12 May 2013
Berita Semasa 12 Mei 2013 ...
There's a villain to the Gold crash story
What Bernanke did, on Friday, 12 April, was hit the market with 500 tonnes of naked shorts, knocking $73 off an ounce of gold. That adds up to 16 million ounces, worth $24,800,000,000, producing a loss for the seller(s) of $1,168,000,000: this begs the question of who has $25 trn of walking-around money in his hip pocket, and can afford to drop $1.2 bn on the street?
The sudden and completely unexpected collapse of gold - down 13.7% in the blink of an eye - was a huge market intrusion or manipulation, or major fiddle, into an overall rising bullion market - but by whom?
The spin was already craftily fed into the ether, along with the price: the fingered culprit was little lowly Cyprus, everyone’s favourite kicking-boy at the moment, as it was forced by the so-called rescuing Troika - the IMF, the EU and its ECB - to sell off its minimal gold hoard of just a piffling €400 million, and in effect send it to Germany.
The Troika isn’t interested in saving the Cypriot economy and its banks’ depositors, you see, but is only out to save the euro and its over-grandiose ambitions for the now over-stretched eurozone. The truth about gold, however, was completely different, and contained menacing overtones for the future of the world economy.
The real villain
So, stand up the real villain: it’s Ben Bernanke, of course! Yes, Helicopter Ben, you have been unmasked as the central banker at the Fed who’s slowly losing his clothes, and now Spear’s will rapidly remove your fig-leaf of a great deception - to reveal a major market manipulation.
And we will attempt to formulate the thinking behind you actions, which isn’t difficult, as we have seen through your QE failing game. Spear’s can see the consequences that so frightened you, that led to your breaking yet another sacred central banking rule: never to manipulate markets with public money.
Even your predecessor Sir Alan Greenspan - unwisely knighted in the UK for his services to (irony of ironies) financial stability - wisely disavowed any Fed interference with the booming dotcom markets of his day, which eventually crashed: but Greenspan didn’t see it as within the Fed’s charter to interfere with stock or bullion markets, or for that matter, to have a QE policy driven by unemployment.
Fake money
Now Bernanke is upholding his own failing and unproven strategy of flooding the economy with printed - or rather fake - money. He may have avoided a wholesale banking collapse, and supported the ongoing bonuses of those who broke the bank back in 2009.
His further attempts to avoid Global Depression II, however, are just stepping-stones to the ultimate disaster, the very result he so earnestly wished to avoid. His concern is that he will fail to prove his monetarist theory that the 1930s Great Depression was caused only by a serious lack of liquidity... for which his simplistic solution is just to print more of the bloody stuff, and throw some of it out of his helicopter over Iowa or wherever else isn’t on the map.
This is Bernanke’s answer to the unanswerable question, but QE doesn’t add one iota to aggregate demand. His QE3+ printing programme, which currently spews out $85.0 billion into the US economy every month, does nothing whatsoever, unfortunately, to increase consumer demand; and demand is what the world economy actually needs to get back to anything recognisable as Growth, as we once knew it.
Why gold tanked
What Bernanke did, on Friday, 12 April, was hit the market with 500 tonnes of naked shorts, knocking $73 off an ounce of gold. That adds up to 16 million ounces, worth $24,800,000,000, producing a loss for the seller(s) of $1,168,000,000: this begs the question of who has $25 trn of walking-around money in his hip pocket, and can afford to drop $1.2 bn on the street?
Answer: only the Fed, which can print money until the cows come home.
But what if it goes wrong? It’s an enormous and uncharted risk that Bernanke is taking, so why did he take it? Obviously, he wants to keep gold at around $1,400 per ounce, but why? Because the fall in value of the dollar against gold is caused by his QE3+ programme, which is designed to reduce unemployment by over one per cent, to seven per cent, but not to weaken the dollar and send import costs up, and lose control of interest rates. Hmm. It all sounds pretty rum.
Bernanke’s actions are the flipside of other central bank actions: Venezuela has repatriated its gold; Germany is doing the same, but the US only agreed to hand it over a seven-year period. So Bernanke now wants the price down, as he is committed to QE3+ until the US economy achieves lift-off.
The economy, however, is still patchy and not yet anywhere near take-off speed, so he daren’t let interest rates rise while he is printing money like a maniac, or he thinks his recovery will falter and fail.
It’s not difficult to see all this nonsense ending up as a nasty mess in the field at the end of the runway... with inflation and slump, slumpflation in a word, and banking and derivative collapses also found at the scene. What price gold then?
Sumber : Google
11 May 2013
Berita Semasa 11 mei 2013 ...
Gold's recovery appears to be faltering
Silver ended the morning in London around $24.40 an ounce, also little-changed from a day earlier, while other commodities and stock markets failed to hold onto gains from earlier in the day, while US Treasuries gained.
Following a dip during Asian trading, the gold price climbed back above $1470 per ounce Tuesday morning in London, broadly in line with where it was a day earlier, with China's markets shut for this week's Labor Day holiday.
