US stocks are behaving amazingly well given the political and economic near-chaos of the past few months. This is probably the first recession that inflated rather than popped financial asset bubbles.
Why? Because panicked governments and central banks are dumping trillions of play-money dollars into the system, a big part of which flow directly into the brokerage accounts of the 1%.
Suddenly it seems that nearly all of The Banks and Bullion Banks are raising price forecasts and rallying around the precious metals. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
That’s the question, of course. Banks like Goldman Sachs have earned a reputation for leading their clients into taking the opposite side of whichever trade the firm prefers. If you’ve forgotten the origin of this story, here’s a link from 2012:
Silver prices rose nearly 163% from its Coronavirus-panic lows of $11.30 to its peak on August 6 of $29.82. However, following that incredible rise, silver has since fallen dramatically: from its August 6 peak down to its September 23 low of $21.64 is a drop of nearly 28% in just six weeks. As this article is going to press, the precious metal is trading in the middle region of that range at $24.50.
What is ahead for silver? Is this sell-off over, or is there more downside to come?
America’s key institutions are broken. More people wake up daily to that reality. They are preparing for the moment this realization dawns on Americans at large, which explains why the markets for physical bullion are so active.
Markets certainly aren’t working. Perpetual central bank intervention, rampant Wall Street cheating, high frequency trading, index funds, and many other factors have divorced the price of securities from fundamental realities, such as high unemployment.
The adjacent screen capture from CNBC in April says it all about how badly markets are doing at reflecting true economic fundamentals.
The current pullback in the precious metals sector is a buying opportunity. Since trading at a closing high of $2,064 an ounce on August 6, gold bullion has declined 8.34% as of this writing.1 Gold mining shares have followed suit, declining 9.26% since the August high. It is possible that gold and related mining shares could continue to chop sideways to lower until the U.S. presidential election results are known and even into yearend as the implications are sorted out. Whatever the electoral outcome, the path towards monetary debasement is bipartisan. It is crucial for investors to focus on the long-term trend and to avoid the distractions of short-term timing considerations.
They say that time travels are impossible. But we just went back to the 1960s! At least in the field of the monetary policy. And all because of a new Fed’s framework. So, please fasten your seat belts and come with me into the past and present of monetary policy – to determine the future of gold!
At the end of August 2020, the Fed has modified its Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy – for the first time since its creation in 2012. As a reminder, the Fed will now target not merely a 2 percent rate of inflation, but an average inflation rate of 2 percent, which allows overshooting after the periods of undershooting. So, the Fed will try to compensate for periods of low inflation with periods of high inflation . Hence, on average , we will see a more accessible monetary policy and higher inflation – Good news for the gold bulls.
Precious metals investors faced choppy market seas this week. Gold bobbed to a slight decline while silver essentially treaded water through Thursday’s close. Both are advancing strongly today.
Metals markets are being overshadowed by equities markets. The S&P 500 broke out to a 5-week high on Thursday. The rally comes on a rising tide of Federal Reserve liquidity coupled with on again, off again hopes for a stimulus deal in Washington.
More stimulus is definitely coming. The only question is how many trillions and whether they get dished out before or after the election.
After soaring in a powerful upleg, the gold miners’ stocks have been grinding lower for a couple months now. This ongoing correction is increasingly draining enthusiasm for this small contrarian sector, working to rebalance sentiment. Gold-stock price levels relative to gold suggest this necessary and healthy selloff hasn’t fully run its course yet. But once this passes, current valuations remain very bullish for the gold miners.
Unlike the vast majority of other industries, gold miners’ earnings are almost totally dependent on a single variable. That’s the price of gold. The profitability of excavating and selling gold directly levers prevailing gold prices. The costs of producing this metal are largely fixed, mostly determined during mine-planning stages when engineers decide which gold-bearing ores to mine, how to dig to them, and how to process them.
Silver’s dazzling parabolic surge this summer was overwhelmingly driven by enormous silver-ETF-share buying. Led by momentum-chasing millennial traders, unprecedentedly-huge amounts of stock-market capital deluged into the dominant SLV iShares Silver Trust silver ETF. But since silver’s resulting lofty peak, silver-ETF-share selling has been mounting. An acceleration is a major downside risk for silver prices.
Silver has certainly lived up to its wildly-volatile reputation this year. Ahead of mid-March’s brutal stock panic driven by governments’ heavy-handed national lockdowns to slow the spread of COVID-19, silver was inconspicuously grinding higher. In late February before pandemic fears flared in the US, silver was running $18.62. But it was then soon sucked into the epic maelstrom of fear as stock markets cratered.
