Baltic Dry Index. 581 +03 Brent Crude 58.99
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
12.15 a.m. CQD (6
times) DE (this is) MGY (6
times) position 41.44 N. 50.24 W. La Provence and Frankfurt receive Titanic's
first distress signals. Titanic sends position to Frankfurt. Frankfurt
says "OK: stand by"
12.25 a.m. MGY (Titanic)
says CQD, Here (is my) corrected position 41.46 N. 50.14 W.
Require immediate assistance. We have collision with iceberg. Sinking. Can hear
nothing for noise of steam (engineers
releasing excess steam pressure from boilers to minimise
risk of explosion) Sent about 15 to 20 times to Ypiranga.
Today on the 103rd anniversary of the sinking of
the White Star Line RMS Titanic, its modern equivalent the (barely) independent
nation of Greece is sinking fast in its efforts to remain in the Eurozone. Each
event in its own way was unthinkable until it happened. Even today, marketeers
everywhere are still betting that the Greek government will fold at the last
minute, and bend to the diktats from Berlin. Only Greek bank depositors seem to
be betting the other way, and are removing their euro deposits in droves.
Below, yet another “last chance” meeting on Greece. Since
May would seem to be an impossible challenge to overcome, I suspect that the
Greek government is merely buying time to bring back the New Drachma, and
demonstrate to the Greek voters that it was not they who left the euro but
German Nazis in Berlin who forced them out for Germany’s own ends.
Greek Talks Resume Amid Concern Reform Deadline Won’t Be Met
7:58 PM BST April 14, 2015
Talks on resolving Greece’s financial deadlock resume Wednesday amid growing
creditor concern that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government won’t come up
with the reforms necessary to unfreeze aid by its self-imposed deadline of
April 24.The two sides are not moving closer to a deal, said an international official involved with the negotiations. The Greek government’s refusal to proceed with any privatizations, and its pledges to reverse labor-market reform, pension reform and budget savings can’t be accepted by the country’s creditors, the official said, asking not to be named as talks between the two sides are not public.
A Greek official wasn’t immediately available for comment.
As negotiations drag on, a further “crisis that would unsettle financial markets can’t be ruled out,” International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard said Tuesday. Greek stocks and bonds fell, with yields on the country’s 2017 notes rising the most in two months amid doubt that a solution will be reached by next week when euro-area finance ministers meet in Riga, Latvia to discuss the bloc’s most indebted state.
While leaving the euro would be “extremely painful” for Greece, “the rest of the euro zone is in a better position to deal with a Greek exit” than it has been previously, Blanchard said.
Greece’s government can use cash reserves of state enterprises, pension funds and local governments to stay afloat until May even if the Riga meeting is inconclusive, the international official said. Such a depletion of cash buffers would only make sense if the government’s final goal is to strike a compromise with creditors, the official said.
The European Central Bank increased the ceiling of emergency liquidity assistance available to Greek lenders to 74 billion euros ($79 billion) from 73.2 billion euros, people familiar with the matter said Tuesday. Greek banks have used about 70 billion euros of ELA so far, one of the officials said.
With a monthly bill of about 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) for pensions and salaries, Greek officials last week said they are targeting the finance ministers’ meeting as a deadline for approving new money. In the first two weeks of May alone, Greece must make payments to the IMF of nearly 1 billion euros.
More
Elsewhere, the IMF is preparing for “dollar shock” later
this year. Greece may be doomed no matter what outcome of decisions in the
EUSSR. The curse of John Connally on the rest of the world is finally coming
through.
“it’s
our currency, but it’s your problem.”
US Treasury
Secretary John Connally, on the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money 1971.
IMF fears 'cascade' of woes as Fed crunch nears
Dollar shock looms for emerging markets as Fed poised to raise rates much more sharply than markets expect
The United States is poised to
raise rates much more sharply than markets expect, risking a potential storm
for global asset prices and a dollar shock for much of the developing world,
the International Monetary Fund has warned.
The IMF fears a "cascade of
disruptive adjustments" as the US Federal Reserve finally pulls the
trigger for the first time in eight years, ending an era of cheap and abundant
dollar liquidity for the international system.
The Fed's long-feared inflexion
point is doubly treacherous because investors seem ill-prepared for what lies
ahead, and levels of dollar debt outside the US have reached an unprecedented
extreme. The Fund said future contracts are pricing in a "much
slower" pace of monetary tightening than the Fed itself is forecasting.
The crunch comes as the world
economy remains becalmed in 2015 with stodgy growth of 3.5pc, held back by
another set of brutal downgrades for Russia and string of countries in Latin
America. Emerging markets face a fifth consecutive year of slippage as they
exhaust the low-hanging fruit from catch-up growth and hit their structural
limits.
The IMF's World Economic Outlook
forecast that rich economies will clock up respectable growth of 2.4pc this
year after 1.8pc in 2014 as fiscal austerity fades and quantitative easing
lifts the eurozone off the reefs, but there will be no return to the glory days
of the pre-Lehman era.
"Potential growth in
advanced economies was already declining before the crisis. Ageing, together
with a slowdown in total productivity, were at work. The crisis made it
worse," said Olivier Blanchard, the IMF's chief economist.
"Legacies of both the
financial and the euro area crises — weak banks and high levels of public,
corporate and household debt — are still weighing on growth. Low growth in turn
makes deleveraging a slow process."
The world will remain stuck in a low-growth trap until 2020,
and perhaps beyond. The Fund called for a blast of infrastructure spending by
Germany and others with fiscal leeway to help break out of the impasse.
The report said markets may have
been lulled into a complacency by the lowest bond yields in history and a
strange lack of volatility, seemingly based on trust that central banks will
always come to the rescue. Any evidence that the fault lines of the global
financial system are about to be tested could "trigger turmoil", it
warned.
