Armageddon Arrives in Commodities; Stocks Next

As has been the ongoing motif of this blog for many months, the grand Bernanke experiment is now experiencing some of the nasty side effects. Today's action in commodities, particularly silver and crude oil, came as a stark reminder that leveraged positions can go very, very badly in very, very short spans of time.

It was just last Friday that silver stood at the precipice of $50/ounce, approaching the all-time high. As of this writing it is now trading on the spot market at $34.76, a drop of 30% over just four days. WTI crude oil futures were at $116 on Monday, and today it closed on the NYMEX at $99.80. All those sheiks and oil robber-barons drooling over $4/gall gas across the USA can now wipe their chins with their sell tickets.

Stocks were also not immune from the liquidity trap. The Dow was down as many as 200 points around midday, but recovered a bit into the close. Still, leveraged bets (margin) on selected stocks have finally begun to display inherent risk and the carnage has only begun.

What set off today's massive selling spree were a number of unrelated events which combined to turn the trading day into an economic tornado, tearing through asset classes like a Midwestern twister. First, a series of margin tightenings on silver speculation that has been ongoing from Sunday night began the unwinding process. Silver had been hammered for three straight days without buyers on the downside. Then, with the 8:30 am release of some truly horrible weekly unemployment claims, the spring was coiled tighter.

Initial claims for the most recent week (last week in April) came in at 474,000, the highest since August of 2010, off expectations for a number around 400,000. So much for Hope and Change, Bernanke's Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) and QE2. The smart money has made its way out of Dodge and the rest of the pilgrims are scrambling to leave town with whatever they can salvage.

While commodities were being ravaged one after another, stocks were salvaged from the brunt of the storm, though they eventually faced capitulation and will likely be under pressure from the opening bell on Friday, after the April non-farm payroll report goes public at 8:30 am EDT. Following the unemployment number, expectations have been ratcheted lower. The expected number of new jobs created during the month was supposed to be around 200,000, though that's been trimmed to 185,000 and even lower by some analysts. Anything under 185,000 will produce a bloodbath. Even anything over that will likely induce more selling, on a faster pace than today's, because this is a liquidity trap, and economic numbers - good, bad or indifferent - may not matter at all.

The winners on the day were the US dollar, which majestically made its move all the way from a low of 72.81 (about the point at which Mssrs. Bernanke and Geithner were having accidents in their pantaloons) to a close at 74.08, a move of roughly 1.5%, which, in the world of currencies, is enormous. This created a vicious, self-reinforcing virtuous loop, with the dollar's rise causing commodity margin calls, and a risk-off scramble in stocks.

The other winner was bonds, which explains much. Bonds are the lifeblood of the Ponzi scheme between the Treasury, Primary Dealers and the Federal Reserve which gave us the illusion of prosperity against the backdrop of an eroding dollar. Bumping right up to the debt ceiling, the Fed intervened in a very big way today - behind the scenes, of course - to dampen risk appetite and make fixed income investments the choice for the foreseeable future. They had to, being backed into an untenable position.

It was truly a momentous day, one which we've been preparing you for with our reminders all week that the narrative was changing with the (fictitious) slaying of Osama bin Laden. And now, change has come to us all.

Dow 12,584.17, -139.41 (1.10%)
NASDAQ 2,814.72, -13.51 (0.48%)
S&P 500 1,335.10, -12.22 (0.91%)
NYSE Composite 8,397.40, -109.21 (1.28%)

Advancing issued were submerged by decliners overall, 4183-2412. The NASDAQ recorded 48 new highs and 52 new lows, the second straight day of high-low reversal. On the NYSE, there were 100 new highs and 36 new lows, mostly due to the elevated levels reached recently. It's hard to imagine the daily lows not overtaking the highs within the next week. Volume was magnificently higher as sellers sold with both hands.

NASDAQ Volume 2,241,177,750
NYSE Volume 5,510,796,500

Crude oil took an earth-shattering drop of over 8%, losing $9.44, to finish at $99.80. The selling is certainly far from over as the tempering of emotions in the Middle East after the slaying of OBL will surely push prices back to some level of sanity and take out the majority of the risk premium and speculative fever.

Gold, which had been holding up relatively well with respect to other precious metals, finally took a beating, losing $43.40 (nearly 3%), to its current trading level of $1473.10. Silver took the worst of it again, falling another $4.73, to $34.66, but there is a silver lining for the faithful in precious metals. Most of the true believers - who only hold physical metal and use the futures and ETFs only as a hedge - have a cost basis below $20/ounce.

Technically, they've lost nothing, and could still sell right here for a hefty profit. But they won't, and are actually looking at this momentous correction as a buying opportunity, hoping to snatch up more metal at what they perceive as bargain-basement prices. The general strategy is to buy once everything has more or less settled out. Nobody is really worried about catching the absolute volume, and a few days of upwards trending will not entice the hardiest of the breed. They will wait until a bottom is confirmed. Like love, they'll know it when they see it. The same strategy holds more or less true for gold bugs worldwide.

The holders of gold and silver will eventually rule the world as we approach - at breakneck speed - the eventual destruction of the global fiat money regime and the likely collapse of more than a few governments. What has happened in Greece, Iceland, Ireland and Portugal will eventually visit the shores of Japan, the USA, Great Britain, France and even China.

We are still reeling from the catastrophe of the housing bubble and collapse and the general liquidity and solvency crisis of 2008. The measures taken by the Federal Reserve and other central banks has been to throw more money at the credit monster they created, but it has resulted in extreme imbalances everywhere. The thinking at the top of government is focused already on the elections of 2012. The betting is that the US government and the financial community will have a time making it there unscathed.

If this looks anything like 2008 to those wizened enough to learn from history, those people would be on the right track, except, this time, it's likely to be worse and without any magic bullets, because the Fed is all out of them.