Baltic Dry Index. 779 unch Brent Crude 63.13
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the
age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it
was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had
everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to
Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so
far like the present period.
European Council President
Donald Tusk, with apologies to Charles Dickens.
In
typical EUSSR fashion, a deal with Greece was done yesterday in Brussels, and a
deal with Greece wasn’t done yesterday in Brussels. Everyone agreed to have the
European Keystone Kops Finance Ministers meet again on Wednesday to decide if
they did a deal with Greece or didn’t. The markets took it on faith that in all
the confusion there must have been a deal. They wouldn’t do a pump and dump
would they?
Below,
Greece promises to take two steps back over the next two years, i.e. another 8
billion of austerity and reform, but first the troika has to give them more
money. A troupe of monkeys could run a monetary union better than this. Has
anyone contacted Berlin Zoo?
“We
all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done
it.”
Jean-Claude Juncker. Failed Luxembourg Prime Minister and
ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar. EC
President.
Greek bailout proposals lift hopes of deal
Published: June 22, 2015 6:32 p.m. ET
BRUSSELS — Greece’s creditors suggested for the first time that a deal
to avert the country’s bankruptcy was in sight after an 11th-hour proposal
submitted by Athens on Monday made a significant concession on pension cuts.
The currency union’s finance ministers, who met Monday afternoon ahead
of a meeting of eurozone leaders, said that more work was needed to ensure
Greece’s figures were in line with creditors’ demands but that talks would
continue with the hope of reaching an agreement later this week.
The new offer was a potentially decisive breakthrough in the bailout
negotiations after four months of fractious talks.
“Some promising things have happened, including today’s talks,” said
European Council President Donald Tusk. “The latest Greek proposals are the
first real proposals in many weeks.”
A first assessment from the institutions overseeing Greece’s bailout—the
European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary
Fund—found the new plans to be “broad and comprehensive,” said Jeroen
Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who presided over the talks.
Greek bank run fears escalate as eurozone ministers openly discuss capital controls
Belgium's finance minister admits eurozone is considering draconian measures to stop banks from going bust as Tsipras swallows austerity
Pressure is mounting on the European Central Bank to keep Greece's flailing banking system alive for another day, amid tentative hopes Greece will finally be granted the bail-out money it needs to avoid a debt default next week.The possibility of capital controls was raised at an aborted meeting of eurozone finance ministers on Monday, with Belgium's finance minister admitting EU officials had discussed the draconian measures to stop money bleeding out of the financial system.
"There were indeed different opinions; not everybody was on the same wave length with respect to capital controls" said Johan Van Overtveldt.
Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is thought to have raised the possibility which was roundly dismissed by his Greek counterpart Yanis Varoufakis.
Capital controls, such as deposit withdrawal limits, can only be imposed in a country at the request of a member state government in the EU. They were last seen in the eurozone in 2013, during Cyprus's banking crisis, after the ECB threatened to pull the plug on the country’s financial system.
The remarks came as European leaders failed to agree a deal to keep the country in the eurozone after two emergency summits convened in Brussels on Monday.
After the summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said there remained "much more to do" as Athens failed to get its reforms rubber stamped by the euro's finance ministers earlier in the day.
The Eurogroup said they needed more time to consider a revised set of Greek reforms in order to ascertain whether or not they "added up". Confusion reigned in Brussels as Athens was reported to have sent the wrong document to creditors at 2am on Monday morning.
But in a hopeful sign, president Jeroen Dijsselbloem said the Greek plans were a "welcome step in a positive direction".
More
"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
At the Comex silver depositories Monday
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, Bonnie Scotland, home of the racist, anti-English
Gnats, and home too of the Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, money Laundromats. A
billion at least went in, but where it went after that, has collapsed three
banks in Moldova wiping out the equivalent of 20 percent of Moldovan GDP. With
competence like this they should easily fit into the Eurozone. The racist
Scottish Gnats, are firm believers in the EUSSR, and want to be admitted if the
rest of the UK votes out. With a track record like this Europe deserves them,
they ought to fit in between Greece and Luxembourg.
