Auguries - January 10, 2013
Liquefaction
Kevin Michael Grace

Liquefaction, Japan 1964: All it takes is a shock.
Gold was up (at press time) $15.90 (+1%) for the fortnight to $1,664.70, and silver was up $0.18 (+0.6%) to $30.18. Gold fell $24.10 Thursday (-1.4%), a development Bloomberg attributed to “Federal Reserve policymakers sa[ying] they probably will end their $85-billion monthly US bond purchases sometime in 2013.” No, the Federal Open Market Committee said no such thing, as its minutes prove, minutes which the BBC, unlike Bloomberg, managed to report accurately.

In any event, gold finished 2012 up for the twelfth year in a row, gaining 7% measured in US dollars. As for 2013, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes January 1, “The US, Japan, Britain, as well as the Swiss, Scandies and a string of states around the world, are actively driving down their currencies or imposing caps…. The side-effects of this currency warfare—or ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ policy, as it was known in the 1930s—is an escalating leakage of monetary stimulus into the global system.”

Read more about gold prices here.