What is this secret repatriation of Gold about?

Jon

We have heard from one very reliable source that repatriation of gold is secretly taking place at this moment from the USA to Europe. This is October 2014!
The information contains details about transported quantities by one of the global security firms being much higher than usual, as well as country of destination.
This leads us to believe that some central banks in Europe may be feeling tension and their boards see that the ‘whatever it takes’ QE, LTRO or OMT policy, or whatever they call this monetary financing, can and probably will have serious repercussions.
The Swiss National Bank (SNB) started selling gold in 2000 near the lows of the market. At that same time, many years ago, the movement to stop this selling started in Switzerland which, on November 30, will lead to a definitive choice by Swiss voters whether to a) Stop selling gold, b) repatriate all foreign held gold, and c)maintain 20% gold backing of SNB assets, or alternatively risk being dictated to by the European Union and the ECB.

This post was published at GoldSwitzerland on October 23rd, 2014.

Ebola Fears Take Shine Off Panic-Buying Surge In Stocks

Jon

Note the regularly spaced volume spikes that took the eMini down $ES_F pic.twitter.com/zakCP4UzsZ
— Eric Scott Hunsader (@nanexllc) October 23, 2014

Buyback-manipulated earnings produced the low-volume opening face-ripper everyone wanted and stocks took off, recovering yesterday’s late losses and not looking back. Trannies were the big winners, led by a resurgence in Airlines (as Ebola in US is fixed) and, despite drastically lower than average volume, stocks kept lifting after EU close on a bed of AUDJPY and USDJPY… until 1450ET (when NYC Ebola headlines hit). Airlines were hit hard, S&P futures dumped back to VWAP, VIX was whacked back above 17, and the exuberant day transformed into merely a great day for stocks. Weakness in Treasuries and the HY bond ETF (despite notable compression in HY spreads) had the smell of a lot of HY issuance being hedged and unhedged but TSYs ended the day up 6-7bps (off their highs post-NYC-Ebola headlines). The USD rose for the 3rd day in a row taking gold lower. Copper (China) and Oil (Saudi) rose on the day (oil unch on the week).

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 10/23/2014.

The Market Says Markit Is Full Of It: Global PMIs Are Painting An Unrealistically Rosy Picture

Jon

Markit (not to be confused with the centrally-planned market) is best known for providing its monthly survey of national (seasonally-adjusted) manufacturing and service industry coincident businesses (whose results just may be released milliseconds early to select, highly paying HFT clients). Surveys which, such as today, are released after extensive adjustments and revisions, at key inflection points designed to achieve one simple thing: restore confidence in the Ponzi, usually when “hard data” indicates a collapse or recession is nigh. Such as last week:

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 10/23/2014.

French Private Sector Output Falls at Sharpest Rate in Eight Months; Tale of Two Europes

Jon

France
Looking for growth in Europe? You won’t find it in France, but for now you can still find it in Germany (for now).
The Markit Flash France PMI shows French private sector output falls at sharpest rate in eight months.
Key Points
Flash France Composite Output Index falls to 48.0 (48.4 in September), 8-month low Flash France Services Activity Index falls to 48.1 (48.4 in September ), 8-month low Flash France Manufacturing Output Index falls to 47.6 (48.4 in September ), 2-month low Flash France Manufacturing PMI falls to 47.3 (48.8 in September), 2-month low Summary
The latest flash PMI data signalled a deepening downturn in France’s private sector economy during October. The seasonally adjust ed Markit Flash France Composite Output Index , based on around 85% of normal monthly survey replies, slipped to 48.0, from 48.4 in September. That was its lowest reading since February, albeit indicative of a moderate rate of contraction overall. Faster declines in output were recorded in both the services and manufacturing sectors during October.
Employment in the French private sector fell further in October, extending the current period of contraction to one year. Furthermore, the rate of decline quickened to the sharpest since April 2013. Similarly solid rates of job shedding were registered across the services and manufacturing sectors. Staffing levels were cut in line with reduced workloads.
Outstanding business at French private sector firms fell for the sixth month running, and at the fastest pace since May 2013. Lower backlogs were signalled by service providers and manufacturers alike.

This post was published at Global Economic Analysis on October 23, 2014.

