The Coin Toss.

Baltic Dry Index. 630 -04       Brent Crude 66.17

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

"We are in a world of irredeemable paper money - a state of affairs unprecedented in history."

John Exter

Another day, and another day of guessing on Greece. Will paymaster Germany really force Greece out of the doomed, wealth and jobs destroying European Monetary Union, or will Mrs Merkel blink, and once more walk Greece back from the Pirate’s plank of death?  Greek Prime Minister Tsipras clearly thinks so, even as he bounces up and down on the plank of death. Clearly this is no way to be running a fiat monetary union, let alone one that once had aspirations to replace the fiat dollar as the world’s main reserve currency. China’s Yuan now seems to be occupying that aspiration.

Below even Bloomie can’t seem to figure out who’s winning. One way or another we’ll likely know by the coming long weekend. The perfect time to force Greece out of the euro and back into Drachma.

Greece Deal Said to Remain Elusive as Tsipras Eyes Summit

5:14 PM BST May 18, 2015

Greece hasn’t made enough progress in its talks with euro-area authorities to seal a deal by this week’s leaders’ summit in Riga, Latvia, according to two European officials familiar with negotiations.

Furthermore, any efforts by the European Commission to broker a compromise won’t succeed unless the International Monetary Fund is fully on board, said two other European officials. All asked not to be named because talks are ongoing and private.

Those pessimistic views contrast with reports from Athens that talks are moving closer to a deal. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Monday night in televised remarks that the bailout discussions are in the final stage. The accord should include a writedown and restructuring of Greek debt, looser budget targets and protection for wages and pensions, he told a business event in Athens.

----Greece hopes to conclude a technical agreement with creditors at a Brussels Group meeting on Tuesday, with the aim of reaching political approval at the May 21-22 summit, government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis told reporters Monday in Athens.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is “personally involved” as the Greece talks continue, commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas told reporters in Brussels on Monday. He declined to comment on specifics or whether a deal by the Riga summit was possible.

“The commission is actively involved in the negotiations and we want to help,” Schinas said. “Whatever happens in Riga cannot be a substitute of the need that there is to bridge the gaps on the last remaining issues.”

A spokesman for the IMF declined to comment.

More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-18/greece-deal-said-to-remain-elusive-as-tsipras-eyes-summit

Juncker steps in with emergency Greek rescue as negotiations reach 'final stages'

European Commission chief proposes relaxed budget targets and emergency cash release to finally break four-month negotiating impasse

By Mehreen Khan 6:30PM BST 18 May 201

The president of the European Commission has reportedly intervened in Greece's bail-out negotiations, proposing a reduction in Troika-imposed budget targets and a release of emergency cash to prevent Greece going bankrupt in the summer.

According a blueprint leaked to Greek media, Jean-Claude Juncker's "plan" to break Greece's deadlock includes a relaxation of Athens' primary budget surplus target to 0.75pc this year - half that previously sought by Greece's paymasters.

The proposals also include releasing €5bn to the government in June, and delaying a number of fiscal austerity measures until October. However, the blueprint maintained that Greece would have to retain a controversial property tax and push for flexible labour market reforms.

Despite refusing to confirm the plan, a spokesman for Mr Juncker said the EU chief was now "personally involved" in Greece's talks.
More
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11612513/Bundesbank-warn-Greeks-are-on-the-edge-of-default.html

With the Russian consumer market mostly cut-off from German firms due to sanctions, supposedly intended  to right America’s botched coup in Kiev that  by now was long ago supposed to have dispatched Putin, and begun slicing and dicing up Russia and its natural resources, German industry is eyeing up business in Iran, now that sanctions are set to end starting at the end of next month. Not an outcome the American War Party and its financial backers want. The War Party and its ilk, have merely about one month left to thwart the Iranian nuclear deal. Stay tuned as they try.

An Eye To Iran: European Businesses Prepare for Life After Sanctions

By Martin Hesse, Susanne Koelbl and Michael Sauga May 18, 2015 – 03:54 PM

In Germany, officials believe Iran has investment needs of $100 billion per year. German companies are eager to rebuild ties and business in a lucrative market once a nuclear deal is reached and sanctions lifted.

When Iran's oil minister receives visitors, he wears the usual insignias of the Iranian Revolution: an open shirt with a dark suit, five o'clock shadow and no tie. He holds Tasbih prayer beads in his left hand.

