Baltic Dry Index. 565 +04 Brent Crude 59.39
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood. For these few gold has been the asset of last resort."
Antony C. Sutton
Later today, the ECB starts its own continental European version of “Abenomics
Lite.” While the Fed id in a panic that they may have to raise their key
interest rate by a miniscule quarter percent as early as June, following Friday’s
US employment report, the ECB is headed off the other way, and ever so timidly
about to join in the universal currency wars to collapse the fiat currencies.
Greece meanwhile is still meandering towards Grexit.
Below, the state of central bankster anarchy and chaos, on the Great
Nixonian Error of fiat money staggering towards its death throes. Stay long
fully paid up physical precious metals.
ECB Buying Starts New Era for Bonds, Euro
Currency heads toward parity with dollar; paying to hold debt
By Josie Cox March 8, 2015 6:13 p.m. ET
The arrival of the European Central Bank’s huge bond-buying plan Monday is
forcing investors to prepare for the once unthinkable: paying to hold debt
issued by the eurozone’s one-time trouble spots—even countries that have
recently relied on financial bailouts to stay afloat.What is more, the euro is sinking toward the point that it trades on a one-to-one basis with the dollar. Both trends are already in play.
Weighing a super-accommodative ECB, which hopes to rekindle the eurozone economy and dodge deflationary stresses with a €60 billion-a-month ($65 billion) bond-buying program, against a U.S. Federal Reserve that is preparing to raise its interest rates as early as June, investors have fled the euro.
Since last summer, the euro has shed more than a fifth of its value against the greenback.
“It’s a very clear divergence of monetary policy and we are still very positive on the dollar against the euro,” said Andrew Wilson, chief executive officer for Europe at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, which has assets of more than $950 billion under management.
On Friday, the euro lurched lower again, dropping as far as $1.0839, its lowest point since 2003, before inching up to end the day at $1.0843. Additional pressure came from the U.S., with better-than-expected news about employment teeing up a possible U.S. rate rise as soon as this summer. If current trends stay in place, the euro could soon fetch $1.
“A move down to parity looks realistic,” said Adrian Owens, a currency-fund manager at Swiss investment firm GAM who manages just over $3 billion in assets. “The only question is whether we get there in three to four months or whether it takes 18 months.”
The euro was last at parity against the dollar more than 12 years ago, in November 2002. In July 2008, it hit its all-time high of just over $1.60.
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Creditors Reject Greece's Reform Proposals
10:00 PM WET March 8, 2015
(Bloomberg) -- Greece’s
provisional agreement with creditors to avert a default started to crack as
European officials said the country’s latest proposals fell far short of what
was tabled two weeks ago and Greek ministers floated the prospect of a
referendum if their reforms are rejected.
The list of measures Greece’s
government sent to euro region finance ministers last Friday, including the
idea of hiring non-professional tax collectors such as tourists, is “far” from
complete and the country probably won’t receive an aid disbursement this month,
Eurogroup chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem said on Sunday.
Greece’s anti-austerity
government, elected in January on a promise to renegotiate the terms of a
240-billion euro ($260 billion) bailout, has to present detailed proposals to
European creditors or risk running out of cash as soon as this month. The
renewed tensions threaten to temper a rally in Greek bonds sparked by optimism
over the provisional accord.
“It seems their money box is
almost empty,” Dijsselbloem told reporters at an event on Sunday organized by
Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant in Amsterdam.
Greece is seeking the
disbursement of an outstanding aid tranche totaling about 7 billion euros.
Without access to capital markets, its only sources of financing are emergency
loans from the euro area’s crisis fund and the International Monetary Fund. Its
banks are being kept afloat by an Emergency Liquidity Assistance lifeline,
subject to approval by the European Central Bank.
“I can only say that we have
money to pay salaries and pensions of public employees,” Greek Finance Minister
Yanis Varoufakis told Italy’s Il Corriere della Sera in an interview Sunday.
“For the rest we will see.”
More
Austria is fast becoming Europe's latest debt nightmare
A mini-Greece is about to go off in Europe's heartlands, and markets don't even know it
Ah Austria, land of schnitzel,
lederhosen, Mozart, alpine meadows and beer drinking. Less widely appreciated
is its special place in the history of catastrophic banking crises.
