Baltic Dry Index. 1142 -07
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
“It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity. If there must be madness something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."
J. K. Galbraith.
The people behind the botched coup in Kiev are all
assembled in Wales today and tomorrow, trying to decide how to save the botched
US coup in Kiev, that was supposed to bring down Russia’s President Putin, and
allow America to slice and dice up the natural resource spoils of Russia.
Instead America’s coup got taken over by anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, and
although America got to pick the Kiev President and Kiev Prime Minister, half
the country revolted and the Crimea seceded and rejoined Russia. A proxy civil
war now rages in the Ukraine, with a million displaced persons, an economy and
currency in freefall, infrastructure wrecked, winter approaching, and an iffy
cease fire supposedly negotiated, although no one seems to have told the
combatants in the field.
For the amusement of the European lesser “deciders”
attending in Newport and Cardiff, President Obama has brought along his favourite
Kiev Muppet du jour, Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s “Chocolate King.” No word yet
if he’s bringing along free samples, nor if President Obama has booked a round
of golf at Celtic Manor.
Below, the state of play in America’s disastrous
miscalculation in the steppes.
Putin Seen Waging Ukraine Shadow War Until Veto Assured
Sep 3,
2014 9:00 PM GMT
Vladimir Putin will
continue his shadow war until he’s created quasi statelets in Ukraine’s
easternmost regions with veto power over the country’s future, five current and
former Russian officials and advisers said. Even after Putin and his counterpart Petro Poroshenko agreed on steps to end more than five months of fighting, the Russian president won’t settle for less than broad autonomy for Ukraine’s mainly Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, including the right to reject key decisions at the national level such as joining NATO, according to the people.
Putin
is willing to wait until November, after Ukraine elects a new parliament and
the heating season starts, to ensure his goals are met, in part by extending a
natural gas cutoff to force a compromise if needed, one official said on
condition of anonymity after speaking with Putin last week.
“Putin’s goal is to force Ukraine to its knees,” said Stanislav Belkovsky, a Kremlin adviser during Putin’s first term who heads the Institute for National Strategy in Moscow. “He wants a federal structure to put part of the country under Moscow’s informal control and block NATO membership.”
Russian and Ukrainian markets rallied yesterday after Poroshenko and Putin agreed to work on a “cease-fire regime” and take other steps to end a conflict that the United Nations says has killed 2,600 people and displaced more than 1 million. The announcement came as President Barack Obama and other leaders of North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations headed to the U.K. for the annual meeting of the military bloc, which was created in 1949 in part to counter the Soviet Union.
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Vladimir Putin raises prospect a peace deal could be achieved in Ukraine
The Russian president says ways to resolve the conflict are close as the Kremlin publishes a plan to end the crisis which has killed more than 2,000 people
Vladimir
Putin claimed peace in Ukraine could be achieved on Friday as he sought
to freeze the conflict on terms favourable to Russia.
After a phone conversation with
Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, Mr Putin said that the two leaders’
“views” on how to end the war were “very close”.
The announcement came after a day
of confused diplomacy in which Mr Poroshenko first announced agreement on a
“permanent ceasefire”, but later backtracked.
Nato says Russia
has deployed troops in eastern Ukraine,
supported by tanks and artillery. This intervention succeeded in halting a
Ukrainian offensive which had been gaining ground against pro-Russian
insurgents. The Kremlin’s deployment then helped the rebels to launch a
counter-attack and inflict a series of defeats on Ukraine’s forces.
After halting Ukraine’s offensive
and saving his allies from possible defeat, Mr Putin now appears determined to
freeze the conflict in a way that would leave large areas of eastern Ukraine in
rebel hands.
A peace plan, published by the
Kremlin, requires both sides to cease offensive operations. Ukrainian troops
would also have to “withdraw to a distance that rules out the possibility of
populated areas being fired upon by all forms of artillery and multiple rocket
launchers”.
