Precious Metals

Quite a few articles have been written about the importance of owning Gold and other precious metals as a means of maintaining one’s wealth in the face of rampant money printing by the world’s Central Banks. Today I’m going to share some ideas on how to actually buy bullion.

The head of industrial and precious metals trading at Barclays, Cengiz Belentepe, has told Bloomberg that investors are selling their investments in gold ETFs and opting for the safety of allocated physical gold.

Barlcay’s Belentepe said “the question is whether the pace of buying has slowed, or whether the people have become a bit more sophisticated in recognizing the costs and liabilities.”

WTI crude started moving first but soon afte the US day session opened we saw EUR weakness, US strength and precious metals started to fade rapidly. Gold and Silver have now retraced the post-FOMC Bernanke-Bump, but remain above the Draghi-Day levels...

With the election right around the corner, the chickens are going to come home to roost.  Our ability to print our own currency and buy all the commodities we want with it is the exorbitant privilege that allowed us to export most of the problems within the monetary system elsewhere first.  As Nixon’s Treasury Secretary John Connelly said when confronted by a group of European Finance Ministers: “it’s our currency, but your problem.”  At the time he was correct, as we were at the very beginning of the fiat dollar standard.  41 years later the system is in its final days and our currency is about to become our problem as well. There were always going to be massive consequences to keeping this ponzi alive. The main point here is one I was hammering on in my last piece The Global Spring.  You can only push people so far into hardship before things snap.  They snapped in North Africa.  They snapped in Southern Europe.  They snapped in China.  They are about to snap here.  Oh, and one last thing.  What do you think all of this signals for corporate margins?

We talk a lot about the importance of owning precious metals… and often for the sake of convenience, we lump gold and silver together in the same category. But while the two share similar characteristics as excellent inflation hedges and stores of value, silver has unique fundamentals worth considering. For starters, while the entire gold market is small, the silver market is even smaller. This means that, in a boom, silver is going to rise more rapidly than gold. In a bust, silver is going to drop more rapidly. This gives silver an interesting edge as a speculation. And one way to play this is to buy specific types of silver whose premiums soar during financial panics.

With equities sat the edge of an ugly-looking cliff and precious metals leaking lower, FX markets remain somewhat less shell-shocked (for now). Citi's Steve Englander provides a quick-and-dirty view of the five key issues FX investors are focusing on.

It seems our recent re-introduction of the world to Robert Triffin has struck a note among a number of market participants. The gold-convertible U.S. dollar became the global reserve currency under the Bretton Woods monetary system, which lasted from 1944-1971. This arrangement ended because foreign central banks accumulated unsustainably large reserves of U.S. Treasuries, threatening price stability and the purchasing power of the dollar. Today, central banks are once again stockpiling massive Treasury reserves in an attempt to manage their currency values and gain advantages in export markets. We have, effectively, returned to Bretton Woods. The trouble is, as Guggenheim's Scott Minerd notes,  that the arrangement is as unsustainable today as it was during the middle of the last century. None of this should come as a surprise given the unorthodox growth of central bank balance sheets around the world. The collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971 caused a decade of economic malaise and negative real returns for financial assets. Can anyone afford to wait to find out whether this time will be different?

While we have grown 'used' to hearing of protests in several European peripheral nations, South Africa has turned the anti-austerity protest amplifier to 11 in recent days. From the Lonmin massacre and subsequent wage increase to the truck-drivers' strike and Amplats firing of 12,000 workers , Reuters is reporting that South Africa's local government worker's union has now said it will join a nationwide strike amid the labor unrest in the mining sector. Demanding 'market-related salaries' this strike would bring the South African economy to its knees - at a time of rising deficit concerns. Critically, this has dramatic repercussions. Since firing people is no longer an option as "Those who are dismissed will make sure that there will be no operations operating and that will cause a massacre just like at Marikana," some companies will be forced out of business (reducing supply) or suffer significant margin compression on cost increases leaving commodity producers struggling - which will inevitably mean prices for end-users will rise (slowing end-user demand or crushing their margins). It seems the South African labor unions found the M.A.D. card.

Precious metals have all run up with the recent loose money policies enacted by various governments.  Clearly the market darling of late is silver which is now gaining favour in Asia for its value appeal.  Spot silver traded in New York has risen by 27% since the end of June, while the price of spot gold has increased by a meek 12%. Analysts say future Indian demand is key for silver’s price to climb. Futures contracts for silver at India's largest commodity exchange, the Multi Commodity Exchange, rocketed 30% in September compared with July, while volumes fell by 10% for gold futures contracts over the same period. Indian rupee weakness sent gold prices in rupees to an all time high this year, while silver never exceeded the record it hit last April. Rupee-denominated silver is currently being quoted around 20% below the record. Indian investors have ceased purchasing because the 2 weeks ending Oct. 15th is regarded as inauspicious.  The buying will commence and peak during the week ahead of the Hindu festival of Diwali on November 13th. In China, on the Shanghai Futures Exchange silver futures were up 29% at the end of September verses the end of June, while gold climbed 13%, according to data from the exchange's website.

