Silver Goes Up, Down and All Around!

Well… Yesterday’s price action was something…really something… The currencies backed off their assault on the dollar for a day, but the slippage was minimal… The real rodeo for the prices was in gold and silver, with silver riding the bull till the horn sounded! As I mentioned yesterday, silver had traded to $49, which represented a $9 rally in less than two weeks. Well, it was as if silver stepped on the trap door and it sprung, with silver falling $3, then gaining it back, only to see it lose $2 on the day… Up, down, all around…

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What Is Silver Screaming About?

The current surge in bids to buy silver might seem dramatic, but it’s more measured by far – to date, at least – than the true silver bubble of September 1979 to January 1980.

Even so, you may as well call this a record price. In real terms, as Matt Turner at Mitsubishi told me this week, one ounce of silver briefly rose above 40 of today’s US dollars per ounce in 1864, when the American Civil War neared its climax. In nominal dollars, the Hunt brothers’ multi-billion-dollar corner only saw it more highly priced on 5 trading days in January 1980. And while US investors waiting to buy silver are also still waiting for it to record a new intra-day high, it’s already broken new ground against the British pound and for most of the Eurozone, too.

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Making Friends With Precious Metals

The stock market continues wobbling today, as gold and silver continue soaring – gold has jumped almost $30 an ounce over the last two days to a new all-time high of $1,485.00, while silver has popped almost two dollars to a new three-decade high of $42.75 an ounce.

And the show is probably not over yet…

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The Long and Short of Spending More Than You Make

Breakfast was a real drag, as the kids were whining more loudly than usual about money, and how they needed some money, and how they didn’t have any money, and how they were the only people they knew that were not dripping with cell phones and iPods and reader tablets and all that stuff, like this was supposed to make me rush out and buy them these things so that I don’t damage their fragile self-esteem and ability to make friends, so that they can call and text each other all day and night about how much they hate me, and hatch their little plans to put poison in my food or something; you never know with kids, you know what I mean?

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Living Well on Gold and Silver

Naturally, I bristle at people ignoring me except to say hurtful things, like, “Eww! Gross! Eat with your mouth closed!” and who then turn right around and say, “Shut up about buying gold and silver!”

But how do I not eat and talk? Man, it has been said, cannot live on bread alone! Unless, of course, it is made into a nice, big sandwich with all the fixins, maybe with a tall, cool beverage and a fresh bag of potato chips, you’re bent over the plate like some kind of starving Neanderthal, noisily shoveling it in your mouth with both hands, perhaps while you are watching TV, necessitating changing channels by hitting the remote control with your elbow.

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Buying Silver and Avoiding the Sharks

I keep pounding, pounding, pounding the table that silver is the biggest bargain out there, for, at last count, a jillion reasons, and that anybody who does not buy silver Right Freaking Now (RFN) is making the mistake of a lifetime, and the family is all, like, “Will you please stop pounding the table? It is irritating and is making things spill, aside from the fact that we don’t have any money with which to buy silver, and you know that!” which devolved into a lengthy discussion about who among them was the most irritated with me and everything I say or do.

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Gold and Silver: Head and Shoulders Above the Market

I admit that I am pretty lazy, and I don’t do a lot of technical analysis of markets and/or prices, but I do some charting of some things, and I naturally come across some of what others write about emerging chart patterns, and price-points, and channels, and bands, and stuff I don’t understand even more than I don’t understand any of this.

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Underestimating Lots of Money

According to Harper’s Index, the “estimated value of Chinese household income that goes unreported is $1.4 trillion.”

To put it in perspective, the follow-up item is “Portion of China’s GDP this represents: 1/3.”

Of course, I don’t know what to make of this, economics-wise or any other wise, but merely note with a soft whistle of appreciation that that is a LOT of money unaccounted for, and which does not show up in official statistics, which means that somebody is seriously underestimating something, which means that trouble is usually ahead.

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Strong Yen Brings Predictable Response from Japanese Officials

The risk aversion fog that drifted over the currencies yesterday has remained in place this morning, with just faint signs of lifting here and there. The Japanese yen (JPY) moved back to its 15-year high level versus the dollar yesterday, and the Swiss franc (CHF) pushed above 99-cents on its way to parity with the dollar.

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