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分享 Guest Post: Gold Manipulation, Part 2: How They Do It (And How To Hedge It)
insight 2013-2-28 17:04
Guest Post: Gold Manipulation, Part 2: How They Do It (And How To Hedge It) Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/26/2013 22:45 -0500 Central Banks Gold Bugs Guest Post Monetary Base Precious Metals Repo Market Shadow Banking Submitted by Martin Sibileau of A View from the Trenches blog , “…The genius of central bankers was not to forbid gold but to morph it into another fiat currency, by adding a credit multiplier to it. …” This is the second of three articles I am posting on the suppression of gold. In the first article I showed that, under mainstream economic theory, the suppression of the gold market is not a conspiracy theory, but a logical necessity, a logical outcome. This second article will show how that suppression takes place . Those familiar with the gold market will likely find nothing new. The third article will examine the implications of this suppression and support the claim of the gold bugs, namely that physical gold will trade at a premium over fiat gold or gold paper is also not a conspiracy theory, but the logical outcome of the current paradigm. How they do it: The concept The popular notion, which central bankers would love to destroy, is that gold is a good hedge against inflation. In its simplest form, gold cannot be printed and, as its supply remains anchored, its price should spike if the supply of fiat money increases. The implicit math behind can be represented as follows: Given a constant demand for money… The equation above shows the price of gold, in terms of a fiat currency (in this case, the US dollar) as a function of the relative supplies of gold and the US dollar. In the case of a fiat currency, its supply is the product of two factors: the monetary base created by the respective central bank and the corresponding credit multiplier. This multiplier reflects every single mean by which the original base is expanded, through the banking system and the shadow banking system. If the equation above was indeed representative of the state of affairs we’re in, there would be no room for manipulation. The supply of gold, in terms of ounces available, could be perhaps capped or confiscated, but not expanded. The price of gold, therefore, could not be suppressed. Now that we know what cannot be, let’s understand what really is happening. To suppress the price of gold. central bankers, simply, have invented a new currency: Fiat gold. The math involved in it now is: Given a constant demand for money… As you can see from the second equation above, the genius of central bankers was not to forbid gold but to morph it into another fiat currency, by adding a credit multiplier to it. With this, it only takes to proportionally expand this credit multiplier faster than the numerator (of the equation) and the price of gold will fall regardless of fundamentals. If they want to go one step further and signal to the public that they can do this with complete impunity and for as long as they please, they then proceed to expand the credit multiplier predictably at specific times of the day (i.e. 8:20am ET). How they do it: The details Below, I will describe how the supply of this new currency, fiat gold, is expanded. The motivation for this expansion was already explained in the previous article. Below, I present the steps included in the expansion of the supply of fiat gold. In the next article, I will elaborate on the graph below, addressing its implications and consequences. But today, let’s just look at the mechanics: The above graph shows the aggregate balance sheets of the central banks, bullion banks and the gold market. Bullion banks handle transactions in precious metals and, in this case, in gold. As you can see, central banks hold gold as part of their assets. However, they can swap their gold holdings for liquidity, for US dollars. This swap is a mere exchange and is shown as step 1, in the graph. The official explanation is that such swaps would have temporary liquidity management purposes, because they remove US dollars from the market (i.e. from the Bullion banks). At a later date, not shown in the graph, the Bullion banks should return the gold to the central banks, and receive US dollars back (including an interest). For this reason, because the swap contract implies the return of the gold at a later stage, central banks are allowed to continue showing the gold they swapped in their balance sheets, as an asset. Once the physical gold is in the hands (i.e. balance sheet) of the Bullion banks, these banks can create loans against it, supplying the market with fiat gold. This is shown in step 2. Gold is debited and Gold loans are credited. The ultimate amount of gold loans outstanding is obviously a factor of the credit multiplier in fiat gold. The higher the multiplier, the higher the supply of fiat gold in the market