Silver-coin sales from the Perth Mint, which was founded in 1899 and processes all of the country’s bullion, have surged to a record as buyers seek to protect their wealth with the metal known as poor man’s gold.
The mint sold 10.7 million one ounce silver coins since July 1 last year, according to Sales and Marketing Director Ron Currie. That’s 66 per cent higher than the previous full fiscal year and about 10-fold more than five years earlier. Sales of one ounce gold coins will be close to a record, he said.
The soaring demand adds to signs investors are stepping up precious-metal purchases as Europe’s governments tackle a sovereign-debt crisis and central banks led by the US Federal Reserve print cash to stimulate their economies, potentially devaluing paper currencies. Cash silver, the second-best performing commodity over the past year, hit a record in April.
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“Silver’s still booming and it’s been going strongly for a year,” Currie said. “A lot of the buying is by people new to the market,” with European and US investors the most active international purchasers of the mint’s products, he said.
Immediate-delivery silver, which rallied to $US49.79 an ounce on April 25, was at $US36.3850, 42.5 times cheaper than gold. Over the past year, silver has beaten all the commodities on the Standard & Poor’s GSCI index apart from top-ranked corn. Spot gold, rallying for an 11th straight year, has gained 25 per cent.
Sovereign-debt crisis http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/silver-coin-sales-boom-as-investors-seek-haven-20110622-1gdzo.htmlSome Greeks Fear Government Is Selling Nation
By RACHEL DONADIO and STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: June 22, 2011
ATHENS — They are the crown jewels of Greece’s socialist state, and they are now likely to go to the highest bidder: the ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki; prime Mediterranean real estate; the national lottery; Greek Telecom; the postal bank and the national railway system.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/world/europe/23greece.html?_r=2&hp
Greece Budget Hole Threatens to Swallow Europe
George Papandreou was staring into a 20 billion-euro ($29 billion) hole.
It’s common for freshly minted leaders to discover that there’s not enough money to pay for their campaign promises. So when Papandreou’s new Greek government woke up to a looming budget disaster within days of taking office in October 2009, the alarm bells were slow to ring in European capitals.
Don’t “overrate” the problem, said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, later to play a pivotal role in the debt saga that continues to rock the 17-nation euro area. “There are deficits in other parts of the world as well.”