Scotland: the Moldovan Connection
It’s a humble ground-floor flat in Royston Mains Street in Pilton – the Edinburgh housing estate which gained notoriety as the setting for Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel about drug addiction and crime.The property is the home of a 36-year-old Lithuanian, Viktorija Zirnelyte. It is also home to hundreds of companies, some of which have recently been accused of involvement in a $1 billion Moldovan bank fraud.
Of the 438 firms registered at the modest looking address, some are owned by offshore vehicles based in jurisdictions such as the Seychelles.
Owing to a quirk of company law and Britain’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, Scottish limited partnerships, which date back to the Limited Partnerships Act of 1907, are still not required to disclose their annual accounts or even the names of the people who control them. Ownership and control can be masked and layered through the use of faceless “general partners” and “limited partners”, and these are often based in secrecy jurisdictions including Marshall Islands, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Belize and the Seychelles.
In addition to being favoured because of their tax efficiency by private equity, venture capital funds and commercial property investors, Scottish limited partnerships have become a vehicle of choice for money launderers, tax evaders, fraudsters, and other forms of skulduggery.
Companies legitimately offering no more than registration services and accommodation addresses can then be used as unwitting instruments in crime.
“Most [limited partnerships], like a drug dealer’s pay-as-you-go mobile phone, almost certainly exist for one deal before they are discarded,” said former tax inspector Richard Brooks.
In a special report published in Private Eye he added: “Those deals, however, can be extremely valuable to the perpetrators – while devastating their victims and sustaining corrupt regimes.”
Zirnelyte’s modest flat is the address of two company formation businesses, Royston Business Consultancy, which Zirnelyte runs, and Arran Business Services, directed by a succession of Latvian expatriates, including Anzelika Young, née Trifonova, who was sentenced to 250 hours community service for mortgage fraud in February 2012 at Kirkcaldy Sherriff Court.
Royston Business Consultancy played a part in the formation of companies that were named by the security firm Kroll as having facilitated a massive Moldovan bank fraud which, last November, is said to have triggered the collapse of three Moldovan banks, and last month led to 20,000 people taking to the streets of the Moldovan capital Chisinau to protest against corruption (see below).
In a report commissioned by Moldova’s central bank, and leaked last month, Kroll alleged that Fortuna United LP and Novland Limited, both registered at 18/2 Royston Mains Street, were involved in this fraud.
Companies House data shows that, since 2013, no fewer than eight other individuals, apparently Lithuanian, Latvian and Ukrainian nationals, have given Zirnelyte’s flat as their residential address. Zirnelyte was unavailable for comment. Calls to Edinburgh numbers listed as her business number were answered by the Royston Wardieburn Community Centre, where Zirnelyte was unknown.
Zirnelyte picked up her company formation skills at Leith-based company formation specialists Lawsons & Co, which is based in Duke Street, at the foot of Leith Walk, and run by the Cypriot-born businessman Marios Papantoniou.
Lawsons provide the registered addresses for at least 561 limited companies and limited partnerships, several of which have been named as being under investigation overseas in connection with allegations of a $20bn “Russian Laundromat” money laundering conspiracy (the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project won a special Europan Press Prize for its extensive coverage of this scandal). In November the UK National Crime Agency confirmed it was probing aspects of the ‘laundromat’.
According to the Kroll report, Lawsons’ premises, shared with Papantonioiu’s accountancy firm Axiano, are also the registered addresses of half a dozen companies and limited partnerships allegedly involved in the $1bn Moldovan bank fraud.
Papantoniou told the Sunday Herald that Lawsons is not responsible for the behaviour of firms registered at its addresses and that neither the National Crime Agency nor any other UK authority has approached him about the allegations. He said: “Some of the companies we create are sold to an agent in Estonia, but we are not involved in the day-to-day activities of these companies or anything else they do.” In a subsequent email, Papantoniou said the Kroll report was inaccurate and that he is considering suing the New York headquartered firm for defamation.
