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This post was inspired by an exchange between Martin Armstrong of Armstrong Economics and one of his readers. In an earlier blog entry Mr. Armstrong wrote: “The wealth of a nation is the total productivity of its people. If I have gold and want you to fix my house, I give you the gold for your labor. Thus, your wealth is your labor, and the gold is merely a medium of exchange. So it does not matter whatever the medium of exchange might be.” One of his readers took exception to this comment and argued that money should be tangible and ideally should be gold or silver.

Mr. Armstrong’s reply is worth reading in full. After giving us an abbreviated history of money through the ages, he sums up as follows:

“Paper money is the medium of exchange between two people where one offers a service or something they manufactured, which is no different than a gold or silver coin requiring CONFIDENCE and an agreed value at that moment of exchange. You can no more eat paper money to survive than you can gold or silver. All require CONFIDENCE of a third party accepting it in exchange. For the medium of exchange to be truly TANGIBLE it must have a practical utilitarian value and that historically is the distinction of a barter system vs. post-Bronze Age REPRESENTATIVE/INTANGIBLE based monetary systems predicated upon CONFIDENCE.”

I agree with Mr. Armstrong’s central point. Many gold advocates assert that gold is “real wealth” and has intrinsic value, which is patently wrong. Value is subjective and will change based on circumstances. For example, you might place a high value on gold in your current circumstances, but if you were stranded alone on an island with no hope of rescue then gold would probably have no value to you. Gold has exactly the same intrinsic value as a Federal Reserve note: zero.

However, he is very wrong when he states: “…it does not matter whatever the medium of exchange might be.” On the contrary, it matters more than almost anything in economics!

The problem with today’s monetary system isn’t that the general medium of exchange (money) has no intrinsic value. As noted above, money also had no intrinsic value when it was gold. The problem with today’s monetary system is that an unholy alliance of banks and government has near-total control of money. Banks have the power to create new money at whim, as does the government via the central bank.

Aside from the comparatively minor problem of causing the purchasing power of money to erode over time, the creation of money out of nothing by commercial banks and central banks distorts the relative-price signals that guide investment. This happens because the money enters the economy in a non-uniform way. In the US over the past several years, for example, most new money entered the economy via Primary Dealers who used it to purchase financial assets from other large speculators. The stock and bond markets were therefore the first and biggest beneficiaries of the new money, which led to an abnormally-large proportion of investment being directed towards strategies designed to profit from rising equity prices and low/falling interest rates. Such investment generally doesn’t add anything to the productive capacity of the economy. In fact, it often results in capital consumption.

Instead of saying “it does not matter whatever the medium of exchange might be”, what Mr. Armstrong should have said was: it does not matter whatever the medium of exchange might be, as long as it is chosen by the free market. Putting it another way, the government should stay out of the money business.

Here’s the wrong way to think about gold supply: “Although gold’s aboveground inventory is huge compared to current production, only a tiny fraction of this gold will usually be available for sale near the current price. Therefore, changes in mine supply can be important influences on the gold price.” I’ll now explain the right way to think about gold supply.

Whenever I point out that the supply side of the gold market consists of the entire aboveground gold inventory, which is probably somewhere between 150K tonnes and 200K tonnes, and that the gold-mining industry does no more than add about 1.5%/year to this inventory, an objection I often get is that only a tiny fraction of the aboveground inventory is available for sale at any time. This is of course true, and nobody who has a correct understanding of gold supply has ever claimed otherwise.

If all, or even most, of the aboveground supply were for sale at the current price then the price would not be able to rise. The price can rise and fall by substantial amounts, however, because there is always a huge range of prices at which the owners of the aboveground supply are prepared to sell. Moreover, this range is constantly changing based on changing personal circumstances and assessments of the market. In addition, some holders of existing aboveground gold will be planning to hold forever. These plans, which are themselves subject to change in response to changing circumstances, also factor into the formation of the gold price, in that a decision to withhold X ounces of supply can have a similar effect to a decision to buy X ounces.

