Exposing "The Legend" - How Traders 'Spoofed' The Precious Metals Markets

Following last week's admission by a former Deutsche Bank trader that he and many other traders conspired to manipulate the precious metals markets, court documents expose chat messages that show the level of rigging and how an unknown trader known as "the legend" taught them the "tricks from the... master."

The Deutsche Bank trader, David Liew, pleaded guilty in federal court in Chicago to conspiring to spoof gold, silver, platinum and palladium futures, according to court papers. Bloomberg notes that spoofing involves traders placing orders that they never intend to fill, in an attempt to manipulate the price.

Following an introductory period that included orientation and training, LIEW was eventually assigned to the metals trading desk (which included base metals and precious metals trading) in approximately December 2009. During the Relevant Period, LIEW was employed by Bank A as a metals trader in the Asia-Pacific region, and his primary duties included precious metals market making and futures trading....

Between in or around December 2009 and in or around February 2012 (the "Relevant Period"), in the Northern District of Illinois, Eastem Division, and elsewhere, defendant DAVID LIEW did knowingly and intentionally conspire and agree with other precious metals (gold, silver, platinum, and palladium) traders to: (a) knowingly execute, and attempt to execute, a scheme and artifice to defraud, and for obtaining money and property by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises, and in furtherance of the scheme and artifice to defraud, knowingly transmit, and cause to be transmitted, in interstate and foreign commerce, by means of wire communications, certain signs, signals and sounds, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1343,which scheme affected a financial institution; and (b) knowingly engage in trading, practice, and conduct, on and subject to the rules of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange ("CME"), that was, was of the character of, and was commonly known to the trade as, spoofing, that is, bidding or offering with the intent to cancel the bid or offer before execution, by causing to be transmitted to the CME precious metals futures contract orders that LIEW and his coconspirators intended to cancel before execution and not as part of any legitimate, good-faith attempt to execute any part of the orders, in violation of Title 7, United States Code, Sections 6c(a)(5)(C) and 13(a)(2); all in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371.

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The Real Unemployment Number: 102 Million Working Age Americans Do Not Have A Job

Did you know that the number of working age Americans that do not have a job right now is far higher than it was during the worst moments of the last recession?  For example, in January 2009 92.6 million working age Americans did not have a job, but we just found out that in May the number of working age Americans without a job increased to just a shade under 102 million.  We’ll go over those numbers in more detail in a moment, but first I want to talk a bit about the difference between perception and reality.  According to the bureaucrats in the federal government, the “unemployment rate” in May was the lowest that we have seen in 16 years.  At just “4.3 percent”, we are essentially at “full employment”, and so according to them anyone that really wants a job should be able to find one pretty easily.

Of course that is a load of nonsense.  John Williams of shadowstats.com tracks what our economic numbers would look like if honest numbers were being used, and according to his calculations the unemployment rate is currently 22 percent.

So what accounts for the wide disparity between those numbers?

Well, the truth is that the official “unemployment rate” that the mainstream media endlessly hypes is so manipulated that it has essentially lost all meaning at this point.

In May, we were told that the U.S. economy added 138,000 jobs, but that is not even enough to keep up with population growth.

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The Bilderberg 2017 Agenda: "The Trump Administration - A Progress Report"

Every year, the world's richest and most powerful business executives, bankers, media heads and politicians sit down in some luxurious and heavily guarded venue, and discuss how to shape the world in a way that maximizes profits for all involved, while perpetuating a status quo that has been highly beneficial for a select few, even if it means the ongoing destruction of the middle class. We are talking, of course, about the annual, and always secretive, Bilderberg meeting.

And just like last year's meeting in Dresden, the primary topic on the agenda of this year's 65th Bilderberg Meeting which starts today and ends on Sunday, is one: Donald Trump.

Ironically, this year "the storm around Donald Trump" as the SCMP puts it, is not half way around the world, but just a few miles west of the White House, in a conference centre in Chantilly, Virginia, where the embattled president will be getting his end-of-term grades from the people whose opinion actually matters: some 130 participating "Bilderbergs".

