Wednesday 29 April 2015

Strange Odds.



Baltic Dry Index. 600 Unch.       Brent Crude 62.64

LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000.  Revised due to QE programs.

The three supervolcano eruptions at Yellowstone – on the Wyoming-Idaho-Montana border – covered much of North America in volcanic ash. A supervolcano eruption today would be cataclysmic, but Smith says the annual chance is 1 in 700,000.

6 numbers are drawn at random from the set of integers between 1 and 49, which means there are 49!/(6!*(49-6)!) combinations of numbers (the draw order doesn't matter). The means that the [UK] jackpot chance is 1 in 13,983,816 or approximately 1 in 14 million.
lottery.merseyworld.com/Info/Chances.html

Less than 10 years ago, who would have thought that asset backed bonds could legitimately stop paying interest to the hapless Goldman Muppets that invested in them. Yet that is one of the ever more bizarre outcomes of our insane world of QE forever, ZIRP and NIRP in the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money, fuelling the central bankster asset bubbles. We are destroying the basis of the pensions and annuities savings sector, to the detriment of the rapidly retiring baby boom generation. And all seemingly just to enrich the one percent cronies of the central banksters. 

In the end game of the Great Nixonian Error and the EUSSR, we live in a world where the odds are considerably better that the Yellowstone super volcano will explode this year, than the chance of winning the UK lottery assuming one bought a ticket.  On unorthodox measures, our central banksters long ago lost control of the volcano they’re toying with. On an astronomical fiat money debt fuelled gambling binge, we are all assuming that we will win the UK lottery before witnessing a cataclysmic blowoff in the debt bubble.

Negative Rates Halt Payments in European Asset-Backed Bonds

11:22 AM BST April 28, 2015
Bonds backed by loans to Spanish small businesses became the first asset-backed securities to stop making interest payments last week after benchmark rates turned negative, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The floating-rate notes, which were sold as part of a securitization in 2007 by Banco Popular Espanol SA, cease payments to investors when the euro three-month interbank offered rate, or Euribor, falls to zero. The benchmark is now at minus 0.005 percent, according to data compiled by the European Money Markets Institute.

Investors in outstanding asset-backed bond are the latest to suffer the consequences of the European Central Bank’s efforts to spur new lending and boost growth in the euro area. Yields on about $2 trillion of government notes along with about 150 billion euros of covered bonds have also dropped below zero.

“This is another example of the side-effects of ECB action,” said Gareth Davies, JPMorgan’s head of European asset-backed securities research in London. More notes including some Dutch residential mortgage-backed securities with government guarantees may stop paying interest if rates drop further, according to Davies.

Banco Popular’s securities are the first to stop paying interest and others may follow if benchmark rates fall further. More than 2.2 billion euros of notes secured with residential mortgages in Europe are among asset-backed securities priced with spreads over Euribor of five basis points or less, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
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Why Markets Are Manic—-The Fed Is Addicted To The ‘Easy Button’

by David Stockman • 
Later this week another Fed meeting will pass with the policy rate still pinned to the zero bound. The month of May will make the 77th consecutive month of ZIRP—–an outcome that would have been utterly unimaginable even a decade ago; and most especially not with the unemployment rate at 5.5% and after 23 quarters had elapsed since the official end of the recession.

There never was an Armageddon-like crisis in 2008 that justified all this; it all happened because two emotionally unstable and misguided high officials—-Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson—-panicked Washington into the utterly false fear that Great Depression 2.0 was at hand.

I debunked this urban legend by chapter and verse in The Great Deformation, but suffice it to say here that not withstanding all the crony capitalist larceny that this financial terrorism enabled, it is impossible with the stock market at 2100—-50% above its pre-crisis level—that there remains any justification for maintaining these “extraordinary policies” seven years later.

In fact, the Fed’s cowardly dithering for yet another meeting this week has precious little to do with the so-called Great Financial Crisis—-the ostensible reason why we ended up with perpetual free money subsidies for financial market speculators. Instead, it is a product of a policy ideology and insular culture that has been building at the Fed and most other major central banks for more than two decades.

Central bankers now have their big fat thumbs perpetually on the Easy Button because they are addicted to it. In the case of the Fed, it has been in a rate cutting or rate holding mode during 80% of the time since 1990. Stated differently, during 240 of the last 304 months, the Fed has been riding the Easy Button.
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A large Bank is exactly the place where a vain and shallow person in authority, if he be a man of gravity and method, as such men often are, may do infinite evil in no long time, and before he is detected. If he is lucky enough to begin at a time of expansion in trade, he is nearly sure not to be found out till the time of contraction has arrived, and then very large figures will be required to reckon the evil he has done.

Walter Bagehot. Lombard Street. 1873

At the Comex silver depositories Tuesday final figures were: Registered 62.64 Moz, Eligible 112.72 Moz, Total 175.36 Moz.  

Crooks and Scoundrels Corner

The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.

Today, a rare trip by mainstream media into today’s Keynesian madness central bankster world. Even then, the Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner can’t seem to grasp that it’s just the logical outcome of the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money. The few, the cronies of the central banksters who get free money and unlimited bailouts when gambling goes wrong prosper, but only at the expense of everyone else, and our children and grandchildren’s future. To fatten up banksters and their ilk in the central bankster casino, we are eating up our seed corn of the future.

