June is wrapping up strong for gold at the COMEX with 20,101 contracts being delivered. There are still 583 contracts open that have not been delivered, but the majority of the contracts have been completed. Meanwhile, were seeing more and more stress on silver and platinum.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell went to Capitol Hill this week and talked. His open-mouth operations dominated the financial news and drove gold lower. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap, host Mike Maharrey digs into Powell’s comments, reads between the lines, and points out a couple of things Powell got completely wrong. He also talks about some actual economic news that most people just ignored.
The average person doesn’t understand gold. Or even money for that matter.
The bleed of metal from COMEX vaults has resumed and silver inventories have hit record lows with 28 paper claims for each ounce of physical silver.
This analysis focuses on gold and silver within the Comex/CME futures exchange. See the article What is the Comex? for more detail. The charts and tables below specifically analyze the physical stock/inventory data at the Comex to show the physical movement of metal into and out of Comex vaults.
A bill making its way through the North Carolina legislature would mandate a cost-and-benefit study on creating a state precious metals bullion depository. A bullion depository would not only create a safe place to store precious metals; it could also facilitate the everyday use of gold and silver in financial transactions in North Carolina and set the stage to undermine the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money.
The global precious metals market is on pace to top $400 billion within the next five years.
According to Fortune Business Insights, an India-based consultancy company, the precious metals market is on pace to hit $403.1 billion by 2028, driven primarily by the gold market. This is up from $275 billion in 2021.
There is the mainstream and market perception of what going on in the economy and financial system. And then there’s the underlying economic reality. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey talks about the growing divergence between the two in the context of the June Federal Reserve meeting and the latest CPI data.
The Federal Government ran a deficit last month of $240B. Revenue continues to be at or below levels last year while expenses continue to grow.
The CPI rose in May by 0.12%. Energy accounted for -0.25% of the move. This means without the move in Energy, the CPI would have risen by 0.37% which annualizes to a rate of 4.5%. This shows that inflation is still quite problematic.
The Treasury has an open data platform where they publish all of the data related to the US Treasury. This includes debt, spending, revenue, etc. Different data sets are updated at different frequencies. The official US Debt is updated monthly (typically by the fourth business day). This data can be seen in the chart below.
