Bill Cara’s Blog
by ilene - January 11th, 2010 11:47 am
Bill argues that the Geithner/Obama economic stimulus plan to co-opt the equity markets, while effective so far, is neither sustainable nor healthy. – Ilene
Bill Cara’s Blog for January 11, 2010
Courtesy of Bill Cara
Trading in the Gold market Friday and again this weekend was bizarre. We need to look into this situation closely.
With the release of the US December Jobs Report on Friday, the spin was that there was a negative surprise, which would lead to more Quantitative Easing, which in turn would lead to higher Gold prices. Gold popped for just a few minutes, and then sidetracked the rest of the day. So who made any money? Just as important, the November Jobs Report was revised stronger, which balanced out the reported December weakness. So it looked to me that the economic data was merely a cover for traders who wanted to distribute Gold.
Then on Saturday, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor of the UK Telegraph in London, continued his hard hitting bearish reporting in an article entitled: America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels: (sub-head) December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/696263…
Immediately, the spin was that more Quantitative Easing would be needed, and when the Gold futures market opened on the weekend the opening tick was 1139 and the next at 1163, which was a greater than +2% move in a couple minutes. From that point forward through this morning, the Gold price has side-tracked, presently at about 1156.
At current prices, all the gold ever produced in the world, which Gold Bugs claim still exists, amounts to a valuation of $5 trillion, so that +2% move in less than 15 minutes has supposedly added about $200 billion. Wow. Not even the spending in D.C. can grow that fast.
Some time in the past year, I realized that capital markets had become something other than what they are designed for, which is a price discovery mechanism for assets based on economics. Regrettably, since the central banks of the world have caused their balance sheets to balloon during 2009, which is well illustrated in the graph I show in this weekend’s Week In Review, the global financial system is now based on hot air, not real assets in the economic sense.