The Threat to Commodity Derivatives The Threat to Commodity Derivatives
By Alasdair Macleod
Thursday, September 19, 2024
For years, bulls of gold and silver have complained about how derivatives have been used to suppress their prices. Their dreams of the practice ending could be coming true.
… Introduction
If you think about it, there is a simple reason that derivatives for speculating in or hedging gold is fatally flawed. It is because in nearly every nation's common law, gold is money, and currencies are inferior credit, which is where payment risk actually lies. That the Western financial establishment is ignorant of this does not change the law.
There is good reason why this matters. Gold has lasted as legal money, and credit has been separately acknowledged to be deferred payment in money since Rome's Twelve Tables defined them and their relationship in 449 BC. Since then there have been many instances of governments denying these facts and promoting their currencies in the place of gold, which have always ended in their collapse.
In any price relationship involving a medium of exchange, there is an objective value and a subjective one. The objective value is always in the medium of exchange and the subjective value is in the goods or services being exchanged. Put another way, the buyer and seller will both value money or its substitute the same, but the buyer values the goods or services more highly than the seller. Otherwise the exchange won't take place.
But if gold is the money, where does that leave a fiat currency?
Clearly, if the currency is not a credible gold substitute, then it should bear the subjective value relative to gold. That it is not regarded this way is partly due to government anti-gold propaganda, but mainly due to accounting in the government's currency for tax purposes.
Furthermore, while a gold standard is always defined as a currency being exchangeable for a given weight of gold, for convenience it is referred to as so many currency units per gramme or ounce. This gives the erroneous impression that gold is being priced in the subordinate currency.
But in the knowledge that a fiat currency always fails while gold as money never does, the recognition of this reality will eventually kill off any derivatives in gold, and if the market in derivatives evolves without collapsing entirely, it should then refer to fiat currencies in terms of gold-grammes, or better still in a credible gold substitute instead, if one exists.
That gold derivatives should not exist in the first place should be borne in mind in the context of this article.
... The plan was to kill off gold as money
Following the inflationary 1970s, which almost destroyed the post-1971 dollar-based fiat currency system, there can be little doubt that the deep thinkers in the U.S. Treasury thought long and hard as to how to drive inflation out of the economy while promoting the dollar to kill off gold as money.
The answer they chose came in three distinct policies.
The first and most obvious was to reform the financial system so that the banks would wrest control of financial securities from the brokerage industry. This resulted in London's big-bang, implemented by the Thatcher government in the mid-1980s at the U.S. Treasury's behest. A capital-starved securities industry would become turbocharged by bank finance, ensuring a perpetual bull market in financial asset values, including government debt, and ensuring everlasting demand for dollars.
The second was to reform statistical calculation for key economic indicators, such as consumer price inflation and jobless figures, giving a measure of government control over them to create the illusion of currency stability.
Not only was the indexation cost of pensions and welfare contained, but interest rates were thereby permitted to be lower than they would otherwise be. In fact, all economic statistics are produced by government agencies, which control this information.
The third was to sanction and encourage derivative markets to expand and by doing so divert speculative demand from physical markets for gold. This was to prevent gold prices from being driven higher, threatening the status of the dollar as a medium of exchange. It was the basis of the massive expansion of gold trading on the London Bullion Market Association, and the expansion of gold futures under the control of the large U.S. banks that would occasionally act as conduits for the U.S. Exchange Stabilization Fund.
Forty-four million ounces were cleared daily in 1998 on the London bullion market, valued at approximately $13 billion at that time. Last May, volume had dropped to a low of 16 million ounces, but at higher prices it was valued at $37 billion. It should be noted that outstanding forward commitments measured by their average duration in days are unrecorded multiples of daily settlement.
The falling settlement numbers in London forward ounces from 44 million to 16 million while the value of the settlement rose 2.8 times illustrates the problem paper markets now face. On Comex, which has the same problem, this is demonstrated by the gross and net short position of the Swaps category, which is comprised mainly of bullion bank traders.
Between 2010-2018, the average gross short position was $15 billion, compared with $75 billion today. And the net position averaged $7 billion, compared with $61 billion currently.
This particularly matters because physical gold is now being drained out of London and New York directly or indirectly by a combination of central bank and wider Asian demand. While London faces a liquidity crisis of available gold bullion, Comex has a position that is proving impossible to contain, drifting into ever higher liabilities for bullion bank traders.
Hope that demand for physical gold will diminish, allowing the bullion establishment to initiate a raid on bullish speculators, is proving to be whistling into the wind, a wind blowing with increasing strength driven by a mixture of geopolitics and increasing credit risk facing the fiat dollar.