Baltic Dry Index. 868 -03
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"There can be no other
criterion, no other standard than gold. Yes, gold which never changes, which
can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality and which is
eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par
excellence."
Charles De Gaulle
Italy’s new government wasted no time in joining
France in going off Germany’s EU reservation. Brussels quickly moved to approve
the new anti-Germany alliance. It will not be long before they are joined by
Portugal and Spain. Greece and Cyprus will probably join too, right after they
get the next tranches of the troika’s cash. Mrs Merkel’s austerity union is
going up in smoke before our eyes. Continental Europe is now headed for one
almighty car crash. From the right side of the English Channel this outcome
always appeared the most likely to occur. There is no Germanic will anywhere in
Club Med. If Club Med had been at Stalingrad, Club Med would have surrendered a
few days after getting surrounded by the Russians. That Club Med stuck with
German imposed austerity so long, wrecking their economy’s in the process and
impoverishing much of the middle class and one in every two unemployed
youngsters, was entirely out of keeping with form.
Continental Europe is now de facto split in two.
Stay long physical precious metals held safely outside of a bank. The fireworks
are just about to start. Mrs Merkel’s re-election campaign, yesterday flew off
the rails, helped by a massive shunt from the Berlusconi controlled new Italian
government of Enrico Letta. If Germany retaliates it’s Letta’s political party that
will take all the heat.
"All previous attempts to base money solely on intangibles such as credit or government edict or fiat have ended in inflationary panic and disaster."
Donald Hoppe
Italian showdown with Germany as Enrico Letta rejects 'death by austerity'
Italy’s new premier Enrico Letta is on a collision course with Germany after vowing to end death by austerity, and warned that Europe itself faces a “crisis of legitimacy” unless it charges course.
“Italy is
dying from fiscal consolidation. Growth policies cannot wait any longer,” he
told Italy’s parliament. He said the country is in “very serious” crisis after
a decade of stagnation and warned of violent protest if the social malaise
deepens.
The grand
coalition of Left and Right - the first since the late 1940s - will abolish the
hated IMU tax on primary residences, a wealth levy imposed by ex-premier Mario
Monti, and push for tax cuts for business and young people to pull the country
out of perma-slump. A rise in VAT to 22pc in July may be delayed.
Vice-premier
Angelo Alfano - the appointee of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi - said he agreed
with every word from “beginning to end”, as the Berlusconi camp claimed “total
victory” over the policy agenda.
Mr Letta
said Italy would abide by EU budget pledges and but in reality he seems to have
broken with the core demands of the EU fiscal compact.
Markets
surged as optimism swept the country, with the Milan bourse up 2pc and yields
on 10-year Italian bonds falling to 3.94pc, the lowest since 2010
Yet it is
unclear whether the European Central’s Banks bail-out pledge (OMT) to backstop
Italy’s debt markets is still in place since it entails strict conditions that
must be ratified by a vote in the German parliament. This has yet to be tested.
Mr Letta
will visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday, hoping to persuade her
that the EU will lose the consent of the people unless it becomes an “engine of
growth” once again.
While he
is a passionate pro-European - and called for a “United States of Europe” in
his speech - his anti-austerity drive takes the eurozone into uncharted waters.
It comes
as France, too, appeared close to breaking ranks with German-imposed policy
doctrines. A leaked version of French president Francois Hollande’s Socialist
Party’s text openly attacked “German austerity” and the “egoistic intransigence
of Mrs Merkel”.
While the
text has since been toned down to the “liberal politics of the German Right”, the
episode has stunned Berlin and threatens irreparable damage to the
Franco-German relationship that anchors the EU Project.
The
ground is also shifting in Brussels, where EU employment chief Laszlo Andor
called on Monday for a radical change in EU crisis strategy. “If there is no
growth, I don’t see how countries can cut their debt levels,” he told the Süddeutsche
Zeitung.
In a
direct attack on Berlin, he said the German practice of “wage dumping” within
EMU to gain larger export surpluses “could not be justified”
More
Italy wants to renegotiate stability pact: minister
MILAN |(Reuters) - Italy's new government wants to renegotiate the pact of stability with the European Union, the industry minister said in an interview on Tuesday.
