The Federal Reserve appears to be increasingly nervous about the long term bond market. This is serious. How panicked are they? After leaking a story on Friday, they are back at it on Sunday.
The Federal Reserve leaked to CNBC’s Steve Liesman on Friday that they weren’t targeting long rates. Why such a leak? Probably because the Fed did not want to appear impotent in controlling the long rate. So they put out the word through Liesman that they weren’t targetting the long rate. Can you imagine what would happen to the markets if it sensed long rates were beyond the control of the Fed?
The Fed can of course print money to buy up every Treasury bond in existence, but the inflationary ramifications would be Zimbabwe like, and crush the dollar on international currency markets. Are we near the phase where all hell breaks loose? I have never even answered, maybe, to this question before. It’s always been, “no.” Now it’s maybe.
What really has me spooked is another article out this afternoon (on a Sunday) that Drudge has even picked up. It’s a Reuters story by Alister Bull. The headline: Federal Reserve puzzled by yield curve steepening.
Translation, the Fed doesn’t know what is going on, but they are really scared.
Here’s more from Bull:
The Federal Reserve is studying significant moves in the U.S. government bond market last week that could have big implications for the central bank’s strategy to combat the country’s recession.
But the Fed is not really sure what is driving the sharp rise in long-dated bond yields, and especially a widening gap between short and long term yields.
Do rising U.S. Treasury yields and a steepening yield curve suggest an economic recovery is more certain, meaning less need for safe haven government bonds and a healthy demand for credit? If so, there might be less need for the Fed to expand the money supply by buying more U.S. Treasuries.
Or does the steepening yield curve mean investors are worried about the deterioration in the U.S. fiscal outlook, or the potential for a collapse in the U.S. dollar as the Fed floods the world with newly minted currency as part of its quantitative easing program. This might be an argument to augment to step up asset purchases.
Another possibility is that China, the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury debt, has decided to refocus its portfolio by leaning more heavily on shorter-term maturities…
An obvious culprit for the move in bond yields is the country’s record fiscal deficit, which will generate a massive amount of new government issuance.
The U.S. Treasury must sell a record net $2 trillion in new debt in 2009 to fund a $1.8 trillion projected fiscal deficit, resulting from falling tax revenues, an economic stimulus package and sundry bank bailouts.
It’s the Chinese, and any other Treasury bond buyer who follows the markets, that have pulled away, to varying degrees from buying Treasury long securities. No one wants to be the last one holding bonds, where the new debt about to be issued is in the trillions.
Bull continues with the part of the message the Fed really wanted to get out: With officials still grappling to divine the factors steepening the yield curve, a speedy decision on whether to ramp up the Treasury debt purchase program or the related plan to snap up mortgage-related debt seems unlikely.
“I’m in wait-and-see mode,” said one Fed official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We laid out the asset purchase plan and we’re following it. That is going to have some affect on various interest rates, but together with a hundred other things. So I don’t think we should be chasing a long-term interest rate,” the official said. It’s the same message as Friday. The Fed does not want to spook the world into thinking that it can’t push long term rates down, so it says it is not trying. But if rates continue to climb, a panic out of Treasury securities is a very likely scenario. And Bernanke has only one play to force long rates back down, buy every long bond in sight, which of course is highly inflationary and puts upward pressure on rates. How’s that for a dilemma?
The end of the current financial system, as we know it, may be imminent. If you would have asked me even two weeks ago if collapse was imminent, I would have said it was highly unlikely, now I am saying it is possible. Bernanke may be able to patch things up short-term, if he is lucky, but in the long term the U.S. financial structure is in serious trouble. There is just too much Treasury debt that needs to be raised. An international panic out of Treasury securities, even a slow controlled panic, means the Fed will be the major buyer. This will ultimately mean record inflation.
And keep this in mind, we have never seen a collapse of a currency like the dollar. Even the hyperinflation during Germany’s Wiemar Period can not serve as an example. Since the dollar is the reserve currency of most of the world, a panic out of the dollar means more dollars will return to the U.S. shores than any country has ever experienced.
Other countries have had collapsed currencies, but never in the history of world of finance has so much currency been held outside a country of issue that could come flying back, almost on a moments notice. If the panic out of the dollar starts, even if Bernanke stops printing money (unlikely), all the dollars flying back into the U.S. could cause a huge price inflation all on its own....
Stolen US Government Gold Reserves.....
Criminal syndicates do what they best know.......steal.
No credible audit of the Sovereign U.S. Gold Reserve will EVER be allowed – because the gold is simply not there.
