Baltic Dry Index. 706 - +06
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"Gold would have value if for no other reason than that it enables a citizen to fashion his
financial escape from the state."
William F. Rickenbacker
Written above the gates of continental
Europe, “abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
According to the most recent Italian polls, Italy’s “bunga, bunga”
partying former Prime Minister, is well on course to win next month’s Italian
general election. Silvio, the Monti heartbreaker. Is Euroland dysfunctional or what? Mrs Merkel’s
peons are just going to have to work harder for much less, as Europe’s
delusional politicians attempt to keep the party on the Europa Titanic in full
swing. Head for the lifeboats marked physical gold and silver.
"The paper standard is self-destructive."
Hans F. Sennholz
Monti, Berlusconi Spar on Taxes in Weekend Media Barrage
By Andrew Davis - Jan 6, 2013 11:01 PM GMT
Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and one of his challengers in next
month’s elections, Silvio Berlusconi, sparred over the government’s unpopular
property tax and economic policy in a weekend media blitz. Monti signaled that the property tax known as IMU could be restructured, while Berlusconi renewed a pledge to eliminate the levy on the purchase of a first home, a move that would mean a revenue shortfall of more than 3 billion euros ($3.9 billion).
Monti indicated that cutting income tax and suspending a planned increase in the value-added tax would be possible, although those moves would have to be offset by spending cuts.
Politicians “must avoid making easy promises to the public,” he said in an interview yesterday with SKYTG24.
Berlusconi, who had supported Monti’s 13-month-old government of non-politicians, has been stepping up his attacks against Monti, yesterday telling newspaper Giornale di Umbria it is “immoral’ for Monti to run in the elections after leading a government of non-politicians. Monti was appointed prime minister in November 2011, when Berlusconi’s government unraveled and he resigned.
Monti is forming a list of candidates to back his economic overhauls, which are aimed at taming public finances and making Italy more competitive. Monti has allied with centrist parties that back his agenda, including Union of Centrists and a new movement started by Ferrari SpA Chairman Luca Cordero di Montezmolo.
Monti ‘‘has chosen traveling partners that aren’t reliable, and the list that he is creating will just deliver votes to the left,” Berlusconi told Giornale di Umbria.
----Berlusconi’s frequent media appearances have raised protests from other parties because Italian law requires that all candidates have equal access to television time during the campaign period. The three-time premier has been a regular guest on television and radio programs since withdrawing his support for Monti’s government last month, an action that prompted Monti to announce his intention to resign.
The coverage may be helping Berlusconi in the polls. His People of Liberty Party, along with its potential allies, the Northern League, and some smaller parties would win 28.8 percent of the vote if elections were held today, according to a poll by Tecne for SKYTG24. That’s more than twice the 14.3 percent for Monti and his allies, the poll said.
More
On the
other side of the Atlantic, in a continent sized land armed to the teeth with assault
rifles, it was war on again, after last week’s two day truce. After a
humiliating abject surrender of the “Reds” to the “Blues” over taxes, the Reds
are loading six bullets into the chambers ahead of next month’s game of “American
roulette.” Stay long physical precious metals. Seen from faraway dreary grey
skied January London, it’s starting to look like only a war between China and
Japan over China’s “Falkland Islands,” will 1940s style pull the world out of a
renewed slump.
"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
McConnell Takes Taxes Off the Table in Debt Limit Negotiations
By Cheyenne Hopkins - Jan 7, 2013 5:00 AM GMT
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said further tax changes are off the
table as lawmakers and the president gear up for a fight next month over
raising the U.S. government’s debt limit. “The tax issue is finished, over, completed,” Kentucky Republican McConnell said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “Now the question is what are we going to do about the biggest problem confronting our country and our future and that’s our spending addiction.”
Less than a week ago, President Barack Obama and lawmakers reached a compromise that averted the package of spending cuts and tax increases known as the fiscal cliff.
Republicans attempted yesterday to shift the debate away from taxes to focus on cutting government spending. Democrats countered that everything including taxes has to be a part of the negotiations.
“If Mitch McConnell is going to draw that line in the sand; it’s going to be a recipe for more gridlock,” Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
The U.S. reached its $16.4 trillion legal debt limit on Dec. 31, and the Treasury Department began using extraordinary measures to finance the government. It will exhaust that avenue as early as mid-February, the Congressional Budget Office says.
----After partisan gridlock brought the government to the brink of default in August 2011, the stock market fell and Standard & Poor’s cut the nation’s credit rating to AA+ from AAA. House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, withdrew from negotiations on July 22, 2011, and the S&P 500 Index fell more than 16 percent in the next 11 trading days.
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-06/mcconnell-takes-taxes-off-the-table-in-debt-limit-negotiations.html
Analysis: Doom scenario far-fetched but euro gloom to deepen
LONDON |(Reuters) - It would be fair to say that U.S. hedge-fund manager Kyle Bass does not expect the explosion in global debt in recent years to turn out well.
"This ends through war," Bass, the founder of Hayman Capital Management in Dallas, said. "I don't know who's going to fight who, but I'm fairly certain that in the next few years you will see wars erupt, and not just small ones," he told a recent conference.
