The analysts were confident about valuations going forward, especially long term. Company execs swore their deals didn't need any money, while brokers and bankers alike had a gleam in their eye about the financing opportunities amid the debris - even a sense of urgency. One broker - my former business partner, actually - wondered whether the fundamentals for gold have ever been as bullish in our lives.

The answer was unambiguous. The market has answered too.

Newmont and Freeport this week filed documents in conjunction with potential underwritings by J.P. Morgan and Citigroup, in the amounts of $1.2 billion and $750 million, respectively, totaling just under $2 billion. Kinross sold UBS about $400 million worth of stock last week. Lundin's Red Back also negotiated a bought deal worth about $150 million with a group of underwriters led by Cormark Securities and BMO last week. Earlier this month, Yamana closed a $135 million share offer and borrowed $200 million, while in December, Agnico-Eagle raised some $300 million from stock issuances after borrowing $300 million a few months earlier (in September). Where's the deflation?!

The money is coming into the gold sector. The Canadian National Post reported last week that gold miners are "raising cash with ease... many generalist funds have jumped onto the precious metals bandwagon."

Many juniors have also reported financings where needed. Some are turning them away. Share issues are just too dilutive down here, and any company that doesn't need money to survive 2009 is prudent to refuse.

Asked about the ability of miners to raise cash in this environment, the analysts at the podium at the Cambridge House investment conference in Vancouver all agreed there is always funding for assets that have sound economic fundamentals. They finance themselves. In fact, in my experience, it is often better to buy the shares of companies with good assets that need cash than companies with cash and no assets, even if the latter are trading at a discount to cash breakup, and even if funding is relatively scarce. Companies with a lot of cash can sometimes get lazy and put up their feet, or insiders waste it - or even steal it, if they lack integrity. Cash itself yields nothing. It's a depreciating good, as you know. It's one thing to buy a company at below cash breakup and then break it up and keep the extra cash. It is another thing to invest in a company at cash breakup or less. We invest to earn profits.

If you want to buy cash at a discount, buy a T-bill or term deposit. Or else, you're just sharing in potential losses due to debasement, negligence, debauchery or theft. That doesn't mean you should avoid the deals that have a lot of cash - just that's not what you're investing in. You are investing either in the underlying asset, which yields profit (i.e., more cash in the future) or management's abilities.

Ultimately, sound "assets" will hold their value better than idle cash in an inflationary environment.

It is obvious that through this crisis, despite some turbulence, gold prices have held up better than just about any other asset, commodity or currency (other than dollars and yen) we may imagine. From the point of view of a gold miner, this is a very good thing. Even better is that the price of oil, a significant cost input for miners, has fallen a lot relative to gold. This is bullish for margins. Also bullish for gold miners is that the slump may have freed up capital and labor for the development of gold assets, where previous scarcity drove up capex estimates so much that some projects had to be abandoned.

The combination of strong investment demand for gold and lower input costs makes gold stocks one of the only sectors poised for any growth in operating results (i.e., earnings and cash flows) in 2009.

On the other hand, the ratio of gold prices to many of the commodities, and the averages, is at more than a 10-year extreme, and it is not sustainable. As a matter of fact, I think it could be a drag on gold prices. Gold is the only commodity challenging the resistance point in its post-March 2008 downtrend.

It looks poised to break out, and the other commodities appear to be bottoming.

However, while the extremity lasts, it could cap gold prices.

My feeling is that the gold ratios (i.e., gold prices relative to other assets, commodities and currencies) are going to ebb in the short term while commodity prices catch up a little. I continue to think that this catch-up phase will include a rally in stock prices, and a general recovery in risk appetite, even if short-lived. While it lasts, it is likely to shave a few safe-haven points off gold. It hasn't started yet.

I'm not looking for new lows in gold on this... just some backfilling and consolidation while the other commodities and assets catch up some. This could happen over the next few months. Then look out.

Regardless, however, I expect gold shares to benefit from the general return of risk appetite too.

That is, but for some ebb and flow, I expect gold shares to do well whether gold goes up or not - so long as it doesn't go down too much. As long as it holds the $800-850 level, gold shares are a buy.

It is still a buyer's market. Many gold shares are still factoring in a gold price of less than $800. But don't be hasty.

Rather, be deliberate, which means don't waver from the plan or your conviction on dips. Buy them. Try not to buy on days when everyone else is, like today, but make sure you have a shopping list and just pick away at it when you get the dip.

Investors should always wade in (and out) of their positions, rather than jumping in and out - as ole Jesse Livermore used to do. They called him the "Boy Plunger." He made big on the way up and lost big on the way down. There are lots of folks like that on Wall Street. They're big gamblers. You could say the Fed made them. They don't care about the black swan, because they believe that should they lose, they will just win again tomorrow.

Keep in mind, though, you're not buying blue chips here. Small-cap miners (and options) are extremely volatile and risky.

Remember this is for 10-20% of your financial assets - whatever you can sleep at night with. Some people can sleep with more - some can't sleep anyway. I guess the analogy doesn't apply to insomniacs, but you get the gist.

Good trading,

Ed Bugos
for The Daily Reckoning

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Thus, the media jumped all over the deflation theme. Although there was only one mention of "deflation" in the entire 6,000-plus word release, it prompted headlines like this one from MarketWatch: "FOMC Members Discussed Mounting Risks of Deflation, Depression at Mid-December Meeting."

The stock markets crumbled. Most commodities fell. And even though the dollar fell, gold prices fell $24 on the Comex in response to all this noise Wednesday, while the gold stocks were among the worst performing sectors on the board. Recovery sentiment halted in its tracks as the deflation trade came back with a vengeance. Of course, I've been more cautiously bullish with gold prices approaching the resistance points controlling their intermediate downtrend. But my reasoning is that the reflation trade will win out and drive up both stocks and commodities broadly, at gold's expense, but only short term.

The bulk of the evidence supports this trade, but it has ebbed a little this week because of the news flow - none of which says anything new about the prospects of "deflation" in the Fisherine sense of a liquidation of debts and contraction in deposits. It was just more of the same drivel about falling prices and the shrinking economy, profits and employment, with commentators dragging in long-discredited concepts like velocity of money, the multiplier or even Japan's alleged deflation during the '90s.

Of course, as with any other "bubble" - if I am right to call it that - it implies an extent of irrational exuberance or popular delusion, and then there is the sustainability feature... bubbles simply don't last.

In the reader comment section in response to the MarketWatch report on the minutes of the FOMC, there were example after example illustrating that people believe deflation is caused by a slowing in the economy; rising unemployment; or falling wages and prices, including asset prices... or that deflation is bad; or saving is bad; or deflation existed throughout the '30s, despite the Fed's efforts.

I have already dealt with most of these misunderstandings in past issues. My influence must be waning, because they're not fading away!

Now let me take this opportunity to emphasize something. I do not mean to seem stubbornly fixed to the inflation paradigm. I'm not, in fact. I worry about the deflation possibility. I am always considering new facts and old premises as part of an analytical check to my evolving outlook. My recent tirade is not against the "possibility" of deflation - which cannot be denied. It is a reaction to the nonsense that underlies the great many bad arguments for deflation, which are either littered with factual errors about history or rely on theoretical concepts that are outdated, obsolete and have been long discredited.

The best argument for deflation, given the current monetary system, is if central banks decide that they want to take liquidity out of the system one day (i.e., run a deliberate deflation policy) or be serious enough about fighting inflation, they might overshoot. But no one is making this case.

Unlike the period 1929-33, central banks today can print "reserves" up. You can see this yourself.

There is nothing much to check this process but the will of the populace or the prudence exercised by politicians. The original deflationist, Irving Fisher, made sure of that. He scared America off the gold standard much like the deflation calls of the day have scared the Fed into ballooning its balance sheet!

