Baltic Dry Index. 959 +11
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money."
Daniel Webster
Having hyped
up expectations at last month’s ECB meeting of an ECB miracle at today’s ECB
meeting, it is put up time for the ex-Goldmanite heading up the ECB. Will Mr.
Draghi be able to turn continental Europe’s dross into gold, or was it just
more of Europe’s main contribution to the modern era, hot air. Stay around for
later today, when the ECB’s Houdini must live up to his own billing. But will
he get his feet wet when he attempts to walk on the Rhine?
“The world is a place that’s gone from being flat to round to crooked.”
Mad Magazine.
'Stuttering' eurozone growth keeps pressure on ECB to act
GDP in the 18-nation currency bloc expands by just 0.2pc in the three months to March as eurozone recovery remains fragile
Eurozone growth remained just above zero
in the first quarter, with the "stuttering" recovery and deflation
fears reinforcing expectations of fresh stimulus from the European Central Bank
on Thursday.
GDP in the 18-nation currency bloc expanded by just 0.2pc in the three months to March, the EU's statistics office Eurostat said.
The data followed a drop in eurozone inflation to a worse-than-expected 0.5pc in May and was released alongside a key purchasing managers index which showed that while the region is on track for its best year of economic growth since 2011, the recovery is fragile.
GDP in the 18-nation currency bloc expanded by just 0.2pc in the three months to March, the EU's statistics office Eurostat said.
The data followed a drop in eurozone inflation to a worse-than-expected 0.5pc in May and was released alongside a key purchasing managers index which showed that while the region is on track for its best year of economic growth since 2011, the recovery is fragile.
European shares fell and the euro
slipped against the pound after the data confirmed a slowdown in the eurozone's
economic recovery in the first quarter.
The Markit Eurozone PMI Composite Output Index came in at 53.5 for May, down only slightly from a near three-year high in April of 54 – the eleventh month of growth in output at manufacturers and service companies. A figure above 50 denotes expansion.
Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, said: “Despite falling, the Eurozone PMI remains firmly in expansion territory and consistent with GDP rising by a reasonable 0.4pc in the second quarter."
However, he cautioned: "Although the eurozone is enjoying its best performance for three years, this is an uneven, stuttering and lacklustre recovery."
The Markit Eurozone PMI Composite Output Index came in at 53.5 for May, down only slightly from a near three-year high in April of 54 – the eleventh month of growth in output at manufacturers and service companies. A figure above 50 denotes expansion.
Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, said: “Despite falling, the Eurozone PMI remains firmly in expansion territory and consistent with GDP rising by a reasonable 0.4pc in the second quarter."
However, he cautioned: "Although the eurozone is enjoying its best performance for three years, this is an uneven, stuttering and lacklustre recovery."
----“France remains a major drag on the
region’s revival," said Mr Williamson, adding that the survey data
suggested the French economy had stagnated in the second quarter and was a
possibility of a renewed downturn in French GDP if business conditions
continue.
“Germany, in contrast, remains the key driver of the region’s recovery," he said.
“Germany, in contrast, remains the key driver of the region’s recovery," he said.
More
In something
of a victory for Russia yesterday, the G-7 baulked for now at imposing any real
sanctions on Russia, just as President Putin forecast. Depression delayed for
continental Europe, despite the blustering of America’s War Party. Continental
Europeans, it seems, have little willingness to impose suicidal real sanctions
against Russia just to bailout America’s hare-brained botched coup in Kiev, and
even less willingness to start swapping Berlin and Paris for Moscow and St
Petersburg. For now, Europe still has a free press and a thinking society, but
how will the NSA react? Europe’s political class is wide open to blackmail and
bribery.
The secret of politics? Make a good
treaty with Russia.
Count
Otto von Bismarck.
G-7 Spares Russia New Sanctions Urging Ukraine Diplomacy
Jun 4,
2014 11:16 PM GMT
Group of Seven leaders spared Russia further sanctions in favor of diplomatic efforts to
resolve the Ukraine crisis, giving the Kremlin another chance to cut off
support to pro-Moscow separatists seeking to break up the country. The world’s leading industrial democracies urged Russia to complete the pullback of its troops from Ukraine’s eastern border, warning that “we stand ready to intensify targeted sanctions and to implement significant additional restrictive measures” in the absence of a peaceful settlement, according to a statement issued late yesterday after the first session of a two-day G-7 meeting in Brussels.
