You are here
Citing 'financial repression,' FT's Gillian Tett sounds like Jim Rickards and Rob Kirby
Suppressing the gold price is a crucial piece of the "financial repression" cited here, as a rising gold price would advertise the theft perpetrated by government bonds paying a negative interest rate.
* * *
Ties Between Sovereigns and Banks Set to Deepen
By Gillian Tett
Financial Times, London
Sunday, December 22, 2011
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7830bb98-2cbc-11e1-aaf5-00144feabdc0.html
A few weeks ago, some senior officials at Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi spotted a fascinating fact: For the first time the volume of Japanese government bonds sitting on the bank’s balance sheet swelled above corporate and consumer loans.
Yes, you read that right: At an entity such as Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, it is now the government -- not the private sector -- which is grabbing most credit, as the bank gobbles up JGBs, notwithstanding rock-bottom low rates.
Welcome to a key theme of 2012. During the past four decades, it was widely assumed in the Western world that the main role of banks and asset managers was to provide funding to the private sector, rather than act as a piggy bank for the state. But now that assumption -- like so many of the other ideas that dominated before 2007 -- is quietly crumbling. And not just in Japan.
... Dispatch continues below ...
Sona Discovers Potential High-Grade Gold Mineralization
at Blackdome in British Columbia -- 13.6g over 1.5 Meters
From a Company Press Release
November 22, 2011
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- With its latest surface diamond drilling program at its 100-percent-owned, formerly producing Blackdome gold mine in southern British Columbia, Sona Resources Corp. has discovered a potentially high-grade gold-mineralized area, with one hole intersecting 13.6 grams of gold in 1.5 meters of core drilling.
"We intersected a promising new mineralized zone, and we feel optimistic about the assay results," says Sona's president and CEO, John P. Thompson. "We have undertaken an aggressive exploration program that has tested a number of target zones. Our discovery of this new gold-bearing structure is significant, and it represents a positive development for the company."
Sona aims to bring its permitted Blackdome mill back into production over the next year and a half, at a rate of 200 tonnes per day, with feed from the formerly producing Blackdome mine and the nearby Elizabeth gold deposit property. A positive preliminary economic assessment by Micon International Ltd., based on a gold price of $950 per ounce over eight years, has estimated a cash cost of $208 per tonne milled, or $686 per gold ounce recovered.
For the company's complete press release, please visit:
http://www.sonaresources.com/_resources/news/SONA_NR18_2011-opt.pdf
In Europe, Nicholas Sarkozy, French president, indicated this month that he is keen for banks to use their E489 billion European Central Bank bonanza to purchase more eurozone government bonds. Asset managers in places such as Spain and Ireland are now facing pressure to acquire more sovereign debt, or quasi-sovereign bonds, as debt pressures bite there.
More subtly, British banks are being required to buy more sterling bonds, as a result of regulatory reform. Even in the US, government officials and bank leaders have recently taken to muttering that American banks have an unusually low holding of US government bonds, by international standards. The unspoken assumption, then, is that as western debt levels rise, banks and asset managers' holdings of state debt will grow too -- never mind that western sovereign debt is looking riskier by the day.
Now in part this is simply a knee-jerk consequence to the current crisis. And in a sluggish world where private sector demand for credit is limited, it arguably might make macro economic sense for the banks to lend more to government. But the really big question now, that investors would do well to ask, is whether this trend also reflects a stealthy slide towards a wider process of quasi-financial repression.
To understand this, it is worth taking a look at a fascinating recent working paper by Carmen Reinhart and M. Belen Sbrancia, published by the Bank for International Settlements* but drawing on earlier work for the International Monetary Fund.
The arguments in this paper are complex. For an excellent description, see John McDermott's posts on FT Alphaville:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/12/12/793411/financial-repression-p...