Speaking of Fisher, I want to deal with one of the most ancient nonsensical theories about money that underpins the deflation scare today: the "velocity of money," a concept that Fisher himself resurrected.

According to proponents, an increase in money supply doesn't necessarily mean that money will lose its purchasing power if the velocity of circulation slows down, which happens if people don't spend.

David Rosenberg, Merrill Lynch's chief economist, recently put it this way:

"Money supply will increase, but money velocity will not. We are getting asked repeatedly these days how it is that the government debt creation we are about to see is not going to be inflationary. After all, aren't we going to see a boom in the money supply? Well, we're sure that the money supply is going to increase, but at the same time, we are going to see the turnover rate of that money, or what is called money velocity, decline." [Emphasis added.]

And in a segment on CNBC Wednesday discussing the grave threat of deflation, Art Cashin said:

"Even if you walked over and gave somebody a trillion dollars and they either put it in the mattress or just in their pocket, it doesn't help the economy. You need the velocity of money to move. You gonna give people money, they gotta go out and begin to use it. And we're seeing some of that worry coming home to roost here in the market today. We saw Intel..." [Emphasis added.]

With people like this, big credentials and all, promoting such ideas, it's no wonder the deflation scare has teeth, even though it can't bite through the flesh. Contrast their words with those of former Wall Street Journal reporter and economist Henry Hazlitt, who brought the Austrian School to America:

"Monetary theory would gain immensely if the concept of an independent or causal velocity of circulation were completely abandoned. The valuation approach, and the cash holdings approach, are sufficient to explain the problems involved."

Hazlitt wrote that in 1968 in an essay in which he demolished the velocity of money notion.

Simply put, the idea "refers to the rate at which money circulates, changes hands or turns over." It is a very old idea, harking back to the days when the "mechanistic quantity theory" of money predominated. That is, before we understood how individual judgments determined value, this concept of velocity explained variations in the value of money that were out of proportion with the variations in its supply. Under the mechanistic quantity theory, such changes were to be proportional.

Fisher adopted the idea of velocity in his dubious formulation MV=PT (where M is the supply of money, V is its velocity of circulation, P is the general price level and T is the volume of trade).

Both the mechanistic quantity theory and Fisher's equation have long since been refuted. No credible economist takes either of them seriously. But the idea of the velocity of money has survived, nevertheless, and today it's a pain in the neck. Hazlitt's insights were as follows.

First, as far as Fisher's equation goes, velocity (V) is not an independent variable. It is always exactly equal to the volume of trade T, and is driven by trade, not vice versa - it does not drive trade:

"What we have to deal with, in the so-called circulation of money, is the exchange of money against goods. Therefore, V and T cannot be separated. Insofar as there is a causal relation, it is the volume of trade which determines the velocity of circulation of money, rather than the other way around... the velocity of circulation of money is, so to speak, merely the velocity of circulation of goods and services looked at from the other side. If the volume of trade increases, the velocity of circulation of money, other things being equal, must increase, and vice versa."

Changes in the velocity of circulation are thus the effect, and not the cause, of changes in the demand for money and/or goods. The concept is a makeshift explanation for the factors affecting the demand for money. For example, if the price level did not change in direct proportion to the money supply, the "Fisherine quantity theorists" would explain it with reference to changes in the velocity of circulation.

Yet the statistic has no more bearing on the value of money (its purchasing power) than the concept of "inventory turnover" has on the price of the individual units of inventory. It cannot cause anything.

Second, as Ludwig von Mises explained, money doesn't really circulate at all. Nor is it idle. It is always in someone's possession, but ready to be exchanged (or used). It only spends a fraction of the time changing hands - i.e., without an owner. And when it is exchanged, someone else wants it for the same reason: to keep on hand for future use. It does not simply circulate on its own, as if by some unexplained force, and especially not independent of human judgments of value or expressions of the demand for money, as von Mises pointed out in his famous treatise Human Action:

"The service that money renders does not consist in its turnover. It consists in its being ready in cash holdings for any future use. The main deficiency of the velocity of circulation concept is that it does not start from the actions of individuals, but looks at the problem from the angle of the whole economic system. This concept in itself is a vicious mode of approaching the problem of prices and purchasing power. It is assumed that, other things being equal, prices must change in proportion to the changes occurring in the total supply of money available."

Third, neither does velocity measure the willingness of people to hold or get rid of their cash, because for everyone who is rendering their cash, someone is taking it, so that at all times, Hazlitt tells us:

"Average individual cash holding must always be the total supply of money outstanding divided by the population... People who are more eager to buy goods, or more eager to get rid of money, will buy faster or sooner. But this will mean that V increases, when it does increase, because the relative value of money is falling or is expected to fall. It will not mean that the value of money is falling, or prices of goods rising, because V has increased... It is the changed valuation by individuals of either goods or money or both that causes the increased velocity of circulation as well as the price rise. The increased velocity of circulation, in other words, is largely a passive factor in the situation."

He did find, however, that increases in money velocity corresponded with periods of intensifying speculation, whether that speculation was a bullish or bearish extreme. That is, this velocity has no directional significance even as a byproduct - it was just as likely to rise with too much speculation on the bearish side as on the bullish side. Consequently, since it is tied to the volume of speculation and trade, "velocity of circulation cannot fluctuate for long beyond a comparatively narrow range."

In summary, I am not saying deflation is impossible - only that if the Fed is inflating, we'll have inflation.

This truth is so simple that it is bewildering to see so many people take the other side of that bet. It is a testament to the effectiveness of the Fed's propaganda campaign that the deflation argument tends to recruit some of its otherwise potentially most ardent critics.

Keep your eye on the ball, and in the end, you will see that the deflation bogeyman is just that - a myth - used by politicians and central bankers to fear monger the masses into allowing them to inflate.

It has never been anything more.

Irving Fisher was one of its earliest authors, and it was he who lobbied for creation of the Fed, and advised the subsequent abandonment of the gold standard. Certainly, there is no precedent for what the Fed is doing today, but that by itself is no reason to summon the deflation bogeyman.

As for why the reserves the Fed is creating have not been multiplied, the answer is simple: Interest rates are too low! If you fixed the price of oil at 50 cents per barrel, supply would run out quick too.

Ed Bugos
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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My outlook for this period is very bullish. Having spent both the peace and productivity dividends of the last few decades, the current direction of government policy - increasingly interventionist - threatens to set in motion the forces of capital flight... into gold. The effect of this on the dollar will be historic. There is no more honest a measurement for this forecast.

However, it is a three-five year outlook. It may start to unwind tomorrow, or perhaps not for two or three years.

Technically, the long-term chart contains no great knowledge. I don't put much stock in the charts of any price trend spanning more than 10 years. My calls would lag major turning points by about five years. But as far as the long-term chart goes, the gold price is still in a long-term bull market.

The last highest low in the eight-year bull trend lies at around $540, which is just above the final resistance point of the previous bear - the break out point after which the gold price accelerated in 2005...the year that Bernanke was chosen to head up the Fed. Go figure - turns out gold was right about him.

However, the more normal "primary" trend support lies at around $700.

The "primary" trend is the sequence that shows up most prominently in the five-10 year (weekly or monthly) chart.

In the case of gold, it is the trend that began back seven or eight years ago.

In a normal trend, the correction lows stop at previous highs, or resistance levels, which are at the $700 mark here. Note that the bulls bumped up against that level a few times during 2006 and 2007, before ultimately breaking out. That just makes support that much more significant at this level.

However, during a correction to the primary sequence, the normal support points might fail, and it becomes difficult to figure out whether it is still a bull market at all. In other words, it is possible to see gold prices fall to $600, or even $540, even if the general bull market is still on.

Percentagewise, a correction of just such magnitude occurred in 1975. Gold prices fell from around $200 per ounce at the 1974 peak to just above $100 a year later, before soaring to new highs, and to over $600 by 1980. So the long-term technicals tell us almost nothing, except that there is room on the downside whether or not the bull market is still on.

