Baltic Dry Index. 1024 +13
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no
holidays.
Henny Youngman
Say goodnight Europe, at least that’s the
opinion of Rupert Murdoch’s downwardly mobile Wall Street Journal, mouthpiece
of the Bernanke Fed. Below, the Journal looks at the decline and Fall of
Europe, brought low by socialism, and dumbed down education and modern TV. Stay long physical precious metals.
I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas with a
note on it saying, toys not included.
Bernard Manning.
November 15, 2012, 6:11 p.m. ET
Europe's Lingering Crisis Augurs Badly for Its Clout
Europe's
strategic thinkers are worrying about heart failure in the euro zone.
In the
early phases of the euro-zone debt crisis, many of them dismissed its
significance, arguing it was a transitory financial and economic phenomenon
that would have little or no lasting geopolitical impact. Now, the crisis has
dragged on for so long that deeper consequences appear unavoidable.
With
large parts of the region in economic retreat, and a few countries in
depression, there are growing doubts that the European Union will hold
together. But even if it does hold on, the current muddle-through speaks of a
continuing decline of European influence in the world.
In an
article in the journal Survival, François Heisbourg, special adviser to the
Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research, points out that it is
"heart failure"—an unwillingness at the center to deal with the
problems of the periphery—that ultimately kills political unions.
---- In the article, Mr. Heisbourg paints four possible scenarios for Europe's strategic future: continued muddle-through, a closer union, a splintering of the euro in which countries, such as Greece, leave, or a complete breakdown of the euro zone. All suggest big changes in the strategic landscape.
He says
Europe has been lucky to have muddled through as long as it has. With the euro
zone in recession and the political climate getting worse, the risks to this
approach grow with every month. "We are probably running out of
luck," he said Thursday. "I'd be very surprised if we had no
accidents in 2013."
More
Up next, the French run, isolated IMF, advocates
forgery for the Eurozone. Ironically, forgery is one of the few things that
Euroland does really well. The euro is really only forgery on the grandest
scale of all. Unbacked by anything more than Germany’s willingness to indulge
in transfer payments to the idlers of Club Med. Even their bank notes have
pictures of fictitious buildings. The EU’s accounts are so bad that 25% of the
money spent, gets stolen, goes missing and simply disappears. The auditors
haven’t been able to sign off on the EU’s books in 18 years. Would you put your
money in Europe’s super Madoff?
Santa Claus has the right idea - visit people only once a year.
Victor Borge.
IMF's Lagarde says important for euro zone to forge deal on Greece
MANILA |(Reuters) - A crucial Eurogroup meeting next week on Greece should forge a deal that will put the insolvent country's economy on a sustainable path, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde said on Friday.
The IMF chief is cutting short her tour of Asia to attend the Eurogroup meeting in Brussels on November 20.
A row between euro zone governments and the IMF over how to make Greece's giant debt mountain manageable is holding up the release of 31 billion euros ($39.5 billion) in emergency loans needed to keep Athens afloat.
---- "It is a question of working hard, putting our mind to it, making sure that we focus on the same objective which is that the country in particular, Greece, can operate on a sustainable basis, can recover, can get back on its feet, can reaccess markets as early as possible."
Lagarde earlier this week publicly disagreed with euro zone finance ministers who have suggested that Greece should be given until 2022 to lower its debt to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio to 120 percent. Lagarde has insisted the existing target of 2020 should remain.
--- Greece's total debt is
forecast to rise to nearly 190 percent of gross domestic product next year,
meaning it is highly unlikely to fall back to 120 percent of GDP by 2020, the
level the IMF has said is the maximum sustainable in the long term.
More
Next, while wait to see what happens later in the
day in America, as the two warring tribes meet to negotiate a way past the “fiscal
cliff,” a timely warning on Reuters to trust nothing in our high tech world. I’ll
bet the ex-CIA boss now wishes he’d read this article
last year.
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took
me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
Shirley Temple.
Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore
By Mat Honan 11.15.12 6:30 AM
You have
a secret that can
ruin your life.
It’s not
a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of
them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re cautious—that can reveal everything about
you.
Your
email. Your bank account. Your address and credit card number. Photos of your
kids or, worse, of yourself, naked. The precise location where you’re sitting
right now as you read these words. Since the dawn of the information age, we’ve
bought into the idea that a password, so long as it’s elaborate enough, is an
adequate means of protecting all this precious data. But in 2012 that’s a
fallacy, a fantasy, an outdated sales pitch. And anyone who still mouths it is
a sucker—or someone who takes you for one.
