Baltic Dry Index. 591 +07 Brent Crude 54.88
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood. For these few gold has been the asset of last resort."
Antony C. Sutton
It is do or die week for Greece in the dying EUSSR. And it’s Germany that gets to decide if it’s to be do or die. Right now Germany seems to be pushing for “Grexident,” which is probably best in Greece’s long term interests, but few in Greece see any short term gain in exiting the euro. They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t stay in the euro, so getting out from being a debt slave to Merkel et al, makes the greater sense. Default, devalue, reform, recover. But in increasingly fractious Europe, is the EU viable at all?
Greece Faces Decisive Week as Tsipras Is Set to Meet Merkel
10:00 PM GMT March 22, 2015
(Bloomberg) -- Greek Prime
Minister Alexis Tsipras is set to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel for the
second time in five days on Monday, at the start of a week that may prove
decisive for Greece’s future in the euro area.
The meeting in Berlin with the
leader of the biggest contributor to Greece’s stalled 240 billion-euro ($259
billion) bailout is a precursor to make-or-break decisions Tsipras faces as his
country’s financial predicament becomes ever more perilous. His government
needs to spell out economic measures it plans to undertake as early as this
week to unlock long-withheld aid payments that will keep the country afloat.
“I hope there’ll be a U-turn on
policies in Athens, but I maintain my view that if not, the Greek economy will
collapse and they’ll slip out of the euro zone into chaos,” said Erik Nielsen,
global chief economist at UniCredit AG. “The Greek government ought to
recognize that this is ‘endgame stuff.’’
Locked out of capital markets and with its coffers running dry, Greece is scraping the bottom of the barrel to pay pensions and salaries amid signs that it could run out of money by early next month. European leaders, including Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi pressed Tsipras at a March 19 meeting in Brussels to make good on a February accord and ‘‘present a full list of specific reforms’’ in the coming days before any further aid can be disbursed.
As Tsipras prepared for the meeting in Brussels, he wrote to Merkel that it will be ‘‘impossible’’ to service imminent debt obligations without short-term financial aid, the Financial Times reported Sunday, citing a March 15 letter seen by the newspaper.
More
Spain says no cash for Greece until reforms implemented: FT
MADRID(Reuters) - The euro zone will not make any cash payment to Greece until it has passed and implemented all the reforms Athens agreed on in February, Spain's Economy Minister Luis de Guindos told the Financial Times on Sunday.
The Spanish stance heaps pressure on Greece three days after it pledged to meet creditors' demands for a broad package of economic reform proposals within days to unlock the funds it needs to avoid stumbling out of the euro zone.
"We will see whether the list of reforms is comprehensive enough or not. (But) there will not be any disbursement before there is a real test that the reforms have been approved and implemented. That is the approach," de Guindos was quoted as saying.
"Nobody can violate the rules. It would be a failure for Greece or any other member to leave the euro. But it would be a similar, or even bigger, failure to breach our rules," he also said, adding that the Greek government should return to the policies of the previous center-right government.
More
Elsewhere in Europe, Switzerland pays back Uncle Scam in kind for
America’s repeated attacks on their banks. UK election uncertainty starts putting
a wobble into the UK economy. More signs
of a dying EUSSR. Anti Euro parties scored high percentages in local elections
in France and Spain.
Switzerland to take part in founding of AIIB bank
ZURICH, March 20
(Reuters) - Switzerland will participate
in the establishment of a new international development bank backed by China,
along with several other western European countries, the Swiss government said
on Friday.
The Alpine nation will become a
prospective founding member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB),
subject to approval by the existing signatories, the government said in a
statement.
Election uncertainty saps enthusiasm for UK investment
The upcoming Election raises fears over the UK's membership of the EU, and will create a volatile pound, as well as uncertainty in the markets
Investors have short attention
spans and they will already be moving on from last week’s Budget to the
election campaign it kicked off. The final act in the Coalition was anyway a
purely political confection, attempting to please as many different
constituencies as possible.
Markets responded positively to
the Chancellor’s self-congratulation, but the next few weeks could be more
challenging.
This election could have a bigger
impact on asset prices than any in living memory. The currency will most likely
bear the brunt of pre and post-election uncertainty, but equities and gilts
will be affected too.
