Baltic Dry Index. 1362 -11
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"My daughter asked me when
she came home from school, “What’s the financial crisis?” and I said, it’s
something that happens every five to seven years."
Jamie Dimon, US CEO of
JPMorgan Chase
After
unintentionally blitzing the stock market earlier in the year, with intemperate
words about an early Fed taper, the Fed’s modern version of the Oracle of
Delphi, a talking “Chair,” yesterday was at pains to suggest that due to the
weak US economy, QE Forever and ZIRP were here to stay. “Get on with the boom,”
was the order of the day from the talking Chair. This is what passes for
capitalism in the late stages of the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money. What
could possibly go wrong?
"The only surprise about the economic
crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many."
Joseph
Stiglitz
Asian shares hit four-month high on China data, Yellen
By Hideyuki
Sano TOKYO
(Reuters) - Asian shares hit four-month high on Tuesday after China's
official PMI survey showed manufacturing managed to continue expanding in
March, and dovish comments from Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen.MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS rose by up to 0.3 percent to reach its highest level since early December.
China's official Purchasing Managers' Index increased to 50.3 in March from February's 50.2, in line with economists' forecasts. Above 50 indicates expansion, below 50 signifies contraction.
While the PMI figure alone is unlikely to dispel concerns of a slowdown in China, investor sentiment has improved on China in recent weeks as they expect Beijing will adopt a stimulus plan to achieve its growth target.
Shares were also supported after Fed chair Yellen reinforced the need for "extraordinary" commitment to support the U.S. economy, seemingly tempering expectations of a sooner-than-expected start to the rate-hike cycle.
Yellen gave a strong defense of the Fed's easy-money policies in her first public speech since becoming Fed chair two months ago, saying there remains "considerable" slack in the economy and job market.
"It seems like she expressed her own dovish ideas. There's nothing really new and the outlook of the Fed's policy has not changed that much but the markets like her remarks," Makoto Noji, senior strategist at SMBC Nikko Securities.
More
In the
EUSSR, back in the real world, Euroland is about to give its long suffering
destitute a break. Coming next for the EUSSR, deflation and lower prices for
all, if you’ve got money. Of course, officially the ECB says that it has a 2
percent inflation target and that deflation, or lower prices, are bad for
Europe’s downwardly mobile riff raff. The wealth destroying Euro is a long way
from what was billed in the 1990s. Stay long fully paid up physical precious
metals. With Russian sanctions, Germany is about to join France in committing
national suicide.
"Everyone is saying that we’re on a tightrope,
and we certainly are in mid-air over a gorge. But where is the rope?"
Anonymous
Euro Inflation at Lowest in Over 4 Years Misses Estimates
Mar 31, 2014 1:29 PM GMT
Euro-area inflation slowed in March by more than economists forecast to the
lowest level in over four years, keeping pressure on the European Central Bank
to take action to foster the currency bloc’s recovery. Consumer prices grew 0.5 percent in the year, after a 0.7 percent gain in February, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said today. That missed the 0.6 percent median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey of 41 economists. The inflation rate has been below 1 percent for six months, while the ECB seeks to keep it at just under 2 percent.
Today’s result is half of the ECB’s forecast for 2014 and well below the central bank’s medium-term objective. Only three of 57 economists in a separate Bloomberg survey expect the ECB to cut its benchmark interest rate when policy makers meet on April 3 in Frankfurt. The rest expects it to remain unchanged.
More
Next, more
on our new lawless age. Time for a posthumous pardon for America’s Queen of
Mean, whose only crime seems to have been to have told the truth.
"We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”
Caterpillar. With apologies to Leona Helmsley, a woman ahead of
her time.
Caterpillar Escaped $2.4 Billion Tax With Swiss Maneuver
Mar 31, 2014 10:00 PM GMT
Caterpillar
Inc. (CAT) avoided paying $2.4 billion in U.S. taxes by shifting
profits from a parts business to a subsidiary in Switzerland, according to a
report released today by a Senate investigative committee. The world’s largest maker of construction and mining equipment made a “paper change” starting in 1999 that made the profits of the subsidiary subject to a Swiss tax rate as low as 4 percent, said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who will question company executives at a hearing tomorrow.
“Nothing changed in the real world after that except Caterpillar’s tax bill,” Levin told reporters today. “Caterpillar waved a magic wand to make billions of dollars in U.S. taxes disappear.”
The report makes the point that offshore profit-shifting by U.S. corporations goes beyond the intellectual property maneuvers of technology companies such as Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) that have been the subjects of past hearings by Levin and scrutiny from governments in Europe.
According to the report, Caterpillar was able to take a profitable U.S.-based business, change little if anything about its operations and locate it in Switzerland for tax purposes.
The tax structure saves Caterpillar, which is based in Peoria, Illinois, about $300 million a year, or 7.9 percent of 2013 net income.
