Nadler is great to read because he’s in the precious metals industry (Kitco is a bullion dealer), but he isn’t a perma-bull. He takes a non-hysterical approach to the market, and provides insights into internal supply and demand forces.
This is a long interview, published here. Here’s an excerpt:
“…If deflationary pressures really take hold, we may have a case of “reverse hedge” developing, whereby gold might still fall to the mid-$600s or even as low as the low $500s, but still fall less in percentage terms than other assets might. In that case, investors would still be better off holding some gold and lots of cash rather than equities or real estate and such. Hopefully we don’t head into that deflationary spiral because that could hurt a lot of higher-priced producers of gold. Certainly a lot of the mining companies would have to reconsider what projects to mothball if that happens.
If we don’t go into that vortex and confidence returns by whatever means, things could stabilize. Stability in gold would imply a trading range between $650 and $850. It’s definitely a blow to the doomsday newsletter writers, who thought the circumstances we are seeing now were the ideal scenarios they’d dreamt of as far back as we can recall. They know, however, that the world of $2,000 gold is not one they would want to live in.
The fact that in July gold had trouble surpassing $930, (not even matching the March highs when Bear Stearns failed), was definitely a big wake-up call as to what was going on. And of course what’s going on is that a lot of people had already bought gold starting at $252 and all the way up to $400 and $600. When this big crisis hit, if they spotted their 401(k) accounts off by 38% and their gold holdings ahead by 50% or 60% or much more, it wasn’t a hard decision to make. They liquidated that which was profitable in order to mitigate their losses. That’s why they’d bought their gold to begin with.
So the latecomers, those who were rushing in, having put off their gold purchases until it became a burning issue, basically got caught trying to buy into this “runaway train” scenario. The few people who tried cost-averaging higher-level purchases of $900 to $1,000-plus were the freshest of buyers during these past couple of weeks. The difference we spotted in retail transaction patterns is that this particular cycle in the gold market brought out quite a few sellers, along with new buyers. So there’s very good two-way activity going on in the physical market.
TGR: The gold bullion coins appear to have a very high premium over the gold spot price, so there still seems to be some fear out there, or is it shortages?
JN: Some issues in the physical market are really grossly misinterpreted. Observers are not doing anyone any favors. My perception is that we have a contingent of pundits who are extremely panicked that this is a very poor reaction by gold to the crisis, and it will make them look bad. It already has. Now they’re trying to manufacture this global stampede into gold by panicking investors and by scaring them with stories of supplies running out. No one will argue that there are higher levels of individual investor interest, but it’s nothing “unprecedented.” They’re trying to make it out as unprecedented, and that’s simply not the case. Perhaps it says more about how short a time such pundits have spent in these markets.
TGR: Just how real is the shortage in coins, then?
JN: Specifically, what’s going on with the coins is that most of the mints of the world do not operate on a “produce-then-wait-and-see” basis. They don’t pre-mint hundreds of thousands of coins and put them on the shelf waiting for buyers to materialize. They basically operate on a mint-to-demand policy.
Because of the prolonged bear market in the ’80s and ’90s, most of them had slimmed down to bare essentials and, in fact, a lot farm out some components of the coin manufacturing process, such as blanking. The U.S. Mint is one of them. They ran into some blank coin quality problems in silver back in March, with about half a million silver blank rejects. That put them behind the production schedules, and when demand indeed kicked in for physical small coins, they were unable to fulfill commitments on a timely basis. This does not mean they ceased production. In fact, most of these mints consider small-item production quite profitable, which implies that they have added shifts, are finding new suppliers of blanks and new refiners for material, and augmenting production to meet the demand. Inventory build-up is one of their top current priorities.
Look back in recent history at the classical gold rushes, if you will. During the first one, in that inflationary period in the late ’70s and early ’80s, some 16 million Krugerrands were sold globally. The market events of 1987 brought on the next wave of buying, and that is when the U.S. Mint sold more than 1.25 million ounces of gold. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that in the ’91 recession, just a few short years later, they only sold a quarter million ounces. And then we go to about 1999 before Y2K. Again, they suspended sales of certain products like silver rounds, which were being hoarded by people expecting the end of the world. Next would be May of 2006, with the North Korean and Iranian political tensions. Again, very good robust sales, but nothing of the magnitude of ’80 or ’87, and similar to what we’ve had since last year. But at best, I think this year the U.S. Mint will sell about 750,000 or 800,000 ounces. It’s not the level of 1987’s stampede or panic, so I don’t see why they’re trying to make it out to be something bigger than it is.
TGR: Why is there such a premium, though? Just because they’re undersupplied?
JN: Yes, once the retail shops saw the Mint selling coins on an allocation basis, with some restrictions to build up inventories, the retailers started raising premiums on coins that they couldn’t basically get to fulfill previously sold orders. They raised their bids; they also raised their offer. It’s really limited to items like the silver rounds and some of the smaller fractional coins.
But in terms of Kitco getting supplies, basically we took the attitude that if we could not get a commitment from our distributors and suppliers as to a firm premium and/or a delivery date or both, we simply removed the items from the order pages in the online store. Those order pages are limited to items we are confident we can deliver at a decent price within a decent number of days. I know that the list is looking pretty slim, but we do have product to sell, and our pool accounts have never had any shortage of underlying material to secure; namely, 1,000-ounce bars of silver and 400-ounce bars of gold. We continue to offset 100% of all pool account purchases for the peace of mind of our clients.
And we’re adding back a lot of the items that had been removed. For instance, we just got several tens of thousands in gold coins and about a quarter million in silver coins from the Royal Canadian Mint. We’re getting Austrian gold and silver coins in very soon, and I’m sure that the U.S. will restart its sales to distributors once they switch dates on the coins to 2009. This is, coincidentally, the period when mints cease producing old (current year) dating and start with the new ones, and the switchover generally creates a bit of a glitch, too. At any rate, there will be product. We have eggs, thus we will have the omelet as well.
TGR: So it would be prudent to wait a bit.
JN: Absolutely. People are not good consumers if they go out and pay $5 over spot on $10.50 silver just to secure something that they think they’re going to have to barter at the grocery store….”