Flavio Zanonato said Italy needed to pursue a credible economic policy to maintain its reputation in Europe and keep the spread between Italian and German bond yields low.
"But we are also interested in renegotiating with the union the pact of stability," he told La Repubblica newspaper.
Zanonato said other countries such as France were calling for similar actions.
"In particular it should be possible to exclude from the pact investment spending," he said.
Italy's new Prime Minister Enrico Letta said on Monday his right-left coalition government would press for a change to the European Union's focus on austerity and pursue economic growth and jobs.
He said he would visit Berlin, Brussels and Paris this week to put forward his case.
In other European news, the
sky is now falling in on continental European real estate. The great liner
Costa EUSSR is now starting to capsize. Time to have plenty of cash safely
stored outside of Europe’s banks, time to be under the limit of bank account
guarantees. Time to be at the maximum personal prudent level of holding
physical gold and silver. As former President George W. Bush so elegantly put
it in the chaos of September 2008, “this sucker could go down.”
"The gold standard sooner or
later will return with the force and inevitability of natural law, for it is
the money of freedom and honesty."
Hans F. Sennholz
S&P sees deepening house slump in Spain, France and Holland
Spanish house prices are to fall a further 13pc by the end of next year as the authorities flood the market with a backlog of repossessed properties, Standard and Poor’s has warned.
The
agency said the housing slump is deepening across large swathes of the
eurozone. French declines are “gaining momentum”, with prices likely to fall
5pc this year and a further 5pc in 2014.
French
property faces a “protracted correction” as the economy buckles, hit by fiscal
tightening, higher taxes and a surge in unemployment to post-war highs.
France’s
price-to-income ratio rose to a record 180pc of historic levels during the
bubble, one of the most stretched levels seen anywhere in the OECD bloc.
The
property market began to roll over last year, prompting warnings by the French
consultants PrimeView that values could tumble by as much as 40pc before
excesses are purged.
S&P
said the deep crisis in the Netherlands would grind on despite the government’s
partial retreat from austerity and its decision to delay €4.3bn in spending
custs.
Dutch
home prices will slide another 6.5pc by late next year, bringing the
accumulated fall to more than 23pc. The agency said the apparent recovery in
mortgage loans this year was a statistical distortion that would fade as job
losses mount. Dutch unemployment surged to 8.1pc in March from 5.9pc a year
ago.
Over 25pc
of Dutch mortgages are now “onder water” - as they say in Holland - with
negative equity.
S&P
said Italy, Portugal and Ireland will all see further falls this year but the
chief worry is Spain, where a vast glut of unsold property has yet to hit the
market.
Spanish
prices have already dropped by 28pc from their peak in March 2008 - or more
some estimates - and face a fall of 8pc this year and 5pc next year as the
Spanish "bad bank" Sareb gradually sells its stock of 91,000
foreclosed homes.
Experts
say the key reason why Spanish prices held up well in the early years of the
crisis is that banks held onto foreclosed properties from bankrupt developers
rather than take losses immediately and “clear” the market.
This
began to change in 2012 as Santander, BBVA and other banks rushed to liquidate
their portfolios before the onslaught from the nationalized banks folded into
Sareb
More
Next, more on Asia’s wobble. The Great Disconnect just
keeps on getting greater. With the arrival of “sell in May, go away, don’t go
long till Labor Day,” I suspect that the Great Reconnect is about to visit our
markets across the summer.
"The gold standard makes the money's purchasing power independent of the changing, ambitions and doctrines of political parties and pressure groups. This is not a defect of the gold standard; it is its main excellence."
Ludwig von Mises
Taiwan’s Economy Expanded Slower Than Estimated Last Quarter
By Chinmei Sung - Apr 30, 2013 2:58 AM GMT
Taiwan’s economy expanded
at a slower pace than economists estimated in the first quarter as a faltering
global recovery hurt exports, increasing pressure on the central bank to extend
an interest-rate pause to aid growth. Gross domestic product rose 1.54 percent in the three months through March from a year earlier, after increasing 3.72 percent in the fourth quarter, the statistics bureau said in a preliminary report in Taipei today. The gain was less than all estimates in a Bloomberg News survey of 17 economists, where the median was 3.1 percent.
