LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
“I've
never really wanted to go to Japan. Simply because I don’t like eating fish.
And I know that's very popular out there in Africa.”
Britney
Spears
F. U. don’t
buy Japanese, seems to be the new message out of Tokyo this morning. We don’t
need you or your filthy lucre, get lost. The wrong side won World War Two and
don’t we know it. In the words of that genius President Ford to New York City “drop
dead.” I suspect that millions of Brits, Aussies, Chinese, Koreans, Indonesians,
Burmese and others will be only too happy to oblige. If Japan wants to return
to its racist nationalist past, protected by America, so be it. But no one has
to help them by buying tainted goods. We don’t let modern Germany get a free
ride and we shouldn’t let Japan get a free ride now, even if America seems to
want to kow-tow to Abe and his fellow racists.
Below, the
Middle Kingdom strikes back.
“The only English words I saw in Japan were Sony and Mitsubishi.”
Bill Gullickson, a major league baseball pitcher.
Japan’s Abe Sends Traditional Offering to Yasukuni Shrine
Apr 22, 2014 6:22 AM GMT
A group of nearly 150 lawmakers visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, after China
and South Korea rebuked Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for sending a traditional
offering to the site that honors Japan’s war dead. The 147 lawmakers are from several parties, according to ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Toshiei Mizuochi. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato also visited the shrine, Kyodo News reported.
“My father is enshrined there,” Hidehisa Otsuji, an LDP upper house lawmaker, told reporters today at Yasukuni. “I pray there all the time and have been doing so for decades, and today I prayed there in a calm way.”
Abe sent an offering during the annual spring festival that runs until April 23, Tomoaki Higuchi, a spokesman for the shrine, said yesterday. Yasukuni honors war dead including 14 World War II leaders convicted as Class-A war criminals.
The prime minister will not visit Yasukuni during the festival, said an aide to Abe who asked not to be named, citing government policy. The premier went to the shrine in December, the first visit by a sitting prime minister since 2006.
Abe’s latest gesture and visits by lawmakers and cabinet ministers risk stoking friction with Japan’s neighbors as territorial tensions remain high over islands in the East China Sea also claimed by China. U.S. President Barack Obama is due to arrive in Japan tomorrow as part of a four-nation Asia tour, while Vice President Joe Biden in a visit to the region in December called on all sides to take practical steps to “lower the temperature.”
More
China Court Impounds Japanese Ship in Unprecedented Seizure
Apr 21, 2014 10:59 AM GMT
A Shanghai court ordered the seizure of a Japanese ship owned by Mitsui OSK Lines Ltd. (9104) as compensation for the loss
of two ships leased from a Chinese company before the two countries went to war
in 1937. The 226,434-ton Baosteel Emotion was impounded on April 19 at Majishan port in Zhejiang province as part of a legal dispute that began in 1964, the Shanghai Maritime Court and Mitsui OSK said in notices on their websites.
The holding of the ship reflects strained ties between China and Japan amid a territorial dispute over an island chain and visits by Japanese politicians to a Tokyo shrine honoring that country’s war dead. The move is the first time a Chinese court has ordered the seizure of Japanese assets connected to World War II, and could cast a pall over the countries’ trade, according to Shogo Suzuki, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester in the U.K. who studies China-Japan relations.
“Many of the major Japanese companies like Mitsubishi or Mitsui have existed through back to the pre-war era and could all be implicated in one way or another,” Suzuki said. “Japanese companies can’t extract themselves easily at this stage so I think they’ll be quite worried.”
----The dispute had its genesis in 1936, when Mitsui OSK predecessor Daido Kaiun chartered two vessels from Chung Wei Steamship Co., only to have them appropriated by the Japanese government, Mitsui OSK said in a statement today. Both ships were later lost at sea.
The heir of Chung Wei Steamship’s president sued unsuccessfully in Japan in 1964 and 1970, and then took the case to China in the late 1980s. After the maritime court ruled in the plantiff’s favor, Mitsui was seeking an out-of-court settlement when the vessel was “suddenly impounded,” Mitsui OSK said.