As I write, gold is trading in the $1120s. It is therefore certain that a tiny fraction of the aboveground supply is currently changing hands in the $1120s and that there are plans in place to sell other tiny fractions in the $1130s, the $1140s, the $1150s, and all the way up to some extremely high number. Some people will also have plans to sell gold if the gold price falls below a particular level and there will be millions of people who have no specific selling intentions who will decide to sell in the future for some currently unforeseeable reason. At the same time there will be countless plans in place to buy at certain levels and millions of people with no present intention to buy who will, for reasons that aren’t currently foreseeable, decide to buy in the future.

It is the combination of these myriad plans that determines the price. Furthermore and as mentioned above, over the days ahead many of these plans will change. For example, some gold-buying/selling intentions will change based on what happens to the stock market or the bond market.

How does the gold-mining industry fit into the situation?

The gold-mining industry is not materially different from any other seller except that its plans are not price sensitive. Specifically, every year it will sell an amount that’s equivalent to about 1.5% of the total aboveground supply regardless of price. At this time four years ago it was selling gold in the $1800s and it is now selling roughly the same amount of gold in the $1100s. It is the ultimate price-taker. To put it another way: whatever price arises from the changing plans of gold owners and potential owners, that’s the price at which gold producers will sell.

On a related matter, due to the huge existing aboveground supply of gold there should never be a genuine shortage of physical gold. Obtaining more gold should always be solely a question price. A consequence is that the gold market should never go into “backwardation”, that is, the spot gold price should always be lower than the price for future delivery. Just to be clear: in an abundantly-supplied commodity market the futures price should be higher than the spot price by enough to eliminate the risk-free profit that could otherwise be had by selling the physical and buying the futures. That’s why it would be very significant if the gold market were to make a sustained and sizeable move into backwardation. Such a development would indicate that holders of the aboveground supply were withdrawing their gold from the market en masse and/or that the gold futures market was breaking down due a collapse in trust. Even the small and brief backwardations of the past two years have some significance*, although recent gold backwardation episodes have more to do with near-zero short-term US$ interest rates than gold supply/demand. The point is that gold backwardation is only important because the existing aboveground supply in saleable form dwarfs the rate of annual production.

In summary, the price of gold is where it is because of the range of prices at which existing holders intend to become sellers and the concurrent range of prices at which potential future holders intend to become buyers. These ranges are constantly in flux due to changing perceptions and circumstances.

*Keith Weiner has written extensively about the significance of gold backwardation at https://monetary-metals.com/.

Here is an excerpt from a commentary posted at TSI on 30th August:

During bull-market years and bear-market years, it is not uncommon for the US stock market to experience a quick decline of 10% or more at some point. For example, there was at least one quick decline of 10% or more in 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. In other words, 15 out of the 19 years from 1994 to 2012, inclusive, had quick declines of 10% or more. Only two of these years (2001 and 2008) had declines that could reasonably be called crashes.

The periods from mid-2003 through to early-2007 and late-2012 through to mid-2015 were unusual because they did NOT contain any quick 10%+ declines. In other words, the 12.5% decline in the S&P500 Index (SPX) from its July peak to last Monday’s low was not extraordinary in an historical context, it only seemed extraordinary because the market had gone an unusually long time without experiencing such a decline. That is, it only seemed extraordinary due to “recency bias” (the tendency to think that trends and patterns we observe in the recent past will continue in the future). Furthermore and as noted in the email sent to subscribers late last week, this year’s July-August decline was significantly smaller than the July-August decline that formed part of a bull-market correction in 2011.

In summary, what happened over the past few weeks was not a crash by any reasonable definition of the word and was only extraordinary in the context of the unusually long period of low volatility that preceded it.

That being said, the recent market action could well have longer-term significance. Just as the sudden increase in volatility in 2007 following a multi-year period of exceptionally-low volatility marked the end of a cyclical bull market, the sudden increase in volatility over the past few weeks could be marking the end of a cyclical bull market. In fact, there is a better-than-even-money chance that this is the case.

