Bill Dudley

And now for a quick blast from the past: on November 26, moments after Mark Carney was announced as the Bank of England's next "shocking" head (confirming our prediction that just this would happen), we made a very simple prediction, one which ran contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, that Carney would pursue a sensible policy of preserving the strength of the British pound, namely the following:

It took Goldman's Mario Draghi about 3 hours to launch an epic EUR destruction campaign. Anyone going long the GBP here needs therapy

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 26, 2012

Sure enough, after rising very modestly in the days after Carney's coronation, cable has since imploded and moment ago touched on a new seven month low. Those who have been long the GBPUSD throughout the ensuing 700 pip plunge, can invoice Goldman Sachs with their therapy bills.

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.

In what could be a watershed moment for the price, provenance, and future of physical gold, not to mention the "stability" of the entire monetary regime based on rock solid, undisputed "faith and credit" in paper money, German Handelsblatt reports in an exclusive that the long suffering German gold, all official 3,396 tons of it, is about to be moved. Specifically, it is about to be partially moved out of the New York Fed, where the majority, or 45% of it is currently stored, as well as the entirety of the 11% of German gold held with the Banque de France, and repatriated back home to Buba in Frankfurt, where just 31% of it is held as of this moment. And while it is one thing for a "crazy, lunatic" dictator such as Hugo Chavez to pull his gold out of the Bank of England, it is something entirely different, and far less dismissible, when the bank with the second most official gold reserves in the world proceeds to formally pull some of its gold from the bank with the most. In brief: this is a momentous development, one which may signify that the regime of mutual assured and very much telegraphed - because if the central banks don't have faith in one another, why should anyone else? - trust in central banks by other central banks is ending.

The Fed is set to become considerably more dovish in 2013 and beyond as Evans and Rosengren become voting members. It seems unlikely that any new 'Bernanke' would drastically alter the Fed's path; and so we present the 'Doves' path to prosperity (in nominal terms). As BofAML notes, "More immediately, the doves largely support the idea that policy should be kept easy “for a considerable time” after the recovery is underway. Market participants thus should be cautious not to overreact to better near-term data: the Fed isn’t likely to turn notably more hawkish any time soon."

Back on July 3, we made an explicit and very simple prediction: "now that the natural succession path at the BOE has been terminally derailed, it brings up those two other gentlemen already brought up previously as potential future heads of the BOE, both of whom just happened to work, or still do, at... Goldman Sachs:  Canada's Mark Carney or Goldman's Jim O'Neil. Granted both have denied press speculation they will replace Mervyn King, but it's not like it would be the first time a banker lied to anyone now, would it (and makes one wonder if this whole affair was not merely orchestrated by the Squid from the get go... but no, that would be a 'conspiracy theory'.)" We are, once again, 100% correct, and have beaten all the bookie odds which had Tucker as a favorite and Mark Carney as along odds outsider. Pity: all one needs to realize and remember how the events in the world play out is to remember one simple thing: GOLDMAN SACHS RUNS IT. Everything else is secondary.

In a watershed moment for inverse inflation watchers everywhere, Russia, and specifically its alcohol watchdog entity aptly named "Rosalkogoluregulirovaniye" just delivered the judgment blow, with a decision to hike the minimum vodka price by 36% in 2013... as if a million cirrhotic livers cried out (or was it rejoiced) and were suddenly silenced. The reason for this shock and awe approach to defeating deflation: fighting counterfeiting, by hiking the tax on alcohol purchases, which in turn will push the baseline price of alcohol everywhere higher. In other news, a lightbulb is slowly lighting up above the president's head: "new taxes -> booze -> "fairness doctrine" -> bingo" as vice taxes are set to surge in a banana republic near you. Remember: "that's a tax for that" and if there isn't yet, there will be.

We already know that Ben Bernanke is a gold bug's best friend (here, here and here). And while technically Ben Bernanke is a republican, and was appointed to his post by a republican president, it is safe to say that when it comes to printing money political affiliation is irrelevant, especially since it was paradoxically a democrat Obama who was Bernanke's biggest backer during the last year for very obvious reasons - after all it was merely Bernanke's $2 trillion in excess reserves that pushed the stock market higher and gave the false impression that the economy is improving (even if a potential Romney administration would have hardly budged the status quo and likely replaced Bernanke with an even more pro-printing figurehead in the face of Bill Dudley). So a different question is: should gold bugs be more excited by a democrat or a republican president. The answer is self-evident: of the $4000 inflation-adjusted increase in gold price since gold was floated by Nixon, a solid $3000, or 75% of this rise, has taken place under Democratic administrations. So dear gold bugs: stock pile that physical and cheer on Obama and hopefully his democratic successors. At this rate, gold (and ostensibly all other precious metals) will outperform every single asset class known to man (sorry Buffett).

