TSI subscribers will soon receive an email alert regarding Thursday’s panic in the gold-mining sector, including brief thoughts on what it means for the days ahead and the actions that I am planning to take. The purpose of this post is to highlight the starkly contrasting long-term charts of the HUI and the US$ gold price. The relevant charts are displayed below.

There was already a dramatic difference between the HUI and gold charts prior to this week, but the price action of the past two trading days has magnified the difference. The HUI is now slightly below its 2004 and 2005 lows, and is within spitting distance of its 2008 crash low. At the same time, gold hasn’t even breached its lows of the past year and is trading about 220% above its 2004 low.

I think that the HUI’s position relative to gold equates to one of the most extreme market sentiment situations ever. It is, I think, right up there — in terms of magnitude, but at the opposite end of the sentiment spectrum — with the March-2000 upside blow-off in the NASDAQ.

One of my readers sent me the following two-paragraph excerpt — written by someone called “Bill H” about a debate between Chris Powell and Doug Casey at a recent conference — from a commentary at lemetropolecafe.com, a web site dedicated to the idea that downward price manipulation dominates the gold market. He asked me to comment on the second paragraph, but I’ll do better than that — I’ll comment on both paragraphs. I’ll explain why the first paragraph contains a misunderstanding about economics and why the second paragraph reveals extreme ignorance of the gold market. First, here’s the excerpt:

“Powell also pointed to Larry Summer’s Gibson paradox study where low gold prices also aid in low interest rates and allow for more debt and currency issuance than would otherwise be the case. He also pointed to documents from the CME that shed light on the fact the central banks are “customers” and actually receive volume discounts for trading. Chris then mentioned that just because gold has gone higher, this is not evidence of no suppression as gold would or could be much higher in price if it were not for suppression. In answer to Casey’s statement “we would never suppress the prices of gold and silver because this would aid the Chinese and Russians”, insider Jim Rickards claims a “deal” has been struck with the Chinese.

I have no proof of this one way or the other but it does make perfect sense to me. I could write an entire piece on this subject but for now a paragraph will have to suffice. If China (and India) are buying more than the entire year’s global production of gold …yet the price has been dropping during this operation …the metal HAS to be coming from somewhere. The ONLY “somewhere” this can be is from where it is (has) being stored, central bank vaults. The only possible way for prices to not rise when physical demand grossly exceeds supply is through the use of paper derivatives. It is really just this simple. In my opinion what Jim Rickards has said must have some truth behind it, some sort of deal has to have been struck which allows China/India (and Russia) to purchase increasing amounts of gold at decreasing prices. As I have said all along, once China cannot receive gold in exchange for dollars …then of what use are their dollar holdings? Do you see? The game will be up and there will be no incentive to China whatsoever to hold any dollars which will …end the game.”

The misunderstanding about economics has three parts.

First, “Gibson’s Paradox” only applies in the context of a Gold Standard. It has no relevance to the current monetary system.

Second, there is actually no paradox.

As an aside, Keynesian economists sometimes arrive at what they consider to be paradoxes, the “Paradox of Thrift” being the classic case. However, this is only because they are being guided by hopelessly flawed economic theories. For example, Keynesians get the economic growth process completely backward. They think it begins with consumer spending, when in reality it ENDS with consumer spending and begins with saving. That’s why they believe that an economy-wide increase in saving (meaning: a reduction in consumer spending in the present) is bad for the economy and must be discouraged. In the case of “Gibson’s Paradox”, which revolves around the link between interest rates and the general price level under a Gold Standard, there will only be a paradox for the economist who doesn’t understand the relationship between interest rates and time preference (the desire to spend money in the present relative to the desire to delay spending (to save, that is)).

Third, if gold were being manipulated today in accordance with the relationship between gold and interest rates that existed during the Gold Standard, then an effort to create lower interest rates would involve an effort to manipulate the price of gold UPWARD relative to the prices of most other commodities (under the Gold Standard, a decline in interest rates tended to be associated with a rise in the purchasing power of gold). Strangely, this is what happened over the past 7 years, in that the gold/commodity (gold/CCI) ratio rose as interest rates fell and reached a multi-generational high in 2012 at around the same time as interest rates on long-dated US Treasury securities reached a multi-generational low.

Now, I’m not saying that gold was manipulated upward relative to other commodities as part of an attempt to suppress interest rates. These days central banks make full use of their power to manipulate interest rates directly, thus obliterating any reliable link between the price of credit and the general desire to spend/save. Central banks have even gone a long way towards obliterating any link between the price of credit and the risk of default. In a nutshell, interest rates have been distorted to the point where they no longer provide valid signals. What I’m saying is that you need to have a sub-par understanding of economics to believe that gold has been manipulated downward as part of a scheme to create lower interest rates.

I could write a lot more about the relationships between economy-wide time preference, interest rates, the general price level and gold, but I don’t want to get bogged down and this post is already longer than originally intended. Instead, let’s move on to the second of the excerpted paragraphs.

I was particularly impressed by the following sentences:

“If China (and India) are buying more than the entire year’s global production of gold …yet the price has been dropping during this operation …the metal HAS to be coming from somewhere. The ONLY “somewhere” this can be is from where it is (has) being stored, central bank vaults. The only possible way for prices to not rise when physical demand grossly exceeds supply is through the use of paper derivatives. It is really just this simple.”

