Rolfe Winkler

Reader note: off on vacation the next few days so posting will be light. But LOTS of great links today….2 days of reading here!

Must Read – Volcker’s rules: DOA (Pethokoukis, Reuters) It appears the administration was never seriously considering a big push to get the “Volcker Rules” limiting bank size and proprietary trading added to financial reform legislation. My colleague Jimmy P. has a pithy, incisive analysis of what’s happening.

Must Read — How JP Morgan treats its clients, scandalously and in bad faith (Felix) Great find from Felix. Judge Rakoff is at it again, this time ruling against JP Morgan, which Rakoff says acted in bad faith. “The gist is that JP Morgan took one of its longest-standing clients in Mexico — Grupo Televisa — and tried to hand all of its secrets over to its biggest rival, Carlos Slim. And the way it tried to do that was by selling Slim a loan larded up with covenants which would essentially force Televisa to reveal any and all information to the holder of the debt.”

China sells Treasurys….or did they? (EconompicData) Great post. The WSJ follows their lead today.

Stripping away the disguise of derivatives (Das, FT) Explaining how derivatives can be used to mask debt. Not a long piece, but read slowly if you’re not familiar with the terms.

Treasury Secretary would lead new systemic risk council (Chan, NYT) The idea that a systemic risk council will help avert crises is foolish when you think about it. None of the regulators that will be on the council has done a very good job “leaning against the wind” in the past.  Yet together they are going to be able to not only reach consensus about systemically risk firms, but actually take corrective action?

IMF to sell 191 tons of gold on open market (Pardomuan/Wroughton, Reuters) It sold 400 tons not long ago, half of which was scooped up by India. Gold still makes sense in the long-run as insurance against a dollar crisis, but with the dollar likely to get stronger in the short run on the back of continued debt problems in Europe, it may be possible to add to gold positions below $1,000…

Ackman may make $170 million on grand-slam General Growth bet (Taub/Burton, Bloomberg) And he could make much more if Simon ups its bid or another bidder emerges at a price higher than Simon’s offer of $9. The market expects a higher price in the end, what with the shares trading near $13. Ackman bought his for 46¢! He’s said the shares are worth at least $24, but with the cash component of Simon’s offer just $6, it would make sense to take some profits…

Goldman’s Rococo PR prince (Abelson, NY Observer)

States sink in benefits hole (Merrick, WSJ) As of June 30, 2008 the 50 states collectively faced a $1 trillion funding deficit between what they’ve promised to public sector retirees and the funds they’ve actually set aside. And the data were collected before the bottom fell out of the market, so the gap is likely worse. Keep this in mind when liberal economists try to explain away the federal debt as manageable. If banks got bailouts, you can bet public sector employees will, so consider these funding gaps as obligations of the federal government…

Muni threat: Cities weigh Chapter 9 (Dugan/Maher, WSJ) It isn’t just states facing budget trouble.

Feather starfish swimming (Youtube) Wow.

Gadget Noir…

Reader note: This is Jim’s second piece in an ongoing debate with Warren Mosler about the economy. Here are links to previous posts in the series: Writer biographies / Mosler #1 / Rickards #1 / Mosler #2.  There will be one more post from each writer.

by James Rickards

Before I lay siege to Warren Mosler’s remedies, let me say he’s a brilliant guy I’ve admired for 25 years going back to his days at AVM.  I got reacquainted in 2004 when I lived in St. Croix and Warren ran for Congress from the Virgin Islands.  His campaign ads were 5-minute infomercials; tutorials on economics and gems of sound fiscal advice.  But this is a debate, so let’s begin.

Warren makes eleven points and I agree with two – the elimination of payroll taxes and converting banks into utilities.  Payroll tax elimination spurs consumption and stimulates job creation. As for banks, we need them, we just don’t need casinos that call themselves banks.  Bring back Glass-Steagall, separate deposit and loan functions from proprietary trading and banish the latter to hedge funds.  Speculation should survive on its own dime.