But Bijan Zanganeh is one of the Iranian pragmatists who would like to see a change in relations with the West. His schedule during a visit to Berlin the week before last was accordingly jam-packed with meetings.

He had breakfast with company representatives from Volkswagen and Linde, the world's largest gases and engineering company; held discussions with owners of small- and medium-sized businesses and also showed German Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel the enormous possibilities that lie in the expansion of the Iranian energy sector.

A Lucrative Market

The Tehran official found attentive listeners. Officials in Gabriel's ministry estimate that Iran has investment needs of around $100 billion per year. The country needs to update aging infrastructures, it needs modern automobiles, heavy machinery and pharmaceuticals -- all segments in which Germany is a global market leader.

Before sanctions against the country were tightened four years ago, German companies exported just under €4 billion ($4.56 billion) worth of goods and services to the country each year. If the embargo is lifted in phases next year, the Economics Ministry claims, trade volume could "markedly exceed" that figure.

The clock is ticking. In six weeks, on June 30, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his negotiating partners want to present a treaty on the Iranian nuclear program and the elimination of sanctions that could be agreed upon by the hardliners in Tehran as well as Congress in Washington. The hurdles for approval are higher in the United States, and the US Congress could cause the deal to collapse at any time.

Still, that hasn't stopped German industry leaders from enthusing about the possibility of doing business in Iran again. In Frankfurt, for example, leading bankers have taken up secret contact with the government in Tehran -- a controversial and delicate balancing act. On the one hand, they don't want to anger the Americans, but they also want to make sure that business channels to Iran are reactivated once money is circulating in the country again.

At companies like Volkswagen and Daimler, executives are also actively looking to Iran. Managers at both companies could imagine taking apart cars manufactured in Germany, packing the parts in boxes and shipping them to Iran, where they would be reassembled, sources say. The advantage this procedure would offer over the export of completed vehicles would be that no import levies would be applied by the Iranians. VW subsidiary MAN, which focuses on commercial and transport vehicles, is already looking for an importer to sell its trucks in Iran.

German engineering giant Siemens never ceased its activities in Iran, even during the difficult years of sanctions. The company's office in Tehran remained open throughout. The global company is fully aware of the opportunities potentially afforded by the rehabilitation of Iranian industry structures -- everything from electrification to the supply of energy, to road and railway construction right up to modern manufacturing using automated processes.

More
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/european-business-prepare-for-lifting-of-iran-sanctions-a-1034240.html#ref=nl-international

And in Russia, the American War Party sanctions are losing much of their bite. Not that they had much bite outside of biting continental Europe in the wallet. No American oligarchs or one percenters, were inconvenienced in the least by imposing EUSSR sanctions on Russia. It’s a funny old world in the dying days of the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money.

Russia’s Richest Billionaire Says Sanctions Impact Waning

10:00 PM BST May 18, 2015
Russia’s richest man said international investors are coming back to the country and the impact of sanctions has peaked.

“Now it’s getting clear that the situation is more politically stable or predictable,” Vladimir Potanin, who heads Russia’s biggest miner, OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Monday. “Nobody wants more sanctions. I think we reached a stable level in terms of tensions.”

Europe and the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia’s energy and finance industries and several prominent individuals last year after the nation annexed Crimea from Ukraine. The ruble lost almost half its value as the central bank burned through currency reserves in an attempt to slow the collapse.

So far this year there are signs the situation may be stabilizing. The ruble has rallied to become the world’s best-performing currency in 2015, while President Vladimir Putin last week met U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for the first time in more than a year.

Investors were expecting more sanctions and more problems for the Russian economy, Potanin said. It’s now the “right time” for investors to come back to Russia, he said.

Most of Potanin’s wealth, estimated at $16.7 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, comes from his 30 percent holding in Norilsk Nickel, which isn’t subject to sanctions. Norilsk shares have advanced 82 percent in Moscow over the past 12 months, giving company a market capitalization of 1.62 trillion rubles ($33 billion).

The company benefited last year from increases in the price of both nickel and palladium. It’s also gained from the the depreciation of the ruble, which despite this year’s rally is still down 30 percent against the dollar over the last year. Norilsk pays its local costs in rubles while selling its metal production for dollars.

----Potanin characterizes his relationship with Putin today as that of a businessman discussing issues important to the mining industry. The billionaire shares with the president a common passion for ice hockey. In May, he played against Putin’s team in Sochi in a gala match.