These sentences reflect a very basic misunderstanding about the gold market that I end up addressing several times every year in TSI commentaries. The fact is that the supply of gold is NOT the annual amount of gold produced by the mining industry. Rather, the mining industry adds only about 1.5% to the total supply of gold every year. This is why changes in mine production have almost no effect on gold’s price trend and why it is illogical to compare the gold demand of some countries or regions with annual mine production.

The total supply of gold is around 170,000 tonnes, and over the next 12 months the mining industry will add about 2,500 tonnes to this total supply. Furthermore, the mining industry is no different to any other seller (an ounce of gold mined over the past year is the same as an ounce of gold that has been sitting in storage for the past 200 years), except that it is price-insensitive. The mining industry will sell its 2,500 tonnes regardless of price, whereas the actions of the holders of the existing 170,000 tonnes of aboveground gold will be influenced by changes in the gold price and changes in the perceived attractivess of gold as an investment or store of value.

Some existing holders (the weak hands) are likely sellers in response to price weakness, whereas other holders are likely sellers in response to price strength. Some existing holders will change their plans based on their assessments of current and likely future conditions, whereas others will be determined to hold forever. At the same time there are a huge number of potential buyers, some of whom will be planning to buy in response to lower prices, some of whom will be likely to buy in response to signs of an upward trend reversal, and many of whom will change their plans based on changes in the financial world.

The main point to be appreciated here is that it’s the urgency to sell on the parts of existing holders of the total gold stock relative to the urgency to buy on the parts of prospective new owners that determines the change in price. As noted above, the gold mining industry is just one small piece of a very big puzzle.

Finally, I’m not going to attempt to debunk the unsubstantiated claim that the US government has made a deal with the Chinese government whereby the gold price will be held down to facilitate the latter’s gold accumulation. This is just a nonsensical story.

This blog post is a slightly modified excerpt from a recent TSI commentary.

“If you believe in the thesis that world GDP will continue to expand and that population growth will continue, then you should own natural resources. New people who are born will want to eat, drive, and build houses. This trend offers long-term support for natural resources.”

The above is a comment by Rick Rule in an article titled “Are the Worst of Times Yet to Come?“. I consider Rick Rule to be a brilliant investor in natural-resource companies and agree with his investment strategy. I also agree with everything in the afore-linked article EXCEPT the above comment. If it is true that the prices of natural resources are supported by economic and population growth, then why is it that world population and world GDP have grown relentlessly over the past 200 years and yet over that entire period the real prices of most commodities have been in downward trends?

The fact is that economic growth causes prices, including the prices of most natural resources, to become LOWER, not higher. Real growth involves producing more with less. That’s why the fastest-growing industries generally have downward-trending product prices. However, the downward trend in prices that would otherwise occur due to real growth can be counteracted by monetary inflation and political intervention, and these days that’s exactly what happens most of the time. These days, monetary inflation causes prices (prices in general, not all prices) to have an upward bias even during periods of economic progress — periods when prices, on average, should be trending downward. This is because in addition to reducing the purchasing power of money, an effect of monetary inflation is to make the economy less efficient by distorting relative price signals. Political intervention also puts upward pressure on prices by placing obstacles in the way of more efficient production.

Consequently, genuine economic growth is most definitely not an ingredient for large rises in natural-resource prices. Instead, two of the three main ingredients are monetary inflation and an increase in politically-motivated/directed spending.

The third main ingredient is valuation. The relative valuations of different assets and commodities will have a big influence on which prices are affected the most by the current cycle’s monetary inflation. In particular, for commodities to be major beneficiaries of monetary inflation, commodity prices should be low relative to the prices of equities and bonds. According to the following weekly chart, commodity prices (as represented by the CCI) are currently near a 10-year low relative to the S&P500 Index, which is certainly low enough to enable a multi-quarter period of relative strength.

From the Stock market section of the Weekly Market Update posted on 19th October, under the heading “What to do”:

“We have no idea what anyone else should do, apart from maintain a substantial cash reserve. Having exited all stock-market-related put options last week, the short-term plan for our own account is to begin averaging into January-2016 SSO (ProShares Ultra S&P500) put options following some additional rebounding activity over the next few weeks. We might also average into the unleveraged, actively-managed bear funds previously mentioned at TSI (BEARX and HDGE).

This plan assumes that a multi-week low was put in place last week. If this assumption is wrong and it turns out that the initial decline from the September peak is not yet over, then we will take no action. We will not enter bearish speculations when the market is in the midst of a sharp decline.“

I’m posting this brief comment to advise that if the US stock market opens strongly today (Tuesday) then I will probably take an initial position in the aforementioned SSO put options or some other puts. I want some coverage in case the rebound fails sooner than anticipated.

I also want to make readers aware that Almaden Minerals (AAU) and True Gold Mining (TGM.V) issued bullish press releases earlier today. The news will be discussed, as usual, in the next Weekly Update.

