Tag Archives: MMT

Extreme Disconnect Between Paper And Physical Gold

Financial Markets, Gold, Market Manipulation, Precious Metals, U.S. Economy, , , , , ,

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it” – George Orwell

The western Central Banks, led by the BIS, are operating to push the price of gold and silver as low as possible.  It’s a highly motivated effort to remove the proverbial canary from the coal mine before it dies.  A soaring price of gold signals to the world that the Central Banks have lost control of their fiat currency, debt-induced profligacy.

“In the last 10 years,” George said, “the central banks have effectively shown that when there is a real crisis, gold actually goes down — and it’s so blatant, it’s a joke.” – Peter George, South Africa’s “Mister Gold,” at 2005 GATA conference

The signs of massive intervention abounded last week:   record levels of PNT and EFP transactions;  aggressive interventionary gold swap transactions by the BIS in January/February (per the monthly BIS statement of operations) – and presumably this month as well;  and a big physical dump of gold last Thursday at the p.m. London gold price fix which knocked down the gold price. These opaque Central Bank operations thereby triggered even more paper selling on the Comex.

The most overt signal of the disconnect between the physical and paper markets is coming from large international bullion coin dealers. I have seen three letters from large dealers (BullionStar, JM Bullion and SD Bullion) which detail shortages and an inability to replace what’s being sold.   Here’s insightful commentary from BullionStar sent out over the weekend:

“The bullion supply squeeze and shortages are getting worse and worse every day. We are working very hard to source metal but regret that we can not replenish most products as they sell out. We will be getting some additional inventory which is already on the way in transit to us by the end of March. Following that, our expectation is that we may not be able to replenish for months…

Paper gold is traded on the and on the in New York. Both of these markets are derivative markets and neither is connected to the physical gold market…By now it is abundantly clear that the physical gold market and paper gold market will disconnect. If the paper market does not correct this imbalance, widespread physical shortages of precious metals will be prolonged and may lead to the entire monetary system imploding.” – Torgny Persson, founder & CEO of BullionStar

The removal of supply/demand price discovery by the oppressive manipulation of gold and silver in the paper derivative markets has created a shortage in the availability of physical metal, with buyers currently willing pay 50% above the spot price of silver.

This is highly reminiscent of the price take-down that occurred in 2008, a few months head of Helicopter Ben launching his money helicopters AND the massive taxpayer bailout of the big banks.  Back then silver eagles were trading at 50-60% over the spot price. This preceded the remarkable 2 1/2 year price rally in gold and silver that took gold up to an all-time high.

Historically, official induced market intervention fails. And when it fails, it fails spectacularly.  Gold ran from $700 to $1900 and silver ran from $7 to $49 between late 2008 and mid-2011, before the bullion banks were able to gain control of  the price discovery mechanism.  This time around the systemic problems – notwithstanding the virus crisis – are far worse than the problems that erupted in 2008.

Barring some type of systemic debt and monetary reset – and I have no idea what something like that would look like –  gold and silver will eventually be trading several multiples higher than their current price.

Modern Monetary Theory, Centralized Control And Gold

Financial Markets, Gold, Market Manipulation, Precious Metals, U.S. Economy, , ,

My friend and colleague, Chris Powell, Treasurer of GATA, wrote a compelling essay on Modern Monetary Theory. MMT has been in operation by the western Central Banks since Bretton Woods. The “QE” program that began in 2008 is the most recent and blatant implementation of MMT. This is a must-read if you are interesting in understanding the hidden mechanism at work that is destroying the United States.

Modern Monetary Theory, which has been getting much attention lately, is so controversial mainly because it is misunderstood. It is misunderstood first because it is not a theory at all but a truism.

That is, MMT holds essentially that a government issuing a currency without a fixed link to a commodity like gold or silver is constrained in its currency issuance only by inflation and devaluation.

This is a very old observation in economics, going back centuries, even to the classical economist Adam Smith, and perhaps first formally acknowledged by the U.S. government with a speech given in 1945 by the chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Beardsley Ruml. The speech was published in 1946.

Ruml said:

“The necessity for a government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments, but it is not true for a national government. Two changes of the greatest consequence have occurred in the last 25 years which have substantially altered the position of the national state with respect to the financing of its current requirements.

