Archive - Jan 2014

Frontier markets offer some of the best investment opportunities over the next decade. We like Vietnam which is recovering after a massive credit bust.

If you want to get an idea of where the rest of America is heading, just take a trip through the western half of West Virginia and the eastern half of Kentucky some time.  Once you leave the main highways, you will rapidly encounter poverty on a level that is absolutely staggering.  Overall, about 15 percent of the entire nation is under the poverty line, but in some areas of eastern Kentucky, more than 40 percent of the population is living in poverty.  After decades of decline, vast stretches of impoverished Appalachia look like they have been through a war.  Those living in the area know that things are not good, but they just try to do the best that they can with what they have.

"I happen to think that 2014 is a VERY different year than 2013 from a variety of viewpoints.  First, there appears to be a dispersion of opinion about markets, valuations, policy frameworks and more.  This is a healthy departure from YEARS of artificiality.  Artificiality in valuations, artificiality in market and policy mechanics and essentially artificiality in EVERY financial, and real, relationship on the planet based on central bank(s) balance sheet expansion and other measures intended to be a stop-gap resolution to  tightening financial conditions, adverse expectations of economic activity, and the great rollover" - Russ Certo, Brean Capital

Overview of the dollar's outlook against the major currencies, without a preconceived notion that the US is in some kind of terminal decline.  

A picture worth $17 Trillion...

If the Federal Reserve is trying to force feed us prosperity then the inevitable blowback will be adversity. If the Fed is trying to compel the most dramatic economic recovery in history, then the blowback may well be the deepest depression in history. If the Fed is trying to enforce confidence and optimism then the blowback will be fear and despair. If the Fed is trying to force consumers to spend then the blowback will be a collapse in consumer confidence.

"Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences." - Robert Louis Stevenson

We sincerely hope that we are completely wrong here, that we are missing something, that there is a flaw in our logic. However until we can locate such a flaw we must trust the technical case for treating this Fed force-fed rally in the stock market as something that will end badly.

 This doesn’t mean hyperinflation HAS to occur, but it is unlikely this situation will end well.

A common argument that has been made to explain the precipitous decline of the price of precious metals in 2013 (in spite of the significat demand for the physical bullion) is of investors’ disenchantment with gold and silver, which had been piling up in exchange traded products as a way for investors to gain exposure to the metals. However if redemptions are a symptom of investors' disenchantment with precious metals as an investment, shouldn't silver have suffered the same dramatic redemptions fate as gold? Indeed it should have, but we think the reason silver ETFs were not raided like gold was that Central Banks do not have a silver supply problem, they have a gold problem...

Germany's blowback against gold manipulation is accelerating. Following yesterday's report that Bafin took a hard line against precious metals manipulation, after its president Eike Koenig said possible manipulation of precious metals "is worse than the Libor-rigging scandal", today the response has trickled down to Germany and Europe's largest bank, Deutsche Bank, which announced that it would withdraw from the appropriately named gold and silver price "fixing", as European regulators investigate suspected manipulation of precious metals prices by banks. As a reminder, Deutsche is one of five banks involved in the twice-daily gold fix for global price setting and said it was quitting the process after withdrawing from the bulk of its commodities business. The scramble away from gold fixing was certainly assisted by the recent first (of many) manipulation expose in the legacy media, when Bloomberg revealed "How Gold Price Is Manipulated During The "London Fix." And sure enough, with Germany already very sensitive to the topic of its gold repatriation, and specifically why it is taking so long, it was only a matter of time before any German involvement in gold manipulation escalated to the very top.

"We are concerned about the sustainability of the Equity market rally at this stage," warns Citi's FX Technicals' Tom Fitzpatrick. Between price action parallels to those seens around the peaks in 2000, the fragility of confidence, the Fed taking its "foot off the gas" and bonds now yielding considerably more than stocks, Citi adds, though we are yet to see bearish breaks, they doubt higher highs wil be sustained for long.

The following is Part 2 (Part 1 here) a firsthand story of how and why a former US citizen - who kindly shared this information on condition of anonymity - decided to renounce his US citizenship

Freedom, true freedom, can only begin when we willing choose to start down the path of personal sovereignty and total personal accountability.

On the heels of his less-than-optimistic presentation, DoubleLine's Jeff Gundlach tells Europe's Finanz und Wirtschaft "he's concerned about the growing amount of speculation" and draws a parallel between today’s markets and the dot-com boom of the late Nineties. This excellent interview takes the themes of his recent conference call and extends them as he warns "In the over thirty years I’ve been in the financial investment industry, I don’t recall a single year where I saw the year begin with the consensus being so solidified in its thinking across virtually every asset class." His biggest worry (for investors, as opposed to his funds), "the most unthinkable things happen this year and that is a basic pain trade that forces people into treasury bonds."

Hjalmar Schacht was Hitler’s economic guy. According to Wikipedia, Schacht: ”became a supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and served in Hitler’s government as President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics. As such, Schacht played a key role in implementing the policies attributed to Hitler.” Now, we all know what happened to Hitler. But what about Schacht?