Despite the fact that the NASDAQ Composite and NYSE Composite Indices tested Wednesday’s intra-day lows on Thursday 16th October, the number of individual NYSE and NASDAQ stocks making new 12-month lows collapsed on Thursday. The relevant charts are shown below. Across the NASDAQ and NYSE markets, the number of new lows fell from around 660 on Wednesday to around 200 on Thursday. This has bullish implications with regard to the next few weeks.

If you are in the position of needing a market to do something specific in the short term, such as rally or decline by a certain amount, then you are positioned wrongly. You should be positioned in such a way that you can watch the day-to-day price moves with equanimity. Furthermore, unless you make a living from scalping small profits from intra-day fluctuations, you should NOT watch the markets closely during the trading day. No good will come of it, because closely watching the intra-day price action will increase the risk that you will make a spur-of-the-moment decision based primarily on emotion. That is, it will increase the risk of making a mistake.

Before a market in which you have a financial interest opens for trading you should know the prices at which you would be a buyer and the prices at which you would be a seller. You should therefore be able to place any orders prior to the open. You can then check back later — ideally, after the market has closed — to see what happened and which, if any, of your orders were filled.

I feel fortunate to be separated by 12 hours from the stock markets in which most of my stocks trade (the US and Canadian stock markets). This separation removes any temptation that I might otherwise feel to watch the intra-day trading action, because it means that I am usually asleep during the bulk of the trading day.

On a typical day (night) I check the futures markets and company-specific news well before the start of the North American trading session and decide what, if any, new orders are appropriate. Most orders are placed prior to the open, although occasionally I watch the first few minutes of trading before placing an order. I then usually check back after about one hour to see what’s happening before switching off for the night. By the time I switch back on the markets are closed and I can calmly (most of the time) assess the day’s outcome and start thinking about what new orders make sense for the next day.

On a related matter, the majority of the orders I place are either priced well above the market (for sell orders) or well below the market (for buy orders), with the bid and offer prices usually determined by a combination of valuation and chart-related support/resistance. As a result, my orders sometimes sit around for at least a few weeks before getting filled and sometimes don’t get filled at all. I never, ever, use market orders.

Due to the scaremongering of some bloggers, newsletter writers and other promoters of gold manipulation theories, there is still a popular belief within the so-called “gold community” that the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD), the world’s largest gold ETF and for a while in 2011 the world’s largest ETF of any type, doesn’t have all the gold it is supposed to have. There is supposed to be slightly less than one ounce* of allocated gold in the vaults of GLD’s custodian or sub-custodians for every 10 GLD shares, but rumour has it that GLD has put some or all of its gold bullion at risk via gold leasing or other secretive dealings.

The operative word in the above sentence is “rumour”, because there isn’t a shred of evidence that GLD has leased any of its gold or put its gold at risk in some other ‘unacceptable’ way. There is, however, definitive evidence that GLD does have the correct amount of gold. First, GLD maintains a list of every gold bar it owns. The Bar List is located HERE, is updated daily, and contains the serial number, weight and assayed purity of each bar (61,488 of them as at 13th October 2014). Second, the Bar List is audited by Inspectorate International. Specifically, Inspectorate conducts two audits every year of the gold bullion held on behalf of GLD at the vaults of GLD’s custodian. One of these audits involves a complete bar count, meaning that every single bar is inspected and checked against the Bar List. The second audit is a random sample count.

Interestingly, James Turk’s Goldmoney.com also uses Inspectorate to audit the gold in its custodian’s vaults. The latest full audit report of GLD’s gold inventory can be viewed HERE and the latest audit report of Goldmoney’s inventory can be viewed HERE.

Owning GLD is not the same as having physical gold in your possession or having ownership of allocated gold in a vault that you can take delivery of (GLD shares can only be exchanged for gold bullion in 100,000-share lots by Authorised Participants). It is simply a convenient way to trade something that is fully backed by physical gold via the stock market at very low commissions and buy-sell spreads.

If you own GLD shares and plan to maintain your position for 1-2 years or longer then you should give some thought to switching from GLD to GTU (Central Gold Trust), because GTU is currently trading at a discount of almost 8% to net asset value. At current prices, by selling GLD and buying the same dollar amount of GTU you end up with exposure to almost 8% more gold.

*There was originally one ounce of gold for every 10 GLD shares, but the amount of physical gold per GLD share falls by a tiny amount each year due to storage and insurance costs.

Two weeks ago I discussed the claim that the US debt/GDP ratio (the debt of the US federal government divided by US GDP) drove the gold price, with a rising debt/GDP ratio resulting in a higher gold price and a falling debt/GDP ratio resulting in a lower gold price. I explained that the claim was misleading, and that a chart purporting to demonstrate this relationship was both an example of data mining (in this case, cherry-picking a timescale over which the relationship worked while ignoring more relevant timescales over which it didn’t work) and an example of confusing correlation with causation. I also mentioned in passing that there was a similar misleading claim doing the rounds regarding the relationship between gold and the US monetary base (MB). Considering that the failure of the gold price to follow the US MB higher over the past two years is being cited by the usual suspects as evidence of gold-market manipulation, I’ll now briefly address the question: Does the US monetary base drive the gold price?

