Baltic Dry Index. 3844 -89
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $3,000
“Florida formed a task force of lawyers to handle claims for additional compensation from businesses including restaurants, hotels, oyster fishermen and companies that depend on the Gulf, Crist said.”
More on Florida’s “task force of lawyers” in response to BP’s oil spill later, only in America, as they say. First news from Asia of a stock market meltdown. Are we heading for Black Monday today, or another “flash crash” in the Squids New York Casino? Below the Journal covers the news from Asia. Will Ebenezer Squid’s high frequency traders add liquidity like they’re supposed to, or will the Great Vampire Squids blow apart stocks doing “God’s work?”
Below, today’s Journal covers the east.
Now it is not good for the Christian's health, To hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles, And it weareth the Christian down.
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white With the name of the late deceased
And the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here Who tried to hustle the East."
Rudyard Kipling.
JUNE 7, 2010, 12:44 A.M. ET
Asia Falls Sharply; Euro Slips
SINGAPORE -- Asian stock markets were sharply lower Monday on heightened risk aversion after Wall Street slumped on Friday, while the euro hit multi-year lows against the U.S. dollar and the Japanese yen.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average's 3.2% tumble Friday sent investors fleeing out of equity markets. U.S. and European markets were roiled Friday by concerns that European sovereign debt problems could widen, after comments late last week from an official in Hungary's new government that the country faces a Greece-style fiscal meltdown sent the euro tumbling Friday.
The new government rushed to calm markets Saturday with a pledge to keep the country's official budget deficit goal for 2010 while stressing that Hungary isn't facing any sovereign credit default.
"The fear over the European debt crisis can come back to haunt us because the problems have not gone away," said Daphne Roth, head of Asia equity research at ABN Amro Private Bank in Singapore. "Take some money out (of the market) and come back after the World Cup football tournament. There's no need to chase the market and face sleepless nights."
Japan's Nikkei Stock Average was down 3.7%, Australia's S&P/ASX 200 fell 3.0%, South Korea's Kospi Composite was 2.2% lower, China's Shanghai Composite Index was off 2.1%, Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index slipped 2.5% and India's Sensex was 2.3% lower. DJIA futures were down 88 points in screen trade.
Investor sentiment was also hit by disappointing U.S. jobs data Friday. May nonfarm payrolls grew by 431,000, but below the 515,000 increase expected, with census jobs contributing to most of the rise and private sector employment up by just 41,000 jobs.
Next, tax dodging Euroland’s Club Med work ethic, has the fiat Euro heading for the fate of all fiat currency. What’s a good northern Calvinist to do except to form a new better currency union without Club Med.
They say hard work never hurt anybody, but I figure why take the chance.
Ronald Reagan.
Euro 'will be dead in five years'
The euro will have broken up before the end of this Parliamentary term, according to the bulk of economists taking part in a wide-ranging economic survey for The Sunday Telegraph.
By Edmund Conway Published: 10:23PM BST 05 Jun 2010
The single currency is in its death throes and may not survive in its current membership for a week, let alone the next five years, according to a selection of responses to the survey – the first major wide-ranging litmus test of economic opinion in the City since the election. The findings underline suspicions that the new Chancellor, George Osborne, will have to firefight a full-blown crisis in Britain's biggest trading partner in his first years in office.
Of the 25 leading City economists who took part in the Telegraph survey, 12 predicted that the euro would not survive in its current form this Parliamentary term, compared with eight who suspected it would. Five declared themselves undecided.
-----A year ago or less, few within the City would have confidently predicted the currency's demise. But the travails of Greece, Spain and Portugal in recent weeks, plus German Chancellor Angela Merkel's acknowledgement that the currency is facing an "existential crisis", have radically shifted opinion.
Two of the eight experts who predicted that the currency would survive said it would do so only at the cost of seeing at least one of its members default on its sovereign debt. Andrew Lilico, chief economist at think tank Policy Exchange, said there was "nearly zero chance" of the euro surviving with its current membership, adding: "Greece will certainly default on its debts, and it is an open question whether Greece will experience some form of revolution or coup – I'd put the likelihood of that over the next five years as around one in four."
Douglas McWilliams of the Centre for Economics and Business Research said the single currency "may not even survive the next week", while David Blanchflower, professor at Dartmouth College and former Bank of England policymaker, added: "The political implications [of euro disintegration] are likely to be far-reaching – Germans are opposed to paying for others and may well quit."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/budget/7806064/Euro-will-be-dead-in-five-years.html
Now back to “the task force of lawyers.” And not just any old American lawyers either, these are Florida lawyers, the SS of the whiplash Willies. In BP news, BP says its new cap and riser is capturing about 10,000 barrels of oil a day. Well if they say so, but few now trust much of what BP says. There’s simply no credibility left in pronouncements from BP Houston or BP St James Square.
