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According to the CEO of one of the world’s top primary producers of silver, looming precious metals shortages could drive the price of gold to $5000 and silver to $100 over the next three to five years. Keith Neumeyer, who oversees First Majestic Silver and is also the Chairman of mineral bank First Mining Finance, says that with commodity prices in capitulation mining companies around the world are either reducing operations or outright shutting down, the consequence of which will be a supply crunch across the industry and a resurgence in precious metals prices.

And Neumeyer isn’t the only one who sees the trend developing. Well known investment billionaires like George Soros and Carl Icahn are rushing into gold. Soros is so convinced that a paradigm shift is in the works that after warning of financial collapse and violent riots in America he sold his holdings in major U.S. banks and allocated more of his portfolio into gold mining firms.

And here’s a little known secret Neumeyer shares in an interview with SGT Report – high net worth individuals aren’t just buying paper. Neumeyer says that the coin shortages being reported by national mints around the world are the result of direct buying of physical gold and silver from sophisticated market players:

I’m seeing the numbers coming out of the the Canadian Mint, Australian Mint and the U.S. Mint… the numbers are quite high for silver coins and to a lesser degree gold coins… I think, personally, that the commercials are buying them… I think that very sophisticated high net worth investors at banks and institutions are buying them.

Supply and demand fundamentals aside there appears to be another significant reason that major players like billionaires and central banks are shifting their holdings into precious metals.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The End of the Bubble Finance Era

December 13, 2015

The End of the Bubble Finance Era

We are nearing a crucial inflection point in the worldwide bubble finance cycle that has been underway for more than two decades. To wit, the world’s central banks have finally run out of dry powder. They will be unable to stop the credit implosion which must inexorably follow the false boom.

We will get to the Fed’s upcoming once in a lifetime shift to raising rates below, but first it is crucial to sketch the global macroeconomic context.

In a word, we are now entering an epic deflation. Its leading edge is manifested in the renewed carnage in the commodity pits.

This week the Bloomberg commodity index, which encompasses everything from crude oil to soybeans, copper, nickel, cotton and livestock, plunged below 80 for the first time since 1999. It is now down nearly 70% from its all-time high on the eve of the financial crisis, and 55% from its 2011 recovery high.

Wall Street bulls and Keynesian apologists for the Fed want you to believe that there isn’t much to see here. They claim it’s just a temporary oil glut and some CapEx over-exuberance in the metals and mining industry.

But their assurances that in a year or so current excess supplies of copper, crude, iron ore and other commodities will be absorbed by an expanding global economy couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, this error is at the heart of my investment viewpoint.

We believe the global economy is vastly bloated with debt-based spending that can’t be sustained. And that this distortion is compounded on the supply side by an incredible surplus of excess production capacity. As well as wasteful malinvestments that were enabled by dirt cheap central bank credit.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Economic growth: How it works; how it fails; why wealth disparity occurs

December 8, 2015

Economic growth: How it works; how it fails; why wealth disparity occurs

Economists have put together models of how an economy works, but these models were developed years ago, when the world economy was far from limits. These models may have been reasonably adequate when they were developed, but there is increasing evidence that they don’t work in an economy that is reaching limits. For example, my most recent post, “Why ‘supply and demand’ doesn’t work for oil,” showed that when the world is facing the rising cost of oil extraction, “supply and demand” doesn’t work in the expected way.

In order to figure out what really does happen, we need to consider findings from a variety of different fields, including biology, physics, systems analysis, finance, and the study of past economic collapses. Since I started studying the situation in 2005, I have had the privilege of meeting many people who work in areas related to this problem.

My own background is in mathematics and actuarial science. Actuarial projections, such as those that underlying pensions and long term care policies, are one place where historical assumptions are not likely to be accurate, if an economy is reaching limits. Because of this connection to actuarial work, I have a particular interest in the problem.

How Other Species Grow

We know that other species don’t amass wealth in the way humans do. However, the number of plants or animals of a given type can grow, at least within a range. Techniques that seem to be helpful for increasing the number of a given species include:

Natural selection. With natural selection, all species have more offspring than needed to reproduce the parent. A species is able to continuously adapt to the changing environment because the best-adapted offspring tend to live.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why “supply and demand” doesn’t work for oil

November 24, 2015

Why “supply and demand” doesn’t work for oil

The traditional understanding of supply and demand works in some limited cases–will a manufacturer make red dresses or blue dresses? The manufacturer’s choice doesn’t make much difference to the economic system as a whole, except perhaps in the amount of red and blue dye sold, so it is easy to accommodate.

