I haven’t discussed gold’s true fundamentals* at the TSI Blog since early December of last year, at which time I concluded: “All things considered, for the first time in many months the true fundamentals appear to be slightly in gold’s favour. If the recent trend in the fundamental situation continues then we should see the gold price return to the $1300s early next year…” The “recent trend in the fundamental situation” did continue, enabling my Gold True Fundamentals Model (GTFM) to turn bullish at the beginning of this year (after spending almost all of 2018 in bearish territory) and paving the way for the US$ gold price to move up to the $1300s.

The following weekly chart shows that after moving slightly into the bullish zone (above 50) at the beginning of January, the GTFM has flat-lined (the GTFM is the blue line on the chart, the US$ gold price is the red line). Based on the current positions of the Model’s seven inputs, its next move is more likely to be further into bullish territory than a drop back into bearish territory.

As an aside, the bullish fundamental backdrop does not preclude some additional corrective activity in the near future.

The most important GTFM input that is yet to turn bullish is the yield curve, as indicated by the 10year-2year yield spread or the 10year-3month yield spread. This input shifting from bearish to bullish requires a reversal in the yield curve from flattening (long-term rates falling relative to short-term rates) to steepening (long-term rates rising relative to short-term rates). If the reversal is driven primarily by falling short-term interest rates it indicates a boom-to-bust transition, such as occurred in 2000 and 2007, whereas if the reversal is driven primarily by rising long-term interest rates it points to increasing inflation expectations.

As illustrated below, at the end of last week there was no evidence of such a trend change in the 10year-3month yield spread.

The US$ gold price could rise to the $1400s during the second quarter of this year as part of an intermediate-term rally, but to get a gold bull market there probably will have to be a sustained trend reversal in the yield curve.

*I use the term “true fundamentals” to distinguish the actual fundamental drivers of the gold price from the drivers that are regularly cited by gold-market analysts and commentators. According to many pontificators on the gold market, gold’s fundamentals include the volume of metal flowing into the inventories of gold ETFs, China’s gold imports, the volume of gold being transferred out of the Shanghai Futures Exchange inventory, the amount of “registered” gold at the COMEX, India’s monsoon and wedding seasons, jewellery demand, the amount of gold being bought/sold by various central banks, changes in mine production and scrap supply, and wild guesses regarding JP Morgan’s exposure to gold. These aren’t true fundamental price drivers. At best, they are distractions.

[This blog post is a modified excerpt from a TSI commentary published about a month ago]

Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT for short, is gaining popularity in the US. It is based on the idea that under the current monetary system the government doesn’t have to borrow. Instead, it simply can print all the money it needs to fill the gap between its spending and its income. The only limitation is “inflation”. As long as “inflation” is not a problem the government can spend — using newly-created money to finance any deficit — as much as required to ensure that almost everyone is gainfully employed and to provide all desired services and infrastructure. It sounds great! Why hasn’t anyone come up with such an effective and easy-to-implement prosperity scheme in the past?

Of course it has been tried in the past. It has been tried countless times over literally thousands of years. The fact is that there is nothing modern about Modern Monetary Theory. It is just another version of the same old attempt to get something for nothing.

Most recently, MMT was put into effect in Venezuela. For all intents and purposes, the government of Venezuela printed whatever money it needed to pay for the extensive ‘free’ social services it promised to the country’s citizens. The MMT apologists undoubtedly would argue that the money-printing experiment didn’t work in Venezuela because the government didn’t pay attention to the “inflation” rate. It kept on printing money at a rapid pace after “inflation” became a problem. Our retort would be: “Great point! Who would have thought that a government with the power to print money couldn’t be trusted to stop printing as soon as an index of prices moved above an arbitrary level.”

In essence, MMT is based on the fiction that the government can facilitate an increase in overall economic well-being by exchanging nothing (money created ‘out of thin air’) for something, or by enabling the recipients of the government’s largesse to exchange nothing for something. It is total nonsense, although there is an obvious reason that it appeals to certain politicians. Its appeal to the political class is that it superficially provides an easy answer to the question that arises when politicians promise widespread access to valuable services free of charge. The question is: “Who will pay?” According to MMT, nobody pays until/unless “inflation” gets too high.

And what happens when inflation gets too high? Well, according to MMT the government simply ramps up direct taxation to reduce the spending power of the private sector, which supposedly quells the upward pressure on prices.