I don’t need to take the rest point-by-point because they’re the same thing – an unlimited belief in the Fed’s power to print money.  Warren calls for a $500 per capita state rebate, a federal job for all takers, direct Treasury funding of housing, unlimited deposit insurance, no debt ceiling, Treasury overdrafts at the Fed and federal purchase of foreclosed homes. He doesn’t propose free ice cream for children but I don’t see why not; just print some money and go for it!

Warren’s program would work if the world had as much faith in the dollar as he does.  But it doesn’t, and neither do the American people. If we were all captives of a government dollar monopoly with no alternative, then maybe his plan would work for awhile.  But we do have alternatives in land, art, commodities and the oldest form of money – gold.  It’s no coincidence that when FDR debased the dollar in 1934 he simultaneously banned private ownership of gold.  He knew citizens would hoard gold when he trashed the dollar so he made that illegal.  One of Reagan’s lasting gifts to the American people was a law in 1985 which made U.S. mint gold coins available to average citizens.  Now when the Fed cranks up the printing presses, citizens have a choice.  Foreign central banks have the same choice in terms of gold bullion and commodities such as oil and copper which serve as stores of value and industrial inputs.

Here’s where complexity theory comes in.   Each citizen, company and central bank is an interdependent agent with a threshold for dollar rejection based on the thresholds of others.  Some will not flee the dollar unless many others go first.  But some have already bought gold and others are on a hair trigger.  What does the complete system look like? Are we in the critical state where a small shift brings the entire edifice crashing down – the tipping point? It’s impossible to say, but we’re certainly closer than ever.  Warren’s cavalier approach to printing money as the cure for all ills guarantees the greatest disease of all – destruction of the dollar.

James G. Rickards is a writer, lawyer and economist. Twitter.com/JamesGRickards.

Is gold going to $6,300? Dylan Grice, an analyst with Societe Generale, says it’s possible, given the decline in central bank credibility. But investors need to keep one thing in mind: Gold is merely a vehicle to protect the purchasing power of money.

Gold is surging because investors see that the Federal Reserve — more concerned with deflation and unemployment than sound money — may be trapped in a never-ending cycle of monetary accommodation.

Ben Bernanke says he won’t monetize debt, but he already has. His Fed has bought $300 billion of Treasuries and is on pace to buy $1.45 trillion of government-backed mortgage debt all of which is being salted away indefinitely on the Fed’s balance sheet.

Why indefinitely? Because the Fed has no intention of unwinding its balance sheet so long as the economy is stressed. Witness comments this week from Bernanke, Fed Vice Chairman Don Kohn and San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen all suggesting that the Fed’s “extended period” of low interest rates can be measured in years, not months. Today St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said rates aren’t going up till 2012.

So long as deficit spending continues, if the Fed wants to avoid deflation, it will be forced to monetize more debt.

[Elsewhere, capital controls are being erected in emerging economies like Brazil, Taiwan, and possibly Indonesia in order to keep speculative waters at bay. As Hong Kong's chief executive remarked last week, a dollar carry trade spawned by low rates threatens to inflate dangerous asset bubbles in emerging markets the same way low Japanese rates did in the '90s.]

Exploding debt throughout the developed world means other central banks face similar pressure.

(Click chart to enlarge in new window, reprinted with permission)

So confidence in paper currencies is waning.

Some people say it is absurd to buy gold; the metal has no intrinsic value. That may be. But is it any less absurd to hold paper? The best that can be said for paper is that if you lend or invest it, tomorrow someone will give you more paper in return. This is fine so long as its purchasing power is maintained. But it isn’t. A 2009 dollar is worth a 1914 nickel.

Eventually the value of all the paper you’ve accumulated goes to zero. The trick is to turn that paper into tangible assets with tangible value.

Gold may be volatile, but at least it maintains its real value:

(click chart to enlarge in new window, reprinted with permission)

Grice contends that the price of gold could reach $6,300 an ounce. He explains: “The U.S. owns nearly 263 million troy ounces of gold (the world’s biggest holder) while the Fed’s monetary base is $1.7 trillion. So the price of gold at which the U.S. dollar would be fully gold-backed is currently around $6,300. Gold is very cheap — at current prices, the USD is only 15 percent gold-backed.”

Absurd you say? It happened 30 years ago. President Nixon ended the Bretton Woods global monetary system and his compliant Fed Chairman Arthur Burns let inflation run wild. So by 1980 gold spiked to a level at which the dollar was “overbacked” according to Grice.

