Baltic Dry Index. 1022 -05
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
I was deposed by a coup d'etat, by
friends that I trusted and aided by the American Government.
Ferdinand Marcos.
It’s 2014, “do
not be concerned.” It might as well be the motto of our modern lawless age.
America’s spying on everyone, for military gain, economic gain, and political
gain via blackmail for all we know, but US authorities say do not be concerned.
Do not be concerned, either, that in our new lawless age, Pax Americana seems
to have been usurped by Attila the Hun and his horde. Since the Presidency of
Mr. Clinton, foreign escapades, usually illegal, have become the international
order of the day. Under President Obama, the Monroe Doctrine now apparently
cover EurAsia as well. Do not be concerned, might as well be the motto of our
global stock and commodity markets, deeply disconnected from reality via QE
Forever, currency wars, and the mispricing of money via ZIRP. For more on “do
not be concerned,” scroll down to the articles on Thailand.
We open
today with Mr Putin still in China, after yesterday he can hardly believe his
luck. God must be an Orthodox Russian after all. For more on that scroll down
to Crooks Corner. But do not be concerned about the other shoe falling.
Continental Europe doesn’t need Russia’s natural gas.
“They are
constantly trying to drive us into a corner because we have an independent
position, because we maintain it and because we tell it like it is and don’t
engage in hypocrisy. But there is a limit to everything. And with Ukraine, our
Western partners have crossed the line, playing the bear and acting
irresponsibly and unprofessionally.”
President Putin.
Russia Close to $400 Billion Gas Pipeline Deal in Pivot to China
May 19, 2014 9:00 PM GMT
Russia is close to signing
a decades-long contract to supply natural gas to China at a price that would
value the deal at about $400 billion, according to Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev. Medvedev’s boss Vladimir Putin arrives in Shanghai today to try and complete an agreement after more than 10 years of talks. The stumbling block has been price, but with Putin facing trade and financial sanctions from the U.S. and European Union after he annexed Crimea from Ukraine, a deal is seen as probable.
“It’s time we reached an agreement with the Chinese on this issue,” Medvedev said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Moscow yesterday. “It is very likely that there will be a contract, which means long-term contracts.”
OAO Gazprom (OGZD), the world’s largest natural gas producer, aims to sign a contract with China National Petroleum Corp. during the visit, Russian executives and officials have said. China, Russia’s largest trading partner with $94.5 billion of business last year, was the only country in the United Nations Security Council not to censure Putin’s actions in Ukraine
More
Stalin-Mao Roles Reverse as Putin Courts China Investment
May 19, 2014 9:00 PM GMT
China, which relied on Soviet aid during the era of Joseph Stalin
and Mao Zedong,
has turned the tables as Russian President Vladimir Putin
visits Shanghai.
The Russian leader starts a two-day visit to China today, seeking to complete an agreement on natural gas supplies to the world’s second-largest economy, held up for more than a decade because of a debate over the price. The contract is “nearly finalized,” Putin told Chinese media in an interview published yesterday.
Putin is looking to cement ties with China as the conflict in Ukraine alienates him from the U.S. and its European allies. The relationship with China, Russia’s biggest trading partner after the two-way volume surged sevenfold in the past decade to $94 billion last year, is becoming even more important as escalating sanctions threaten to tip the economy into recession.
“As Russia’s relations with the West deteriorate, its ties with China will need to grow stronger,” Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said by e-mail. “Beijing, rather than Moscow, will be the senior power.”
That role reversal is underscored by the disparity of the two countries’ economic development during the past 35 years. In 1979, as Deng Xiaoping started an economic overhaul, China’s output was 40 percent of the Soviet Russian Republic’s -- the present-day Russian Federation, according to a study published this year by the Center for European Reform. By 2010, China’s economy had become four times the size of Russia’s, it said.
More
We end on
China today with yet another red flag in commodities. This time the commodity is
gold. China’s Great Wobble seems to be turning into something more. If China
catches a cold, I suspect the rest of us, including Uncle Scam, especially
after yesterday’s provocation, are about to catch flu. Is the Great US taper
finally showing up?
"The great merit of gold is precisely that it is scarce; that its quantity is limited by nature; that it is costly to discover, to mine, and to process; and that it cannot be created by political fiat or caprice."
