Baltic Dry Index. 554 -05 Brent Crude 57.57
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money."
Daniel Webster
We open today with oil news, where Citigroup
commodity analysts foresee the price of West Texas Intermediate oil dropping as
low as $20 a barrel. That would put the price to remote frackers somewhere
around $5 a barrel, far below the cost of lifting. If Citi’s gurus are even
halfway right, America’s frackers are facing a wipe-out. Short Texas, short
Colorado, short Canada, short Dakota, short Scotland, short Venezuela, and just
about every other producer of oil on the planet outside of Arabia. At $20
dollar crude a global oil industry that planned on $100, faces massive destruction.
The “Green” energy, electric vehicle, brigade, get totally nuked too.
Oil may drop by more than $30 a barrel from current levels, says Citi
Published: Feb 9, 2015 6:00 p.m. ET
Citi sees potential for $20 oil price bottom,
slashes 2015 estimates
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Crude-oil futures have been mounting a come
back, lately. But not everyone believes this rally is a legitimate rebound for the beaten-down commodity. .
In a note Monday, analysts at Citigroup raised the possibility that West Texas Intermediate oil prices may fall to as low as the $20 range. Prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange already suffered a loss of 46% last year.
Year to date, crude-oil prices CLH5, -1.49% have posted a decline of less than 1%, after gaining nearly 9% in the past three sessions.
----The oil market should bottom sometime between the end of the first quarter and beginning of the second quarter, with oversupply being a key factor, Citi analysts said.
“It’s impossible to call a bottom point,” Ciit notes. But that didn’t stop them from trying. Nymex oil hasn’t settled at the $20 level since 2002.
Crude-oil prices on Monday didn’t appear to be rattled by the bearish Citi call, as West Texas Intermediate oil for March delivery rose 2.3% on Monday to close at $52.86. At that level, oil would have to shed about $32 to fulfill Citi’s most dire predictions.
Citi also cut its forecast for 2015 WTI oil prices to $46 a barrel from a previous forecast of $55, and reduced its 2015 estimate for Brent crude to $54 a barrel from $63.
More
Drillers Take Second Crack at Fracking Old Wells to Cut Cost
12:00 AM WET February 10, 2015
(Bloomberg) -- Beset by falling
prices, the oil industry is looking at about 50,000 existing wells in the U.S.
that may be candidates for a second wave of fracking, using techniques that
didn’t exist when they were first drilled.
New wells can cost as much as $8
million, while re-fracking costs about $2 million, significant savings when the
price of crude is hovering close to $50 a barrel, according to Halliburton Co.,
the world’s biggest provider of hydraulic fracturing services.
While re-fracking offered mixed
results in the past, earning it the nickname “pump and pray,” the oil crash is
forcing companies to pursue new technologies to produce oil more cheaply.
Analyzing reams of data from older wells has become a key piece of the puzzle,
identifying the best candidates for re-fracking instead of picking them simply
at random, said Hans-Christian Freitag, vice president of integrated technology
at Baker Hughes Inc.
“You want to talk about the next
step to increasing production without increasing costs?” said Carl Larry,
Houston-based director of oil and natural gas at Frost & Sullivan, a
consulting firm. “Re-fracking looks great.”
----While fewer new
wells would seem to mean less total fracking, the re-fracking phenomenon means
there won’t be as big a reduction as some had expected.
More
Oil Jobs Start Drying Up
4:39 PM WET February 9, 2015
It's been a Spindletop-like
five years for the American oilman. As fracking
projects mounted from the expanse of south Texas to North Dakota's Drift
Prairie, hiring did too.Last year, about 198,000 workers were employed in oil and gas extraction, the most since 1987. Another 325,500 were working in the industry's support services, the most since the Labor Department began tracking those figures in 1990. Combined, some 523,500 were on company payrolls in 2014, more than twice the number a decade earlier.
That's likely to change this year.
A report last week from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas showed 20,193, or 38 percent, of the 53,041 announced job cuts in January were in the energy industry. Oilfield service company Schlumberger last month said it will eliminate 9,000 jobs; Baker Hughes and Halliburton have said they expect to cut 7,000 and 1,000 positions, respectively. Not all of those will occur in the U.S., and the Challenger announcements have to be taken with a grain of salt because they include foreign affiliates of American companies. Also, many job cuts are carried out through early retirement and some may not even occur at all.
Still, exploration and production customers have so far slashed spending budgets by as much as 30 percent for this year, Halliburton CEO Dave Lesar said in January, and that doesn't bode well for the industry's employment picture.
More than 37 percent of the announcements in January originated from the nation's No. 1 oil-producing state -- Texas. Mine Yucel, head of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said last month that 140,000 Texas jobs directly and indirectly tied to energy will be lost this year if oil stays near $50 a barrel.
More
And in the Greek tragedy, more bluff an bluster
from all sides. Will Germany really be the nation that puts an end to the
Bilderberger EUSSR? Will Greece really use the nuke option. I have no idea
either, but stay long fully paid up physical precious metals held outside of
the banking and financial systems. If/when this game of bluff goes wrong
Germany may rue the day that it couldn’t get its gold back from Uncle Scam.
