Precious Metals

Dylan Grice may no longer work at SocGen, and, as we reported previously, has finally put his mouth where his money is and opted to replace his desk at a government subsidized, undercapitalized French megabank with a hedge fund invested 60% in precious metals, but his wisdom remains. And while we are confident that we have covered all of his prior reports over the years, we now provide one handy, 244-page compendium covering the bulk of Grice's work over the past 4 years. Covering the financial gamut: from Valuation, to the Euro Crisis, to Japan, to Asia, to Gold and commodities, all the way to the Philosophically arcane, we are confident that the attached presentation will provide countless hours of reading pleasure for all.

Gold fell $11.70 or 0.7% in New York yesterday and closed at $1,664.80/oz. Silver slipped to a low of $31.09 and finished with a loss of 1.66%.

Gold Spot $/oz, 60 Days, 30 Minutes – (Bloomberg)

On the surface, it may seem innocuous for Germany to move some pallets of gold closer to home. But most economists can't see the bigger implications and frequently miss the forest for the trees. What your friendly government economist doesn't reveal and the mainstream journalist doesn't report (or doesn't understand) is that in the event of a US bankruptcy, euro implosion, or similar financial catastrophe, access to gold would almost certainly be limited. If other countries follow Germany's path or the mistrust between central bankers grows, the next logical step would be to clamp down on gold exports. It would be the beginning of the kind of stringent capital controls Doug Casey and a few others have warned about for years. Think about it: is it really so far-fetched to think politicians wouldn't somehow restrict the movement of gold if their currencies and/or economies were failing? Remember, India keeps tinkering with ideas like this already.

The central planner's policy tool formerly known as "the stock market" has experienced unprecedented levitation in the past two months on the heels of what, as shown previously, is some 38 countries concurrently pursuing negative interest rates and monetizing their debt, while flooding the market with record liquidity. Furthermore, as we said back on January 9, now that the Fed is back to full scale unsterilized market injections in the form of good old POMO, anyone who wishes to challenge the Fed directly may want to reconsider doing so via stocks (buying precious metals on FRBNY, BOE and BIS-facilitated 8:00 am crashes is always encouraged).  Below is a chart of what happened next: it shows the stock market's performance and whether or not there was POMO on that day. In brief: of the 15 POMO days since January 9, the market was up 13 of them, or an 87% hit rate. Those who did not short January POMO at least did not lose money.  And since Goldman's Bill Dudley was kind enough to release the February POMO schedule, during which the Fed will add another $44 billion to Primary Dealer dry powder, not to mention some $40 billion in MBS, and since there is no stock market and hasn't been since 2008, we urge everyone to stude the POMO table below and to not short the S&P on the highlighted POMO days unless they absolutely must.

Stocks have slipped, precious metals have round-tripped, and the FOMC did nothing to save us but nevertheless the world's analysts and economists came to the rescue of yesterday's negative GDP growth print yammering over a never-ending series of reasons why ignoring the bad parts, it was great. UBS' Art Cashin, as always, cuts through all the spin as he notes, while most of headlines concentrated on the 4th Quarter GDP, it did give us a look at the annual GDP for 2012 at about 1.5% (not the 4% growth that was the Fed's projection, he snarks); and it is that 1.5% growth rate that has a 65-year history of concerning implications...

Gold rose $13.80 or 0.83% in New York yesterday and closed at $1,676.50/oz. Silver slipped to a low of $31.24 in the morning, but it then ran up to a high of $32.24 and finished with a gain of 2.01%.

Gold hovered nearly unchanged after surprise GDP figures showed that the U.S. economy contracted and the U.S. Federal Reserve maintained asset purchases. Platinum is on track for its most stellar month’s performance in a year.

"History is replete with examples of societies whose downfalls were related to or caused by the destruction of money. The end of this phase of global financial history will likely erupt suddenly. It will take almost everyone by surprise, and then it may grind a great deal of capital and societal cohesion into dust and pain. We wish more global leaders understood the value of sound economic policy, the necessity of sound money, and the difference between governmental actions that enable growth and economic stability and those that risk abject ruin. Unfortunately, it appears that few leaders do."

- Paul Singer, Elliott Management

Today we look at long term charts of some key commodities and investigate means by which we might gain insight into the dynamics of their price movements. The charts are most commonly studied as a plot of price vs time. However, the dynamical evolution of a complex system is described by a succession of states through which the system has evolved. Even though gold and silver have been in a bull market for over ten years, the real regime change only happened about three years ago. What was evident was the separation of the precious metals (which still includes silver) from the industrial metals and agricultural commodities. What happened?

