Category: Market News

Gold on Track for Best Week in Seven

Sirhc

RPMEX: January 10, 2025

Gold prices are on course for their strongest week in seven, hitting a four-week high on Friday. This uptick is driven by growing safe-haven demand amid heightened uncertainty surrounding the policies of the incoming administration.

Recent economic data has revealed significant job growth in December, with nonfarm payrolls rising by 256,000, far exceeding expectations. This surge in jobs is a critical indicator for Federal Reserve policymakers, as they assess the need for future monetary policy adjustments. The minutes from the most recent Federal Reserve meeting raised concerns that the new administration’s policies could contribute to inflationary pressures, adding to the complexity of future policy decisions.

Despite the positive jobs report, the ADP Employment Report showed that private sector job additions were weaker than expected in December, with only 122,000 new positions, below the forecasted 136,000. Meanwhile, weekly jobless claims dropped to an 11-month low, signaling continued strength in the labor market.

Gold futures for February gained 0.7% on Thursday, closing at $2,690.80 an ounce, and have increased by 1.4% for the week. After a strong 2024, with a 27% rise—the largest annual gain since 2010—gold remains a sought-after asset. The current February contract is trading at $2,722.30 an ounce, while the spot price sits at $2,695.20. Gold’s performance in 2024 was fueled by monetary policies, economic conditions, and central bank activity globally.

The Federal Reserve has reduced its benchmark interest rates three times since September, most recently bringing them to a range of 4.25% to 4.50%. Higher interest rates typically place downward pressure on gold, as they increase the appeal of other interest-bearing investments. Currently, market expectations suggest that the Fed will maintain rates at the end of this month, with the majority of investors anticipating no changes.

Silver futures also showed strength, rising 1.1% on Thursday to $31.02 an ounce. The March contract has gained 3.2% in the first part of the week. Despite a decline in December, silver ended 2024 up 21%. The March contract is now priced at $31.35 an ounce, and the spot price is $30.52.

Palladium and platinum prices saw modest gains on Thursday. Palladium rose by 0.1% to $942.50 an ounce, while platinum increased by 0.4% to $967.10. These metals have faced challenges in recent months, with palladium down 17% in 2024 and platinum sliding by 8.4%.

Disclaimer: This editorial content is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice or a recommendation to engage in any specific financial transactions. The views expressed herein may not reflect the position of of RPMEX and or it’s affiliates. Always consult with a financial advisor before making any investment decisions, as market conditions can change unpredictably.

Multiple Texas Bills Look to Challenge Fiat Currency

Dean

Two Texas bills filed by state Rep. Mark Dorazio, HB1049 and HB1056, propose creating gold and silver-backed transactional currencies as legal tender in the state.

These bills would require the Texas Comptroller to issue these currencies through the Texas Bullion Depository, ensuring full backing by gold and silver. The bills aim to offer an alternative to the U.S. dollar, allowing for both physical and electronic transactions using gold and silver.

This will challenge the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money by facilitating everyday use of sound money over fiat money, potentially driving Federal Reserve notes out of circulation.

We’ll be keeping an eye on both these bills as they make their way to the House committees on January 14th when the legislative session begins.

Capitol Building, Austin-Texas

SECRETARY STATEMENTS & REMARKS

Sirhc

Remarks by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen at the Open Session of the meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council

Editorial: The Financial Stability Oversight Council was Established in 2010 under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Financial Stability Oversight Council provides comprehensive monitoring of the stability of our nation’s financial system.

This council is charged by statute with identifying risks to the financial stability of the United States; promoting market discipline; and responding to emerging threats to the stability of the U.S. financial system.

This council may be monitoring and identifying but they aren’t doing anything to reduce excessive government spending which has resulted in a $2.5T annual U.S. budget deficit, a 40 year high inflation rate, and a U.S. National Debt approaching $34T? This is just more of the same nonsensical approach of creating more layers of bureaucracy expense and resolving nothing.

November 3, 2023

As Prepared for Delivery

Our first agenda item is to discuss and vote on the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s analytic framework for financial stability risk identification, assessment, and response, and on the Council’s interpretive guidance on nonbank financial company designations. Before we turn to the presentation, I’d like to explain why I believe it is so important for the Council to achieve greater public transparency and analytic rigor and how these two documents will help the Council do so. 

Financial stability is a public good. The U.S. financial system enables people to make payments, build businesses, save, and manage risks. To fill our needs, it has evolved to be complex, diverse, and interconnected. We rely on it every day, and it has succeeded in supporting American families and businesses, enabling wealth creation and economic growth over generations. But, when it falters, we can experience financial crises that can devastate households and businesses for years afterwards.  

