Over $1.50 for the Euro this morning!
The Pound ran up to $1.675 and, as soon as the Nikkei closed (up 40 points), the dollar dove to just 87.5 Yen. That sent gold flying up to $1,180, copper to $3.18 and silver to $18.80 but oil couldn’t get back over $76.50, which is strange because the last time the dollar was this low oil was $140 a barrel. Why have the commodity speculators abandoned oil and moved on to metals?
For one thing, energy trading is now under Congressional scrutiny – as well it should be since it is a forced tax on every man, woman and child on the planet. Copper prices don’t affect anybody since no one is building anything anyway and pennies sure aren’t worth saving since you need 5 of them just to buy a piece of gum these days. Silver has industrial uses but there’s not much industry with Industrial Production at less than 80% capacity so no one is complaining (are there any workers left to complain?) about that price and gold consumption is off 34% from last year so the 43% rise in price since last year isn’t tapping more overall global dollars – speculators are just getting much much less for much much more.
Oil collapsed last year because, when push came to shove, people simply couldn’t afford to buy barrels of oil for $140, or $100, or $80. The problem with trying to manipulate the oil market is 86M barrels more come out of the ground every day, whether you want it or not and if people stop consuming then it has to be stored and that can get expensive. As it is now, global stockpiles of crude products are at record levels and it is possible that the US is literally out of room to store natural gas despite massive production cutbacks from cartel members like CHK, XOM and EOG.
So manipulating the price of oil and natural gas gets tough as demand falls off but only 800 tons of gold were consumed in all of Q3, down from 1,206 last year, when gold averaged $825. In India, the world’s largest consumer of gold, demand fell about 50% from 271.2 tons to just 137.6 tons. China picked up the slack as the government stockpiled metals (just another speculator) and demand there went from 116.9 tons to 128.6 tons so a 10% increase in Chinese demand to WOW the investors into…
