Baltic Dry Index. 2501 -01
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $3,000.
"But together we represent some 85 per cent of the global economy, and we have forged a coordinated response to the worst global economic crisis of our time."
President Barack Obama. Toronto June 28, 2010.
Below, after hapless Canadian taxpayers footed a bill for 1 billion CDN to host the G-8 and G-20 summits of the elite, the vainglorious, the incompetent, the irrelevant, the despicable and the downright murderous, money surely that could have been spent better on the poorest and the disabled of Canada, the best that was achieved was to “forge” consensus that adopted the very worst of the European Union’s Herman in Wonderland’s “assymetrical translation.” In effect, in translation, everyone agrees to read the final communiqué as adopting their own position entirely. And for this was a billion dollars of Canadian wealth poured away into the sewers of Toronto. If only the world’s top diplomatic negotiators ever spent 45 hours drafting a solution to Darfur, Israel-Palestine, ending the bankster gambling economy, setting safe standards for deep water oil and gas drilling before we wreck the planet, or getting back to sound money before the crash of the Euro or dollar wipe out 21st century life as we know it. Below, The Telegraph on the forged consensus. Stay long precious metals. Unable to solve the problems of their own countries, these misfits think they are “God’s,” and can solve each other’s problems instead!
In a sign of how much work was involved to forge the G20 consensus, negotiators spent at least 45 hours drafting the summit's final communique.
G20 summit: leaders agree to halve deficits by 2013
Leaders at the G20 summit in Toronto have agreed to cut national budget deficits in half by 2013.
Published: 4:25AM BST 28 Jun 2010
The deadline for stripping debt has been pushed back by 12 months, giving banks more time to adopt tougher rules.
In a reversal from the unity of the past three crisis-era Group of 20 summits, the leaders decided to adopt "differentiated and tailored" policies for each country.
"Our challenges are as diverse as our nations," US President Barack Obama said. "But together we represent some 85 per cent of the global economy, and we have forged a coordinated response to the worst global economic crisis of our time."
In a sign of how much work was involved to forge the G20 consensus, negotiators spent at least 45 hours drafting the summit's final communique.
In the document, the Group of 20 endorsed a flexible timeline for building up higher levels of capital and liquidity, giving some breathing room to banks that say they are still struggling after the global recession.
Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, said the group's richest members should halve their deficits within three years, a timeline that every major G20 country had already committed to before the summit.
The delay marks a victory for banks and countries such as Japan, Germany and France, which said that the shift to stricter rules by 2012 would have imposed huge capital-raising burdens on banks and jeopardise lending and economic recovery.
However, the chief executive of Deutsche Bank warned that too much variance in the timelines could lead to an uneven playing field for banks.
Proposals for a global levy on banks have been dropped, Mr Harper said. Instead, that will be left to individual countries.
Herman Van Rompuy coins new 'EUphemism'
"Asymmetrical translation" is an new European Union phrase coined by its President to spare Gordon Brown's political blushes.
Published: 7:00AM GMT 27 Mar 2010
Herman Van Rompuy came up with the idea, early on Friday morning, after a Franco-German call for an "economic government" horrified the Prime Minister.
"We consider that the European Council should become the economic government of the EU," said the Franco-German text.
To get around the G-word, "ideologically unacceptable" to Britain, but insisted on by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, Mr Van Rompuy came up with a novel solution to keep everyone happy.
As a result, the French version of the binding summit text, agreed on Thursday, used the original words "le gouvernement économique".
To spare Mr Brown's feelings, the English text used the more innocuous and less controversial term "economic governance".
"There is no fundamental difference of view, but rather a sensitivity to certain words which has led to an asymmetrical translation," remarked the EU president.
Below, score at least one major victory for the world’s great vampire squids lead by Ben Bernanke and NY’s Ebenezer Squid.
“Proposals for a global levy on banks have been dropped, Mr Harper said. Instead, that will be left to individual countries.”
