Precious Metals

Lately Bloomberg's reporting group (now without access to client tracking) has been hitting it out of the park when it comes to cognitive schizophrenia-inducing news article headlines. Last Friday it was the market somehow going up and down at the same time. Now, Bloomberg has shifted its deductive skills over to analyzing the gold market with the following article headline: "China’s Gold Imports From Hong Kong Slump on Quota Backlog" in which Bloomberg says: "Mainland buyers purchased 126,135 kilograms, including scrap, compared with 223,519 kilograms in March, according to Hong Kong government data yesterday. Net imports, after deducting flows from China into Hong Kong, were 75,891 kilograms, from 130,038 kilograms a month earlier, according to Bloomberg calculations." Now perhaps what would have made this "slump" more amusing is if BBG had also shown it in context. Which we are happy to do. Because the 126.1 tons of gold imports in April, or the month of the "great gold crash", was only the second highest ever, and just shy of the all time record high of 223.5 tons imported in March.

Turd Ferguson, of the TF Metals Report, does superb work and commentary on the precious metals markets. His latest analysis on Friday’s Commitment of Traders Report caught my attention for a number of reasons, in addition to it being so well done.

In the wake of the financial collapse of 2007, central banks around the world run by Keynesian zealots religiously applied the formulas they had been taught would boost aggregate demand and rescue the economy from the brink of total catastrophe. Easy money, going under the euphemistic moniker of “quantitative easing” was supposed to stimulate borrowing, spending and growth through the mechanism of historically low interest rates. Predictably, this approach failed miserably, as these kind of policy decisions largely miss the point of how the economy really works. As long as central banks continue to meddle with the money supply, investments will not be made efficiently and the economy as a whole will suffer.

Weakness in gold and silver is leading to robust demand internationally as store of value buyers accumulate gold and silver on this dip. This is particularly the case in Asia where premiums remain robust and supply demand imbalances remain. The persistent strong demand of this week began on the price falls in April. This demand is clearly seen in the London gold and silver trading data released by the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) yesterday. London gold trading jumped to a 20 month high in April and silver volumes surged 25% after the price falls led to an increase in physical buying, the LBMA said in a report. Trading in gold averaged 24.1 million ounces a day in the London market, the most for any month since gold reached record nominal highs in August 2011, the LBMA said in a statement yesterday as reported by Bloomberg.  The 24.1 million ounces was a 10% increase on March when 21.8 million ounces a day were traded. Silver volume surged nearly 25% to 165.2 million ounces a day, up from 132.5 million ounces in March. There were 5,395 gold transactions on average per day, the highest on record, while silver transfers at 1,007 a day were the second-highest ever, according to the report.

Jim Rogers was recently interviewed by GoldMoney and had plenty to say (as usual):

On Bernanke: "He doesn’t want to be around for the consequences of what he’s doing."

 

On Fiat: "Paper money doesn’t have a very glorious history, but again, nothing imposed by the government has a very long and glorious history."

 

On Europe's Crisis: "You can postpone it all you want, but the problems just mount."

 

On Capitalism: "You are not supposed to take money away from the competent people and give it to the incompetent so that the incompetent can compete with the competent people with their own money. That’s not the way capitalism is supposed to work."

Definitely a sector to watch. Given the record number of Gold shorts outstanding, it the precious metal begins to pick up again, the rally could be absolutely explosive.

"Since we're dealing with markets that are being manipulated by central bank policies, there is no such thing as economic analysis anymore. All you have is the imaginations of central bankers, and you don't know what they're going to do, so you have to be diversified."

It appears that the USD is no longer the cleanest dirty shirt - but precious metals, perhaps? And amid all this chaos in fiat and non-fiat currency markets, equities and bonds remain somewhat stoic. This is the biggest 2-day drop in the USD in 19 months. These are chaotic movements in colossal markets (that dwarf equity market capitalization) - but of course, none of that matters.

