The Silver Alpha

A love affair with silver is so natural. The fundamentals are astoundingly positive and bullish in price prospects. My basic argument has been repeated many times. Industry has countless uses for silver, significant demand. But industry has only miniscule isolated uses for gold, in trivial demand. So silver wins on the Demand side of the equation. Central... Read more...

Fitch Puts Entire US Residential Mortgage Servicer Space on Negative Outlook

What’s that you say Bank of America and JPM, “it’s all contained?” Hey Fed, it’s not too late to add $8 trillion in MBS to QE2. On the other hand, now we know what QE3 will be buying. Fitch Ratings-New York-04 November 2010: Fitch Ratings has assigned a Negative Outlook for the entire U.S. Residential Mortgage Servicer... Read more...

RICO Suit Filed Against HSBC And JPMorgan for Silver Market Manipulation

If JPM and HSBC hoped that the lawsuits filed a week ago by Brian Beatty and Peter Laskari, which we discussed previously, were going to be the end of their public exposure with regard to possible silver market manipulation, they are about to be disappointed. Today, in a separate lawsuit filed by Carl Loeb in the Southern District of New York, a new... Read more...

FOMC Announcement: $600 Billion

Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in September confirms that the pace of recovery in output and employment continues to be slow. Household spending is increasing gradually, but remains constrained by high unemployment, modest income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Business spending on equipment and software... Read more...

Regulators Face Uphill Battle as Dark Pools Grow Murkier

It would be hard to find a phrase less suited to generating confidence in markets, or more specifically market structures, than “dark pools”. It conjures up a world where trading is done in secret, away from public view. It suggests possibly nefarious activities carried out beyond the sight of regulators. The latter statement is (probably) false.... Read more...

How the Banks Put the Economy Underwater

This chapter of the financial crisis is a self-inflicted wound. The major banks and their agents have for years taken shortcuts with their mortgage securitization documents — and not due to a momentary lack of attention, but as part of a systematic approach to save money and increase profits. The result can be seen in the stream of reports of colossal... Read more...

U.S. “Quantitative Easing” is Fracturing the Global Economy

What is reversing trends that seemed irreversible for the past 65 years is the manner in which the United States has dealt with its bad-debt crisis. The Federal Reserve and Treasury are seeking to inflate the economy out of debt with an explosion of bank liquidity and credit – which means yet more debt. This is occurring largely at other countries’... Read more...

Ambac Says May Go Bankrupt This Year

In March, Wisconsin Insurance Commissioner Sean Dilweg, who regulates the company’s Ambac Assurance Corp unit, seized $64 billion of Ambac’s worst assets. On October 8, he filed a rehabilitation plan for a segregated account containing those assets, which would pay policyholders a combination of cash and notes for their claims. Read more... Read more...

Gold Will Outlive Dollar Once Slaughter Comes

The world’s monetary system is in the process of melting down. We have entered the endgame for the dollar as the dominant reserve currency, but most investors and policy makers are unaware of the implications. The only questions are how long the denouement of the dollar reserve system will last, and how much more damage will be inflicted by new rounds... Read more...

Court Voids Swaps in UniCredit Derivatives Case

An Italian court has cancelled interest rate swaps between UniCredit SpA (CRDI.MI) and the city of Rimini in the first ruling backing a local government in a  derivatives case, Rimini municipal government said on Friday. UniCredit, Italy’s biggest bank, has been ordered to pay back Rimini 651,632.43 euros ($906,600), the amount the city had lost... Read more...

Treasury Explores Forex Swaps Exemption From CFTC Rules

The U.S. Treasury Department is seeking public comment to determine if it should exempt foreign-exchange swaps and forwards from the over-the-counter derivatives regulations being developed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In a notice in Thursday’s Federal Register, Treasury raised the question of whether exchange trading and clearing... Read more...

ConvergEx Launches Abraxas Europe

Press Release Highly Adaptable Technology to Source Fragmented European Liquidity LONDON, Oct. 27 /PRNewswire/ — ConvergEx Group, a leading technology company, today announced the European launch of Abraxas(SM), the firm’s tactical trading algorithm that uses several technologies to source liquidity in both displayed and dark venues.  Using... Read more...

Singapore OKs Dark-Pool Deal

A joint venture between Singapore Exchange Ltd. and Chi-X Global Inc. received approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore to operate what is known as a dark pool, further expanding the role of alternative trading platforms in the Asian-Pacific region. Trading in the dark pool is expected to begin in the fourth quarter, according to a statement... Read more...

JPMorgan, HSBC Sued for Alleged Silver Conspiracy

JPMorgan Chase & Co and HSBC Holdings Plc were hit with two lawsuits on Wednesday by investors who accused them of conspiring to drive down silver prices, and reaping an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profits. The banks, among the world’s largest, were accused of manipulating the market for COMEX silver futures and options... Read more...

Investors in MBS Deals Prepare to Fight Back

It just went from bad to worse for mortgage servicers: Bloomberg reports that investors who collectively hold over $500 billion in MBS, are huddling and preparing to fire back at the servicers. Mortgage-bond investors represented by Dallas lawyer Talcott Franklin will send letters to securities trustees complaining that they shouldn’t bear the costs... Read more...

Imminent Big Bank Death Spiral

The mortgage and foreclosure scandal runs so deep that ordinary observers can conclude the US financial foundation is laced with a cancer detectable by ordinary people. The metastasis is visible from the distribution of mortgage bonds into the commercial paper market, money market funds, the bank balance sheets, pension funds under management, foreign... Read more...

Is HFT Ready to Take Over the World?

High-frequency trading may be poised to take over the world. While high-frequency traders in the United States and Europe increasingly are looking to expand into emerging markets, exchanges in places such as Brazil and India have been actively increasing their capacity in terms of lower latency and throughput. At the same time, regulators in these markets... Read more...

US Asks to Seal Courtroom to Guard Goldman Sachs Secrets

U.S. prosecutors asked a federal judge to seal the courtroom for part of the upcoming criminal trial of a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer, an effort to protect the secrecy of the bank’s high-frequency trading platform. * U.S. says Goldman could be harmed if details leaked * Defense seeks to prove no intent to harm Goldman NEW YORK –... Read more...

Tighter Derivatives Rules Gain Headway in U.S., EU

The first global crackdown on the $615-trillion derivatives market gained momentum on Tuesday when U.S. regulators unveiled a new tool to police would-be fraudsters and European officials urged tighter controls. Moving to rein in vast markets that were only loosely policed going into the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading... Read more...

Statement at the CFTC Public Meeting

By: CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton I believe that there have been repeated attempts to influence prices in the silver markets.  There have been fraudulent efforts to persuade and deviously control that price.  Based on what I have been told by members of the public, and reviewed in publicly available documents, I believe violations to the Commodity... Read more...

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