Baltic Dry Index. 954 -19
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
“We made too many wrong mistakes.”
Secretary of State Kerry, with apologies to Yogi Berra.
We open with
war news from the Ukraine. As far as I can see from faraway, safe, non-Russian
energy dependent, UK, the only thing preventing a Russian intervention, is the
continuing gas talks over the Ukraine paying its bills, and the still
relatively low casualty figures and collateral damage. But time is fast running
out on all. Is the west misreading Russia’s signals, just as America did before
Chinese troops intervened in the Korean war?
“It’s like deja vu all over again.”
President Putin, with apologies to Yogi Berra.
Russia Urges ‘Emergency Steps’ Over Ukraine After Rebel Losses
May 28, 2014 10:00 PM GMT
Russia called for
unspecified “emergency” measures to halt the violence in eastern Ukraine after
separatist militias suffered the heaviest casualties of their insurgency. “It’s necessary to take emergency steps to stop the bloodshed and start an inclusive internal Ukrainian dialogue,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier by phone yesterday, according to the ministry’s website. “There’s no excuse” for military action in the southeastern part of the country, Lavrov said.
Ukraine stepped up air patrols over the eastern city of Donetsk yesterday as a convoy of pro-Russian rebels moved through the city with an anti-aircraft gun in tow, threatening renewed violence after dozens of militants were killed in a government operation to retake the area’s biggest airport.
Both sides suffered casualties as rebels stormed a National Guard base in Luhansk last night, the Interior Ministry said on its website, without further details.
President-elect Petro Poroshenko has vowed to wipe out the insurgents and re-establish order after winning office May 25. He’s faced with trying to stabilize an economy the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development expects to shrink 7 percent this year while reclaiming swaths of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions captured by pro-Russian militias.
----The Foreign Ministry in Moscow said earlier yesterday that Russia is being asked to provide humanitarian aid to people in eastern Ukraine affected by the conflict. Russia wants Ukraine’s help delivering supplies across the border and expects “the fastest possible answer” to its proposal, the ministry said on its website.
Ukraine said thanks, but no
thanks.
----As the violence continued, Ukraine stopped short of accepting an EU proposal to reach a debt and price deal for natural gas from Russia and avert a threatened shutoff. Russia, the world’s largest supplier of the fuel, has twice cut gas flows to Ukraine since Putin came to power in 2000, leading to shortages throughout Europe.
Under the EU plan, Ukraine’s state energy company, NAK Naftogaz Ukrainy, would pay Russian gas exporter OAO Gazprom (GAZP) $2 billion by May 30 and a further $500 million by June 7. That would partially cover Ukraine’s outstanding debt, which Gazprom Chief Executive Officer Alexey Miller said yesterday will reach $5.2 billion by June 7.
Ukraine’s government is “ready to clean the bill” and “pay the arrears” of its bill, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said in Berlin yesterday. The country is seeking a market-based price of $250-$350 per 1,000 cubic meters, he said.
Russia is ready to discuss the price and is willing to consider canceling a requirement for Ukraine to prepay for the fuel if the country pays Gazprom in accordance with a May 26 agreement, the Energy Ministry in Moscow said in an e-mailed statement.
“I hope that we won’t reach a situation where we have to move to prepayments,” Putin said in the Kremlin yesterday after Energy Minister Alexander Novak laid out a proposal to resolve the dispute.
More
And from
Uncle Sam’s spin machine, conveniently omitting how the CIA and Ollie North ran
Nicaragua and the fight against the USSR in Afghanistan. What Uncle Sam can do,
the Russian bear can do too, but Uncle Sam expected the Russian bear merely to
get up and dance to Washington’s tune. Coming next Manpads, just like the US
provided SAMs to bin Laden’s forces fighting Russians in Afghanistan. The march
to war continues. Stay long precious metals.
"'Truth,' it has been said, 'is the first casualty of
war.'"
Samuel Johnson.
Russia's Hand in Ukraine Is Exposed
609
By Marc
Champion
Among those who died fighting in Donetsk this week were Russian citizens -- at
least eight, according to the city’s mayor. With that revelation,
Russia’s involvement in the violence in eastern Ukraine is no longer in
question.The confirmed presence of foreign fighters exposes as untrue repeated claims by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that they are merely horrified bystanders to events in eastern Ukraine. Those claims were never plausible, given Russia's record in Crimea and thin popular support for the secessionist rebels in the east.
