Baltic Dry Index. 1135 -03
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"The
nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the
government and I'm here to help.'"
Ronald
Reagan.
With our new century increasingly becoming more
China centric, we open today with a reality check on what type of economy and
country China really is. Western politicians voluntarily decided to ride this
tigers back, for the cheap profits giant corporations got from cheap labour,
and the low prices western consumers got on the manufactured products. Back
then “deficits didn’t matter,” as the banksters and vampire squids promoted the
credit/debt casino crony capitalism society. Now we live in a QE Forever world
where deficits do matter, where casino capitalism collapsed in 2007-2009, and
the command economy of China seems to be faltering. Falling off this tiger will
very likely bring on a massive reconnect with reality. Stay long physical
precious metals for coming Weimar phase of the Great Nixonian Error of fiat
money.
Next decade our new Graphene Age will likely reboot
the global economy, just as the Industrial Revolution did in an earlier
age. The trouble is we have to get from
mid-2013 through to the arrival of that super-material age. The euro, and a
whole lot of erroneous fiat currencies will get the Icelandic krona treatment
first. Unhappily for us, all of the fiat currencies are linked. The benefits of
fiat currency were all front loaded. We long ago dissipated that advantage in
the 70s and 80s.
It was a confusion of ideas between him and
one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to
make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it
wasn't.
P.G. Wodehouse.
China Sees 7% as Bottom-Line Growth Tolerable in Slowdown
By Bloomberg News - Jul 23, 2013 7:10 AM GMT
Premier Li
Keqiang’s government sees 7 percent growth as the bottom line for tolerance
of an economic slowdown, Chinese news organizations reported, signaling the
nation will act to support expansion if needed. Expansion below 7 percent won’t be tolerated because China needs to achieve a moderately prosperous society by 2020, according to a commentary published July 21 by the official Xinhua News Agency and credited to reporter Wang Yuewei. Li said at a recent meeting with economists that 7 percent is the “bottom line” and the nation can’t allow growth below that, the Beijing News reported today.
Chinese stocks headed for their biggest
gain since July 11 amid optimism that the government won’t let expansion slow
too much after gross domestic product rose 7.5 percent in the second quarter
from a year earlier, the same pace as China’s official target for this year. Li
previously said the government shouldn’t let growth and employment fall below
lower limits that he didn’t specify.
More
Billionaire Ma’s Comment Fallout Shows Fine Line on Politics
By Lulu Yilun Chen - Jul 22, 2013 8:00 PM GMT
The fallout from comments attributed to Jack Ma about the
1989 Tiananmen
Square crackdown highlights the balance business leaders need to strike in
China between pleasing politicians and showing independence.
After the South China Morning Post newspaper quoted Ma as saying China’s rulers made the “most correct decision” in their handling of the deadly June 4, 1989, protests, activists started an online petition calling for an apology. The billionaire’s company, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., disputed the accuracy of the report, which the newspaper said it stands by.
Alibaba, which some analysts estimate may be worth as much as $120 billion in an initial public offering, joins Carrefour SA (CA) and News Corp. (NWSA) in being criticized in China for involvement in sensitive political issues. Even mentioning the events at Tiananmen Square, in which hundreds of people were believed to have been killed, guaranteed a debate, said Mark Tanner, the founder of China Skinny, a Shanghai-based research agency.
“Everyone that comes to China doing business, lesson 101 is never mention Taiwan, Tiananmen or Tibet,” Tanner said. “That pretty much applies to everyone, especially with the government having such a strong hold on business here.”
News Corp., the media company controlled by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, faced backlash when its HarperCollins unit scrapped plans to publish a book by Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong before its return to China in 1997. The company pulled the book on concern it criticized leaders in Beijing, the New York Times reported in 1998.
More
Elsewhere, the decline and fall of Anglo-American
hegemony is generating serious unrest, although the Anglo part fell the better
part of 70 years ago.
“The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.”
“Adam Smith” aka George Goodman.
BRIC Bust Seen in Emerging Market Discontent With Growth
By Joshua Goodman & Matthew Malinowski - Jul 23, 2013 12:19 AM GMT
Stretched budgets and sluggish growth are putting emerging-market
governments on a collision course with rising pressures from recently empowered
middle classes for more spending and better services. From Jakarta to Brasilia, policy makers face the end to an era of abundant global liquidity that helped fuel the fastest expansion in three decades. In the eight weeks through July 17, investors pulled $40.3 billion from emerging-market bond and equity funds amid signs the Federal Reserve may begin reducing stimulus later this year. In 2012, $111 billion poured into these asset classes, according to EPFR Global in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which tracks money flows.