We noted yesterday the growing disconnect between stocks and credit - today saw stocks start to play catch-down. High-yield credit (specifically HYG - the bond ETF) has fallen four days in a row - its biggest four day plunge in over 2 months (with today's drop the biggest single-day drop in almost 4 months) amid mega volume. VIX (another notable disconnect) continued to push higher (above 14% for the first time in 3 weeks). Treasuries had been leaking higher in yield on the week (30Y +8bps as FOMC hit) but slid lower as the post-FOMC day wore on. The USD weakness (led by significant strength in CHF and EUR) supported precious metals (and commodities broadly) but not stocks. Silver are up almost 3% on the week (and Gold outperforming USD's implied shift). Homebuilders faded from the open with all the QE-sensitive sectors (Materials, Energy, and Discretionary) all red on the week now. It would appear that bonds recoupling (higher in yield) with stocks was the end of the catalyst for this run higher for now as divergences are appearing everywhere. S&P futures end the day red on the week, on large average trade size and volume.

As soon as the much-weaker-than-expected GDP print hit the tape this morning, precious metals began to rise. Led by Silver, it appears the physical demand of recent weeks is creeping into the reality of prices (suppressed or otherwise) as bad is good enough for moar help from Ben and his buddies. The upward move in the PMs is as good a predictor of what to expect (i.e., not even a hint of tightening) as the sell-side crew, which is expecting merely another boring FOMC statement - as Goldman notes, following the substantial policy changes announced in December - including the shift to outcome-based forward guidance and the introduction of open-ended Treasury purchases - Goldman expects the January meeting will likely be relatively uneventful with few changes to the economic assessment.

My colleague and erstwhile nemesis Gonzalo Lira posed the question above in a recent essay, and it is indeed a most puzzling one.  Given that the world’s central banks — joined most recently by a shockingly reckless Switzerland — are waging all-out economic war by inflating their currencies, shouldn’t gold be soaring?

A regular feature back in 2010 when we had our first taste of global currency warfare as Brazil's finance minister accurately summarized when he said "a currency war has broken out" (and yes: currency war existed then, and especially in the 1930s which led to the Great Depression, long before the recent eponymous book came out desperate to take credit for this simplistic concept) were the global FX heatmaps which showed how any given currency is doing on any given day. Since currency warfare is now back and more violent than at any time in the past 80 years, it only makes sense to bring back a long-time reader favorite: the currency warfare heatmaps which show who, on any given day, is winning and losing, the global race to debase and in the process beggar all globalized and SWIFT-interlinked neighbors. But don't forget: in a relativistic fiat world, nobody can actually win the global race to debase. Well, not nobody: gold (and other precious metals) can, assuming it is not confiscated as it was the last time the US ended the global currency war with a 50%+ devaluation of the USD relative to gold... and promptly confiscated all gold.

That precious metals are not the best friends of central banks, whose sole provenance is in creating, and lately massively diluting, faith-based fiat currency is no secret, especially not after the recent snafu involving the Bundesbank and its shocking gold repatriation announcement which came in direct refutation of its public statements just 2 months earlier about faith in the NY Fed this, and bashing of a "phantom debate" on the safety of gold reserves that. Yet it was not gold gold, silver or even tungsten that was the object of derision in an amusing paper released by the ECB in early November titled "Virtual Currency Schemes", which we profiled at the time, but rather the decentralized electronic currency BitCoin, which was supposed to highlight what, in the eyes of the Draghi-led Frankfurt institutions, is nothing but a Ponzi scheme. Why the ECB suddenly felt threatened so much by Bitcoin, it felt an imperative to issue a 55 page paper decrying such electronic currencies we will never know. What we do know, however, courtesy of a reminder by Bloomberg's Max Raskin, is that since the publication of said paper, the value of Bitcoin as tracked by the Mtgox exchange, has soared some 40% in just under three months, from a "fiat equivalent value" of $13 to a most recent closing price of $18.50, and has doubled in the past 12 months alone.

Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey expanded their gold holdings in December, seeking to diversify their foreign reserves and protect from currency devaluation risk. Russian gold holdings climbed 2.1% to 957.8 metric tons or 30.793 million ounces, according to data on the International Monetary Fund’s website. The increase in December takes the increase in Russian gold reserves in 2012 to 8.5%.  The Russian central bank has said that they will continue buying gold. The pace of the purchases may vary, First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev told reporters this month.  He denied that there is a 10% target for gold’s share in the reserves according to Bloomberg

James Turk: "My guess is that 2013 and 2014 are going to be big up year for the precious metals, but we still have to contend with the central planners and the various government policies, which have been actively trying to keep the gold and silver prices from reaching fair value. The central planners are losing the war. They may win an occasional battle or two, but they’re losing the war, and eventually gold and silver are going to go higher.... I can’t say that trust between central banks is waning, but you have to recognize that there are two categories of central banks: There are central banks that are in the U.S. circle of control and dominance, and then there are central banks outside the circle of U.S. control and dominance. The ones that are outside of the U.S. control and dominance are accumulating physical gold. The ones within the U.S. control tend not to do that, although it’s interesting that Germany, Netherlands, and now Austria, too, are talking about bringing their gold back."