Tuesday, 12 November 2013

Overdrive.



Baltic Dry Index. 1564 -17

LIR Gold Target by 2019: $30,000.  Revised due to QE programs.

"The gold standard, in one form or another, will prevail long after the present rash of national fiats is forgotten or remembered only in currency museums."

Hans F. Sennholz

The race to the bottom in the renewed fiat currency wars has shifted into overdrive with last week’s ECB rate cut, but we haven’t seen anything yet. Just wait till 2014 and the arrival of the Yellen Fed. But first this report from Reuters of potential backtracking by China.

“The Communist party must control the guns.”

Chairman Mao. Communist Mass Murderer.

China to unveil 10-year reform plan, expectations toned down

By Kevin Yao
BEIJING Mon Nov 11, 2013 4:14pm EST
(Reuters) - China's leaders will unveil a reform agenda for the next decade on Tuesday, seeking to balance the need to overhaul the world's second-largest economy as it loses steam with preserving stability and to reinforce the Communist Party's power.

The blueprint, which past experience suggests will be first published by the official news agency Xinhua, will show just how committed the new leadership is to reform after formally taking power in March.

Economic reforms were expected to dominate four days of closed-door talks that began on Saturday and involved the 205-member Central Committee of China's ruling Communist Party. The conclave was held under tight security at a Soviet-era hotel in western Beijing.

Some social and political issues could have been tackled, but Western-style political reform were probably not on the agenda, analysts said.

President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang must unleash new growth drivers as the economy, after three decades of breakneck expansion, begins to sputter, burdened by industrial overcapacity, piles of debt and eroding competitiveness.

Yu Zhengsheng, the fourth-ranked member of the ruling elite, said last month the meeting would deliver "unprecedented" reforms. However, several analysts and official media have sought to tone down expectations.
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“It's always darkest before it becomes totally black.”

Chairman Mao. Communist Mass Murderer.

Now back to more of the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money fast coming towards its end.

"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

Race to Bottom Resumes as Central Bankers Ease Anew: Currencies

By Emma Charlton & John Detrixhe - Nov 11, 2013 5:17 PM GMT
The global currency wars are heating up again as central banks embark on a new round of easing to combat a slowdown in growth.

The European Central Bank cut its key rate last week in a decision some investors say was intended in part to curb the euro after it soared to the strongest since 2011. The same day, Czech policy makers said they were intervening in the currency market for the first time in 11 years to weaken the koruna. New Zealand said it may delay rate increases to temper its dollar, and Australia warned the Aussie is “uncomfortably high.”

----With the outlook for the global economy being downgraded by the International Monetary Fund and inflation slowing to levels that may hinder investment, countries and central banks are revisiting policies that tend to boost competitiveness through weaker currencies.

The moves threaten to spark a new round in what Brazil Finance Minister Guido Mantega in 2010 called a “currency war,” barely two months after the Group of 20 nations pledged to “refrain from competitive devaluation.”

“We’re seeing a new era of currency wars,” Neil Mellor, a foreign-exchange strategist at Bank of New York Mellon in London, said in a Nov. 8 telephone interview.
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Volatility Seen in Treasuries as Traders Brace for Higher Yields

By Liz Capo McCormick - Nov 12, 2013 4:05 AM GMT
U.S. government debt is becoming increasingly perilous to options traders who are pushing up the cost to protect against sudden losses by the most in a year, even as Federal Reserve stimulus suppresses volatility.

The cost to lock in fixed-interest rates that are a half-percentage point above 10-year yields is now about 17 percent higher than contracts tied to prevailing rates, according to data compiled by Deutsche Bank AG. The premium for the three-month options has risen from this year’s low of 10 percent in June, signaling growing demand for protection from the risk U.S. borrowing costs will start rising before March. The increase was the biggest since 2012.

While the prospect the Fed will keep its $85 billion of monthly bond purchases into 2014 caused swings in 10-year Treasury yields (USGG10YR) to diminish and encouraged bullish options traders to bet on lower rates, the relative calm is obscuring the danger that investors may get blindsided by a pullback. Some speculators are hedging their bets that yields are poised to eclipse 3 percent. Reports on jobs, services and manufacturing last week all showed U.S. companies persevered through the partial government shutdown.
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Next the next likely head of the  Fedster’s gets a very dodgy glowing endorsement from fallen former guru “Bubbles” Greenspan. She made me do it, he says.