and the pressure on the price to come down. The anxiety around this issue is noticeable and the big questions are: How far can central banks go with this manipulation? How long can it last? Is there a mechanism by which the market should revert to fundamentals? I will devote the next letter to the last question . With respect to the first ones, all I can say is that central banks can go very, very far with the manipulation and can last longer than you or I are willing to believe. Why? Because unlike the case of other currencies and their respective credit multipliers, in fiat gold , the players that demand gold loans are also the ones who transact in gold (i.e. Bullion banks) and dominate the repo market to provide funding (to those ultimately speculating with gold). They are all the same and only a handful. They play a cooperative game among themselves and with the central banks. The public that holds physical gold or the central banks that accumulate physical gold but do not enter into swaps with the Bullion banks cannot force a contraction in the credit multiplier. By their actions (i.e. hoarding of physical gold), all they can do is to force the rest of the central banks and Bullion banks involved to take a higher risk in the expansion of the multiplier. But they cannot force a rush for delivery. They are, by definition, outside of the system. How can we protect ourselves from the manipulation? One way to protect ourselves from the manipulation described above is to simply trade the expansion of the credit multiplier for fiat gold. At this point, I remind the reader to read my disclaimer. (My comments are not intended to provide personal investment advice and they do not take into account the specific investment objectives, financial situation and the particular needs of any specific person). If the supply of fiat gold is a factor of the monetary base in fiat gold and its credit multiplier, one can think of proxies for these factors. In my view, the monetary base is represented not only by the stock of physical gold outstanding, but also by the stock that is to be mined: By the gold miners, collectively. Fiat gold, on the other hand is represented by either futures or gold certificates. When the manipulation succeeds , the credit multiplier expands. In this case, if I am correct, it should be profitable to be long the promise to deliver gold and short the monetary base of fiat gold . When the manipulation is not successful or a rush for delivery is triggered, the credit multiplier contracts. Here, if I am correct again, it should be profitable to be short the promise to deliver gold and to be long the monetary base of fiat gold . There are many ways to express this trading thesis, but I’d rather leave these speculations to the reader. Average: 4.48276 Your rating: None Average: 4.5 ( 29 votes) Tweet Login or register to
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分享 Eric Sprott: Do Western Central Banks Have Any Gold Left?
insight 2012-10-3 16:44
Eric Sprott: Do Western Central Banks Have Any Gold Left? Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/02/2012 18:49 -0400 From Eric Sprott and David Baker of Sprott Asset Management Do Western Central Banks Have Any Gold Left??? Somewhere deep in the bowels of the world’s Western central banks lie vaults holding gargantuan piles of physical gold bars… or at least that’s what they all claim. The gold bars are part of their respective foreign currency reserves, which include all the usual fiat currencies like the dollar, the pound, the yen and the euro. Collectively, the governments/central banks of the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Switzerland, Eurozone and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are believed to hold an impressive 23,349 tonnes of gold in their respective reserves, representing more than $1.3 trillion at today’s gold price. Beyond the suggested tonnage, however, very little is actually known about the gold that makes up this massive stockpile. Western central banks disclose next to nothing about where it’s stored, in what form, or how much of the gold reserves are utilized for other purposes. We are assured that it’s all there, of course, but little effort has ever been made by the central banks to provide any details beyond the arbitrary references in their various financial reserve reports. Twelve years ago, few would have cared what central banks did with their gold. Gold had suffered a twenty year bear cycle and didn’t engender much excitement at $255 per ounce. It made perfect sense for Western governments to lend out (or in the case of Canada – outright sell) their gold reserves in order to generate some interest income from their holdings. And that’s exactly what many central banks did from the late 1980’s through to the late 2000’s. The times have changed however, and today it absolutely does matter what they’re doing with their reserves, and where the reserves are actually held. Why? Because