Precious Metals

The last 3 days have seen precious metals surging. Silver is up over 7% - its biggest such rise since Aug 2013, and Gold up 3% - its largest in 4 months. Volume is heavy also. A specific catalyst is unclear but USD weakness is being cited, weak macro data suggesting further easing, China demand ahead of SDR-backing, and finally the realization that the Chinese shift to unconventional monetary policy (LTROs) is a slippery slope to full-blown QE from which few (if any) have ever escaped.

Marc Faber Contrarian Bet Against Market Consensus - US Treasuries

Special thanks to Dr. Marc Faber for giving us permission to publish excerpts from his May Gloom Boom & Doom Report.

Is bad news good? For now, stocks levitate in their ubiquitous run-stop opening ramp manner, bonds are leaking higher in yield but precious metals and currencies are extremely active...

Artificially low prices for the metal have forced mines to close in recent years. Supply may not be able to match increasing demand in the coming years.

As a diversification, art has some merit but only as a small part of an overall portfolio. For those of us who cannot afford a Picasso - as the great heritage of western art continues to be shuttered away in private Xanadus - gold remains an accessible and ideal store of value.

It all started again in Asia, although not in China where the berserker mania bid for stocks has returned and the SHCOMP is now up nearly 5% in the past two days following the PBOC's latest easing, but in Japan where once again the massively illiquid JGB market, of which the BOJ owns roughly a third as of this moment, is going through yet another shock period (if not quite VaR yet) with last night's 10 Year JGB auction seeing the lowest Bid to Cover since 2009. This was the beginning, and promptly thereafter bond yields around the globe spiked once more, with 10-year Treasury yields climbing to a five-month high, as the global rout in debt markets deepened. The biggest casualty so far is the Bund, which having retraced some of the flash crash losses from two weeks ago is once again in panic selling mode, and while not having taken out the recent 0.8% flash crash wides, traded just shy of 0.75% this morning.

Whoever holds the most gold will hold the most real wealth and, by extension, gain the most prominent seat at the bargaining table for decades to come. Whether that table will be the IMF, the new AAIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), or any future central economic entity, the future will go to the player with the most metal, as he will be able to create the most currency, in whatever form it may take.

He has previously advised to act as your own own central bank and buy physical precious metals as a hedge against currency depreciation and geopolitical crises. Faber believes that storing gold in Singapore is the safest way to own gold today.

In a remarkably unbalanced and lazy article on gold this month the Economist magazine attempts to dismantle the case for investors and others to own gold. Both from an investment point of view and also from an ethical point of view. The article is so laughably one sided that it resembles propaganda rather than journalism. Therefore, we take pleasure in dissecting the article misleading sentence by misleading sentence.

Since 2012, there’s been an unprecedented call from foreign nations to repatriate their gold from Federal Reserve vaults in the U.S. This is an incredible development given many countries’ 71-year reliance on the Fed as a custodian for their bullion. Something huge must of happened in the last few years to prompt such action. That something may be a break in foreign gold holders’ trust in the Fed as a custodian of their precious metals.

The prices of gold and silver reflect the deflationary view to the exclusion of the likely outcome of all this experimentation. There is no doubt that many dealers believe that gold and silver are merely commodities, otherwise they would be chasing their prices upwards in a dash for cash. Future historians should be puzzled.

JP Morgan’s massive silver buying brings to mind the Hunt Brothers' attempt to corner the silver market in the late 1970s. The Texas oil-tycoons tried to corner the silver market by accumulating a massive silver futures position.  Ted Butler has estimated that JP Morgan may currently hold far more than their official figure of 55 million ounces.

Holidays in Europe and Asia left things quiet overnight after some traders used the last day of April to frontrun the old "sell in May and go away" market adage. Market closures also kept the Chinese day trading hordes from using a tiny beat on the official manufacturing PMI print as an excuse to pile more money into the country's equity mania, while Japanese shares ended mostly unchanged as investors fret over when the BoJ will deliver the next shot of monetary heroin. In the US we'll get a look at ISM manufacturing and the latest read on consumer confidence as we head into the weekend.

“The market is dead,” one industry insider tells Bloomberg, referring to demand for tax-free physical gold in Dubai. As it turns out, the ill-effects of sliding crude prices aren't confined to Alberta's housing market, cash-strapped oil boom towns and the market for blue collar jobs in Texas. The pain is also being felt by gold vendors who are quickly discovering that when oil revenue begins to run short, fewer Saudis and Russians go on precious metals shopping sprees.

The biggest overnight story was neither out of China, where despite the ridiculous surge in new account openings and margin debt the SHCOMP dipped 08%, or out of Japan, where the Nikkei dropped 2.7%, the biggest drop in months, after the BOJ disappointed some by not monetizing more than 100% of net issuance and keeping QE unchanged, but Europe where for the second day in a row there was a furious selloff of Bunds at the open of trading, which briefly sent the yield on the 10Y to 0.38% (it was 0.6% two weeks ago), in turn sending the EURUSD soaring by almost 200 pips to a two month high of 1.1250, and weighing on US equity futures, before retracing some of the losses.