Baltic Dry Index. 580 -07 Brent Crude 68.31
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
Now in England if you commit a crime, the police don't have a gun and you don't have a gun so if you commit a crime it's "Stop, or I'll say stop again!
Robin Williams
We open today with Greece. Another day and another war of words against the rebranded Troika. Greece seems to be winning it seems to me. Every time Greece looks likely to really default, Europe’s fairy Godmother shows up to provide Greece with a little more cash. Greece thinks it is winning the war. Sooner or later, in this game of bluff, someone is bound to miscalculate. For now that someone seems to be in Berlin.
Greece Attacks Creditors as ECB Considers Next Liquidity Step
3:25 PM BST May 5, 2015
Greece blamed its creditors for the failure to end the impasse over its
fiscal crisis as government bonds slumped and the European Central Bank weighs
how much more liquidity to offer its financial system.No deal will be possible until the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund reduce the number of red lines they’re demanding, a government official said on Tuesday.
The comments clouded the outlook for bailout talks, which some officials had said were making progress, and accelerated a selloff in the country’s stocks and bonds. Yields on two-year notes rose 149 basis points to 20.98 percent, sparking a selloff across European debt markets. The benchmark stock index fell 3.9 percent, the most in six weeks.
Attention now turns to the ECB’s Governing Council, which meets in Frankfurt on Wednesday and will discuss emergency funding for Greek lenders. While the ECB has increased the amount of liquidity on offer to Greek banks, concerns are rising about the risks attached to the strategy.
Greek Deputy Prime Minister Yannis Dragasakis met with ECB President Mario Draghi on Tuesday, with the ECB only saying they they discussed the current state of talks and the country’s economy.
Dragasakis told Draghi that achieving an agreement is a realistic goal, provided all the institutions act constructively, according to an e-mailed statement from Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s office.
Greece’s latest comments came amid signs that talks were advancing before another finance ministers’ meeting on May 11. European Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici tweeted that progress was being made and French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said there’s room for a “good compromise.”
----Greece’s new line of argument focuses on what it says are divisions among the international creditors. The IMF won’t compromise on labor deregulation and pension reforms, while the European Commission is insisting on fiscal targets being met, said the government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential. The commission is also refusing to consider a debt writedown, he said.
IMF spokeswoman Angela Gaviria
said in an e-mail that she had no immediate comment. A European Commission
spokesman wasn’t immediately available.
Greece is sending mixed signals
about just how much money it has left. While officials say they can make
payments to the IMF this week and next, one policy maker signaled last month
that the country may struggle to keep its finances afloat beyond the end of
May.
More
Below Luxembourg’s failed,
corporate tax avoidance deals for all, EC president Juncker, takes on America
and Great Britain. Proof positive that Scotch for breakfast is not a good idea.
Perhaps he hasn’t been told that Great Britain is about to commit suicide
tomorrow. His hard left Euro allies in the Scottish National Party are about to
seize power in England via their Red Labour Mupets. Not that anyone in Britain is worried about Juncker. We've had Junckers over us before and we sent them packing. Still for Greece his message is keep
bluffing.
'Anglo-Saxons' would rip Europe apart after a Grexit, says Juncker
Commission president says Grexit exposes the euro to huge danger as capitalist forces would try to dismantle the EU "piece by piece"
The president of the European
Commission has risked angering Britain after comments warning that the
"Anglo-Saxon world" would seek to dismantle the European project if
Greece was ever allowed to leave the single currency.
Speaking to an audience at the
Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, Jean-Claude Juncker said a
"Grexit" would leave the euro prey to forces who "would do
everything to try to decompose" what remained of the monetary union.
“Grexit is not an option,"
said Mr Juncker.
"If
we were to accept, if Greece were to accept, if others were to accept that
Greece could leave the area of solidarity and prosperity that is the eurozone,
we would put ourselves at risk because some, notably in the Anglo Saxon world,
would try everything to deconstruct the euro area piece by piece, little by
little."
A spokeswoman for Mr Juncker said the reference to the Anglo-Saxon world could be "understood in the sense of the markets and speculators," rather than a reference to Britain specifically.
