Baltic Dry Index. 634 -03 Brent Crude 66.93
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
“The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.”
“Adam Smith” aka George Goodman.
Greece has reached the end of the road. The end of its cash gimmicks
too, for all practical purposes. Stated differently, so has the troika,
paymaster Germany, the IMF, the ECB, and the triple Presidents of the EUSSR who
hang out like Kings in Brussels, they might not have run out of cash but they
have all run out of road in terms of time left to pass any new bailout deal.
Last week the IMF said it was out of any new bailout deal for Greece. So the
ball is firmly in the court of tag team Berlin-Brussels. As China positions the
Yuan for IMF entry, Berlin appears to be positioning the euro for IMF exit.
Stay long fully paid up physical gold and silver. After this week this game of
Russian roulette takes on a different risk set. All but one of the chambers get
loaded instead of the other way round.
Greece Remains Defiant as It Seeks Creditor Deal This Week
2:09 PM BST May 17,
2015
Greece’s government said it won’t back down on election pledges to end
austerity even while seeking to agree on a deal with creditors as soon as this
week to unblock financing and avert a default.“We’re striving for a mutually beneficial agreement by Friday,” Nikos Filis, spokesman for the parliamentary group of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza party, said Sunday in comments broadcast on Mega TV. “Our mandate from the Greek people is to reach an agreement where we stay in the euro area without harsh austerity measures,” he said, adding that “tough negotiations” will take place before a summit meeting of European Union leaders in Riga, Latvia, on May 21-22.
Tsipras’s so-called red lines include no further cuts to wages and pensions. More than 110 days of talks between Greece and its creditors have failed to produce an agreement to unlock additional aid from a 240 billion-euro ($275 billion) bailout. The standoff has triggered a liquidity squeeze, pulling the country back into a recession and renewing doubts over Greece’s future in the euro area.
Greece’s financial situation is serious, and the country can only obtain another tranche of aid upon completing the next stage of its reform program, European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said Saturday in an interview with Germany’s Bild newspaper. Greece still hasn’t submitted its reform list, he said.
----Greece won’t accept “take-it-or-leave-it” proposals, and the issue of a national referendum on reforms “will depend on whether the creditors impose an ultimatum,” Syriza’s Filis said.
A Greek referendum might speed up
the decision process on moving forward, German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel
said Sunday in an interview published in Bild am Sonntag. A “third aid package
for Athens is only possible if reforms are also implemented,” he said. A Greek
exit from the euro would pose a political challenge and not an economic one,
but “no one would have trust anymore in Europe if, in the first big crisis,” a
currency member quits, he said.
Negotiations in the so-called Brussels Group of Greek and creditor institution representatives will continue this week, an EU official said, asking not to be identified as the talks are private. The group includes the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the commission.
Greece must stick to its pledges and fulfill the terms of its current aid package, Volker Kauder, head of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party bloc in the federal parliament, said Sunday in a Welt am Sonntag interview. “The situation is very difficult,” he said.
Greece is convinced it can play by different rules from other countries in the 19-member euro area, and the situation around the talks is “not tenable,” Yves Mersch, an ECB executive board member, told Luxembourg radio 100.7 Saturday.
“We are in an end game,” Mersch said. “There has been an accord between Europe and Greece to go through a program. This hasn’t been the case since December last year because the new government said it doesn’t want to have anything to do with the program. But then they can’t demand money that was attached to that program either.”
An agreement must be reached, Tsipras said Friday. “But those who think that the Greek side’s resistance can be tested or that its red lines will fade as time passes would do well to forget it,” he said.
More
Elsewhere, it might not matter much what Greece and the troika decide. If
the bond rout continues resetting interest rates higher anticipating the end of
ZIRP forever, its game over for the central banksters whose only option left is
to go nuclear, and try to outlaw cash! The new cash would carry some mechanism that
depreciated it the longer it stayed circulating outside of the banking system.
One hundred dollars dropped to ninety say after six months. It gets issued at
100 by the likes of JPM Chase, but the hapless depositor six month later, only
gets credited with 90. It’s the nuclear option to get people and firms
spending. If tried, I think it will unleash chaos and anarchy, but our ever more
desperate central banksters are deep into the end game of the Great Nixonian
Error of fiat money. The US run financial system blew up in 2008. Nothing tried
since then has really worked, let alone as intended. We are one Lehman away from
central bankster gangsterism attempting to outlaw cash.
Below, Bloomie tries it hand at whistling past the graveyard. It might
just work this first time. Recent data from Uncle Scam suggest to me at least,
an America that’s dipping back into a new recession.
Bond-Market Crash Has Wall Street Divided on What’s Next
12:30 AM BST May 18, 2015
Maybe, just maybe, this whole bond rout is ending.The global selloff that’s set investors on edge finally slowed last week, and some analysts are saying the worst is over. Treasuries look fairly valued given the outlook for inflation and interest rates, according to Bank of America Corp. -- although with plenty of caveats. In Germany, options traders convinced a bund-market crash was all but inevitable less than two weeks ago have scaled back most of those bets.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. warns that government debt is still expensive, but a growing number of investors are finding value after the four-week exodus sent yields soaring. Prudential Financial Inc.’s Robert Tipp is buying because tepid U.S. growth will keep the Federal Reserve on hold, while Europe remains too weak to sustain higher yields.
And don’t forget about central banks in Europe and Japan, which are buying billions of dollars in bonds each month.
“There’s a good chance people will look back at this as having been a good buying opportunity,” Tipp, the chief investment strategist at Prudential’s fixed-income unit, which manages $560 billion, said from Newark, New Jersey.