International monitors would then
arrive and “corridors” for aid and reconstruction would be opened.
But the clause requiring
Ukrainian forces to withdraw would leave large areas of Donetsk and Luhansk
regions, including their two capitals, under the control of the armed
separatists.
Western diplomats believe that Mr
Putin’s “endgame” is to “freeze” the conflict by creating an autonomous region
in eastern Ukraine that would depend on Russian patronage, following the
example of the territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, and
Transdnistria in Moldova.
However, even if a peace
agreement along these lines is signed, Mr Putin and Mr Poroshenko may lack the
ability to enforce it on front-line units.
The pro-Russian
separatists, buoyed by recent successes, say they plan to capture the port city
of Mariupol. On the other side of the lines, many pro-Ukrainian fighters are
members of volunteer battalions who say their loyalty to Mr Poroshenko’s
government is conditional.
More
In other news, both the ECB and the BOE are heading
for a fall off a cliff. France seems heading for a depression and President
Marine Le Pen and an EU exit. In typical EU fashion, despite the inaccurate
headline, France hasn’t actually cancelled the warship sale to Russia,
triggering over a billion euros in penalties, France has merely suspended the
delivery. As for the BOE, they’re trapped over a barrel of the Scotch.
In central banking as in diplomacy,
style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count
greatly and results far much less.
J. K. Galbraith.
Mario Draghi cannot launch QE without German political assent
It is surely wishful thinking to suppose that the ECB is ready to launch full-fledged QE at its meeting this week, given its political make-up
Global markets are behaving as if
quantitative easing were a done deal in the eurozone. They are betting that the
European Central Bank will pick up the baton from the US Federal Reserve in a
seamless transition, keeping the world's monetary system smoothly supplied with
liquidity as Fed winds down QE in October.
The Eurostoxx 50 index of
equities is up 8pc since mid-August in spite of the EU showdown with Russia.
Belief that the ECB will soon sweep into crowded bond markets on a vast buying
spree is a key reason why yields on 10-year German Bunds have broken all
records, falling to 0.88pc last week, with French yields down in lockstep to
1.23pc.
Yet there is in fact no stimulus,
and nor is there likely to be much for a long time. Europe's policy settings
continue to be contractionary. Company loans are still shrinking at a rate of
2.3pc. Inflation has dropped to 0.3pc, and factory gate prices have fallen
1.1pc over the last year.
France's Francois Hollande is
pushing through €50bn of austerity measures over three years to comply with EU
rules, guaranteeing mass unemployment through his presidency.
Italy's Matteo Renzi is caught in
the same vice, forced to keep cutting in order to plug a budget largely caused
by a triple-dip recession and near deflation - themselves the result of ECB
policy.
Even Germany has stalled. There
is no recovery in sight. Eurozone retail sales fell in July and consumer
confidence dropped to a six-month low in August. Lena Komileva, from
G+Economics, calls it "a self-sustaining public, bank, business and
consumer balance sheet contraction", replicating the onset of Japan's Lost
Decade. Nothing is actually being done to break free of this suffocating
dynamic.
It is surely wishful thinking to
suppose that the ECB is ready to launch full-fledged QE at its meeting this
week, given its political make-up, or that it will signal action over coming
months on a big enough scale to pull Europe of out structural depression.
More
France caves and cancels €600m warship deal with Russia
Wednesday 03 September 2014
In a significant escalation of European
sanctions on Moscow, France has announced that it will be suspending the
controversial delivery of a state-of-the-art €600m warship to the Russian navy.
After an emergency meeting of the
national defence council, President François Hollande said that “conditions do
not today exist” for the delivery of the first of two Mistral helicopter
carriers this autumn. He described the latest developments in eastern Ukraine
as “grave”.
Russia has paid for the ship and
Russian sailors are already training aboard the vessel in St Nazaire on the
French Atlantic coast. Until tonight, France had stoutly resisted pressure from
the United States and its EU partners to suspend its delivery. Mr Hollande had
previously insisted that the handover would go ahead next month, but that the
delivery of a second ship next year would depend on Moscow’s behaviour in the
Ukraine crisis.
