Today's parting words from gold market analyst Ned Schmidt. He tenders an explanation for the dollar's rally that may not make the conventional headlines, but it is one you might want to take note of. "As is readily evident, the US$ has staged an incredible rally. That rally is one of the strongest to occur without some underlying causal event. In short, nothing readily apparent is happening around the world to cause such a move. Now, consider the weekly purchases of U.S. debt by official institutions, essentially central banks around the world. These numbers are reported weekly by the Federal Reserve, the depository for these bond holdings. In the week ending Wednesday, official institutions made the largest net purchase of U.S. debt ever recorded. They bought the annualized equivalent of $1.457 trillion. Those purchases created a shortage of dollars which created a massive short covering rally in the dollar. That buying pushed the dollar up almost 3% in the past week, or at a 320% annual rate."