The real US GDP plunged with a 31.4 percent annual rate in Q2 of 2020. In that regard, what’s next for the American economy and the gold market?
We all know that the second quarter was disastrous for the US economy. And now, it’s official. Last week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis published the third real GDP estimate in the Q2. According to the report, the real GDP decreased at an annual rate of 31.4 percent (slightly better than the second estimate of 31.7-percent plunge), or 9 percent more from the previous quarter and the second quarter of 2019, as the chart below shows. In other words, the US economy has suffered the sharpest contraction since the government started keeping records in 1947.
October always brings a sense of foreboding given its history, and we can only hope that the rest of the month will go significantly better than the start. Gold tends to move to the forefront when things go bump in the night, but then again, gold has been in the forefront for most of 2020 – prompting some analysts to proclaim the launch of a new leg in its long-term secular bull market.
Before I wade into my Q4 strategy analysis, I have to tell you that prior to last Tuesday’s “debate”, I was leaning toward a “neutral” investment strategy largely based upon the 2016 outcome where heavily-favoured Hillary Clinton was upset by the Trump Train at the last hour and in direct opposition to what EVERY poll was predicting. I have a theory about the 2016 election and just exactly WHY the pollsters got it so completely wrong. I will explain.
Silver’s dazzling parabolic surge this summer was overwhelmingly driven by enormous silver-ETF-share buying. Led by momentum-chasing millennial traders, unprecedentedly-huge amounts of stock-market capital deluged into the dominant SLV iShares Silver Trust silver ETF. But since silver’s resulting lofty peak, silver-ETF-share selling has been mounting. An acceleration is a major downside risk for silver prices.
Silver has certainly lived up to its wildly-volatile reputation this year. Ahead of mid-March’s brutal stock panic driven by governments’ heavy-handed national lockdowns to slow the spread of COVID-19, silver was inconspicuously grinding higher. In late February before pandemic fears flared in the US, silver was running $18.62. But it was then soon sucked into the epic maelstrom of fear as stock markets cratered.
Precious metals markets are advancing this week as a massive new stimulus bill makes its way through Congress.
On Thursday evening the House of Representatives passed a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill on a party line vote.
It’s a big deal whenever Congress commits to spending that kind of cash, especially when it’s money that has to be borrowed into existence. These days, though, it’s not that unusual for Washington to dole out trillions of dollars at a time.
Note: all references to inflation are of the quantity of money and not to the effect on prices unless otherwise indicated.
In last week’s article I showed why empirical evidence of fiat money collapses are relevant to monetary conditions today. In this article I explain why the purchasing power of the dollar is hostage to foreign sellers, and that if the Fed continues with current monetary policies the dollar will follow the same fate as John Law’s livre in 1720. As always in these situations, there is little public understanding of money and the realisation that monetary policy is designed to tax people for the benefit of their government will come as an unpleasant shock. The speed at which state money then collapses in its utility will be swift. This article concentrates on the US dollar, central to other fiat currencies, and where the monetary and financial imbalances are greatest.
For the week ending September 25, 2020:
The gold miners’ stocks have just been hammered, plunging to new correction lows. That shattered their indexes’ 50-day moving averages, pounding nails in the coffin of this sector’s recent high consolidation. This necessary correction probably isn’t over yet. It is still small and short compared to this bull market’s precedent, the gold stocks are nowhere near oversold, and they are heading into a seasonal-plunge month.
Seeing the gold stocks rolling over into a correction shouldn’t surprise anyone. They enjoyed a great run, as evident in their leading and dominant sector benchmark the GDX VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF. From mid-March’s pandemic stock-panic lows to early August, GDX rocketed 134.1% higher in just 4.8 months! That powerful and fast upleg left gold stocks seriously overbought, necessitating a correction.
This article examines two inflationary experiences in the past in an attempt to predict the likely outcome of today’s monetary policies. The German hyperinflation of 1923 demonstrated that it took surprisingly little monetary inflation to collapse the purchasing power of the paper mark. This is relevant to the fate of the “whatever it takes” inflationary policies of today’s governments and their central banks. The management of John Law’s Mississippi bubble, when he used paper money to rig the market is precisely what central bank policy is aimed at achieving today. By binding the fate of the currency to that of financial assets, as John Law proved, it is the currency that is destroyed.
GLOBAL ROYAL FAMILIES:
In an ephemeral world, few things survive. I am not talking about species or human beings whose existence on earth is also transitory. Instead I am referring to social and financial systems which are now coming to an end.
In July 2009 I wrote an article called The Dark Years Are Here. It was reprinted again in September 2018.