This is where the Council, or FSOC, comes in. Congress created FSOC after the global financial crisis to identify and respond to risks to financial stability. To maintain the strength of the financial sector, we need a nimble but robust structure to monitor and address the build-up of risks that could threaten the system. In the lead-up to the global financial crisis, inadequate oversight led to reckless risk-taking. When large, interconnected financial companies failed in 2007 and 2008, stress spread through the financial system and then to the real economy. The reforms implemented after that crisis substantially strengthened the financial system. And the banking system as a whole remains strong. But recent stresses in some financial sectors arising from the onset of the pandemic and the sudden failures of some regional banks underscore the continuing need to remain vigilant to threats to ensure the resilience of the financial system and our economic strength.  

This is the purpose of the Council, and our two votes today go to the heart of FSOC fulfilling its critical mission. 

Our first vote will be on approving the Council’s analytic framework for financial stability risks. This framework will help the public better understand how the Council goes about its work and how it draws on its various statutory tools to respond to risks. For the first time, it provides a clear explanation of how the Council monitors, evaluates, and responds to potential risks to financial stability, regardless of whether they come from activities, individual firms, or other sources. Under the framework, the Council’s response to a particular risk to financial stability will depend on the nature of the risk. Often, risks emanate from widely conducted activities and can be effectively addressed through action by an existing regulator or interagency coordination. Other times, risks are instead concentrated in one or more specific nonbank financial companies. 

This brings me to the Council’s guidance on nonbank financial company designations. Among the tools Congress gave the Council is the authority to designate a nonbank financial company for Federal Reserve supervision and prudential standards if the company’s distress or activities could pose a threat to financial stability. The guidance we are voting on today will help ensure that the Council is able to use this authority as needed. It describes in detail the procedural steps for the Council’s review of nonbank financial companies for potential designation. These involve rigorous analysis and transparency. The guidance maintains strong procedural protections for companies under review, including significant Council engagement and communication, and provides them with opportunities to be heard. The guidance also affirms that the Council will engage extensively with companies’ primary financial regulators. The guidance also eliminates several prerequisites to designation in place under the current guidance that were not contemplated by the Dodd-Frank Act and that are based on a flawed view of how financial risks develop and spread. And, again, designation is only one of the Council’s tools and is not being prioritized over other approaches to addressing financial stability risks. 

In voting to adopt the analytic framework and guidance, we will increase the transparency of the Council’s work and establish a durable process for the Council’s use of its designation authority, strengthening the Council’s ability to promote a resilient financial system that supports all Americans.  

With that, let me turn to Sandra Lee, Treasury’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Council, for the presentation.

2021 To 2024: From “Revenge” Splurging To Forced Frugality

Sirhc

TUESDAY, AUG 15, 2023 – 11:05 AM

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

After all, “they can always print more money.” That’s always the solution until it becomes the problem.

What we call economics is best understood as:

1. A mechanism that distributes resources asymmetrically: some benefit more than others.

2. The running of the herd: humans are a social-herd species.

3. Everyone seeks a windfall: something for nothing, or grabbing more while doing less.

4. Everyone seeks to make windfalls permanent by rigging the mechanism to favor their interests.

5. The mechanism is a system of self-reinforcing feedback loops that generate diminishing returns, blowback and unintended consequences.

This perspective helps us understand the progression of the economy from 2021 to 2024. In a nutshell:

  • 2021: massive stimulus, “meme stock” bubble
  • 2022: “Revenge” splurging, inflation
  • 2023: AI stock bubble, “soft landing”
  • 2024: Forced Frugality

So massive stimulus initially triggers the locked-down herd into meme stocks, inflating a bubble. Once the lockdowns end, this massive stimulus unleashes “revenge spending” where price no longer matters, we need a vacation, a new wardrobe, etc., never mind the cost.

Unsurprisingly, this tsunami of price-insensitive spending while the distribution mechanism was still struggling to reconnect disrupted global supply chains leads to 1) rampant price gouging / profiteering and 2) rampant inflation as costs are passed up the food chain.

Many costs are “sticky” and rarely decrease: taxes, fees, wages and benefits, healthcare, rent, insurance, childcare, etc. typically only ratchet higher. Any ratchet lower is rare and modest, and eventually reversed.

The net result is self-reinforcing inflation, as stimulus never really stops: windfalls are rigged to be permanent, even as broad-based stimulus dries up.

