Monday 26 January 2015

Euroland – The Sky Fell In.



Baltic Dry Index. 720 -31    Brent Crude 48.35

LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000.  Revised due to QE programs.

"Gold was not selected arbitrarily by governments to be the monetary standard. Gold had developed for many centuries on the free market as the best money; as the commodity providing the most stable and desirable monetary medium."

Murray N. Rothbard

To no one’s great surprise, Greek voters turned to Syriza to form the next government in Athens. Anti Euro parties in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy will be watching closely to see just what kind of a renegotiated deal the new government can get from Berlin and Brussels. For now Syriza says that it intends to remain in the Eurozone, and there’s no mechanism to throw them out even if they stop complying with most of the rules. In fact Germany and France and the ECB itself, don’t comply with the rules when its suits them, so Greece is unlikely to be asked to leave. A great new uncertainty descended over Euroland yesterday, yet more downward pressure on the Euro. Stay long fully paid up physical gold and silver. We are in for several weeks of high theatre, then the ECB turns Japanese in March.

Tsipras Sets Collision Course for Greece After Syriza Victory

Jan 26, 2015 1:49 AM GMT
Greek Prime Minister-elect Alexis Tsipras set up a confrontation with his European peers as he prepared to form a coalition dedicated to ending austerity, saying the era of bowing to international demands for budget cuts is over.

Tsipras issued the challenge to Greece’s euro-area partners after his Syriza party won an historic victory in Sunday’s elections by harnessing a public backlash against years of belt-tightening, job losses and hardship. The Syriza government’s priority “will be for Greece and its people to regain their lost dignity,” he said.

Even in a fragile coalition, the result hands Tsipras a mandate to confront Greece’s program of austerity imposed in return for pledges of 240 billion euros ($269 billion) in aid since May 2010. The challenge for him now is to come good on his election pledges including a writedown of Greek debt, while persuading creditors in Berlin and Brussels to keep aid flowing.

 “There will neither be a catastrophic clash nor will continued kowtowing be accepted,” Tsipras, 40, told crowds of cheering supporters in central Athens late Sunday. “We are fully aware that the Greek people haven’t given us carte blanche but a mandate for national revival.”

----“Political stability will be difficult to find,” Vincenzo Scarpetta, a political analyst at the London-based Open Europe research group, said by e-mail. Syriza’s potential coalition partners “only agree in parts” with its platform, while “governing alone with a tiny majority will be hard with tough debt negotiations ahead and a radical fringe to appease. The medium-term outlook is far from clear.”

While Syriza’s victory was more decisive than polls had predicted, the results after 95 percent of the vote left the party just short of a majority, with 149 seats in the 300-seat Parliament. Outgoing Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s New Democracy, which took 27.8 percent to Syriza’s 36.4 percent, won 76 seats. The far-right Golden Dawn placed third with 6.3 percent, followed by To Potami with 6 percent.

----Syriza’s victory sends a signal to parties such as Spain’s Podemos that are challenging economic and political conventions across Europe from a country whose output has shrunk by about a quarter and where one in two young people is jobless.
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'Hospitals with no medicines, graduates with no jobs, children with no hope'

Nick Squires witnesses unheard-of poverty and long-gone diseases return to Greece, the birthplace of the European ideal

On a dusty street corner in a grimy port on the outskirts of Athens, a public health crisis that has no precedent in Europe is unfolding.

After five years of unrelenting austerity, doctors working in a charity-run clinic are witnessing daily what they never thought they would see in their entire careers - children and adults suffering from malnutrition.

In Perama, one of the poorest parts of Athens, unemployment has reached 60 per cent and many families do not have enough money to put food on the table.

The town once prospered on the back of building and repairing ships but it has been hammered first by a drastic contraction of the sector and then by the unremitting tax rises, pension cuts and other austerity measures introduced by the government at the behest of its international creditors.

The health clinic was originally set up to provide free health care and medicines to the growing number of poor, but now it hands out emergency boxes of food as well.

Middle-aged men and women carrying plastic bags full of milk, beans, pasta and oil emerge from the clinic, which is run by Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), a French charity which normally provides disaster relief in Africa and Asia.

“Five years ago, before the crisis began, I would never have thought this would happen to Greece,” said Dr George Tomaras, 38, a paediatrician who works at the clinic, one of seven run in Greece by the French organisation.

“But I think it’s only the beginning. I don’t see any change coming, just more people losing their jobs every day.”