Did gold overshoot in 1980? Sure, but only because Paul Volcker was willing to hammer the economy to re-establish the Fed’s credibility. Today’s Fed has been very clear that it isn’t willing to put up with a recession of any kind in the service of sound money.

All of that said, investors should be careful. Grice’s chart shows that, over the long run, gold is likely to do no better than protect your purchasing power. An ounce of gold today buys a good men’s suit; in 100 years, it is likely to buy the same.

So gold won’t make you rich. But it may protect you from becoming poor.

Gold’s recent behavior strikes me as similar to oil circa July ’08. With it leaping to another new high today — $1,119 — I thought I’d offer the following chart for reader comments:

(Click chart to enlarge in new window)

Thanks to Nick Laird of Sharelynx for the data.

Methinks gold is rising because investors are anticipating a big second stimulus to counter the rising unemployment rate.

I’m a fan of gold as insurance, especially for high net worth individuals who want some of their wealth “out of the system.” It protects against violent deflationary or inflationary episodes, both of which can wipe out the value of paper wealth very quickly. That said, the premiums to buy that insurance are getting pretty expensive…

Personally, I don’t see how we escape this crisis without a dramatic decline in paper wealth. Credit can’t expand forever, much as the Fed and Treasury would like for that to happen. Eventually the cycle goes into reverse because the government no longer has the balance sheet capacity to absorb more of the private sector’s liabilities. When that happens, asset values crater. The economy is so over-levered in my estimation, its equity value is probably negative. There’s a reason the Dow declined 90% a few years into the Depression. (Stocks have some option value, so they aren’t going to zero.)

The government is aware of how violent deflation can be…ergo, the stupendous show of monetary and fiscal support over the past year. But seems to me all we’re doing is re-inflating the bubble, using the public balance sheet for financing instead of private balance sheets.

Some would argue that so long as there is an “output gap” this won’t be inflationary. I disagree. I think runaway stimulus means the U.S. will eventually face a “sudden stop” situation á la Argentina or Ireland when credit markets lose confidence in U.S. paper. They’ll see the only way they will be paid back is via direct monetization. When that happens, the bid for dollar-denominated assets could disappear more quickly than folks might be willing to admit.

But these dynamics could literally take years to play out. We still print the currency in which our debt is payable. Some consider this a huge advantage. To me, we just have more rope to hang ourselves with.

And I’m not saying this is going to happen. It’s entirely possible we get our act together and let the economy deflate gradually, using stimulus to support a gradual de-levering of the economy. But politically that may not be possible, and so the correction may be forced on us. To hedge that risk, it’s not a bad idea to diversify out of paper wealth into tangible wealth.

BTW, I don’t think you make money on gold in the long run. I think, at best, you protect the purchasing power of the dollars you already have.

From Marketwatch:

Gold futures rose to a new record high of $1,100 an ounce Friday after data showed the U.S. unemployment rate topped 10% in October, raising the metal’s appeal as a safe asset. Gold for November delivery gained 1% to $1,100 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest level for a front-month contract. The more actively traded December contract rose to $1,101.90 an ounce.

From Surojit Gupta and Lesley Wroughton, Reuters:

The International Monetary Fund has sold 200 tonnes of gold to the Reserve Bank of India for $6.7 billion, quietly executing half of a long-planned bullion sale that has threatened to slow gold’s ascent….

…Although the IMF’s plan to sell a share of its gold holdings in order to increase low-cost lending to poor countries had been flagged for a year before it was formally approved in September, the speed, scale and identity of the buyer were a surprise….

….The market’s focus has now shifted to China, which has reportedly been in talks with the IMF about buying some of the fund’s bullion as Beijing seeks to shift some of its more than $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves away from the U.S. dollar….

Already the world’s top producer of gold and rivaling India as a consumer, China revealed this year that it had quietly lifted its own government holdings of gold stocks to 1,054 tonnes from 600 tonnes when it last reported its holdings in 2003.

200 tons is decent chunk. I’ve seen varying estimates, but according to Peter Bernstein, the total supply of gold is 125,000 tons. That puts this single purchase at about two-tenths of one percent of the total.

