The reason for these prices... Is it actually "different this time?

I've never been harassed, or felt I was treated like a criminal etc but then again I'm pretty relaxed.

I have experienced the nuisance aspect of overzealous decisions remembering one transaction in particular that was stalled for a few days involving a few $thousand because we referenced it "Isis" (it was Isis District in Qld lol) and it got flagged by someone or something at Commbank, but generally the modern banking system operates flawlessly. Or getting asked why I didn't use the ATM to deposit bags of coins instead of over the counter etc but big deal, it's hardly going to take years off my life answering their inane questions (just like the questions pharmacists drag you through). When I was younger banks closed at 3pm (later at 4pm), you had to do all your banking during your lunch hour, you needed a passbook and it took days for funds to clear. I was paid by cheque and I'd have to duck into the local pub to get it cashed because there weren't banks around in my locality or they were closed after work and so on and so on and on. Hardly convenient.

We're so accustomed to instant gratification nowadays that when some are confronted by the inconvenience of a network outage, power supply interruption or barriers to smooth transactions because things aren't proceeding in the way they think they should then their whole world falls apart.

You raised that as an aspect in relation to risk. It's negligible = overblown.

I'll ask you this: how many bank customers have lost their deposits due to a "bail-in"? And how many owners of gold/silver have lost their savings due to theft?

 

Fear is a marketing tool. It's as present in the precious metals sector as it is present in every other market. That doesn't mean that the fear is non-existent, it's just often blown out of proportion to lure in more money.

 

You've ignored my question but I'll answer yours.

People's houses burn down all the time, just as people' stuff gets stolen from their homes. On the other hand there hasn't been a bail-in in Australia. On a risk scale theft or fire would rate as much higher, even government land resumption is a higher risk than bail-ins but that doesn't even enter most people's thoughts and nor should it really.

 

No

 

Risk assessment is an attempt to provide a framework in order to mitigate risk.

Say you've got $200 000 in cash sitting in a bank account, do you buy a kg of gold and keep it under your bed or leave it in the bank?

In 2023-2024 2.1% of households in Australia experienced a break-in. There's been a steady decline in incidences of robbery over the previous ten year period. But the risk is real and evidenced.

In 2023-2024 0% of deposit holders lost their funds to a bail-in. There's been no decline nor rise in the incident of bail-ins over a similar period. So while the risk is real on paper, it's never materialised.

You can take steps to minimise or prevent a break in, but what's going to prevent a bail-in? Answer: government legislation around banking frameworks mitigates much of the risk and of course there's the government bail-outs that have occurred, yet not one institution has resorted to bail-ins in this country. Hence why fears of bail-ins is largely overblown. I hope you can understand my position now.

 

Sort of, it's more because bail-in legislation is completely unnecessary. Let's just say that there is a minimal risk of it actually happening because there is a minimal need for it to be implemented.

Probably as an outcome of the GFC and the fact that legislation takes time to be implemented and in the post-GFC world there was a move away from government bail-outs of banks for a variety of reasons ie people were pissed off and politicians were scrambling for promises they could make.

I didn't think it was required, and even now I'd argue the same.The government could always bail-out the banks if it chose, sometimes they chose not to eg Lehman Bros. And that was shown to be a huge mistake. But in the minds of legislators at the time they probably thought that taxpayer's dollars shouldn't be used to fund poor decisions on the part of banksters. Naturally that's nonsense as taxpayers don't fund bank bail-outs but nonsense often feeds the justifications of our lawmakers.

Since 2018 governments have continued to support the banking sectors with support packages during times of crisis eg SVB and Signature though not by supporting the failed banks themselves but by providing liquidity to the banking sector eg BTFP which allowed banks to swap assets at par value with The Fed which in turn increases the level of confidence of the stability of the financial sector more so than bail-in legislation alone would provide. The BASEL accord is another step to increasing the resilience of the banking sector meaning bail-ins become even less relevant and add to that central banks support each other as well eg The Fed provides temporary liquidity swaps to the RBA in times of need to protect stability ie when we have a shortage of USD to meet market need.

 

MarketReader AI:

So the perspective is that the trajectory of gold's price (as well as silver) is to trend lower. This is reflected in the futures/options which really is just a market that just trades in sentiment.

 

Sentiment meets reality in the form of Trump's comments around nuclear testing and the gold price surges again.