Off the rink, one of Putin’s main challenges is to find a younger leader to succeed him, Potanin said.

“People love him,” Potanin said, referring to Putin. “Russia loves strong leaders.”

More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-18/russia-s-richest-billionaire-says-impact-of-sanctions-is-waning

"If you don't trust gold, do you trust the logic of taking a beautiful pine tree, worth about $4,000 - $5,000, cutting it up, turning it into pulp and then paper, putting some ink on it and then calling it one billion dollars?"

Kenneth J. Gerbino

At the Comex silver depositories Monday final figures were: Registered 60.16 Moz, Eligible 117.02 Moz, Total 177.18 Moz.  

Crooks and Scoundrels Corner

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

Today the good old days from my past. New York City 1975 plus. In reality one tremendous city back then, despite the recession, the inflation, the sleaze, the disorganised and organised chaos. To a 24 year old, single, high flying, Anglo-Scot, commodity trader, from the sleepy Thames Valley  well outside London, and  in the midst of a full on commodity inflation boom, what wasn’t there to like about Manhattan before the one tenth of the one percenters, took over the place.

Massive snow storms, and a famous summer blackout to boot. And Jimmy Carter’s famous NYC presidential election convention, when the NYPD swept the streets of all of Manhattan’s infamous hookers. The decaying, exciting, elevated, West Side Highway, with bits that fell off many a time. Salomon Brothers, Phibro, ACLI, and a cast of thousands of uniquely different, but generous New Yorkers, straight out of central casting. Jerry Ford’s “Whip Infaltion Now” buttons.  The good old days indeed!

Ford to City: Drop Dead. Vows He’ll Veto Any Bailout.

Daily News headline October 30, 1975.

'Welcome to Fear City' – the inside story of New York's civil war, 40 years on

Monday 18 May 2015 11.43 BST

Travellers arriving at New York City’s airports in June 1975 were greeted with possibly the strangest object ever handed out at the portal to a great city: pamphlets with a hooded death’s head on the cover, warning them, “Until things change, stay away from New York City if you possibly can.”

“Welcome to Fear City” read the stark headline on these pamphlets, which were subtitled “A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York”. Inside was a list of nine “guidelines” that might allow you to get out of the city alive, and with your personal property intact.

The guidelines painted a nightmarish vision of New York; one that made it sound barely a cut above Beirut, which then had just been engulfed in Lebanon’s civil war. Visitors were advised not to venture outside of midtown Manhattan, not to take the subways under any circumstances, and not to walk outside anywhere after six in the evening.

----Tourists must have been baffled, if not horrified. They might have been even more shaken had they known that the men in casual clothes handing them these strange, badly set little pamphlets – with their funereal black borders and another death’s head leering at them inside next to the smirking wish “Good luck” – were members of New York’s police forces.

“A new low in irresponsibility,” fumed New York’s embattled mayor at the time, Abe Beame, who sent the city’s lawyers into court to try to ban distribution of the pamphlet. They failed. Justice Frederick E Hammer agreed that the members of “New York’s Finest” distributing the pamphlet were violating “a public trust” – but ruled that this was a “reasonable dissemination of opinion” under the US constitution, even if it struck at the heart of public confidence.

Near panic ensued. The New York Convention and Visitors Bureau immediately dispatched emissaries armed with slideshow presentations to London, Paris, Frankfurt and Brussels, to “prove” to European travel agents just how attractive the Big Apple still was. Tourism was one of the city’s few remaining industries, still drawing 10.5 million visitors to the city each year, despite reports of massive city budget cuts.

----New York’s fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s is surely one of the weirdest moments in the history of the city – indeed, of the United States. It was a time when the wholesale disintegration of the largest city in the most powerful nation on earth seemed entirely possible. A time when the American president, Gerald Ford – egged on by his young chief of staff, one Donald Rumsfeld – sought not to succour New York but to deliberately shame and humble it, and perhaps even replace it as the world’s leading financial centre.

----Many of the warnings in the Fear City pamphlet were, of course, ludicrous exaggerations or outright lies. The streets of midtown Manhattan weren’t “nearly deserted” after six in the evening, and they were perfectly safe to walk on. The city hadn’t “had to close off the rear half of each [subway] train in the evening so that the passengers could huddle together and be better protected”. 

