The letter will give you the percentage. It will not tell you what that raise is actually worth in real terms — that's a separate question. It is the one this desk has worked on for thirty-five years, every weekday morning, before COMEX opens, in about five minutes.
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CPI-W, the basket the adjustment is priced off, ran 3.5 percent over the year. Two of the three months that matter were closed at that point.
It closes the third-quarter average the adjustment is computed from. Your raise for next year is decided by that release, on that morning.
The 2027 Part B premium is published in November. It comes out of the same check, before the check reaches you.
Every October the same thing happens. One agency announces a raise, another announces what it is taking back, and the coverage stops at both numbers. The desk starts there.
A raise is a number divided by a yardstick. Washington sets the number. It also picks the yardstick, revises it, and grades its own work. A bullion desk keeps a second set of books, and it measures the same check in the one thing nobody can print.
In July 2021 the average retired worker’s check was $1,556.72. Gold fixed in London at $1,825.75 on the last session of that month. The check weighed 0.85 ounces.
Five Julys later the same line reads $2,085.98, and the fix reads $4,026.60. The check weighs 0.52 ounces.
Up 34 percent in dollars. Down 39 percent in ounces. Both true. Only one of them is measured in something a government cannot issue more of.
SSA monthly statistical snapshot, July 2021 and July 2026, Table 2 · LBMA Gold Price PM, July 30, 2021 and July 31, 2026. Two dates, two fixes, one division. Check it yourself.
That is one window, and a different window gives a friendlier answer. The dispatch does this every morning with the window the day hands it. No pick comes attached. No product is waiting at the end.
The one signal that caught the desk overnight. A tonnage figure, a vault, a print nobody read right.
Why it is not random. Sometimes the tape rhymes with a named week in 1979. Most mornings it is plumbing.
What it means for your money, in plain English. Not a pick. Not a pitch.
Three things forming that have not hit the headlines yet.
Then this is squarely your story. The check is paid in dollars and the yardstick is the dollar. What that yardstick does between now and your eighties is the whole subject.
That's not really what this newsletter does. Forecasts are cheap, and the print lands October 14 regardless of anyone's prediction. You get what the number is made of, and what to watch after it.
Fair. Weekday mornings only, no weekend noise, one click to leave. The read itself is never a pitch, and nothing here sells a coin.
I am Marcus Thorne. I started on a London bullion desk in the early 1990s. Gold was $350 and nobody at the firm’s parties wanted to hear about it. Thirty-five years later I still price things the same way, in weight. A man who worked forty years is owed a straight answer about what his money is measured in. He should get it from someone with no coin to sell him.
October 14 sets the number. What the number is worth is the part you live with all year. The desk works on that one every morning, before the bell.
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