August 5, 2010
For the past few years, investors have been flocking to exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as an alternative to mutual funds, which often penalize investors for bailing out less than 90 days after buying in. The ETFs are traded on exchanges in the same manner as individual stocks. Investors can buy however many shares of an ETF as they desire, rather than being faced with a minimum investment as required by many mutual funds. Other investors see ETFs as a less-risky alternative than buying individual stocks, since some funds consist of an assortment of stocks from a given sector.
The most recent essay by one of my favorite commentators, Paul Farrell of MarketWatch, is focused on the ETFs that are based on commodities, rather than stocks. As it turns out, the commodity ETFs have turned out to be yet another one of Wall Street’s weapons of mass financial destruction. Paul Farrell brings the reader’s attention to a number of articles written on this subject – all of which bear a theme similar to the title of Mr. Farrell’s piece: “Commodity ETFs: Toxic, deadly, evil”.
Mr. Farrell discussed a recent article from Bloomberg BusinessWeek, exposing the hazards inherent in commodity ETFs. That article began by discussing the experience of a man who invested $10,000 in an ETF called the U.S. Oil Fund (ticker symbol: USO), designed to track the price of light, sweet crude oil. The investor’s experience became a familiar theme for many who had bought into commodity ETFs:
What happened next didn’t make sense. Wolf watched oil go up as predicted, yet USO kept going down. In February 2009, for example, crude rose 7.4 percent while USO fell by 7.4 percent. What was going on?
What was going on was something called “contango”. The BusinessWeek article explained it this way:
Contango is a word traders use to describe a specific market condition, when contracts for future delivery of a commodity are more expensive than near-term contracts for the same stuff. It is common in commodity markets, though as Wolf and other investors learned, it can spell doom for commodity ETFs. When the futures contracts that commodity funds own are about to expire, fund managers have to sell them and buy new ones; otherwise they would have to take delivery of billions of dollars’ worth of raw materials. When they buy the more expensive contracts — more expensive thanks to contango — they lose money for their investors. Contango eats a fund’s seed corn, chewing away its value.
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Contango isn’t the only reason commodity ETFs make lousy buy-and-hold investments. Professional futures traders exploit the ETFs’ monthly rolls to make easy profits at the little guy’s expense. Unlike ETF managers, the professionals don’t trade at set times. They can buy the next month ahead of the big programmed rolls to drive up the price, or sell before the ETF, pushing down the price investors get paid for expiring futures. The strategy is called “pre-rolling.”
“I make a living off the dumb money,” says Emil van Essen, founder of an eponymous commodity trading company in Chicago. Van Essen developed software that predicts and profits from pre-rolling. “These index funds get eaten alive by people like me,” he says.
A look at 10 well-known funds based on commodity futures found that, since inception, all 10 have trailed the performance of their underlying raw materials, according to Bloomberg data.
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Just as they did with subprime mortgage-backed securities, Wall Street banks are transferring wealth from their clients to their trading desks. “You walk into a casino, you expect to lose money,” says Greg Forero, former director of commodities trading at UBS (UBS). “It’s the same with these products. You’re playing a game with a very high rake, a very high house advantage, and you’re not the house.”
Another problem caused by commodity ETFs is the havoc they create by raising prices of consumer goods – not because of a supply and demand effect – but purely by financial speculation:
Wheat prices jumped 52 percent in early 2008, setting records before plunging again, and sugar more than doubled last year even as the economy slowed, forcing Reinwald’s Bakery in Huntington, N.Y., to fire five of its 32 employees. “You try and budget to make money, but that’s becoming impossible to predict,” says owner Richard Reinwald, chairman of the Retail Bakers of America.
Paul Farrell also brought our attention to an article entitled “ETFs Gone Wild” to highlight the hazards these products create for the entire financial system:
In Bloomberg Markets’ “ETFs Gone Wild,” investors are warned that many ETFs are “stuffed with exotic derivatives,” at risk of becoming “the next financial time bomb.” In short, thanks to ETFs, Wall Street is already creating a dangerous new kind of global weapon of mass destruction — a bomb primed to detonate like the 2000 dot-coms, the 2008 subprimes — and detonation is dead ahead.
Mr. Farrell’s essay included a discussion of a Rolling Stone article by McKenzie Funk, describing the exploits of Phil Heilberg, a former AIG commodity trader. The Rolling Stone piece demonstrated how commodity ETFs are just the latest weapon used to advance “Chaos Capitalism”:
And yet, as Funk puts it: “Heilberg’s bet on chaos is beginning to play out on the streets.” The toxic trail of commodity ETFs is already proving to be deadly, starving thousands worldwide, while the new Capitalists of Chaos only see incredible profit opportunities, as they make huge bets that they’ll get even richer in the next round of catastrophes, disasters, poverty, starvation and wars.
Bottom line: Commodity ETF/WMDs are mutating into a toxic pandemic fueled (and protected by) the insatiable greed of banks, traders and politicians whose brains are incapable of giving up their profit machine, won’t until it implodes and self-destructs. The Wall Street Banksters have no sense of morals, no ethics, no soul, no goal in life other than getting very rich, very fast. They care nothing of democracy, civilization or the planet.
Don’t count on the faux financial “reform” bill to remedy any of the problems created by commodity ETFs. As the BusinessWeek article pointed out, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is going to have its hands full:
How much the new law will help remains to be seen, says Jill E. Sommers, one of the agency’s five commissioners, because Congress still needs to appropriate funds and write guidelines for implementation and enforcement.
Let’s not overlook the fact that those “guidelines” are going to be written by industry lobbyists. The more things change — the more they remain the same.
Jobless Recovery Myth Is Dead
August 12, 2010
On July 29, I discussed the fact that for over a year, many pundits have been anticipating a “jobless recovery”. In other words: don’t be concerned about the fact that so many people can’t find jobs – the economy will recover anyway. Recent economic reports have exposed how the widespread corporate tactic of cost-cutting by mass layoffs (to gin-up the bottom line in time for earnings reports) has finally taken its toll. Although this tactic has helped to inflate stock prices and produce the illusion that the broader economy is experiencing a sustained recovery, we are finding out that the opposite is true. The “jobless recovery” advocates ignore the fact the American economy is 70 percent consumer-driven. If those consumers don’t have jobs, they aren’t going to be spending money. Timothy Homan and Alex Tanzi of Bloomberg News gave us the ugly truth on Wednesday:
The August 10 press release from the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) began this way:
Steve Goldstein of MarketWatch recently wrote a piece entitled, “The jobless recovery won’t go further without jobs”. Mr. Goldstein explains that the corporations relying on layoffs to juice their earnings reports are running out of people to sacrifice for their bottom line:
Business consultant Matthew C. Keegan wrote an essay for the SayEducate website entitled, “Jobless Recovery & Other Illusions”. He began the piece with this thought:
Steve Goldstein’s MarketWatch article raised the possibility that this cloud may have a silver lining:
Another myth bites the dust.
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