There were still many safe and secure neighbourhoods outside Manhattan, and there was neither a spate of “spectacular” robberies nor deadly fires in hotels.

----There was a pervasive sense that the social order was breaking down. Most subway trains were filthy, covered in graffiti inside and out. Often only one – and sometimes no – carriage door would open when they pulled into a station, and in summer they were “cooled” only by the methodical sweep of a begrimed metal fan that just pushed the sordid air about. The trains ran late, and were always crowded; their denizens included chain-snatchers, raggedy buskers and countless beggars, including at least two legless individuals, manoeuvring with remarkable agility between the cars on their wheeled boards.

The roads were in no better condition. Public restrooms were almost non-existent; dangerous and dirty when they were available at all. Men could often be seen pissing in the gutter down side-streets. Times Square’s venerable old theatres and spectacular movie palaces were torn down for office buildings or allowed to slowly rot away, showing scratchy prints of cheesy second-run films or pornography, which any casual visitor might have thought was the city’s leading industry.

More

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/18/welcome-to-fear-city-the-inside-story-of-new-yorks-civil-war-40-years-on

West Side Elevated Highway

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Elevated_Highway

Solar  & Related Update.

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

Is Tesla’s Li-ion battery really the battery of the future, or just another dead end like the steam automobile? Do you really want to install a Li-ion power-pack in a home, office or hotel?

Replacing Your Smartphone Battery Just Got Harder

10:00 PM BST May 18, 2015

Replacing your smartphone battery just got harder.

Fearing cargo fires like one that caused a United Parcel Service Inc. freighter to crash into the desert near Dubai in 2010, at least 18 airlines have banned freight shipments of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries this year. Pilots are pushing for the cells to be taken off all passenger flights until they can be transported more safely.

Removing lithium-ion batteries from parts of the $6.4 trillion global air freight market risks disrupting supply chains for a technology used to power products from Apple Inc. iPhones to Lenovo Group Ltd. laptops. As many as 30 percent of the 5.5 billion cells made each year are shipped by plane, and cargo bans have already affected supplies of defibrillator power-packs in Australia and New Zealand, according to a group representing battery-makers.

“Anybody that ships lithium batteries is affected by this,” George Kerchner, executive director of PRBA -- The Rechargeable Battery Association, said by phone from Washington. “It has an impact on everybody, whether you’re a small business or a large business.”

Emirates, Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd., Cargolux Airlines International SA, and Qatar Airways Ltd., four of the world’s top 10 cargo carriers, have removed shipments of bulk batteries from all flights since January, according to an International Air Transport Association document. Singapore Airlines Ltd., another top-10 cargo airline, won’t allow them on its passenger planes. Delta Air Lines Inc., American Airlines Group Inc., and United Airlines ban them from all flights.

----The two biggest air cargo carriers, UPS and FedEx Corp. haven’t removed them either, according to e-mails from the companies’ respective spokesmen Mike Mangeot and Scott Fiedler.

Tesla Motors Inc. transports the mattress-sized lithium batteries that power its sports cars by ship, a spokeswoman said by e-mail.

----The property that makes the technology attractive to electronics companies -- “a higher power density for more battery life in a lighter package”, according to an Apple website -- also increases the safety hazard if they ignite.

The fires can reach temperatures as high as 850 degrees Centigrade (1,600 degrees Fahrenheit), a 2013 paper published by the U.K.’s Royal Society of Chemistry said.

In fire tests conducted by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in 2005 and 2006, laptop-style batteries burst open and within 30 seconds started spraying highly flammable liquid. The heat “would often ignite adjacent cells”, while others “exploded forcefully”, creating a fireball and explosive pressure pulse.

Incidents of fire, smoke, extreme heat or explosions involving lithium-ion batteries were reported to the FAA 11 times last year. While that’s a small proportion of the global shipments of the devices, the prevalence of the technology “constitutes a safety hazard that must be managed in a clear and comprehensive manner”, according to IATA.

Relatively minor damage to batteries can cause them to ignite. In one 2011 incident on a flight from the Australian town of Lismore to Sydney, a misplaced internal screw on an iPhone was enough to damage its battery, causing smoke to pour out of the case, an Australian government report said.

More

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-18/airplane-fire-risk-prompts-widening-ban-on-smartphone-batteries

The monthly Coppock Indicators finished April

DJIA: +112 Down. NASDAQ: +198 Down. SP500: +150 Down.