It was the failure of
Creditanstalt, a Viennese bank founded in 1855 by Anselm von Rothschild, that
arguably sparked the Great Depression, setting off an unstoppable chain
reaction of bankruptcies throughout Europe and America.
No-one would think that what
happened last week at Austria’s failed Hypo Alpe-Adria Bank International falls
into quite the same category; we are meant to be in the recovery phase of the
latest global banking crisis, so this is more about re-setting the system than
again bringing it to its knees, right?
Well, make up your own mind. I
suspect neither financial markets nor policymakers have yet caught onto the
full significance of the latest turn of events.
In a nutshell, the Austrian
government has had enough of funding the bank’s losses, and announced plans to
“bail-in” external creditors to the tune of €7.6bn instead.
As such, this marks a test case
of new European rules to make creditors pay for failing banks. About time too,
you might say. What took them so long?
Only in this case, the bonds are
notionally guaranteed by the Austrian state of Carinthia, which now
theoretically becomes liable for the bail-in. It’s an echo of the mess Ireland
got itself into at the height of the banking crisis, when it foolishly
attempted to stem the panic by underwriting all Irish banking liabilities; the
move very nearly ended up bankrupting the entire country. Hypo will bankrupt
Carinthia.
Essentially, what the Austrian
government is doing is cutting loose an entire region, rather in the way the
federal authorities in the US allowed Detroit to go bust a number of years ago.
It’s a mini-Greece going off in
the heartlands of Europe.
More
Fed ‘can’t hang around’ for hikes after jobs report, analysts say
Published: Mar 6, 2015 3:26 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The strong payroll data for February increases
the chances that the Federal Reserve drops the word “patient” from its forward
guidance later this month, setting the stage for a rate hike in June or
September, analysts said.“My sense is this report keeps them on track to raise rates in the middle of the year,” said Christopher Low, chief economist at FTN Financial in New York.
The U.S. labor market added 295,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate fell to a cycle-low 5.5%. Hourly wages rose a scant 0.1% in the month, lowering the year over year rate to 2%. See comprehensive report on the data.
Paul Dales, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, said “even if wage growth is still subdued, the Fed can’t hang around before raising rates.”
U.S. stocks sold off on the jobs report, while the dollar and Treasury yields rose.
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Technical breakdown in the S&P 500 is significant
Published: Mar 6, 2015 3:03 p.m. ET
Opinion: The bears are taking control
The chart of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index broke below support at 2,090, and that is significant.The stock market, as measured by the S&P 500 Index SPX, -1.42% had recently gone dull after making new all-time highs.
The S&P 500 Index was unable to build any momentum since breaking out above its prior, late-December peak two weeks ago. In fact, the index had become one, large yawn-inducing slug.
That is changing today — in a big way — and it’s a welcome change for anyone looking to trade volatility or momentum.
The 2,090 level wasn't only the previous late-December high, but had also quelled daily declines for about three weeks now. The 20-day moving average of the S&P 500, which is still rising, is now near 2,090 also. Hence, if that area is clearly penetrated on the downside — if SPX closes below there today — a move toward the next support level at 2,065 would be likely. A breech of that level would resurrect targets near 2,000.
Equity-only put-call ratios have remained bullish for several weeks. They continue to decline on their charts, yet they are not so low as to be considered overbought.
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Exclusive: China's international payments system ready, could launch by year-end - sources
HONG KONG(Reuters) - A long-awaited China International Payment System (CIPS) that would facilitate international usage of the yuan is ready and may be launched as early as September or October, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
The system, which would be a worldwide payments superhighway for the yuan CHN= CNY=CFXS, will replace a patchwork of networks and allow hassle-free renminbi transactions, greatly boosting the internationalization of the Chinese currency.
"The CIPS is ready now and China has selected 20 banks to do the testing, among which 13 banks are Chinese banks and the rest are subsidiaries of foreign banks," said a senior banking source who is involved in the matter.
"The official launch will be in September or October, depending on the results of the testings and preparation," the source said.
A second source with direct knowledge of the matter said authorities are striving to launch the first phase of CIPS before December.
"It's not a plan but we are trying our best to have the first phase (of CIPS) online before the end of this year," said the source, who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.
