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The price of Ether is soaring today, heading back towards record highs as broader acceptance (UK's IG Group offer ETH trading), government discussions (ETH founder meets with Thai central bank), and perhaps most of all fork-related buying (ETH faces hard fork and traders are betting on BTC-like reaction).

Ether is surging today, heading back towards its $400 record highs from mid June.

There appears three main drivers of this most recent move:

While overnight equity, bond and FX markets traded in a narrow range as a result of scarce mid-summer liquidity, mounting Trump administration and geopolitical concerns and uncertainties ahead of Friday's Jackson Hole symposium, the same can not be said about the latest "berserker" action in the commodity space in general, and industrial metals in particular, where China's horde of momentum-chasing speculators were unleashed overnight, sending Zinc to its highest since October 2007 at $3,180.50 a tonne, the bellwether industrial metal, and "doctor", copper surged to to $6,593 a ton

Most false or irrational ideas about money are not new. For example, take the idea that government can just fix the price of one monetary asset against another. Some people think that we can have a gold standard by such a decree today. This idea goes back at least as far as the Coinage Act of 1792, when the government fixed 371.25 grains of silver to the same value as 24.75 grains of gold, or a ratio of 15 to 1. This caused problems because the market valued silver a bit lower than that.

Absent any major geopolitical shocks, it is set to be a quiet summer week ahead with focus on the Jackson Hole conference. On the data front the key releases will be US durable goods and Eurozone PMIs, as well as Japan inflation & UK and Norway GDP. In Emerging Markets, there are monetary policy meetings in Indonesia, Hungary and Kazakhstan.

Buffett Sees Market Crash Coming: His Cash Speaks Louder Than Words

The Sage of Omaha’s adage is “it’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”

Editor: Mark O'Byrne