Gold Reacts to Greece and the Dollar but Remains Indecisive

Gold Reacts to Greece and the Dollar but Remains Indecisive

Commentary for Monday, June 29, 2015 ( www.golddealer.com) – Gold closed up a modest $5.60 on the Comex today at $1178.50 – so a little excitement over the weekend and into domestic trading on Monday – very little. The overnight Hong Kong and London markets were a bit firmer but nothing to write home about – but there was weakness in stocks both here and abroad.

So what does this mean to the price of gold? Actually it should mean a great deal more especially with the press coverage of people standing in line trying to get money out of Greek ATM’s. Their banking system is closed today and probably will remain so for the next week. Depositors are limited to withdrawals of $70.00 per day so what a mess.

With no resolution as when Greece can expect more borrowed money and little in the way of debt reform creditors might embrace it’s no wonder the markets are a bit strained. But Greece is not the real problem – it’s the idea of a debt default contagion within smaller EU countries which is creating all the commotion.

Suppose Spain or Portugal decide they want better terms? Or some other country decides that Greece being bad is a good financial strategy? Puerto Rico announced today that it cannot pay its “international debts” – so the bigger picture is more important – if the only problem was Greece it would not mean much to the price of gold.

Still today’s price action in gold was subdued to say the least – what happened to all that “safe-haven” buying everyone should be talking about?

To see why there was not a bigger bang in the price of gold understand that first the bigger financial markets are not as worried as the press might imagine. And second, the dollar capped any possible gains early on because under such circumstances the dollar is king if the financial markets are looking for a place to ride out the storm.

Once they learned that Europe was not going to blow-up the dollar reversed direction considerably. The Dollar Index last closed at 96.18 and today’s range was 94.68 through 96.37 – it is now around 94.84. So when the news of “no deal” was announced the dollar moved to 96.37 higher than its last close and when the Tsunami began looking more like small surf it weakened considerably. The ride top to bottom was pretty amazing – more than 1.69 points so the conclusion you should draw is that big trouble in Europe or the US will push the hot money into the dollar not into gold – at least for the present.

China announced today it would lower its key lending rate to stimulate its economy. This alone should have created some action in the price of gold – it did not.

The reason is that gold buzz is considerably lacking – this can be seen by looking at Gold’s Moving Averages – 50 DMA ($1191.00) – the 100 DMA ($1193.00) and the 200 DMA ($1205.00) – the close today ($1178.50) is still below all three hanging the momentum players out to dry.

Silver closed down $0.07 at $15.66. Now this is not exactly a blow-out low number – things could get cheaper as they say but what is interesting is that sales of silver bullion products are hot. The Greek situation is not responsible and while this current trading range below $16.00 is considered the beginning of the “sweet spot” for physical investors we have been here before – several times.

So what is different? Can’t point to anything out of the ordinary, but the physical across the counter sales of $1000.00 90% bags, silver bars and Monster Boxes are unusually strong.

If you watch the charts carefully you might consider this – Silver broke below a rising trend line last week and is now within about $0.30 of the $15.34 low close on the year.

Platinum closed unchanged at $1081.00 and palladium was down $12.00 at $666.00.

If you have not heard of Gary North you should have by now – he has been around a long time and his views are very conservative. I can’t say exactly when I began reading his views about the dangers of Keynesian economics and the importance of sound money but it was probably in the early 1970’s – an era which carved out the foundation of positive American sentiment relative to real gold and silver as money.

Real hard core physical buyers of gold and silver bullion love to tell stories of when it was still possible to take 90% silver coins out of circulation – and better still of owning gold in the US before it was legal (1975).

Actually the notion that all Americans followed the government gold edit is a myth – if they wanted to own gold there were many ways to do it publically and it was accomplished in most coin stores in the country.

At any rate my recollection of how important what Gary North had to say came into being probably between 1969 and 1973. His conservative views have not changed much so take some time to read – Keynes, the Great Depression, and the Coming Great Default – (Gary North – June 26, 2015) Ideas have consequences, but not in a social vacuum. There are no social vacuums.

Ideas that are held by a minority of fringe academics or polemicists sometimes become the foundations of victorious social movements after existing social institutions are undermined by a social crisis.

