Home » Posts tagged 'commodities' (Page 3)

Tag Archives: commodities

The commodity industry is bracing for a high year of bankruptcy and default filings that will impact mining and metals along with oil and gas. Moody’s has also warned of global speculative-grade corporate defaults that will increase by more than 30% in 2016, reaching the highest level since 2009. Those interested in mining shares should pay close attention to what they are buying. Until gold crosses that key resistance, we still have only a typical three-month reaction. A rally must extend beyond March to be impressive.

Betting on Deflation May Be a Huge Mistake. Here’s Why…….

January 24, 2016

Betting on Deflation May Be a Huge Mistake. Here’s Why…….

Precious metals investors heading into 2016 worry the dollar will continue marching ahead, right over the top of gold and silver prices. The Fed is telegraphing additional rate hikes throughout the year, and commodity prices – led by crude oil – are falling. There have been tremors in the biggest beneficiary markets of all when it comes to the Fed’s QE largesse – U.S. equities and real estate. And the possibility of a recession is growing, both in the U.S. and around the world.

There are plenty of reasons we might see even lower official inflation numbers and a stronger dollar in 2016. But don’t think for a second that consumer prices or living costs will fall. They haven’t, they aren’t, and they never will in a sustained way – thanks to the Fed’s creation in 1913. This is where the deflationists have it wrong.

The impact of further disinflationary forces or even a deflationary episode on precious metals prices is a bit harder to predict.

The bear case for precious metals is rather simple. Should metals trade like commodities, they are likely to follow other raw materials lower. If we get a liquidity crunch akin to the 2008 financial crisis, just about everything will be sold as investors raise cash to meet margin calls or flee to the dollar as a perceived safe-haven.

There is also the possibility that metals prices will simply be managed lower. Growing numbers of investors realize that Wall Street is not a bulwark of free markets. Major banks have admitted to rigging markets against their own customers, and the Federal Reserve aggressively intervenes in markets in its quest to centrally plan the world economy. Why wouldn’t the Fed also be active in trading precious metals? Those dismissing the notion that metals prices are manipulated are naive.

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

New Harbor: A Time For Staying Out Of Harms Way

January 24, 2016

New Harbor: A Time For Staying Out Of Harms Way

Preserving your financial capital

Given the brutal start to the markets in the first three weeks of 2016, we thought it a good time to check in with the team at New Harbor Financial. We have had them on our podcast periodically over the past years as the market churned to ever new highs, and have always appreciated their skepticism of these liquidity-driven “”markets”” as well as their unwavering commitment to risk management should the party in stocks end suddenly.

So, how is their risk-managed approach faring now that the S&P 500 has suddenly dropped 8% since Christmas? Quite well. Their general portfolio is flat for the year so far — evidence that caution, prudence and hedging can indeed preserve capital during market downdrafts.

We’ve invited the New Harbor team back on this week to hear their latest assessment on the markets, as well as how they’re approaching their portfolio positioning moving forward:

We spend a lot of time talking about position sizing. Right now we have very little in the stock market. We never cheer for a crash in the sense that we know a lot of people would likely get harmed in such a scenario, but we also spend our time assessing reality and probability. The likelihood of probability for a crash certainly has never been non-zero, but it has developed a greater likelihood than it had even just a few weeks ago. There has been a notable sentiment change.

I’d like to point out: we’re not even a month into the year and we have already clawed back over two years’ worth of gains in the stock market. Even if you look at the S&P 500, which has been the most lofty because of its capitalization-weighted nature, where we are at right now takes us all the way back near the end of 2013.

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

Looking for Sanity in an Insane World

January 8, 2016

Looking for Sanity in an Insane World

Why has China become so important? Largely because global investors are in this transition mode and do not understand how or why the foundation of everything is changing beneath them. The market turmoil in China spread around the world on Thursday as global investors took their lead from China as a contagion unfolded with no real understanding. Some try to justify this by saying China is a casino and not a real market that is trading on speculation rather than solid earnings. Those types of statements reveal the lack of knowledge of the speaker since ALL markets trade on anticipation — NOT on earnings (anyone remember the DOT.COM bubble?).

