- The dollar rallies while Chuck is gone!
- Oil shippers are scratching their heads…
Good Day… And a Wonderful Wednesday to you! Welcome to March, one of my favorite months, and I’m glad to be back… I actually had a dear reader send me a note that said, “I haven’t gotten a Pfennig since 2/218″… It does seem like a long time ago, but it isn’t in reality… I had a wonderful time with my spring training buddies here for a week to go to games and sit out on the balcony at night and talk… Weezer greets me this morning with their song: Island In The Sun…
Well, I was all prepared to tell you in my first pfennig back, that Gold & Silver were well on their way to full recovery after the engineered takedown at the end of Jan. BUT NOOOOOOOO! The SPTs had something up their sleeves and took Gold & Silver down by large amounts yesterday. And Gold & Silver weren’t the only metals taken down; Platinum, Palladium and Copper all lost major ground yesterday… When I left, Gold was $4,922… And Silver was $75.65… So, even with the SPTs taking them down again yesterday, they are still of greater value now than when I left….
The PPT was out in force on Monday this week, and that the dollar hasn’t looked back since… With the U.S. joining Israel in bombing Iran, the dollar was on tenterhooks, and looking to fall. But then the PPT stepped in and bought dollars and the dollar hasn’t looked this healthy in a while… The BBDXY closed yesterday at 1,204 and it was 1,183 when I left, so the PPT put the fear of God into dollar traders and they decided that shorting the dollar was in their best interests as long as the PPT was there to stem the slide…
The one commodity that we track, that has had a strong reaction to the new attack in Iran is the price of Oil… Oil ended the day yesterday at $75 and it was $64 when I left… The price of Oil was up to $77 at one point yesterday, but I guess some profit taking took over at the close…
And the 10-year Treasury ended the day with a 4.06% yield, after falling below 4% last week… a friendly reminder, yield up, means price of bond is down…
In the overnight markets last night… Gold & Silver are back to doing what they were doing before being interrupted by the SPTs yesterday… Gold is up $97 to start our day, and Silver is up $3.90. This is absolutely ridiculous that the SPTs are allowed to do what they did yesterday…. And I’ll tell you that the selloffs in late January and yesterday are simply attempts to save the SPTS from major margin calls… In the event of the late January selloff, they SPTS HAD received their margin calls, and they would have gone bankrupt if they had to pay them… instead, they engineered a massive selloff and brought the prices back down to eliminate the margin calls… The prices of Gold & Silver were close to generating margin calls again before yesterday’s sell off…
I sent an email to Ed Steer and said that the selling was very ugly… He replied, “Let’s hope this is “da boyz” last swing at the fences”…. I thought, boy wouldn’t that be nice….
The dollar, overnight, has been sold, and the BBDXY starts today at 1,9999… So, dollar traders are stepping their toes back in the water to test just how far they can take the dollar down before triggering a response from the PPT and the Exchange Stabilization Fund…
The price of Oil has slipped back below the $75 handle to start our day… The Iranians have closed the strait of Hormuz, and so shipping of Oil around the world has been slowed greatly… The shippers have to rethink their routes and this will delay many countries from receiving Oil on time… Good thing that winter is over in the Northern hemisphere…. I could talk for hours about Oil but I reserve my thoughts here, for this is not the time or place…
And the 10-year Treasury bumped higher in yield to start our day today trading with a 4.08% yield… I sure wish the Fed Heads would leave Treasuries alone and quit their “yield curve maintenance”… But then everything in the world is manipulated these days… So, why not Treasuries?
Well, we stuck our necks out again… This time in the Gulf Coast, with Iran… This conflict had been brewing for some time now, and finally came to a head over the weekend… I’m not a fan of war… So, I’ll come right out and say that now, but I also believe that any war that the U.S. gets involved with I’ll support the troops to the end. So there’s that!
There have been many articles that came across my email box while I was gone… I didn’t read them because I was on vacation from the markets and chaos in the markets every day… So, yesterday, I decided I would get caught up with them and I got lost in the words… There are a lot of theories out there that talk about how the world will be caught up in the Iran conflict, so there’s that!
The Swiss franc was the lone survivor of the currencies during this dollar rally… The Petrol currencies, minus the Russian ruble, have also held their ground vs the dollar, currencies like the Norwegian Krone, and Brazilian real seem to have fended off the dollar… Now, if the dollar goes back to getting sold again, then the Petrol currencies will really have the wind in their sails! I’m just saying…
I don’t have much for you today as I’m still trying to get “back in the saddle”… So, we’ll go on to the BIG FINISH and start anew tomorrow.