Russia’s seizure of Crimea and menace to eastern Ukraine led the U.S. and European Union to impose asset freezes and travel bans on 98 people and 20 companies, while stopping short of broader curbs on investment and trade that might damage western economies as well.
“With our good balance of diplomatic efforts but also the repeated threat of sanctions we managed to achieve quite a bit for Ukraine, though not enough,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters after a working dinner with her G-7 counterparts. “We want to pursue this path and not any other.”
More
Putin Offers to Meet Obama as East Ukraine Battles Rage
Jun 4, 2014 3:05 PM GMT
President Vladimir Putin offered the first face-to-face talks with Barack Obama
since pro-Russian separatists unleashed an insurgency that’s claimed almost 200
lives in Ukraine. The Russian leader, who rejected accusations his military is present in Ukraine, said he’s ready to meet Obama this week in France during 70th anniversary commemorations of the allied landings in the north of the country in World War II. Meanwhile, Obama met Ukrainian President-elect Petro Poroshenko in Warsaw, where he pledged to step up non-lethal military aid.
“That’s his choice -- I’m ready for dialogue,” Putin said, according to an excerpt of an interview with French radio Europe 1 and the TF1 television channel posted today on Europe 1’s website. “I hope this isn’t a new phase of the Cold War.”
The White House repeated that there are
no plans for the U.S. president to have a separate meeting with Putin, while
not ruling out the possibility. French President Francois Hollande, German
Chancellor Angela
Merkel and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron
all have scheduled meetings with Putin while in France.
More
Russia Set to Launch Rocket to Secure Future of Space Industry
Jun 4, 2014 2:27 PM GMT
Russia is poised to launch
its first new rocket capable of carrying heavy payloads since the Soviet era,
and a success may unlock the future of the country’s space industry. The launch of the Angara rocket will take place in the last week of June at the Plesetsk space center in northern Russia, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said today in e-mailed comments.
Russia, which put the first man into space with Yuri Gagarin’s flight 53 years ago, has relied on the Proton rocket, its largest booster, which entered into operation in 1965. It’s planning to use the Angara at Plesetsk and a new cosmodrome in the country’s Far East.
The national space program has 2.1 trillion rubles ($60 billion) of spending planned for 2013-2020, including the completion of the Vostochny cosmodrome near the border with China. Russia currently uses the Soviet-era Baikonur base in Kazakhstan for manned missions.
“Angara is destined to be the main workhorse of the Russian space program,” Yuri Karash, a member of the Tsiolkovsky Russian Academy of Cosmonautics, said by phone from St. Petersburg. “It will be a critical test of Russia’s ability to design and build new space hardware.”
Russia has suffered a series of space accidents in recent years that cost billions of rubles, including the crash of a Proton-M rocket carrying three Glonass navigation satellites soon after take-off from Kazakhstan in July last year.
More
Over 100,000 spectators expected at Russia’s first ever F1 GP in Sochi
Sports May 30, 17:14 UTC+4
Grand Prix in Russia’s Sochi was scheduled for October 12 as the 16th out of 19 F1 Grand Prix races in 2014
Grand Prix in Russia’s Sochi was scheduled for October 12 as the 16th out of 19 F1 Grand Prix races in 2014
MOSCOW, May 30. /ITAR-TASS/.
Initial estimations of spectators’ turnout at Russia’s first ever Formula-1
Grand Prix, to be held in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi this fall, suggest
that over 100,000 people would attend the so-called royal racing three-day
weekend, a chief organizer of the upcoming global sports event said on Friday.
In December, the International
Automobile Federation (FIA) officially announced the calendar of the 2014
Formula One races, and the Grand Prix in Russia’s Sochi was scheduled for
October 12 as the 16th out of 19 F1 Grand Prix races this year.
“According to our modest, but
feasible estimations, over 100,000 spectators will be present during the three
days of the Grand Prix,” Sergei Vorobyov, the promoter and the man in charge of
the Sochi GP organization, said.
He said 40% of spectators were
expected to come watch the race from the country’s southern Krasnodar
Territory, where Sochi is located, and 30% from the Russian capital of Moscow.
