Archive - Dec 2012 - Story

With gold and silver down this morning - following a mysterious vertical plunge last night (once again) - we thought ConvergEx's Nick Colas' timely discussion of gold was worthwhile. As he notes, Gold is the ultimate personality test for investors.  Some hate it, excoriating its adherents for their lack of faith in human ingenuity – gold has been valuable since before humans could write. And some swear by the yellow metal, in the belief that it is the last vestige of rationality in a world of financial assets manipulated by central banks and opaque trading venues.  What gets lost in the wash is that gold is a commodity and can be analyzed as such. On that basis, here is the 'Top 10' list of real-world fundamentals for gold.

Presented with no comment...

If the Mayans are correct, the world has just over a week before it goes poof. But, the hard-core chartists will say, is there any technical analysis suggestion they may be right? Let's take a look: the chart below shows all the 450 MunichRe-documented natural disasters that have taken place in the first half of the year, running at at annualized pace of a near record-setting 900 in 2012 alone. Is this enough to set off the most terminal selling event in the history of the world in 8 short days? You decide.

The economic data dump trifecta has been released, with updates on claims, retail sales and PPI. The end result was a nearly even beat/miss split.

Gold fell nearly 1% in illiquid markets in Asia overnight. Some traders may have decided to take profits on the short term long the FOMC announcement trade. Gold bullion prices had already ran up to $1,723 in the 2 weeks prior to the policy statement. Overnight, as prices fell below the 100-day moving average at $1,705, stop-loss selling was triggered which pushed prices lower quickly. Yesterday, the Federal Reserve took the bold, some would say reckless step, of linking its monetary policy to unemployment, creating concerns that the U.S. dollar will be debased even more in the coming months.  The US Federal Reserve will keep interest rates at close to zero until unemployment falls below 6.5%. This is a historic and very radical change to monetary policy. It is the first time a large central bank has ever tied its interest rate policy directly to one facet of the economy – unemployment.

The Eurozone was once again engaged in burning the midnight oil, in yet another futile endeavor, this time setting the stage for a common bank supervisor in the face of the ECB, which is somehow supposed to "regulate" Europe's thousands of banks. That this was a total practical dud can be seen in the response of the EURUSD to the news. However, for those interested in the theoretical nuances, whose actual implementation has once again been kicked into the future, here is a quick and dirty primer from SocGen.

• Bernanke Wields New Tools to Reduce Unemployment Rate (BBG)
• Home Seizures Rise as Banks Adjust to Foreclosure Flow (BBG)
• EU Backs Release Of Greek Aid (WSJ)
• Democrats Confident They Have 'Cliff' Leverage (WSJ)
• Americans Back Obama Tax-Rate Increase Tied to Entitlement Cuts (BBG)
• Goldman flexes tentacles: Treasury open to Carney radicalism (FT)
• Launch Fuels Asia Security Concerns (WSJ)
• BOJ’s Unlimited Loan Program Seen Open to Use by Hedge Funds (BBG) - there are Japanese hedge funds?
• Abe Set to Face Manufacturing Gloom as Japan Contracts (BBG)
• US and UN condemn N Korea rocket launch (Guardian)
• Eurozone agrees common bank supervisor (FT)
• Berlusconi Adds to Italy Turmoil by Signaling He’d Step Aside (BBG)

Anyone hoping that if left on autopilot, pardon the pun, the frayed relations between Japan and China will fix themselves, is in for a disappointment. Because while the Japanese trade with China has imploded resulting in a collapse in Japanese exports, which in itself is crushing the local economy, the country may offset that economic decline with some "GDP growing" Keynesian voodoo if and when the provocations between the two countries escalate to the point of exchanged fire. Sure enough, Kyodo reports, that a Chinese government airplane entered Japanese airspace over the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea on Thursday in the first such airspace intrusion in Japan, prompting an immediate protest from the Japanese government. This is only the first time a Chinese airplane has entered the disputed airspace, the the third time in history: once before by a Soviet bomber in 1979 and a Taiwanese civilian aircraft in 1994. We now look forward to what China's response will be to this reaction which will certainly be seen as provocative in itself.

Why the lack of follow through? Because, according to preliminary desk talk, just as we predicted yesterday now that the Fed has reengaged the QEasing machine, the ECB will too have to intervene and ease on its own once again to push the EURUSD lower (as otherwise the internal devaluation for most European countries will be simply unbearable). Which means one thing: the time to drag the Spanish insolvency out of cryogenic sleep is coming, and if Rajoy still refuses to request a bailout, he will get some much needed assistance from Frankfurt to make up his mind, allowing the ECB to inject hundreds of billions into the market and in doing so to keep up with the Fed or else risk dropping too far behind in the global race to debase (with a footnote that in Europe, a drop in the currency always raises redenomination risk now and going forward).

