Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
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No worries Cowichan, but this is not a crypto forum Cowichan- and I don't post CEY on crypto forums... the prob with crypto is it's sooooo broad- anyone who goes for minor eg Terra being a classic example is a risk too far for me- I stick to what I see as the key ones with differing methods which I believe will all succeed and worth the risk as my smallest amount of my funds allocated as the highest % risk asset- the next highest being gold miners... the vast majority of commentary out there is pure clickbait- the nature of the beast, as is so much of the gold people predicting on youtube- how wrong have they been...
A completely different crisis to 2008- hence my mild recession and not like 2008. Inflation will top and drop- rate rises will to and drop about 6months later (the drop part).
The FED actions remind me of a group of scientists who say do not worry about the record amount of snow in the mountains to those living in the valleys below. We have devices that can manage the snow melt so that the water will flow to seas far away. They start with their adjustments gradually melting bits of snow here and there reflecting the sun at particular times and magnify it with their protocol untested recipe. Unfortunately, the science team underestimate the forces of physics when they raise the temperature just a tiny bit beyond a critical point, and the result is not trickle flows of water, but the largest of all snow avalanches.
This month the FED are doing QT of $95B and probably a 0.75% rate hike. The capital markets across the globe have shut down everywhere bar the energy and renewables sector over the last six months. This is already baking in a big future recession as existing projects end and nothing much is replacing the capital flows of the past. We are of course seeing large number of bank jobs now going in USA, UK and Europe. They probably want the caps on income removed to retain some of the people who may have to rebuild the entire sector again sometime in the future or making do with less people and allowing them to burn out on higher pay. The FED have redefined the absence of growth as the shortage of workforce means they do not have high unemployment. However, when wages are tight, less stuff gets bought, less is made, less gets delivered and sold the earnings drop and then companies have to make savings not just in what they produce, but the numbers employed to deliver the output. Additionally, productivity falls apart as public spending retrenches, and their benefits provided to the income generating productive side of society are also adversely affected. In effect society operates in a greater number of small silos will little cohesion between them and hence low productivity.
At some point, the FED pain becomes an avalanche and companies compete to get dwindling market share and the jobs losses start a spiral that causes a second avalanche and then a third. Finally, we get to a point like in 2008 when a crisis has to be resolved with doing whatever it takes mantra as money is poured in to get everybody out of a buried hole.
Where it becomes relevant to Centamin investors is having the ability to weather this process of central bankers assuming all knowledge until something comes along for them to blame it on something else and not what they did. It could get awful in the coming weeks, and it will be those who can buy when the sector is absolutely hated that will get a major return here. Tony
Russia's gold fix lasted only a week.
Https://www.reuters.com/business/russias-central-bank-says-it-will-stop-buying-gold-fixed-price-2022-04-07/
Hi Spoonington.
To add some thought to the discussion. I doubt anything Russia does will make a scrap of difference, if he's attempting to sell his gold at discount to the $ price. The dollar is so strong, and the US can trade the gold price down at a whim so any customers to their exchange will be short lived. If anything it could end up being a pull down on the gold price.
I don’t care what people think of crypto, all I know is I have made more money trading BTC & ETH in the past 2 years than any other asset class so I love crypto:)
On the gold side, what are peoples thought on Russia’s move to introduce a Moscow gold exchange/standard? The current animosity towards Russia will make this difficult but if it gains traction could certainly give gold a well needed boost?
What idiot voted a recomendation for you.
Its clear from previous posts .
Another deluded person, Guess who/
The prize , free beer for all tommorow.
When the WEF oligarchs say 'Inclusion', what they really mean by this Orwellian doublespeak is 'there can be no escape to peasantry from the incoming system'. Hence virtually everyone mustbe a part of it. They intend for 99+% of people to be subjects of social credit / CBDC etc.
It does seem that crypto has tended to accumulate in the hands of early adopters, which empirically seems problematic, but perhaps less so than the current system of enforced inflation.
Sure, there are challenges around decentralisation models, but a bit bizarre for the BIS to decry such issues, while pushing a centralised CBDC slavery system.
Currency backed to a basket of gold and coal is the measure required.
Stevejones999 - sorry to upset you - the Centamin thread is a little slow lately and since I know many of us do hold crypto I thought posting an IMF article would be more or less neutral ground. We all know the history of crypto and that it was a way to make money for some - but all true investments should be open to scrutiny - heck, I scrutinize Centamin on nearly a daily basis - doesn't mean I'm bashing the company or its future prospects - just means I want to be sure it's run open and honestly , looking under ever rock. Same should be said of crypto - no?