More
In other less
reported news, “move along, nothing to see here.”
Google, Others Blast Turkey Over Internet Clampdown
Premier's Opponents Warn of Looming Crackdown After Ruling Party Wins Vote
Updated March 31, 2014 3:35 p.m. ET
Google
Inc. GOOG -0.50% and
other U.S. companies alleged that Turkey's telecommunications firms
impersonated their servers to block access to social-media sites, as the ruling
party tried to squelch dissent around local elections.The telecom moves targeted sites like Twitter Inc. TWTR -1.33% and YouTube, which Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's detractors have used to organize and express dissent.
Sunday's decisive victories by Mr. Erdogan's ruling party renewed speculation that he will seek the presidency, which would extend his grip on power, and take revenge on his political enemies.
On Monday, Mr. Erdogan's rivals alleged vote-rigging and a political witch-hunt, a sign the election hasn't soothed the country's increasing polarization.
The weekend's results stunned his
critics, as the opposition failed to check the premier's power amid the
government's increasingly aggressive Internet blackout.
Mr. Erdogan—whose ruling Justice
and Development Party, or AKP, took a greater-than-expected 46% of votes,
trouncing his closest rival's 28%—hailed the election as paving way for an era
of what he called advanced democracy.
Opposition leader Kemal
Kilicdaroglu cast the results as a prelude to declining freedoms and increased
pressure.
The competing visions lay bare
the difficulties the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's largest Muslim member
and former emerging-market star faces as Mr. Erdogan's policy of confronting
his critics has widened splits in Turkey's social fabric.
----The significance of Turkey's local elections has risen dramatically since the December unveiling of allegations of financial and political impropriety against the premier and his allies. Mr. Erdogan cast the allegations as an international conspiracy and removed from office thousands of police and judicial officials.
Social-networking websites have
become the latest target of Mr. Erdogan's efforts to quell corruption
allegations, with the government deploying a law adopted in February to tighten
its grip over the Internet.
More
Lithuania bans Russian TV station over 'lies'
VILNIUS(Reuters) - Lithuania banned broadcasts of a Russian TV channel for three months on Friday for showing a film that authorities said lied about events in 1991, when the Soviet army tried unsuccessfully to remove its pro-independence government.
Tensions between the Baltic states, including Lithuania, and Russia have risen since the Ukraine crisis. The former Soviet republics fear Moscow is trying to destabilize their region, which like Crimea also has large Russia-speaking minorities.
A Lithuanian court upheld a move by a media watchdog to suspend the Gazprom-owned NTV Mir after it broadcast the movie this month, on the eve of the 24th anniversary of Lithuania's declaration of independence from Soviet Union.
"The movie intentionally spread lies about events in Lithuania on January 13, 1991 ... mocking the Lithuanian people and scorning the memory of the fighters for Lithuanian freedom," Lithuania's broadcast watchdog, which asked for the ban, said in a statement.
In January 1991, 13 civilians were killed in Vilnius as the Soviet army stormed a TV tower and the headquarters of the TV station.
Russian media sometimes insist that the civilians were killed by undercover Lithuanians in order to discredit the Soviet army, something that Lithuania denies.
The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, part of NATO and the European Union since 2004, still in large part depend on Russia for energy and trade and have sizeable Russian-speaking minorities.
A similar three-month ban on rebroadcasts of Russia's state-owned Channel One was imposed by Lithuania in October, also for alleged lies about January 1991 events.
Signs of earthquake off North Korea prompts nuclear test fears
The location and depth of the earthquake did not immediately suggest North Korean nuclear testing was the cause
By Chad O'Carroll, NK News 12:59AM
BST 01 Apr 2014
A magnitude five earthquake has been detected 132km (80 miles) from the
Korean peninsula early on Tuesday morning, the United States Geological Survey
(USGS) has said. The quake, which was said to have occurred at approximately 03:48 local time, took place at a depth of nearly 16km (10 miles) in the sea west of the Korean peninsula – just days after North Korea threatened to carry out a “new form” of nuclear test.
While North Korean nuclear tests have previously been detected by the USGS quake monitoring center, the location and depth of the earthquake did not immediately suggest North Korean nuclear testing was the cause.
Although its December 2012 test M5.1 shockwave was similar in size to Tuesday’s 5.0M event, it was detected by geological surveys in China and the US as having occurred in a North Korean mountain range well known for weapons testing, and at a depth of only 1km.
On Sunday, North Korea threatened to carry out a “new form” of nuclear test, but did not clarify what it meant. Since then some observers have suggested that, angry with recent United Nations Security Council discussions about missile testing last week, Pyongyang may test a fourth nuclear device in the coming months.
More
We end for
the day with China. Is China’s wobble about to intensify? The Fed’s talking
Chair may be about to get the wrong sort of “boom.”
