Sunday, May 10, 2009

The Underwater Beach Ball Effect


Today, a technical analysis of the markets is misleading, mainly because the Fed is pumping the USTbond and Agency MBS markets and the President's Working Group including Goldman Sachs is propping up the equities markets. Also, the currency markets are distorted by the turbulent capital flows driven by fear, and the interventions by central banks into those currency markets. And the commodities markets, including the gold and oil markets, are the beaten down stepchild of all the powerful forces listed above.

So if technical analysis is misleading, perhaps a fundamental analysis gives us a clearer view of the future. It is well known, after all, that market interventions can create short term market movements, but they always succumb to the larger secular trend in the end.

When reading about interventions in the gold market we often hear of the big "bullion banks". The following article posted today on GATA is one of the best I have read at describing what has been going on with these "bullion banks" and why we may soon see what a beach ball does when it is released under water. And for those of you that have been following Martin Armstrong's writings, there are some interesting connections here!

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Murray Pollitt: The gold monetization scheme is ending
By Murray Pollitt
Pollitt & Co., Toronto
Thursday, April 30, 2009

The G8 appears finished but their policymakers continue to try to bend the G20, and the world, to their will. The establishment, the Fed, the Bank of England, the Bank for International Settlements, the same gang that has been setting policy for decades, is still at it. They appear to remain in charge (with nary a whimper of criticism about the trillions of dollars' worth of damage their policies have caused) but, when it comes to gold, they are slowly losing their grip.

Besides setting the stage decades ago for sub-prime paper, CDSs, and so on, it appears policymakers embarked on a scheme, at more or less the same time, to monetize the hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of gold lying sterile in central bank vaults. The temptation was too much. One-percent income on gold for a central bank was better than nothing, so the argument ran, and for the Lehman types borrowing gold (and selling it) provided lots of money (capital) to play games with.

It was so easy. Besides, the gold carry trade involved selling lots of gold into the market and this helped keep the price down (and hopefully the dollar up), a subject near and dear to policymakers.

It also led to: a) huge mine hedging with the two biggest miners, each with a link to Morgan, together short over 30 million ounces ("making money on gold in the ground" was the argument) and b) significant outright central bank sales, which may have been interventionist or may have been for portfolio diversification, however ill-advised.

And if banks and markets didn't always follow the script, there was always high-level intervention. To illustrate the mindset, in 2004 one William White, advisor to the BIS, talked about the need for "international credits and joint efforts to influence asset prices (especially gold and foreign exchange) in circumstances where this might be thought useful." The idea of rigging markets is as old as the hills, and if the government is on your side. ...

Anyway, the great gold monetization (mobilization?) scheme appears to have started in the 1980s and the following events that, in part, characterize it are not necessarily in sequence.

1) Goldman bought gold dealer J. Aron.

2) In an early gold carry trade, Drexel borrowed hundreds of tonnes of gold from Portugal.

3) All the big swinging banks sought to get into the gold game and they bought all the London gold dealers except Rothschild, which was definitely in on the game on its own.

4) Mine hedging was pushed very hard, to a peak of about 120 million ounces.

5) Greenspan and others dropped broad hints that central Banks stood "ready" to supply gold to the market.

6) Drexel went broke and it apparently took Portugal five years to recover its gold.

7) Two long-term gold players, Republic and Safra, each with a somewhat checkered past, had a shotgun wedding. Later Mr. Safra was fried to death in his Monte Carlo apartment, presumably for nonrepayment of gold.

8) Two of the largest American players, JP Morgan and Chase, also had a shotgun wedding and now carry more gold derivatives than can be imagined.

9) Much of the Drexel brain trust apparently went to work for AIG, which promptly started boasting about mine hedging.

10) HSBC (often advised by Paul Volcker) bought Midland Bank (which had earlier bought bullion dealer Samuel Montagu) and, in another shotgun wedding, bought Republic, transactions that made HSBC one of the major gold players. HSBC's U.S. subsidiary is now the custodian for the SPDR ETF.

