Baltic Dry Index. 573 -02 Brent Crude 65.41
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
For, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest woman gives up but with life itself.
Nicola Sturgeon, with apologies to The Declaration of Arbroath. 1320
God must be an Englishman after all. While the neo communist Scottish
National Party wiped out all comers north of the border, storing up future
constitutional problems for the incoming new UK parliament, the prospect of the
SNP dictating policy in England via a weak Labour government beholden to them
for power, drove English and Welsh voters back to the Conservatives in droves.
The still just barely United Kingdom limps on, probably to an in or out vote on
the EUSSR in 2017, if the new Parliament can get that far.
What happens if the 55 out of 59 Scots SNP MPs opt to meet only as
Scottish Grand Committee in Westminster, or opt not to take their seats in
Westminster at all, and to meet instead in Edinburgh? Still they won’t do that right away, “Wee Eck”
wants to strut around London at the head of the marauders from Hell. The Brits
now need more than ever to stay long fully paid up physical gold and silver.
The next few weeks and months, in the for now still United Kingdom, look
interesting.
General Election 2015: Pound surges against the euro after Conservatives storm ahead
Friday 08 May 2015
The pound made its biggest
one-day gain against the euro for two years and the FTSE-100 was expected to
surge as the Conservatives stormed ahead in the polls on Friday.
Markets rejoiced at the prospect
of a stable, Tory-led government continuing the austerity economics of the past
five years.
Sterling leaped at 10pm following
the exit polls and continued rising As results came in. Against the
dollar it is now up 2 cents at $1.5498, traders said. The euro slumped against
the booming pound by 1.54p to 72.46p.
Broadly, sterling moved in line
with the results coming in and their effect on the spread betting markets
predicting the outcome for the Tories. It peaked as, at one stage, these were
indicating a spread of between 322-325 seats for the Tories. The spread is
currently 319-322.
More
Asian shares rebound, sterling jumps on UK exit polls
Asian shares rebounded from one-month lows on Friday, helped by signs global bond markets are stabilizing after a big selloff, though investors were on guard ahead of U.S. jobs data and crunch talks between Greece and its creditors at the weekend.Sterling jumped more than one percent against other major currencies after British Prime Minister David Cameron appeared set to govern Britain, showing surprising strength in a tightly-contested election.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS rose 0.4 percent, recovering from a one-month low hit earlier. Japan's Nikkei .N225 ticked up 0.4 percent from one-month low hit on Thursday.
Investors breathed a sigh of relief after the global bond market rout since late April appeared to have run its course for now.
"Yields have risen to levels that would attract investors," said Chotaro Morita, head of Japan rates strategy at SMBC Nikko Securities.
More
In continental EUSSR news,
Finland looks set to take an easier line on Greece, while Greece upped the
rhetoric on Grexit. If we go others will be next. The new incoming Finnish
government now says it might go along with a third Greek bailout on the same
terms as earlier bailouts. But Finland got Greek collateral for previous Finnish
cash are they going to ask for more?
Varoufakis says Grexit is a 'forbidden thought'
BRUSSELS
Greek Finance Minister Yanis
Varoufakis said on Thursday that talk of Greece leaving the euro zone risked
increasing the probability it would happen, which in turn would start to
unravel the entire common currency.
"Grexit is a forbidden
thought in our minds," he told an audience at the European Parliament in
Brussels.
Noting suggestions that a Greek
exit could be contained by the rest of the bloc, he added: "Once there is
this mindset that now we don't have an indivisible common currency... this is a
very corrosive idea which will eventually bring the whole project down.
"And therefore the thought
of Grexit is profoundly anti-European."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/07/us-eurozone-greece-varoufakis-grexit-idUSKBN0NS1K720150507
Finland's election winner plans coalition with eurosceptics
HELSINKI
Finland's likely next prime
minister Juha Sipila announced plans on Thursday to form a coalition with the
Finns Party, which wants a tougher line on euro zone bailouts and immigration.
Sipila, head of the Centre Party,
said the planned majority coalition in parliament would also include the
center-right National Coalition led by the previous prime minister, pro-EU
Alexander Stubb.
"This was the best option.