It has become the conventional
wisdom that another hung parliament is the most likely outcome. What is less
well understood is the difficulty either main party may have in forming a
workable coalition. That’s because they are neck and neck in the polls while
the king-makers of 2010 are likely to win fewer seats this time.
According to HSBC, the most
likely two-party government could be Labour and the SNP, which brings obvious
constitutional challenges. Given these, it is entirely possible that either the
Conservatives or Labour may try to battle on as a minority government, with the
possibility of a second election within a year, as in 1974.
More
Liquidity crisis could spark the next financial crash
Traders warn of a global credit 'meltdown' if corporate bond markets don't improve
For Norval Loftus, chief
investment officer at Allegra Asset Management, trading corporate bonds is not
as easy as it used to be.
“It’s like night and day compared
with six or seven years ago,” the bond market veteran says. “There’s no
comparison. It’s even tougher than it was six or seven months ago. It’s getting
more and more difficult all the time.”
He is not alone. Investors across
corporate bond markets are finding it harder to buy and sell company debt. And
some investors are beginning to fear that the lack of liquidity will be the
spark that ignites the next crisis in financial markets.
Liquidity is generally taken to mean the ease with which an investor can quickly buy or sell a security without moving its price. As regulation of banks tightens, the liquidity, particularly of European and US credit markets, has evaporated, prompting a host of regulators and central banks to sound warnings about the difficult trading environment.
A rate hike by the US Federal Reserve, which would be the first since 2006, could trigger turmoil. Given the bond market is much larger than the equity market, and investors have piled into fixed income in recent years, fears are growing that when credit investors attempt to sell bonds en masse, the illiquidity in the market has the potential to cause a crisis of a similar magnitude to the credit crunch.
Last week, the Bank for International Settlements cautioned that liquidity was concentrating in the most readily traded securities and that “conditions are deteriorating in the less liquid ones”. A week earlier, Edwin Schooling-Latter, the Financial Conduct Authority’s head of market infrastructure, said that the scant liquidity in corporate bond markets warranted “careful regulatory monitoring”.
Perhaps the most arresting warning came last November, when the International Capital Market Association (ICMA) surveyed investors, analysts and traders of European corporate bonds and concluded that the common fear was that a “meltdown” of global credit markets had become unavoidable.
More
23 March 2015
France local elections: Conservatives hold off National Front
France's centre-right UMP party
and its allies have taken first place in the first round of local elections,
partial results show.
Projections suggest that the
far-right National Front - despite strong gains - came second with about 25% of
the vote, behind the conservatives on 31%.
President Francois Hollande's
governing Socialists came third with 20%.
Voters are electing
representatives in 101 departments, or counties, charged with issues like
schools and welfare.
The results mean the second round
on 29 March will see a run-off between the UMP and the FN in many
constituencies.
In the past, voters for rival
parties have combined in the second round to keep the far right out.
The poor results for the
Socialists follows on from their defeats in municipal and EU elections last
year.
More
Podemos storm into Andalusian parliament as Socialists fall short of majority
By James Badcock, Madrid 9:58PM
GMT 22 Mar 2015
Voters in Andalucia punished
Spain’s two major parties in Sunday’s regional election with a big drop for
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) as the Socialists (PSOE)
failed to secure a majority.
Two new parties, Podemos and
Citizens, have gained representation for the first time in Andalucia, where
unemployment stands at 34 per cent.
With 99 per cent of the votes
counted, the PSOE had won 47 seats, short of the 55 needed for a majority, and
the same number it won three years ago.
The PP, which won 50 seats in
2012, plummeted to 33.
Podemos had won 15, with Citizens
taking 9 and the United Left 5 seats.
Pablo Iglesias, the pony-tailed
leader of Podemos, tweeted his thanks to his supporters and Teresa Rodriguez,
leader of Podemos in Andalucia.
"We're on the way. Thank you
Andalucia, thank you Teresa Rodriguez, thank you supporters, for taking this
first step. Onwards. #Podemos22M."
"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 70.02 Moz, Eligible 104.85
Moz, Total 174.87 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
"Gold would have value if for no other reason than that it enables a citizen to fashion his financial escape from the state."