Those who believe that the answer to the question is “yes” will sometimes show a chart like the one presented below to prove the correctness of their belief. Clearly, if you were armed only with this chart and the conviction that a substantial rise in the US MB should always go hand-in-hand with a rallying gold price, then you would likely take the happenings of the past two years as definitive evidence of artificial gold-price suppression. Of course, you would also have to put aside the fact that the gold price rose 300% from its 2001 low to its early-2008 peak with only a minor increase in the US MB, but this wouldn’t be a problem because it is always easy to come up with a fundamental reason for a large rise in the gold price. It’s only a large price decline that needs to be explained-away by a manipulation theory.

So, is gold’s divergence over the past two years from the on-going rise in the US MB strange or suspicious, such that it can be best explained by market manipulation?

The answer is no. As is the case with the relationship between the gold price and the debt/GDP ratio, the visually-appealing positive correlation of the past several years disappears when the gold-MB relationship is viewed over a much longer timescale. Specifically, the following chart shows that the only period over the past 45 years during which there was a strong positive correlation between the gold price and the monetary base was the three-year period from late-2008 through to late-2011.

I wish that anticipating the performance of the US$ gold price were as easy as monitoring the US monetary base or the Fed’s balance sheet (the monetary base is controlled by the Fed via the expansion/contraction of its balance sheet), but unfortunately the gold market isn’t that simple. The reality is that like a rising debt/GDP ratio, a sharply rising monetary base can be a valid part of a bullish gold story. However, this is only to the extent that it helps to bring about lower real interest rates and/or a steeper yield curve and/or a weaker US dollar and/or rising credit spreads. It isn’t directly bullish.

I think that the first leg of the next substantial multi-year rally in the gold price will be linked to the Fed’s efforts to stabilise or contract the monetary base, because these efforts will expose the mal-investments of the past few years.

In June of 2012, when there appeared to be a serious threat that Europe’s monetary union would unravel, the Speculative net-short position and the offsetting Commercial net-long position in euro futures reached an all-time high. The following chart from Sharelynx.com shows that over the past two months the Speculative net-short and Commercial net-long positions got almost as high as their 2012 extremes, despite the absence of an existential threat to the euro.

The COT situation tells us that euro-related sentiment is ‘in the toilet’ and that there is a lot of speculative-short-covering fuel to power a euro rally. However, the main reason for including this chart is to show that the Speculative net-short and the Commercial net-long positions had already reached unusually high levels in August when the euro was trading at 1.34. This means that the bulk of the euro’s decline occurred AFTER the Commercials became massively net-long in the futures market. The question is: How could the Commercials be so dumb in the currency market and at the same time be so smart in the gold market?

The answer is that the Commercials are neither dumb in the currency market nor smart in the gold market. As I’ve explained in the past, the Commercial net-position in the futures market is simply a mathematical offset of the Speculative net-position, with Speculators being the driving force behind short-term price trends. The Commercials only appear to have been wrong based on their recent positioning in euro futures and right based on their recent positioning in gold futures because euro speculators (as a group) have recently been right and gold speculators (as a group) have recently been wrong.

It is also worth reiterating that the Commercial position in the futures market does not generally reflect the overall Commercial position. For example, a Commercial that is net-short in the futures market could be either flat or net-long when all positions are taken into account. In fact, a Commercial that establishes a large net-short position in the futures market is probably doing so BECAUSE it has a large net-long position to hedge in the cash market.

When the euro’s short-term trend reverses upward, the Speculators will be on the wrong side of the market and the Commercials will start to look right.

The ECB recently launched a two-pronged attack aimed at boosting bank lending to the private sector. These ‘prongs’ are the TLTRO (Targeted Longer Term Refinancing Operation), which got underway on 18th September, and the ABS (Asset Backed Security) and Covered Bond Purchase Program, which will soon get underway. Will these schemes be successful?

That depends on what constitutes success. The schemes cannot possibly foster economic progress, because creating money and credit out of nothing distorts price signals, redistributes wealth from savers to speculators and generally makes the economy less efficient. So, if success is defined as bringing about a stronger economy then failure is guaranteed. However, if success is defined as increasing the size of the ECB’s balance sheet by 1 trillion euros and adding 1 trillion euros to the money supply, then the schemes will probably, but not necessarily, be successful.

The challenge faced by the ECB as it tries to prod the commercial banks into lending more money to the private sector is the dearth of lending opportunities open to the banks. Due to the after-effects of the credit bubble that blew-up in 2008 and the ensuing years during which wealth was siphoned out of the real economy to prevent the holders of government bonds from suffering any losses (part of what we referred to back in 2010 as “the no bondholder left behind policy”), the euro-zone’s pool of willing and qualified private-sector borrowers has experienced severe shrinkage.

The new ABS purchase program is supposed to encourage the commercial banks to be more aggressive in their search for lending opportunities, in that the ECB is effectively saying “if you securitise it, we will buy it”. In other words, the ECB is effectively saying to the banks: “If you make new loans and bundle the loans into a security that can be sold, then you will definitely have a buyer for the security at an attractive price. You will therefore be able to shift the risk from your balance sheet to our balance sheet.” The extent to which the commercial banks will take advantage of this ‘generous’ offer is unknown.

