Baltic Dry Index. 1428 -06
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries."
David Rockefeller. Bilderberger. June 1991.
It is open season on the Bilderbergers again, who are meeting in conclave outside St Moritz, Switzerland, at the 5 star Suvretta House Hotel, slumming it in 3,000 franc a night suites, most paid for by the taxpayer as usual, swilling Pol Roger while carving up the world markets for the coming year. Well someone has to do it I suppose. Out of deference to brother Dom, who is unable to make this year’s gathering and is occupied in Manhattan, the regular Bilderberg maid service has been suspended and this year’s maids will only clean rooms. If circumstances don’t appreciably change, next year’s gathering will have to be switched to brother Dom’s new digs in Manhattan. After 2007s success in ending 2002s boom, 2011s meeting might be the year they take down China. Below, more on the Lords of the Universe gathering at “Teddy’s World”.
Rich, Famous and Powerful Converge at Bilderberg
Thursday, 9 Jun 2011 4:29 AM ET
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, naturally, isn't attending this year, and his likely successor Christine Lagarde is in China, but the Bilderberg Conference which kicks off in the Swiss resort of St. Moritz on Thursday retains its conspiratorial chic and pulling power.
The attendee list of Bilderberg is still pretty much the only thing that is not a closely guarded secret, as 120 of the world's richest and most powerful people meet behind closed doors, this time at the Suvretta House hotel in Switzerland, a venue which not only boasts a "fairytale castle" design, but also its own "Teddy World."
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne are known to have attended in the past, although it seems unlikely that either will attend this week.
A spokesperson at the U.K. Treasury press office said it "didn't know" whether or not Osborne would go this year, but promised to call CNBC.com back. They did not. Given the secretive spirit of Bilderberg, that could well be taken as a confirmation.
The first Bilderberg meeting in 1954 was an attempt to stamp out post-war anti-Americanism in Europe, bringing together senior U.S. and European figures to meet and discuss the international challenges of the day.
Since then, the rich and powerful have continued to meet. The 2010 event, in Sitges, Spain, included on its agenda "The Growing Influence of Cyber Technology," "Security in a Proliferated World," "Promises of Medical Science," and "Can We Feed the World." according to its official website.
----The 120 participants attend in a private capacity and, officially, they do not forge agreements over global economic policy.
"Bilderberg is a small, flexible, informal and off-the-record international forum in which different viewpoints can be expressed and mutual understanding enhanced. Bilderberg's only activity is its annual conference. At the meetings, no resolutions are proposed, no votes taken, and no policy statements issued," the official Bilderberg website says.
In which case, you might ask, what is the point of Bilderberg?
More.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/43325286
Meanwhile elsewhere, gloom, gloom, and doom. Stay long precious metals. Fiat currency isn’t fit for purpose anymore.
US economy at risk of 'double-dipping', Robert Shiller warns
The US economy is at risk of double-dipping back into recession, according to a leading economist, intensifying fears for the global recovery
By Emma Rowley 7:14PM BST 09 Jun 2011
Recent disappointments in American housing and employment figures suggest the world's biggest economy is at a tipping point, warned Robert Shiller. "Whether we call it a double-dip or not, I think there is a risk," he told Reuters.
The S&P/Case-Shiller index of US property values, which he co-founded, showed house prices dropped 4.2pc in the first quarter of 2011 against the previous three months, marking the biggest drop since the start of 2009.
A further fall in prices of up to 25pc in the next five years "wouldn't surprise me at all", Mr Shiller said, given the amount of unsold homes in the US and the thousands of people who are behind with their mortgages. Japan saw prices fall for 15 years, he noted.
The comments came as officials reported the number of Americans signing on to claim unemployment benefits had edged higher. Initial claims rose last week by 1,000 to 427,000, confounding predictions that they would drop back. The data confirmed worries the recovery in the US jobs market has hit a wall, after the unemployment rate climbed to 9.1pc for May.
More.
High street pain lays bare fragile state of economy
The dire state of the consumer economy was brutally exposed yesterday when the owner of the Argos chain said that sales of TVs, iPods and audio equipment fell by up to 25pc over March and April.
By James Hall, Retail Editor 6:00AM BST 10 Jun 2011
Shares in Home Retail Group tumbled 14pc on the news, dragging down high street rivals such as Dixons and HMV Group.
