How to Corner the Gold Market

Posted March 30, 2010By Janet Tavakoli

First, let your greed overcome all regard for the stability of the global market, and overcome your aversion to illegal activities. Stay away from people like me, and fly under the radar, because I’d like to see you thrown in jail. Most Washington officials, regulators, and Wall Street managers are probably safe to hang around, especially if you cut them in for a piece of the action or give them vague promises of a future lucrative job.

Next, cultivate relationships—or plant someone—on as many as the gold exchanges as possible in London, New York, Chicago, Hong Kong, Sydney, and Dubai. Get to know key people at one or more of the bullion banks: JPMorgan Chase, UBS AG, ScotiaMocatta, Barclays Bank, and Deutsche Bank AG. Get to know as many mine producers as possible (China has been buying gold mines), and watch the sales of mines, particularly to China. Get to know all of the refiners.

Set up some new offshore corporations, subsidiaries of existing corporations, and a hedge fund or two of your own to engage in some gold trading.

Get to know as many hedge fund buyers as possible, and encourage everyone to buy physical gold. Remove the gold from custodian banks, and stash it in a vault solely under the control of the hedge fund. Use your network of people with net worth of $1 billion or more to get them to buy gold, too. Then work on the “small” investors with only $100 million or more net worth. Keep the key decision making group as small as possible to make it harder for anyone in your group to try to back out.

Pump up the gold story. Get your friends to tell retail investors to buy some gold every month. Get your buddies in the financial business to offer exchange traded gold funds (ETFs) that claim to buy physical gold. This will sound safe to retail suckers investors, but in fact, the ETFs are very risky. This will serve your purpose when you are ready to start a panic. These particular ETFs will allow the “gold” to be commingled with the custodian’s gold, and the custodian can lease out the gold. Moreover, the “gold” custodian can give it to a sub custodian that the manager doesn’t know. The sub custodian can give it to yet another sub custodian unknown to the original custodian. The manager will never audit the gold, and the gold is not “allocated” to a particular investor. Since this is an “exchange traded” gold fund, investors will probably assume the gold is regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), but it isn’t. By the time investors wake up to the probability that there is very little actual gold backing their investment, your plan will be ready to execute.

Locate the naked shorts, the bullion dealers whose short positions are greater than their long positions. After you complete your plan, the naked shorts will have to pay whatever you can squeeze out of them to cover the contracts they have with you.

Now you are ready to execute your plan.*

Step 1: Let everyone in the futures markets know you are buying gold, speculating in gold, and want to take physical delivery. It helps that China openly announced it wants to increase its gold reserves; the market isn’t looking too hard at you. At first, act like you’re naïve. Buy on margin and pyramid up by reinvesting your profits when you have them. This part is legal, but you don’t want to draw too much attention to yourself. Your buddies in the market will distract attention from you by buying gold and putting on straddles (selling the near months and buying in future months). No one will suspect collusion.

Step 2: Get the banks to let you finance your gold. They will lend you most of the value of your gold, especially if you do not argue about the interest rates they charge. Since they are borrowing from the Fed or another Central Bank at nearly zero, they consider the difference they get from you (backed by your gold) as gravy. As the price of gold rises, they will lend you more, and you can add to your gold position.

Be careful with the loans, though. In March, 1980, Paul Volcker was Chairman of the Federal Reserve. As the Hunts tried to corner the silver market, Volcker inadvertently ruined their plans. Volcker raised interest rates to fight inflation and issued a special credit restraint to banks admonishing banks not to provide financing for speculators in gold and silver. Borrowing costs rose, while silver prices dropped. The former billionaires were bankrupted by Volcker’s prudence. Fraud is not for sissies. But don’t worry too much. No one in Washington is really listening to Paul Volcker today. They just trot him out for a photo-op, and then dilute any “rules” he suggests to render them totally ineffective.

Step 3: Book up all of the space at gold refiners, so that no one else can do it. Buy as many gold mines as possible, and do not hedge (sell gold forward). Since the price of gold is going up, persuade other mines to keep as much of new production as possible off the market, while you execute your plan to push up prices. Keep the part about your attempt to manipulate gold prices a secret. You won’t be 100% successful with all the mines, but you don’t have to be, and every bit helps. Besides, if these other mines insist on hedging (by selling gold forward), your plan may drive them into bankruptcy, and then you can buy them cheap.

Step 4: Create credit derivatives contracts that give you the option to ask for your pay-off in gold. Make the reference credit the United States or the United Kingdom and create extra triggers like credit downgrades or other events that make it easier for you to demand payment in gold. The steps you use here to manipulate the gold market can be adapted to the credit derivatives market, so even if you can’t trigger the event, you can make the spreads move in your favor and demand collateral in gold. Hide the credit default swap contract from the eyes of the clearing exchanges by embedding them in a securitization, a credit-linked note, or a sovereign fund product. The suckers investors that invest in these products never read the documentation, so when you trigger the event, they won’t realize they are caught in a short squeeze—scrambling for your gold at the high prices you set—until it is too late.

