Baltic Dry Index. 782 -06 Brent Crude 57.76
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"Sooner or later both the Greek population and international creditors will tire of fighting a losing battle, leading to a break-up of the currency union as Greece pulls out, probably followed by other countries"
Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of the Centre of Economics and Business Research.
In the unloved, wealth destroying, dying Euroland, the sky fell in yesterday. All the EUs bribes came to nought. Greeks will get to vote on January 25th on the EU up or down. After going on 5 years of rape and pillage by Berlin and Brussels, even the dumbest Greek by now has figured out, the present economic policy is a total disaster, and it’s time to default and renegotiate the debt. If that means Euro exit, so what. It can hardly be worse than what the Greek serfs are undergoing now. If that means exiting the EU too, good. They can always apply to China and old protector Russia for help. 2015 already looks like becoming a year for the history books.
"We
take a decision, then put it on the table and wait to see what happens. If
there is no protest, because most people have no idea what we are doing, we
take step after step until we are beyond the point of no return."
Jean-Claude Juncker. Failed Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar. EC President.
Greece comes back to haunt eurozone as anti-Troika rebels scent power
Greece's finance minister warns ECB could “strangle the Greek economy in a split second” if it cuts off life-support for banks.
The eurozone’s long-simmering
crisis has returned with a vengeance as snap elections in Greece open the way
for an anti-austerity government and a cathartic showdown over the terms of
euro membership.
Yields on 3-year Greek debt
surged 185 basis points to 11.9pc on Monday amid default fears after premier
Antonis Samaras failed to win the extra votes in parliament needed to avert a
general election on January 25, despite dire warnings that such an outcome
risked “bankruptcy and exit from the euro.”
The upset opens the door for the
hard-Left Syriza movement, which has vowed to tear up Greece’s hated
‘Memorandum’ with EU-IMF Troika creditors “on its first day in office”, and
threatened to default on up to €245bn of rescue loans unless the EU grants debt
relief.
Syriza is leading by 29.9pc to
23.4pc in the latest Palmos Analysis poll, though other surveys are closer. It
is likely to become the first truly radical group to take power in any EMU
state since the creation of monetary union. A quirk in Greece’s electoral law
gives the winning party an extra fifty seats in parliament.
Alexis Tsipras, the bloc's firebrand leader, vowed to
overthrow of the austerity regime and launch new era of social salvation,
claiming the government’s campaign of “blackmail and terror” had failed. “There
will be an end to austerity. The future has started,” he said.
Markets were caught off-guard.
Flight to safety drove yields on German 10-year Bunds to an historic low of
0.54pc, while the Athens bourse crashed 10pc before partly recovering in late
trading.
German finance minister Wolfgang
Schauble warned Greeks not to play with fire by pressing impossible demands.
“Fresh elections won’t change Greece’s debt. Each new government must fulfil
the contractual obligations of its predecessors. If Greece chooses another way,
it’s going to be tough,” he said.
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"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
At the Comex silver
depositories Monday final figures were: Registered 64.60 Moz, Eligible 111.87
Moz, Total 176.47 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
There can be few fields of human endeavour in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.
J. K. Galbraith
Commodity Prices Are Cliff-Diving Due To The Fracturing Monetary Supernova—The Case Of Iron Ore
by David Stockman •
Crude oil is not the only
commodity that is crashing. Iron ore is on a similar trajectory and for a
common reason. Namely, the two-decade-long economic boom fueled by
the money printing rampage of the world’s central banks is beginning to
cool rapidly. What the old-time Austrians called “malinvestment” and what
Warren Buffet once referred to as the “naked swimmers” exposed by a
receding tide is now becoming all too apparent.
This cooling phase is
graphically evident in the cliff-diving movement of most industrial
commodities. But it is important to recognize that these are
not indicative of some timeless and repetitive cycle—–or an example merely
of the old adage that high prices are their own best cure.
Instead, today’s plunging
commodity prices represent something new under the sun. That is, they are the
product of a fracturing monetary supernova that was a unique and never before
experienced aberration caused by the 1990s rise, and then the
subsequent lunatic expansion after the 2008 crisis, of
a cancerous regime of Keynesian central banking.
Stated differently,
the worldwide economic and industrial boom since the early 1990s was not
indicative of sublime human progress or the break-out of a newly
energetic market capitalism on a global basis. Instead,
the approximate $50 trillion gain in the reported global GDP over the
past two decades was an unhealthy and unsustainable economic deformation
financed by a vast outpouring of fiat credit and false prices in the
capital markets.
For that reason, the radical
swings in commodity prices during the last two decades mark the path of
a central bank generated macro-economic bubble, not merely the unique
local supply and demand factors which pertain to crude
oil, copper, iron ore, or the rest. Accordingly, the chart
below which shows that iron ore prices have plunged from $150 per ton in early
2013 to about $65 per ton at present only captures the tail end of
the cycle.
What really happened is that the
central bank instigated global macro-economic bubble ripped commodity
pricing cycles out of their historical moorings, resulting in a one time
eruption of price levels that had no relationship to sustainable supply and
demand factors in the mines and petroleum patch. What materialized, instead,
was an unprecedented one-time mismatch of
commodity production and use that caused pricing abnormalities of
gargantuan proportions.
Thus, the true free
market benchmark for iron ore is the pre-1994 price of about $20-25
per ton. This represented the long-time equilibrium between advancing
mining technology and diminishing ore grades available to steel mills in the DM
economies.
But as shown below, after
Mr. Deng institutionalized export mercantilism and printing press prosperity in
the form of China’s red capitalism in the early 1990s, iron ore prices broke
orbit and soared to $100 per ton in the second half of the decade and
then went parabolic from there. After peaking at $140 per ton on the eve
of the financial crisis,China’s mad cap “infrastructure” stimulus boom after
2008 drove the price to a peak of $180 per ton in 2011-2012. To wit, iron ore
prices peaked at nearly 9X their historic range.
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
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished November.
DJIA: +136 Down. NASDAQ: +262 Down. SP500: +204 Down.
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