James Rickards: If Gold Was Just a Barbarous Relic...

There’s nothing new about the Russian accumulation of gold bullion in their reserve position. It began in a material way in 2009 when Russia had about 600 metric tonnes of gold.

Today, Russia has 2,183 metric tonnes, a stunning 264% increase in less than 10 years. Russia is the sixth-largest gold power in the world after the U.S., Germany, IMF, Italy and France.

Russia’s gold hoard is over 25% of the U.S. hoard, but Russia’s economy is only 8% the size of the U.S. economy. This gives Russia a gold-to-GDP ratio over three times that of the U.S.

While these developments are well-known, the question of why Russia is accumulating so much gold has never been answered.

One reason is as a dollar hedge. Russia is the second-largest energy producer in the world. Most of that energy is sold for dollars. Russia can hedge potential dollar inflation by buying gold.

Another reason has to do with the avoidance of U.S. sanctions. Gold is nondigital and does not move through electronic payments systems, so it is impossible for the U.S. to freeze on interdict.

Yet a deeper reason is that Russia has a long-term plan to subvert the dollar’s role as the leading global reserve currency. The Russian ruble is not positioned to be a reserve currency, but a new cryptocurrency backed by gold would be a good candidate.

The Central Bank of Russia will consider a new study that suggests just such a gold-backed cryptocurrency to settle balance of payments among willing participants. This plan is in its preliminary stages and is a long way from reality at this point.

Still, the Russian endgame has now been revealed. The dollar’s days as the leading reserve currency are numbered.

Of course, Russia is not the only nation accumulating gold as a means to move away from the dollar. You can certainly add China to that list, and many others.

The latest move comes from Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. He promoted the idea of a common trading currency for East Asia that would be pegged to gold. “The currency that we propose should be based on gold because gold is much more stable,” he said.

I’ve actually advised Mahathir Mohamad in the past and he’s very familiar with my writings on gold. So I’m not surprised he’s issuing this call.

The global monetary regime has collapsed three times over the past 100 years, in 1914, 1939, and 1971. They seem to happen about every 30 to 40 years on average. It’s now been over 40 years since the last collapse, so we’re due.

Got gold?

- Source, James Rickards

Jim Rickards: The Perfect Storm is Coming

People often refer to the “perfect storm.” A perfect storm is generally understood as two or more events that are independent but converge to produce an outcome much worse than either event alone.

The term is an overused cliché, and as a writer I avoid clichés whenever possible. But though rare, perfect storms do exist. The most common example is the devastating 1991 storm popularized by the book and movie of the same name, although it was initially known as the “Halloween storm.”

In that case, three separate weather dynamics all converged in one place on one day to produce a perfect storm. The odds of all three coming together at once were less than one in 100,000. That’s less than once in 270 years. That’s a perfect storm.

Do metaphorical perfect storms happen in politics and capital markets?

The answer is yes, provided the conditions of the perfect storm definition are satisfied. The multiple events that make up the true perfect storm must be independent and rare and come to converge in an almost impossible way.

Unfortunately, a political and market perfect storm is now on the way and may strike as early as Halloween 2019, marking a new “Halloween storm.” Get ready.

Today I’ll be discussing the components making up this perfect storm, and how I see them all coming together at the same time.

In my 40-plus years in banking and capital markets, I have lived through a number of financial fiascos that arguably qualify as perfect storms. 

Here’s a partial list:

1970: Penn Central bankruptcy, the largest in history at that time
1973–74: Arab oil embargo
1977–80: U.S. hyperinflation
1982–85: Latin American debt crisis
1987: One-day 22% stock market crash
1988–92: Savings and loan (S&L) crisis
1994: Mexican tequila crisis
1997: Asian financial crisis
1998: Russia/Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) crisis
2000:Dot-com crash
2007: Mortgage market collapse
2008: Lehman Bros./AIG financial panic.

I was not just a bystander at these events. From 1977–85, I worked at Citibank and dealt with inflation, currencies and Latin America from a front-row seat.

From 1985–93 I worked for a major government bond dealer that financed S&Ls and traded their mortgages.

From 1994–99, I was at LTCM and dealt in all the major international markets. I negotiated the LTCM rescue by Wall Street in September 1998.

In 1999–2000 I ran a tech startup, and in 2007–08 I was an investment banker and financial threat adviser to the CIA.

That’s a lot of action for one career, but it also makes the point that financial perfect storms happen more frequently than standard models expect.

Here’s what I learned: Every one of these episodes was preceded by mass complacency or euphoria.

Before the Arab oil embargo, we expected cheap oil forever. Before the Latin American debt crisis, countries like Brazil and Argentina were “the land of the future.”

- Source, Daily Reckoning via Jim Rickards

Four Reasons to Consider Gold In 2019

Here are just 4 of the largest current threats to the global economy, which all point to the viability of a Gold IRA to diversify your retirement portfolio:

1. Global Tensions and Conflicts

North Korea’s disarmament plans have ground to a halt. The U.S. decision to renege on the Iranian Nuclear Deal has tensions high and the recent U.S. backing of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has further fanned the growing flames of perceived U.S. Mideast “interference.”

