Hedge Funds Betting Against the Eurozone: Why You Should Worry

Some of the world's most prominent hedge fund managers are betting against the eurozone -- and not just the peripheral countries everyone knows are in trouble. They're taking positions against the core countries, economies that -- until now -- everyone has assumed were rock-solid.

In a nutshell, some of the world's best-paid, most-seasoned, and savviest investors are sufficiently convinced of the underlying sickness of even the most apparently stable eurozone countries that they're placing serious bets on their potential collapse.

John Paulson, the billionaire who made his name (and his money) by shorting the U.S. mortgage securities market in the run up to the 2008 financial meltdown, is one of the hedge fund managers reported to be shorting Germany. More...

Almost Half of Insider Trading Defendants Avoid Prison

Image via WikipediaAlmost half of the 43 defendants who were sentenced in Manhattan federal court in the past eight years for insider trading avoided a prison term, with many never seeing the inside of a jail cell because they cooperated with prosecutors.

Nineteen who were sentenced since 2003, or 44 percent, weren’t incarcerated, an analysis of court cases by Bloomberg showed. Of the remainder, the average defendant got a prison term of 18.4 months. The greater the profit made on illegal trades, the longer the sentence. The longest term was 10 years. Danielle Chiesi, who pleaded guilty yesterday for her role in the Galleon Group LLC hedge fund insider-trading scandal, faces between 37 and 46 months in prison.

Since 2009, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan has stepped up insider-trading prosecutions, charging more than 30 people in three overlapping rings. Of the three defendants sentenced so far in the Galleon ring, the average sentence has been 17 months. The nationwide investigation has implicated hedge funds, technology companies and so-called expert- networking firms. Read more...

Trader Dan's Take on Today's Gold Action

Image via WikipediaTrader Dan
Once again we have a front row seat in the battle between China and the US when it comes to the Federal Reserve’s global inflationary policy, aka, Quantitative Easing 2.

With the Fed persisting on conjuring “wealth” into existence and working to manipulate and deliberately distort the long end of the yield curve, China is fighting to contain the effects of excess liquidity coming its way. It is almost as if Bernanke has uttered the command to: “Release the Kraken”, in this case the terrible Titan being the inflation monster.

The Chinese authorities have good reason to fear the rise of this beast as it, perhaps above all things at the current moment, has the single greatest potential to create unrest and social disorder in their nation. The Fed has been exporting inflation around the globe and nowhere is that showing up more forcefully than in the rising cost of food. Yes, basic material costs are soaring in China but the authorities can live with that – it is food that worries them seeing that the average Chinese worker spends a much larger percentage of their overall income on food than do their counterparts here in the US.

In yet another attempt to try to rein in price rises, the Chinese raised bank reserve ratios to try to slow down growth somewhat and perhaps pull back some of the fuel that might be contributing to the problems that they are dealing with. Of course, once the news hit the wires, out came the hedge fund algorithms, terrified to death that the world economy was now going to collapse, with the result that commodity sector was hit with massive selling all across the board. Down went gold and down went silver and down went the CCI.

Personally, while I understand what the Chinese authorities are attempting to do, I do not think that they are going to be a match for Ben who can manufacture more Dollars faster than Agent Smith could replicate himself in the Matrix. The Chinese are going to need their own version of Neo to combat Ben’s printing press; either that or they are going to have to upwardly revalue the yuan at a faster pace – something that the US schemers have no doubt long intended as part of their QE plan. I am sure Chuckie Schumer will be happy as he has been a one note Johnnie when it comes to blaming China for the US economic woes. “it’s all that currency manipulation by China”. Yeah sure – the US monetary authorities are pristinely pure having never even considered manipulating the US markets.

The move lower in gold takes it back down to the lower portion of the trading range that has contained it for most of this month now with important chart support near $1350 serving to hold it for now. There are plenty of bottom pickers active near this level but the key is whether the funds will sit tight or decide to liquidate some of their longs. Should they do so, price will fall to $1345 which is near the 100 day moving average and has been a level which tends to attract buying from those with a longer term investment view. A breach of that level would be much to the bears’ delight as that would set it up for a drop down towards $1325 – $1320. Asia of course would also be delighted as it would become picnic time for them, with the table being set by hedge fund algorithm selling.