Here we go again- bored are we crypto bashers?
Compare gold with crypto since 2012 and gold miners over the past 5years or even the same time frame and I rest my case, .
If you don't hold it, don't criticise it, else who are you trying to convince bar the echo chamber bods? Those on this forum who hold some crypto like me also hold CEY, yet I don't bash what and I don't hold- and if you really think crypto people swap to gold or vice versa then you're deluded.
Crypto has failed in all of its promises. and I hold a lot of crypto. Its going to end up just Binance and they'll only need 1 bullet to kill it.
And of course, many of the crypto businesses that have emerged over the past decade make no pretense of decentralization: centralized exchanges, wallet providers, and stablecoin issuers, for example, are all critical players in the crypto ecosystem. Many of these intermediaries are simply new (and often unregulated) equivalents of what already exists in traditional finance.
And so crypto users will always have to trust in people. These people are no less greedy or biased than anyone else—but they are largely unregulated (sometimes even unidentified), and in the absence of consumer protection regulation, the crypto industry’s claims of furthering financial inclusion take on a more troubling cast. The crypto ecosystem is certainly rife with hacks and scams that prey on users, but at a more fundamental level, the value of crypto assets is driven entirely by demand because there is no productive capacity behind them, and so founders and early investors can profit only if they can find new investors to sell to. If they rely on traditionally underserved populations to make up that market, then the most vulnerable members of society—in both developed and developing economies—could be left holding the bag.
Even if the market for crypto assets were somehow sustainable, there are many reasons to doubt that crypto could democratize finance. For example, crypto lending platforms demand significant amounts of crypto collateral before they grant loans, so they won’t help those who lack financial assets to begin with. And although stablecoins are often touted as a better payment mechanism for underserved populations, the World Economic Forum concluded that “stablecoins as currently deployed would not provide compelling new benefits for financial inclusion beyond those offered by preexisting options.”
To be clear, financial inclusion is a real and pressing problem, and there are also many other problems with traditional finance that need to be solved. Part of the reason crypto firms, venture capitalists, and lobbyists have been so successful in selling crypto is their very lucid and compelling indictment of our current financial system. The largest banks did perform terribly in the lead-up to 2008 (and some still do); lots of people are underserved by the current financial system; in the United States, in particular, payment processing is too slow.
However, these are by and large political rather than technological problems—and if the underlying political issues aren’t resolved, the new crypto intermediaries that emerge will simply perpetuate existing problems. Where technological upgrades to our current systems are indeed necessary, there are often simpler, centralized technological solutions already (as is the case with real-time payments). What is often lacking is the political will to implement those solutions.
“Blockchain turned out to be the most rapid recentralization of a decentralized technology that I’ve seen in my lifetime.” Although the Bitcoin white paper’s promise of decentralization did not deliver, the underlying complexity of the technology that tried to do so remains—which is also true of crypto writ large.
Over the spring and summer of 2022, we saw a number of other purportedly decentralized crypto players stumble and fail—and as they did so, it became abundantly clear that there were intermediaries calling the shots. A stablecoin is a type of crypto asset designed to maintain a stable value, and as the Terra stablecoin lost its peg to the dollar in May 2022, holders looked to founder Do Kwon’s Twitter feed for guidance. Before Terra failed, it received an attempted rescue package of crypto loans from a nonprofit established by Kwon. The loaned crypto was allegedly deployed to allow some of Terra’s largest holders—commonly referred to as “whales”—to redeem their Terra stablecoins at close to par value, while smaller investors lost nearly everything. In the crypto market turmoil that followed the failure of Terra, multiple episodes showed the power of founders and whales in platforms ostensibly administered by decentralized autonomous organizations. Many crypto proponents were quick to criticize the affected platforms, saying that they were never really decentralized in the first place and that only the “truly decentralized” deserved to survive. All of crypto, however, is centralized to varying degrees.
Voting rights in decentralized autonomous organizations and wealth tend toward concentration in crypto even more than in the traditional financial system. In addition, decentralized blockchain technology cannot handle large volumes of transactions very well and does not accommodate transaction reversal, so it seems inevitable that intermediaries will emerge to streamline unwieldy decentralized services for users (especially because there are profits to be made by doing so). Without mincing words, economists at the Bank for International Settlements concluded that there is a “decentralization illusion” that is “due to the inescapable need for centralized governance and the tendency of blockchain consensus mechanisms to concentrate power.”