The news co-incided with a major survey showing that 40pc of consumers – equivalent to 20m people – have made "significant" spending cutbacks in their daily lives since the turn of the year.
The Big Money Index from AXA also showed a dramatic fall in financial confidence over the past 12 months. One in five Britons have admitted to regretting some of their pre-recession financial decisions, while 25pc of people have been forced to dip into their savings and investments, particularly among the older population.
The raft of bad news will raise fears that the UK's latent economic recovery is being derailed by a savage retrenchment in consumer spending.
Rising fuel, food and clothing prices and January's VAT tax increase have meant that the average household has £13 a week less to spend than it did one year ago.
More
Default fears grip Greece as debt insurance soars
The cost of insuring Greek sovereign debt has been pushed to a record high amid fresh fears the indebted country is moving closer to default.
By Louise Armitstead, Chief Business Correspondent 7:40PM BST 09 Jun 2011
Greek credit default swaps jumped 50 basis points to a high of 1,510bps as crowds protested against austerity measures put before the Cabinet on Thursday. The level means it now costs £1.51m to insure £10n of Greek debt.
Market concerns were compounded by new figures showing Greece's economy slowed faster than expected in the first three months of 2011. The figures put the annual pace of the downturn at 5.5pc rather than 4.8pc as previously estimated as public sector cuts and higher indirect taxes hit the economy.
However, Greek exports, including petroleum products, increased by 31.5pc during the January-March period, according to the Panhellenic Exporters Association.
Experts said the country, struggling under €340bn (£301bn) of debt, was likely to stay in recession in 2011 for the third year in a row.
There were further strikes on Thursday as Greece's prime minister George Papandreou sought to get further austerity measures approved by the Cabinet.
More
We end for the week with continuing trouble in grains. Though parts of Europe and China have received much needed rains, generating massive flooding in some of the drought stricken parts of China, it’s late in the northern hemisphere year to be still sowing crops. It’s also highly unlikely that water stressed crops can recover enough to return average yields and quality, assuming no further weather related problems.
June 9, 2011, 6:14 p.m. EDT
Corn futures reach record; USDA cuts crop outlook
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Corn futures reached a record and stocks in agricultural companies rallied Thursday after the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast tighter supplies, as poor weather hurt crop production.
Corn futures /quotes/zigman/1741625 C1N -0.19% reached a new settlement price record, with the July front-month contract gaining 21 cents, or 2.8%, to settle at $7.854 per bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, after touching $7.93. Prices have more than doubled in the last year as demand for livestock feed and ethanol biofuel continue to grow.
The rise came after the USDA cut expectations for corn acreage by 1.5 million acres. Excessive rains resulted in more than one-third of Midwest fields planted after the mid-May target for optimal growth, according to an analysis of the report by Rabobank. Ohio was hit the hardest, with just over 50% of crops planted.
The USDA also brought down the production estimate by 305 million bushels from last month’s projection, to 13.2 billion bushels. That number would be a record, but still leave supplies very tight, with worse numbers only seen during the 1995-96 harvest, according to John Sanow, a grains analyst from Telvent DTN in Nebraska.
With a majority of the season still to come, the price of corn may not be done rising, according to Sanow.
More
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/corn-futures-rise-after-usda-cuts-crop-outlook-2011-06-09
"Although Bilderberg and the European Movement shared the same founders, members and objectives, arguably Bilderberg constituted the more effective mechanism...it is clear that the [1957] Rome Treaty was nurtured at Bilderberg in the preceding year."
Richard Aldrich, academic and former CIA operative, writing in the March 1997 issue of Diplomacy and Statecraft
At the Comex silver depositories Thursday, final figures were: Registered 28.69 Moz, Eligible 72.32 Moz, Total 101.01 Moz.
+++++
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner.
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, Keynesians, fallen gurus Greenspan and Bernanke, and the unintended consequences of fiat economies. The golden goose dead, what next in our job threatened, double dipping, derivatives gambling bankster driven, world? The benefits of fiat currency were all front loaded, and long dissipated in conspicuous consumption lifestyle and discretionary war. Now on the backend of fiat currency, all the negatives have started to appear, just as 40 years of debt excess has fallen due. The “next Lehman” takes down the system and everyone knows it, which is why the banksters and Bilderbergers keep looting and pillaging while the goings still good. But the going doesn’t look good for much longer. Will an “Arab spring” soon come to visit us all?
