Wednesday 12 September 2012

G-Day!



Baltic Dry Index. 662  -04 A new post Lehman low.

LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000.  Revised due to QE programs.

FIAT

Noun. Decree, command, edict, mandate, permission. A cheap Italian car.

Unsound At Any Price. 1994.

G-Day has arrived! Today is the day that Germany’s constitutional court must prostitute itself and pronounce that the European Stability Mechanism somehow passes the German constitution and is legal. How they get to that conclusion is up to them. Everyone knows that it doesn’t really and that it should be put to a German referendum. Everyone knows that won’t happen because in current circumstances the German voters will vote it down. The result: the German court must somehow come up with convoluted logic supporting the legality of the ESM. If they go off reservation and declare it illegal, Club Mad goes boom by the end of the day.

In an unfortunate coincidence, the humourless, libertine Dutch go to the polls today to vote for a new coalition government. As is the way of continental Europe, complicated voting systems rarely produce anything but weak coalition governments. Everyone must be placated from mad muslim extremists to anti-immigration, anti-Euroland little Hollanders. By ancient tradition, weeks of horse trading result in a bland centre left, government that with two left feet, slowly edges to the left. Will this time be different?

Below, the EU makes a power grab against the nation states. Elitist Bilderbergism is alive and thriving in Brussels. The Germanic euro as we knew it is over. Long live the new ECB run fiat Latin Euro.

FIAT CURRENCY

A currency whose value is whatever it is decreed to be, undetermined by market forces. One Italian Lira [euro.]

Unsound At Any Price. 1994.

September 11, 2012, 8:15 p.m. ET

EU Puts Central Bank in Charge of Policing Lenders

BRUSSELS—With a proposal Wednesday to put the European Central Bank in charge of policing the more than 6,000 banks in the euro zone, Europe is taking a first step toward creating a system aimed at shielding individual countries from the fallout of bank failures.

The proposal is the beginning of an effort to replace the euro zone's patchwork of national banking systems and regulators with the uniform rules of a "banking union," which officials say is necessary to repair Europe's crisis-hit common currency. Yet even before the proposal was published, there was disagreement over the pace at which this should happen.

The struggle to pull Europe's financial sector closer together risks unsettling investors in coming months, even if the bloc successfully slides past two other potentially momentous events Wednesday. In the morning, Germany's top court will rule whether the euro zone's new bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, or ESM, conflicts with the country's constitution.

And by the late evening, provisional results will emerge after a general election in the Netherlands, which has been a leading advocate of austerity as the solution to the debt crisis. Prolonged coalition talks in The Hague could complicate the euro zone's efforts to reinvent itself.

Already, some governments have advocated speeding up some parts of the planned banking union, including forcing losses on creditors of failing banks. Other elements, such as sharing responsibility for other countries' bank debts, may be slowed down. The European Parliament, meanwhile, is threatening to block any initiative it doesn't deem effective enough.
More

Below, Canada and yet another sign that all is not well in the global economy. The euro as we know it is un-saveable.

Sharp trade slowdown set to wallop GDP

BARRIE McKENNA
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail Last updated
The high dollar and the global slowdown are crushing Canada’s trade-dependent economy.

The latest evidence: The country posted the largest trade deficit in July since Statistics Canada began keeping records in 1971.

It wasn’t just the scale of the gap – $2.3-billion – that jolted analysts. It’s how the economy got there.
Virtually all major exports fell sharply, including energy, autos, agriculture, forest products and machinery-and-equipment. The overall drop was 3.4 per cent, paced by an even larger 5 per cent decline in exports to the U.S. – Canada’s largest customer.

“This is about as bad as it gets for Canadian exporters,” Scotiabank economist Derek Holt said.
And in spite of the strong dollar, which has risen even higher since July, Canadian shoppers and businesses are consuming and importing less. Imports fell 2.2 per cent in July.

While we wait for up or down news for Germany, we end for today with massive trouble brewing in the East China Sea. Japan doesn’t seem to realise that for China this is China’s “Falkland Islands” issue. An issue with likely the same ending. Stay long physical precious metals. There’s no easy exit from this issue. Unlike Great Britain and Argentina, there’s not thousands of miles between the antagonists.

China deploys two warships after Tokyo announces disputed island purchase

China deployed two navy vessels and launched a furious verbal assault on Japan after Tokyo announced it had ‘bought’ a group of islands disputed by the two countries in the East China Sea.

On Tuesday morning Osamu Fujimura, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, confirmed his country had agreed to purchase the islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, from a Japanese family it claims owns them.