"An army of experts assured us on a daily
basis that this boom couldn't possibly crash like previous booms because this
boom was still going on whereas all previous booms had ended."
Mark
Steel
China Overnight Rate Climbs to Two-Week High as PBOC Pulls Funds
Apr 1, 2014 4:31 AM GMT
China’s
overnight money-market rate climbed to the highest level in almost two weeks as
the central bank drained more funds from the financial system. The People’s Bank of China sold a total of 72 billion yuan ($11.6 billion) of repurchase agreements today, adding to 974 billion yuan withdrawn in the previous seven weeks. The official Purchasing Managers’ Index (CPMINDX) of manufacturing rose to 50.3 in March from 50.2 in February, the statistics bureau reported today. A gauge from HSBC Holdings Plc and Markit Economics dropped to 48 from 48.5, below the 50 level dividing expansion and contraction.
----The PBOC sold 22 billion yuan of 28-day repos at a yield of 4 percent today and 50 billion yuan of 14-day contracts at 3.8 percent, according to a statement on its website.
The central bank withdrew 100 billion yuan via five-day short-term liquidity operations on Feb. 27 at a yield of 3.4 percent, it said in a statement on its website yesterday. The seven-day repo rate had reached 3 percent on Feb. 26, the lowest since July. It climbed three basis points to 4.22 percent today.
“The operations were conducted when there was confusion about the PBOC’s attitude on liquidity controls, and now it clearly indicates the central bank didn’t have any intention to loosen,” analysts led by Qu Qing at Shenyin Wanguo Securities Co. wrote in a research note today.
More
"We will have more crises and none of them
will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human
nature."
Alan
Greenspan
At the Comex
silver depositories Monday
final figures were: Registered 53.42 Moz, Eligible 126.36 Moz, Total 179.79 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
We open today in our new lawless age, with Bloomberg reporting on what may just turn out to be just an April fool’s joke. Supposedly, the FBI is going to investigate the friends of the Fed who regularly rig the markets for the NY Fed, using High Frequency Trading front running programs in the process. On QE Forever and ZIRP, all roads in America lead back to the Fedster’s or the NSA. The price of nearly everything is rigged or fixed.
"Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat
for this crisis: they really did this."
Michael Lewis.
FBI Probes High-Frequency Trading Firms for Abuse of Information
Apr 1,
2014 5:00 AM GMT
Federal agents are investigating whether high-frequency trading firms break
U.S. laws by acting on nonpublic information to gain an edge over competitors. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry stems from a multiyear crackdown on insider trading, which has led to at least 79 convictions of hedge-fund traders and others. Agents are examining, for example, whether traders abuse information to act ahead of orders by institutional investors, according to an FBI spokesman. Even trades based on computer algorithms could amount to wire fraud, securities fraud or insider trading.
The FBI joins a roster of authorities examining high-frequency trading, in which firms typically use super-fast computers to post and cancel orders at rates measured in thousandths or even millionths of a second to capture price discrepancies. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman opened a broad investigation into whether U.S. stock exchanges and alternative venues give such traders improper advantages.
Regulators have focused for years on whether high-speed trading hurts market stability. More recent law enforcement investigations are shifting the focus to unfair practices and possible criminal activity.
More
Exclusive: NSA infiltrated RSA security more deeply than thought - study
By Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO
(Reuters) - Security industry pioneer RSA adopted not just one but two
encryption tools developed by the U.S. National Security Agency,
greatly increasing the spy agency's ability to eavesdrop on some Internet
communications, according to a team of academic researchers.Reuters reported in December that the NSA had paid RSA $10 million to make a now-discredited cryptography system the default in software used by a wide range of Internet and computer security programs. The system, called Dual Elliptic Curve, was a random number generator, but it had a deliberate flaw - or "back door" - that allowed the NSA to crack the encryption.
A group of professors from Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois and elsewhere now say they have discovered that a second NSA tool exacerbated the RSA software's vulnerability.
The professors found that the tool, known as the "Extended Random" extension for secure websites, could help crack a version of RSA's Dual Elliptic Curve software tens of thousands of times faster, according to an advance copy of their research shared with Reuters.
While Extended Random was not widely adopted, the new research sheds light on how the NSA extended the reach of its surveillance under cover of advising companies on protection.
RSA, now owned by EMC Corp, did not dispute the research when contacted by Reuters for comment. The company said it had not intentionally weakened security on any product and noted that Extended Random did not prove popular and had been removed from RSA's protection software in the last six months.
More
“Reviewing someone’s first novel, it is
customary to be polite about it,” started Philip Hensher in The Observer. “So
let me say straight away that James Thackara’s The Book of Kings is printed on
very nice paper, and the typeface is clear and readable.”
The Observer Book Review October 2000.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished March
DJIA: +197 Down. NASDAQ: +357 Up. SP500: +254 Down.
No comments:
Post a Comment