The new ABS purchase program appears to have a better chance than the TLTRO of promoting increased bank lending to the private sector. The reason is that the ABS program enables banks to shift the risk of loan default to someone else (to the ECB and ultimately to tax-payers throughout the euro-zone), whereas the TLTRO is supposed to encourage banks to add risk to their own balance sheets. The TLTRO could still work, though, because the senior managements of banks are often guided by the same type of short-term thinking as most politicians. Just like the average politician is focused on doing/saying whatever it takes to win the next election, the average bank CEO is focused on doing whatever it takes to make the next quarterly and annual earnings reports look good.

Some analysts and commentators are concerned that the ECB’s new money-and-credit creation schemes won’t do enough to bring about the “inflation” that — according to their crackpot theories — the euro-zone needs. Therefore, they believe that the ECB should resort to Fed-style QE (outright large-scale monetisation of government bonds). This prompts me to address the question: Why hasn’t the ECB resorted to Fed-style QE? After all, it is blatantly obvious that Mario Draghi is as ignorant about economics as his Federal Reserve counterpart.

It’s first worth noting that the ECB does not appear to be facing a legal obstacle to the sort of QE programs implemented by the Fed. The ECB is legally prohibited from buying government bonds directly from any euro-zone government, but it is able to buy government bonds in the secondary market. In this respect it is in the same boat as the Fed. Like the ECB, the Fed is legally prohibited from buying US Treasury bonds directly from the US government, but it can buy as many Treasury bonds as it wants from Primary Dealers.

Rather than being legally constrained, the ECB appears to be politically constrained. Whereas some euro-zone governments and national central banks would be in favour of a full-blown QE program, other euro-zone governments and central banks, most notably the German government and the Bundesbank, would be very much against it. That’s why the ECB is coming up with half-measures. At this stage Draghi & Co. can’t get approval for the large-scale monetisation of government bonds, but they can get approval for a monetisation program that will supposedly result in additional credit to private businesses.

Lastly, if the ECB is determined to add 1 trillion euros to its balance sheet and the money supply over the coming 12 months then it will almost certainly find a way of doing so. If the ABS purchase program and the TLTRO don’t do the trick, then some other method will be concocted.

The article linked HERE answers yes to the above question. The correct answer is no.

The above-linked article presents the following graph as evidence that the debt/GDP ratio (US federal government debt divided by US GDP, in this case) does, indeed, drive the US$ gold price. However, this is a classic example of cherry-picking the timescale of the data to demonstrate a relationship that isn’t apparent over other timescales. It is also a classic example of confusing correlation with causation. Many things went up in price during the 2002-2014 period covered by this graph. Should we assume that all of these price rises were caused by the increase in the US government-debt/GDP ratio?

By the way, graphs like this were far more visually appealing — although no more valid — three years ago, because the positive correlation ended in 2011. Since 2011, the debt/GDP ratio has continued its relentless advance while the gold price has trended downward. A similar graph that was popular for a while showed a strong positive correlation between the gold price and the US monetary base from the early-2000s through to 2011-2012, which created the impression that the gold price would continue to rise as long as the US monetary base continued to do the same. Again, though, this impression was the result of confusing correlation and causation.

Here’s a chart showing the relationship between the gold price and the US debt/GDP ratio over a much longer period. This chart’s message is that there is no consistent relationship between these two quantities. For example, the huge gold bull market of the 1970s occurred while the debt/GDP ratio was low with a slight downward bias and actually ended at around the time that the debt/GDP ratio embarked on a major upward trend. In fact, from the early-1970s through to the mid-1990s there appeared to be an INVERSE relationship between the gold price and the debt/GDP ratio, but this is just a coincidence. It doesn’t imply that gold was hurt by a rising debt/GDP ratio and helped by a falling debt/GDP ratio; it implies that the debt/GDP ratio isn’t a primary driver of gold’s price tend. For another example, the gold price and the debt/GDP ratio rose in parallel during 2001-2006, but the rise in the debt/GDP ratio during this period was slow and was not generally considered to be a reason for concern. Therefore, it wasn’t the driver of gold’s upward trend.

The theory that the US government debt/GDP ratio is an important driver of the US$ gold price seems to be solely based on the 3-year period from late-2008 through to late-2011, when the two rocketed upward together.

The reality is that a rising US debt/GDP ratio can be a valid part of a bullish gold story, but only to the extent that it helps to bring about lower real interest rates and/or a steeper yield curve and/or a weaker US dollar and/or rising credit spreads. It isn’t directly bullish for gold, which is why a long-term comparison of the US$ gold price and the US debt/GDP ratio shows no consistent relationship. The same can be said about a rising US monetary base.

A number of markets are currently at sentiment and momentum extremes. Generally, the Dollar Index is very extended to the upside in terms of both sentiment and momentum, whereas the markets that benefit from a weaker US$ are very extended to the downside in terms of both sentiment and momentum. With regard to the markets that are stretched to the downside, here are some of the most extreme cases based on Market Vane bullish percentages and daily RSIs (Relative Strength Indexes) over the first four days of this week. Note that a market is considered to be ‘oversold’ when its daily RSI(14) drops to 30, while a daily RSI reading of 20 or lower is a rarely-reached extreme.