Did U.S. Export Over 175 Million Ounces of Gold?
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) publishes monthly Mineral Industry Surveys with one series that focuses on gold production, imports and exports. These reports include information from the U.S. Census Bureau on the quantities of refined gold bullion and gold compounds exported from the US.
The latest monthly report is from February 2009, which includes data for 2008 and early 2009. The February 2008 report is the oldest of these reports available at the USGS Web site (www.usgs.gov), which includes data for all of 2007. For prior years, there are annual reports that do not lay out the data in the same format.
In 2008, domestic U.S. gold mine production was reported at between 228 and 230 metric tons. Since a metric ton contains 32,151 troy ounces of gold, that means U.S. mine output was somewhere between 7.33 million and 7.395 million troy ounces last year. In 2007, gold mine output was about 244 tons, or 7.845 million troy ounces.
U.S. net exports (gross exports minus imports) of refined gold were about 10.8 million ounces in 2008 and 11.2 million ounces in 2007.
The intriguing statistics contained in these two annual totals is the net exports of gold compounds. For 2008, there were net exports of 2,818 tons (90.6 million ounces) of gold compounds. In 2007, the net exports were 1,988 tons (63.9 million ounces).
Rob Kirby of Kirbyanalytics in Toronto contacted a USGS employee knowledgeable in the preparation of these reports. This employee told Kirby that the USGS had contacted the U.S. Census Bureau to confirm the accuracy and details of gold compounds exported.
According to the Census Bureau, gold compounds include industrial type products containing low percentages or amounts of actual gold content, with gold paint being given as one example. Kirby mentioned to the USGS employee that the increase in net exports from 2007 to 2008 did not make sense given the global economic downturn. The USGS employee acknowledged that the figures did not make sense, which was one reason that the Census Bureau had been contacted to confirm the data.
Kirby then observed that the high value of such exports did not make sense if it could include only industrial goods, given the decline in global commercial activity. Rather, Kirby speculated the amount of gold exported indicated that it was more likely to be gold bullion or equivalent forms. To this, the USGS employee responded, "That would be correct."
So, for 2007 and 2008 combined, the U.S. exported 22 million ounces of refined gold and over 154 million ounces of "compound gold." This is more than 11 times U.S. gold mine production during those two years. In fact, this is higher than global gold mine output. Where did all this gold come from?
This amount of gold exceeds what is held by all private parties in the U.S. combined. When the U.S. government called in gold in 1933, it then melted down the coins without refining. As a result, such bars from the coin melt would have a purity of around 90 percent gold. These would not qualify for description as refined gold, but could fit the definition of compound gold.
In the past few years, several gold traders have commented that a surprising number of coin melt gold bars were being delivered in London and Zurich markets, bars which almost certainly came from the U.S. Treasury vaults.
It is possible that some of these gold exports could be the repatriation of foreign central bank gold that had been stored with the New York Federal Reserve. Such transfers would be classified as "exports" for purposes of this report. The other possibility is that it could be gold formerly held by the only central bank in the world that had that much gold - the United States.
Wherever this gold came from, it is bad news for the U.S. government. If foreign central banks are pulling their gold reserves out of storage in the U.S., that signals lost faith in U.S. financial strength, which the U.S. government would not want the general public to learn about. If the U.S. government has actually been exporting its own gold, while still trying to pretend that the quantity in its vaults is unchanged, confirmation of such exports would clobber faith in both the U.S. government and the dollar.
The U.S. government has not had a genuine audit of its gold holdings in decades. In recent years, it has changed the description of gold holdings in reports so that now it is only described as "custodial gold" rather than gold reserves.
The so-called experts such as the World Gold Council, GFMS, and CPM Group do not include the appearance of all these gold supplies in their reports on global gold supplies and demand, which makes their analyses grossly inaccurate.
The U.S. government has a huge interest in hoping that the general public will not notice or care where all this gold came from. On the other side, for their personal financial protection, Americans urgently need to know the source of all this gold.
Kirby released his report last Friday. I expect that it will foster a clamor for disclosure. If the U.S. government resists providing the information, people will assume the worst - that the U.S. government has a lot less gold than it claims. It would be difficult for the government to lie about the source of this gold and get away with it - too many analysts will be double checking the information. Alternatively, the U.S. government could honestly admit where the gold came from, which I am confident will show much lower gold holdings than reported. No matter how the U.S. government responds, I anticipate that this matter will spark a sharp increase in the price of gold. {source}
The Surveyor said
The Fed was created by congress in 1913 and exists at the discretion of the American people. The people foolishly surrendered USE and ONLY USE of their gold currency through the 1930s in exchange for fiat. It is invalid to assume that any agency of government has ownership other than as custodian for the American People. The private banks are provided a gold facility via government entities created by our representatives.
