The threat to commodity derivatives

For years, bulls of gold and silver have complained about how derivatives have been used to suppress their prices. Their dreams of the practice ending could be coming true.

Introduction

If you think about it, there is a simple reason that derivatives for speculating or hedging gold is fatally flawed. It is because in nearly every nations’ common law, gold is money, and currencies are inferior credit which is where payment risk actually lies. That the western financial establishment is ignorant of this fact does not change the law.

There is good reason why this matters. Gold has lasted as legal money, and credit has been separately acknowledged to be deferred payment in money since Rome’s Twelve Tables defined them and their relationship in 449 BC. Since then, there have been many instances of governments denying these facts and promoting their currencies in the place of gold, which have always ended in their collapse.

In any price relationship involving a medium of exchange, there is an objective value and a subjective one. The objective value is always in the medium of exchange and the subjective value is in the goods or services being exchanged. Put another way, the buyer and seller will both value money or its substitute the same, but the buyer values the goods or services more highly than the seller: otherwise, the exchange won’t take place. But if gold is the money, where does that leave a fiat currency?

Clearly, if the currency is not a credible gold substitute, then it should bear the subjective value relative to gold. That it is not regarded this way is partly due to government anti-gold propaganda, but mainly due to accounting in the government’s currency for tax purposes. Furthermore, while a gold standard is always defined as a currency being exchangeable for a given weight of gold, for convenience it is referred to as so many currency units per gramme or ounce. This gives the erroneous impression that gold is being priced in the subordinate currency.

This is as may be, but in the knowledge that a fiat currency always fails while gold as money never does, the recognition of this reality will eventually kill off any derivatives in gold, and if the market in derivatives evolves without collapsing entirely, it should then refer to fiat currencies in terms of gold-grammes, or better still in a credible gold substitute instead if one exists. 

That gold derivatives should not exist in the first place should be borne in mind in the context of this article.

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