Figure 1. From Wikipedia: The price P of a product is determined by a balance between production at each price (supply S) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand D). The diagram shows a positive shift in demand from D1 to D2, resulting in an increase in price (P) and quantity sold (Q) of the product.

A gradual switch in consumer preferences from beef to chicken is also fairly easy to accommodate within the system, as more chicken producers are added and the number of beef producers is reduced. The transition is generally helped by the fact that it takes fewer resources to produce a pound of chicken meat than a pound of beef, so that the spendable income of consumers tends to go farther. Thus, while supply and demand are not independent in this example, a rising percentage of chicken consumption tends to be helpful in increasing the “quantity demanded,” because chicken is more affordable than beef. The lack of independence between supply and demand is in the “helpful” direction. It would be different if chicken were a lot more expensive to produce than beef. Then the quantity demanded would tend to decrease as the shift was increasingly made, putting a fairly quick end to the transition to the higher-priced substitute.

A gradual switch to higher-cost energy products, in a sense, works in the opposite direction to a switch from beef to chicken. Instead of taking fewer resources, it takes more resources, because we extracted the cheapest-to-extract energy products first.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Case For Peak Oil

November 21, 2015

The Case For Peak Oil

All charts below were created with data from JODI, the EIA and OPEC MOMR. It is in thousand barrels per day and the last data point is September 2015.

World crude oil production has taken off during the last two years due primarily to US shale oil production and higher output from OPEC. However very high oil prices has enabled many other countries to increase drilling rigs and production.

Low oil prices are having an effect on Non-OPEC oil production though not nearly as much as a lot of people thought they would, and not nearly as soon either.

Five nations, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, USA and Canada, have been responsible for way more than 100 percent of the increase in oil production in the last decade.

The world less the five nations charted above is down 5,000,000 barrels per day since 2005. This decline is despite the fact that oil prices, during much of that time, has been above $100 a barrel.

A look at the Non-OPEC segment of this group.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Federal Reserve, Interest Rates and Triffin’s Paradox

November 19, 2015

The Federal Reserve, Interest Rates and Triffin’s Paradox

There is no way Fed policy can be win-win-win for all participants.

One result of the global dependence on central bank interventions is a unhealthy fixation on the slightest changes in those interventions, oops I meant policies.

Since the slightest pull-back in central bank inflation of asset bubbles could spell doom for the global economy and everyone holding those assets, the world now hangs on every pronouncement of the Federal Reserve in a state of extreme anxiety.

Why the extreme anxiety? Because any change in Fed intervention creates both winners and losers. There is no way Fed policy can be win-win-win for all participants, and to understand why we turn to Triffin’s Paradox, a.k.a. Triffin’s Dilemma.

The core of Triffin’s Paradox is that the issuer of a reserve currency must serve two quite different sets of users: the domestic economy, and the international economy.

Triffin’s Paradox has two basic parts:

1. Any nation that issues the reserve currency must run a trade deficit to supply the world with surplus currency to hold in reserve and as a result,

2. The issuing nation faces the paradox that the needs of global trading community are generally different from the needs of domestic policy makers.

The global trading community requires that the issuer of the reserve currency run trade deficits large enough to satisfy the demand for reserves, while domestic audiences want a strong export sector, i.e. a trade surplus.

You can’t have it both ways: if you want to issue a reserve currency, you have to run a trade deficit that is commensurate in size with the global demand for your currency.

Since supply and demand set price, this push-pull affects the value of the U.S. dollar: U.S. exporters want a weak dollar to spur foreign demand for their products, while foreign holders of the USD want a strong dollar that holds its value/purchasing power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is The Oil And Gas Fire Sale About To Start?

October 16, 2015

Is The Oil And Gas Fire Sale About To Start?

Much has been written about the mounting pile of debt for U.S. oil companies (not to mention the well-known Brazilian oil giant).

Not that long ago, many oil and gas companies secured at least a part of their revenue by hedging contracts. Bloomberg already reported in June that many of these companies saw their artificial safety nets vanishing as oil prices failed to recover. One month later, we heard such morale boosting terms as ‘frack now, pay later,’ which were merely a bold move by struggling oil services companies to encourage cash strapped oil and gas companies to continue operations.

