OTC Derivatives

Here are some Trivial Pursuit questions for you:
1) What is the biggest market in the world for a physical commodity?
2) Is the gold market one of the smallest markets in the world for a physical commodity?
I would guess that you answered:
1) Crude oil.
2) Yes. Gold is one of the smallest commodity markets in the world.
If those were your answers, you are wrong. What everybody believes to be the "tiny gold market" is in fact the world's biggest physically traded commodity market. Let's have a look at some facts. The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) "over-the-counter" (OTC) gold market trades approximately 90 percent of the world's physical gold trade.

This article was inspired by a conversation in January 2010 with fellow directors of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee: Chairman Bill Murphy, Secretary/Treasurer Chris Powell, and Directors Adrian Douglas and Ed Steer. In speaking about the growing role of the exchange traded funds in the precious metals market, it was clear that the disclosure that the precious metals ETFs described below were providing to investors was inadequate. However, was there a material omission under securities law? I found the issues complex. Understanding the commodities markets can seem daunting to someone like myself with a securities background. Meanwhile, the securities markets and related legal and regulatory issues can be unfamiliar to those with a background in commodities. I decided to ask my attorney to help me gather the relevant information into one document to make it easier for GATA supporters and other interested parties—whether from the commodities or securities markets—to examine these issues and to better understand and price these securities. - Catherine Austin Fitts, Solari Report

The leaders of our industry have poured gasoline on the banking crisis and accelerated it completely out of control. It has gotten to the point where legislators and regulators seem to be doing their best to burn the industry down to the ground to rid it of the evils that caused the crisis in the first place. I put this squarely at the feet of our industry's leaders. They ignored common sense, signs, hints, nudges and flat out requests to curb their risk taking to the point where governments now are proposing rules that not only will force institutional break-ups and hurt our industry, but that very well may cripple the capital formulation engine Main Street needs to generate jobs. Talk about cutting off our proverbial nose to spite our face. All that our industry leaders needed to do was come together, highlight the major gaps that led to the subprime crisis and come up with a solution to solve the most egregious issues. Yes -- in order to keep the industry whole and the world sane, some profitable business would need to be eliminated, sacred cows slaughtered and sacrifices made to appease government leaders and stop the gathering hordes from marching down the Street with torches and pitchforks. - Larry Tabb, founder and CEO, TABB Group

Recently the general public had the unpleasant experience of seeing what the real face of Warren Buffett looks like when it comes to derivative reform: a man ready to maim and kill to prevent even a minor loss when it involves controlling what he previously called "weapons of financial mass destruction." Sigh - yet another another hypocrite unmasked. However the battle over derivatives is just beginning. As the attached presentation from erdesk.com indicates, the big banks are not about to let a $55 billion annual revenue stream go away without a massive fight. And despite what Blanche Lincoln thinks, with Financial Reform suddenly stalling hopelessly in yet another indication that Chris Dodd's many years of robbing the middle class blind need to end yesterday, derivatives are not going anywhere in a hurry: with $11 billion in IR, $22 billion in FX, $10 billion in Credit, $10.5 billion in commodities and $1.5 billion in mortgages, most of it split between Goldman, DB, CS, MS and JPM, for anyone to think that the firms who run the world will cede such a core part of their business to the exchanges is naivete defined. We recommend the attached simplified overview to anyone who has a passing interest in not only the fascinating $600+ trillion world of OTC derivatives but of ongoing (futile) attempts to reform it.

Now we know why BRK, CAT and the other big corporates came oozing out of the woodwork last year to defend the OTC derivatives market. JPMorgan (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and the other OTC dealers let Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) and the other "AAA" corporates play at the roulette table w/o any chips. Isn't this the man who called OTC derivatives weapons of mass destruction?

Dudley talks theory, avoids practice, when discussing the driving force behind today's market - the biggest asset bubble reflation in history. Although to be fair, Dudley does destroy the concept of efficient markets and notes that when we enter the irrational exuberance everyone piles on the same side of the trade, only to realize there is nobody to sell to when the bubble pops. Dudley says nothing to indicate that Fed pundits are anything beyond theoretical puppets of Wall Street, whose sole purpose is to reflate the market to the highest possible point before recent events catch up with Wall Street surreality. And we quote, courtesy of Geoffrey Batt: state of emergency in Thailand, Kyrgyzstan and parts of South Africa, increasing violence in Iraq and Pakistan, bombing in India, multiple bombings in Russia, imminent Greek default, talk of Iran invasion, Karzai claiming he may join the Taliban, South Korean ship attacked and destroyed, Israel considering using nukes as a preemptive weapon, UK elections, massive banker backlash, and so much more. Yet all investors care about is whether the iPad's WiFi can penetrate 1 inch of drywall (ignoring that by buying apple shares, they are selling life insurance on Steve Jobs), and whether everyone can pretend just long enough that there is nothing moving this market but excess liquidity, before it all unravels with the 1% of the population that has profitted the most long taken profits and relaxing on a beach in a non-extradition Pacific island.

