By Jeff Nielson
SPROTT MONEY
There’s a “rally” in the gold market right now, and (to a lesser extent) in silver. We’re told this by the mainstream media – in between its salvos of gold-bashing. Sadly, we have also seen this parroted by numerous Alternative Media commentators. So let’s examine this “rally” yet again.
The rally started almost precisely on the first day of the year (nothing suspicious about that). In the 8 ½ months since then, the price of gold has risen by roughly $250, or a little below $30/month. For convenience, let’s say that the price has been advancing by about $1 per day.
For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that this is a real rally, and see how long it would take to reach any rational price targets. Let’s start with a big target: a fair and rational price for gold – today . A previous commentary pegged that fair price at $10,000/oz, calculated in relation to a fair price for silver, today: $1,000/oz. The 10:1 price ratio between the two metals (rather than the historic ratio of 15:1) is based upon the fact that most of the world’s silver stockpiles have been literally consumed, thus the supply ratio between gold and silver has not been this low in at least 500 years.
How long would it take the price of gold to get to $10,000/oz, with the price advancing by $1/day? With the price differential between the current price ($1325/oz US) and the fair price for gold a little less than $8,700, it would take a little less than 8,700 days for the market to reach that price level. The “rally” in the gold market would have to continue for roughly 25 years, just for the price of gold to reach a level which it should already be at – today.
Some readers will find this metric unconvincing. They have been deluged with mainstream media propaganda for so long that they cannot even conceive of a fair price for gold. So let’s move to a lower target.
Gold is a monetary metal . As such its price must precisely reflect changes in the monetary base. Between 2009 and 2014; the Federal Reserve quintupled the U.S. monetary base – the infamous Bernanke Helicopter Drop . At the time the Helicopter Drop began, the price of gold was at roughly $800/oz. Thus if we ignore all of the other positive fundamentals of the gold market, and we pretend that the price of gold at the end of 2008 ($800/oz) was a fair price, the price of gold had to rise to at least $4,000/oz, by the end of 2014.
Of course the Federal Reserve’s conjuring of mountains of funny-money is only one of many positive fundamentals for the gold market. The price of $800/oz at the end of 2008 was not a fair price. It was absurdly low, due to the serial price-manipulation of which all informed readers are very familiar. Thus a price for gold of $4,000/oz – at the end of 2014 – would also have been absurdly low.
How long would it take for the price of gold to reach this low, 2014 price-target, at the pathetic pace of today’s Fake Rally ? We’re now dealing with a price differential of a little less than $2,700, meaning a little less than 2,700 days to reach a somewhat fair price for gold – in 2014. Eight more years. It would take nearly eight more years of this pseudo-rally for the price of gold to reach an absurdly low price target, which it should have already hit, in 2014.
This would make the total length of this hypothetical rally a little over 8 ½ years, with the price advancing from a sub-$1,100/oz price up to $4,000 – a total move of roughly 370%. Now let’s compare this to the ten-year bull market from 2001 to 2011. During that period, the price of gold moved from roughly $300/oz to nearly $2,000/oz. That’s a move of approximately 670%, and this significant advance in price came despite the fact that the manipulation of the price of gold was, in some respects, more extreme during those years than what we see today.
Back then, Western central banks were still pounding the market with their official gold-dumping: 500 tonnes per year. But Western central banks have long since run out of gold to dump, and now central banks in other parts of the world having been buying gold – at a pace not seen in more than 30 years. The 500 tonnes per year of gold-dumping has nearly been reversed , a positive differential of nearly 1,000 tonnes per year in supply/demand fundamentals.
Along with that major shift in supply/demand fundamentals, we have had the emergence of China as another mammoth gold market – on par with India – and another gigantic source of demand: in excess of 1,000 tonnes per year. Those are just the largest shifts in supply/demand fundamentals, and have resulted in a large, structural supply-deficit emerging in the gold market.
As already noted, we have also seen Western central banks since embark upon a new, unprecedented era of money-printing insanity , another price-driver which did not even exist for most of the 2001 – 11 bull-run. Thus, for numerous reasons, the price of gold would have to rise at a much, much faster pace during any legitimate rally today than it did during the previous 10-year bull market. Instead, we see prices advancing at little more than half that pace. Impossible.
Still, even this analysis, with an extremely modest price target, will be too great a stretch for the minds of some readers. These readers have been brainwashed with anti-gold propaganda for so many years that they can barely even conceive the price of gold reaching a new, nominal high. Note that in real dollars, the price of gold would have to rise to well over $3,000/oz – just to equal the 1980-high in the price of gold. But let’s stick with phony, nominal numbers.
