From Ed Steer:

On Tuesday, neither gold nor silver did much of anything. Volume again was extremely light, and it doesn't take a lot of buying or selling to move the prices around. The price of both metals is still miles away from any moving average that would be of interest to the black box tech funds.

Open interest for Monday was, once again, of the rather strange variety. Despite the wonderful gains in both metals on that day, there was a divergence between them. Gold o.i. rose a respectable 3,669 contracts on the back of its $16 gain, but silver o.i. fell 314 contracts...despite the fact that the price rose 35 cents. Don't ask me what that means, as I'm just the messenger.

A few things of interest in the way of gold and silver news. I see that Anglogold has decided to dilute its current shareholders by issuing more stock to raise $1.6 billion to close out part of its hedge book. Yesterday they announced a reduction in hedges during the last quarter to the tune of about 1.25 million ounces...bringing their hedge book down to about 10 million ounces. That extra $1.6 billion will buy them out of an additional 1.8 million ounces of hedged production. They (and their shareholders) have still got several more years of pain to go before they get their utterly disastrous hedge book paid off.

I also note that the IMF decision to sell 403 tonnes of gold was approved at their meeting in Washington. Let's see how the U.S. Congress votes on this.

In silver, Ted Butler informed me that the huge buyer(s) of the silver ETF...SLV...were out in force again yesterday, after taking Friday off. Ted figures that the silver ETF is now owed somewhere between 5 and 10 million more ounces to bring the physical inventory into line with the number of shares sold recently. It will be of interest to see how long it takes to find this amount. The other question is...who's buying?

I have another couple of stories today. The first is from Michael Kosares over at USAGold.com. In his commentary, he speculates that the European central Bank has begun to intervene surreptitiously in the currency markets to halt the Euro's rise, and that gold's recent fall can be largely attributed to this. The essay is entitled "Has Europe Declared War on the Weak Dollar?" and it's linked here.

The second story comes from "Sin City" itself...Las Vegas. This story gives you some idea how fast and how hard this recession is hitting the US...and how quickly discretionary spending is evaporating as the consumer gets squeezed. The story is out of Newsweek and is entitled "Down on Its Luck" and is linked here.

As a sidebar to this story, there was a report in The Wall Street Journal yesterday that the famed Tropicana Resort & Casino in Las Vegas has sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy after missing an interest payment on a $1.32 billion loan to Credit Suisse Group last Friday.

Reason obeys itself. Ignorance submits to what is dictated to it. - Thomas Paine

Another day of worse than awful news...and another up day for the Dow. Up is down and black is white...and there are so many pigs with lipstick. So don't worry... and be happy...because everything is fine.

See you tomorrow.

Casey Research correspondent-at-large Ed Steer is a keen observer of the financial scene and a board member of GATA.org.