Baltic Dry Index. 1060 (Wed.)
LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
FIAT CURRENCY
A currency whose value is whatever it
is decreed to be, undetermined by market forces. One Italian Lira.
DOLLAR
Noun. The chief U.S. monetary unit,
buck, greenback, simoleon. See Wampum.
WAMPUM
Noun. Beads used as money by extinct
North American Indians. Had a value of whatever the Chief said.
CHIEF
Dr. Ben Bernanke. Bernocchio, Helicopter Ben, aka chairman of
the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States.
It’s not quite panic
time in stocks but it’s starting to look like it in US bonds. Bernocchio’s
loose lips to the WSJ in June, seems to be sinking all kinds of ships in August.
And the Fed hasn’t actually “tapered” and is spinning like a banshee that it
never will. But if the Fed is lying and actually tapers in September, this
October’s traditional crash season will make October 1987 look like a child’s picnic.
Stay long physical precious metals for the outcome of the Great Bernanke Dilemma.
Taper next month and blow up bonds and the Great Disconnect in stocks, continue
on with QE forever and trigger the Great Inflation and the end of the Great
Nixonian Error, the era of fiat currency. You’re doing a heck of a job Benny!
"Liquidation
sometimes is orderly, but more frequently degenerates into panic as the
realization spreads that there is only so much money, not enough to enable
everyone to sell out at the top."
Charles
P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes.
China, Japan lead record outflow from Treasuries in June
NEW YORK |(Reuters) - China and Japan led an exodus from U.S. Treasuries in June after the first signals the U.S. central bank was preparing to wind back its stimulus, with data showing they accounted for almost all of a record $40.8 billion of net foreign selling of Treasuries.
The sales were part of $66.9 billion of net sales by foreigners of long-term U.S. securities in June, a fifth straight month of outflows and the largest since August 2007, U.S. Treasury Department data showed on Thursday.
China, the largest foreign creditor, reduced its Treasury holdings to $1.2758 trillion, and Japan trimmed its holdings for a third straight month to $1.0834 trillion. Combined, they accounted for about $40 billion in net Treasury outflows.
More
Asian shares slip as prospects for Fed tapering rise
TOKYO |(Reuters) - Asian stocks were weaker, while U.S. Treasury yields held near two-year highs as signs of improvement in the U.S. job market and rising consumer prices cemented expectations that the Federal Reserve will start reducing its stimulus next month.
The dollar wallowed near seven-week low, however, as signs of improvement in Europe and elsewhere undercut the perceived relative strength of the U.S. economy, especially in light of some weak U.S. earning results, as well as disappointing factory data.
Other U.S. data released overnight showed China and Japan -- the two largest foreign holders of U.S. debt -- were at the forefront of a $66 billion exodus from long-term US Treasuries in June, dumping a net $40 billion as they braced for an eventual end in the Fed's bond buying.
"I'd say the markets are pricing in an 80 to 90 percent chance that the Fed will announce tapering in September, although I suspect the Fed will try to send a message to curb the rise in bond yields," said Arihiro Nagata head of foreign bond trading at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.
More
Aug. 15, 2013, 4:30 p.m. EDT
U.S. stocks slammed; Dow drops over 200 points
Improving labor market cements views of September tapering
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — U.S. stocks on Thursday thudded lower
for a second day, with the Dow industrials posting their first back-to-back
triple-digit drop since June, as Treasury yields spiked to 2011 highs and Wal-Mart
Stores Inc. and Cisco
Systems Inc. cut their forecasts.
Several
upbeat economic reports spurred thinking that the Federal Reserve will begin to
scale back its monthly bond buys in September.
The
Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA
-1.47% dropped
225.47 points, or 1.5%, to end at 15,112.19, with Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO
-7.17% pacing
the drop, off 7.2%. Of the Dow’s 30 components, 28 fell. Wal-Mart’s shares were
down 2.6%. Read more on Wal-Mart
The
S&P 500 index SPX -1.43% lost
24.07 points, or 1.4%, to 1,661.32, with all its 10 major sectors ending lower;
among them, consumer discretionary and technology were slammed the hardest. The
Nasdaq Composite COMP
-1.72% declined
63.16 points, or 1.7%, to 3,606.12.
More
We end for the week with more on our new lawless
age. Last decade Uncle Sam switched sides and became a fully made member of the
Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. Thank God for Snowy for pointing it out. What do
they know about you and what do they want for not telling?
When a President does it that means
it is not illegal.
President Richard N. Obama.
NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year: report
Fri Aug
16, 2013 5:01am BST
(Reuters)
- The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its
legal authority thousands of times each year since 2008, the Washington Post
reported on Thursday, citing an internal audit and other top-secret documents.
Most of
the infractions involved unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign
intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by law
and executive order, the paper said.
They
ranged from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted
in unintended interception of U.S. emails and telephone calls, it said.