There are two facts, however, that argue against a correction of the same magnitude today.

One is technical, sort of, and the other is fundamental.

From a technical standpoint, it should be noted that the advance in gold prices leading up to 1975 was larger (percentagewise) than the advance from the $260 low in 2001, and occurred over a shorter time frame. I don't know how much that may be worth, but it's something to consider.

Fundamentally speaking, moreover, simply comparing the Federal Reserve's policies today with those of 1973-74, when it was similarly trying to rescue the world economy from a crisis that saw a 40% decline in the Dow, it cannot be denied that the current policy is far more inflationary... more bold... more off the charts, if you will. If the Fed underestimated its contribution to the inflationary events of the '70s, as Bernanke argued in a speech about inflation last year, what is the 2008 Fed doing?

The Medium-term Outlook, One-Two Years

My outlook for this period is also quite bullish for gold, as the positive short-term effects of the government's current policies begin to wear off and the negative effects start to set in sometime in this time frame. I know this is counterintuitive to anyone who believes what the government is doing today is beneficial, but that is really the only way it can work. In this period, you will see asset prices recover, along with commodity prices, and maybe even a fleeting boom (bubble) somewhere, like in biotech, or public works - wherever. However, the rising tide won't come in fast or high enough to keep all the boats rising like in other bull markets, or even in significant bear market advances.

Let me distinguish here between a recovery in the economy and reflation.

I expect significant deterioration in the economic fundamentals in the medium term. However, much of it is priced in, and the effects of monetary debasement will underpin the dollar value of the soundest assets. Indeed, only the soundest equity or real estate assets will provide real protection against the confiscatory policies of governments over this period. These include gold-related assets, and some of the other important commodities, though it isn't certain whether gold will outperform in this time frame.

It could take a full year for inflation expectations to recover from their current trough.

Moreover, although the Fed has been a leader in the reinflation program in 2008, it had not inflated nearly as much as the other central banks between 2003-2007. This fact created the illusion of a global boom that would sustain even as the U.S. economy recessed. Now it is being liquidated.

That is one of the reasons the commodity liquidation was so excessive, and also why the dollar rallied this summer. I don't know exactly what to expect from the dollar in the next year or two, but at best, trade should continue to be choppy.

Currency markets won't offer much opportunity for most people until the dollar's bear market resumes - sometime after 2009, in my judgment. However, this should not hinder gold's performance. Moreover, my feeling is that the Fed will pursue a low interest rate policy for longer than other central banks, which will eventually be the catalyst that undermines the dollar and sets it up for the final chapter in its bear market - the one that leads to a brush with hyperinflation.

Technically, the intermediate trend (i.e., the nine-month trend) is still down. The bulls have bounced off normal primary support at $700 nicely, and October tends to herald correction lows, seasonally speaking. Most of my leading indicators, including gold shares, moreover, suggest the low is in.

The technical objective of the seven-month top formed January-July 2008 was also already achieved at $695, plus or minus, suggesting the bear leg is complete. However, until the last lowest high ($940) in the downtrend is cleared, we have to tame our enthusiasm. What's more, the current rally has stalled at the downtrend line, which intersects the current time horizon at about $890.

If the bulls can't make it back up to at least the $940 high of September/October before the market falls back through $830, then I would worry the market MIGHT either retest its $690 low, or go lower.

The Short-term Outlook, One-Three Months

My outlook for this period is neutral to bullish, with the possibility of one more test of support in the mid-high $700s if bullish sentiment returns to Wall Street prematurely. Although the policies governments are pursuing are fundamentally and relatively bullish for gold, it is more than possible that they engender a recovery confidence in the short term that may hinder the performance of gold.

Technically, the objective of the October-November ascending triangle (bottom) in the chart below has completed at $875-880.

The last highest low in the short-term sequence is around $830. If the market falls through this level before extending the current rally to the $940 area, as mentioned above, there is the slight risk that there is something wrong with my bullish medium-term (or intermediate) outlook above.

But this risk is not that great considering all the bullish permutations that could still take shape on the chart. Still, the most likely scenario in my mind is for a pullback to somewhere between $750-800, whether or not the current two-month sequence extends to $940 in the next few weeks.

If the pullback starts now before a higher high, I'd put it at the low end of the shaded area in the chart ($740); if it starts higher, say from $940, it could stop a little higher, like $775-800.

But until we get over $900, the $830 handle should be watched, as a break through it before a higher high could trigger the liquidation of the two-month advance and start a correction to at least $775.

Ed Bugos
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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The rally was a no-brainer. There is a strong line of support at $700, which was resistance during 2006 and the first half of 2007. Moreover, the market was, and is, oversold.

The catalyst was news that the U.S. government had to bail out Citigroup, the world's largest bank by revenues. The event has given way to new concerns about the economy, which weighed on stocks and gold this week, or at least provided an excuse to take some profits in the latter.

The big question now is whether it was just a retracement rally that ultimately gives way to new lows or whether we have seen the bottom in gold, with this rally being only the first of many to come.

I don't think the chart can answer that question alone. Technically, the structure of the market is healthy now, and as far as the fundamentals go, gold should not remain under $1,000 for very long.

Indeed, I sense the market is building up for a very bullish move.

Allow me to touch on some of the bullish factors coming into play.

"Notwithstanding the many developments on the bailout front during the past six weeks, The New York Times, like other media outlets, continues to quote Wall Street insiders who report" [that] "'You have a market that is frozen.' What planet do these guys live on? It certainly is not the same one to which the Federal Reserve's data apply. I've been singing this song for many weeks, but I'm going to keep singing it until somebody in the news media wakes up and realizes that these 'frozen credit market' tales are pure hooey. Look at the data, for crissake."

- Robert Higgs, author of Crisis and Leviathan, in a recent essay on the bailout programs

The fundamentals are significantly bullish for gold. I'd like to say they are bearish for the dollar, but in truth, they are increasingly bearish for all paper currencies. Outside of the Bank of Japan, everyone is inflating madly. In the G-7, narrow money (M1) is growing at 7-10% on a year-over-year basis in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia - more in developing countries like China. And this rate is picking up now.

October's data are not in yet for the ECB. Its balance sheet increased by some 400 billion euros during the month, which is the first big change since the second quarter, and will probably reflect in M1. The Bank of Japan started inflating M1 again in September too, after holding it steady for most of the year.

The broader monetary aggregates (i.e., those determined by the banking system at large) are growing briskly everywhere but in the U.S. and Japan, though even the latter are still growing.

Broad money in the U.S. is growing between 5-10%, depending on whether you rely on TMS or MZM or higher, if you like M3 (I don't).

The U.S. data are good through October. Up till the end of September, as far as we are updated, the year-over-year growth rate in broad money approached 20% in Australia, its highest rate in almost 20 years. In the U.K., the broader monetary aggregates are growing at close to 14% on a year-over-year basis, which is its highest growth in almost a decade.

These growth rates are almost as bad as China's, which is approaching 20% year over year too, again. Given these numbers, it is no surprise to me whatsoever that the yen is the strongest currency, followed by the U.S. dollar, or that the Aussie and the pound are taking the greatest beatings, along with all the other riskier currencies.

The actions governments are taking now are bearish for stocks and bullish for inflation. But they are not just bullish for inflation - they are remarkably bullish.

I don't mean to sound happy about it. It's just an observation that the market has yet to come to terms with. Since September, the Fed has expanded its balance sheet a total of $1.3 trillion. Of that total, it has created about $600 billion in reserves out of thin air.

Most of that is not counted in money supply, because it excludes deposits held by depository institutions. Total money supply is about $6 trillion, if you rely on the Austrian School definition (I do). It has, nevertheless, translated into growth of about $100-200 billion in new money created by the banking system since September already. Deflation is a no-show so far, and I don't think it will arrive at all. I think history will see this as just another scare.