the countries in question are now all grossly over-indebted and printing their respective currencies with reckless abandon. It would be reassuring to know that they still have some of the ‘barbarous relic’ kicking around, collecting dust, just in case their experiment with collusive monetary accommodation doesn’t work out as planned. You may be interested to know that central bank gold sales were actually the crux of the original investment thesis that first got us interested in the gold space back in 2000. We were introduced to it through the work of Frank Veneroso, who published an outstanding report on the gold market in 1998 aptly titled, “The 1998 Gold Book Annual”. In it, Mr. Veneroso inferred that central bank gold sales had artificially suppressed the full extent of gold demand to the tune of approximately 1,600 tonnes per year (in an approximately 4,000 tonne market of annual supply). Of the 35,000 tonnes that the central banks were officially stated to own at the time, Mr. Veneroso estimated that they were already down to 18,000 tonnes of actual physical. Once the central banks ran out of gold to sell, he surmised, the gold market would be poised for a powerful bull market… and he turned out to be completely right – although central banks did continue to be net sellers of gold for many years to come. As the gold bull market developed throughout the 2000’s, central banks didn’t become net buyers of physical gold until 2009, which coincided with gold’s final break-out above US$1,000 per ounce. The entirety of this buying was performed by central banks in the non-Western world, however, by countries like Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and the Philippines… and they have continued buying gold ever since. According to Thomson Reuters GFMS, a precious metals research agency, non-Western central banks purchased 457 tonnes of gold in 2011, and are expected to purchase another 493 tonnes of gold this year as they expand their reserves. 1 Our estimates suggest they will likely purchase even more than that. 2 The Western central banks, meanwhile, have essentially remained silent on the topic of gold, and have not publicly disclosed any sales or purchases of gold at all over the past three years. Although there is a “Central Bank Gold Agreement” currently in place that covers the gold sales of the Eurosystem central banks, Sweden and Switzerland, there has been no mention of gold sales by the very entities that are purported to own the largest stockpiles of the precious metal. 3 The silence is telling. Over the past several years, we’ve collected data on physical demand for gold as it has developed over time. The consistent annual growth in demand for physical gold bullion has increasingly puzzled us with regard to supply. Global annual gold mine supply ex Russia and China (who do not export domestic production) is actually lower than it was in year 2000, and ever since the IMF announced the completion of its sale of 403 tonnes of gold in December 2010, there hasn’t been any large, publicly-disclosed seller of physical gold in the market for almost two years. 4 Given the significant increase in physical demand that we’ve seen over the past decade, particularly from buyers in Asia, it suffices to say that we cannot identify where all the gold is coming from to supply it… but it has to be coming from somewhere. To give you a sense of how much the demand for physical gold has increased over the past decade, we’ve listed a select number of physical gold buyers and calculated their net change in annual demand in tonnes from 2000 to 2012 (see Chart A). CHART A Numbers quoted in metric tonnes. † Source: CBGA1, CBGA2, CBGA3, International Monetary Fund Statistics, Sprott Estimates. †† Source: Royal Canadian Mint and United States Mint. ††† Includes closed-end funds such as Sprott Physical Gold Trust and Central Fund of Canada. ^ Source: World Gold Council, Sprott Estimates. ^^ Source: World Gold Council, Sprott Estimates. ^^^ Refers to annualized increase over the past eight years. As can be seen, the mere combination of only five separate sources of demand results in a 2,268 tonne net change in physical demand for gold over the past twelve years – meaning that there is roughly 2,268 tonnes of new annual demand today that didn’t exist 12 years ago. According to the CPM Group, one of the main purveyors of gold statistics, the total annual gold supply is estimated to be roughly 3,700 tonnes of gold this year. Of that, the World Gold Council estimates thatonly 2,687 tonnes are expected to come from actual mine production, while the rest is attributed to recycled scrap gold, mainly from old jewelry. 