Here is an extract from my original article:
“The Dark Years will be extremely severe for most countries both financially and socially. In many countries in the Western world there will be a severe depression and it will be the end of the welfare state. Most private and state pension schemes are also likely to collapse. It will be a worldwide depression but some countries may only have a deep recession. There will be famine, homelessness and misery resulting in social as well as political unrest. Different type of government leaders and regimes are likely to result from this.
How long will the Dark Years last? There is a book called ”The Fourth Turning” written by Neil Howe.
Gold has been consolidating high since early August, when it rocketed parabolic on colossal gold-ETF demand. That 6-week-old sideways drift has worked off some greed and overboughtness, but plenty still remains. So gold isn’t out of the woods yet for this essential sentiment-rebalancing selloff. With residual overboughtness still extreme, gold faces considerable downside risk heading into its biggest seasonal selloff.
Across the financial markets, absolute price levels usually don’t matter much in technical and sentimental terms. Though they are important fundamentally. Supply and demand always converge to drive prices to sustainable levels, and over time traders come to accept them as normal. But how fast prices surged or plunged to current prevailing levels is exceedingly important, greatly affecting their short-term staying power.
When someone asks what the price of gold is, the answer depends on which gold market he means.
In most cases, the different gold markets are close enough that the minor differences are insignificant. TV news anchors just want to know if the price is in a major trend, up or down (up). Old Uncle Ernie could be reminiscing about the bull market of the 1970s and comparing the price back then to the price today (spoiler: it’s higher today).
But if you’re studying gold, you may be curious about the differences between the three markets:
Daily coronavirus cases may be down in the United States, but that is no reason to be complacent, especially given that cold and flu season is only a few weeks away, says the nation’s top doctor.
In a roundtable discussion Thursday at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that “we need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter, because it’s not going to be easy.” He compared the pandemic to the early days of HIV in terms of how quickly it escalated, and how it might continue to escalate, if current trends of low mask-wearing and social distancing continue. “We’ve been through this before,” he said. “Don’t ever, ever underestimate the potential of the pandemic. And don’t try and look at the rosy side of things.”
Asset bubbles are a repeating theme. In 2017, bitcoin entered a bubble driving prices from $1000 to $19,000. The recent Bubble in Tesla marked a rally from $70 (post-split price) to over $500 in less than 6-months. Our work supports a bubble in gold and precious metals later this decade. This article will explore the various aspects of a bubble and how one could prepare.
Below are the three ingredients often associated with bubbles.
The big gold-ETF buying that catapulted gold higher into early August has gone missing in action. That’s why gold stalled out since, drifting sideways flirting with a correction. To continue powering higher, gold needs these major stock-market-capital inflows via exchange-traded funds to resume. The near-term fortunes for the precious-metals complex are heavily dependent on how American traders position in gold ETFs.
For better or worse, exchange-traded funds are increasingly dominating gold’s price trends. Their relative importance has been mounting for years, and cannot be overstated. Major gold ETFs are becoming the global gold market. Despite lingering concerns about gold ETFs’ physical bullion holdings, speculators and investors keep flocking to them. They are the easiest way to get gold portfolio exposure, quick and cheap.
The U.S. stock market plunged last week. Will gold follow suit?
Last week, the U.S. stock market has seen strong selling activity. The S&P 500 Index has declined about 7 percent from its peak, while the Nasdaq Composite Index plunged more than 10 percent (entering a correction territory), below 11,000, as the chart below shows. It was the tech sector’s worst drop since the end of March, if not the quickest correction ever.
There can be little doubt that macroeconomic policies are failing around the world. The fallacies being exposed are so entrenched that there are bound to be twists and turns yet to come.
This article explains the fallacies behind inflation, deflation, economic performance and interest rates. They arise from the modern states’ overriding determination to access the wealth of its electorate instead of being driven by a genuine and considered concern for its welfare. Monetary inflation, which has become runaway, transfers wealth to the state from producers and consumers, and is about to accelerate. Everything about macroeconomics is now with that single economically destructive objective in mind.
By David Haggith – Re-Blogged From Gold Eagle
I just finished with one of my readers, Bob Unger, and I thought Bob’s questions led to a well-rounded expression of how, over the past two years, our economy got to the collapse we are in now, how predictable the Federal Reserve’s policy changes and failures were, why economic recovery has stalled, and why the stock market was certain to crash twice this year, including why the second crash would likely hit around September.
I’ve found Bob’s interviews with others interesting, so I recommend checking out his YouTube page. I had no idea where the interview below would go, but it wound up encapsulating my main themes for the past two years:
(Other interviews I’ve done are linked in the right side bar where I usually just let people stumble onto them on their own.)