Ticket prices for the Sochi GP,
which went on sale starting today, will range between 5,000 and 200,000 rubles
($145-5,800), Vorobyov said, adding that the pricing policy was based on
tickets’ sales for F1 GPs in other countries and the recently held Olympics.
----“Owing to the Olympics, Sochi turned into the city with outstanding accessibility. Racing fans will have no problems at all with transportation,” Vorobyov said adding he hoped that Russian President Vladimir Putin would also attend the Russian GP.
“It will be very pleasant, if he
(Putin) arrives in Sochi,” Vorobyov said. “We are preparing for this.”
The Russian F1 race promoter said this
year’s Grand Prix in Sochi would start on October 12 at 3.00 pm local time
(11.00 am GMT), but in the future years the Sochi GP would turn into a night
race, similar to Singapore and Abu-Dhabi GPs.
More
In China, it
was yet another red flag, as the coal city of Taiyuan declared its own crash
landing. Ominously, the first of many more to come, perhaps. Is a new MF Global
scandal dawning in China’s commodities? Actually, to me it sounds closer to the
Great Salad Oil scandal of 1963, just updated.
China City Crash-Lands to Zero Growth on Coal Bust
Jun 5, 2014 3:21 AM GMT
Economic growth in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan, Shanxi province,
has crashed to zero from 12 percent in one year. Yan Xiaofeng’s coal-equipment
business has gone down with it. Yan, 38, said last week that he’s recorded 1 million yuan ($160,000) in sales so far this year from supplying gear and parts to coal mines, down from more than 10 million yuan a year in the boom times of 2009. “The economy in Shanxi is very simple: It’s all about coal,” said Yan, who’s been in business in the region for 15 years. “When the coal industry is in decline, every other business follows.”
Taiyuan’s hard landing shows how China’s transition to slower growth from decades averaging 10 percent expansion will be messy in some places, especially Shanxi, which is suffering from anti-pollution policies aimed at curtailing coal use. The city’s situation highlights the challenge for policy makers in coming up with jobs and industries to replace manufacturing in regions dependent on commodities with diminishing demand.
More
Chinese port stops metal shipments due to probe - trade sources
By Melanie Burton SYDNEY, June 2
(Reuters) - China's northeastern port of Qingdao has halted shipments of
aluminium and copper due to an investigation by authorities, causing concern
among bankers and trade houses financing the metals, trading and warehousing
sources said on Monday.Port authorities could not immediately be reached for comment. China has a public holiday on Monday.
"We were told we can't ship any material out while they do this investigation," a source at a trading house said.
The port of Qingdao is China's third-largest foreign trade port and the world's seventh-largest port, trading with 700 ports in more than 180 countries, according to its website (www.qdport.com/).
"Banks are worried about their exposure," one warehousing source in Singapore said.
"There is a scramble for people to head down there at the minute and make sure that their metal that they think is covered by a warehouse receipt actually exists," he said.
Metal imports have been
partly driven in China as a means to raise finance, where traders can pledge
metal as collateral to obtain better terms. In some cases the same shipment can
be pledged to more than one bank, fuelling hot money inflows and spurring a
clampdown by Chinese authorities.
"It appears there is a
discrepancy in metal that should be there and metal that is actually
there," said another source at a warehouse company with operations at the
port.
"We hear the discrepancy is
80,000 tonnes of aluminium and 20,000 tonnes of copper, but we hear that the
volumes will actually be higher. It's either missing or it was never there -
there have been triple issuing of documentation," he said.
More
Salad Oil Scandal
----The scandal involved the company Allied Crude Vegetable Oil in New Jersey, led by Tino De Angelis, which discovered that it could obtain loans based upon the inventory of its salad oil.[3]Ships apparently full of salad oil would arrive at the docks, and inspectors would confirm that the ships were indeed full of oil, allowing the company to obtain millions in loans. In reality, the ships were mostly filled with water, with only a few feet of salad oil on top. Since the oil floated on top of the water, it appeared to inspectors that these ships were loaded with oil. The company even transferred oil between different tanks while entertaining the inspectors at lunch.[4]
Once the scandal was exposed, American Express was one of the biggest casualties. Its stock dropped more than 50% as a result of the scandal, which cost the company nearly $58 million. De Angelis was convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges in connection with the scandal and served seven years in prison, gaining his release in 1972.[5
More
Staying with
China, with the USA busy trying to stoke up World War Three with Russia, China
is busy pursuing its own Asian version of Uncle Sam’s Monroe Doctrine. Is
President Obama really up for war on two continents. Thankfully, the UK was
forced out of being the world’s policeman after two disastrous World Wars in
the last century. Since the Ukraine is none of NATO’s business and GB has no
vital national interest in the South China Sea, with luck GB can put national
interest first and sit these disputes out, like America in WW1 and WW2, only
entering at great profit, late in the day when everyone else has gone bankrupt.