Lavrov recently challenged those who insisted Russia was backing the rebels to produce a single captured Russian agent. Of course, he can maintain that the Russian citizens killed in Donetsk were simply volunteers motivated by attacks on their ethnic kin in Ukraine. The eight, however, included Chechens, who by no stretch of the imagination are Russian nationalists.
There are certainly Chechen mercenaries available for hire, but they also answer to Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, who is fiercely loyal to Putin. Kadyrov has denied sending anyone to fight in Ukraine, but in an otherwise hard-to-explain twist, he personally negotiated the recent release of two Russian journalists held by pro-Ukraine forces. It is inconceivable that Kadyrov would send fighters to Ukraine without Moscow's approval or, more likely, instructions.
This conflict is following a script more than 20 years old: Russia intervenes in its ex-Soviet neighborhood using “volunteers,” including Chechens, and unmarked Russian military equipment to provide deniability.
Although transparent, Russia’s subterfuge is useful. It provides Europe’s leaders cover to avoid imposing costly economic sanctions on Russia. Putin withdrew troops from its border with Ukraine just before Sunday’s election there, the failure of which German Chancellor Angela Merkel had set as a trip wire for broader sanctions. European Union leaders who met on Tuesday were plainly relieved that they would not have to follow through on her threat.
More
Man-portable air-defense systems
In less
dramatic news, now the US economy is starting to wobble. But don’t let on to
our disconnected, QE forever driven stock markets. China seems headed for a hard landing, the
BRICs are in meltdown, Europe is dead in the water, with the UK and France
moving closer to the exit, and now the US economy looks like coming off the
rails. Time for some deep out of the
money purchased put options on stocks. How much longer can corporate stock
buybacks on borrowed money, still keep the Fed’s final bubble expanding? I don’t
know either, but the fan’s now gone into overdrive.
“I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.”
Janet Yellen, the talking chair, with apologies to Yogi Berra.
First-quarter U.S. GDP seen dipping into negative territory
May 28, 2014, 4:55 PM E
The U.S. economy almost certainly
contracted in the first quarter during an unusually harsh winter, a government
report to be released Thursday is expected to show. That’s because American
exports didn’t increase as much as previously believed and construction
spending was a bit softer, too.
Economists polled by MarketWatch
predict gross domestic product will reveal a 0.6% decline in the first three
months of the year instead of a meager 0.1% increase as originally reported.
The report – the second of two updates to first-quarter GDP – will be released
at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.
Does it really matter? Not all
that much. The economy was repeatedly disrupted by cold and snowy weather and
much of the activity that did not take place then is occurring now during the
warmer spring months. Wall Street expects second-quarter growth to snap back
with a 3.8% gain.
More
Yellen Has Scant Power to Relieve U.S. Housing Slowdown
May 28, 2014 5:44 PM GMT
The hesitant housing recovery has surprised and concerned Federal Reserve
Chair Janet Yellen and her colleagues at the central bank. It’s not clear how
much they can do about it. While the industry is rebounding from a weather-ravaged first quarter, the pickup will probably fall short of previous projections, according to economists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. of New York and Macroeconomic Advisers LLC in St. Louis. As a result, they trimmed their forecasts for economic growth in the second half of 2014 to about 3.25 percent from 3.5 percent.
“Housing is a growing worry,” said Macroeconomic Advisers’ senior economist Ben Herzon.
Yellen and many of her colleagues
agree. The Fed chair flagged the industry as a risk to the outlook in testimony
to Congress on May 7, while Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William
C. Dudley said last week he had been surprised by how weak it had been
recently. He added that he still expects gross domestic product to “get back on
a roughly 3 percent growth trajectory” after stalling in the first quarter.
The trouble from the Fed’s perspective
is that many of the forces holding housing back are outside of its control.
While the Fed can influence mortgage rates through its conduct of monetary
policy, it can’t do much, if anything, to counteract the other causes of
faltering demand: lagging household formation, stingy lenders and wary
borrowers.
More
Elsewhere in
America food price inflation looks here to stay.
Exclusive: Deadly pig virus re-infects U.S. farm, fuels supply fears
By Tom
Polansek CHICAGO
(Reuters) - An Indiana farm has become the first to confirm publicly it
suffered a second outbreak of a deadly pig virus, fueling concerns that a
disease that has wiped out 10 percent of the U.S. hog population will be harder
to contain than producers and veterinarians expected.The farm, through its veterinarian, publicly acknowledged on Tuesday a repeat incident of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv), which has killed up to 7 million pigs and pushed pork prices to record highs since it was first identified in the United States a year ago.