"If it's all smooth, (the launch) will be in September or October. If there is a need for a bit more time, we are still confident about (rolling it out) before the year-end," he said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/09/us-china-yuan-payments-idUSKBN0M50BV20150309
In oil news, if the crude price surges, expect a new flood of oil from
America’s frackers. Those US frackers that don’t default or go bust later this
year, are planning to game any and every oil price rally for the rest of the
decade,
Introducing fracklog, the new-fangled oil storage system
Dan Murtaugh and Lynn Doan, Bloomberg News Friday, Mar. 6,
2015
Oil drillers expecting prices to
rebound after the biggest drop in six years have come up with an alternative to
storing their crude in tanks: They’re keeping it in the ground.
It’s a new twist on an old
oil-trading technique, known as a contango storage play, in which a trader buys
cheap crude in an oversupplied market and saves it to lock in profits at higher
future prices. Drillers who have spent millions boring holes through
petroleum-rich shale rock are just waiting for prices to go up before turning
on the spigot.
From North Dakota to Texas, there
are more than 3,000 wells that have been drilled but not tapped, based on
estimates from Wood Mackenzie Ltd. and RBC Capital Markets LLC. Waiting gives
producers such as Apache Corp. and EOG Resources Inc. a better chance of
receiving a higher price.
It could also delay a recovery by attracting more
supply every time prices rise.
“Effectively, the rock is the
storage,” Troy Cook, an analyst with the Energy Information Administration in
Washington D.C., said by phone. “If you can afford to hang on to it, you could
certainly choose to wait until the price goes up.”
Shale drilling is a two-part
process.
Once a rig bores a horizontal
tunnel through the underground shale layers, another crew blasts it with a
mixture of water, sand and chemicals to crack the rock and release the oil.
It’s only after the second process, known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking,
that the well is complete and able to produce oil.
The backlog of unfracked wells —
call it a fracklog — is one reason that U.S. crude output is poised to climb
even as companies have idled more than a third of the rigs that were drilling
for oil in October. About 85 percent of U.S. wells aren’t being completed right
now, Continental Resources Inc. Chief Executive Officer Harold Hamm said in a
March 2 interview.
“If you shut off all drilling and
just went to pure completions, you’re still talking about a half a year of
production growth,” Harold York, vice president of integrated energy research
at consulting company Wood Mackenzie Ltd., said Thursday by phone.
The U.S. produced 9.32 million
barrels of crude the week of Feb. 27, the highest level in weekly Energy
Information Administration data going back to 1983. Output will average 9.3
million barrels a day this year, up 7.8 percent from 2014, the agency predicted
Feb. 10. Oil inventories at 444.4 million barrels are at the highest level
since 1930.
In North Dakota, home to the
prolific Bakken shale formation, the number of unfracked wells ballooned in
November as companies slowed crews to avoid releasing the initial flood of oil
into a low-price environment, Lynn Helms, the state’s oil and gas director,
said in January.
Apache, the third-largest
leaseholder in the Permian Basin, has deferred completions to trim costs and
try to bring its oil to market when prices are higher, Chief Executive Officer
John Christmann said Feb. 12 on a conference call with investors.
Anadarko Petroleum Corp. expects
to have as many as 440 uncompleted wells by the end of the year. EOG started
the year with about 200 uncompleted wells and plans to let that inventory build
in the first half of the year, CEO Bill Thomas said on a Feb. 25 conference
call. Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., the largest heavy oil producer in
Canada, has 161 uncompleted wells.
“Most of these wells, they’re
high-rate wells that decline fairly rapidly so it makes sense to hold off until
prices stabilize,” Steve Laut, the company’s Calgary-based president, said in a
phone interview March 5. “That’s where most of the value is going to be, in
that first production period.”
----Delaying completions could also, paradoxically, extend the very oil slump companies are trying to wish away. If drillers respond to price increases by finishing more wells and adding new crude supply, it would delay the conditions needed for a rebound.
A well should take no longer than
three months to complete, depending on the time it takes to hire contractors, set
up equipment and fracture, according to Charles Kemp, senior consultant at
Dallas-based energy consulting company Baker & O’Brien Inc. James Cron, an
independent petroleum engineer in Flaxton, North Dakota, pegged it at anywhere
from one to three months.
Initial production from a new
well ranges from 750 to 1,000 barrels a day, based on estimates compiled by
Bloomberg Intelligence. That means the fracklog could represent as much as 3
million barrels a day of new output, at least at the outset.
More
We end with China’s new English language website on the Diaoyu Islands.