----Japan argues that China gave up its right to reparations as part of a 1972 joint communique signed when the two countries established diplomatic relations. The communique says China “declares that in the interest of the friendship between the Chinese and the Japanese peoples, it renounces its demand for war reparation from Japan.”
----China and Japan currently have a $366 billion trade relationship. Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang called the case a common commercial dispute.
----The Baosteel Emotion, built in 2011, is a 320-meter long ore carrier and is now docked at Majishan, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The company’s shares fell as much as 2.2 percent today in Tokyo trading, while the broader Topix index declined 0.2 percent.
More
Obama Faces Asia Allies Uncertain of U.S. Commitment
Apr 21,
2014 11:00 PM GMT
President Barack Obama’s trip to Asia this week brings him
face-to-face with allies who have grown uncertain about his commitment to the
region. Even with the president’s pledge to continue “rebalancing” U.S. policy toward Asia, the region’s leaders have been unnerved by Obama’s focus on the crises in Syria and Ukraine, military budget cuts, and that the U.S. wants a new “great power relationship” with China that they worry will reduce Japan and other U.S. allies to second-class status.
More
Below, more
of why China seems about ready to implode. Stay long fully paid up gold and
silver. QE Forever and ZIRP have arrived at the end of the can kicking road.
Only hard choices are left now in the Great Nixonian Error of free fiat money. Even
harder choices if Europe is stupid enough to commit continental suicide and
impose meaningful sanctions of Russia.
"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit (debt) expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit (debt) expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."
Ludwig von Mises
Xi’s Squeeze Leaves China’s Heartland Missing Boom
Apr 22, 2014 4:23 AM GMT
In front of construction-site billboards depicting Tiffany and Louis Vuitton
shops, Liu Cuiying squats on the bank of the Han river, washing orange
bedsheets. “What do I have? I have nothing!” she says repeatedly as she beats the sheets on the bank with a wooden bat. “My land is gone. What are we going to do?”
Liu lives in a run-down house in the village of Luying on the outskirts of the city of Laohekou in central China. She says her land was bought by the local government as part of a plan to expand the city to more than twice its size, but she hasn’t been relocated to a new home. In other villages nearby, farmers say the government promised to buy their houses and then didn’t have the money to pay.
They are caught between a local government that wants to extend China’s three-decade investment spree and President Xi Jinping’s determination to rein in lending and real-estate development that caused debt to soar. With Xi’s cash squeeze, inland cities that are trying to urbanize to reduce poverty are relying on private developers who can tap the estimated $7.7 trillion in the nation’s shadow-banking industry.
“This is a litmus test for whether Xi Jinping’s reforms are working,” said Tom Miller, managing editor of the China Economic Quarterly at GaveKal Dragonomics in Beijing and the author of “China’s Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History.” “Cities in the interior are trying to grow along the same model as the cities in the east did 10-20 years ago that made them rich. If they start building and then it gets stopped that’s a disaster because it will end up a white elephant.”
An economic slowdown and the credit squeeze are already claiming victims. Last month, Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy Science & Technology Co. became the first company to default in China’s $4.2 trillion bond market since the central bank started regulating the industry in 1997. Days later, news emerged of the collapse of closely held Zhejiang Xingrun Real Estate Co., based in the eastern town of Fenghua, with 3.5 billion yuan ($563 million) of debt.
China’s broadest measure of new credit fell 9 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, while new-building construction tumbled 25 percent, the government said last week.
New-home price increases eased across the country last month as tighter credit prompted developers to give discounts.
More
We end for
the day with one of the banksters fattest cats eyeing a “Golden Decade” ahead,
provided we don’t drop the ball over Russia, and though he doesn’t state it,
don’t drop state socialism for bankster via too big to fail taxpayer support.