Matt Ackerman, whose veterinary practice is in southeastern Indiana, told Reuters the farm's operators did not want to be identified but authorized him to speak on their behalf.
The state and federal effort to stamp out PEDv has operated on an assumption that a pig, once infected, develops immunity and will not be afflicted by the disease again for at least several years. Likewise, farms that had endured the disease were not known to suffer secondary outbreaks.
But a year after the virus was identified, repeat outbreaks have occurred at farms but not been publicly confirmed before now. These so-called secondary outbreaks are a challenge to efforts to stem the disease, which is almost always fatal to baby piglets.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is fighting against repeated outbreaks by trying to extend immunity in female hogs through effective vaccines, Chief Veterinary Officer John Clifford told Reuters at the general session of the World Animal Health Organization in Paris. "It happens and it could happen again," he said about secondary outbreaks of PEDv. "We need to practice good bio-security, cleaning and disinfection, all-in all-out, in order to break the cycle and prevent its re-emergence."
Nationwide, PEDv outbreaks seem to recur in about 30 percent of infected farms, the American Association of Swine Veterinarians told Reuters, confirming for the first time the likelihood of repeated outbreaks.
Hog futures reached a record high last month and are up nearly 25 percent at $113.75 per hundredweight since the first U.S. outbreak was confirmed last year. Retail pork prices also have set new records, and a wave of re-infection could cause even more losses to the nation's hog herd.
More
Between,
graphene, recent solar power advances, and this breakthrough below in
supercaps, the next decade ushering in the new Carbon Age, ought to be one of
another giant leap forward for mankind. Structural supercaps alone, if it lives
up to its potential, will alter the way we make many things, well beyond just
phones, homes and cars. With graphene, solar and supercaps, much of the third
world will get access to clean drinking water, and adequate electric power, for
the first time. Elsewhere, lighter faster trains. Lighter safer, electric
vehicles. Solar replacing the need for dangerous subsidised nuclear power?
Still to this old Scots commodity trading dinosaur, I’d like to know what
happens to structural supercaps in a thunderstorm.
“The future ain’t what it used to be.”
Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov,
with apologies to Yogi Berra.
Structural supercapacitors could make batteries and power cords obsolete
By Lakshmi Sandhana May 26, 2014Imagine using a mobile phone powered entirely by its casing, or an electric car that runs off power stored in its chassis. Researchers at Vanderbilt University have created a structural supercapacitor that could, they believe, bring this closer to reality, making batteries and power cords obsolete. The structural supercapacitor could make it possible to store energy directly in structural materials, allowing them to deliver power long-term while surviving the real-life mechanical stresses they're bound to experience.
The team's new supercapacitor looks like a thin grey wafer, and is made of silicon electrodes that have been chemically treated to have inner surfaces containing nanoscale pores. Instead of storing energy in chemical reactions, like batteries, the supercapictor stores power by assembling electrically-charged ions on the surface of the porous material. In a recent test, the supercapacitor was able to store and release power without a hitch, the team reported, even when it was subjected to vibrational accelerations exceeding 80 g and stresses of up to 44 psi.
“These devices demonstrate – for the first time as far as we can tell – that it is possible to create materials that can store and discharge significant amounts of electricity while they are subject to realistic static loads and dynamic forces, such as vibrations or impacts,” said Cary Pint, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Vanderbilt University.
----"The majority of building materials that we use in these systems have absolutely no function than to just maintain mechanical integrity," Pint tells Gizmag. "What if we could take the tons of materials used in homes and convert them to energy storage systems that were not more expensive, could perform the same mechanical function as building materials, but could have decades worth of energy storage capability built in?".
"For a home or stationary
powered system, this technology is the seed to putting solar panels on the roof
and enabling power delivery around the clock without the need for a grid, even
when the sun isn't shining," he adds.
More
Finally, in
view of last week’s UK European election
vote, won quite easily by UKIP, and the decision to carry on with business as
usual in Brussels, likely imposing Jean-Claude Juncker as the next EC
President, it might be well for the EU to start making contingency plans for a
UK exit from the EU. Britain’s square peg has never fitted well in continental
Europe’s round holes, and the EU is unlikely to make a suitable compromise with
Britain sufficient to sway Britain’s voters. The UK needs to move fast before
France under love rat Hollande needs a bailout, and Ms. Le Pen moves into the
Elysee Palace.