The Fed has now officially changed its inflation target from 2%, to one that averages above 2% in order to compensate for the years where inflation was below its target. First off, the Fed has a horrific track record with meeting its first and primary mandate of stable prices. Then, in the wake of the Great Recession, it redefined stable prices as 2% inflation—even though that means the dollar’s purchasing power gets cut in half in 36 years. Now, following his latest Jackson Hole speech, Chair Powell has adopted a new definition of stable prices; one where its new mandate will be to bring inflation above 2% with the same degree and duration in which it has fallen short of its 2% target.
Since posting new record highs in early August, the gold market has consolidated above $1,900/oz support.
A close below the $1,900 level would carry bearish implications for the near term.
Alternatively, a move back above $2,000/oz would likely be followed through to the upside with a rally to fresh highs. Silver, in turn, could be expected to run to new multi-year highs above $30/oz.
The gold miners’ stocks are mired in correction mode, which isn’t surprising after their mighty post-stock-panic upleg. Huge buying catapulting them higher left this sector extremely overbought. Corrections are normal and healthy after prices get too stretched technically. They eradicate upleg toppings’ excessive greed, rebalancing sentiment. That paves the way for bulls’ next uplegs, and offers great buying opportunities.
The most-popular gold-stock benchmark today is the GDX VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF. It includes the world’s biggest and best gold miners, dwarfing its peers in size. Launched way back in May 2006, GDX’s first-mover advantage has grown insurmountable. This ETF’s $17.9b in net assets this week are running 31.4x larger than its next biggest competitor’s in the 1x-long major-gold-miners-ETF space. GDX is king.
If you think that price inflation runs at about 1.6% you have fallen for the BLS’s CPI myth. Two independent analysts using different methods — the Chapwood Index and Shadowstats.com — prove that prices are rising at a far faster rate, more like 10% annually and have been doing so since 2010.
This article discusses the consequences of price inflation suppression, particularly in the light of Jerome Powell’s Jackson Hole speech when he downgraded the importance of price inflation in the Fed’s policy objectives in favour of targeting employment.
It concludes that the reconciliation between the BLS CPI figure and the true rate of price inflation is inevitable and will be catastrophic for the Fed’s policy of suppressing interest rates, its maximisation of the “wealth effect” of inflated financial asset prices, and for the dollar itself.
I’ve been saying the stock market will take a turn for the worst sometime between mid-August and October. Numerous market metrics now show a market that looks ready to turn over. The bear may soon be back in charge.
The futility of trying to stop the stampeding herd and the Fed fallacy
When I pointed out last January that the market was more perilously overpriced than ever and imminently ready to crash, the stock market took one of its most spectacular dives in history just a month later. (See: “Stock Market More Overpriced and Perilous Than Anytime in History.”)
The buzz word of Central Bank Chiefs at Jackson Hole was INFLATION: “The Fed to tolerate higher inflation” says Powell, “ECB to inject more monetary stimulus to ensure inflation” says ECB Chief Economist, “Bank of England has ample fire power to support UK economy…… and not tighten monetary policy until inflation returns“ says Governor of BoE.
So here we have the Chiefs of three of the mightiest central banks in the world speaking with one voice and telling the world that the solution to the world’s financial woes is inflation. Kuroda, the Governor of the Bank of Japan would have said the same since they have been trying to get inflation above one percent for almost 30 years.
By Stefan Gleason – Re-Blogged From Headline Wealth
Public and private pension plans face a dual crisis.
The first and most obvious threat to pensioners is that defined-benefit vehicles are severely underfunded. By one estimate, pension systems taken as a whole are $638 billion in the red.
Some are in better shape financially than others. But all pension plans will have to reckon with a second huge challenge going forward.
Namely, they are already entirely unable to meet their stated return objectives by owning conventional “safe” interest-bearing instruments such as Treasury bonds.
By Clint Siegner – Re-Blogged From Money Metals Exchange
Bullion investors took a breather when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Demand for coins, rounds, and bars fell significantly on the day after election day and stayed down for the next 3 years.
After 8 years of Barack Obama, ultra-loose fed policy and a historic run-up in the national debt, investors felt things would get better under Trump.
As the Federal Reserve embarks on a new campaign to raise inflation rates, markets may be in for a change in character.
On Wednesday, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced that the central bank would be targeting an inflation “average” of 2%. By the Fed’s measures, inflation has been running below 2% in recent years. So, getting to a 2% average in the years ahead will require above 2% inflation for a significant period.
Here’s Powell attempting to explain himself from central bankers’ virtual Jackson Hole conference:
Those in favor of Judy Shelton’s approval by Congress, pursuant to her nomination to the Federal Reserve Board Of Governors, should not be surprised by the torrent of criticism directed at her.