In European news, the austerity backlash is growing, and we haven’t really imposed any real austerity on the public yet. Below the NY Times covers the beat. Stay long precious metals. Social distress will lead to tax evasion and labour unrest in the second half, I suspect.
Safety Net Frays in Spain, as Elsewhere in Europe
By SUZANNE DALEY Published: June 27, 2010
MADRID — This was the deal that Gema Díaz, 34, thought she had made: When she took a job with this city as a purchasing agent 12 years ago, she knew her salary would be low.
But the income would be reliable. She could expect steady raises, manageable hours, six weeks of vacation, a good pension and the usual benefits — from free health care to subsidized housing.
Now, as Spain embarks on a range of austerity measures, the careful math of Ms. Díaz’s life is coming undone. Her salary is being cut. Her pension does not look so secure. Even the day care for her second child — due in August — will cost more.
“There can be no more illusions about getting help from the state,” said Ms. Díaz, at home on a recent evening in a charmless, government owned complex on the outskirts of the city. “We talk about it all the time. We talk about it with our friends. We talk about it with our family. The fear is the worst part.”
Hers is a story repeated across Europe, fueling the protests and strikes that have tied up airports, blocked highways and, in Greece, even turned deadly.
For millions of Europeans, modest salaries and high taxes have been offset by the benefits of their cherished social model — a cradle-to-grave safety net which, in the recent boom years, seemed to grow more generous all the time.
Now, governments across Europe say they have little choice but to pull back on social benefits, at least for now. Tax revenues are falling; populations are aging and rising deficits are everywhere, threatening the euro. Cutbacks and higher taxes have been announced in Ireland, Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal. Even France, until recently a holdout, has now proposed to raise the legal retirement age to 62 from 60.
The reforms, however, may be politically explosive. In Spain, they come at a particularly hard time. The austerity measures are hitting a population that is already reeling from the highest unemployment in the euro zone — 20 percent over all, 40 percent for its young people. In some cases, entire families are surviving on the pension of a grandparent.
With each new proposal, the popularity of the Socialist government has plummeted. One recent poll found that more than 50 percent of the population wanted Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to call early elections, which he would lose by more than 10 percentage points.
When Mr. Zapatero announced a move to stimulate the economy last week — an overhaul of the country’s labor laws, which make it virtually impossible to fire older workers — unions, traditionally his allies, called for a general strike in September, the first one in nearly a decade.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/world/europe/28spain.html?hp
In other news, as austerity bites, the wisdom of fighting never ending wars diminishes, even if they are largely financed by borrowing from Beijing and quantitative easing. Money being fungible, QE allegedly raised to support the economy, or real estate, or car sales, simply allows the diversion of other funding to support the never ending war. In the past, this sort of wealth depleting finance only existed during existential war, e.g. the American Civil War, the UK, Germany and France in WW1, the UK, America and Germany in WW2. Since the abandonment of the dollar-gold link in the Nixonian error of 1971, and the adoption of universal fiat currency ponzi finance, has now become the norm under pinning the western way of life. We have just about run exhausted fiat finance, undone by the greed and theft of the great vampire squids. A great fiat currency financial crisis lies ahead. The G-8 and G-20 summits just blew another chance to try to avert it. Below, the west slowly coming to the realization never ending war is not an end in itself.
JUNE 25, 2010
Corruption Suspected in Airlift of Billions in Cash From Kabul
KABUL—More than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years, a sum so large that U.S. investigators believe top Afghan officials and their associates are sending billions of diverted U.S. aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad.
The cash—packed into suitcases, piled onto pallets and loaded into airplanes—is declared and legal to move. But U.S. and Afghan officials say they are targeting the flows in major anticorruption and drug trafficking investigations because of their size relative to Afghanistan's small economy and the murkiness of their origins.
