Baltic Dry Index. 1235 -38
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
You
can get much farther with a kind word and a gun, than you can with a kind word
alone.
President
Putin, with apologies to Al Capone.
Stay long
physical fully paid up gold and silver. Whether we want it or not, the powers
that be, are on an American agenda to go for broke and a war with Russia and
after that China. Madness I know, but we are powerless to stop it.
NATO Condemns Russia’s ‘Propaganda’ as Lavrov Cries Foul
Apr 4, 2014 3:46 AM GMT
As President Barack Obama signed legislation imposing sanctions on
Russians for the incursion in Crimea and economic aid for Ukraine, NATO accused
Russia of spreading “propaganda” about its reach in Europe. North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen rejected Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s contention that the U.S.-led alliance had broken a commitment to limit its military forces in Eastern European countries.
Rasmussen said it was Russia, not NATO, that is trampling on pledges made in the 1990s by wresting control of Crimea and massing troops near Ukraine’s borders.
“This is just another piece of Russian propaganda and disinformation,” he said yesterday in Brussels. “Russia is violating every principle and international commitment it has made, first and foremost the commitment not to invade other countries.”
The dispute over NATO’s role showed there’s been little headway in finding a diplomatic resolution to the confrontation over Ukraine. The deployment of as many as 40,000 Russian soldiers on Ukraine’s eastern border continued to fuel concern that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government may invade after its annexation of Crimea.
Escalating tensions further, Russia said it detained dozens of Ukrainian citizens suspected of plotting terrorist attacks on its territory, and Ukraine accused Russian forces of playing a role in violence during anti-government protests that cost more than 100 lives. A Russian security forces statement cited by the state-run RIA Novosti newswire didn’t say where the Ukrainians had been detained.
With the U.S. and European Union imposing asset freezes on Russian government officials and Putin’s associates, Russia sought to intensify the economic squeeze on its neighbor by announcing it will charge Ukraine 26 percent more for natural gas.
Ukraine is already feeling the economic impact of the confrontation with Russia. Its exports will decline 3.1 percent to $82.7 billion and imports will fall 5.3 percent to $53 billion in 2014 compared with 2013, the government said in a statement on its website yesterday.
More
When Is Sovereignty Not Sovereignty?
Harvard Professor Stephen Walt has described the current contretemps over Ukraine as “geostrategic incompetence of the highest order” on the part of the White House. Seconding that I would add that the central problem with the Obama foreign policy, guided as it is by a bundle of poorly defined principles, is that it has no coherency. Moscow is claiming that it has intervened in Crimea, for the most part peacefully and with the overwhelming support of the local population, because it has a responsibility to protect Russian nationals living among its neighbors and also because its national security is threatened. All of that may or may not actually be true, but the argument has a certain plausibility in that one of Russia’s major naval bases is in Crimea while the population is largely Russophone and identifies as ethnically Russian. The jubilant crowds celebrating the referendum that overwhelmingly approved reunion with Russia should give pause to those insisting that the process was somehow coerced.From Moscow’s point of view the new government in Kiev might reasonably be regarded as a US puppet which will not be heedful of Russian interests. The “Nuland tapes” revealing a phone conversation between senior State Department official and noted neocon Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt describing how Washington would form the new government suggests that Moscow’s assessment is likely correct, that the American policy both was and is geared towards moving Ukraine away from Russia and towards Western Europe. Why the United States should feel compelled to do that is not at all clear as the Cold War ended in 1991 and Russia has generally been a responsible player on the world stage since Putin gained power.
The lack of coherency surfaces because the United States has itself recently abused the “national security” argument to prolong its unhappy stay in Afghanistan, to threaten Iran and to justify an aborted plan to bomb Syria, all nations that are many thousands of miles away from the continental US and which would hardly seem to endanger anyone apart from their own citizens.
The US vice-president, Joe Biden, speaking during a recent visit to Poland and the Baltic states aimed at reassuring Russia’s neighbors, said that Russia stands “naked before the world” and is guilty of international aggression. But Biden’s effusions aside, Moscow can at least claim that Ukraine is of critical importance because it is on Russia’s doorstep. Indeed, if intervention in another country to reorder its politics under the pretext of strengthening one’s own security is a standard to judge by then the United States under Bush and Obama has been a serial offender while Putin’s Russia has been relatively peace loving. The difference between Washington and Moscow is that the former seeks to maintain global dominance while Russia pretty much operates within its own local zone of influence.
Washington’s hypocrisy is also on full display when it denounces the largely peaceful separation of Crimea from Ukraine while ignoring its own support of separation of Kosovo from Serbia in 1999 after a prolonged bombing campaign. The US military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the forty-six year domination of the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem by Israel are arguably much more brutal than anything occurring in Crimea. Russia can claim that Crimea was actually part of Russia prior to 1954, while the Israelis’ historical claim is shrouded in antiquity and requires a leap of faith to be considered credible. Washington’s nation building role in the Balkans and Asia has even less justification than either, apart from the desire to continue to be kingmaker in what have been sometimes regarded as client states.
