As can be seen, the GSCI index appears to be in a full-on bear market, making lower lows and lower highs over the past 4 months.  This large drop-off was largely due to the popping of the mini-bubble in oil prices caused by the Middle East unrest earlier this year, an event which we forecast here at the Commodity Analyst.  While fundamentals at the time looked good for commodities in general, crude oil prices had gotten way ahead of themselves, and speculation on higher prices was at an all-time high, never a good thing for a long investor.  While this decrease in speculation is actually a good thing for the economy going forward, the CRB Raw Industrial index is also showing weakness, a bad sign for economic fundamentals going forward.

As we stated in last week’s letter, the CRB Raw Industrial index can serve as something of a canary in a coal mine for commodities and the economy in general.  In 2008, it peaked a full 2 months before the commodity bubble collapsed in July 2008.  As can be seen from today’s chart, the CRB RIND has dropped almost 12% since the highs in April.  As the CRB index’s components are not traded across futures exchanges but rather measure prices of commodities traded directly between producers and consumers, the CRB index is a much better gauge of true commodity demand than the GSCI index, and is much less volatile than publicly traded commodities.  The fact that the CRB index continues to trend lower is not a good sign for the economy in general, and could signal lower commodity prices across the board, if not an outright recession.  We will continue to monitor this index for signs of stabilization, but at this time, the signs are bearish.

QE3
At the end of this week, Bernanke will speak at the annual Jackson Hole meeting, the same meeting in which he alluded to the beginning of QE2 one year ago.  Judging from the commodity and currency action, investors are largely pricing in, and in fact piling in to investment decisions predicated on a renewed round of quantitative easing.  10 year bond yields touched below 2% for the first time on Thursday, gold is rising parabolically, and the dollar loses value against the euro even on days when Europe looks like it’s in terrible shape.   However, trader expectations of quantitative easing may be a bit overblown, and even if they are realized, they may already be priced in to the market.

The most paradoxical of recent commodity action is that industrial commodities are rallying even on days when equities are taking a beating.  The overwhelming sentiment on the street is that there is no way to lose with commodities: either the economy improves and industrial demand picks up, or governments around the world continue printing money non-stop and commodities rally as monetary safe havens.  The widespread love for commodities as a hedge against the coming slowdown feels very similar to mid-2008, when everyone on earth wanted to buy crude oil, copper, platinum and every other commodity in order to hedge against money-printing.  What they soon realized is that when industrial demand falls due to decreased economic activity, no amount of money printing can make people buy them.  Such value traps were realized as platinum fell from $2300 to $800, copper fell from $4 to $1.25, and crude oil fell from $140 to $30.

While Bernanke clearly has a quick trigger finger when it comes to Fed policy, we do not believe QE3 will be announced at Friday’s meeting.  We know that Bernanke has used equity market prices as justification for policy in the past, and we expect that the recent fall in equities has certainly caught his attention.  However, his most recent response, giving a mid-2013 target date to ultra-low interest rates, was met with extremely harsh criticism, and notable dissension within the Fed itself.  His ability to embark on a new round of asset purchases just 3 weeks after his last move was so frowned upon is highly limited, and we believe that QE3 will remain on the backburner for some time.  In addition, Thursday’s CPI numbers showed that consumer prices continue to spiral upwards, even with commodities undergoing a significant pullback.  While it may eventually come to fruition, Bernanke’s lack of political support combined with spiraling inflation will stay his hand for at least a while longer.

However, the most interesting point about QE3 is whether it will even change anything.  The following chart shows the CRB RIND over the past 2 years.

As can be seen, the CRB index had already rallied more than 8% off its lows before Bernanke alluded to further quantitative easing at the Jackson Hole meeting on August 27^th, 2010.  What this means is that industrial commodity demand rebounded well before equity markets during the summer 2010 correction.  While quantitative easing may have increased business confidence and therefore put a renewed fire underneath industrial commodity prices, raw commodity buyers were already bidding prices up by the time the Fed acted.