Looking out a few years, I’m as bearish as anyone, I admit. But I’m a little worried that suckers could get caught in this gold rally. A hedge-funder I spoke with at the Value Investing Congress said half of the sessions were devoted to doomsday scenarios, precious metals, etc. Today there was a keynote from Eric Sprott of Sprott Asset Mgmt. Fully 70% of his assets under management are in precious metals, silver and gold.

But he’s been in the trade for 10 years. And Einhorn built up his gold position long before it leaped past $1000.

While I believe that gold is a good insurance policy to hedge sovereign risk, I think it could be some time before that thesis really plays out, before we max out the national credit card as it were. In the meantime, gold’s price could be highly volatile.

Right now, I suspect we could be seeing a lot of herding into gold as retail investors and other latecomers pile into the trade.

Folks inclined to jump into gold should be very careful here.

(As always: don’t make any buy/sell decisions based on anything you read in this space, nor construe anything written here as investment advice. You don’t want to anyway….I’m a shitty market-timer.)

Two years ago, when he spoke at the Value Investing Congress, David Einhorn said Lehman was in deep trouble. Turned out it was a good call. Today he gave another keynote at the conference in which he argued the policies of the administration have put us on a very dangerous path, one which has encouraged him to buy physical gold as insurance against sovereign default(s).

Here’s a pdf of the speech. A few highlights below.

On Bernanke and Geithner:

Presently, Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner have become the quintessential short-term decision makers. They explicitly “do whatever it takes” to “solve one problem at a time” and deal with the unintended consequences later. It is too soon for history to evaluate their work, because there hasn’t been time for the unintended consequences of the “do whatever it takes” decision-making to materialize.

On too big to fail and the true lesson of Lehman:

The proper way to deal with too-big-to-fail, or too inter-connected to fail, is to make sure that  no institution is too big or inter-connected to fail. The test ought to be that no institution should ever be of individual importance such that if we were faced with its demise the government would be forced to intervene. The real solution is to break up anything that fails that test.

The lesson of Lehman should not be that the government should have prevented its failure. The lesson of Lehman should be that Lehman should not have existed at a scale that allowed it to jeopardize the financial system. And the same logic applies to AIG, Fannie, Freddie, Bear Stearns, Citigroup and a couple dozen others.

The administration talks tough about TBTF, but has made very clear they aren’t willing to make policy choices to do anything to proactively break them up. It was very telling when, in a keynote at the Economist’s Buttonwood Gathering, Larry Summers said too-big-to-fail means too-big-not-to-be-regulated. The correct thing to have said, the correct policy that needs to be worked out so that we avoid a re-run of last year’s crisis is “too big to fail is too big to exist.” But don’t take my word for it, take Alan Greenspan’s.

On CDS (bold mine):

I think that trying to make safer CDS is like trying to make safer asbestos. How many real businesses have to fail before policy makers decide to simply ban them?

On arguments that the lesson of 1937-8 is not to withdraw stimulus too soon:

An alternative lesson from the double dip the economy took in 1938 is that the GDP created by massive fiscal stimulus is artificial. So whenever it is eventually removed, there will be significant economic fall out. Our choice may be either to maintain large annual deficits until our creditors refuse to finance them or tolerate another leg down in our economy by accepting some measure of fiscal discipline.

Channeling Stephen “There-is-no-exit” Roach:

As we sit here today, the Federal Reserve is propping up the bond market, buying long-dated assets with printed money. It cannot turn around and sell what it has just bought.

There is a basic rule of liquidity. It isn’t the same for everyone. If you own 10,000 shares of Greenlight Re, you have a liquid investment. However, if I own 5 million shares it is not liquid to me, because of both the size of the position and the signal my selling would send to the market. For this reason, the Fed cannot sell its Treasuries or Agencies without destroying the market. This means that it will be challenged to shrink the monetary base if inflation actually turns up….

….The Fed could reach the point where it perceives doing whatever it takes requires it to become the buyer of Treasuries of first and last resort.

