Baltic Dry Index. 586 -06 Brent Crude 65.37
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
“Call
it the Goldman Sachs test. If this is something Goldman would do to its
clients, [Greece] don't do it."
Felix
Salmon.
Friday in the EUSSR, more talk less action. Unless Germany blinks, the end is nigh for Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and France. If Greece goes down for the count, it’s going to take the others with them albeit over the next two years.
Merkel, Hollande Tell Greece to Take Route A to Agreement
1:00 PM BST May 22,
2015
Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande told Greece there’s no alternative to
dealing with creditors as it seeks to unlock bailout funds, after another round
of negotiations failed to break the impasse over aid.With time running out for a deal to free up the remaining 7.2 billion-euro ($8 billion) tranche of aid, the German chancellor and the French president said the Greek government needs to do more work to flesh out its reform program and satisfy the creditor institutions of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.
They spoke after discussions with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on the sidelines of a European Union summit in Latvia broke up in the early hours of Friday with an agreement only to keep talking. Whereas Tsipras referred to a solution “soon,” Merkel said there’s “a whole lot to do.”
----The
meeting marked another rejection by Merkel -- backed by Hollande -- of the
latest Tsipras attempt to bypass finance ministers and strike a political deal
at the level of government leaders, highlighting German insistence that
Greece’s budget numbers must add up before aid can be released. Without an
agreement, Greece risks a default that would put in question its future in the
19-nation euro region.
A government official, in a debriefing after the talks broke up about 1 a.m., signaled Greek frustration by saying that a main obstacle is that the International Monetary Fund needs to be on board. “Open issues” remain with creditors, including pensions, sales-tax rates and targets for a primary budget surplus, the official told reporters.
Optimism Quashed
A short statement released separately by the French and German governments after more than two hours of talks with Tsipras was devoid of earlier optimism expressed by Hollande at paving the way for an accord as soon as the end of the month. In its place, the governments of the two biggest euro-area economies talked of agreement “to stay in close contact.”
More
In Brexit news, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, thinks
it’s going to happen. Forget the oily central bankster words, the BOE is
preparing for a UK EUSSR exit. But was it a genuine error or deliberate leak
intended to sink Brexit?
Secret Bank of England taskforce investigates financial fallout of Brexit
News of undercover project emerges after Bank staff accidentally email details to the Guardian including PR notes on how to deny its existence
Phillip
Inman Economics correspondent Friday 22 May 2015 19.11 BST
Bank of England officials are secretly researching the financial shocks that could hit Britain if there is a vote to leave the European Union in the forthcoming referendum.
The Bank blew its cover on Friday when it accidentally emailed details of the project – including how the bank intended to fend off any inquiries about its work – direct to the Guardian.
According to the confidential email, the press and most staff in Threadneedle Street must be kept in the dark about the work underway, which has been dubbed Project Bookend.
It spells out that if anyone asks about the project, the taskforce must say the investigation has nothing to do with the referendum, saying only that staff are involved in examining “a broad range of European economic issues” that concern the Bank.
The revelation is likely to embarrass the bank governor, Mark Carney, who has overhauled the central bank’s operations and promised greater transparency over its decision-making.
MPs are now likely to ask whether the Bank intended to inform parliament that a major review of Britain’s prospects outside the EU was being undertaken by the institution that acts as the UK’s main financial regulator. Carney is also likely to come under pressure within the Bank to reveal whether there are other undercover projects underway.
----The report could prove incendiary, but without a public notice advertising the Bank’s research project, parliament and the public would be unable to demand its publication.
The email indicates that a small group of senior staff are to examine the effect of a Brexit under the authority of Sir Jon Cunliffe, who as deputy director for financial stability has responsibility for monitoring the risk of another market crash.
Cunliffe also sits on the board of the City regulator, the Prudential Regulatory Authority.
James Talbot, the head of the monetary assessment and strategy division, is involved in Project Bookend, drawing on his past work as an adviser on European economic policy.
The email, from Cunliffe’s private secretary to four senior executives, was written on 21 May and forwarded by mistake to a Guardian editor by the Bank’s head of press, Jeremy Harrison.
