In reaction to the ECB cutting off financial support to Greece’s banks and the resulting closure of all banks in Greece, the Global X Greece ETF (GREK) plunged 19% on Monday 29th June to a new bear-market low.

However, apart from the assets most directly affected by the goings-on in Greece there are currently no real signs of fear in the financial markets. For example:

The Dollar Index initially rallied on Monday and broke above short-term resistance at 95.5-96.5. This was a predictable response to the burgeoning crisis in the euro-zone, but the gains were quickly given back and the Dollar Index ended the day with a loss. This price action reflects a general lack of concern.

The S&P500 Index (SPX) finally broke below the bottom of its recent narrow trading range, but while this is a preliminary sign of weakness it is far from a sign of panic.

The EURO STOXX 50 Index (STOX5E), the European equivalent of the Dow Industrials Index, fell 4% on Monday. This is a sizable decline for a single day, but it wasn’t even enough to push the index to a new multi-week low.

TLT, an ETF proxy for long-dated US Treasuries, bounced on Monday, but the bounce came from a 6-month low and wasn’t even sufficient to take the price to the declining 50-day MA.

The HYG/IEF ratio, a credit-spread indicator that rises when credit spreads contract and falls when credit spreads widen, has been working its way higher since mid-January. This upward trend implies increasing complacency and/or rising economic concidence. It pulled back on Monday in reaction to the Greek news, but the size of Monday’s move was not out of the ordinary.

I would have expected a bigger financial-market reaction to the ramping-up of the “Grexit” risk. However, with none of the other major financial markets showing much fear on Monday, I’m not surprised that there was only a small move in the gold price.

There could be a much bigger reaction over the days ahead as the situation in Greece continues to evolve, but right now the financial world is taking the Greece news in stride. The thinking seems to be: this is a major problem for Greece, but a minor issue elsewhere.

I was recently sent an article containing the claim that during the next financial crisis and/or stock-market crash there will be a panic ‘into’ the US dollar, but that unlike previous crises, when panicking investors obtained their US$ exposure via the purchase of T-Bonds, the next time around they will buy dollars directly. This is wrong, because large investors cannot simply buy dollars. As I’ll now explain, they must buy something denominated in dollars.

If you have $50K of investments in corporate bonds and stocks, then you can sell these investments and deposit the proceeds in a bank account. You can also withdraw the $50K in physical notes and put the money in a home safe. In the first case you are effectively lending the money to a bank and therefore taking-on credit risk, but the deposit will be fully insured so the credit risk will be close to zero. In the second case you have no credit risk, but there will be the risk of theft. The point is that it is feasible for an investor with US$50K to go directly into US$ cash.

This is not true, however, for an investor with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

If you have $1B of investments and you want to ‘go to cash’ you can, of course, sell your investments and deposit the proceeds in a bank account. The bank will certainly be glad to receive the money, but less than 1% of the deposit will be covered by insurance. This means that more than 99% of the deposit will be subject to credit risk (the risk that the bank will fail), which can be uncomfortably high during a financial crisis. In effect, depositing the money at a bank will be risking a loss of almost 100%. Not exactly the safety you were looking for when you shifted to cash!

Also, if you have a huge sum of money then removing the money from the banking system will not be an option. First, you probably won’t be permitted to convert such a sum to physical notes, but even in the unlikely event that you are permitted you will have the cost of transporting, storing, insuring and securing the cash. This cost will be large enough to preclude the exercise. Furthermore, accumulating a physical cash position of that magnitude will have the undesirable side effect of drawing greater government scrutiny to your business dealings.

Therefore, if it’s US$ exposure that you want and you are looking for a place to safely park a large quantity of dollars for a short period, you really have no choice other than to lend the money to the US government via the purchase of Treasury notes or bonds. That’s why a panic ‘into’ the US dollar will always be associated with a panic ‘into’ the Treasury market.

Keith Weiner often posts thought-provoking stuff at his Monetary Metals blog. A recent post entitled “Interest – Inflation = #REF” is certainly thought-provoking, although it is also mostly wrong. It is mostly wrong because it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about saving.

Before I get to the main point, I’ll take issue with the following paragraph from Keith’s post:

“Normally, you don’t spend your savings, only the income on it. In ancient times, people had to hoard a commodity like salt when they worked. In retirement, they sold it to buy food. Modern economies evolved beyond that, with the development of interest. Retirees should not have to liquidate their life savings.”

Who says you shouldn’t have to spend your savings? One of the main reasons to save today is so that you can spend more in the future. Also, interest isn’t a modern development, it has been inherent in economic activity since the dawn of economic activity.

