Commodity market The price of gold bullion fell dramatically on 12 April 2013 and analysts frantically sought explanations. Rumors spread that the European Central Bank (ECB) would force Cyprus to sell its gold reserves in response to its financial crisis. Major banks such as Goldman Sachs began immediately to short gold bullion. Investors scrambled to liquidate their exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and margin call selling accelerated. George Gero, precious metals commodities expert at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Wealth Management section reported that he had not seen selling of gold bullion as panicked as this in his forty years in commodity markets.
Commodity money a legal code. Several centuries after the invention of cuneiform script, the use of writing expanded beyond debt/payment certificates and inventory lists to codified amounts of commodity money being used in contract law, such as buying property and paying legal fines. Today, the face value of specie and base-metal coins is set by government fiat, and it is only this value which must be legally accepted as payment for debt, in the jurisdiction of the government which declares the coin to be legal tender. The value of the precious metal in the coin may give it another value, but this