Other Scottish properties hosting companies allegedly involved in Moldovan fraud include a non-descript semi-detached council house, 45 Rosehaugh Road, in Inverness’s deprived South Kessock district, colloquially known as “The Ferry”. The property is home to a further 585 opaque limited partnerships, five of which, Kroll alleges, were used for the Moldovan heist. The Electoral Register says the residents of 45 Rosehaugh Road are David A MacMillan and Latvian-born Liene Brice, both in their thirties. They could not be contacted.
Another address favoured by companies said to be linked to fraud is 78 Montgomery Street in Edinburgh’s East End, home of John Hein, founder of Scotsgay magazine and a former candidate for the Liberal Party, and his partner James Stuart McMeekin. Both Hein and McMeekin are directors of company formation business Cosun Formations Ltd.
Their address is the principal place of business of an astonishing 3,500
limited partnerships. Of these, five are mentioned in the Kroll report as being
involoved in Moldovan fraud – Avenilla Commercial LP, Intratex Sales LP,
Metalforum LP, Swedtron Alliance LP and Trademarket Networks LP. Hein failed to
respond to requests for comment.
Overall the Kroll report identifies 28 Scotland-based companies and 20
based elsewhere in the UK, many with Latvian bank accounts, in connection with
its investigation into the Moldovan fraud. The underlying network of opaque
corporate entities, sometimes known as “shell” companies, is believed to be
vastly larger, numbering at least 11,000 companies in Scotland alone. And the
Scotland-based company formation specialists identified by the Sunday Herald
are churning out a further new 300 limited partnerships each month.
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. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC energy
mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards? A quantum computer
next?
First Solar CEO: ‘By 2017, We’ll Be Under $1.00 per Watt Fully Installed’
Eric
Wesoff June 22, 2015
Jim Hughes, CEO of vertically integrated solar developer First
Solar, spoke at the recent Edison
Electric Institute meeting in New Orleans.He cited "three big trends" in solar power.
Utility-scale: The CEO of one of the world's largest utility solar builders said, "There's lots of talk around distributed generation, and yet the bulk of the photovoltaics added on a global basis is still utility-scale...[and] will continue to be utility-scale."
"Cost, cost, and cost": "We recently did a strategic review of our business and asked, 'What does it take to trigger demand? How do we gain competitive advantage over our competitors?' The answer is cost."
Hughes said that markets are being driven by "demand elasticity versus price in a rather spectacular fashion." He gave two examples. "In Texas, 18 months ago, CPS put out an RFP and they had...responses that had a 4 in the front for a price -- 4-cent solar." He described that price as a "wake-up call" and added that the "response has been massive procurement" across the Southeastern U.S. Hughes also cited a project in the Middle East for Dubai Power and Water. First Solar won the 13-megawatt first phase at a relatively high price "because the cost structure was unknown." By the second phase of 100 megawatts, the price was in the 5-cent range and the customer's response was to double the demand.
He continued, "I don't remember the last time I saw pricing that had a 7- or 8-cent price in front of it...and [now] we're regularly bidding in at...5- and 6-cent power. We're beginning to see 4- to 5-cent power." The CEO said that the 4-cent level is reachable in certain cases. He added, "I fully believe that within 10 years we'll be talking about low-3-cent power on a peak basis."
Expiration of the ITC: Hughes called the expiration of the ITC "irrelevant," saying, "Within 18 months, we will overcome the cost delta resulting from the drop [of the ITC] from 30 percent to 10 percent. It actually opens up new markets, in our opinion, because you'll see an increased interest in utility generation once the distortion of the ITC is behind us."
The CEO added, "We have a technology roadmap -- by 2017, we'll be under $1.00 per watt fully installed on a tracker in the western United States." (News of First Solar's record-setting module efficiency is here; an overview of the findings of GTM Research's Global PV Demand Outlook 2015-2020 report is here.)
"The growth in corporates interested in direct acquisition of photovoltaic power is not driven by climate change concerns -- it's driven by economics. When you look at data centers, when you look at electricity-intensive industries, they are all interested in locking in a significant cost as a fixed cost rather than a commodity-priced variable cost -- and that's driving a whole lot of procurement on a global basis."
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: +107 Down. NASDAQ:
+195 Down. SP500: +139 Down.
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