Time For A Break

You know how they say that dogs can sense an impending earthquake? Don't you kind of feel that way these days? I know I do.

First, it seems that everything is down. Stocks. Bonds. Commodities. Every currency. If there's a market for it, it's being sold. The only thing that is consistently rising this past week is The Pig. And once those dollars are bought, where are they going? Apparently nowhere. Very strange. Almost ominous.

Then you've got very knowledgeable folks like Bill Holter at MilesFranklin blaring the alarm with columns like this: https://blog.milesfranklin.com/the-great-unwind-has-finally-arrived and this: https://blog.milesfranklin.com/the-button-has-been-pushed-ready-or-not

We've got Santa, who is clearly very, very nervous. He's practically begging you to meet him somewhere for a discussion: https://www.jsmineset.com/2013/06/24/chicago-vancouver-and-scottsdale-qa-session-tickets-still-available/ And he keeps posting messages urging you to Get Out of The System (GOTS) as quickly as possible. Just yesterday, he linked two articles which you really do need to take some time to consider:

https://www.leap2020.eu/GEAB-N-76-is-available-Alert-for-the-second-half-of-2013-Global-systemic-crisis-II-second-devastating-explosion-social_a14266.html &

https://www.valuewalk.com/2013/06/u-s-banks-crisis-plan-fed/

There are items such as this, which I found at ZeroHedge: https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/mid-year-digest/

And Chris Martenson, who I know to be a very wise and sober fellow, got into the act, too: https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/82210/everything-being-sold

So here we are. Look, I don't know if the financial world is ending this week or next or even this year, but I do know that the current system is unsustainable. To that end, your only financial protection is the physical possession of gold and silver. Not paper derivatives. Not ETFs. Not a basket of mining stocks. Physical metal, in your own two hands.

For those of you upset about the current, eight-month decline of fiat-conversion value, I'm sorry. If having gold and silver consistently move higher in terms of dollars would make you feel more comfortable, I regret that that hasn't happened for you. If you are sitting upon unrealized losses which makes you feel uncomfortable, I apologize and I wish I could make it different for you. But I can't.

However, you need to remember that we live in extraordinary times. Those spouting disinformation about the future price of gold are either hopelessly misinformed or deliberately trying to mislead you. The global forces at work behind the scenes have been in control and remain in control of the paper metal market. The past eight months have been a coordinated effort to crush price, thereby freeing physical for immediate delivery and allowing The Bullion Banks to cover paper short positions, transferring the future risk and liability to the Specs. This has now been accomplished and I firmly believe that we are very near a price bottom.

One day, very soon, paper price will reverse and head higher. Then, one day in the future, paper price will no longer exist as price resets multiples higher with the emergence of a new global financial paradigm. Please understand: THIS IS NOT AN OPPORTUNITY FOR "PROFIT". This is simply an opportunity to protect and defend all that you have accumulated to this point in your life.

To that end and to personally prepare, I'm going to be taking a few days off. Over the next two weeks, I'll still post from time to time but I'll also be sharing some "guest posts" from a handful of your favorite site regulars. Then, come next month, I plan to make a few changes to the way we do things around here. Nothing earth-shattering but necessary changes, nonetheless.

In the meantime, stay alert. Now is not the time to be complacent. Trust your instincts and use your brain. Double-check that you have acquired enough physical metal and consider buying even more. The End of The Great Keynesian is upon us. Please continue to prepare accordingly.

About the Author

TF

Founder

TF Metals Report

613 Comments

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OC15

Jun 25, 2013 - 11:01am

2nd and Thurd?

OC15

Jun 25, 2013 - 11:02am

Next!

Yes.

Istack

Jun 25, 2013 - 11:05am

I'll take a break

once i get one of these. My instinct to take shelter is strong right now as well. If I think about it too much i start getting a feeling of hopelessness. This world is one messed up place.

hai

Jun 25, 2013 - 11:07am

Changes In The Silver Market: Part 1

In 1999, the photographic market was to hit its peak of silver production. In the United States alone, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, this market consumed over 93 million ounces. Globally, the photographic industry needed 267 million ounces that year, around 1 silver ounce in every four traded worldwide. So photography carried real buying power as an industry. But the turn of the century was the beginning of the end.

https://www.hardassetsinvestor.com/columns-a-opinions/4930-changes-in-th...