I'm not against derivatives - including credit default swaps. But keeping them secret and hidden is a recipe for disaster ...

In a video conference before the ACI 2010 World Congress in Sydney, Australia, the head of the FRBNY's trading desk, aka, the busiest daytrader over the past year, Brian Sack, demonstrated once again that Fed members are either completely clueless about ongoing market dynamics or are so good at octuple re-reverse psychology, that they make the squid pale in shame and squirt ink in envy.

It is irrefutable. The Bernanke Fed will go down in history as the most wildly successful ever. Nobody in financial history has been able to re-sky stocks in one year after the two largest banks in the country were within a hairsbreadth of imploding. No doubt, he will be trumpeted and hailed as a national hero, for orchestrating the fastest run in retail stocks in world history.

Things are really starting to get wild. CNBC should just eliminate the NYSE trading floor shots and replace them with battle scenes from "Hamburger Hill" or some of the medieval battles in "Lord of the Rings". Basically, everyone is out for blood today as panicked put and call holders are getting barbecued with Goldman's flamethrowers or getting bludgeoned to death by spiked clubs.

In a letter to the CFTC's Chairman, Gary Gensler, GATA Chairman William Murphy shares the following bombshell:"GATA has evidence that there are enormous physical short positions in the gold and silver markets that cannot be covered." Even as the CFTC is meeting later this month to establish position limits in the gold, silver, and other precious metals' markets, it could be none other than the CFTC's core banks, and Mr. Gensler's former Goldman bosses, that form the very core of the biggest market manipulation collusion syndicate in the history of the commodity markets. If GATA is not bluffing and indeed has evidence of massively uncoverable physical positions, and should this evidence be made public, the repercussions for the price of gold will be unprecedented.

We ran an interview with our friend Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism today. She has done an excellent job of describing how the intellectual ghetto that was once financial economics has helped to destroy the world of investing and involuntarily turn us all into day traders. The full text follows below. -- Chris

Does the Fed's move spell the end of easy bank profits? Not a chance! They will continue making a killing on prop trading and the revival of M&A activity. Then there is OTC derivatives, which fatten up profit margins and remain unregulated. We need another Brooksley Born and fast!

You know the official version of how god's bank, aka Goldman, makes money: in the traditional, and not at all mysterious god's way, as a pureplay investment bank, which allocates capital, provides financing, advisory services, etc. Despite what Mr. Blankfein would want you to believe, that's only half the story. This two part PBS Series analyzes the other side of the equation. Who should know the truth better than former Goldmanite, Nomi Prins, author of "It Takes a Pillage." Classical investment banking function is a small portion of their revenues, I think it is about 10% or so. So if he is doing god's work, he is only doing it 10% capacity. The rest is prop trading." But wait, according to Goldman prop trading accounts for only 10% of revenue. Why the discrepancy? Simple - because that 80% "vacuum" is really just the client-facing prop/flow fixed income hybrid model, which after the disappearance of all big fixed income trading houses (Bear, Lehman and soon, RBS) Goldman has now monopolized. Being able to determine how big or small the bid/offer spreads on anything from cash bonds, to CDS to various non-CDS OTC derivatives should be, courtesy of having the largest fixed income inventory in the world at any one time, to which it can add or from which it can sell, makes Goldman not so much a pure play prop trader, as a market monopoly, which has to be dismembered as it now is the market (just like the Fed is the market in MBS and Agency paper) when it comes to all non-Fed dominated Fixed Income and OTC derivative products. This is, and always has been, an FTC issue: remember Ma Bell?

Brazil's BOVESPA and the Merc entered into a Memorandum of Understanding as Global Preferred Strategic Partners to jointly develop a new multi-asset class electronic trading platform, with capacity to process transactions in less than one millisecond for equities, derivatives, fixed income securities and other exchange-traded or OTC-traded assets. Based on technology derived from the CME Globex® trading system, this new platform will house all BVMF segments under the same infrastructure. [1] Cliffs Notes highlight of the press release in toto ~ [2] Daily & Weekly CME charts