Baltic Dry Index. 2918 +37
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $3,000.
On the 8th September 1944 a huge explosion occurred in Staveley Road Chiswick in Southwest London. There was no siren, no warning. This was the first ballistic missile, Hitler's much vaunted V2 Rocket. It weighed 13 tons and had arrived via the stratosphere at 3,000 miles an hour. 3 People died and 17 were seriously injured in the tragedy which reduced rows of houses to the appearance of a battle field.
London V2 Rocket Sites...Mapped
Hitler's 'vengeance' rocket, the V-2, was the world's first ballistic missile, and the first man-made object to make a sub-orbital spaceflight. Over 1400 were launched at Britain, with more than 500 striking London. Each hit caused devastation. The 13 tonne rocket impacted at over 3000 miles per hour. There was no warning; the missile descended faster than the speed of sound and survivors would only hear the approach and sonic booms after the blast.
http://londonist.com/2009/01/london_v2_rocket_sitesmapped.php
We open by wishing all our Jewish readers a very happy and joyous celebration of Rosh Hashanah. This year it almost falls on the Moslem feast of Eid ul Fitr which marks the end of Ramadan, and should occur between the 9th and the 11th. With luck and goodwill, 66 years on from today, the peoples of the middle east will be living in the same kind of peace and tolerance that Great Britain and Germany enjoy today. We can only hope that common sense and some Christian charity will prevail in Florida on the coming anniversary of the 9/11 atrocity.
Four years ago in speaking of a Jewish nation one ran the risk of being regarded ridiculous. Today he makes himself ridiculous who denies the existence of a Jewish nation.
Theodor Herzl
We open with Bloomberg getting on the case of those tax and work shy Greeks again. Almost a year on from Greece all but going bankrupt, Greece still hasn’t disclosed full details of its secret bankster financial transactions to Eurostat. Wisely investors are shunning Greek bonds leaving them to the ECB pending an almost guaranteed future restructuring of Greek debt.
There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Naploeon.
Greek Deals Hidden From EU Probed as 400% Yield Gap Shows Doubt
Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Four months after the 110 billion- euro ($140 billion) bailout for Greece, the nation still hasn’t disclosed the full details of secret financial transactions it used to conceal debt.
“We have not seen the real documents,” Walter Radermacher, head of the European Union’s statistics agency Eurostat, said in a Sept. 2 interview in his Luxembourg office. Eurostat first requested the contracts in February.
Radermacher vows new toughness when officials from his staff head to Greece this month to come up with a “solid estimate” of the total value of debt hidden by the opaque contracts. “This is a new era,” he said.
Greece is the only euro country that lied about using these complex swap contracts after Eurostat told countries to report them in 2008, Radermacher, 58, said. It also likely signed a greater number of individual agreements than any other euro member, based on information it has provided to Eurostat, he said. Greece’s debt was 115.1 percent of its total economic output last year, second among the 16 counties that share the euro, behind Italy’s 115.8 percent.
---- Investors still don’t trust Greece. They demand yields more than five times that of Germany to hold 10-year Greek debt - a sign that buyers fear the country will have to reorganize its borrowing.
“I think restructuring will be a necessary part of them pulling out of the predicament they are in,” Andrew Bosomworth, Munich-based head of portfolio management at Pacific Investment Management Co., which oversees the world’s largest bond fund. He cited the projection of the International Monetary Fund, which foresees Greece’s debt topping out 149 percent of gross domestic product in 2012. Italy in May estimated that its debt would be 117.2 percent of economic output in 2012.
http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aOdJhjpLyiVk&pos=1
Next, you’re doing everything wrong, Nobel prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz tells the UK and Europe. Forget austerity, and borrow and spend, spend, spend your way back to prosperity. Of course, unlike some others, the good Keynesian dismal scientist never saw last decade’s bubble bursting, nor the bankruptcy and reckless criminality of most of Wall Street’s bankster houses. Poor Joe, he still hasn’t twigged that all our problems stem from the great Nixonian error of August 15, 1971 compounded by the Fed actively aiding and abetting Wall Street’s rent seeking. He now advocates wiping out the grandchildren along with just this generation and the next.
I'm honored to be here with the eternal general of the United States, mi amigo Alberto Gonzales.
George W. Bush.
Austerity cutbacks are an economic 'disaster', Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz warns
The European Union risks prolonging the global economic downturn if its largest members insist on using austerity measures to cut their budget deficits, a leading economist has warned.
By Jamie Dunkley Published: 6:55AM BST 08 Sep 2010
Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, said the use of deep spending cuts was a "disaster" adding that Europe was heading towards more economic difficulties if politicians cut back spending rather than calm down the financial markets.
"If that (austerity) happens I think it is likely that the economic downturn will last far longer and human suffering will be all the greater," he warned on Tuesday.