Ten-year U.S. notes posted their first weekly gains since April 17, while German bunds pared some of their losses.
That lessened the pain of a selloff that lopped off hundreds of billions in market value from sovereign debt in the developed world, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
The retreat first began in Europe as signs of inflation emerged with the ECB’s most-aggressive quantitative easing yet. Yields surged, especially in markets such as Germany where negative rates prevailed, then quickly spread around the world as DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach and Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen suggested bonds were overpriced.
Yields on 10-year Treasuries, which reached a low of 1.82 percent in April, rose to 2.36 percent on May 12 before ending the week at 2.14 percent. The yield was 2.15 percent as of 12:18 p.m. in Tokyo.
In Germany, where average yields for the entire market dipped below zero for the first time ever last month, bunds soared to 0.78 percent before falling to 0.62 percent Friday.
The speed and magnitude of those losses still pale in comparison to previous market meltdowns, including the “taper tantrum” that then-Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke touched off in May 2013.
And there’s little chance of a repeat now, even if yields jump further in the near-term, according to Priya Misra, Bank of America’s head of U.S. rates strategy.
Not only has a raft of U.S. economic releases -- from retail sales to consumer confidence and factory production -- been so disappointing, the data hasn’t nearly been strong enough to trigger the kind of inflation what would prompt bond investors to demand much higher yields.
“For the bull market to be over, we need robust global growth and inflation,” said Misra, who forecasts 10-year yields will end the year at 2.35 percent. “Fundamentals don’t argue for much higher yields.”
More
"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
At the Comex silver
depositories Friday final figures were: Registered 60.16 Moz, Eligible 117.32
Moz, Total 177.48 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Think the unthinkable. Suppose the US economy has
already entered a new recession.
Global shares struggle after data raises more questions on U.S. economy
TOKYO |
Asian shares slipped on Monday and the dollar stayed near a four-month low
against a basket of major currencies after soft data raised doubts over whether
the U.S. economy has been growing despite U.S. share prices standing at
historic highs.MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS fell 0.4 percent, although Japan's Nikkei share average .N225 edged up just 0.4 percent thanks to some companies' move to boost shareholder returns.
U.S. industrial production unexpectedly fell for a fifth straight month in April while consumer confidence dropped to a seven-month low in early May, data showed on Friday, pushing down the dollar and U.S. bond yields.
Coming on the heels of
weak retail sales and producer inflation data, the reports stoked concerns that
the U.S. economy is hardly gaining momentum after disappointing 0.2 percent
annualized growth in January-March.
Questions have arisen over
whether the economy grew at all in the last quarter.
"U.S. GDP will likely be
revised down in the next update to show a contraction. We estimate the U.S.
economy shrank 0.9 percent," said Shuji Shirota, head of macro economics
strategy group at HSBC in Tokyo.
While many investors stick to the
view that the U.S. economy will accelerate later this year, signs of weakness
are a source of concerns given many investors counted on U.S. growth to lead
the global economy as China slows down and many other major economies are in
the doldrums.
More
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
Solar & Related Update.
With events
happening fast in the development of solar power, I’ve added this new section.
Updates as they get reported.
Today a UK solar update,
where like everywhere else, government subsidies are distorting the market.
Today’s solar panels are roughly 15 to 18 percent efficient at converting
sunlight to AC current. Subsidies encourage these inefficient panels into use.
Tomorrows solar panels will have efficiencies in the 30 percents, and probably
won’t need a subsidy at all. Other than “green” politics and fictitious “man-made
global warming” policies, why the rush to subsidise anything other than
research?
Solar car parks ‘could power 1.7 million homes’
By Liam Stoker 15 May 2015, 14:03 Updated:
15 May 2015, 14:22
Installing solar panels above car
parks in the UK could generate enough energy to power 1.7 million homes,
according to solar developer Hive Energy.
Giles Redpath, founder of Hive
Energy, said so-called ‘solar carports’ could be the “next exciting frontier”
for solar in the UK, while the RAC Foundation has estimated that there’s approximately
17,000 non-residential car parks in the UK, 93% of which are not covered.
“Solar car park shelters offer
the UK a chance to generating clean, renewable power right at the heart of our
town and city centres where it’s needed. We predict they’ll be a common and
welcome sight here in the UK within the next five years, making safe, clean and
affordable energy for all of us,” Redpath said.
Hive said it was in discussions
with a number of “high-profile names” to create solar car parks in the country
and hoped the UK could emulate the likes of Germany and the US, the latter of
which installed 600MW of capacity at car parks in 2014.
Electricity generated by renewables up by 20% in the UK
By Peter Bennett 14 May 2015, 7:43
Updated: 14 May 2015, 8:52
The generation of renewable
electricity in the UK has increased by a fifth spurred on by dramatic increases
in solar PV capacity, according to figures published in the Renewable Energy
Association’s annual REview.
The report, authored in
conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Innovas, reveals that a total
of 64,404Gwh of electricity was generated from renewable sources in 2014,
compared to 53,667GWh in 2013.
The report also notes that the
rise in electricity generation has matched an increase in jobs in the renewable
sector, growing by 9% since 2013. The association said that regions such as the
East Midlands, North West, London and Scotland had exhibited stronger than
average job growth in the period too.
“2014 has been another strong
year for investment in the renewable energy sector, bringing the total
investment since 2010 to £40 billion,” said Ronan O’Regan, director, renewables
and clean tech at PwC.
He continued: ”The majority of
investment during 2014 was in renewable electricity generation, attracting
almost £10 billion of capital, with solar the big winner, representing £4.5
billion of investment.”
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished April
DJIA: +112 Down. NASDAQ: +198 Down. SP500: +150 Down.
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