Optimism and Social Revolution – There seems to be an inherent optimism in the thinking of most members of the human race. It is the source of men's sacrifice in the present for the sake of the future. We think the future is going to get better, and therefore it is worth sacrificing present consumption for the sake of future consumption. This is the basis of thrift. This is the basis of expanded capital in our society.

Basic to the success of every social revolution in the West since 1640 has been the doctrine of progress. Each revolution offers hope for the future. Usually, these have been short on details of the transition between now and the new utopia, but there is hope.

The free market was such an idea. Adam Smith was the major promoter. His disciples extended his vision of the wealth of nations. The timing was perfect: 1776. That was about the time that the Industrial Revolution began its transformation of the West and then the world.

Beginning around 1800, and limited to the Eastern shore of the United States and the British Isles, compound economic growth began. By 1820, the economic transformation was leaving irrefutable historical evidence of this transformation. Economic historians debate as to the causes of this growth, but it had never been seen before. By 1850, the world was very different. A series of inventions transformed modern agriculture, modern transportation, and communications. This was visible to everybody by 1851. That was the year of the great London exhibition. Anyone who attended that exhibition realized that the world had fundamentally changed since 1800.

We are now over two centuries into this process. It is almost impossible for us to think of a society made up of human beings who are systematically pessimistic about the future. What began in the English-speaking world of the Atlantic Coast has now spread into the villages of India and China. There is almost nowhere left on earth in which optimism regarding the economic future is not a fundamental presupposition of every village, every tribe, and every family. Economic reality finally caught up with human optimism, and then raced ahead.

There has been only one period in which economic growth has stagnated for more than a decade since 1800. That was the Great Depression, which was followed by World War II. Output of almost all goods and services declined in the 1930's, and then the war destroyed much of the output of the first half of the 1940's. This destruction was systematic: bombs, armies, and battles destroyed the output of military factories. Both sides were committed to the destruction of any economic growth on the other side. With the exception of the United States, all nations that were involved in the conflict suffered direct economic contraction as a result of the war. But there was full employment for the survivors — at below-market wages. There was central planning on an unprecedented scale: the ration-book economy.

The Keynesian Revolution – What was most significant about the 1930's was not the fact that there was economic stagnation for a decade. What was most significant was the transformation of the thinking of Western civilization. The intellectuals changed their minds; the voters changed their minds.

In Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in Great Britain, in Japan, and in the United States, there was a shift of opinion away from the free market in favor of government economic planning. The supreme mark of this transformation was the acceptance of John Maynard Keynes' unreadable book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which was published in 1936. A new generation of younger economists adopted this book and its outlook, which prevails today. The fascist economic idea of an alliance between government and business became almost universally accepted.

There had always been a tendency for special-interest groups to seek government subsidies. Mercantilism, 1550-1800, was a manifestation of this worldview. But, from an academic point view, economists after Adam Smith were generally not committed to anything like mercantilism. There were some who were, but they were not dominant.

There was always an appeal in the United States for federal finances and subsidies, and the mark of this was Sen. Henry Clay's so-called American system. Abraham Lincoln was an early convert. But the size of the federal government in the overall economy was so small that these interventions were mainly limited to roads, canals, and transportation projects. In other words, there was a commitment to the government-business alliance, but there was not much government to be allied to. This changed in the 1930's.

I am probably the only person who has ever noticed the following, but it bears repeating. The Macmillan publishing company in Great Britain published three books analyzing the causes of the Great Depression. The first one was written by a disciple of Ludwig von Mises, Lionel Robbins. He was probably the most prominent British economist favoring the free market in the 1930's. He was a colleague of F. A. Hayek at the London School of Economics, who was also a defender of the free market, but who was an Austrian. Both of them at the time were followers of Mises. Robbins' book was titled simply, The Great Depression. It was published in 1934. One year after Keynes's book, in 1937, Macmillan published another economic analysis of the depression, which was also basically a defensive of the Austrian theory of the business cycle. That book was titled, Banking and the Business Cycle. Both of these books are available for downloading or purchase on the website of the Mises Institute. They are both quite readable. Keynes' book was not readable. Yet so devastated was Robbins by the depression that he repudiated his own book in the 1940's. It is Keynes' book that remains in print. The other two books were essentially forgotten by 1940.

