Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - SP Cuts Greece to 'Selective Default'

Metals were capped most of the day. Could just be a consolidation.

Breaking news after the bell, S&P has cut Greece to 'selective default.' The action is based on the modification of the terms of the debt with some of the bondholders.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts

Looks toppy here.

Feds Key In on $325 Million Wire Transfer Made in Last Hours of MF Global

I wonder if this newly released MF Global information is some of the data that the creditor team has been examining and only recently released to Federal investigators.

It was surprising to hear that JPM as a creditor gets to decide how and when customers can have information about their MF Global accounts as reported here.

The truth may come out some day, but will be heavily coated in sugar. They will try to drag this out until the public loses interest and becomes distracted by something else.

A last minute wire transfer of a large cash amount, not to mention a transfer almost certainly involving customer money, would be an automatic clawback in any bankruptcy I have ever heard about. I saw a trial balloon floated out a week or so ago that put forward the theory that the money would not be returned because it was protected by a 2005 bankruptcy law regarding the sanctity of 'commercial paper' payments.

That rationale might work in a friendly court, but would establish an unbelievable precedent about the ability of banks and insiders to seize funds from the carcass of any failing enterprise ahead of other creditors.

Keep in mind that customers who had requested their money DAYS before the 31st were sent checks instead of the customary wire transfers which they had requested, and those checks were not honored. And I have heard of at least one instance where a customer's wire tranfer was reversed a day later by the banks, which I had thought was not even possible.

This looks like a fraudulent conveyance, and possibly a conspiracy of theft of customer money amongst financial insiders as MF Global slid into bankruptcy.

The more I hear about this, the more outrageous it gets.

Dealbook
Investigators Scrutinize MF Global Wire Transfers
By AZAM AHMED and BEN PROTESS
February 26, 2012, 9:07 pm

Federal investigators examining the final days at MF Global and how customer money went missing are poring over scores of wire transfers in and out of the brokerage firm, including the possible movement of $325 million that may have belonged to customers, according to people briefed on the matter.

The suspicious transfer, which until now has not been made public, was first discovered in the early hours of Oct. 31, the day the firm filed for bankruptcy. Initially, the firm attributed a shortfall of more than $1 billion in customer money to an “accounting error,” records show. But after hours of searching, executives acknowledged to regulators in the firm’s offices in Chicago that the shortfall was real — and may have been caused in part by the $325 million transfer, said one of the people briefed on the matter.

It remains unclear where that money went, or even if it belonged to customers. (Did they lose the receipt?  LOL - Jesse)  But it is one of many significant wire transfers that federal authorities — including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — have spent months reviewing to piece together MF Global’s final days.


Investigators have also reviewed another transfer, of $220 million on Oct. 31, which represented a last-ditch attempt to patch the hole discovered in the customer accounts.

Once the firm disclosed the shortfall to officials from the C.F.T.C. and the CME Group, the giant exchange that also regulated the firm, MF Global shifted $220 million in customer money from the securities side of the business to its commodities brokerage unit, where the shortfall in client cash was discovered earlier.

Ultimately, the final attempt came up short. Just hours after the transfer, the firm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy...

Read the rest here.

Performance of Stocks, Bonds, and Gold In an Inflationary Environment

Jeremy Grantham's GMO group has produced an interesting study showing the performance of three asset classes against inflation.

I think the true correlation is with negative real interest rates rather than inflation itself. In an inflationary period, interest rates tend to lag the increase in inflation, producing negative real rates.

But in a period of economic decline in which the Fed lowers rates artificially, negative real rates can also be created and rather more easily than some amateur economic theorists believe.

To slightly complicate matters, the markets tend to anticipate, tend to act on expectations before the reality of something. So we might see something like gold or interest rates signaling a period of inflation well ahead of its appearance, if they are allowed to seek their own levels in the market.

If you think about it, the correlation with negative interest rates makes sense. In a period of negative rates, all currency heavy financial instruments are probably facilitating the confiscation of wealth by the official banking system. Since gold has relatively little counterparty risk if properly held, it is likely to be considered a safe haven, in addition to other hard assets and stronger alternative currencies if such things are available.

Unfortunately for analysis, things are never so simple in real life.

In addition to negative interest rates, there are other forms of wealth confiscation, including the fraudulent mispricing of risk, outright fraud itself, and currency devaluation.

And finally, there is the sort of price manipulation which the Western central banks engaged in for a long period of time in strategically selling off portions of their gold in order to hold the price lower in a disastrous attempt to manage the financial markets and silence the warning signal from gold as asset bubbles began to build in the credit markets and the Bretton Woods global monetary agreement began to fall apart.

And so what might have been a gradual price increase in gold and silver instead became a powerful rally as the markets sought to correct to the primary trend once the banks stopped being net sellers of gold.   Now the financial system can only use other means in order to try and control their ascent to a genuine market clearing price based on years of monetary inflation.  There are various estimates of what that eventual price might be, but it most certainly is much higher than where the price is today.

Years of underinvestment in mining has created a dangerous shortage of gold and silver relative to potential demand.  Various financial instruments have been introduced to provide 'paper gold and silver' to meet that demand.  In addition, even physical exchanges like the LBMA have been pushed to dangerously high rates of leverage as demand for bullion outstrips available supply.  And so the markets drift inexorably into great opaqueness and repeated frauds because the world of paper has unhinged itself from reality across multiple fronts.   The problem is that the state of the currency feeds into all finanical markets and so a mischief done there spawns its children everywhere.

As one might suspect, the credibility trap in which the financial engineers find themselves causes occasional outbursts of hysterical animosity and antagonism against the reactions of the markets, and the reality of their own economic chickens coming home to roost. 

This is a recipe for disaster, and we can thank the Anglo-American banking cartel, and their gullible accomplices in the other western banks, for it when it happens.  When Dick Cheney said, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" what he did not realize was that he was reading the epitaph for the dollar reserve currency system that had been in place since the end of WW II.   They do matter, but sometimes the lags in time between cause and effect can be deceptively reassuring.

Debt may not matter in the short run, and Keynes had some very good and valid points to make about government stimulus during short periods of economic slumps to avoid feedback loops and the spiral of decline.   As an aside I wonder, if Keynes came back and saw what his acolytes were saying in his name, if he could stop throwing up.  When he found new facts he changed his mind, and I suspect he might have changed his and strongly cautioned against turning a remedy into an addiction to support  habitual corruption and unsustainable privilege.  But I do not know if he was that honest of a intellect, or would have merely gone along with the rest for the benefits of his class.

Huge deficits over long periods of time to finance non-structural consumption and underwrite malinvestment and currency manipulation are almost invariably toxic.  The 'vendor financing' that gave rise to the age of 'Asian miracles' is the rope which will be used to hang the capitalist system unless strong measures are taken to clean up the corrupt system that grew up to support and profit from this economic Frankenstein.

The only reasonable course of action is for the West to nationalize its TBTF banks, dismantle them gracefully while keeping their depositors whole, and give up their dreams of global and domestic financial domination by adopting a system of real capitalism based on market pricing, price discovery, competition kept intact from monopoly through effective regulation and law enforcement, transparency and a climate of honesty.  But that would visit restraint, inconvenience, and even some pain on the powerful and privileged, those who have benefited greatly from this long charade, so it will be resisted to their bitter end.

While the stock and housing market bubbles have burst, the bond bubble, which includes the US dollar as a bond of zero duration, remains to be resolved and marked to market.

Source: Jeremy Grantham's 4Q 2011 Investment Letter