Henry Hazlitt
China Gold Demand Drops 18% in 1Q on Fewer Bar Sales
May 20, 2014 5:00 AM GMT
China’s gold demand fell 18
percent in the first quarter as investors in the world’s biggest user bought fewer
bars and coins, offsetting record interest in jewelry, the World Gold Council
said. Purchases declined to 263.2 metric tons in the three months through March from a year earlier, the London-based council said in a report today. While jewelry consumption rose 10 percent, demand for bars and coins sank 55 percent, accounting for about 40 percent of the global decrease.
Lower demand from China, which surpassed India as the largest gold consumer last year, may weigh on the precious metal that has increased 7.7 percent this year, partly on haven demand amid tension in Ukraine. As holdings in bullion-backed exchange-traded funds contract to the least since 2009, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. expects prices to extend declines after a 28 percent drop in 2013, the most in three decades.
“The seasonal impact of Chinese New Year being closely followed by Valentine’s Day, and the strong gold buying and gifting traditions associated with those two occasions drove jewelry consumption to a record first quarter volume,” the council said. “Investment demand in China followed a similar pattern to that of jewelry: holding up well in the approach to Chinese New Year before dropping away fairly sharply.”
More
Gold Imports by India Plunge 52% in Q1 on Curbs, Weaker Demand
May 20, 2014 5:00 AM GMT
Gold imports by India,
the world’s second-largest consumer, dropped by more than half in the first
quarter on government restrictions and lower demand, according to the World
Gold Council. Inbound shipments declined 52 percent to 129 metric tons from a year earlier, the London-based group said in a report today. Demand fell 26 percent to 190.3 tons with consumption of bars and coins tumbling 54 percent to 44.7 tons and sales of jewelry sliding 9 percent to 145.6 tons, the council said.
Foreign purchases slumped after India increased the import tax three times last year and introduced rules requiring importers to supply 20 percent of their bullion to jewelers for re-export. The moves were designed to reduce a record current-account deficit and reverse a slump in the rupee. Official imports dropped 4.1 percent to 825 tons last year and unofficial inflows were probably toward the upper end of 150 tons to 200 tons, according to the WGC.
“Gold continues to enter India through unofficial channels,” said Somasundaram P.R., managing director for India. “With the election of the BJP and its declared pro-business approach, there is an expectation that the short-term curbs on gold will be removed.”
More
In other
Asian news, when is a military coup not a coup? No not the US botched coup in
Kiev today, this time round this is Asia and Bangkok. It’s not a coup when the
military staging the coup say it’s not a coup. Don’t be concerned. The currency
may be collapsing, which is good news for any tourists still willing to risk
life and limb visiting Thailand, but I suspect that this is just applying a
sticking plaster to a cancer.
I'm very disappointed by the
mature-democracy countries. I was ousted by a coup d'etat.
Thaksin Shinawatra.
Thai Military Declares Martial Law, Seeks to Quell Protests
May 20, 2014 4:57 AM GMT
Thailand’s army imposed
martial law nationwide after months of political turmoil that brought down an
elected leader and tipped the economy into a contraction. The move is not a coup and people should not be concerned, Army Chief Prayuth Chan-Ocha said on local television. The military is seeking to restore order and asks political groups to halt their protests, he said. Soldiers and military vehicles were on the streets of the capital Bangkok, although no curfew had been imposed.
“There will be a center to control order, headed by the army chief,” Prayuth said. “The center can enforce any law under the martial law act to control the situation effectively.”
The move is the army’s most direct involvement in the Southeast Asian nation’s politics since 2006, when then-premier Thaksin Shinawatra was removed in a coup, with Thai stocks and the baht falling. Martial law already is in place in parts of southern Thailand, and then-prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva briefly declared it in Bangkok in 2010 to quell anti-government protests.
“The political crisis seems to have reached a tipping point,” said John Blaxland, a senior fellow at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre in Canberra. “The one institution that remains the arbiter of power in Thailand is the military. The politics have gotten so toxic there aren’t many viable alternatives to martial law.”
More
Thai Stocks Drop With Currency After Army Declares Martial Law
May 20, 2014 4:24 AM GMT
Thailand’s benchmark stock
index headed for its biggest drop in almost two weeks as the army imposed
martial law nationwide amid political turmoil. The baht pared early declines
after suspected central bank intervention. The SET Index (SET) fell 0.9 percent to 1,397.40 at 11:22 a.m. in Bangkok, the most since May 8. The baht slid as much as 0.6 percent, the biggest intraday retreat in two months, before trading 0.2 percent weaker at 32.52 per dollar. The currency pared its loss on suspected intervention, according to Kozo Hasegawa, a currency trader at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.
----The army acted a
day after government data showed gross domestic product shrank 0.6 percent in
the first three months of 2014 compared with a year earlier.