The secretive three-day summit of the political and economic elite kicks off Thursday in heavily guarded seclusion at the Westfields Marriot, a luxury hotel a short distance from the Oval Office.

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Dear Fed, It's Not "Really Hard To Spot Bubbles"

Here are some visual aids to help the Fed spot the housing bubble.

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari was the latest Fed official to claim in an essay – thus following in the time-honored footsteps of former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke – that “spotting bubbles is hard,” that the Fed cannot see them, and that if it could see them, it shouldn’t do anything to stop them because it had only “limited policy tools,” and because “the costs of making policy mistakes can be very high.”

But it’s OK to use these “limited policy tools” to inflate the greatest bubbles the world has ever seen and then preside over the damage they cause to the real economy before they even implode.

Neither Kashkari nor anyone else working at the Treasury Department in 2006 – when they were tasked by Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson to look for signs of trouble because they were “due for some form of crisis,” as he writes – could see any bubbles, not even the housing bubble although it was already beginning to deflate.

“It is really hard to spot bubbles with any confidence before they burst,” Kashkari writes, specifically naming stock prices and house prices. “Everyone can recognize a bubble after it bursts, and then many people convince themselves that they saw it on the way up.”

So here are some visual aids I put together for Kashkari and other Fed governors. It will help them “spot” the beautiful housing bubbles in the US – because bubbles really aren’t hard to recognize before they burst, if you want to recognize them.

What’s hard to predict accurately is when they’ll burst.

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The Greatest Financial Bubble In History

China is in the greatest financial bubble in history. Yet, calling China a bubble does not do justice to the situation. This story has been touched on periodically over the last year.

China has multiple bubbles, and they’re all getting ready to burst. If you make the right moves now, you could be well positioned even as Chinese credit and currency crash and burn.

The first and most obvious bubble is credit. The combined Chinese government and corporate debt-to-equity ratio is over 300-to-1 after hidden liabilities, such as provincial guarantees and shadow banking system liabilities, are taken into account.

Paying off that debt requires growth, but the growth itself is fueled by more debt. China is now at the point where enormous new debt is required to achieve only modest new growth. This is clearly non-sustainable.

The next bubble is in investment instruments called Wealth Management Products, or WMPs. You may remember hearing about in the Daily Reckoning and also covered in Bloomberg’s article China Is Playing a $9 Trillion Game of Chicken With Savers.

Picture this. You’re a middle-class Chinese saver and you walk into a bank. They offer you two investment options. The first is a bank deposit that pays about 2%. The other is a WMP that pays about 7%. Which do you choose?

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"This Market Is Crazy": Hedge Fund Returns Hundreds Of Millions To Clients Citing Imminent "Calamity"

While hardly a novel claim - in the past many have warned that Australia's housing and stock market are massive asset bubbles (which local banks were have been forced to deny as their fates are closely intertwined with asset prices even as the RBA is increasingly worried) - so far few if any have gone the distance of putting their money where their mouth was. That changed, when Australian asset manager Altair Asset Management made the extraordinary decision to liquidate its Australian shares funds and return "hundreds of millions" of dollars to its clients according to the Sydney Morning Herald, citing an impending property market "calamity" and the "overvalued and dangerous time in this cycle".

"Giving up management and performance fees and handing back cash from investments managed by us is a seminal decision, however preserving client's assets is what all fund managers should put before their own interests," Philip Parker, who serves as Altair's chairman and chief investment officer, said in a statement on Monday quoted by the SMH.

The 30-year investing veteran said that on May 15 he had advised Altair clients that he planned to "sell all the underlying shares in the Altair unit trusts and to then hand back the cash to those same managed fund investors." Parker also said he had "disbanded the team for time being", including his investment committee comprising of several prominent bears such as former Morgan Stanley chief economist and noted bear Gerard Minack and former UBS economist Stephen Roberts.

Parker said he wanted "to make clear this is not a winding up of Altair, but a decision to hand back client monies out of equities which I deem to be far too risky at this point."

"We think that there is too much risk in this market at the moment, we think it's crazy," Parker said with a candidness few of his colleagues are capable of, at least when still managing money.

