I hope this turns out to be right.Dub has posted a couple of...

I hope this turns out to be right.

Dub has posted a couple of interesting articles on the gold thread, here's just an excerpt from one. Just go to the gold forum, two articles are the ones Dub has all the thumbs up for as of today's date:

Strong Indications of Gold & Silver Shortages


22 by Adrian Douglas


Since reaching new highs at the end of 2010 gold and silver have been sold off, and the selling has been particularly intense in the last few days. The news on the economy is almost exclusively bullish for the precious metals. From the price action one might be falsely led to believe that investment demand for the precious metals is waning. On the contrary the data analysis I will show in this article reveals strong indications of growing shortages and furthermore that the gold and silver markets are approaching "tipping points" that will lead to an acceleration of price appreciation.



There are five ellipses shown in pink and numbered 1 through 5. The long axes of the ellipses tip toward the horizontal as one goes from left to right on the chart. Ellipse #1 encompasses data from very early in the bull market. The ellipse is almost vertical which means that at that time increased demand for gold futures was met willingly by the sellers such that increasing open interest resulted in only minor increases in price. It can be seen from ellipse #1 that an expansion of open interest from 100,000 contracts to 375,000 contracts resulted in the gold price increasing from $260/oz to $425/oz, an increase of $165/oz. The ellipse #5 shows that an increase of around 50,000 contracts (600,000 to 650,000) resulted in an increase in the gold price of almost $200/oz ($1200/oz to $1400/oz). Just as we saw with silver the tendency of the long axes of the ellipses to tilt over as we go from left to right on the chart is an indication of a growing shortage. Ellipse #6 has been marked in red. It is horizontal. That is not yet quite as dramatic as in the case of silver where the ellipse is downward sloping but nonetheless it is indicating a looming chronic physical shortage. This horizontal data cluster means that even as the price rises the sellers, considered overall as a group, can not be persuaded to sell more commitments to deliver gold in the future despite a rising price.

The clear trend in the data clusters that has developed over the last ten years indicates that the gold open interest will soon be declining with a rising price as is the case for silver. Taken together the data shows that in both gold and silver there is a growing reluctance of the traditional short sellers to meet rising demand even at elevated prices. This is strongly indicative of looming physical shortages. This conclusion is corroborated by many other market observations and anecdotal evidence. We are likely very close to the "tipping point" where shortages become exposed and a stampede of investors into precious metals to benefit from the accelerating prices will give rise to a feeding frenzy that will exacerbate the shortages.

Perversely the more the market becomes close to the tipping point the more we can expect the cartel of bullion banks to make bear raids as we have seen this last week because they desperately need to cover their short positions. However, in the case of silver and soon to be the case with gold a negatively correlated open interest to price relationship means that lower prices lead to higher open interest; in other words there is no way to cover at lower prices; the only way to cover is at higher prices. As this becomes increasingly obvious to the cartel the severity of the bear raids will decrease, particularly when the premiums in the physical market are showing that the bear raids are stimulating massive physical offtake making the predicament of the cartel ever more precarious.

This makes the brouhaha about the CFTC imposing position limits on the Comex a complete joke because, as always, the regulators are going to be too late.

Just like all the other nefarious financial engineering schemes that are falling like houses of cards, the scam of selling precious metals that do not exist is fast approaching a rendezvous with its day of reckoning.


Adrian Douglas
Editor of Market Force Analysis
Board Member of GATA

January 15, 2011

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