Bloomberg reports U.S. Mint Has Reduced Silver, Gold Coin Supplies to Purchasers
The US Mint has reduced the volume of gold and silver coins it’s distributing to authorized purchasers as the coronavirus pandemic slows production, a document seen by Bloomberg shows.
The Mint’s West Point complex in New York is taking measures to prevent the virus from spreading among its employees, and that will probably slow coin production there for the next 12 to 18 months, the document shows. The facility is no longer able to produce gold and silver coins at the same time, forcing it to choose one metal over the other, according to the document, which was presented to companies authorized to buy coins from the Mint last week.
“The pandemic created a whole new set of challenges for us to manage,” the Mint said in the document. “We believe that this environment is going to continue to lead to some degree of reduced capacity as West Point struggles to balance employee safety against market demand.”
To cope with demand, the Mint is now asking dealers to provide their 10-day and 90-day forecasts for demand for the first time ever. That will allow it to decide what products to make as some are more labor-intensive than others, according to the document. If the Mint decides to make one-tenth of an ounce of gold, for instance, it must cut production of American Eagle Silver coins.
No Shortage of Gold or Silver
This story is sure to bring out all sorts of silliness regarding a shortage of physical gold and silver as well as conspiracy theories regarding how much gold is in Fort Knox.
Also look for nonsensical articles on the alleged price difference between paper gold and physical gold.
Unobtanium?
I discussed this setup on March 31 in No WSJ, Gold is Not the New Unobtanium: Where to Buy?
On March 29 I tweeted: “It is easy enough to buy gold and silver at Goldmoney.
I bought silver today at Goldmoney. If you insist on forms in limited supply, yep, the price is high.”
Gold and Silver Coins From the Mint
The markup on coins from the mint is too ridiculous for me.
Gold Hits New Record High and There’s More to Come
In case you missed it, please see my report on Gold COTs which led me to this viewpoint: Gold Hits New Record High and There’s More to Come
Gold vs the US Dollar
If by chance you think gold moves inversely to the US dollar you need to reconsider.
For discussion, please see Nonsense from the WSJ on Gold vs the Dollar
Mish
It’s interesting to consider, that these have a value of currency of exactly $1, and if someone deposited it in a bank account, their bank balance would reflect $1 and no more. I wonder if this did happen, would the bank teller be obligated to return it to the Fed?
Those are proof editions, which have an additional markup. I would like to know how much gold is actually in Fort Knox. I would guess it’s empty, but who knows? Does it actually matter?
When it comes down to real life use of metal as currency, then the mint is not that important at all. Older coins that are recognisable as authentic go for nearer to by weight. The US mint just provides first buyer with guarantee of fineness, which is ok and some will pay premium for that plus for the historic/mint state of a coin, but in terms of gold or silver as money only a small advantage. In practice if precious metal coins go into circulation widely, by that time no one is going to much care what is printed on them as long as the quality can be recognised. I.e. even if US fresh minted coins still hold a premium, you are just going to get back what was paid for them, same as if you buy other acceptable coins just by weight. New minted coins are nice obviously, so not to put people off either, but in terms of the US mint slowing down it is not that important to my view – the silver and gold they stopped obtaining, where it was from miners and not the open market, will likely just end up on the market instead, just not as coins….unless you think they are stockpiling supply waiting for higher prices to turn a higher profit…even then I don’t imagine it would by itself move the market much.
Living where I do have been unable to find gold or silver without 25%+ markups so I just didn’t do it though wanted to years ago.
But the coronavirus angle: Mish, you’ve gone dark on it. Suggest you bone up on the data: https://www.americasfrontlinedoctors.com/ where they have extensive white papers:
https://www.americasfrontlinedoctors.com/
https://www.americasfrontlinedoctors.com/content
It was already well-known in 2005 that HCQ (and the other ‘quins) are effective against not only malaria but also coronaviruses and most flus. Known. The simple fact is that the pandemic aspect has been a huge disinformation campaign from the get-go. It would have been quite easy to prevent widespread infection of any given population by simply recommending prophylactic doses to all at-risk people including frontline healthcare providers.
I heard about it in March, quickly found several papers, managed to buy it the next day before it became impossible to get (so much for market efficiency, eh?) and a really nasty flu disappeared like magic in about 8 hours.
People are still terrified in the US, wearing useless masks (not all of them are useless but the ones most people are wearing are) even when driving alone in their cars, even when walking on a beach etc. etc. and all because of a massive disinformation campaign designed to reduce national ability to effectively handle this relatively minor health threat.
This is actually a big story: one of the largest economic disasters in the post-industrial revolution era deliberately engineered. Why? No end of theories could be offered, but that it has happened is hard to refute.
