“We’ve seen a downturn in the price as expressed in the paper derivatives precious metals’ price. There hasn’t been any large scale physical selling of gold or silver. Coin dealers sell gold and silver on a daily basis to retail buyers and the bullion banks broker bullion from major gold bullion producers into the countries that are buying – India, Russia, China, etc – but I have not heard of any entity that owns a large amount of gold say ‘we have to sell 100 tonnes gold, bid wanted in comp…”
The economic and corporate earnings data continue to reflect an economy that is heading into a recession – a bad one, I suspect. 85% of the S&P 500 companies have reported their first quarter. The S&P 500 GAAP earnings are down 14% versus Q4 2021 and up only 1% year-over-year. If earnings were adjusted by just the highly massaged YoY CPI inflation rate of 8.3%, real YoY SPX earnings are down 7.5%. The general economic data, which I scrutinize weekly for my Short Seller’s Journal newsletter, began showing economic weakness last summer, after the round two stimmies were largely spent. The one area that continued to show robust activity was the housing market. But both home sales (new and existing) and retail sales (nominal) have been in sharp downtrend since the beginning of 2022.
Elijah Johnson invited on to his Liberty and Finance podcast to discuss the economy and, of course, gold and silver: