Precious Metals

This is the third and last of three articles we are posting on the price suppression of gold. In the first article we showed that, under mainstream economic theory, the suppression of the gold market is not a conspiracy theory, but a logical necessity, a logical outcome.  Mainstream economics, framed by the Walras’ Law, believes in global monetary coordination which, to be achieved, necessitates that gold, if considered money, be oversupplied. The second article showed, at a very high (not exhaustive) level, how that suppression takes place and how to hedge it (if my thesis is correct, of course). Today’s article will examine the systemic impact of this suppression and test the claim of the gold bugs, namely that physical gold will trade at a premium over fiat/paper gold, commensurate with the credit multiplier created by the bullion banks. (Hint - it is)

Retail investors are piling into the stock market again in the false belief that the worst of the economic crisis is over. Alas, those who are not properly diversified may again be in for a rude awakening.

"Equity prices in the US and Europe have been hovering at multi-year highs. To the extent that this reflects powerful policy easing, equity markets may have lost some of its ability to reflect economic trends in exchange for an important role in the policy fight to support spending." This is a statement from a Bank of America report overnight in which the bailed out bank confirms what has been said here since the launch of QE1 - there is no "market", there is no economic growth discounting mechanism, there is merely a monetary policy vehicle. To those, therefore, who can "forecast" what this vehicle does based on the whims of a few good central planners, we congratulate them. Because, explicitly, there is no actual forecasting involved. The only question is how long does the "career trade", in which everyone must be herded into the same trades or else risk loss of a bonus or job, go on for before mean reversion finally strikes. One thing that is clear is that since news is market positive, irrelevant of whether it is good or bad, virtually everything that has happened overnight, or will happen today, does not matter, and all stock watchers have to look forward to is another low volume grind higher, as has been the case for the past two weeks.

Five-year plans in the Land of the Free? Apparently it’s not that far off from reality. Yesterday Senator Tom Harkin introduced S. 544, “a bill to require the President to develop a comprehensive national manufacturing strategy.” In effect, Senator Harkin wants the President to centrally plan the economy. Never mind that the President has zero experience in business or manufacturing. But hey, this worked out so well for Stalinist Russia, it’s no wonder Mr. Harkin wants to copy that model... The trend is clear. Every single day the political elite gives us even more evidence that they’re working overtime to destroy the economy and what few remaining civil liberties still exist.

The “Fix” Is In?

The markets have begun to wonder whether the Fed (and other central banks) will ever be able to exit from its Quantitative Easing policy. We believe there is only one reasonable exit the Fed can take. Rather than sell its portfolio of bonds or allow them to mature naturally, we believe the Fed’s only practical exit will be to increase the size of all other balance sheets in relation to its own. This “exit” will be part of a larger three-part strategy for resetting the over-leveraged global economy, already underway...

Years after the CFTC, under the leadership of Goldman's Gary Gensler, theatrically agreed to investigate whether the price of precious metals was manipulated during trading - whether systematically or ad hoc - only to let that inquiry fizzle and drop the whole idea proclaiming there is manipulation, the commodity futures regulators are once again taking a look at shady activities originating at London. Or rather, it is "discussing internally" whether the daily London gold and silver price fixing is open to manipulation.

The spectre of stagflation threatens the UK economy due to concerns that sterling weakness will contribute to even higher inflation amid very weak economic growth and the likelihood of a recession – likely a severe one.

Markets are pricing in a jump in inflation as inflation expectations, as measured by the difference between nominal and inflation-linked bond yields, ticked up to near 3.3% yesterday.

Recent poor economic data and the appalling UK fiscal position are rightly leading to concerns of stagflation as was seen in the 1970s. Conditions that make owning gold and silver vitally important to own in order to protect and grow wealth.

This is the third day in a row that an attempt to mount an overnight ramp out of the US has fizzled, with first the Nikkei closing down for the second day in a row and snapping a week-long rally, and then the Shanghai Composite following suit with its 5th consecutive drop in a row as the rumblings out of the PBOC on the inflation front get louder and louder, following PBOC governor Zhou's statement that inflation expectations must be stabilized and that great importance must be attached to inflation. Stirring the pot further was SAFE chief Yi Gang who joined the Chinese chorus warning against a currency war, by saying the G20 should avoid competitive currency devaluations. Obviously China is on the edge, and only the US stock market is completely oblivious that the marginal economy may soon force itself to enter outright contraction to offset the G-7 exported hot money keeping China's real estate beyond bubbly. Finally, SocGen released a note last night title "A strong case for easing Korean monetary policy" which confirms that it is only a brief matter of time before the Asian currency war goes thermonuclear. Moving to Europe, it should surprise nobody that the only key data point, Eurozone Industrial Production for January missed badly, printing at -0.4% on expectations of a -0.1% contraction, down from a 0.9% revised print in December as the European recession shows no signs of abating. So while the rest of the world did bad or worse than expected for the third day in a row, it will be up to the POMO and seasonally adjusted retail sales data in the US to offset the ongoing global contraction, and to send the perfectly manipulated Dow Jones to yet another all time high, in direct refutation of logic and every previous market reality ever.