The U.S. Data Cupboard while I was gone, wasn’t kind to the U.S. economy… Only the ISM Manufacturing Index showed a gain. Factory Orders were negative, and everything else while I was gone was in bad shape… Today we’ll see the Feb ADP Employment Report… This is an important report but the markets dont’ see it that way, but they will… One day in the future…. And the Fed/Cabal/ Cartel’s Beige book will print, which is a review by the local Fed Offices of how the economy is doing in their region. Not really an important piece for the markets…
To recap… Everything for Gold & Silver was going well, until it wasn’t yesterday… The SPTs came in and took all the metals down… It was very ugly as Gold was down $275 at one point, and Silver was down over $9… They came back a little as the day went on, and that was that… Chuck is back and that means he full of you know what and vinegar as he hasn’t kept up with the chaos in the markets while gone…
For What It’s Worth… this came to me from the good folks at GATA and it’s about Gold & Sliver and it can be found here:Chris Powell: Canada, you’re a rich country, so stop insisting on being poor | Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee | Exposing the long-term manipulation of the gold market
Or, here’s your snippet: ” Please forgive the lack of a French translation for my remarks. I took four years of French in high school and still don’t know merde.
But since we met here a year ago things have changed dramatically for the monetary metals. For much of the last year gold and silver have been more or less soaring. I think I know why.
The violence of the recent rise in the monetary metals — gold up more than 70% and silver more than 150% in a year — typifies either the apocalypse or a short squeeze — and massive naked short positions in gold and silver, short positions long encouraged and underwritten by Western central banks, are exactly what GATA has been complaining about for many years. Those shorts started to be called for delivery after February 2022 when the United States froze Russia’s international foreign exchange assets.
Whereupon other governments and central banks as well as industrial companies began to realize that their assets in the Western financial system would no longer be secure unless they capitulated to ever more aggressive U.S. foreign policy. People outside the United States began to realize that their claims on gold and other assets in the Western financial system could not be relied upon. So they started to shift their assets into gold, which was to be kept in their own vaults, prompting the short squeeze, because most of the gold they thought they held at Western bullion banks was merely paper. That is, the gold didn’t exist.
The long-awaited scramble out of over-rehypothecated paper and into real metal had begun.
The naked short position in gold and other commodity markets may have been first identified in 2001 by the British economist Peter Warburton with his essay “The Debasement of World Currency: It Is Inflation But Not As We Know It”:
Warburton wrote: “How much capital would it take to control the combined gold, oil, and commodity markets? Probably, no more than $200 billion, using derivatives. Moreover, it is not necessary for the central banks to fight the battle themselves, although central bank gold sales and gold leasing have certainly contributed to the cause.”
Warburton saw that the major investment banks, often the enthusiastic tools of Western central banks, would help central banks suppress commodity prices with derivatives.
The British businessman and gold mining entrepreneur Peter Hambro confirmed Warburton’s assertion from his own experience in the gold banking business. In an essay written in 2022, “Don’t Forget the Golden Rule: Whoever Has the Gold Makes the Rules” —
Chuck again… Good stuff from Gata’s Treasurer, and well worth the time to go through the entire thing…
Market Prices 3/4/2026: American Style: A$.7058, kiwi .5918, C$ .7323, euro 1.1644, sterling 1.3385, Swiss $1.2817, European Style: rand 16.3582, krone 9.6417, SEK 9.1820, forint 330.95, zloty 3.6600, koruna 20.9370, RUB 77.93, yen 157.07, sing 1.2744, HKD 7.8169, INR 92.14, China 20.6943, peso 17.59, BRL 5.2315, BBDXY 1,999, Dollar Index 98.81, Oil $74.72, 10-year 4.08%, Silver $86.08, Platinum $2,174.00, Palladium $1,721.00, Copper $5.93, and Gold…. $5,187
That’s it for today… Did you miss me? I missed getting up near dawn to write, that’s for sure! Well, my beloved Cardinals can’t hit; it’s that simple. They are very young and inexperienced and will be taken advantage of by Major League Pitchers this year… it’s going to be a loooooonnnngggg year for my beloved Cardinals… Maybe they’ll surprise me with spirited play… I sure hope so! I finally ate a hot dog at the DUNE DOG restaurant yesterday. I had gone there for years, and always ordered something else other than a hot dog… It was good, with lots of chili and shredded cheese and onions… I think I’ll order it again the next time I go! The Steve Miler Band takes us to the finish line today with their song: Living in the U.S.A… I hope you have a Wonderful Wednesday today, and Please Be Good To Yourself…
Chuck Butler