Best I've seen is estimates of $1350 for q4 2016 for gold and worst is 990 so i doubt we'd see any flux in anything under class 2 boards (what board sort caps in the back plane category where gold is still a second or third consideration. The problems with scrapping as a business investment comes into play with class 1 material: gold finger cards hard drive boards optical controllers etc and "prime" 1 gold ram, cell/pager/tablet boards. And processors.
If China starts dumping doubloons the gold world is in trouble but I, personally, don't see any reason they would.
Both China and Russia have the largest (richest deposits) source mines for rhodium in the world. It's why as a tech guy I cringe at the political dick measuring issues. It's not recycling I'm worried about, it's a cutoff of rhodium that could send tech prices through the ceiling and well into orbit and beyond. Think $1500 cell phones and $1000 raspberry pi motherboards. This already happened once for a two year span when the ussr/sssr dissolved. When those early brick bag cell phones went from $900ish -1500 in days. And the price of apple, ibm, and Atari computers doubled in a few weeks, before settling the following year. Why do i bring this up? Because... the return value for the scrap won't Chang. Suddenly the escrap market crashes on everything but rhodium heavy material. So cell phone boards are suddenly $30-$40/lb well gold ram keeps dropping and anything less than that tanks.
What if the various price fixing methods in the TPP/TTP trade agreements weren't cut in the first round and Europe implemented the aluminium export restrictions. Suddenly! Low" and "mid" grade power boards are worth over $3-$5 a pound and gold destabilises.
Minimum changes we, as scrappers and recyclers take forgranted have such far reaching effects...! So my point: don't hoard your material. One person sitting on 10 lbs won't effect anything (but you could gain, or loose, a lot of value). If 100, 1000... people hoard we're into the realms of possibility of affecting markets locally which will eventually cause issues nationally, and globally. Boardsort isn't making $100 on that $11 pound of ram you sent them. Any you won't either.
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