Baltic Dry Index. 933 +03
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"Sooner or later both the Greek population and international creditors will tire of fighting a losing battle, leading to a break-up of the currency union as Greece pulls out, probably followed by other countries"
Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of the Centre of Economics and Business Research.
Europe and the snake bit euro are saved once again,
tiny irrelevant Cyprus has been tossed under the bus by Germany in the latest
episode of “lets create the United States of Europe to get even with the
Americans.” In version 2.0 of the grand theft from Brussels-Berlin, only those bank
deposits above 100,000 euros are to be robbed, the small fry are to be spared,
although thanks to capital controls they can’t actually get at their money lest
they wisely transfer it out of their banks and out of Cyprus. The message
Germany and the EU have sent is loud and clear – don’t keep any money in any of
Club Med’s struggling banks, and don’t keep any money in a European bank,
including the UK’s, above the EU guaranteed 100,000 euros. Not that the guarantee will be worth much once
France and Italy fail.
Quite how businesses across Europe are expected to
operate and meet payroll is now something of a gamble, a calculated risk
against a new bank failure or the perception of one. At the first hint of bank trouble
anywhere in Euroland, including Germany, the first thing everyone must now do
is immediately transfer their money out of that struggling bank. This applies
even to those within the statutory guarantee. We already know that the
guarantee is worthless when push comes to shove. Berlin may have trashed Cyprus and all the
lesser nations in the new German Empire, but only at the price of setting up
the EUSSR for hair trigger multiple bank runs. At the first hint of trouble in a Soc Gen, Deutsche Bank, Santander, Unicredit,
et al, a massive scramble to transfer deposits is going to ensue. Chancellor
Merkel didn’t just hammer Cyprus as part of her re-election campaign, she effectively
hammered all of Euroland’s banks.
Stay long physical precious metals. Like every
other European rescue before it, this one solves nothing but merely adds to the
European wealth destroyed in the slow motion breakup of the ill-conceived
European Monetary Union.
Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.
J. Edgar Hoover
Cyprus Salvaged After EU Deal Shuts Bank to Get $13B
By
Rebecca Christie, James G. Neuger & Svenja O’Donnell - Mar 25, 2013 3:48 AM
GMT
Cyprus
dodged a disorderly default and unprecedented exit from the euro currency by
bowing to demands to shrink its banking system in exchange for a 10
billion-euro ($13 billion) bailout.
Cypriot
President Nicos Anastasiades agreed to shut the country’s second-largest bank
under pressure from a German-led bloc of creditors in a night-time negotiating
melodrama that threatened to rekindle the debt crisis and rattle markets.
----It was the second time in nine days that Cyprus struck a deal with creditors and the International Monetary Fund, capping a tumultuous week that underscored the contradictions of the crisis management that has dominated European policymaking for more than three years.
The first accord, reached March 16, fell apart three days later when the parliament in Nicosia rejected a key plank, a tax on all Cypriot bank accounts that aroused the indignation of smaller savers. Cyprus, the euro area’s third-smallest economy, is the fifth country to tap international aid since the crisis broke out in Greece in 2009.
----With the ECB threatening to cut off emergency financing for tottering banks as soon as today, Cyprus’s leaders engineered another way of shrinking the Mediterranean island’s financial system.
The revised accord spares bank accounts below the insured limit of 100,000 euros. It imposes losses that two EU officials said would be no more than 40 percent on uninsured depositors at Bank of Cyprus Plc, the island’s largest bank, which will take over the viable assets of Cyprus Popular Bank Pcl (CPB), the second largest.
Cyprus
Popular Bank, 84 percent owned by the government, will be wound down. Those who
will be largely wiped out include uninsured depositors and bondholders,
including senior creditors. Senior bondholders will also contribute to the
recapitalization of Bank of Cyprus.
Banks in Cyprus, which have been shut for the past week,
will remain closed until further notice. Lawmakers in Cyprus voted last week to
impose capital
controls to prevent a run on deposits when they reopen.
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-25/cyprus-to-chop-banking-system-to-win-aid-avoid-default.html
Euro zone bailouts getting harder to agree: policymakers
SAARISELKA, Finland |(Reuters) - Euro zone bailouts are getting tougher to agree as opposition within creditor nations grows and indebted states struggle to persuade citizens to back austerity, policymakers said on Sunday.
At a meeting in Finnish Lapland this weekend, attendees including Ireland's Europe Minister Lucinda Creighton and host Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen sounded confident that Cyprus would secure a bailout deal to avoid financial collapse.
Toomas Hendrik Ilves, president of Estonia which joined the euro in 2011, said many saw bailouts as unfair.
"The result has been, over time, a decreasing willingness on the part of governments to go along with bailing out because their publics are not willing to go along with it, and so their parliaments are not going along with it," he said.
"It's going to get harder and harder to get things such as EFSF and ESM (bailout funds) passed in parliaments if we don't see more responsibility taken by those who need assistance."