On his gold thesis:

I have seen many people debate whether gold is a bet on inflation or deflation. As I see it, it is neither. Gold does well when monetary and fiscal policies are poor and does poorly when they appear sensible. Gold did very well during the Great Depression when FDR debased the currency. It did well again in the money printing 1970s, but collapsed in response to Paul Volcker’s austerity. It ultimately made a bottom around 2001 when the excitement about our future budget surpluses peaked….

….When I watch Chairman Bernanke, Secretary Geithner and Mr. Summers on TV, read speeches written by the Fed Governors, observe the “stimulus” black hole, and think about our short-termism and lack of fiscal discipline and political will, my instinct is to want to short the dollar. But then I look at the other major currencies. The Euro, the Yen, and the British Pound might be worse. So, I conclude that picking one these currencies is like choosing my favorite dental procedure. And I decide holding gold is better than holding cash, especially now, where both earn no yield.

He’s also buying long-dated options on interest rates using derivatives:

Along these same lines, we have bought long-dated options on much higher U.S. and Japanese interest rates. The options in Japan are particularly cheap because the historical volatility is so low. I prefer options to simply shorting government bonds, because there remains a possibility of a further government bond rally in response to the economy rolling over again. With options, I can clearly limit how much I am willing to lose, while creating a lot of leverage to a possible rate spiral.

There’s much more in the speech.

Deflation could be the biggest threat to the economy, but gold — usually an inflation hedge — is reaching new highs. That’s because smart investors aren’t playing the inflation trade, they’re buying currency crisis insurance.

With the amount being spent by the public sector, with the huge amounts of leverage still in the system, there’s a palpable fear that America won’t be able to meet its obligations. Relative to GDP, the amount we’re borrowing to finance deficits makes us look irresponsible.

When such economies hit a wall, investors make a run on the currency, typically moving their assets to a stronger currency, like the dollar.

But this time the problem is the dollar, along with other leading paper currencies, all of which are threatened by profligate fiscal and monetary policies. So some investors want out of the system entirely. Gold, as my colleague Neil Collins noted earlier, is a way to do that.

The gold market is small enough that a decision by a handful of money managers to increase their asset allocation from, say, zero to 5 percent can move the market. All the gold ever mined would fit aboard an oil tanker; its total weight of 125,000 tons amounts to a few hours’ output for the U.S. steel industry.

But economists tell us that inflation isn’t a risk now. Are they wrong? No and yes.

The conventional way economists view inflation is to look at things like “output gaps.” When the economy falls below a level of output it previously achieved, it is said to have unemployed resources. If you think of inflation as workers demanding and getting higher wages, which leads to higher prices for the goods and services they produce, then inflation isn’t a threat.

So economists tell us more borrowing and money printing won’t be inflationary as long as people are unemployed.

One problem: Their models ignore the fact that peak output was artificially inflated by a credit binge. Borrowing more to sustain an unsustainable level of spending borders on insanity, yet that’s precisely what such economic models tell us we need to do.

There’s an extra variable these models don’t account for — the Chinese and all major lenders to the United States. They don’t much care if our employment rate is below desirable levels. At a certain point, they may recognize that the United States is acting like a banana republic and choose to stop lending.

When that happens, we might see a “sudden stop” event: Capital inflows to the private and public sector cease as everyone races to get out of dollars.

Eric Sprott, CEO of Sprott Asset Management has $4.5 billion under management, $2 billion of which is invested in physical bullion — silver and gold — stored at banks in Canada. Another large chunk is invested in gold stocks.

He views gold as an insurance policy against both inflation and deflation. Central bank quantitative easing policies mean “we’re printing paper currency like crazy,” so he doubts the long-run value of fiat currencies.

On the flip side, if central banks pull back, you could enter a deflationary spiral, essentially a banking collapse, in which case “your deposits wouldn’t be returned to you. Better to have physical gold in your control.”

Most economists and investors still labor under the illusion that there’s a way out of debt that doesn’t involve a drastic reduction in the paper value of wealth. Smart investors aren’t so sure and want at least a portion of their assets out of the financial system.

A dollar crisis isn’t necessarily coming tomorrow, so there’s no guarantee gold’s price will keep going higher. Still, gold is a decent insurance policy against economic Armageddon.

