“A dollar is definitely going to be worth less in one hundred years than it is today; an ounce of gold will still be an ounce of gold.”
-Graham Birch
“The gold standard has one tremendous virtue: the quantity of the money supply, under the gold standard, is independent of the policies of governments and political parties. This is its advantage. It is a form of protection against spendthrift governments.”
-Ludwig von Mises, from Economic Policy
Artikel pertama ditulis oleh Dan Amoss untuk The Daily Reckoning yang berjudul “The Fed Is Officially Insane”, dan menjelaskan dengan sangat baik tentang kenapa pencetakan uang dari the Fed AS akan berakhir buruk serta tentang apa yang dapat kita lakukan untuk melindungi kita dari ‘kegilaan’ tersebut:
“There’s an old saying that defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The Federal Reserve wants to test that theory.
Fed officials have been all over the media for weeks, laying the groundwork for a third round of quantitative easing. By preparing markets for QE3, the Fed refuses to let real-world evidence get in the way of its beloved theories. QE operations haven’t worked; they’ve just promoted government spending and higher savings rates to make up for low interest rates.
The arrogance and groupthink among Federal Reserve officials won’t allow them to diagnose the following: The Fed, by its radical actions, mutates the very economy it’s trying to “boost.”
An honest review of the Fed’s record would conclude that it’s rotten. In a recent update of The Speculative Investor, Steve Saville explains why the whole concept of central banking is “rotten to the core.” He describes how central banks are providers of gambling insurance to the banking system:
“[The] central bank offers the equivalent of gambling insurance to the banking industry.
“Imagine if an insurance company made the following deal with all patrons of a casino: In exchange for a patron’s promise to gamble prudently, the insurance company promises to come to the patron’s aid if he finds himself short of money. Knowing that the insurance company was essentially acting as a financial backstop, at least a few gamblers would take more risk than they would otherwise.
“In a similar vein, knowing that the central bank will be ready, willing and able to provide support via emergence liquidity injections if things go wrong, some private banks will take more risks. Furthermore, due to the higher profits that tend to temporarily accrue to the banks that take more risk, most banks will eventually be drawn toward riskier business practices. This is why a mechanism supposedly (according to the propaganda) put in place to prevent banking crises ends up increasing the severity and frequency of banking crises.”
It’s no mystery why the US banking system had built up reckless lending and securitizing practices in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis: Reckless behavior paid well.
Now, instead of enabling reckless bank lending, the Fed (and other central banks) is enabling the addiction of governments to easy borrowing terms. It’s now providing gambling insurance to the biggest spending addicts in history: the US government. Suppressing interest rates near zero for years and years will transfer countless wealth from savers to the government budget.
As budget deficits continue to be measured in the trillions, we will see the size of central bank balance sheets grow too. Inflation will remain stubbornly high worldwide, despite sluggish economic activity. Central bankers may talk tough from time to time, but they will ultimately do the bidding of governments — and print.
For years, I’ve expected that at the end of all this central bank printing, we’ll see the end — not a reversal — of quantitative easing programs and a re-pegging of the US dollar to gold at much higher gold prices. A new gold standard would allow the Fed and other central banks to save face after the following sequence of events:
1. Central banks inflate their balance sheets and buy up many of the bonds governments issue to fund soaring budget deficits
2. Once the largest suppliers of scarce products realize they’re exchanging products for infinitely diluted paper money, they start demanding more and more money in exchange for sending their scarce products to the marketplace
3. Consumer prices start rising
4. Calls for monetary tightening (reduction of central bank balance sheets and interest rate hikes) grow louder
5. These central banks won’t be able to slash money supplies without crashing government bond markets and stock markets. They talk about tightening, but don’t tighten
6. As central banks lose credibility, gold launches on a final, near-vertical stage of its bull market
7. In response to inflation expectations running wild, governments and central banks draw up plans to re-peg currencies to gold in order to avoid having to drain trillions worth of cash from the banking system.
It’s almost impossible to imagine the Fed managing a “soft landing” back to its pre-quantitative easing condition. I compare QE operations to a roach motel: easy to enter and impossible to exit in a practical manner.
Say that the Fed doubles the size of its balance sheet yet again over the course of a QE3 operation, while the market’s expectation of future inflation steadily rises. The selling pressure on Treasuries would steadily grow, undermining the value of the Treasuries already sitting on the Fed’s balance sheet. On a mark-to-market basis, the equity on the Fed’s balance sheet would be negative — by several hundreds of billions of dollars.
How long will it take investors to realize this dilemma is incredibly bullish for gold? At the end of these money-printing operations, central banks won’t be able to sell assets and shrink money supplies gracefully — or at all.
Perhaps once the global paper money system is restructured, involving some sort of gold standard, sanity will return to the Fed and other central banks. Until we see more signs of sanity, hold a core position in gold, silver, and precious metal mining stocks. These asset classes will be the prime beneficiaries of future printing.”
Selanjutnya penulis kawakan untuk surat kabar harian, Richard Russell, yakin bahwa emas akan digunakan untuk menyelamatkan dunia yang sedang dililit hutang. Berikut adalah yang ia katakan pada sebuah wawancara dengan KWN (www.kingworldnews.com) tanggal 5 September 2012:
“The national debt of the US is now well over $16 trillion and growing at the rate of over one trillion dollars a year. It can never be paid off through the ‘normal’ means. Paying off by normal means would entail a huge, really killer boost in taxes and a brutal unmerciful, slashing of entitlements. The only way the US’s debts can ever be seriously addressed is to devalue the dollar.
