Monetary Metals's blog

It was all over the news last week, both mainstream and gold sites. Barclays was caught manipulating the gold price. This story is a big deal to the gold community.

One allegation about price manipulation was made by the German regulator BaFin. That proves it, right? Not so fast.

We are not going to lament the folly of traders nor comment on the unemployment data. We watch the dynamic between price setters and the speculators trying to front run them.

There is a stark difference between the states of the markets for the monetary metals. The number of open futures contracts in gold is low, while in silver it’s high. What does it mean?

Gold is a tangible commodity. It's a material good that can be held in the hand, bought and sold--and warehoused. You have to understand warehousing to understand the gold market.

Everyone knows the dollar is unstable, and falls alarmingly over long periods. And yet we still presume to use this paper to measure the value of gold! Amazing.

The dollar dropped a lot this week, though most would say gold and silver spiked. Gold owners have 4% more dollars and silver owners have 7.4% more. How much less are those dollars worth?

In this part, we look at the question: Is gold a currency? Professor Tom Fischer answers, “Yes, gold is a currency with the symbol XAU”.

The linear Quantity Theory of Money holds that if more units of a currency are issued, then the value of each unit should fall. Bitcoin was designed with this idea in mind. It's a fatal flaw.

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A widening bid-ask spread in silver would be tantamount to the metal losing its moneyness.

The selloff in silver has had an unexpected effect on silver spreads.

Think sentiment in gold and silver are the same? They violently diverged this year. The difference could have a profound impact on your trades.

At times silver metal is being dumped in quantity in the spot market, and at other times paper silver is being bought aggressively in the futures market.

The prices of the metals were down sharply last week. Was this manipulation? As you’ll see below, the picture in silver is astonishing.