The Investing World In 10 Objects

Jon

What do an old German bank note, a current $100 bill, and an apple all have in common? The answer, according to ConvergEx’s Nick Colas, is that these simple objects can tell us much about the current investment scene, ranging from Europe’s economic challenges to the U. S. Federal Reserve’s attempts to reduce unemployment. Colas takes an ‘object-ive’ approach to analyzing the current investment landscape by describing 10 common items and how they shape our perceptions of reality. The other objects on our list: a hazmat suit, a house in Orlando, a barrel of oil, a Rolex watch, a butterfly, a heating radiator in Berlin, and a smartphone.
Imagine a radio program about the 100 most significant pieces in the British Museum. At first blush, this would seem to be a stupendously bad idea. Art is visual, after all, and radio is about the least visual medium out there. Still, the BBC did such a series a few years ago and the overwhelming success of the program led to a book titled, predictably enough ‘The History of the World in 100 Objects’ that went on to be a New York Times bestseller.
The idea works, even in radio format, because it simplifies large swaths of human history into identifiable works created by real people down through time. You might know very little about the situation in China 1000 years ago, but a statue or painting from the period allows you to relate to a community of actual human beings who lived, loved, worshipped and died there. Not just the world, but history itself, gets smaller and more approachable when viewed through this lens.
We can do the same with the world of investing and economic analysis, distilling many complex topics to their essential core. For the sake of brevity, let’s take 10 – rather than the 100 from the BBC series and book – and see how far we get. Here’s our take on a list:

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 10/23/2014.

Meet Janet Dupree:72, Alcoholic, HIV-Positive, $16,000 In Student Debt: “I Won’t Live Long Enough To Pay It Off”

Jon

One would think that Janet Lee Dupree, 72, a self-professed HIV-infected alcoholic, would be slowly putting aside material worries as she prepares to set the intangibles in her life in order for one last time. One would be wrong.
As she admits, “I am an alcoholic and I have HIV,” she tells the BBC. “That’s under control.” So what is the cause of most if not all consternation in the final days of Dupree’s life? “I was sick and I didn’t worry about paying back the debt.” As a result, Dupree defaulted on her loan, and since she turned 65 she has had money withheld from her Social Security benefits.
“Just recently I received a notification that they are going to garnish my wages because I am still working,” says Dupree, who works 30 hours a week as a substance abuse counsellor.
The debt in question: Dupree owes $16,000 in student loans she acquired in 1971 and 1972.
Or make that “student loans” – debt which is crippling the last days of a person who hasn’t seen the inside of a classroom in four decades.
Dupree, who lives in Citra, Florida, admits she forgot for many years that she had borrowed the money – originally $3,000 – in order to complete her undergraduate studies in Spanish.
The stunning story of how the exponentially rising…

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 10/23/2014.

Are sovereign bonds the last rampart before the collapse?

Jon

Last week was a rocky one on the stock markets, with London, Frankfurt, Paris and New York sliding heavily. Sort of a mini-crash, but not too serious… a simple warning showing some nervousness among investors: has the time of disillusion come? In Europe and Japan, stock market indices are below their January 1st, 2014, level, and in the United States, they’re just slightly above it.
The basic problem is that global liquidity is growing at a much higher pace than real economic growth. Even with the Fed stopping its QE, there is Japan accelerating its own QE and the European Central Bank is restarting its own plan, notably by buying banking assets. And all those central banks are maintaining rates at zero, which facilitates monetary expansion. The result being that all this excess money, which is not going into the real economy (loans to businesses haven’t picked up), finds its way on the markets and pushes asset prices higher. Hence the stock market performance since 2009 (March 2009 exactly, date of the first Fed QE).
But, at a certain level of appreciation, the prices of risky assets (stocks, corporate bonds) stop going up because investors realise that, obviously, the risk premiums are not enough to cover the risk anymore. And the fear is being reinforced by the fact that hopes for a real economic recovery are vanishing (the IMF lowered its previsions, a series of poor numbers were recently published in the United States and Germany).
How are investors reacting?

This post was published at Gold Broker on Oct 23, 2014.

“Warning Signs” & The Fed’s Grand Illusion

Jon

Via Scotiabank’s Guy Haselmann,
Ever since Bullard’s agoraphobic performance last week on Bloomberg TV, it should be crystal clear to the FOMC and investors just how powerfully markets will react to any shifts in Fed policy or attempts at policy normalization. An equity market freefall abruptly took an about-face, resuming its ‘melt-up’ trade, after a worried Bullard merely hinted at the possibility of more QE stimulants.
The FOMC should take this as a warning sign. It would be irrational for the Fed to believe that after QE purposefully elevated asset prices and generated a one-way moral hazard spectacle, that there is not going to be some-type of reversal (reaction) when QE is withdrawn and the first hike nears.
The new flaw in Fed communication that has arisen recently, and that was amplified by Bullard’s interview, is how Fed policymakers fundamentally assess and mollify the trade-off between attempts at stimulating real economic activity and financial stability risks.
For several years, the FOMC has been confronted with the delicate balance between removing accommodation too slowly and removing it too quickly. Since the Fed is basically out of effective bullets and its balance sheet has ballooned to the practical limits of prudence, the Fed is therefore trying to err on the side of not removing accommodation too quickly. In this regard, the Fed has allowed the fog to roll in, by repeatedly and cunningly changing the markets’ focus in order to ‘buy time’. (As a case in point, the first hike never arrived when the unemployment rate hit 6.5% as the Fed initially said it would.)