When contrasting that situation to today, the CRB RIND continues to make lower lows and lower highs, and is already at its lowest point this year.  This means that raw industrial commodity demand continues to slacken.  Even during the week after August 8^th when the S&P 500 rallied impressively, the CRB continued to fall.  To us, this indicates that there is more than just a liquidity or confidence issue, there is an actual aggregate demand shortfall, and commodities will not be spared the pain.

The situation seems to be setting up to a very similar outcome as the middle of 2008, when all commodities became a safe haven alternative for equity market and other risk asset investments.  However, if demand keeps falling, prices for these commodities could take a huge dive as speculators cut their net long exposure in anticipation of a global recession.  While gold could continue to outshine because of its lack of industrial connection, precious metals such as platinum, silver and palladium could lose value as industrial demand for these commodities falls, and traders rotate out of these safe havens.

For these reasons, we are extremely wary of being long commodities such as wheat, corn, platinum group metals, silver, and crude, that have rallied on an implicit expectation of perpetual monetary easing.  While we believe monetary policy will remain easy for some time, true aggregate demand is necessary to keep the bull market in commodities alive, and a US recession would not achieve that regardless of the Fed’s activities.

However, until Fed policy becomes more clear, which we hope is a process that begins on Friday, markets will continue to act schizophrenically as they have all summer.  For example, Thursday’s beating in the stock market appears to have been motivated by the greater than expected CPI readings.  The market was reacting to increased inflation being reflected in goods as a sign that renewed quantitative easing is less likely.  As Bernanke’s political justification for QE has been to decrease the likelihood of deflation, the quickening of inflation in July, even with commodity prices having decreased substantially in the last few months, bodes very poorly for the Fed’s deflation-fighting thesis.  When viewed in this light, the stock market selloff makes sense.  However, gold rose big on the week, as did the euro against the dollar, as commodity and forex investors continue to price any negative move in the stock market as increased likelihood of QE3, and any positive move in the market as renewed signs of inflation.  This lackadaisical attitude towards perpetual dollar devaluation and gold perpetual appreciation is very dangerous, as investors are stacking huge bets on these premises.  If their expectations are not realized, prices could move dramatically the other way.

Gold
Gold’s recent run has simultaneously surprised us as well as caused us great concern.  While we have been a long-time proponent of precious metals as being in a secular bull market, gold’s recent infallibility is not a good sign for its long-term health.  In all bull markets, there comes a time when the asset is so coveted that buyers will pay almost any price for it, and the asset takes on a rocket-like trajectory.  At this point, it can no longer be bought or sold with any conviction, as the money chasing it can push it up to no end, but the inevitable fall will also be severe.  While gold may not be in such a dire situation just yet, it is getting perilously close to such a fate.

The following chart shows the only other bull market gold has experienced, ending in early 1980.

In an eerie similarity to our present market, gold rose roughly in line with the moving averages for much of the early stages of the bull market.  However, in late 1979, gold took off from the moving averages, exploding upward by 123% in just 3 months.  After the bubble was pierced, gold fell 30% in just 7 days.  This is the classic bubble, as those savvy investors got involved in the late 1970s, but then the investing public got wind of it and decided to flood in all at the same time, causing the price of the metal to escalate extremely rapidly.  We believe the odds of this large a rise are not great given today’s deeper global market for physical gold and ETFs, but the outcome could be the same.  We have always maintained that at some point gold would go absolutely crazy, with buyers bidding it up ever-dizzying heights each day on end, exactly how silver looked in April, and that would most likely mark the end of the gold bull market.  We sincerely hope that situation is not what is being played out right now, but we must err to the side of caution.

In viewing gold’s incredible rise, it is helpful to know just who is buying.  The following chart shows the Managed Money net long interest in blue and gold’s price in yellow.

