by Alasdair MacLeod
Gold Money
Gold and silver drifted lower over the week, in falls which are commonly accepted to reflect prices being massaged ahead of option expiry on Comex.
Gold lost $16 to $1325, and silver, 58 cents to $19.11 in early European trade this morning (Friday). If this sort of thing happened on a regulated market in London, the regulators would be crawling all over the suspected riggers. But hey, it’s America.
Putting this behind us, we should focus on the rapidly developing banking crisis in Germany and on its impact on the US dollar. These are separate issues, but they are much intertwined.
This week, a collapse of Deutsche Bank was openly discussed in the general media, and there are signs that institutional depositors in wholesale money markets have begun to minimise their exposure. The result is that DB’s shares on Wall Street last night dropped 7% into new low ground and continued this weakness overnight (Thursday/Friday) into the Frankfurt opening in heavy volume.