Baltic Dry Index. 779 +06 Brent Crude 63.00
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.
Greece, Italy, Spain, France, with apologies to Groucho Marx.
It is decision day for Germany. D-Day as in Drachma or not. Does the Empress Merkel want Greece in or out of the euro for a few more weeks? Is Germany
ready for the opprobrium to follow if Germany crashes Greece out later today in
Brussels? Everyone else attending todays emergency meeting is a nonentity. It’s
not their money or call after all. It all comes down to what the German
Empress wants and is willing to pay for. Of course, any “fix” today only buys Greece a more
few weeks in the euro sunshine. A little more time for the Greeks to empty
their bank accounts. Another episode in the never ending, game theory contest
of Greek Roulette between Athens and Berlin. What a way to run a dying monetary
union.
If Germany crashes Greece out later today, the separatist parties across
Europe will likely be the major winners. But giving in to Greece will only
embolden them too. Continental Europe’s Bilderbergers have managed to achieve
the impossible. No matter what the outcome today, the EUSSR loses. Brexit looks
more likely with each passing day. Europe can thank God that any in-out vote in
the UK is still well over a year away.
We open with a mixed view from the UK. Below that, a more cynical view
from the USA, and JP Morgan on the financial reality.
Eurozone doomed whether Greece leaves or stays, study shows
The single currency is forcing its members further apart and cannot survive in its current form, new analysis shows
The Eurozone is doomed and cannot survive in its current form, regardless of what happens to Greece, a major new study shows.New research demonstrates that members of the single European currency are becoming more economically divergent, making a single rate of interest increasingly unsuitable for the bloc.
Political, social and cultural differences will also make it
increasingly hard for the euro members to share a currency. Eventually, the
Eurozone will have to either “integrate or disintegrate”, the analysis says.
The research, by economic consultants from the ECU Group, is part of
Change, or go, a wide-ranging study of Britain’s European Union membership and
future prospects.
The study is being serialised in The Telegraph at the start of a
potentially decisive week for the EU and its currency, with Greece once again
facing a potential exit from the Eurozone.
However, the report concludes that whether or not Greece is forced out
of the single currency, the Eurozone will still face deep-seated problems that
must be resolved by either breaking up or full-blown political integration.
More
Greek Debt Crisis Is The Iraq War of Finance
Guardians of financial stability are deliberately provoking a bank run and endangering Europe's system in their zeal to force Greece to its knees
by Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard at The Telegraph • June 21, 2015
Rarely in modern times have we witnessed such a display of petulance and bad
judgment by those supposed to be in charge of global financial stability, and
by those who set the tone for the Western world. The spectacle is astonishing. The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the International Monetary Fund, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.
They want to see these rebel Klephts hanged from the columns of the Parthenon – or impaled as Ottoman forces preferred, deeming them bandits - even if they degrade their own institutions in the process.
----Does anybody dispute that the ECB – via the Bank of Greece - is actively inciting a bank run in a country where it is also the banking regulator by issuing this report on Wednesday?
It warned of an "uncontrollable crisis" if there is no creditor deal, followed by soaring inflation, "an exponential rise in unemployment", and a "collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership".
The guardian of financial stability is consciously and deliberately accelerating a financial crisis in an EMU member state - with possible risks of pan-EMU and broader global contagion – as a negotiating tactic to force Greece to the table.
It did so days after premier Alexis Tsipras accused the creditors of
"laying traps" in the negotiations and acting with a political
motive. He more or less accused them of trying to destroy an elected government
and bring about regime change by financial coercion.
I leave it to lawyers to decide whether this report is a prima facie
violation of the ECB’s primary duty under the EU treaties. It is certainly
unusual. The ECB has just had to increase emergency liquidity to the Greek
banks by €1.8bn (enough to last to Monday night) to offset the damage from
rising deposit flight.
In its report, the Bank of Greece claimed that failure to meet creditor
demands would “most likely” lead to the country’s ejection from the European
Union. Let us be clear about the meaning of this. It is not the expression of
an opinion. It is tantamount to a threat by the ECB to throw the Greeks out of
the EU if they resist.
----One should have thought that the IMF
would wish to lower the political temperature, given that its own credibility
and long-term survival are at stake. But no, Christine Lagarde has upped the political ante
by stating that Greece will fall into arrears immediately if it misses a €1.6bn
payment to the Fund on June 30.In my view, this is a discretionary escalation. The normal procedure is to notify the IMF Board after 30 days. This period is a de facto grace period, and in a number of past cases the arrears were cleared up quietly during the interval before the matter ever reached the Board.
The IMF could have let this process run in the case of Greece. It has chosen not to do so, ostensibly on the grounds that the sums are unusually large.