Also, while the recent quick decline doesn’t meet a reasonable definition of a stock-market crash, it could be part of a developing crash pattern. Recall from previous TSI commentaries that a US stock-market crash pattern involves an initial sharp decline in the 7%-15% range (step 1) followed by a rebound that retraces at least 50% of the initial decline (step 2) and then a drop back to support defined by the low of the initial decline (step 3). A breach of support can then result in a crash. Step 1 of a potential crash pattern is complete and step 2 is now very close to being complete. Note, however, that even if steps 2 and 3 are completed over the next couple of weeks the probability of a crash will still be low, albeit much higher than it was a few weeks ago.

After China’s government announced a small reduction in the Yuan’s foreign exchange (FX) value early last month, US Presidential aspirant Donald Trump immediately leapt onto the nearest available podium and exclaimed:

“They [the Chinese] continuously cut their currency. They devalue their currency. And I have been saying this for years. They have been doing this for years. This isn’t just starting. This was the largest devaluation they have had in two decades. They make it impossible for our businesses, our companies to compete. They think we’re run by a bunch of idiots. And what’s going on with China is unbelievable, the largest devaluation in two decades. It’s honestly…a disgrace.”

The fact is that even after its recent “devaluation”, relative to the US$ the Yuan is up by 8% over the past 5 years and 30% over the past 10 years. Here’s a chart showing the performance (a rising line on this chart indicates a strengthening of the Yuan relative to the US$). Take a look at this chart and then re-read the above Trump comments.

Is Trump really that poorly informed about what’s going on? Perhaps, but probably not. It’s clear that Trump has become the consummate populist — someone who is willing to say anything that he thinks will strike a chord with a large mass of voters, even if he knows that what he is saying is complete nonsense.

In the case of China’s so-called devaluation, however, it isn’t just bombastic billionaires with a lust for political power who have misrepresented the situation. Anyone who has claimed that the Yuan’s devaluation was primarily about boosting exports has a poor understanding.

The reality is that the Yuan is very over-valued and has begun to fall under the weight of this over-valuation. Furthermore, rather than deliberately devaluing the Yuan, as part of its effort to maintain the semblance of stability China’s government has actually been trying to prevent the Yuan from devaluing. This can be deduced from the fact that China’s government has been selling-down its FX reserves (selling reserve-currency (mostly US$) assets and buying the Yuan puts upward pressure on the Yuan’s relative value). However, trying to prop-up the exchange rate via the selling of FX reserves and the simultaneous buying of the local currency is a form of monetary tightening, which, according to the fatally-flawed Keynesian theories that guide policymakers the world over, is the last thing that China’s economy needs right now.

Faced with the choice of keeping the Yuan’s FX value at an unrealistically high level via a form of monetary tightening or allowing the currency to start falling under the weight of its own over-valuation, China’s policymakers opted for the latter. Actually, they didn’t have much of a choice.

The following charts are referenced in an email to TSI subscribers.

Despite the huge differences between gold and all other commodities, gold is still a commodity and its US$ price is still affected by the overall trend in commodity prices. In particular, a major decline in commodity prices will naturally put downward pressure on the gold price and a major advance in commodity prices will naturally put upward pressure on the gold price. That’s why gold’s performance can be most clearly ‘seen’ by comparing it to the performances of other commodities. When this comparison is done it becomes apparent that gold is now very expensive or at least very highly-priced relative to historical levels.

As evidence I present the following chart of the gold/CRB ratio. This chart shows that relative to the basket of commodities represented by the CRB Index, gold has just made a new multi-decade high.

When I look at the above chart I can’t help but think it’s just as well that gold is being manipulated lower, because just imagine how expensive it would otherwise be.

It won’t surprise me if gold moves even higher relative to commodities in general over the coming month in parallel with an on-going flight from risk. Also, I expect the long-term upward trend in the gold/CRB ratio to continue. Lastly, it’s clear that the operators of the great gold-market price-suppression scheme have been doing a lousy job and deserve to be fired for poor performance.

When I say that China’s bubble has burst I’m not referring to the recent large decline in the stock market. Although the stock market was the focal point of Chinese speculation during 2006-2007 and during an 8-month period beginning last October, in the grand scheme of things it is no more than a sideshow. Unfortunately, the stock market crash is a minor issue compared to the main problem.