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 10/23/2014.

The China Gold Association Confirms Koos’ Numbers

Jon

Now even the China Gold Association is openly admitting that total Chinese wholesale demand was 2,200 metric tonnes in 2013. Of course, the only “analysis” that seems to matter creeps from the bowels of The World Gold Council, which continues to understate Chines demand fully by half. Why does the WGC persist with their imaginary numbers? Could an agenda be involved?
Again, all of Koos’ great work now appears at the Bullion Star website: and you can find his original link here:China Gold Association: 2013 Gold Demand 2199t by, Koos Jansen
We now have official confirmation from the China Gold Association (CGA) that Chinese wholesale gold demand in 2013 reached 2,200 tonnes, in contrast to what all Western consultancy firms and news outlets have been reporting. On September 11 the China Gold Yearbook 2014 (that covers the financial year 2013) was released by the CGA on the China Gold Congress in Beijing.
As you can read below in the translation from a Chinese press release about the China Gold Yearbook 2014, the CGA states Chinese wholesale gold demand in 2013 was 2,199 tonnes; bullion import 1507 tonnes, dor import from overseas mines 17 tonnes and domestically mined gold accounted for 428 tonnes. (scrap supply must have been 247 tonnes)
Why the Western media don’t report on these numbers is ‘a mystery’. Remember the 1,500 tonnes net imported in 2013 by China exclude PBOC purchases!

This post was published at TF Metals Report on October 23, 2014.

Goldman Sachs Is Buying Carl Icahn’s “High Yield Bond Bubble”

Jon

High-yield bond issuance has surged in recent days as ‘wide’ spreads have encouraged investors to take the dip once again (despite firms’ record leverage and increasing desperation to roll the wall of maturing debt). However, it’s not all guns blazing, as one manager noted, “while the market reopens, it reopens with issuers having to be a little more investor friendly.” Despite Carl Icahn’s warning that “the high-yield bond market is in a major bubble that’s gonna burst,” Bullard’s “QE4″ comments sparked Goldman to add US junk bonds and Aberdeen says selling EU and buying US corporate debt “is the trade that kind of screams at you right now.” The dash-for-trash down-in-quality is back as CCC-demand surges and, as one trader notes the market’s schizophrenia: “one day the market feels like it is shut down and you can’t sell anything and you wake up this morning and you can price any part of the curve.”
There is nothing to fear but the lack of The Fed itself…

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 10/23/2014.

Who Really Owns Your Home?: Detroit Preparing to Foreclose on 142,000 Residents By 2016

Jon

Have you ever considered the legitimacy of property taxes? It’s one thing for the government to take a cut from your income, but there’s something deeply offensive about the idea of property taxes. It’s the idea that you have to pay your local government, year after year for the rest of your life, for something you’ve already paid in full. It’s complete nonsense.
It calls into question whether you even own your property in the first place. After all, do you really own it if you have to keep paying for it? It seems to closely resemble the medievalsystem of serfdom. The peasants didn’t own the land they worked on. They had to pay a yearly fee for the right to work that land, which went towards the nobles and knights. It was protection money. So at least they had the benefit of protection from the warrior class in those societies. Can you say the same of your local police?
I digress. In reality, you don’t ‘own’ your house or the land it sits on, even if it’s been paid in full. That’s another benefit those peasants have on us. They didn’t have to pay some bank for decades, only to have their land taken from them when they didn’t pay their ‘yearly fee’. They were never under the illusion that the land belonged to them.

This post was published at The Common Sense Show on 23 Oct, 2014.

Canada Shook By Assault inside Parliament

Jon

Canada’s capital was attacked on Wednesday by the fatal shooting of a soldier and an attack on the parliament building after a gunman managed to get inside. The gunman in the parliament building was shot dead. The question is WHY? It would be nice if someone investigated and revealed the truth. Was the man just nuts? Or was he disgruntled over some economic issue? There is a huge difference for taxes are rising in Canada and there is the issue of Quebec that should start to rise once again under a separatist movement when the ECM turns down

This post was published at Armstrong Economics on October 23, 2014.