Silver ended the morning in London around $24.40 an ounce, also little-changed from a day earlier, while other commodities and stock markets failed to hold onto gains from earlier in the day, while US Treasuries gained.
"Gold's recovery appears to be faltering somewhat," says this morning's commodities note from Commerzbank.
"From a technical point of view," adds ANZ head of global markets research Asia Tim Riddell, "although the rebound has been relatively solid, it appears to be a more sustained correction of the fall that we saw from late March, rather than a turn in trend. Really what we need to see is a series of closes above$1505 to take the pressure off."
By Tuesday lunchtime in London gold looked set to record its biggest monthly loss in Dollar terms since December 2011, down nearly 8%, based on London Fix prices.
In Euro terms gold was headed for a 9.5% loss, the biggest since July 2010. In Sterling gold was down 9.6%, also the biggest monthly loss since July 2010, although an afternoon fix at �951 an ounce or below would make for the biggest monthly drop since October 1990.
Gold's sharp price drop earlier this month "broke below the $300 range which prevailed from the highs in July 2011," says technical analysts at Societe Generale.
"This confirmed a major double top which projects a target at $1265...the indicators are toppish and call for vigilance."
Elsewhere at that bank however another SocGen strategist repeated a case for a $10,000 gold price last week.
Since the low of $1322 an ounce touched on April 16, gold has rallied more than 10% as the lower gold price has been met by strong demand for physical gold in many parts of the world, especially in the form of smaller bars, although "physical buying has slowed down" according to one Hong Kong dealer speaking to newswire Reuters Tuesday.
"The problem in the market is the tight physical supply," the dealer said. "It will take time to refine the metal."
"We are producing 24 hours a day," says Frederic Panizzutti, global head of marketing and sales at Swiss bullion refiner MKS.
"[Strong demand for physical bullion] is all across the globe...the fact that premiums are so high, it means that no one is making enough."
The US Mint meantime has sold 312,500 of American Eagle bullion gold coins so far this month, the biggest monthly total since June 2010.
By contrast, gold exchange traded funds tracked by Bloomberg continued to see outflows throughout April, losing 168.2 tonnes, the biggest monthly drop on record. By comparison, Barclays reported at the start of the month that gold ETFs saw outflows of around 154 tonnes for the whole of the first quarter of the year.
Of these, the world's biggest gold exchange traded fund SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) has seen its holdings fall 11.5% this month to 1080 tonnes, the lowest since September 2009.
The recovery in the gold price has also been due to "the combined impact of a weaker Dollar and on market chatter that the Federal Open Market Committee meeting this week and the European Central Bank policy meeting will confirm ongoing monetary easing in the United States and Europe," says a note from HSBC.
The note adds that HSBC's currency analysts see diminishing expectations that the Fed will announce an early end to its ongoing quantitative easing asset purchases.
The FOMC begins its latest policy meeting today ahead of a decision tomorrow, while the ECB is due to make its latest policy announcement Thursday.
German unemployment rose by 4,000 this month, figures published Tuesday show, twice the consensus forecast among analysts, although the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate remained steady at 6.9%.
For the Eurozone as a whole meantime the unemployment rate ticked higher to 12.1% last month.
Elsewhere in Europe, Italy's new prime minister Enrico Letta told parliament Monday that the country "will be lost" unless it adopts policies aimed at stimulating economic growth.
Sumber : Google
10 May 2013
Berita Semasa 10 Mei 2013 ...
Gold accounts for 9% of Turkey exports to MENA
Turkey, which is not a major gold producer, was a net importer of gold, jewellery and precious metals in 2011 but swung to being a net exporter last year when it began shipping billions of dollars of the metal to Iran.
Gold accounted for 9 percent of Turkey’s exports to Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) country's, particularly to Iran and the UAE.
According to Standard Chartered research, Iran and the United Arab Emirates received so much Turkish gold last year that the trade affected their export data.
That’s because of sanctions that prevent Turkey from buying Iranian oil with euros or dollars. Turkey is exempt from certain US sanctions on trade with Iran because it is dependent upon Iranian natural gas.
However, Iran-Turkey gold trade have been singled out by the US and EU for sanctions.
Analysts said Turkey pays Iran for natural gas in Turkish lira. Iranians then buy gold in Turkey and send it to Dubai via couriers, who import the yellow metal in hand luggage.
Once in Dubai, they can exchange gold for foreign currency, or ship it back to Iran. They added that, Interestingly, this turns up as exports in Turkey’s data.
Turkey, which is not a major gold producer, was a net importer of gold, jewellery and precious metals in 2011 but swung to being a net exporter last year when it began shipping billions of dollars of the metal to Iran.
In February, the most recent month for which figures are available,Turkey’s total exports of gold were worth $550 million, far below last year’s average of $1.1billion a month — although they were still almost wholly accounted for by sales to the UAE and Iran.
That drop in demand is likely to contribute to a rise in Turkey’s current account deficit this year, after a decline last year, and increases the woes of the country’s gold trade at a time when it is beset by other problems.
Sumber : Google
9 May 2013
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