So global markets look for direction and make up excuses as they go to try to make it sound logical. As we have been warning, China is in an economic decline into 2020. Sorry, but that is the way it is. There is no dark conspiracy to suppress metals — it’s a deflationary wave since commodities became addicted to the Chinese demand that is now retreating. The rest of the world is in the same boat of deflation set in motion by rising taxes and tax enforcement as governments suck an ever-larger portion of wealth to sustain themselves at the expense of the private sector.

The euro has paused, not because of any reversal in trend, but simply because everyone became too short and it forced liquidations on what they assumed was a one-way street based solely upon fundamentals. Yet, the euro has been unable to rally to reach key resistance just yet. The Japanese yen has not risen because of a bullish change in trend, which is just capital retrenchment as markets decline. Never forget, the higher a currency rises, the greater the economic deflation. The ONLY WAY to turn the U.S. economy down is for a dollar rally — not a decline.

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

How Big is the Bust in Commodities Really?

January 8, 2016

How Big is the Bust in Commodities Really?

We have frequently come across articles lately that are purporting to show that commodity prices have in the meantime declined below the lows that obtained at the start of the last bull market. Yesterday Zerohedge e.g. posted a chart from Sean Corrigan’s True Sinews Report, which depicts the GSCI Excess Return Index. The following remark accompanied the chart:

“Returns from being long the commodity super-cycle have evaporated in the last 18 months – to 42 year lows.”

So are commodities as a group really at 42 year lows? Here is a little test: can you name even a single listed commodity that currently trades at a lower price than at any time since January 1974?

Image credit: Ian Berry / CNN

There is actually no need to check, because there isn’t one. So how can an entire commodity index, which presumably includes a whole range of commodities, have fallen to a 42 year low? Below is a chart that provides us with a hint. It shows the performance of the crude oil ETF USO since its introduction and compares it to the performance of WTIC crude.

Performance of WTIC (red line) vs. the crude oil ETF USO (black line) since mid 2006. USO has declined by nearly 31% more than the commodity the price of which it purports to reflect – click to enlarge.

In one sense, the remark accompanying the GSCI excess return index chart is entirely correct: Had one invested in commodities via this index, the nominal value of the investment would now be at a 42 year low. However, the same is not true of the commodities the index is composed of (although buying them directly wouldn’t have helped much, as we will explain below). The cause of the GSCI’s dismal performance is also the reason why USO has so vastly underperformed crude oil.

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

2016: Oil Limits and the End of the Debt Supercycle

January 7, 2016

2016: Oil Limits and the End of the Debt Supercycle

What is ahead for 2016? Most people don’t realize how tightly the following are linked:

Growth in debt
Growth in the economy
Growth in cheap-to-extract energy supplies
Inflation in the cost of producing commodities
Growth in asset prices, such as the price of shares of stock and of farmland
Growth in wages of non-elite workers
Population growth

It looks to me as though this linkage is about to cause a very substantial disruption to the economy, as oil limits, as well as other energy limits, cause a rapid shift from the benevolent version of the economic supercycle to the portion of the economic supercycle reflecting contraction. Many people have talked about Peak Oil, the Limits to Growth, and the Debt Supercycle without realizing that the underlying problem is really the same–the fact the we are reaching the limits of a finite world.

There are actually a number of different kinds of limits to a finite world, all leading toward the rising cost of commodity production. I will discuss these in more detail later. In the past, the contraction phase of the supercycle seems to have been caused primarily by too high population relative to resources. This time, depleting fossil fuels–particularly oil–plays a major role. Other limits contributing to the end of the current debt supercycle include rising pollution and depletion of resources other than fossil fuels.

The problem of reaching limits in a finite world manifests itself in an unexpected way: slowing wage growth for non-elite workers. Lower wages mean that these workers become less able to afford the output of the system. These problems first lead to commodity oversupply and very low commodity prices. Eventually these problems lead to falling asset prices and widespread debt defaults.

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Real Financial Risks of 2016

January 3, 2016

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Real Financial Risks of 2016

Worry less about the banking system, but commodities, epidemics and climate volatility could be trouble

How should we think about financial risks in 2016?

First, worry less about the banking system. Financial institutions today are less fragile than they were a few years ago. This isn’t because they got better at understanding risk (they didn’t) but because, since 2009, banks have been shedding their exposures to extreme events. Hedge funds, which are much more adept at risk-taking, now function as reinsurers of sorts. Because hedge-fund owners have skin in the game, they are less prone to hiding risks than are bankers.