In Finland, one of the few remaining countries in the euro zone to be rated triple-A by all major credit rating agencies, the anti-euro Finns Party has become a major opposition force, with voters viewing bailouts of countries such as Greece and Portugal as a reward for profligacy.
"When it's a union of values, it means that we have to have a strong sense of fairness," Katainen said. "One of the reasons we are in a crisis is that everybody did not follow the rules."
More
And so on to the next European domino to fall.
After that, the biggies Italy and France. You’ve really got to be mad to keep
any serious bank deposits in Europe now.
Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.
P. J. O’Rourke
Spain’s Swelling Debt Seen Impeding Rajoy Deficit Battle
By Angeline Benoit - Mar 25, 2013 12:00 AM GMT
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s progress in curbing a deficit worsened by the
cost of servicing Spain’s swelling debt load will be revealed this week with
the release of data on the country’s finances. The Budget Ministry will tomorrow publish figures for February showing the central government’s budget shortfall, which accounted for more than half of the nation’s deficit in 2012. Data in the following days on mortgage loans, inflation and retail sales will also highlight the plight of the taxpayers financing those outlays.
Rajoy
last week signaled the difficulty of his task in curbing a budget deficit
without the aid of economic growth as he backtracked for the first time on his
pledge to haul Spain out of a six-year slump later this year. He said the euro
region’s fourth-largest economy may face a worse recession than the 0.5 percent
contraction he’d previously predicted for 2013.
----In January, the central government’s
deficit rose 35 percent from a year earlier to 1.2 percent of gross domestic
product as interest costs surged 11 percent. Spain's total public debt jumped 20 percent last year to reach 84.1 percent
of output as the government bailed out the nation's banks, its municipalities
and its pensions and jobless-benefit systems.
----The National Statistics Institute, or INE, releases data for January mortgage lending tomorrow and February retail sales on March 27, both of which have declined from a year earlier in every month since at least 2010. Other data on March 27 will show Spanish inflation slowed in March, according to the median of 11 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey.
Bad loans as a proportion of lending at Spanish banks resumed their increase in January as the country’s economy continued to suffer from the aftermath of the end of a real- estate boom in 2008
More
In other news, is Japan bluffing or has the era of
cheap rare earth elements arrived? If Japan is in fact right, a whole slew of
REE companies will crash to the ground later this year.
Japan breaks China's stranglehold on rare metals with sea-mud bonanza
Japanese scientists have found vast reserves of rare earth metals on the Pacific seabed that can be mined cheaply, a discovery that may break the Chinese monopoly on a crucial raw material needed in hi-tech industries and advanced weapons systems.
"We
have found deposits that are just two to four metres from the seabed surface at
higher concentrations than anybody ever thought existed, and it won't cost much
at all to extract," said professor Yasuhiro Kato from Tokyo University,
the leader of the team.
While
America, Australia, and other countries have begun to crank up production of
the seventeen rare earth elements, they have yet to find viable amounts of the
heavier metals such as dysprosium, terbium, europium, and ytterbium that are
most important.
China has
a near total monopoly in the heavier end of the spectrum, though it is also the
dominant supplier of the whole rare earth complex after driving rivals out of
business in the 1990s. It still accounts for 97pc of global supply.
Beijing
shocked the world when it suddenly began to restrict exports in 2009, prompting
furious protests and legal complaints by both the US and the EU at the World
Trade Organisation. China claimed that it was clamping down on smuggling and
environmental abuse.
"Their
real intention is to force foreign companies to locate plant in China. They're
saying `if you want our rare earth metals, you must build your factory here,
and we can then steal your technology," said professor Kato.
The team
of scientists from Japan's Agency for Marine-Earth Science and the University
of Tokyo first discovered huge reserves in the mid-Pacific two years ago. These
are now thought to be 1000 times all land-based deposits, some of it in French
waters around Tahiti.
The
latest discovery is in Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone in deep-sea mud around
the island of Minami-Torishima at 5,700 meters below sea level. Although it is
very deep, the deposits are in highly-concentrated nodules that can be
extracted using pressurised air with minimal disturbance off the seafloor and
no need for the leaching.
More
We end for the day with the USA opening up another
front in their war on American tax cheats. You can hide, but not for long in
our new age of all before the almighty crushing state.
All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
Benito Mussolini.
U.S. Seeks Answers in Liechtenstein on Tax Cheats
By Dylan Griffiths - Mar 24, 2013 11:01 PM GMT
The U.S. has asked Liechtenstein to hand over data on foundations that may
have been used to hide untaxed American money from the Internal
Revenue Service, a step that may threaten Swiss banks. The U.S. wants to know the number of foundations set up by fiduciaries -- lawyers, accountants, financial advisers and asset managers -- for American taxpayers, according to a letter sent by the Department of Justice to authorities in the Alpine principality. A “formal request” to fiduciaries will follow, the DOJ said.
