Baltic Dry Index. 600 +01 Brent Crude 65.15
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
We open this morning with Greece still in the Euro and still in the
dying, wealth destroying EUSSR. But will this be the week Athens is forced to
introduce capital controls and a Cyprus style Greek bank “bail-in”? Kicking the
can down the road, runs out of road in May for Greece. On current polls, the road runs out for the
UK on May 7 in the general election that no one seems to want to win. May is
shaping up to be a disastrous month for Europe.
Greece’s Day of Reckoning Inches Closer as Debt Payments Loom
Nikos Chrysoloras 10:01 PM
BST April 26, 2015
Greece will look for ways to assemble enough cash to pay its pensioners and
employees this week, after euro area finance ministers on Friday said
they won’t disburse more aid until bailout terms are met.Europe’s most-indebted state will use the deposits of local governments, cities and other funds to meet end-of month payments totaling over 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion). By doing so, they risk straining liquidity buffers, after households and companies withdrew almost 1.3 billion euros in savings last week, according to a person who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Greece has fought to unlock aid since striking a deal to extend its bailout program in February. The government has repeatedly expressed confidence that a deal was imminent, only to be rebuffed by euro-area officials seeking concrete steps. Last week was no different: days after Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said views were converging, his counterparts across the region hit him with a volley of criticism.
Greek bonds fell on Friday, sending yields on three-year notes up 144 basis points to 26.3 percent.
----The consensus at the International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington this month was increasingly that a Greek default would be systemically manageable, UBS Chairman Axel Weber told the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung.
The Governing Council of the European Central Bank may debate on May 6 whether to raise the haircut on Greek collateral posted against Emergency Liquidity Assistance, a decision that could worsen the country’s cash squeeze. ECB staff have already proposed increasing the discounts imposed on the securities banks post as collateral when borrowing emergency cash from the Bank of Greece.
State coffers may be further depleted on the same day when Greece needs to find 200 million euros for an International Monetary Fund payment.
Bleeding deposits and unable to access ECB’s regular financing operations while the bailout review remains stalled, Greek lenders currently rely on a 75.5 billion euro ELA lifeline.
The assistance is subject to weekly review by the ECB. Any reduction of the value of collateral that Greek banks pledge may mean the days of ELA are numbered, further increasing pressure on the government to make a choice between complying with creditors’ demands or imposing capital controls.
More
If Greece falls, no one wants their prints on the murder weapon
BRUSSELS |
(Reuters) - "We're going
bust." "No, you're not." "You're strangling us."
"No we're not." "You owe us for World War Two." "We
gave already."
The game of chicken between
Greece and its international creditors is turning into a vicious blame game as
Athens lurches closer to bankruptcy with no cash-for-reform agreement in sight.
Europe's political leaders and
central bankers and Greek politicians agree on only one thing: if Greece goes
down, they don't want their fingerprints on the murder weapon.
If Athens runs out of cash and
defaults in the coming weeks, as seems increasingly possible, no one wants to
be accused of having pushed it over the edge or failed to try to save it.
Greece's leftist government has
already identified its culprit of choice - Germany, Europe's main paymaster,
accused of having inflicted toxic austerity policies on Greeks, causing a
"humanitarian crisis".
Euro zone governments are
preparing the ground to blame the novice government of Prime Minister Alexis
Tsipras for having blustered, obstructed, failed to meet commitments and evaded
hard choices while Athens burned.
"We are doing everything we
can to save Greece from itself, but in the end, it's up to them," is the
message pouring out of Berlin, Brussels and IMF headquarters in Washington.
Tsipras and outspoken Finance
Minister Yanis Varoufakis tried at first to mount a coalition against Berlin,
touring France, Italy, Britain, Brussels and media studios after their
election. They found no allies outside the media.
Tsipras revived demands for
reparations for the Nazi German occupation of Greece in 1941-44, which his
government put at 279 billion euros ($303.5 billion) - more than its 240
billion euro bailout from the euro zone and the International Monetary Fund.
Berlin responded that it had
already compensated victims and a 1990 agreement with the four victorious World
War Two powers on German unification had put an end to war claims.
More
SNP candidates threaten to deliver 'Westminster's worst nightmare'
The SNP's next generation of prospective MPs launch attacks on the British way of governing as they pledge to avenge 'the way they've treated us for 300 years'
Tommy Sheppard, the SNP candidate
for Edinburgh East, made a rapturously-received speech to his party's
conference in April.