11) When the gold price started to move up, Rothschild said enough and sold its "book" (at a loss?) to Barclays.

12) Finally there was recently a shotgun wedding between Dresdner bank and Commerzbank.

Crisp details are rare, but the past generation has seen hundreds of millions of ounces of gold bled into the market. Canadian and Australian gold reserves are gone; Britain, Switzerland, and many others are down by two-thirds.

But this doesn't count the gold that has been lent. In general it seems that the same sort of banks that got into trouble investing in high-yield, low-quality sub- prime paper have also taken short positions in low-yield, high-quality gold. Too many favorite-son banks are on the wrong side of the market for policymakers to be rational. Given the option between common sense and helping a bank, well, the record is clear. This is probably the main reason the establishment remains anti-gold today -- the old ideological reasons are not that relevant.

So once again they trot out the idea of International Monetary Fund gold sales. What rubbish. The IMF hasn't sold gold since the 1970s, but every year the idea is advanced to frighten the gold market. Why would the IMF sell $10 billion of gold when central banks are printing $10 billion of new money every day? Gold is the only IMF asset worth 100 cents on the dollar -- everything else is junk.

As well the establishment hammers on the idea that the gold price is high, and GFMS continues its weird forecasts.

Well, the gold price is not high. Oil and several other commodities have outperformed gold since World War II. A good underground gold mine may grade 5 parts per million (ppm) while a good open pit may grade 1 ppm.

Nobody who has said the gold price is high has ever spent a nine-hour shift drilling rock -- it's a tough business. God only knows the blood-to-gold ratio for old Roman mines in Spain or Spanish mines in Peru, and getting the gold from mine to home base was often not easy. Much Victorian gold went from Ashanti by caravan through Timbuktu, the Sahara, and on to Europe -- the Brits were hardly keen to auction it off then.

Gold mine production is down about 12 percent from the 2001 peak (and still falling) and Barrick shares have barely moved in a decade. Much of the industry's cash flow is attributable to accounting magic, and the long years, even decades, of gold price suppression have taken their toll. There are few major new mines on the horizon, and lots of old ones on the way out.

Notwithstanding, GFMS has consistently forecast rising production for the past eight years (even though it has consistently fallen), raising the question: Why?

Our guess is that GFMS' big clients are the very banks we refer to above, the ones on the wrong side of the market, and for them Ms. Rosy Scenario needs the healthy, and expanding, industry model that GFMS gives them.

What are companies like Commerzbank and Societe Generale doing sponsoring GFMS anyway? Neither Germany nor France has any gold mining industry at all.

One would have to be barking mad not to see the benefits a higher gold price would have on vast chunks of the global economy. Even long-suffering Zimbabwe would be a huge beneficiary, and more wealth in Africa and Latin America would mean more exports of Fords and Cats from the United States. The establishment may not care, but that won't stop G20 members (and others) from connecting the dots and following China's lead in increasing gold weighting in monetary reserves.

Gold is again becoming a preferred central bank asset and the great monetization scheme is coming to an end. Western policymakers and banks have pushed their game too far for too long and the combination of the shift of power from G8 to G20, plus the reduced availability of gold, will turn the tide. You can sell gold only once, although, in the new wondrous world of derivatives, maybe somebody has actually sold it twice.

10 comments:

FOFOA said...

Hyper Hyper-Inflation - Real Time Economics - WSJ

Martijn said...

Generally inflation means that the monetary base grows in relation to the products ("real economy") it covers. I would argue however that products of different quality are not really the same products.
In that sense it could be argued that e.g. the deteriation of America's infrastructure (roads and bridges) is also a form of inflation, as government balances, or GDP have not declined by the same amount.

This argument also goes for many products we buy today, as lots of (Chinese) goods are of lesser quality that the items they replace.

Martijn said...

The Yugoslavian case btw is terrible. Almost everything that happend there is owing to foreign parties seeking to gain their influence and break the regional strength.

Anonymous said...

