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Today’s AM fix was USD 1,248.50, EUR 929.64 and GBP 775.76 per ounce.
Yesterday’s AM fix was USD 1,271.50, EUR 939.69 and GBP 787.11 per ounce.

Gold fell $28.70 or 2.25% yesterday, closing at $1,244.70/oz. Silver slid $0.47 or 2.31% closing at $19.85/oz. Platinum dropped $22.80 or 1.6% to $1,389.00/oz, while palladium fell $9.75 or 1.4% to $708.25/oz.

Gold was trading near four month lows today after its biggest drop in seven weeks yesterday. Another bout of peculiar concentrated selling led to Comex halting trading in December gold futures twice yesterday, the fourth time in less than 3 months.

Gold in U.S. Dollars  and Suspensions Of COMEX Gold Trading – 3 Month (Bloomberg)

Minutes of the Fed’s October policy meeting suggested that the Fed may start scaling back the U.S. central bank’s $85 billion in monthly asset purchases at one of the next few meetings and this may have exacerbated the sell off. ‘Taper’ speculation remains rife despite the increasing likelihood of no taper due to the very fragile state of the U.S. economy.

Gold trading on Comex was interrupted twice, according to Nanex, which provides exchange data and summarizes high frequency trading activity. Thus, trading of gold futures were suspended twice yesterday and four times in the last three months as trading was also suspended on September 12, October 11, and now, November 20.

Nanex reported that about 1,500 gold futures contracts traded in one second at 6:26:40 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, triggering a $10 drop in prices and a 20 second trading halt.

Damon Leavell, a spokesman for the exchange said trading was halted at 6:26:41 a.m. New York time, for about 20 seconds. The December contract fell about $11 in less than a minute before trading was suspended.

Leavell declined to comment on the size of the trade that led to the halt. The “stop-logic” mechanism gives traders the opportunity to provide additional liquidity and prevent excessive price movements.

Immediately after the release of the Fed minutes, came another burst of selling which led to gold futures being suspended for another 20 seconds. The second bout of concentrated selling is believed to have been even more than 1,500 contracts. Each contract is worth 100 ounces so 1,500 contracts is worth nearly $200 million.

Myra Saefong of Dow Jones Marketwatch wrote on her blog that, “sudden drops in gold prices and temporary trading halts in gold futures on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange seem to be becoming the norm”.

The timing was interesting as it came a day after news that Britain’s financial regulator is looking into whether gold benchmarks could have been rigged. The Financial Conduct Authority has launched a preliminary review into the issue, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

It is believed the London gold fixing is one of the important benchmarks being investigated for rigging. The London AM Fix determines the spot price for physical gold and is set twice daily by a panel of five banks. Zero Hedge suggested that the price falls on the COMEX yesterday may have been due to official intervention, possibly by the Bank of International Settlements.

Gold in U.S. Dollars, 1 Year – (Bloomberg)

Some entity appeared determined to get the gold price lower and they succeeded – for now.

The peculiar trading action in gold again yesterday suggests that certain banks may be manipulating the gold price in the same way that they rigged LIBOR and are alleged to have rigged foreign exchange markets. If so, a key question is, are they manipulating prices purely for profit motives or is there an official sanction for such intervention as alleged by GATA for many years now and by Zero Hedge recently.

The bottom line is that such trading action makes traders on the COMEX very nervous to go long and prevents gold getting some momentum and animal spirits.

However, while price manipulations work in the short term, in the long term gold prices will be dictated by the real world forces of physical supply and demand forgold coins, bars and jewellery. The smart money is fading out the considerable noise regarding volatile intraday price falls and focussing on gold’s importance as a long term diversification in a portfolio.

Investment Pyramid – (GoldCore)

It remains prudent to ignore this short term noise and day to day volatility and focus on gold’s importance as financial insurance and a vital diversification for all investors and savers today.

