Archive - Aug 2015 - Story

Something surprising happened on Friday afternoon: in the latest daily COMEX update 25,386 ounces of Registered gold had been "adjusted" out of registered and into eligible. This reduction in deliverable Comex gold pushed the amount of registered Comex gold to an all time low: at 351,519 ounces registered Comex gold has never been lower! It also means that as of Friday's close there was a whopping 123.8 ounces in potential paper claims to every ounces of physical gold.

"Due to the lack of appropriated funds for this fiscal year the entirety of the PFC payment was not made today. This was a decision that reflects the serious concerns about the Commonwealth's liquidity in combination with the balance of obligations to our creditors and the equally important obligations to the people of Puerto Rico to ensure the essential services they deserve are maintained."

"As precious as gold..." That was how then-president Hu Jintao described Caofeidian during his visit in 2006. It was pledged to be "the world’s first fully realised eco-city" – yet 10 years and almost $100bn later, only a few thousand inhabitants have moved to this land reclaimed from the sea.. as yet another 'centrally planed' idea is completely FUBAR.

Is Barack Obama trying to kill the economy on purpose? He promised to fundamentally transform America, and he is doing it in hundreds of different ways.  These new greenhouse gas regulations are just one example.  Our nation is being gutted like a fish, and most Americans don’t seem to care. What in the world will it take for this country to finally wake up?

"With these stupid governments printing trillions and trillions of new currency units," warns investor Doug Casey, "it's building up to a catastrophe of historic proportions." In an excellent brief interview with Reason magazine Editor-in-Chief Matt Welch, Casey expounds on the US noting that "as any institution gets larger and older it inevitably becomes corrupt and fails." What to do? "I wouldn't keep significant capital in banks," he exclaimed, "most of the banks in the world are bankrupt. That didn't stop the "brain dead" Greeks who left their money in banks as all the signs were on the wall, he notes as he addresses whether gold is a good investment in 2015, and offers back-handed bright side: Catastrophes create many opportunities to earn a profit.

"It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over."

Having a security clearance comes with a certain amount of responsibility and those who are privy to potentially sensitive information are expected to exercise good judgement. In other words, whether or not the information carried a giant red "top secret" stamp isn’t the relevant question, nor is "no harm no foul" a legitimate after the fact defense. And that, apparently, is the difference between a Clinton and say a Manning or a Snowden - that is, holding Hillary (or any other member of what Jimmy Carter would call America’s "political oligarchy") to the same standards as everyone else turns out to be an uphill battle.

We are delighted to report that about 7 years after it was glaringly obvious to everyone except the Fed of course, now - with the usual half decade delay - even the NY Fed has finally figured out what even 5 year olds get. "A new study from the New York Federal Reserve faults these policies for enabling college institutions to aggressively raise tuitions. The implication is the federal government is fueling a vicious cycle of higher prices and government aid that ultimately could cost taxpayers and price some Americans out of higher education, similar to what some economists contend happened with the housing bubble."

We have lived through a credit hyper-expansion for the record books, with an unprecedented generation of excess claims to underlying real wealth. In doing so we have created the largest financial departure from reality in human history. Bubbles are not new – humanity has experienced them periodically going all the way back to antiquity – but the novel aspect of this one, apart from its scale, is its occurrence at a point when we have reached or are reaching so many limits on a global scale. The retrenchment we are about to experience as this bubble bursts is also set to be unprecedented, given that the scale of a bust is predictably proportionate to the scale of the excesses during the boom that precedes it. Deflation and depression are mutually reinforcing, meaning the downward spiral will continue for many years. China is the biggest domino about to fall, and from a great height as well, threatening to flatten everything in its path on the way down. This is the beginning of a New World Disorder…

The Fed would have needed to hike rates by 800 bps in the wake of the dot-com collapse in order to prevent the housing bubble. That would have purged the system and gradually, the FOMC could have eased by around 300 bps over the next four years. That policy course would have prevented the speculative bubble that brought capital markets the world over to their knees in 2008. And why didn’t the Fed do this? Because "such a large increase in interest rates would have depressed output more than the Great Recession did." In other words, thanks to Alan Greenspan, the US economy cannot function under a normalized monetary policy regime.

We could not have put it better - Progress indeed...

How many more times will we be told that "it" doesn't matter... or it is "transitory" with regard any and every flashing red warning signal from asset values that are not centrally manipulated with regard asset values that are 'plunge protected'? Well to try and kill one of those myths off, we present the following chart... showing how a collapse in commodity prices is unequivocally bad for US equity markets...

Lately the leaders of some of the world’s biggest energy companies have been saying oil prices will remain depressed for some time – perhaps for the next five years – and now they’ve decided to cut their costs in the most painful way possible: massive job cuts.