Yet another Great Nixonian Error of 1971. Nixon passed “administration” over
the Diaoyu Islands to Japan, but not sovereignty, because following the Cairo
Declaration of 1943, only China would hold sovereignty after the war.
"For more than two thousand years gold's natural qualities made it man's universal medium of exchange. In contrast to political money, gold is honest money that survived the ages and will live on long after the political fiats of today have gone the way of all paper."
Hans F. Sennholz
At the Comex silver
depositories Friday final figures were: Registered 68.85 Moz, Eligible 109.73
Moz, Total 178.58 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, a worrying split in
NATO. The American War Party, cheered on by faraway disarming Great Britain,
seem to want war over the Ukraine. Those continental countries with most to
lose from a war with Russia and the hundreds of thousands of refugees it will
generate, are desperately trying for peace. The American War Party is getting
ever more desperate as its puppet state falls increasingly apart. It is now
doing all in its power to push for European war.
Breedlove's Bellicosity: Berlin Alarmed by Aggressive NATO Stance on Ukraine
By SPIEGEL Staff March 06, 2015 – 07:47 PM
It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet
day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian
army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was
being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn't holding perfectly, but it was
holding.
On
that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe,
stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once
again "upped the ante" in eastern Ukraine -- with "well over a
thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most
sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery" having been sent to
the Donbass. "What is clear," Breedlove said, "is that right
now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day."
German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn't understand what Breedlove was talking about.
And it wasn't the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).
The pattern has become a familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove's numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America's NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.
The German government is alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel? Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove's comments as "dangerous propaganda." Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even found it necessary recently to bring up Breedlove's comments with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg.
But Breedlove hasn't been the only source of friction. Europeans have also begun to see others as hindrances in their search for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict. First and foremost among them is Victoria Nuland, head of European affairs at the US State Department. She and others would like to see Washington deliver arms to Ukraine and are supported by Congressional Republicans as well as many powerful Democrats.
Indeed, US President Barack Obama seems almost isolated. He has thrown his support behind Merkel's diplomatic efforts for the time being, but he has also done little to quiet those who would seek to increase tensions with Russia and deliver weapons to Ukraine. Sources in Washington say that Breedlove's bellicose comments are first cleared with the White House and the Pentagon. The general, they say, has the role of the "super hawk," whose role is that of increasing the pressure on America's more reserved trans-Atlantic partners.
A mixture of political
argumentation and military propaganda is necessary. But for months now, many in
the Chancellery simply shake their heads each time NATO, under Breedlove's
leadership, goes public with striking announcements about Russian troop or tank
movements. To be sure, neither Berlin's Russia experts nor BND intelligence
analysts doubt that Moscow is supporting the pro-Russian separatists. The BND
even has proof of such support.
But it is the tone of Breedlove's
announcements that makes Berlin uneasy. False claims and exaggerated accounts,
warned a top German official during a recent meeting on Ukraine, have put NATO
-- and by extension, the entire West -- in danger of losing its credibility.
There are plenty of examples.
Just over three weeks ago, during the cease-fire talks in Minsk, the Ukrainian
military warned that the Russians -- even as the diplomatic marathon was
ongoing -- had moved 50 tanks and dozens of rockets across the border into
Luhansk. Just one day earlier, US Lieutenant General Ben Hodges had announced
"direct Russian military intervention."
Senior officials in Berlin
immediately asked the BND for an assessment, but the intelligence agency's
satellite images showed just a few armored vehicles. Even those American
intelligence officials who supply the BND with daily situation reports were
much more reserved about the incident than Hodges was in his public statements.
One intelligence agent says it "remains a riddle until today" how the
general reached his conclusions.
---- The government in Berlin is concerned that Breedlove's statements could harm the West's credibility. The West can't counter Russian propaganda with its own propaganda, "rather it must use arguments that are worthy of a constitutional state." Berlin sources also say that it has become conspicuous that Breedlove's controversial statements are often made just as a step forward has been made in the difficult negotiations aimed at a political resolution. Berlin sources say that Germany should be able to depend on its allies to support its efforts at peace.
More
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/germany-concerned-about-aggressive-nato-stance-on-ukraine-a-1022193.html#ref=nl-international
"Gold would have value if for no other reason than that it enables a citizen to fashion his financial escape from the state."
William F. Rickenbacker
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished February
DJIA: +120 Down. NASDAQ: +213 Down. SP500: +169 Down.
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