Diamond News Archives
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Mike Maloney mentioned an economist he was studying as part of his research for a new book, so I ordered one of his books.
The core message in this economist’s book pulls no punches: There is no escaping another debt-related crisis. And while he doesn’t specifically state the crisis will be worse than the Great Depression, the data he shares and conclusions he draws make that clear.
The book is Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? by Steve Keen[1], past Professor of Economics at Kingston University in the UK. For those who follow economic theories, he is closely associated with the beliefs of Hyman Minsky, who some credit as providing the best explanations of the causes of financial crises.
According to Mr. Keen, there are two reasons we will have another financial crisis and that it will be nasty. Both are based on debt, but may not come from the angles you expect…
#1 Private Debt Is Too High
It’s hard to do much financial reading these days without running into an article on debt. While most analysts reference public or government debt, Mr. Keen says that history shows it is private debt that is the real culprit.
- “The USA’s financial crisis is not over, because the level of private debt has remained high.”
Consider why this is true. A government or central bank can print money or tinker with interest rates to deal with their debt load. The private sector can’t do these things, so their options to escape debt are very limited and thus tend to have a greater drag on an economy.
Because of this, it is inevitable we’ll have another financial crisis. Mr. Keen points out that...
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Gem Diamonds (LON:GEMD) revealed that the 10 rough, larger-than-100-carats diamonds that its Letšeng mine produced in the first six months of 2018 helped boost the company's sales by 43 per cent to $169.2 million.
Rough stones from Letšeng, which is located in northern Lesotho, achieved an average price of $2,742 per carat, almost $700 more than last year's sale price.
The highest price achieved was $62,433 per carat for a 2.26-carat pink diamond. The highest price achieved for a white diamond was $56,028 per carat for a 66.27 carat, Type IIa, diamond. The 910-carat Lesotho Legend, which is the company’s largest find to date, sold for $40 million in March or $43,912 per carat.
Some 25 stones produced at Letšeng were sold for more than $1 million each, the U.K.-based miner said in a press release.
These results reflect the 174-per-cent hike Gem Diamonds experienced in the first quarter of the year thanks to strong demand for its rough rocks and the sale of the Legend, the fifth-largest diamond ever found.
In terms of volume, overall sales climbed 8 per cent to 61,696 carats in the first half of 2018. Total production from Letšeng was 61,596 carats, recovered from 2.5 million tonnes of ore.
"We are delighted to see the continuation in the recoveries of large diamonds during the period with a record ten diamonds greater than 100 carats recovered. This trend continued into Q3 2018 with the eleventh diamond greater than 100 carats recovered in July, now equalling the highest number of these recoveries in a single year. Greatly improved recoveries combined with the discovery and subsequent sale of the Lesotho Legend has generated a strong financial performance for the first half," the company's CEO Clifford...
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Last month in Venezuela’s capital city of Caracas, a cup of coffee would have set you back 2 million bolivars. That’s up from only 2,300 bolivars 12 months ago, meaning the price of a cup of joe has jumped nearly 87,000 percent, according to Bloomberg’s Café Con Leche Index. And you thought Starbucks was expensive.
But that was July. Prices in Venezuela[1] are doubling roughly every 18 days. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) now projects inflation to hit an astronomical 1 million percent by the end of this year. This puts the beleaguered Latin American country on the same slippery path as Zimbabwe a decade ago and Germany in the 1920s, when a wheelbarrow full of marks was barely enough to get you a loaf of bread.
Venezuela’s socialist president Nicolas Maduro announced last week that the country plans to rein in hyperinflation by lopping off five zeroes from its currency. If you recall, Zimbabwe similarly tried to combat soaring prices of its own by issuing a cartoonish $100 trillion banknote—which in 2009 was still not enough to buy a bus ticket in the capital of Harare.
Without structural governmental reforms, a new bolívar is just as unlikely to steady Venezuela’s skyrocketing inflation or remedy its crumbling economy.
Gold could save your life
So where does this put gold? At some point, hyperinflation gets so ludicrously out of control that discussing exchange rates becomes pointless. But as of July 30, an ounce of the yellow metal would have gone for 211 million bolivars—an increase of more than 3.1 million percent from just the beginning of the year.
My point in bringing this up is to reinforce the importance of gold’s Fear Trade, which says...
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(IDEX Online) – Fancy color diamond prices showed no significant change in the second quarter of 2018, the Fancy Color Research Foundation (FCRF) reported today. <?xml:namespace prefix = "o" ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /?> FCRF’s Fancy Color Diamond Index indicated an overall rise of 0.1% in Q2 2018 for yellow, pink and blue fancy color diamonds, in all sizes and saturations. However, after having gradually decreased over the past 4 years, prices of yellow fancy color diamonds increased by 0.2% in Q2 2018, with fancy intense yellow outperforming all other saturation categories. The prices of blue fancy color diamonds increased by 1.5% during Q2 2018, continuing the trend over the past 2 years. Prices of 2 carat fancy pink, 1 carat intense pink, and 3 carat vivid pink increased by 2% in this quarter, while the pink category as a whole decreased by 0.5%. In Q2 2018, throughout all colors the prices of 1 – 3 carat stones increased, while prices of 3 carats and above slightly decreased. On a year-to-year basis, when compared to Q2 2017, the Fancy Color Diamond Index increased by 0.5%, with blue prices up 5.7% and yellow and pink prices down by 0.7% and 0.6%, respectively. For a complete data analysis, please visit www.fcresearch.org FCRF Advisory Board member Jim Pounds said: "The demand for the 1-3 carat weight category remains positive as they are relatively more affordable in their total amount, compared to 3 carats and above. However, larger exceptional yellows continue to command strong prices.” The Fancy Color Diamond Index is published by the non-profit Fancy Color Research Foundation (FCRF),...
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Archaeologists working in the remote Tarbagatai Mountains of northeastern Kazakhstan unearthed 3,000 gold and precious metals objects and jewelry pieces that are presumed to date back almost 800 years before Christ.
The treasure, found at the ‘Yeleke Sazy’ burial site, probably belonged to a noble family of the Saka people who ruled throughout central Asia 2,800 years ago and were a nomadic sub-group of the great Scythian people.
According to local media, the research team led by historian Zeinolla Samashev were impressed by the level of technological development in gold jewelry production that the pieces showcase.
The burial items that accompanied two bodies included bell-shaped earrings, gold plates, chains, necklaces with precious stones, exquisitely crafted animals and golden beads that were used to decorate the elaborate clothing of the Saka.
The archaeologists continue to excavate the region because they presume there are close to 200 burial mounds on the Eleke Sazy plateau.
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