The Federal Reserve just announced two new programs that commit it to another $800 billion, and that is even before President-elect Obama puts his stimulus package together.

Reuters cited Wachovia's chief economist:

"Some, however, are worried the mounting costs of the measures, which have the potential to reach several trillion dollars, could eventually fuel a troubling inflation.

"'It may mean (a) longer-run issue with inflation and inflation concerns,' said John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Securities in Charlotte, N.C. 'It may be too much of a good thing is a bad thing.'"

Ya think?

Even more inflationary, in my opinion, is the fact that the talking heads think the Fed's latest facilities are simply not enough. They are complaining the programs do not include direct purchases of credit card debt and mortgages in the secondary market and that the Fed isn't going to buy mortgages with maturities of more than one year. Not long ago, the Fed never bought anything but Treasury notes.

Gold bulls are going to attempt to raid Comex's vaults by forcing delivery on their December futures contracts (Dec. 19). Who can tell how that will go? I can't. But it'll be interesting to watch.

Facts: The open interest in futures contracts on the Comex has fallen to its lowest level since summer 2005, breaking a general uptrend in place since 2001. From a contrarian standpoint, the short-term bottoms in these data tend to favor the buyers over the sellers. However, the statistic went into orbit during the last half of 2007 - it broke away from the upper channel on the charts, creating a bubble in appearance. The current extremity could simply be a symmetrical reaction to that extreme.

Nevertheless, this is a bearish fact, technically speaking, if it represents a lasting new trend.

It is tempting to suggest that the threat of a raid in futures contracts is causing a short squeeze.

It is true that the commercials are liquidating their short positions promptly. But the funds are increasing their short bets, and the liquidation of longs is such that the net short ratio has hardly budged off its mid-September low - which, incidentally, is a level that has coincided with strategic buying points at seven other junctures since the bull cycle began in 2001.

However, the record of this statistic in gold is unique in that during bear markets, the commercials tend to be net long (wrong) most of the time.

So the fact that they are covering their short interests on net does not necessarily presage a rally if a bear market has set in. A bear market would mean that gold prices could fall as far back as US$500.

Fundamentally, the conditions just don't look ripe for a bear.

I don't believe the COTs (Commitment of Traders report published by CFTC) have any real predictive value. They tell us only whether the market is too much extended one way or another; they don't tell us how long those conditions will last. Right now, the structure of the market is healthy. The commercials are covering their shorts, the funds are getting short and the numbers basically favor the bulls. The contraction in open interest worries me a little, but it could be explained in terms of a collapse in spread trades linked to various index products.

In its most recent report on gold demand, the World Gold Council said as much in trying to explain the drop in the gold price in the context of soaring physical demand. In its third-quarter report on gold demand, the WGC noted growth in both jewelry and investment demand across the spectrum relative to both the last quarter and the year-ago quarter. I don't want to go into a critique of the method here, except to point out that it chronically understates investment demand and overstates jewelry demand.

The inclusion of ETFs all but proves the point.

In just one year, investment demand has grown in importance from under 15% to over 30% of total gold demand, causing the deficit (supply shortfall) to grow nearly tenfold. The WGC interprets this deficit as supply coming from speculative sources, like futures trading or changes in inventories at the various exchanges - like at Comex. Thus, it calls it "inferred investment." Formerly, it called this the "balance." But as it grew, the WGC decided it meant something. What is causing it to grow, aside from growing demand in general, is that while the WGC is "identifying" new kinds of demand, it has not kept up with the various sources of supply. Gold bugs have argued for years that the supply of gold is not limited to mine production, officialdom or scrap...that it is not like other consumable commodities.

It is more useful to assume that most of the gold ever produced is held as a reserve, or store, aboveground. And if this is true, then investment demand must be much larger than the WGC calculates, or the price would, frankly, never go up. If the WGC is smart enough to include producer hedging (or dehedging) in the equation, it should also include a measure of demand that expresses itself through all the exchanges and bring itself up to speed on all the sources that supply the market. It assumes that jewelry demand dominates the market, which is incorrect, but even if it were, it still has the wrong idea.

Jewelry demand may be price sensitive in the short term, yet it has grown every year, at successively higher prices, since the bull market began. Despite my objections, however, I am in total agreement with the council's explanation why gold prices have fallen despite the evidence of soaring gold demand:

"Notably, the selling captured by the [inferred] investment category was mainly by investors with a short-term focus. It largely reflects the fact that gold was caught in the downdraft of other commodities and other assets - it does not reflect a questioning of gold's value or role as a safe haven. The strong buying in the ETF and bar and coin markets during the quarter, which reflects investors with largely a longer-term focus, suggests that investor belief in gold's role as a safe haven and store of value is stronger than ever."

No wonder the commercials are covering. The establishment is getting hot for gold.

JP Morgan's gold analysts "urged" investors to stock up on gold this month, citing counterparty risk and tight supplies.

Citigroup's foreign exchange group also put out a bullish tout.

Well, that's an understatement, actually. "[Gold] continues to look like a bull market to us. We continue to believe that a move of similar percentage to that seen in the 1976-1980 bull market can be seen, which would suggest a price north of $2,000," Citigroup's FX group said last week.

What I found particularly intriguing, besides the timing of these calls, was that they both discounted the dollar. That is, they noted, as I have in the past, that the foreign exchange value of the dollar may not be important at this stage. Morgan said, "It is not an absolute given that a rally in gold means a falling U.S. dollar," while Citigroup pointed out, as I also have, examples of just such a situation during the 1970s.

Anyway, it's not a sure thing yet, and it all makes great fodder for the bull market in gold.

Good Trading,

Ed Bugos
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Today’s Current Gold Price
• U.S. Dollar Bulls Rallying Behind Fed Statement
• Demand for Credit is Growing Less Fast
• Gold Price Outlook – the Long and Short of it
• Gold Ratios: Bearish for Gold Prices, Bullish for Gold Shares

- Percy L. Greaves Jr., Mises Made Easier

Occasionally I hear the odd guest on CNBC or Bloomberg Radio who lays blame for the crisis in exactly the right place - the Federal Reserve System in the U.S....or central banking more broadly.

These extremely influential institutions ostensibly exist to regulate prices, employment and interest rates by way of control over the money supply. They do this by inflating bank reserve credit, on which the banks can pyramid, thus essentially abrogating the role of interest rate determination by the market.

That is, the central bank tries to determine interest rates as far as it can. The rationale for this policy is to attain full employment and price stability, and to otherwise manage economic affairs.

Any economist whose lenses aren't blurred by the fatal errors of the neo-classical doctrines is immediately capable of spotting the problem with that policy foundation. Unemployment could scarcely exist on a free market, where the government did not interfere with the price of labor. Just like shortages of goods cannot really exist in a market where their price is free to adjust to the reality of existing conditions, there can be no excess labor unless the government intervenes to artificially boost its price. It's the same principle. It is a simple economic fact - free of political considerations. Labor is an economic good primarily because it is scarce.

Moreover, whether we are talking about labor legislation or the central bank trying to manage growth, prices and interest rates, it amounts to economic management, even planning.

The apparent effect of the policy is to bring about a boom in investment and consumption... the building up of bubble companies and uneconomic enterprises relying on the continued increases in the selling prices of the goods they deal in - be it widgets, homes or securities.

These price increases are afforded by regular money debasement, which is one of the economic consequences of an increase in the supply of money in particular. So it is illusory.

In reality, as Rothbard points out, the boom "is actually a period of wasteful misinvestment. It is the time when errors are made, due to bank credit's tampering with the free market".

So this policy, and the booms it engenders, crowds out real savings (by pushing rates below market), and investment comes to rely on the continued "stimulus" of money creation or from borrowing overseas.

