Gold & Precious Metals
Dear Readers,
We’re continuing with our series of video conversations, as we believe they will be most useful to you while they are fresh. But fear not: if Doug has a “guru moment” or experiences an urgent need to comment on something in the news, we’ll step in with his thoughts. Meanwhile, John Hathaway’s comments are particularly relevant and reassuring, given the fluctuation we’re seeing in gold this week.
Thanks for reading/viewing, and more soon,
Sincerely,
Louis James
Senior Metals Investment Strategist
Casey Research
[John Hathaway revealed more valuable insights about the precious-metals market at the Casey Research Recovery Realty Check Summit. Joining him were Doug Casey, James Rickards, John Mauldin, and 27 other financial experts. You can hear all of their presentations – which include timely stock picks and asset-protection strategies – on the Summit Audio Collection.]
Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator
Louis James: Ladies and gentleman, thanks for tuning in. We’re at the Casey Research Recovery Reality Check Summit. We’re talking with John Hathaway, one of the more successful fund investors – institutional investors – in our precious metals field near and dear to my heart. John, can you give us a quick version of what you talked about here, for those who didn’t make it to the conference?
John Hathaway: Sure, yes. I think we’re at the end of a correction that resulted from the peak last summer. It was overcooked, kind of hyperventilated hysteria over the debt-ceiling talks, the rating downgrade of the US sovereign debt, and I think basically the stocks and the metal had been working off that boiled down to what we now have is a simmer. I think we are at a position where there’s not a lot of downside, and I would not be surprised by revisiting the previous highs of $1,900 and maybe even new highs over $2,000 this year.
What will do that is basically – so much of the narrative has been quantitative easing. When Bernanke announced on the 29th of February that they were done with quantitative easing (and if you believe that I’ve got a bridge to sell you, but for the time being let’s assume that there won’t be any), I was very impressed that gold did not go to a new low. It printed somewhere below $1,600 at the end of the year, made a couple-of-day swoon, but it didn’t go to a new low. And then when the Fed minutes came out it also did not go to a new low, it kind of reiterated what Bernanke said. So the narrative may be changing. I’m not ruling out quantitative easing as a possibility, but there are things out there that gold might be looking at that the CNBC mentality hasn’t figured out.
Remember that gold rose for many years before we even heard of quantitative easing; it was in a steady uptrend. So what could those things be? What would take gold – what would be the new headlines that might take gold to higher highs? To me, the biggest thing is that the Federal Reserve has purchased something like 61% of all new Treasury debt in the last year; and if they aren’t going to continue that, then what’s going to happen to rates?
Louis: Right.
To Read More or Watch the Video CLICK HERE
Gold and silver are down again today, but the mining stocks are up big. One day does not a trend make, but this is still a possible indicator of several things:
1) The plunge in mining shares has finally gotten the attention of investors who understand that most of these companies are viable and profitable, and that they won’t go to zero. So at some point the downtrend will stop, and though today might or might not be that day, it’s definitely coming. Downside risk, in other words, is now smaller than upside potential.
2) Share buyers are watching the mess in Europe and concluding that austerity is being replaced with monetary and fiscal ease. The European Central Bank will have no choice but to buy up trillions of euros of peripheral country debt to keep the eurozone together — or the currency union will fall apart and former members will go back to their old currencies and devalue aggressively. Either outcome is inflationary and therefore great for precious metals.
CLICK HERE for the 3rd Reason
Mitt Romney thinks so:
China has an interest in trade. China wants to, as they have 20 million people coming out of the farms and coming into the cities every year, they want to be able to put them to work. They want to have access to global markets. And so we have right now something they need very badly, which is access to our market and our friends around the world, have that same– power over China. To make sure that we let them understand that in order for them to continue to have free and open access to the thing they want so badly, our markets, they have to play by the rules.
They’re a currency manipulator. And on that basis, we go before the W.T.O. and bring an action against them as a currency manipulator. And that allows us to apply tariffs where we believe they are stealing our intellectual property, hacking into our computers, or artificially lowering their prices and killing American jobs. We can’t just sit back and let China run all over us. People say, “Well, you’ll start a trade war.” There’s one going on right now, folks. They’re stealing our jobs. And we’re gonna stand up to China.”
The theory goes that by buying U.S. currency (so far they have accumulated around $3 trillion) and treasuries (around $1 trillion) on the open market, China keeps demand for the US dollar high. They can afford to buy and hold so much US currency due to their huge trade surplus with America, and they buy US currency roughly equal to this surplus. To keep this pile of dollars from increasing the Chinese money supply, China sterilises the dollar purchases by selling a proportionate amount of bonds to Chinese investors. Supposedly by boosting the dollar, yuan-denominated Chinese goods look cheap to the American (and global) consumer.
