Baltic Dry Index. 553 -03 Brent Crude 54.97
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
“Bank of England Governor Mark
Carney urged the G20 to mount a “big push” to implement global
regulatory reforms, fearing that governments may be tiring of non-stop
rule-making since the financial crisis six years ago.”
Ex-Goldmanite, BOE Governor,
Canadian, Keynesian, Mark Carney.
With idiots like Mark Carney in charge of our
central banks, who needs Syriza and other communist fellow travellers? Who in
their right mind “fears” the end of “non-stop rule-making.” Where in the world
does the Goldman factory get its endless stream of clueless Mario’s and Mark’s,
and why does it shape them into wealth destroying, QE, ZIRP, and NIRP, fiat
currency horsemen from the Apocalypse? Did “non-stop rule-making” Mark, play
hockey too long in Canada without a helmet?
The G-20’s Istanbul Confab—-A Colossal Waste Of Taxpayer Money On Pointless “Growth” Schemes
by Pater Tenebrarum • February 9,
2015
Apparently, the G 20 are meeting
in Istanbul to discuss the same thing they discussed last time around, namely how
assorted government minions can supposedly “create economic growth”. The
crucial problem with this notion is of course that they can’t.
Growth is the result of
entrepreneurs seeking to serve their fellow human beings by engaging in
profitable business. Profits – ephemeral though they are – represent proof that
a business is providing a valuable service. There is only one small caveat to
this: profits that are the result of privileges bestowed by the State (whether
in the form of monopoly grants, tariffs, the sanctioning of direct breaches of
property rights, etc.) are an exemption from this general rule.
No government anywhere makes a
profit, and if one of them did produce a surplus, it would only indicate that
the revenue it obtains by coercion temporarily exceeds its spending by some
mistake.
----Reuters reports with not even the slightest trace of irony that “finance ministers and central bankers” are supposedly tasked with “spurring global growth”:
Finance ministers and central bankers face a tough task coordinating action to spur global growth at G20 meetings this week, with major economies running at different speeds and monetary policies diverging.
Concern over the ability of the United States to sustain the global economy as most of the world slows will be high on the agenda as the Group of 20 leading economies hold talks in Istanbul on Monday and Tuesday.
The meetings come as Greece casts a new shadow over Europe, cheap oil plays havoc with inflation and growth forecasts and a strengthening dollar threatens emerging economies.
“There is a lot at stake,” IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said in a blog post on Friday. “Without action, we could see the global economic supertanker continuing to be stuck in the shallow waters of sub-par growth and meager job creation.”
(emphasis added)
The burnt-to-a-crisp IMF leader might have considered using something else than this unfortunate shipping analogy. The real super-tankers are indeed stuck in what appear to be decidedly sub-par shallow waters:
----If we read one more time that “cheap oil plays havoc with inflation” we will probably throw something across the room. Of all the stupid memes the etatistes are routinely regaling us with, this one surely takes the cake (we suspect that the owners of ships receiving the charter rates currently indicated by the BDI are praying day and night that low oil prices will be “playing havoc” a little while longer).
More
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-g-20s-istanbul-confab-a-colossal-waste-of-taxpayer-money-on-pointless-growth-schemes/?utm_source=wysija&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mailing+List+AM+Tuesday
In other news, the rout in the global economy seems to be accelerating, despite the help coming from the collapse in commodity prices led by oil.
Chart Of The Day: Baltic Dry Index Hits All-Time Low
by Constantin Gurdgiev •
Readers of this blog would be familiar with the Baltic Dry Index and with its
importance in flagging up trends in global trade and, especially, in European
trade.Well, today, BDI has hit a historical low…http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/chart-of-the-day-baltic-dry-index-hits-all-time-low/?utm_source=wysija&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Mailing+List+AM+Wednesday
Next, yet more on the malinvestment madness of QE and ZIRP in Great Nixonian Error of fiat currencies run by insane Keynesian central bankster, Keynesian parasites.
"a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is".
The South Sea Bubble 1720
Bubble? Meet the $25 million grilled cheese truck
There are some time-honoured signs of an impending market top.One of them is that margin debt has peaked.
Another is that interest rates are going through the floor.
Another is that the velocity of money is also going through the floor.
Another is that Goldman Sachs’ Senior US Investment Strategist Abby Joseph Cohen reckons the stock market is relatively cheap, an opinion which she generously gave at a recent Barrons roundtable.
