Copper

If the Fed raises the short-term interest rates next month, it will do so only as a token. And it will continue doing so only as long as it has no negative effect on asset prices. Higher rates, in other words, will only happen as long as – and only insofar as – they are irrelevant. Should higher rates begin to do the work of tightening credit, as they are supposed to, the Fed will back off and fly to the aid of Wall Street and fellow bankers coast to coast. They have rigged the system to function on fraudulently low interest rates; now the fraud has gotten into its bones. The economy – especially the Wall Street economy – depends on cheap money. It will fall in a heap without it.

Editor’s Note: The tragic events in Paris, terrorism and war throughout the world, show geopolitical risk remains high.  These risks will likely impact economies and financial markets and will see continuing safe haven demand for gold. “The future is uncertain and gold is the most effective insurance against that.”

• Belgian Police 'Arrest' Public Enemy No.1 (Sky News)
• France Widens Crackdown at Home as Bombs Rain on Islamic State (BBG)
• Putin Goes From G-20 Pariah to Player at Obama Turkey Talk (BBG)
• Paris Attacks: 150 Raids as France Goes to 'War With Terrorism' (NBC)
• 'Rocket Launcher Found' In French Police Raids (Sky)
• Geopolitical worries lift oil after Paris attacks, but glut weighs (Reuters)
• Japan's economy falls back into recession again (BBC)

As so often happens in these upside down days, was the best thing that could happen to the market, because another economic slowdown means the BOJ, even without sellers of JGBs, will have no choice but to expand its "stimulus" program (the same one that led Japan to its current predicament of course) and buy up if not government bonds, then corporate bonds, more ETFs (of which it already own 50%) and ultimately stocks. Because there is nothing better for the richest asset owners than total economic collapse.

Global policymakers have gone to incredible measures to stabilize market, financial and economic backdrops. Yet reflationary measures will continue to only further destabilize. When policy-induced “risk on” is overpowering global securities markets, fragilities remain well concealed. Fragilities, however, swiftly manifest with the reappearance of “risk off.” Rather quickly securities markets demonstrate their proclivity for illiquidity and so-called “flash crashes.” So after an unsettled week in global markets, the critical issue is whether “risk on” is giving way to “risk off” dynamics.

Greenspan’s phony disinflation success led to the Fed’s embrace of fully mobilized and massively intrusive monetary policy in the guise of the Great Moderation and the wealth effects theory of financial asset levitation. In due course, Greenspan’s self-aggrandizing but purely experimental forays of massive central bank intrusion in the financial markets were supplanted by the hard-core Keynesian model of Bernanke and Yellen. Alas, they operated under the grand illusion that a domestic wage and price spiral would tell them when the domestic GDP bathtub was filled to the full employment brim, and therefore when to lift their foot from the monetary accelerator. It never happened, and they never did. The era of Lite Touch monetary policy was by now ancient history.

The global economy is in dire straits and China can push it into a fierce recession!

Brutal news is pouring in from pretty much everywhere. The world, in short, is rolling over. Debt monetization on the scale so far attempted has failed to stop the implosion of tens of trillions of dollars of bad paper, growth has stalled and geopolitics has begun to turmoil. And none of this is a surprise. It’s just what you get when you put monetary printing presses in the hands of governments and/or big banks.

The world of Bubble Finance economies created by the Fed and other central banks is fundamentally different than that prevailing under the “Lite Touch” monetary policies which preceded the Greenspan era. The problem today is that the PhDs running the Fed have an economic model which is a relic of the Lite Touch era. It is not only utterly irrelevant in today’s casino driven system, but is actually tantamount to a blindfold. It causes them to look at a dashboard full of lagging indicators like jobs and GDP components, while ignoring the explosive leading indicators starring them in the face on CNBC. The clueless inhabitants of the Eccles Building do not recognize that they have created a world in which Wall Street supersedes main street.

For once, the overnight session was not dominated by weak Chinese economic data (which probably explains why the Shanghai Composite dropped for the second day in a row, declining 1.4%, and ending an impressive run since the beginning of November) and instead Europe took the spotlight with its own poor data in the form of Q3 GDP which printed below expectations at 0.3% Q/Q, down also from the 0.4% increase in Q2, with several key economies rolling over including Germany, Italy, and Spain while Europe's poster child of "successful austerity" saw Q3 GDP stagnate, far worse than the 0.5% growth consensus expected.

Overnight Goldman released a report titled simply enough "Copper poised to move even lower" which confirmed everything we said a month ago when we warned that the latest "production cut" initiatives by Glencore would have absolutely no impact on the longer-term price dynamics of the metal which has achieved "doctor" status. We were right:

COPPER FALLS 1.8% TO $4,856/TON, REACHING LOWEST SINCE 2009