The theme of a recent report from Casey Research was that the Russian government is planning to issue its own cryptocurrency (the “CryptoRuble”) that would be created, tracked and held on a state-controlled digital ledger. This was portrayed as being a huge plus for the Russian economy. I don’t see how giving the government greater ability to monitor financial transactions and thus divert more money into its own coffers could be anything other than a negative for any economy, but the Casey report got me thinking about whether a state-sponsored cryptocurrency is a valid concept.

I’m far from an expert on cryptocurrencies and so I could be missing something (please let me know if I am), but it seems to me that it is not a valid concept. The essence of the blockchain technology that underlies cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is that the ledger is DISTRIBUTED. This is what makes the system secure. Cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets can be hacked, but the blockchain itself is, for all intents and purposes, ‘unhackable’.

If a digital currency exists on a centrally-controlled ledger it is not a cryptocurrency, it is a garden variety electronic currency like the dollars in your bank account.

Central banks and governments want to eliminate physical cash so that there is a digital record of all transactions. This is not to promote economic growth or to fight terrorism or to reduce crime or to further any other noble cause; it is primarily to maximise tax revenue and secondarily to cut off a way of escaping from negative interest rates. Therefore, it’s a good bet that physical cash will be outlawed in the not-too-distant future. For exactly the same reason (they make it more difficult for the government to monitor financial transactions and thus maximise tax revenue) it’s likely that cryptocurrencies will be outlawed at some stage.

Another relevant point is that commercial banks generate a lot of profit by lending new money into existence and monetising securities. Given the banking industry’s influence on government and the reliance of government on the financial support of banks, there is no chance of the government implementing a monetary system that substantially reduces the profitability of commercial banks.

In summary, I expect that governments will attempt to make the official currency 100% digital/electronic, but not introduce their own cryptocurrencies. As far as I can tell, “government-controlled cryptocurrency” is a contradiction in terms.

[This post is a brief excerpt from a TSI commentary published a week ago]

The US economic boom is still in progress, where a boom is defined as a period during which monetary inflation and the suppression of interest rates create the false impression of a growing/healthy economy*. We know that it is still in progress because the gap between 10-year and 2-year Treasury yields — our favourite proxy for the US yield curve — continues to shrink and is now the narrowest it has been in 10 years.

Reiterating an explanation we’ve provided numerous times in the past, an important characteristic of a boom is an increasing desire to borrow short to lend/invest long. This puts upward pressure on short-term interest rates relative to long-term interest rates, which is why economic booms are associated with flattening yield curves. The following chart shows the accelerating upward trend in the US 2-year yield that was the driving force behind the recent sharp reduction in the 10yr-2yr yield spread.

The above paragraph explains why a yield-curve trend reversal from flattening to steepening invariably occurs around the time of a shift from economic boom to economic bust. Such a reversal is a sign that the willingness and/or ability to take on additional short-term debt to support investments in stocks, real estate, factors of production and long-term bonds has diminished beyond a critical level. From that point forward, a new self-reinforcing trend involving debt reduction and the liquidation of investments becomes increasingly dominant.

The recent performance of the yield curve indicates that the US economy hasn’t yet begun the transition from boom to bust.

*The remnants of capitalism enable some genuine progress to be made during the boom phase, but the bulk of the apparent economic vibrancy is associated with monetary-inflation-fueled price rises and activities that essentially consume the ‘seed corn’.

A blog post titled “Sentiment Synopsis” posted two weeks ago contained some explanatory remarks about the Commitments of Traders (COT) reports and briefly discussed the sentiment situations for gold, silver, the Canadian dollar and the Yen using the COT data as the indicators of market sentiment. In this post I’ll do the same for the euro, the Swiss franc and oil, again with the help of charts from Gold Charts ‘R’ Us.

As noted in the earlier post, what I refer to as the total speculative net position takes into account the net positions of large speculators (non-commercials) and small traders (the ‘non-reportables’) and is the inverse of the commercial net position. The blue bars in the middle sections of the charts that follow indicate the commercial net position, so the inverse of each of these bars is considered to be the total speculative net position.

