Baltic Dry Index. 875 +10
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
“There are some bored foreigners,
with full stomachs, who have nothing better to do than point fingers at us
[China]. First, China doesn’t export revolution; second, China doesn’t export
hunger and poverty; third, China doesn’t come and cause you headaches, what
more is there to be said?”
First Secretary of Secretariat of the Communist
Party, Xi Jinping
Today the transfer of power in China became
complete. Today Xi Jingping became China’s President, consolidating his position
at the top of all three centres of power in China. It was the fastest
consolidation of power in China in the era since the death of Mao. Is the 21st
century destined to be China’s century? If it is, what of Japan’s unrepentant,
provocative new government, foolishly goading China? Stay long physical
precious metals, against a coming reorder in the failing fiat currencies.
Xi Assumes China’s Presidency to Cement Transition of Power
By Bloomberg News - Mar 14, 2013 4:19 AM GMT
Xi Jinping was named China’s
president by the national legislature, replacing Hu Jintao in the country’s
most rapid formal transfer of power in more than a generation. Xi, 59, added the largely ceremonial title of president to his portfolio today after taking over the top post in the ruling Communist Party as well as chairmanship of the party’s military commission in November. It took Hu Jintao, Xi’s predecessor, almost two years to get all top three positions. Jiang Zemin, who ruled China before Hu, had to wait almost four years to assume all the top posts.
The
appointment of Xi cements a power transition that was thrown into turmoil last
year when Bo Xilai was expelled from the ruling Politburo and his wife
convicted of murdering a British businessman. Having all the formal positions
gives Xi a leadership mandate in a system where retired leaders still hold
sway, said Kerry Brown, a former British diplomat in Beijing.
“The
party secretary is the bones, this is the covering of flesh,” said Brown, now a
professor at the University of Sydney. “Granting Xi the full suite so quickly
is a big deal -- it shows huge confidence in him by the party elders and across
factions.”
----Xi inherits a country that is wealthier
and militarily more powerful than during the leadership change a decade ago. In
2002, China was dueling with Italy for seventh spot among the world economies.
Its 51.9 trillion yuan ($8.3 trillion) gross domestic product last year is
second in size only to the U.S., while its military budget is set to rise 10.7
percent this year to 740.6 billion yuan.
More
If it is to be China’s century, China desperately
needs to address its quality of life issues. From 19th century
pollution issues, to dangerously ignorant issues of public health, at times
China seems to the west to be a medical disaster waiting to happen. With 6,600
pig cadavers found, where are the other 63,400?
Shanghai Finds 6,600 Dead Pigs as Farm Confesses to Dumping
By Bloomberg News - Mar 14, 2013 2:53 AM GMT
The number of dead pigs found in Shanghai’s
Huangpu river climbed to at least 6,600 as the official Xinhua News Agency
reported a farm in neighboring Zhejiang province confessed to dumping carcasses
in the water. The municipal government pulled 685 hogs from the river yesterday, adding to the 5,916 it had retrieved earlier, according to a statement on its website. A farm in Jiaxing admitted to discarding dead pigs in the river, after 70,000 of the animals died in the city from crude raising techniques and extreme weather at the start of the year, Xinhua said yesterday, citing the Jiaxing authorities. The Xinhua report didn’t specify whether other farms were involved in the dumping.
The discovery of the hogs comes as China’s legislature addresses food safety and citizens become more vocal on public health and environmental issues. The government said March 10 at a National People’s Congress meeting that it plans to create a regulator with broader authority to ensure food and drug safety and said the agriculture ministry will oversee the quality of farm products.
----The Huangpu River cuts through the center of China’s financial hub, running past Shanghai’s historic waterfront Bund area. The districts of Songjiang and Jinshan, where many of the pigs were found, are more than 30 kilometers (18 miles) southwest of the city center, which is home to the country’s largest stock market and the China headquarters of HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA) and Citigroup Inc. (C)
A common disease among hogs, porcine circovirus, was found in a sample taken from the river, Shanghai’s agriculture department said on March 11, citing the city’s animal disease control authorities. Tests conducted on the river, which provides drinking water for some of the municipality’s 23 million residents, were negative for other diseases including foot-and-mouth, swine fever, hog cholera and blue ear, it said.
More
The good news over for the day, we return to the disaster
of the sinking SS Eurozone. If it wasn’t for bad news there wouldn’t be any
Euroland news at all. Below, yesterday’s view from the rear view mirror. The
never ending euro crisis just keeps rolling on, destroying wealth.