----Washington also claims that it is defending Ukrainian sovereignty even though it worked hard to overthrow the country’s government, just as it had been meddling in places like Egypt and Russia itself before the respective governments got wise and expelled the so-called democracy promoters. When the national security appeal fails or is not convincing it is always possible to claim that one is spreading democracy, which is surely a good thing. Or is it? Consider for a moment what it actually amounts to in many cases. It means sending in teams of Americans to train local people in how to organize and act politically.
That translates into setting up and supporting groups that are opposed to the government, and that is exactly how many foreigners see it and why there are so many claims that the US is interfering in local politics.
Imagine for a moment how Mr. Obama would have reacted in 2012 if the Russian government were sending over advisers to educate American voters on what would have been needed to bring about a change of government in the United States. Impossible, right? But that is precisely what the United States does overseas through its National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and associated groups, which are allegedly “Non-government organizations” or NGOs but which are in fact largely funded by Congress. Sending in a bunch of NEDers, which has been described as doing openly what the CIA did covertly back in the 50’s and 60’s, is usually the first step in the process to destabilize the local government.
More
Hagel Says U.S. Mulls Adding Brigade to Counter Russia
Apr 4,
2014 5:15 AM GMT
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said permanently stationing an additional U.S.
Army brigade in Europe
is among options to beef up security as Russian troops remain massed along
Ukraine’s eastern border. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has asked its top military commander, U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, to study “a number of new possibilities, new measures, new options that we and NATO should consider,” Hagel said in an interview yesterday in Honolulu with Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Television.
Asked if those included permanently stationing a third brigade of 5,000 troops in Europe, Hagel said, “That’s all part of the measures that could be considered.”
Reports of Russia withdrawing some of its forces from the Ukrainian border are unconfirmed, he also said.
More
Next, when USAID morphed into the CIA. Shame about poor old Alan Gross, a USAID subcontractor, though. Does Cuba have its own version of the NSA and GCHQ? Was Alan Gross toast even before he boarded his airplane for Havana?
All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.USAID with apologies to Benito Mussolini.
US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest
WASHINGTON (AP) — In July 2010,
Joe McSpedon, a U.S. government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final
touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining
Cuba's communist government.
McSpedon and his team of
high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and
Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds
of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would
set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank
account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the
company's ties to the U.S. government.
McSpedon didn't work for the CIA.
This was a program paid for and run by the U.S. Agency for International
Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in U.S. humanitarian
aid.
According to documents obtained
by The Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the
project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones "Cuban Twitter," using
cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba's strict control of information and its
stranglehold restrictions over the Internet. In a play on Twitter, it was
called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet.
Documents show the U.S.
government planned to build a subscriber base through "non-controversial
content": news messages on soccer, music, and hurricane updates. Later
when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of
thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring
Cubans to organize "smart mobs" — mass gatherings called at a
moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document
put it, "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and
society."
At its peak, the project drew in
more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its
subscribers were never aware it was created by the U.S. government, or that
American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it
might be used for political purposes.
"There will be absolutely no
mention of United States government involvement," according to a 2010 memo
from Mobile Accord, one of the project's contractors. "This is absolutely
crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of
the Mission."
The program's legality is
unclear: U.S. law requires that any covert action by a federal agency must have
a presidential authorization. Officials at USAID would not say who had approved
the program or whether the White House was aware of it. McSpedon, the most
senior official named in the documents obtained by the AP, is a mid-level
manager who declined to comment.
USAID spokesman Matt Herrick said
the agency is proud of its Cuba programs and noted that congressional
investigators reviewed them last year and found them to be consistent with U.S.
law.
"USAID is a development
agency, not an intelligence agency, and we work all over the world to help
people exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms, and give them access to
tools to improve their lives and connect with the outside world," he said.
"In the
implementation," he added, "has the government taken steps to be
discreet in non-permissive environments? Of course. That's how you protect the
practitioners and the public. In hostile environments, we often take steps to
protect the partners we're working with on the ground. This is not unique to
Cuba."
But the ZunZuneo program muddies
those claims, a sensitive issue for its mission to promote democracy and
deliver aid to the world's poor and vulnerable — which requires the trust of
foreign governments.
"On the face of it there are
several aspects about this that are troubling," said Sen. Patrick Leahy,
D-Vt. and chairman of the Appropriations Committee's State Department and
foreign operations subcommittee.
"There is the risk to young,
unsuspecting Cuban cellphone users who had no idea this was a U.S.
government-funded activity. There is the clandestine nature of the program that
was not disclosed to the appropriations subcommittee with oversight
responsibility. And there is the disturbing fact that it apparently activated
shortly after Alan Gross, a USAID subcontractor who was sent to Cuba to help
provide citizens access to the Internet, was arrested."
