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(Kitco News) - Gold and silver prices are sharply higher in early morning U.S. trading Thursday. Gold powered to a five-year high, while silver prices hit a five-week high. Major central banks that are leaning easy on their monetary policies are boosting the metals and the raw commodity sector, in general. Gold is also seeing increased safe-haven buying interest as tensions in the Persian Gulf are on the rise. August gold futures were last up $37.50 an ounce at 1,386.50. July Comex silver prices were last up $0.417 at $15.385 an ounce. Traders and investors are still digesting Wednesday’s conclusion...

Gold and silver have been getting the snot beaten out of them lately as people respond to a fiat currency crisis in Turkey by flocking to another fiat currency. But even if I were a Keynesian and believed in paper money, I'd have to say that precious metals are looking attractive. I'm generally a gold guy, but silver is crazy cheap right now. As of right now it's trading at around $14.50 oz. But the real story that conventional analysts are missing is the silver to gold price ratio. Since gold was demonetized in the early 1970's the average price...

Fueled by speculation that a bitcoin ETF could be approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the next week or so, the price of bitcoin has risen steadily, finally surpassing the cost of an ounce of gold on Thursday. As of press time, one Bitcoin was worth $1,273 according to CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index, and an ounce of gold was worth $1,244, according to precious metals retailer APMEX. The market capitalization of all outstanding bitcoin also surpassed $20 billion for the first time in bitcoin's history, according to Coinmarketcap. The SEC is expected to make a decision on a...

Major U.S. and international banks cheat their customers and rig markets. Revelations have been piling up since the 2008 financial crisis. Hundreds of billions have been paid in fines, penalties, and settlements. The fraud, price manipulation, lying, and theft – once considered conspiracy theories – are now incontrovertible conspiracy facts. This reality is dawning now in the precious metals industry. GATA, the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, labored for years making the case for price manipulation in the markets. They, and others, made a powerful argument complete with price charts and trading patterns that simply could not be explained in free...

Vice President-elect Michael Pence is currently the most powerful single political influence on President-elect Trump. Among other things, he is in charge of the transition team. He will also be in charge, after the inauguration, with dealing with Congress. For leftists, hostile to gold, that is a problem. However, for those of us who believe that the only way to solve our long-term economic problems is by a return to honest money, it is a godsend. The editor of the New York Sun realized this quite a while ago. He wrote, back in July, about the wise choice of then-Governor...

As it goes in silver, so it goes in gold. In London at least. In a bid to have UBS reinstated as a defendant in a London Gold Fix antitrust lawsuit, plaintiffs documents submitted to a New York Court last week include explosive chat room transcripts of UBS and traders from different banks encouraging each other to “push,” “smack,” and “whack” gold prices. The transcripts are equally as startling as those described of banks of the London Silver Fix and UBS given to the court the previous day and described last week in this article. On December 6th attorneys for...

Tyler DurdenNovember 19, 2016 India's 'de-monetization' scheme has caused chaos across the nation, and while SocGen says the government's plan may have some short-term success in curbing so-called 'black-money', investors should "brace for economic disruption" as Bloomberg reports the Indian government is considering a cap on cash holdings for individuals. As SocGen concludes, "people will now be more inclined to park their black income in gold rather than in currency." The daily images of utter chaos in India that has brought the conutry's economy to a standstill since they unleashed their war on cash... Are perhaps about to get worse,...

Jeff Berwick November 17, 2016 We are living in a world where paper fiat money is becoming a novelty. In Australia, Citibank has just become the first to declare that it no longer will accept notes or coins. Only digital transactions. This follows on the heels of India banning large cash denominations. The cash-oriented changes of these two countries are especially troubling in light of the eventual plans to phase out large denomination euro notes and the US 100 dollar bill by 2018. Just as the Economist predicted nearly 30 years ago, the world is going cashless. A few days...

Chaos in the Wake of the Ban Here is a link to Part 1, about what happened in the first two days after India’s government made Rs 500 (~$7.50) and Rs 1,000 (~$15) banknotes illegal. They can now only be converted to Rs 100 (~$1.50) or lower denomination notes, at bank branches or post offices. Banks were closed the first day after the decision. What follows is the crux of what has happened over the subsequent four days.

George Soros’s hedge fund Soros Fund Management sold its stake in a widely used gold exchange-traded fund in the third quarter, according to a regulatory filing out Monday. The fund reported no stake in the SPDR Gold Trust GLD, +0.58%  in the period ended Sept. 30. That’s after disclosing a position worth $30.4 million in a second-quarter filing. The storied billionaire investor had attracted attention during the second quarter for being generally bearish on world markets — and scooping up safety-play gold.