If needed, we can reverse the current condition and move for the Fed's elimination and determine what happens to the gold then. It may indeed be time to rein in this separate government psychology, either by electoral means or the second amendment.
{more comments}
The US and European Illuminists are also in a cat fight, because the European enclave controls more gold than the US elitists, so naturally they do not believe that the system of dollar hegemony, and all the privileges that go with it, should be continued any longer
You might be tempted to think that, in reality, the US gold reserves and, for that matter, central bank gold reserves around the world, are not what the central banks claim them to be, due to leasing and outright sales, so the US and European Illuminists are in no better position than the Chinese and Russians with respect to the debate about a new world reserve currency. You would be dead wrong if you thought that. Why, you might ask? Let’s discuss that.
Never mind that the roughly eight thousand tons of US gold is stolen or hypothecated, because the US and European Illuminists stole a large portion of it, or they bought it at fire-sale prices and still have it in their secret vaults in Switzerland and off-shore in safe-haven countries. Who do you think was doing all the buying during the London Gold Pool of the late 1960’s, just for starters, which was fueled by Fort Knox gold provided courtesy of President Johnson, who was an elitist bootlicker and one of the most evil men of the 20th century? Why do you think US coin melt from the Depression is showing up in London gold vaults? Rumors still abound that the Rockefellers, with President Johnson’s help, stole a large portion of the Fort Knox gold during the London Gold Pool days, and those rumors could well be true based on what we have heard from some of our subscribers who used to work at Fort Knox. Could that explain why one of Rockefeller’s secretaries, who blabbed about them acquiring some of the US gold, “accidentally” fell out of a high rise building? Could it be that President Johnson was grateful for Rockefeller’s help in eliminating the pesky President Kennedy when he tried to put their precious Fed out of business via Executive order 11110? We’ll let our subscribers decide!
The same is true for the European gold holdings and the holdings of other central banks around the world, which are a fraction of what they claim, perhaps with as little as five thousand tons remaining out of some thirty thousand tons officially claimed by all central banks, including the privately owned US central bank, the Fed, via its so-called gold certificates, which are claims on the US Treasury gold. Rest assured that much of this gold was leased out and sold not just to jewelers, but to the US and European Illuminists as well. In addition, much of this central bank gold was either pilfered outright, or was virtually given away by people like Gordon Brown of England, the King of Fire-Sale Gold, who sold half of the UK national gold reserves to the Rothschilds and other Illuminists at the bottom of the gold market. The remainder of the UK gold reserves is probably leased out and gone to oblivion like the US gold. The people in the UK are minus eight billion and counting on that one, while the Rothschilds are on the plus side of that equation.
And who do you think were buying a large portion of the gold sold under the Washington Agreement and its various renewals? We’ll give you three guesses.
And who owns all the secret gold that has been stolen in various wars, conquests, pogroms, genocides and religious inquisitions over the many centuries, that don’t show up in the World Gold Council’s figures? And who owns all the scrap gold that was melted down in the last gold craze of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s for which no records were kept? And who owns all the old investment gold held by families of old wealth that was secretly moved from the US to Europe after the Great Depression on a tip-off from FDR that he was going to render gold ownership illegal in the US. They got a nice profit when FDR bumped the gold price from $20 an ounce to $35 dollars an ounce, didn’t they? Who owns all this unaccounted for gold. Again, we’ll give you three guesses. We can assure you that it is more than the 2% unaccounted for by the World Gold Council.Then there is the 26,500 tons of gold which the World Gold council allocates to private investment. Just who do you think most of those private investors are anyway? They are US and European Illuminists, that’s who. They own tens of thousands of tons. Either they own it, or their central banks own it. The US and European Illuminists can shuffle their gold back and forth between themselves and their central banks as they see fit, since none of them are ever meaningfully audited. So if the Chinese and Russians want to play in this high stakes game, they need to buy lots of gold, and very quickly. The window of opportunity to buy gold on the cheap has already closed. Hyperinflation is on its way. They are too late to the cheap gold party. Buy gold now, before China and Russia try to accrue the amount of the gold required to ante up in “The Big Game” so they can have a say on the new world economy that will emerge in the aftermath of the current catastrophe. {more}.....
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