The recent evidence of escalating
Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine has forced Mr Hollande’s hand.
In return, France will expect other EU countries, including Britain, to drop
their objection to sanctions on Russia which might hurt their own domestic economies.
Scottish 'Yes' vote could cause eurozone-style currency crisis, Goldman Sachs warns
Economist at bank warns of 'severe consequences' of vote in favour of independence
Goldman Sachs has warned that the
UK could fall into a eurozone-style crisis if Scotland votes for independence
later this month.
In some of the most bleak
predictions economists have made about independence, the Wall Street bank said
a "Yes" vote on September 18, while looking unlikely, "could
have severe consequences" for both the Scottish economy and the UK
overall.
Goldman warned that public
services would have to be cut if Scotland goes it alone, and that the country
would face much higher borrowing costs.
But the most worrying
consequence, the bank predicted, would be that uncertainty over a currency
union would cause a run on sterling and a capital flight with echoes of the
eurozone crisis.
"The most important specific
risk, in our view, is that the uncertainty over whether an independent Scotland
would be able to retain sterling as its currency could result in an EMU-style
currency crisis occurring within the UK," wrote Kevin Daly, senior
economist at Goldman.
He said that despite Holyrood
claiming the UK would be forced into a monetary union with an independent Scotland,
Westminsters's threat to leave an independent Scotland on its own is
"credible".
"One of the main lessons
from the euro area crisis is that a reasonably high degree of fiscal and/or
financial integration is necessary, as a means of effective risk sharing, for a
monetary union to work," Mr Daly wrote.
He predicted that, even if a
currency union were agreed, the uncertainty in the months up to a resolution
could mean a run on assets based in Scotland.
"Even if the sterling
monetary union does not break up in the event of a 'Yes' vote, the threat of a
break-up would provide investors with a strong incentive to sell Scottish-based
assets, and households with a strong incentive to withdraw deposits from
Scottish-based banks."
More
And so we await the madness of NATO, the EUSSR, the
ECB and the BOE. Stay long fully paid up physical gold and silver. Does
Mariupol fall at the weekend?
"Gold would have value if for no other reason than that it enables a citizen to fashion his financial escape from the state."
William F. Rickenbacker
At the Comex silver depositories Wednesday final figures were: Registered 63.21
Moz, Eligible 116.40 Moz, Total 179.61 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
No usual suspects today, just film of one of Her
Majesty’s Grenadier Guards, pirouetting his way to the “Glasshouse” and an exit
back to the real world in Civvy Street. Still it might be better to wait to see
what the great NATO Pow wow decides, he might be needed to sail in a great French
built, Russian warship to the gates of Sevastopol again. How did the last time
turn out?
We
aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While
it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.
Rudyard Kipling.
Pirouetting Buckingham Palace guard facing disciplinary action for 'dancing on duty'
A Grenadier Guard is under investigation by the Ministry of Defence after footage emerged of him performing pirouettes and comical struts to entertain the crowds
By Myles Burke, video source
Storyful 3:29PM BST 03 Sep 2014
A Grenadier Guard positioned
outside Buckingham Palace was filmed by onlookers doing pirouetting and doing
funny walks while on-duty outside the palace.
The video which was posted to
YouTube shows the unidentified soldier wearing his red tunic and bearskin,
performing a variety of slow-motion silly walks a for onlooking tourists.
While marching outside the
Palace, he first bends down to pick up something from the gravel forecourt
which he puts in his pocket.
The soldier then engages in a
slow motion walk, freezes, and launches comical speed strut to the delight of
watching tourists.
The Ministry of Defence, however,
was not quite so amused. A spokesman told the Daily Mail that an internal
investigation had been launched and that "anyone who is found to fall
short of the Army’s high standards can expect to face appropriate action".
