Sell gold | Gold Falls, US Mint 5 Oz Silver Bullion Coins Temporarily Sell Out ...

Gold Falls, US Mint 5 Oz Silver Bullion Coins Temporarily Sell Out ...

Posted: 21 Apr 2014 02:45 PM PDT

Great Smoky Mountains National Park Five Ounce Silver Bullion Coin Up Close

The U.S. Mint temporarily sold of out its Great Smoky Mountains National Park Five Ounce Silver Bullion Coin

Gold prices on Monday retreated to a two-week low in thin post-holiday trading. The loss marked the third in four sessions.

Gold for June delivery shed $5.40, or 0.4%, to settle at $1,288.50 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. The closing price was the weakest since April 3. Gold ranged from a low of $1,281.80 to a high of $1,302.50.

"The bearish technical posture presently gripping the gold market is prompting keener selling interest amid a lack of fresh, bullish fundamental news at present," Jim Wyckoff, a senior analyst at Kitco Metals Inc., said in a report.

Gold prices ended the Easter-shortened week on Thursday at $1,293.90 an ounce for a weekly loss of 1.9%.

Other precious metals recorded weighty declines in starting the new trading week. In their daily breakdowns:

Silver for May delivery lost 25 cents, or 1.3%, to $19.35 an ounce, trading between $19.23 and $19.71.
July platinum declined $28, or 2%, to $1,400.70 an ounce, ranging from $1,399.80 to $1,418.20.
Palladium for June delivery tumbled $29.30, or 3.6%, to $777.80 an ounce, trading between $766.90 and $802.

The three metals were mixed last week with palladium edging higher by 30 cents while silver fell 1.8% and platinum plunged 2.3%.

London Fix Precious Metals

London markets shut down for Good Friday and Easter Monday holiday. The most recent PM fixings changes from Wednesday PM to Thursday PM had:

Gold falling $2.50, or 0.2%, to $1,299 an ounce,
Silver rising 2 cents, or 0.1%, to $19.62 an ounce,
Platinum dropping $5, or 0.3%, to $1,437 an ounce, and
Palladium gaining $1, or 0.1%, to $801 an ounce

Last week, palladium rose 0.9% while the other metals logged declines of 1.4% for gold, 2.3% for silver and 1.2% for platinum.

US Mint Bullion Sales in March

U.S. Mint silver bullion coins advanced by 694,500 ounces with splits of 691,500 in one-ounce American Silver Eagles and 600 in five-ounce America the Beautiful Silver Bullion Coins.

In related coins news about the latter, the U.S. Mint announced that it has temporarily sold out of Great Smoky Mountains National Park 5 Ounce Silver Bullion Coins. Sales hit 23,000 with the 600 increase on Monday.

The bureau said it is "in the process of producing additional inventory" and that it "will likely have additional coins in a few weeks."

The Great Smoky Mountains bullion coin launched on March 17 with the Mint noting around the time that it expected to produce enough to fulfill demand. The related collector version is nearing a sellout with last reported sales at 21,415 of the maximum 25,000. The U.S. Mint has not yet released the other five-ounce 2014 coins — bullion or collector versions.

Below is a sales breakdown for U.S. Mint bullion products with columns offering the number of bullion coins sold on Monday, last week, last month, the month-to-date, and the year-to-date.

American Eagle and Buffalo Bullion Sales (# of coins)
	Monday Sales	Sales Last Week	March Sales	April Sales	YTD Sales
$100 American Platinum Eagle Bullion Coins	0	300	10,000	900	10,900
$50 American Eagle Gold Bullion Coins	0	7,500	16,000	19,500	120,000
$25 American Eagle Gold Bullion Coins	0	0	2,000	1,000	18,000
$10 American Eagle Gold Bullion Coins	0	8,000	4,000	18,000	60,000
$5 American Eagle Gold Bullion Coins	0	10,000	30,000	30,000	270,000
$50 American Buffalo Gold Bullion Coins	0	3,000	12,000	13,000	78,500
$1 American Eagle Silver Bullion Coins	691,500	1,085,000	5,354,000	3,120,000	16,999,000
Great Smoky Mountains National Park 5 Oz Silver Bullion Coins	600	7,400	12,400	10,600	23,000

The final word on Gordon Brown's gold sell-off | ampp3d

Posted: 11 Apr 2014 03:42 AM PDT

Gordon Brown sold more than half of Britain's precious gold bullion at the bottom of the market just before the price of gold started a decade of almost uninterrupted growth.

Or so the Tory attack line goes.

It's a favourite of Conservative Party press officers, the Prime Minister and clueless commentators everywhere.

