Baltic Dry Index. 516 +04 Brent Crude 58.81
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.
J. Edgar Hoover
Yesterday, the Fedster’s talking chair said the US economy was now so
good absent QE forever, but still on crisis panic level ZIRP, that the Fed had
lost patience with ZIRP and that we can expect a 25 point increase in the key US
interest rate any time from April. Marketeers yawned and bought more stocks.
The biggest bubble ever in the history of the world, i.e. US bonds, 34 years
and counting, may be about to burst later this year, but everyone and their dog
now expects the world’s central banksters to fix it, whatever happens.
Yellen Signals Fed’s Patience With Zero Interest Rate Has Limits
11:16 PM WET February 24, 2015
(Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve
Chair Janet Yellen signaled that the central bank’s patience with holding
interest rates near zero has its limits as she began laying the groundwork for
a possible increase in borrowing costs later this year.
While she made clear no rate
increase is imminent, she told the Senate Banking Committee that the economy is
on solid ground and she saw hints wages may be starting to pick up. Although
inflation is still too low for the Fed’s liking, she ascribed its recent
softness mainly to lower oil prices and said central bankers expect it to rise
gradually to its 2 percent target in the medium term.
“She opened the door for rate
increases in the second half of the year,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S.
economist at Barclays Plc in New York and a former Fed official.
The clearest sign of that shift
came with Yellen’s suggestion that the central bank might drop its pledge to be
“patient” in deciding when to begin tightening credit. That promise, which was
reiterated by policy makers last month, meant that a rate increase was unlikely
for “at least the next couple” of meetings, she said.
A modification of that pledge --
which Gapen said could occur next month -- wouldn’t lock the Fed into an
immediate rate rise, Yellen said. Instead, it would be a signal that liftoff
“could be warranted at any meeting.”
More
But if the economy’s so good, why iis confidence back in
negative territory? “Capitalism’s broken,” wailed disgraced fallen guru “bubbles”
Greenspan, all the way back in the mid 90s. We are all shortly to find out just
how broken.
U.S. Economic Confidence Index Back in Negative Territory
by Rebecca Riffkin February 24, 2015.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Gallup's U.S.
Economic Confidence Index fell to an average of -2 for the week ending Feb. 22.
This is the first time the index has had a negative
weekly average since late December. Prior to that, the index had
consistently been in negative territory since Gallup began tracking it daily in
2008.
The Economic Confidence Index fell five points from the week prior, the largest drop since July. The weekly index numbers are usually fairly stable, not changing more than a couple of points unless there is some significant event. It is not clear what is behind last week's decline in confidence, although quickly rising gas prices last week may have played a role -- given that the drop in gas prices coincided with the rise in confidence in late 2014. The index had more or less leveled off in early 2015 before this decline.
Gallup's Economic Confidence Index is the average of two components: how Americans rate current economic conditions and whether they say the economy is getting better or getting worse. Last week, both components dropped from the prior week, falling into negative territory.
More
In EUSSR news, how Greece was “fixed.”
The Reason Why The Eurogroup Rushed To Approve The Greek Reform Package?
Submitted by Tyler Durden on
02/24/2015 11:51 -0500
As we noted earlier today, there was some confusion over the plight of the
Greek reform proposal document, which initially was said to have been delayed
until today, only for the Troika, pardon, Institutions, to flip around and say
they had actually received it before midnight on Monday. How could the two be
possible? Courtesy of Yannis
Koutsomitis, who had the simple but profound idea of looking at the
properties tab in the leaked Varoufakis draft of the agreed to proposals, we
now know. As it turns out, the reason why not only the Troika received an agreed to version of the Greek reform proposals "before midnight on Monday", but rushed these through with a favorable agreement today, is that, drumroll, the European Commission drafted the entire letter!
All Yanis Varoufakis had to do was agree to the letter that the Troika had previously written and agreed in advance was agreeable to it, and send it back. The skeptics are encouraged to play around the original pdf "leak" found here.
As for the actual author of the "Greek" reform package, a document which was created at 10:09 pm on Monday, February 23, 2015 (so technically, yes, before midnight on Monday) was one Declan Costello of the European Commission.
Who is Declan? Here is his bio courtesy of the CEPR's Policy Portal, VOX:
----But the biggest joke in all this? As the
FT's Peter
Spiegel revealed, the IMF, which is an integral part of the Institutional
Troika, now pretends to not be on board with the very letter it helped
draft (and one doesn't need to believe the pdf story above for that: after all
all parties have said they cooperated over the weekend when drafting the final
version of the letter) just to give the process some aura of legitimacy.