5 (See footnote 5). The reporting agencies have a tendency to insist that total physical demand perfectly matches physical supply every year, and use the “Net Private Investment” as a plug to shore up the difference between the demand they attribute to industry, jewelry and ‘official transactions’ by central banks versus their annual supply estimate (which is relatively verifiable). Their “Net Private Investment” figures are implied , however, and do not measure the actual investment demand purchases that take place every year. If more accurate data was ever incorporated into their market summary for demand, it would reveal a huge discrepancy, with the demand side vastly exceeding their estimation of annual supply. In fact, we know it would exceed it based purely on China’s Hong Kong gold imports, which are now up to 458 tonnes year-to-date as of July, representing a 367% increase over its purchases during the same period last year. If the imports continue at their current rate, China will reach 785 tonnes of gold imports by year-end. That’s 785 tonnes in a market that’s only expected to produce roughly 2,700 tonnes of mine supply, and that’s just one buyer . Then there are all the private buyers whose purchases go unreported and unacknowledged, like that of Greenlight Capital, the hedge fund managed by David Einhorn, that is reported to have purchased $500 million worth of physical gold starting in 2009. Or the $1 billion of physical gold purchased by the University of Texas Investment Management Co. in April 2011… or the myriad of other private investors (like Saudi Sheiks, Russian billionaires, this writer, probably many of our readers, etc.) who have purchased physical gold for their accounts over the past decade. None of these private purchases are ever considered in the research agencies’ summaries for investment demand, and yet these are real purchases of physical gold, not ETF’s or gold ‘certificates’. They require real, physical gold bars to be delivered to the buyer. So once we acknowledge how big the discrepancy is between the actual true level of physical gold demand versus the annual “supply”, the obvious questions present themselves: who are the sellers delivering the gold to match the enormous increase in physical demand? What entities are releasing physical gold onto the market without reporting it? Where is all the gold coming from? There is only one possible candidate: the Western central banks. It may very well be that a large portion of physical gold currently flowing to new buyers is actually coming from the Western central banks themselves. They are the only holders of physical gold who are capable of supplying gold in a quantity and manner that cannot be readily tracked. They are also the very entities whose actions have driven investors back into gold in the first place. Gold is, after all, a hedge against their collective irresponsibility – and they have showcased their capacity in that regard quite enthusiastically over the past decade, especially since 2008. If the Western central banks are indeed leasing out their physical reserves, they would not actually have to disclose the specific amounts of gold that leave their respective vaults. According to a document on the European Central Bank’s (ECB) website regarding the statistical treatment of the Eurosystem’s International Reserves, current reporting guidelines do not require central banks to differentiate between gold owned outright versus gold lent out or swapped with another party. The document states that, “ reversible transactions in gold do not have any effect on the level of monetary gold regardless of the type of transaction (i.e. gold swaps, repos, deposits or loans), in line with the recommendations contained in the IMF guidelines.” 6 (Emphasis theirs). Under current reporting guidelines, therefore, central banks are permitted to continue carrying the entry of physical gold on their balance sheet even if they’ve swapped it or lent it out entirely. You can see this in the way Western central banks refer to their gold reserves. The UK Government, for example, refers to its gold allocation as, “Gold (incl. gold swapped or on loan)”. That’s the verbatim phrase they use in their official statement. Same goes for the US Treasury and the ECB, which report their gold holdings as “Gold (including gold deposits and, if appropriate, gold swapped)” and “Gold (including gold deposits and gold swapped)”, respectively (see Chart B). Unfortunately, that’s as far as their description goes, as each institution does not break down what percentage of their stated gold reserves are held in physical, versus what percentage has been loaned out or swapped for something else. The fact that they do not differentiate between the two is astounding, (Ed. As is the “including gold deposits” verbiage that they use – what else is “gold” supposed to refer to?) but at the same time not at all surprising. It would not lend much credence to central bank credibility if they admitted they were leasing their gold reserves to ‘bullion bank’ intermediaries who were then turning around and selling their gold to China, for example. But the numbers strongly suggest that that is exactly what has happened. The central banks’ gold is likely gone, and the bullion