Ultimately, it further lays the seeds of its own demise because the process invariably arrives at a point at which the central bank must desist if it does not want to prompt a run of confidence in its notes, leading to hyperinflation.

This is why we say the policy is "unsustainable."

Thus it tries to withdraw the stimulus or "tighten" money and credit - explaining that the overheated economy might produce inflation. The error in its thinking is that it is managing a delicate balance between price stability and growth...that it checks market failures, and can know the unknowable (the future).

In fact, almost all economists would agree, it cannot produce growth. It's like the analogy of pushing on a string.

The Fed's policy can only increase employment by decreasing the relative cost of labor through inflation (the expansion of money supply relative to demand). And as one of the largest of interventions conducted by government policy, it only produces more instability - i.e. the boom-bust cycle as well as interest rate and foreign exchange volatility eventually.

Technically, tampering with the rate of interest produces disequilibrium as a mismatch between consumer preferences and producers' investment plans - during the boom phases. Effectively, it taxes long run growth, and is but a massive redistribution of wealth from savers to borrowers and speculators.

The bust, which often begins with the onset of a financial crisis, brings much pain, and threatens job losses on a wide-scale. But this is because the artificially low rate of interest produced by the previous policy, which could not be sustained, produced waste, a "cluster of error" as Rothbard called it. This "malinvestment" or uneconomic activity is essentially exposed as the subsidy is withdrawn.

In his book, America's Great Depression, Rothbard posits the error in Marx's reasoning,

"In the purely free and unhampered market, there will be no cluster of errors, since trained entrepreneurs will not all make errors at the same time."

What you see then is basically the widespread failure of parasitic enterprises that could not survive on their own - without the handouts and support of the central bank. This is the empirical evidence that should indict any inflation policy. But, the bust still merely represents a return to natural market ratios.

"The 'depression' is actually the process by which the economy adjusts to the wastes and errors of the boom, and reestablishes efficient service of consumer desires. The adjustment process consists in rapid liquidation of the wasteful investments" (Rothbard)

It follows then, that "Attempts to interfere with free and flexible prices, wage and interest rates prevent recovery and prolong the depression period" (Mises Made Easier )

Efforts to stabilize the bust with even more inflation effectively prevent the liquidation of uneconomic enterprises necessary to return the economy to equilibrium, where markets reflect actual conditions.

Now, I'm not a policy maker. I don't want to suggest the best way to fix the world or argue why these theories are true. My chief concern is the future. And the evidence that most people would side with Marx on this (over Mises et al) is all I need to predict more inflation, war and higher gold prices.

Joe Public can't for the life of him figure out why it matters if interest rates are 1.5% or 1%.

He cannot connect the escalating price at the pump to the process of money creation required to bring about such a modest change in the interest rate. The tech bust was the fault of irrational speculators, and greedy investment bankers. The housing bust is blamed on Wall Street's larceny, his mortgage and real estate brokers, or the thrust toward deregulation. The painful increase in commodity prices is caused by too much growth. The growing trade deficit is caused by new competition from foreign countries. And so on.

For, Joe takes his cue not from Mises, but from the media and political classes under heavy influence by the progressive institutions.

Political leaders in Europe, meanwhile, are taking full advantage of Joe to wage a new war on capitalism from the left on grounds that American style capitalism is in dire need of more regulation.

This is the great evil of the inflation policy.

It is insidious. The great economists have all recognized this truth. It only produces the opposite of what it claims to accomplish. It also funds the growth of government and anti-capitalist sentiment, and other confused ideas that may lead, ultimately, to the general disintegration in the division of labor, the fabric of society. It promotes moral degradation and corruption, conflict, and finances wars. It is 80% of what's wrong with the world.

But for the most part, the voices of reason that point to this cause are trampled over by the rhetoric of the larger political class, which fear mongers people into clamoring for more money and credit.

This truth is evident in the Fed's actions. It has abandoned any remnants of conservatism, as have the other central banks worldwide. The helicopter blades are in full swing. So any enthusiasm about the world having reached this place where it is ready to turn a new leaf must be tempered by this fact.

The voices of reason, though on the beltway, are still only voices in the wilderness.

This alone suggests we are going to continue to see more inflation, taxes and government. The scary part is that this process is accelerating.

The next bubble may well be in gold.

Good trading,

Ed Bugos
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Central Banks are Free to Create as Much Inflation as They Want
• Historically, the Only Reserve a Central Bank Can Trust is Gold
• What Inflation Means to Central Bankers, Investors and the Consumer
• Obama Insists That Not Only Can We Detect Bubbles We Can Also Deflate Them
• Central Bank Has Lost Control of Credit Crisis

But so have gold bugs and, after today, maybe gold share investors also.

There are only two things gold bulls should worry about from this point forward, now that the general commodity correction is out of the way and the froth has been worked out of the market: deflation in the strict sense of the term (monetary, not asset deflation) or a suddenly brightening economic outlook, both of which, in this writer's opinion, would require a political austerity hardly imaginable these days.

As far as deflation goes, we saw that the Federal Reserve inflated its balance sheet by an astonishing US$600 billion (almost 70%) in September, $170 billion of which ended up as an un-sterilized liquidity injection into the financial system - also unprecedented any way it is measured.

It is almost as much as the entire U.S. banking system created in the 12 months ending August 2008. It is about 20% of the cumulative amount of reserves the Fed has directly injected into the banking system since its inception in 1913. In one month, the Bernanke Fed "printed" MORE money than the Greenspan Fed in its entire easing campaign from 2001-03 - on top of which the banking system created $1.5 trillion.

Let me be the first to tell you that this represents a deliberate and abrupt change in monetary policy.

The Fed is no longer sterilizing its liquidity injections by selling off assets - probably because it doesn't have any left. No one else seems to have caught on yet. The Fed is now printing with abandon, as literally as that can mean.

However, that isn't enough to convince the deflationists. They point out that banks aren't lending and that credit markets have frozen all over the world.

This is obviously true. However, it does not follow from this that there will be deflation.

Let me reiterate that first, whether deflation comes about or not (I think not), the financial crisis is deepening precisely because, up until last month at any rate, the Fed had not created much money, despite the massive rate cuts. This policy was unconventional and deliberate. It was aimed at gold.

It has produced many things that the Austrian business cycle theory would predict from the policy.

The enterprises that are failing today are boom dependent. They have come to depend not only on the artificial stimulus of lower interest rates, but on a continued expansion in credit and money supply.

Indeed, Fed and Treasury officials, the media and Wall Street all talk as if the economy could not grow if the banks were not producing new credit. For them, boom and growth are one and the same thing.

The market is telling you that some operations are uneconomical in the absence of this "stimulus."

If the Fed continued on its austerity program (with respect to the printing press), the dominoes would no doubt continue to fall. This would be a process of returning the economy to equilibrium, if you will.

That is the definition of a bust or recession. It would probably be deflationary.

The Fed wasn't aiming for that. It wanted only to put the squeeze on inflation expectations building in the gold and currency markets without undermining the boom. It was a bold and new move, but naive. But its actions can only suggest that it is realizing this, and is not prepared to do what is right - nothing.

Lending strikes are not new. They are typical at the height of a crisis.

The Fed has published data on reserves only up until the third week of September, so it does not yet reflect the $170 billion net increase in reserves created by the Fed through the entire month, as I had reported last week. However, up to Sept. 24, the Fed created some $84 billion in reserves, while the figure for total reserves increased by $67 billion (from $44 to $111 billion) in the same period.

Excess reserves, meanwhile, increased by about the same amount.

Don't get caught up in the numbers. These facts essentially support the view that banks aren't lending out those new reserves. However, this fact is neither new nor typically long lasting.