William F. Rickenbacker
Sunday 22 March 2015
The US economy is under threat because of its neglected infrastructure
Out of America: Public spending on roads, airports, bridges, railways and power grids is only half of Europe's, and some say the nation’s very prosperity is threatened
----Potholes are an unavoidable fact of life in climates such as Washington’s, of successive freezes and thaws, rainstorms and snowstorms, and God knows what corrosive chemicals slathered on the roads to keep them open. Indubitably though, there are now more potholes than ever. And they are a symptom of a far deeper crisis, one that some say threatens the very economic pre-eminence of America.
The way to eliminate potholes, or
at least diminish their number, is to keep the roads in good shape, with
regular resurfacing. But far less is being done than required. And the same
goes for the rest of the infrastructure in the US: not just roads, but ports
and airports, bridges, railways and power grids, those boring basics that keep
a country running. America, to believe the title of a recent television
documentary on the subject, is falling apart – literally.
Not so long ago the opposite was
true. The US was the shining future that had already arrived. It had the best
technology, the most modern cities, the fanciest cars, the most up-to-date
airports. The jewel in the crown was the interstate highway system, built in
the 1950s and 1960s to knit a continent together.
Alas, sooner or later, youthful
beauty fades. And so it is with America’s infrastructure. Many of those
projects date back to the immediate post-war years, even to FDR’s New Deal to
counter the Great Depression. More than half a century later, they’re in
desperate need of overhaul or replacement.
Surveys merely confirm America’s
relative slide. A World Economic Forum report ranking countries by
infrastructure puts America 25th (Britain came 24th while the winner, you might
have guessed, was Switzerland). In air transport, a field pioneered by the US,
the country has fallen to 30th – and anyone navigating New York’s grubby and
congested airports, or drab Dulles here in DC, would consider that assessment
flattering. Astonishingly, not a single major new airport has opened in the US
since Denver International in 1995.
Another report claims that almost
a third of America’s most important roads need major repair, while 70,000
bridges – one in nine – are deemed “structurally deficient”; in plain English,
unsafe. In Pittsburgh, a river city where bridges are all, the proportion is
one in five. A couple of times in recent years, these arid figures became
real-life disasters: when the bridge at Minneapolis over the Mississippi,
carrying Interstate I-35, collapsed in 2007, killing 13 people; and in 2013
when a bridge failed on I-5, the main Pacific coast highway, in Washington
state.
In a car-addicted country, rail
transport is inevitably something of a side-show. But that doesn’t explain why,
of the 14,000-plus miles of high-speed rail in operation around the world, not
a single mile is in the US – not even in the north-east corridor, where the
national rail company Amtrak actually owns the track between Washington, New
York and Boston, and where a high-speed link really would relieve congestion in
the country’s most crowded airspace. Of course, you’d have to do something
about railway stations too. Arriving at Penn Station in New York is to enter
the antechamber of Hades.
In sea transport as well, America
is losing ground. Ports on both Atlantic and Pacific coasts are scrambling to
be ready to accommodate the larger New Panamax container ships that will pass
through the expanded Panama Canal. But the two biggest, Los Angeles and nearby
Long Beach, which handle 40 per cent of US imports, are already desperately
congested, way behind the game.
It adds up to a pretty grim
picture. Since the 1960s, public spending on infrastructure, as a share of GDP,
has dropped to around half the European average and, the American Society of
Civil Engineers reckons, $3.6trn will have to be spent if the US is to catch
up. It’s a huge ask, for the federal government, the states and private
investors who will have to put up the money. But if not, the ASCE warns, the
price in terms of potential exports, jobs and personal income lost could be no
less high.
Morehttp://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-us-economy-is-under-threat-because-of-its-neglected-infrastructure-10125082.html
"We need only take our heads out of the sand to see clearly that interventionism not only has failed to provide the promised something-for-nothing, but has led to all sorts of undesirable consequences. Indeed, many are just beginning to realize that we are moving towards disaster even though we have been on a wrong heading for decades."Leonard Read
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished February
DJIA: +120 Down. NASDAQ: +213 Down. SP500: +169 Down.
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