AlienEyes

Jun 25, 2013 - 11:08am

Top ten !

tyberious

Jun 25, 2013 - 11:09am

See you on the other side!

Enjoy your well deserved break TF!

wildstylechef

Jun 25, 2013 - 11:10am

sixth

need a break here , I mean come on this is just brutal

Istack

Jun 25, 2013 - 11:11am

My summer home

The Green Manalishi

Jun 25, 2013 - 11:15am

Regarding TTM

Turd, I don't know if you have seen this, but Steve Keen has had the same trouble with Gonzalo Lira as outlined here:

https://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/debunking-economics/

"So I suddenly realized that the site was far from profitable—given my production costs of about $2500 a month—and asked Lira to shut down yearly memberships while I decided what to do. This is why the videos stopped being made—on top of the time I was losing to the industrial relations dispute with UWS, and getting ready for the Kickstarter campaign to raise development funds for my Minsky software (which ran from February 9 to March 18). I was now conscious that the site was costing me more than I was actually earning from it. My objective had never been the money itself—first and foremost, I was hoping to “buy time” using its revenue stream so that I could focus on my research—so the fact that it was losing money as well as costing my time made it a doubly bad project. I therefore stopped recording videos and cut back to just providing my weekly blog column here prior to its publication on Business Spectator (more about this below) and asked Lira to terminate the yearly membership option immediately—since this made it harder to ultimately terminate this site. Then I received the January statement on March 2nd—and saw that yearly memberships were still being taken."

Lamenting Laverne

Jun 25, 2013 - 11:15am

Fred Charts - Longer perspective and a hmmm

Several posters (Hrunner, Ivars, Eric O, Spartacus, Pining, Ctob, and Green Lantern off the top of my head) have pointed to the importance of the Velocity Chart recently. Once again I got curious, because Hrunner was kind enough to explain in simple terms what it actually meant.

GDP in relation to Monetary Base or one of the other Money Supply metrics. So when Monetary Base is flat and GDP goes up - Velocity goes up. When Monetary Base goes up and GDP is flat - Velocity goes down. When both moves up or down proportionately with each other - Velocity is flat. This is my understanding.

It was interesting to take a look at these metrics in several ways. It is not the subject of this post, but just take a quick look at the historic perspective. For all of us, who are feeling the pain of doubt these days, it is a good view of just how long time ago the problems with our monetary system began to bite. It seems to me that the "beneficial" characteristics of the fiat money system stopped paying off in 1980..... as in NINE-TEEN-EIGHTY.

Is that because that was the point in time, when real economic expansion slowed decisively, because the big shift for most families from rentals to own house, from bus to own car, from hand washing diapers to washing machine etc. etc. had been completed. Apart from some booster effect from new technology during the 1990'ies, we shifted to credit driven consumption and an economy weighted heavier on the service-side than manufacturing side.

Could it be that service does not have the same transmission power as manufacturing?

Anyways - back to the focus of this post: Technicalities. This is what I cannot reconcile, and that I hope fellow Turdites will help clarifying:

Baring in mind the expected Velocity behavior mentioned at the top, it is clear from this chart that Velocity dropped significantly - BEFORE we went into recession after the credit crunch in 2008. We were told that the problem started with a run on the money market funds, because of rumors and subsequent confirmation of the Lehman Brothers collapse.

Well - this Velocity Chart relates to the Adjusted Monetary Base. So in order for this chart to produce a drop like that - either Base Money has risen significantly more than GDP or GDP has fallen of a cliff with constant Base Money - right?

(Fed Definition: "Velocity is a ratio of nominal GDP to a measure of the money supply. It can be thought of as the rate of turnover in the money supply--that is, the number of times one dollar is used to purchase final goods and services included in GDP.")