The biggest challenge is the economic situation. We need a strong coalition
that is capable of planning reforms and implementing those decisions,"
Sipila told a news conference.
---- Finland has suffered three years of recession, largely because of the downfall of Nokia's phone business and a slowdown in Europe and Russia. The outgoing, quarrelling left-right government failed to curb debt growth or step up reforms.
The Finns, led by Timo Soini,
came second in April's election, scoring one more seat than the National
Coalition.
Soini spooked financial markets
in 2011 with his anti-bailout rhetoric, but has toned down his demands that
Greece be kicked out of the euro zone.
"The situation in Greece is
utterly horrible. I have my own view on how the situation should be handled,
but we will together see what is possible," he told reporters on Thursday.
"But Greece is not in a form
that it could survive on its own."
The
Finns and the two other parties have said they could accept a third bailout for
Greece from the EU rescue fund within its current capacity and capital
structure.
More
"Until government administrators can so identify the interests of government with those of the people and refrain from defrauding the masses through the device of currency depreciation for the sake of remaining in office, the wiser ones will prefer to keep as much of their wealth in the most stable and marketable forms possible - forms which only the precious metals provide."
Elgin Groseclose
At the Comex silver
depositories Thursday final figures were: Registered 59.77 Moz, Eligible 114.51
Moz, Total 174.28 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, it’s the turn of our madly deluded Keynesian
central banksters again. Go on David, don’t hold back, hit them with the cosh
again.
The Great Disconnect——Central Bank Driven “Markets” Have Nothing To Do With Economics
by David Stockman •
The German bund yield is soaring like a rocket today. After touching on
the truly lunatic rate of 5 bps only a few weeks back, it has just
crossed the 60 bps marker. Needless to say, when a blue chip 10-year bond
widely held on @95% repo leverage moves that far that fast—–there is some
heavy duty furniture breakage happening in fast money land.But don’t cry for the bond market gamblers. They already made a killing front-running the ECB. During the 16 months between January 2014 and the April peak, speculators in German 10-year bunds would have made a 350% profit using essentially zero cost repo funding. So in the last few days they have given a tad of that back while making a bee line for the exit.
Yet during the uninterrupted march of the bund into the monetary Valhalla depicted above, how many times did you hear that the market was merely “pricing in” a flight to quality among investors and the dreaded specter of “deflation”. That is, what amounted to sheer lunacy—– valuing any 10-year government bond at a deeply negative after-tax and after-inflation yield—-was attributed to rational economic factors.
No it wasn’t. The manic drive to 5 bps was pure speculative caprice, triggered by the ECB’s public pledge to corner the market in German government debt. What gambler in his right mind would not buy hand-over-fist any attempt to corner the market by a central bank with a printing press——especially one managed by a dim bulb apparatchik like Mario Draghi!
Never has an agency of a state anywhere on the planet pleasured speculators with such stupendous windfalls. Yet any day now we will hear from the talking heads on CNBC that, no, massive bond buying by central banks does not repress or distort interest rates because once Europe’s QE started, rates actually backed up. And, furthermore, this is entirely logical because QE will enable the economy to escape its deflationary trap, meaning that investors are discounting an imminent resurgence of growth!
Oh, com’on. When investors—-if there are any such naïve waifs left—–start down the rabbit hole believing that markets and economics are still connected in a historically orthodox manner, they will eventually run smack into something a lot more ferocious than a rabbit. Namely, the next bear market crash——the inexorable end game of a financial system in which price discovery has been totally extinguished.
Thus, in today’s central bank dominated casinos, bad news is not priced in slowly as its scope and timing become more defined; it’s priced-in suddenly and violently when even the fast money gamblers conclude that the pricing has reached irrationally exuberant extremes that even the central banks cannot sustain.
That’s what now happening to the bund, the Italian bond, the US treasury note and most all else in the $100 billion global bond market. The front-runners are cashing-out. The vast falsification of pricing fostered by the central banks is unraveling upon its own perilous extreme.
