Futures market

Fast forward to this morning when in yet another Reuters piece, we "find" that the narrative has shifted once more and that now, "traders from Hong Kong to New York are pointing the finger at others for being behind the move while struggling to unmask the mystery sellers." In other words: the "hunt" for the great gold "bear raid leader" has begun.

"I held in my hand the Holy Grail for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The most influential economic mind of the twentieth century provided the CME with the intellectual foundation upon which to build its financial superstructure."

Since yesterday there has been another of wave of negative, misleading and almost triumphalist commentary on gold most of which studiously ignores the clear evidence of manipulation of the price on Sunday night.

"Now that the spell is broken, we expect that many holders may want to sell to the forced buyers in the market. In addition, although difficult to assess accurately, due to a lack of data, we estimate that around 1/5 of the free float is still carried on margin. The high margin cost means that selling pressure is high as long as investors do not expect the market to go up significantly.we expect the market to experience another leg down, possibly within months."

Yesterday, just before the Chinese market opened, precious metals but mostly gold, flash crashed in milliseconds with a violent urgency never before seen. We documented the unprecedented event last night, but for those who missed it, the following chart from Nanex clearly lays out just how sudden the "out of nowhere" selling was, which led to not one but two 20-second halts in the gold futures market spaced out precisely 30 seconds apart as a result of a Velocity Logic (or lack thereof) event.

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.

The dollar made new multi-year highs against the dollar-bloc and is bid against most major and em currncies.  Why?  

 This is the continuation of the trend of China positioning the yuan as global reserve currency ... The Chinese are pushing for full convertibility of the RMB and increasing their gold holdings will create confidence in the fledgling reserve currency and aid them in this regard.

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But... but... they just provide liquidity.

Non-bombastic look at the price action and speculative positioning, with the hope of anticipating next week's developments.

The Fed’s Stanley Fischer has said that the U.S. was preparing such legislation – after Tucker had indicated that such legislation was in place. The EU is also at an advanced stage in forcing countries to ratify bail-in legislation. The legislation is being devised to protect the larger banks against the interest of both depositors, taxpayers and the wider economy.

Seven years of bailing out the big banks that control the Federal Reserve and US Treasury at the expense of the US economy has threatened the US dollar to the extent that the dollar must be protected at all cost, including US regulatory tolerance of illegal activity to suppress gold and silver prices.

You might be tempted to suspect that the inevitable unwind of a completely unsustainable margin mania is to blame for the brutal selling that has cost Chinese shares some $3.5 trillion in market value over the last three weeks. But you’d be wrong, according to several Chinese newspapers.