Testimony

Gold fell $28 or 1.73% yesterday in New York and closed at $1,591.60/oz.  Gold traded sideways prior to another 1% fall in Asia but has recovered somewhat in early European trading and has made gains in euros and Swiss francs particularly. 

Cross Currency Table – (Bloomberg)

• Obama Seeking Ally on Europe Finds Merkel a Tough Sell (Bloomberg) - but he has an election to win
• China rate cut sparks fears of grim May data (Reuters)
• China faces stimulus dilemma  (FT)
• Papademos warns of Grexit vortex (FT)
• China’s Shipyards Fail to Win Orders as Greek Owners Shun Loans (Bloomberg)
• Rajoy Holds Bank Talks With EU Leaders as Fitch Downgrades Spain (Bloomberg)
• Capital Rule Is One Size Fits All (WSJ)... now the modest question of where to get the $3.9 trillion in capital
• Merkel Pokes at Cameron With Backing for Two-Speed Europe (Bloomberg)
• City safeguards set Britain at odds with EU (FT)
• Bernanke says Fed to act if Europe crisis deepens (Reuters)

All you need to read.

The game continues.  Talk up the economy, talk down printing and pray. If the market heads into the Fed meeting at current levels it runs the risk of being disappointed.  If this is combined with continued economic weakness then the real set up happens between the June meeting and the August one.  It is in that interim period that the market could throw another one of its hissy fits and beg for more liquidity.  Money supply growth is extremely sluggish right now all over the world.  The velocity never happened and the global economy is rolling over.  The Fed is already behind the curve and so when they are forced to act the infusion will have to be huge just to stem the momentum. Mike Krieger suggests people go back and look at different asset classes from the prior two lows in China’s M2 year-over-year growth rate.  The first one occurred in late 2004.  The M2 growth rate then accelerated until around mid 2006.  In that time period gold prices went up around 65% and the S&P 500 went up 20%.  In the second period of acceleration from late 2008 to late 2009 gold was up 65% and the S&P500 was up 15%.  We are at one of these inflection points and considering the DOW/Gold ratio is still holding gains from its countertrend rally from last August of almost 40%, this is probably one of the best entry points to buy gold and short the Dow of any time in the last decade.

At the rate the market has soared in the past 3 days, one would think Bernanke has already formally announced QE. Instead we have had a rumor, a hint, and a headline. All of this was sufficient to push the DJIA up 500 points. Problem is there has been nothing official from the Fed. Which is why everyone will be looking for the Chairman to leak something at the 10am hearing before the Joint Economic Committee. Otherwise, if nothing comes now, and nothing comes on June 20, we may be looking at another deja vu event from 2011: namely the August 2011 market crash.

Central bank gold demand remains robust as central banks continue to diversify out of the euro and the dollar. Further central bank demand is confirmed in the news this morning that Kazakhstan plans to raise the share of gold in its international reserves from 12% to 15%. So announced central bank Deputy Chairman Bisengaly Tadzhiyakov to reporters today in the capital, Astana. “We’ve already signed contracts for 22 tons,” Tadzhiyakov said. Bloomberg report that immediate-delivery gold was little changed at $1.620.41 an ounce at 10:50 a.m. in Moscow, valuing 22 metric tons of gold at about $1.2 billion. “The bank is ready to buy when suppliers are ready to sell,” Tadzhiyakov said. Kazakhstan said yesterday it will cut its holdings in the euro by a sixth. It was reported in the Reuters Global Gold Forum that the central bank buys all the gold produced in Kazakhstan and owned 98.19T at the end of April, according to the IMF's most recent international finance statistics report. Meanwhile, supply issues remain and South African gold production continues to plummet. South African gold production fell 12.8% in April from a year earlier, Juan -Pierre Terblanche, a spokesman for Statistics South Africa, told Bloomberg.

Well, risk is on. Not so much because of the ECB, or BOE, both of which did nothing, but because everyone is hoping and praying that in two weeks the Princeton professor will unleash the 4th round of quantitative easing in the US (yes, Twist was a flow-shifting operation and thus QE3). And the reminder that China is not immune, and did its first rate cut since 2008 only validated the realization "that they have every idea just how bad it is", as Cramer would say. Sure enough, risk is ripping, although considering the world's 2nd largest economy just joined the monetary easing pants party, the 10 point ES response is oddly subdued. Where the reaction is yet to manifest itself is in gold: we expect the PBOC will take a little longer before it announces its meager 1000 tons of gold holdings have at least doubled following 100 ton/month gold imports as recently announced. But announce it will. In the meantime, China's aggressive step likely means that unless we get a global coordinated intervention at 9 am today, as was the case on November 30 after the last notable move by the PBOC, which was the first reserve cut also since 2008, there will be none this time around and Bernanke will be on his own. God save the markets if he does not deliver, either today at the JEC testimony at 10 am or at 2:15 pm on June 20, as the S&P has now priced in at least 75 points of NEW QE intervention.

