Baltic Dry Index. 815 +03
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
Today, compare and contrast being in a fiat
currency union, and staying out retaining your own fiat currency. In the European Monetary Union all knees must
bend before Berlin. In Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK,
retaining the flexibility of a national currency albeit fiat, made it easier
for their citizens to hold on to more of their wealth.
"The history of paper money is an account of abuse, mismanagement, and financial disaster."
Richard M. Ebeling
House price plunge worsens in Greece and Spain
A world league table of property markets has shown values are falling fastest in Southern Europe, as a recovery gathered pace in major markets across the globe.
Prices in
Greece, where the economy has been crippled by the weight of government debt
and by austerity measures, fell by 11.8pc in the year to the end of March,
according to estate agency Knight Frank.
The rate
of decline worsened from 9.8pc a year earlier.
Other
countries in the so-called PIIGS countries - Spain (-7.9pc), Portugal (-6.9pc),
Italy (-4.1pc) and Ireland (-3pc) - were also among the weakest markets (see
the table below).
The fall
in the value of Spanish propery was marginally worse than the year before when
it was 7.3pc.
Ireland's
fall, however, was a vast improvment from a 16pc plunge the year before.
Unemployment
has soared in many of the eurozone economies while wages have stagnated or
fallen in real terms, putting pressure on property valuations. In Spain,
further ill-effects have been imposed by changes in tax rules, according to
experts.
A new law
in April required residents to declare any overseas asset worth more than
€50,000, sparking fears that their may be a future Cyprus-style money grab.
More
European Stock Futures Decline Before OMT Court Hearings
By Corinne Gretler - Jun 11, 2013 7:14 AM GMT
European stock-index futures slipped as the Bank of Japan
refrained from expanding stimulus and a German court began hearings on the European
Central Bank’s bond-buying plan. Asian shares declined while U.S. futures
were little changed.
----The euro “will be in focus later today with day one of the German constitutional court ruling on the OMT program kicking off,” Stan Shamu, a market strategist at IG Markets in Melbourne, wrote in e-mailed comments. “It’s important for the OMT backstop to remain available in order to keep confidence steady.”
Germany’s top court will begin a two-day hearing today to address the ECB’s Outright Monetary Transactions program and the European Stability Mechanism.
The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe is reviewing the OMT, which was introduced last year as concerns peaked that the euro region would break apart, after plaintiffs including a lawmaker allied to Chancellor Angela Merkel brought a case against it. The as-yet-unused OMT foresees potentially unlimited purchases of bonds of debt-stricken countries that sign up to adjustment programs.
The court last year allowed Germany to ratify the 500 billion-euro ($663 billion) ESM bailout facility and the EU fiscal pact, while ruling the measures must include provisions that the country won’t be forced to assume higher liabilities without its consent. The September ruling was preliminary and didn’t cover the OMT bond program.
The BOJ today refrained from expanding their tools to rekindle inflation and stoke growth, sticking with an April pledge to increase the monetary base by 60 trillion yen ($611 billion) to 70 trillion yen a year. Markets in China were closed for the Dragon Boat Festival.
More
UK in growth mode as recovery gathers pace, says OECD
The UK remains in growth mode, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), supporting hopes that the recovery is gathering strength.
The
Paris-based think-tank’s latest composite leading indicators (CLIs), which have
a good record for predicting changes in growth, showed that the UK economy
continued to expand at a little over its 'trend’ trajectory in April.
Specifically,
the indicator climbed to 100.8 for the month from 100.7 in both March and
February, and 100.6 in the previous two months. A reading of 100 represents the
trend for an economy’s activity.
The
report will add to signs that the UK remains safely in growth mode, if not expanding
at a rapid rate, as it comes after the release of other positive UK data.
“In fact,
survey evidence for May for the UK has been markedly firmer, not only overall
but across a wide range of sectors of the economy,” said Howard Archer, UK
economist at IHS Global Insight. “As a result, we have upgraded our UK GDP
forecasts modestly to 1pc (from 0.8pc) in 2013 and to 1.6pc (from 1.4pc) in
2014.”
More
Home sales hit three-year high as housing revival continues
Home sales have hit a three-and-a-half-year peak, surveyors have reported, confirming the housing market revival.