banks that sold it have no realistic chance of getting it back. CHART B Sources: 1) http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/Documents/reserves/2012/Aug/tempoutput.pdf 2) http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/IR-Position/Pages/08312012.aspx 3) http://www.ecb.int/stats/external/reserves/html/assets_8.812.E.en.html 4) http://www.boj.or.jp/en/about/account/zai1205a.pdf 5) http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/gold.htm 6) http://www.snb.ch/en/mmr/reference/annrep_2011_komplett/source Notes: ECB Data as of July 2012. Bank of Japan data as of March 31, 2012. * European Central Bank reserves is composed of reserves held by the ECB, Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia and Finland. ** Bank of Japan only lists its gold reserves in Yen at book value. Our analysis of the physical gold market shows that central banks have most likely been a massive unreported supplier of physical gold, and strongly implies that their gold reserves are negligible today. If Frank Veneroso’s conclusions were even close to accurate back in 1998 (and we believe they were), when coupled with the 2,300 tonne net change in annual demand we can easily identify above, it can only lead to the conclusion that a large portion of the Western central banks’ stated 23,000 tonnes of gold reserves are merely a paper entry on their balance sheets – completely un-backed by anything tangible other than an IOU from whatever counterparty leased it from them in years past. At this stage of the game, we don’t believe these central banks will be able to get their gold back without extreme difficulty, especially if it turns out the gold has left their countries entirely. We can also only wonder how much gold within the central bank system has been ‘rehypothecated’ in the process, since the central banks in question seem so reluctant to divulge any meaningful details on their reserves in a way that would shed light on the various “swaps” and “loans” they imply to be participating in. We might also suggest that if a proper audit of Western central bank gold reserves was ever launched, as per Ron Paul’s recent proposal to audit the US Federal Reserve, the proverbial cat would be let out of the bag – with explosive implications for the gold price. Notwithstanding the recent conversions of PIMCO’s Bill Gross , Bridegwater’s Ray Dalio and Ned Davis Research to gold, we realize that many mainstream institutional investors still continue to struggle with the topic. We also realize that some readers may scoff at any analysis of the gold market that hints at “conspiracy”. We’re not talking about conspiracy here however, we’re talking about stupidity. After all, Western central banks are probably under the impression that the gold they’ve swapped and/or lent out is still legally theirs, which technically it may be. But if what we are proposing turns out to be true, and those reserves are not physically theirs; not physically in their possession… then all bets are off regarding the future of our monetary system. As a general rule of common sense, when one embarks on an unlimited quantitative easing program targeted at the employment rate (see QE3), one had better make sure to have something in the vault as backup in case the ‘unlimited’ part actually ends up really meaning unlimited. We hope that it does not, for the sake of our monetary system, but given our analysis of the physical gold market, we’ll stick with our gold bars and take comfort as they collect more dust in our vaults, untouched. 1 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-04/central-bank-gold-buying-seen-reaching-493-tons-in-2012-by-gfms.html 2 See notes in Chart A. 3 http://www.gold.org/government_affairs/reserve_asset_management/central_bank_gold_agreements/ 4 http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/faq/goldfaqs.htm 5 Mine supply estimate supplied by World Gold Council; YTD gold mine production data suggests that total 2012 gold mine supply will come in lower around 2,300 tonnes, ex Russia and China production.In addition, Frank Veneroso has recently published a new report that warns that the supply of recycled scrap gold could drop significantly going forward due to the depletion ofthe inventories of industrial scrap and long held jewelry over the past decade. 6 http://www.ecb.int/pub/pdf/other/statintreservesen.pdf Average: 4.875 Your rating: None Average: 4.9 ( 40 votes) Tweet Login or register to post comments 18111 reads Printer-friendly version Send to friend Similar Articles You Might Enjoy: “Gold Ponzi Schemes” Revealed - Physical Gold Favored Over Derivatives Sprott's John Embry:“The Current Financial System Will Be Totally Destroyed“ Barclays Opens Massive Brand New Precious Metals Vault In London Guest Post: Does Central-Bank Gold-Buying Signal The Top Is Near? Gold Investment Demand And India, China Demand Down; Central Bank Demand Doubles
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