Great and Wonderful Friday Morning Folks,
The precious metals seem to be taking a breather after last night’s rally to new highs just as the Asians markets opened with the trade in Gold now at $1,293.10, down $1.70 with the high at $1,300.40 and the low close to the now at $1,291.00. Silver is following with its trade at $15.77, down 2.7 cents with the low at $15.73 and it’s high at $15.955. The US Dollar seems to be taking a breather as well as we wait to see what the “fake” (according the MA) Working Group on Financial Markets does when the Unemployment Report comes out just before this post with the US Dollar now at 95.725, down 15.3 points, taking away more of the push from Wednesdays rally, with a high at 95.98 and the low at 95.685, all of this or course, being done sometime way before 5 am pst. Venezuela is now seeing Gold priced at 12,914.84 Bolivar, up another 34.04 over the past 24 hours. Silver under the same conditions is seeing a price at 157.503, gaining another 1.249 in Bolivar. As a reminder, the first days of February 2018 is when the precious metals exploded in price in Venezuela, with Silver going from 166.12 to 3,745,196 (in old currency value) by July 2018 before the loping off a few zeros and the devaluations of the currency.
January’s Silver deliveries are showing a demand for 837 receipts for physical with a volume of 1 on the board so far this morning. I do see a bid for 36 more receipts at $15.675 but no takers at present. The traders keep adding more to their positions with the overall count now at 181,622 obligations, showing a slight increase of 101 overnighters in order to keep Silver from going any higher in yesterday’s action. Something to consider here, the jump in Open Interest could be reasoned as a hedge against those Call options that were purchased on the March Options Board. This way the seller of the Calls, can keep from losing any more money (by buying the contracts) in the trade. The tires meet the road right here: once the demands for physical start to overwhelm CME supply and the allowed paper game, the market makers have to meet the demands one way or another. That is, if they wish to keep their system intact, supplies must be found, and if they cannot be located at these prices, up the price goes until the product becomes available. This is where we look for that commercial failure, which does happen, rarely. But if one is on the right side of the outcome when this occurs, there is a new set of problems.
Brexit is up in the news again as another poll was taken because the last few hundred still said the same thing; The people of Britain do not want anything to do with the European Union making monetary descisions. What is at stake here is, “some 1,000 police officers from England and Scotland are beginning preparations and training for a possible deployment to Northern Ireland in case a 'no deal' Brexit forces the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the EU - the only land border between an EU state and the UK.” It’s another border dispute, and people are catching on.
Germany has another issue to deal with today in that Merkel and friends got hacked and now have to deal with the data dump placed right in front of the people of Germany and the world. Apparently Facebook was the starting point of this hack and leak, “It looks like the hackers got the passwords to Facebook accounts and Twitter profiles and worked their way up from there, said Simon Hegelich, a political scientist at Munich’s Technical University who has studied the manipulation of social networks. “It’s a very elaborately done social engineering attack,” he said Friday by phone. “It’s a lot of data that’s been dumped.”
So more data is coming out from hackers that do not work for the governments and it is exposing what the government hackers and friends have been doing and the agencies are upset that the voting public can see their behind the scenes antics, sound familiar? It does have a certain ring to it all. Regardless, we go right back to our point of stability, physical Silver and Gold. Once it is in your hands, it becomes the safest historical purchase in the history of fiat. So hang on to it and become your own bank. When you need cash, sell some. Buy more when you can and keep out of the banking system until we find out what the heck has just recently happened. Have a great weekend, keep a positive attitude no matter what, also of note, its Bill Holter’s birthday today, so make sure to let him know, and as always …
Stay Strong!
J. Johnson