While some (such as Bloomberg) see the unprecedented rise in orders to withdraw copper supplies from inventory at the LME as an indication of "improving demand," we suspect the huge demand bias from Asia (read China) suggests more is at play here than 'hope' in economic surprises. While the reasons are still unclear, the timing of this spike in demand is very close to our recently discussed concerns over the collapse in the Chinese Copper Financing Deal (CFFD) rehypothecation-based funding system. The unlimited "collateral" capacity of the previously described funding chains means that there may simply not be enough copper in bonded warehouses to meet the Letter of Credit needs once the copper warrants start being demanded upon LC termination. So, perhaps, the surge in LME delivery requests reflects a desperate demand for physical copper to meet these unwinding funding deals' needs. Either way, just as we saw gold vaults promptly emptied post the mid-April precious metals crash (especially that of JPMorgan), this sudden surge in physical demand bears very close watching.

The conventional wisdom is that oil should decline in nominal price as global demand weakens along with the global economy. In the hot-money-seeks-a-new-home scenario outlined above, demand could decline on the margins but speculative inflows - demand for oil contracts by speculators - push prices higher, potentially a lot higher in a geopolitical crisis. The central banks that are creating all the "free money" that is available to large speculators fulminate against oil speculators, as if all the free money is only supposed to go to "approved" speculations in equities and bonds. Unfortunately for the central bankers, they only create the money, they don't control what the financiers who get the free money do with it. Gasoline is expensive at the pump, but by one measure oil is cheap and poised to go higher and despite the endless MSM hype about U.S. energy independence and U.S. exporting energy abroad, the U.S. still imports over 3 billion barrels of crude oil every year and when oil becomes expensive: the economy sinks into recession.

While this morning's explosion higher in Treasury bond yields (the largest in 9 months) was 'evidence' for many of the 'great rotation' as stocks rallied; it seems that now the 'crowd' is selling everything. Stocks, commodities, bonds, and credit are all offered (while the USD and precious metals are bid). The end of POMO appears to have stalled the exuberance and cracked the JPY collapse of the day (for now - since it is Tuesday). With the 10Y yield now well above the S&P 500 yield, we wonder what 'measure of cheapness' will be wheeled out next to justify buying stocks again.

A week ago, when the brand new Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange suddenly shuttered after being in operation for only two years, urgently settling what little contracts were outstanding, many questions were left unanswered. Such as: how it was possible that the exchange, expected by many to become the new preferred trading venue for Asian precious metals and to steal the CME's crown, could close on such short notice. This mystery deepened further after reports that the exchange barely had seen any volume, with allegedly only a tiny 200 open contracts remaining to be settled upon shuttering. Now, the confusion surrounding the HKMex closure has taken another big step for bizarrokind following news that not only have at least four HKMex senior executive have been arrested having been found to be in possession of false bank docs for nearly half a billion in dollars, but that government itself was forced to "shore up confidence" in CY Leung, Hong Kong's 3rd Chief Executive, whose former top aide was none other Barry Cheung Chun-yuen, founder of the HKMex.

It is not just the massive short positioning in Gold futures that has BofAML's commodity strategists concerned; but the regime changes in the precious metal's volatility structures suggests risks are significantly mispriced relative to equities, rates, and other commodities. Following the most abrupt price collapse in 30 years, near-dated implied volatility in gold spiked dramatically in the past month. The term structure of implied gold volatility has also changed shape and the market now shows a marked put skew. Even then, the spike in precious metals volatility had remained a rather isolated event until this week’s sharp drop in Japanese equities. As the following chartapalooza demonstrates, while large-scale QE has tempered volatility across all asset classes for months, we remain concerned about the recent sharp price movements in gold or Japanese equities, and see a risk that other bubbling asset classes may follow.

During the third week of May each year, representatives of the platinum industry gather in London, for an event that has become known as ‘Platinum Week’. Platinum Week centers on an industry dinner sponsored by the London Platinum and Palladium Market (LPPM) which marks the anniversary of the inauguration of the London Platinum Quotation (the forerunner of the present London Fixings) in 1973.

Today’s AM fix was USD 1,386.00, EUR 1,074.92 and GBP 919.16 per ounce.  
Yesterday’s AM fix was USD 1,385.25, EUR 1,071.43 and GBP 917.75 per ounce.