It appears that the Bundesbank has never heard of the saying: when in a hole, stop digging (neither has any Keynesian in the history of humanity, but that's a different story). From Buba to Goldman's (and now new York Fed's) Bill Dudley: "you can be assured that we are confident that our gold is in safe hands with you. The days in which Hollywood Germans such as Gerd Fröbe, better known as Goldfinger, and East German terrorist Simon Gruber, masterminded gold heists in US vaults are long gone. Nobody can seriously imagine scenarios like these, which are reminiscent of a James Bond movie with Goldfinger playing the role of a US Fed accounting clerk.... While gold is important, we have to combat a crisis of confidence in the euro area. This is the task we need to concentrate on. And we will do so."

While the theater of the presidential election hits peak season, and InTrade odds for this candidate or that are approaching flash crash territory, the one person who truly runs not only the US, but the entire "developed" world, Ben Bernanke, is going nowhere. At least not until January 2014. At which point he may be going somewhere - retirement. Reuters cites the NYT: "U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has told close friends he probably will not stand for a third term at the central bank even if President Barack Obama wins the November 6 election, the New York Times reported." In other words: the republican Fed Chairman who mysteriously became a Democrat president's bestest friend (and has been publicly threatened by every other GOP candidate, including Romney, although that would be merely to replace him with Bill Dudley, not Glenn Hubbard)  that $4 trillion that the Fed will have in assets at the time of Ben's departure, and $5 trillion at December 31, 2014, just became someone else's problem. Good luck to that someone else unwinding a Fed balance sheet which as we explained previously, will at one point in the next 2 years hold well over half of the marketable US Treasury debt inventory. How the sale of this inventory will happen in a time of spiking rates (because that's what the Fed wants - inflation) is literally anyone's guess, because in practice it will never happen.

September core CPI, ex such trivial, hedonically displacable items as food and energy (remember: when in doubt, just nibble on your obsolete first generation iPad, for which you waited hours in line - cause Bill Dudley said so) rose a tiny 0.1%, on expectations of a 0.2% pick up. Of course, for those lucky few who still get to eat and/or have a job to drive to, inflation rose by 0.6% in September from August, higher than expectations of a 0.5% increase. Luckily, in America the intersection of the Venn Diagrams for those who i) eat and ii) drive is so small it is barely worth mentioning...

Jim Bullard, of the St. Louid Federal Reserve, is currently answering questions following the delivery of prepared remarks. As a reminder, Bullard is a non-voting member of the FOMC this year who in 2010 was the first Fed official to call for a second round of QE. He just said the following:

• Fed’s Bullard Says He’s Concerned About Low Returns to Savers

Now this is beyond mere sheer hypocrisy and pathetic "good Fed cop, bad Fed cop" routine (still waiting for Bill Dudley to disclose what is the deflating hedonic equivalent of food inflation in a NEW iPad world). This is similar to Stalin saying, several days after completing the purges which saw tens of millions of people quietly "disappeared", that he is concerned that the price of graveyard real estate might be in a bubble.

The following chart from Bank of America shows that with a few short hours ahead of the dangling strawman known as Bernanke's J-Hole address (now that Mario Draghi has more pressing issues to deal with elsewhere), expectations for QE3, in the form of what is actually priced in, just hit an all time high. So is, by implication, the potential for disappointment and that the petulant market, no longer caring about such trivia as fundamentals, technicals, newsflow or frankly anything except what the Chairsatan ate or what side of the bed Bill Dudley woke up on, will not get what it demands. It then begs the question: if the S&P is at 1400 with virtually all of QE3 priced in, what is the "fair value" if there is, gasp, no QE3 announced either today, in two weeks when the FOMC delivers it periodic oracular address to the plebs, or until the post-election FOMC meeting, which will take place on December 12, and just days ahead of the Fiscal Cliff arrival (which will certainly not be resolved by then)?

Bernanke has all but admitted this recently, saying "I assume there is a theoretical limit on QE as the Fed can only buy TSYs and Agencies… If the Fed owned too much TSYs and Agencies it would hurt the market."

UPDATE: Added Romney's Bernanke-Busting Clip

With Romney's comments (that QE2 didn't work, that he doesn't back QE3, and that Bernanke should go) somewhat cornering the Fed-Head's decision-making, CNBC's Rick Santelli's comments this morning are even more prescient. The Chicago truth-sayer vociferously noted the increasingly politicized Federal Reserve actions, highlighting Schumer's recent 'demand' that Bernanke do his job. With Bullard this morning noting that muddle-through was not enough to justify the size of QE3 the market seems to be anticipating, it appears any actions by the Fed in the near-term can only be seen as political. The only way to justify any sizable NEW QE is then surely for the market to crash - and with Spain's no-bailout-soon, and Merkel back in the headlines, who knows what's possible. One thing is certain: under Romney the country will need a Fed Chairman. And if it is not Bernanke, despite Glenn Hubbard's promises yesterday, one very likely name will be Hubbard's close friend and co-author: Goldman's Bill Dudley, who now runs the NY Fed. One wonders which choice will be worse for the country (if not for gold longs) - the Chairsatan or Bill Dudley? Of course, look for Obama to retaliate and promise to para-drop dolla dolla billz if elected. Critically, the wizened ex-Gold trader Santelli notes the precious metal knows this and is acting as a barometer of anxiety in this stand-off.