Chatting about this blog post from last week.

UPDATE: gold hits record high today. BTW, be careful of chasing this momentum. While I remain a long-term bull on gold relative to the dollar based on fiscal/monetary policies in Washington, I think the price could be quite volatile and investors may have future opportunities below $1,000.

Alice Schroeder wrote a great column for Bloomberg yesterday that I’m just getting to. The best stuff comes at the end, where she describes why some people are buying gold even though inflation doesn’t seem to be a big risk. (Apologies in advance for block-quoting lots of stuff in this post, but I think it’s worth it…)

In a nutshell: They aren’t playing a conventional inflation trade. They’re buying currency crisis insurance.

[Gold bugs] aren’t just betting on inflation, as is the conventional wisdom. Gold has a wicked history of being an unreliable inflation hedge. It has, though, at times been a haven against sudden currency depreciation.

In all the talk of inflation because the Treasury is printing so much money versus deflation because it may not print enough, there is one type of inflation that is rarely discussed. This is the mega-inflation caused by a sudden currency devaluation. Currency is like any financial innovation, an obligation secured by assets. When the obligation is perceived to have increased far beyond the level justifiable by the assets, which in this case make up a country’s economy, a bubble has formed.

Schroeder is describing, in much simpler terms, what economist William Buiter has called a “sudden stop” event. (I’m having trouble logging on to FT to find the right link, but the guys at Baseline Scenario have a good one here.) Let’s take a quick detour to Buiter then, writing early this year:

But as the recession deepens, and as discretionary fiscal measures in the US produce 12% to 14% of GDP general government financial deficits – figures associated historically not even with most emerging markets, but just with the basket cases among them, and with banana republics – I expect that US sovereign bond yields will begin to reflect expected inflation premia (if the markets believe that the Fed will be forced to inflate the sovereign’s way out of an unsustainable debt burden) or default risk premia….

The US is helped by the absence of ‘original sin’ – its ability to borrow abroad in securities denominated in its own currency – and the closely related status of the US dollar as the world’s leading reserve currency.  But this elastic cannot be stretched indefinitely….

The only element of a classical emerging market crisis that is missing from the US and UK experiences since August 2007 is the ’sudden stop’ – the cessation of capital inflows to both the private and public sectors. . . . But that should not be taken for granted, even for the US with its extra protection layer from the status of the US dollar as the world’s leading reserve currency.  A large fiscal stimulus from a government without fiscal credibility could be the trigger for a ’sudden stop’.

Most economists, using their conventional models, are looking at things like “output gaps” to rationalize additional borrowing to stimulate the economy. So long as people and capital are unemployed, cost-push inflation isn’t seen as a threat so stimulus is believed to be cost-free. The risk, of course, is that we can’t borrow to infinity. At a certain point — tough to say when — we’ll tap out the national credit line. Where economists get in trouble, IMHO, is they envision this nebulous period in the “medium term” when the economy will be growing again and debt can be paid back. As I argued in my column yesterday, this ignores the fact that growth, which is to say growth in spending, is no longer possible without incremental borrowing. We’ve gotten ourselves into a cycle of perpetual borrowing to, in Schroeder’s words, “pump the economy back to a high-water mark that was phony to begin with.”

To Schroeder’s conclusion:

As in any bubble, those who recognize this need to act well in advance. Historically, governments have taken action to prevent currency flight when the owners of a severely overvalued medium of exchange start selling so much that it adds to the pressure on its price. They make private purchases of gold illegal, or tax the exchange of currency.

Right now, the American economy is worth less than the value implied by the market value of its obligations. How much less, no one knows. But gold bugs will tell you, privately, that this is why they are buyers. Might as well stock up, they say, before gold becomes a controlled substance.

The bolded section is why I haven’t touched stocks in two years and don’t plan to for some time: The U.S. economy is underwater. The value of our obligations is greater than the value of our assets, which is to say the equity value of the economy is negative. The best proxy for that is the stock market.

Stocks aren’t going to zero. They have option value. But a 90% fall from the peak is what I see happening eventually. Either explicitly or priced in gold. Over what time frame, I haven’t a clue.

But that’s what happened during the Depression. Today we’re far more leveraged…