As nearly 10 million Greeks voted on Sunday in a general election, it was austerity, and the devastating effects it has had on the country, that underpinned every aspect of the political debate.

----It is young children who are hit hardest by the acute poverty that has torn apart the fabric of social and economic life in Athens.

“I saw a 15 month-old baby girl recently who had lost 1.5 kg. Her mother said she was only feeding her milk - she couldn’t afford anything else,” said Dr Tomaras, who has seen his own monthly salary cut from 1,300 euros to 1,000 euros.

----The health crisis in Greece is not just limited to malnutrition. In another alarming phenomenon, thousands of children are no longer being vaccinated against deadly diseases because their parents no longer have health insurance and cannot afford to pay for the jabs.

That has created a ticking time-bomb in which a whole generation of Greek children will be vulnerable to illnesses such as polio, measles, tuberculosis, meningitis and hepatitis.
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Elsewhere in the dying, wealth destroying, unemployment generating EUSSR, the ECB is setting out to trash the euro and much of Europe’s savings. You really couldn’t make this sort of thing up.

Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.

J. Edgar Hoover.

Europe’s Saddest Day In 50 Years: Another Trillion For The Banks, More Trauma For The People

by Raúl Ilargi Meijer • 
I was going to start out saying yesterday was the saddest day in Europe in 50 years, or something like that, because of the insane and completely nonsensical largesse the ECB permits itself to launch, aimed at once again saving a banking system, but which will not only not help the European people, it will make things even much worse than they already are. Which is also, lest we overlook that ‘detail’, entirely thanks to the ECB/EU/IMF Troika,

I’ve said many times that the EU in its present form should be dismantled tomorrow morning (even though it’s not the same tomorrow morning anymore), and if Draghi’s $1.1 million x million ‘stimulus’ should make anything clear, it’s that the dismantling gets more urgent by the day.

But calling it the saddest day in Europe in 50 years would show far too little respect for the people who died in former Yugoslavia, and in eastern Ukraine. It’s still a very sad day, though. And I was already thinking about that even before I read Theopi Skarlatos’ article for the BBC; that really made me want to cry.

When you read about female doctors(!) feeling forced to prostitute themselves to feed their children, about the number of miscarriages doubling, and about the overall sense of helplessness and destitution among the Greek population, especially the young, who see no way of even starting to build a family, then I can only say: Brussels is a bunch of criminals. And Draghi’s QE announcement is a criminal act. It’s a good thing the bond-buying doesn’t start until March, and that it’s on a monthly base: that means it can still be stopped.

I’ll get back to Skarlatos’ story in a minute. First the insanity of the ECB QE itself. The problem with Europe’s economy, what drives it into high unemployment and deflation, is that people are not spending. If QE would really be aimed at reviving the economy, or at battling deflation, it would need to assume that people will start borrowing on a massive scale just because Draghi buys bonds – and soon perhaps even stocks – from bankers. There simply is no logic in that. The stated goals, pro-growth and anti-deflation, are not true. It’s a sleight of hand.

In order to achieve the stated goals, money would have to reach the real economy. As it stands, the best Draghi can do is to ‘hope’ it will. That’s not enough by a mile. This is not about doubts over its effectiveness, that’s baloney, we know it’s not effective when it comes to the stated goals. It will still leave Europe with no growth, and deeper deflation, and now €1.1 trillion deeper in debt. While banks can grow their reserves.

And it’s not as if Draghi doesn’t understand. Draghi is Goldman. And neither is it as if this is the only option. Steve Keen’s modern version of a debt jubilee, in which money is given directly to the people, under the condition that they first use it to pay off debt if they have any, would be much more effective. But it would be far less profitable for the banks, and that’s why it’s not considered. China yesterday announced a third option: they will effectively raise salaries of government workers by 60%.

----Back to QE, or Draghi’s big swindle. I think Simon Jenkins at the Guardian had as good a go at it this morning as anyone:

QE For The Eurozone Is A Gigantic Confidence Trick. It Should Fool No One
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In better news for most.

Oil Slides to Near 6-Year Low; Saudi Arabia Holds Firm Despite Supply Glut

Jan 26, 2015 5:21 AM GMT
Oil fell to the lowest level in almost six years as signs that Saudi Arabia’s new king will maintain its production policy and rising U.S. crude stockpiles bolstered speculation that a global glut will persist.

