@weissgarnix / wg. Prof. Fekete

Hallo weissgarnix,

im Goldseiten-Forum bezeichnest du heute Antal Fekete etwas abwertend als “Gold-Guru“..
Meine Frage: Ist Fekete ernst zu nehmen oder ist er ein Scharlatan?

Für Fekete sind – trotz seit 1971 abgeschafftem GS – die monetären Edelmetalle Gold und Silber immer noch der Reif, der das Welt-Finanzsystem zusammenhält. Nach seiner Theorie wurde 1971 der Gold-Futures-Handel als Trojanisches Pferd ins System eingeschleust, um die „get-quick-rich-crowd“ ins Papiergold zu kanalisieren. Der Contango im Gold/Silber-Futures-Handel sei das Bestechungsgeld, das Versprechen anstatt des Dings zu nehmen.

Er meint, im Gegensatz zu allen anderen Rohstoffen, wo Backwardation Knappheit signalisiere, hätten Contango/Backwardation bei den monetären Edelmetallen eine andere Funktion: Sie seien Indikatoren dafür, inwieweit sich Gold/Silber bereits in privater Hortung befände und ließen Rückschlüsse auf den Gesundheitszustand des bestehenden Systems zu. Er beobachtet die Gold/Silber-Basis seit 35 Jahren und sieht sie, unter Schwankungen, mit fallender Tendenz. Er vermutet, dass Backwardation zunächst bei Silber, danach bei Gold eintreten wird. Dies sei dann das Signal, dass der Gold/Silber-Futures-Handel vor dem Zusammenbruch stehe, was auch das Aus des bestehenden Dollar-Systems bedeute, unabhängig davon, ob zu diesem Zeitpunkt gerade Inflation oder Deflation vorherrsche.

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/fekete/2006/0604.html
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/fekete/2006/0623.html

Laut den laufenden Lageberichten Tom Szabo's von der Silber-Szene befinden sich Gold/Silber noch im Contango-Modus, allerdings weit unter den üblichen Levels. Silber war in den letzten Wochen mehrmals in die Backwardation gerutscht.

http://www.silveraxis.com/

Falls die Annahmen von Fekete richtig sind, müssten wir also kurz vor dem Zusammenbruch des Silber-Futures-Handel stehen und das Ende des Welt-Finanzsystems schon um die Ecke lauern.....

Hier die wichtigsten Passagen aus den oben verlinkten Fekete-Artikeln::