1) The following extreme daily RSI(14) readings were recorded during the past four days:

– 19.2 for the Continuous Commodity Index (CCI)

– 14.3 for the TSXV Venture Exchange Composite Index (CDNX), a proxy for junior Canadian resource stocks

– 14.5 for platinum

– 15.4 for silver

– 16.4 for the silver/gold ratio

– 16.2 for the Yen (note: the daily RSIs for the euro and the Pound went below 20 earlier this month, but are now a little higher)

2) The following extremely low Market Vane bullish percentages were recorded over the past four days:

– 22% for silver (the lowest level in more than 10 years and possibly a multi-decade low)

– 20% for corn

– 14% for wheat (one of lowest levels ever, in any market)

Negative sentiment and momentum extremes do not necessarily mean that a price low is imminent. The meaning is that there will be a lot of potential energy to drive a rally after the price trend reverses.

Over the past 12 months I’ve written extensively at TSI about the myths surrounding US bank reserves and the relationship between bank lending and bank reserves. For example, I’ve explained that bank reserves cannot be loaned into the economy and that in the real world — as opposed to the world described in economics textbooks — banks do NOT expand credit by ‘piggybacking’ on their reserves. As part of these bank-reserve writings I addressed the reasoning behind the Fed’s decision to start paying interest on reserves, reaching the conclusion that the decision had been taken to enable the Fed Funds Rate (FFR) to be hiked in the future without contracting the supplies of reserves and money. Last week there was confirmation from the horse’s mouth that my conclusion was correct, as well as some other interesting information on how an eventual tightening of US monetary policy will proceed.

As implied above, the Fed confirmed last week that when it finally gets around to moving the FFR upward, it will do so primarily by adjusting the interest rate it pays on excess reserve balances. If not for the existence of this relatively new policy tool, the only way that the FFR could be hiked would be via the traditional method involving reductions in the supplies of reserves and money. Moreover, considering the immense quantity of excess reserves now in the banking system, there would need to be a large reduction in the supply of reserves just to achieve a 0.25% increase in the FFR. Trying to shift the FFR upward via the traditional method would therefore quickly ignite a financial crisis.

The other interesting information conveyed by the Fed last week is that the size of its balance sheet will be reduced by ceasing to reinvest repayments of principal on the securities it holds. For example, if the Fed currently owns a bond with 3 years remaining duration, then — assuming that it has embarked on a policy normalisation route — it will not reinvest the proceeds when the bond’s principal is repaid in three years’ time. Instead, the principal repayment will bring about a reduction in the Fed’s balance sheet and a reduction in the money supply.

This means that the Fed plans to reduce the size of its balance sheet — and tighten monetary policy — at a snail’s pace.

The following chart is very interesting. I found it in John Mauldin’s latest “Thoughts from the Frontline” letter, although it was created by the Boston Consulting Group. It compares the cost of manufacturing in the top 25 exporting countries.

According to this chart, Australia is now the most expensive country to manufacture stuff. Manufacturing costs in Australia are now 30% higher than in the US, almost 20% higher than in Japan, almost 10% higher than in Germany, and about 5% higher than in Switzerland. The cost of manufacturing in the US is now slightly below the average — at around the same level as South Korea, Russia, Taiwan and Poland. This means that the Fed is almost half way to its goal of reducing US living standards to the point where the average factory worker in the US can compete on a cost basis with the average factory worker in Indonesia.

The above comment is only partly tongue-in-cheek. Many pro-free-market commentators discuss the decline in US living standards as if it were an unintended consequence of the Fed’s policies, but there is nothing unintended about it. It is a deliberate objective. The Fed will never come out and say “we are doing what we can to reduce living standards”, but a policy that is designed to boost asset prices, support capital-consuming businesses and promote investments that would never see the light of day in the absence of artificially low interest rates, all while minimising “wage inflation”, is also designed to reduce real wages and, therefore, to reduce living standards. The Fed surely doesn’t want to reduce US living standards to Indonesian levels, but that’s the direction in which its efforts are deliberately pointed.

I’ve explained in TSI commentaries that the root of the problem is unswerving commitment to bad economic theory. Under the Keynesian theories that all central bankers religiously follow, wealth is something that just exists. There is no careful and deep consideration given to how the wealth came to be and why some countries managed to accumulate a lot of wealth while other countries remained poor. According to these theories, people spend more during some periods due to a vague notion called rising “animal spirits”. This causes the amount of wealth to grow. Then, after a while, the mysterious “animal spirits” begin to subside, causing people to start spending less. This leads to a reduction in the amount of wealth. Under this perception of the world, one of the central bank’s primary tasks is to combat the unfathomable and destabilising natural force that drives the shifts in spending. This is done by indirectly manipulating prices throughout the economy, including the real price of labour.

The so-called counter-cyclical policies are destined to backfire, but the nature of the eventual backfiring is often difficult to predict. In broad terms, there are two possibilities: There could be a surge in inflation fear followed by a collapse in asset prices, a recession and a moonshot in deflation fear, or the collapse in asset prices and its knock-on effects could happen without a preceding surge in inflation fear. In both cases, the asset-price collapse and recession would likely usher-in a new round of ‘stimulative’ policy, because the devotion to bad theory prevents the right lessons from being learned.