U.S. depository institutions are required to have about 10% of their checkable demand deposits at the Fed as reserve. This amount peaked at a little over $60 billion in the mid-'90s, declined to about $40 billion by the end of the century and has hovered around that number ever since, as if inflation did not exist. It pales in comparison with the more than $1.5 trillion in reserves that the Fed has pumped into the banking system in its entire 95-year history or the $4-5 trillion in deposits that the U.S. banking system has created on top of that in the same period (even after accounting for deposits destroyed).

This is leverage, but the Fed, not the stock market, controls the denominator.

The reason that total reserves have been shrinking has to do with reserve requirements.

Although savings deposits are often checkable in practice and can be accessed by debit cards, banks are not required to keep reserves against them. Therefore, banks like to sweep (and create) as many of these deposits as possible into the savings categories.

That's why there is an upward bias to the underlying trend in the ratio of excess to total reserves. It does not reflect an increasing tendency for bankers to restrict lending voluntarily, but likely understates the inflation in reserves.

But while the figure on total reserves may have become obsolete and lost much of its relevance, big changes in the data are always important and shed light on things.

Today, the Fed is opening new windows through which to transmit policy. It can inject liquidity directly into money markets, and now commercial paper markets. It can lend directly to primary dealers. It can buy mortgages. It can pay interest on deposits, which will have two effects: exposing the hidden reserves (above) and luring money into the Fed. The latter is deflationary, but the interest payments are inflationary, if "unsterilized."

At every crisis that is bigger than the last, the deflation argument is always compelling. But it is fundamentally misguided if it is related to the idea of asset deflation or deleveraging. These concepts are not interchangeable with deflation.

Deflation, for instance, hasn't occurred since 1933, but deleveraging and asset deflation have, often - last in the 2000-02 bear market, and even as the Fed and banking system created a bunch of money.

Banks don't make money on the interest differential from lending out other people's deposits. They make money by lending out more than they take in... by "creating" deposits (i.e., inflation).

This is what a fractional reserve banking system does. It will lend again once it is confident that the central bank is making funds easily available and stands ready to bail banks out. By not printing until last month and letting Lehman go, the Fed sent out mixed messages that it is only now clearing up.

Abolishing the Fed would be a great idea.

Your freedom would be secure. Recessions would be gone. Governments would not be able to increase spending without immediate retribution. Growth and equality would become synonymous.

Crazy?

Not really. It's basic economics.

However, it appears somewhat utopian given the public's attitudes about the market and politics.

Most of the world, led by its political leaders, believes that the economic crisis was caused by greed and excess in the private sector, that the market is inherently unstable or that deregulation was the culprit.

Even some Austrian School authors blame the repeal of Glass-Steagall - the New Deal-era legislation that prohibited bank holding companies from owning nonbank financial firms or competing with securities and insurance companies - for the crisis. That's ironic for reasons I won't get into here, but it is a qualified charge - meaning deregulation is a good idea only if the central bank didn't exist.

I personally don't agree.

Still, people by and large do NOT see monetary and fiscal policy as interventions causing disequilibrium.

They see them as offsetting and stabilizing institutions - safety nets and tools of economic and social management - as they were supposedly envisioned.

For this reason, I posit, central banks and governments do not have the political will it takes to do nothing.

The change in Fed policy last month proves precisely that, which is why gold should soar.

I believe the markets are wrong again to perceive a deflationary outcome. It is an entirely different monetary system than existed in the 1930s, when the Fed could not simply print up reserves.

Deleveraging and asset deflation are not bearish for gold, as they don't necessarily imply a contraction in money supply, and rarely have. They may be bearish for gold stocks, but they are bullish for gold prices, because they are the very factors that motivate the near- certain cries for new credit (or more money) arising from a bad understanding of the true causes of the crisis. They are not new and are ultimately dwarfed by the next crisis.

But maybe the deflationists will be right about the behavior of banks this time. They have been wrong at each point in history when the economy faced a crisis caused by inflation. The thymological (historical) experience is that when the Fed inflates, the banking system does soon after. The Fed has never inflated in one month as much as it did in September. So the odds are against deflationists.

Indeed, the money supply could grow 25-50% in less than a year if that liquidity isn't taken back.

Ultimately, though, both the prior boom and the bust can be explained wholly by the Fed's specific policies. As will the next boom... in gold mining!

Ed Bugos
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Nationalised Banking System Will Come from Global Market Rout
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In just two months, the economic landscape in America has markedly changed. It will change in the rest of the world, too. And not for the better, despite the pleasantly surprising news that the U.S. House of Representatives actually rejected the $700 billion bailout - the Treasury's latest harebrained idea.

Maybe it demonstrates there is a limit to how much the American people will tolerate, at least from the greedy capitalists on Wall Street. After all, it is not like the plan was defeated because the public has grown tired of government interventions and schemes. It just did not like bailing out the brokers.

Still, the markets had not expected this outcome. And as you saw, there was a lot of momentum behind the bailout news.

That's why the Dow was off some 700 points Monday. When I heard they were going to raise the money for the plan from foreign governments, as opposed to printing it, I started drafting plans for a rally on Wall Street that might produce another pullback in gold.

However, I still thought it was going through. Notwithstanding such unexpected surprises, markets are generally moving in the direction that we expected. In the end, gold shrugged off the reversals in the dollar and oil.

Now, I think that the failure of this bailout increases the probability of a more inflationary solution.

The Fed and Treasury have worked very hard to outwit us gold bugs by doing everything possible to support the boom without resorting to the "helicopter" option, right up to the final draft of the bailout.

But believe me when I tell you I feel little personal joy about that prospect.

Gold bulls gave back very little following the Sept. 17 one-day reversal. Including the following day, the market rallied $145 points from trough to peak on the news of the Lehman Bros. and AIG blunders.

In the days that followed, the market developed a bullish formation that technicians refer to as an ascending triangle - a pattern of higher lows closing in on a horizontal line of resistance highs.

We can't say how the Fed and Treasury are going to react to this. I'm sure it hurt in the right places, and when people get hurt - wherever - their reactions are even less predictable than usual.

From my perch, in a quiet suburb on the outskirts of Vancouver, where Agora Financial hosts an annual investment conference, it looks as if they are out of ideas, or at least their best ones.

The printing press is all they've got (aside from the much-feared laissez-faire option). So sit tight. Gold is the safest asset class to be in right now. In the current environment, producing assets reign supreme.

In fact, I recently wrote of a buy signal in the major gold shares. This may not be what you want to hear if you are loaded up with exploration stocks. However, in the context of a fear-driven gold price advance, in which stock prices are generally in decline, the companies most likely to benefit are those that can translate the gain in gold prices most immediately to their own bottom lines. These include all producers, junior and major alike, although at first, the market will probably prefer the safer large caps.

But as they rise, the pressure will build and spread to the emerging producers and even development assets, if they are close enough to production. Exploration stocks have a life of their own. There are terrific buys in that space today too, but I believe the values in the near production stages offer just as much upside with a little less risk here. The right strategy will outperform gold and the average major gold stock over time. The million-dollar question, therefore, is which juniors offer the best risk-reward?

I've looked through hundreds of companies over the past two months alone.

I've assessed our general strategy and wondered whether to sell some of the stocks in our portfolio.

In fact, the reason this month's issue is late is that I have gone back to the drawing board a few times in the search for the most appropriate investment strategy in this space.

Notwithstanding the shifting macro winds, I think that in light of the significantly improved gold price outlook, it makes sense to hold onto the bulk-tonnage low-grade development assets in our portfolio.

However, the demoralized level of sentiment has opened up a new window of opportunity to cherry-pick those top-quality gold stocks for which we normally must "pay up." These are the "alphas." These are companies that either can generate cash flows internally, by actually mining, or are led by people with deep pockets or credibility... companies with strong balance sheets and diversified portfolios of high-quality assets in politically secure regions... with growth potential whose premium is lost in the current slaughtering.

They are not cheap relative to their peers, but they probably never will be.

They are cheap in the context of the gold price cycle.