THE LAST CONTANGO IN WASHINGTON
by Antal E. Fekete,
Professor Emeritus, Memorial University of Newfoundland
June 4, 2006
When the silver corpse stirs, money doctors runPeople from around the world keep asking me what advance warning for the collapse of our international monetary system, based as it is on irredeemable promises to pay, they should be looking for. My answer invariably is: “watch for the last contango in silver”.It takes a little bit of explaining what this cryptic message means. Contango is that condition whereby more distant futures prices are at a premium over the nearby. The opposite is called backwardation which obtains when the nearby futures sell at a premium and the more distant futures are at a discount. When contango gives way to backwardation in all contract spreads, never again to return, it is a foolproof indication that no deliverable monetary silver exists. People with inside information have snapped it up in anticipation of an imminent monetary crisis.“Last contango” does not mean that the available supply of monetary silver has been “consumed” by industrial applications, as trumpeted by the cheerleaders of the get-rich-quick crowd. Such a notion is at odds with the fact that silver has always been, and still is, a monetary metal. Huge stores of monetary silver still exist, but are kept out of sight and availability by their current owners who, for obvious reasons, want to remain anonymous. “Last contango” is the endgame of the grand tug-of-war between the money doctors and “We, the People”. The doctors exiled silver from banking to the futures market hoping that it will drown there in a sea of paper silver. But the silver corpse stirs. People withdraw ever greater chunks of cash silver from exchange-approved warehouses. The money doctors run scared. If futures trading in silver is unsustainable and must end in default, then the flimsiness of the house of cards built of irredeemable promises will be exposed for all to see. Following the last contango in Washington the money doctors, led by Helicopter Ben, will follow the example set by the 18th century Scottish adventurer John Law of Lauriston. He left Paris in a hurry. In a disguise. Disguised as a woman.Don’t kill the goose laying silver eggs My main argument justifying the claim that the bulk of monetary silver has not been consumed is that silver, just as gold, is far more useful in monetary than in industrial applications.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GOLD BASIS
by Antal E. Fekete,
Professor Emeritus, Memorial University of Newfoundland
June 23, 2006
(…)
Supply-shocksBriefly stated, man is in a continual struggle with supply-shocks in the market. They come in two varieties: bumper crops and crop failures. The former is the Nemesis of producers, the latter that of consumers. Either way, the whole society suffers. However, supply-shocks can be mitigated through foresight, organized speculation, and intelligent warehousing. The fulcrum is the activity of warehousemen who, following the example of Joseph, allocate scarce storage space in a most efficient manner in order to provide for future contingencies.Their talisman, enabling them to perform this job successfully, is the basis. It is a seismographically most sensitive instrument to provide information in a most concentrated form. It makes for an early warning system exposing potential supply shocks threatening society. Moreover, the basis also digests information such as the producers’ estimate of what is a good price for their product, comparing it with the speculators’. The basis picks up all signals, including producers’ forward sales and speculators’ purchases of futures contracts, bringing the two into balance. The question arises how this can be accomplished. After all, the basis is the spread between the nearby (rather than distant) futures price and the cash price. The answer is: through arbitrage. Floor traders hedge their sales and purchases of distant futures as they simultaneously do the opposite transaction in nearby futures. The basis registers and harmonizes all signals coming from all markets trading that particular commodity. One cannot help but admire this fine communication system through which potential supply-shocks, ever present due to risks inherent in nature, are mitigated by the “invisible hand” as directed by the basis.
(…)
The rise of the gold basisWhen in the early 1970s governments in their wisdom discarded gold from the international monetary system, not only did they cut adrift foreign exchange and interest rates. They also let the genie of the gold basis out of the bottle. Treasury officials were confident that they could control it by giving speculators the run of the house. The fundamental feature of the gold market is contango.
(…)
God created basis. He wanted to help men fend off blows from the prodigality or frugality of nature. Like the creatures of Prometheus they would perish without fire. The basis, in the case of agricultural commodities, is just that mythological fire stolen from heaven. It is the Creator’s gift to his creatures to help them survive devastating supply-shocks.Demand-shocksBy contrast, the gold basis is not a gift of God. It is a scourge of God to punish conceited governments pretending to be omnipotent and omniscient. (…)Therein lies a great error. The gold basis has risen, but its rise is to be followed by a fall and, later, by the downfall of governments trying to play God as they gamble with the welfare of their subjects. The fall of the gold basis tells us that God’s gold cannot be drowned in a sea of paper gold. The price of the former will tend to infinity while that of the latter will keep falling to zero. The genie of the gold basis will crush the government through demand-shocks waiting in the wings of the gold market.
(…)
The monetary commodity must be immune to both supply and demand-shocks. God has kept His side of the covenant by helping man control supply-shocks. Governments haven’t: they have artificially magnified demand-shocks through foolish monetary policies.The upshot is that the basis risk is much higher for gold than for non-monetary commodities. The fall in the gold basis, whenever it comes, will have nothing to do with assumed supply-shocks. Even if governments threatened to dump all their remaining monetary gold, the result (after the news wore thin) would be counter-productive. The dumped gold, and more, would be readily absorbed.