No matter
how complex, no matter how unique, your passwords can no longer protect you.
Look
around. Leaks and dumps—hackers breaking into computer systems and releasing
lists of usernames and passwords on the open web—are now regular occurrences.
The way we daisy-chain accounts, with our email address doubling as a universal
username, creates a single point of failure that can be exploited with
devastating results. Thanks to an explosion of personal information being
stored in the cloud, tricking customer service agents into resetting passwords
has never been easier. All a hacker has to do is use personal information
that’s publicly available on one service to gain entry into another.
This
summer, hackers destroyed my entire digital life in the span of an hour. My
Apple, Twitter, and Gmail passwords were all robust—seven, 10, and 19
characters, respectively, all alphanumeric, some with symbols thrown in as
well—but the three accounts were linked, so once the hackers had conned their
way into one, they had them all. They really just wanted my Twitter handle:
@mat. As a three-letter username, it’s considered prestigious. And to delay me
from getting it back, they used my Apple account to wipe every one of my
devices, my iPhone and iPad and MacBook, deleting all my messages and documents
and every picture I’d ever taken of my 18-month-old daughter.
Since
that awful day, I’ve devoted myself to researching the world of online
security. And what I have found is utterly terrifying. Our digital lives are
simply too easy to crack. Imagine that I want to get into your email. Let’s say
you’re on AOL. All I need to do is go to the website and supply your name plus
maybe the city you were born in, info that’s easy to find in the age of Google.
With that, AOL gives me a password reset, and I can log in as you.
First
thing I do? Search for the word “bank” to figure out where you do your online
banking. I go there and click on the Forgot Password? link. I get the password
reset and log in to your account, which I control. Now I own your checking
account as well as your email.
This summer I learned how to get into, well, everything.
With two minutes and $4 to spend at a sketchy foreign website, I could report
back with your credit card, phone, and Social Security numbers and your home
address. Allow me five minutes more and I could be inside your accounts for,
say, Amazon, Best Buy, Hulu, Microsoft, and Netflix. With yet 10 more, I could
take over your AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. Give me 20—total—and I own your
PayPal. Some of those security holes are plugged now. But not all, and new ones
are discovered every day.
More
We end for the week, with the logical outcome of a
world built on fiat money. Deficits don’t matter, provided you have your own
fiat money and a central bank. If bailing out banksters is good for the nation
state, how much better to bail out one and all?
Bah, humbug!
Confessions of a deficit denier
By Anatole Kaletsky November 15, 2012
Here is a
confession: I am a deficit denier.
To say
this in respectable society is to be reviled as a self-serving rogue, worse
than someone who denies climate change. Yet whenever I see a budget crisis
— the U.S. falling off a fiscal cliff; austerity protests paralyzing Europe;
Britain’s governing coalition tearing itself apart over missed budget targets
-– I cannot resist the same conclusion: These countries’ leaders should take a
deep breath, relax and stop worrying about deficits.
For there
is actually no fiscal crisis in the United States, Britain or most European
countries — including even Italy and Spain. Greece is another matter. But the
very specific Greek disaster hardly justifies a generalized global panic about
all government debts.
Consider
some statistical facts. Interest rates are lower today than at any time in
history, meaning that governments find it easier to borrow money than ever
before. This hardly suggests impending bankruptcy.
Especially
since the investors falling all over themselves to lend them money are not
naïve widows and orphans or government-controlled central banks. Rather, hedge
funds, billionaires and the sovereign-wealth funds of financially sophisticated
nations like Norway and Singapore have all poured far more money into government
bonds than into shares, property or gold over the past three years.
Why are
sophisticated investors unmoved by the deficit panic? Because they know that
governments, at least outside the euro zone, are nowhere near bankruptcy. In
fact, debt levels are not dangerously high. The U.S. government net debt is
expected to stabilize at 89 percent of gross domestic product from 2014 to
2017, according to the International Monetary Fund, even if all the Bush tax
cuts were extended and without any of the spending cuts assumed in the fiscal
cliff. Similar stable debt levels are projected for Germany, France, Italy,
Britain and even Spain. Assuming debt levels do stabilize in the rage of
85 percent to 100 percent of GDP, these won’t be worryingly high. U.S. national
debt peaked at 110 percent of GDP in the late 1940s, and Britain’s was even
higher. But nobody worried much about national bankruptcy after World War II –
and the confidence proved justified. For the U.S. and Britain both enjoyed
their strongest economic performance in the two decades after their deficits
peaked at more than 100 percent of GDP.