Greece has been struggling to meet conditions laid out by its paymasters in order to unlock vital funds it needs to stave-off bankruptcy. But with the country edging ever closer to a default on its creditors, fears have mounted that that it will soon become the first state to be forced out of the euro.
Analysts have warned that a Greek ejection would effectively turn the eurozone into a de facto exchange rate system, rather than the full-blown monetary union first envisaged by its founders.
More
We end for the day with the
reality of dumbed down Britain, getting ready to vote itself out of meaningful
existence. Now even the dumbest of Brits is going to need some gold. Will
Australia or Canada put in a bid for the rump of England and Wales? Will Putin
put in an bid for Belarus Scotland, pardon the pun. Going cheap, two nearly completed aircraft
carriers, no planes. Several never used Trident subs.
Would the last one
out of Great Britain turn out the lights.
Election 2015: Don't let Labour and the SNP 'tear our nation apart', says Sir John Major
The former Conservative prime minister warns that a Labour government propped up by the SNP will “divide and rule” and “turn rich against poor, north against south, worker against boss”
The British people must come together and unite against the prospect of a Labour-SNP government which will “tear our nation apart”, Sir John Major says.The former Conservative prime minister’s warning came as Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, boasted that she would be “sitting across the table from Ed Miliband” on Friday discussing how to put him in office.
In an article for The Telegraph, Sir John says that a minority Labour government propped up by the Scottish nationalists would seek to “divide and rule” and "turn rich against poor, north against south, worker against boss".
In
an appeal on the eve of the election to the “open-minded, generous-spirited and
compassionate” people of Britain, Sir John urges voters to have the
“confidence” to “oppose all those that appeal to prejudice or bigotry, or seek
to tear our nation apart”.
“After the election, either the
Conservatives or Labour will form – or at least lead – the new Government,” Sir
John says. “We need a Government that can reach out to every single part of our
country. And Labour cannot do that.
“I know Labour. I grew up with
them. Labour divides to rule. To win votes they will turn rich against poor;
north against south; worker against boss.
“They have done this before and
are doing it now. But it is emphatically not what this country needs. Now, more
than ever, we need to bring people together, not create chasms to drive them
apart.”
More
More on Friday after Great
Britain votes itself into Cuba without the sun.
If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me, she
doesn't deserve to have any.
Oscar
Wilde
At the Comex silver
depositories Tuesday final figures were: Registered 62.20 Moz, Eligible 113.06
Moz, Total 175.26 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today China, and $160 billion of new bonds from
nothing, to bail out local government debt that can’t be repaid any other way.
The trouble is very few Chinese banks want to play along. Does this sound like
a sustainable economy growing at 7 percent a year? With desperate measures like
this, does this sound like an economy growing at all? Stay long fully paid up
physical gold and silver. The next Lehman gets closer by the day.
"As fewer and fewer people have confidence in paper as a store of value, the price of gold will continue to rise. The history of fiat money is little more than a register of monetary follies and inflations. Our present age merely affords another entry in this dismal register."
Hans F. Sennholz
China mulls new monetary tool that ‘the world has never seen’
Published: May 5, 2015 11:55 p.m. ET
The People’s Bank of China is said to be considering its own version of QE-style bond buys
BEIJING (Caixin Online) — China’s central bank is considering lending to policy banks through a new tool so they can buy bonds issued by local governments, a person close to the regulator says.The loans would have a maturity of at least 10 years, the source said. Other details of how this would work remain unclear, but the tool will be unlike anything the bank has used before, he said.
“It will be a new monetary tool the world has never seen,” the person said. “The format does not matter, and all possible means could be taken.”
He said the regulator will use the new instrument to provide China Development Bank (CDB) and perhaps other policy banks with capital so they can buy bonds that local governments have issued.
The Ministry of Finance has said local governments can issue 1 trillion yuan ($160 billion) worth of bonds this year to repay their old debts — in other words allowing them to swap existing debts, which are mostly bank loans, for bonds that have longer maturities and cost less.
The problem is that commercial banks are not interested in the bonds.