More
We end for
the day with the dying Bilderberger Euro project. Europe won’t get growing
again until continental Europe drops its one German size fits all fiat euro
straightjacket and gets back to localised currency. Kowtowing to US Russian
sanctions over their botched Ukraine coup is suicidal. Europe must put
Europeans interests first, less it turn economic stagnation into a calamity of
depression. Europe has enough problems of its own, without importing American
ones that lead only to war or a freezing destitution.
"The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe."
Mikhail Gorbachev
The overwhelming victor at the European election will be indifference
Nothing explains Europe’s growing disillusionment with its institutions and established political parties better than the economic stagnation
Without any obvious sense of occasion, enthusiasm or anticipation, Europe goes to the polls this week, and thus will rather less than 40pc of the European Union’s 400m eligible voters select a new parliament.Almost everywhere, the eurosceptic vote will be in the ascendant. But it is the abstainers who will speak more loudly than the anti-Europeans. Thirty five years ago, 62pc of Europeans voted in EU elections.
In Britain, the turnout this time around will be lucky to top 25pc. Only in countries where voting is compulsory do we see mass participation. The European project is dying of indifference.
By coincidence, the elections happen the week after another dire set of GDP figures. Nothing explains Europe’s growing disillusionment with its institutions and established political parties better than the economic stagnation that has settled like a pall over much of the Continent.
If they cannot deliver growth and prosperity, what’s the point of them? About the only significant parts of Europe growing strongly right now are Britain and Germany, and even Germany is showing signs of slowing.
Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland all contracted in the first quarter, and Spain only grew by applying a bigger so-called GDP deflator in recognition of emergent price deflation. For France, it was the famous “nil point”, or no growth at all.
In all my conversations with business leaders and economists, I can find hardly any who are optimistic about Europe’s prospects.
It’s not just the present hiatus in economic activity that dismays them; it’s Europe’s apparent appetite for repeatedly shooting itself in the foot which is the bigger cause for concern. Macro-economic failure is forgivable if there are clear signs of attempting to put it right. But from the nonsense of the financial transaction tax to the Luddite-like European Court of Justice ruling on internet privacy, Europe seems determined to go the other way.
More
“They act as they
please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building
coalitions based on the principle ‘If you are not with us, you are against us.’
To make this aggression look legitimate, they force the necessary resolutions
from international organizations, and if for some reason this does not work,
they simply ignore the UN Security Council and the UN overall.”
President Putin.
At the Comex
silver depositories Monday
final figures were: Registered 56.14 Moz, Eligible 119.79 Moz, Total 175.93 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Not your usual crooks and scoundrels today. Today’s
ones work for the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing. Next month I suppose the
PLA will file similar charges in a Beijing court against all the other
“Snowies” working for the US NSA and hacking not just China, but everyone on
the planet from President Obama and the Supremes down. Talk about pots calling
kettles black. With Mr Putin currently in Beijing for talks and to sign
contracts, there couldn’t be a more a more ill-timed US action.
U.S. Charges on China Hackers Cap 3-Year Pressure Drive
May 20, 2014 5:00 AM GMT
The U.S. Justice Department was considering last year charging
Chinese military officials with the digital theft of trade secrets.
Then Edward Snowden emerged. Snowden’s revelations of the U.S. government’s own massive spying operations collided with an Obama administration campaign whose origins date back at least three years to escalate public pressure on China to halt economic spying.
Yesterday’s indictment of five Chinese officials signals the administration is banking that enough time has passed that it can redirect the worldwide debate over government surveillance toward China’s drive to steal commercial secrets of private companies to boost its own economy.
“We’ve told the Chinese we know they spy on us for military purposes and we spy on them for military purposes, which is what big powers do,” said James Lewis, a fellow in cybersecurity at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “What’s weird is when you spy purely for commercial purposes, and that has to stop.”
Prosecutors have little expectation of getting the hackers into a U.S. courtroom, according to three people familiar with the administration debate over how to confront China, which began as early as 2011 and has been closely managed by the White House.
Instead, the indictment is intended to put forth in a public document some of the extensive evidence the U.S. has gathered, down to a photograph of two of the hackers bedecked in their People’s Liberation Army uniforms.
In that sense, the charges laying out evidence and operational details of cyber espionage conducted by China’s military represent a U.S. counterpoint to the documents leaked by Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor.
“Since well before these recent disclosures, we have made clear that our signals intelligence programs serve a specific national security mission, and that does not include providing a competitive advantage to U.S. companies,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said yesterday.