Support at $1,250/oz has been breached and gold is vulnerable of a fall to test support at $1,200/oz and the June 28th low of $1,180/oz.
 
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via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/cvjvXaN-0yE/story01.htm GoldCore

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

ObamaCare will act as a neutron bomb on the U.S. economy for systemic reasons.

Longtime readers know I have repeatedly explained why healthcare, i.e. sickcare, will bankrupt the nation. ObamaCare simply speeds up the coming collapse. Here are two of the dozens of entries I've written on sickcare: 

America's Hidden 8% VAT: Sickcare (May 10, 2012) 

Can Chronic Ill-Health Bring Down Great Nations? Yes It Can, Yes It Will (November 23, 2011)

I have also explained why ObamaCare's "fixes" are simulacra reforms that don't even address the systemic costs arising from the cartel-fiefdom structure of sickcare: 

Why "Healthcare Reform" Is Not Reform, Part I (December 28, 2009)

Why "Healthcare Reform" Is Not Reform, Part II (December 29, 2009)

Sickcare is unsustainable for a number of interlocking reasons: defensive medicine in response to a broken malpractice system; opaque pricing; quasi-monopolies/cartels; systemic disconnect of health from food, diet and fitness; fraud and paperwork consume at least 40% of all sickcare funds; fee-for-service in a cartel system; employers being responsible for healthcare, and a fundamental absence of competition and transparency.

Please glance at these charts to see how the U.S. healthcare costs are double those of competing nations on a per capita basis. Japan provides care for a mere 36% per person of what the U.S. spends–yet millions of Americans remain uninsured or underinsured.

If you set out to design a corrupt, inefficient, wasteful, unfair, deranged and unreformable system, you would arrive at U.S. healthcare/ObamaCare.

ObamaCare ignores the structural causes of our ill-health:

86% of Workers Are Obese or Have Other Health Issue Just 1 in 7 U.S. workers is of normal weight without a chronic health problem.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), i.e. ObamaCare, is a neutron bomb for employment. A neutron bomb is an enhanced-radiation thermonuclear weapon that famously leaves buildings, autos, etc. intact but kills all the people, even those inside buildings. vehicles, etc.

ObamaCare will act as a neutron bomb on the U.S. economy for these systemic reasons:

1. It is immensely complex, and already-marginalized small business owners will shed employees or simply close rather than have to figure out what all those thousands of pages of regulations and statutes mean to the survival of their business.

2. ObamaCare's primary mechanisms of lowering costs, insurance exchanges and technocratic selection of "best care practices," do nothing to change the systemic flaws of sickcare.

Many other commentators have already outlined how ObamaCare is driving employers to replace fulltime workers with part-time workers to avoid having to pay outrageously expensive monthly healthcare insurance premiums.

I see this response as a Corporate-America strategy. Corporate America has the human resources infrastructure and financial heft to figure out compliance and exploit loopholes in the insanely complex law. Small business has neither the infrastructure nor the financial resources. Small business owners will rely on the same cartels that are currently providing insurance for guidance, and of course the ObamaCare offerings will suit the financial needs of sickcare cartels.

Once small business owners see the costs of their options, some may opt to pay the penalties and others may follow the corporate strategy of turning each fulltime job into two part-time jobs to avoid paying for coverage or penalties, but many will choose instead to call it quits: either downsize to a one-person/one-household business with no employees at all, or sell/close the enterprise and escape the burdens.

What the lobbyists and attorneys who wrote the Obamacare monstrosity do not understand (because they have no exposure to or experience in the real economy) is the fragility of most small businesses: costs keep rising but revenues are stagnant. The mental and financial stresses keep rising, and ObamaCare does nothing to mitigate either source of stress.

The inside-the-Beltway types who crafted this mess have no idea of the pressures facing legitimate (non-black-market) business in America, corporate and small business alike.

ObamaCare offers even more incentives for Corporate America to offshore operations, and it provides powerful incentives to millions of marginal small businesses to shut down or shed all employees.