Greece's leaders stun Europe with escalating defiance
"The euro is like a house of cards. If you pull away the Greek card, they all come down,” says Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister
Greece’s finance minister Yanis
Varoufakis has spelled out the negotiating strategy of the Syriza government
with crystal clarity.
“Exit from the euro does not even
enter into our plans, quite simply because the euro is fragile. It is like a
house of cards. If you pull away the Greek card, they all come down,” he said.
“Do we really want Europe to
break apart? Anybody who is tempted to think it possible to amputate Greece
strategically from Europe should be careful. It is very dangerous. Who would be
hit after us? Portugal? What would happen to Italy when it discovers that it is
impossible to stay within the austerity straight-jacket?”
“There are Italian officials – I
won’t say from which institution - who have approached me to say they support
us, but they can’t say the truth because Italy is at risk of bankruptcy and they
fear the consequence from Germany. A cloud of fear has been hanging over Europe
over recent years. We are becoming worse than the Soviet Union,” he told the
Italian TV station RAI.
This earned a stiff rebuke from
the Italian finance minister, Pier Carlo Padoan. “These comments are out of
place. Italy’s debt is solid and sustainable,” he said.
Yet the point remains.
Deflationary conditions are causing interest costs to rise faster than nominal
GDP in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, automatically pushing public debt ratios
ever higher.
Berkeley economist Barry
Eichengreen warns that Grexit would be “Lehman squared”, setting off a
calamitous chain reaction with worldwide consequences. Syriza's gamble is that
the EU authorities know this, whatever officials may claim in public.
Premier Alexis Tsipras is pushing
this to the wire. Rightly or wrongly, he calculates that Greece holds the trump
card – the detonation of mutual assured destruction, to borrow from Cold War
parlance – and that all the threats from EMU power centres are mere bluster.
His cool nerve has caught
Brussels, Frankfurt, Berlin, and the markets off guard. They assumed that this
40-year neophyte would back away from exorbitant demands in his landmark policy
speech to the Greek parliament on Sunday night. Instead they heard a
declaration of war.
He vowed to implement every
measure in Syriza’s pre-electoral Thessaloniki Programme “in their entirety”
with no ifs and buts. This even includes a legal demand for €11bn of war
reparations from Germany, a full 71 years after the last Wehrmacht soldier left
Greek soil.
There is no possible extension of
Greece’s bail-out programme with the EU-IMF Troika, for that would be an
“extension of mistakes and disaster”, a perpetuation of the debt-deflation
trap. “The People have abolished the Memorandum. We will not negotiate our
sovereignty," he said.
----The speech puts Greece on a collision course this Wednesday with Eurogroup finance ministers, who are having great trouble coming to terms with the election of the first radical Left government in Western Europe since the Second World War. Nor are they listening to what Syriza is actually saying.
Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the
Eurogroup’s chairman, issued an ultimatum last week that this week’s meeting is
the final chance for Greece to puts its Troika programme back on track. The
implicit threat is clear. Should Greece refuse, over €60bn of liquidity support
from the European Central Bank for the Greek financial system will be cut off
on 28th February, forcing the country out of EMU in short order.
“We don’t do bridge loans,” said
Mr Dijsselbloem.
More
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie"
Jean-Claude Juncker. Failed Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar. EC President.
At the Comex silver depositories Monday final figures were: Registered 67.89
Moz, Eligible 108.71 Moz, Total 176.60 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
China January inflation hits five-year low
BEIJING(Reuters) - China's annual consumer inflation hit a five-year low in January while factory deflation worsened, underscoring deepening weakness in the economy and heaping pressures on policymakers to inject more stimulus to underpin growth.
The risk of deflation is rising for the world's second-largest economy as a property market downturn and widespread factory overcapacity have been compounded by an uncertain global outlook and falling commodity prices.
A collapse in global oil prices have already unleashed a wave of easings around the world as central bankers from Europe to Canada to Australia sought to defuse the deflationary pressures and bolster their economies.
And more policy support is expected from Beijing after the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday that China's consumer price index rose 0.8 percent in January year-on-year, undershooting expectations of a 1.0 percent rise and marking the weakest reading since November 2009.
"Today's data confirmed the economic slowdown in January, while intensifying disinflation will weigh further on firms' profit margins," said Julia Wang, Greater China economist at HSBC.
"This increases the need for further monetary easing. We continue to expect another 25bps cut to the policy rate in Q1."
Analysts also said that factory deflation remains a big worry.
The data showed producer price index dropped 4.3 percent in January from a year earlier, worse than a 3.8 percent fall expected by analysts and extending factory deflation to nearly three years. Price cuts have sapped profitability of Chinese manufacturers.
"The PPI really shocked us," said Zhu Qibing, a macro-strategist at Minzu Securities in Beijing.
More
"Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the 'hidden' confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights."
Alan Greenspan
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished January
DJIA: +124 Down. NASDAQ: +220 Down. SP500: +178 Down.
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