More
“The [Germans, your country here] outside looked from America to Russia, and
from Russia to America, and from America to Russia again; but already it was
impossible to say which was which.”
With apologies to George Orwell and
Animal Farm.
Next, more
on the USA HFT, order front running, theft scandal. Is the USA really as
corrupt as the Ukraine? Cover up or clear out? In what happens next we are
about to find out. Is there an unrigged market left anywhere on the planet? If
all is thievery in the 21st century, shouldn’t we all join in and become
thieves? If “Mad Dog McCain” and America’s War Party are intent on forcing “the
big one” with Russia and China, does it matter if all becomes thievery?
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie"
Jean-Claude Juncker. Ex-Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar.
Charles Schwab, Jack Bogle join the debate on high-frequency trading
April 3, 2014, 7:12 PM ET
High-frequency trading is a growing cancer that needs to be addressed,” said
Charles Schwab, chairman of Charles Schwab Corp., and Walt
Bettinger, Charles Schwab President and CEO, in a statement on Thursday.The heads of the massive brokerage firm are just the latest to delve into the debate on whether high-frequency traders are hurting the markets. The book “Flash Boys” by author Michael Lewis accuses HFTs, as they are known, of “rigging the markets.”
Comments by Lewis on “60 Minutes” earlier in the week about the use of complex computerized algorithms to trade has struck a cord with major Wall Street powerhouses, including Schwab and Vanguard.
The Schwab statement goes on to say that “high-frequency trading has run amok and is corrupting our capital market system by creating an unleveled playing field for individual investors and driving the wrong incentives for our commodity and equities exchanges.”
The “vibrant, stable and fair” system of the U.S. capital markets is being threatened, the statement says, and high-frequency traders are gaming the system, reaping billions in the process and undermining investor confidence in the fairness of the markets.
Schwab and Bettinger go on to call high-frequency trading “manipulative” by taking advantage of the technological advances and enabling users to “gain millisecond time advantages” and cut ahead in line in front of traditional orders and with access to market data not available to other market participants.
“It has become systematic and institutionalized, with the exchanges supporting it through practices such as preferential data feeds and developing multiple order types designed to benefit high-frequency traders.”
More
Goldman Wins, Credit Suisse Loses in Lewis’s League Table
Apr 4, 2014 6:22 AM GMT
Just as Wall
Street league tables rank firms by the size of their deals, author Michael Lewis
provides his own hierarchy in the way his latest book describes banks’
stock-trading divisions. In Lewis’s telling, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) reformed and is treating customers more fairly, especially after a management change last year at its electronic-trading unit. By contrast, Lewis describes an executive of IEX Group Inc. who says he found evidence that he thinks shows Credit Suisse Group AG’s (CSGN) trading platform gives an advantage to high-speed traders.
The book’s hero, IEX Chief Executive Officer Brad Katsuyama, at one point says there are only 10 brokers doing the right thing in a U.S. stock market that Lewis says is rigged by Wall Street brokerages, exchanges and high-frequency traders. Lewis lists only five of those firms -- which Katsuyama labels “good brokers” -- by name: Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Goldman Sachs, AllianceBernstein LP’s Sanford C. Bernstein and Royal Bank of Canada (RY), Katsuyama’s former employer.
In “Flash Boys,” released on March 31, Lewis says dark pools owned by brokerages act as a key intersection between high-frequency traders and brokerages’ investor clients. The banks, Lewis says, charge HFT firms for the right to trade against orders placed by their brokerage customers.
“Why would anyone pay for access to the customers’ orders inside a Wall Street bank’s dark pool?” Lewis writes. “The straight answer was that a customer’s stock market order, inside a dark pool, was fat and juicy prey.”
More
In other
bankster news, JP Morgan’s London Whale who turned into a canary, office, is
about to be buried into another office in another far away city in another
jurisdiction. Move along now, nothing to see here.
Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.
J. Edgar Hoover.
JPMorgan Folds London Whale Office Into Another Unit
Apr 4, 2014 12:05 AM GMT
JPMorgan
Chase & Co. (JPM), the biggest U.S. bank by assets, said its operation
that produced a $6.2 billion trading loss in 2012 will be merged with another
business unit. The chief investment office will be folded into the New York-based bank’s Treasury unit, Chief Operating Officer Matt Zames said in an internal memo obtained yesterday by Bloomberg News. Craig Delany will lead the new group as global chief investment officer and treasurer, Zames said.
The moves are part of the bank’s “efforts to strengthen and streamline our infrastructure, processes and controls,” Zames said in the memo dated March 31. Brian Marchiony, a spokesman for the bank, confirmed the contents of the memo.
