From Ed Steer:

With the New York gold market closed on Monday...trading added up to a big zero. Don't forget that well over 90% of all trading volume in both gold and silver occurs out of New York. So when the boyz have a long weekend, there isn't much activity.

However, starting at 8:00 a.m. in Hong Kong on Tuesday morning, gold tacked on around $20 from there...right until the London open...which is a big move for that time of day, as the Far East markets are pretty thinly traded. Nothing much happened in early European trading, but once floor trading started on the Comex in New York yesterday morning, gold added another $13 dollars or so. That ended about 12:20 p.m. when it appeared that someone tapped on the brakes and gold went sideways from there. The usual N.Y. commentator offered this assessment..."Estimated volume was 146,365 lots with a switch effect of 12,978. For such a large move, and to [a] significant new recent high, this is modest. The truly dogged opposition so familiar over the years does not seem to be present." [I'll reserve judgment on that until the open interest numbers come out later this a.m. - Ed]

The price chart for silver looked similar. However, the price rally in New York was very impressive, until it, too, ran into the same not-for-profit seller at 12:20.

The HUI had a good day yesterday, but gave back half its gains once the top in the metals was in. The top lagged the price top by about ten minutes...which is obvious from the graph below. I'd like to blame the HUI's performance on the Dow, but the Dow was flat on its back all day...and it didn't help that Freeport-McMoran got clocked for an 11% loss. I'll just call it profit-taking, as both metals have had pretty big runs from their lows back in late October.

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Open interest for Friday's trading showed that gold o.i. fell a fairly significant 5,517 contracts...whereas silver o.i. went the other direction...up 1,276 contracts. As per my comment in the first paragraph...were these big rallies in gold and silver yesterday instigated by new buyers...or was it short covering? This morning's open interest numbers should tell us a lot. What trading there was on Monday should also be included in this morning's figures as well.

Silver has now plowed its way through $14...up almost $6 from its bottom after the 'bear raid' on commodities that started last July. Below is the 3-year chart for silver. Please note that the RSI is now at an overbought 76.56 and the MACD is at 0.689. Neither of these are record high extremes...but you should carefully note that they're getting there. Will JP Morgan drop the hammer here...or are we safe for a little while longer? Don't know. However, I'm not yet getting the urge to sell anything, because if we do get sidelined by a JP Morgan-inspired rest stop, it should [hopefully] be temporary, as it's my opinion that this up-leg in this precious metals bull market has a lot further to go before it runs out of gas.

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In other gold news, the usual N.Y. commentator had this to say..."Today's ECB [European Central Bank] statement of condition produced the news that the group's 'gold and gold receivables' fell by €155 million [7.76 tonnes]. This was said to "reflect the sale of gold" by one captive CB and the 'net purchase' of gold coin by another. [This was] The largest disposition in quite some time, and a sharp contrast to last week's 0.3 tonne disposition. Still, of course, below the 9.6 tonne average required to meet the WAG2 [Second Washington Agreement on Gold - Ed] quota on an even weekly basis."

I see that the U.S. Mint has punched out another 466,000 silver eagles during the past week. February's total is now a robust 1,616,000 silver eagles... with 3,516,000 minted year-to-date. And the GLD ETF added another 740,000 ounces [23.0 tonnes] yesterday. GLD now allegedly holds 1,008.8 tonnes, which is obviously a new record. Ted Butler says that now almost 7.0 million ounces have been added since January 1, 2009. The silver ETF, SLV, added another 1.7 million ounces to its alleged stash as well. Ted feels that [based on yesterday's enormous volume in SLV trading] that the fund is now owed around 30 million ounces. That's 30,000 good delivery bars...which translates into approximately 46 semi-trailers full of silver! The Swiss precious metal ETFs just "keep buggering on"...to quote Winston Churchill. In the last week, the gold ETF has added 67,732 troy ounces. Their gold ETF now sits at 3.73 million ounces...while their silver ETF added another 1.18 million ounces to bring their total stash up to 39.89 million ounces. Their platinum and palladium inventories continue to climb to new records as well. I thank Carl Loeb for that update.