More
We close for the day with Bloomberg on oil and the
dollar. It looks like trouble directly ahead, but don’t let on to CNBC
bubblevision. In the upcoming UK election no one seems to want to win, both
major parties seem to want the other party to win.
Look Who’s Not Buying The Dips: Oil-Rich Nations Dumping Petrodollar Assets at Record $200 Billion Pace
by Bloomberg Business •
Now that oil prices have dropped
by half to $50 a barrel, Saudi Arabia and other commodity-rich nations are fast
drawing down those “petrodollar” reserves. Some nations, such as Angola, are
burning through their savings at a record pace, removing a source of liquidity
from global markets.
If oil and other commodity prices
remain depressed, the trend will cut demand for everything from European
government debt to U.S. real estate as producing nations seek to fill holes in
their domestic budgets.
“This is the first time in 20
years that OPEC nations will be sucking liquidity out of the market rather than
adding to it through investments,” said David Spegel, head of emerging markets
sovereign credit research at BNP Paribas SA in London.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest
oil producer, is the prime example of the swiftness and magnitude of the
selloff: its foreign exchange reserves fell by $20.2 billion in February, the
biggest monthly drop in at least 15 years, according to data from the Saudi
Arabian Monetary Agency. That’s almost double the drop after the financial
crisis in early 2009, when oil prices plunged and Riyadh consumed $11.6 billion
of its reserves in a single month.
The International Monetary Fund
commodity index, a broad basket of natural resources from iron ore and oil to
bananas and copper, fell in January to its lowest since mid-2009. Although the
index has recovered a little since then, it still is down more than 40 percent
from a record high set in early 2011.
Oil futures in New York traded at
$52.78 a barrel today, 49 percent lower than a year ago.
Reserves Drop
A concomitant drop in foreign
reserves, revealed in data from national central banks and the IMF, is
affecting nations from oil producer Oman to copper-rich Chile and
cotton-growing Burkina Faso. Reserves are dropping faster than during the last
commodity price plunge in 2008 and 2009.
In Angola, reserves dropped last
year by $5.5 billion, the biggest annual decline since records started 20 years
ago. For Nigeria, foreign reserves fell in February by $2.9 billion, the
biggest monthly drop since comparable data started in 2010.
More
12.50
a.m. Titanic calls CQD and says, "I require immediate assistance. Position
41.46 N. 50.14 W." Received by Celtic.
12.53.a.m.
Caronia to MBC (Baltic)
and SOS,"MGY (Titanic)
CQD in 41.46 N. 40.14 W. Wants immediate assistance."
At the Comex silver
depositories Tuesday final figures were: Registered 62.97 Moz, Eligible 110.74
Moz, Total 173.71 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
1.30 a.m. Titanic tells Olympic, "We are putting passengers off in small boats." "Women and Children in boats, can not last much longer"
Hillary Clinton: Class President Of A Failed Generation
by David Stockman • April 13, 2015
Hillary Clinton has always been at the head of her class. That includes
being among the leading edge of the 80-million strong baby boom generation
that first started arriving in 1946-1947.She did everything they did: Got out for Barry Goldwater in high school; got upwardly mobile to Wellesley and social liberation during college; got “Clean for Gene” and manned the anti-war barricades in the late 1960s; got to Washington to uplift the world in the 1970s; got down to the pursuit of power and position in the 1980s; joined the ruling class in the 1990’s; and has helped make a stupendous mess of things ever since.
The baby boom which started with so much promise when it came of age in the 1960s has ended up a colossal failure. It has turned America into a bloody imperial hegemon aboard and a bankrupt Spy State at home where financialization and the 1% thrive, half the populations lives off the state and real main street prosperity has virtually disappeared from the land.
Quite a deplorable legacy, that. And all the while Hillary has been our class president. God help the world if she becomes our nation’s President. She has betrayed all that was right about the baby boomers in the 1960s; and has embraced all the wrong they did during their subsequent years in power.
It starts during our defining moment when peace finally had a chance in the spring of 1968. We drove a sitting President from office, and, at that, one whose megalomaniacal will-to-power was terrifying.
We called bull on the cold war hysteria that had once put us under our desks at school and now claimed that peasants in far off rice paddies threatened our security. We stopped the Vietnam War cold, dented the Cold War deep and put the whole warfare state apparatus on the run—–the Pentagon, CIA, the generals and admirals, the military-industrial complex. Within a few years the real warfare state budget was down 40%
So it was an epochal chance to break the deadly cycle of war that had started a half-century earlier in the bloody trenches of northern France during the Great War; that had been rebooted for a future reprise in the vengeful folly of Versailles; that had been made inexorable by the rise of nationalism, statism, autarky and militarism during the 1930s; and that had been unnecessarily and dangerously extended by the clash of military machines that both victors refused to demobilize after they won the peace in 1945, supplanting the silence of the German and Japanese war guns with the nuclear nightmare of the Cold War.
More
1.45
a.m. Last signals heard from Titanic by Carpathia,
"Come as quickly as possible old man: the engine-room is filling up to the
boilers"
2.17
a.m. Virginian hears Titanic call CQ (call
to all ships) , but
unable to read him. Titanic's signals end very
abruptly as (if) power suddenly switched off.
2.58 a.m. SBA (Birma) thinks he hears Titanic so sends, "Steaming
full speed for you. Shall arrive you 6-0 in morning. Hope you are safe. We are
only 50 miles now."
3.28
a.m. La Provence to Celtic, "Nobody has heard
the Titanic for about 2 hours."
Titanic: The final messages from a stricken ship - BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17631595
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished March
DJIA: +118 Down. NASDAQ: +209 Down. SP500: +161 Down.
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