Probably only because i just finished taking pre-med physics (I got my A!!), and because my mind is just nerdy ...I have two questions:

if one took that beach ball to an extreme depth, wouldn't there be a point at which its acceleration would level out and still have the same trajectory when emerging from the water?

The second is a question for myself, which is whether or not I think it's relevant and practical re: the political/economic quagmire that we live in. My answer is probably not.

Though I do wonder if there is a particular point at which they cannot do any more damage than they already have done. It feels like contemplating various realms of the infinite sometimes.

Prana

FOFOA said...

Hi Prana,

Good Thoughts!

Yes, the infinite or the extreme is often contemplated in physics but rarely is it practical. Think of it as a bell curve. The farther you go toward the infinite, the lower the probability gets. After a few standard deviations it becomes so improbable as to only happen once if the universe lasted a quadrillion years. That is vanishingly small! Even if not impossible, it is as close as it gets.

In the case of the beach ball, I suppose if you took it deep enough it would implode and then sink to the bottom. This could happen eventually if someone figured out how to make real gold from lead. But the probability of this is vanishingly small.

And the deeper the beach ball goes, the more the force that is required to hold it down.

Also, a beach ball is not hydrodynamic like a submarine. So you are right, the deeper it is taken, the more the trajectory may veer from the vertical.

To give a clear analogy, the forces holding the ball underwater expect that when they let it go it will explode upwards as a commodity play.

But the problem is that even though they have held it relatively steady for decades, the surface level of the water has risen a great deal and they now find themselves much deeper than they thought they were, requiring much more force. And when they finally let go from exhaustion, the ball will veer off from the expected path and emerge as a monetary play instead of a commodity play. Most of them do not expect this. Those that do have already prepared. They are the giants that Another speaks of.

The difference being that while a commodity play works in the world of paper derivatives, a monetary play only works in the world of the physical.

Sincerely,
FOFOA

FOFOA said...

Prana,

I read your question again and I see that I misunderstood it slightly.

Yes, I think there is a depth from which the ball will reach terminal velocity and emerge the same. But it will not emerge from the expected location because it is not hydrodynamically designed.

And yes, the height which gold will reach does not depend on the depth the ball is taken any more. It is already well beyond the point of terminal velocity.

FOFOA

Anonymous said...

FOFOA, thanks for bringing some physics back into my life. anything to diversify the conversation just a bit. and your response to my question wasn't much off at all, just tended to represent the depths to which you realize the beach ball is, as opposed to the higher, but still depths, to which I keep thinking it is. i'm still learning about an entirely different perspective here, and glad to hear it's out there, whether or not it reflects the balance of power in the world today or not.

I'm quite a Feyerabendian; thus, i appreciate diverse, well-thought, and even imaginative perspectives, even for their own sake at times.

though as my first comment to you divulged, there was something intuitively magical in those comments/quotes that I knew I was reading someone deep inside (and well before I obviously knew what this blog even was about).

Alas, back to Sept of '08 I go, rereading the perspective and history of how this all unfolded from a different (though similar) set of eyes.

Also, I love the Socratic perspective that Ender engenders. Does he still participate here, or was he a flash in the Sept, '08 pan? I felt like I was reading an economic Ishmael teaching me about the world :)

anyway, i ramble, and digress, but appreciate, nonetheless (and that wasn't meant to be a poem, but i'll take the credit for it anyway).

sat nam,

Prana

FOFOA said...

Hello Prana,

I know it's kind of like an Easter egg hunt here, but Ender did comment just two days ago under the post "Martin Armstrong makes the case for Freegold". Also, there is some more physics you might enjoy in the comments under "CB Gold Sales=Looting". Look for comments 39 through 56.

And if you create a Blogger profile, you can get email notifications when people respond to your comments. It gets hard to follow after a while. You don't want to miss any responses!

Sincerely,
FOFOA

Anonymous said...

i might just have to break down and sign up. thanks for the tip.

prana

Victorian Gold Mines said...

Such a nice post..........

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