As can be seen, while gold Managed Money longs remain near an all-time high, they have actually backed off slightly in the past 2 weeks.  This past week, gold Managed Money net longs increased by over 8,000 contracts, or 80,000 ounces, but is still down from the peak of 228k contracts set 2 weeks ago.  While it would be convenient if gold futures traders were holding the bulk of the position, it isn’t necessarily bullish that gold is rising while Managed Money net longs are falling.  Thinking back to silver, Managed Money net longs hit an all-time high in September 2010, but silver itself did not peak until April 2011.  While futures traders scaled back, ETF and physical silver buyers flocked in to the metal en masse, and despite their not being as leveraged as futures traders, silver collapsed magnificently, falling 27% in one week.

Peering into total holdings of gold by ETFs paints a similar picture as to the run-up in silver.  The chart below shows total dollar value of gold holdings by ETFs.

Since August 1^st, ETFs have accumulated more than $23 billion in gold, a staggering amount.  In fact, at this point, Managed Money net longs control only about $37 billion of gold in notional value, whereas ETFs hold a combined $135 billion, meaning ETFs are much more influential in the gold market at this point than gold futures traders.  At this point, the GLD has a higher market value than the S&P 500 ETF, the SPY, a truly staggering feat.  Gold’s status as the premier hedge for every investor on the planet has made it a must-own asset.

The incessant buying of physical and ETF gold is due to the need for investors to find a hedge in the market.  While hedge funds were shorting the euro against the Swiss franc as their hedge, driving the euro down 20% from the beginning of the year until the trough on August 9^th, the Swiss National Bank’s claim that they could peg the franc to the euro or take other drastic intervention steps caused an exodus out of this trade.  Not coincidentally, gold’s rise took an accelerated leg up on the same day, causing gold to rally almost 4% on the day before settling up around 2%.  From that date, gold has not fallen below the 1720 level even with an increase in margin requirements because gold has become the hedge of choice for almost every investor on the planet.  However, this is an extremely dangerous scenario, as it has become a crowded trade, and could end in tears.

Following the SNB’s verbal intervention with the franc, the franc lost 14% against the euro in a matter of 6 days.  For a currency to move that much is a staggering correction and it was caused by hedge funds all rushing to the exits at the same time to take off their hedge.  If the trend reverses in gold for some reason, a similar move could easily play itself out, causing gold to fall back to the 50 day moving average, currently at $1615/ounce, 15% lower from here.  Nassim Taleb once said that markets tend to hurt the highest number of hedgers, and we believe that scenario will play itself out in the gold market at some point over the next few weeks.  Weakness in gold, caused by the disappointment of no renewed quantitative easing or other unexpected event, could cause a mass exodus out of the metal in a short amount of time.  Whether it is a good buy for the long-term afterwards depends on how high it goes before correcting now, and how much confidence becomes lost in this latest run-up, but for now, steering clear of gold is a prudent idea.

Just as they are today, buyers began buying gold, silver and other commodities during the stock market’s 12% decline from 4/30/08-7/15/08.  While stocks fell 12% in this period, silver rose 14% and gold rose 13%; this was largely due to the increase in money supply implied from Fed guarantees on the Bear Sterns bailout, and the perception of the necessity of perpetual monetary easing to get the economy through its rough patch.  However, as the market finally realized that physical commodity demand had slowed, and that the world was headed for a deep, global recession, investors sold off gold and silver just as they did US stocks.  From 7/15/08, silver fell an incredible 40% until the end of the year.  While gold fell “only” 10%, its peak to trough decline was much larger, and it certainly did not perform well during this period of financial upheaval.

Comparing 2008 to today, buyers are buying gold as a hedge against systemic financial collapse, only instead of it being based on US mortgages at US banks, it is now being caused by European sovereign debt at European banks.  In the Armageddon scenario of a SocGen or a BNP going bust, silver,  gold and platinum group metals will fall, and fall precipitously.  Since the market has chosen gold as the hedge of all hedges, it is massively overowned by hedge funds and other hedged investors.  If those investors face margin calls on their risk asset portfolio (stocks, bonds, etc.), they will be forced to sell what they can, not what they want to.  Gold will suffer.  Additionally, silver and platinum group metals will fall at least twice as much because of their dependence on industrial demand, and as investors decrease their expectations for economic growth, they will sell these economically-sensitive commodities.

