I read the following today … “But as euro group ministers met on Monday for their traditional pre-summit talk, all eyes were on growth and inflation figures, following Friday's announcement that inflation in the zone had jumped to 3.0 per cent” … but didn’t make much of it (source: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/s... . 42 tons connected a lot of dots. The article talked about the impact that the sub-prime mess and dollar crisis was having on EU inflation. With the EU ministers set to meet today to talk about inflation they obviously decided to hammer gold on Friday to see if they could put the inflation Genii back in the bottle. That 42 tonnes (1.435 million ounces) represents a little over a billion $US gambit that they played. Someone got to convert a lot of $US to gold on this deal. Wonder who it was? Maybe one of those oil countries that last week were talking no extra oil and then suddenly said maybe they would open the spigot a little more???? The banks were back at it this morning as gold got pounded again on the London exchange.

As an aside, the Bank of Canada injected a little over $1.5 billion into the markets overnight and this morning to ensure liquidity in the Canadian banks. Lots and lots of intervention going on around the world and lots of other countries taking advantage of it (for example Kuwait -- the one that the US bailed out in the first Gulf War ceased to accept US dollars on oil deals back in May). When someone stops selling the ink for all those printing presses the US mint owns things are going to crash big and fast.