The island’s growth slowdown adds to
signs of a cooling global economy after China and the U.S.
expanded less than analysts estimated last quarter. Taiwan’s export orders and
industrial output for March unexpectedly fell, while Japanese and South Korean
production missed forecasts as faltering demand limits Asia’s recovery.
More
We end for today waiting for the Fed’s two day meeting to
run its course and awaiting the ECB’s wisdom on Thursday. In the meantime as a
service to our less than regular readers, we post this warning about Wall
Street from top economist Jeffrey Sachs. When Wall Street calls hang up! Wall
Street is full of crooks, he says. Who knew?
“Call
it the Goldman Sachs test. If this is something Goldman would do to its
clients, don't do it."
Felix
Salmon.
Top economist Jeffrey Sachs says Wall Street is full of 'crooks' and hasn't changed since the financial crash
The IMF adviser also blamed 'a docile president, a docile White House and a docile regulatory system'
Monday 29
April 2013
In a
cutting attack on America's financial hub, one of the world's most respected
economists has said Wall St is full of "crooks" and hasn't reformed
its "pathological" culture since the financial crash.
Professor
Jeffrey Sachs told a high-powered audience at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve
earlier this month that the lack of reform was down to “a docile president, a
docile White House and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find
its voice.”
Sachs,
from Colombia University, has twice been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most
Influential People in the World, and is an adviser to the World Bank and IMF.
“What has
been revealed, in my view, is prima facie criminal behavior,” he said.
“It’s
financial fraud on a very large extent. There’s also a tremendous amount of
insider trading - you can even watch when you are living in New York how that
works.”
In his
live remarks, via videophone from New York, an emotionally charged Sachs also ripped
into practices at Goldman Sachs and into the political classes on both the left
and right, according to the New York Post.
More
One of the queries Quakers are asked to consider, is: "Do
you maintain strict integrity in your business transactions and in your
relations with individuals and organizations? Are you personally scrupulous and
responsible in the use of money entrusted to you, and are you careful not to
defraud the public revenue?"
Probably why there a no Quakers on Wall Street or in the City.
At the Comex silver depositories Monday final figures were: Registered 37.41
Moz, Eligible 128.64 Moz, Total 166.05 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
No crooks or scoundrels today, just a sad report on
my local football team’s ignominious exit on Sunday from England’s Premier
League. Some things are just too good not to share, along the lines of the Observer’s Book Review of October 2000.
“Reviewing
someone’s first novel, it is customary to be polite about it,” started Philip
Hensher in The Observer. “So let me say straight away that James Thackara’s The
Book of Kings is printed on very nice paper, and the typeface is clear and
readable.”
Reading 0 Queens Park Rangers 0: match report
As both Reading and Queens Park Rangers prepare to depart the Premier League, perhaps the nicest thing that could be said about them is that this was a more than fitting send-off. A goalless draw that would scarcely have dignified a Championship dead rubber, it truly was the worst the Premier League has to offer. Sometimes the table lies. Not here.It was a result that relegated both sides, but like all the best funerals there was a bleakly comic tenor to the whole afternoon. Many of the Reading fans had decided to turn up dressed as blue plastic seats. Those that had attended indulged in a hearty chorus of “If you’re all going to Bournemouth, clap your hands”. QPR’s supporters happily joined in.
On the touchline stood Reading’s hired fall guy Nigel Adkins, displaying the impotent rage of a driving instructor whose student is about to swerve into oncoming traffic. Watching his furious gesticulations was to be reminded of the words of England cricket captain Archie MacLaren in 1902: “My God, look what they’ve given me this time.” Instead, he said: “I’ve been here for five games now. I want us to change the way we play. You can’t do that overnight. If anything, it’s about that bit of quality that’s required, especially in the attacking third.”