Euro zone factory output shows surprisingly big fall in January
BRUSSELS |(Reuters) - Output at euro zone factories fell more than expected at the start of 2013 and production in France and Germany slipped in the latest sign the bloc is struggling to emerge from recession.
Industrial production in the 17 countries sharing the euro fell 0.4 percent in January from December, the EU's statistics office Eurostat said on Wednesday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast a 0.1 percent fall.
Factory output, two-thirds of which is generated by Germany, France and Italy, was also down 1.3 percent on an annual basis in January, showing just how few cars, televisions and other manufactured goods like fridges Europeans are buying at a time of record unemployment.
The poor state of manufacturing is a reminder to euro zone heads of state meeting for a summit in Brussels on Thursday evening of how far the bloc has to go to build a recovery after three years of a devastating public debt crisis.
Production of machinery used to make other goods, an indicator of future business, fell 1.2 percent in January from the previous month and output of durable consumer goods, such as cars and furniture, fell 1.4 percent in the same period.
Germany and France, the euro zone's two biggest economies, both recorded a contraction in manufacturing, while data for Italy was not provided by Eurostat.
More
In other EU news, it’s yet another Great Leaders’ summit to save the euro. Under plan B forced by the Italian election, gone is austerity except in token form. The ruins of Club Med are about to be given a pass. Too little too late, it seems to me. Most of Euroland’s already back in a wealth crushing recession. Youth unemployment exceeds 50% in parts of Club Med. The social revolution sweeping Italy, seems all too likely to sweep most of Europe in the elections ahead. The euro becomes an active competitor in the race to the bottom.
Below, Bloomberg swallows the spin from the Great Leaders’ summit.
EU Summit Set to Loosen Deficit Shackles
By James G. Neuger & Rebecca Christie - Mar 13, 2013 11:01 PM GMT
European leaders are loosening the economic shackles once demanded by
Germany as the recession and mounting unemployment in southern Europe shove
aside the debt crisis as the euro area’s biggest headache. A two-day Brussels summit starting today will endorse plans for “structural” assessments of national budgets, according to a draft statement, using code for granting countries such as France, Spain and Portugal extra time to bring down deficits.
“Substantial progress is being made toward structurally balanced budgets and that progress must continue,” reads the statement, obtained by Bloomberg News. The focus is on “growth- friendly fiscal consolidation.”
European politicians are cloaking the shift in language designed to reassure investors who have driven borrowing costs lower since mid-2012 that balanced budgets remain the goal. The relative calm was barely disturbed by last month’s inconclusive election in Italy. Another milestone in coming out of the debt crisis was reached yesterday, when Ireland sold 10-year bonds for the first time since its bailout in 2010.
As a result, officials in Brussels, Berlin, Paris and Madrid said yesterday that an aid package for the next problem country, Cyprus, doesn’t even need to be discussed at the summit. It will be dealt with tomorrow starting at about 5 p.m., at a separate meeting of euro area finance ministers.
----Greece, Portugal and Spain were granted extra deficit- reduction time last year. More extensions may come “in the near future,” the two officials wrote. Portugal is set for another respite, the commission’s president, Jose Barroso, told Expresso newspaper last week.
----Beppe Grillo, a comedian-turned-politician who grabbed 25 percent of the vote in Italy’s election, took his anti-austerity grievances to the German public yesterday by saying that northern countries are conspiring to kick Italy out of the euro.
Once banks in northern Europe have cashed in their Italian bonds, Grillo told Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper, Italy will be dropped out of the euro “like a hot potato.”
In a nod to Italy, the draft summit statement said the euro rules provide space for “productive public investment” by countries with deficits under the limit of 3 percent of gross domestic product. Italy was one of eight euro states to pass that test last year.
The summit marks the final European appearance by caretaker Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, who blamed his 10 percent showing in the election on a backlash against budget cuts he imposed.
More
We end for today on Europe with business as usual
in the parallel universe called Brussels. Who would want to remain a member of
a Club like this. Time to take the UK’s Brussels subsidy of £10 billion a year,
and let continental Europe go its own way.
MEPs reject EU spending cuts and demand extra £1.7bn from British taxpayers
MEPs have rejected cuts to European Union budgets agreed at an all-night summit last month and have demanded that national governments pay an extra £14 billion in spending for this year.
Five weeks ago, at a marathon 32-hour Brussels summit, David Cameron secured a reduction in long-term European spending plans, the first in the EU's history.The Prime Minister hailed the EU cuts as the implementation of long overdue austerity in Brussels at a time when national governments were cutting back on spending.