More
At the Comex silver
depositories Friday final figures were: Registered 60.85 Moz, Eligible 117.91
Moz, Total 178.76 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Below, what happens when the central bankster’s
stock and bond bubbles end.
"Finance
is the art of passing customer segregated funds from hypothecation to hypothecation
until it finally disappears."
How China's (Formerly) Richest Man Destroyed His Own Fortune When He Tried To Sell A Stock
05/22/2015 18:17
On Wednesday, we reported on what was certainly the biggest market news of the week when in under one second, Chinese solar company Hanergy Thin Film crashed by nearly 50% due to what are still unknown reasons. As a reminder, before its crash and indefinite trading suspension,
Hanergy’s market value was higher than all other listed Chinese solar companies combined and six times the value of First Solar, the biggest producer of thin-film solar panels.
Aside from the dramatic move, the reason why the wipeout of this tightly held stock was particularly memorable is because it took with it some $14 billion or nearly half of majority owner Li Hejun's $30 billion fortune, who as we reported previously, is China's richest man, having recently overtaken Alibaba's Jack Ma. Or rather was.A quick tangent into how Li built up his stratospheric paper wealth on very short notice.
As noted above, the bulk of Li's fortune comes from his 80.8% stake in Hanergy, whose market cap had topped at approximately $40 billion, or greater than the market cap Sony and Twitter. Even more notable, is that the bulk of the appreciation in the stock took was a result of what appears to have been an aggressive buying campaign by none other than Li himself, who as Bloomberg recounts, was the single biggest buyer in the name as it soared since the start of January, becoming "wealthier" (on paper) by buying ever more stock, thus pushing his own net worth every higher!
----What is certainly peculiar is that even as Li was aggressively single-handedly pushing the price of the stock, thre were many questions about the company's operations. Of note, about 61% of the company’s revenue was sourced from sales it made to its own parent company Hanergy Group, and its affiliates.
The relationship was laid out by Bloomberg as follows: "The publicly traded entity makes factory equipment that produces thin-film solar panels. Closely held Hanergy Group makes the panels and installs them, though it has never disclosed its production output. Hanergy Thin Film also buys PV panels from its parent company to make into finished solar parks."
As the FT reported first 5 months ago, Hanergy "has been racking up enviable revenues largely through sales between its listed subsidiary, HTF, and itself." No wonder the company has been desperate to distract attention from its cooked books, and instead had focused on pure marketing, pitching itself as a company that promises to revolutionize solar power and to become the Apple of green energy.
-----Such market microstructure airpockets are very familiar to frequent Zero Hedge readers, appearing periodically and unexpectedly in virtually all HFT-traded stocks, and occasionally, such as on May 6, 2010, in the entire market.
As Nanex' Eric Hunsader notes,
"a large seller exhausted liquidity and tipped the market over.. boom."
----Cited by the WSJ, Hunsader said the collapse "could have been caused by high-speed traders pulling out of the market due to heavy selling by an investor looking to unload a large chunk of stock."
Bingo.
Because as it turns out, after
accumulating a gargantuan position in the stock in order to diffuse speculation
that his primary investment vehicles is a fraud, Mr. Li decided he had had
enough. And decided to sell.
He did this at first by shorting
several billions shares of the stock in which he had built up an 80% stake.
According to the WSJ, "on
Friday in a filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Mr. Li disclosed he went
short 759.7 million shares in Hanergy on Monday, two days before the annual
meeting. This represented 1.9% of the company and about 5.3 times that day’s
trading volume of Hanergy shares."
Yet something must have provoked Li to switch his posture from a chronic buyer to an acute shorter/seller.
That something was a very fundamental factor, the most fundamental of all - the company had run out of money.
As Caixin reported, "the solar panel manufacturer whose listed subsidiary has suffered a sell-off of shares in Hong Kong failed to repay bank loans, sources close to the parent company say."
Worse, the selling avalanche and the subsequent suspension of trading means that all hell may be about to break loose according to Caixin, Hanergy had "used shares in its listed unit to take out bank loans, but has been unable to repay some of them. The share sales escalated after debtors made little progress in negotiations with the company over the defaults, those sources said."
