Baltic Dry Index. 597 +01 Brent Crude 63.31
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is".
The South Sea Bubble 1720
While we all wait for Greece to collapse, without disturbing the EUSSR,
ECB, or stocks and bonds of course, over in China a different sort of collapse
is underway. With all news now being “good news” buy more of course. The
talking chair will bail us all out in due course. Stay long fully paid up
physical gold and silver, as insurance against the day the
Greenspan-Bernanke-Yellen Put doesn’t work or China’s bubble bursts.
Does the Collapse of a Chinese Developer Signal the Start of More Defaults?
8:10 PM BST April 20,
2015
Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd.
captivated Wall Street by minting fortunes from troubled real estate in China.
Now the developer is in trouble
itself -- and the question is how far the pain will spread.
On Monday, the news came that
many had been dreading for months: The company, caught up in an anti-corruption
probe, is buckling under its debts as a slumping real estate market weighs on
the entire Chinese economy. After missing $52 million in interest payments,
Kaisa, once a stock market darling, now confronts an uncertain future.
It’s a remarkable comedown for a
company that burst onto the scene in 2007 as billions poured into Chinese real
estate. Its troubles, long in coming, have set investors on edge and have many
asking if Kaisa is a one-off or the start of something worse. Just last week,
Standard & Poor’s warned that “more defaults cannot be ruled out,” saying
it’s concerned profitability in the Chinese property sector is faltering.
“More than one big developer is
going to go under,” said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan
who examines legal issues in corporate and sovereign debt restructuring
efforts. “Busts follow booms. There’s no reason for it to be any different in
China.”
While reaction to the default was
muted in Chinese markets on Tuesday, the saga has sparked jitters among the
country’s corporate bond investors on multiple occasions over the past several
months.
---- Kaisa’s
benchmark dollar bonds, meanwhile, are hovering at prices that show investors
anticipate the company will saddle them with losses of more than 40 percent
when a restructuring offer is made. Its stock has been suspended in Hong Kong
since March 31 after sinking 48 percent in four months.
The default, the first ever in the $43.2 billion market for dollar bonds issued by Chinese developers, is in part emblematic of the nation’s weakening real estate sector. The slump has helped drag down China’s annual economic expansion to the slowest pace since 1990 after serving as a key engine of outsized growth rates over the past five years.
Companies in other industries have found themselves in trouble too. Coking-coal importer Winsway Enterprises Holdings Ltd., for instance, missed a bond interest payment this month and water-treatment company Sound Global Ltd. flagged potential audit issues.
More
China's stock market is now so big its computers can't handle all the numbers
Shanghai Stock Exchange's trading turnover exceeds 1 trillion yuan but software wasn't designed to report numbers that high
By Reuters 12:44AM BST 21 Apr
2015
China's stock trading fever has
made the Shanghai Stock Exchange the world's biggest in terms of turnover,
surpassing the New York Stock Exchange, but the explosion in volumes has
exceeded the ability of the exchange's software to report it.
The exchange's trading turnover
exceeded 1 trillion yuan (£108.24bn) for the first time on Monday, but the data
could not be properly displayed because its software was not designed to report
numbers that high.
"This is a software
configuration issue, not a technical glitch," the Shanghai Stock Exchange
said in a statement, adding that trading and price quotes for individual stocks
were not affected.
The exchange said it would need
to replace its current software files that handle volume reporting to resolve
the issue.
China's stock market has nearly
doubled over the past six months on hopes of monetary easing, with the
world-beating performance luring retail investors who have been opening
accounts at a record pace.
Morehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/11551142/Chinas-stock-market-is-now-so-big-its-computers-cant-handle-all-the-numbers.html
Greece Makes It Expensive to Hedge European Stocks
5:00 AM BST April 21,
2015
While U.S. stock traders breathed a sigh of relief after Friday’s selloff,
their counterparts in Europe are still on edge as drama unfolds in Greece.A gauge of anxiety in Euro Stoxx 50 options jumped to the highest level in more than 12 years relative to a similar volatility measure in U.S. equity derivatives. The divergence reflects rising costs for hedges to protect gains in Europe even as its benchmark equity gauge sits about the same distance from a record as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.
Concern is growing among traders who see the deadlock between Greece and its creditors threatening European equities’ fourth straight month of gains. Investors piled into European stock options late last week on speculation the region’s rally will prove tenuous as time ticks away with no negotiations.
“The danger to the markets is that Greece says we’ve had enough, we’re going to jump out of the euro, or default on our debt, or both,” Randy Frederick, managing director of trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab Corp., said by phone. “Clearly the concern is that the impact of that could be much greater in Europe.”
The VStoxx Index, a measure of expected volatility for European shares, soared 43 percent to 25.06 last week. The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, derived from S&P 500 hedging costs, climbed 10 percent in that same period to 13.89. The European volatility index closed 1.8 times above its U.S. counterpart on Friday, the highest ratio since December 2002.
More
"When paper money systems begin to crack at the seams, the run to gold could be explosive."
