Business

Over the weekend, using the latest Commitment of Traders data, we showed something gold-traders had been aware in recent months (and years): "having closed lower for 8 of the last 9 weeks, gold has become the momentum-chasing hedge fund community's latest target.... Managed Money added to its already record short position in gold futures this week, pushing the leveraged bets to the most extremely bearish in history."

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

Good friend Michael Pollaro just sent a couple of charts that show the US economy heading for a brick wall. The first illustrates what happens when business sales (the green line) turn negative. In the previous two boom/bust cycles, when sales started falling the economy either tipped into recession shortly thereafter or (it was discovered in retrospect) was already well into a contraction.

The 'death cross' of these two energy market indicators is all one needs to know about the oil market...

As Bloomberg notes, total industry oil stocks reported by the International Energy Agency rose for a third month, increasing by 0.5 percent to the highest on record at 2.99 billion barrels.

China’s Beige Book, released last week, showed further economic deterioration in one of the world’s largest commodity-consuming nations in the fourth quarter.

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In late October, we noted that for the second time this year, Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as the biggest exporter of crude to China.

As a result of the Fed's balance sheet expanding to $4.5 trillion over the past 7 years, the most direct consequence has been the increase in excess reserves held at various banks to just over $2.5 trillion. This, as we have shown before using the Fed's H.8 data, means that cash held by various commercial banks has risen proportionately, and as shown in the chart below, there has been a direct correlation between the amount of excess reserves in the system (shown by the black line) and bank cash holdings.