The U.S.
and British fiscal situations today are even less troubling — partly because
two-thirds of the government debt issued since the 2008 crisis has been bought
by the central banks. Since the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England are
part of their respective governments, the bonds they own represent debts the
government owes to itself.
Once
central bank holdings are consolidated within the government, the true burden
of debt owed to the public falls to roughly 65 percent of GDP in both Britain
and the United States.
Britain
belatedly began to acknowledge this fiscal reality in a path-breaking move last
Friday, when the Treasury decided to credit back to itself the interest
payments it had been theoretically making to the Bank of England. At a stroke,
this will slash £35 billion off government deficits and spending.
The next
logical step might be to cancel completely the £375 billion worth of bonds held
by the Bank of England, thereby reducing reported debt by some 25 percent of
GDP.
More
"Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas
shopping when they ran out of money."
Anon.
At the Comex silver depositories Thursday final figures were: Registered 35.82
Moz, Eligible 105.31 Moz, Total 141.13 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, it’s
the banksters again. It’s not their fault, really it isn’t. When it comes to
lying, cheating, stealing, they just can’t help themselves, even to save their
lives. “My word is my bond,” leave it out Gov’, give us a break!
Christmas is coming and the geese are getting fat,
Please put a trillion in the banksters’ hat.
If you haven’t got a trillion a billion will do,
If you haven’t got a billion, God damn you!
Ebenezer Squid
RBS claim it's 'co-operating' on Libor is false, says Canadian regulator
Canadian regulators have publicly refuted a claim by the Royal Bank of Scotland that it is “co-operating fully” with authorities around the world in the on-going Libor probe.
The Ottawa-based Canadian Competition Bureau (CCB) said RBS was not co-operating because it has been refusing to hand over relevant documents for months.In a move that escalates an on-going spat, the CCB said it felt duty bound to point out inaccuracies it had spotted a recent regulatory filing made by RBS that said it was working with regulators.
“The suggestion that the RBS Group is “co-operating fully” with the Bureau is false,” the authority said in a statement posted on its website. It added: “The RBS Group has not applied to the Bureau’s Immunity or Leniency Programs and, in fact, has challenged a production order issued by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in relation to the Bureau’s investigation.”
Phil Norris, a spokesman for the CCB, told reporters: “We take misleading statements regarding our investigations very seriously, so in this case we did not hesitate to release a statement, to take the appropriate action to correct them,”
RBS quickly issued a statement itself saying that it was “simply not accurate to imply that we do not want to co-operate.”
JP Morgan banned from trading electricity in the US
JP Morgan has been banned from trading electricity in the US after a regulator accused the bank of making "egregious" misrepresentations during an investigation into alleged market maniplation.
The
six-month ban imposed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is the
latest sign that US authorities are stepping up their policing of the country's
vast energy market. Last month, it proposed Barclays be fined $435m (£274m) for
allegedly manipulating electricity prices.
The
punishment handed down to JP Morgan relates to a dispute that began in 2011,
when the state operator of the power grid in California asked the bank for
documents during an investigation into alleged price manipulation in the wider
market.
The
California Independent System Operator (CAISO) fined the bank $486,000 in
February for failing to submit the documents, a fine that JPMorgan asked FERC
to overturn because it claims it was not required to produce the documents.
Although
JP Morgan withdrew its appeal in June, FERC this week imposed the ban because
of the "egregious nature of JP Morgan's repeated submission of false and
misleading statements", to CAISO that it found during its own
investigation.
Energy
experts said that it is the first time that a major company has been suspended
from the energy markets since the Enron scandal in 2001. FERC was equipped with
new powers after Enron, once the world's largest energy trader, was found
guilty of accounting fraud.
“Money's scarce
Times are hard
Here's your f***ing
Xmas card”
Times are hard
Here's your f***ing
Xmas card”
Ebenezer Squid, with apologies to Phyllis Diller.
The monthly
Coppock Indicators finished October:
DJIA: +92 Up. NASDAQ: +99 Up. SP500: +102 Up.
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