Uncle Patso says:

I must confess to a slight feeling of shadenfreude at the continued drop in precious metals, especially gold. Quite by accident, our family sold off most of our silver at/near its peak.

Kitco is an excellent source of both current and historical data on metal prices. Particularly enlightening are the historical charts.

kitco.com/charts/

Recommended.

Somebody says:

I know JCD takes some kind of perverse delight in being an anti-gold bigot. I would just have to bare it as he berated some poor soul who was trying find some assurance in gold in this otherwise false and fickle world. Usually Adam. But the “fact” remained that the price of gold was not starkly exposing the free-fall in the value of the Dollar. I suspected hanky-panky but I couldn’t figure it out.

But Ben Bernanke had the vision to bring the disease to the cure. It seems that the FED rents gold to dealers who then sell it. I have no idea how this is legal maybe some fine print in Dod – Frank. But it does provide a plausible reason to explain the fact that the Germans were flatly refused an audit of their gold holdings in the FED.

So, in hindsight it makes sense. The same “fractional reserve” businesses practices that are making the paper dollar worthless can be used to drive down the value of paper gold and in practice gold itself.

The astute reader will spot the flaws in this system.

It will be interesting to see when the music stops in this beautiful game of musical chairs if it will be Adam or JCD who is sitting on tangible assets.