Barrons actually gave us two signs of a market top for the price of one (but then everything’s devalued these days) – their February 6th edition pointed out that the value of fine art sold at auction had quadrupled from $3.9 billion in 2004 to some $16.2 billion in 2014.
Barrons then tastefully offered readers a choice between the conclusions of malign ‘bubble’ and benign ‘boom’.
The problem is that in an environment of ubiquitous government manipulation, markets can trade at whatever levels central bankers want them to trade at, for a period at least.
So we’re not going to be rash enough to call a market top; we’ll merely draw attention to some anecdotal evidence of a certain, how shall we put it, irrational exuberance at work in the US stock market.
We tip our hat to the Wall Street Journal for the recent news that Carmine “Tom” Biscardi is on the hunt for Bigfoot, and is planning an IPO to fund the expedition:
“Mr. Biscardi and his partners hope to raise as much as $3 million by selling stock in Bigfoot Project Investments. They plan to spend the money making movies and selling DVDs, but are also budgeting $113,805 a year for expeditions to find the beast. Among the company’s goals, according to its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission: “capture the creature known as Bigfoot.”
“Investment advisers caution that this IPO may not be for everyone. For starters, it involves DVDs, a dying technology, said Kathy Boyle, president at Chapin Hill Advisors. Then there is the Sasquatch issue. She reckons only true believers would be interested in such a speculative venture.”
This is a wonderful instance of life imitating art. Note the similarities between the Bigfoot IPO and The Onion’s satirical market scoop from November 1999 (the date is instructive):
“LAKE ERIE—Seeking to capitalize on the recent IPO rage on Wall Street, Lake Erie-based blue-green algae Anabaena announced Tuesday that it will go public next week with its first-ever stock offering.
“Anabaena, a photosynthesizing, nitrogen-fixing algae with 1999 revenues estimated at $0 billion, will offer 200 million shares on the NASDAQ exchange next Wednesday under the stock symbol ALG. The shares are expected to open in the $47-$49 range.”
Markets are allowed their petty indiscretions, of course. But these petty indiscretions seem to be piling up.
Barry Ritholtz and Bloomberg last week drew attention to the fact that shares of The Grilled Cheese Truck Inc. had commenced trading on the OTCQX marketplace under the ticker GRLD:
“Let’s look at the fundamentals of the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida-based company. Based on the 18 million shares outstanding and a recent stock price of $6 the company has a market value of about $108 million.
No matter how much you like grilled cheese… I can’t see this as a reasonable valuation.
“If you go to the company’s website, you will learn that ‘The company currently operates and licenses grilled cheese food trucks in the Los Angeles, CA area and Phoenix, AZ and is expanding into additional markets with the goal of becoming the largest operator in the gourmet grilled cheese space.’
“[A]ccording to the company’s financial statements, it has about $1 million of assets and almost $3 million in liabilities. In the third quarter of 2014, it had sales of almost $1 million, on which it had a net loss of more than $900,000.”
“I can’t think of a more interesting sign of the old irrational exuberance in equity markets than a publicly traded grilled cheese truck (four in this case) business trading at a $100-million-plus valuation. That sort of thing doesn’t happen unless there is significant excess in the markets.”
Any reference to a company seeking to dominate the “gourmet grilled cheese space” is desperately seeking a twin reference to a slogan from late 1999 (right before the bubble burst):
“Our business strategy is to lose money on every sale but make up for it in volume.”
Enjoy the party, but dance near the door.
And rounding out this morning’s news in the arriving death throes of the Great Nixonian
Error of fiat money, which spawned Casino Capitalism and Central Banksterism.
Greece, euro zone fail to agree on debt, to try again on Monday
By Renee Maltezou and Jan
Strupczewski BRUSSELS
(Reuters) - Greece's new leftist government and its international creditors
failed to agree on a way forward on the country's unpopular bailout and will
try again on Monday, with time running out for a financing deal.In seven hours of crisis talks in Brussels that ended after midnight, euro zone finance ministers were unable to agree even a joint statement on the next procedural steps. Both sides played down the setback, insisting there had been no rupture.
But Greek stock prices, which whipped higher after hours in New York on talk of an accord, sagged with disappointment when it emerged that Greece's laconic new Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis had walked away from a draft deal to extend current credit terms after conferring with fellow Greek officials.
"We had an intense discussion, constructive, covering a lot of ground, also making progress, but not enough progress yet to come to joint conclusions," Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the chairman of Eurogroup finance ministers, told a midnight news conference.