I am not alone in simply not wanting to waste the time, money and energy required to understand the new law and its various impacts on my business. We will cling to our already insanely expensive private healthcare insurance, one of the few that has been grandfathered in: new self-employed entrepreneurs won't be able to buy the absurdly costly policy we have–they will be offered a range of even worse deals, with higher costs and less coverage.

3. Perhaps most cruelly, the bronze level of ObamaCare–the "affordable" care–is a mirage, a simulacra of insurance rather than actual insurance. Bronze level ObamaCare features deductables of around $6,000.
In other words, you have to spend $6,000 before your insurance kicks in.

In an economy in which two-thirds of all households live paycheck to paycheck, this is the equivalent of no insurance. High-income sickcare lobbyists and millionaire politicos may look at $6,000 as no big deal, but for households with little savings or credit, that might as well be $60,000.

4. As many others have pointed out, the income levels that divide receiving a Federal subsidy from not receiving a subsidy are begging to be gamed. If $62,000 is the line in the sand that qualifies your household for a hefty subsidy on health insurance, the incentives to adjust earnings to fall just below $62,000 (or whatever the number is for the locale and household size) are immense.

People respond to the incentives and disincentives they are presented with, perverse or otherwise. The lobbyists, toadies and apparatchiks who wrote and passed ObamaCare could not have stuffed the bill with more perverse incentives if they had set out with that as their primary goal.

The neutron bomb has gone off, unseen by politicos and the Elites who wrote the bill. It is already undercutting fulltime employment, and it will soon add momentum to the free-fall erosion of small business growth and employment.
The strip malls and office parks will still be standing; there just won't be many employees in them.

Of related interest:

About Your $3.16 a Day Healthcare Insurance Plan… (February 21, 2013) MirageCare

What If ObamaCare, Too Big To Fail Banks and the State Are All the Wrong Sized Unit?(February 25, 2013)

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/yHh0_4ChTmY/story01.htm Tyler Durden

A pair of conflicting economist reports this morning.

On one hand, the DOL reported that seasonally adjusted Initial Claims dropped from an upward revised 344K to 323K (a number which will be revised higher as is now the tradition) below the expected 335K, which incidentally in an ultrasensitive environment to every piece of good news may be bad news as it means the November NFP report may come in better than expected and cement the Fed’s intention to taper as soon as December at least according to yesterday’s FOMC Minutes. Then again, the BLS noted that the decline was influenced by the Veterans’ Day holiday, so once again what is really going on beneath the surface is very much unclear. As Bloomberg notes, as a result of the holiday, “investors should anticipate a likely reversal next week in the pace of firings.” Ironic when the bulls are forced to cheer for bad economic data so the Fed balance sheet-driven melt up may continue. Continuing claims rose modestly by 66K to 2.876MM, slightly higher than expected, but well below the 3.325MM at this time last year.

 

On the other hand, Producer Price Inflation followed the recent CPI decline, and dropped by 0.2% in October in line with expectations, making the October headline PPI print the biggest drop since April’s -0.7%. Broken down by component, foods saw an increase of 0.8%, offset by a 1.5% drop in energy. PPI ex-food and energy rose by 0.2%, a fraction above the expected 0.1%, and rose 1.4% compared to a year earlier.

So adding the two reports together: Claims suggest Fed may taper soon if the labor market is indeed improving (with companies hiring part-time workers), while the PPI confirms that at least according to the BLS, inflation is nowhere to be found, suggesting much more QE in stock.

Just you typical, run of the mill, baffle with BS day.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/HZvm52gCElQ/story01.htm Tyler Durden

 

The capital market for new issues and refinancing of corporate debt has been on a tear the past few months – I think that ended yesterday. That's because the dreaded Taper Talk has resurfaced. The Fed minutes yesterday rekindled Fear of Taper.