The US owns the world’s greatest hoard of gold. Here’s what I think the authorities have to do. They should unilaterally, overnight raise the price of gold to a high value, maybe around $10,000 an ounce. Thus, each dollar would be worth one ten-thousandth of an ounce of gold. This would allow our enormous debt to be paid off with vastly devalued dollars.
This would be inflationary, since everyone who owned gold would own a pile of devalued dollars. The huge increase in the number of dollars would drive prices up, and that would work against the current forces of deflation.
Nations owning gold would in turn (in order to compete) — devalue their own currencies, and thus be able to pay off their own ‘impossible’ debts. In the end, a new world monetary system would have to be established, but the terrible problem of a planet choking on debt would be solved.
I think this is the only way the world-debt problem is going to be solved. It will, in the end, be solved by devaluation (as Roosevelt did in 1933, when he suddenly and unilaterally raised the price of gold from 20 to 35 dollars an ounce).
Interestingly, we now hear an increasing amount of talk regarding gold entering the world monetary system. Furthermore, I think we are going to hear even more about gold in future months. Smart, wealthy, well-informed investors will start accumulating gold. Soros and Paulson are doing it already. I don’t doubt that Soros has inside information.
I also believe that the US will, in due time, start backing its currency with part-gold and the dollar will be convertible into gold at around $10,000 an ounce. This will render the dollar the most wanted currency in the world.
I believe the Chinese are onto the same idea. But as of now, China does not own as much gold as they desire, which is one reason China has rushed headlong into the gold business — China is currently the world’s biggest producer of gold. It is also why China is encouraging its own people to buy and accumulate gold. China knows that gold is the future of the world monetary system.”
What Do the Charts Say?
Meskipun harga emas jelas terlihat bullish kembali dalam beberapa pekan terakhir, menurut saya akan keliru jika terlalu gegabah untuk membeli logam mulia tersebut tanpa pertimbangan apapun. Dominic Frisby, seorang komentator emas dan komoditas di MoneyWeek, juga memiliki pandangan serupa.
Di bawah ini adalah tiga alasan mengapa emas mungkin akan turun terlebih dahulu dalam jangka pendek:
“First, it is approaching a big line of resistance at just below the $1,800 mark, as shown by the red line on the next chart below.
Given the action we have seen since the end of July, I would wager that we are bound to see some kind of breather. There are so many traders who will have had such a good couple of months, profit taking is inevitable, even as soon as this week – on the stocks as well as the metals themselves.
Second, we always seem to see some kind of shake-out either in late September or early October. You can see this on Dimitri Speck’s seasonal chart, shown below. (The chart basically shows that over the last 30 years, gold has generally had a fall during these months).
Third, there is a heck of a lot of bullish sentiment about gold and silver all of a sudden. Since the latest Fed announcement of apparently unlimited QE, a number of people – many of whom I have great respect for – are declaring that “this is it”, “this is the beginning of the end-game”, “Von Mises’ crack-up boom, here we come”, and the like.
(“Crack-up boom” refers to the economist Ludwig Von Mises’ oft-quoted line: “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”)
If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that this ‘end-game’ is going to be a lot longer in coming than most of us ever expect. (I thought it was coming in 2008.) Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you can remain solvent and all that.
When you hear these kinds of pronouncements, it often pays not to listen to them. There’s no doubt that the stances of the world’s central banks are extremely inflationary and bullish for gold. But the expectation for stimulus was, to at least a degree, priced in. Perhaps this is a moment to ‘sell the news’.”
Satu hal lagi yang perlu diingat adalah fakta bahwa emas sudah masuk dalam kondisi overbought saat ini sementara dolar AS, sebaliknya, berada dalam kondisi oversold. Jika dolar AS berhasil rebound dari levelsupport-nya, maka kenaikan emas akan terhadang.
Pekan lalu Ed Steer, director pada the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) dan editor pada Ed Steer’s Gold & Silver Daily, mengetengahkan update singkat mengenai emas dan indeks dolar AS dibarengi dengan sejumlah grafik yang bagus:
“It will be interesting to see how high this dollar index rally goes…as it is as much oversold as the precious metals are overbought. I still haven’t forgotten about JPMorgan et al and their horrendous Comex short positions in all precious metals…but silver in particular…along with their corresponding short position in SLV. Unless they get over run…they’re going to be looking to cover as many of these short positions as they can.
Here’s the 6-month dollar index chart…
And the 6-month gold chart
This is the “in your ear” short-term scenario that I’m concerned about…and JPMorgan et al‘s track record is 100% in this department, with no exceptions.
But this is one of those times that all dips should be bought…and I’ll be taking my own advice if or when this scenario finally plays out.”
Yang terakhir namun tak kalah pentingnya catatan dari Café Américain-nya Jesse pada 14 September yang mengatakan bahwa emas telah menyelesaikan bentuk ‘cup’ pada grafik harian. Artinya bahwa kita seharusnya menyaksikan bentuk ‘handle’ pada pergerakan emas ke depan.
Berikut ini adalah grafik ‘bayangan’-nya untuk emas, yang selalu membuat Jesse tetap “in background to watch developing scenarios without having to engage in unnecessarily tedious redrawing of the published chart”:
Di akhir laporan mengenai emas ini, saya hanya akan memberikan sebuah peringatan yang datang dari Louise Yamada, mantan Managing Director dan Head of Technical Research untuk Smith Barney sebelum kemudian menjadi analis independen:
“The renewed fear of further liquidity on the part of the Fed weakened the US dollar (until the next crisis?), at least short term, from its perceived safe-haven status. Gold and the dollar generally move in an inverse relationship. Therefore, were a renewed crisis to result in a dollar rally, Gold might reverse its current gains.”
Sumber : Nico Omer Jonckheere
Sumber : Nico Omer Jonckheere
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