Precious Metals

Perhaps the biggest surprise about the overnight Chinese stock rout is which followed the lowest manufacturing PMI since March 2009, is that it happened despite repeat sellside pleas for a PBOC RRR cut as soon as this weekend: usually that alone would have been sufficient to push the market back into the green, and it almost worked when in the afternoon session stocks rebounded after dropping as much as 4.7% below the "hard" floor of 3500, but then a second bout of selling just before the close took Chinese stocks right back to the lows with the Shanghai Composite closing at 3,507, down 4.3% on the day, having wiped out the entire 18% rebound from July 8 when the PBOC first threatened both sellers and shorters with arrest.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record we'd like to say a bit more about economists' tendency to get their monetary history wrong; in particular, the common myths about the gold standard. If there's one monetary history topic that tends to get handled especially sloppily by monetary economists, not to mention other sorts, this is it. Sure, the gold standard was hardly perfect, and gold bugs themselves sometimes make silly claims about their favorite former monetary standard. But these things don't excuse the errors many economists commit in their eagerness to find fault with that "barbarous relic." The point, in other words, isn't to make a pitch for gold.  It's to make a pitch for something - anything - that's better than our present, lousy money.

After yesterday's slamming efforts, precious metals are well bid this morning following the USD flash crash this morning. Silver has regained yesterday's losses and gold is hitting one month highs...

With China's currency devaluation having shifted to the backburner if only for the time being, all attention was once again on the Chinese stock market roller coaster, which did not disappoint: starting off with yesterday's dramatic 6.2% plunge, the Shanghai Composite crashed in early trading, plunging as much as 5% in early trading and bringing the two-day drop to a correction-inducing 11%, and just 51.2 points away from the July 8 low (when China unleashed the biggest ad hoc market bailout in capital markets history) . And then the cavalry came in, and virtually the entire afternoon session was one big BTFD orgy, leading to a 1.2% gain in the Shanghai Composite closing price, while Shenzhen and ChiNext closed up 2.2% and 2.7%, respectively.

It's human nature for us to want to keep our wealth close at hand. Trouble is, you have all your wealth in one jurisdiction, and should that jurisdiction find itself in an economic crisis, all that “diversification” will be seriously at risk. If we’re being really truthful with ourselves, governments pose a greater threat than the average thief, as they can steal legally. Much of the world has gone on a massive spending spree and has, in effect, used a credit card to do so. Soon, that bill will need to be paid and the jurisdictions that are in debt will unquestionably be revealed to be insolvent. The economic crisis, when it hits, will be sudden and will be devastating.

The most pivotal importance of China is that it was the world’s latest financial hope. The yuan devaluation shatters that hope once and for all. The global economy looks a lot more bleak for it, even if many people already didn’t believe official growth numbers anymore. Because we’ve reached the end of the line, the game changes. Of course there will be additional attempts at stimulus, but China’s central bank has de facto conceded that its measures have failed. They just hope you won’t notice, and try to bring it on with a positive spin. Central banks are not “beginning” to lose control, they lost control a long time ago. The age of central bank omnipotence has “left and gone away” like Joltin’ Joe. Omnipotence has been replaced by impotence.

Just 3 weeks after the world could not purge itself fast enough of 'pet rocks', Gold is pushing to one-month highs this morning (at $1120) and Silver just broke a key technical level at its 50-day moving average as USD weakness and global turmoil have seen Precious metals gain for the last few days...

If yesterday it was the turn of the upside stop hunting algos to crush anyone who was even modestly bearishly positioned in what ended up being the biggest short squeeze of 2015, then today it is the downside trailing stops that are about to be taken out in what remains the most vicious rangebound market in years, in the aftermath of the Chinese currency devaluation which weakened the CNY reference rate against the USD by the most on record, in what some have said was an attempt by China to spark its flailing SDR inclusion chances, but what was really a long overdue reaction by an exporter country having pegged to the strongest currency in the world in the past year.

Hedgies are the most short ever... and Commercials are the least hedged in 14 years... and it appears rumors of PBOC buying along with dismal data from around the world has sparked a renewed awareness of another looming QE sending gold well north of $1100 and silver back above $15.

For the last three weeks, gold has experienced something that has never happened before - hedge funds aggregate net position has been short for the first time in history. However, as Dana Lyons notes, this week saw another 'historic' shift in gold positioning as commercial hedgers shifted to the least hedged since 2001... so the 'fast' money is chasing momentum and the 'smart' money is lifting hedges into them.

"The future is unknown and we are not dealing with markets that are free markets anymore...now we have government interventions everywhere. [But] in the last say twelve months, I have observed an increasing number of academics who are questioning monetary policies. That's why I think they will take the gold away and go back to some gold standard by revaluing the gold say from now $1000/oz to say $10,000 dollars. An individual should definitely own some physical gold. The bigger question is where should he store it? because... the failure of monetary policies will not be admitted by the professors that are at central banks, they will then go and blame someone else for it and then an easy target would be to blame it on people that own physical gold because - they can argue - well these are the ones that do take money out of circulation and then the velocity of money goes down - we have to take it away from them... That has happened in 1933 in the US."

It makes logical sense that China would understate its gold aspirations. If you had the means to acquire hundreds, or even thousands, of tons of gold, you’d want to do so as stealthily as possible in order to avoid tipping off the market. If your strategic objective was to dramatically boost gold reserves over a period of several years, you wouldn’t want to see the price rise – at least not while you’re still accumulating. And if you had no ethical qualms about interfering in the market, you’d want to rig prices lower so you could obtain more ounces. Chinese officials are more than willing to manipulate markets, whether through subterfuge, deceit, or outright force.

Russia is resubmitting its claim of more than 460,000 square miles of the Arctic, including the North Pole, as its sovereign territory, saying it has enough evidence to convince the United Nations that its claim is valid. The Arctic, which is believed to contain as much as one-quarter of Earth’s undiscovered oil and gas, is part of a territorial dispute involving not only Russia but also Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States. This is the second time Moscow has submitted a claim in the Arctic.

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…