Simultaneously, we witnessed the bankruptcies of companies such as Samson Resources, Hercules Offshore and Sabine Oil & Gas Corp. These bankruptcies put the industry on notice. The cash flow situation for the entire oil and gas sector looks outright grim. Credit rating agency Moody’s expects a sector wide negative cash flow of $80 billion and is expecting spending cuts to continue next year. See figure 1 below for an overview of industry income and spending.

Image source: Reuters

(Click to enlarge)

Summing it up, debt, negative cash flows and the outlook for oil prices have led weak companies with balance sheets to a divest in a big way.

Although we have witnessed a couple of noteworthy acquisitions in the last months, which put 2015 in the books as a year with high volume takeovers, we cannot yet speak about an absolute M&A boom.

One of the most important reasons holding back takeovers of entire companies is the oil price volatility we have seen in the last few weeks. Financially stronger oil and gas companies seem to have postponed takeover plans and are now focusing on the acquisition of promising land holdings. Nonetheless, it seems that both buyers and sellers are preparing themselves for what could turn out to be a fire sale.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Too Many Wildcards For Oil Markets To Settle Yet

October 6, 2015

Too Many Wildcards For Oil Markets To Settle Yet

Could the price of oil be a value such that the current quantity produced exceeds the current quantity consumed? The answer is yes, and indeed that has been the case for much of the past year.

Suppose, for illustration, that even at a price of $40, there would be enough producers with sunk costs on projects already begun who would be willing to bring sufficient oil to the market to fully meet current consumption. But suppose further that at a price of $40, few new investments are undertaken, so that next year supply is much lower than it is this year, such that next year’s production would equal next year’s demand at a price of $60.

What’s wrong with this picture? Under the above scenario, if you were to buy oil today at $40, store it for a year, and sell it next year for $60, you’d make a huge profit. And if right-minded capitalists tried to do exactly that in huge volumes, the price of oil today would be bid up above $40, as the inventory demand is added to current consumption demand. As that oil is sold next year, it would bring the price next year below $60. In equilibrium, the difference between this year’s price and next year’s expected price should be close to the storage cost.

That arbitrage is clearly an important aspect of what has been going on over the last year. In response to lower prices, capital expenditures in the oil patch are being slashed. The number of drilling rigs active in the U.S. areas associated with tight oil production is only 43 percent of its level a year ago.

Number of active oil rigs in counties associated with the Permian, Eagle Ford, Bakken, and Niobrara plays, monthly Jan 2007 to Aug 2015. Data source: EIA Drilling Productivity Report.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Prediction: Gold and Gold-Silver Ratio Up, Stocks Down

September 28, 2015

A Prediction: Gold and Gold-Silver Ratio Up, Stocks Down

A Trend Change may be in the Works

The price of gold moved up moderately, and the price of silver moved down a few cents last week. However, there were some interesting fireworks in the middle of the week. Tuesday, the prices dropped and Thursday the prices of the metals popped $23 and $0.34 respectively.

Everyone can judge the sentiment prevailing in gold and silver articles for themselves, but we think there is a growing feeling of optimism (that is a renewed fall in the dollar, which most think is a rise in gold). This goes along with a sense that the long bull run in the stock market is rolling over.

gravity-2 Gravity… ever since Einstein invented it, stocks occasionally go down

We are inclined to agree that the stock market may be overdue for its appointment with gravity. This is not a good business climate, and we sure don’t see where earnings growth could come from. At the same time, we see lots of forces that could cause margin compression, not to mention rising default risk in many disparate places (e.g. shale oil bonds). We are not stock market prognosticators, so treat this as nothing more than a feeling.

Gold market participants may be expecting the price of gold to move up if the stock market moves down. This would be a continuation of the pattern of the last several years, with the prices moving opposite to each other. We are inclined to agree with this. That said, to shamelessly borrow a phrase from the London Underground (we’re currently visiting London), please mind the gap between the theory and the data.

For an updated picture of the only true supply and demand data read on…

Last Week’s Market Data

First, here is the graph of the metals’ prices.

The prices of gold and silver – click to enlarge.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Buy Gold While You Still Can!

September 26, 2015

Buy Gold While You Still Can!

An important update on the supply of physical gold

One of our long-running themes here is that the truly historic and massive flows of gold from West to East is (someday) going to stop, for the simple reason that there will be no more physical bullion left to move.

