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Keeping your emotions away from silver

In this exclusive interview with the Silver Coin Investor, Grant Williams shares his 2012 outlook about Gold and silver. Grant is portfolio manager and strategist for Vulpes Investment Management in Singapore – a hedge fund running $200million of largely partners’ capital across multiple strategies. In 2012, all Vulpes funds will be opened to outside investors. Grant has 26 years of experience in finance on the Asian, Australian, European and US markets and has held senior positions at several international investment houses.

Dr. Jeff Lewis:It’s my sincere pleasure to speak with Grant Williams, author of the weekly newsletter “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” Grant is coming to us from Singapore. He produces this entertaining, informative, very clever and down to earth view of current events from the perspective of someone who not only demonstrates a clear passion for history and a knack for weaving the past into the present, but he has also been an active participant in financial markets for quite some time now. We’ve spoken about this in the past, but perhaps you could give listeners some background on now how what I consider to be this somewhat underground newsletter evolved?

Grant Williams: It’s been something I’ve been putting together for two or three years now initially to a small group of friends and some clients out here in Asia. It’s just kind of grown in popularity and it’s grown in scope as well. It started off as a one-page report put out to people everyday just with a few things that I thought they ought at least be aware of and that they wouldn’t probably find on the front page of cnn.com or the BBC News website, these are things that I thought would have a potentially material impact on markets and finance but they weren’t necessarily in the mainstream. As it’s grown, it’s now, I guess in some weeks it can get up to 25, 30 pages long; including a collection of snippets of these articles we’re doing to the full piece for people to check out themselves and read.

All we’re really trying to do is provide a broader view, as I say, some issues that from both a macro and a micro-perspective that are probably a little bit more important than what one would think if you find where exactly on the totem pole they’ll appear. So, it’s really, that was the genesis of it. It’s something that I sit and do a lot of reading, a lot of thinking about this stuff and so it actually helps me to put this stuff down on paper; it helps clarify your thoughts and get some perspective around them. So that’s really how the whole thing came about.

Dr. Jeff Lewis: Great, well thanks for that. I certainly have been a big fan and listeners should rest-assured that I will provide some information on how people can find a copy.

In the current issue of Things That Make You Go Hmmm you’ve used an interesting literary device as a way of predicting what we might see in the coming year. Maybe you could tell us a bit about why you chose that approach which by the way, it prophesies among other things the possibility of two resignations. One, Obama withdrawing from the Democratic ticket and, perhaps more shocking or more pertinent for those of us with the particular interest in silver, the resignation of CFTC commissioner Bart Chilton in protest of inaction on the part of the CFTC. But Grant, how serious are things getting out there? Do you think that 2012 contains enough road left for the proverbial can to be kicked?

Grant Williams: Well, you know, this metaphor of kicking a can down the road has become – it’s just become ubiquitous in the last year or so; in the last couple of years. It really is, at very root of it, that’s what’s going on. We all know what the problems are. The problems are basically too much debt, too much spending and governments the world over are living on borrowed time but they’ve managed to put band-aides over wounds and keep the game going for this long and they will try and do that for as long as possible in the vain hope that they can find some organic way to grow their way out their problems. But realistically that’s not going to happen.

As tumultuous as 2011 has been, you know, we took Europe and the Middle East and downgrades for the U.S. and all kinds of upheaval. We haven’t really had any resolution to any of those events. The European situation still goes, the Middle East is an absolute powder keg and getting worse with the fact that the U.S. has no withdrawn from Iraq or in the process of doing so and Iran are agitating for trouble.

So I suspect that 2012 could bring about resolution for some or several of those events that began in 2010, 2011 and with that resolution I suspect will come some real upheaval. A lot of people sit down at the end of the year and write their predictions for the year. It’s a fool’s errand really because we all sit in this because you have to kind of do a little thinking about how you see things playing out and sometimes to verbalize that it just puts a tiger on your back. While I tend to read people’s predictions for the year and I’ll evaluate what they see as possible outcomes through my own filters, I’m never going to hold someone to a prediction they made about what might happen in the future, I mean it’s crazy.

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Posted by on Jan 16 2012. Filed under Silver Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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