----Nomura International Plc, citing the “surprise” outbreak recently of protests in Brazil and Turkey (XU100), said 11 other countries -- including China, India and Russia as well as commodity exporters Argentina and Venezuela -- face the risk of market-moving civil unrest in the short to medium term. Frustration with corruption by a middle class that swelled during the past decade is partly fueling the angst, according to its June 27 report.
“If you lift your people out of extreme poverty, it’s not like they’re going to say ‘Great, now we’re all set, we don’t want anything else,’” said Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, in a June 30 interview in Lima, Peru. “This is not going to go away. This is the most natural thing in the world.”
More
We end, as all too often, with dying Europe going
the way of the unloved and dead USSR. It doesn’t take a genius to see how the
unloved, dysfunctional, wealth destroying euro ends, only the timing and final cause
of the death remain open. A scandal in Germany, the collapse of France? Separatist
movements in Italy and Spain? Another Cyprus style bank bail-in in Luxembourg?
An external shock coming in from Asia or America? The ECB actually implementing Outright Monetary
Transactions? Sooner or later, and my money’s on sooner, the final curtain
falls on the never ending, wealth destroying euro-crisis.
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie"
Jean-Claude Juncker. Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar.
Jul 22,
8:29 AM EDT
Eurozone debt burden hits all-time high in Q1
By PAN
PYLAS Associated Press
LONDON
(AP) -- Europe's debt dynamics keep getting worse in spite of years of
cost-cutting and tax hikes designed to return public finances to health.
Official
figures showed Monday that the debt burden of the 17 European Union countries
that use the euro hit all-time highs at the end of the first quarter even after
austerity measures were introduced to rebalance the governments' books.
Eurostat,
the EU's statistics office, said government debt as a proportion of the total
annual gross domestic product of the eurozone rose to a record 92.2 percent in
the first quarter of 2013, from 90.6 percent the previous quarter and 88.2
percent in the same period a year ago.
Battered
by a global recession, a banking crisis and in some cases lax financial
management, a number of euro countries have been forced to take remedial action
to deal with their debts, some in return for multibillion bailout loans.
----One side-effect
of the austerity measures has been to keep a lid on economic growth -
government spending is a key component of the economy while tax rises can choke
consumption and investment. Many euro countries are actually in recession -
shrinking economies can make the debt-to-GDP ratio look less favorable. Coupled
with the fact that countries continue to add to their debt mountains by
ongoing, albeit smaller, budget deficits, the overall debt burden of the
eurozone has continued to rise.
More
"The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe."
Mikhail Gorbachev
At the Comex silver depositories Monday final figures were: Registered 48.06 Moz,
Eligible 116.56 Moz, Total 164.62 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, yet another politician having trouble with
the truth. This time it’s Germany’s Chancellor Merkel lying for the secrets of
the new Stassi. Still think that you live in a free democratic society, think
again. From hanging chads to dubious US voting machines, to lying politicians
who’ve never held a real job in their lives, we more and more come to resemble George Orwell’s 1984.
The
thought police would get him just the same. He had committed--would have
committed, even if he had never set pen to paper--the essential crime that
contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was
not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a
while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you."
George
Orwell, 1984.
'Key Partners': The Secret Link Between Germany and the NSA
Chancellor Angela Merkel has
repeatedly said she knew nothing about American surveillance activities in
Germany. But documents seen by SPIEGEL show that German intelligence cooperates
closely with the NSA and even uses spy software provided by the US. By
SPIEGEL
It
was a busy two days for the surveillance specialists of the
Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency. At the
end of April, a team of 12 senior BND officials flew to the United States,
where they visited the heart of the global American surveillance empire: the
National Security Agency (NSA). The purpose of their mission can be read in a
"top secret" NSA document which SPIEGEL has seen -- one of the trove
of files in the possession of whistleblower Edward Snowden.
According to the document, BND President Gerhard
Schindler repeatedly expressed an "eagerness" to cooperate more
closely with the NSA. The Germans, the document reads, were looking for
"guidance and advice."