David Cameron used it in Prime Minster's questions last week to counter criticisms about the Royal Mail sell-off. He even called the two Labour Eds "muppets" because of their involvement with the sale.

Here's a chart of the gold price which will excite whoever's behind @CCHQPress:

GoldSaleBrown

Unfortunately for Tory press release writers, the story's a little more complicated than that.

Why did Brown sell the gold?

Between July 1999 and March 2002 Gordon Brown's government sold 395 tonnes of UK gold, about 58% of the government's total reserves of 715 tonnes.

Brown's justification for the sale was to diversify the country's assets.

As Alan Beattie says in the FT, holding onto gold is a largely pointless activity for governments.

If you convert the gold to money you can at least earn interest and that's what happened to the money which the government made from the sell-off: it was invested in foreign currency interest-bearing assets, 40% in dollars, 40% in euros and 20% in yen.

Fantasy-land losses from the gold sale

David Cameron and the Tories want you to believe that selling the gold in 1999 cost the taxpayer many billions of pounds. Here's how his fantasy maths works:

Selling the gold at an average price of $277/oz made the government a total of $3.5 billion. With gold prices peaking at $1,780.65 the government could have made as much as $22.5 billion. But anyone who says they can predict the price of anything 12 years in the future is completely bonkers.

Here's that fantasy-land loss in a number:

$19bn

Hypothetical losses from selling at $277/oz instead of the peak gold price in 2011.

Note that David Cameron cites a figure of £9 billion which comes from a Daily Mail story.

A more common sense analysis of the gold sale

The average price of gold in the three years after the sale was $376/oz. That's still more than the $277/oz average sale price, but not much more. So in theory waiting a couple of years would have netted the Treasury $4.8 billion.

Here's this more common sense analysis of the loss in a number:

$1.3bn

Hypothetical losses from selling at $277/oz instead of the average price over next three years.

That's still a huge chunk of change but it ain't £9 billion. It also doesn't include any potential profit from the money we made from selling the gold. And it's less than the estimated losses from the bodged Royal Mail sale.

Taking Cameron's argument to its logical conclusion

If Ed Balls and Ed Miliband are "muppets" for the gold sale in 1999, what does that make Cameron?

According to Oren Laurent, chief executive of Banc De Binary:

"Gold prices have been on a downward trajectory since their peak in August 2011, after ten years of virtually uninterrupted growth".

Why aren't people angry that Cameron didn't sell the rest of our gold at the peak price in 2011?

Here's why:

Politicians do not and should not speculate with our gold

Here's a chart of the UK's gold reserves between 1957 and 2010. Note how since 1971 UK politicians have barely touched it, and for good reason.

Source: Global Gold Markets by Catherine R. Shenk

The price of gold fluctuates wildly.

The Treasury's latest update on the state of the Bank of England's gold assets has this shocking line:

"Since 31 March 2013 the market value of gold has fallen. [...] we estimate that the impact on the Statement of Financial Position, as at 2 July 2013, to be a reduction of around £2.3 billion or 22%."

We'll repeat that: in the five months it took for the Treasury to write its report about our assets the value of our gold dropped by a fifth!

Did you know we sold half our gold in 1970?

Between 1970-71 the Bank of England sold nearly half of our gold reserves. Just like the Brown sell-off it was sold at a historic low of about $42.5/oz in October 1971. Only a year later it was worth $65/oz.

As Catherine R. Schenk says in her book about the global gold market:

"Picking the right time for portfolio changes is clearly challenging".

A gold-plated understatement if we've ever heard one.

The gold sell-off is just one of a string of billion pound mistakes

The punch and judy politics which we see at PMQs is a massive distraction from the real problem with our system of government.

Governments of every colour are constantly making mistakes that cost the taxpayer billions of pounds.

Ivor Crewe, the Master of University College, Oxford lists some of the multi-billion pound policy mistakes made in the last thirty years:

The poll tax aka "the classic policy blunder"
The bodged entrance and exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism
Countless government IT failures like the cancellation of the NHS Patient Record System
The Millennium Dome mishap which cost £800m
The collapse of Metronet which cost £2 billion
The Assets Recovery Agency designed to get money back from criminals but which cost more than it ever obtained

The list goes on and on. Only yesterday we were writing about the £500 million the government wasted stocking up on Tamiflu.

So can we stop with the dunces and muppet talk, please?

The public is badly served by the utterly base level of debate by our leaders who know all too well that a loud argument will distract people from the true story.

A debate about how to fix things and stop blunders like the gold and Royal Mail sales might be boring, but it's what the country needs.