Izabella Kaminska has an interesting take on the record-high gold price, via Bedlam Asset Management: essentially, it’s rising because the big gold ETFs, like GLD, are so incredibly easy to buy and to speculate with. Gold is now something that individuals can easily trade in and out of daily — goldbugs are no longer just hold-it-until-you-die inflation hawks and eschatologically-inclined survivalists.

The implication, according to Bedlam, is that the whole swathes of ETF-linked commodities risk being dumped en masse, if and when the current wave of momentum fizzles out:

One or more of the smaller exotics will expire. Little notice will initially be taken. After a couple more, especially if in different sectors, there will be a rush to dump them all. The good and the bad will be forced sellers alike to meet redemptions. This will lead to an avalanche of physical gold, live hogs and cocoa being heavily sold into often thin markets, causing sharp price declines.

Remember: insofar as gold is being held by speculators, it isn’t safe. And GLD alone has more than $30 billion invested in it, much of that on margin. Where would gold be if even a fraction of that sum got sold at once? I don’t like to think.

The best kind of hedge is the one like Agustín Carstens put on in Mexico: he locked in high oil prices, and made billions when the price of oil fell. Sometimes, of course, hedges don’t work out nearly so well. Larry Summers, for instance, thought he was locking in low interest rates, but then saw rates fall even lower, and ended up losing billions of Harvard’s dollars.

And then there are the hedges which just don’t make any sense at all: like Barrick Gold, which locked in low gold prices and is now spending a whopping $3 billion to unlock them at the top of the market. Anybody care to explain that one to me?

Many congratulations to Agustín Carstens, who, according to Javier Blas, has managed to make Mexico $8 billion by putting on some smart oil hedges last summer:

Traders joked on Monday that Mr Carstens was probably 2009’s “most successful, but worst paid, oil manager”.

Of course, it helped that Carstens had $1.5 billion lying around last summer to pay for the hedges in the first place. But really all this financial cleverness only puts off the day of reckoning: Mexico is running out of oil revenues fast, and has no visible means of replacing the taxes currently paid by Pemex.

The tax burden on Mexican individuals and companies is low in theory and lower still in practice, and the kind of tax hikes which would be needed to even partially compensate for falling government oil revenues are politically impossible to pass. No one is more aware of Mexico’s coming fiscal crunch than Carstens, and if anybody can do something constructive, he can. I suspect, however, that no one can do anything constructive, and Mexico will be in serious fiscal pain sooner rather than later.

Back in March 2008, Diana Henriques noted something very odd: a large number of futures contracts traded in Chicago were expiring at levels much higher than the spot cash price. She said at the time that “economists who have been studying this phenomenon say they are at a loss to explain it”.

This very odd phenomenon — which caused farmers a lot of harm — has now been explained in a 247-page report from the Senate investigations subcommittee, entitled Excessive Speculation in the Wheat Market. The main PDF is here; there are exhibits and addenda here. The culprit, it turns out, is index traders.

The rise in the basis between the futures price and the cash price is a function of the rise of commodity indices, and investors buying a basket of commodities. This affected the wheat market particularly badly, as explained in footnote 213 of the report, partly because of the ease of storing wheat:

Aside from wheat, the other commodity markets in which index traders hold a substantial share of the long open interest are the futures markets for two livestock commodities, lean hogs and live cattle. Lean hog futures contracts are financially settled, meaning that the price of the expiring futures contract is set at the price of the commodity in the cash market at contract expiration. By definition, therefore, lean hog futures and cash prices will be equal at settlement, so there is no problem with convergence. Live cattle, unlike grain, cannot be placed in storage from one contract expiration to another. That constraint means there is always an active cash market for live cattle at contract expiration that helps to force convergence.

The Senate subcommittee recommends that the futures exchanges should curb speculation in the futures market in order to bring the basis between futures and cash back down to a reasonable level. It’s coming down already, but it’s still extremely high, at over a dollar a bushel:

This whole thing reminds me slightly of the way in which the USO oil ETF helped to exacerbate contango in the oil market. And in general, it seems that attempts by investors and banks to construct financial instruments which give simple exposure to commodities have not worked very well. Chalk up another failed financial innovation.