When we look at the Adjusted Monetary Base chart, it is clear that it did a bend-off - not drop - but bend-off some time before the recession started. When you look at the GDP chart further below, it can be seen that GDP continued upwards with the virtually same slope until the start of the recession and did not drop off significantly before well into the recession.

(Fed Definition: "The Adjusted Monetary Base is the sum of currency (including coin) in circulation outside Federal Reserve Banks and the U.S. Treasury, plus deposits held by depository institutions at Federal Reserve Banks. These data are adjusted for the effects of changes in statutory reserve requirements on the quantity of base money held by depositories. This series has been reconstructed starting July 14, 2003.")

Here is my first question - how can a formula that must be GDP divided by Base Money (when you look how it behaves elsewhere on the chart) produce a significant drop in velocity when the number below the division line rises much slower and the number above the division line continues to rise, with at most a very slight temper? With that formula, the velocity should have risen before the recession. Or at least - just have been up-sloping flatter.

I know it is difficult to see details out of a chart like that, but if you compare with the velocity movements for the GDP drop in the 1980 and 1990 recessions - that was more pronounced with a steeper Base Money up-slope than just before the 2008 recession - and produced less velocity change than the drop before 2008.

I don't understand this. It leads me to think that either GDP is misrepresented or Base Money is misrepresented. But which one? Or is it Velocity, that is misrepresented?

The GDP chart suggests that there was no growth slowdown, but the velocity chart suggests that there was either a growth in Base Money or a reduction in GDP. A housing crash due to defaulting subprime mortgages most likely due to jobloss of the most vulnerable workers, who are always the first to be fired, when sales and revenues get sluggish, initially suggests that the GDP number is the odd one out. But is that it? Let's take a closer look at the number below the division line.

Roughly speaking - again if I understand the definitions correctly - a bend-off in Base Money growth rate can either be because the Commercial Banks have withdrawn deposits from the Federal Reserve Banks, or it can be because the growth rate of addition to currency in circulation had been reduced. Looking at the Adjusted Reserves chart, it looks as if the reserves were completely flat during the timeframe in question. Ergo - I assume the rate of introduction of new currency in circulation was reduced.

Next oddity: We were told that the credit crunch and subsequent recession was caused by a run on the money market funds. Money market funds are included in M2 but not in M1.

Taking a look at M1 first, which to my understanding does not include the part of Base Money that is commercial bank deposits with the Federal Reserve and what they keep in their vaults, but instead merely consists of currency in circulation plus various forms of short term demand deposits. It went notably flat at approx. 1,4 T before and during the timeframe in question.

(Fed Definition: "M1 includes funds that are readily accessible for spending. M1 consists of: (1) currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions; (2) traveler's checks of nonbank issuers; (3) demand deposits; and (4) other checkable deposits (OCDs), which consist primarily of negotiable order of withdrawal (NOW) accounts at depository institutions and credit union share draft accounts.")

At first I thought that this is not so weird, because the housing crash 2006 is likely to have caused a lot of people to draw down on their deposit accounts in the commercial banks and not put as many employment cheques in, when they had lost their jobs and defaulted on their mortgages.

However, since the Base Money had a bend-off at roughly the same time, it was also possible that the the bend-off in M1 was simply inherited from the Base Money bend-off. Checking a more detailed zoomed-in Base Money chart again, see below, it appears that the bend-off started in 2005 or possibly even at the end of 2004.

This suggests that the bend-off in M1 was not caused by a reduction of private deposits due to a housing bust, that only happened later, but instead that it was a result of reduced pace of introduction to currency in circulation.

(I just remembered now, that someone mentioned in connection with a Turdite discussion about the many false 100 Dollar notes in circulation and the new Gold 100$ notes, that this person had noticed that the newest notes he/she had seen recently was issued in 2006.)

Note also that from 2005 to 2007, when Base Money reduced its growth pace, and GDP was rising with unchanged pace, the velocity chart was going up as expected - re my first point of confusion above.