This isn’t to say that the financial system has healed: Monetary policy made itself ineffective with low interest rates, which were seen as a cure rather than a transitory painkiller. Zero interest rates turn monetary policy into a massive weapon that has no ammunition. There’s no evidence that “zero” interest rates are better than, say, 2% or 3%, as the Federal Reserve may be realizing.

I worry about asset values that have swelled in response to easy money. Low interest rates invite speculation in assets such as junk bonds, real estate and emerging market securities. The effect of tightening in 1994 was disproportionately felt with Italian, Mexican and Thai securities. The rule is: Investments with micro-Ponzi attributes (i.e., a need to borrow to repay) will be hit.

Though “another Lehman Brothers” isn’t likely to happen with banks, it is very likely to happen with commodity firms and countries that depend directly or indirectly on commodity prices. Dubai is more threatened by oil prices than Islamic State. Commodity people have been shouting, “We’ve hit bottom,” which leads me to believe that they still have inventory to liquidate.

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

This Is Going To Happen In 2016: “One Of The Greatest Commodity Plays Of All Time”

January 3, 2016

This Is Going To Happen In 2016: “One Of The Greatest Commodity Plays Of All Time”

While stock markets held strong near their all-time highs, the last year saw massive financial destruction in global commodities markets. Oil, gold, silver, steel, coal and other raw materials experienced price drops not seen since just before the the Crash of 2008. As an example of how bad it has gotten in the raw materials space one need only look at the Baltic Dry Index, which is used to assess the cost of shipping raw materials by sea. Signaling serious economic problems, the BDI recently hit its all-time low, surpassing even the lows hit during the last financial crisis.

That a significant financial, economic or monetary event will soon be upon us cannot be denied.

Yet within crisis there is opportunity, and knowing what can happen and how to position yourself accordingly ahead of the fallout will not only ensure that your wealth is preserved, but will help you thrive financially. While we have always urged those concerned with the state of affairs in the world to have a healthy storage of food and supplies in anticipation of supply disruptions or hyperinflationary monetary policy, a major financial event will, as it did following the last crisis, likely lead to significant gains in precious metals as investors the world over shift capital into the historical monetary asset of last resort.

As Future Money Trends explains in the following micro-documentary, there are three perfect catalysts for why silver and gold are headed to new highs in the very near future: low prices and global supply shortages, war, and the collapse of U.S. bond markets.

What we are about to show you is undeniable evidence… This is going to happen within the next year… Silver is likely the most undervalued asset available to investors today.

Watch (Courtesy Future Money Trends):

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

2016 Is An Easy Year To Predict

December 29, 2015

2016 Is An Easy Year To Predict

No year is ever easy to predict, if only because if it were, that would take all the fun out of life. But still, predictions for 2016 look quite a bit easier than other years. This is because a whole bunch of irreversible things happened in 2015 that were not recognized for what they are, either intentionally or by ‘accident’. Things that will therefore now be forced to play out in 2016, when denial will no longer be an available option.

A year ago, I wrote 2014: The Year Propaganda Came Of Age, and though that was more about geopolitics, it might as well have dealt with the financial press. And that goes for 2015 at least as much. Mainstream western media are no more likely to tell you what’s real than Chinese state media are.

2015 should have been the year of China, and it was in a way, but the extent to which was clouded by Beijing’s insistence on made-up numbers (GDP growth of 7% against the backdrop of plummeting imports and exports, 45 months of falling producer prices and bad loans reaching 20%), by the western media’s insistence on copying these numbers, and by everyone’s fear of the economic and financial consequences of the ‘Great Fall of China‘.

2015 was also the year when deflation, closely linked -but by no means limited- to China, got a firm hold on the global economy. Denial and fear have restricted our understanding of this development just as much.

And while it should be obvious that 2015 was the year of refugees as well, that topic too has been twisted and turned until full public comprehension has become impossible. Both in the US and in Europe politicians pose for their voters loudly proclaiming that borders must be closed and refugees and migrants sent back to the places they’re fleeing due to our very own military interventions.

