kong first surfaced, many people who I am acquainted with automatically assumed that these bars were manufactured in China – because China is generally viewed as “the knock-off capital of the world”. 
Here’s what I now understand really happened:
The amount of “salted tungsten” gold bars in question was allegedly between 5,600 and 5,700 – 400 oz – good delivery bars [roughly 60 metric tonnes].  This was apparently all highly orchestrated by an extremely well financed criminal operation. Within mere hours of this scam being identified – Chinese officials had many of the perpetrators in custody.
And here’s what the Chinese allegedly uncovered:
Roughly 15 years ago – during the Clinton Administration [think Robert Rubin, Sir Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers] – between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten blanks were allegedly manufactured by a very high-end, sophisticated refiner in the USA [more than 16 Thousand metric tonnes].  Subsequently, 640,000 of these tungsten blanks received their gold plating and WERE shipped to Ft. Knox and remain there to this day.  I know folks who have copies of the original shipping docs with dates and exact weights of “tungsten” bars shipped to Ft. Knox.

The value of gold is not changing, it's the price of fiat currency that is going down.

Agreed
The BBC triggered me in recent years by claiming I was a far-right extremist! Only 20 years ago I would have been described by the BBC as a centrist, maybe even centre-left. It's not me that has changed it is the BBC. Now instead of documentaries about the bravery of our servicemen in WWII, we've given lectures about the bravery of a user on X who has transitioned from a woman into a seahorse. We're not allowed to drive combustion vehicles, not allowed to leave the EU, must support terrorists like Sinn Fein IRA and Hamas. Paying for the BBC is like paying a sponsorship to a far-left neo-Marxist political organisation
I might get ridiculed but I pay the BBC license as there are people in my house who want it. I also pay for Sky and TNT, sometimes Amazon. At least I've avoided Netflix 🤗

Nothing to see here, nothing to see..

Because you're paying the BBC to give you a blast propagandised view of events. If they were impartial and actually did proper journalism then people would be happy to pay. But to have them peddle the lies from the government... erm no. That's why I don't even have a TV. 

It's morally repugnant but we are not a moral society - we operate under Common Law. Our Common Law is based on a moral code - Christianity - but we are not an explicitly Christian nation nor are we a theocracy. We are a secular nation. In this example the only thing that matters is the law
The law of the UK forbids the sale of fake or counterfeit precious metals. There are severe penalties for violations (maximum unlimited fine, 2 years in prison for a business owner)
The terms and conditions of eBay forbid the sale of fakes or replicas
Therefore these items should not be for sale on eBay by law, which is a separate issue from morality in a secular state (theocracies include KSA, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, Vatican City, Mauritania and Afghanistan)

The seller in question is selling other coins that are not original. Regardless of what he put lower down in his gold listing your listing heading should be accurate. The idea also that in as few words as possible to include words that will be picked up in any search. Anyone who thinks they are getting a sovereign for the price listed either hasn’t got a clue or is being rather hopeful and probably gets what they deserve. The question here isn’t really why is this person ripping people off, rather, why are people buying this …. or is something else turning up in the post?🤔🫢

I can't see how that listing could be considered honest.
The headline description of the lot is a lie. It's one thing to clarify something (eg condition) in the longer description below, but it's another to try to get away with stating something that actually contradicts it.
Also, since the 1899 sov is still legal tender, doesn't that make any realistic "replica" a fake?

I've only just heard that my friendly local coin dealer - the chap who introduced me to gold sovereigns a couple of months ago - has just been the victim of a most heinous crime. In the early hours of New Years Eve a professional gang of thieves ram-raided his lovely little coin and stamp shop in the next town. They literally backed up the truck and made off with his safe. Poor chap is utterly devastated to say nothing of the damage caused both physically and emotionally. I don't know if I can do anything except raise awareness of the incident, maybe if we see any 'unusual activity' in people trying to offload large amounts of bullion that we can flag it here and maybe pass it on to the police for investigation.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-12920333/EDEN-CONFIDENTIAL-Paddington-star-Nick-Lumley-wife-left-horrified-vicious-gold-raid-door-house-leaves-hole-living-room-wall.html

Lot 1   £226

Lot 1   £226

Think an intermediary @Zeton and @CoinBug would be in order.
Just my opinion.