Two things happen when windfalls are rigged to be permanent: 

  • 1) the distribution of resources (“money,” entitlements, tax breaks, subsidies, goodies of all kinds) becomes increasingly asymmetric (the already-rich get much richer at the expense of those barely holding their ground) and
  • 2) the source of the supposedly permanent windfall generates self-reinforcing feedback loops that lead to diminishing returns, blowback and unintended consequences.

In other words, the asymmetric distribution either self-corrects or enters run to failure feedback. Either way, the sources of the windfall cease functioning, and the result is forced frugality. Windfalls that were presumed to be permanent are revealed as temporary asymmetries whose own dynamics generate decay, diminishing returns, blowback and run-to-failure.

And always, of course, the gravy train ending is “impossible” because recency bias encourages us to think the distribution mechanism has god-like powers and permanence. Bur frugality ends up being forced one way or another, even if the stimulus appears to increase. Bubbles deflate and windfalls shrink and then reverse into doing more to get less.

After all, “they can always print more money.” That’s always the solution until it becomes the problem.

  *  *

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Fitch Warns Big Banks Face Downgrades

Sirhc

BY TYLER DURDEN

TUESDAY, AUG 15, 2023 – 08:30 AM | ZeroHedge

At the start of August, Fitch Ratings downgraded the US government’s top credit rating. Last week, Moody’s cut the credit ratings of small and midsized US banks because of higher funding costs, potential regulatory capital weaknesses, and rising risks tied to commercial real estate loans. Now, another week, another possible downgrade, this time of major banks.

Fitch analyst Chris Wolfe told CNBC another round of turmoil could be nearing for the banking industry. He said the ratings agency is mulling over sweeping rating downgrades for dozens of banks, including ones as big as JPMorgan Chase. 

“Another one-notch downgrade of the industry’s score, to A+ from AA-, would force Fitch to reevaluate ratings on each of the more than 70 US banks it covers,” Wolfe told CNBC at the firm’s New York headquarters. 

He continued, “If we were to move it to A+, then that would recalibrate all our financial measures and would probably translate into negative rating actions.” 

Wolfe said lowering of the operating environment score for US banks to ‘aa-‘from ‘aa,’ reflecting downward pressure on the US sovereign rating, gaps in the regulatory framework and structural uncertainty around the normalization of monetary policy, went “largely unnoticed because it didn’t trigger downgrades on banks.” 

This comes one week after a triple whammy of factors of regional banks: Higher funding costs, potential regulatory capital weaknesses, and rising risks tied to CRE loans prompted Moody’s to lower credit ratings for ten small and midsize US banks; and noted in a slew of notes that it may downgrade major banks.

“Collectively, these three developments have lowered the credit profile of a number of US banks, though not all banks equally,” the ratings agency wrote in some of the assessments.

Perhaps Fitch is sending out trial balloons for Wall Street to inform them that the potential for another round of bank downgrades is a real risk for the market. 

More from CNBC on the conversation with Wolfe:

The problem created by another downgrade to A+ is that the industry’s score would then be lower than some of its top-rated lenders. The country’s two largest banks by assets, JPMorgan and Bank of America , would likely be cut to A+ from AA- in this scenario, since banks can’t be rated higher than the environment in which they operate. 

And if top institutions like JPMorgan are cut, then Fitch would be forced to at least consider downgrades on all their peers’ ratings, according to Wolfe. That could potentially push some weaker lenders closer to non-investment grade status.

The timing of the next round of bank downgrades wasn’t disclosed but serves as a warning for more banking turmoil as the Federal Reserve has hiked interest rates to 22-year highs. 

“What we don’t know is, where does the Fed stop? Because that is going to be a very important input into what it means for the banking system,” he said.

Rates on swap contracts referencing future Fed policy meetings suggest the rate hikes might be peaking with the potential for cuts to begin in the second half of 2024. 

The interview continued:

A related issue is if the industry’s loan defaults rise beyond what Fitch considers a historically normal level of losses, said Wolfe. Defaults tend to rise in a rate-hiking environment, and Fitch has expressed concern on the impact of office loan defaults on smaller banks.

“That shouldn’t be shocking or alarming,” he said. “But if we’re exceeding [normalized losses], that’s what maybe tips us over.”

Meanwhile, days ago, we quoted a note from Vishwanath Tirupattur, a strategist at Morgan Stanley, who said, “We are skeptical that the turmoil in the regional banking sector which came to the fore in March is behind us.” 

… and this all comes after Fitch downgraded the US credit rating from AAA to AA+ earlier this month. Of course, the Biden administration blamed Trump. 

Shares of big banks are already sliding premarket on the CNBC report. 

Clearly banking turmoil is not over.