Baltic Dry Index. 760 - +09
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"For more than two thousand years gold's natural qualities made it man's universal medium of exchange. In contrast to political money, gold is honest money that survived the ages and will live on long after the political fiats of today have gone the way of all paper."
Hans F. Sennholz
Stay long physical precious metals. We are just 14
days into 2013 and in continental Europe its business as usual. In America, at
least, some sanity has returned, and we are assured now that they will not
perpetrate an outright fraud on the rest of the world by minting up a platinum “trillion
dollar” coin. What they will do instead is merely keep monetizing the US debt
via the Fed as they have been doing all along. As a policy it works until one
day it doesn’t. For now though, as the not so great and the not so good start
to assemble in Davos, it still works for the elitist crooked banksters, who rig
liebor and all the other interest rates. But the day gets nearer when the
crooked casino stops paying out. Maybe it’s France taking out the euro. Maybe
it’s Japan over cooking its books. Maybe it’s just too much American excess
debt. Maybe it’s just the rise of too much lawless anarchy. Our unstable
financial system gets closer to breaking apart with each new crisis and fix.
French capital flight spikes as Hollande hits business
France suffered a surge of capital flight over the autumn as president Francois Hollande pushed through a raft of tax rises and stepped up his campaign against the rich.
Fresh
data from the Banque de France show a sudden rise in outflows in October and
November, registered in the so-called Target2 payments system of the European
Central Bank.
Simon
Ward from Henderson Global Investors said the net loss of funds was €53bn
(£43.8bn) over the two months, roughly the period when Mr Holland unveiled a
string of tax rises and suffered a collapse in relations with French
business.
A key
gauge of the French money supply -- six-month real M1 -- has been contracting
at an accelerating rate ever since Mr Holland's election in May.
It has
fallen to levels last seen in the depths of the crisis in 2008. France's money
data is now flashing more serious warnings than numbers in Italy or Spain.
"Taken together, it is clear that there has been a major loss of
confidence and funds have been pulling money out of the country," said Mr
Ward.
While France
is at no serious risk of a debt crisis, it has been bumping along at slump
levels for two years with the youth jobless rate rising to a record 27pc.
The economy may have tipped into recession already even
before Paris embarks on fiscal tightening of 2pc of GDP this year to meet EU
deficit targets. Analysts say the "double whammy" of tax rises and
monetary contraction could prove a toxic mix in 2013.
More
Greece faces decision over tax evasion scandal
Greek lawmakers will vote on whether two former prime ministers and a pair of ex-finance ministers should face criminal prosecution for turning a blind eye to potential tax cheats.
By Anthee
Carassava 10:30PM GMT 13 Jan 2013
The
parliamentary vote, scheduled for January 17, spawns from allegations of fraud
and breach of duty leveled against George Papaconstantinou, a socialist
politician, while at the helm of the country's finance ministry three years
ago.
Last
month, after a lengthy investigation, judicial prosecutors suggested that the former
finance minister may have had a hand in the country's biggest tax evasion
scandal in decades
after the names of three of his relatives were deleted from a list of wealthy
Greeks with more than $2bn in savings stashed away in an HSBC bank branch in
Geneva.
The
account holders include Eleni Papaconstantinou, a high-flying Harvard educated
corporate lawyer, and her husband whose joint account hold $1.2m, as well as Ms
Papaconstantinou's sister's spouse, an arms dealer.
Last week
the parties appeared before an investigating magistrate, denying all
allegations of tax evasion and providing written proof that their Swiss savings
accounts were both declared and taxed, as required by Greek law.
Should
that the declarations be proved true, Mr Papaconstantinou could be cleared of
criminal prosecution and probable incarceration, slapped instead with
misdemeanor charges for tampering with state documents to omit the names of
relatives names from the so-called "Lagarde List."
A suave,
socialist-minded economist who ceded his international career to join forces in
what he called 'the rebirth" of his country, Mr Papaconstantinou admits to
having received a compact disc of the contentious list from Christine Lagarde,
the now head of the International Monetary Fund, when she was French finance
minister and he was serving in the socialist government of prime minister
George Papandreou in 2010.
Two
administrations that followed, including a brief 11-month government led by
technocrat Lucas Papademos, last year, failed to expose billionaire tax cheats.
No one on the Lagarde list has been charged, let alone probed.
Worst
yet, when questioned by a first congressional subcommittee last year, Mr.
Papaconstantinou maintained that the contentious CD had gone missing after he
personally proffered a copy to the country's financial police (SDOE).
On Monday
those former heads will face additional questioning after computer experts
added another twist to the deepening scandal, suggesting last week that data
contained in the memory stick which Papaconstantinou passed on to SDOE was
"modified" long after the former minister left office in July 2011.
