12 February 2016

On the absurdity of buying gold

Izabella Kaminska Feb 11 11:18am: "all evidence points to a serious network-wide issue that’s spiralling out of control ... the root cause of the insecurity is the increased pressure on banks to make their systems as user friendly as the systems of non-bank challengers ... even if the latter don’t necessarily have the same quality of checks and balances in place ... the real cost for banks might not even be associated with the rise of successful fraud attacks on the network but rather the missed business opportunities associated with contaminated data profiles"


Izabella Kaminska

Monetary Metals Hires Bron Suchecki

Yep, you read right, I have resigned from the Perth Mint, see announcement below. Looking forward to being able to do some innovative stuff in the gold "space". Will be based in Perth but will get to enjoy the TSA experience a few times a year.


https://monetary-metals.com/monetary-metals-hires-bron-suchecki/


Scottsdale, AZ—Monetary Metals is pleased to announce that it has hired Bron Suchecki as Vice President, Operations. Bron will help the company develop new products and processes.


“We are excited to be able to attract someone of Bron’s caliber. We are growing to serve many customer opportunities, and Bron is a key part of our team,” said Keith Weiner, the CEO.


Bron leaves a management position at the Perth Mint, where he has become widely known over 20 years there. His areas of expertise include the physical side of the bullion business, risk management, and market analysis.


Bron will help the company grow its fund and market letter business, and develop additional products as part of the Monetary Metals vision.

About Monetary Metals
Monetary Metals is the leading company in gold investments, offering investors a gold yield on their gold. The company also publishes much of its groundbreaking proprietary research, to help the investment community better understand gold and its emerging role.


Contact:
Keith Weiner, CEO
keith _at_ monetary _dash_ metals _dot_ com

04 February 2016

Ethics and the inner ring

C. S. Lewis is one of my favourite writers so it was good to be reminded of his work by blogger mickeyman in a post I strongly recommend http://worldcomplex.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/ethics-and-inner-ring.html


Highly relevant to our times and also relevant to the gold blogosphere. "Lewis tells us that there are many inner rings in society--and rather than entering the inner ring of financial chicanery, there is the possibility of entering a ring composed of those of good will--the sound craftsmen."

03 February 2016

LBMA 2016 Precious Metal Forecast

At the beginning of each year the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) polls a range of respected precious metals analysts in the large banks and independent consultancies for their forecasts for metal prices for the coming year. This year contributors are “predicting price increases across the board for all four metals”. Their forecasts for the average price during 2016 are:

Gold – $1,103, ranging from $978 to $1,231
Silver – $14.74, ranging from $12.63 to $16.78
Platinum – $911, ranging from $748 to $1,076
Palladium – $568, ranging from $413 to $674


Read more here

02 February 2016

Would You Risk Going to Jail to Fix the Fix?

To fix the Fix, bullion bank traders (whether they are direct participants or not of the fix process) have to be able to “buy the fix and sell the futures” when the fix gets swamped by sell orders (or vice versa). The problem is that banks have a wide range of clients who hold positions with them across spot, forwards, futures, options, ETFs and so on. It is therefore highly like that one of those clients would be the loser of any such activity (and others winners) and complain (as did the client Barclays’ trader Daniel Plunkett traded against) about it. Alternatively, the regulator may decide to investigate markets from time to time.

The problem is that when a regulator comes looking at trades after the fact they could construe manipulative intent when no such thought was going through the trader’s mind – who was just arbitraging a market imbalance – and the trader finds themselves fined £95,600 and banned from trading, as Plunkett was.

If you think that traders would not be worried about such an unfair claim against them happening, or that client complaints or random regulatory investigations it would be unlikely, you haven’t been reading enough Matt Levine

Read more here

01 February 2016

Mystery Federal Reserve Bank NY Gold Depositor

The release of Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s December gold stocks report provides and opportunity to analyse the progress of this current phase of withdrawals from its custodial stocks. I say “phase” because in recent times there have been periods of concentrated withdrawal activity in between periods of little or no activity, as the chart below from Nick Laird at Sharelynx shows.


Read more here