But while many investors have, like Bass, bet heavily on chaotic sovereign default in countries such as Greece, three years of dogged diplomacy in Europe have so far wrong-footed the doomsayers.
And while some popular protests have erupted into violence, notably in Greece, the mystery for many analysts is why Europeans have not fought harder against escalating job losses, social spending cuts and tax rises. Unemployment in Greece and Spain has reached 25 percent.
Bass bases his apocalyptic view on his calculation that credit market debt has reached 340 percent of global output, saying the world has never lived in peacetime with such a burden.
He says some societies will not withstand the social strain when trillions of dollars of debt have to be restructured, inflicting hefty losses on millions of investors.
War in the euro zone - which Bass does not expect to survive in its present form, if at all - looks far-fetched, to put it mildly.
----Jean-Dominique Giuliani, who heads the Robert Schuman Foundation, a pro-European think tank in Paris, says difficult reforms must continue because the crisis shows no sign of going away.
"Changes will now be constant and will demand a great deal of populations, overturn societies, surprise political leaders and unsettle experts," he said in a commentary on his group's web site.
Charles Robertson, chief economist at Renaissance Capital in London, is among those wondering how much more voters are prepared to sacrifice. He expects Greece to quit the euro this year and says Spain might follow by the end of 2014.
Spain has already endured one year of unemployment above 25 percent but will probably have to manage three more in order to meet the financial targets set by its international creditors.
"No economy (as far as we are aware) has ever sustained this unemployment rate and maintained a peg to a fixed exchange rate," Robertson said in a report.
More
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/07/us-eurozone-idUSBRE90603N20130107
"All of the government's monetary, economic and political power, as well as its extensive propaganda machinery, will be enlisted in a constant battle to drive down the price of gold - but in the absence of any fundamental change in the nation's monetary, fiscal, and economic direction, simply regard any major retreat in the price of gold as an unexpected buying opportunity."
Irwin A. Schiff
At the Comex silver depositories Friday final figures were: Registered 40.43
Moz, Eligible 109.93 Moz, Total 150.36 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today,
welcome to the Spanish wing of the Euro insane asylum. Not content with
bankrupting Spain itself, the Spanish government aided by the corrupt central
bank, is now willing to risk Spain’s retirees future pensions. If/when this
goes wrong as it probably will, Spanish pensioners will find that the while the
nominal value of the pensions is unchanged, the purchasing power of their pension
has plunged towards zero. Spain is repeating Yeltsin’s Russia, Kirchner’s
Argentina.
"If ever there was an area in which to do the exact opposite of that which government and the media urge you to do, that area is the purchasing of gold."
Robert Ringer
January
3, 2013, 5:34 p.m. ET
Spain Drains Fund Backing Pensions
MADRID—Spain has been quietly tapping the country's richest piggy bank, the Social Security Reserve Fund, as a buyer of last resort for Spanish government bonds, raising questions about the fund's role as guarantor of future pension payouts.Now the scarcely noticed borrowing spree, carried out amid a prolonged economic crisis, is about to end, because there is little left to take. At least 90% of the €65 billion ($85.7 billion) fund has been invested in increasingly risky Spanish debt, according to official figures, and the government has begun withdrawing cash for emergency payments.
Although the trend has drawn little public attention or controversy, it has become a matter of concern for the relatively few independent financial analysts who study the fund, which is used to guarantee future payments of pensions. They say the government will soon have one less recourse to finance itself as it faces another year of recession and painful austerity measures to close a big budget deficit.
That pressure, some analysts said, could force Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's government to seek a rescue this year from the European Union's bailout fund, a politically risky course he seeks to avoid.
In addition, there are worries that Social Security reserves for paying future pensioners are running out much quicker than expected.
In November, the government withdrew €4 billion from the reserve fund to pay pensions, the second time in history it had withdrawn cash. The first time was in September, when it took €3 billion to cover unspecified treasury needs.
Together, the emergency withdrawals surpassed the legal annual limit, so the government temporarily raised the cap.
----In the years before Europe sank into crisis in 2008, some countries, including Spain, Finland and France, accumulated rainy-day pension funds made up of the surplus left from social-security payroll deductions after pensions were paid out. The reserves were to be tapped in future years, when payroll deductions may fall short of payout obligations.
After the crisis began, some of those countries began using the pension reserves for other contingencies, such covering a drop in foreign demand for their government bonds. Since the collapse of Ireland's property boom, for example, most of its pension fund has been used to buy shares of nationalized banks and real estate for which no foreign buyers could be found.
"Most of the [Spanish] fund is an accounting trick," said Javier Díaz-Giménez, an economics professor in Spain's IESE business school. "The government is lending money to another branch of government."
More
"If you don't trust gold, do you trust the logic of taking a beautiful pine tree, worth about $4,000 - $5,000, cutting it up, turning it into pulp and then paper, putting some ink on it and then calling it one billion dollars?"
Kenneth J. Gerbino
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
No comments:
Post a Comment