Baltic Dry Index. 737 +02
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
The cooks are French,
The engineers are German
The administrators are Swiss
And the lovers Italian.
In hell, the police are German
The cooks are British
The engineers are Italian
The administrators are French
And the lovers Swiss.
Anon.
It’s not often that Italy gets to decide the
fate of Europe, but this weekend Italians hold the fate of the great
Bilderberger project, the EUSSR, in their hands. Complacently the markets still
expect technocrat Mario “three card” Monti to win via a coalition with Pier Luigi Bersani’s party. If it
happens nothing changes and the German imposed age of austerity rolls on.
Banksters across Europe win. Italian turkeys vote for Thanksgiving.
But
seen from faraway London it’s not at all certain that the Italians are about to
become good model modern Germans, and vote for pain and austerity for all
except banksters. While financial traders and Europe’s gambling marketeers
might complacently think that they have covered the one way bet, I’m not at all
sure that they have bet right. Stay long physical gold. If Italian voters don’t
act like turkeys this weekend next week could see the never ending Euroland
crisis explode back onto the front pages of the WSJ and FT. If Italian voters
really get mad with bankster austerity and imposed serfdom, come Tuesday
Chancellor Merkel could be looking at a losing partnership with back from the
dead Silvio Berlusconi, or even worse, Genoese comedian turned populist
politican Beppe Grillo. That ought to bring one big bundle of laughs at the
next Great Leaders’ summit later in the year.
Monti’s Austerity Pushes Italians Toward Parliamentary Upheaval
By Andrew Frye & Chiara Vasarri - Feb 21, 2013 11:01 PM GMT
Elisa Dalbosco says she lost her job when it came time for her former
employer, a refugee shelter in northern Italy, to either hire her with a
permanent contract or let her go. “I have a college degree and it would have cost too much,” said Dalbosco, who at 26 is now unemployed and poised to vote for self-described populist Beppe Grillo in elections on Feb. 24 and Feb. 25.
Dalbasco’s disappointment shows why Italy is braced for its biggest political upheaval since 1994. Dalbosco, whose ballot five years ago went to an ally of front-runner Pier Luigi Bersani, won’t vote for anyone tied to incumbent Mario Monti because she says his austerity policies in a shrinking economy put the interests of banks ahead of everyone else’s.
Monti, a divisive figure at home, is celebrated abroad for replacing a discredited Silvio Berlusconi 15 months ago and calming the European sovereign debt crisis. While some of his European counterparts say Monti deserves a second term as head of government -- and steward of Italy’s $2.6 trillion of debt load -- voters may push the nation away from his rigor that has driven financial-market gains.
“The fear remains that the general election produces a significant no-confidence vote on the current austerity plan and the need to reform further,” Raj Badiani, principal IHS Global Insight economist for Italy, said in a research report this week. “This could spark an immediate spike in bond yields in the aftermath of the election.”
Royal
Bank of Scotland Group Plc is advising clients to bet against Italian bank
debt. JPMorgan Chase & Co. economist Alex White predicted yesterday in a
research report that Grillo would be “a big winner” in the election and his
voters will “pose a major policy challenge” for the next government.
More
Staying with the EUSSR for now, it’s rock and roll
time in scandal struck Spain. Come back Generalissimo Franco all is
forgiven. While the Spanish Prime
Minister and his party are deeply involved in a bribery scandal, the latest
scandal seems to involve members of the royal family helping themselves to a
charities money. Charity begins at home, as they say, but trapped in the
unloved austerity euro, Spain lacks its own currency for the central bank to
print up some replacement stash. Would you really want to join a Bilderberger
currency union with the likes of Spain, Italy and Greece?
Spain’s Graft Scandals Reach Palace as King’s Adviser Testifies
By Ben Sills - Feb 21, 2013 11:00 PM GMT
The graft allegations roiling the Spanish elite may edge closer to the head
of state, King Juan Carlos, when his son-in-law and a senior palace official
testify in court on corruption charges. Inaki Urdangarin, a former Olympic handball player married to Princess Cristina, is due to answer questions in Mallorca tomorrow as part of a private prosecution where he has been named as an official suspect on six counts including fraud, embezzlement and money laundering, a court spokeswoman said. Magistrates on the tourist island will also question Carlos Garcia Revenga, the princess’s personal secretary, who is also a suspect, she said.
The corruption investigation follows a year of missteps that have tarnished the 75-year-old king’s reputation and broken a taboo that prevented Spanish media from reporting on his private life. In April, the monarch apologized to his people after a trip to Botswana came to light when he fell and broke his hip. El Confidencial newspaper said he was on an elephant hunt with a friend, Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.
“They’ve been so over-protected,” Juan Pan-Montojo, a professor of contemporary history at Madrid’s Autonomous University, said in an interview yesterday. “It makes the shock all the greater when we discover these god-like, Olympian figures go hunting in Botswana” at a time of national hardship.
---- Clean Hands, the Madrid-based public workers union that filed a private prosecution against Urdangarin, will ask the court to name Princess Cristina as a suspect and may request that Sayn-Wittgenstein, a German aristocrat, is called as a witness, Miguel Bernad, general secretary of the group, said in an interview yesterday.
The allegations against the king’s son-in-law stem from his involvement in the non-profit Noos Institute aimed at making Spanish companies more competitive. The institute, where Urdangarin was chairman, won 5.8 million euros ($7.7 million) of contracts from the regional governments of Valencia and the Balearic Islands between 2004 and 2007 without participating in a competitive tender, ABC newspaper reported last year.