Negative interest rates put world on course for biggest mass default in history

More than €2 trillion-worth of eurozone government bonds trade on a negative interest rate. It's a bubble that is bound to end badly

Here’s an astonishing statistic; more than 30pc of all government debt in the eurozone – around €2 trillion of securities in total – is trading on a negative interest rate.

With the advent of European Central Bank quantitative easing, what began four months ago when 10-year Swiss yields turned negative for the first time has snowballed into a veritable avalanche of negative rates across European government bond markets. In the hunt for apparently “safe assets”, investors have thrown caution to the wind, and collectively determined to pay governments for the privilege of lending to them.

On a country by country basis, the statistics are even more startling. According to investment bank Jefferies, some 70pc of all German bunds now trade on a negative yield. In France, it's 50pc, and even in Spain, which was widely thought insolvent only a few years ago, it's 17pc.

Not only has this never happened before on such a scale, but it marks a scarcely believable turnaround on the situation at the height of the eurozone crisis just a little while back, when some European bond markets traded on yields that reflected the very real possibility of default. Yet far from being a welcome sign of returning economic confidence, this almost surreal state of affairs actually signals the very reverse. How did we get here, and what does it mean for the future? Whichever way you come at it, the answer to this second question is not good, not good at all.

What makes today’s negative interest rate environment so worrying is this; to the extent that demand is growing at all in the world economy, it seems again to be almost entirely dependent on rising levels of debt. The financial crisis was meant to have exploded the credit bubble once and for all, but there's very little sign of it. Rising public indebtedness has taken over where households and companies left off. And in terms of wider credit expansion, emerging markets have simply replaced Western ones. The wake-up call of the financial crisis has gone largely unheeded.

The combined public debt of the G7 economies alone has grown by close to 40 percentage points to around 120pc of GDP since the start of the crisis, while globally, the total debt of private non-financial sectors has risen by 30pc, far in advance of economic growth.

----The flip side of the cheap money story is soaring asset prices. The bond market bubble is just the half of it; since most other assets are priced relative to bonds, just about everything else has been going up as well. Eventually, there will be a massive correction, in which creditors will suffer sickening losses.

Nobody can tell you when that moment will arrive. We live in an “extend and pretend” world in which economies pathetically fight between themselves for any scraps of demand. One burst of money printing is met by another in an ultimately futile, zero-sum game of competitive currency devaluation
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A permanent Governor of the Bank of England would be one of the greatest men in England. He would be a little 'monarch' in the City; he would be far greater than the 'Lord Mayor.' He would be the personal embodiment of the Bank of England; he would be constantly clothed with an almost indefinite prestige. Everybody in business would bow down before him and try to stand well with him, for he might in a panic be able to save almost anyone he liked, and to ruin almost anyone he liked. A day might come when his favour might mean prosperity, and his distrust might mean ruin. A position with so much real power and so much apparent dignity would be intensely coveted.

Walter Bagehot. Lombard Street. 1873

Solar  & Related Update.

With events happening fast in the development of solar power, I’ve added this new section. Updates as they get reported.

A solar future isn't just likely — it's inevitable

Updated by David Roberts on April 28, 2015, 10:30 a.m. ET
I plan to write a great deal about the short-term prospects for clean energy, both economic and political, but I want to begin life here at Vox with an imaginative exercise, a bit of musing about what energy might look like in the future — not 10 or 20 years from now, but 50, 70, even 100 years ahead.

Obviously, predicting the far future is a mug's game if you take it too seriously. This post is more about storytelling, a way of seeing the present through a different lens, than pure prognostication. But storytelling is important. And insofar as one can feel confident about far-future predictions, I feel pretty good about this one.

Here it is: solar photovoltaic (PV) power is eventually going to dominate global energy. The question is not if, but when. Maybe it will happen radically faster than anyone expects — say, by 2050. Or maybe it won't be until the year 3000, or later. But it'll happen.

The main reason is pretty simple: solar PV is different from every other source of electricity, in ways that make it uniquely well-suited to 21st-century needs. (Among those needs I count abundance, resilience, and sustainability.)

Every other commercial source of electricity — besides solar PV — generates energy through roughly the same means: by spinning a turbine.

Coal plants, gas plants, nuclear plants, and concentrated solar power plants are all just different ways of boiling water to produce steam that spins a turbine. Wind power harnesses the wind to spin a turbine. Hydropower dams use flowing water to crank a turbine. These spinning turbines, in turn, provide mechanical force to an electric generator, which translates it into electrical current (this is done by moving electrical conductors through magnetic fields — see Faraday's Law).

Solar PV works differently: it converts sunlight directly into electricity. Photons of light excite the surface of a semiconductor, knocking electrons loose to become part of a charged electrical field, generating electromotive force that can be tapped by wires. (See: the photovoltaic effect.)

This difference sounds technical, but it is enormously consequential. It brings three obvious advantages, often touted by solar proponents.

---- So let's try to think beyond the limitations of today's PV to a possible future — after another, say, 20 or 30 years of intense research, development, and deployment.

Imagine small, modular, highly efficient solar cells embedded in all newly built infrastructure as a matter of course — buildings, bridges, parking lots, vehicles. Solar PV would no longer be a category of product in itself, but a routine feature of other products. As energy storage also gets cheaper, smaller, and better integrated, it will be worthwhile to capture and discharge small amounts of energy continuously.
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I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.

Albert Einstein.

The monthly Coppock Indicators finished March

DJIA: +118 Down. NASDAQ: +209 Down. SP500: +161 Down.  

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