Baltic Dry Index. 1157 +08
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
Of course, our vision and our aims go far beyond the complex arguments of economics, but unless we get the economy right we shall deny our people the opportunity to share that vision and to see beyond the narrow horizons of economic necessity. Without a healthy economy we cannot have a healthy society. Without a healthy society the economy will not stay healthy for long.
Margaret Thatcher.
Voters across Europe don’t like austerity and
are showing it at the polls from the UK to Greece. On Sunday, voters in France
and Greece are about to set back Euroland with an old fashioned return to
outright nationalism. Greece in the great scheme of things doesn’t matter,
France unfortunately does. Barring a last minute miracle, French voters are
about to elect an old fashioned tax and spend socialist. The two biggest
economies in Euroland are then about to clash. In the UK, in yesterday’s local
elections, the parties of the incredibly weak coalition government, the
Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats were trounced. In a very low turnout,
voters voted in anti-austerity old Labour socialists. Europe is polarised and
polarising further. Today ahead of the French presidential runoff election on
Sunday, we focus on today’s Europe.
Stay long precious metals. 2012 is an epic
year of electoral change. From America, across Europe, through Russia and India
and China, elections or in China’s case a Communist Party generational
transition, are rewriting the political landscape. Voters are angry at the
bankster-great vampire squid collapse of their lifestyles. Predictably, they
are falling for fringe parties and the foolish “easy life” promises of woolly socialism.
They will get socialism but no easy life. A polarised America at present, seems
headed towards a toss-up. It would seem our world is headed into a period of
great instability. Our 2012 investing world is summed up by Facebook and
Google. We are in a world of transition and make believe.
"Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
Alan Greenspan
May 3, 2012, 10:06 p.m. ET
French Discontent Imperils Sarkozy
PARIS—One
morning recently, Nicolas Sarkozy summoned a top aide to discuss his fading
re-election prospects. Yet another poll was pointing to victory for his rival,
Socialist François Hollande, in the presidential election taking place this
Sunday.
"I
know what my strategy should be," Mr. Sarkozy said to the aide, according
to a person who was present. "But I sometimes get lost."
Mr.
Sarkozy was elected five years ago on a pledge to restore France's economic
power by encouraging entrepreneurship and rewarding "those who wake up
early." He promised change and revival, and said France should become more
like the U.S.
On
Sunday, however, Mr. Sarkozy could join the long list of leaders swept aside by
Europe's economic crisis or by austerity measures that proved unpopular with
voters. Ten have fallen so far, including Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi and
Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
It is
still possible for the combative 57-year-old Mr. Sarkozy to pull off a
comeback—mainly if he can persuade undecided voters to swing his way in the
closing hours—though he trails Mr. Hollande by a sizable deficit of at least
five percentage points.
Defeat would cap an extraordinary reversal of
fortune for a president the French had elected on promises to create more jobs
and cut the country's state sector. Today, the world's fifth-largest economy is
saddled with a record debt of €1.7 trillion ($2.24 trillion), about €500
billion more than when Mr. Sarkozy took office in 2007. The jobless rate has
risen to a 13-year high of 10%.
More
May 3,
2012, 5:49 p.m. ET
Greek Elections Seen Leading to Instability
Angry Voters Are Set to Punish Main Parties, Leading to New Polls Within Months and Threatening Bailout Package
ATHENS—Greece's
election on Sunday is expected to usher in such political instability that
officials from the country's major parties are planning another possible
election within months.
That, in
turn, could threaten the viability of Greece's latest bailout package from the
European Union and the International Monetary Fund and aggravate the euro
zone's financial woes.
A nation
eager to punish its political establishment for Greece's financial and economic
meltdown is set to give the country's two major established parties a drubbing
this weekend. Even before the first vote is cast, senior officials from both
parties say privately that any new coalition government between the
conservative New Democracy and the center-left Socialists, known as Pasok,
could be short-lived—and that more elections will be needed soon.
Many of
these party officials expect elections by the fall. Some, especially in New
Democracy, say fresh elections could happen as early as June.
----With
10 parties polling above the 3% threshold for winning seats, Greeks are likely
to elect the most fragmented Parliament since the restoration of democracy and
fall of Greece's military junta in 1974.