Europe has an even bigger crisis on its hands than British a exit
British people will vote to leave the EU unless offered a new dispensation, writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
9:02PM BST 28 May 2014
If Europe's policy elites could
not quite believe it before, they must now know beyond much doubt that they
have lost Britain. This island is no longer part of the European project in any
meaningful sense.
British defenders of the status
quo were knouted on Sunday. UKIP won 27.5pc of the vote, or 29pc after adjusting
for the negligence - or worse - of the Electoral Commission in allowing a
spoiler party with much the same name to sow confusion. Margaret Thatcher's
Tory children are scarcely more friendly to the EU enterprise.
Britain's decision to stay out of
monetary union at Maastricht sowed the seeds of separation, as pro-Europeans
fully understood at the time, though almost nobody expected EMU officialdom to
clinch the argument so emphatically by running the currency bloc into the
ground with 1930s Gold Standard policies and youth unemployment levels above
50pc in Spain and Greece, and above 40pc in Italy.
European leaders must henceforth
calculate that the British people will vote to leave the EU altogether unless
offered an entirely new dispensation: tariff-free access to the single market
along lines already enjoyed by Turkey or Tunisia; and deliverance from half the
Acquis Communautaire, that 170,000-page edifice of directives and regulations
that drains away sovereignty, and is never repealed.
Ideological hardliners would
prefer to see Britain leave rather tolerating any reversal of the one-way
Monnet Doctrine, and some talk of shutting British goods out of the European
markets. They are fanatics. Others know that the EU's global credibility would
be shattered if one of its largest states - and twin-leader in projecting
military power - were to walk away in disgust, as Germany's Wolfgang Schauble
has repeatedly warned.
More
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10861252/Europe-has-an-even-bigger-crisis-on-its-hands-than-British-a-exit.html
Between 1959 and 1969, the Élysée was occupied by Charles de Gaulle, the first President of the Fifth
Republic. De
Gaulle did not like its lack of privacy, and oversaw the purchase of the
luxurious Hôtel
de Marigny to
lodge foreign state officials in visits to France, saying, "I do not like
the idea of meeting kings walking around my corridors in their pyjamas."
At the Comex
silver depositories Wednesday
final figures were: Registered 56.23 Moz, Eligible 119.89 Moz, Total 176.12 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Below, one of the Squids gets it. But one has to
wonder what would have happened if the now slightly poorer ex-Goldmanite hadn’t
been French.
“Egol and Fabrice were way ahead of their time,” said one of the former Goldman workers.
“They saw the writing on the wall in this market as early as 2005.”
'Fabulous Fab' will not appeal fraud conviction
Fabrice Tourre, a former Goldman Sachs trader, misled investors on the sale of mortgage-linked securities
By agencies 10:53PM BST 27 May
2014
Former Goldman Sachs trader
Fabrice Tourre will not appeal a US court ruling that he defrauded investors.
A New York jury concluded in
August last year that the Frenchman, nicknamed "Fabulous Fab", misled
investors on the sale of mortgage-linked securities that sank in value after
the housing bust.
Tourre has been ordered to pay
$825,463 in penalties, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains and interest payments.
Tourre, who is pursuing a
doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago, said on Tuesday he wanted
to move on with his life.
"After careful
consideration, I have decided not to pursue a lengthy appeal process which, if
successful, would lead to a retrial," Tourre said in a statement released
through a spokesman.
"While my lawyers have
advised me there are strong grounds to appeal, I prefer to move forward with my
education and close this difficult chapter of my life."
Tourre said he looked forward to
completing his degree "and to making meaningful contributions to my
field".
Tourre became a symbol of Wall
Street excess that was partly to blame for the 2008 financial crisis. A
two-week civil trial in July 2013 focused on a series of communications that
the jury agreed showed Tourre had misled investors about the risk of the
investments.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financial-crime/10859506/Fabulous-Fab-will-not-appeal-fraud-conviction.html
Do not expect that once taking advantage of
Russia's weakness, you will receive dividends forever. Russian has always come
for their money. And when they come - do not rely on an agreement signed by
you, you are supposed to justify. They are not worth the paper it is written.
Therefore, with the Russian is to play fair, or do not play.
Otto von Bismarck
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished April
DJIA: +189 Down. NASDAQ: +347 Down. SP500: +249 Down. Sell in May, go away.
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