"We didn’t actually go into detailed proposals, we didn’t enter into negotiations on content of the program or a program, we simply tried to work next steps over the next couple days. We were unable to do that."
Greece would have no further contact with experts from the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank before Monday, he said. That was the opposite of how other EU ministers understood they had left matters when they headed home an hour or so earlier.
More
Global Oil Layoffs Exceed 100,000
Bradley Olson 5:01 AM WET February 12, 2015
(Bloomberg) -- The promise of
plentiful jobs and salaries as high as a quarter-million dollars a year lured
Colombia native Clara Correa Zappa and her British husband to Perth, Australia,
at the height of the continent’s oil and gas frenzy. Engineers were in high demand in 2012, when oil prices exceeded $100 a barrel, making the move across the world a no-brainer. Within two years, though, oil plunged to less than half the 2012 price and Zappa lost her job as a safety analyst. Now she’s worried her husband, who also works in the commodities industry, could also lose his job.
Such anxieties are rising at a time when the number of energy jobs cut globally have climbed well above 100,000 as once-bustling oil hubs in Scotland, Australia and Brazil, among other countries, empty out, according to Swift Worldwide Resources, a staffing firm with offices across the world.
“It’s shocking,” Zappa, 29, said in a telephone interview. There is “so much pressure for him to keep his job and even work extra.”
Her concerns mirror those of tens of thousands of workers who migrated to oil and gas boomtowns worldwide in the years of $100-a-barrel crude, according to Tobias Read, Swift’s chief executive officer. While much of the focus on layoffs has centered on the U.S., where the shale fields that created the glut have seen the steepest cutbacks, workers in oil-related businesses across the globe are suffering, he said.
“The issue is one of uncertainty, of whether there’s a job out there,” Read said in a phone interview. “For seven years, there was a shortage of staff. Now for the first time, there’s a surplus. Currently almost no one is hiring.”
----The outlook isn’t brightening. After briefly rising above $50 this month, U.S. crude fell again Wednesday to settle at $48.84 a barrel. Citigroup Inc. said oil could drop to “the $20 range” by April as oversupplies build.
More
Goldman: Here's Why Oil Crashed—and Why Lower Prices Are Here to Stay
Too. Much. Oil.
8:37 PM WET February 11, 2015
Oil prices have gotten crushed
for the last six months. The extent to which that was caused by an excess of
supply or by a slowdown in demand has big implications for where prices will
head next.
People wishing for a big rebound may not want to read farther.
Goldman Sachs released an
intriguing analysis on Wednesday that shows what many already suspected: The
big culprit in the oil crash has been an abundance of oil flooding the market.
A massive supply shock in the second half of last year accounted for most
of the decline. In December and January, slowing demand contributed to the
continued sell-off. Goldman was able to quantify these effects.
Goldman’s model is simple on its
face, looking at just two variables over time: the price of oil and the value
of U.S. stocks (as measured by the S&P 500). The idea is that the stock
market is a pretty good indicator of economic demand. So when stocks move in
tandem with oil prices, demand is in the driver’s seat. When the price of oil
moves in the opposite direction of stocks, the shock is coming from supply.
It’s a bit more complicated than
that—for the statistically inclined, Goldman uses a “vector autoregression with
sign restrictions”—but you get the idea. In the following chart, they split
apart the effects of demand shocks (left) from supply shocks (right).
More
“Call
it the Goldman Sachs test. If this is something Goldman would do to its
clients, don't do it."
Felix
Salmon.
At the Comex silver depositories Wednesday final figures were: Registered 67.86
Moz, Eligible 108.34 Moz, Total 176.20 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, it’s those man-made global warming nutters
again. Yet again caught out rigging the data. Perhaps Barclays has a job for
them in setting LIBOR or fiat currency fixes.
“The world is a place that’s gone from being flat to round to crooked.”
Mad Magazine.
The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever
New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming
When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.
This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.
Following
my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather
stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious
one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global
Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official
surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the
National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate
temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are
taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely
for their belief in “global warming”.
Homewood
has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic,
between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again,
in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show
warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was
actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was
long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom
Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version
completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of
extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.
More
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
All things bright and beautiful.
The
bankster in his mansion,
The
Greeks at his gate,
Draghi
made them high or lowly,
He disordered
their estate.
With
apologies to All things bright and beautiful.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished January
DJIA: +124 Down. NASDAQ: +220 Down. SP500: +178 Down.
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