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The Next Stock Market Crash Will Be Blamed On Donald Trump But It Will Be The Federal Reserve’s Fault Instead

A stock market crash is coming, and the Democrats and the mainstream media are going to blame Donald Trump for it even though it won’t be his fault.  The truth is that we were headed for a major financial crisis no matter who won the election.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up a staggering 230 percent since the lows of 2009, and no stock market rally in our history has ever reached the 10 year mark without at least a 20 percent downturn.  At this point stocks are about as overvalued as they have ever been, and every other time we have seen a bubble of this magnitude a historic stock market crash has always followed.  Those that are hoping that this time will somehow be different are simply being delusional.

Since November 7th, the Dow is up by about 3,000 points.  That is an extremely impressive rally, and President Trump has been taking a great deal of credit for it.

But perhaps he should not have been so eager to take credit, because what goes up must come down.  The following is an excerpt from a recent Vanity Fair article…

According to Douglas Ramsay, chief investment officer of the Leuthold Group, Trump administration officials will come to regret gloating about the market’s performance. That’s because Trump enters the White House during one of the most richly valued stock markets in U.S. history. The last president to come in at such valuations was George W. Bush, and the dot-com bubble burst soon afterward. Bill Clinton began his second term in a more overvalued stock market in 1997, and exited unscathed. But if his timing were different by just a year, he would have been blamed for the early-aughts market crash.

This stock market bubble was not primarily created by Barack Obama, Donald Trump or any other politician.  Rather, the Federal Reserve was primarily responsible for creating it by pushing interest rates all the way to the floor during the Obama era and by flooding the financial system with hot money during several stages of quantitative easing.

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Visualizing How The Big 5 Tech Giants Make Their Billions

Hitting record high after record high, tech companies have displaced traditional blue chip companies like Exxon Mobil and Walmart as the most valuable companies in the world.

Here are the latest market valuations for those same five companies:

Together, they are worth $2.9 trillion in market capitalization – and they combined in FY2016 for revenues of $555 billion with a $94 billion bottom line.

BRINGING HOME THE BACON?

Despite all being at the top of the stock market food chain, Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins points out that the companies are at very different stages.

In 2016, Apple experienced its first annual revenue decline since 2001, but the company brought home a profit equal to that of all other four companies combined.

On the other hand, Amazon is becoming a revenue machine with very little margin, while Facebook generates 5x more profit despite far smaller top line numbers.

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The 5 Possible Outcomes Of The OPEC Meeting

The highly-anticipated OPEC meeting is taking place this week, but unlike the last few meetings, the hype and excitement is much less palpable. That is largely because the end result is thought to be a foregone conclusion.

Last week, Saudi Arabia and Russia telegraphed the events of the May 25 meeting, announcing support for a nine-month extension of the existing production cuts – 1.2 million barrels per day (mb/d) from OPEC plus 558,000 barrels per day (bpd) from a group of non-OPEC countries. With the two most important oil producers in agreement, the meeting should be quick and easy.

"The decision seems to be almost a done deal," said Bjarne Schieldrop, chief commodities analyst at SEB Markets. "There seems to be a very high harmony in the group."

But if we have learned anything from the OPEC meetings over the last several years, it is that nothing should be taken for granted. Time and again the cartel seems to surprise the markets. Saudi Arabia’s energy minister hinted over the weekend that the OPEC meeting could have more drama than many analysts currently expect.

"Everybody I talked to... expressed support and enthusiasm to join in this direction, but of course it doesn’t preempt any creative suggestions that may come about," Saudi energy minister Khalid al-Falih said at a news conference in Riyadh.

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They Are Killing Small Business: The Number Of Self-Employed Americans Is Lower Than It Was In 1990

After eight long, bitter years under Obama, will things go better for entrepreneurs and small businesses now that Donald Trump is in the White House?  Once upon a time, America was the best place in the world for those that wanted to work for themselves.  Our free market capitalist system created an environment in which entrepreneurs and small businesses greatly thrived, but today they are being absolutely eviscerated by the control freak bureaucrats that dominate our political system.  Year after year, leftist politicians just keep piling on more rules, more regulations, more red tape and more taxes.  As a result, the number of self-employed Americans is now lower than it was in 1990…

In April 1990, 8.7 million Americans were self-employed, but today only 8.4 million Americans are self-employed.