The CEOs of commodity-producing companies are usually knowledgeable about the supply of and the demand for their company’s products, but gold-mining CEOs are exceptions. The vast majority of gold-mining CEOs have almost no understanding of supply and demand in the gold market.

For example, like most gold-market analysts and commentators, most gold-mining CEOs wrongly believe that the change in annual gold production is an important driver of the gold price. In particular, they talk about “Peak Gold” as if a leveling-off or a downward trend in global gold-mine production would be very supportive for the gold price. This means that they don’t understand that the gold-mining industry’s contribution to the total supply of gold currently equates to only 1.5% per year, and, therefore, that changes in industry-wide gold production will always be dwarfed — in terms of effect on the gold price — by changes in investment/speculative demand. (And by the way, changes in investment/speculative demand cannot be quantified by looking at transaction volumes.)

Gold CEOs’ general cluelessness about the gold market is reflected by the performance of the World Gold Council (WGC). Every year, the WGC produces a pile of completely irrelevant information about gold.

Fortunately, understanding the gold market has nothing to do with being a good CEO of a gold-mining company. A good gold-mining CEO is someone who a) implements strategies that keep total costs at relatively low levels, b) prudently manages country, local-community, environmental and other political risks, c) ensures that the balance sheet remains healthy, and d) only makes acquisitions that are accretive.

Last Thursday (4th September) the ECB introduced a cunning new plan to spur growth in the euro-zone, the first part of which involves cutting official interest-rate targets by 0.1%. The benchmark refinancing rate has been reduced to 0.05%, because 0.15% was obviously too high, and the deposit rate has gone further into negative territory, because it obviously wasn’t negative enough. The actions have been taken due to “inflation” and inflation expectations being too low.

Inflation of any kind is the last thing that Europe needs, but from the Keynesian perspective, which is the perspective of all central bankers, it is critical that both inflation and inflation expectations are well above zero. The reason is that in the back-to-front world in which Keynesians are mired, consumption spending comes first and is the driving force of the economy. Furthermore, according to Keynesian logic if people believe that prices are going to be lower in the future they will put off their spending, which will set in motion a vicious deflationary spiral of price declines leading to reduced spending, leading to additional price declines, and so on.

Keynesian logic explains why the computer and smartphone manufacturers never sell anything. Everyone knows that if they wait a year they will be able to buy a better smartphone and a better computer at a lower price, so nobody ever buys these products. As a consequence, the entire computer and smartphone industries have zero sales year after year.

Getting back to the ECB, a goal of reducing the cost of credit to zero is to generate some “price inflation”, which, according to the theories that inform the decisions of central bankers, will boost immediate consumption and cause the economy to grow faster. But if a faster rate of price inflation is what they want, then what they will have to do is increase the rate of monetary inflation. In this regard, taking an overnight interest rate down from 0.15% to 0.05% is probably not going to do much. If the ECB is serious about generating “inflation” then what it really needs to do is implement a Fed-style QE program.

Which brings me to the second part of the ECB’s cunning new plan. The ECB announced that it would begin monetising covered bonds and asset-backed securities (ABS)*, including real-estate-backed securities, next month, with the details to be announced at next month’s ECB meeting. Depending on its size and mechanics, this asset monetisation program could certainly cause prices to rise. To the extent that it does cause prices to rise it will benefit banks and speculators at the expense of savers, productive businesses and wage earners.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, due to the limited availability of eligible collateral the QE program announced by the ECB last week might be restricted in size to about 200B euros. This means that it might not be large enough to have much effect on the euro-zone money supply.

*Banks create asset-backed securities by pooling mortgages and other loans. Covered bonds are similar, but the underlying assets are ‘ring-fenced’ on the bank’s balance sheet, which means that the assets are still there if the bank goes bust.

The gold market is generally weak relative to the industrial metals markets during the boom phase of the inflation-fueled, central-bank-sponsored boom/bust cycle and strong relative to the industrial metals markets during the bust phase of the cycle. In other words, the gold/GYX ratio (gold relative to the Industrial Metals Index) tends to fall during the booms, which are periods when economic confidence rises while mal-investment sets the stage for an economic contraction, and rise during the busts, which are periods when the mistakes of the past come to the fore. This is due to gold’s historical role as a store of purchasing power and a hedge against uncertainty.

By shading the bust periods in grey, I’ve indicated the global booms and busts on the following chart of the gold/GYX ratio. During the 16-year period covered by the chart there have been three busts: the recession of 2001-2002 that followed the bursting of the NASDAQ bubble, the global financial crisis and “great recession” of 2007-2009, and the euro-zone sovereign debt and banking crisis of 2011-2012.

The booms tend to fall apart more quickly than they build up, so the rising trends in the gold/GYX ratio tend to be shorter and steeper than the falling trends.

Gold/GYX’s current situation looks most similar to Q2-2007. At that time the ratio tested its late-2006 bottom and then reversed upward, marking the end of the boom that began in 2003. However, gold will soon have to start strengthening relative to industrial metals such as copper in order for the 2007 similarity to be maintained. If this doesn’t happen and the gold/GYX ratio breaks decisively below its December-2013 bottom, it will indicate that the boom is going to extend into 2015.