A trader nicknamed the London Whale because of the size of his positions accumulated the $6.2 billion loss in 2012. The episode led to criminal charges against two of his former colleagues, management changes and more scrutiny from regulators.
More
We end today’s
probity challenged LIR edition, with a whale of a tale from Singapore. Is this
why we are going to war, to bury all the corruption spawned by the Great
Nixonian Error of fiat money?
Singapore Stock-Trade Probe Seen as Test of Credibility
Apr 4, 2014 5:55 AM GMT
Singapore’s investigations
into suspected stock-trading irregularities at three commodity companies whose
shares plunged in October are seen as a test of credibility for Southeast
Asia’s biggest equities market. Authorities widened the probe this week to include executives from at least four more companies six months after the rout that triggered a plunge of least 87 percent in the shares of Blumont Group Ltd. (BLUM), Asiasons Capital Ltd. and LionGold Corp. over three days last October. Magnus Energy Group Ltd., Innopac Holdings Ltd., ISR Capital Ltd. and ITE Electric Co. (ITE) Ltd. said they or their units are being asked to assist. IPCO International Ltd. said late yesterday it’s also probed.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore and the police’s white-collar crime unit are investigating trading in shares of Blumont, Asiasons and LionGold (LIGO) for possible breaches of the Securities and Futures Act, or SFA, according to an April 2 statement. The probe’s scale is unprecedented and reflective of what global regulators are doing, said Lan Luh Luh, an associate dean at the National University of Singapore’s business school.
More
“The boat struck the bank full tilt. The dreamer, the joyous
oarsman, lay on his back at the bottom of the boat, his heels in the air.”
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
At the Comex
silver depositories Thursday
final figures were: Registered 53.72 Moz, Eligible 125.23 Moz, Total 179.95 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
No ordinary crooks today, just bent politicians
Malaysian style. What does the Malaysian government know and when did they know
it? Was the Malaysian Airforce really all asleep in their beds? Doesn’t
Malaysia owe it to the families of the missing to reveal all, warts and all?
MH370 Malaysia Airlines: Anwar Ibrahim says government purposefully concealing information
Malaysia’s sophisticated radar system would have immediately detected Flight MH370 as it crossed the country’s mainland after changing course and should have alerted the air force, Anwar Ibrahim, the opposition leader, has claimed
Malaysia’s government is deliberately concealing information that would help to explain what happened to missing Flight MH370, the country’s opposition leader has claimed.In a wide-ranging interview that cast doubt on the official investigation into the disappearance of the plane, Anwar Ibrahim said the country’s “sophisticated” radar system would have identified it after it changed course and crossed back over Malaysia.
Mr Anwar, who personally knew the pilot of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that went missing in the early hours of March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, called for an international committee to take over the Malaysian-led operation because “the integrity of the whole nation is at stake”.
He indicated that it was even possible that there was complicity by authorities on the ground in what happened to the plane and the 239 people on board.
In an interview with The
Telegraph, he said that he had personally authorised the installation of “one
of the most sophisticated radar” systems in the world, based near the South
China Sea and covering Malaysia’s mainland and east and west coastlines, when
he was the country’s finance minister in 1994.
It was “not only unacceptable but
not possible, not feasible” that the plane had not been sighted by the Marconi
radar system immediately after it changed course. The radar, he said, would
have instantly detected the Boeing 777 as it travelled east to west across “at
least four” Malaysian provinces.
Mr Anwar said it was “baffling”
that the country’s air force had “remained silent”, and claimed that it “should
take three minutes under SOP (standard operating procedure) for the air force
planes to go. And there was no response.”
He added: “We don’t have the
sophistication of the United States or Britain but still we have the capacity
to protect our borders.”
It was “clearly baffling”, he
said, to suggest that radar operators had been unable to observe the plane’s
progress.
He said the families of the 153
Chinese victims on board were right to demand information from the Malaysian
government, which had permitted a multi-national search operation to spend a
week searching in what it must have known was the wrong place.
“Why didn’t we alert the Chinese,
the Vietnamese that the operation should cease in the South China Sea and let
them spend millions on search and rescue in a place that they know fairly well
cannot be the site of the plane?”
More
Another weekend, and increasingly a spring weekend in my part of the
sleepy Thames and Pang valleys. My country walks with my border collie Rosie,
are now a warmer delight of blackthorn blossom, greening trees, butterflies and
bees, with bluebell plants surging forth for next month’s spectacular. Why do
we need a new war to wreck all this? Have a great weekend everyone.
“Well,
very long ago, on the spot where the Wild Wood waves now, before ever it had
planted itself and grown up to what it now is, there was a city - a city of
people, you know. Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and
talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their
horses and feasted, from here they rode out to fight or drove out to trade.
They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last,
for they thought their city would last for ever.”
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished March
DJIA: +197 Down. NASDAQ: +357 Up. SP500: +254 Down.
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