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

The Confidence Game Is Ending

December 21, 2015

The Confidence Game Is Ending

Immediately after the Fed hiked interest rates last Wednesday – after sitting at 0% for 7 years – markets acted pretty much as one might expect. The Fed tightens monetary policy when the economy is strong so rising stock prices, rising interest rates and a strong dollar are all things that make sense in that context. I am sure there were high fives all around the FOMC conference room. Too bad it didn’t last more than one afternoon. By the close Friday, the Dow had fallen nearly 700 points from its post FOMC high, the 10 year Treasury note yield dropped 13 basis points, junk bonds resumed their decline and the dollar was basically unchanged. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Fed’s assessment of the US economy.

I’m not saying the Fed’s rate hike is what caused the negative market reaction Thursday and Friday. The die for the economy has likely already been cast and right now it doesn’t look like a particularly promising roll. Raising a rate that no one is using by 25 basis points is not the difference between expansion and contraction. And a bit over a 3% drop in stocks isn’t normally much to concern oneself with; a 700 point move in the Dow ain’t what it used to be.

The pre-existing conditions for the rate hike were not what anyone would have preferred. The yield curve is flattening, credit spreads are blowing out and the incoming economic data is not improving. Inflation is running at a fraction of the Fed’s preferred rate and falling oil prices have been neither transitory nor positive for the economy, at least so far. The Fed is not unaware of this backdrop – they may not like it or acknowledge it publicly but they aren’t blind – but seems to have decided the financial instability consequences of keeping rates at zero longer are greater than any potential benefit. A sobering thought that.

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

Christmas Present

December 21, 2015

Christmas Present

Theory du jour: the new Star Wars movie is sucking in whatever meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse relationship between Star Wars box office receipts and soundness of the financial commonweal. In other words, Star Wars is all that remains of the US economy outside of the obscure workings of Wall Street — and that heretofore magical realm is not looking too rosy either in this season of the Great Rate Hike after puking up 623 points of the DJIA last Thursday and Friday.

Here I confess: for thirty years I have hated those stupid space movies, as much for their badly-written scripts (all mumbo-jumbo exposition of nonsensical story-lines between explosions) as for the degenerate techno-narcissism they promote in a society literally dying from the diminishing returns and unintended consequences of technology.

It adds up to an ominous Yuletide. Turns out that the vehicle the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee was driving in its game of “chicken” with oncoming reality was a hearse. The occupants are ghosts, but don’t know it. A lot of commentators around the web think that the Fed “pulled the trigger” on interest rates to save its credibility. Uh, wrong. They had already lost their credibility. What remains is for these ghosts to helplessly watch over the awesome workout, which has obviously been underway for quite a while in the crash of commodity prices (and whole national economies — e.g. Brazil, Canada, Australia), the janky regions of the bond markets, the related death of the shale oil industry, and the imploding hedge fund scene.

As it were, all credit these days looks shopworn and threadbare, as if the capital markets had by stealth turned into a swap meet of previously-owned optimism. Who believes in anything these days besides the allure of fraud?

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

Plunging Commodities Interfere With The New World Order

December 9, 2015

Plunging Commodities Interfere With The New World Order

Anglo American, a British company, and one of the world’s biggest miners, and a ‘producer’ (actually just a miner, how did those two terms ever get mixed up?!) of platinum (world no. 1), diamonds, copper, nickel, iron ore and coal, said today it would scrap dividends AND fire 85,000 of it 135,000 global workforce (that’s 63%!). Anglo is just the first in a long litany line we’ll see going forward. Commodities ‘producers’ are being completely wiped out, hammered, killed, murdered. They’ve been able to hedge their downside risks so far, but now find they can’t even afford the price of the hedges (insurance) anymore. And then there’s all the banks and funds that financed them.

And they’ve all been gearing up for production increases too, with grandiose plans and -leveraged- investments aiming for infinity and beyond. You know, it’s the business model. 2016 will be a year for the record books.

Just check this Bloomberg graph for copper supply and demand as an example. How ugly would you like it today?

And what’s true for copper goes for the whole range of raw materials. Because China went from double-digit growth to shrinking imports and exports in pretty much no time flat. And China was all they had left.

Iron ore is dropping below $40, and that’s about the break-even point. Of course, oil has done that quite a while ago already. It’s just that we like to think oil’s some kind of stand-alone freak incident. It is not. With oil today plunging below $37 (down some 15% since the OPEC meeting last week), it doesn’t matter anymore how much more efficient shale companies can get.

They’re toast. They’re done. And with them are their lenders. Who have hedged their bets too, obviously, but hedging has a price. Or else you could throw money at any losing enterprise.