First order of business for the bulls will be get price back above $1365 if they can hold it above $1350. Next they would need to regain $1380 to reaffirm a trading range market.

Along this line I am watching the Euro gold price to see if it can hold its ground above the €1000 level. If so, (the PM Fix today was €1021), that should also shore up the Dollar price of gold. Europe has been the epicenter of a great deal of economic fears so how the price of gold reacts in terms of the Euro will give us a clue as to how the investment world is thinking about the overall health or lack thereof of the wider global economy. Keep in mind what I have written so many times over the past years – the problem with most gold analysts here in the US is that they are too US Dollar gold price focused. All such Elliot Wave claptrap projections based only on the US Dollar price are worthless because gold is an international commodity, or perhaps even more appropriately, international currency.

Silver lost chart support at $28.50 but so far is holding more important support near the $28 level. Silver bulls would not want to see the metal close below that level as it would drop it back down towards $27 where I would suspect we will see very substantial buying emerge. Long term oriented investors would welcome such an occurrence should it indeed take place. The tightness in the physical market suggests that this is once again more of a paper trade thing related to the Comex that we are seeing and not a true reflection of the underlying physical market.

The HUI – what else can be said about the price chart except it stinks but then again, what is new about that during times of gold and silver weakness. It looks like it might want to drift down towards 500 if it violates this week’s low early next week. The 200 day moving average comes in close to that level and should prove to be a solid level of chart support as it has tended to hold dips in price over the last year and a half or so. Also, 500 was tough resistance on the way up back in late spring of 2010. It held on a dip September and October of last year so unless we have some sort of change in the fundamentals for gold and silver that I am currently unawares of, I would expect it to hold. The weekly chart shows an uptrend that is still intact but I would feel more comfortable if it would at least recapture 530. It will need to climb back above 550 to get me excited again. Read More...

Only buyers of the current rally are investment banks

Leigh Skene

The outperformance of risk assets over the past year suggests investors appear to believe that all credit problems have been solved – but nothing could be further from the truth, says Leigh Skene at Lombard Street Research.

“Rising stock markets and narrowing credit spreads depend on buyers being more anxious to buy than the sellers are to sell,” he says. “So who are the enthusiastic buyers of risk assets?”

Surprisingly, says Mr Skene, surveys show that the usual investors in major rallies – pension funds, hedge funds and retail investors – have not been net buyers of equities. And he says the most likely explanation for this anomaly in the biggest stock market rally since the 1930s is that major investment banks are the anxious buyers. More...

Woman Who Invented Credit Default Swaps is One of the Key Architects of Carbon Derivatives

Washington's Blog

As I have previously shown, speculative derivatives (especially credit default swaps or "CDS") are a primary cause of the economic crisis. They were largely responsible for bringing down Bear Stearns, AIG (and see this), WaMu and other mammoth corporations.

According to top experts, risky derivatives were not only largely responsible for bringing down the American (and world) economy, but they still pose a substantial systemic risk:

• A Nobel prize-winning economist (George Akerlof) predicted in 1993 that CDS would cause the next meltdown

• Warren Buffett called them “weapons of mass destruction” in 2003

• Warren Buffett’s sidekick Charles T. Munger, has called the CDS prohibition the best solution, and said “it isn’t as though the economic world didn’t function quite well without it, and it isn’t as though what has happened has been so wonderfully desirable that we should logically want more of it”

• Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan - after being one of their biggest cheerleaders - now says CDS are dangerous

• Former SEC chairman Christopher Cox said "The virtually unregulated over-the-counter market in credit-default swaps has played a significant role in the credit crisis''

• Newsweek called CDS "The Monster that Ate Wall Street"

• President Obama said in a June 17 speech on his plans for finance industry regulatory reform that credit swaps and other derivatives “have threatened the entire financial system”

• George Soros says the market is still unsafe, and that credit- default swaps are “toxic” and “a very dangerous derivative” because it’s easier and potentially more profitable for investors to bet against companies using them than through so-called short sales.