The main problem is that China’s economy is the scene of a credit bubble of historic proportions. That this is indeed the case is evidenced by the following charts from an article posted by Steve Keen last week.

The first chart shows the ratio of private debt to GDP over the past 30 years for the US (the blue line), Japan (the red line) and China (the black line). In particular, the chart shows that China’s current private-debt/GDP is well above the 30-year high for US private-debt/GDP, which suggests that China’s private-debt bubble is bigger than the US bubble that burst in 2007-2008.

The above chart indicates that China’s private-debt bubble isn’t yet as big as the bubble that popped in Japan in the early-1990s, but the next chart shows that the rate of private-debt growth in China over the past several years is far in excess of anything that happened in either Japan or the US in the years leading up to their respective bubble peaks.

There’s no telling how big a credit bubble will become before it bursts, so the fact that China’s economy is host to one of history’s greatest-ever credit bubbles doesn’t mean that the bubble won’t continue to inflate for years to come. However, there are clues that China has transitioned to the long-term bust phase of the monetary-inflation-fueled boom-bust cycle, that is, there are clues that China’s bubble has burst.

Chief among these clues is the large and accelerating flow of money out of China. So-called “capital outflows” from China have been increasing over the past 12 months and according to a recent Telegraph article amounted to $190B over just the past 7 weeks.

Pressure caused by the flow of “capital” out of China led to the small Yuan devaluation that garnered huge media coverage a couple of weeks ago. In an effort to maintain the semblance of stability, if China’s government had been able to delay the inevitable and keep the Yuan propped-up at an artificially-high level for longer, it would have done so. In other words, the devaluation was a tacit admission by China’s government that the pressure caused by capital outflows had become too great to resist.

Once a private-sector credit bubble begins to unwind, the process is irreversible. The standard Keynesian remedy is to replace private debt with public debt, but all this does is add new distortions to the existing distortions.

At the end of the week before last the amount of physical gold held by the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD), the largest gold bullion ETF, fell to its lowest level since September-2008. What does this tell us?

In many TSI commentaries over the years and in a couple of posts at the TSI blog over the past year I’ve explained that changes in GLD’s bullion inventory are not directly related to the gold price. Neither a large rise nor a large fall in the gold price would necessarily require a change in GLD’s inventory, the reason being that as a fund that holds nothing other than gold bullion the net asset value (NAV) of a GLD share will naturally move by the same percentage amount as the gold price.

However, there is an indirect relationship between the gold price and GLD’s bullion inventory. At least, there has been such a relationship in the past. I am referring to the long-term correlation between the gold price and the GLD inventory that stems from changes in sentiment.

As traders in GLD shares become more optimistic about gold’s prospects they sometimes buy aggressively enough to push the market price of GLD above its NAV, which prompts an arbitrage trade by Authorised Participants (APs) involving the issuing of new GLD shares and the addition of physical gold to GLD’s inventory. And as traders in GLD shares become more pessimistic about gold’s prospects they sometimes sell aggressively enough to push the market price of GLD below its net asset value (NAV), prompting an arbitrage trade by APs involving the redemption of GLD shares and the removal of physical gold from GLD’s inventory.

That is, changes in GLD’s market price relative to its NAV create opportunities for arbitrage trades that adjust the supply of GLD shares and the amount of physical bullion held by the fund, thus ensuring that the market price never deviates far from the NAV. This modus operandi is common to all ETFs.

Since traders in GLD shares tend to become more optimistic in reaction to a rising price and less optimistic in reaction to a falling price, the most aggressive buying of GLD shares will tend to occur after the gold price has been trending higher for a while and the most aggressive selling of GLD shares will tend to occur after the gold price has been trending lower for a while. This explains why the following chart shows that the long-term correlation between the gold price and the GLD inventory is strongly positive and why the major downward trend in GLD’s inventory began well after the 2011 peak in the gold price.

The upshot is that the price trend is the cause and the GLD inventory is the effect.

In conclusion, here are three implications of the above:

1) Anyone who claims that the gold price has trended lower over the past few years due to the selling of gold from GLD’s inventory is getting cause and effect mixed up.