More
Fascism rises from the depths of Greece's despair
A neo-Nazi party that wants work camps for immigrants is on course to win its first seats in parliament on Sunday
It
started, as many days do in Greece, with a trip to the kiosk to buy cigarettes.
Still half-asleep, Panayiotis Roumeliotis was surprised to be asked to show his
identity card by two young men with shaved heads. It was his first direct
contact with the vigilante groups that have become a feature of everyday life
in some areas of the Greek capital.
"They
were calling themselves the residents association but they were just fasistakia
(little fascists)," said the 28-year-old.
Over the
last two years, Mr Roumeliotis has watched the central Athens neighbourhood of
Ayios Panteleimonas, where he grew up, undergo an ugly transformation. Taking
the bus on another morning soon after, a gunshot shattered the back window and
a gang of men forced the driver to stop. When the doors opened, they came on to
the bus and started to assault the non-Greek passengers. The attackers were
wearing T-shirts from the right-wing extremist group Golden Dawn. While
panicked people were trying to escape from the bus the men were hitting them
with flagpoles.
"They
were beating people with the Greek flag," said Mr Roumeliotis.
When the
police arrived they stood off until the thugs had finished. When he asked the
police why no one had been arrested one of the officers replied to him:
"Why, did they do something to you?"
Formerly
a solid middle-class neighbourhood, the economic crisis and waves of new
arrivals have changed the area and erased old certainties.
Property
prices here have dropped to as little as one quarter of what they were five
years ago. The Greeks who could afford to have left. For rent signs are
plastered over almost every one of the area's shabby five-storey apartment
blocks. On the side streets among the North African-run mini markets and
Nigerian internet cafes, newcomers from West Africa push shopping trolleys full
of scrap metal stripped from deserted buildings. Large-scale drug dealing has
overtaken an entire street in the neighbourhood. Violent crime has rocketed.
The
square in front of the local church, daubed in anti-immigrant slogans such as
"foreigners don't fit in our square", has witnessed pitch battles
between anarchists and Golden Dawn supporters.
Among the
Greeks who remain, Mr Roumeliotis' own circumstances are fairly typical. He was
made redundant from the "job for life" that his grandfather had got
for him at the state-run airline Olympic Airways. Of his 10 closest friends,
eight are unemployed.
More
4 May 2012 Last updated at 06:58
Local elections: Labour makes gains across England
Labour
has won a string of victories in English local elections - with shadow
ministers claiming Ed Miliband is now on course for No 10.
The party
is set to add more than 700 seats and has taken control of nearly 20 councils
including Birmingham.
Based on
results so far, Labour is projected to end up with a 39% national share of the
vote, up three points, with the Tories down four on 31%.
The Lib
Dems' share of the vote is estimated to be unchanged at 16%.
More
Spain's poorest region suffers 32% unemployment
Extremadura is often cited by Spaniards as an area
that lives off taxes provided by wealthier and harder-working areas
Thursday 3 May 2012 20.22 BST
Bordering on Portugal, the sprawling but thinly populated region of
Extremadura has long been Spain's poorest, with per-capita GDP at just over
two-thirds the national average.From the foothills of the Gredos mountains, where Jaraíz de la Vera lies, to the harsher landscapes of the south, this has traditionally been an area of landowners and poor agricultural labourers. At 32%, its unemployment is rivalled only by the Canary Islands and southern Andalucia.
Just over a million Spaniards – one in 40 – live here in the two sleepy frontier provinces of Badajoz and Caceres. It is also home to the much prized, acorn-fed black Iberian pig, whose fatty, cured ham – jamón ibérico – sells at up to €250 a kilo.
The gentle dehesa countryside of sometimes scrublike grazing land, dotted with ancient cork and holm oak trees, provides a home where the pigs can scoff their acorns in libertyfreely.
As a region that produces just 1.6% of Spain's wealth, Extremadura is often held up by angry Catalans and others as an area that lives off taxes provided by wealthier and harder-working areas of Spain. It has also traditionally been a receiver of generous EU funding.
After two decades of socialist rule, the region's government was last year taken over by a bizarre alliance between the conservative People's party of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy and the communist-led United Left.