"When it comes to the 7th of
May, we shall get rid of the Labour Party in Scotland, and we shall put
backbone into the Labour Party in England. What has happened is a political
re-alignment of our country.
"It wasn't us that wanted to
be in the United Kingdom. They [the right-wing press] have a cheek to suggest
to people in Scotland that there is something illegitimate, something to be
questioned about the democratic choices they make.
"The next time we consult
the Scottish people on a government of their own will we're coming up the front
path.
"On the 18th September we
sent the British Establishment a message and we gave them a shock. On the 7th
of May we can visit upon them their worst nightmare.
"We can send from this
country a majority of people to the Palace of Westminster who will not dance to
the tune of the British Establishment, but instead who march to the rhythm of
the people of Scotland."
'It isn't just about this
government - it's about the British way of governing'
More
We end for the day
with a critical look at the new Apple Watch. Watch out best sums it up. Caveat
Emptor.
Company breaks open Apple Watch to discover what it says is 'planned obsolescence'
Saturday 25 April 2015
Tech repair and upgrade website iFixit
has claimed that the Apple
Watch won’t be a long term option for those hoping to continually upgrade
their device.CEO Kyle Wiens has always been a vocal critic of Apple’s obstructive policies on third parties fixing and upgrading iOS devices and his company provide an online “free repair guide for everything” where methods to repair or improve electronic devices are posted.
Tech repair and upgrade website iFixit has claimed that the Apple Watch won’t be a long term option for those hoping to continually upgrade their device.
CEO Kyle Wiens has always been a vocal critic of Apple’s obstructive policies on third parties fixing and upgrading iOS devices and his company provide an online “free repair guide for everything” where methods to repair or improve electronic devices are posted.
----“The S1 SiP [internal system in package] is encased in resin, and is further held in place by a mess of glue and soldered ribbon connectors. In short, basic component replacements look nearly impossible.”
More
"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
At the Comex silver
depositories Friday final figures were: Registered 62.64 Moz, Eligible 112.55
Moz, Total 175.19 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, Michael Lewis debunks the case against Mr
Sarao causing the “flash crash.”. Why prosecute Mr Sarao for “spoofing” and not
all of America’s home grown HFT spoofing industry? Sounds like a political
prosecution to me, and that’s not covered by the extradition treaty. But Mr Lewis
does a far better job of rebuttal than me.
Crash Boys
Apr 24, 2015 5:00 AM EDT By Michael Lewis
The first question that arises from the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission’s case
against Navinder Singh Sarao is: Why did it take them five years to bring
it?A guy living with his parents next to London's Heathrow Airport enters a lot of big, phony orders to sell U.S. stock market futures; the market promptly collapses on May 6, 2010; it takes five years for the army of U.S. financial regulators to work out that there might be some connection between the two events. It makes no sense.
A bunch of news reports have suggested that the CFTC didn’t have the information available to it to make the case. After the flash crash, the commission focused exclusively on trades that had occurred that day, rather than orders designed not to trade -- at least until some mysterious whistle-blower came forward to explain how the futures market actually worked. But this can’t be true.
Immediately after the flash crash, Eric Hunsader, founder of the Chicago-based market data company Nanex, which has access to all stock and futures market orders, detected lots of socially dubious trading activity that May day: high-frequency trading firms sending 5,000 quotes per second in a single stock without ever intending to trade that stock, for instance. On June 18, 2010, Nanex published a report of its findings.
The following Wednesday, June 23, the website Zero Hedge posted the Nanex report. Two days later the CFTC’s chief economist, Andrei Kirilenko, e-mailed Hunsader. “He invited me out to D.C. and I talked with everyone there (and I mean everyone -- including a commissioner),” Hunsader says. “The CFTC then flew out a programmer to our offices where we showed him how to work with our data. Took all of a day. We sent him back with our flash crash data, and that was pretty much the last we heard about that project.”
In October 2010, Hunsader was
still poring over data from the flash crash. “Between October 7 and October 14,
I noticed Sarao’s spoofing,” he says. Hunsader assumed it to be the work of an
algorithm of some large high-frequency trading firm -- as this sort of
deception had become common practice for big HFT firms. He told the CFTC about
it in a phone call -- but that they hadn’t discovered it already for themselves
surprised him.
“It’s important to know the CFTC
had our data, and the ability to use it in August 2010,” Hunsader says. “We
were focused on stocks (the CFTC does futures), so they should have seen it
right away.”
----They’ve been ridiculed in the news media and will no doubt soon be hauled before various congressional committees. They’ll have annoyed their colleagues at the Securities and Exchange Commission, who now look like even greater fools than they did before, for not bothering to mention in their report on the crash the various nefarious activities of algorithmic traders, and instead offering up as the primary cause of the crash a stupid mistake made by a money manager in Kansas. The authors of the SEC report either consciously ignored or did not bother to acquire from the CFTC a lot of accessible, and damning, information about what was happening in the U.S. stock markets the day of the flash crash. The world will now want to know why they did this. (And why we should not instantly listen to Paul Volcker and fold these two regulators into one.)
----Traders who seek to manipulate the U.S. stock market are meant to encounter resistance from the market itself. During the flash crash, Navinder Sarao apparently used Jon Corzine’s now defunct MF Global to place orders and clear trades. Why didn’t MF Global see what he was up to, or at least call him to ask him about it? There’s now a big business on Wall Street of firms renting out their HFT infrastructure to prop shops. Does that business depend on the brokers paying no attention to what their customers are doing? Do the big Wall Street firms that rent out their technology bear any responsibility for what their customers do with the weapons they've been given? For that matter, why don’t U.S. securities exchanges assume any responsibility for what happens on them?
Sarao’s manipulative orders were
placed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Why didn’t the CME notice what was
going on? Or did they notice, and simply not care, as the behavior was standard
practice for their high-frequency trading clients?
Then there is
the biggest question of all: How can a guy working from his parents’ house in
suburban England whose only actionable orders were to BUY stock market futures
cause such a sensational collapse in U.S. stocks? On the day of the flash
crash, Sarao never actually sold stocks. He was trying to trick the market into
falling so that he could buy in more cheaply. But whom did he fool with his
trick? Whose algorithms were so easily gamed that they responded to phony sell
orders by creating a crash? Stupidity isn’t a crime. Still, it would be
interesting to know who, at this particular poker table, on this particular
day, was the fool.
More
Solar & Related Update.
With events
happening fast in the development of solar power, I’ve added this new section.
Updates as they get reported. Stay tuned this week for Tesla.
Tesla Unveiling Not-So-Secret Battery Systems Next Week
We’ll guess a 5-kilowatt home unit and a 200-kilowatt commercial-scale battery
Eric Wesoff April 24, 2015
I would suggest that Tesla has already unveiled these battery products over the last three years. Tesla already has 97 energy storage projects in motion in California in 2015 alone. Judging from the California SGIP spreadsheet, Tesla offers a 5-kilowatt residential battery that is almost always paired with a PV system. The company has been installing hundreds of these systems in some form for years.However, Tesla has been booking an increasing number of commercial and government energy storage jobs ranging from 100 kilowatts to 1.5 megawatts. The large systems are just as often standalone batteries as they are paired with PV. In many cases, SolarCity, the nation's largest residential solar installer and financier, is coupling Tesla's battery-based energy storage hardware with its rooftop solar systems.
The big commercial projects appear to be a relatively new development and square with reports in Bloomberg that Wal-Mart has Tesla energy storage systems deployed at 11 California sites, along with a 1-megawatt battery at Cargill in Fresno, Calif.
In an interview late last year, Tesla's Director of Powertrain Business Development, Mateo Jaramillo, said, "Tesla has new industrial and residential units coming out next year at compelling price points." He also said he was disappointed to hear recent reports out of Germany that dismissed batteries as too expensive.
----Late last year, Peter Rive, the co-founder and CTO of SolarCity, said that the standard offering from SolarCity could eventually include storage. Rive added that the combination of solar and storage "won't look that much different for the customer," but that "the benefit to the customer will be that you will have a little backup power." Rive said, "One of the cool things about storage is that if you're already installing a solar system, the incremental cost of also getting a storage system installed is low." Rive sees this as being particularly true once storage systems are integrated into the same box as inverters.
He added, "Our approach is to basically look at all the things that would make solar more valuable and invest in those things. For example, increasing the capacity value of solar through a combination of load shifting, demand response and integrated storage could dramatically increase the value of solar."
Note that these batteries are not meant to get customers off the grid. Instead, they are intended to offer some relief from demand charges and to provide a little backup power.
Given these signals, we expect that next week's product announcement will look a bit like this.
More
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Tesla-Unveiling-Not-So-Secret-Battery-Systems-Next-Week
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished March
DJIA: +118 Down. NASDAQ: +209 Down. SP500: +161 Down.
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