That former San Fran Fed chairman Janet Yellen would demand more easing is no surprise: she used to do it all the time. That Fed Vice Chairman, and Bernanke's second in command, Janet Yellen just hinted that she is "convinced that scope remains for the FOMC to provide further policy accommodation either through its forward guidance or through additional balance-sheet actions", and that "while my modal outlook calls for only a gradual reduction in labor market slack and a stable pace of inflation near the FOMC's longer-run objective of 2 percent, I see substantial risks to this outlook, particularly to the downside" is certainly very notable, and confirms everyone's worst dream (or greatest hope assuming they have a Schwab trading platform or Bloomberg terminal) - more cue-EEE is coming to town.

And now for some Monday morning poetry with the Chairman of the Fermentation Committee.

While we do not agree that anything will happen on Wednesday (or pre-Greek-election to be more precise) - aside from perhaps a small bump in BoE LSAP, Peter Tchir provides a useful update to our original 'full central bank menu' two weeks ago. Markets and economies are teetering across the globe.  More and more people are coming to the conclusion that a Greek Exit would be catastrophic. Central banks won’t want to act as though they are panicking, but neither will they want to wait much longer to act. Tchir believes investors will be extremely disappointed if nothing happens and expects markets to decline rapidly.  If central bankers do take some policy actions, it is key to figure out which ones are practical, which are merely symbolic, and which are just a dream and not an action.  Who says what is just as important in some cases as what they say.  When Merkel says something, we all need to listen.  When anyone from the EU in Brussels says something, it will be the same thing they have said over and over and is completely self-serving and should be ignored.  Anything Draghi and Bernanke might say is critical to listen to, because in this weird world, they have the most power to do something meaningful in a short period of time.

We all know that things are bad and getting worse. Goldman's Jan Hatzius take this opportunity to summarize all the various ways in which the global economy is floundering and once again floats the Goldman solution to everything: More QE, this time with a Bill Gross twist, pun and all, where the Fed again pulls a 2009 and goes for MBS: "Our confidence that the FOMC will ease policy once more at the June 19-20 meeting has also grown... Our baseline remains that Fed officials will purchase a mixture of mortgages and long-term Treasuries, financed via balance sheet expansion and possibly coupled with an extension of the forward guidance into 2015. This would be considerably more powerful than an extension of Operation Twist or other ways of changing the composition of the balance sheet, which are possible alternatives but are limited by the relatively modest amount ($200bn) of short-term paper that is still available for sale on the Fed's balance sheet." Well, if anything, global or Fed-based easing will most likely not come before the Greek June 17 elections - after all Greek confidence has to be crushed heading into the Euro referendum, and the only way to do this is by facilitating collapsing markets. So those hoping for a groundbreaking ECB announcement on June 6 will be disappointed. But June 20? That is fair game. We look forward to seeing PIMCO MBS holdings rise to a new all time high when the monthly TRF update is posted in a few days. Also look for something like this in the EURUSD if and when Bernanke surprises few at 2:15 pm on June 20.

All you need to read.

For anyone who had doubts that the JPM CIO debacle was only just starting, the just broken news by Bloomberg that the firm has hired former SEC enforcement chief William McLucas "to help respond to regulatory probes of the firm’s $2 billion trading loss" should put all doubts to rest. Because the last thing JPM needs now is to be perceived as engaging in even more regulatory capture (its current general counsel was also previously a head of enforcement at the SEC) . Yet because it is doing precisely this, means that the offsetting cost, namely the fallout that will be associated with the CIO unwind if and when completed (and we will know for sure when the Q2 earnings are released at the latest), will be fast and furious.

No close encounters of the Dimon kind today, but we get our first sworn testimony on all matters #FailWhale, when Mary Schapiro and Gary Gensler open their mouths at 10:00 am, and confirm what everyone knows - that the TBTF's prop trading desks are alive amd well, that the Volcker Rule was one big misdirection, and most importantly, that nobody has any idea what multi-billion trades the big banks engage in until it is far too late, and even then they refuse to give their investors a snapshot of how big the real losses are.

 I am back from Buffett’s Omaha.  Every year I come back feeling supercharged for the year ahead.  This year was no different.  From morning till night I had the pleasure of sharing and debating ideas with investors from all over the world.  Though I did not plan it this way, the first day I had dinner with value investors/friends from the UK, on the second from Germany, and on the third from Spain.  I have at least a dozen stock ideas to research and new thoughts to process.