Let’s begin with the euro.

For the past few months the net speculative long position in euro futures has hovered near an all-time high. In fact, the only time that speculators in currency futures, as a group, have ever bet more heavily on a rise in the euro was in 2011 when the euro/US$ exchange rate was peaking in the high-1.40s. Consequently, it could be argued that sentiment is more conducive to euro weakness than euro strength in the short-term.

There is, however, a caveat, which is that if speculators were to become as bullish on the euro as they were bearish in Q2-2012 or Q1-2015 then the speculative net-long position in euro futures will become much larger than at any time in the past. The current COT situation should therefore be viewed as a short-term warning of euro weakness, but not a reason to place a substantial bearish bet.

Turning to the following Swiss franc (SF) chart we see the opposite situation. Whereas the COT report indicates that speculators in the futures market are almost as bullish on the euro as they have ever been, it also indicates that the same speculators are almost as bearish on the SF as they have ever been. In particular, it was only for a brief period in 2012 that currency speculators, as a group, were more short (that is, more bearish) on the SF than they are right now. It looks very much like speculators in currency futures have been buying the euro and selling the SF as a pair trade, undoubtedly to take advantage of the downward trend in the SF/euro exchange rate that got underway in April.

I view the current COT situation as a reason to be short-to-intermediate-term bullish on the SF relative to both the US$ and the euro.

Last but not least, below is a chart showing the COT situation for US (West Texas Intermediate) crude oil futures. The chart tells us that the net speculative long position in oil futures made an all-time high two weeks ago and remains close to its high.

Based on considerations other than sentiment I expect the oil price to trade well into the $60s during the first half of next year, but oil’s COT situation is a short-term danger sign. In the absence of a steady stream of bullish news the oil price is likely to trade at least 10% below its current price within the next two months. I hasten to point out, however, that the risk/reward does not suggest that oil should be shorted.

The following monthly chart shows that relative to a broad basket of commodities*, gold commenced a very long-term bull market (47 years and counting) in the early-1970s. It’s not a fluke that this bull market began at the same time as the final official US$-gold link was severed and the era of irredeemable free-floating fiat currency kicked off.

Anyone attempting to apply a traditional commodity-type analysis to the gold market would have trouble explaining the above chart. This is because throughout the ultra-long-term upward trend in the gold/commodity ratio the total supply of gold was orders of magnitude greater, relative to commercial demand, than the supply of any other commodity. Based on the sort of supply-demand analysis that routinely gets applied to other commodities, gold should have been the worst-performing commodity market.

The reason that a multi-generational upward trend in the gold/commodity ratio began in the early-1970s and is destined to continue is not that gold is money. The reality is that gold no longer satisfies a practical definition of money. The reason is the combination of the greater amount of mal-investment enabled by the post-1970 monetary system and the efforts by central bankers to dissuade people from saving in terms of the official money.

In brief, what happens is this: Central banks put downward pressure on interest rates (by creating new money) in an effort to promote economic growth, but the economy’s prospects cannot be improved by falsifying the most important price signals. Instead, the price distortions lead to clusters of ill-conceived investments, thus setting the stage for a recession or economic bust. Once it is widely realised that cash flows are going to be a lot less than previously expected there is a marked increase in the general desire to hold cash. At the same time, however, central banks say that if you hold cash then we will punish you. They don’t use those words, but it is made clear that they will do whatever it takes to prop-up prices and prevent the savers of money from earning a real return on their savings. This prompts people to look for highly liquid assets that can be held in lieu of the official money, which is where gold comes in.

This is why the gold/commodity ratio tends to trend downward when everything seems fine on the surface and rocket upward when it becomes apparent that numerous investing mistakes have been made and that the future will be nowhere near as copacetic as previously assumed.

It’s reasonable to expect that the multi-generational upward trend in the gold/commodity ratio that began in the early-1970s will continue for at least as long as the current monetary system remains in place. Why wouldn’t it?

*For the broad basket of commodity prices the chart uses the CRB Index up to 1992 and the GSCI Spot Commodity Index (GNX) thereafter.