“…somebody has to take governments’ place, and business seems to me to be a logical entity to do it.”
David Rockefeller. Newsweek International, Feb 1, 1999.
We’ve used up all our options, so what next?
The British and US economies have failed to recover, despite our most desperate efforts , writes Jeremy Warner.
By Jeremy Warner 6:51AM BST 10 Jun 2011
Western policymakers are at a loss. In textbook Keynesian fashion, they’ve chucked everything up to and including the kitchen sink at the economic crisis, but, beyond a little pain relief, it’s failed to work as prescribed. With their actions fast running up against the limits of political and economic acceptability, is there anything more they can do?
It’s not just in Britain that the recovery seems to have run out of steam. In the past few weeks, much of the economic data has turned worryingly negative almost everywhere. Even in Germany, which has been experiencing near boom conditions, the air has turned decidedly chilly, with both industrial production and exports unexpectedly falling last month. The US, too, has entered a notable “soft patch”, prompting calls for the Federal Reserve to repeat what it did in the same circumstances a year ago and flood the system afresh with newly printed money – “quantitative easing”. So convinced are the markets that it’s coming that they’ve driven the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds to the almost inconceivably low level of less than 3 per cent, despite the very real political risk of federal default and a virtual denial that there will be more quantitative easing from Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman.
For how much longer can the policy elite keep on delivering more of the same? Every time the engine of economic growth looks like spluttering back to life, it conks out again, and another turn of the public policy crank is demanded. Left-wing critics insist that it’s not the policy that’s wrong, but that there simply hasn’t been enough of it. In this regard, they are much like the bankers. Give us more liquidity, they shout, in blissful disregard of the underlying solvency problem, which is as largely unaddressed today as it was when the crisis began back in 2007.
The International Monetary Fund, together with most global policymakers, clings to the belief that the present economic hiatus is just temporary. Both Mr Bernanke and John Lipsky, the IMF’s acting managing director, have this week spelt out a number of reasons for thinking this.
On top of everything else, the world economy has had to absorb three major shocks over the past few months – disruption to the international supply chain caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, another spike in oil and commodity prices, and a further intensification of the eurozone crisis.
-----Once again, it seems to be sliding towards the cliff edge.
What’s more, the harsh truth is that policymakers have very limited scope for doing anything about it this time around. Both in terms of fiscal and monetary stimulus, they’ve pretty much shot their bolt – there’s nothing left in either cannon to fire at a renewed downturn.
Interest rates are already at rock bottom and can be cut no further. The manifest inflationary consequences for commodity prices of repeated bouts of US quantitative easing raise serious questions over whether it’s worth engaging in another dose. The inflationary costs are cancelling out the supposed demand-side benefits.
Much the same thing might be said about fiscal policy. Admittedly there is, in theory, scope for further fiscal expansionism in the US, where the frightening size of the deficit is a function not so much of overspending as inadequate taxation. If the US were to move to more European levels of taxation, the deficit would melt away as quickly as snow in summer.
Yet the US was born out of tax rebellion. There is no chance any time soon of a shift in this deeply held cultural aversion to the oppressions of big government. Even if it were economically desirable for the US to engage in further fiscal stimulus, gridlock on Capitol Hill makes it politically impossible.
More
"The great merit of gold is precisely that it is scarce; that its quantity is limited by nature; that it is costly to discover, to mine, and to process; and that it cannot be created by political fiat or caprice."
Henry Hazlitt
Another weekend, and the weekend before the next major Armstrong tipping point date of June 13/14. Now out of prison for the longest contempt sentence in American legal history, (7 years,) Mr Armstrong now has his own website at http://armstrongeconomics.com/
Will the Bilderbergers crash the Chinese economy? America’s? Blow up the failing Euro? Call an end to the era of fiat? Have a great weekend everyone.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May:
DJIA: +196 Up. NASDAQ: +249 Up. SP500: +200 Up.
The Dow and SP 500 and NASDAQ have all reversed from down to up. The Fed’s rigging of the indicators seems to have worked. Note: like all indicators, they were devised for normal markets not markets where the central bank is flooding the economy with new cash. In current conditions where risk is suspended by too big to fail, I doubt any indicators are showing more that where the Fed’s new cash is flowing in our world of casino capitalism. But the Fed’s QE program is supposed to end this month!!!
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