I would like to buy batch 1 with the pandas please @LongJohnSilver.
If I can be of some assistance to move on the other things I am happy to put in the effort.
I would also be happy to take everything from you and post things individually on your behalf. I would only charge the buyer the actual Royal Mail price of postage, and all funds for the silver go directly to you. This I can do straight away. I would however leave advertising/listing to you.
If this is of help to you.
If you would prefer me to do a more comprehensive service including communications etc, this would have to wait until mid January as I am busy until then.

This, and that.

Count me in.

Count me in.

Count me in.

Public Statement (relates to NBS): Why I am not the real Christmas Scrooge
Firstly: The main purpose of TSF is not to make money, and TSF was not set up to make money. Which is perhaps why it is a successful forum and one of the largest English speaking platforms for precious metals enthusiasts. We therefore have no hesitation in removing accounts that are deliberately trying to cause issues or upset the balance of the forum.

The vast majority of regular members however are extremely helpful to the community here and wish for the forum to succeed and have been generous enough to support the forum with a Premium Membership and specifically Platinum Group Premium Memberships.
 

TSF is however still a business and one of my main sources of income, which creates a very small modest income after taxes for the vast amount of hours I have put into the forum. And which sometimes operates some months at a loss and I need to put money into the forum. There are a lot of members who profit more from the existence of the forum than the forum itself makes. The success of the forum also affects others who I have outsourced work to for other projects to help them, and who also rely on the finance success of the forum. 
I do not own any large amounts of gold or silver other than the TSF branded rounds/bars as anytime I have purchased some precious metals I have ended up selling it in order to invest into the forum as our costs (especially development and maintenance of existing custom applications/plugins regularly exceeds the small revenue which TSF generates month to month. TSF is not VAT registered as we do not even make enough revenue to hit that small limit currently, which shows how little profit it can make)

As I have stated before I believe that members should be able to discuss a wide range of topics as long as they remain respectful to other members and have on many occasions defended the existence of the NBS topic where I believe members should be able to relax in a slightly more informal section of the forum. I have however politely asked that it doesn’t spill out into the precious metals section of the forum and ruin the forum experience for other members.  This has repeatedly been broken over the last 5-6 months, despite many pleads to keep the NBS style posts strictly to the NBS topic. In fairness the fast majority of members posting in the NBS have been respectful and have followed my requests, thank you for this.

This has created a continue increased amount of Admin workload and there have been many posts which I have missed (as I am unable to read everything) In order to help keep the forum tidy and respectful we have outsourced an AdminSupport @AdminSupport

I would still like the NBS topic to remain, as per the clear rules set out.

As stated in the NBS topic*:
There will be some sort of promotional offer during this time. (please do continue reading the full post below, and specially the however part below) 
 
Sorry if anyone feels that the new change is a ‘money grab’ and comparable to the ULEZ. But the decision was purely an administrative decision to try to reduce the repeated issues of the NBS style posts flowing into the precious metals sections and trade section, and the continue headache I have to deal with reports and issues. Our costs (both the amount of time myself needs to put into Moderation opposed to focusing on growing the forum and other projects, as well as outsourcing someone to help have also increased our costs) As the vast majority of members in the NBS topic are already Platinum Group Premium Members I do not think it is much of an ask. As previously stated there will also be a generous offer for those who wish to consider upgrading, and as members who have been here a long time will understand I am more than generous with helping members. Platinum Premium Membership if paid annually in GBP is only £8.25 per month.
 