Glenn Stevens, RBA Governor: "Central banks can provide liquidity to shore up financial stability and they can buy time for borrowers to adjust, but they cannot, in the end, put government finances on a sustainable course... They can't shield people from the implications of having mis-assessed their own lifetime budget constraints and therefore having consumed too much."

Rightly so, the FX and equity futures markets are almost entirely ambivalent at the farce that at 430am in Brussels, the EU leaders announce a compromise agreement on ECB banking supervision:

• *BARNIER HAILS 'HISTORICAL ACCORD' ON ECB BANK OVERSIGHT
• *BARNIER SAYS EUROPE HAS SHOWN 'CAPACITY TO TAKE ACTION' (yay)
  
• *MOSCOVICI SAYS SUPERVISION IS FIRST STEP IN EURO BANKING UNION
• *MOSCOVICI SAYS ECB WILL BE SUPERVISOR FOR ALL BANKS
• *SCHAEUBLE SAYS AGREEMENT REACHED ON EU30B OVERSIGHT THRESHOLD
• *BARNIER SAYS SUPERVISOR IS FUNDAMENTAL FOR FINANCIAL STABILITY
• *BARNIER SAYS ECB OVERSIGHT NEEDS PREPARATION OF AT LEAST A YEAR (umm)
• *ECB COUNCIL WON'T HAVE FINAL SAY ON BANK REGULATION: SCHAEUBLE (oops)

Of course, none of this matters - what is the ECB going to tell them "de-lever more!", "buy less of your sovereign's debt?" Until there are pooled deposit guarantees (nein nein nein) this is irrelevant and markets are treating it thus - no matter the PR efforts.

At the end of October, as the Tristate Area was being flooded by Hurricane Sandy, one after another Wall Street firm tried to position Sandy virtually as a non-event, with total damage "forecasts" by such "reputable" firms as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America forecasting a total bill between $10 and $20 billion (as anything above that and the Q3 damage to GDP would be far more substantial than their recently bullish forecasts had accounted for, and would also imply a substantial spillover effect into Q1 2013), the same as various insurance companies who had other far more obvious reasons to undershoot on the total damages. We said the opposite, and based on historic damage forecasts, predicted the damage would likely be between $50 and $100 billion. Once again the sellside consensus was wrong and a fringe blog was accurate, as the CBO has just released the Obama administration's full aid request. Bottom line: $60.4 billion, or roughly what one year of what the ultimate tax hike compromise will bring into the government's treasury. Furthermore, if fully funded by debt today, this amount would send the US (which has a $57 billion debt buffer as of this moment) over the debt ceiling immediately.

While many believe that with the output gap so wide that inflation is not an immediate threat, longer-term, as UBS notes, excessive money printing could indeed generate inflation and that inflation expectations are unusually volatile and could quickly be dislodged. This inflation hedges are a very valid concern. An oft-cited reason for owning stocks is that they have an implicit inflation hedge, however, just as with many market myths, UBS finds that, in fact, equities do not look like a compelling hedge against rising inflation. Indeed, they provide an appropriate hedge to rising inflation only in a limited number of cases. In short, equities provide only a partial hedge – one which works only for small positive inflation shocks.

Gold bugs can’t understand how the public can be so unaware, how highly intelligent policy makers can be so immoral, and how the mainstream media can be so incurious. We can’t understand why more men and women in the investment business haven’t joined some of the more successful ones that have come around to precious metals and have taken substantial positions in them for their funds and personal accounts. Conventional financial asset selection guidelines for professional investors are becoming increasingly uneconomic and problematic. Current macroeconomic conditions leave little doubt as to why. A zero-bound rate structure across developed economies, heavy monetary policy intervention, guaranteed negative real returns of benchmark financial assets and cash, impossible discount cash flow models,cacophonous (and economically meaningless) fiscal political wrangling diverting attention from legitimate budget arithmetic ($800 billion over ten years when we’re running $1 trillion-plus annual deficits?), dubious short and intermediate-term prospects in already-emerged emerging economies, and non-trending financial markets, all suggest something has changed. Regardless of whether one is investing personally or as a fiduciary, conventional financial asset allocation models and procedures are obviously failing and the reason is simple: the currencies in which financial assets are denominated are gravely flawed.