The Taper On/Taper Off story has been with us for six months now. It started in May with the release of the Fed minutes and the first "whisper' of the Taper. The talk of the Taper reached a zenith in late September as the debt markets were convinced that Bernanke would start the Taper in October. It was a big surprise to players when Good Ole Ben chose to delay the October start and push it to sometime in the future; and now it's back.

 

 

An interesting consequence of Taper Talk is how it affects the Corporate new issue bond calendar. The following chart shows how talk of taper killed the ReFi market in June/July/October, and it also shows how the window for new issues opened right after Big Ben delayed the taper for a few months. Up until yesterday the corporate finance types and bond dealers on Wall Street were having a daily party. As of today, they will be back to struggling to push deals out the door.

 

 

My read of this is that the debt market does not work well unless there is the perception of QE -4 ever. The capital markets freeze up whenever the threat of a disruption of the $85B of grease the Fed provides every month arises. When the capital markets are working well, the deal flow is there, and this is good for the economy. When there is Taper Talk the refinancing gears get gummed up, and it acts like a drag on the economy.

There is no doubt in my mind that Yellen is going to push off the Taper for as long as she can. But even the Great Dove can't push the Taper off for too long. I think that Yellen will be forced to initiate a Taper by March. That suggests that there is a four month window before the actual event, but I don't think the Taper Talk is going to subside as it did in October/November. The Talk of the Taper will be with us (and the closing of the refinancing window) for months. As a result we are going to see a pause in the up move in equities and a closing of the bond window. This will translate into an economic drag. Whatever your forecast of 4th Q and 1st Q growth were on Tuesday, you should mark them down a bit today.

QE is the lubricant of the system. But when it is ended (or threatened to end) it causes pain. We've had five years of grease, now we are going to have to pay a price. My guess is that this new round of Taper Talk is going to hurt pretty bad. The reason is that there is next to no basis to believe that QE can be continued beyond a few more months. The Taper sign is now on, it will remain on until the talk is turned into action. When the Taper Talk sign is on, beware. The sign is now brightly lit.

 

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/nYQlPCt_5iE/story01.htm Bruce Krasting

 

The capital market for new issues and refinancing of corporate debt has been on a tear the past few months – I think that ended yesterday. That's because the dreaded Taper Talk has resurfaced. The Fed minutes yesterday rekindled Fear of Taper.

The Taper On/Taper Off story has been with us for six months now. It started in May with the release of the Fed minutes and the first "whisper' of the Taper. The talk of the Taper reached a zenith in late September as the debt markets were convinced that Bernanke would start the Taper in October. It was a big surprise to players when Good Ole Ben chose to delay the October start and push it to sometime in the future; and now it's back.

 

 

An interesting consequence of Taper Talk is how it affects the Corporate new issue bond calendar. The following chart shows how talk of taper killed the ReFi market in June/July/October, and it also shows how the window for new issues opened right after Big Ben delayed the taper for a few months. Up until yesterday the corporate finance types and bond dealers on Wall Street were having a daily party. As of today, they will be back to struggling to push deals out the door.

 

 

My read of this is that the debt market does not work well unless there is the perception of QE -4 ever. The capital markets freeze up whenever the threat of a disruption of the $85B of grease the Fed provides every month arises. When the capital markets are working well, the deal flow is there, and this is good for the economy. When there is Taper Talk the refinancing gears get gummed up, and it acts like a drag on the economy.

There is no doubt in my mind that Yellen is going to push off the Taper for as long as she can. But even the Great Dove can't push the Taper off for too long. I think that Yellen will be forced to initiate a Taper by March. That suggests that there is a four month window before the actual event, but I don't think the Taper Talk is going to subside as it did in October/November. The Talk of the Taper will be with us (and the closing of the refinancing window) for months. As a result we are going to see a pause in the up move in equities and a closing of the bond window. This will translate into an economic drag. Whatever your forecast of 4th Q and 1st Q growth were on Tuesday, you should mark them down a bit today.