Futures dropped as much as 2.7 percent in New York, extending a 6.4 percent slide last week. King Salman Bin Abdulaziz, who took over after the death of King Abdullah on Jan. 23, pledged to maintain the policies of his predecessor in a speech on Saudi national television. U.S. inventories climbed to 383.5 million barrels last month, the highest level for December since 1930, the American Petroleum Institute reported.
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We end for the day with yet more dodgy statistics from the “man-made global warning nutters,” who can only get to global warming by doctoring the statistics.  The whole article is well worth taking the time to read. Cui bono springs to mind.

Climategate, the sequel: How we are STILL being tricked with flawed data on global warming

Something very odd has been going on with the temperature data relied on by the world's scientists, writes Christopher Booker

Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”. The evidence on Notalotofpeopleknowthat, uncovered by Paul Homewood, was indeed striking.

Puzzled by those “2014 hottest ever” claims, which were led by the most quoted of all the five official global temperature records – Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) – Homewood examined a place in the world where Giss was showing temperatures to have risen faster than almost anywhere else: a large chunk of South America stretching from Brazil to Paraguay.

Noting that weather stations there were thin on the ground, he decided to focus on three rural stations covering a huge area of Paraguay. Giss showed it as having recorded, between 1950 and 2014, a particularly steep temperature rise of more than 1.5C: twice the accepted global increase for the whole of the 20th century.

But when Homewood was then able to check Giss’s figures against the original data from which they were derived, he found that they had been altered. Far from the new graph showing any rise, it showed temperatures in fact having declined over those 65 years by a full degree. When he did the same for the other two stations, he found the same. In each case, the original data showed not a rise but a decline.

Homewood had in fact uncovered yet another example of the thousands of pieces of evidence coming to light in recent years that show that something very odd has been going on with the temperature data relied on by the world's scientists. And in particular by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has driven the greatest and most costly scare in history: the belief that the world is in the grip of an unprecedented warming.

How have we come to be told that global temperatures have suddenly taken a great leap upwards to their highest level in 1,000 years? In fact, it has been no greater than their upward leaps between 1860 and 1880, and 1910 and 1940, as part of that gradual natural warming since the world emerged from its centuries-long “Little Ice Age” around 200 years ago.

This belief has rested entirely on five official data records.
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"For more than two thousand years gold's natural qualities made it man's universal medium of exchange. In contrast to political money, gold is honest money that survived the ages and will live on long after the political fiats of today have gone the way of all paper."

Hans F. Sennholz

At the Comex silver depositories Friday final figures were: Registered 66.61 Moz, Eligible 110.12 Moz, Total 176.73 Moz.   

Crooks and Scoundrels Corner

The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.

Today, what’s wrong with this? US “capitalism” 21st century style, and it’s not just the banksters and Goldmanites.

"God, no, we don't club baby seals. We club babies."

Goldmanite, quoted in The Times of London. November 8 2009.

Target's package for ex-CEO matches package for all 17,600 Canadian workers

Value of Gregg Steinhafel's 'walk-away' package estimated at $61M

CBC News Posted: Jan 22, 2015 12:56 PM ET Last Updated: Jan 22, 2015 1:19 PM ET
Social media readers had some snarky comments Thursday about reports that the former CEO of Target got a total severance and other benefits package worth about the same as the total amount being offered to all 17,600 of the chain’s Canadian employees who will soon be out of work as the company winds down its presence in Canada.

Target’s "employee trust" package for its Canadian workers, announced last week, amounts to $70 million ($56 million US). It’s designed to provide each worker with 16 weeks of pay.

Depending on who’s doing the calculation, the golden handshake handed to ex-CEO Gregg Steinhafel last May is in roughly in the same ballpark.

Fortune Magazine put the value of his total "walk-away" package, including stock options and other benefits, at $61 million US, including severance of $15.9 million.  

"I'm not normally one to jump on the anti-corporate bandwagon, but these numbers really put things in perspective," wrote Reddit user leafsfan_89 on a busy Reddit chat page.

"My next gig is to become a CEO of a company, fail miserably and collect millions," a Twitter user named Tim Parent tweeted Thursday morning.

The reference is to Steinhafel’s tenure at the helm of the troubled retailer. A year ago, Target suffered a massive data breach affecting 70 million U.S. customers.

Target’s ill-fated expansion into Canada also cost the company billions of dollars, prompting the new CEO and board to cut their losses and shutter all of the retailer’s 133 Canadian locations.
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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 December.

DJIA: +138 Up. NASDAQ: +247 Down. SP500: +198 Down.  

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