With youth unemployment above 50 percent across much of Europe, thanks to
casino capitalism and unlimited derivatives gambling, and a hollowed out America
facing a retail rout, I have my doubts. An increasingly angry and troubled
world, is fast moving away from Pax-Americana 1945-2000.
Why did I take up stealing? To live better, to own things I couldn't afford, to acquire this good taste that you now enjoy and which I should be very reluctant to give up.
Ebenezer Squid, with apologies to Cary Grant. To Catch A Thief.
Ex-Barclays Executive Sees ‘Golden Decade’ for Banking
Apr 21, 2014 11:00 PM GMT
The world’s securities firms are poised for 10 years of
growth, according to Hans-Joerg Rudloff, the former chairman of that business
at Barclays Plc. (BARC) “Investment banking has a brilliant future,” Rudloff, 73, said in an interview in Milan on April 16, making his first public comments on the business since retiring from Barclays in February. “The industry is looking at a golden decade.”
The growing need for capital will propel profits, once securities firms finish adapting to tighter rules designed to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis and shield depositors from trading losses, said Rudloff, who during his five-decade career helped foster the expansion of the Eurobond market in the 1980s.
“It isn’t about trading with the firm’s money, but about allocating capital and playing the intermediary” by originating, packaging and distributing all types of securities, including derivatives, he said.
----“What we’re seeing in FICC is the effect of derisking, adjusting to new leverage and capital rules -- they’re huge factors,” Rudloff said. “Where people are suffering now is in proprietary trading.”
Barclays’s management is facing
demands from shareholders for a clear strategy for the securities unit, the
biggest source of income for Britain’s second-largest bank, amid declining
profitability. Barclays said this month that it will present a plan on May 8 to
deliver “improved and sustainable returns and growth.”
While Rudloff was at Barclays,
where he spent 16 years as chairman of the investment bank, the firm morphed
into a fixed-income specialist, having sold its equities business in 1997. It
returned to underwriting and trading stocks in 2008 with the purchase of Lehman
Brothers Holdings Inc.’s North American operations out of bankruptcy.
----Rudloff started as a trainee at Credit Suisse in Geneva in 1965. An economics graduate from the University of Bern, he joined Kidder Peabody International Ltd. three years later and returned to Credit Suisse First Boston in London in 1980. There he helped expand the firm internationally, including in Russia, where Credit Suisse grew to become one of the largest international investment banks.
For Rudloff, chairman of Marcuard Heritage AG, a Swiss wealth manager which oversees about $3 billion, Russia and the Ukraine crisis are the greatest threat to global economic growth and prospects for an investment-banking expansion.
“The attitude of western powers toward the crisis, if you analyze it, what they’re saying is that they’ll wage war with different means, financially, economically, diplomatically,” Rudloff said. “If that’s the intention, what has driven the last 25 years’ of development, that is, globalization, will come to an end.”
More
Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.
J. Edgar Hoover.
At the Comex
silver depositories Monday
final figures were: Registered 53.40 Moz, Eligible 123.29 Moz, Total 176.69 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, alas poor Italy, where things are now so bad that even the Sicilian Mafia are thinking about getting a “real” job. Except of course, there are no real jobs in tax and workshy, modern Italy. Perhaps they could join the brain drain rush to booming London. Wait a moment, some already have.
If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it.W.C. Fields.
Times are so tough in Italy that Mafiosi are considering getting jobs
Sunday 20 April 2014
Changing attitudes and a lingering
economic crisis are hitting the Mafia where it hurts, say law enforcement
authorities in Palermo, where a mob boss has been secretly recorded complaining
about the collapse of extortion rackets.
Video cameras have shown jailed
Cosa Nostra boss Giovanni Di Giacomo, lamenting that these days his men are only
able to get a “miserable”, €5,000 to €7,000 a month from hotels and
businesses that he targets. He added that with so many establishments closing
down, and so many people refusing to pay and instead calling the police, it
“might not be worth the bother”.