• U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters introduced a bill in July that tried to ban credit-default swaps because she said they permitted speculation responsible for bringing the financial system to its knees.

• Nobel prize-winning economist Myron Scholes - who developed much of the pricing structure used in CDS - said that over-the-counter CDS are so dangerous that they should be “blown up or burned”, and we should start fresh

• A leading credit default swap expert (Satyajit Das) says that the new credit default swap regulations not only won't help stabilize the economy, they might actually help to destabilize it.

• Senator Cantwell says that the new derivatives legislation is weaker than current regulation
  

Round Two: Carbon Derivatives

Now, Bloomberg notes that the carbon trading scheme will be largely centered around derivatives:

The banks are preparing to do with carbon what they’ve done before: design and market derivatives contracts that will help client companies hedge their price risk over the long term. They’re also ready to sell carbon-related financial products to outside investors.

[Blythe] Masters says banks must be allowed to lead the way if a mandatory carbon-trading system is going to help save the planet at the lowest possible cost. And derivatives related to carbon must be part of the mix, she says. Derivatives are securities whose value is derived from the value of an underlying commodity -- in this case, CO2 and other greenhouse gases...

Who is Blythe Masters?

She is the JP Morgan employee who invented credit default swaps, and is now heading JPM's carbon trading efforts. As Bloomberg notes (this and all remaining quotes are from the above-linked Bloomberg article):

Masters, 40, oversees the New York bank’s environmental businesses as the firm’s global head of commodities...

As a young London banker in the early 1990s, Masters was part of JPMorgan’s team developing ideas for transferring risk to third parties. She went on to manage credit risk for JPMorgan’s investment bank.

Among the credit derivatives that grew from the bank’s early efforts was the credit-default swap.

Some in congress are fighting against carbon derivatives:

“People are going to be cutting up carbon futures, and we’ll be in trouble,” says Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from Washington state. “You can’t stay ahead of the next tool they’re going to create.”

Cantwell, 51, proposed in November that U.S. state governments be given the right to ban unregulated financial products. “The derivatives market has done so much damage to our economy and is nothing more than a very-high-stakes casino -- except that casinos have to abide by regulations,” she wrote in a press release...

However, Congress may cave in to industry pressure to let carbon derivatives trade over-the-counter:

The House cap-and-trade bill bans OTC derivatives, requiring that all carbon trading be done on exchanges...The bankers say such a ban would be a mistake...The banks and companies may get their way on carbon derivatives in separate legislation now being worked out in Congress...

Financial experts are also opposed to cap and trade:

Even George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator, says money managers would find ways to manipulate cap-and-trade markets. “The system can be gamed,” Soros, 79, remarked at a London School of Economics seminar in July. “That’s why financial types like me like it -- because there are financial opportunities”...

Hedge fund manager Michael Masters, founder of Masters Capital Management LLC, based in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands [and unrelated to Blythe Masters] says speculators will end up controlling U.S. carbon prices, and their participation could trigger the same type of boom-and-bust cycles that have buffeted other commodities...

The hedge fund manager says that banks will attempt to inflate the carbon market by recruiting investors from hedge funds and pension funds.

“Wall Street is going to sell it as an investment product to people that have nothing to do with carbon,” he says. “Then suddenly investment managers are dominating the asset class, and nothing is related to actual supply and demand. We have seen this movie before.”

Indeed, as I have previously pointed out, many environmentalists are opposed to cap and trade as well. For example:

Michelle Chan, a senior policy analyst in San Francisco for Friends of the Earth, isn’t convinced.

“Should we really create a new $2 trillion market when we haven’t yet finished the job of revamping and testing new financial regulation?” she asks. Chan says that, given their recent history, the banks’ ability to turn climate change into a new commodities market should be curbed...

