Loading ...Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Craig Hemke of the TF Metals Report, writing this week for Sprott Money —
— speculates about the far out-of-the-money options that have been purchased on the December contract for gold on the New York Commodities Exchange, which have caused people to wonder if somebody knows something about a possible upward revaluation of gold by the end of the year.
At his YouTube channel, Vince Lanci of GoldFix guesses at the identities of the options buyers:
He notes that a gold moonshot isn’t necessary for the buyers to make money on them, since any strong rise in the gold price may make the options more valuable.
In previous commentary Hemke has written that a revaluation of gold at some point is plausible and even likely. After all, it has happened before, the most famous example being the gold revaluation and U.S. dollar devaluation proclaimed in the United States by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1934.
Indeed, gold revaluation is a standard mechanism of money creation for central banks to avert catastrophic debt deflations, as the Scottish economist Peter Millar detailed in a study written in 2006:
https://www.gata.org/node/4843
Fourteen years ago the U.S. economists Paul Brodsky and Lee Quaintance argued that major central banks likely were already planning for gold revaluation, surreptitiously redistributing world gold reserves among themselves so they all might be fully hedged against an inevitable devaluation of the dollar:
https://www.gata.org/node/11373
The trillion-dollar platinum coin idea that has been floating around Washington for a few years is a variant of gold revaluation and dollar devaluation, a variant that would try to restrict the benefit to the U.S. government, the only possessor of the coin:
https://www.gata.org/node/23324
While this stuff sometimes seems wild, it is actually serious, at least as anything in a system of infinite fiat money can be serious.
But it is hard to believe that anyone would have much of a chance to cash in on a major revaluation of gold by using Comex gold futures contract options.
Official gold and currency revaluations happen suddenly. They are top secret, matters of national security, since front-running would negate them. So the general thinking about a major gold and currency revaluation has been that it would be proclaimed while all financial markets are closed and that governments would suspend futures markets and require contracts and options to be settled for cash at the prices on the last trading day before the revaluation.
After all, if the Comex, which lately has been more noted for the market manipulation it countenances than for integrity, is glad to let traders, especially big banks, sell far out-of-the-money options on just about anything, the exchange could be confident that the government would intervene as necessary to prevent disaster — like the disaster that might result from such options suddenly becoming in-the-money. If enough gold options like the ones Hemke and Lanci cite ever came into the money, they might bankrupt the exchange. So anyone buying those options is betting not just that gold may go to the moon by the end of the year but also that the U.S. government will let the exchange go bust.
For that matter, anyone owning gold and shares of gold mining companies in the belief that a major revaluation of gold and devaluation of the dollar are inevitable is also betting that the U.S. government will let gold investors keep spectacular capital gains and not take them away via punitive windfall profits taxes or outright confiscation of metal and nationalization of mines.
Bobby Godsell, former CEO of AngloGold Ashanti, once said that he wanted “a good gold price in a good world.” Most gold investors probably share that hope. But as the saying goes, hope is not a strategy, and all investors, especially investors in the monetary metals, must consider whether, and, if so, how they can guard against government’s totalitarian tendencies even in nominally free countries.
Yes, it’s distressing. But as Lee Strasberg’s Hyman Roth told Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in one of the “Godfather” movies, “This is the business we’ve chosen”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fc5tWRUcuk
Since gold is the secret and even prohibited knowledge of the financial universe, its business is fascinating, exciting, aggravating, demoralizing, sometimes highly profitable, and sometimes ruinous. Of course everyone in this business may hope to get rich from it while helping to make markets and the world financial system a little more honest, transparent, and democratic. But maybe not too rich.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
CPowell@GATA.org
The Adens meanwhile see a parabolic rise in PM’s, that would allow for such huge prices and allow the option sellers to delta hedge on the way up.
So the exchange would not go bust….just some granters would be a lot poorer.
* * *