Chartered
surveyors polled by industry body Rics handled an average of 17.9 sales during
the three months to May, the highest figure reported since January 2010. While
still low by historical standards, the latest survey adds to the picture of
rising activity.
----Surveyors
also reported signs that prices were beginning to rise outside London, a market
boosted by international buyers. Of those polled, 5pc more surveyors reported
price increases rather than decreases in their areas.
The
Government’s Funding for Lending scheme, launched to give banks access to cheap
finance, has been cited by lenders as a factor pushing down bank funding costs
and helping to reduce interest rates for customers, stimulating house sales
rates.
Peter
Bolton King, a director at Rics, said: “May was an interesting month for the
housing market. More people decided to get out there and view property and more
transactions went through than in quite some time.
----The report will add to signs that the UK
remains safely in recovery mode, after the release of other positive UK data.
The number of job vacancies in the City sector rose 20pc to 6,426 between April
and May as employers took comfort from more stable financial markets, recruiter
Morgan McKinley said yesterday.
More
We end today’s shortened LIR update, with troubling
news from the not so free land between the shining seas. The experts who never
saw the 2007-2009 crash coming, now see the end of QE forever by Q4 13. I doubt
that the Fed can ever end QE at all, without bringing on the event that QE was
initiated to prevent. If the experts are right, the Fed’s Final Bubble pops in
our traditional autumn crash season. Provided that is that Europe doesn’t crash
out first. Can France really make it to the autumn? Italy, Spain, Holland,
Belgium?
"It is the greenback which is unstable, and not the bullion."
Dr. Franz Pick
Fed retreat from bond buying expected by fourth quarter: poll
June 10, 2013, 12:41 PM
Nearly
two-thirds of U.S. economists think the Federal Reserve will start to retreat
from its massive bond-buying strategy in the waning months of 2013, according
to a poll.
Some
35.1% of those who expect the Fed to reduce bond purchases believe the bank
will begin to pull back in September, the Blue Chip Economic Indicators found.
An additional 27% think the bank will wait until October and another 35.1%
believe the Fed will hold off until December.
Not a
single economist surveyed thinks the Fed will act after its June 18-19 meeting.
And only 2.7% pinpoint the July 30-31 gathering as the starting point for the
Fed’s withdrawal.
U.S.
stock and bond markets have ruptured over the past few weeks amid worries that
the central bank might start to curtail bond purchases in the near future. The
Fed has been buying about $85 billion in Treasury and mortgage-related
securities each month to keep interest rates low – part of a broader goal of
speeding up U.S. economic growth.
If the Fed
does wait at least until September, that might give equity investors more
time to dabble in the market in search of a quick buck. The Fed’s bond-buying
effort is widely viewed as having boosted stock prices. Yet once the retreat
begins, many analysts say, the stock market could face an extended
period period of volatility.
More
"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
At the Comex silver depositories Monday final figures were: Registered 41.76 Moz,
Eligible 122.39 Moz, Total 164.15 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today,
more on our Big Brother, casino capitalism, lawless age. Too big to jail doesn’t
apply to the 99 percent. Thinking about holding the governing class to account?
Think again. Did you really pay every last penny of tax in your life? What
would your children think if we show them where you surf. What would your
employer do with a copy of those emails you wrote about what you really think
about your job. Via Metadata we can build up blacklists of persons of interest,
deemed not suitable to employ. Do you hold a high visibility job like Justice
of the Supreme Court? Think twice before you find against Big Brother. Do you
like holding on to your job as CEO of MegaCorp? Be very careful not to stick
your head over the parapet. Perhaps you might just like to come by for a nice
chat.
Of
course it was all only targeted at Johnny Foreigner, and of course in the UK,
GCHQ wasn’t sidestepping UK and EU laws and regulations. We know that because
they say so. “Move along, nothing to see here.” As mentioned yesterday,
prismgate rhymes with prisongate, but what is the likelihood of those illegally
authorising data-mining going to jail, as opposed to the hapless data-mined? What chance of a Judge finding for the data mined? Tomorrow
will not be like today which was like yesterday. Tomorrow will be closer the
USSR and Mao’s hellhole China.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin.
