Yes, it’s another inflation post going up even as inflation expectations are in the dumper and casino patrons just cannot get enough of Treasury and Government bonds yielding 0%, near 0% and below 0%.
Feel free to tune out the lunatic inflation theories you’ve found at nftrh.com over the last few weeks. But if by chance you do want to look, here’s a visual path we have taken to arrive at the barn door, behind which are all those inflated chickens, roosting and waiting. All sorts of animals will get out of the barn if macro signals activate.
Gold led silver ever since the last inflationary blow off and blow out in early 2011. The gold-silver ratio rose through global deflation, US Goldilocks, good times and bad. There was no inflation problem, anywhere. Then early this year silver jerked leadership away from gold and now for the second time the ratio of gold to silver has broken below the moving average that has defined its trend (it did so in 2012 as well).
Why is this significant? Well, try on 2010 for size (see chart below). I for one happily managed the gold-silver ratio up spike in 2008, buying gold miners as they crashed. As gold (monetary, risk ‘off’) topped vs. silver (commodity/monetary, relatively risk ‘on’) we expanded the bullish view to commodities as well. But then came the bottoming pattern that was not a bottoming pattern. To this day I believe that the macro was preparing for a next leg up and some serious new destruction before Ben Bernanke, the “Hero”, sprung into action and ruined the beautiful Inverted H&S pattern that long-time NFTRH subscribers will remember me making a big deal about at the time. Continue reading "A Path Toward Inflation"