Cryptocurrencies can’t deliver their claimed benefits, and instead pose grave risks
In the 14 years since Bitcoin emerged, proponents have made promises that crypto will revolutionize money, or payments, or finance—or all of the above. These promises remain unfulfilled and look increasingly unfulfillable—yet many policymakers have accepted them at face value, supporting crypto experimentation as a necessary step toward some vague innovative future. If this experimentation were harmless, policymakers could let it be, but the ills of crypto are significant. Given these negative impacts, policymakers must train a more critical eye both on crypto assets themselves and on their underlying databases (known as blockchains) to determine whether crypto can ever deliver on its promises. If it cannot, or is even unlikely to, deliver, there must be strong regulation to rein in the negative consequences of crypto experimentation.
Among its negative impacts, the rise of crypto has spurred ransomware attacks and consumed excessive energy. Bitcoin’s blockchain relies on a proof-of-work validation mechanism that uses about as much energy as Belgium or the Philippines; the Ethereum blockchain keeps promising to shift from proof of work to the more energy-efficient proof of stake, but this never seems to happen.
A crypto-based financial system would perpetuate, and even magnify, many of the problems of traditional finance. For example, the amount of leverage in the financial system could be multiplied through a potentially unlimited supply of tokens and coins serving as collateral for loans; rigid self-executing smart contracts could deprive the system of the flexibility and discretion so necessary in unexpected and potentially dire situations. More generally, the crypto ecosystem is extremely complex, and that complexity is likely to be a destabilizing force (both because complexity makes it hard to assess risks even when there’s plenty of data and because the more complex a system is, the more susceptible it is to “normal accidents,” when a seemingly minor trigger cascades into significant problems). So any crypto-based financial system would likely be subject to regular destabilizing booms and busts.
Crypto’s complexity arises from attempts at decentralization—by distributing power and governance in the system, there is theoretically no need for trusted intermediaries like financial institutions. That was the premise of the initial Bitcoin white paper, which offered a cryptographic solution intended to allow payments to be sent without involving any financial institution or other trusted intermediary. However, Bitcoin became centralized very quickly and now depends on a small group of software developers and mining pools to function. As internet pioneer and publisher Tim O’Reilly observed
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2022/09/Point-of-View-the-superficial-allure-of-crypto-Hilary-Allen
Pipenburg,sorry .
And Kitco News.
Good weekend all .
Inflation is in double digits. Mathew Pitenburg.
Its well worth a read ,for the real truth.
Currently up .78% at $1677.34
What has been interesting is that the pull back on some gold miners has been on relatively lowish volumes. We shall see if USA market has any more paper gold to sell as they probably ran out of the real thing ages ago.
Inflation-
Then of course, rates increases will do the same but normally require more time especially has the fed along with all other world economies have been wrong.
Steve, non capisco….you say” at some point this will top and turn”?? Do you mean interest rates or inflation or Cey price in which case a new all time high and then turn? Sorry to be obtuse!
Steve, I suspect a battle on 84.7 line. I am not sure it will go back down as low as 75p as it will need some high sell volumes to do it. Blackrock or someone like them would have sell a few million.
It's playing out similar to last months CPI- the FED hikes range is 50, 75.100 next week- of course 75bps is now most widely favoured- traders make around this move. The big drop overall after the news showed this. Prior to this, as gasoline had dropped many thought inflation topped, and other things increased greater. I expect 75 and again the same to happen next month with a slight recovery back so long as there is no negative hints, and then a rise break through next month figures- at some point this will top and turn, I said that this would happen this year and still expect this to be the case. Should oil keep down there will be a follow through in all the other prices heavily reliant upon it.
86.2, 84.7 and 82.4
Major stock markets in Europe declined in premarket trading on Friday as investors remained worried about high inflation and central banks hiking interest rates in response, as well as the situation in Ukraine. On the data front, market watchers are awaiting final inflation figures for August from the Eurozone and the UK retail sales report.
The FTSE 100 fell 0.53% at 6:54 am CET, the DAX slid 0.82% and the CAC 40 dropped 0.84% at the same time.
The euro lost 0.05% against the dollar, going for 0.99958 at 7:00 am CET and the pound was down 0.04% compared to the greenback, selling for 1.14633 at the same time.
Baha Breaking News (BBN) / NP
Happy Friday y’al
Enjoy your weekend.