Step 5: Pick the future month to make your big move. You will go long gold futures and demand physical delivery. Your buddies will all go long, too. Mix it up a little by buying some straddles to make it appear you are just a regular speculator, and throw everyone off the scent. Balance your straddle so it is relatively neutral, and the initial long position continues to apply pressure. When the long side of your straddle becomes due, demand physical delivery (this will be before your other long position) to keep up the pressure.

Step 6: Secretly and habitually start making some large early purchases in non-U.S. markets. That way, when the U.S. markets open, gold should follow the upward trend. Create chaos by doing as many as the following as possible in the shortest time possible. Move any remaining gold you have in trading depositories to private storage. Get some banks to issue research reports on how the bullion banks don’t have enough gold to cover their massive short positions, and talk about the tight gold supplies. Trigger some of those credit default swaps. Inform the suckers investors in non-allocated “paper” gold ETF’s just how stupid it is to give their money to a “manager” that doesn’t audit the gold, insure the gold, prevent leasing of the gold, allocate the gold, or otherwise prove the gold is backing the fund.

Step 7: The bullion banks and dealers that have over-hedged their physical gold with short positions will now be squeezed and have to meet margin calls. You and all of your speculator friends will look bad, so now is the time to use a ruse. Offer to cancel some of your forward contracts in exchange for early delivery of gold. This will temporarily relieve the bullion dealers’ pain on their short positions, and give you control over even more of the gold supply.

Step 8: You and you friends have pinched off the gold supply and control most of the free gold supply having locked it up in your own vaults and warehouses. You are all long a lot of futures contracts, and you will all demand physical delivery. You now have the naked shorts exactly where you want them.

Step 9: Rely on bankruptcy and bailouts to get what you want. Normally, you would be afraid that you would never get paid, because your demands would bankrupt the naked shorts. But the naked shorts are likely to be unwary hedge funds or other sophisticated investors, and no one cares if you bankrupt them. Other naked shorts are likely to be the bullion banks, and they are all being bailed out by the Central Banks who will lend them what little gold they have left and then beg the IMF for whatever they have. In lieu of that, you can set a very high cash price and take cash. In the gold feeding frenzy you have created, you can gradually unload some of your physical gold. If you managed to bankrupt any gold mines, circle back and see if you can scoop them up for a song.

China is a wild card. If it is not part of your scheme and decides to lend its gold, it could dampen your profits or even upset your short squeeze. But China may not want to help out your victims. Why should they? If China buys enough gold mines and increases its reserves enough, it may be in its interest to befriend you. Your combined ownership will have made the futures markets irrelevant. Together you will not only have cornered the gold market, you will have cornered gold.

* The Hunt Brothers used a similar earlier strategy in an attempt to corner the silver market in 1979-80 as recounted by Stephen Fay in The Great Silver Bubble Coronet, 1982). This book was also published under the title: Beyond Greed.

See also: “Structured Finance: Price Manipulation Includes Silver and Gold” – August 17, 2013

Read more finance articles by Janet Tavakoli

http://www.tavakolistructuredfinance.com/2010/03/corner-gold-market/#.UzlbuRoNugY.twitter

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Jeremy Grantham Speaks

Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham says the US Federal Reserve is killing the recovery of the world's biggest economy and the ''next bust will be unlike any other''.

Mr Grantham – the cofounder and chief investment strategist at the $US112 billion ($123 billion) Boston-based fund manager GMO –said he wouldn't invest his clients' money in US stocks for at least the next seven years because of the Fed's ''misguided policies''.

Mr Grantham has an impeccable track record, having called both the internet bubble and then the US housing bubble. In November he said he believed the US sharemarket could rise another 30 per cent, although he believed it was overvalued, before crashing again.

''We invest our clients' money based on our seven-year prediction,'' Mr Grantham told Fortune.

''Over the next seven years we think the market will have negative returns. The next bust will be unlike any other because the Fed and other central banks around the world have taken on all this leverage that was out there and put it on their balance sheets. We have never had this before.

''Assets are overpriced generally. They will become cheap again. That's how we will pay for this. It's going to be very painful for investors''.

Mr Grantham said the Fed's $US85 billion a month bond buying program had failed to stimulate the economy, saying that there was no proof that more debt creates growth.

''It's quite likely that the recovery has been slowed down because of the Fed's actions,'' he said.

''Go back to the 1980s and the US had an aggregate debt level of about 1.3 times GDP. Then we had a massive spike over the next two decades to about 3.3 times debt. And GDP over that time has slowed.''