Little chance, given Her Majesty’s armchair warrior government dreaming of a bygone
age.
China Refuses to Defend its South China Sea Claims to UN Court
Jun 4, 2014 9:55 AM GMT
China refused to defend its
territorial claims in the South China Sea to a United Nations tribunal because
it doesn’t recognize international arbitration of its dispute with the
Philippines. “China’s position that it will not accept or participate in the tribunal case involving the Philippines hasn’t changed,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hong Lei said in Beijing today.
The UN’s Permanent Court of Arbitration announced yesterday it was giving China until Dec. 15 to respond to the complaint by the Philippines filed in March, when it asked the court to uphold its right to exploit waters within its 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone. So far China has refused any international efforts to resolve the dispute, insisting any discussions on the issue must be held directly between China and the Philippines.
Under President Xi Jinping, China has been tapping its economic and military muscle to assert its claims to surrounding waters that may be rich in mineral and energy deposits. China claims much of the South China Sea under its “nine dash-line” map, first published in 1947, which extends hundreds of miles south from China’s Hainan Island to equatorial waters off the coast of Borneo, taking in some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
----The U.S. is
treaty-bound to defend the Philippines and Japan, involved in a separate
dispute with China in the East China Sea, in case of any conflict.
More
"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
At the Comex
silver depositories Wednesday
final figures were: Registered 57.02 Moz, Eligible 118.72 Moz, Total 175.74 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Below, more on our new lawless era. Toss away Magna Carta and the US Constitution. News from the land of the not so free and the very afraid. Presented without need for further comment.
U.S. Marshals Seize Cops’ Spying Records to Keep Them From the ACLU
By Kim Zetter 06.03.14
6:15 pm
A routine request in Florida for
public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took
an extraordinary turn recently when federal authorities seized the documents
before police could release them.
The surprise move by the U.S.
Marshals Service stunned the American Civil Liberties Union, which earlier this
year filed the public records request with the Sarasota, Florida, police
department for information detailing its use of the controversial surveillance
tool.
The ACLU had an appointment last
Tuesday to review documents pertaining to a case investigated by a Sarasota
police detective. But marshals swooped in at the last minute to grab the
records, claiming they belong to the U.S. Marshals Service and barring the
police from releasing them.
ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed
Wessler called the move “truly extraordinary and beyond the worst transparency
violations” the group has seen regarding documents detailing police use of the
technology.
“This is consistent with what
we’ve seen around the country with federal agencies trying to meddle with
public requests for stingray information,” Wessler said, noting that federal
authorities have in other cases invoked the Homeland Security Act to prevent
the release of such records. “The feds are working very hard to block any
release of this information to the public.”
Stingrays, also known as IMSI
catchers, simulate a cellphone tower and trick nearby mobile devices into
connecting with them, thereby revealing their location. A stingray can see and
record a device’s unique ID number and traffic data, as well as information
that points to its location. By moving a stingray around, authorities can
triangulate a device’s location with greater precision than is possible using
data obtained from a carrier’s fixed tower location.
The records sought by the ACLU
are important because the organization has learned that a Florida police detective
obtained permission to use a stingray simply by filing an application with the
court under Florida’s “trap and trace” statute instead of obtaining a
probable-cause warrant. Trap and trace orders generally are used to collect
information from phone companies about telephone numbers received and called by
a specific account. A stingray, however, can track the location of cell phones,
including inside private spaces.
----Recently, the
Tallahassee police department revealed it had used stingrays at least 200 times
since 2010 without telling any judge because the device’s manufacturer made
the police department sign a non-disclosure agreement that police claim
prevented them from disclosing use of the device to the courts.
More
“The Europeans 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.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: +181 Down. NASDAQ: +340 Down. SP500: +246 Down. Crisis? What crisis?
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