While hundreds of U.S. entities have been penetrated by Chinese military hackers since 2002, the Justice Department focused on five companies specializing in solar panels, metals and next-generation nuclear power plants.
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-20/u-s-charges-on-china-hackers-cap-3-year-pressure-drive.html
U.S. to Charge Chinese Army Personnel With Cyberspying
----The announcement about the
Chinese will most likely increase the tensions between American and Chinese
officials, who in recent years have accused each other in public and in private
of using military assets to launch hacks and cyberattacks.
In 2013, amid reports that
detailed the extent of Chinese hacking of American companies and corporations,
American officials tried to pressure the Chinese government to stop its
military from compromising American systems.
United States officials pointed
to a report released by Mandiant, an American security firm, as evidence that
the Chinese government was behind the attacks. The report said that an
overwhelming percentage of attacks on American corporations and government
agencies were being initiated by a unit of the Chinese Army.
Mandiant said the hacks were
coming from Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United
States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — that were based in a 12-story
white office tower on a Chinese Army base on the outskirts of Shanghai.
In March, it was revealed that
the National Security Agency had created a back door into the computer networks
of Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications giant that is considered a threat by
the United States. The N.S.A. has also tracked more than 20 Chinese hacking
groups — including some from the Chinese Army and Navy — that have broken into
American government networks and companies. The companies included Google, and
drone and nuclear-weapon part makers.
China Suspends Cybersecurity Cooperation After U.S. Charges
May 20, 2014 5:15 AM GMT
China suspended its
involvement in a cybersecurity working group and threatened further retaliation
after the U.S. indicted five Chinese military officials for allegedly stealing trade secrets.
The indictment is a “serious violation of the basic norms of international relations and damaged China-U.S. cooperation and mutual trust,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement. Assistant Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang summoned U.S. Ambassador Max Baucus yesterday to lodge a formal protest, the ministry said today.
Qin’s sharply worded statement reflected how the charges, which accused China of a vast effort to mine U.S. technology through cyber-espionage, added new strains to a relationship already tested by past allegations of hacking. Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden claimed last year that the U.S had been hacking into computers in China since 2009.
The cybersecurity working group was established last year when U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Beijing and the two sides tried to patch up ties. China urged the U.S. to “revoke the so-called prosecution,” according to Qin’s statement.
China will take countermeasures “if the United States goes its own way,” the Xinhua News agency said hours after the U.S. announced the indictment, citing a spokesperson for China’s State Internet Information Office.
The
spokesperson said the U.S. is the biggest attacker of China’s cyberspace and
China is a “solid defender of cybersecurity,” according to Xinhua. It said that
between March 19 and May 18, 1.18 million Chinese host computers were under the
control of servers in the U.S.
More
Chinese Hackers Show Humans Are Weakest Security Link
May 20, 2014 2:58 AM GMT
Some of the biggest companies in the U.S. remain vulnerable to one of the
oldest hacking tricks in the book, according to yesterday’s indictment of five
Chinese military officials accused of stealing trade secrets.
The common tactic, called spearphishing, was used to access the computer networks of companies including United States Steel Corp. (X) and Alcoa Corp. (AA), according to the U.S. Justice Department, which unveiled the charges yesterday. By sending employees false e-mails purporting to be official messages, hackers were able to trick them into divulging user names, passwords and other sensitive information.
The charges, which effectively accuse China and its government of using cyber-espionage to steal technology, expose what remains a gaping hole for many companies: their own workers. Even though computer-security firms are profiting from record spending on technologies to prevent hacks, people end up being the weakest link in such attacks, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of CrowdStrike Inc., a cybersecurity firm in Irvine, California.
“It’s not the vulnerability in the computer -- it’s the vulnerability in the human that always gets targeted,” Alperovitch said.
More
And in a class entirely on its
own.
White House vows CIA will not stage fake vaccine programs
Washington
(AFP) - The White House has promised the United States will not use vaccination
programs as cover for spy operations -- after the move was attempted during the
hunt for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
As Pakistan suffers a resurgence of polio, a top White House official pledged in a letter dated May 16 that intelligence agencies would foreswear the tactic, which is partly blamed for the spread of the crippling disease.
Islamic militant leaders are reluctant
to embrace vaccination programs after Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi attempted
to help the CIA track down the Al-Qaeda terror chief through a fake vaccine
project.
More
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H. L. Mencken.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished April
DJIA: +189 Down. NASDAQ: +347 Down. SP500: +249 Down. Sell in May, go away.
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