Trade topics do not need to mention ********* woman, or any of your hidden desires which should be kept private and not publicly announced in trade topics. There is absolutely no need for such crude remarks. And we believe it is perfectly acceptable to ask members not to post trade topics with such titles. TSF can remain a fun place without this needing to affect the trade section and precious metals section of the forum.

Scantily dressed photos of women should not be posted on the forum (though we have allowed this in the NBS topic providing it does not breach the rules on pornography)
I am trying to keep the forum stable and pleasant for for all members including our members and official sponsors who are female, please remember this when posting on the forum and remain respectful. It is a public precious metals forum, not a gentleman’s private club. And there is the NBS topic remains for members to join in some fun and banter, please do continue to keep the NBS style posts strictly to that topic and thank you to the members who do. 

I am unsure why some wish to be disruptive or deliberately try to damage the forum, or to try to publicly create unbalance or resentment against myself or the forum, I am merely trying to keep the forum stable and ensure the long term survival. Sometimes I may be very busy and replies may be short, direct and to the point. This in no way is an indication that I do not care about the forum or about you, or about the community here. I am merely overworked and overstressed and trying to effectively deal with the tasks at hand as efficiently as possible. There may also be some cultural differences.

There is a clear safe place for members to joke around (within reason) and have banter in, and I have asked repeatedly to keep such posts in that particular NBS topic.
 
We want members to have fun. And overall the forum is generally a very relaxed environment with a large amount of freedom given to members. The problem comes when members ruin the forum experience for others, some members only wish to engage in precious metals content or to buy and sell, which is why we released the default activity feed to not include the NBS topic (this can be changed and saved as per members settings to also include as written in the NBS)
 
In order to improve the member experience and account support there is a new account AdminSupport @AdminSupport, they will automatically be added to any private message conversations started with me or ones where I am added to, so that we can respond to you account enquires as quickly as possible. They will also be helping with moderation to help keep the forum tidy.

This will also have the advantage of improving the member experience as account related questions can be answered in a more timely manner. This is in addition to the Moderators that we have that help out on the forum, many thanks to all the moderators and especially @trp for recently organising the Christmas Draws and helping out on the forum a lot  

*however:

Due to the current economic climate and the fact that it is Christmas and I do not wish to be labeled as scrooge this year, in an unheard of 180 degree turn I have decided to revoke my previous decision in reaction to members breaching the NBS terms and will keep to the original plan of Gold and above as outlined nearly 6 months ago. This will ensure that anyone wishing to engage in the NBS topic only needs to have Gold or above and does not need a Platinum Level Premium Membership. But we hope that members can appreciate and understand our situation, both from a cost and time perspective. Thank you to those members who continually respect the forums rules and the NBS guidelines and who keep such posts strictly to this section of the forum. Thank you to all members who help keep the forum tidy and who report posts so that we can tidy the forum and keep it pleasant for all. 

I also have not only my own finances or the forums to worry about but other people who I have outsourced work to in order to help them and have these responsibilities, which can add stress to an already sometimes stressful 😰 (but mostly very enjoyable) role dealing with (mostly very) lovely people  

Once again many thanks to all members who decide to support TSF with Premium Membership and especially those who choose a Platinum Group Premium Membership. We understand, and can feel it ourselves how the recent costs of living (especially in Europe but also worldwide) have affected many people’s finances making the cost of living much higher. I myself have moved to try to take advantage of price arbitrage in order to afford the cost of life.

We hope that you all have a very Merry Christmas with friends and family

Hey all hope everyone is doing well.
So this December the organisers of the Vegas coin show have invited me over as a guest artist. I've been looking forward to this for a few months now and can't wait to represent uk poured silver as the first uk artist to attend 
If any of our american friends on the forum will he attending feel free to drop me a message as hoping to meet as many people as possible.
I'm flying out next Wednesday and will be I'm Vegas through till Monday evening 
Pics of the bars ive designed and made for the show 
Have a great week all