I gave you a “like” because this is possible and should be discussed. I don’t doubt that there has been various kinds of manufactured reponse and that some of those serve other interests, but I don’t doubt that the virus is real also, and that it poses more danger than simply popping some HCQ. That uncertainty in itself gives a lot of room for leverage, and that is where we are, trying to figure out third or fourth hand exactly what is going on.
One like engenders another!
I didn’t mean to suggest the virus isn’t ‘real.’
However, the unprecedented shut-down response was unwarranted especially given the already-known existence of a highly effective prophylactic.
To be clear: even without HCQ the shut-down was not justified, rather the standard quarantining of those infected and those at high-risk.
With HCQ, already known as effective against corona virus (and most flus, btw, as well), the shut-downs are unforgiveable.
For me, for example, it means I can no longer regard Trump as a capable President. Either he is complicit in this sham, or he was duped. Either way, unacceptable.
The Chief Medical Experts I regard as criminals, without any doubt.
The major media guardians who have acted in concert to suppress information about effective prophylactics, the unprecedented nature of shut-downs, the unqualified support of bad policies etc., are similarly criminal.
That we don’t have a legal framework to prosecute people for crimes who have either deliberately caused massive harm to peoples’ lives or unnecessarily facilitated higher death rates by withholding life-saving information, is a huge deficit in the Republic, which is in danger of terminal collapse at this juncture – perhaps rightly so, though unfortunately nothing better is being contemplated in any public fora.
Covid19 is not and never was a medical crisis.
It has always been a manufactured political crisis, moreover a crisis on a global scale not seen since the last Great War (from 1914 – 1949), so it’s highly unlikely that Trump (and we the people) will get the desired V-bottom (least suffering for all of us). Rather, if history is any guide, it is far more likely that we will go through several years of deep turmoil with widespread suffering and death. Of course I hope this doesn’t happen, but nor did any successful society (like France, Russia, others) expect the steep, traumatic fall they experienced so close to their being a highly successful entity. In each case, they lost millions of lives in a world with populations around a quarter the current levels. Maybe modern war can play out in months what used to take years, and maybe the end results can be effected without millions of deaths, but that remains to be seen.
That said, Trump’s hard core supporters believe he has been using the shut-down period to essentially restructure global trade and will further reform the entire credit cartel system as well – throughout the world – ushering in a new Golden Age. I find this a highly fanciful view, however I must confess that compared to the alternative, I sincerely hope this proves to be the case.
[Picture of HCQ comparison chart I plucked from Twitter and cannot verify or source. Usually when I paste in a twitter link it doesn’t show… it comes via https://c19study.com/ at the bottom of which page you can click on each of 39 different peer-reviewed studies, most of which are positive – viz. HCQ use.]
Also, I saved the Frontline doctors White Paper and put it on my own email service server so here it is for any interested:
The covidiots: wearing masks while driving, on beaches, implementing imbecilic guidelines to the letter, etc… are contributing to the cynicism about masks, and makes legitimate use looking bad.
About, HCQ: it wasn’t Trump who promoted it, but became a legend as soon as he mentioned it. He shoul have mentined water, and millions would die of thirst.
Replied at more length to Anda below.
As to Trump-HCQ: If Trump didn’t exist, they would invent something equivalent: a person or cause worthy of 24/7 demonization blamed as the source of all evil. 1984’s Goldstein.
Perhaps the root function is distraction, distraction away from what matters, what is really going on. Everyone runs around worrying about mask use, for example, and meanwhile hardly anyone discusses the instant Great Depression along with not only the additional deaths it will cause this calendar year, but for years to come, how many communities will never recover as many leave, businesses close never to re-open, let alone what happens if the entire country ends up with a CCP-style one-party rule and most of the founding rights and common law basics chucked out.
Where is this conversation happening? Only in fringe areas and mainly in extreme, emotive, jingoistic contexts.
In any case, I see no evidence that the US as a Republic has the ability to withstand concerted propaganda persuading its people that up is down and red is blue. They can be told pretty much anything and believe it. They will walk around with entirely useless cloth masks terrified that if they don’t wear them they will almost certainly die; they can be told to believe that if children go to school this fall, half the country might end up dead; they can be made to believe that a man who has been under siege unable to do hardly anything for almost four years and has been illegally surveiled, legislatively and judicially blocked, is a tyrant threatening to destroy our democracy. They will believe anything they are told to believe – including that one o the lowest risk drugs in world history – HCQ – is a dangerous hoax despite literally hundreds of papers – dating back years – proving the contrary.
Trump may indeed be as bad as many here and elsewhere say.
But those lined up against him are ten times worse, almost without exception.
In short: it ain’t lookin’ good!