OK - so the bend-off in M1 was likely due to the Fed holding back issuance of new currency and coins in circulation. Why would they taper the currency in circulation, when everything was going great and there was no bubbles in sight according to Mr. Bernanke at the time.

Tinfoil: Did the Fed do a repeat of the alleged draining of currency that triggered the Great Depression?

And why is the M1 Money Multiplier, that shows how much bang-for-the-base-money-buck we get, suggesting that our problems with transmission into the real economy started in early 1980'ies. And why are the Velocity Chart suggesting the same, despite continuously rising GDP?

(I know the Velocity chart is falling after 1980, because of rising base money - but why is it necessary? The multiplier tells me that increasingly more Base Money is needed to produce a rising M1 - what happened to the transmission from Base Money to M1 in the early 1980'ies? Is it because an increasing proportion of GDP is derived from the service sector, and is this not multiplying a base dollar as well as manufacturing, as mentioned in the introduction?). I would love to hear opinions on those last two questions.

(Fed definition: "The M1 multiplier is the ratio of M1 to the St. Louis Adjusted Monetary Base. Multiplicator 2013-06-12: 0.790 Ratio". )

So if currency in circulation was tapered. The question is again why? The tapering started in the beginning of 2005 - possibly with a small flat piece in the very end of 2004 as seen from this zoomed-in chart above. This was before the housing bubble bursted with a housing price peak in early 2006.

OK - So what happened to M2 during the velocity drop - the aggregate that holds the money market funds that was said to have experienced a run in 2008.

(Fed definition: "M2 includes a broader set of financial assets held principally by households. M2 consists of M1 plus: (1) savings deposits (which include money market deposit accounts, or MMDAs); (2) small-denomination time deposits (time deposits in amounts of less than $100,000); and (3) balances in retail money market mutual funds (MMMFs).")

Not much. In fact, since M2 includes M1, it must have experienced inflows, because M1 was growing at a slower pace from 2005. The M2 Velocity Chart is also quite different from the Base Money Velocity Chart. During the reduction in M2 in the early 1990'ies, the M1 rose quite a bit, and the M1 multiplier rose as well, suggesting that money was moved from M2 to M1 back then. From 2005 it looks as if the opposite occurred, and money moved from M1 to M2.

So to recap:

GDP did not budge its uptrend, despite severe housing crash - how can that be?

Base Money bended off with rising GDP - yet Velocity fell significantly even before the recession - If the Base Money chart and the GDP chart is to be believed, how is that possible, unless there is a third component to Velocity?

Did the Fed reduce currency in circulation on purpose to produce a crisis, or was it an economy cooling policy gone bad, or was the drop of on Base Money organic, because of lack of need?

I took a look at the Effective Federal Funds Rate as defined by Wikipedia (my emphasis in bold):

>>"In the United States, the federal funds rate is the interest rate at which depository institutions actively trade balances held at the Federal Reserve, called federal funds, with each other, usually overnight, on an uncollateralized basis. Institutions with surplus balances in their accounts lend those balances to institutions in need of larger balances. The federal funds rate is an important benchmark in financial markets.

The interest rate that the borrowing bank pays to the lending bank to borrow the funds is negotiated between the two banks, and the weighted average of this rate across all such transactions is the federal funds effective rate.

The federal funds target rate is determined by a meeting of the members of the Federal Open Market Committee which normally occurs eight times a year about seven weeks apart. The committee may also hold additional meetings and implement target rate changes outside of its normal schedule.

The Federal Reserve uses open market operations to influence the supply of money in the U.S. economy to make the federal funds effective rate follow the federal funds target rate."<<

It sounds a lot like that interbank lending, we have been discussing before. A bit like the SHIBOR rate that just spiked because of liquidity issues - or should we say bad-bank-around- so-want-more-dough-to-take-on-interbank-lending-risk.

Doesn't this Effective Funds Rate chart look a bit like the Velocity chart? But the Fed Funds Rate is not a part of the Velocity calculation, so that must be a coincidence

Anyways, from approximately 2005 the Fed funds rate rose quite quickly - then flatlines at the same time the Velocity fell hard. Based on the Wikipedia description it can be assumed that this interest rate rise was accompanied with FOMC actions to adjust money supply to achieve this outcome.