“What we have just been woken up to in the credit crisis -- to a jarring and shocking degree -- is what happens in the real world,” she says...

Friends of the Earth’s Chan is working hard to prevent the banks from adding carbon to their repertoire. She titled a March FOE report “Subprime Carbon?” In testimony on Capitol Hill, she warned, “Wall Street won’t just be brokering in plain carbon derivatives -- they’ll get creative.”

How the Movie Ends

Yes, they'll get "creative", and we have seen this movie before ...an inadequately-regulated carbon derivatives boom will destabilize the economy and lead to another crash.

I have previously pointed out that CDS sellers - like the big sellers of other financial products - know that the government will bail them out if CDS crash again. So they have strong incentives to sell them and to recreate huge levels of leverage. Indeed, the same dynamic that led to the S&L crisis also led to last year's CDS crisis, and will lead to the next crisis as well. So - while CDS might be a particularly dangerous type of "weapon of mass destruction" (in Warren Buffet's words), the new carbon derivatives may very well become the new form of looting on the public's dime. If the government allows massive carbon derivatives trading with as little oversight as over the CDS market, taxpayers will end up spending many trillions bailing out the giant banks and propping up the economy when the carbon market bubble bursts.

And as I have previously pointed out: (1) the giant banks will make a killing on carbon trading, (2) while the leading scientist crusading against global warming says it won't work, and (3) there is a very high probability of massive fraud and insider trading in the carbon trading markets.

Morgan Stanley Strategist: Head for the Hills!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

James Pressley

Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the former chief global strategist for Morgan Stanley is telling people to prepare for the worst. One more time folks, this is no conspiracy theorist. Barton Biggs, MORGAN STANLEY'S FORMER CHIEF GLOBAL STRATEGIST is telling you there is going to be an economic collapse. Read the article below.

Barton Biggs has some offbeat advice for the rich: Insure yourself against war and disaster by buying a remote farm or ranch and stocking it with ``seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc.''

The ``etc.'' must mean guns.

``A few rounds over the approaching brigands' heads would probably be a compelling persuader that there are easier farms to pillage,'' he writes in his new book, ``Wealth, War and Wisdom.''

Biggs is no paranoid survivalist. He was chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley before leaving in 2003 to form hedge fund Traxis Partners. He doesn't lock and load until the last page of this smart look at how World War II warped share prices, gutted wealth and remains a warning to investors. His message: Listen to markets, learn from history and prepare for the worst.

``Wealth, War and Wisdom'' fills a void. Library shelves are packed with volumes on World War II. The history of stock markets also has been ably recorded, notably in Robert Sobel's ``The Big Board.'' Yet how many books track the intersection of the two?

The ``wisdom'' in the alliterative title refers to the spooky way markets can foreshadow the future. Biggs became fascinated with this phenomenon after discovering by chance that equity markets sensed major turning points in the war.

The British stock market bottomed out in late June 1940 and started rising again before the truly grim days of the Battle of Britain in July to October, when the Germans were splintering London with bombs and preparing to invade the U.K.

`Epic Bottom'

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plumbed ``an epic bottom'' in late April and early May of 1942, then began climbing well before the U.S. victory in the Battle of Midway in June turned the tide against the Japanese.

Berlin shares ``peaked at the high-water mark of the German attack on Russia just before the advance German patrols actually saw the spires of Moscow in early December of 1941.''

``Those were the three great momentum changes of World War II -- although at the time, no one except the stock markets recognized them as such.''

Biggs isn't suggesting that Mr. Market is infallible: He can get ``panicky and crazy in the heat of the moment,'' he says. Over the long haul, though, markets display what James Surowiecki calls ``the wisdom of crowds.''

Like giant voting machines, they aggregate the judgments of individuals acting independently into a collective assessment. Biggs stress-tests this theory against events that shook nations from the Depression through the Korean War, which he calls ``the last battle of World War II.''

Refresher Course

Biggs has read widely and thought deeply. He has a pleasing conversational style, an eye for memorable anecdotes and a weakness for Winston Churchill's quips. His book works as a brisk refresher course.

