Archive - Jul 20, 2015

Overnight we saw a flush in precious metals, with no apparent catalyst, and now we are seeing US Treasuries extreme volatility as earlier strength extending gains from last week, are unceremoniously and suddenly dumped after Fed's Bullard warned markets that the probability of a September rate hike is now above 50%. Of course, thanks to meltups pre-market in FB, GOOG, and AAPL, stock indices don't care at all.

The only way to sort the wheat (real collateral based on enterprise value) from the chaff (phantom collateral created by central banks' speculative bubbles) is for a crash to force price discovery and the cramdown of losses.

Several hours ago, in yet another deadly bomb attack attributed to ISIS, at least 27 people were killed and more than 100 others injured in a powerful explosion in the town of Suruc in southeastern Turkey, 10 km from the Syrian border and across from the heavily contested town of Kobane in Syria where surprise ISIS attacks killed more than 200 people last month.

Be careful what you wish for...

• Gold Plunges to Lowest Since 2010 (BBG)
• In Greek crisis, one big unhappy EU family (Reuters)
• Greek Banks Reopen Their Doors (WSJ)
• Greek reshuffle hints at autumn election (FT)
• Angela Merkel signals conditions for Greek debt talks (FT)
• Dollar hits three-month high on rate view, pans gold (Reuters)
• History Shows Iran Could Surprise the Oil Market (BBG)
• ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Will Cease Publishing Cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (Newsweek)

In what looked like another successful bid to manipulate the gold market lower, there was massive selling of gold futures contracts - some 700,000 ounces worth of gold futures in mere seconds. The equivalent of one-fifth of a whole day’s trade in a normal session, was sold in a concentrated manner in less than two minutes - pushing prices lower again.

Today's action is so far an exact replica of Friday's zero-volume ES overnight levitation higher (even if Europe's derivatives market, the EUREX exchange, did break at the open for good measure leading to a delayed market open just to make sure nobody sells) with the "catalyst" today being the official Greek repayment to both the ECB and the IMF which will use up €6.8 billion of the €7.2 billion bridge loan the EU just handed over Athens so it can immediately repay its creditors. In other words, Greek creditors including the ECB, just repaid themselves once again. One thing which is not "one-time" or "non-recurring" is the total collapse in commodities, which after last night's precious metals flash crash has sent the Bloomberg commodity complex to a 13 year low.

Greece. China. Banking system messes. Central bank printing. And here we are, under $1140. Breakdown?

That cannot be determined from price charts. We want to know the fundamentals of supply and demand. Here's how we measure it.