Here is a rather disturbing video from Zimbabwe. "MDC activist Sam Chakaipa returned to his village in rural Zimbabwe to find his friends and neighbours starving to death, reduced to panning gold powder from the rivers to exchange for food at an exorbitant rate." I spent some time in that country...as did Doug Casey...when Ian Smith ran the place back in the early 1970s. It was called Rhodesia then. It was personally distressing for me to watch this...but it could be a sign of things to come just about everywhere in the world in the years ahead...and I thank CR's 'Big Gold' editor, Jeff Clark, for sending it to me. It's from The Guardian out of London, and it's entitled "Zimbabwe - gold for bread". The link is here.

In other news...and there's four days worth to catch up on...the talk in England over the weekend was the Lloyds Bank [and by extension, its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Halifax Bank of Scotland] may fail...and will have to be nationalized. And in a Bloomberg story late Friday, I see that the CBRC [China Banking Regulatory Commission] 'clarified' a comment that it would only buy U.S. debt paper...by issuing this statement..."holding U.S. government bonds is not the only option for investing reserves, clarifying comments made a day earlier, the China News Service reported. U.S. debt is one option, in addition to gold and other government debt, said Luo, head of the training center at the banking regulator." In an AP story that didn't get a lot of attention..."The deepening recession spells trouble for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. With companies reporting shortfalls in their pension funds, it's all but certain that the PBGC will be forced to take over the pension plans of a rising number of bankrupt businesses." And lastly...in a Bloomberg story...the Madoff Ponzi scheme has now been joined by the Stanford Ponzi scheme...as the SEC has finally accused them of a "massive, ongoing" fraud. [I wonder if the the SEC will ever get around to silver and gold? Just asking. - Ed]

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Today's first two stories are from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at The Telegraph in London. The first made huge waves all over the world on the weekend. It's entitled "Failure to save East Europe will lead to worldwide meltdown." "The unfolding debt drama in Russia, Ukraine, and the EU states of Eastern Europe reached acute danger point." It's a 'must read' and the link is here.

His next story is equally to the point, and is headlined "Gold hits record against euro on fear of Zimbabwean-style response to bank crisis". Ambrose says there are "mounting concerns that global authorities are embarking on a 'Zimbabwe-style' debasement of the international monetary system." [I wonder what gave him that idea...LOL! - Ed]. The link to this 'must read' story is here.

In a story in The Times in London...former Times editor, William Rees-Mogg, has an interesting commentary that's certainly worth your time. He says "The dollar is simply a piece of paper. Gold is a much better store of value and is the best insurance against futures shocks." The article is entitled "In times of crisis, never forget the value of gold"...and the link is here.

James Turk over at goldmoney.com has commentary worth reading that he posted over the weekend. The article is entitled "Gold & Silver Break Through Resistance". It's accompanied by the usual wonderful graphs...and the link is here.

And lastly...silver analyst Ted Butler's latest. Butler reviews the latest data from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and concludes that all the short selling of silver for the last seven weeks probably has been undertaken by a single trading house, bringing the silver market to an unprecedented level of concentration and thus an unprecedented level of manipulation. The article is entitled "Only One Seller Left?" and the link is here.

We have suffered more from this cause [paper money] than from every other cause or calamity. It has killed more men, pervaded and corrupted the choicest interests of our country more, and done more injustice than even the arms and artifices of our enemy. - Daniel Webster

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The price objective on the above gold P&F chart is $1,060...and the silver P&F shows a hard-to-believe $24.50 target. With both gold and silver once again on the prowl in Thursday morning trading in the Far East, it's hard not to get the feeling that the ground beneath our feet is about to give way. The current financial and monetary order is on its last legs. Russian stock trading was suspended yesterday when the RTS tumbled 9.4%. Can the President's Working Group on Financial Markets stop the world-wide equities avalanche...or will they finally get buried by it? We'll find out soon enough.

See you on Thursday.

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