What really packs a wallop, though, is his combination of military history, market action, maps and charts. It's one thing to say that the London market scraped bottom before the Battle of Britain. It's another to show it.

In May and June 1940, some 338,000 British and French troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk by a flotilla of fishing boats, tugs, barges, yachts and river steamers. The French and Belgian armies had collapsed; the Dutch had surrendered. Britain stood alone, as bombs shattered London and the Nazis prepared to invade. Yet stocks rallied.

Mankind endures ``an episode of great wealth destruction'' at least once every century, Biggs reminds us. So the wealthy should prepare to ride out a disaster, be it a tsunami, a market meltdown or Islamic terrorists with a dirty bomb.

The rich get complacent, assuming they will have time ``to extricate themselves and their wealth'' when trouble comes, Biggs says. The rich are mistaken, as the Holocaust proves.

``Events move much faster than anyone expects,'' he says, ``and the barbarians are on top of you before you can escape.''

Bank Runs May Now Become Illegal

In addition to the current administration proposal to authorize "Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes", note the more chilling reaction to Huffington's Move Your Money campaign:

New regulations proposed by the administration, and specifically by the ever-incompetent Securities and Exchange Commission, seek to...[change] the primary assumptions of the key Money Market Rule 2a-7. A key proposal in the overhaul of money market regulation suggests that money market fund managers will have the option to "suspend redemptions to allow for the orderly liquidation of fund assets."

The next time there is a market crash, and you try to withdraw what you thought was "absolutely" safe money, a back office person will get back to you saying, "Sorry - your money is now frozen.

Bank runs have become illegal.

"This is precisely the regulation now proposed by the administration. In essence, the entire US capital market is now a hedge fund, where even presumably the safest investment tranche can be locked out from within your control when the ubiquitous "extraordinary circumstances" arise. The second the game of constant offer-lifting ends, and money markets are exposed for the ponzi investment proxies they are, courtesy of their massive holdings of Treasury Bills, Reverse Repos, Commercial Paper, Agency Paper, CD, finance company MTNs and, of course, other money markets, and you decide to take your money out, well - sorry, you are out of luck. It's the law."

Read more...

Parabolic Gold Price Rise Imminent

John Embry
As the gold price is set to appreciate for the ninth consecutive year, investors that have accumulated investments tied to the gold price such as gold-backed ETFs and gold stocks have been amply rewarded. The gold sector has been one of the best performing asset classes over the past decade as investors have pushed gold to record highs above $1,200 per ounce in an effort to diversify out of the U.S. dollar and other global fiat currencies - which have been debased by both politicians and central banks through persistent deficits and rising debt levels. One of the oldest and foremost bulls on the gold price and gold mining stock sector has been Sprott Asset Management, the Canadian-based hedge fund controlled by Eric Sprott. In the latest edition of Investor’s Digest of Canada, John Embry, Sprott’s Chief Investment Strategist, wrote a piece titled, “Gold bull has many years, thousands of dollars to go.”

Mr. Embry begins by providing a history lesson on the volatile relationship between the gold price and central banking. He argues that for the past 15 years, central banks such as the U.S. Federal Reserve have been flooding the market with very large quantities of the yellow metal in order to suppress the price of gold - thereby allowing the U.S. dollar to maintain its preeminence as the world’s reserve currency while easy monetary policies are pursued. While this strategy worked exceptionally well in the 1990s as the gold price held below $400 per ounce, it has been particularly ineffective over the past decade, as a huge amount of fund flows has pushed the price of gold from below $300 per ounce to an all-time nominal high of $1,226.50 per ounce in early December.

Embry goes on to reiterate his disdain for the actions of the central banks, stating that history has demonstrated that in the long run government intervention in the free market does not work. As evidence of this, he cites the successful efforts of central banks to depress the gold price during the 1960’s - which was followed by a subsequent 2,300% rise during the 1970s. Accordingly, “markets that have been artificially capped tend to catapult upwards when the suppression ultimately fails. In my opinion, the last experience in the 60s and 70s was a mere bagatelle in comparison to what is happening today,” argues Embry. To support this claim, he suggests that as much as 15,000 tonnes of gold have hit the market in the past 15 years, relative to just 3,000 tonnes in the 60s and 70s.