2) Anyone who claims that gold is being removed from GLD’s inventory to satisfy demand in Asia (or elsewhere) is either clueless about how ETFs work or is telling untruths to promote an agenda.

3) The early-August decline in GLD’s bullion inventory to a new multi-year low was consistent with the price action. It was evidence that GLD traders were getting increasingly bearish in reaction to lower prices. They loved it at $1600-$1900 and they hated it below $1100.

Almost every major price move in the financial markets looks predictable after it happens. This is called “hindsight bias”, which is defined thusly at Wikipedia:

“Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along effect or creeping determinism, is the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it.”

Almost everyone suffers from hindsight bias to some degree. Of special relevance to me, many newsletter writers and other commentators on the financial markets are afflicted by it. After the event they are quick to explain how a big price move was totally predictable, but often forget to explain why they didn’t predict it ahead of time or perhaps even predicted the opposite of what happened.

It’s important to recognise hindsight bias when it occurs in the market-related opinions/analyses/ramblings you read and when it occurs in yourself. And with regard to the latter it is important not to beat yourself up or wallow in regret when the future turns out to be different from what you expected. Regardless of how predictable an outcome appears to have been with the benefit of hindsight, you can be sure that prior to it happening there were other realistic possibilities. It’s just that these other possibilities shrank to nothingness when they didn’t happen.

The best way to deal with the fact that nothing is certain without the benefit of hindsight is to simply accept the possibility that the future will not pan-out as you expect and position yourself accordingly. In particular, don’t bet so heavily on a specific outcome that you will be financially devastated if something different happens.

Here are ten basic gold-market realities that are either unknown or ignored by many gold ‘experts’.

1. Supply always equals demand, with the price changing to maintain the equivalence. In this respect the gold market is no different from any other market that clears, but it’s incredible how often comments like “demand is increasing relative to supply” appear in gold-related articles.

2. The supply of gold is the total aboveground gold inventory, which is currently somewhere in the 150K-200K tonne range. Mining’s contribution is to increase the aboveground inventory by about 1.5% each year. An implication is that there should never be a shortage of gold.

3. Although supply always equals demand, the price of gold moves due to sellers being more motivated than buyers or the other way around. Moreover, the change in price is the only reliable indicator of whether the demand side (the buyers) or the supply side (the sellers) have the greater urgency. An implication is that if the price declines over a period then we know, with 100% certainty, that during this period sellers were more motivated (had greater urgency) than buyers.

4. No useful information about past or future price movements can be obtained by counting-up the amount of gold bought/sold in different parts of the gold market or different parts of the world. An implication is that the supply/demand analyses put out by GFMS and used by the World Gold Council are generally useless in terms of explaining past price moves and assessing future price prospects.

5. Demand for physical gold cannot be satisfied by “paper gold”.

6. Prices in the physical and paper (futures) markets are linked by arbitrage trading. For example, if speculative selling in the futures market drives the futures price down relative to the physical (or cash) price by a sufficient amount then arbitrage traders will profit by selling the physical and buying the futures, and if speculative buying in the futures market drives the futures price up relative to the physical (or cash) price by a sufficient amount then arbitrage traders will profit by selling the futures and buying the physical.

7. The change in the spread between the cash price and the futures price is the only reliable indicator of whether a price change was driven by the cash/physical market or the paper/futures market.

8. In a world where US$ interest rates are much lower than usual, the difference between the price of gold in the cash market and the price of gold for future delivery will usually be much smaller than usual. In particular, when the T-Bill yield is close to zero, as is the case today, there will typically be very little difference between the spot price of gold and the price for delivery in a few months. An implication is that in the current financial environment the occasional drift by gold into “backwardation” (the futures price lower than the spot price) will not be anywhere near as significant as it would be under more normal interest-rate conditions.

9. Major trends in the US$ gold price are determined by changes in the general level of confidence in the Fed and the US economy. An implication is that major price trends have nothing to do with changes in jewellery demand, mine supply, scrap supply, central bank buying/selling, and the amounts of gold being imported by India and China.

10. The amount of gold in COMEX warehouses and the inventories of gold ETFs follow the major price trend, meaning that changes in these high-profile inventories are effects, not causes, of changes in the gold price.

