Baltic Dry Index. 813 -10 Brent Crude 61.94
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
When I use a word,’ Humpty Draghi said in rather a scornful
tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alexis, ‘whether you can make words mean so many
different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Draghi, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
With apologies to Lewis
Carroll.This morning panic rules the elite of the EUSSR. The ECB’s Draghi seems to be spinning that if the Greeks will just vote yes to more austerity on Sunday, the ECB will resume the ELA lifeline to Greek banks. The bribe that’s not a bribe because if the Greeks vote yes the ECB will probably not follow through, and anyway by then this Euro car crash has already happened. In just about 20 years, this continental European construct that was supposed to replace the dollar and humiliate the despised brash Americans, has blown up in their Bilderberger faces. The damage has already happened and is irreversible. The EUSSR today is a house divided, ruined, but in total self denial.
European wealth and jobs have been destroyed, or at best transferred into the German economy. The euro itself, far from replacing the dollar, looks to be a totally flawed fiat currency, that simply isn’t in the interest of most ordinary working Europeans. The banksters and Great Vampire Squids over reached, and as a consequence, crashed the wealth of EU savers, pensioners, the poor and the futures of their youth generation. All he King’s horses and all Goldman’s men aren’t putting this Humpty Dumpty euro back together again. After this rout involving only miniscule Greece, Europe still has Belgium, France, Italy and Spain to come. Stay long fully paid up physical precious metals. Europe’s “Great Leaders” blew up the euro, and haven’t yet come to terms with the routs consequences. This monetary union is now dead in the water awaiting the real test still to come when one of the more important four turn into Greece. Like Germany after Stalingrad the ending is certain, just not the timing. Unlike Germany after Stalingrad, Euroland and the ECB has no General von Manstein.
Tsipras Says EU Won’t Eject Greece as ECB Signals Way Out
June 30, 2015 — 12:13 AM BST Updated on June 30, 2015 — 3:20 AM BST
The battle lines over Greece’s future hardened as the country prepares to
leave the protection of Europe’s bailout regime and its citizens grapple with a
new reality of capital controls.As 12,000 people gathered in the central Syntagma Square with banners that read “our lives do not belong to the creditors,” Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told ERT TV that European leaders wouldn’t throw his country out of the euro, saying the costs would be “enormous.” Meanwhile, a European central banker signaled a way still could be found to keep Greece in the currency bloc -- if voters reject Tsipras’s policies in a referendum Sunday.
Tsipras and his adversaries from Brussels to Berlin are surveying a landscape transformed by his shock decision to hold a vote on July 5. Greece is on course to withhold a $1.7 billion payment to the International Monetary Fund due June 30, and starting at midnight that day the country’s ravaged treasury no longer will be formally under the protection of European Union rescue programs.
Tsipras’s decision to hold the vote jolted the financial system so badly that Greece’s 11 million citizens now are coping with a new reality of capital controls that have locked their savings inside the country’s banks.
Grexit ‘Theoretical’
“The exit from the euro zone, which was a theoretical point, can unfortunately no longer be excluded,” European Central Bank Executive Board member Benoit Coeure said in an interview with Les Echos published late Monday.Tsipras is counting on voters’ anger and hurt to strengthen his hand. His calculation is that Greeks can vote “no” to the terms attached to aid and still not pay the price of being forced out the bloc.
“The referendum will give us a stronger negotiating position when the talks resume,” he said in an ERT TV interview. “The higher the participation and numbers of people voting ‘no,’ the stronger our position will be.”
A vote in favor, the likeliest outcome, would make the government’s position untenable and probably lead to early elections, which could produce new leadership more amenable to the demands of creditors.
Early Elections
“We think there is a 60 percent chance that the electorate will vote yes in favor of the bailout,” said Kelvin Tay, Singapore-based chief investment officer for South Asia Pacific at UBS Wealth Management. “That’s likely to be followed by a period of confusion as there will be pressure on the current government to step to down, because they are actively campaigning for a no vote.”“If they step down then we might have to go through another period of elections before the whole deal gets signed and finalized. Bear in mind that on the 20th of July, we have another 3.2 billion euros worth of payments coming due.”