Mr Stiglitz said historical evidence showed that increased state spending helped economies emerge from recession. He added that the example of Ireland showed that austerity leads to declining output, rising unemployment and high bond spreads, instead of renewed investment.
"I feel sorry for the Irish people who have to suffer from this policy... but it doesn't have global or European consequences. If the UK, Germany or other countries do it, then it is going to have systemic consequences for Europe and the whole world."
Mr Stiglitz added that policymakers should not be too concerned whether the global economy was on track to a double dip.
"From the perspective of the world, or workers, there is very little difference between growth of a quarter point of a percent and a decline of a quarter point of a percent," he said. "What workers care about is if growth will be strong enough to reduce the high level of unemployment in the US or Europe."
Below, yet another shock from BP. BP’s North Sea disaster recovery plans are hardly worth the paper they’re written on. Later today BP publishes the result of its own internal inquiry into the GOM Macondo disaster. The entire US tort bar is sharpening up their knives.
BP oil spill: Deepwater oil blow-out in North Sea not considered by BP
BP has admitted the consequences of a deepwater oil blow-out in the North Sea "have never been considered in detail" – in its own emergency spill plan filed to the Government.
By Rowena Mason Published: 6:00AM BST 08 Sep 2010
The acknowledgement in documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws comes as BP publishes its own internal investigation into what caused the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
The report is expected to find that BP should shoulder some responsibility for failures on board the rig, but find no evidence of any gross negligence that could lead to a criminal inquiry.
The accident, which killed 11 men and triggered the biggest offshore oil spill in history, has prompted authorities across the world to re-examine safety regimes and ask how far oil companies should be trusted to self-regulate. BP, in common with all North Sea operators, is obliged to submit an emergency spill response plan to the Government to detail how it would deal with disaster.
However, its most recently approved filing from August 2009 singles out deep sub-sea explosions as difficult to plan for. It claims this is because "no large scale incident had occurred" for it to study.
The document contains no details about how or under what circumstances a relief well would be drilled to stop a blown-out well from leaking.
It raises the possibility of "mechanical containment and recovery"- but does not include a process for using caps, top hats, top kill, domes or other devices like those used in the Gulf of Mexico, to stop a leaking North Sea well.
A spokesman for BP said the document "has been reviewed in light of the Macondo accident" in order to "directly address sub-surface and deepwater releases", relief wells and containment options.
"In light of the Macondo accident deepwater exploration well, oil pollution emergency plans are now required to include consideration of relief wells and containment options. These will be addressed on a case by case basis and approved by DECC (Department for Energy and Climate Change) before any activity."
At present BP's North Sea operations are mainly in a shallow 100m-200m range, but it is also exploring to the West of Shetland, in depths up to 500m. This is classed as deepwater but it is not as deep or high pressure as the exploded Gulf of Mexico well.
UK North Sea operators are currently assessing whether their emergency planning needs to be improved through an industry-led focus group called the Oil Spill Prevention and Response Advisory Group.
We end for today, with what might lie behind the rise in the Baltic Dry Index. Their shipping cousins in the oil industry are betting on a US recovery getting underway next year. Below, Bloomberg with unintended deadpan humor, reports that Deutsche Bank’s “chief energy economist” in Washington “predicted prices will rise to $80 next year”, a whopping $6.26 up on yesterday’s closing price. I wonder if Mr. Stiglitz has ever met Mr. Sieminski?
Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?
George W. Bush.
Oil Contango Doubles in 2011 Recovery Betting With Ship Demand
Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Oil traders are showing increasing confidence that U.S. economic growth will rebound next year as they take advantage of the widening gap between current prices of crude and contracts for delivery six months from now.
The price advantage, or contango, to buy and hold crude more than doubled to $5.76 a barrel last month from $2.60 at the end of July, as contracts for October delivery fell 9.4 percent and March dropped 5.3 percent. ConocoPhillips hired the tanker TI Europe for storage in the Gulf of Mexico, according to data on the website of RS Platou A/S, an Oslo-based shipbroker.
Crude, gasoline and heating oil inventories reached a 20- year-high last month as the U.S. Commerce Department said the economy probably expanded at a 1.6 percent annual pace in the second quarter from an initially reported 2.4 percent. The gap, or curve, between the price of oil for immediate delivery and for March has increased to a three-month high, making storage a profitable wager on an American rebound next year.
“Demand is going to look a lot better in 2011,” said Adam Sieminski, chief energy economist at Deutsche Bank AG in Washington, who predicted prices will rise to $80 next year. “By then the overall numbers on things like industrial production, housing, investment and probably even consumer sentiment will be better.”
---- Frontline Ltd., the world’s largest tanker operator, said on Aug. 27 that demand for ships used for storage will rise in the fourth quarter.
“Floating storage will come back,” Inger Klemp, chief financial officer of Frontline’s management unit, said Sept. 1 at a conference in Oslo, where she’s based. “In fact, we have already been approached with various enquiries.”