The modern fascist economy that dominates the West, meaning an economy sustained by central bank counterfeiting and central government fiscal deficits, was born during the Great Depression. It was conceived much earlier, but it took the Great Depression to provide what we can legitimately call labor pains. Most people today cannot conceive of a world without government intervention, central banking, government guarantees of all kind, and so forth. The Federal Register turns out approximately 80,000 pages of fine print regulations every year. This regulatory order is cumulative. Most of these regulations stay on the books. They are not repealed by the bureaucrats; they are amplified by new rules.

Despite the fact that most economists say they are free marketers, only a handful of Austrian economists favor the shutting down of the Federal Reserve System. Yet in 1900, most economists in the United States were not in favor of a central bank. Institution by institution, crisis by crisis, fascist economics increases its support among academics, and it increases its support among the masses. Social Security and Medicare are simply the most visible manifestations of this outlook. The public is completely in favor of both programs.

I am arguing here that a sustained economic crisis always calls forth radical new ways of explaining the crisis. These new ways are always extensions of previous opinions. But a new generation of economists will adopt the new format of the previous opinions, including errors in some cases. That is the lesson of the Great Depression. Keynes simply baptized what politicians and central bankers were already doing.

Keynesian economics is incoherent. That is our great advantage. The defenders of Keynesian economics, when standing in front of a crowd to explain the system, proclaim its goals and describe its interventions, but they cannot explain how these interventions have in fact created wealth. The system is incoherent. This is why The General Theory is invoked but never assigned. Austrian School economists still assign Mises' 1920 essay, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." It is readable.

The great advantage Keynesians they have is this: people find it difficult to believe in the theory first proclaimed in the 18th century, namely, that social evolution, including economic progress, is based on individual decision-making within a free market setting. The idea that coherence grows out of individual decisions, and that there is no central organizing entity, is difficult for people to believe. Adam Smith correctly named this system of unplanned providence: the invisible hand.

On the one hand, most people believe in God. On the other hand, most people believe in free will. They trust in God's providence, but they also want personal liberty. They want to believe in the free market, but they also want to believe that there is an overarching coherence to it that is supplied by God. Economists don't believe this, but most people are not economists. Economists believe, as Adam Smith believed and Adam Ferguson believed, that society is the result of human action, but not the result of human design. It takes enormous faith to believe this, and most people are not capable of enormous faith. They want to believe in God, but they don't quite believe that the free market is God's way of bringing coherence to the world. It is easier for most people to believe that politicians and bureaucrats provide this social and economic coherence in general, despite repeated failures of such planning in specific cases. It is hard to believe in the coherence provided by the invisible hand of the free market's profit-and-loss system. People want to see a more visible hand. This has been true down through the ages, from Pharaoh's pyramids to Washington's pyramids.

This quest for a visible hand initially favored faith in socialism, but now that the socialist faith has collapsed, as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, this leaves only Keynesianism. Keynesianism is in fact incoherent, and nobody can really explain it, but that is true of every doctrine of God. It is a question of how much mystery most people can tolerate. At some point, this issue will arise: how much economic pain they are willing to tolerate.

It is easier to believe in the free market than in Keynesianism, but only if you understand economic logic — causation through competitive bidding. But most people do not understand economic logic. This is why they support tariffs and other interventions by the state into the market.

So, in the back of most people's minds in 1929 was faith in some kind of god. As long as the money kept flowing, and economy kept growing, people believed that the boom would last forever. This was basic to their optimism. They weren't sure exactly why the boom was taking place, but they figured that it was forever. They wanted to believe that good times would last. But good times did not last.

The Great Depression was the great stumbling block for optimism. It undermined faith in Western political liberty and Western economic liberty. The Fascists and the National Socialists took advantage of this. The Fabian socialist movement took advantage of this in Great Britain. The New Deal took advantage of this in the United States. Lenin (Ulyanov) had already taken advantage of this from 1917 to 1924, and Stalin (Djugishvili) was taking advantage of it.

Conclusions – New ideas alone do not change the minds of most people. This includes intellectuals. There is usually a crisis that serves as a catalyst for changing the minds of millions of people. Ideas that had been floating around in the world of intellectuals then get applied by a new generation of intellectuals, and simultaneously they are also applied by politicians. This is what creates revolutions.