Below The Telegraph covers latest developments. Is President Obama about to embark on resource nationalism like Venezuela and Bolivia? Never let a crisis go to waste, perhaps? Despite the temptation to try to bottom fish BP’s stock after a fall of a third, my guess is that BP’s stock is going to be toxic for the next few years. Assuming BP America doesn’t get annexed or its assets attached, BP’s profit stream will largely be going to non shareholders for up to a decade. As the oil now really starts to come ashore and the media gets obsessed with dead and dying birds, fish and turtles, it’s not going to get any better for many weeks or months. And then there’s still the controversy over the alleged plumes of oil. If real, I suspect they will eventually show up somewhere, doing damage too.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers".
William Shakespeare.
BP oil spill: Does all the President's anger point to an oil annexation? History will tell
'I am furious at this entire situation. It is an example of where somebody didn't think through the consequences of their actions." A very angry President Obama has been spitting tacks about the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
By Helia Ebrahimi Published: 8:19PM BST 06 Jun 2010
Day by day the vitriol has increased and the President has been "venting and yelling" at a company that these days he likes to refer to pointedly as British Petroleum. With Tony Hayward, BP's crumpled chief, fast becoming America's most hated man, talk has spiralled from criminal lawsuits, to enforcing dividend bans, to the latest and most potent threat: seizing control of BP's US assets – or indeed the company itself. The administration's chest-beating is so closely tied to American approval ratings that BP could become the President's biggest political football ahead of American midterm elections.
But before Obama lathers up for another round of BP bashing, perhaps he should consult his history books. This is not the first time America has eyeballed a controlling stake in BP's equity.
-----In recent days BP's boss, Hayward has drawn on his own Churchill quote, telling the media: "When you are going through hell, keep going."
The cost of the oil spill in the Gulf has been estimated at more than $20bn. BP has already spent $1bn. It has lost more than a third of its market capitalisation. The British flag bearer, responsible for £6bn of the treasury's income in taxes last year, faces an onslaught of encroachment to its autonomy.
Yesterday, Hayward appeared resigned to further assaults on his control of BP. "It is up to US authorities as to what they want to do," he told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. "People are angry, frustrated and emotional."
The question: is the President's tough-talking just political football or has Washington set its sights on something it started more than half a century ago?
Is this punishment for political gain or petroleum annexation? The President is so angry these days it's hard to tell.
Florida Officials Want to Run Cleanup While BP Writes Checks
June 7 (Bloomberg) -- BP Plc should hand over the effort to clean up its oil washing onto Florida beaches because the company is failing to take forceful enough action, local government officials said.
“They can write the checks,” Gene Valentino, a commissioner for Escambia County, which includes Pensacola Beach, told reporters at a briefing yesterday. “In the meantime, we need action. We need boots on the ground. We need specific remedies and solutions to respond to the impacts as they occur.”
Floridians are preparing for the worst as oil spilling from a BP well in the Gulf of Mexico threatens the state’s $60 billion tourism industry. Officials of Escambia County in Florida’s northwest Panhandle, where tar balls and clumps of oil began soiling white-sand beaches last week, said hundreds of residents have called and sent e-mails asking how they can help, with little response from BP on what to do.
“We think we know a lot more about beach cleanup,” Grover Robinson, chairman of the County Commission, said at the briefing.
Lucia Bustamante, BP’s spokeswoman in Florida, said the London-based company is committed to helping the state.
“We are ready, we are prepared,” she said in an interview yesterday. BP is training people “as fast as we can” and working to ensure that all of the clean-up workers are local residents, she said.
‘Aren’t Going Anywhere’
“We are here,” Bustamante said. “We aren’t going anywhere.”
Valentino said the crews cleaning up local beaches, including BP workers, county employees and volunteers, will increase to about 1,000 people today from about 550 yesterday.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=amcvu2Ob7Axo&pos=9
U.S. Ramps Up Coast Protection as BP Oil May Linger for Months
June 7 (Bloomberg) -- Oil from BP Plc’s ruptured well will linger in the Gulf of Mexico until at least the fall and the U.S. is seeking more equipment to help prevent the crude coming ashore, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said.
Skimming equipment to corral oil on the surface is being sent to the Gulf from all over the U.S. to keep the crude as much as 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the coasts of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, Allen said.
“This is a siege across the entire Gulf,” Allen, in charge of the government response to the leak, said yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” broadcast. “There will be oil out there for months. This will be well into the fall.”
BP said it captured 10,500 barrels of oil from the leak on June 5, up from 6,077 barrels the previous day. The flow from the seabed leak 5,000 feet (1,524 meters) below the surface is estimated by government scientists at 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.