The European Parliament demands, which hold the spending deal hostage until MEPs agree, could cost the British taxpayer up to £1.7 billion in extra EU contributions in 2013 at a time of deep cuts to domestic public spending.
"The European Parliament cannot accept the proposal from the member states without the fulfilment of certain essential conditions," said Martin Schulz, the speaker of the EU assembly.
While accepting the overall figures for EU financing for the seven years 2014 to 2020, the parliament has tied its agreement to conditions including "unpaid payment claims" for this year, a bill that would represent a 12 per cent increase in national contributions.
Additionally,
MEPs have demanded a "compulsory, legally binding and comprehensive
revision" of EU spending cuts in 2017 that could restore expenditure by a
vote of Europe's leaders, stripping Britain of its veto.
The
parliament is also seeking more "flexibility" in spending to allow
the EU to go to the top of expenditure ceilings and to roll cash over from one
year to another between 2014 and 2020.
Most
controversially, and without any prospect of agreement, MEPs have demanded that
the EU create new taxes to fund the Brussels budget.
More
There can be few fields of human endeavour in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.
J. K. Galbraith
At the Comex silver depositories Wednesday final figures were: Registered 42.53
Moz, Eligible 119.39 Moz, Total 161.92 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, it’s back to
the banksters again, with a pie in the sky proposal from the Dallas Fed to end
too big to fail banksterism. Were it to happen, the USA would undergo the credit
crunch of all credit crunches, making sequestration look like a credit boom.
Over our dead bodies say the banksters.
“The
boom can last only as long as the credit expansion progresses at an
ever-accelerated pace. The boom comes to an end as soon as additional
quantities of fiduciary media are no longer thrown upon the loan market.”
Ludwig Von Mises
Dallas Fed Cap Seen Shrinking U.S. Banking Units by Half
By Yalman Onaran - Mar 13, 2013 11:01 PM GMT
A proposal by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas to
limit government support for banks could force JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)
and Bank of America Corp. to shrink their U.S. consumer
and commercial-lending units by more than half. The plan would cap assets at deposit-insured divisions of the largest U.S. financial firms at about $250 billion and wall off investment banking from traditional lending, Dallas Fed Executive Vice President Harvey Rosenblum said in an interview. The limit is needed to allow the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to shut a failed bank without using taxpayer funds, he said.
Rosenblum and his boss, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, join a chorus of Democratic and Republican policy makers in expressing dissatisfaction with efforts to assure that banks are no longer too big to fail. FDIC Vice Chairman Thomas Hoenig has called for breaking up the largest lenders and Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, for limiting their size.
“While we enact high and deep Chinese walls between commercial banking and the rest of the megabanks’ operations, we also need to make sure the deposit-insured units are of a size that they can be closed and resolved quickly,” Rosenblum said. “Commercial banking is risky enough on its own.”
Fisher revealed the outlines of the proposal in a Jan. 16 Washington speech. He didn’t specify what the cap would be at the time. The two wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal this week defending their plan to make traditional- banking units “too small to save” without putting a dollar amount on the limit.
While Congress probably won’t enact new banking legislation so soon after the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, Fisher and others can pressure regulators to be tougher, according to Brian Gardner, a Washington policy analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. The law has given the Fed and the FDIC authority to break up firms they deem threatening to the financial system, he said.
“We’re not going to have an AT&T moment,” said Gardner, referring to the 1984 breakup of the phone company. “But the regulators are going to use their powers and new tools to make life so tough for the big banks that they’ll end up shedding assets, businesses and breaking up de facto on their own.”
JPMorgan’s U.S. consumer and commercial-lending units had assets of $646 billion at the end of December, according to a regulatory filing by the New York-based bank. Similar divisions at Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America had $686 billion of assets. That means each would have to shrink by about 60 percent to drop below the Dallas Fed’s proposed cap. JPMorgan is the largest U.S. bank by assets, and Bank of America is No. 2, when all their businesses are included.
More
Old Ebenezer Squid had one-way
pockets. He would walk ten miles in the snow to chisel an orphan out of
tuppence.
With
apologies to P.G. Wodehouse and the Duke of Dunstable
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished February:
DJIA: +111 Up. NASDAQ: +129 Up. SP500: +148 Up. All three indexes are giving the same signal since
January, up, but surprisingly February’s
move in all three was weak, suggesting that the indicators are topping
out. Will sequestration turn March into a
down month? So far so good.
No comments:
Post a Comment