QPR’s ineptitude, meanwhile, was best captured by their £100,000-a-week defender Chris Samba, who on Saturday morning had tweeted his excitement about “today’s game”, only to be reminded that it was on Sunday.
Humour on the gallows, but what was on the pitch was no laughing matter. To describe QPR as underachievers barely scrapes at the enamel of their failure. Last season was underachievement. This season was off the scale, and while their fans brandished a banner blaming the sacked Mark Hughes, current manager Redknapp, who took over with 26 games remaining, must be held at least as responsible.
How has the master motivator so failed to motivate this squad? This time last year, Jose Bosingwa was shackling Lionel Messi and Andrés Iniesta in the Nou Camp. It was hard to reconcile that player with the one substituted on 72 minutes, smirking as he shuffled down the tunnel, another appearance fee in his pocket. Adel Taarabt, one of the few survivors of the thrilling promotion push of 2010-11, missed not one, not two, but five clear-cut chances. For him this was a strangely fitting afternoon.
Redknapp had his excuses carefully honed. “When I came I didn’t realise we didn’t have any frontmen, that was the big problem. If I had had the job at the start of the year, it would have been different.
“There’s problems within the club. It’s not been easy, I’ve got to be honest with you. It is all about good players and good professionals. If you have got good players it is the easiest job in the world.”
So, to summarise: partly the fault of Hughes, partly the fault of the owners, partly the fault of the players, but Redknapp himself? Just an innocent bystander caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Whatever the owners’ plans are for the club, whether it’s with me, or whether it’s with... it’s not a problem for me,” he said. You watch what happens if a lucrative job offer arrives in the summer.
To be fair to him, this is a club where chaos runs out of the hot and cold taps. Privacy and discretion are in short supply. The internal post-mortem was carried out within minutes of full-time, on the very public forum of Twitter. “No quitting,” said owner Tony Fernandes. “Planning starts tomorrow. Meeting Harry at 11 to discuss squad.”
Midfielder-in-absentia Joey Barton, meanwhile, lobbed hand grenades from the south of France. “Too many w-----s amongst the playing staff,” he said. “All brought in by Hughes. Too many maggots.”
If QPR’s problem is a lack of resolve, Reading’s is a lack of quality. Here again, they came up sadly short. Nick Blackman, a young striker playing as a winger, frequently forgot to defend. Pavel Pogrebnyak was a crushing disappointment, as he has been all season, while these 90 minutes brought us no nearer discovering the point of Chris Gunter.
There were chances, many of them. Jay Bothroyd missed an empty net.
Pogrebnyak missed twice from four yards and once more from six. In the final minute of injury time, Loïc Rémy bore down on the Reading goal, sniffing a late miracle. He slipped over.
And so for the fans of these two fine clubs, there was to be no consolation in their moment of dismay, no last vestige of hope on which to cling. The chorus of clapped hands was a recognition of the fact that they will all assuredly be going to Bournemouth next season. Whether Redknapp, who only lives up the road in Poole, will be joining them remains to be seen.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished March:
DJIA: +119 Up. NASDAQ: +132 Up. SP500: +157 Up. Another Fed bubble, but now it’s challenged.
Now more on the arrival of the new Dalton Minimum.
Awful April: Spring hard to find across northern USA
Several cities had their snowiest single month of all time in April.
April has
been a freakishly cold month across much of the northern USA, bringing misery
to millions of sun-starved and winter-weary residents from the Rockies to the
Midwest.
"The
weather map ... looks like something out of The Twilight Zone,"
Minneapolis meteorologist Paul Douglas of WeatherNation TV wrote on his blog
last week.
Record
cold and snow has been reported in dozens of cities, with the worst of the
chill in the Rockies, upper Midwest and northern Plains. Several baseball games
have been snowed out in both Denver and Minneapolis.
Cities
such as Rapid City, S.D.; Duluth, Minn.; and Boulder, Colo., have all endured
their snowiest month ever recorded. (In all three locations, weather records go
back more than 100 years.) In fact, more than 1,100 snowfall records and 3,400
cold records have been set across the nation so far in April, according to the
National Climatic Data Center.
More