But what Reinhart and Sbrancia argue is that if you want to understand how the West cut its debts during the last great bout of deleveraging, namely after the Second World War, then do not just focus on austerity or growth; instead, the crucial issue is that during that period, the state engineered a situation where the yields on government bonds were kept slightly below the prevailing rate of inflation for many years. This gap was not vast. But since asset managers and banks continued to buy those bonds at unfavourable prices, this implicit, subtle subsidy from investors helped the government to cut its debt pile over several years. Indeed, Reinhart and Sbrancia calculate that such "repression" accounted for half of the post-Second World War fiscal adjustment in the US and UK, due to the magic of compounding.
Now these days it is hard to imagine any Western government overtly calling for a second wave of such "repression." After all, as Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor, recently pointed out, the drawback of financial repression is that it curbs private-sector investment and credit growth. And in any case, it is a moot point whether such repression could even be implemented today, given the globalised nature of markets.
Nevertheless, the political incentives to flirt with this concept are clear. After all, the beauty of a stealth subsidy is precisely that: It is too subtle for most voters to understand. It is also arguably a more equitable form of burden sharing, and thus less politically divisive, than, say, state spending cuts.
Moreover, governments do not necessarily need to be "repressive" to achieve the "repression" trick. As the economist Alan Taylor observes, if investors are so terrified that they cannot see alternative investment choices, they may end up buying government bonds by default -- even at unattractive prices. Indeed, that is arguably what is already occurring today in the Treasuries market, or the world of JGBs. And, perhaps, in the eurozone too. After all, when eurozone banks were given E442 billion of ECB money two years ago, they used half of this to buy government bonds -- without compulsion at all.
Whatever you want to call it, then, the state and private-sector finance are becoming more entwined by the day. It is a profound irony of 21st-century "market" capitalism. And in 2012, it will only deepen.
-----
* -- BIS working paper 363: "The Liquidation of Government Debt" by Carmen Reinhart and M. Belen Sbrancia (with discussion by Ignacio Visco and Alan Taylor.)
* * *
Join GATA here:
Vancouver Resource Investment Conference
Sunday-Monday, January 22-23, 2012
Vancouver Convention Centre West
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
http://cambridgehouse.com/conference-details/vancouver-resource-investme...
California Investment Conference
Saturday-Sunday, February 11-12, 2012
Hyatt Grand Champions Resort
Indian Wells, California, USA
http://cambridgehouse.com/conference-details/california-investment-confe...
Support GATA by purchasing gold and silver commemorative coins:
https://www.amsterdamgold.eu/gata/index.asp?BiD=12
Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt:
Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009:
http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal
Or a video disc of GATA's 2005 Gold Rush 21 conference in the Yukon:
Help keep GATA going
GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at:
To contribute to GATA, please visit:
Prophecy Drills 384.9 Meters Grading 0.623 g/t PGM+Au,
0.3% Ni, 0.15% Cu (0.45% NiEq) From Surface At Yukon Wellgreen Project
Company Press Release
Thursday, December 8, 2011
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Prophecy Platinum Corp. (TSX-V: NKL, OTC-QX: PNIKF, Frankfurt: P94P) has announced the final drill results from 2011 drilling at the company's fully owned Wellgreen platinum group metals, nickel, and copper project in the Yukon Territory.
Borehole WS11-192 intercepted 384.9 meters of 0.45 percent nickel equivalent starting from 9.45 meters depth. Included in this greater interval of continuous mineralization is a platinum group metals-rich zone with a combined platinum-palladium-gold grade of 1.358 grams per ton over 19.23 meters (nickel equivalent 0.74%).
The final drilling results for 2011 have shown the Wellgreen Central-East and Central-West deposits to be one contiguous body, whereby there is good potential to broaden significantly the Central-West resource base, which currently contributes only about a quarter of the current 43-101 compliant resource at Wellgreen. Overall the drilling program met with good success in expanding the resource to the east and south. The long drill intercepts suggest the deposit remains very much open in those directions.
For the complete drilling results and the full company statement, please visit:
http://prophecyplat.com/news_2011_dec08_prophecy_platinum_wellgreen_dril...