Another group of foreign diplomats are uneasy about U.S. support for Venezuela’s opposition leader, Juan Guaido. And today’s lower oil prices could become a distant memory if a host of Middle East relations do not improve and quickly. All of these factors can cause sudden chaos in the stock market, but rarely impact gold prices heavily.

2. U.S. National Debt

It’s not only concerning that we’ve passed the $22 trillion deficit mark, but even more concerning is the fact that the last $1 trillion was added in less than a year (for the first time ever). $22 trillion is more than the entire U.S. economy!

This condition is not only unsustainable, there appears to be no planned end in sight. Erosion of the dollar’s value continues as Baby Boomers continue to file for social security from a fund that’s been hemorrhaging for decades. China and Russia are lobbying and eager to fill a void being created by a continuing decline of the dollar’s value.

3. Banking Blunders and Bail-Ins

A big part of the 2008 financial meltdown had to do with a bank’s misuse of derivatives, which in 2018 achieved heights exponentially greater than 2008 levels. And for all the complaining about Dodd-Frank, the one thing that no one seems to be aware of is actually THE MOST IMPORTANT FACT: All bank deposits immediately become bank assets in the event of insolvency!

This means taxpayers are no longer a bank’s first line of defense. Instead, that “privilege” has been quietly dumped onto depositors. Your Checking or Savings accounts can now legally and without recourse be commandeered for the bank’s own financial needs.

4. An Oversold Stock Market

Top analysts have been warning about the growing possibility of a market crash even greater than the one experienced during the Great Depression. They hurry to point out the suspicious lack of “significant” corrections during the recent bull market, which became the longest in our history last year.

Just one factor in their concerns is the fact that public companies borrowed $1.1 trillion in cheap Fed money, made available by the Fed’s notorious Quantitative Easing program, which was earmarked for wage increases, infrastructure, and expansion. Then they spent $1.2 trillion on stock buyback programs that inflated stock prices, but did virtually nothing beneficial for the company, particularly in potential growth or even maintenance.

These warnings signs have led analysts predict a 70% correction this year. In fact, the CIA's Financial Threat Advisor Jim Rickards even stated on Money Morning that he believes a 70% drop is the best case scenario...

- Source, JPost

Crypto Is Here to Stay, Bitcoin Isn’t

Bitcoin is back! So say the true believers, even with Friday’s flash crash. But there less there than meets the eye.

Bitcoin has staged a notable comeback from its 2018 crash. From a level of about $4,000 through the month of March, 2019, bitcoin had a two-day 23% spike from $4,135 on April 1, 2019 to $5,102 on April 3, 2019.

Bitcoin then moved sideways in the $5,000 to $6,000 range until May 8, 2019 when it staged another three-day spike from $5,932 on May 8 to $7,255 on May 11, a 22% surge.

Combining the April 1 and May 8 spikes, the bitcoin price moved from $4,135 to $7,255 for a spectacular 75% price rally in six weeks.

By last Thursday morning, it soared even higher, to over $8,300.

This rally was bitcoin’s best price performance since its 83% collapse from $20,000 in late December 2017 to $3,300 in December 2018. That crash marked the collapse of the greatest asset price bubble in history, larger even than the Tulipmania of 1637.

The questions for crypto investors are what caused the recent rebound in the price of bitcoin and will it last? Is this the start of a new mega-rally or just another price ramp and manipulation? Has anything fundamental changed?

If you’re beginning to suspect these are leading questions, you’re right.

Of course, bitcoin technical analysts are out in force explaining how the 100-day moving average crossed the 200-day moving average, a bullish sign. They are also quick to add that the 30-day moving average is gaining strength, another bullish sign.

My view is that technical analysis applied to bitcoin is nonsense. There are two reasons for this. The first is that there is nothing to analyze except the price itself. When you look at technical analysis applied to stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign exchange or other tradeable goods, there is an underlying asset or story embedded in the price.

Oil prices might move on geopolitical fears related to Iran. Bond prices might move on disinflation fears related to demographics. In both cases (and many others), the price reflects real-world factors. Technical analysis is simply an effort to digest price movements into comprehensible predictive analytics.

With bitcoin (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein) “there is no there, there.” Bitcoin is a digital record. Some argue it’s money; (I’m highly skeptical it meets the basic definition of money).

Either way, bitcoin does not reflect corporate assets, national economic strength, terms of trade, energy demand or any of the myriad factors by which other asset prices are judged. Technical analysis is meaningless when the price itself is meaningless in relation to any goods, services, assets or other claims.

My other reason for rejecting the utility of technical analysis is that it has low predictive value when applied to substantial assets and no predictive value at all when applied to bitcoin.

If you follow technical analysis, you’ll see that every “incorrect” prediction is followed immediately by a new analysis in which a “double top” merely presages a “triple top” and so on.

Technical analysis can help clarify where the price has been and help with relative value analysis, but its predictive analytic value is low (except to the extent the technical analysis itself produces self-fulfilling prophesies through herd behavior).

That said, what can we take away from the recent bitcoin price rally, putting aside its flash crash for the moment?

The first relevant fact is that no one knows why it happened. There was no new technological breakthrough in bitcoin mining. None of the scalability and sustainability challenges have been solved. Frauds and hacks continue to be revealed on an almost daily basis. In short, it’s business as usual in the bitcoin space with no new reasons for optimism or pessimism...

- Source, The Daily Reckoning