First, I don’t really think we can conclusively say that the yuan is necessarily undervalued. That is like assuming that there is some natural rate of exchange beyond prices in the real world. For every dollar that China takes out of the open market, America could print one more — something which, lest we forget — Bernanke has been very busily doing; the American monetary base has tripled since 2008. Actions have consequences; if China’s currency peg was so unsustainable, the status quo would have collapsed long ago. Until it does, we cannot conclusively say to what extent the yuan is undervalued.
To Read More CLICK HERE
Debt, risk and employment are in a death-spiral of malinvestment and debt-based consumption.
Standard-issue financial pundits (SIFPs) and economists look at debt, risk and the job market as separate issues. No wonder they can’t make sense of our “jobless recovery”: the three are intimately and causally connected. An entire book could be written about debt, risk and jobs, but let’s see if we can’t shed some light on a complex dynamic in a few paragraphs.
Risk: As I described in Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change, risk cannot be eliminated, it can only be shifted to others or temporarily masked.
Masking risk simply lets it pile up beneath the surface until it brings down the entire system. Transferring it to others is a neat “solution” but when it blows up then those who took the fall are not pleased.
Risk and gain are causally connected: no risk, no gain. The ideal setup is to keep the gain but transfer the risk to others. This was the financial meltdown in a nutshell: the bankers kept their gains and transferred the losses/risk to the taxpayers via the bankers’ toadies and apparatchiks in Congress, the White House and the Federal Reserve.
Risk is like the dog that didn’t bark. In the story Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes calls the police inspector’s attention to the fact that a dog did something curious the night in question: it did not bark when it should have.
When scarce capital is misallocated to unproductive uses such as duplicate tests that can be billed to Medicare, sprawling McMansions in the middle of nowhere, etc., “the dog that didn’t bark” is this question: what productive uses for that scarce capital have been passed over to squander the scarce capital on Medicare fraud, McMansions, Homeland Security (“Papers, please! No papers? Take him away”), etc.
Once the capital has been squandered, it’s gone, and the opportunity to invest it in productive uses has been irrevocably lost.
Debt: Debt has a funny cost called interest. If you have a corrupt, self-serving central bank (a redundancy) that can lower interest rates by printing money to buy government bonds, then this funny thing called interest can be lowered to, say, 1%.
At 1% interest, the government can borrow $100 and only pay 1% in annual interest. That is almost “free,” isn’t it? The key word here is “almost.” If you borrow enough, then that silly 1% can become rather oppressive.
Let’s say the Federal Reserve is willing to loan you $100 billion at zero interest. You have an incredible sum of cash to use for speculation, and it doesn’t cost anything! Wow, you must be an investment banker….
Now what happens when the interest rate goes from zero to 1%? Yikes, you suddenly owe $1 billion a year in interest. That is some serious change. You can of course pay the interest out of the borrowed $100 billion, unless you’ve spent it building bridges to nowhere and supporting crony capitalism.
To Read More CLICK HERE
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”- Sir Winston Churchill – November 1942
I have studied the evolution of the graphite market for the past 15 months. It is fair to say that Sir Winston Churchill’s words are as true in 2012 as they were 70 years ago. We have just returned from a world tour of speaking engagements in Germany, Canada, and the US. Graphite was the topic du jour. There is a great deal of “graphite curiosity” around the world, about how to take advantage of its exploding interest. This desire for education has been responsible for the near-parabolic rise in the share prices of junior mining companies now exploring for graphite.
We have constructed a proprietary market capitalization-weighted index of junior mining companies involved in graphite exploration. The chart speaks for itself:
Source: Bloomberg
We are strongly of the opinion that while Discovery Investors can still profit from the interest in graphite, the initial move, “Phase I,” is over. We caution selectivity as the order of the day in the graphite space. The chart above seems to confirm our belief. Graphite topped out in early April 2012.
By Phase I, we refer to the initial phase of the lifecycle of most junior mining companies where the interest, a function of the “mystery” surrounding a new mineral or metal, serves as a powerful force to bid share prices higher. This occurs till these “mysteries” are understood. As a project moves from the exploration to the development phase, the share price often “goes sideways” as early investors take profits and sit on the sideline as a company evolves towards a production decision.
What Got Us Here?
The lifecycle of a junior miner exploring for graphite is no different. It has been interesting to watch this market develop. It seems to have developed incredibly quickly relative to some of graphite’s young cousins like rare earth elements. We believe there are still profits to be had here as the macro themes which brought graphite to the fore initially are very much intact.
To Read More CLICK HERE
-
I know Mike is a very solid investor and respect his opinions very much. So if he says pay attention to this or that - I will.
~ Dale G.
-
I've started managing my own investments so view Michael's site as a one-stop shop from which to get information and perspectives.
~ Dave E.
-
Michael offers easy reading, honest, common sense information that anyone can use in a practical manner.
~ der_al.
-
A sane voice in a scrambled investment world.
~ Ed R.
Inside Edge Pro Contributors
Greg Weldon
Josef Schachter
Tyler Bollhorn
Ryan Irvine
Paul Beattie
Martin Straith
Patrick Ceresna
Mark Leibovit
James Thorne
Victor Adair