'No proof'

When questioned to provide evidence backing his claim, Mr Grantham said while there was ''some indication'' the crash and downturn would have been sharper had the Fed not intervened, there's ''no proof on the other side that the economy is any stronger from quantitative easing''.

''By now the depths of that recession would have been forgotten, the system would have been healthier, and we would have regained our growth.

''In the economic crisis after World War I there was no attempt at intervention or bailouts and the economy came roaring back.''

When asked if the Fed could be blamed for bailouts when they were an act of Congress, Mr Grantham pointed his finger firmly at former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke.

''I don't like to get into the details. The Bernanke put – the market belief that if anything goes bad the Fed will come to the rescue – has a profound impact on people and how they act.''

Mr Grantham said record low interest rates had also failed to deliver growth.

''My view of the economy is not principle-based. Higher interest rates would have increased the wealth of savers. Instead, the have become collateral damage of Bernanke's policies.

''The theory is that lower interest rates are supposed to spur capital spending, right? Then why is capital spending so weak at this stage of the cycle?

''There is no evidence at all that quantitative easing has boosted capital spending. We have always come roaring back from recessions, even after the mismanaged Great Depression. This time we are not. It's anecdotal evidence, but we have never had such a limited recovery.''

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/very-painful-world-heading-for-bust-unlike-any-other-says-jeremy-grantham-20140325-35f34.html#ixzz2xAEvpojz

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Fiat leads to more Fiat

By Ronald-Peter Stoferle, Incrementum AG Liechtenstein

March 11

There is an undeniable fact with significant consequences:  Today money is lent into existence; the outstanding interest for that very loan is not....

Therefore, ‘stability’ in a debt based monetary system requires new money to be continually loaned into existence, otherwise a shortage of currency to service the debt will occur.  This leads to an imperative need for:

►  Exponential Money Supply Growth

►  Exponential Credit/Debt Growth

►  Exponential Nominal GDP Growth (Accomplished through productivity increases and/or price inflation)

Leaving this exponential path feels like going cold turkey and lets us cry for our monetary drug dealers, begging to bring us back to the exponential credit expansion.  This becomes more and more relevant as the curve of the money supply/debt starts becoming steeper and ‘goes exponential.’

http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/3/12_4_Astonishing_Charts_Reveal_The_World_Is_Going_Exponential.html

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)

...from Dr. John

"A final note – in my view, it is incorrect to believe that the 2008-2009 market plunge and financial crisis were caused by the housing bubble. The housing bubble was merely the expression of a very specific underlying dynamic. The true cause of that episode can be found earlier, in Federal Reserve policies that suppressed short-term interest rates following the 2000-2002 recession, and provoked a multi-year speculative “reach for yield” into mortgage securities. Wall Street was quite happy to supply the desired “product” to investors who – observing that the housing market had never experienced major losses – misinvested trillions of dollars of savings, chasing mortgage securities and financing a speculative bubble. Of course, the only way to generate enough “product” was to make mortgage loans of progressively lower quality to anyone with a pulse. To believe that the housing bubble caused the crash was is to ignore its origin in Federal Reserve policies that forced investors to reach for yield.

Tragically, the Federal Reserve has done the same thing again – starving investors of safe returns, and promoting a reach for yield into increasingly elevated and speculative assets. Thinking about the crisis only from the perspective of housing, investors and policy-makers have allowed the same process to play out more broadly in the equity market. On a quantitative basis, the overvaluation of the equity market is greater percentage-wise, and greater dollar-wise, than the overvaluation of housing in 2006-2007. We fully expect that from present valuations, U.S. stocks will produce zero or negative returns on every horizon shorter than 7 years. There is no antidote or alchemy that will allow a buy-and-hold approach to squeeze water from this stone. There is no painless monetary fix that will shift the allocation of capital toward productive investment and away from distortive speculation. Instead, one must wait for the rain. Impatient, crowd-following investors are all too willing to wastefully scatter seeds onto this parched desert, thinking that this is their only chance to sow. To wait patiently in the expectation of fertile soil and rain is not an act of pessimism, but an act of optimism and informed experience."

http://www.hussman.net/wmc/wmc140310.htm

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Gold in 2013: The Foundation For 2014

By Alasdair Macleod

Posted 28 February 2014

The chronological events of 2013 set the background for gold in 2014. It was a momentous year which should ensure a rise in the gold price in 2014.

Before 2013 demand for physical ETFs was high. At the same time Asian demand, from China, India, Turkey and elsewhere, was accelerating leaving Western bullion markets increasingly short of physical liquidity. Hong Kong and China between them in 2012 had absorbed on official figures 1,458 tonnes, and India a further 988 tonnes, ensuring 2013 kicked off with more global demand than available supply from mines and scrap.

The following is a list of subsequent important developments in 2013.