For those who claim that gold is in a bubble phase, Embry strongly disagrees and argues that gold has received very little attention from the general investing public and not anywhere near the level of coverage from the financial media that would exist if gold was a bubble. Furthermore, according to Mr. Embry, in a true gold bubble gold mining companies and gold producers would be generating extraordinary earnings - a situation that is not occurring, despite the strong rise in the gold price over the past decade.

Going forward, Embry believes another chief factor for the ongoing gold bull market will be the lack of gold mine supply. He cites an absence of quality projects ready for gold mining, further environmental and geopolitical issues, continuing capital constraints, and a “chronic shortage of skilled miners and competent mine builders.” The decline in gold mine supply will continue “for some time, irrespective of what the gold price does.”

Embry highlights recent commentary from Aaron Regent, the CEO of Barrick Gold (ABX), the world’s largest gold mining company, who stated that global gold production was in terminal decline and went so far as to use the term “peak gold.” In addition, Embry provides comments from the research and technical director of a Cape Town, South Africa-based consultancy, who stated that the famous Witwatersrand goldfields - the largest goldfield ever discovered and one that constitutes roughly 10% of the world’s gold supply - are approximately 95% exhausted. Add to this backdrop the declining supply of central bank gold and heightened investment demand for gold, and the Sprott team opines that the necessary ingredients for a significant rise in the price of gold are in place.

Embry concludes his piece by boldly stating that “I now firmly believe that the chances of gold ever trading below $1,000 per ounce are becoming increasingly remote.” He does add one caveat however - if the global economy suffered a “catastrophic deflationary collapse, gold could briefly be swept under but would then emerge with even greater relative strength as the only true safe haven.” Nevertheless, Embry believes the chances of such a deflationary collapse are very small given the pure fiat currency environment that exists.

He believes that gold is “going to stage a parabolic rise from current levels shortly” and that gold “remains one of the best supply-demand imbalance stories I have ever encountered in my career.” Such a bold claim by an experienced, successful money manager indicates just how much upside potential could remain in gold’s bull market.

Dave’s Top 10 Reasons To Dismiss Last Friday’s Unemployment Report

By David Goldman

Over at Asia TImes Online, I take apart the Friday BLS report. Market reaction was amusing: every hedge fund in the world appears to have been offsides, and forced to liquidate gold and commodities. Central banks will be happy, particularly the ones who want to accumulate gold. The last thing they want is for hedge funds to run in front of them. Weak hands will be shaken out, but I think there is a buying opportunity here: the US economy remains extremely weak.

Here are my Top 10 Reasons to scrooge the BLS report:

10. Nearly 300,000 people disappeared from the labor force, yet the BLS reports no increase in “discouraged workers” or workers forced to take part-time jobs for economic reasons.

9. Private sector service jobs supposedly increased by 51,000, yet the National Institute of Purchasing Managers’ (NIPM) survey shows that services employment fell during November. The unexpected drop in the NIPM report, which is a reasonably good advanced indicator of economic activity, doesn’t square with the BLS report.

8. The reported improvement in services was driven by an 86,000 increase in temporary employees in “administrative and support services”. There almost certainly is an element of truth in this report, but it is not necessarily good news. The biggest hiring boom stems from the huge backlog of home foreclosures. With one out of eight American homeowners behind on mortgage payments, the Wall Street Journal on November 19 reported, “Mortgage restructuring for strapped homeowners has emerged as a rare growth area in the economy as companies in the field keep hiring. Four of the largest mortgages servicers - Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc, JP Morgan Chase & Co and Wells Fargo & Co - have collectively hired almost 17,000 people this year, mostly to work with financially ailing homeowners. With the number of defaults rising, many are planning to keep adding staff.”