The Post said the documents it obtained were part of a trove of materials provided to the paper by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who has been charged by the United States with espionage. He was granted asylum in Russia earlier this month.
The documents included a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance, the paper said. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
In one instance, the NSA decided it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans, the Post said.
A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a "large number" of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt.
The Post said the NSA audit, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications.
The paper said most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. It said the most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.
In 2008, the FISA Amendments Act granted NSA broad new powers in exchange for regular audits from the Justice Department and the office of the Director of National Intelligence and periodic reports to Congress and the surveillance court, the Post said.
More
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men
to do nothing.
Edmund Burke.
At the Comex silver depositories Thursday final figures were: Registered 39.71
Moz, Eligible 125.75 Moz, Total 165.46 Moz.
Crooks and
Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
No crooks today, just a level headed analysis by
Reuters of Mr. Europe’s “recovery.”
Strip out the seasonal boost from tourism and an ominous inventory build
in France, and Mr, Europe’s leap from his deathbed looks more iffy than
recovery. And that’s before we take the terminal cases of Italy, Spain,
Portugal and Greece, now joined in decline this time round by Holland, the
country that is, not the old socialist relic determined to lead France back to
the 1960s and 70s.
"Considerable
uncertainty is attached to all economic estimates"
Fallen
former Guru Greenspan.
Analysis: One swallow doesn't make a summer for euro zone
LONDON |(Reuters) - The cheery freeze frame of the euro zone economy last quarter is no guarantee of a happy ending to what has been a horror movie for most of the single currency bloc since the onset of the great financial crisis.
The return to growth, albeit of just 0.3 percent between the first and second quarters, is unalloyed good news for Europe and the world after 18 months of contraction.
But the recovery is vulnerable to external shocks and too weak yet to make a difference to two of the major issues hanging over the euro zone: record unemployment and the sustainability of the area's public and private debt.
Quarterly growth of 0.7 percent in Germany and 0.5 percent in France, the bloc's two biggest economies, was faster on an annualized basis than in the United States, whose economy expanded 1.7 percent in the second quarter using that calculation.
Context counts, however. Inflation-adjusted U.S. output is about 5 percent higher than it was in the first quarter of 2008. Households have acted swiftly to pay down debt and the housing market is enjoying a brisk upswing. Growth has responded, even if the recovery has been weak by historical standards.
The euro zone, by contrast, is still in catch-up mode. Gross domestic product remains 3 percent below the peak reached five years ago and, on current trends, is unlikely to regain that high water mark until the middle of 2015 at the earliest, according to Jefferies, an investment bank, in London.
Mirroring the unused resources in the economy, unemployment is a record high 12.1 percent.
----Some of the factors boosting growth, such as the end of a hard winter giving way to a buoyant tourism season, are inherently fleeting. A build-up in inventories - which accounted for 40 percent of France's growth in the second quarter - will turn out to be a dead weight if final demand does not improve.
-----The drag from higher taxes and government spending cuts is fading. Global uncertainty is easing somewhat as China stabilizes and economists pencil in faster U.S. growth in 2014.
"This is what is allowing the region to exit recession. The situation is not great, but it is no longer as bad as it was last year," Greg Fuzesi, an economist with J.P. Morgan, wrote.
Ebrahim Rahbari with Citi in London said he was reasonably optimistic that the euro zone would be able to keep posting quarterly growth.
"No matter how bad things are, you really do reach a trough at some point unless you are continuously hit by bad shocks. And we haven't been hit by major shocks in Europe for a while," he said. "With all of this slack, an economy should be able to generate clearly positive growth at this point in the cycle."
For many, however, it will still feel like recession. That is because firms have plenty of spare capacity and so will be able to meet rising demand without hiring more workers - or investing in new plant - until this so-called output gap has been closed. Productivity will rise before employment does.
----Take Spain, where unemployment is more than 26 percent.
In a recent health-check on the economy, the International Monetary Fund said Spain in the past has never added jobs when the economy grew by less than 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent a year.
Yet growth is unlikely to reach these rates even in the medium term. Unemployment is still likely to be above 25 percent in 2018, the Fund said.
More
Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
Edmund Burke.
Another weekend and a national tragedy unfolding in
Egypt. If Egypt morphs into another Syria or Iraq, our fragile global recovery
will get a black swan shock, as 82 million watch the Egyptian Pound collapse. After
the massive car bombing yesterday in Beirut, this August the entire Middle East
seems on the brink of civil war. In far-away summery southern England time to
start harvesting God’s free fruits starting with blackberries. Have a great
weekend everyone.
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice,
neither, in my opinion, is safe.
Edmund Burke.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished July:
DJIA: +164 Up. NASDAQ: +167 Up. SP500: +195 Up. The
Fed’s final bubble still inflates.
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