Central Banks

• The best performing asset class of this Millennium is gold, by a country mile.........

“If the ECB merely does on 3 December what is effectively priced by the market, we could collectively wake up on 4 December feeling a bit deflated, like a child discovering on Christmas day that his parents ‘only’ gave him what he/she had asked for, without the ‘little extra’ that would have kept him/her smiling all day long."

Forgotten what 2008 was like? What's coming will be far worse.

The IMF will decide if it's 'Game Over' for the reserve status of the Greenback...

If we assume that China’s hard landing can and will get hard-er-er, it’s worth asking which assets and currencies have priced in a further deceleration in the world’s engine of global growth and trade. Barclays has more on what’s expensive and what’s cheap vis-a-vis persistent deterioration in the Chinese growth story.

Within the last week China appears to have hit the panic button with regards the seemingly unstoppable collapse of commodity prices. First, desperate Chinese producers began to demand a QE-for-commodities bailout; then, following the well-trodden (and failing) path of China's equity market maipulation, authorities began to crackdown on "malicious" commodity short-sellers. So why now? Why focus attention on the commodity markets? Perhaps this chart holds the key...

The fact of the matter is that despite public opinion, there are problems that are so big that the Central Banks cannot fix them. We’ve seen this in Switzerland and China and now in Europe. It will be spreading to other countries in the near future.

Risk goes up, yeilds go down... What's that look for? Don't you know how bond pricing works in the new millenium?

“We should focus on the meaning rather than individual words"...

The China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association has submitted a request to Chinese regulators to probe "malicious" short-selling in domestic metal contracts amid recent price declines. Becase it is always the "malicious" sellers who are the cause of all the world's problems, never the "malicious" buyers, especially when said buyers are the central banks themselves.

Yes, it’s true that the propping up of the markets by the Fed and Central Banks has gone on longer than we realized, the unraveling of the World’s Greatest Financial Ponzi Scheme is still on its way.

China's aluminum and nickel producers have asked Beijing to buy up surplus metal, sources said, the first coordinated effort since 2009 to revive prices suffering their worst rout since the global financial crisis. China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association had suggested that the state buys 900,000 tonnes of aluminum, 30,000 tonnes of refined nickel, 40 tonnes of indium, and 400,000 tonnes of zinc. Or, in other words, "QE for metals."

The S&P 500 is up 0.44% in the last three days, a solid return for the buy-and-hold'ers thinking about long-term appreciation. However, under the covers of that move is, just as we predicted, a massive and accelerating short-squeeze is underway, dragging the "Most Shorted" stocks up 4.65% since Friday's open as investors bet increasingly on central-bank-inspired expectations that hedge fund blow ups will force domino-like, sequential short squeezes.

• European stocks up, oil slides as concerns ease over Russia-Turkey tension (Reuters)
• ECB discusses two-tiered bank charges, broader bond buys (Reuters)
• New agonies, alliances as Fed debates post-liftoff plan (Reuters)
• A New Military Power Rises in the Mideast, Courtesy of One Man (BBG)
• Russia's Gazprom says halts gas supplies to Ukraine over payment (Reuters)
• Other central banks set to act, but Swiss policy cupboard bare (Reuters)