Brexit is back in the news, but this time it's weighing on gold prices and gold mining stocks. The difference: Unlike in June, there's no real panic, just a vague sense of foreboding, but nothing bad enough to keep the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates. December gold closed down 3.3% to $1,269.70 an ounce on Tuesday, the biggest one-day decline since December 2013. It was the sixth straight losing session as gold undercut a key technical level. Gold price moves have a big impact on the profitability of gold miners, which tumbled on the stock market today... ...A stronger...

On June 23, the voters of Great Britain will decide whether or not to leave the European Union (EU), which Britain joined in the early 1970s. With a week until the decision is due, the forces of “Leave the EU” have increased sharply over the “Remain” vote. This has caused a collapse in the British pound in anticipation of the vote. This has also caused many Britons to exchange their weak pound sterling for gold. One leading British gold dealer said that the U.K. is outstripping all other regions for demand growth this month, up 59% in June. Their head...

It wasn’t so long ago that some of the more famous investor gurus were shrugging off gold as nothing more than shiny trinkets with no investment value. They were wrong. This safe haven is back, the recovery is clear, and there have been some very big changes of heart. The biggest gold producers in the world have seen their share prices double this year. Not only are gold prices soaring, but producers are cutting costs and slimming down debt as they pave the way for gold to return to the top of the favored commodities list. Even though gold dropped...

April 27, 2016 Sol_Palha We are still not convinced that Gold is fully out of the woods. Peter Schiff is busy telling everyone that it was a bad idea to have sold Gold in 2011, we beg to differ for the trend indicates otherwise, and so does the price of Gold. He is coming out with scary scenarios though they are not as grandiose as James Sinclair's scenario that calls for Gold to move to $50,000 an ounce. Even, when we dream we find it hard to envision such a price, so it is interesting that he can come up...

BlackRock's Gold ETF (IAU) has seen fund inflows every day in 2016 (no outflows at all) and with the stock trading above its NAV for most of the year, the world's largest asset manager has made a significant decision: •*BLACKROCK SAYS ISSUANCE OF GOLD TRUST SHARES SUSPENDED• *BLACKROCK SAYS SUSPENSION DUE TO DEMAND FOR GOLD ... It appears the huge demand for physical gold (and lack of supply) is finally catching up with the manipulation of paper prices. If this is anything other than a brief technical suspension, it could well unleash panic-buying as we already pointed out - there...

Tyler Durden March 3, 2016One month ago, when looking at the latest Canadian official international reserves, we noticed something strange: Canada had sold nearly half of its gold reserves in one month. According to the February data, total Canadian gold reserves stood at 1.7 tonnes. That was just 0.1 per cent of the country’s total reserves, which also include foreign currency deposits and bonds. As we noted, the decision to sell came from Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s office. “Canada’s gold reserves belong to the Government of Canada, and are held under the name of the Minister of Finance,” explained a...

Germany's financial regulator has said it won't take further action against the country's largest bank over alleged interest rate rigging and precious metals price fixing. The moves takes the spotlight off a former boss. The watchdog, known as Bafin, announced on Thursday it had ended several major special audits against Deutsche Bank. [...] Deutsche Bank paid $2.5 billion (2.26 billion euros) in fines in April last year after investigations on manipulating interest rates. The bank was also probed for its role in rigging prices of gold, silver, platinum and palladium. It also recorded a multibillion-euro loss for 2015. Bafin officials...

Just thought this seems possibly important. Gold also jumped.

With countless settlements documenting the rigging of every single asset class, it was only a matter of time before the regulators - some 10 years behind the curve as usual - finally cracked down on gold manipulation as well, even though as we have shown in the past, central banks in general and the Fed in particular are among the biggest gold manipulators. That said, we are confident by now nobody will be surprised that there was manipulation going on in the gold casino. In fact, ever since Germany's Bafin launched a probe into Deutsche Bank for gold and silver...

Tyler Durden 09/09/2015 Just over one month ago, when looking at the latest changes in registered gold held at the Comex ,we were stunned not only by the collapse in this series to a record low of just over 350k ounces or barely over 10 tons, but also by the surge in "gold coverage", or the amount of paper gold claims on physical gold, which exploded to a record high 124 per ounce. This is what we said on August 3: While on its own, gold open interest - which merely represents the total potential claims on gold if exercised...