More
We end for the week with a hint of the UK’s future.
Pound devaluation against Europe and America, only of course to stimulate the
UK economy, not a real devaluation you understand. While America’s Fed hints at
a suicidal dollar revaluation next month, moving the 10 year yield back up to
3% and crashing the real economy in the process, (see below,) the Old Lady of Threadneedle
Street doesn’t believe that spin for a second. Stay long physical precious
metals. Watch what they do rather than pay attention to what they say.
QE may need to be raised by £175bn, says BoE's David Miles
The Bank of England has a case for restarting its asset purchase programme, and may need to increase it by up to £175bn if the economy is running substantially below capacity, a senior policymaker has said.
6:27PM GMT 21 Feb 2013
David Miles, in a speech on Thursday, gave a detailed model of how policy should respond to the amount of slack in the economy - something the central bank has generally avoided before, and which moves in the direction of policy guidance favoured by incoming central bank governor Mark Carney.Miles is an external member of the bank's Monetary Policy Committee, and until this month he was alone in voting for an extra £25bn of asset purchases.
But his views appear to be gaining momentum. This month he was joined by Governor Mervyn King and markets expert Paul Fisher, prompting economists to revise their expectations and pencil in a possible restart of the bond purchase scheme.
The central bank bought £375bn of government bonds between March 2009 and October 2012 to boost Britain's battered economy. But in recent months persistent inflation and doubts about bond buying's effectiveness at boosting growth had put further purchases in question, Reuters reported.
However, in a speech at the University of Bath, Miles set out an economic model which, he said, better captured uncertain estimates of the state of the economy as well as the scope of stronger growth to boost the economy's ability to overcome supply bottlenecks and avoid accelerating inflation.
"Based on my views about plausible ranges of outcomes, a good case can be made for more expansion," he said.
Miles said he was open to alternatives to buying government bonds, but added that he could not see any. If bond purchases were less effective than in the past, that simply meant more should be bought than before, he said.
The amount of slack in the economy appeared to be the most influential variable in Miles's model. In the central case that the amount of slack was estimated to be equivalent to 0pc to 3pc of annual output, this would point to £60bn more of asset purchases being needed, Miles said.
If slack were somewhere in a range of 0pc to 6pc, this pointed to £175bn more purchases. Current estimates for the amount of slack in Britain's economy range from 0.8pc to 5.2pc, Miles added.
More
But Beppe Grillo won’t be the only funny act coming up next
week. In America Helicopter Ben Bernoccio gets to bamboozle the US
Congress.
Fed unlikely to curtail stimulus despite rising doubts
WASHINGTON |(Reuters) - U.S. Federal Reserve officials are likely to press on with their bond-buying stimulus program even though some harbor growing concerns the purchases could fuel an asset bubble or inflation if pushed too far.
A full-throated debate among U.S. central bankers over the wisdom of ongoing quantitative easing, or QE, sent U.S. stock prices down sharply when minutes of the meeting were released on Wednesday.
Investors were right to assume the Fed is treading more carefully as it weighs the risks of its effort to spur a faster economic recovery, but that does not mean policymakers will conclude the costs outweigh the benefits.
Indeed, the officials who have voiced the greatest angst over the central bank's course do not currently have a vote on the policy-setting panel and the Fed's two most influential officials - Chairman Ben Bernanke and Vice Chairman Janet Yellen - are seen as committed to the bond-buying plan.
"It is not an even discussion in the sense that these two sides on the committee do not have equal weight," said Dean Maki, chief economist at Barclay's Capital in New York. "Bernanke and Yellen are strong advocates of QE."
The Fed has more than tripled the size of its balance sheet since 2008 to around $3 trillion through a series of bond buying programs and it opted in January to keep purchasing assets at an $85 billion monthly pace until the labor market outlook improved substantially.
But the minutes highlighted deep
divisions among the 19 policymakers at the central bank.
---- Economists will now look for clues
to the Fed's course from congressional testimony Bernanke is set to deliver on
Tuesday and Wednesday. They could be disappointed, since the Fed chief rarely
likes to get ahead of the central bank's policy panel.
---- Despite the hand-wringing, the U.S. economy still appears in need of help. Economic growth braked sharply in the fourth quarter and the jobless rate edged up in January to 7.9 percent.
With the prospect of deep government spending cuts looming and a possible market-wracking showdown over the government's debt limit also on the horizon, the Fed has ample reason to keep its stimulative policy in place.
More
"As fewer and fewer people have confidence in paper as a store of value, the price of gold will continue to rise. The history of fiat money is little more than a register of monetary follies and inflations. Our present age merely affords another entry in this dismal register."
Hans F. Sennholz
At the Comex silver depositories Thursday final figures were: Registered 37.27
Moz, Eligible 123.14 Moz, Total 160.41 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, the weekend read. How the
banksters at HSBC were too big to fail and too big to Jail.
Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail
How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it
By Matt Taibbi February 14,
2013 8:00 AM ET
The
deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government
was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice.
Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S.
Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank
HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they
issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't
extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a
decade of stupefying abuses.People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often cease to amaze. But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder – well, aiding and abetting it, anyway.
For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.
"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business."
More
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214
"Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood. For these few gold has been the asset of last resort."
Antony C. Sutton
Have a great weekend everyone.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished January:
DJIA: +106 Up. NASDAQ: +126 Up. SP500: +140 Up. All three indexes are giving the same signal,
up.
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