Therefore, MMT can be viewed as a case of heads the government wins, tails the private sector loses. As long as “inflation” is below an arbitrary level the government can extract whatever wealth it wants from the private sector indirectly by printing money, and if “inflation” gets too high the government can extract whatever wealth it wants from the private sector via direct taxation.

The crux of the issue is that new wealth can’t be created by printing money, but existing wealth will be redistributed. It’s like when a private counterfeiter prints new money for himself. When he spends that money he diverts real wealth to himself while contributing nothing to the economy. MMT is the same principle applied on a gigantic scale.

That being said, MMT does have its good points, just not the good points that its proponents claim.

As happens when money is loaned into existence under the current system, the application of MMT will affect relative prices as well as the so-called “general price level”. The reason is that the new money won’t be injected uniformly across the economy. However, it’s likely that the price increases stemming from the monetary inflation will be more uniform and direct under MMT than under the current system. In other words, under MMT the effects of monetary inflation should be reflected much sooner and to a far greater extent in the CPI than is the case with the current system.

That the application of MMT would lead quickly to what most people think of as “inflation” is a benefit, because the link between cause (monetary inflation) and effect (rising prices) would be obvious to almost everyone. A related benefit is that MMT would short-circuit the boom-bust cycle.

Booms happen when the Fractional Reserve Banking (FRB) system (with or without a central bank) expands credit and in doing so creates the impression that the quantity of real savings is much greater than is actually so. This prompts excessive investment in long-term business ventures that would not look viable in the absence of misleading interest-rate signals.

We assume that under MMT the commercial banks still would be lending new money into existence, but the temporary downward pressure on interest rates from the surreptitious money creation of the banks would be more than offset by the upward pressure on interest rates from the blatant money-printing of the government. The boom phase therefore would be very short, perhaps even barely noticeable. In effect, MMT would bypass the boom and go straight to the bust. Again, this would be beneficial because it would expose the link between cause (the application of a crackpot monetary theory) and effect (economic hardship for most people).

MMT is such an obviously silly idea that any economist, politician, journalist or financial-market commentator who advocates it should not be taken seriously. However, that they are being taken seriously opens up the possibility that MMT will be implemented in the not-too-distant future, with the ‘benefits’ outlined above.

It’s likely that by the middle of the next decade, most new cars, trucks and buses will be Electric Vehicles (EVs). As a consequence, it’s a good bet that over the next several years the demand for both gasoline and diesel will shrink dramatically while the demand for electricity (to recharge EV batteries) experiences huge growth. Part of this demand growth will be satisfied by nuclear power, which is why uranium is an indirect play on the EV trend.

The uranium price might have begun to discount the aforementioned shift in demand in that it has been quietly trending upward since around April of last year (a weekly chart is displayed below). I say “quietly” because the rally has been accompanied by very little in the way of speculative enthusiasm. On the contrary, the rally that began last April has been accompanied by widespread scepticism.

This is an important sentiment change. Whereas every multi-month up-move in the uranium price prior to last year was greeted as if it heralded the beginning of a bull market, almost everyone has dismissed the most recent rally as just another counter-trend bounce. Being bearish on uranium has become easy, but bull markets begin when it’s easy to be bearish.

I’m not convinced that a uranium bull market is underway, but I do think that for the uranium-mining sector the intermediate-term risk/reward is skewed decisively towards reward. The reason is that the mining stocks could achieve large price gains with or without a genuine bull market in the underlying commodity. All it would take, I think, is a move by the uranium price into the $30s to convince many speculators that a major trend reversal had occurred and prompt aggressive buying of uranium-mining equities.

It used to be that owning shares of the Global X Uranium Fund (URA) was the simplest and surest way of participating in a uranium-mining rally, but that is no longer the case due to the changes that were made to this fund last year. As outlined HERE, during the second quarter of last year the index that URA tracks was changed from the Solactive Global Uranium Total Return Index to the Solactive Global Uranium & Nuclear Components Total Return Index. Thanks to this change, seven of URA’s current top ten holdings have no correlation with the uranium price.

Nowadays, owning the shares of Cameco (CCJ) is the surest way of participating in a uranium-mining rally.

It looks to me like CCJ is not far from completing a 3-year base (see chart below). I like the idea of gradually building up a position on weakness while the basing process continues.