The leak began April 20 when the Deepwater Horizon rig owned by Transocean Ltd. and leased by BP exploded and sank two days later, killing 11 workers and unleashing the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. Allen said the company was “taking every step possible” to plug the well, yet he joined Florida Governor Charlie Crist in faulting BP for slow response to compensate businesses and workers for losses.
“We want these claims to be responded to much more quickly,” Crist said on CNN’s “State of the Union” broadcast. “These people need help. And we have to be there to try to make them as whole as we can during this very difficult process.”
Lawyer Task Force
Florida formed a task force of lawyers to handle claims for additional compensation from businesses including restaurants, hotels, oyster fishermen and companies that depend on the Gulf, Crist said.
----- BP reported that 37,193 claims have been submitted and $48.4 million has been distributed, according to a statement on the Deepwater Horizon Response website. About half of the claims have been paid and the other half are being processed, Mark Proegler, a spokesman for BP said in a telephone interview.
No claims have been denied to date, according to the statement.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601130&sid=aQ8AhSGh5ykk
At the Comex silver depositories Friday, final figures were: Registered 52.46 Moz, Eligible 65.46 Moz, Total 117.92 Moz.
+++++
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner.
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, so who holds Europe’s dodgy Club Med debt? No one really knows, it seems. Stay long precious metals. Will Germany really bail out non German banks?
Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.
Thomas Carlyle.
Debtors’ Prism: Who Has Europe’s Loans?
By JACK EWING Published: June 4, 2010
FRANKFURT IT’S a $2.6 trillion mystery.
That’s the amount that foreign banks and other financial companies have lent to public and private institutions in Greece, Spain and Portugal, three countries so mired in economic troubles that analysts and investors assume that a significant portion of that mountain of debt may never be repaid.
The problem is, alas, that no one — not investors, not regulators, not even bankers themselves — knows exactly which banks are sitting on the biggest stockpiles of rotting loans within that pile. And doubt, as it always does during economic crises, has made Europe’s already vulnerable financial system occasionally appear to seize up. Early last month, in an indication of just how dangerous the situation had become, European banks — which appear to hold more than half of that $2.6 trillion in debt — nearly stopped lending money to one another.
Now, with government resources strained and confidence in European economies eroding, some analysts say the Continent’s banks have to come clean with a transparent and rigorous accounting of their woes. Until then, they say, nobody will be able to wrestle effectively with Europe’s mounting problems.
------Limited disclosure and possibly spotty accounting have been long-voiced concerns of analysts who follow European banks. Though most large publicly listed banks have offered information about their exposure — Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt says it holds 500 million euros in Greek government bonds and no Spanish or Portuguese sovereign debt — there has been little disclosure from the hundreds of smaller mortgage lenders, state-owned banks and thrift institutions that dominate banking in countries like Germany and Spain.
Depfa, a German bank that is now based in Dublin, is one of the few second-tier European banking institutions that have offered detailed disclosures about their financial wherewithal, and its stark troubles may be emblematic of those still hidden on other banks’ books.
Despite boasting as recently as two years ago of its “very conservative lending practices,” Depfa, which caters primarily to governments, has flirted with disaster. It narrowly avoided collapsing in late 2008 until the German government bailed it out, and today its books are still laden with risk.
DEPFA and its parent, Hypo Real Estate Holding, a property lender outside Munich, have 80.4 billion euros in public-sector debt from Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy. The amount was first disclosed in March but did not draw much attention outside Germany until last month, when investors decided to finally try to tally how much cross-border lending had gone on in Europe.
------- “Everybody knew there was a lot of debt out there,” said Nick Matthews, senior European economist at Royal Bank of Scotland and one of the authors of the report that tallied up Greek, Spanish and Portuguese debt. “But I think the extent of the exposure was a lot higher than most people had originally thought.”
Concern has quickly spread beyond just the sovereign bonds issued by the three countries as well as by Italy and Ireland, which are also seriously indebted. Private-sector debt in the troubled countries is also becoming an issue, because when governments pay more for financing, so do their domestic companies. Recession, along with higher interest payments, could lead to a surge in corporate defaults, the European Central Bank warned in a report on May 31.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/business/global/06toxic.html?src=me&ref=business
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.
Help the LIR fight Banksterism, the EU, and for sound money.
If you can, help the LIR stay around and make a difference. Please make a donation at the PayPal link on the website or better still become a sponsor for what looks like an exciting 2010. Capitalism not banksterism. Many thanks to all who have helped.
+++++
Sunspots – A 22 year colder world? (From 2004?)
Spotless Days June 06
Current Stretch:0 days
2010 total: 33 days (21%)
2009 total: 260 days (71%)
Since 2004: 802 days
Typical Solar Min: 485 days
No comments:
Post a Comment