QE is the lubricant of the system. But when it is ended (or threatened to end) it causes pain. We've had five years of grease, now we are going to have to pay a price. My guess is that this new round of Taper Talk is going to hurt pretty bad. The reason is that there is next to no basis to believe that QE can be continued beyond a few more months. The Taper sign is now on, it will remain on until the talk is turned into action. When the Taper Talk sign is on, beware. The sign is now brightly lit.

 

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/nYQlPCt_5iE/story01.htm Bruce Krasting

With the US shale revolution set to make America the largest exporter of crude, however briefly, the influence of Saudi oil is rapidly declining. This has been felt most recently in the cold shoulder the US gave Saudi Arabia and Qatar first over the Syrian debacle, and subsequently in its overtures to break the ice with Iran over the stern objections of Israel and the Saudi lobby (for a good example of this the most recent soundbites by Prince bin Talal ). But despite the shifting commodity winds and the superficial political jawboning, the reality is that nothing threatens the US dollar’s hegemony in what many claim is the biggest pillar of the currency’s reserve status – the petrodollar, which literally makes the USD the only currency in which energy-strapped countries can transact in to purchase energy. This may be changing soon following news that the Shanghai Futures Exchange could price its crude oil futures contract in yuan, its chairman said on Thursday, adding that the bourse is speeding up preparatory work to secure regulatory approvals.

 In doing so China is effectively lobbing the first shot across the bow of the Petrodollar system, and more importantly, the key support of the USD in the international arena.

This would be in keeping with China’s strategy to import about 100 tons of gross gold each and every month, in addition to however much gold it produces internally, in what many have also seen as a preparation for a gold-backed currency, which however would require a far broader acceptance of the renminbi in the international arena and most importantly, its intermediation in a crude pricing loop. It is precisely the latter that China is starting to focus on.

Reuters reports:

China, which overtook the United States as the world’s top oil importer in September, hopes the contract will become a benchmark in Asia and has said it would allow foreign investors to trade in the contract without setting up a local subsidiary.

 

“China is the only country in the world that is a major crude producer, consumer and a big importer. It has all the necessary conditions to establish a successful crude oil futures contract,” Yang Maijun, SHFE chairman, said at an industry conference.

 

Yang’s presentation slides at the conference stated that the draft proposal is for the contract to be denominated in yuan and use the type of medium sour crude that China most commonly imports.

It is hardly panic time yet: Reuters adds that industry participants with direct knowledge of the plan have said the contract would be priced in the yuan, otherwise known as the Renminbi, and the U.S. dollar. However, one can argue that the CNY-pricing is for now a test to gauge acceptance of the Chinese currency, and will take on increasingly more prominence as more and more countries, first in Asia and then everywhere else, opt for the CNY-denomination and in the process boost the Renminbi to ever greater parity with the USD.

Here are the punchlines:

“The yuan has become more international and more recognised by the financial market,” Chen Bo, Chinese trading firm Unipec’s executive general manager, told Reuters.

 

“I don’t think it would be unacceptable for the world to use the renminbi for commodities trading.”

Certainly not, although it would also entail a depegging the CNY from the USD, something which China is for now unable and unwilling to do. Because once the Yuan is freely priced, kiss all those Wal-Mart “99 cent” deals goodbye. 

Which in retrospect may be just what the US wants: a very gradual and controlled dephasing of the USD’s reserve currency status. Recall that what the Fed wants at any cost is inflation which has so far failed to materialize at the level demanded by the Chair(wo)man thanks in part to cheap Chinese goods and ongoing US exporting of inflation to China. So if that means a spike in the prices of China imports – so key to keeping US inflation in check – so be it. Because we can already see the Fed’s thinking on the matter – certainly it will be able to always restore the USD’s supreme status in “15 minutes” or less when it so chooses.

Of course, by then China, and the Petroyuan, may have a very different view on the world.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/FF5-qCF-J9U/story01.htm Tyler Durden