---- So what’s left now is for the euro-market gamblers to unload their stashes to the sucker with the dumbest bid in the casino. Namely, the geniuses in Frankfurt who apparently believe that if you tax an economy to 50% of income and then bury its consumers, producers and taxpayers alike under endless heapings of debt, that you can make growth accelerate by injecting $1.3 trillion of fraudulent credit conjured from thin air into the casino.
In fact, today’s bund and treasury dumpers are piling into other short-run speculations like oil futures and busted shale names. And soon the rabbit hole dwellers will pronounce that the oil bottom is in and all is awesome in the forward outlook for growth and profits.
But here’s the problem—–that is, the very same and universal problem as that which afflicts the fixed income markets. To wit, any and all of the “incoming data” on the economy is badly distorted and deformed owing to the global falsification of financial prices by the central banks.
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
Solar & Related Update.
With events
happening fast in the development of solar power, I’ve added this new section.
Updates as they get reported.
Blu-Ray Disc Can be Used to Improve Solar Cell Performance
Data storage pattern transferred to solar cell increases light absorption
EVANSTON, Ill. --- Who knew
Blu-ray discs were so useful? Already one of the best ways to store
high-definition movies and television shows because of their high-density data
storage, Blu-ray discs also improve the performance of solar cells — suggesting
a second use for unwanted discs — according to new research from Northwestern
University.
An interdisciplinary research
team has discovered that the pattern of information written on a Blu-ray disc
-- and it doesn’t matter if it’s Jackie Chan’s “Police Story 3: Supercop” or
the cartoon “Family Guy” -- works very well for improving light absorption
across the solar spectrum. And better yet, the researchers know why.
“We had a hunch that Blu-ray
discs might work for improving solar cells, and, to our delight, we found the
existing patterns are already very good,” said Jiaxing Huang, a materials
chemist and an associate professor of materials science and engineering in the
McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
---- The findings are published today (Nov. 25) in the journal Nature Communications.
In the field of solar cells, it is known that if texture is placed on the surface of a solar cell, light is scattered more effectively, increasing a cell’s efficiency. Scientists have long been searching for the most effective texture with a reasonable manufacturing cost.
The Northwestern researchers have demonstrated that a Blu-ray disc’s strings of binary code 0s and 1s, embedded as islands and pits to store video information, give solar cells the near-optimal surface texture to improve their absorption over the broad spectrum of sunlight.
---- Huang puzzled over the question of why for some time. One day, his wife, Shaorong Liu, a database engineer at IBM, suggested it likely had something to do with data compression. That was the insight Huang needed.
Huang and Sun then turned to McCormick colleague Dongning Guo, an expert in information theory, to investigate this idea. Guo is an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
The researchers looked closely at the data processing algorithms in the Blu-ray standard and noted the algorithms serve two major purposes:
• Achieving as high a degree of compression as possible by converting the video signals into a seemingly random sequence of 0s and 1s; and
• Increasing error tolerance by adding controlled redundancy into the data sequence, which also limits the number of consecutive 0s and 1s.
These two purposes, the researchers said, have resulted in a quasi-random array of islands and pits (0s and 1s) with feature sizes between 150 and 525 nanometers. And this range, it turns out, works quite well for light-trapping applications over the entire solar spectrum.
The overall broadband absorption enhancement of a Blu-ray patterned solar cell was measured to be 21.8 percent, the researchers report.
“In addition to improving polymer solar cells, our simulation suggests the Blu-ray patterns could be broadly applied for light trapping in other kinds of solar cells,” Sun said.
“It has been quite unexpected and truly thrilling to see new science coming out of the intersection of information theory, nanophotonics and materials science,” Huang said.
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2014/11/blu-ray-disc-can-be-used-to-improve-solar-cell-performance.html#sthash.1bqgyeJA.dpuf
Another weekend, and us Brits can breathe easier that we are for now, not to be robbed, raped and pillaged by my countrymen from the north. But the SNP horde will want a ton of Danegeld to stay safely on their reservation for long. And what’s going to happen in Greece this weekend? Have a great weekend everyone.
From the Orwellian
thoughts of Comrade Sturgeon:
“All Brits are
equal, but the Scots are more equal than others.”
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished April
DJIA: +112 Down. NASDAQ: +198 Down. SP500: +150 Down.
No comments:
Post a Comment