The one thing within your post that I can wholeheartedly agree with is the mention of the incessant Pharma and MSM crusade against HCQ … or they should say HCQ+Zinc given as early after onset of symptoms as possible … but they always fail to mention that whole story.
All of the supposed “studies” that pretend to prove that HCQ is “dangerous” (preposterous on its face when administered properly as proven by the history of the drug) or “ineffective” are all designed to not include +Zinc and/or not be given as early after onset of symptoms as possible i.e. they are designed to prove what Pharma wants proven … that only a brand new very expensive vaccine they are feverishly working to produce could possibly be the answer.
And I am not bashing the search for or eventual use of a vaccine that is first safe and then effective … expensive is already baked into the vaccine cake.
But fortunately, EARLY HCQ+Zinc has been used, has been found effective and not dangerous (there are contra-indications that must be observed) and try as they might, Pharma and the MSM have been unable to counter those facts, as much as they continue to try.
Well, one of Scott Adams’ iconic postulates is that we know live in a world where facts don’t matter any more (or some such). He’s right.
“Pharma and the MSM have been unable to counter those facts..”
You are correct, but:
they are still able to control the dominant narrative, usually by simply marginalising anything that goes against theirs.
Or outright censorship: the rapid take-down yesterday of the americasfrontlinedoctors.com website which included quite a bit of peer-reviewed data, not just the testimonial-style video done on the front steps of the Capitol, the suspension of Trump Jr for simply tweeting a link to one of their videos, and the deletion of the President’s tweet for doing the same.
I did save the Doctors’ White Paper:
I didn’t get through it all but it’s pretty reasonable. The sad truth is that, as so many scorned ‘conspiracy theorists’ frequently claim: ‘we have been played.’ We have. Unlike them, we may not claim to know who is doing what and for why, but clearly the main pandemic story and the principle shut down response has been based on a huge amount of deception.
That can never be good.
This whole drama dwarfs any partisan political concerns though it seems, especially these last three months, that it will be impossible to view anything outside that frame.
This notion that you continually push that the entire planet has conspired to bring down Trump by promulgating a wild over-reaction to a mere trifle of a disease caused by a new unknown virus is lunatic fringe.
Sure, there have been plenty of missteps along the way … but Trump leads the pack in missteps. I’m just glad that the insane approach to the virus that you Trump sycophants push all the time (as exemplified by “the principle shut down response has been based on a huge amount of deception”) was not, and will not be, followed. It is based on the insane idea that if we had just gone about our normal activities (while “just protecting the most vulnerable old people”) everything would have just gone away soon enough like a miracle exactly as Trump said at the very beginning. INSANE.
“Due to a Covid outbreak the US mint cannot produce enough coins to meet demand.”
…
Oh, wonderful.
Does that mean Mike Mezak (coin hawker on tv for decades) will hit 11 on Shilling meter??
I might have to check him out … to see if he does indeed have another gear … which I did not think possible …
You can check minute by minute at Kitco how the value of gold changes with the strength/worth of the dollar:
The world is ending. All hope is lost. Buy gold now.
not offered in the 401k, unfortunately.
Well you did suggest that people buying gold a couple of months ago will be nursing a loss now.
Man, could it be that GoldMoney is turning into a scam?
All it takes is some ambulance chaser on the make calling up a robed erstwhile fratbro of his; and the junta will force them to scam you, whether they originally intended to or not.
Once all once-were “law” is entirely arbitrary, thrown on the bonfire of “saving” a purely value destroying and kleptocratic “system”, even the mere word “scam” itself, ceases to have any real meaning. Instead, those who can take, take. Just because they can.
IMHO if you don’t hold the gold/silver you are at risk. Even the most trusted company holding/storing your gold may collapse and leave you with nothing. I have personally seen that happen.
Diversify where you store it. Some in vaults in the US, some in the EU, some in Switzerland, some in Singapore, some at home.
You can’t trust anyone any more. That is why it’s all going to collapse soon.
Isaiah chapter fifty-seven
Even if you hold the gold, you are at risk. It might be tungsten covered with gold. It might have other metals mixed in. It could get stolen.
There’s no perfect solution. Everyone should do there own due diligence. I chose to use BullionVault because:
a) Bullion stored in the vaults is specifically allocated to customers, & audited daily for all to see online,
B) It’s insured for all risks & the policies are visible online (once logged in),
C) Customers are the Legal owners so a liquidator couldn’t access it if BullionVault folded,
D) You can hold bullion in a number of different locations to spread the geographical risk.
So I’m told anyway.
No doubt there’s some loophole or weakness somewhere but it’s safer than keeping it at home and trading is very efficient and straightforward as well.
The dilemma of holding it at home, and make extra effort to sell it, or hold it in a vault, and see it disappear thru government confiscation. After all, gold is a hedge against systemic failure.