I want to stress that gold’s relationship to the boom/bust cycle is primarily about its performance relative to other commodities, especially the industrial metals. It is not about gold’s performance in US$ terms. For example, from mid-2005 through to mid-2006 gold performed poorly relative to the industrial metals, but this was a good time to be long gold and a very good time to be long gold stocks. It’s just that the industrial metals handily outperformed gold during this period, which makes sense considering the global economic and financial-market backdrop at the time. For another example, from May through November of 2008 gold performed extremely well relative to the industrial metals. This makes sense considering the global economic and financial-market backdrop of the period, but it was a bad time to be long gold and a very bad time to be long gold stocks.

Over the past 15 years there have always been very compelling reasons to short Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs), but almost everyone who has attempted to make money by shorting JGBs has ended up losing money. The consistency with which bearish JGB speculators have lost money over a great many years led to the short-selling of JGBs becoming known as the “widowmaker trade” and spawned the saying: “you can’t claim to be a speculator until you’ve lost money shorting JGBs”.

As evidenced by the steady downward trend on the following Bloomberg.com chart of the 10-year JGB yield, anyone who has attempted to short the JGB since the beginning of this year has lost money. In other words, the “widowmaker trade” is still living up to its name. Moreover, with the exception of a few days during early-April of last year, the 10-year JGB yield has never been lower than it is right now.

Actually, despite the steady upward grind in price and downward grind in yield, I doubt that many speculators have lost money shorting JGBs this year. The reason is that the market for JGBs no longer functions like a real market. It has effectively been squashed by the gigantic boot of the Bank of Japan (BOJ).

Due to the BOJ’s policy of buying-up every piece of government debt it can get its hands on, the JGB is so over-priced that there are no buyers apart from the BOJ. At the same time, nobody in their right mind would bet against a high-priced investment that was being supported by a totally committed buyer with infinitely deep pockets. Consequently, for all intents and purposes the JGB market is dead.

Given the proclivity of the US monetary authorities to copy Japan’s worst policy choices, speculators who believe that they will make a fortune over the years ahead by shorting US government bonds should probably re-think their stance. After all, if a Keynesian remedy fails dismally in Japan, it can only be because the remedy wasn’t implemented aggressively enough.

It is illogical to expect an artificially-low interest rate to help the economy. This is because the best-case scenario resulting from interest-rate suppression is a wealth transfer from savers to speculators. In other words, the best case is a ‘wash’ for the overall economy. The realistic case, however, is very much a negative for the overall economy, because in addition to punishing savers an artificially low interest rate will cause mal-investment and thus make the economy less efficient.

Furthermore, thanks to the Japanese experience of the past two decades there is now a mountain of recent empirical evidence to support the logic outlined above. Japan’s policymakers have tried and tried again to propel their economy to the mythical “escape velocity” by pushing interest rates down to absurdly low levels and keeping them there, but every attempt has failed. Unfortunately, the fact that interest-rate suppression has been a total bust in Japan has not dissuaded other central banks from going down the same path.

The root of the problem is devotion to bad economic theory. If you are convinced that lowering the interest rate, pumping money into the economy and ramping-up government spending is beneficial, then from your perspective a failure of such measures to sustainably boost the rate of economic growth can only mean that the measures weren’t aggressive enough. If the interest rate is reduced to zero and the economy remains sluggish, then a negative interest rate must be needed. If the economy doesn’t become strong in response to 10% annual money-supply growth, then 15% or 20% annual monetary expansion is obviously required. If a hefty boost in government spending fails to kick-start the economy, then it must be the case that government spending wasn’t boosted enough.

The alternative is that the theory underlying the policy is completely wrong, but this possibility must never be acknowledged.

A popular view is that the Bank of Japan (BOJ) is inflating the Yen to oblivion. This view is wrong. The reality is that while there is certainly a risk that the BOJ will eventually inflate Japan’s money supply at a fast pace, it is not currently doing so.

The spectacular QE program introduced by the BOJ in April of last year did have some effect on the money supply, but the effect was nowhere near as great as generally believed. As illustrated by the chart displayed below, the year-over-year (YOY) rate of increase in Japan’s M2 money supply rose from around 3% in early-2013 to just above 4% near year-end, but 4% is a long way from the explosive growth that most analysts thought would result from the BOJ’s new Yen-depreciation policy. Furthermore, the YOY rate of increase in Japan’s M2 has since drifted down to 3% and appears to be on its way back to the long-term average of 2% (I think it will be back at 2% by October). This means that Japan is still maintaining the world’s lowest monetary inflation rate, which prompts me to ask: Why are so many analysts still blindly assuming that the BOJ is rapidly expanding the Yen supply? Why aren’t they spending the 15 minutes that would be needed to validate — or in this case invalidate — their assumptions by checking the money-supply figures available at the BOJ web site?

An implication of the above is that the supply side of the Yen’s supply-demand equation remains bullish for the Yen’s exchange rate. However, for most currency traders this doesn’t matter. The reason is that the supply side dominates very long-term trends in the foreign exchange market, but the demand side often dominates over periods of up to 2 years.