“The first of these changes is the gaining of vast new experience in the management of central banks. The second change is the elimination, for domestic purposes, of the convertibility of the currency into gold. Final freedom from the domestic money market exists for every sovereign national state where there exists an institution which functions in the manner of a modern central bank and whose currency is not convertible into gold or into some other commodity.”

Ruml noted that in a fiat currency system such as the United States had adopted by 1945, government did not need to tax to raise revenue but could create as much money as it wanted and deploy it as it thought best, using taxes instead to give value to its currency and implement social and economic policy.

MMT does not claim that the government should create and deploy infinite money. It claims that money can be created and deployed as much as is necessary to improve general living conditions and eliminate unemployment until the currency begins to lose value.

The second big misunderstanding about MMT is that it is not a mere policy proposal but is actually the policy that has been followed by the U.S. government for decades without the candor of Ruml’s 1945 acknowledgment.

The problem with MMT is that, in its unacknowledged practice, it already has produced what its misunderstanding critics fear it for: the creation and deployment of infinite money and credit by central banks as well as vast inflation.

In accordance with MMT, this creation of infinite money and credit has necessitated central banking’s “financial repression” — its suppression of interest rates and commodity prices through both open and surreptitious intervention in bond and futures markets and the issuance of financial derivatives.

That is, since money creation in the current financial system is restrained only by inflation, this restraint can be removed or lessened with certain price controls, which, to be effective, must be disguised, lest people discern that there are no markets anymore, just interventions.

The British economist Peter Warburton perceived this in his 2001 essay, “The Debasement of World Currency — It Is Inflation, But Not As We Know It“:

“What we see at present is a battle between the central banks and the collapse of the financial system fought on two fronts. On one front, the central banks preside over the creation of additional liquidity for the financial system to hold back the tide of debt defaults that would otherwise occur. On the other, they incite investment banks and other willing parties to bet against a rise in the prices of gold, oil, base metals, soft commodities, or anything else that might be deemed an indicator of inherent value.

“Their objective is to deprive the independent observer of any reliable benchmark against which to measure the eroding value not only of the U.S. dollar but of all fiat currencies. Equally, they seek to deny the investor the opportunity to hedge against the fragility of the financial system by switching into a freely traded market for non-financial assets. [EMPHASIS ADDED.]

“Central banks have found the battle on the second front much easier to fight than the first. Last November I estimated the size of the gross stock of global debt instruments at $90 trillion for mid-2000. How much capital would it take to control the combined gold, oil, and commodity markets? Probably no more than $200 billion, using derivatives.

“Moreover, it is not necessary for the central banks to fight the battle themselves, although central bank gold sales and gold leasing have certainly contributed to the cause. Most of the world’s large investment banks have overtraded their capital so flagrantly that if the central banks were to lose the fight on the first front, then the stock of the investment banks would be worthless. Because their fate is intertwined with that of the central banks, investment banks are willing participants in the battle against rising gold, oil, and commodity prices.”

This “financial repression” and commodity price suppression have channeled into financial and real estate assets — the assets of property owners — the vast inflation resulting from the policy of infinite money creation, thereby diverting inflation from assets whose prices are measured by government’s consumer price indexes. Meanwhile those indexes are constantly distorted and falsified to avoid giving alarm.

As a result the ownership class is enriched and the working class impoverished. Of course this is exactly the opposite of what MMT’s advocates intend.

But while the monetary science conceived by MMT people well might develop a formula for operating a perfect monetary system with full employment and prosperity for all, the monetary system always will confer nearly absolute power on its operators, and as long as the operators are human, such power will always corrupt many of them — even MMT’s advocates themselves.

That’s why market rigging is the inevitable consequence of MMT as it is now practiced and why the world is losing its free and competitive markets to monopoly and oligopoly and becoming less democratic and more totalitarian.

So what is the solution?

Maybe some libertarianism would help: Let governments use whatever they want as money, but let individuals do the same and don’t mess with them. Gold, cryptocurrencies, seashells, oxen, whatever — leave them alone.

Most of all, require government to be completely transparent in whatever it does in the markets. If government wants to rig markets, require that it be done in the open and reported contemporaneously.

After all, the world can hardly know where to go when it isn’t permitted to know where it is.

MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) Thoroughly Disemboweled

Financial Markets, Gold, Market Manipulation, Precious Metals, U.S. Economy, , , ,

The best I can figure is that some very liberal, trust-fund Phd Sociologist professors at Bennington hooked with a group of radical Public Policy students from Harvard somewhere in a cabin in Vermont and did a group analysis of John Maynard Keynes’ “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” after ingesting copious quantities of LSD. From out of that drug-addled assemblage, MMT sprung to life in “socially correct” political circles in NYC and DC.

Short of that explanation for the current obsession with MMT – also known as “Magical Money Tree” –  among the elitist intellectual trust-fund liberal political class, I have a hard time explaining the enthusiasm for this comic book version of economics.

A good friend of mine, who happens to be highly intelligent and obsessive about research, is thoroughly confounded by the idea anyone in their right mind would consider MMT as a serious policy tool other than as a mechanism to accelerate the confiscation of wealth and liberties from the public.

The best I could offer is that legitimizing MMT with academic endorsements is a precursor to the next round of QE, which will have to be Weimar in scale.  Occam’s Razor applies here. It’s that simple.  A Government unable  slow down its spending deficit has no other means of paying its bills other than to raise taxes to a level that will trigger mass revolt or use its printing press.  You see where this is going…

Interestingly, a writer/analyst who springs from the left, and who otherwise I would have thought to have been a proponent of MMT, thoroughly explores and disembowels the concept.  You can literally sense the author’s struggle to find a use for MMT:

We have a private economy driven by exploitation, overwork, asset stripping, and ecological destruction. MMT has little or nothing on offer to fight any of this. The job guarantee is a contribution, though a flawed one, and it’s not at the core of the theory, which proceeds from the keystroke fantasy. That fantasy looks like a weak response to decades of anti-tax mania coming from the Right, which has left many liberals looking for an easy way out. It would be sad to see the socialist left, which looks stronger than it has in decades, fall for this snake oil. It’s a phantasm, a late-imperial fever dream, not a serious economic policy.

Ordinarily I would have briefly skimmed through this essay. But if you are making an effort to be open-minded and understand the genesis, history and follies of MMT, it’s worth spending the time to read this piece in its entirety – then you can have a good laugh:  Modern Monetary Theory Isn’t Helping by Doug Henwood

Modern Monetary Theory isn’t just an insult to one’s intelligence, it’s a complete affront to common sense.

Gold Is Historically Cheap To The Stock Market

Financial Markets, Gold, Market Manipulation, Precious Metals, , , ,

“The monetary authorities running the paper-money schemes of the present are anxious to forestall significant rises in the paper price of gold, because such rises would diminish confidence in the lasting value of the paper money in use today.” – Hugo Salinas Price

The price of gold was victimized by yet another raid on the Comex paper gold market on Friday. The pattern has been repetitive over the last 15-20 years:  hedge funds push the price of gold higher accumulating a massive net long position in gold futures while the Comex bullion banks feed their appetite, building up a mirror-image large net short position.

A raid is implemented typically on a Friday after the rest of the world has shut down for the weekend, the Comex banks begin bombing the Comex with paper, which in turn sets-off hedge fund stop-losses set while the market is moving higher. This triggers a “flush” of hedge fund long positions which the banks use to cover short positions, booking huge profits.

As evidence, the preliminary Comex open interest report based on Friday’s activity shows the gold contract o/i dropped 14,316 contracts. For the week, gold contract o/i is down over 26,000 contracts representing 2.9 million ozs of paper gold. This is 8x the amount of “registered” – available for delivery – gold in the Comex gold warehouse.  I call this “a Comex open interest liquidation raid” by the bullion banks.  When the CFTC finally releases a COT report to reflect Comex trading activity for this past week, it will likely show a large drop in the net short position of the banks and a concomitant large drop in the hedge fund net long position.

Trump was out flogging the Fed on Friday for holding the dollar up with interest rates – interest rates that the Emperor of DC has declared “too high.” This likely signals a political campaign to drive the dollar lower, which will be bullish for gold.

Trevor Hall and I discuss on our Mining Stock Daily podcast why we believe the current sell-off in the price of gold will lead to higher prices. I also present a couple junior mining stocks I believe will be acquired in the escalating wave of gold mining company M&A transactions (click on the image or HERE to listen to the podcast):

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You can learn more about the highly undervalued junior mining stocks mentioned in the podcast plus many more in the Mining Stock Journal:  Mining Stock Journal information