VideoThe Glasshouse - The Aldershot Military Detention Barracks
Despite its pleasant sounding name, 'The Glasshouse' was one of the most imposing buildings in mid 19th century Aldershot - the military prison. Built in 1870 to house soldiers sentenced for military offences, the building derived its name from its large, glass lantern roof. The term 'Glasshouse' has since become synonymous with all military prison establishments but it has its origins in Aldershot.Military Prisons were first established in 1844 'to avoid the necessity of mixing soldiers sentenced for military offences with the ordinary criminals in county gaols.' During the second half of the 19th century there were never less than 500 soldiers confined in Military Prisons.
Aldershot's first prison was opened in 1856. Standard wooden huts in the North and South Camp housed around 200 prisoners. Each hut was capable of accommodating up to 19 men and their warders who were part of the Corps Mounted Police, established in 1855.
A twelve foot boarded fence surrounded the complex. This standard open plan layout was to change in 1864 with a report from the Inspector of Military Prisons. The report called for the rebuilding of the prison complex in cell formation 'to prevent the evils of association'.
Re-building started in 1870 at an estimated cost of some £6,000. Sheldrake's Guide to Aldershot gives a vivid description of the 'large aggressive looking building', which had been constructed in the area bounded on the north and south sides by North and Redvers Buller Roads, and to the west by James Road. From Sheldrake's description, the building was very similar to conventional Victorian civil prisons, such as Wormwood Scrubs.
The new three-storey prison was originally designed to house 165 inmates, considerably fewer than the open huts. Each storey housed 55 prisoners with light iron galleries running around the whole building giving access to the cells.
Each cell was about 12 feet long and 10 feet high with fresh air coming from the 'hopper' arrangement of the window frames. A shaft carried off the foul air off through an outlet on the roof. A form of central heating was also provided via a system of pipes from the boiler rooms in the basement and the building even had gas lighting.
----By 1946 there were between 400 and 500 inmates at the prison: more than double the number the building had originally housed. The overcrowding was such that prisoners slept in three-tier bunks in single cells and each association room held as many as 20 to 25 men.
On 23/24 February 1946, a number
of prison inmates rioted destroying the main building. Further damage was
caused by the water from the hoses used by the Army Fire Service to quell the
riot. The disturbances lasted from 5pm on the Saturday until the late afternoon
of the Sunday. Eighteen soldiers of various units and one Royal Marine were
court-martialled as a result in June 1946.
The riots signalled the end of
'the Glasshouse'. With the main building unusable, prisoners were transferred
to other military and civil prisons. Though the War Office considered
rebuilding in 1948 at an estimated cost of £18,000, the prison was eventually
demolished in early 1958. Today the sole surviving military prison of the
British Army - the Military Corrective Training Centre (as 'the Glasshouse' is
now called) is located at Colchester.
You
talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For
it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!
Rudyard Kipling.
The Crimean War: "Britain in Blunderland" part 2
Marjie Bloy Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow, National University of Singapore
---- The Commissariat Department, responsible for supplies, was notoriously inept and corrupt. It sent no building materials or food; it sent left and right boots in separate ships — and one of the ships sank — and so on. Wellington had complained about the red tape and inefficiency in the French Wars and it was just as bad in the Zulu Wars (1878). The great gale merely compounded the inadequacy of the Commissariat.Then the Russian winter set in, while the troops were still under canvass, with no, food, fuel or heating. Cholera and typhus broke out; men froze to the bone-marrow in the trenches; dysentery took its toll. Illness killed more men than died in battle: shades of 1812.
-----Czar Nicholas I bragged about having "Generals January and February" on his side, to send the Allies packing. He offered to provide one three-decker ship for the rag-end of the Allied army to leave the Crimea: it began to look as if that was all they would need.
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The monthly Coppock Indicators finished Aug.
DJIA: +152 Down. NASDAQ: +312 Down. SP500: +231 Down.
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