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

The Commodity Roller Coaster

November 19, 2015

The Commodity Roller Coaster

CAMBRIDGE – The global commodity super-cycle is hardly a new phenomenon. Though the details vary, primary commodity exporters tend to act out the same story, and economic outcomes tend to follow recognizable patterns. But the element of predictability in the path of the commodity-price cycle, like that in the course of a roller coaster, does not make its twists and turns any easier to stomach.

Since the late eighteenth century, there have been seven or eight booms in non-oil commodity prices, relative to the price of manufactured goods. (The exact number depends on how peaks and troughs are defined.) The booms typically lasted 7-8 years, though the one that began in 1933 spanned almost two decades. That exception was sustained first by World War II and then by the post-war reconstruction of Europe and Japan, as well as rapid economic growth in the United States. The most recent boom, which began in 2004 and ended in 2011, better fits the norm.

Commodity-price busts – with peak-to-trough declines of more than 30% – have a similar duration, lasting about seven years, on average. The current bust is now in its fourth year, with non-oil commodity prices (relative to the export prices of manufactures) having so far fallen about 25%.

Commodity-price booms are usually associated with rising incomes, stronger fiscal positions, appreciating currencies, declining borrowing costs, and capital inflows. During downturns, these trends are reversed. Indeed, since the current slump began four years ago, economic activity for many commodity exporters has slowed markedly; their currencies have slid, after nearly a decade of relative stability; interest-rate spreads have widened; and capital inflows have dried up.

Just how painful the downturn turns out to be depends largely on how governments and individuals behave during the bonanza.

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

Junk Bonds Under Pressure

November 18, 2015

Junk Bonds Under Pressure

While the Stock Market is Partying …

There are seemingly always “good reasons” why troubles in a sector of the credit markets are supposed to be ignored – or so people are telling us, every single time. Readers may recall how the developing problems in the sub-prime sector of the mortgage credit market were greeted by officials and countless market observers in the beginning in 2007.

Photo credit: Getty Images

At first it was assumed that the most highly rated tranches of complex structured products would be immune, as the riskier equity tranches would serve as a sufficient buffer for credit losses. When that turned out to be wishful thinking, it was argued that the problem would remain “well contained” anyway. After all, sub-prime only represented a small part of the overall mortgage credit market. It could not possibly affect the entire market. This is precisely the attitude in evidence with respect to corporate debt at the moment.

A weekly chart of high yield ETF HYG (unadjusted price only chart) – click to enlarge.

The argument as far as we’re aware goes something like this: there are only problems with high yield debt in the energy and commodity sectors. This cannot possibly affect the entire corporate credit market. We should perhaps point out that in spite of this sectoral concentration, problems have recently begun to emerge in other industries as well (a list of recent victims can be found at Wolfstreet).

The argument also ignores the interconnectedness of the credit markets. Once investors begin to lose sufficiently large amounts of money in one sector, the more exposed ones among them (i.e., those using leverage, a practice that gains in popularity the lower yields go, as otherwise no decent returns can be achieved), will start selling what they can, regardless of its relative merits. This will in turn eventually make refinancing conditions more difficult for all sorts of industries.

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

The Grand Finale: “World War III Will Be A Fight Over Basic Human Needs – Food and Other Commodities”

November 15, 2015

The Grand Finale: “World War III Will Be A Fight Over Basic Human Needs – Food and Other Commodities”

As political tensions heat up it is becoming clear that the world’s super powers are vying for control of resources like oil, water, metals and food. And though developed nations have thus far avoided any significant clashes with each other, the proxy wars being waged in the middle east and Europe are a slow burning fuse that will soon lead to widespread military confrontation.

Throughout human history one key factor has been behind every major war: a battle for resources. As the following documentary from Future Money Trends warns, this time will be no different:

“The Pentagon told Fortune Magazine that World War III will be a fight over basic human needs – food and other commodities.”

(Watch this video at Youtube)

Natural resource wars are brewing and becoming an increasing threat, and may be the grand finale to an already intensified currency war among the world’s top economies.

Most wars in human history are a fight over natural resources.

… Credit is ever expanding, but the resources we pull out of the ground are finite.

The culmination of economic, financial and monetary crisis will be a grand finale unlikely any seen in the history of the world. War is coming. The time to prepare is now.

Tag Archives: commodities

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts