What Happens At 10:00 Am Est?

Got a tidbit of new info for you, Barry. It seems as if 10 AM EST coincides with the London daily gold price fix time. I think that there is a 5 hour difference between London and New York times, so that would be 3 PM in London.

The big 10am drop again. Looks like a rough day. Buying is starting to look good again!

lol OK, OK. The London Bullion Exchange is one of, if not THE, largest bullion markets on Earth. Each business day, the price of gold is "fixed", which is to say set by this exchange. I'm not quite sure of the details of how they go about fixing this price but they are the folks who do it. Price fixing is supposedly illegal in the US but not necessarily in other countries. Usually, it is done by cartels who have the power to do it and a cooperative political system that allows it to occur. This is similar to OPEC, I suppose, although there are a lot of people bidding on oil to partly establish the price. With oil, at least, the producers can always reduce the volume they sell to raise the prices. I suppose that it is possible to do the same with gold and even silver. I will check into this and see how this is done for the metals...

Very interesting reading, Ed! I had no idea whatsoever.

Coming up on 10:00 again. I'm hoping for another massive dip to get prices back into buying range...

Yes! This is starting to look like major manipulation by the big players. I wonder how long this will or can go on as it's so obvious to market watchers. Fortunately it seems to correct most days. I also wonder who is getting ripped by this action that occurs every day or almost every day?

I agree Ed. I keep people talking about the "primary upwards trend" of gold and silver, saying that any "small" dips along the way should be ignored. But as far as I'm concerned, it's just as likely that gold and silver have now peaked and that the current "dip" is simply the beginning of the slide back down. Or perhaps we're going to hit another 20-30 year plateau.

This is why I refuse to buy gold and have only put a very small percentage of my total assets into silver. Enough to make me giggle with glee if silver does go up above $100, but not enough to make me jump out a window if it goes back down to $5...

Barry... I agree that gold and silver could come down a lot in price but for that to happen, the list of things that would need to change for the better looks virtually impossible to me. We would have to: 1) get the Federal budget under control; 2) set up a process whereby we would begin paying down the national debt; get the balance of payments to our trading partners in much closer balance (this "we sell, you buy" nonsense HAS to end); reduce the amount of US currency now in circulation; grow our economy at a 5-6% rate or higher; and probably several other things I can't think of right now. The ones mentioned so far look so unlikely to me that adding any more items to the list really won't matter a whole lot. All that said, gold and silver will very likely be more expensive in the future than they are today, particularly when measured in FRNs.

For a REAL eye-opener, look up a chart of the Dow 30 as measured in ounces of gold sometime. That really puts the "growth" lie to the test because the Dow 30 is lower today in gold terms than it was 10 years ago. Practically all of the growth in the Dow 30 for the past 3 years has come from the Fed dumping trillions of dollars into the economy. As we all know from supply and demand, adding a lot more money to the system while production remains stagnant means that prices HAVE to increase... and that includes share prices as well as consumer goods and services.

I have read in a number of places that if we want a very good estimate of the rate of inflation in an economy, all we need do is measure the current money supply and divide that by last year's money supply. The result multiplied by 100 will be very close to the rate of inflation over that 1 year time period. If the rate of production is similar from one year to the next, this will work reasonably well. If, for example, we had $2.5T in the money supply in 2010 and $2.7T in 2011, then the rate of inflation over 2011 would be given by 2.7 / 2.5 x 100 = 8%. While a figure like this is reasonably accurate, it does not show what the Fed and the US government want so they massage the numbers in various ways until an acceptable answer is created. Apparently, perception matters more to them than the facts. Unfortunately for this approach, it is difficult to hide the truth of the situation for very long and when the citizens become aware of the game that is being played on them, they will become very angry and very distrustful of any further comments from the fed and the government.

Sounds like an interesting method of setting the prices, Fredd. Things like that tend to have started a long time ago and then just continue due to inertia and familiarity. I suppose that technology does creep into such things but it probably meets some resistance.