1. Germany's Bundesbank announced in January that it would recall 300 tonnes of its gold stored at the New York Fed by 2020. The Bundesbank was criticised for this decision, since gold held in New York amounted to 1,536 tonnes, so why take seven years to repatriate less than 20% of it? In the event by the year-end only five tonnes had been repatriated, fuelling rumours that it didn't actually exist other than as a book entry.

2. The Cyprus bail-in debacle in February alerted everyone to the new bail-in procedures being adopted by all G20 member states. Wealthy depositors in the Eurozone suddenly realised their deposits were at risk of confiscation. Governments were no longer going to bail out large euro depositors, let alone those with bullion accounts.

3. The new bail-in regime was followed by ABN-AMRO and Rabobank's refusal to deliver physical gold to their account-holders, offering currency settlement instead. Many interpreted this as evidence of long-term holders attempting to withdraw physical bullion.

4. By end-March it was becoming clear that growing demand for physical bullion was a potential systemic problem. This was followed in April by a co-ordinated attack on the gold price to persuade the investing public that gold was in a bear market.

5. The result was liquidation by weak holders in ETF gold funds. However, lower prices also triggered unprecedented physical demand, particularly from China and India but also across the whole Asian continent. Gold coin sales broke records. None of this escalating demand appears to have been expected by Western central banks, which by elimination had to be the principal source of maintained liquidity.

6. In July I discovered that in the four months following its 28th February year-end the Bank of England appeared to have delivered up to 1,300 tonnes of gold from its vaults. This amount tied in with record Asian demand in the wake of the April price drop, far greater than can have been satisfied from other known sources such as ETF liquidation.

7. The new Governor at the Reserve Band of India, Raghuram Rajan, who was once the IMF's Chief Economist, introduced restrictions on India's gold imports blaming them for the trade deficit. This overturned official policies which led to the liberation of the gold market in the early 1990s, fuelling suspicions that this move was orchestrated by Western central banks.

8. Premiums in India rocketed and smuggling escalated to meet demand.

9. Ben Bernanke in his testimony to Congress in mid-July said "No one really understands gold prices, and I don't either." Was he admitting to a policy failure over gold management?

10. In October both the Swedish and Finnish central banks announced the location of their gold reserves. Additionally, the Finnish central bank's Head of Communications added further information in Finnish in a blog run on the Bank's website, to the effect that all 25 tonnes held at the Bank of England was "invested" (i.e. leased or swapped), and that "Gold investment activities are common for central banks". This appears to be an admission that significant amounts of monetary gold have been sold into the market. Question: How do they get it back, when Asian demand alone absorbs the equivalent of all global mine and scrap supply?

11. Chinese public demand through the Shanghai Gold Exchange and Hong Kong rose to 2,668 tonnes over the whole year. Add in 50 tonnes of coin, and it amounts to 2,718 tonnes in all. We know this because these are firm figures issued by the SGE and the Hong Kong Government, not the result of surveys, aiming to identify end-users.

12. We can assume that China's own mine production of 430 tonnes is not in these figures, on the basis that the government buys all domestic mine production and is unlikely to put gold production from mines it controls through commercial brokers on the SGE. This being the case, Chinese mine production should be added to total demand figures, raising the total to 3,148 tonnes. Furthermore available statistics do not include gold bought outside China by the Government and wealthy citizens and either imported or held in vaults abroad, so we can probably regard this figure as a minimum, even though the SGE deliveries includes scrap of a few hundred tonnes.

13. Meanwhile the China Gold Association reports gold "consumed" of 1100 tonnes, and the WGC reports identified Chinese demand of 1,066 tonnes. These are the figures commonly accepted by Western analysts as total demand.

In conclusion

The events of 2013 persuaded investors in western capital markets that gold's bull market had definitely been broken, and that gold would probably go lower or at best move sideways in 2014. The underlying reality is very different, with China in particular managing to corner the physical market with trend-following Western analysts caught unawares.

So far, instead of continuing to fall the gold price actually bottomed on 31 December at $1182, and since then has rallied over 13% to $1340. The position today is that some hedge funds which were short have closed their positions and there are more yet to do so. There is growing evidence for the trend-chasers that the price is entering a new bull phase, with the 50-day and the 200-day moving averages both rising and about to complete a golden cross.

Central banks appear to be facing a problem of their own making. The lesson from Germany's attempt to repatriate her gold appears to have provided prima face evidence that central banks have little or no physical liquidity left. Minor central banks, such as Finland's, must now be wondering if gold out on lease will ever be returned to them, so may be increasingly reluctant to make their gold available for further leasing. Instead they are likely to end current leasing agreements as they mature rather than extend them.

In 2014 there is likely to be a growing realisation that the vaults in the West are very low on stock.

2014 should be an interesting year.

http://www.goldmoney.com/research/analysis/gold-in-2013-the-foundation-for-2014?gmrefcode=gata

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