The spread shows that traders are betting the economy will keep weakening through 2010 before improving in the first half of next year, said John Kilduff, a partner at Again Capital LLC, a New York-based hedge fund that focuses on energy.
http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=amhjqfKiku4I&pos=6
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
George W. Bush.
At the Comex silver depositories Tuesday, final figures were: Registered 51.83 Moz, Eligible 58.88 Moz, Total 110.71 Moz.
+++++
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner.
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, more on the scam of global warming, now rebranded “climate change” now that global warming seems to have ended over 5 years ago, if it was ever real at all. Up first, the icecap loss seems to have been grossly overestimated and hyped. Below that, the scam of “carbon trading” seems to have netted Europe’s fraudsters some 5 billion euros, but in 3 Presidents too many Euroland, who’s counting?
We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Climate: New study slashes estimate of icecap loss
PARIS (AFP) - – Estimates of the rate of ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica, one of the most worrying questions in the global warming debate, should be halved, according to Dutch and US scientists.
In the last two years, several teams have estimated Greenland is shedding roughly 230 gigatonnes of ice, or 230 billion tonnes, per year and West Antarctica around 132 gigatonnes annually.
Together, that would account for more than half of the annual three-millimetre (0.2 inch) yearly rise in sea levels, a pace that compares dramatically with 1.8mm (0.07 inches) annually in the early 1960s.
But, according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the ice estimates fail to correct for a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment.
This is the term for the rebounding of Earth's crust following the last Ice Age.
Glaciers that were kilometers (miles) thick smothered Antarctica and most of the northern hemisphere for tens of thousands of years, compressing the elastic crust beneath it with their titanic weight.
When the glaciers started to retreat around 20,000 years ago, the crust started to rebound, and is still doing so.
This movement, though, is not just a single vertical motion, lead researcher Bert Vermeersen of Delft Technical University, in the Netherlands, said in phone interview with AFP.
"A good analogy is that it's like a mattress after someone has been sleeping on it all night," he said.
The weight of the sleeper creates a hollow as the material compress downwards and outwards. When the person gets up, the mattress starts to recover. This movement, seen in close-up, is both upwards and downwards and also sideways, too, as the decompressed material expands outwards and pulls on adjacent stuffing.
Often ignored or considered a minor factor in previous research, post-glacial rebound turns out to be important, says the paper.
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20100908/tts-climate-warming-science-ice-c1b2fc3.html
Taxman claims first cases of missing trader fraud in energy
The first suspected cases of attempted missing trader fraud in the gas and power sector have been identified by the tax authorities – a year after the carbon trading industry was hit with a €5bn (£4.2bn) attack
By Rowena Mason Published: 6:15AM BST 08 Sep 2010
Fraudsters looking to steal value-added tax (VAT) on the items are believed to have switched their target from carbon allowances to traded gas and electricity contracts.
Missing trader fraud, also known as "carousel" fraud, typically involves goods such as mobile phones and computer chips imported VAT-free from European Union member states
---- The Treasury abolished tax on carbon allowances last year, instantly eradicating the fraud. But the gas and power market also provides high value, high volume and intangible items suitable for missing trader fraud.
Steve Pope, deputy national co-ordinator for missing trader fraud at HM Revenue & Customs, said the first examples of the fraud had been spotted early and "snuffed out".
But he warned that it had the potential to grow like the carbon credit fraud and urged energy traders at investment banks and utilities to be alert to the warning signs.
"Carbon credit missing trader fraud took off very quickly and the level of activity we saw was £100m in a matter of weeks," he told The Daily Telegraph.
----- Last year, seven people were arrested and 27 addresses raided by HMRC over a suspected £38m fraud involving the trade of carbon credits to avoid paying VAT.
Then in April this year, a major cross-border investigation into alleged fraudulent trading of carbon credits resulted in 22 UK arrests in a case linked to raids at Deutsche Bank.
More than 2,450 UK and German tax officers were involved in the operation, with 81 house and office searches. The UK investigation saw 13 arrests in England and eight in Scotland.
Europol, the cross-border law enforcement agency, estimated last year that carbon-trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some European countries.
It said criminals mainly from Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland are estimated to have pocketed €5bn.
"We finished the year, and we reported that we had $17 billion of cash sitting at the bank's parent company as a liquidity cushion. As the year has gone on, that liquidity cushion has been virtually unchanged."
Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz. March 12, 2008.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished August:
DJIA: +243 Down. NASDAQ: +366 Down. SP500: +243 Down.
The bull market (or bear market rally) that commenced on Nasdaq on 30/4/09 at 1717 has ended. (30/5/09 SP 500 at 919, 30/5/09 DJIA 8500.) While the indicators can flip flop at market turns, this action is rare on the slow monthly indicators. August is the third down month in a row and “crash season” approaches.
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