Contango

• Gunshots, tear gas in riots over shooting of black Missouri teen (Reuters)
• Russia sends big aid convoy to Ukraine, West sounds warnings (Reuters)
• Maliki Bid to Block Successor Escalates Crisis in Iraq (BBG)
• Poor German data pushes euro toward 9-month lows against dollar (Reuters)
• Derivatives Reincarnate Boosting Debt Wagers in New Era  (BBG)
• Israel Says No Gaza Talks Progress as Hamas Warns on Truce (BBG)
• Traders brace for research crackdown as easy money dries up (Reuters)
• U.S. Bank Profits Near Record Levels (WSJ)
• Unproven Ebola Drugs Are Ethical to Use in Outbreak: WHO (BBG)
• Caesars’ CEO Loveman Says No Qualified Bidders for Revel (BBG)

• France's Sarkozy faces corruption probe in blow to comeback hopes (Reuters)
• Ukraine Says Military Offensive Against Rebels Yielding Results (WSJ)
• JPMorgan Investors Show Support for Dimon in Cancer Fight (BBG)
• World’s ATM Moves to Frankfurt as Yellen’s Fed Slows Cash (BBG)
• Argentina Seen Backtracking on Fernandez Vows as Legacy at Risk (BBG)
• Palestinian teen killed in possible revenge attack (Reuters)
• The Bill and Hillary Clinton Money Machine Taps Corporate Cash (WSJ)
• London House Prices Surge the Most Since 1987, Nationwide Says (BBG)
• Last Jew in Afghanistan faces ruin as kebabs fail to sell (Reuters)

The biggest news in the sage surrounding Chinese evaporated collateral troubles at Qingdao, which as noted is merely the 3rd largest Chinese port, is that this scandal has now spread to a second Chinese port: Penglai, which is also located in the Shandong province. Putting some size numbers for context: Qingdao's copper inventory is about 50,000 tons, compared to 800,000 tons in Shanghai, analysts say. There's "little evidence" for now that traders in Shanghai fraudulently have pledged collateral to banks, said Sijin Cheng, an analyst with Barclays Research in Singapore. Little evidence will become "lots" in the coming days when we expect more "discoveries" at all other bonded warehouses as the relentless inflow of commodities finally reverses and the beneficiaries finally demand possession. As everyone who has followed even the simplest Ponzi schemes knows, this is the part of the lifecycle when many tears are shed by most.

While we have warned about the problem with near-infinitely rehypothecated physical/funding commodities/metals, be they gold or copper, many times in the past, and most recently here, it was only this week that China finally admitted it has a major problem involving not just the commodities participating in funding deals - in this case copper and aluminum - but specifically their infinite rehypothecation, which usually results in the actual underlying metal mysteriously "disappearing", as in it never was there to begin with. It would appear our fears of global contagion (through various transmission channels) are now coming true as WSJ reports that as many as a half-dozen banks are trying to determine whether the collateral for loans they made to commodities traders was used fraudulently by a third party to obtain other loans. As we detailed previously, it appears the day when the Commodity Funding Deals finally end is fast approaching... and as we note below, why that will certainly be a watershed event.

It was all over the news last week, both mainstream and gold sites. Barclays was caught manipulating the gold price. This story is a big deal to the gold community.

Ultimately, I think the problem for HFT liquidity providers is not that they are skinning investors, but that they are outsiders. They're doing what the keepers of the market infrastructure keys have always done - skin investors, retail and institutional alike, to the outer limits of what technology and the law allows. But while their outward behavior and appearance may be familiar, they are clearly an alien species on the inside, without so much as a microgram of Wall Street DNA. They are Rakshasa's. HFT liquidity providers are technology companies disguised as financial intermediaries. They hijacked the market infrastructure in the aftermath of the Great Recession, stealing it away from under the noses of the big financial firms who had come to see control over market structure as their birthright, and they had a good run. But now the big boys want their market infrastructure back, and they're going to get it.

Gold is a tangible commodity. It's a material good that can be held in the hand, bought and sold--and warehoused. You have to understand warehousing to understand the gold market.

If you said a short list of commodities manipulated by the Too Big To Prosecute banks, you are probably right, but the answer we were looking for is that these are all the various, and increasingly more ridiculous, commodities that serve to make up the bulk of China's hot money flow (those flows into China which are not reflected in the current account flows or FDI) facilitating synthetic structures, also known as Chinese Commodity Funding Deals.

The story of how JPMorgan, Goldman and the rest of the Too Big To Fails and Prosecutes, cornered, monopolized and became a full-blown cartel - with the Fed's explicit blessing - in the physical commodity market is nothing new to regular readers: to those new to this story, we suggest reading of our story from June 2011 (over two and a half years ago),  "Goldman, JP Morgan Have Now Become A Commodity Cartel As They Slowly Recreate De Beers' Diamond Monopoly." That, or Matt Taibbi's latest article written in his usual florid and accessible style, in which he explains how the "Vampire Squid strikes again" courtesy of the "loophole that destroyed the world" to wit: "it would take half a generation – till now, basically – to understand the most explosive part of the bill, which additionally legalized new forms of monopoly, allowing banks to merge with heavy industry. A tiny provision in the bill also permitted commercial banks to delve into any activity that is "complementary to a financial activity and does not pose a substantial risk to the safety or soundness of depository institutions or the financial system generally." Complementary to a financial activity. What the hell did that mean?... Fifteen years later, in fact, it now looks like Wall Street and its lawyers took the term to be a synonym for ruthless campaigns of world domination."

In this part, we look at the question: Is gold a currency? Professor Tom Fischer answers, “Yes, gold is a currency with the symbol XAU”.

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... the most effective alpha-generating investment strategies are parasites. An alpha-generating strategy of the type I’m describing uses the market itself as its habitat. It’s not an investment strategy based on the fundamentals of this company or that company – the equivalent of a geographic habitat – but on the behaviors of market participants who are living their investment lives in that fundamentally-derived habitat. A parasitic strategy isn’t the only way to generate alpha – you can also be better suited for a particular investment environment (think warm-blooded animal versus cold-blooded animal as you go into an Ice Age) and generate alpha that way – but I believe that the investment strategies with the largest and most consistent “edge” are, in a very real sense, parasites.

There is a tradable approach to analyzing the fundamentals of supply and demand in the monetary metals markets. This article is a brief summary of the approach we take...

Since February, there has been at least one silver contract in backwardation and since May 31, the September contract has been backwardated. But that has now come to an end.

Greed; corporate arrogance; lobbying influence; excessive leverage; accounting tricks to hide debt; lack of transparency; off balance sheet obligations; mark to market accounting; short-term focus on profit to drive compensation; failure of corporate governance; as well as auditors, analysts, rating agencies and regulators who were either lax, ignorant or complicit. This laundry list of causes has often been used to describe what went wrong in the credit crunch crisis of 2008-2010. Actually these terms were equally used to describe what went wrong with Enron more than twenty years ago. Both crises resulted in what at the time was the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history — Enron in December 2001 and Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Naturally, this leads to the question that despite all the righteous indignation in the wake of Enron's failure did we really learn or change anything?