Commentators on the financial markets often make statements like “it’s a bull market” and “the trend is up” as if these were indisputable facts, but such statements are always opinions.

A statement of fact could reasonably be phrased along the lines of “the market was in an upward trend between date X and date Y”, because if a sequence of rising lows and rising highs occurred between two dates then the trend was, by definition, up during that period. However, it is impossible to know the direction of a market’s current price trend with absolute certainty, let alone the direction of its future price trend. The reason is that even if a market has just made a new high/low there will be some chance that this will turn out to be the ultimate high/low.

For example, it’s a fact that gold was in a bear market in US$ terms from its peak in September of 2011 through to 24th July 2015 (when it hit a 4-year low of $1072), but it is a matter of opinion as to whether gold is now in a bear market. The bear market could obviously still be in progress, but there is also a possibility that it ended on 24th July 2015. At the time of writing, nobody knows for sure.

Some market participants and commentators will draw a line on a chart and then make a statement such as “I will consider the trend to be up (or down) unless the market proves otherwise by moving below (or above) my line”. Fine, but there’s a big difference between claiming to know the direction of the price trend and working under the assumption that the trend is in a particular direction unless/until proven otherwise by some predetermined event. The valley of shattered financial dreams is littered with traders who were determined to stay ‘long’ or ‘short’ because they thought they KNEW the direction of the price trend.

The impossibility of knowing whether a bull/bear market or an up/down trend is going to continue, or even whether the market is currently in bull or bear mode, makes risk management essential. Someone who knew the future would never have to bother with risk management; they could, instead, risk everything on a particular outcome because for them it wouldn’t be a risk at all. But ordinary mortals always face a degree of uncertainty when making investment decisions and, as a result, always need to face the reality that these decisions could prove to be wrong. Be wary, then, of advisors who claim that there is only one possible direction for the future price of an investment.

But while unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility of being wrong is a defect in the approach of some investors, other investors suffer from the opposite problem in that they have a hard time maintaining a bullish or bearish view unless that view is continually being validated by the price action. That is, they are incapable of remaining confident in any opinion that doesn’t happen to conform to the current opinion of the manic-depressive mob. As a result they routinely get ‘sucked in’ following large price rises and ‘blown out’ following large price declines, as opposed to taking advantage of the mob’s proclivity to be wrong.

Therefore, as investors the challenge we all face is to strike a balance between staying the course in rough weather and preparing ourselves for the possibility that there could be unseen rocks up ahead.

A bullish divergence between the gold-mining sector of the stock market, as represented by the HUI and/or the XAU, and gold bullion involves the gold-mining sector having an upward bias while gold bullion has a downward bias or the gold-mining sector making a higher low while the bullion market makes a lower low. However, bullish divergences often don’t happen around major price bottoms. In fact, it is not uncommon for a major price bottom in gold-related investments to be preceded by a bearish divergence between the gold-mining indices and the metal. To be more specific, it is not uncommon for the gold-mining indices to be weak relative to gold bullion right up to the ultimate price bottom, at which point they suddenly become relatively strong.

Here are charts showing two historical examples of what I am referring to, either of which could be relevant to the present situation. The first chart shows the continuing downward bias in the XAU along with an upward bias in the US$ gold price in the weeks leading up to the XAU’s July-1986 bottom. The July-1986 bottom was followed by a huge multi-quarter rally in the gold-mining sector. The second chart shows the relentless decline in the HUI along with a flat gold price in the weeks leading up to the HUI’s November-2000 bottom. The November-2000 bottom was also followed by a huge multi-quarter rally in the gold-mining sector. The rally from the July-1986 bottom turned out to be the bear-market variety whereas the rally from the November-2000 bottom turned out to be the first leg of a new bull market, but from a practical speculation perspective an X% gain in a bear market is just as good as an X% gain in a bull market.

For comparison purposes, here is a chart showing the present situation.

It’s obviously too soon to know if the 10th August rebound in the gold-mining sector marked the start of a multi-quarter rally or even a 1-2 month rally, but the potential is there.