All fundamental arguments about just about everything go out the window, and it's all about the dollar vortex

Always check the show notes.  Title of the show is "FED Will Hike to 6% and Crash Everything, says Tom Luongo," dated October 12, 2022.

Antonio Atanasov and Tom Luongo are not your investment advisors. They likely own shares of companies mentioned in this publication. Always assume them biased.

Antonio, 1:02 I don't know about the other two asset classes [goats and guns], but gold has not been great over the last 52 weeks [Tom shaking his head in agreement], neither have my stocks.  What's up with that?  

Tom, 1:12  Well, we're in a dollar bull market, and when the dollar is in a bull market, everything else at this point, and certainly the severity of the dollar bull market, looking at the U.S. dollar index, it's trading at a 20-year high, 25-year high, it's immense.  This isn't a normal dollar market, or a normal bear market correction, or a bull market rally.  This is not a bear market rally.  This is a sincere bull market that is draining liquidity from every corner of the globe, and it is something that I expected to happen, because I expected the Federal Reserve to be aggressive at raising interest rates when they did decide to move back into the market.  I have a lot of reasons as to why I believe that.  I believed that previously, and then when the Fed started raising interest rates, I've actually been a little shocked that they've been aggressive as they have.  Actually, I'm edified because Powell is acting like how I would have acted had I been the chairman of the Fed, looking at the world the way that I look at it.  

2:20  Gold is priced, set at the margin by the future's market, and the future's market in gold, in the west, primarily, is a cash-settled market; it's not a gold-settled market.  People don't go in to buy gold futures to then take physical delivery of, you know, 400 ounces of LBMA bars, or 100 ounce Comex's.  They don't do that.  They go in to hedge their dollar risk.  And so know that they've got interest rate swaps, so they've got treasuries . . . so if they're worried about their dollar-based longs being--you know, how are you going to hedge your dollar-based longs?  You buy some gold, which is a short against the dollar.  Buy gold, sell dollars.  Or buy term to make dollars, and then you hedge your position.  

3:15  Under these types of moments in time, all fundamental arguments about gold go out the window.  All fundamental arguments about just about everything go out the window, and it's all about the dollar vortex.  It's all about the dollar vacuum, for lack of a better term.  We're seeing it in stocks, we're seeing it in bonds, we're seeing it in gold.  We're seeing it everywhere except basically in base commodities, okay, which have pumped and dumped over the last year and a half, post-COVID. 

3:47  So, why is that?  Well, stocks and bonds, real estate, car prices, stuff like that, they're all credit based.  When the credit cycle is virtuous, when the credit is expanding, and the central banks are all expanding their balance sheets, and they're at the zero bound and the money is cheap, people buy loans, they expand credit, they pump up prices, but we haven't produced any more real commodities.  We're just driving the prices of commodities up, because at some point, during that time that you're pumping up asset prices, money is not preferentially flowing into commodities during the asset bull market.  Commodity producers are getting crushed.  They're getting pushed down to their cost of production, cost of goods sold.  They're effectively on a cost-plus business model.  You're allowed to have cost plus 3%.  If you look at gold stocks through the bear markets, that's the way it's been.  And then gold hit a bottom in late 2015.  We're on a five-year up until Q3 of 2020.  Since then it's been in a bull market correction.