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NEW C.O.T. REPORT

Good Article

Where's The Kaboom?
Karl Denninger
Market Ticker
written Aug 15, 2008
Aug 18, 2008

[Editor's comment: It's been a horrible few weeks for us and our 321gold readers. So we are delighted to welcome Karl Denninger to our writer's fold; a new breath of fresh air... just what we all need.]

Take your pick last night. Right after the market closed, the dollar started strengthening again. A lot.

Then, suddenly, the floor dropped out of Gold, and the S&P 500 Futures spiked HARD, with over 2,000 contracts bought at the market.

A few hours later, it happened again. And at 4:30, once more!

What in the Sam Hell is going on?

Simple, really. See, there are what - 8,000 hedge funds? Well, for 7,999 of them (up until the last few days anyway) they have all been in one trade, more or less - short dollar, long energy, short financials.

Nice, if and when it works.

But now that trade has been unraveling at a frightening rate. As the dollar has gotten stronger it has squeezed people. Hard. See, these guys are not just investing the money they get from rich folks all over the world - they are taking that money and borrowing, then investing that.

So when these bets go bad - oil falls, the dollar goes higher, or any of the "parameters" they've been working get the rug pulled out from under them, they have a huge problem, all at once, and they have a very bad hair day.

That's happening. In spades.

This is where the "recovery" has come from in the stock market the last month or so - you kick the shorts in the nuts and they cover, then the lemmings rushing in, once again listening to the idiotic calls of "the bottom is in" from media outlets like CNBC that will shove a microphone under the snout of anyone who toes that line.

This trade started unwinding slowly, but in the last week or two it has gotten very disorderly and so have the markets.

As credit has continued to deteriorate the weaker hands get flushed and forced out. This causes them to have to buy back their short dollar trade, which spikes the DX. THAT in turn spooks someone else, who then covers a big futures short, which in turn freaks out someone in the gold market, and they dump a big long.

Rinse, repeat, and continue until the dead bodies are all piled on the floor and only the bugs are left scurrying around.

Oh, and those very same Hedgies are some of the guys "guaranteeing" the credit in these default swaps, which means as they go down, credit continues to blow wide, never mind the actual deterioration which is far worse than claimed because these so-called "guarantors" can't actually pay.

What you need to understand is that there is nothing that can be done to stop this. Not by the government, not Bernanke, not The Fed, nobody. The overly-geared will die, one by one, until there is nobody left who has too much gearing on for the trade and credit risk they took.

What's worse is that some of our "big institutions", sensing this - that credit quality is deteriorating very, very rapidly, are looking for someone, anyone, to offload the bag to. Over the last few months they've found a few people they can try to throw the bag at - maybe those with poor risk controls, with automated trading systems that aren't actually verifying anything, and perhaps there's a bit of a pollyanna view at a few of them too?

If you can't find those folks because there aren't any of that sort buying the debt you're desperate to unload (since you know it's going to go "boom!") then the next move is to "sell" that debt to some private equity guy but carry back the financing (in some cases on a non-recourse basis!), as several folks have done recently, which makes it look like you got 20 cents on the dollar when in fact you only got 5. For the Hedgie or P/E guy who makes the bet, it's not a bad deal - they have a defined risk trade, like a CALL option. For you, the writeoff is real but it's 75% less than it should have been, with the rest sitting out in limbo pending the truth being discovered in the fullness of time (when the deal blows up and your "non-recourse" deal comes back at you like a boomerang.)

How many of those folks will die, and what impact will it have on the credit markets in general? I can't quantify it accurately - I don't think anyone can. But what is obvious from the magnitude of these "little tremors", and the rapidly increasing rate at which they are coming, is that:

It's very bad.
It's getting worse, at an increasing rate.
A number of supposed "liquidity providers" have either been gamed (and this has not been recognized and reported to the public) or they're "buying" this debt with carried-back loans, making their actual risk of loss tiny compared to the nominal "value" transferred. In other words and to put it in terms "Joe Q Public" can understand, everyone is still lying!
There is a "supercritical" point where all asset values will get hit at once, unless the process runs to exhaustion first, and I don't think there is a snowball's chance in Hell that it will.
I may be wrong about the impending supercriticality, but if I'm not, well, it would be a good idea to be sure you are in safe places with your money.

Equities and debt other than treasuries would be in the "not" column on the list of safe instruments, and note carefully the very specific constraint on exactly what sort of debt is safe - all other, and I do mean all, is not.

Comport yourself accordingly.

Comments

  • storm888storm888 Posts: 11,701 ✭✭✭
    Next weeks numbers might be more telling.

    I'm really more informed/clued by what the amateurs playing with the ETFs do.

    If SLV pops good on Monday/Tuesday, I will feel my SHORT is safe. If it falls
    hard, I will rethink my tactics. My whipsaw strategy only works when there
    is good volatility; I will not add to the position during a hard selloff.

    Hopefully, they will walk it down to draw in newbies, let it run up, and back
    down SLOWLY; repeatedly. Lower-lows, lower-highs, everytime.






    Folks Who Bite Get Bitten. Folks Who Don't Bite Get Eaten.
  • C.O.T. REPORT FOR AUG. 22ND, 2008

    Smoking Gun!

    Is there a connection between 3 U.S. banks selling an additional 78,611 gold futures contracts (7,861,100 ounces) in a month, followed shortly by a severe price decline in gold? That’s equal to 10% of annual world production and amounts to more than $7 billion worth of gold futures being sold by 3 U.S. banks in a month. How can this extraordinary concentrated trading size not be manipulative?

    Because prices fell so sharply after the short sales were taken (with the appropriate dirty tricks as I have previously explained) holders of known physical silver in the world suffered a decline in value of more than $2.5 billion and long COMEX silver futures holders suffered a similar $2.5 billion decline in the value of their contracts. In gold, because the dollar value held is much greater than silver, investor losses were much greater, on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars on their physical holdings. Declines in the value of mining shares adds many billions more. Was this loss of value caused by the concentrated short selling of 2 or 3 U.S. banks?

    What real legitimate business do 2 or 3 U.S. banks suddenly have for selling short such quantities of speculative instruments over a brief time period? Do we want banks to be engaging in this type of activity? If the manipulation was not successful, would U.S. taxpayers be called on to bail out yet another bank speculation gone bad?

    Do the traders who lost money in the recent price collapse of silver have a reason to believe that their money is now in the pockets of these two or three U.S. banks? If so, do they have recourse?

    The data in the Bank Participation report is clear and compelling. that it is hard to conclude anything but manipulation. It is beyond credulity to conclude other than two or three banks caused one of the most severe price collapses in precious metals history. The CFTC has a lot to answer for as the regulatory agency responsible for preventing this type of blatant manipulation.

  • mhammermanmhammerman Posts: 3,769 ✭✭✭
    Seemingly we could all conclude that there is collusion and coordination amongst some majors. Is it an effort at fraud...well, no one seems to think so, so it must be cool. At some point, these guys are going to step on a mine and the gov. isn't going to be there even if they wanted to be. Interesting news story yesterday; there were some local banks that were going to start doing their local credit lending based on cash deposits in the bank...fancy that. Carry on.
  • Stll Fractional Reserve lending, right?
  • mhammermanmhammerman Posts: 3,769 ✭✭✭
    "Stll Fractional Reserve lending, right?"

    Yes but the article had a % in there that sounded reasonable and then gave the rationale for it and it all seemed pretty sensible. Seems like it was 3:1 for cash rather than the 10:1 you expect to find. I can't find the article but I'll keep looking.
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