Four years ago today, the Troubled Asset Relief Program was signed into law. We thought it timely to take stock of different asset price levels with respect to that magnificent day in the history of our country as well as how a broad cross-section of global asset markets have performed relative to their pre-crisis peaks. Of the major US banks, Wells Fargo has done the best (-2.3%) while BofA and Citi are worst (down ~80%). As Goldman notes, two features stand out when we look at the broad markets: asset markets that have outperformed and are closer to pre-crisis peaks are either ‘defensive’ in some way, or have benefited inadvertently from the ‘Great Easing’ in response to the crisis. From precious metals and Swedish and Canadian house prices at the top to European bank stocks and US Growth at the bottom; 'hard assets' and 'defensives' combined with central bank yield compression has, as we would expect, dominated performance.

With precious metals once again on the rise, the questions begin as to whether or not gold is in a bubble. While these questions never seem to occur among the cogniscenti when equity prices race ahead non-stop for months on end with no volatility, Brent Johnson (of Santiago Capital) offers up five 'facts' that help to explain why gold at $1800 is far from a bubble - especially as central banks shift from 'measured' responses to open-ended debauchment.

In a post entitled 'Mugabenomics: Inflation in UK Higher than in Zimbabwe,' Guido Fawkes points out how the Liberal Democrats Vince Cable once warned that Quantitative Easing (QE) was “Mugabenomics.” This was prior to coming to power and a swift u-turn which would make even the most slippery politician proud. Remember when Vince Cable warned that Quantitative Easing (QE) was “Mugabenomics”? Vince flip-flopped on that even before he joined the coalition.  Guido Fawkes then reminds its readers about the time when George Osborne said “Printing money is the last resort of desperate governments when all other policies have failed.”  Alas as the blog rightly warns, "In government Osborne has overseen the printing of more money than any other Chancellor in British history. A quarter of the national debt – all this government’s overspending – has been bought by the Bank of England via QE."  “So it is not a shock that inflation in Zimbabwe (3.63%) is now lower than inflation in the UK (3.66%, August 2011-July 2012).” Those who have been warning about this monetary madness for some years are gradually being proved right

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the world’s Western central banks lie vaults holding gargantuan piles of physical gold bars… or at least that’s what they all claim.

Our analysis of the physical gold market shows that central banks have most likely been a massive unreported supplier of physical gold, and strongly implies that their gold reserves are negligible today. If Frank Veneroso’s conclusions were even close to accurate back in 1998 (and we believe they were), when coupled with the 2,300 tonne net change in annual demand we can easily identify above, it can only lead to the conclusion that a large portion of the Western central banks’ stated 23,000 tonnes of gold reserves are merely a paper entry on their balance sheets – completely un-backed by anything tangible other than an IOU from whatever counterparty leased it from them in years past. At this stage of the game, we don’t believe these central banks will be able to get their gold back without extreme difficulty, especially if it turns out the gold has left their countries entirely. We can also only wonder how much gold within the central bank system has been ‘rehypothecated’ in the process, since the central banks in question seem so reluctant to divulge any meaningful details on their reserves in a way that would shed light on the various “swaps” and “loans” they imply to be participating in. We might also suggest that if a proper audit of Western central bank gold reserves was ever launched, as per Ron Paul’s recent proposal to audit the US Federal Reserve, the proverbial cat would be let out of the bag – with explosive implications for the gold price.... We realize that some readers may scoff at any analysis of the gold market that hints at “conspiracy”. We’re not talking about conspiracy here however, we’re talking about stupidity. After all, Western central banks are probably under the impression that the gold they’ve swapped and/or lent out is still legally theirs, which technically it may be. But if what we are proposing turns out to be true, and those reserves are not physically theirs; not physically in their possession… then all bets are off regarding the future of our monetary system.

When it comes to investing in gold, investors often see the world in black and white. Some people have a deep, almost religious conviction that gold is a useless, barbarous relic with no yield; it’s an asset no rational investor would ever want. Others love it, seeing it as the only asset that can offer protection from the coming financial catastrophe, which is always just around the corner. PIMCO's views are more nuanced and, we believe, provide a balanced framework for assessing value. Their bottom line: given current valuations and central bank policies, we see gold as a compelling inflation hedge and store of value that is potentially superior to fiat currencies.

Charlie Evans proved once and for all that he is the 'doviest' dove in the Fed's dove-cote as he espoused his own special sense of reality with CNBC's Steve Liesman this morning. His ability to speak out of both sides of his dual-mandate mouth while suppressing the reality of rising prices and expounding on the need for the Fed to be more accomodative (we assume they will stop at infinite infinities of easing), Evans made it very clear, when pushed on the topic of QE efficacy, that they will continue to print (unable to provide any quantitative assessment of the result) until morale improves. That's it; nothing less. Inflation - no worries; all the time the unemployment rate is where it is they are justified in debasing to the max. Must watch clip to understand why precious metals have surged this morning and stocks not so much as they will repeat the same actions again and again and expect a different outcome.