In a world defined by “financial innovation”, where $1 of hard collateral can spawn over $1000 in repoed and rehypothecated liabilities (and assets), where “shadow banking” is far more important than traditional bank liabilities (and to this date remains completely misunderstood), and where every month the central and commercial banks force create over $100 billion in credit money (which end consumers refuse to absorb and which therefore ends up in the stock market), the concept of a “hard asset” is an increasingly redundant anachronism.
Yet while the Federal Reserve has emerged as the bastion of the New Normal’s financial innovation front in which the concept of money is backed by absolutely nothing other than the Dollar’s increasingly fleeting reserve status, when it comes to the definition of “Old Normal” money - gold - it still is the domain of the first and original central bank: London.
At first blush, most would not associate London with the hard asset mecca of the world: in fact, when it comes to some of the most spectacular hyper-levered “New Normal” cataclysms in recent years: AIG, Lehman, MF Global, JPMorgan’s London Whale, all of them originated in London. Yet for the most part these events occurred precisely because of the mindboggling leverage already employed by the London financial system.
Recall that the UK has some 600% in financial debt/GDP - an unprecedented amount compared to any other developed world nation. Yet, paradoxically, the fact that there is so much financial leverage implies that there must be an abundance of hard assets at the bottom of the London Exter Pyramid.
After all, financial counterparties, especially in this day and age, may be insolvent but they are not idiots, and all will demand at least some paper representation that there is a trace of hard collateral at the bottom of the latest financial Frankenstein CDO, SPV, CLO, CPDO, RMBS or [insert any other modern financial "asset" acronym]. And keep in mind we are talking private sector gold: Gordon Brown’s epic blunder of dumping the sovereign UK gold at rock bottom prices hardly needs a mention.
Which is why in order to spawn such a gargantuan amount of financial debt, London, which for centuries was the financial capital of the world and which sequestered the bulk of the world’s real, tangible wealth until the ascendancy of the US in the 20th century, London’s commercial vaults, are literally full of gold (as much as it may pale in comparison with the total notional amount of liabilities it has created).
After all it is the London Billion Market Association. Not New York, Zurich orSingapore.
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