And this may be one of the few opportunities we get to accumulate such assets at favorable terms. The market has discounted their growth profiles and prospects for higher gold prices as it has with any others.

Regards,

Ed Bugos
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• U.S. Treasury bonds Still Rising
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Ben won’t be there long, anyway, especially if he mucks this up.

Maybe the new administration will replace him. Then he could write a book debunking gold bug myths about the Federal Reserve System, such as the one about how the Fed is “the engine of inflation.”

Anyway, the markets, overall, are performing as expected.

They are treating the gold correction as though it were a healthy mistake.

Not only did it weed out the weak hands, but it gave central bankers a false sense of security in the face of escalating energy costs. With gold in the doldrums, bond yields relatively low and stock prices recovering, all looked good for a relaxing summer vacation – at least until last week.

Gold bulls are popping with enthusiasm about the post-FOMC recovery in gold prices.

They should be.

After breaking through $920, the market almost shot clean through the May high of $940, staring the reversal point at $950-960 right in the face. The chart bias has turned bullish. I would expect to see support hold above the $900-920 level if the market were to backfill over the next few days – to validate my bullish outlook. But it’s not just technical. The market is doing all the right things, fundamentally.

It has realized that the Fed didn’t really mean what it said, and if it did, it isn’t all that, anyway.

The focus of the debate is shifting to areas that make the Fed uncomfortable: The Dow failed to breach 13,200 and the inflation story is heating up, despite ongoing cracks in the economy.

These things are driving gold now.

Bull markets are notorious for going much further than their earliest prophets ever imagined.

That’s the message in oil prices. As a gold bull, I am taking heed.

What the Fed didn’t anticipate was that the oil price rise would be so sticky that it would embolden the inflationary psychology with or without gold. And it cannot afford to lose control over bond yields.

On the other hand, it cannot afford to tighten.

It can only try to talk down inflation expectations.

A whole new generation has grown up since 1979. It is not used to a tough Fed. The toughest Fed it has seen was in 1994. And putting aside the character comparisons, I’ll tell you this – it was only after several years of inflationary fallout, when people finally began to worry more about inflation than deflation, that Volcker was hired with a political mandate to attack the inflation monster head-on. At the time, CPI inflation and interest rate levels were already high, and P/E ratios were half today’s.

The Bernanke Fed is nowhere near such a mandate. It cannot have anything more in mind than Greenspan’s gradualism. Yet even that is dangerous at this time.

The Greenspan Fed was raising rates during a period of economic stability (2004-2005). Today, the Fed is talking about raising rates in response to an inflation outbreak amid a financial crisis.

C’mon! How are you gonna ’splain that to the voters?

If Bernanke wants to survive long enough to secure another term, he’s not going to challenge the status quo, and the status quo is not willing to accept the kind of austerity package necessary to contain or defeat inflation. The Fed is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t.

This means that prices will continue to rise until outright fear of inflation exceeds all others.

That’s why gold has the potential to catch fire here.

The market is beginning to understand this, too. It has seen Bernanke flip-flop from worrying about deflation to worrying about inflation a few times already. The Fed’s hesitation to act in last week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting was like a starting pistol for this realization.

It’s too late to fix this break in confidence, and it’s too early for the Fed to really take it to inflation.

Watch gold prices double over the next year. My forecast is for gold to reach $1,200 by year-end, and $2,000 by next summer.

This may well be your last chance to buy the metal below $1,000 per ounce.

Ed Bugos
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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• U.S. Bond Prices Rose and Yields Fell

What he was saying is that early in the inflation, the value of money does not drop as much because the individuals determining its value are used to it having a stable purchasing power. Expectations, however, will change as the inflation progresses, and eventually the value of money drops faster...

That is how, yielding to cries for more money and credit, the dog chases its tail right into hyperinflation.

The bull market in gold started on a transition to "the middle stages" of an inflation cycle that began with Greenspan's reign in the nineties. During that decade, the pundits argued that inflation was dead and that there was no longer any correlation between money supply growth and the price level, which was true if you forgave the method of calculation of both statistics, and ignored the technology bubble.

But, the fact was simply that we were in "the early stages" of a new inflation cycle.

The last one ended with Paul Volcker, Greenspan's predecessor. Volcker had resolve, but that's not saying much because America's policymakers had nothing left to lose by 1978. Attempts to lower the long-term bond yield failed through the seventies as it went to higher highs whenever the Fed stopped lowering short-term yields. By the time Volcker got in, the economy suffered almost a decade of rising prices and interest rates, the stock market was trading at less than 10 times earnings, the dollar made new record lows, there were long lines at the gas stations, and the banks (to buy gold), and the policy of expanding money (inflation) was no longer boosting employment or growth... and then, stagflation!

Only then did the central bank and government deal directly with the root cause of the problem.

They face too much risk today for that kind of resolve. The stock market is trading at about 20 times earnings and bond yields are in the low single digits. People are only beginning to see that inflation is not quite dead. They are not yet demanding higher wages and pushing up interest rates because of it, at least not widely. It is not yet causing unemployment. The inflation policy is still a useful tool for the expropriation of wealth under the guise of illusory booms. It is not yet producing results that will make it unpopular. If it was abandoned now, the detrimental effects would be great. They cannot afford it.

Naturally, this predicament all but guarantees the later stages of inflation, where "prices rise by more than the increase in the quantity of money" as people lose confidence in the value of money.

From there we get the combination of rising prices and recession that people who can't recognize the early stages of hyperinflation will call stagflation. I don't think we'll see that until the next recession, and if central bankers or politicians continue to bury their collective heads in the sand then, you'll see the "crack up boom," a term that readers of this publication are no doubt familiar with by now.

So it is that the current environment for gold couldn't be better. You have the Federal Reserve System slashing rates aggressively and leaning on depression era loopholes in order to stave off a financial crisis, which it caused by slashing rates and expanding credit too aggressively in the first place.

And it is doing it at a time when commodity prices are printing records that the pundits never imagined possible a decade ago, and when even the massaged inflation numbers are approaching the high end of a two-decade range! Combined with the bail out package offered by the government, where's the discipline that will deter the reckless lending tomorrow? If you understand recessions as corrections to natural market ratios, these moves will only continue to underwrite poor quality economic booms.

We are seeing the Federal Reserve make history by expanding its reach past the government T-bill market into the mortgage and brokerage businesses, which will only help it generate more inflation more directly in the future. You have a free-falling currency that can't seem to find a floor against other fiat never mind gold, national default rates running at a record pace, supply side shortages in gold caused by socialistic policies and resource constraints in some parts of the world, and so on.

You can add the fact that production costs in the gold business as well as MZM, the broadest measure of U.S. "liquidity", have both doubled since the bull market in gold began - raising the floor substantially.

So then, what triggered this gold correction?

The latest advance in gold kicked off with the spreading of the subprime crisis in the final months of summer 2007. The crisis has not likely peaked. Citigroup is predicting way more rate cuts ahead.

Why would a gold correction of any magnitude begin on the week that one of the largest brokers in the world blew up, especially when followed by the kind of policies that should have fired gold right up?

Was it a "sell the news" phenomenon? Maybe, but that would definitely mean buy this dip now.

Last week, the market expected the Federal Open Market Committee to cut its fed funds rate by a full percentage point, but it disappointed the market by cutting only three quarters of a point - on account that it was worried about inflation. The sentiment produced the best of all worlds: soaring stock prices and falling commodity prices, as if such a deep rate cut could actually boost growth and quell inflation all in one fell swoop.

C'mon. How's that again? That's right. The press told us the Fed was worried about stoking inflation expectations, so it held back the extra one-quarter of a percentage point.

Heck, it only needed to recognize that most of the leverage was concentrated on the bullish side of the commodity markets. By upsetting market expectations, this is where it would hurt the most. Add a conveniently timed rumor that the futures exchanges may lift margin requirements, and news that the Chinese had raised their reserve requirements, again, the catalysts for the correction becomes clear.