7. Goods-producing industries lost 69,000 jobs by the BLS count, about equally divided between manufacturing and construction - yet the “recovery” supposedly is led by manufacturing.

6. ADP, America’s largest processor of payroll information, publishes an independent survey of employment based on its own data. This is somewhat less comprehensive than the BLS data, but far more reliable. ADP reported a loss of 169,000 jobs, compared to only 11,000 for the BLS survey.

5.The correlation between changes in the BLS employment measure since 2000 is about 95%, and the discrepancy between the BLS number of 11,000 jobs lost in November versus the ADP number of 169,000 jobs lost lies at the extreme range of error for the two series.

4. The job losses reported by ADP are equally split between goods-producing and services. It simply doesn’t make sense for ADP to show nearly identical job losses for goods-producing and services, while BLS shows a big jump in services employment combined with a big drop in goods-producing employment.

3. One of the brightest spots in the BLS report was a 12,600 increase in health services employment. Yet a forward-looking indicator of demand for health-service employees, the monster.com online advertising index for health-care jobs, fell in November to an all-time low of 83 (from an October level of 96 and a year-earlier level of 111).

2. According to the Conference Board’s monthly survey of consumer confidence, “Consumers’ assessment of the labor market deteriorated moderately. Those claiming jobs are ‘hard to get’ increased to 49.8% from 49.4%, while those claiming jobs are ‘plentiful’ decreased to 3.2% from 3.5%.”

And the top reason not to believe the BLS report is:

1. The level of un- and underemployment is so huge by historical standards as to make the usual sort of measurement questionable. With nearly 20% of the population unable to find proper work, there is a different sort of workforce. The vast majority of job creation in the US during the past two generations came from small businesses, which display only vaguely on the radar of government agencies as well as the bigger private surveys. The financial crisis killed small entrepreneurs as surely as Joseph Stalin killed the kulaks, and the roots of the economy are dead and dry.

Major Gold Melt Up Coming

Before It's News
A highly trustworthy bond trader friend in New York just sent this to me, regarding the recent up move in the gold markets and how he expects this trend to continue. (By the way, the term "Melt Up" was coined by my good friend Thom Calandra.):

the CFTC is about to regulate the position sizes of the major commercials in various commodities, gold included. Apparently, there are a bunch of bullion banks, JP Morgan, and DB who are short a boat load of contracts, and if there (sic) positions need to be cut back, then that could create a squeeze...

For those of us who don't speak Wall Street, the CFTC is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is charged by the government with the regulation of the commodity futures markets. If Deutsche Bank (DB) and JP Morgan are short gold, that means they will have to go on the open market to acquire gold to pay off their end of futures contracts. The squeeze is created when people who owe on contracts have to go out to the open market to buy the gold they need to make good on their contractual obligations. This drives the price of gold much higher.

a story today how Russia came out and said they bt gold last month helped run the tables...

This is from a Reuters story reported at Mineweb and other outlets. Central banks are now accumulating gold and whatever overhang effect the IMF's threats to unload more of their gold stock pile had in the past are effectively gone, as we reported here at Before It's News. There just isn't enough gold for every one in the world to put all their money into it -- at $1170. There's plenty of gold to go around -- at a much higher price, say $8,000 per ounce or $16,000 per ounce.

hedge funds like einhorns greenlight capital says they have moved from the etf to physical gold...

I had heard this. They got out of the GLD ETF, installed their own vault in New Jersey and are accumulating a pile of gold there.

and john paulson is out there marketing a gold fund... real money is getting behind this trade... open interest still is rising... and the charts are starting to look near vertical

Things are starting to accelerate in the gold market. Once the hedge funds jump into gold as a momentum play, it will start to move even higher in a self fulfilling prophecy.

Chinese Wealth Fund Dumping Dollars for Gold

Reports suggest that China's main sovereign wealth fund and other state entities are under pressure to invest in strategic Western assets as the country tries to offload its dollars for firmer-based wealth including gold and oil.

