Propping Up The Gold Price?
Guest post by Azizonomics.
The obvious thing, though — even if we take central bank buying out of the equation altogether — is that total demand for gold is still increasing. And the price of gold has increased faster than sales, illustrating that the market has struggled and continues to struggle to keep pace with underlying demand.
And it’s not just demand for gold-denominated paper (i.e. ETFs or other such as-risky-as-anything-you’ll-get-from-MF Global assets) — it’s recently manifested as demand for hard physical gold:
FSA on LIBOR
Fascinating reading by the FSA on the LIBOR scandal.
Barclays acted inappropriately and breached Principle 5 on numerous occasions between January 2005 and July 2008 by making US dollar LIBOR and EURIBOR submissions which took into account requests made by its interest rate derivatives traders (“Derivatives Traders”). At times these included requests made on behalf of derivatives traders at other banks. The Derivatives Traders were motivated by profit and sought to benefit Barclays’ trading positions. (Full report here with charts.)
What if the Fed Throws a QE3 and Nobody Comes?
A question many should be thinking about, but a very few dare asking. By Hussman of Hussman Funds.
The financial markets were largely unresponsive to news of further easing by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the People’s Bank of China last week. Notably, Spanish bonds plunged, while German short-term government bonds now yield -0.17%, indicating growing concern about sovereign default risk in the Euro area. Every few days will undoubtedly bring word of new “agreements” and “mechanisms” – arcane enough to mask their futility – that promise to solve the European crisis. The headwinds remain very strong. The key distinction here remains liquidity versus solvency. There is little doubt that liquidity will be provided at every opportunity, though the continual degrading of collateral standards by the ECB suggests that all the good collateral has been pledged already. More importantly, with a global recession visibly unfolding, solvency risk will only increase.
The odds remain against European countries agreeing to the surrender their national sovereignty to the extent needed to create a “fiscal union” and enable massive and endless transfers of public resources from stronger to weaker European countries. Barring a catastrophe severe enough to either prompt European countries to hand fiscal control to a central administrator, or to prompt Germany to agree to unconditional bailouts, the least disruptive move would be for Germany and a handful of stronger countries to leave the Euro first, and allow the remaining members to inflate as they wish.
With regard to the economy, I noted two weeks ago that the leading evidence pointed to a further weakening in employment, with an abrupt dropoff in industrial production and new orders. Mike Shedlock reviews the litany of awful figures we’ve seen since then, focusing on the new orders component of global purchasing managers indices: U.S. manufacturing new orders and export orders plunging from expansion to contraction, Eurozone new export orders plunging (only orders from Greece fell at a faster rate than those of Germany), and an accelerating decline in new orders in both China and Japan.
Fixit – forget everything else
With Europe in even bigger confusion after the summit, investors seem clueless of what the next step is in Europe. Is Greece fixed, how about that Spanish bank bail out, is Slovenia joining the party and how is this supposed to be paid for? Some color on the subject, by Edward Hugh.
Yet no matter how positively or cynically we perceive what just happened, the fact of the matter is that this latest summit did produce results which, while possibly not being complete game changers, would in fact constitute a significant advance in the debt crisis if they were implemented, in particular since they do constitute steps towards that long promised banking and fiscal union. And basically, as I say at the start, even if it takes a bit of kicking and screaming first I do think they will be implemented.
Far and away the most important of these decisions was allowing the ESM to in principle fund Spain’s bank recapitalisation. If followed through the decision will possibly come to be seen as a landmark one. My feeling is that the nervy events of the last week will not be the end of the matter, and that eventually a plan and timescale for setting up a banking union will be agreed on, since the costs of not doing so would obviously be far higher than those involved in so doing.
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