How long would it take the price of gold to merely equal the 2011 nominal high of just below $2,000/oz? It would take nearly two more years. This would make it a total “rally” of more than 3 ½ years to take gold from its sub-$1,100 price level at the end of 2015 to get back to a previous (and ridiculously low) nominal high.
Understand the context here. With precious metals having been subjected to decades of the most-extreme price manipulation in the history of commodity markets, this translates into precious metals having the “most bullish” fundamentals of any commodity market in the history of human commerce. The gold market should be “stronger” today than other commodity market in the history of human commerce – except for the silver market .
It doesn’t take such markets 3 ½ years of “rallying” just to reach a previous, nominal high. Three-and-a-half months would be more than a sufficient time horizon. If there was even the faintest hint of legitimacy to this Fake Rally, the price of gold would not have been advancing at a laughable rate of $1/day. It would be leaping higher at an average rate of between $10 – $20 per day, if not much more than that.
The fact that rational, even intelligent people could consider this managed advance in the price of gold to be a “rally” is a credit to the success of the propaganda from the Corporate media and the bankers themselves. When we see the propagandists coming up with their own price-targets for gold, what sort of numbers are we seeing?
Are we seeing predictions of $10,000/oz? Are we seeing predictions of $4,000/oz? Are we even seeing predictions of a paltry advance to $2,000/oz? No. The most enthusiastic “gold bulls” among the bankers and media talking-heads are predicting that the price of gold could – some day – reach $1,500/oz.
This is one of the key elements in anti-gold and anti-silver propaganda: never presenting even quasi-realistic numbers as price-targets for gold and silver. The propagandists pretend that the maximum, future price for gold (and silver) is only some microscopic fraction of where the price should be already, today. To be precise, the propaganda machine almost never publishes any quasi-realistic numbers for the price of gold.
A recent commentary focused upon a rare lapse in the propaganda strategy: a mainstream talking-head asking the question :
Why Is Gold Not At $2,000/oz?
Why has the price of gold not already equaled (and surpassed) the ridiculous, nominal, previous high that we saw back in 2011? As was explained in that commentary, the propagandists have no answer to this question. The “reasons” which were given were analyzed, one by one, as being nothing but infantile nonsense. There is no reason why the price of gold has not already passed the pathetic price threshold of $2,000/oz (USD).
Yet, today, we are 8 ½ months into a rally where we’re told that, if everything goes well, the price of gold might eventually rise to $1,500/oz. A fantasy world. Readers know this world as the Wonderland Matrix . Supply/demand fundamentals don’t count with respect to precious metals. Monetary fundamentals don’t count. What does count?
Again we descend into a realm of utter nonsense. According to the bankers and their media prostitutes, whether or not the price of gold makes it to the ‘elevated’ level of $1,500/oz is totally dependent on whether or not the Federal Reserve raises its benchmark interest rate from 0.25% to 0.50%. Insanity!
Ultra-low interest rates are supposedly rocket fuel for precious metals, based upon the bankers’ own propaganda. Supposedly, all the years where the price of gold was languishing at absurd levels, this was because “gold pays no interest”, while the bankers’ fraudulent paper currencies did. Now these fraudulent paper currencies pay no interest, indeed, our criminalized interest rates are now moving into negative numbers – and still we see the price of gold only creeping higher at the rate of $1/day.
There is no rally in precious metals. There never was. Instead, we have the bankers engaged in a (modest) upward price-fixing operation, setting gold and silver up for a severe take-down, as a part of the banking Crime Syndicate’s strategy for “the Next Crash”.
It is after this manufactured Crash that we will see a real rally in precious metals, just as we had a real (but abbreviated) rally after the Crash of ’08. Note the differences in parameters. Precious metals prices are even more suppressed today than at the end of 2008. Precious metals fundamentals today are much, much more bullish than at the end of 2008. The economic carnage which will result from the Next Crash must be much more severe than the Crash of ’08 – creating much more “safe haven” demand. A real rally in precious metals would (will) be the Mother of All Rallies.
Why do so many people consider the current, tiny upward movement in the price of gold to be a “rally”? Because after years and years of hard-core brainwashing, these people no longer even know what a real rally would look like.
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http://www.sprottmoney.com/blog/evaluating-the-rally-how-long-to-get-to-10000-oz-jeff-nielson.html