Gold & Silver tease watchers with new intraday highs

Gold and Silver teased seasoned market watchers today with new intraday highs in New York trade. Gold briefly hit an all time high of $1500/oz. Silver also had a very quick play with a new post 1980 intraday high of $44/oz.

Whilst of the subject of 1980, in January of that year Gold hit a intraday high of $US850 and Silver a intraday high of $52, both on the same day. Whilst gold is now hit $1500, a 76% increase over the 1980 bull market high, Silver at $44 is still about 20% below its 1980 high. Also keep in mind that the 1980's highs for Gold & Silver were caught in the updraft of an attempted market cornering to the upside by the Hunt Bros. and their Saudi mates. In the current bull market in precious metals the new high for Gold and 31 yr high for silver is being made against the headwind of market cornering to the downside, in the form of naked short bets in silver and 10's of years of net central bank sales of gold.

Silver Fundamentals Explained

Debunking the Silver Bubble Myth

Keiser Report: Murderers & Martyrs

by RussiaToday on Apr 19, 2011

This time Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, report on Senator Carl Levin's report alleging lies and perjury from Goldman Sachs. In the second half of the show, Max talks to Janet Tavakoli, a credit derivatives expert and author of "Dear Mr. Buffett," about corruption and an absence of justice in the U.S. banking industry.

Bix Weir - $1000/oz Silver is Conservative

Tocqueville Asset's Hathaway Interviewed About Gold

April 18 (Bloomberg) -- John Hathaway, senior managing director of Tocqueville Asset Management and manager of the Tocqueville Gold Fund, talks about the gold market, investment in gold-mining companies and the decision by University of Texas Investment Management Co. to convert the endowment fund’s gold investments into bullion. Hathaway speaks with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Television's "Surveillance Midday."

'We view silver as gold on steroids'

From the UK Telegraph:

Silver is a better bet than gold in the current precious metals bull run and has been described as "gold on steroids" by one asset manager.

Brian Ostroff, the managing director of Windermere Capital, a Canadian investment firm, said he was bullish about the prospects for all precious metals because the world's central banks were printing money. But he was particularly upbeat about silver.

"We love silver. It has definitely come into the forefront. The physical market characteristics are very positive," he told the Gold Report. "Ultimately, we view silver as gold on steroids. When you're in these uptrends and everyone's looking at precious metals, silver tends to perform much better [than gold].

"We think that, as the whole precious metals bull market proliferates and more average investors start to look at it, silver at $35–$40 might be more appealing than gold at $1,400–$1,500."

Silver was trading at $43.24 an ounce on Monday, its highest level since 1980. At the same time, gold hit an all-time high of $1,489.

But Mr Ostroff warned silver investors that they faced a bumpy ride. "Our feeling is that silver offers a better opportunity relative to gold – but make no mistake about it, silver is a lot more volatile. If we get a downturn in precious metals, silver will fall harder than gold," he said.

Asked why he was bullish on precious metals, he said: "I've always believed that gold is a currency. Ultimately, investors have a choice – put their money in dollars, yen, euros or pounds, as they choose, or in gold. The one difference is that gold, unlike paper currencies, has to be found and mined.....read on

Will Ben bring himself to say QE3?

From Bloomberg:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke may keep reinvesting maturing debt into Treasuries to maintain record stimulus even after making good on a pledge to complete $600 billion in bond purchases by the end of June.

The Fed chief’s top two lieutenants said this month the economy and inflation are too weak to warrant the start of a monetary-policy reversal. Investors and economists including David Kelly at JPMorgan Funds see that as a signal the Fed will keep its balance sheet at current levels by replacing about $17 billion a month in maturing mortgage debt with Treasuries.

Ending the reinvestment policy and the $600 billion program at the same time would be like quitting stimulus “cold turkey,” said Kelly, who is based in New York and helps oversee $400 billion as chief market strategist at JPMorgan. “It does make sense to reinvest for a while,” he said. “Then they could watch how bond yields react to that".......read on

Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq

From The Independent:

Plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.

The papers, revealed here for the first time, raise new questions over Britain's involvement in the war, which had divided Tony Blair's cabinet and was voted through only after his claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction......read in full

Wall Street shares slump as S&P downgrades US debt outlook

From the Guardian:

Shares fell heavily on Wall Street on Monday after a leading ratings agency fanned fears of Europe's debt crisis spreading across the Atlantic by issuing a strong warning about America's failure to tackle its budget deficit.

In a move seen by Wall Street as a "shot across the bows" of bickering politicians in Washington, Standard and Poor's (S&P) said it was cutting the outlook on the US's long-term rating from stable to negative for the first time since the attack on Pearl Harbor 70 years ago.

The announcement surprised the financial markets, where attention in recent months has been focused on the problems of the weaker nations of the eurozone. Renewed speculation that Greece will be forced to default on its debts led to a sharp sell-off in the euro, but S&P stressed that the US was not immune from the sovereign debt crisis.

In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average ended the day down 140 points, or 1.1%, with the dollar weaker on the foreign exchanges and yields rising on US treasury bills. The FTSE 100 in London was down 126 points at 5870 – a drop of more than 2% – as ongoing concerns about the eurozone's debt crisis were compounded by the setback for the world's biggest economy......read on