Their wish was fulfilled. Senior employees with the NSA's Foreign Affairs Directorate were assigned to look after the German delegation. The Americans organized a "strategic planning conference" to bring their German partners up to speed. In the afternoon, following several presentations on current methods of data acquisition, senior members of a division known as Special Source Operations, or SSO, spoke to their German guests. The SSO, one of the most secretive groups within the intelligence community, is the division that forms alliances with US companies, especially in the IT sector, for data mining purposes. Snowden describes this elite unit as the NSA's "crown jewels".
The journey to Washington wasn't the first educational trip by German intelligence officials across the Atlantic this spring -- nor was it the last. Documents from Snowden that SPIEGEL has seen show that cooperation between Berlin and Washington in the area of digital surveillance and defense has intensified considerably during the tenure of Chancellor Angela Merkel. According to one document, the Germans are determined to "strengthen and expand bilateral cooperation."
Completely Unaware?
This is awkward news for Merkel, who is running for re-election as the head of the center-right Christian Democrats. The German campaign had been relatively uneventful until recently, but now a new issue seems to have emerged: the Americans' lust for data. Opposition politicians have intensified their attacks in recent days. First Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democratic candidate for the Chancellery, accused Merkel of having violated her oath of office for failing to protect the basic rights of Germans. Not long later, SPD Chairman Sigmar Gabriel referred to Merkel as a "spin doctor who is trying to placate the population." According to Gabriel, it has since been proven that the German government knew about the NSA's activities.
But the attacks from the SPD are not the chancellor's biggest worry; the real threat comes from within. At a very early juncture, Merkel insisted that her government had been completely unaware of the NSA's activities. It is a position she reiterated before starting her summer vacation last Friday.
She will now be judged on the basis of those statements. Internally, Merkel's advisors argue that she had no choice but to take such a clear position. After all, both the head of the BND and the president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic intelligence agency, had said that they had had no detailed knowledge of the Prism surveillance program and the extent of American data collection.
----What is worse? To be governed by a cabinet that conceals its connivance from citizens? Or to have a chancellor and ministers whose intelligence agencies exist in a parallel world, beyond the supervision of the government and parliament? Internal NSA documents show that the Americans and German intelligence agencies are cooperating more closely than previously known. The repeated assertions by the government and intelligence agencies in recent weeks that they were not fully aware of what US surveillance specialists were doing appear disingenuous in the extreme in light of the documents SPIEGEL has seen from the collection secured by Snowden.
More
July 10, 2013, 6:10 p.m. ET
The EU Explains Itself
The European Commission wants a media outfit to 'filter' the news to its own liking.
The European Commission is launching its own
"independent" news service, complete with editors, web designers and
"experts in journalism/journalists." In its call for tenders, the
Commission laments that "reporting on EU affairs is often scarce,
irregular, lacks a broader European perspective and citizens do not have any
specialized platform where they can find and share quality content on EU
affairs."
Translation: The EU thinks it has a bad reputation not because it does anything wrong, but because the 500-odd reporters who comprise the regular EU press corps are doing a lousy job at fostering "awareness and understanding of EU affairs." The Commission's latest opinion poll finds that 57% of European citizens "distrust" EU institutions, while only 30% have a "positive" impression.
By our count, the Commission already employs 122 spokespersons, press officers and media secretaries to talk up its policies, and another 50-odd staffers in its Directorate General for Communications. That department's €103.7 million annual budget covers funding for the Presseurop clipping service, Euronews television and Euranet radio broadcasts. The EU also boasts its own YouTube channel, several newsletters and even a bookstore, which publishes everything from posters to children's literature.
But Europeans still lack "critical understanding of EU affairs," says the Commission, which is why it needs its own agency to "filter, select, and explain the news to the EU citizens, and to do it with quality journalism standards."
More
“No
one believes more firmly than Comrade Obama [Merkel, Barroso, Van Rompuy, your
choice here,] that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you
make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong
decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”
With
apologies to George Orwell, Animal
Farm
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished June:
DJIA: +145 Up. NASDAQ: +146 Up. SP500: +177 Unch The Fed’s
Final Bubble continues, but is struggling. The S&P500 moved sideways. The Dow and
Nasdaq both barely eked out a gain. In current highly volatile conditions and
controversial uncertain policy indecision at the Fed, Speculators would stay
long, investors would exit stocks for now or get fully hedged.
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