“under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth... The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation”

Alan Greenspan.  

Greenspan Says Yellen Was His Guide to Economics Research at Fed

By Jeff Kearns & Angela Greiling Keane - Nov 7, 2013 2:20 AM GMT
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that Janet Yellen would be a “great” chief of the central bank and that he relied on her to explain the newest academic research in economics while the two served together.

“She is an extraordinarily good economist,” Greenspan said today at the National Press Club in Washington.
“It was very helpful to me because she was a professor and academic who had very significant insights into where various new theories were coming up and the like in academia.”

Yellen, who has been nominated to succeed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke after his term expires Jan. 31, would “be great, and I can’t imagine that it would be otherwise,” said Greenspan, who ran the central bank for more than 18 years. He spoke today about his recent book, “The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting.”
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Next, more of the worker’s paradise on earth, the Bilderberger Eurozone. It wasn’t meant to be this way! The euro was sold to Europe’s huddled masses yearning to be free, as the way to Easy Street and the Free Lunch. It turned out that many in continental Europe were already on Easy Street and already eating a free lunch. Who knew that the Germanic euro would take away the free lunch and put most of Club Med into Destitution Avenue. Ironically, it’s been great for London and the southeast of England. Capital flight from France and Club Med, plus capital flight from the Arab Spring has turned this part of Merrie  Olde England into something of a European boom zone.

Long may the misanthropic Bilderbergers rule in Brussels and Berlin. Roll out the UK exit option. I mean, think about it, would you really put an Italian in charge of running the European Central Bank! You might as well put a German in the Vatican.

"Borrowers will default. Markets will collapse. Gold (the ultimate form of safe money) will skyrocket."

Michael Belkin

Trash Piles Up in Madrid as Strike Enters Seventh Day

By Emma Ross-Thomas - Nov 11, 2013 12:10 PM GMT
Trash piled up on the streets of Madrid as cleaners struck for a seventh day over plans by companies including Fomento (FCC) de Contrucciones & Contratas SA to cut wages and jobs.

FCC, along with Obrascon Huarte Lain (OHL) SA and Sacyr SA (SCYR)’s Valoriza unit, proposed cutting around 1,000 jobs in Spain’s capital city, said a spokesman for the companies, who asked not to be named.
He declined to comment on the wage cuts, which unions say amount to as much 40 percent.

“The strike is indefinite, we’re not going to sign an agreement that pushes some of us into poverty and the rest into unemployment,” Jesus Fernandez, head of private services at Comisiones Obreras union, said in a telephone interview. “How long will it last? Judging by the irresponsible attitude we’re seeing, we may all die of disgust.”

Passers-by navigated piles of trash obstructing sidewalks, with some holding hankerchiefs over their noses against the stench. Madrid city hall said yesterday it would send more police to shield workers fulfilling minimum-service agreements from picketers. In the conflict, 260 bins have been set alight, the city hall said.

Municipalities are reining in budgets after the end of a decade-long construction boom that swelled their coffers. FCC saw revenue from its Spanish environmental services unit fall 3 percent in the first nine months of the year, mainly due to spending cuts by local governments.

The 2 billion-euro ($2.7 billion) road-cleaning and park maintenance contract, which came into effect on Aug. 1, offered the same services for 40 percent less than the previous contract, the unions’ Fernandez said. The companies’ representative and a spokeswoman for Madrid declined to comment
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European Leaders Revisit Scourge of Region’s Youth Unemployment

By Patrick Donahue - Nov 12, 2013 12:00 AM GMT
European leaders struggling to shake off the legacy of the euro-area debt crisis will today return to the challenge of how to overcome the scourge of joblessness among the region’s youth.

French President Francois Hollande will host counterparts including Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta in Paris for a summit on unemployment among the young. They’ll unveil their latest battery of proposed measures after the jobless rate for those under the age of 25 climbed to 24.1 percent in September, matching a record.

----After the European Central Bank surprised markets last week with an interest-rate cut to aid economic growth, leaders will seek to show that they’re taking action to salve one of the region’s most open wounds. Letta has described youth joblessness as the “true nightmare” of Italy, which this week may announce a ninth straight quarter of economic contraction.