Officials believe some of the cash, if not most, is siphoned from Western aid projects and U.S., European and NATO contracts to provide security, supplies and reconstruction work for coalition forces in Afghanistan. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization spent about $14 billion here last year alone. Profits reaped from the opium trade are also a part of the money flow, as is cash earned by the Taliban from drugs and extortion, officials say.
The amount declared as it leaves the airport is vast in a nation where the gross domestic product last year totaled $13.5 billion. More declared cash flies out of Kabul each year than the Afghan government collects in tax and customs revenue nationwide. "It's not like they grow money on trees here," said a U.S. official investigating corruption and Taliban financing. "A lot of this looks like our tax dollars being stolen. And opium, of course."
Britain will not defeat Taliban and should open talks, says head of Army
Britain and its allies will not defeat the Taliban with military force and should soon open peace talks with insurgents in Afghanistan, the head of the Army said yesterday.
By Jon Swaine Published: 6:00AM BST 28 Jun 2010
General Sir David Richards said he believed the time had come for negotiations with Nato’s enemies to pave the way for the eventual withdrawal of troops.
The Chief of the General Staff said that while British forces would continue to “punish” the Taliban battle by battle, he was “less certain” that an overall victory could now be secured.
There's always been a point at which you start to negotiate with each other," Gen Sir David said. In his “private view” there was “no reason why we shouldn't be looking at that sort of thing pretty soon,” he said.
His comments came soon after the death of another British serviceman in the conflict. The soldier, from 4th Regiment Royal Artillery, had been injured in an explosion in Helmand Province on June 10.
It was the 19th British fatality this month, raising the total close to last June’s record of 22. In all 308 British servicemen have now died in the Afghan campaign.
Another allied soldier was killed yesterday, bringing Nato’s death toll to 91 this month, which was already the deadliest for international forces since the war began in 2001.
In other UK news, the Daily Mail on UK public sector employment practices that make the Greeks look positively efficient. The long suffering taxpayers on both sides of the Atlantic are calling for and expecting change. Since it’s all only fiat money and we electronically print it to bailout banksters, why should anyone care? Stay long precious metals, fiat’s free lunch is coming to its end.
"Until government administrators can so identify the interests of government with those of the people and refrain from defrauding the masses through the device of currency depreciation for the sake of remaining in office, the wiser ones will prefer to keep as much of their wealth in the most stable and marketable forms possible - forms which only the precious metals provide."
Elgin Groseclose
The Great Inertia Sector: A whistleblower’s account of council work where staff pull six-month sickies.
We end for the day with more debunking of the “man made global warming from CO2” pseudo-science. When is “peer review” an attempt to disgracefully mislead the public over already discredited claims. Below, the bogus science specialists at the UN’s discredited, new age socialist, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, still try to defend the indefensible. King Canute was a Newtonian genius compared to the dolts of the UN’s shameless IPCC.
Amazongate: the missing evidence
The story of the IPCC's claims about threats to the Amazon rainforest takes another bizarre turn, says Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker Published: 6:22PM BST 26 Jun 2010
Last week the beleaguered global warming lobby was exulting over what it took to be the best news it has had in a long time. A serious allegation, which last January rocked the authority of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was “corrected” as untrue by The Sunday Times, the newspaper which most prominently reported it. The reputation of the IPCC, it seemed, had been triumphantly vindicated. The growing tide of scepticism over climate change had at last been reversed. But this episode leaves many questions unanswered.
The “correction”, gleefully quoted by everyone from the WWF and The New York Times to The Guardian’s George Monbiot related to what was known as “Amazongate”. This was one of the series of controversies which exploded round the IPCC last winter, when it was shown that many of the high-profile claims made in its 2007 report had been based on material produced by environmental activists and campaigning groups rather than on proper, peer-reviewed scientific evidence.