It’s just a basic supply vs. demand issue. At current rates of flow, sooner or later the West will entirely run out of physical gold to sell to China and India. Although long before that hard limit, we suspect that the remaining holders of gold in the West will cease their willingness to part with their gold.

So the date at which “the West runs out of gold to sell” is somewhere between now and whenever the last willing Western seller parts with their last ounce. As each day passes, we get closer and closer to that fateful moment.

This report centers on preponderance of fascinating data revealing the extent of the West’s massive dis-hoarding of physical gold, for the first time, begins to allow us to start estimating the range of end-dates for the flow to the East.

Here’s the punchline: there’s an enormous and growing disconnect between the cash and physical markets for gold. This is exactly what we would expect to precede a major market-shaking event based on a physical gold shortage.

Stopping the Flows

There are only two outcomes that will stop the process of Western gold flowing East, one illegitimate and the other legitimate.

It becomes illegal to sell gold. This is the favored approach of central planners who prefer to force change by dictate rather than via free markets and free will. Unfortunately, this strain of political intervention is dominant in the West, particularly in the US and EU.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Low Interest Rates Cannot Save a House of Cards

September 24, 2015

Low Interest Rates Cannot Save a House of Cards

When is the price of some marketable good or service at or near zero? When either the supply of it is so plentiful that virtually any demand, no matter how great, can be satisfied. Or when no matter how large or small the supply of it may be, people’s demand for it is so low that nobody is willing to practically pay anything for it.

On Thursday, September 17, 2015, Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen, announced that, once again, America’s central bank was leaving a key interest rate – the Federal Funds rate at banks lend money to each other overnight – at barely above zero. The Federal Reserve has manipulated and maintained this interest rate near zero for almost seven years, now.

Fed Policy Has Created Zero and Negative Interest Rates

When adjusted for inflation, the Federal Funds rate and the yield on one-year U.S. Treasury securities have been negative for almost all of the time since 2009. In real buying terms borrowed money has been either costless or actually given away with a positive real return to the borrower!

In other words, imagine that you borrowed $100 from someone with the promise that in one year you would return the $100 plus $2, or a two percent return on the lender’s money. But suppose that in a year’s time, you pay back the lender only $98.

That is what a negative real rate of interest means. After adjusting for inflation, the lender has less real buying or purchasing power than he did before with the principle of his loan. If you have lent that $100 but over the year price inflation has been, say, four percent, then when you get back $102 from the borrower (your $100 of principle and $2 of interest), this is not enough to buy at higher prices what the $100 had bought in the market before you lent that sum of money a year earlier.

– See more at: http://www.cobdencentre.org/2015/09/low-interest-rates-cannot-save-a-house-of-cards/#sthash.X8Gd2oBp.dpuf

Gold – Follow the Yellow Brick Road?

September 12, 2015

Gold – Follow the Yellow Brick Road?

The following is a veritable tour de force by Nicole Foss on the value of gold in a crashing economy, for different people in different circumstances.

Nicole Foss: In light of the rapidly-propagating loss of confidence, and consequent shift to deflation, with falling prices across the board as a result, it is appropriate to review our stance on gold. The yellow metal is often perceived as a panacea – a safe haven guarding against all manner of potential financial disruption. It has long been our stance at the Automatic Earth that this is far too simplistic a position to take. We live in a complex world for which there are no simple one-dimensional solutions. It is important to distinguish between the markets for paper gold and for physical gold, and to understand the risks inherent in gold ownership in order to manage them. As we wrote back in 2009:

Firstly, the goldbugs are right that physical gold is real money (unlike paper gold, which is just another Ponzi scheme). It has held its value for thousands of years and will continue to do so over the long term. However, that does not mean that gold prices cannot fall or that purchasing gold now is the right way for everyone to preserve capital….People’s circumstances are different. Those circumstances determine their freedom of action, both now and in the future.

Bubble Dynamics

It is our view that (paper) gold has been in a bubble which peaked in 2011, along with the rest of the commodity complex. It has been subjected to the same dynamic as other commodities, which have collectively lost touch with their own fundamentals as they have become increasingly over-financialized. Financialization moves the dynamics into the virtual world, while simultaneously subjecting them to perverse incentives. Substantial price movements having at best a tenuous connection with actual supply and demand are the result.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Peak Oil Ass-Backwards (part 1): PeakOil, Meet Fractional-Reserve Banking

September 1, 2015

Peak Oil Ass-Backwards (part 1): PeakOil, Meet Fractional-Reserve Banking

(image by Viktor Hertz)

If the ongoing crash of oil prices over the past year – and now the stock market crashes of last week – have continuously taught me one thing, that would be that I’ve got very little clue regarding the economic implications ofpeak oil. To explain this I’ll have to take a circuitous, roundabout route here, but if you’ve been as afflicted as I’ve been then you might find the following a bit illuminating.