(…)
Putative gold basis“Hey, wait a minute”, you may interject. “Is this not an anachronism? How could you talk about gold basis under a gold standard?” Well, you are right. Gold basis is a new concoction, barely 35 years old. There was no gold basis before 1970, as there were no futures markets in gold. The world’s first gold futures market opened in the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange in 1970. The contract called for the delivery of the 400 oz. (12.5 kg) international ‘good-delivery’ gold bar, the one central banks of the world have been using to settle international imbalances with one another in the good old days. I meant the putative gold basis in the previous paragraph, that is, whatever the gold basis would have been if there had been a gold futures market at the time of hyperinflation.In 1971 I went to Winnipeg to be witness to history. I purchased a seat on the exchange. I was interested in studying the variation of the gold basis on the floor first hand. At that time gold ownership and trading was still a crime in the United States pursuant to a Presidential Proclamation dating from 1933. F. D. Roosevelt nationalized (read: confiscated) monetary gold. In Canada gold ownership and trading has always been legal. Canada was chosen as testing grounds by the U.S. Treasury to see how the market would react, in preparation for the legalization of gold ownership in the U.S. four years later. The gold futures market in Winnipeg was a robust carrying-charge market.
(…)
Bribe moneyI have always felt that the gold basis was an anomaly. It certainly did not belong to the same category as the basis of agricultural commodities. It was not a bonus rewarding good husbandry. It was more like the Trojan Horse planted by a bankrupt government that wanted to take through deception what it couldn’t by force. I always looked at contango as bribe money, to induce people to take the promise instead of the real thing. It is remarkable and important that under the gold standard there was no need for bribes. (…)We may grant that gold futures trading has materially added to the longevity of the regime of irredeemable currency. But while the central bankers are buying time, sand in the hour-glass of the gold basis keeps trickling down. When it runs out, the trickle of cash gold from warehouses will have become an avalanche that could no longer be stopped. The gold futures market will be bankrupt, along with the regime of irredeemable currency.
(…)
I have never ever wavered in my conviction that such will be the denouement of the drama unfolding before our eyes. Any other outcome, however widely prophesied, whether the inflationary or deflationary variety, appears unlikely to me.
(…)
Aladdin Greenspan whistling in the black holeExpect the regime of irredeemable currency to put up a desperate and vicious fight for survival. There may be times when the gold basis bounces back. But its decline, on the average, is relentless.
(…)
My own explanation is that the shrinking contango and the persistent fall in the gold basis is a measure of the vanishing of gold into private hoards. Monetary gold together with the output of the gold mines is disappearing. Aladdin Greenspan was whistling in the black hole when he testified before a Congressional committee saying that central banks stood ready to sell more gold to quash flare-ups in the gold price. The irrefutable fact is that selling gold makes the central bank’s balance sheet weaker, not stronger. The bank would replace its best assets for the worst. It would exchange an asset that is the liability of no one for the liability of devaluation-happy governments. Central bankers are helpless. They are in a catch-22 situation. Selling gold into a rising market would be the coup-de-grâce to their fiat money scheme. They hope against hope that inundating the world with paper gold in the form of gold futures, options, ETF’s and other derivatives, existing or yet to be invented, will save their skin. It won’t. Not forever, anyhow.So I advise my audience to ignore the siren song of the Quantity Theory of Money. Focus attention on the falling gold basis. It is a foolproof indication of the disappearance of monetary gold still available to the public as insurance against economic disasters. The fact is that the vast majority of the people lives in a fool’s paradise. They haven’t given a thought to purchasing such insurance while they are busily building their homes right on the financial fault line. As a further refinement I call attention to the silver basis which, if my analysis is correct, will fall first. Not because monetary silver has been “consumed”, as trumpeted by the cheerleaders of the get-rich-quick crowd. It hasn’t. But, as the silver basis shows, silver is going into hiding even faster than gold. Why? Basically because central bankers have less scope for bluffing in the silver market. The cupboard is bare and the kitty is empty when they are looking for more silver.Sapere aude!I will not go out on one limb to make predictions about timing beyond repeating what I have already said. The indication for the imminent collapse of the international monetary system will be the “last contango in Washington”: the fall of the silver basis. It will be followed by the fall of the gold basis. These events will indicate that the irredeemable dollar has entered its death throes -- regardless what the inflation numbers say.

Gruß, wuzge (SilVisconti)

Hallo weissgarnix,

im Goldseiten-Forum bezeichnest du heute Antal Fekete etwas abwertend als
“Gold-Guru“..
Meine Frage: Ist Fekete ernst zu nehmen oder ist er ein Scharlatan?

Hi wuzge,

nein, ich kann die Arbeiten des Herrn Prof. Fekete gar nicht beurteilen, weil ich sie im Detail nicht kenne. Ich weiss nur aus anderen Quellen, dass er sich wohl stark für Gold und Goldstandard einsetzt und in der Goldszene sowas wie "Gurustatus" innehat, daher also der kompetente Ansprechpartner für die Themen sein müßte, die ich im hier und im Goldseitenforum aufgeworfen habe.

......in den letzten Tagen in Sachen Debitismus noch einiges dazugelernt

Gruß, wuzge (SilVisconti)