------The story of “Amazon-gate” has unfolded through three stages. Step one was the passage in the IPCC report almost identical to one made in a non-peer-reviewed WWF paper of 2000 on forest fires in the Amazon. Specifically the IPCC stated that “up to 40 per cent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to only a slight reduction in precipitation”. But the only source the WWF in turn had been able to cite to support this was a paper published in Nature in 1999, from a team led by Dr Daniel Nepstad, formerly employed by the WWF but now the “senior scientist” with another advocacy group closely linked to the WWF, the Woods Hole Research Center. Certainly Nepstad’s paper was peer-reviewed: however its subject was not climate change but the impact on the Amazon rainforest of “logging and fire”. It found that “logging companies in Amazonia kill or damage 10-40 per cent of the living biomass of forests”. This had nothing whatever to do with global warming but was cited as the origin of that “up to 40 per cent” figure later used by the WWF and the IPCC.
Step two, when all this was reported last January, was a disclaimer from the WWF, emphasising that its 2000 report did “not say that 40 per cent of the Amazon forest is at risk from climate change”. But it went on to say that the real source for its 2000 paper (which had been “mistakenly omitted”) was another paper, “Fire in the Amazon”. This was also written by Dr Nepstad, as head of yet another advocacy group linked to Woods Hole, the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. Although it was now being suggested that this paper should have been cited as the original source for the IPCC’s claim, it too was not peer-reviewed. Thus, twice over, the IPCC’s claim appears to rest both on non-peer-reviewed science and on studies not related to global warming at all.
So great was the IPCC’s embarrassment over these revelations that the story moved to a third stage. Various scientists, led by Dr Nepstad, suggested further studies which might justify the claim. But an exhaustive trawl through all the scientific literature on this subject by my colleague Dr Richard North (who was responsible for uncovering “Amazongate” in the first place), has been unable to find a single study which confirms the specific claim made by the IPCC’s 2007 report. If one exists we would very much like to see it.
There are several studies based on computer models which attempt to estimate the possible impact of climate change on the Amazon rainforest, but none of these have so far supported that 40 per cent figure. Other researchers in turn have been highly critical of these models, suggesting that they are too crude to replicate the complex workings of the Amazonian climate system and that all observed evidence indicates that the forest is much more resilient to climate fluctuations than the alarmists would have us believe.
Nothing did more to excite attention over the effect of climate change on the rainforest than the exceptional drought of 2005, just when the IPCC’s 2007 report was being compiled. Since then, however, abnormally heavy rainfall in the region has brought disastrous floods to Brazil, both last year and again last week.
In other words there is a real mystery here. Nothing so far made public seems to justify an assertion that the IPCC’s specific claim is “supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence”. In view of all the controversy this issue has aroused over several months, it might seem odd that, if such evidence exists, it hasn’t been produced before.
THERE also happened in this reign the memorable Charta, known as Magna Charter on account of the Latin Magna (great) and Charter (a Charter); this was the first of the famous Chartas and Gartas of the Realm and was invented by the Barons on a desert island in the Thames called Ganymede. By congregating there, armed to the teeth, the Barons compelled John to sign the Magna Charter, which said:
1. That no one was to be put to death, save for some reason (except the Common People).
2. That everyone should be free (except the Common People).
3. That everything should be of the same weight and measure throughout the Realm (except the Common People).
4. That the Courts should be stationary, instead of following a very tiresome medieval official known as the King's Person all over the country.
5. That `no person should be fined to his utter ruin' (except the King's Person).
6. That the Barons should not be tried except by a special jury of other Barons who would understand.
1066 And All That.
At the Comex silver depositories Friday, final figures were: Registered 51.12 Moz, Eligible 63.26 Moz, Total 114.38 Moz.
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Crooks and Scoundrels Corner.