Of course our population has grown much, much larger since that time.  In 1990, there were 249 million people living in the United States, but today there are 321 million people living in this country.

What this means is that the percentage of the population that is self-employed is way down.

In fact, one study found that the percentage of Americans that are self-employed fell by more than 20 percent between 1991 and 2010.

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Over The Last 10 Years The U.S. Economy Has Grown At EXACTLY The Same Rate As It Did During The 1930s

Even though I write about our ongoing long-term economic collapse every day, I didn’t realize that things were this bad.  In this article, I am going to show you that the average rate of growth for the U.S. economy over the past 10 years is exactly equal to the average rate that the U.S. economy grew during the 1930s.  Perhaps this fact shouldn’t be that surprising, because we already knew that Barack Obama was the only president in the entire history of the United States not to have a single year when the economy grew by at least 3 percent.  Of course the mainstream media continues to push the perception that the U.S. economy is in “recovery mode”, but the truth is that this current era has far more in common with the Great Depression than it does with times of great economic prosperity.

Earlier today I came across an article about President Trump’s new budget from Fox News, and in this article the author makes a startling claim…

The hard fact is that the past decade’s $10 trillion in deficit spending has produced the worst economic growth as measured by Gross Domestic Product in our nation’s history.  You read that right, in the past decade our nation’s economy grew slower than even during the Great Depression. This stagnant, new normal, low-growth economy is leaving millions of working age people behind who have given up even trying to participate, and has led to a malaise where many doubt that the American dream is attainable.

When I first read that, I thought that this claim could not possibly be true.  But I was curious, and so I looked up the numbers for myself.

What I found was absolutely astounding.

The following are U.S. GDP growth rates for every year during the 1930s…

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The Perfect Storm Hits Used-Car Values: The Foundation Of The Auto Industry Is Faltering

1) Trade Cycles and How They Affect New Vehicle Sales Velocity

Used car values determine in large the velocity of new car sales. Most new car transactions involve a trade. The level of equity in the trade oftentimes determines whether a new vehicle transaction will be successful or not. Inclining used car values lead to faster trade cycles while declining used car values lead to slower trade cycles. Dismal new car sales volume during our last recession created a shortage of used cars. This created a large supply and demand imbalance that made used car values soar from 2009 till 2014 as seen on this chart.

This time period was extremely favorable for new car sales because consumers found themselves in an equitable position on their vehicles in a very short period of time. To illustrate this, consider this chart of a 60-month loan.

The black line represents the principal balance owed. An optimal trade cycle occurs when the principal balance owed on a loan intersects with the market value of the vehicle. The bullish used car cycle for passenger cars ended in 2014 as a result of extreme pricing pressure from new car leases. Since 2014, used passenger car values have corrected and continue to underperform. This underperformance is largely due to the effects that falling used car values have had on new car sales velocity. A longer trade cycle results in a slower velocity of new car sales. Today, we’ve seen data suggesting that used car values can drop as much as 50% from current levels. Refer to the above loan chart and consider what a drop that large would mean for new car sales velocity in terms of trade cycles.

2) Increased Dependency on Leasing

Used car values also determine the effectiveness of leasing. The most significant component of a lease is the gap between the residual value and the sale price of the vehicle. A residual value is little more than a guess at the future value of a vehicle. Manufacturers and third party companies like ALG use current and historic used car value data to establish residuals. Because of this process, residual values tend to lag used car values. As residuals rise, the gap between the residual value and the sales price gets smaller leading to lower payments. As residuals fall, the gap becomes larger leading to higher payments.

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UBS Hints At Rampant Auto Lending Fraud; "It’s Not Just Smoke And Mirrors Anymore"

For months we've written about the imminently doomed auto bubble in the U.S., spurred in no small part by an unprecedented relaxation of underwriting standards by banks that would put even the shenanigans of the 2008 mortgage crisis to shame.  From stretched out lending terms to promotional interest rates, auto lenders have increasingly played every trick necessary to get those incremental new car buyers into the most expensive car their monthly budgets could possibly absorb.