New York Fed’s Conference Evokes Thoughts of Violence Against Wall Street

Jon

What the New York Fed attempted to pull off this past Monday with its full-day conference for the execs of wayward Wall Street banks was a public relations stunt to switch the national debate from its culture to Wall Street’s culture. Styled as a ‘Workshop on Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry,’ the event came less than a month after ProPublica and public radio’s ‘This American Life’ released internal tape recordings made by a former New York Fed bank examiner, Carmen Segarra, revealing a regulator with no bark or bite.
ProPublica’s Jake Bernstein wrote that the tapes and a confidential report by an outside consultant demonstrated the New York Fed’s ‘history of deference to banks.’
But there is far more to this story. Wall Street banking executives, who elect two-thirds of the Board of Directors of the New York Fed and have frequently served on its Board, have structured the institution to be its sycophant. Consider the fact that Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, sat on the Board of the New York Fed from 2007 through 2012 as the regulator failed to follow through on three separate staff recommendations that JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office undergo a thorough investigation, as reported this week by the Federal Reserve System’s Inspector General.
JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office in 2012 finally owned up to losing $6.2 billion of bank depositors’ money in wild bets on exotic derivatives in London.

This post was published at Wall Street On Parade on October 23, 2014.

Keiser Report: Market Cycle Horrors (E670)

Jon

The following video was published by RT on Oct 23, 2014
Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the looming crisis as investors chasing yield have piled into obscure and less-liquid assets leading to sell-offs in the more liquid markets during panics as investors sell what they can. They also discuss Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac and the FHFA (Federal Housing Finance Agency) lowering bank obligations on buybacks in order to spur more subprime lending. In the second half, Max continues his interview with Mitch Feierstein of PlanetPonzi.com about financial markets on the precipice.

Somone Really Needs To Explain To Europe What “Austerity” Means

Jon

Remember Europe’s “austerity”, or rather as we dubbed it, fauxterity?
Of course, how could you forget: after all everything that is wrong with Europe is blamed not on government corruption and the complete lack of reform, enabled so gloriously by Goldman’s custodian of Europe’s money printer who would do “whatever it takes” to mask Europe’s sad reality that without reform the continent is doomed, but on the intolerable, insufferable imposition of hated, loathed austerity on Europe’s insolvent nations. After all, how on earth are they all supposed to get out of their debt-induced depressions if they have to, gasp, cut their debt!
So yeah, we get the propaganda. What we don’t get is whether everyone in Europe is completely incapable of reading simple numbers, is atrocious at math, or simply doesn’t understand the definition of austerity.
According to the just released government debt data for Q2 2014 where we find that, in a very peculiar definition of what austerity supposedly means in Europe, total debt to GDP for the Euro Area rose once again, from 91.9%, to a new all time high of 92.7%, or in absolute terms from 9.15 trillion in government debt to 9.26 trillion.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 10/23/2014.

Late Payments by Ibex Companies Hits 47 Billion, 169 Days (3 Times Legal Time Limit); Ibex vs. DOW

Jon

Lack of significant improvement in payments by IBEX companies to suppliers is yet another another sign there isn’t much of a recovery in Spain.
La Vanguardia reports Late Payments by Ibex Companies Hits 47 Billion, 169 days (nearly 3 times the legal time limit). Ibex is the name of the Spanish stock market exchange.
Via translation from La Vanguardia. <
Delinquency of the Ibex 35 exceeds 47 billion euros and the average payment is 169 days late, almost three times the limits set by law, according to the latest report of the Platform Multisectoral against delinquency (PMcM), made from the data published by the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV).

This post was published at Global Economic Analysis on October 23, 2014.

About That Referendum in Switzerland…

Jon

On November 30, Switzerland’s citizens will cast a very critical vote.
Through a referendum, they will vote for or against the Swiss National Bank increasing its gold bullion reserves to 20%, the central bank halting the selling of gold, and the storing of gold bullion in the country. (Source: Kitco News, September 30, 2014.)
If the results are in favor of the referendum, it will mean Switzerland’s central bank will be forced to buy a significant amount of gold bullion.
According to the most recent data from the World Gold Council, Switzerland has 1,040 tonnes of gold bullion in its reserves, equal to only 7.8% of its total reserves. (Source: ‘World Official Gold Holdings,’ World Gold Council web site, last accessed October 16, 2014.) To bring its gold bullion holdings to 20% of total reserves, the central bank of Switzerland will have to buy 1,600 more tonnes of gold, or about 60% of all global mine output this year. Will the gold market be able to handle this kind of demand shock? I highly doubt it.
And if the central bank of Switzerland stops selling gold, a significant amount of gold will come off the market.

This post was published at Gold-Eagle on October 22, 2014.