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
No, not BP today, although with the Caribbean tropical storm apparently heading towards Mexico, the Gulf clean up efforts and capture effort will hopefully finally get a break in their favor. This week it’s the turn of the head derivatives idiot at AIG’s Financial Products division in London, that wrote hundreds of billions in uncovered CDS risk derivatives, that spectacularly went wrong and blew up the firm and Goldman Sachs, before the US taxpayers in the form of the FED stepped in to pay off all the CDS derivatives at face. Socialism for the great vampire squids. Thank God it’s only fiat money, and there’s plenty more where that comes from, just don’t say a word to the roughly 1.3 million American’s losing their unemployment benefits this week.
AIG executive to face public grilling by US politicians
One of the executives blamed for bringing American International Group to its knees will this week appear in public for the first time since the insurance giant's near collapse, in what is expected to be a bruising encounter with US politicians.
By Jonathan Sibun and Jamie Dunkley Published: 10:23PM BST 26 Jun 2010
Joseph Cassano, who as head of the AIG's Financial Products division was responsible for overseeing the insurer's activity in subprime mortgage derivatives, is set to be grilled by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on Wednesday.
AIG Financial Products managed $2 trillion (£1.3 trillion) of derivatives, many of which went sour following the subprime mortgage crisis and collapse of Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, in late 2008.
Mr Cassano was last month cleared of any criminal wrongdoing following investigations by US and UK regulators.
"Perhaps he thinks now is the time that he would be able to speak more freely," Ernest Patrikis, a former AIG general counsel, told Bloomberg.
"It's not going to be a pleasant thing. He owes an awful lot to the people of AIG who were harmed financially."
AIG was saved from collapse after an $182bn bail-out by the US Government in 2008-9.
Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn, Chief Financial Officer David Viniar and former AIG chief executive Martin Sullivan will also appear at the inquiry, which is looking at the role of derivatives in the financial crisis.
It comes as the US investment bank has received a welcome boost after a Deutsche Bank salesman was cleared of illegally disclosing information to a hedge-fund manager, in the first US lawsuit alleging insider trading of credit-default swaps.
US District Judge John G Koeltl ruled that there was no evidence that Jon-Paul Rorech and Renato Negrin – a former Millennium Partners portfolio manager – had violated laws against insider trading. He added that information exchanged by the pair in telephone calls, which was presented by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as evidence, was not
confidential.
The SEC, America's leading financial regulator, accused Mr Rorech of illegally feeding Mr Negrin information so that he could buy credit-default swaps and profit from the announcement of a debt restructuring by Dutch media company VNU Group, according to the civil complaint filed last year. Mr Negrin made a $1.2m (£797,000) profit on the deal.
Both men had a bench trial in April before Judge Koeltl. In a written decision on Friday, he agreed with defence arguments that the information shared was not confidential. "It is far-fetched to think that Mr Rorech could believe that the very information shared with outsiders by his supervisor and the head of high yield capital markets would somehow not be appropriate for him to share," the judge wrote. He said the SEC had not shown that Mr Rorech had any motive to share "inside" information with Mr Negrin.
The news will come as a boost to Goldman Sachs, which has also been charged with fraud by the SEC. The regulator claims Goldman defrauded investors by misstating and omitting key facts about a financial product tied to subprime mortgages as the housing market began to collapse. Goldman has denied the charges.
A large Bank is exactly the place where a vain and shallow person in authority, if he be a man of gravity and method, as such men often are, may do infinite evil in no long time, and before he is detected. If he is lucky enough to begin at a time of expansion in trade, he is nearly sure not to be found out till the time of contraction has arrived, and then very large figures will be required to reckon the evil he has done.
Walter Bagehot. Lombard Street. 1873.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May:
DJIA: +276 UP. NASDAQ: +499 UP. SP500: +304 UP. The great Bull market goes on with the all three continuing higher in positive numbers, but is now under serious pressure.
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Sunspots – A 22 year colder world? (From 2004?)
Spotless Days June 27
Current Stretch:0 days
2010 total: 35 days (20%)
2009 total: 260 days (71%)
Since 2004: 803 days
Typical Solar Min: 485 days
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