Klaus Regling, head of the eurozone bail-out fund (EFSF), entered on cue to hint strongly that his organisation would trigger cross-default clauses on its Greek bonds – 45pc of the Greek package – even though there is no necessary reason why it should do so. It is an optional matter for the EFSF board.
He seems to be threatening an EFSF default, even though the Greeks themselves are not doing so, a remarkable state of affairs.
It is obvious what is happening. The creditors are acting in concert. Instead of stopping to reflect for one moment on the deeper wisdom of their strategy, they are doubling down mechanically, appearing to assume that terror tactics will cow the Greeks at the twelfth hour.
More
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11687229/Greek-debt-crisis-is-the-Iraq-War-of-finance.html
So what if Greece leaves the European Union?
Opinion writer
Now come Greeks bearing the gift of confirmation that Margaret Thatcher was
right about socialist governments: “They always run out of other people’s
money.” Greece, from whose ancient playwrights Western drama descends, is in an
absurdist melodrama about securing yet another cash infusion from international
creditors. This would add another boulder to a mountain of debt almost twice
the size of Greece’s gross domestic product. This protracted dispute will
result in desirable carnage if Greece defaults, thereby becoming a
constructively frightening example to all democracies doling out unsustainable,
growth-suppressing entitlements. In January, Greek voters gave power to the left-wing Syriza party, one third of which, the Economist reports, consists of “Maoists, Marxists and supporters of Che Guevara.” Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, 40, a retired student radical, immediately denounced a European Union declaration criticizing Russia’s dismemberment of Ukraine. He chose only one cabinet member with prior government experience — a former leader of Greece’s Stalinist Communist Party. Tsipras’s minister for culture and education says Greek education “should not be governed by the principle of excellence . . . it is a warped ambition.” Practicing what he preaches, he proposes abolishing university entrance exams.
Voters chose Syriza because it promised to reverse reforms, particularly of pensions and labor laws, demanded by creditors, and to resist new demands for rationality. Tsipras immediately vowed to rehire 12,000 government employees. His shrillness increasing as his options contract, he says the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund are trying to “humiliate” Greece.
How could one humiliate a nation that chooses governments committed to Rumpelstiltskin economics, the belief that the straw of government largesse can be spun into the gold of national wealth? Tsipras’s approach to mollifying those who hold his nation’s fate in their hands is to say they must respect his “mandate” to resist them. He thinks Greek voters, by making delusional promises to themselves, obligate other European taxpayers to fund them. Tsipras, who says the creditors are “pillaging” Greece, is trying to pillage his local governments, which are resisting his extralegal demands that they send him their cash reserves.
Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s finance minister, is an academic admirer of Nobel laureate John Nash, the Princeton genius depicted in the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” who recently died. Varoufakis is interested in Nash’s work on game theory, especially the theory of cooperative games in which two or more participants aim for a resolution better for all than would result absent cooperation. Varoufakis’s idea of cooperation is to accuse the creditors whose money Greece has been living on of “fiscal waterboarding.” Tsipras tells Greece’s creditors to read “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Ernest Hemingway’s novel of the Spanish Civil War. His passive-aggressive message? “Play nicely or we will kill ourselves.”
Since joining the euro zone in 2001, Greece has borrowed a sum 1.7 times its 2013 GDP. Its 25 percent unemployment (50 percent among young workers) results from a 25 percent shrinkage of GDP. It is a mendicant reduced to hoping to “extend and pretend” forever. But extending the bailout and pretending that creditors will someday be paid encourages other European socialists to contemplate shedding debts — other people’s money that is no longer fun.
Greece, with just 11 million people and 2 percent of the euro zone’s GDP, is unlikely to cause a contagion by leaving the zone. If it also leaves the misbegotten European Union, this evidence of the E.U.’s mutability might encourage Britain’s “euro-skeptics” when, later this year, that nation has a referendum on reclaiming national sovereignty by withdrawing from the E.U. If Greece so cherishes its sovereignty that it bristles at conditions imposed by creditors, why is it in the E.U., the perverse point of which is to “pool” nations’ sovereignties in order to dilute national consciousness?
The E.U. has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a president no one can name, a parliament whose powers subtract from those of national legislatures, a bureaucracy no one admires or controls and rules of fiscal rectitude that no member is penalized for ignoring. It does, however, have in Greece a member whose difficulties are wonderfully didactic.
More
JPMorgan: Greece's Financial System Just Had a Terrible Week
Outflows appear to be accelerating
June 21, 2015 — 9:16 PM BST
Failure to reach an agreement between Greek and European Union leaders last
week spelled bad news for the banking system of the Hellenic
Republic. Talk of capital controls is heating up, and with it the amount of money
being pulled from Greece appears to be accelerating.JPMorgan analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou estimate that Greek banks lost about 6 billion euros in the week ending June 19. That takes total deposit outflows from Greece to about 44 billion euros since the beginning of the year. The analysts use Greeks' purchases of offshore money market funds as a proxy to generate early estimates of those numbers.