More
"The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe."
Mikhail Gorbachev.
At the Comex silver depositories Thursday final
figures were: Registered 35.58 Moz, Eligible 106.52 Moz, Total 142.10 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner.
The bent,
the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today. proof
that the art world is not all that the eye sees.
“The world is a place that’s gone from being flat to round to crooked.”
Mad Magazine.
Behind bars: the pub chef who cooked up masterful forgeries in his spare time
Friday 04 May 2012
He
dreamed of a glittering career as a successful artist; he ended up at 4.30am
every day working as a chef in a pub. Snubbed for decades by an art world which
refused to buy his paintings, William Mumford finally struck on his plan of
revenge to became one of Britain’s most prolific fine art fakers.
The
remarkable story unfolded yesterday of how the former market art seller
recruited a crew of colleagues down on their luck from the Roundstone pub in
Littlehampton and went on to dupe experts at one of the world’s premier auction
houses.
Working
from a spare bedroom of a rented house, Mumford, now 63, knocked out four
paintings a week for five years notably in the style of celebrated Indian
artists of the post-independence period. He recruited a cleaner and a fellow
chef to peddle them on eBay and at small auction houses to tap into the booming
Asian market.
Two of
his paintings made their way to Bonhams auction house in London where they were
authenticated and sold in Dubai for a combined total of more than $40,000
before he was finally rumbled. Yesterday - with ten of his artworks laid out in
a London courtroom - Mumford was jailed for two years for a scam that was
potentially worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“For 40
years I had painted the same picture, then I put a different name on it and
they queued up,” he told The Independent. “I read a wonderful quote from Mark
Rothko who said: ‘A poor artist has to be a thief. He has to steal a place on a
rich man's wall.’ I loved that.
“I know
it sounds a bit stupid but maybe it was my revenge on the art world. But I
would rather have remained a failed artist than a successful forger.”
His fakes
were released on to the British art market over five years and imitated the
world of Welsh landscape painter Kyffin Williams and India’s best-known artist
MF Husain. Before his death last year, Mr Husain helped confirm to police that
a number of Mumford’s paintings were fakes.
Police
found hundreds of paintings in a garage behind his home along with gallery
stamps and Victorian-era frames. A fellow chef at the pub, Anthony Resse, 24,
stacked up the paintings in his car and tried to sell them at auction houses in
southern England, detailing his plans with military precision on a white board
at home. The pub cleaner, Martin Petrskovsky, sold them on eBay while Mumford
kept painting.
Mumford
admitted creating up to 1,000 forgeries and conspiracy to deceive potential
buyers and launder the proceeds of the crimes. Police have found about 40 of
them, with sellers in Canada, the United States and Greece. The gang sought to
keep beneath the radar by selling them for generally a few thousand pounds and
avoiding the large auction houses.
Julian
Roup, a spokesman for Bonhams, said they had been alerted by one of the Dubai
buyers suggesting that they had bought a high-quality fake. The auction house
ran its own investigation and found a second painting had been sold by Mumford
before calling in Scotland Yard. “However stringent your security systems, now
and then something will get through,” he said.
Petrskovsky,
35, was jailed for 21 months for his role in the scam. Four others, including
Resse and Mr Mumford’s wife Daphne, were given suspended jail terms for their
roles.
Scotland
Yard detective Michelle Roycroft said: “This complicated case highlights the
pitfalls of buying works of art from online auction sites.
More
Another
weekend, and Europe awaits the result of the vote in France. As goes France so
goes the fate of Euroland. If the polls are right, we can write-off Euroland and the euro as a meaningful global
player. If socialist Mr. Hollande wins, Euroland’s two biggest countries and
economies are set to clash for years ahead. A house divided cannot stand, goes
the old saying. If the polls are right we are about to see that tested in
Europe. How much worse can things get in the Disunited State of Euroland?
Unless French voters unexpectedly come to their senses, sadly we are about to
find out. Have a great weekend everyone.
The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
Margaret Thatcher.
The monthly
Coppock Indicators finished April:
DJIA: +89 Down. NASDAQ: +97 Down. SP500: +63 Down. All
three indicators remain down but downward momentum is stalling.
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