It is our opinion that if QE3 is announced on Friday, commodities may rally stunningly, but it will be much better of a selling opportunity than buying opportunity.  With industrial commodity demand trending downwards, washing the markets with more liquidity will have temporary euphoric effects, but do little to solve the problem of European and US slowdowns.  While the markets await QE3 as a psychological boost, it may prove the biggest bull headfake of the past couple years by inflating prices temporarily, while doing nothing to actually increase aggregate demand.  Keep in mind that QE2’s effects lasted only 8 months before the stock market peaked, so QE3 should be even less effective.

This post is from a series of featured articles pulled from a newsletter we are helping launch, The RealFinance Commodity Analyst.  These posts will be a few days delayed and only include a small portion of the newsletter, if you would like to have the entire content delivered over the weekend, see here to sign up: http://realfinancenewsletter.com

As usual, precious metals markets have received plenty of attention recently.  While many market prognosticators are calling for an end to the gold “bubble,” we believe that we are still in the early stages of the bull market in gold due to overwhelmingly bullish fundamentals.

The following chart shows the price of gold  in yellow against the size of the Fed’s balance sheet in red since the year 2000.  The chart has been normalized for percentage.

The reason why the Fed’s balance sheet is an important metric to track against the price of gold is because as the Fed’s balance sheet grows, the likelihood of the US government monetizing its debt (aka printing dollars to pay back debt) increases.  Throughout the history of time, any government that has been as indebted as the US currently is has had to finance the debt by printing money, at least in part.  Obviously, creating money out of thin air to pay back debts is a highly inflationary and currency debasing activity.  The gold market is reacting to the increased likelihood of such an event before its actual occurrence.

As can be seen, the price of gold has risen 375% since 2000, while the Fed’s balance sheet has increased 354% in size.  When viewing the price of gold in this context, it is very difficult to claim that gold is in any sort of bubble.  As investors lose confidence in the government’s ability to make interest and principal payments on our debt, they increasingly turn to gold as a store of value.  While gold has no industrial or commercial use outside of jewelry, it has been a store of wealth for thousands of years, and today’s environment is no different.  While it may be “irrational” to own gold under the premise that it does not pay any yield and it does not have industrial demand to support its price, gold’s status as an alternative to paper currency is so unquestioned that central banks hold massive amounts of it, and emerging market central banks are buying more.

To further illustrate gold’s relationship to government debt levels, the following chart shows gold in yellow and total US public debt outstanding in white.

As can be seen, while gold may appear to be rising parabolically, so is US public debt.  This incredible increase in public debt means that inflation is becoming more and more likely.

An argument I have also been hearing frequently as of late is that gold is “overvalued.”  My question is compared to what?  While stocks have some very loose boundaries as to valuation (i.e. there are usually far fewer willing buyers of a stock at a 100 P/E than a 10 P/E), gold has no such ceiling.  Furthermore, when a commodity such as crude oil rises too much, consumers use less; this phenomenon is known as demand destruction.  However, since all of the demand for gold is comprised of investment demand, demand for gold will not decrease solely because it has gone up in price.  In fact, it may actually increase at some point as momentum gains behind the price of gold and investors late to the party pile in.

In this manner, precious metals (and commodities as an asset class on some level) are a momentum trade.  As long as governments remain fiscally irresponsible and over-indebted, precious metals will continue to rise in price.  As there is no way to know exactly how inflationary these steps will be, and when inflation will peak, putting a price target on gold and silver is an exercise in futility.  The only aspect of precious metals prices an analyst can place a reasonable probability on is direction, not price.

Viewing the same argument from the reverse angle, if an investor expected a recession or deflation in the near future, the sale of gold would be a highly favorable strategy.  However, with the renowned willingness of central bankers around the world (most notably Ben Bernanke) to print money at the slightest hint of deflation, our view remains that the risk is to the side of inflation and not deflation.