It is the job of those intellectuals who favor a new outlook to work on the details of this outlook until such time as a revolutionary figure gains political support, and some new apologist for the revolutionary worldview comes to the forefront and begins to gain disciples. The power of ideas alone does not produce revolutions. There has to be a social setting to allow the catalyst of revolutionary ideas to produce a social and political transformation.

This is why the Great Default of all of the Western welfare states is going to create tremendous opportunities for new ideas to come to the forefront. It is going to undermine and ultimately destroy the Keynesian worldview. This is a great opportunity for younger anti-Keynesians to stake their claims to what appears to be a played-out mine. That is why I outlined my Keynes project.

The body of intellectual materials favoring the free market is vastly larger today than it was in 1940, 1950, or 1960. These older materials went out of print. But today, because of PDF page images and the World Wide Web, the Mises Institute has posted hundreds of volumes. In addition, there is a constant stream of new materials being produced online. We await only the catalyst of the Great Default to produce conditions necessary for the transformation of these academic ideas into effective political programs, especially at the local level. Decentralization is the wave of the future. Free trade and the World Wide Web will supply the benefits of internationalism. The global bureaucrats will not.

When the Keynesian medicine cabinet is visibly bare, people will want explanations of why it is bare and why the economy is sick. Most of all, people will want suggestions for how the cupboard can be filled up with something that heals sickness. I am working on this. So are thousands of other writers. It is not 1970 any longer. The print publishing oligopoly is dying.

Ideas have consequences, but not in a social vacuum.

The walk in cash trade was average but the phones were crazy in the silver bullion area – so for some reason – which escapes me the physical trade seems to have woken up and like this closing number ($15.66).

The 4 th of July falls on a Saturday – so the CNI Building will be closed Friday July 3 rd for our Independence Day.

Also note that the trading markets, banks and post office will also be closed Friday – July 3 rd . Wishing you all a happy and safe 4 th of July.

The GoldDealer.com Unscientific Activity Scale is a “ 6” for Monday. The CNI Activity Scale takes into consideration volume and the hedge book: (last Tuesday – 6) (last Wednesday – 4) (last Thursday – 4) (last Friday – 6). The scale (1 through 10) is a reliable way to understand our volume numbers. The Activity Scale is weighted and is not necessarily real time – meaning we could be busy and see a low number – or be slow and see a high number. This is true because of the way our computer runs what we call the “book”. Our “activity” is better understood from a wider point of view. If the numbers are generally increasing – it would indicate things are busier – decreasing numbers over a longer period would indicate volume is moving lower.

When buying or selling you will receive an email confirmation. This includes a PDF File to confirm your invoice or purchase order and includes forms of payment and bank wire instructions. When doing business please check to see if your current email has been entered into the new system and check to see if your computer will accept our email (no spam).

Thanks for letting us know when you move or change your email.

We believe our four flat screens downstairs with live independent pricing (BullionDesk.com) are unique in the United States. The walk-in cash trade can see in an instant the current prices of all bullion products and a daily graph illustrates the range of the markets on any given day.

Yes – you can visit the store with cash and walk away with your product. Or you can bring product to the store and walk away with cash. We will even wire funds into your account that same day for a small service fee ($25.00) if you are in a hurry.

In addition to our freshly ground coffee we offer complimentary cold bottled water, Cokes and Snapple. We also provide fresh fruit in a transparent attempt to disguise our regular junk food habits as we sneak down the block for the best donuts in the world (Randy’s).

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @CNI_golddealer. Sal is now in charge of our Facebook page and he is a self-proclaimed expert on gold conspiracy theory. He would be happy to respond to even the most ridiculous conspiracy assertion on our Facebook page so why not join the fun?

Thanks for reading – we appreciate your business and enjoy your evening.

Disclaimer – The content in this newsletter and on the GoldDealer.com website is provided for informational purposes only and our employees are not registered financial advisers. The precious metals and rare coin market is random and highly volatile so it may not be suitable for some individuals. We suggest before deciding on a course of action that you talk with an independent financial professional. While due care has been exercised in development and dissemination of our web site, the Almost Famous Gold Newsletter, or other promotional material, there is no guarantee of correctness so this corporation and its employees shall be held harmless in all cases. GoldDealer.com (California Numismatic Investments, Inc.) and its employees do not render legal, tax, or investment advice.

Leave a Reply