For starters, even though I learned about peak oil in 2005, fractional-reserve banking in 2006, and pretty much instantly proceeded to put two and two together, I still ended up falling for what I might unfairly call the “peak oil orthodoxy.” I’m not sure where I first came across this “orthodoxy” I speak of, but an example as good as any – and maybe even better than any – would be that of author and a former Chief Economist at CIBC (one of Canada’s Big Five banks), Jeff Rubin.

As Rubin explained it in his first of two peak oil books, because peak oil implies a curtailment on the supply of oil, and since the demand end of a growing economy is by definition increasing, the notion of supply and demand imply that prices will head upwards if supply is limited. Because of this, upon oil’s peak its price will eventually rise to such ungodly high levels that it’ll become unaffordable by many. Following that, its demand will therefore peter out, and so thanks to the new glut in supply the price will crash to equally ungodly low levels. Once things settle down and the consumer can once again afford the now lower-priced oil, the process will repeat itself since the new (and increasing) demand will once again bump up against the limits imposed by peaking oil supplies. As a result, another crash will occur. On and on the process repeats itself, but with the higher price spikes followed by higher troughs.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Supply and Demand in the Gold and Silver Futures Markets

July 28, 2015

Supply and Demand in the Gold and Silver Futures Markets

This article establishes that the price of gold and silver in the futures markets in which cash is the predominant means of settlement is inconsistent with the conditions of supply and demand in the actual physical or current market where physical bullion is bought and sold as opposed to transactions in uncovered paper claims to bullion in the futures markets. The supply of bullion in the futures markets is increased by printing uncovered contracts representing claims to gold. This artificial, indeed fraudulent, increase in the supply of paper bullion contracts drives down the price in the futures market despite high demand for bullion in the physical market and constrained supply. We will demonstrate with economic analysis and empirical evidence that the bear market in bullion is an artificial creation.

The law of supply and demand is the basis of economics. Yet the price of gold and silver in the Comex futures market, where paper contracts representing 100 troy ounces of gold or 5,000 ounces of silver are traded, is inconsistent with the actual supply and demand conditions in the physical market for bullion. For four years the price of bullion has been falling in the futures market despite rising demand for possession of the physical metal and supply constraints.

We begin with a review of basics. The vertical axis measures price. The horizontal axis measures quantity. Demand curves slope down to the right, the quantity demanded increasing as price falls. Supply curves slope upward to the right, the quantity supplied rising with price. The intersection of supply with demand determines price. (Graph 1)

Supply and Demand Graph 1

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Saudis Claim Conspiracy Theorists, Not OPEC, To Blame For Oil Price Crash

March 18, 2015

Saudis Claim Conspiracy Theorists, Not OPEC, To Blame For Oil Price Crash

A top Saudi official said on March 15 that Thomas Friedman and other conspiracy theorists are to blame for the crash in oil prices.

Rather than an oversupply and weak demand causing an imbalance in global oil markets, Dr. Ibrahim Al-Muhanna, the advisor to Saudi Arabia’s Petroleum Minister, said that excessive speculation drove the oil bust.

“The recent price fall was due largely to expectation and perception about future supply and demand… and the ever-present – and incorrect – belief in conspiracy theories,” Al-Muhanna said at the Institute of International Finance Spring Membership Meeting on March 15.

Al-Muhanna admitted that supplies were building over the course of 2014, but said that demand “remained strong” and that the price fall was unjustified given market fundamentals. After prices started to fall, the media and market analysts drove the narrative to unfounded levels.

In fact, Al-Muhanna said, in October 2014 when Saudi Arabia adjusted its price for oil heading for Asia – a conventional practice that occurs every month – western media began talking up Saudi Arabia’s “price war,” and he even singled out New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “Then an article by Thomas Friedman suggested Saudi Arabia’s policy – in coordination with the Obama administration – was aimed at hurting Russia by lowering the oil price. This idea was a rehash of assumptions that first reasoned the oil fall of the 1980s. All complete fantasy.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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