More
We end for today in snowy southern England, with the demise of the
trillion dollar platinum coin fraud. The US president, the US Treasury and the
US Fed, have all apparently come to their senses and realized that putting over
a blatant fraud on the world was never going to be a good idea. Below the ever
interesting analysis of Detlev Schlichter is worth taking the time to read,
The true significance of the $1 trillion coin
By Detlev
Schlichter On January 10, 2013
----One of the annoying little things that
stand in the way of more debt is the dreaded debt ceiling debate, a quaint
congressional tradition according to which the politicians in Washington have
to periodically pretend that they can indeed exercise self-constraint and that
they would even obey self-imposed limits. After the usual self-serving
theatrics, both parties agree that the debt ceiling should be lifted, that
spending must continue, and that more debt should be accumulated – in the
interest of the American people, the US and the global economy, social peace,
and because the show must go on.
Since March 1962, the debt ceiling has been
raised 74 times.
Enter The Coin!
In order to make this farce a tad easier next
time, the following plan has been concocted. It has recently made the
headlines. You can read about it here and here:
The U.S. treasury is to issue a platinum coin
with a notional value (that is, a value that is fixed entirely arbitrarily by
the government) of $1 trillion, and this coin is deposited with the Federal
Reserve. In fact, the coin is used to pay down $1 trillion of US government
bonds held presently by the Fed (The Fed holds more than $2 trillion in
government bonds). Thus, tradable government debt that counts against the debt
ceiling is swapped for a ‘commemorative’ coin that does not count against the
debt ceiling. $1 trillion of government debt thus magically disappears.
The US government has its fans who believe that
anything, legally or illegally, should be done to keep it living beyond its
means for as long as possible. These fans are supporting the plan. Among them
is, not surprisingly, Paul Krugman, who fears nothing more than a
congressionally enforced coitus interruptus before the protracted orgy
of money-printing and deficit-spending has a chance to climax – as he keeps
promising us – in a wonderful return of self-sustaining growth.
But the plan has many critics. Their criticism
strikes me, however, as rather naïve and faint, and also missing the true
significance of it all.
Weak criticism
The critics make the following points:
1) This is just a trick and may not
be legal.
2) It eases the pressure on politics
to reduce the deficit meaningfully.
3) This could lead us onto the dangerous
road toward debt monetization and could be inflationary.
Let me address each of these points before I come
to what I consider the most important aspect of this.
----The deficits are here to stay and they
will be funded by the printing press. No limit, no end, no exit.
Will this lead to inflation? _ Well, unless you are
a fully signed-up member of the Church of Modern
Monetary Theory, you know the
answer.
This will end badly.
More
"Gold was not selected arbitrarily by governments to be the monetary standard. Gold had developed for many centuries on the free market as the best money; as the commodity providing the most stable and desirable monetary medium."
Murray N. Rothbard
At the Comex silver depositories Friday final figures were: Registered 37.98
Moz, Eligible 110.98 Moz, Total 148.96 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, the worker’s paradise of one party China. The folly of
subsidised electric energy from coal.
Beijing Orders Official Cars Off Roads to Curb Pollution
By Bloomberg News - Jan 14, 2013 5:08 AM GMT
Beijing ordered government vehicles off the roads as part of an emergency
response to ease air pollution that has smothered China’s capital for the past
three days, while warning the smog will persist until Jan. 16. Hospitals were inundated with patients complaining of heart and respiratory ailments and the website of the capital’s environmental monitoring center crashed. Hyundai Motor Co. (005380)’s venture in Beijing suspended production for a day to help ease the pollution, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Official measurements of PM2.5, fine airborne particulates that pose the largest health risks, rose as high as 993 micrograms per cubic meter in Beijing on Jan. 12, compared with World Health Organization guidelines of no more than 25. It was as high as 500 at 6 a.m. today. Long-term exposure to fine particulates raises the risk of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases as well as lung cancer, according to the WHO.
“Pollution levels this high are extreme even for Beijing,” Li Yan, Beijing-based head of Greenpeace East Asia’s climate and energy campaign, said in a telephone interview. “Although the government has announced efforts to cut pollution, the problem is regional and to fix Beijing’s problem, we also have to fix industrial pollution in neighboring regions like Hebei and Tianjin and even as far as Inner Mongolia.”
Exposure to PM2.5 helped cause a combined 8,572 premature deaths in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xi’an in 2012, and led to economic losses of $1.08 billion, according to estimates given in a study by Greenpeace and Peking University’s School of Public Health published Dec. 18. The burning of coal is the main source of pollution, accounting for 19 percent, while vehicle emissions contribute 6 percent, the report said.
----China, which the World Bank estimates has 16 of the world’s 20 most-polluted cities, is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Beijing, home to more than 20 million people, began to release real-time air quality data measuring pollutants of 2.5 micrometers in size in September, and 74 cities started publishing data including PM2.5, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide starting Jan. 1, the official Xinhua news service reported Dec. 28.
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-12/beijingers-told-to-stay-indoors-as-pollution-hits-record.html
"Gold bears the confidence of the world's millions, who value it far above the promises of politicians, far above the unbacked paper issued by governments as money substitutes. It has been that way through all recorded history. There is no reason to believe it will lose the confidence of people in the future."
Oakley R. Bramble
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished December:
DJIA: +100 Down. NASDAQ: +123 Unch. SP500: +129 Up.
All three indexes are giving different
signals. A time for caution.
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