RE:Gold, the Ruble and Natural Gaszero hedge covered the most part of your story this morning.
Ruble Surges To 5-Month Highs After Russia Unexpectedly Slashes Rates By 300bps
What is even more surprising to many is that the Ruble - previously dismissed as "rubble" by President Biden - actually strengthened further on the rate-cut, surging to 72/USD.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/ruble-surges-5-month-highs-after-russia-unexpectedly-slashes-rates-300bps
The increasing value of the ruble hasn't increased the gold price because the russians have already allowed their public access to their
foreign currency accounts. That gives the russians an alternative path to securing insurance on their liquid assets. For the rest, the sanctions net is a porous one. India and china are actively negotiating and enacting rupee and yuan for rubles currency transaction networks. As these alternate avenues for trade payments are opening up, India and china no longer need to buy as many rubles as an all out. That would cut their need to pay for the russian goods they buy with gold.
Europe is still in a state of shock and denial over the ruble for natural gas demand. However, their natural gas bills come due about 30 days after delivery. They think they will pay their bills with euros. However, the sanctions effectively block the banks from transferring those payments to russia...
So the russians have decreed: no payment means the natural gas contracts are void. The problem for europe is they have a significant part of their russian natural gas tied to long term delivery contracts. On those they are paying between 200 and 300 euros or dollars per 1000 cubic meters[-feet?]... The spot price has hit as high as $2200 per unit and is around I don't know $1000 a unit is it?.... Of course europe's disagrees with the russian lawyers interpretation of the contracts.
This is only going to get worse as putin is slowly going to force the west to pay in rubles for wheat fertilizer oil nickel palladium copper aluminum et al... so the ruble for gold gold for ruble game is far from over...
meanwhile inflationary fires are breaking out all over the world.... we are going to have an arab spring on a world scale as people are taking to the streets from peru sri lanka iraq lebanon et al... basically because people's existence is rapidly becoming unaffordable....
So I wouldn't rush to point out that the rising ruble hasn't precipitated a higher gold price because the game is only beginning...
The re-visioning of our teuton and treaty creek holdings in light of the changing dynamic of the gold market is an ongoing process. I'm more interested in speculating on how many meters of drilling ken can deliver in 2022.... covid and the weather are two variables that can impact that calculation... Also ken konkin mentioned the possibility of using a 2000 meter drill rig this drilling season in one of his earlier videos. That would be our potential home run hitter in regard to determining whether there is a deep higher grade system underlying the known goldstorm mineralization... That is something to get excited about huh?