The 44 billion euro outflows has totally eclipsed the 14 billion
euros that had flowed into Greece between June 2012 and November 2014. In
total, the JPMorgan analysts say, Greece has lost 117 billion euros
of deposits since the end of 2009, when worries over the country's debt
profile first began reverberating across financial markets. That means Greece's
bank deposit-to-GDP ratio now sits at 66 percent -- far lower than the 94
percent eurozone average.
The stress on the Greek banking system is also apparent in less
obvious financial corners.
Greek banks remain locked out of the vast and shadowy "repo
market" where financial institutions pawn their assets in exchange
for short-term financing. The liabilities of Greek banks to non-domestic
financial institutions -- or repo loans to Greek banks -- have fallen
by almost 30 billion euros since last November, JPMorgan says, citing Bank of
Greece data.
That's one reason why Greek banks have had to borrow almost 80
billion euros in emergency funding from the European Central Bank in the
same time period -- far more than the 44 billion euros they've lost in
deposits.
"a Union for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is".
The EUSSR, with apologies to the South Sea Bubble 1720
At the Comex silver depositories Friday
final figures were: Registered 57.84 Moz, Eligible 123.61 Moz, Total 181.45
Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today,
a glimpse of the future. What could possibly go wrong in the central banksters’
masterplan? Stay long fully paid up physical gold and silver, against the day
the masterplan goes poof.
"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
The Coming Liquidation
Hugo Salinas
Price 18/June/2015
Total world debt has been calculated recently at $223 Trillion dollars.
World debt has increased some 40% since the crisis of 2008-2009; as I recall,
it was about $157 Trillion at that time. The $223 Trillion is actual debt, and
does not include the potential debt lying in derivates of this debt, which is
another humongous amount and would become debt should there be any default on
the $223 Trillion world debt.
The $223 Trillion world debt is like a huge cloud up in the sky.
It is of vital importance for the world of finance, as it presently
exists, that the $223 Trillion world debt continue up in the sky, and that it
not be subject to liquidation.
Liquidation and payment are two different things.
Liquidation means that holders of debt seek to exchange the debt they
hold, for cash.
The problem for the world's central bankers is to keep the debt cloud up
in the sky and avoid at all costs a deluge of liquidation. That is to say,
there must be no movement to get rid of bonds in exchange for cash.
World debt will continue to be a massive cloud up in the sky, as long as
investors wish to own bonds; since central banks drove down interest rates all
over the world to absurdly low levels - even to negative interest rates -
prices of previously issued bonds rose to equally absurd levels and thus
created huge profits for those who owned those bonds.
World debt is not being paid down and has to grow, because the debt is
being rolled-over, and rollovers include interest due. So the debt cloud has to
get bigger.
When interest rates tick up, as they did just recently, this is an
indication that the market is showing a nascent preference for cash, rather
than bonds.
This incipient increase in interest rates is warning that we may see, at
some point, a widespread desire to dump bonds for cash; that would mean a jump
in interest rates which would lower the prices of bonds, and the fall would
cause losses to holders of bonds and other credit instruments which form the
debt cloud. Hasty sales of bonds would aggravate the fall in values and
reinforce the rise in interest rates. As in all cases of panic, those who panic
first have the greater chance of avoiding losses.
There is a further problem: the great majority of investors and the
giant investment funds are, all of them, invested in bonds, on which they
realized great profits when interest rates began to fall. But if all the big
investors are owners of bonds, who are they going to sell their bonds to when
they wish to liquidate them and get into cash? These investors are going to
suffer big losses, because the prices of bonds will have to collapse. This is
going to take place the moment that the investors think that the trend in interest
rates is no longer down, but up.
Banking systems are investors in bonds, and bonds make up an important
part of their assets. In Europe, if the assets of the banking system fall by
only 4%, then the whole European banking system is bankrupt. A collapse in bond
prices caused by rises in interest rates would be deadly for the whole European
banking system, and if Europe collapses, the rest of the world would have to
follow suit.
Interest rates will have to rise, sooner or later; central bankers
tremble when they see the slightest sign that interest rates are ticking up.
Obviously, the FED and ECB cannot even think of raising interest rates; they
are trapped and wait in dread for the deluge of bond liquidation when the $223
Trillion debt cloud hanging over the world turns into a cloudburst.
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 converting sunlight to usable cheap AC energy
mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards? A quantum computer
next?
No update today.
"I
never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
Albert
Einstein.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: +107 Down. NASDAQ:
+195 Down. SP500: +139 Down.
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