So interbank lending was made more expensive for those banks that needed overnight funding. If there is a connection between banks in need of overnight liquidity and more vulnerable banks, then this action would appear to be making the problem worse.

If the earlier published Alhambra paper (haven't read the recent one, that Icarus wrote about yet) is correct that Gold is used as the ultimate liquidity provider because of the quality of Gold as collateral, could that explain why there was a notable sell off in Gold in May 2006. That the interbank lending had become too expensive at 5% in 2006-2007 - and that the banks had to turn to Gold leasing to get liquidity?

Gold had had a pretty nice run, just prior to this sell off, so maybe the Fed tapered the money supply and raised the Fed funds rate to achieve a tempering of Gold?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but what this suggests to me is that:

A) The real economy appear to have been in fire-fighting mode since the early 1980'ies, and subsequent advances has taken an increasingly big proportion of Base Money to achieve a positive effect on M1 as evidenced by the M1 Multiplier. Cheaper and cheaper credit has been the name of the game - as we all know by now.

B) GDP number does not tally with the other values. Tinfoil: Could it be that the GDP was rolling over hard, and that the numbers could only be fudged for so long, so "an excuse" needed to be manufactured to keep the party going for a few years more. Remembering, the GDP number is an important factor in the spin around sovereign debt sustainability, so a hard dropping GDP for the "leader of the free world" would be very bad publicity.

C) The Velocity Chart shows something that should not be possible - given the information about what goes into the formula.

D) Tinfoil: The Fed possibly resorted to the rumored good ole tried mechanism to set off a correction - withdrawal of money from the system, at a time when it was running on all credit pistons - with the desired (?) effect clear for all to see. Including 2 much needed Gold corrections.

D) Zerohedge mentioned sometime back that the final nail in the coffin for Lehman, was due to a mispriced credit derivatives portfolio at JPM's allegedly not-to-be-believed amateurish fault (hence on purpose?), that produced a massive margin call, that would later be admitted as wrong, but by then it was too late. The Fed moving interest rates in general would produce larger repricing of derivatives for potentially vulnerable banks.

Is the current taper talk evidence of the same need to get "an excuse" (=irrational market participants misunderstanding Mr. Bernanke) for trouble already in the pipeline?. Is that why almost every central bank around the world have "unexpectedly" lowered their interest rates during the last couple of months - because the liquidity squeeze has been serious for as long as that?

E) The M2 chart does not suggest a massive withdrawal from Money Market funds as we have been told. Was it other money market funds than retail - or is the chart useless for seeing these things in detail on - or have we been told something that was incorrect? If it was "other" money market funds - why are they not a part of the M2 or another published aggregate that reveals this?

More questions than answers - as always ;-) But going forward, I will take the information in those charts with a slightly larger grain of salt than previously.

And have a great holiday Mr. T!!

Key Economic Events Week of 10/14

10/15 8:30 ET Empire State Fed MI
10/16 8:30 ET Retail Sales
10/16 10:00 ET Business Inventories
10/17 8:30 ET Housing Starts and Bldg Perms
10/17 8:30 ET Philly Fed MI
10/17 9:15 ET Cap Ute and Ind Prod
10/18 10:00 ET LEIII
10/18 Speeches from Goons Kaplan, George and Chlamydia

Time For A Break

About the Author

TF

613 Comments

2nd and Thurd?

Next!

I'll take a break

Changes In The Silver Market: Part 1

Top ten !

See you on the other side!

sixth

My summer home

Regarding TTM

Fred Charts - Longer perspective and a hmmm

TFMR Podcast - Wednesday, September 25

Thursday Conversation - Dave Kranzler

TFMR Podcast - Thursday, October 3

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Time For A Break

About the Author

613 Comments

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TFMR Podcast - Wednesday, September 25

Thursday Conversation - Dave Kranzler

TFMR Podcast - Thursday, October 3

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Forum Discussion

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