In Letta’s country, the euro-region’s third-biggest economy, youth unemployment rose to a record 40.4 percent in September, evidence of the harsh environment for new workforce entrants that dominates southern Europe.

----In Greece, where the jobless rate of 27.6 percent is the highest in the euro area, European Union data show the youth unemployment rate to have been at 57.3 percent in July.

----While Spain escaped from recession in the third quarter, the jobless situation there is similarly desperate, with the level of young out of work close to that of Greece at 56.5 percent in September, according to EU data.
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"If you don't trust gold, do you trust the logic of taking a beautiful pine tree, worth about $4,000 - $5,000, cutting it up, turning it into pulp and then paper, putting some ink on it and then calling it one billion dollars?"

Kenneth J. Gerbino.

At the Comex silver depositories Monday final figures were: Registered 44.18 Moz, Eligible 125.53 Moz, Total 169.71 Moz.  


Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.

Today, the seriously bent and totally doubled over, wealth destroying, unloved fiat euro. Don’t blame the Germans says the UK Telegraph. They didn’t mean it, says the assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph. They’re victims too, just like the tax and work shy Greeks.  Time to put the great European wealth destroying era of the euro to its end. Time to allow Club Med up from serfdom and the impoverishment of its youth generation. The Bilderberger elite will of course do no such thing. For them and them alone, the euro is the best thing  since the invention of the wheel. Club Mad’s misery will go on, until violent revolution probably. Stay long physical gold and silver.

"Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."

Alan Greenspan.

Don't blame Germany for the eurozone's travails, blame the euro itself

Germany didn’t set out to design an economic model that impoverishes much of the rest of Europe

For a long time now, it has been fashionable to blame Germany for the problems of the euro. In its recent bi-annual currency report, the US went a stage further, and accused Europe’s largest economy not just of deepening the continent’s travails, but of adding a deflationary bias to the entire world economy.

Attitudes have hardened further since it emerged that German representatives at the European Central Bank led the revolt of Northern states against last week’s interest rate cut, and have been attempting to obstruct much else deemed necessary to ease the plight of the eurozone periphery.

Even the normally ultra loyal Olli Rehn, the European economics commissioner, together with his director general for economic affairs, Marco Buti, seem to have joined in the German bashing – well, sort of.

In a new blog, Mr Rehn says he may this week launch an “in-depth review of the German economy”, using a European Union procedure for examining macro-economic imbalances in the region.

Mr Buti is meanwhile widely accused in Berlin of trying to pin it all on the beastly Germans, though it is hard to find any evidence for it in what he has said publicly. To the extent that Mr Buti, an Italian, is guilty of finger pointing, he presumably reserves his strictures for private consumption.

In any case, to blame Germans for standing in the way of a resurgent Europe is just a little too convenient. It also misdiagnoses the nature of Europe’s problem. It’s not Germany, still less its economic success – if indeed you count expected growth this year of just 0.5pc as success – which is at the root of the difficulty; it’s the euro.

I’ve found it impossible to ascertain who was originally responsible for the expression “one size fits all monetary policy”; Eddie George, former governor of the Bank of England, used it in the context of the single currency as far back as the late 1990s, though it possibly has a much longer pedigree.

Yet the problem it defines is the same today as it has always been; any attempt to set a single interest rate for 17 politically and fiscally sovereign nations is almost by definition doomed to failure. Perpetual crisis is more or less guaranteed.

It is hard enough setting monetary policy just for a single country, as Britain, the US and Japan in their very different ways are currently demonstrating.
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"The international monetary order is more precarious by far today than it was in 1929. Then, gold was international money, incorruptible, unmanageable, and unchangeable. Today, the U.S. dollar serves as the international medium of exchange, managed by Washington politicians and Federal Reserve officials, manipulated from day to day, and serving political goals and ambitions. This difference alone sounds the alarm to all perceptive observers."

Hans F. Sennholz

The monthly Coppock Indicators finished October:
DJIA: +178 Up. NASDAQ: +238 Up. SP500: +217 Up. The Fed’s final bubble continues to grow, until QE Forever isn’t forever.

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