Now, the main point: When people save money, it’s not actually money that they want to save. Money is just a medium of exchange. What they want to save is purchasing power (PP). For example, if I have a million dollars of savings to live on over the next 20 years, what matters to me is what the money buys now and what it will probably buy in the future. If a million dollars is currently enough to buy a mansion in the best part of town and if a dollar is likely to maintain its PP over the next 20 years, then I’ll probably be able to live quite comfortably on my savings. However, if a million dollars only buys me a loaf of bread, then I have a problem.

A consequence is that, contrary to the assertion in Keith’s post, the real interest rate is very important to the average retiree. The easiest way to further explain why is via a hypothetical example.

Fred, our hypothetical retiree, has $1M of savings at Year 0. At the dollar’s current purchasing power his cost of living is $20K per year. Also, the interest rate that he receives on his savings is ZERO, but the dollar is gaining PP at the rate of 5% per year.

At Year 1, Fred’s monetary savings will have declined to $980K, because he spent $20K and received no interest. However, $980K now has the same PP that $1029K had a year earlier. That is, over the course of the year Fred’s PP increased by 29K Year 0 dollars. Furthermore, his annual living expense will have declined to $19K.

At Year 2, Fred’s monetary savings will have declined to $961K, because he spent $19K and received no interest. However, $961K now has the same PP that $1059K had at Year 0.

That is, after 2 years of receiving no nominal interest on his savings, our hypothetical retiree is in a significantly stronger financial position. Thanks to the receipt of a positive real interest rate he now has more purchasing power than he started with. The fact that he has less currency units is irrelevant.

I could provide a second hypothetical example of a retiree who, despite earning a superficially-healthy positive nominal interest rate and ending each year with the same or more currency units, has a worsening financial position over time thanks to a negative real interest rate. I could, but I won’t.

The upshot is that the real interest rate is not only important, for savers and investors it is of greater importance than the nominal interest rate. The problem, today, is not only that central banks have pushed the nominal short-term interest rate down to near zero, it’s also that they have done this while reducing the PP of money. The great sucking sound is wealth being siphoned from savers via negative real interest rates.

“Nonsensical Gold Commentary” was the title of a recent Mineweb article in which the author, Lawrence Williams, laments that a significant amount of commentary published on gold can be uninformed and misleading. This is ironic, since the bulk of Lawrence Williams’ writings about the gold market (and the silver market) are uninformed and misleading.

When it comes to his gold-market commentary, Mr. William’s most frequent mistake is to focus on the amount of gold ‘flowing’ into China as if this were one of the most important drivers, if not the most important driver, of the gold price. To be fair, in this regard he has a lot of company and much of what he writes on the topic is copied from the wrongheaded analyses put forward by reputed experts on gold.

I’ve dealt with the China gold fallacy in several previous posts*. It is related to the more general fallacy that useful information about gold demand and the gold price can be obtained by monitoring the amount of gold being transferred from one part of the market to another or from one geographical region to another.

Since every gold transaction involves an increase in gold demand on the part of the buyer and an exactly offsetting decrease in gold demand on the part of the seller, it should be obvious that overall demand cannot possibly change as a result of any purchase/sale. And it should be obvious that regardless of whether gold’s price is in a bullish or a bearish trend, some parts of the market and some geographical regions will be net buyers and others will be net sellers. And it should also be obvious that an increase in volume — which requires an increase in both buying and selling — can accompany a price decline or a price advance, meaning that there is nothing strange about a fall in price going hand-in-hand with increased buying or a rise in price going hand-in-hand with increased selling.

Unfortunately, none of these facts are apparent to the gold analysts who attempt to obtain clues about gold’s price performance and prospects by tracking the amount of gold being transferred from sellers to buyers.

I’m reticent to pick on Lawrence Williams, because I suspect that he means well and, as mentioned above, he has a lot of company. However, his commentary is difficult for me to ignore, the reason being that I closely monitor the Mineweb site and therefore can’t avoid seeing the headlines of the articles he writes. For example, when scanning through the Mineweb headlines a few days ago I was enticed to click on an article titled “SGE gold withdrawals surge again“, which turned out to be another Williams piece about China’s gold demand. Although this article regurgitated some of the usual misleading information, the last paragraph was interesting.

The last paragraph was interesting because it contained a blatant contradiction. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

“…the overall level of SGE [Shanghai Gold Exchange] withdrawals has to be a consistent indicator of Chinese demand trends and from them it looks as though the trend is rising so far this year whether they are a definitive measure of Chinese wholesale gold consumption or not. They are most certainly a measure of China’s internal gold flows.”

The last sentence is correct. The SGE withdrawals are a measure of internal gold flows, that is, a measure of the amount of gold transferred from some people in China to other people in China. As a consequence, they provide NO information about overall Chinese demand trends. The last sentence therefore contradicts the preceding sentence and shines a light on the confusion in the minds of those who attempt to gather useful information about the gold price by fixating on trading volumes.

*For example: HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.