----Incidentally, all of this should remind regular readers of an almost identical example on this side of the Pacific.
Remember CYNK: the illiquid stock of a company which
did not even exist, and yet whose market cap rose to several billion,
before a bout of selling wiped out all the equity holders, and forced the
regulators to halt it and delist it, in the process wiping out its entire
"value" built up courtesy of gullible idiots believing in "get
rich quick" Ponzi schemes.
----Increasingly we are witnessing how this "market", if this rigged, illiquid, central-bank manipulated cesspool can be called a market, is precisely like CYNK.
And as of this moment, Mister Li
and Javier Romero, the President, CEO and secretary, in fact the only employee,
of CYNK certainly have much in common: they see what happens when you levitate
a company to mindblowing extremes on no volume and when you own the bulk of the
float... and what happens when you try to offload it.
Sadly, this is a lesson which the
entire market, and all those who are buying on the way up, and confusing paper
profits with actual wealth, will also learn the hard way.
Because between CYNK and now
Hanergy, we have had a very clear glimpse of the endgame: and as
of this moment nobody can say they were not warned about how this most
manipulated of asset bubbles ever, ends.
More
One
of the queries Quakers are asked to consider, is: "Do you maintain strict
integrity in your business transactions and in your relations with individuals
and organizations? Are you personally scrupulous and responsible in the use of
money entrusted to you, and are you careful not to defraud the public
revenue?"
Probably
why there a no Quakers on Wall Street or in the City.
Solar & Related Update.
With events
happening fast in the development of solar power, I’ve added this new section.
Updates as they get reported.
Who needs rare
earth magnets if cheaper “non-Joulian” magnets arrive?
New class of "non-Joulian magnets" have potential to revolutionize electronics
By Colin Jeffrey May 21, 2015
Magnets are at the heart of much
of our technology, and their properties are exploited in a myriad ways across a
vast range of devices, from simple relays to enormously complex particle
accelerators.
A new class of magnets discovered by scientists at the University
of Maryland (UMD) and Temple University may lead to other types of magnets that
expand in different ways, with multiple, cellular magnetic fields, and possibly
give rise to a host of new devices. The team also believes that these new
magnets could replace expensive, rare-earth magnets with ones made of abundant
metal alloys.
About 175 years ago, physicist
James Prescott Joule (the same person after which the unit of work energy, the
joule, is named) discovered magnetostriction, where iron-based magnetic
materials minutely distort in shape, but not in volume, when placed in a
magnetic field. Since then, it has been pretty much accepted that this was the
way all magnetic materials behaved.
The work conducted on iron alloys
(including iron-gallium, iron-germanium, and iron-aluminum) by researchers at
UMD and Temple, however, has resulted in the observation of a property never
before encountered in magnetic materials: a change in volume whilst in the
process of magnetization. As this was fundamentally different to the phenomenon
discovered by Joule, the new magnets are called "non-Joulian
magnets."
"Our findings fundamentally
change the way we think about a certain type of magnetism that has been in
place since 1841," said former Ph.D. student Harsh Deep Chopra, now
professor and chair of mechanical engineering at Temple University. "We
have discovered a new class of magnets, which we call 'Non-Joulian Magnets',
that show a large volume change in magnetic fields. Moreover, these non-Joulian
magnets also possess the remarkable ability to harvest or convert energy with
minimal heat loss."
The researchers say the
low-energy characteristics of these new magnets means they show potential for
the production of smaller, more efficient sensors and actuators with ever-smaller
heat signatures. Other potential applications range from efficient
energy-harvesting devices and compact micro-actuators for space, automotive,
robotics and medical applications, through to actuators with exceptionally low
thermal signatures ideal for defense applications.
----Though this research is in its infancy, the researchers say there is great potential for the production of multi-pole magnets created from simple, abundant alloys to replace expensive rare-earth element magnets in all manner of applications.
The results of this research were recently published in the journal Nature.
http://www.gizmag.com/expanding-alloy-magnets/37621/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=d6d21c1559-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-d6d21c1559-90625829
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The monthly Coppock Indicators finished April
DJIA: +112 Down. NASDAQ: +198 Down. SP500: +150 Down.
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