It's one of the main reasons I don't believe this correction. Most commodities are due for a correction of some magnitude, and that the dollar is due for a meaningful bear market rally, and that these things are going to cause choppy trade in gold. But gold should be able to decouple from those correlations as the market realizes that the bull market in commodities is about money, and that the dollar is not the only inflationary currency.

This advance in gold will continue without a serious interruption until either it is allowed to blow off on its own into an unsustainable froth, or the Federal Reserve targets inflation - by raising real interest rates (past neutral), or reserve requirements, or some form of credit tightening.

It does not have this resolve today, clearly.

Corrections are healthy. By all counts, one was due in gold anyway. The market was getting a little too far away from its 40-day moving average, and exhausted the $950 implied objective of last year's breakout weeks ago. If you are expecting the current leg to outperform the 2005-06 rally, as I am, you were/are expecting gold prices to make it past the $1100 level before experiencing an intermediate correction of the sort we saw in 2006 - 27% from peak to trough and lasting six to twelve months.

The current correction has been half that depth so far. There are similarities. But it has not triggered any real intermediate sell signals in my model. The bullish case for a climax at $1200 plus (before this summer) is not yet injured on the chart - so long as the bulls hold the line at between $850 and $900.

The last highest low in the intermediate (7-month rally) sequence is at $885 in the cash market. The market could just be making some elbow room for a lunge higher.

It could consolidate for a few weeks yet, as the Dow tests the parameters of its newly forming bearish trend. That conviction is young itself, and it is having trouble engaging because the Fed is fighting that trend. A rally in stock markets engendered by the Fed's rate cuts could alone reignite concerns about inflation, but if not, if it starts to fail, I expect gold will be ready to begin move to my $1200-1400 target.

And it could all happen in months.

Unlike the base and other precious metals, oil, and almost any other commodity, gold has not yet seen the kind of upside volatility that would force me to call a correction beyond what is considered normal.

Unfortunately, the situation is more tentative for gold share investors. A bear market on Wall Street means rising risk premiums and contracting value multiples, and gold stocks are not cheap. Mining companies are not immune to the effects of rising costs on production and development. They are businesses. And as shares, they are not immune to rising bond yields.

Bond yields are not rising right now, but they will. It's difficult to find values in the gold share sector today, at least at the mid to large cap levels. Consequently, I believe they will have difficulty keeping up with gold, especially if stocks are falling.

On the other hand, I'm finding many values in the juniors and small caps, many of which have been in decline since the 2006 peak in gold - and that have sat out the entire 400 dollar rally since August.

In some cases, the decline is warranted as they went to absurd values in the 2003-2006 period. In other cases the decline has left many juniors trading at or near their cash break up values.

The obvious point is that the seven month old gold rally has not reinvigorated much froth broadly. And the risk/reward ratio now favors the juniors, though because they are risk assets there is the chance that they could fall further if the general stock market environment continues to deteriorate.

My advice is to continue to generally overweight gold directly (physical or ETF), reduce or hedge your positions in the expensive mid to large cap precious metals producers, sell all your non-precious metal resource shares, and accumulate the best quality junior gold, silver and platinum assets from here on.

Regards,

Ed Bugos
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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Now remember another one, "Don’t fight the Fed"?

Well, what happens when the Fed fights the trend, as it has been recently? Which axiom to believe?

Historically, the Fed loses that fight until the trend is ready to turn back around. Admittedly, the central bank’s inflationary policies will likely help this occur at a higher nominal dollar value than otherwise.

Nevertheless, the historical odds favor the trend over the Fed when these two maxims collide.

But putting aside my autistic wisdom for a moment, let’s consider what the Federal Reserve is doing for the trend in gold prices – a trend, I am loathe to inform you, which it is not fighting.

Let me sum it up: the trajectory of this bull trend shifted north when Bernanke took the helm of the Federal Reserve System, and that the policies pursued by the Bernanke Fed have confirmed the investment thesis driving the bull market in gold. As one pundit recently noted during a Bloomberg interview, "You gotta go with the inflation theme... it’s the only thing still working."

After upping the size of its new term auction facility from $60 to $100 billion this weekend, the Fed revealed another innovative tool that might help it manage liquidity in the banking system.

The new facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF), will offer up to $200 billion in Treasury Securities to primary dealers in exchange for a wide variety of collateral the Fed has never before accepted, including private label mortgage securities. It also eased swaps with other central banks.

The controversy is that although the Fed has been allowed to accept mortgage backed securities as collateral since 1980, it has never outright bought them, and only recently enacted legislation that allows it to actually monetize them – which means to buy them without having to sell other assets.

Gold bugs have followed the Fed’s legislative changes with interest. This move should not surprise any of them, but it does hold a special significance in its long-term implications, and for gold prices.

And even though the Fed hasn’t expanded bank reserves or the monetary base much since August, it is helping the banking system postpone an increase in reserve demands triggered by criteria built into the Basel II framework, a generally accepted model for capital adequacy standards. By boosting the quality of bank reserves, even if temporarily, the Fed hopefully won’t need to increase the quantity of bank reserves, which have been sufficient to fuel an $800 billion expansion in the broad US credit aggregate, MZM, since August. That is 11%, or 15% year over year. The highest rate since 2002.

That is a bullish recipe for the precious metals. There is nothing more bullish for gold than a situation where the central bank refuses to acknowledge that it is pouring gasoline on a raging fire.

Forget the dollar, and oil. Those were just interim preoccupations.

The real bull market is about to stand up.

If gold prices are going to continue to drive through $1000, they are going to do it because the central banks are all inflating madly at the worst time. This means that a good old-fashioned bear market on Wall Street is sufficient to keep central bankers’ collective petal to the medal, and sustain the gold bull.

So far, the precious metals stocks have bucked the general stock market trend since August.

This is as it should be, and it is impressive because by most counts gold stocks are quite expensive relative to today’s gold price. But, investors are complaining about the underperformance of those stocks relative to gold, and also about the lackluster performance of their junior mining assets, which haven’t participated in the precious sector rally at all since August – when the current leg started.

There are a few explanations for this.

Perhaps John Embry said it best, at a gold conference in Vancouver recently, when he remarked that gold shares sometimes act like a bet on gold, but sometimes they just act like plain old shares.

We should leave it at that...however, that is not like me.

Historically, I have found that gold shares are susceptible to market declines, except occasionally during a major bull market advance in gold, when they tend toward counter-cyclicality – the more so as the bull market progresses. They will still fall during stock market panics, as all shares do, but they are likely to come back harder and hold their trends better. Still, since 2004, I’ve held the position that, as an asset class, gold shares would not outperform gold prices for the remainder of the primary leg.

I continue to think that, with the qualification that we are talking about the average gold stock.

Junior markets are wired differently. They do not correlate that well with the underlying commodity trend in the first place. In my experience, they correlate better with market attitudes toward risk.

Junior and small cap markets have never fared well in a general market meltdown because they are typically risky assets, and in a selling panic the crowd is averting risk.

The larger capitalization precious metal producers are different. The reasons for this are sound. But as a rule, speculative assets do well when the gambling environment is friendly.

However, within the small cap resource sector there will invariably be exceptions. It remains to be seen if the junior gold miners will be able to buck the general market trend, but there is a good chance they will. Many of them are cheap now, and the supply fundamentals for gold are tightening.

Production from many gold producing regions of the world is currently constrained by power shortages; and rapidly inflating development costs are causing the postponement of several otherwise promising development projects around the world. Meanwhile, gold producers need reserves!

The large cap producers are on the hunt for sound mining assets. And they aren’t going to be discouraged by a 20-30 percent drop in gold, or stock prices.

Regards,

Ed Bugos
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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