More
We leave the
last word to David Stockman.
Kick-The-Can Has Morphed Into A Blatant Farce
by David Stockman •
Kick-the-can has morphed
into a blatant farce. Everywhere in the world central banks and financial
officialdom are engaging in desperate, juvenile maneuvers to buy
time—–amounting to hardly a few weeks at a go. Never before has the
debt-saturated, speculation-ridden global casino rested upon such a
precarious foundation.
This week, for instance, Janet
Yellen will again waste two days of Congressional hearings in
forked-tongue equivocations about an absolutely stupid issue. Namely,
the exact date when money market interest rates will be permitted to blip
upward from the zero bound by even 25 basis points.
But this “lift-off” drama is
flat-out surreal. How could it possibly matter whether ZIRP will have been in
place by 80 months or 83 months from its inception point way back in
December 2008? There is not a single household or business on main street
America which will change its behavior in the slightest during the next
year regardless of whether the federal funds rate is 5 bps, 30 bps or
130 bps.
The whole Kabuki dance in the
Eccles Building is about hand signals to Wall Street carry traders; its a
reflection of the desperate fear of our monetary politburo
that having inflated for the third time this century the mother of all
financial bubbles, they must now keep it going literally one meeting at a
time—lest it splatter again and destroy the illusion that an egregious spree of
money printing has saved the main street economy.
Likewise, it now transpires
that the bruising political war of words between the Germans and
the “radical” Greek government has been suspended for another few weeks.
And the reason is a pathetic fear that unites the parties despite their
irreconcilable substantive policy differences. Namely, that
the markets will crater upon even a hint that a real solution is on the
table, and that the way to keep the beast at bay is to cover their eyes,
kick-the-can and hope something turns up to avert the next crisis a few weeks
down the road.
Still, this is getting
beyond juvenile. If there were any adults in the room they would focus on
quickly shaping a workable Greek default and exit—-not
on perpetuating the lie that Greece can ever recover from its debt
servitude to the EU superstate and IMF.
Ironically, the fire breathing
leftists who have taken over in Athens have compliantly strapped on the
poodle collar left behind by the Samaras government. It seems that
their game-theory spouting Keynesian financial spokesman,
Yanis Varoufakis, also fears a thundering upset in the casino. So
the Syriza government stumbles forward——now visibly toting the
massive debt imposed on them by the Eurozone and IMF in order to bailout the
German, French and Italian banks.
Indeed, in a new variation
of the Stockholm syndrome, Syriza has not only embraced the views
of its debtor’s prison jailors, but has actually invited them
to secretly author their own attestations of subordination.
----This is all truly pathetic, but it
should be a reminder that there is no escaping the global regime of central
bank financial repression and state manipulation of debt saturated economies
and gambling-infested financial markets. It took Syriza all of four
weeks to hoist the white flag.
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 Tuesday final figures were: Registered 68.06
Moz, Eligible 108.33 Moz, Total 176.39 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, life in the city built on a hill. Chicago’s
roach motel.
“The Germans [your nation here] 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 disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site'
- Exclusive: Secret interrogation facility reveals aspects of war on terror in US
- ‘They disappeared us’: protester details 17-hour shackling without basic rights
- Accounts describe police brutality, missing 15-year-old and one man’s death
Tuesday 24 February 2015 21.43 GMT
The Chicago
police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering
Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what
lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.
Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:
- Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
- Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
- Shackling for prolonged periods.
- Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
- Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.
Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.
“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”
The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.
Unlike a precinct, no one taken
to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans
who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered
into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at
a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their
whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square
are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.
“It’s sort of an open secret
among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you
can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer
Julia Bartmes.
Chicago civil-rights attorney
Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious
practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of
the constitution.
“This Homan Square revelation
seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more
than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a
lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”
Much remains
hidden about Homan Square. The Chicago police department did not respond to the
Guardian’s questions about the facility. But after the Guardian published this
story, the department provided a statement insisting, without specifics, that
there is nothing untoward taking place at what it called the “sensitive”
location, home to undercover units.
More“Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.”
Edmund Burke
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished January
DJIA: +124 Down. NASDAQ: +220 Down. SP500: +178 Down.
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