That said, in recent weeks there has been growing concern that consumers, auto dealers and/or banks have been going beyond simply relaxing underwriting standards and have instead been forced to commit outright fraud in order to attract that incremental auto volume growth.  As UBS Strategist Matthew Mish told Bloomberg, “something is definitely going on under the hood...it’s not just smoke and mirrors anymore.”

The evidence is growing. First, the explosion of technology makes gaining access to information to improve credit scores very simple. Internet searches for 'credit score' are at record levels. Second, our survey finds 21% of auto loan borrowers admitted to some form of inaccuracy in their loan applications. Third, there is growing concern reported among auto lenders around fraud, which is the extreme case of this behavior.

Overall, the explosion and adoption of technology makes gaining access to "proven" methods for improving credit scores extremely simple. To this point, the popularity of internet searches for "credit score" has been rising consistently and is near peak post-crisis levels (Figure 7). Similarly, our survey finds that 21% of auto loan borrowers admitted to some inaccuracy in their application for non-mortgage related debt (auto, student or credit card loan). More concerning, this trend may be systemic as 29% of other consumer loan (i.e., student loan, credit card) borrowers acknowledged some form of inaccuracy in their applications (Figure 8).

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World Money: Five Hidden Signals From The IMF

Less than a month ago a handful of the world’s policy makers gathered in Washington at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), no surprising headlines were run - but an obscure meeting and a discreet report launched exclusive signals for the next global economic crisis.

The panel, which included five of the most elite global bankers, was held during the IMF’s spring meetings to discuss the special drawing rights (SDR) 50th anniversary.  On the surface the panel was a snoozefest, but reading beyond the jargon offers critical takeaways.

The discussion revealed what global central banks are planning for a future crisis and how the IMF is orchestrating policy for financial bubbles, currency shocks and institutional failures.

Why the urgency from the financial elites?

In the April 2017 “Global Financial Stability Report,” IMF researchers targeted the U.S corporate debt market and how extreme changes in its equity market has left the global economy at risk. While the report may have been missed by major financial news outlets, it was enough to give major concern to those paying attention.The IMF research report noted:

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Manufacturing Resistance – The American Public Is Being Manipulated Into Irrelevance

No honest person could accuse me of being a Trump fan or supporter. I refused to back his candidacy despite my total disdain for Hillary Clinton and pretty much everything she stands for. More importantly, I’ve written a multitude of articles since he was inaugurated severely taking him to task on a wide variety of subjects. I’ve tirelessly discussed how he’s outsourced his economic policy to Goldman Sachs, and condemned his burgeoning neocon foreign policy, evidenced by his disturbing coziness with the autocratic barbarians of Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, the most incredible aspect of the past four months is not how much of a fake populist Trump’s proven to be, but how the corporate media’s managed to disgust me even more. I’m happy to become outraged at Trump, because I find many things about Trump outrageous. That said, I find it telling that the stuff about Trump that outrages me, is never the same stuff which outrages the corporate media. Why is that?

The reason is the corporate media doesn’t mind Goldman Sachs running U.S. economic policy. It also doesn’t mind a close alliance with the terrorist state of Saudi Arabia, or our government’s endless string of disastrous neocon wars abroad. In fact, when it comes to the latter, the corporate media is reliably the primary cheerleader for unprovoked militarism.

Following the election of Trump, an axis of evil in U.S. politics has formed consisting of the corporate media, neoliberal Democrats (Hillary cultists) and neocons. This alliance has one primary objective, which revolves around obsessing incessantly on a conspiracy theory that deflects attention away from the crimes of our very own domestic plutocrats, war mongers and rent-seekers (you know, the forces that are actually wrecking the country). Russia is the perfect outside enemy to rally ignorant rubes around in order to prevent any real progressive or centrist populism from ever gaining a foothold in U.S. politics. Unfortunately, thanks to the gullibility of the average American, their plan seems to be succeeding.

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