Lawrence Williams
LONDON -
Several reports are coming out of China that there is pressure on state-controlled organisations - notably the country's main sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corporation (CIC) to rapidly build investment in non-Chinese enterprises. While the CIC itself, with apparent access to some $300 billion in funds - and the possibility of more from the government - may be concentrating on hedge funds and other investment entities, there is another sector for Chinese state-owned companies looking at major investment in commodities. Indeed with the funds available as China seems to be dumping its US dollars in favour of more concrete assets, virtually no minerals sector is safe from Chinese participation.

While CIC was set up only two years ago, funded with $200 billion in initial capital, a report to the U.S. Congress noted that according to top Chinese officials, it was created to improve the rate of return on China's $1.5 trillion in foreign exchange reserves and to soak up some of the nation's excess financial liquidity. Depending on its performance with the initial allotment of $200 billion, the CIC might be allocated more of China's growing stock of foreign exchange reserves - and this has already proved to be the case.

Probably the most interesting of the recent reports of what is happening with Chinese sovereign wealth fund investment outside China has come from Paul Mylchreest's Thunder Road Report where an ex-U.S. intelligence service member is quoted. He reports that he has a friend who is in the Chinese Sovereign Wealth fund sector who says - hearsay I know and it wouldn't stand up in court - indicated that the wealth fund analysts were working all hours of the day and night trying to put investment deals together - particularly in the oil and precious metals sectors. The conclusion is that China recognises that the U.S. dollar is going to tank and it wants to convert as much of its trillions of dollars of holdings into strategic assets as possible before the collapse really takes hold.

The trouble is there is too much money available chasing too few assets - and too little time available - or such is the conclusion. As a result the Chinese government seems to be doing its utmost in trying to persuade the Chinese public to buy gold and silver by relaxing the restrictions - it's now easier to buy precious metals in China than in the U.S. - and by pushing gold and silver investment on state-owned television. If this continues the likelihood is that China will permanently overtake India as the world's biggest buyer of gold and silver, while the country's store of wealth will help shield it against further western economic collapse.

If this is indeed the case then it must be likely that the country is also building its own gold reserves - perhaps surreptitiously - through creative accounting by buying by a state entity, but not through the Central Bank itself where such sales would need to be reported. Positive for gold looking forward.

Returning to the Sovereign Wealth Funds angle though, CIC's chairman, Lou Jiwei, is reported by the WSJ as saying that investment in CIC's global portfolio for "one month this year equalled that of the whole of last year" and that given that the fund is expecting a positive return on its investments this year it may well ask the government for additional funding. Where it is going to place additional funding, who knows but there seems little doubt that China is using the western recession to buy up assets on the cheap and the funds available to do this are virtually unlimited by Western standards. But the Chinese won't buy up any old rubbish. They'll be looking for the crème de la crème.

Already CIC has bought 17% of Canada's last real remaining diversified miner - Teck Corporation - smartly buying when the latter was only just beginning to recover from last year's collapse and it has to be likely that more minerals-strategic investments are on the cards or being negotiated, either by CIC or other state organisations. Chinalco's ultimately thwarted move into Rio Tinto would have been another such instance and the Chinese investments and takeovers of Australian miners and promises of huge funding for minerals rich African countries are other examples.

Some reckon that China will be the world's second biggest economy, overtaking Japan, within the next couple of years and will overtake the U.S. by 2030. If it continues the way it is going and the U.S. continues the way it is going, this could happen much sooner. Communism, Chinese style, is winning the war of economic dominance and soon the world will no longer rely on the dollar as its reserve currency, but the renminbi!

In an interesting, but perhaps disturbing footnote to the Thunder Road Report mentioned above, Paul Mylchreest comments that in Latin America, where he has been living for 25 years, for the first time he can remember, locals are now preferring their own currency to U.S. dollars. He goes on to finish with this comment: "If a fellow with no education, a poor diet, and inadequate medical treatment living at 3,500 metres above sea level can figure out that the US dollar is undesirable as a store of wealth, how much longer do you think it can last as the world's reserve currency."