The American spirit is rooted in the belief of a better tomorrow. Its success has been due to generations of men and women who toiled, through both hardship and boom times, to make that dream a reality. But at some point over the past several decades, that hope for a better tomorrow became an expectation. Or perhaps a perceived entitlement is more accurate. It became assumed that the future would be more prosperous than today, irrespective of the actual steps being taken in the here and now. And for a prolonged time – characterized by plentiful and cheap energy, accelerating globalization, technical innovation, and the financialization of the economy – it seemed like this assumption was a certain bet. But these wonderful tailwinds that America has been enjoying for so many decades are sputtering out. The forces of resource scarcity, debt saturation, price inflation, and physical limits will impact our way of life dramatically more going forward than living generations have experienced to date. And Americans, who had the luxury of abandoning savings and sacrifice for consumerism and credit financing, are on a collision course with that reality.

The current globally-coordinated central bank ZIRP/bailout policies are destroying the world's saving class. As Jim Rogers notes, "For the first time in recorded history, we have nearly every central bank printing money and trying to debase their currency. This has never happened before. How it’s going to work out, I don't know." The bigger danger that concerns him is the "hollowing out of the 'saving class'" resulting from this situation. Central planners' policies are "punishing the prudent in favor of rescuing the irresponsible." Rogers owns gold, silver, and other precious metals and commodities - as a better way to play the debasement of currencies - and concludes rather ominously that, "this has happened before in world history, and the aftermath has always had grievous economic, social - and often human - costs."

There is a delicate balance between supply and demand in silver. At a recent conference, Jeff Clark concluded that there would be insufficient metal to meet a major spike in investment demand if it were to occur, leading to all kinds of negative consequences for those who don't own silver (and lots of wonderful rewards for those who do). He had plenty of compelling charts and convincing data. But here's the rub: he doesn't believe that what's ahead for the price of silver (and gold) will have anything to do with that data. After all, there are articles from researchers and analysts that use similar data to paint a bearish outlook for the metal. Instead, his reasoning is based on psychology. Here's a good example...

Imagine the following: you read in a newspaper that a group of investors has sold US dollars to the tune of $820 million over the past two months for other currencies. This incidentally represents approximately 0.082% of the broad dollar money supply TMS-2 (which amounts to roughly $9.3 trillion at present). It means they would have been selling roughly $20 million per trading day. You then learn that $4 trillion of US dollars are traded in global currency markets every single trading day. Would you believe that their selling has influenced the exchange value of the dollar beyond a rounding error? And yet, we are supposed to believe that the selling of an equivalent amount of gold from the gold holdings of exchange traded funds over the past two months (they have sold 140 tons, or 0.082% of the total global gold supply) has greatly influenced the gold price.

In official testimony before Congress in December 1912, just three months before his death, J.P. Morgan stated quite plainly: "[Credit] is not the money itself. Money is gold, and nothing else." Of course, this testimony came only 253 days before H.R. 7837, better known as the Federal Reserve Act, was introduced on the floor of Congress. The Federal Reserve Act went on to become law and pave the way for the perpetual fraud of fiat currency which underpins our modern financial system. And if unbacked paper currency isn't bad enough, we award dictatorial control of the money supply to a tiny handful of people, and then simply trust them to be good guys. Owning gold is the same as voting against this system, turning your paper currency into something that they cannot inflate or conjure out of thin air. Yet there's one problem.

Throughout history, bankrupt governments in decline almost ALWAYS fall back on a time-tested playbook. This includes imposing controls on everything - wage and price controls, trade controls, capital controls, border controls, people controls. Everything. And this idea goes back to the dawn of human civilization. From Mesopotamia to Rome and from France to Argentina, these policies have been a complete disaster for the country. But as the rest of the world looks on, people in ‘rich’ countries foolishly believe that ‘it can’t happen here.’ So, again, if you think that gold criminalization, price controls, and IRA/pension confiscation could never happen where you live, think again. This is wishful, ignorant, dangerous thinking. It can happen. It is already happening.