“Seeking documents from the Liechtenstein fiduciaries is an important investigative step,” which will shed light on “the roles of banks, of bankers outside of Liechtenstein,” the Justice Department wrote in the letter, adding that it looked forward to receiving the data by March 29.
The DOJ is investigating at least 11 financial firms, including Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) and Julius Baer Group Ltd. (BAER), for allegedly helping Americans hide money from the IRS. The Liechtenstein request will add to the information the IRS garnered as 38,000 Americans avoided prosecution through an amnesty program, which involved paying back taxes and penalties and disclosing their offshore accounts and bankers.
“It’s a further evolution of the Department of Justice using third-party fiduciaries to gather more information on these structures and the banks involved,” said Milan Patel, a former IRS trial attorney who is now a partner at Zurich-based law firm Anaford AG. “This could be bad news for Switzerland, as the information could be used against more Swiss banks.”
More
"No man in the country is under
the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to
his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest
possible shovel in his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite
rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes
for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer's pocket. And the taxpayer is in
like manner entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the
depletion of his means by the Inland Revenue"
Lord Clyde, Lord President of the Court of Session. Ayrshire
Pullman Motor Services v Inland Revenue (1929)
At the Comex silver depositories Friday final figures were: Registered 42.53
Moz, Eligible 121.57 Moz, Total 164.10 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today we take a
break from the crooked banksters and great vampire squids of the west. Today
Reuters opens up a window into the crooked nature of oil trading in the UAE.
Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know of
that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think
China doesn't run on greed? What is greed?
Milton Friedman.
Special Report: A Gulf family's oil troubles
DUBAI |(Reuters) - At its peak around five years ago, the Al Sari family owned the largest independent oil trader in the Gulf region, with branches in London and Singapore, and a fleet of dozens of ships.
These days, its FAL Oil Co trades more in controversy than oil.
It owes a consortium of lenders nearly $900 million, including about $200 million to Standard Chartered PLC. It is contesting a worldwide asset freeze granted by a London court to the Royal Bank of Scotland.
And it is suing its home government of Sharjah - one of seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates - in a rare public fight over a disputed $750 million fuel-oil bill. The company even hired a British debt collector to chase the emirate for payment.
These are just some of the many bitter courtroom battles being waged by FAL Oil, once a pillar of business here in the UAE. Many of the details have not been made public until now; the colorful claims and counterclaims include allegations of missing oil, disappearing ships and clandestine trips to Iran. Last year, the U.S. State Department sanctioned FAL Oil for allegedly selling petroleum products to Iran in 2010, something the firm denies but has not challenged legally.
The remarkable fall of FAL Oil sheds light on the sometimes murky world of oil trading. It also shows how the distinction between family and business is often blurred in the Gulf.
The clan behind FAL Oil may have crafted an escape hatch for its troubled oil-trading business, Reuters has learned. The family is now operating a similar, private oil-trading company that one of the Al Sari sons said they acquired about six months ago from a public UAE firm the family controls and whose shares trade on the Dubai Financial Market. But as of last week, there was no public disclosure of the transaction on the exchange's website, which lists company filings.
In an interview, Majid Abdalla Juma Al Sari, whose family owns FAL Oil and who serves as its managing director, said the clan's net worth has fallen in recent years from about $3 billion to "north of $300 million." Paying back FAL Oil's mounting debts remains "our aspiration," though the likelihood of doing so is unclear because of the Sharjah litigation, he suggested.
FAL Oil is "just a skeleton now," he said, and is in the process of "winding down." He added: "We are no longer actively in the oil-trading business."
But his family hasn't stopped trading oil. Calls to FAL Oil's office in Sharjah are now answered by another Al Sari-controlled firm, Horizon Energy Co LLC. It's engaged in essentially the same business as FAL Oil, and shares some of the same employees and trading partners. Horizon Energy recently signed deals with oil companies in Pakistan, Bahrain and Yemen, which have all done business with FAL Oil.
Al Sari said FAL Oil and Horizon Energy are separate companies, and that "no assets have been shifted" between them. He also said his family controls both businesses. A London-based spokesman for FAL Oil said that "Horizon Energy Co LLC has no structural relation with FAL Oil, but is a company under the broader umbrella of the Al Sari family."
Al Sari and the spokesman gave several conflicting accounts about Horizon Energy's link to the publicly traded company, raising questions about how the family acquired it.
More
"I want us to do even more
to encourage the risk takers"
Gordon Brown. 2004.
“Prime Minister Gordon Brown called yesterday for the Financial Services Authority to start an inquiry, saying he was “shocked” at the “moral bankruptcy” indicated in the suit.”
Gordon Brown. 2010.
Gordon Brown. 2004.
“Prime Minister Gordon Brown called yesterday for the Financial Services Authority to start an inquiry, saying he was “shocked” at the “moral bankruptcy” indicated in the suit.”
Gordon Brown. 2010.
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.
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