Yes, NSA surveillance should worry the law-abiding
The books you read, the emails you
send, the TV shows you watch – 'big data' could jump to conclusions about your
life
Monday 10 June 2013 17.30 BST
Many internet users will be feeling slightly bemused by the worldwide
reaction to the revelations about US surveillance technology. As President Obama,
the UK foreign secretary, William Hague, and many other senior politicians have
said, what do the innocent have to fear? Why would the National Security Agency
(NSA), or anyone else, care about your search history, Facebook updates, Skype
calls, emails, instant messages, and so on?Data mining tools have developed quickly over the past decade, and a detailed picture can now be painted of people's lives with even small amounts of such information. This picture can ultimately have real-world consequences. Ever had problems getting an electronic visa to travel to countries such as the US and Australia, who pre-screen foreign visitors, or had to go through lengthy additional security at the airport? Thought about getting a job with a government agency or contractor that will do background checks first? Or perhaps you've had difficulty getting medical insurance or credit despite a healthy lifestyle and prompt payment of your bills?
So-called "big data" approaches are revolutionising the way these processes work, in government and the private sector. By crunching through large quantities of data, all sorts of interesting patterns can be found inside people's everyday activities. You might already realise that fatty and sugary foods showing up on your supermarket loyalty card could be interesting to insurers, financial service providers, and even employers concerned about sick days – but did you know significant time spent commuting and watching television are also good predictors of a shorter lifespan?
One phone call to a country such as Pakistan might not in itself say much, but what if three of your own phone and email contacts had made one in the past year, and you also browsed through some quite radical websites protesting at the "war on terror" last month? Or bought three philosophy and history books that have previously been found in the collections of terrorism suspects? Much more complex patterns are generally being sought out by data analysts, in the way that Google (for example) uses more than 200 different "signals" about the quality of a web page to generate its search rankings.
These approaches need huge amounts of both computing power and data. We know that the NSA has both, with its new $2bn Utah Data Centre, due to open in September, reportedly capable of processing trillions of terabytes. Former NSA staff members have explained that the agency has systems that can process trillions of data points to test the strength of connections between them. This explains why Verizon and seemingly other telephone companies have been ordered to hand over complete lists of all telephone calls made – to find suspicious patterns, especially of individuals linked over time to people that have come under suspicion in other ways.
More
Internet's big names in battle to salvage reputations after NSA revelations
Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook,
PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple have been floundering for a response
Monday 10 June 2013 22.46 BST
Google. Apple. Facebook. Microsoft: they are the
brands that want the world to trust them with personal information, emails,
photos, documents – yet they are now facing a battle to maintain that trust
after disclosures that the US government was given access to their customers'
data online via the Prism programme operated by the NSA.The companies involved – Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple – vigorously deny giving the Obama administration backdoor access to users' internet information, but the potential damage to their brand reputation has left the companies floundering for a way to respond.
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, believes there could be serious consequences for the collective reputations of all internet companies who have meticulously built their trade on trust.
He cites Amazon – not one of the companies involved in Prism – as a case in point when the company took the side of consumers after publishers protested about bad reviews. "It may have dissuaded someone to buy a book, but it instilled trust in Amazon which was far more important to it long-term," said Mayer-Schonberger. "If you violate that trust, it is difficult to re-establish. Even if it turned out to be a hoax, trust has been destroyed because everyone is talking about it."
He added: "These companies depend on their users being sufficiently trusting to give them personal data. Many of us are perfectly fine for these companies to use this information for their own commercial benefit, to place more relevant adverts on the right hand side, but we do not want it passed on to the government or to tax authorities for instance."
----In his statement following the Prism revelations, Google CEO Larry Page indicated this was the tack his company would be taking to protect its brand reputation. "The level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish," he said.
Civil liberty activists have also been alarmed. In the UK, the US surveillance, even of high level data, has raised questions about breaches of domestic data protection laws.
Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Benjamin Franklin.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May:
DJIA: +142 Up. NASDAQ: +144 Up. SP500: +177 Up. The Fed’s
Final Bubble continues. But hurricanes and tornadoes appear. Getting out first
beats getting out last.
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