How to structure a gas tax? You could make it a flat X cents per gallon; alternatively (and this is essentially what a cap-and-trade system does, too) you could make it Y%, with the tax increasing with the price of gasoline.

Today, Jim Surowiecki comes up with a third option, where the tax decreases when the price of gasoline goes up:

Rather than leave so much of our fate to chance, we’d be better off doing what politicians always say they want to do: lessen the U.S. economy’s dependence on oil. One step toward that would be to phase in a gas tax designed to smooth out oil’s spikes and plunges by keeping the price of gasoline fixed (the tax would rise when the price of gas fell, and vice versa).

Surowiecki makes a strong case that consumer behavior, when it comes to reducing gasoline consumption, only really changes when there’s a spike in gas prices. As a result, his proposal would seem designed to have the least possible effect on gasoline consumption, and on our dependence on oil. Sure, it’s a sensible way of raising government revenues and reducing the fiscal deficit.

Either you want to effect consumer behavior and reduce gasoline consumption — in which case you actually welcome price spikes. Or else you want to smooth out price spikes, in which case you slowly boil the frog (to use one of the stupidest metaphors ever) and keep consumption high. But you can’t have it both ways. Which is it to be, Jim?

Ryan Avent and the MPG illusion both examine the “cash-for-clunkers” bill from the perspective of how much in the way of carbon emissions will actually be saved when someone takes advantage of it. But there are a few sums missing in these posts, so I thought it would be worth filling them out. Here’s Ryan, for instance:

For passenger cars, the incentive is reasonably ambitious: those moving from less than 18 mpg to better than 22 mpg qualify for $3,500 for a four mpg improvement and $4,500 for a 10 mpg improvement.

But standards quickly decline as you move up in size. For SUVs and light trucks one qualifies simply by moving from below 18 mpg to above 18 mpg. A $3,500 voucher is available for an improvement of just two mpg, while a mere five mpg improvement gets you the full $4,500 available.

The full table is here, but only in MPG form. In terms of gallons of fuel used per 100 miles, things look a bit different. Here’s how things work out in useful gallons per mile, rather than silly miles per gallon.

To get a $3,500 voucher by trading in a car, you need to move from 18mpg to 22mpg — which is an improvement of 1 gallon per 100 miles.

To get a $3,500 voucher by trading in a small SUV/truck, you need to move from 16mpg to 18mpg — which is an improvement of 0.7 gallons per 100 miles.

To get a $3,500 voucher by trading in a large SUV/truck, you need to move from 14mpg to 15mpg — which is an improvement of 0.5 gallons per 100 miles.

To get a $4,500 voucher by trading in a car, you need to move from 12mpg to 22mpg — which is an improvement of a whopping 3.8 gallons per 100 miles.

To get a $4,500 voucher by trading in a small SUV/truck, you need to move from 13mpg to 18mpg — which is an improvement of 2.1 gallons per 100 miles.

To get a $4,500 voucher by trading in a large SUV/truck, you need to move from 13mpg to 15mpg — which is an improvement of 1 gallon per 100 miles.

So Ryan’s absolutely right: the criteria for SUVs are much weaker than the criteria for trucks. Why do you need to improve by 3.8 gallons per 100 miles in order to get the $4,500 voucher on a car, when you can improve by just 0.5 gallons per 100 miles in order to get a $3,500 voucher on a large truck? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

We knew there was a lot of nuclear waste on Lehman’s balance sheet. But we didn’t know that was literally true:

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. is sitting on enough uranium cake to make a nuclear bomb as it waits for prices of the commodity to rebound, according to traders and nuclear experts.

At least uranium can in theory be used as a force for good, in nuclear power stations. Which is more than can be said for CDO-squareds.

(Via Wiesenthal)