Harry Browne
At the Comex silver
depositories Monday final figures were: Registered 62.64 Moz, Eligible 112.99
Moz, Total 175.63 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, a leading US bond Barron, gets his warning
of mayhem ahead on the record. But he’s talking 2018-2019. I think he’s talking
out of his hat. I think trouble comes long before 2018-2019.
"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
Jeff Gundlach issues ominous warning for junk-bond market
Published: Apr 20, 2015 10:43 a.m. ET
High-yield corporate bonds may
present the next financial crisis for markets, says the man known as one of the
barons of the bond world.
“The worry is that interest rates
could start rising a few years from now and when rates start to rise, the quest
for yield will cool down, because that’s what’s driving a lot of investment
activity,” Jeffrey Gundlach, chief investment officer and founder of investment
firm DoubleLine Capital, told Wall Street Week on Sunday.
Gundlach said the problem with
the rollover calendar for many parts of the junk bond, corporate bond, market
and bank-loan markets, is that maturation dates will hit in 2018 and 2019. And
many individual retail investors are exposed to these bonds via exchange-traded
funds and mutual funds.
“The risk is there could be a run
on the bond funds, causing further downward price movement. A lot of investors
don’t like Treasurys. They’ve been searching for yield and throwing caution to
the wind,” said Gundlach. With higher rates, the scramble for yield diminishes
because investors can garner relatively richer returns with less risk, and that
may lead to widening spreads on high-yield bonds.
He added that investors may think
that what happened in 2013, when the Treasury market fell during the taper
tantrum and junk bonds held up and delivered decent returns, is normal and
repeatable.
“They wouldn’t just go up like
Treasury rates, they’d go up even more than Treasury rates, causing price
losses that aren’t expected and means high yields could suddenly be hundreds of
basis points higher in yields,” said Gundlach.
If free cash flow for companies
rolling over those maturities isn't improving in line with those higher
interest payments, investors could see default rates “out of the context of the
4% market average over the last three decades.”
More
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jeff-gundlach-issues-ominous-warning-for-junk-bond-market-2015-04-20?dist=tcountdown
"The paper standard is self-destructive."Hans F. Sennholz
Solar Update.
With events
happening fast in the development of solar power, I’ve decided to create a new
section. Updates as they get reported.
New device combines the advantages of batteries and supercapacitors
By Dario Borghino April 19, 2015
Scientists at UCLA's California
NanoSystems Institute have developed a new device that combines the high energy
densities of batteries and the quick charge and discharge rates of
supercapacitors. The hybrid supercapacitor is reportedly six times as
energy-dense as a commercially available supercapacitor and packs nearly as
much energy per unit volume as a lead-acid battery.
Batteries can store a lot of
energy in a small and light package, but they can’t charge or discharge very
quickly or last a long time the way supercapacitors can. A single device that
combines all of these positive attributes could change the entire technological
landscape of today, leading to lighter, compact phones and electric cars that
charge in seconds instead of hours.
Professor Richard Kaner and Dr.
Maher El-Kady have made an important step in this direction by creating a high-performance
hybrid supercapacitor. Like other supercapacitors, their device charges and
discharges very quickly and lasts more than 10,000 recharge cycles. But,
according the scientists, their invention also stores six times more energy
than a conventional supercapacitor, holding more than twice as much charge as a
typical thin-film lithium battery in one fifth the thickness of a sheet of
paper.
The amount of energy that can be
stored in such a device depends in large part on the contact area between the
electrolyte and the two electrodes: the greater the contact area, the more
energy can be stored. Previous hybrid supercapacitors used porous structures in
the electrode to maximize this area, but the pores were simply too big, and
therefore too few, bearing relatively little effect on performance.
Kaner and El-Kady used manganese
dioxide (a material used for alkaline batteries) for the electrodes, but also
added a special three-dimensional laser-scribed graphene (LSG) structure.
Crucially, this graphene structure was specifically designed for high
conductivity, porosity and surface area, allowing the device to pack much more
energy per unit volume and mass.
----According to the researchers,
the supercapacitors can reach energy densities of up to 42 Wh/l, compared with
7 Wh/l for state of the art commercial carbon-based supercapacitors. Their
device also provides power densities up to around 10 kW/l, which is 100 times
more than lead acid batteries and on the higher end of performance for
commercial supercapacitors.
"The LSG–manganese-dioxide
capacitors can store as much electrical charge as a lead acid battery, yet can
be recharged in seconds, and they store about six times the capacity of
state-of-the-art commercially available supercapacitors," says Kaner.
Supercapacitors are usually
stacked on top of each other and packaged into a single unit, but the
researchers have been able to take advantage of the thinness of their device by
integrating it inside a solar cell array. In this application, it was found
that the supercapacitor could quickly store electrical charge generated by a
solar cell during the day, hold the charge until evening, and then power an LED
overnight.
This is just one of many
potential uses for the technology.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished March
DJIA: +118 Down. NASDAQ: +209 Down. SP500: +161 Down.
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