Gold Daily And Silver Weekly Charts – And The Times, They Are A Changin

“In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

Eric Hoffer

There was intraday commentary here.   I was struck by the continuing erosion of gold from Western trusts and funds, in stark contrast to silver.   I like both metals, but gold is the deffest dog.  And from my perspective the reasons are pretty obvious.

We have come to the end of the informal Bretton Woods II agreement, which was to stay with the US dollar as the primary basis for world trade, an arrangement that had been in place since the end of WW II.  The US dollar based on a relationship to gold became the petrodollar when Nixon unilaterally closed the gold window in 1971. 

The banks agreed to continue to use it as the de facto standard for international currency valuation  The ‘management’ of gold as just another currency was carried out through leasing arrangements and targeted sales.  By 2004 at the latest, a number of the world’s central banks broke from this arrangement, which started quickly falling apart. By 2006 the central banks turned from net sellers of gold to net buyers. 

The agreement finally succumbed to the Greenspan Fed, and the band of Merry Pranksters in the government, who finally played one too many one-sided games with the other sovereign nations.  The credibility of the US hit a virtual brick wall in the aftermath of the obtuse behaviour that followed the world’s outpouring of favourable sentiment for the US after 9/11. 

Bush laid the egg, and Obama hatched it, to borrow a historical metaphor about another Reformation that came after a long period of abuses and a rising tide of nationalism after the long fall of an Empire.

We know who these central banks are, and we have a good idea of why they are doing it, if we are still a little rough on the details, which is understandable given the strategic nature of their actions.