Even more remarkably, Di Giacomo,
a senior figure in the powerful Porta Nuova clan, suggested the situation was
so grim for mobsters seeking to earn a dishonest living that it might be better
for some struggling young clan members to “get a real job” instead.
A year-long probe led by Palermo
prosecutors Francesca Mazzocco and Caterina Malagoli has observed Di Giacomo,
in a prison in Parma in northern Italy, continually addressing economic
concerns with jailed colleagues and in written correspondence as he tries to
get a grip on the organisation’s finances.
“Guaranteeing support for the
families of those behind bars and their earnings had become an obsession for
the bosses. It’s the only way to assert their leadership and maintain the
cohesion of the organisation,” Captain Piero Iannotti, of the Palermo
Carabinieri, told La Repubblica.
Di Giacomo was also caught
railing against the governor of Sicily, Rosario Crocetta, and in particular his
spending review for the cash-strapped island region. “Crocetta, fuck, what a
disaster he’s caused. He’s cutting everywhere,” he said.
Mr Crocetta has a reputation as
an ardent opponent of Cosa Nostra, unlike some of his predecessors who have
been accused and, in some cases, convicted of Mafia association.
“Hotels are closing,
changing management, there’s no longer the work, the building sites,” the
mobster was overheard telling an associate.
Di Giacomo said he was planning
to ruin the business of the celebrated Palermo chef Natale Giunta, who refused
to pay protection money – and whose evidence sent several mobsters to
jail. The anti-racket organisation AddioPizzo was also to be the target
of “some pranks” according to the conversation overheard by investigators
His comments follow news last
year that Cosa Nostra’s own “spending review” was causing serious discontent
within the organisation. The axe was thought to have fallen on hand-outs to
junior mobsters, family members and hangers-on.
It was reported that only the big
Mafia bosses were being spared the mob social security cuts. Those worst
affected have been the relatives of jailed mobsters, prompting their wives and
girlfriends to lead the backlash.
More
Mafia boss living in Uxbridge wins extradition battle
Domenico Rancadore, who is wanted in Italy for alleged Mafia links, is freed by the court after extradition application is thrown out
A former Mafia boss wanted in
Italy for extortion and other crimes has won his battle against extradition,
after a ruling in an entirely unconnected case expressed concern over the
conditions of Italian prisons.
Domenico Rancadore, 65, who has
spent the last 20-years living in quiet obscurity in a west London suburb, had
been due to be sent back to his native Sicily, where he had been described as
one of the country’s “most dangerous fugitives”.
But his extradition was
unexpectedly halted after a judge said a ruling in a different case in the High
Court meant he could no longer approve his removal from the UK.
Mr Rancadore, a former teacher
who was dubbed The Professor, fled Italy in 1994 after allegedly spending years
working for one of Palermo’s most senior crime families.
He changed his name to Marc
Skinner, moved to a dorma bungalow in Uxbridge and set up a travel agency with
his British born wife, Ann.
----Senior district judge Howard Riddle initially approved the extradition, but at a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court was forced to reverse the decision and allow Mr Rancadore to walk free.
He explained that his hands had
been tied by a ruling made last week in the High Court in which UK judges
refused to extradite a Somali man, Hayle Abdi Badri, to Italy because
assurances they had received about Italian prison conditions were “not
sufficient”.
Mr Riddle explained that while
the two cases were entirely unconnected the ruling of the higher court was
binding on him.
He said: “The judgment of the
administrative court is binding on me. The higher court accepted that a similar
assurance given in that case was in good faith, but was not sufficient.
“I cannot distinguish this case
from Badre. While it is true that I heard more up to date evidence than was
available to the court in that case, my intended decision as expressed above,
was based squarely on my acceptance of an assurance that has recently and in
similar circumstances been rejected by a higher court.”
More
Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.
P. J. O’Rourke
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished March
DJIA: +197 Down. NASDAQ: +357 Up. SP500: +254 Down.
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