Banks are “not at all interested” in buying such bonds because “their yields are too low and there is no liquidity,” a source from a joint-stock bank said. He said the bank he works for bought some local-government bonds only because its branches want to maintain a good relationship with local governments.
Xu Hanfei, chief bond analyst at Guotai Junan Securities 1788, +6.29% said the interest rates of bank loans to local-government financing platforms — commercial vehicles that local governments used to circumvent a previous restriction that barred them from borrowing directly — are usually around 8%, and so are the yields of these platforms’ bonds. With local-government bonds, he said, the yields are usually halved.
“Commercial banks do not want to buy local-government bonds … because the yields can hardly cover their capital cost,” a source from a bank’s financial-market division said. “There are many more assets that promise much better returns than local-government bonds. Why bother exchanging them for the bonds?”
As of June 30, 2013, local-government debt including direct and contingent liabilities reached almost 18 trillion yuan, data from the most recent national government debt audit show.
More
Asian stocks at two-week lows, bond woes spread, dollar slips
HONG KONG |
(Reuters) - A selloff in global
sovereign bonds pushed Asian stocks to two-week lows on Wednesday as investors
worried it might trigger profit-taking in other asset classes while the U.S. dollar
stayed on the backfoot dogged by deficit concerns.
Bonds have been among the best
performing asset classes in recent years thanks to the unconventional policy
easing steps taken by global central banks, but signs are emerging that
investors are tired of chasing ever-shrinking yields.
As bond yields rose sharply from
Germany to Australia in recent days, stock markets began to flounder.
An index of Asian shares have
fallen 3 percent after hitting a more than seven-year high on April. 29. On
Wednesday, MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan
.MIAPJ0000PUS slipped 0.3 percent, while Australian stocks fell 1.5 percent
.AXJO.
Market participants struggled to
make sense of the simultaneous selloff in eurozone and U.S. debt markets and
global equities, alongside the rise in commodities.
The churn appeared to have been
sparked by the persistent rise in German bund yields DE10YT=TWEB, driven by
worries over a Greece debt default and excessively long positions in European
debt.
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.
Today, while Tesla
hogged the limelight on Friday, an Australian competitor kicked in the door to
the home storage solar sector. I’m more convinced that ever PV solar will win
out in the 21st century. Just as Bronze won out over Stone nearly 50
centuries ago. What’s not to like. Free energy from the sun converted into
electricity with no moving parts. Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction” at work.
AGL trumps Tesla with batteries-and-solar-cell package
Adds home storage to solar power offering
5 May 2015 at 22:14, Richard
Chirgwin
You could almost pity Australian energy company AGL: while Elon Musk was
displaying Tesla's Powerwall to a breathless, waiting world, it quietly entered
the consumer battery storage market and nobody noticed.The utility, which has been sniffing around the renewable market for some time and recently decided it would “decarbonise” its electricity generation efforts by 2050, announced on Friday that it's going to offer batteries to those of its customers that have grid-connected solar.
It's not, however, entering the Elon Musk Global Battery Beauty Pageant. The Power Advantage is a more conventional battery, and the utility will have multiple battery suppliers for the program.
The entire system – 4.5 kWh of solar with 7.2 kWh of battery storage – offers a 3 kW output, installation, a distribution panel and support.
Price will depend on what the customer buys, with an AGL spokesperson telling Vulture South: “As AGL Energy Limited is providing a broad solution to customers, the battery will be priced as part of an integrated package, which could include solar, grid energy and other services. Price will therefore vary depending on each customer’s needs. For example retrofitting a battery to an existing solar system has different cost considerations than including it as part of a new system.
“Also, we are working with a number of battery suppliers, some of which are still in negotiation with us, so we are not in a position to divulge specific prices.”
The Future of Solar Energy
An Interdisciplinary MIT Study led by the MIT Energy Initiative
May 5, 2015
This study is the latest in the MIT Energy Initiative's
"Future of" series. Its
predecessors have shed light on a range of complex and important issues
involving energy and the environment.
More
Arrogant?
Terrible at cooking? Don’t mean to alarm you, but you might be British.
Anon.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished April
DJIA: +112 Down. NASDAQ: +198 Down. SP500: +150 Down.
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