Media reports in Japan said the government would pay a total of 2.05 billion yen (£16.4 million) for the islands and that the transfer of their ownership would be completed by the end of this month.
Simultaneously, China’s state-controlled news agency Xinhua reported that two Chinese surveillance vessels had arrived in the region on Tuesday to “assert the country’s sovereignty”. Japanese media said the Japanese Coast Guard was monitoring the vessels.

Japan’s move to “nationalise” the disputed islands escalated a simmering and long-standing feud between the two nations over the territory, which is administered by Japan but also claimed by China and Taiwan.

In a statement issued on Monday, after Japan confirmed plans to buy the islands, China’s foreign ministry warned Tokyo would have to “bear all serious consequences”.

“Long gone are the days when the Chinese nation was subject to bullying and humiliation from others. The Chinese government will not sit idly by watching its territorial sovereignty being infringed upon,” it said.

The statement said Japan’s “so-called ‘purchase’” was “a gross violation of China’s sovereignty over its own territory and is highly offensive to the 1.3 billion Chinese people.”

“It seriously tramples on historical facts and international jurisprudence. The Chinese government and people express firm opposition to and strong protest against the Japanese move,” the statement added describing the move as “totally illegal and invalid”.

China to Provide Weather Forecasts for Islands Claimed by Japan

By Bloomberg News - Sep 12, 2012 5:39 AM GMT
China’s Meteorological Administration started providing weather forecasts for islands at the center of a dispute with Japan as both sides seek to assert authority for their claims.

The move falls under the meteorological body’s responsibility to provide forecasts and alerts for China’s land and waters, according to a statement posted on the administration’s website yesterday. The islands are known as Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese.

---- The weather reports will be broadcast after the 7 p.m. news on China Central Television, the country’s main state-run TV channel, according to the statement.

Anti-Japanese protests were reported in three Chinese cities yesterday, according to Xinhua. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in a regular briefing yesterday that “Japan’s recent wrongful actions have sparked Chinese people’s strong indignation within and outside of China.”

Sept. 11, 2012, 8:55 a.m. EDT

Premier Wen: China will meet 2012 growth targets

 “But it [the boom] could not last forever even if inflation and credit expansion were to go on endlessly. It would then encounter the barriers which prevent the boundless expansion of circulation credit. It would lead to the crack-up boom and the breakdown of the whole monetary system.”

Ludwig von Mises

At the Comex silver depositories Tuesday final figures were: Registered 38.04 Moz, Eligible 102.63 Moz, Total 140.67 Moz.  


Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over. 

They’re back. Today, more on the Swizz banksters at leading Swiss bank UBS, who thought that US laws were optional for members of America’s one percent.  Is UBS really deserving of a US banking licence? So far only one Swizz bankster has gone to prison, and he’s collecting $104 million and probably a pardon as well. You couldn’t make this sort of thing up. Still if Mr. Romney makes it into the White House, he will become the first US President to officially have a legal Swiss bank account. The times certainly are changing.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.

Mitt Romney, with apologies Woody Allen.

UBS Whistle-Blower Secures $104 Million Award From IRS

By Tom Schoenberg and David Voreacos - Sep 11, 2012 5:16 PM GMT
Bradley Birkenfeld, the former UBS AG (UBSN) banker who went to prison after telling the Internal Revenue Service how the bank helped thousands of Americans evade taxes, secured a whistle-blower award of $104 million, the largest individual federal payout in U.S. history.

Birkenfeld told authorities how UBS bankers came to the U.S. to woo rich Americans, managed $20 billion of their assets and helped them cheat the IRS. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2008, a year after reporting the bank’s conduct to the Justice Department, U.S. Senate, IRS and Securities and Exchange Commission. He left prison on Aug. 1.

“The IRS sent 104 million messages to whistle-blowers around the world -- that there is now a safe and secure way to report tax fraud,” Birkenfeld’s attorney Stephen M. Kohn said today at a news conference in Washington. He is seeking a presidential pardon for Birkenfeld, who is under home confinement.

Birkenfeld’s disclosures preceded UBS’s decision to pay $780 million to avoid prosecution, admit it fostered tax evasion from 2000 to 2007 and turn over data on 250 Swiss accounts. UBS later agreed to provide information on another 4,450 accounts. Since then, at least 33,000 Americans have voluntarily disclosed offshore accounts to the IRS, generating more than $5 billion.

The UBS case led to an erosion of the use of Swiss bank secrecy by wealthy Americans to cheat the IRS. At least 11 banks are under criminal investigation in the U.S. Two dozen offshore bankers, lawyers and advisers, as well as 50 American taxpayers, have been charged with crimes
More

And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.

Matthew 19:24.

The monthly Coppock Indicators finished August:
DJIA: +76 Up. NASDAQ: +97 Up. SP500: +69 Up. All three indicators have reversed from down to up.

No comments:

Post a Comment