The sudden and completely unexpected collapse of gold – down 13.7 per cent in the blink of an eye – was a huge market intrusion or manipulation, or major fiddle, into an overall rising bullion market – but by whom?
The spin was already craftily fed into the ether, along with the price: the fingered culprit was little lowly Cyprus, everyone’s favourite kicking-boy at the moment, as it was forced by the so-called rescuing Troika – the IMF, the EU and its ECB – to sell off its minimal gold hoard of just a piffling €400 million, and in effect send it to Germany.
The Troika isn’t interested in saving the Cypriot economy and its banks’ depositors, you see, but is only out to save the euro and its over-grandiose ambitions for the now over-stretched eurozone. The truth about gold, however, was completely different, and contained menacing overtones for the future of the world economy.
The real villain
So, stand up the real villain: it’s Ben Bernanke, of course! Yes, Helicopter Ben, you have been unmasked as the central banker at the Fed who’s slowly losing his clothes, and now Spear’s will rapidly remove your fig-leaf of a great deception – to reveal a major market manipulation.
And we will attempt to formulate the thinking behind you actions, which isn’t difficult, as we have seen through your QE failing game. Spear’s can see the consequences that so frightened you, that led to your breaking yet another sacred central banking rule: never to manipulate markets with public money.
Even your predecessor Sir Alan Greenspan – unwisely knighted in the UK for his services to (irony of ironies) financial stability – wisely disavowed any Fed interference with the booming dotcom markets of his day, which eventually crashed: but Greenspan didn’t see it as within the Fed’s charter to interfere with stock or bullion markets, or for that matter, to have a QE policy driven by unemployment.
Fake money
Now Bernanke is upholding his own failing and unproven strategy of flooding the economy with printed – or rather fake – money. He may have avoided a wholesale banking collapse, and supported the ongoing bonuses of those who broke the bank back in 2009.
His further attempts to avoid Global Depression II, however, are just stepping-stones to the ultimate disaster, the very result he so earnestly wished to avoid. His concern is that he will fail to prove his monetarist theory that the 1930s Great Depression was caused only by a serious lack of liquidity… for which his simplistic solution is just to print more of the bloody stuff, and throw some of it out of his helicopter over Iowa or wherever else isn’t on the map.
This is Bernanke’s answer to the unanswerable question, but QE doesn’t add one iota to aggregate demand. His QE3+ printing programme, which currently spews out $85.0 billion into the US economy every month, does nothing whatsoever, unfortunately, to increase consumer demand; and demand is what the world economy actually needs to get back to anything recognisable as Growth, as we once knew it.
Why gold tanked
What Bernanke did, on Friday, 12 April, was hit the market with 500 tonnes of naked shorts, knocking $73 off an ounce of gold. That adds up to 16 million ounces, worth $24,800,000,000, producing a loss for the seller(s) of $1,168,000,000: this begs the question of who has $25 trn of walking-around money in his hip pocket, and can afford to drop $1.2 bn on the street?
Answer: only the Fed, which can print money until the cows come home.
But what if it goes wrong? It’s an enormous and uncharted risk that Bernanke is taking, so why did he take it? Obviously, he wants to keep gold at around $1,400 per ounce, but why? Because the fall in value of the dollar against gold is caused by his QE3+ programme, which is designed to reduce unemployment by over one per cent, to seven per cent, but not to weaken the dollar and send import costs up, and lose control of interest rates. Hmm. It all sounds pretty rum.
Bernanke’s actions are the flipside of other central bank actions: Venezuela has repatriated its gold; Germany is doing the same, but the US only agreed to hand it over a seven-year period. So Bernanke now wants the price down, as he is committed to QE3+ until the US economy achieves lift-off.
The economy, however, is still patchy and not yet anywhere near take-off speed, so he daren’t let interest rates rise while he is printing money like a maniac, or he thinks his recovery will falter and fail.
It’s not difficult to see all this nonsense ending up as a nasty mess in the field at the end of the runway… with inflation and slump, slumpflation in a word, and banking and derivative collapses also found at the scene. What price gold then?
Stephen Hill is a businessman who has been published on classical economics and on European philology and philosophy. Read more by Stephen Hill
This article first appeared on Spear’s.
Content from our partners
Related
