Having broken out convincingly into new
high ground, gold and silver have now paused for breath. Despite the sharpness
of this week’s reaction, their performance indicates good underlying
strength.
This
is not to say there is no speculative froth – of course there is.
Rather, speculators play a distant second fiddle in this market.
Bullion is still doing what it has been doing for the last year: when the
commercials on Comex hit the price it backs off rapidly on little volume,
until someone very big takes the opportunity to clean the market out. It
becomes another ratchet on the torturer’s rack for the commercial
shorts, who find that every time this happens they end up being stretched
further.
On
last week’s rise there were early signs of panic, as the commercials
attempted to reduce their exposure. However, the commercials’ net short
position on Comex is still a very high 933 tonnes. Convention suggests
that the commercials know best, and even if they have an extreme position,
they will still crush you. And indeed, the big commercials, being too
big to fail and with the comfort of the Fed’s antipathy to gold, could
increase their short positions even further. This is now developing
into the biggest game of chicken the markets will probably ever see.
However,
the TBTF commercials are not having things all their own way. Ten years
of bull market must have pretty well exhausted the central banks’
bullion supplies, but parting with the physical has not been the only way
gold has been suppressed. The very structure of the market might have
been designed to neutralise speculative demand: on Comex physical settlement
is little more than token, and in London forwards and leases are rolled or
closed out by matching transactions. These markets encourage users to
avoid delivery of the physical. True demand has been siphoned off into
side-bets.
Investors
may have been unaware of this, and while wheeling and dealing in these
derivatives, they will be unaware that the truly wise long-term players have
been quietly hoarding the physical, upon which this house of cards rests. In
the ‘80s and ‘90s, central banks leased gold to the market that
was then bought and accumulated by oil producers in the Middle East, and when
it was ridiculously cheap large amounts were converted into jewellery. In
this last decade the central banks themselves in aggregate have begun to
accumulate bullion. It is important to understand that none of these
earlier buyers will resupply much to the markets at higher prices.
The
entry of China, Russia, India and a growing list of other
politically-motivated nations into the market as limitless buyers of gold has
created enormous difficulties for the old guard of interventionists, and a
solution is desperately needed. It has developed into a power-struggle
between this old guard, which is trying to manage a way through a crisis of
its own making, and the new which so far has not managed to acquire enough
bullion. Furthermore the new is building up excessive amounts of fiat
paper issued by members of the old; paper which they know is loosing value at
an increasing pace. On this basis gold is simply underpriced in paper
currency terms.
The
struggle between the old and new guards is illustrated by the IMF’s
gold sales, the stated purpose of which was to raise funds to help smaller
nations through the credit crisis. The inner circle at the Bank for International
Settlements must have been tearing its hair out to see these Keynesian clots
gift half this invaluable ammunition to India. And why is the IMF selling
bullion to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, when their policy objective is to
provide “concessional finance” to these struggling nations?
(These sales were agreed for this purpose at the London G20 summit chaired by
none other than Gordon Brown - second time unlucky.)
But
what must have really got under the skin of the BIS is that it knows the real
value of bullion is considerably in excess of the market price. It knows gold
is underpriced, because the BIS and its senior members have been suppressing
the price for the last forty years, which has resulted in an acute shortage
of stock. But when they embarked on this course in the 1970s they would not
have foreseen how gold would be made available to the masses through
yet-to-be-invented ETFs; nor could they have foreseen the emergence of Russia
and China from deep communism into aggressive capitalist-style development,
generating hundreds of millions of new gold-loving savers. Consequently
the old-guard BIS members have lost embarrassing quantities of bullion and
cannot confess this to the markets. Presumably they had hoped that by
withholding this information they could bluff it out; and they might have
succeeded had it not been for the very serious financial and economic
deterioration in the global economy, which raises the possibility of a
Fed-induced dollar crisis, triggering new demand for physical bullion.
As
well as these problems there is growing evidence of disruptive intent behind
the gold policy of the ex-communist nations. I recently covered this in an article that tied in the relationships of the Shanghai Cooperation
Council. In that article I pointed out that the substantial majority of
today’s gold-buying nations are members of, or are associated with this
organisation. As if to confirm these fears, in the last few days Iran, which
is an associate member of the SCO, announced it is now buying gold.
Furthermore, China is restricting the export of rare earth metals, which with
the energy policies emanating out of the SCO membership, has the appearance of
a coordinated attack on the Western economic system. If such a conspiracy
exists, gold is central to it.
The
result of forty years of gold price suppression is not only the disappearance
from the markets of unquantifiable amounts of physical into the firmest of
hands, but also an accumulation of claims for physical bullion through the
growth of unallocated accounts at the bullion banks; and the secret we would
all love to know is how large this commitment has become. In the
absence of hard facts, we have to make a reasonable estimate.
The
only major bullion bank that declares its bullion holdings is HSBC, which at
the end of 2009 held gold valued at $13.757bn (392.6 tonnes)[i]. We shall assume that
this bullion is held against HSBC’s unallocated accounts and we shall
further assume a reasonable fractional reserve multiple of 10, which gives us
net uncovered liabilities of 3,533 tonnes for HSBC alone.
However,
there are 35 banks listed as full members of the LBMA, and it can be assumed
that nearly all of them offer unallocated account facilities[ii]. It is also possible, even
likely, that the fractional reserve multiple for many of these banks is
higher than 10, because banks have been generally reluctant to hold the one
reserve currency that pays no interest.[iii] Furthermore, some of these
banks are among the largest in the world. Taking all this into account,
it is possible that LBMA members are short of over 20,000 tonnes on their
unallocated accounts.
This
liability is unlikely to be hedged, because it is difficult to see who would
take the other side of such large amounts. And this brings us back to the
theme of this article: the key market participants are desperately short of
bullion.
As
a result, the ratio of turnover in forwards futures and options to the
underlying physical has become improbably high, and is still rising.
The deteriorating economic outlook for the US, Europe, the UK and Japan is
now beginning to generate new hoarding demand all over the world. And
all this is before portfolio investors have even begun to invest: the statistics
indicate that portfolio exposure is amazingly low at less than 1%, so the
point where more hoarding triggers market dislocation cannot be far off.
Indeed, a small bullion bank worried about its unallocated exposure would be
wise to cover its position on Comex, and demand for long futures from these
sources may soon become a market factor.
So,
before any pundit makes a price forecast, and before anyone lucky enough to
own gold thinks about selling, they should dwell on this important question:
in this extraordinary market where the central banks are at war, where the
devil and at what price are we going to find 20,000 tonnes of gold?
[i] See page 444 of
HSBC’s Annual Report & Accounts, Note 25 “Other Assets”
[ii] See http://www.lbma.org.uk/pages/index.cfm?page_id=63&title=full_members
[iii] The fall in interest rates
since the credit crunch has reduced the penalty for holding gold as a reserve
asset, but it is likely that before that event bullion banks had low cover on
unallocated accounts because the interest cost of holding bullion was
considerably higher. Furthermore bank balance sheets were stretched by
excessive credit demand, so the legacy position for bullion banks is one of
high gearing on unallocated accounts. This may partly explain the rise in HSBC’s position.
Alasdair McLeod
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