A letter published and signed by former Federal Reserve officials and staffers called on the Senate to reject her nomination, stating that “Ms. Shelton’s views are so extreme and ill-considered as to be an unnecessary distraction from the tasks at hand…”
Her “extreme” views were referred to in a general statement of condemnation:
The mid-tier gold miners in this sector’s sweet spot for upside potential have had a spectacular run since March’s stock panic! That catapulted them to extremely-overbought levels, necessitating a correction to rebalance sentiment. The mid-tiers’ just-reported Q2’20 operational and financial results reveal whether those big gains were fundamentally-righteous, and whether more major upside is likely in coming months.
Mid-tier gold miners produce between 300k to 1m ounces of gold annually, more than smaller juniors but less than larger majors. Mid-tiers are far less risky than juniors, and amplify gold’s uplegs much more than majors. Their unique mix of sizable diversified gold production, material output-growth potential, and smaller market capitalizations is ideal for outsized gains. They are the best gold stocks for traders to own.
Retail sales growth has slowed down. What does it mean for the U.S. economy and the gold market? Retail sales increased 1.2 percent in July. The growth was worse than expected, which hit the U.S. stock market. As the chart below shows, the number was also much weaker than in the two previous months (8.4 percent gain in June and 18.3 percent jump in May), when it seemed that the economy started to rebound.
The major gold miners’ stocks have skyrocketed since mid-March’s stock panic, attracting in a deluge of new capital inflows. That recently catapulted this normally-contrarian sector to extremely-overbought levels, necessitating a rebalancing correction. The gold miners are just finishing reporting their operating and financial results from the challenging last quarter. Was gold stocks’ huge upleg fundamentally justified?
The leading and dominant gold-stock benchmark and trading vehicle today is the GDX VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF. Launched way back in May 2006, GDX’s first-mover advantage has grown into an insurmountable lead. With $16.8b of net assets this week, GDX commands a staggering 31.7x more capital than its next-biggest 1x-long major-gold-miners-ETF competitor! GDX is really the only game in town.
The disruptions caused by the pandemic of Covid-19 forced people, companies, governments, and organizations to challenge their basis assumptions about their ways of life and conduct. Some of them might be trivial such as more frequent and thorough hand-washing, but others are much more important, amongst them putting more emphasis on health that came suddenly under threat and social relationships that were so missing during the quarantine. So, the key question is when the epidemic is fully contained, what will be the “new normal” – and how it will affect the gold market?
The first characteristic feature of the post-pandemic world will be more people working and getting things done from home. The digital transformation has already started before the coronavirus jumped on human beings, but the Covid-19 epidemic has accelerated its pace, with further expansion in videoconferencing, online teaching, e-commerce, telemedicine, and fintech. After all these long years, it turned out that all these boring meetings really could have been e-mails or chats via Zoom, Skype or Teams. What does it mean for the economy and society?
On Monday, the price of silver continued its epic skyrocket. We say this without hyperbole, this kind of price action does not happen every day. Or every year. It occurs perhaps once a decade. And the same can be said for Monetary Metals writing so many articles about silver in the span of a week!
So we wrote yet another article, showing that the fundamentals are keeping up, even though the price was rising (the hallmark of the last decade has been that rising abundance occurs with rising price—price brings more metal out of private hoards).
But before it could go live (it was written Monday night), the price was already moving down. And, holy cow, did it move down!
From $29, it dropped to under $25. About -14%.
Two major asset classes are major beneficiaries of the unlimited money printing and credit creation that is now taking place globally. One of them will end in tears and the other one has just started a major secular bull market.
As the world economy and financial system is disintegrating, investors are under the illusion that all is well with many stock markets still not far from their all-time bubble highs.
Gold has recently been setting all time highs on a nominal basis and has broken the $2,000 an ounce barrier. It had been eight years since a new high had been set, and this is obviously an important event.
However, when compared to the magnitude of gold gains over a secular cycle, the recent price movements have been quite small in comparison to what history shows us could be on the way. To see why this is the case, we need to move from measuring the consistency of the price advantage that gold builds over stocks in a secular cycle, to the cumulative magnitude of the relative gains.
As we will explore, for two investors starting with equal assets, the historical norm is for an investor in the correct asset to have 2 times to 5 times the net worth of an investor in the wrong asset, within 3-5 years of a new secular cycle starting. This extraordinary degree of wealth creation/destruction is so large that it may seem improbable – but it is just what history shows us, and a swing in wealth of this magnitude occurred in all four of the secular cycles studied herein.