With Greece in financial lockdown and banks closed, Tsipras blamed everyone but his government for bringing the country to the brink of financial paralysis,’’
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-29/tsipras-dares-eu-to-eject-greece-as-ecb-signals-route-to-safety
Greece threatens top court action to block Grexit
Exclusive: European leaders warn in concert that a 'No' vote on Sunday means Greece will be pushed out of the euro
Greece has threatened to seek a court injunction against the EU
institutions, both to block the country's expulsion from the euro and to halt
asphyxiation of the banking system.
“The Greek government will make
use of all our legal rights,” said the finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis.
“We are taking advice and will certainly consider an injunction at the
European Court of Justice. The EU treaties make no provision for euro exit and
we refuse to accept it. Our membership is not negotiable,“ he told the
Telegraph.
The defiant stand came as Europe’s major powers warned in the bluntest terms that Greece will be forced out of monetary union if voters reject austerity demands in a shock referendum on Sunday.
“What is at stake is whether or not Greeks want to stay in the eurozone or want to take the risk of leaving," said French president Francois Hollande.
Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s vice-chancellor and Social Democrat leader, said the Greek people should have no illusions about the fateful choice before them. “It must be crystal clear what is at stake. At the core, it is a yes or no to remaining in the eurozone,” he said.
Chancellor Angela Merkel – standing next to him after an emergency meeting of party leaders – was more oblique, but the message was much the same.
She praised hard-liners in her own party and insisted that the eurozone cannot yield to any one country. “If principles are not upheld, the euro will fail,” she said.
The refusal to hold out an olive branch to Greece more or less guarantees that it will not repay a €1.6bn loan to the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday, potentially setting off a domino effect of cross-default clauses and the biggest sovereign bankruptcy in history.
Any request for an injunction against EU bodies at the European Court would be an unprecedented development, further complicating the crisis.
Greek officials said they are seriously considering suing the European Central Bank itself for freezing emergency liquidity for the Greek banks at €89bn. It turned down a request from Athens for a €6bn increase to keep pace with deposit flight.
This effectively pulls the plug on the Greek banking system. Syriza claims that this is a prima facie breach of the ECB’s legal duty to maintain financial stability. “How can they justify setting off a run on the Greek banking system?” said one official.
More
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11707092/Greece-threatens-top-court-action-to-block-Grexit.html
Good On You, Alexis Tsipras (Part 1)
by David Stockman •
Late Friday night a solid blow was struck for sound money, free markets
and limited government by a most unlikely force. Namely, the hard core
statist and crypto-Marxist prime minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras. He
has now set in motion a cascade of disruption that will shake the
corrupt status quo to its very foundations.
And just in the nick of time, too. After 15 years
of rampant money printing, falsification of financial market prices and
usurpation of democratic rule, his antagonists—–the ECB, the EU
superstate and the IMF—-have become a terminal threat to the very survival
of the kind of liberal society of which these values are part and
parcel.
In fact, the Keynesian central banking and the Brussels and IMF
style bailout regime—which has become nearly
universal—-eventually fosters a form of soft-core economic totalitarianism. That’s
because the former first destroys honest financial markets by
falsifying the price of debt. So doing, Keynesian central
bankers enable governments to issue far more debt than their taxpayers and
national economies can shoulder; and, at the same time,
force investors and savers to desperately chase yield in a
marketplace where the so-called risk free interest rate has been pegged at
ridiculously low levels.
That means, in turn, that banks, bond funds and fast money traders alike
take on increasing levels of unacknowledged and uncompensated risk, and
that the natural checks and balances of honest financial markets are
stymied and disabled. Short sellers are soon destroyed because the purpose
of Keynesian central banking is to drive the price of securities to
artificially high and unnatural levels. At the same time, hedge
fund gamblers are able to engage in highly leveraged carry trades based
on state subsidized (free) overnight money, and to purchase downside
market risk insurance (“puts”) for a pittance.
Eventually bond and stock “markets” become central bank enabled
casinos—-riven with mispriced securities, dangerous carry trades, massive
unearned windfall profits and endemic instability. When an unexpected
shock or “black swan” event threatens to shatter confidence and trigger a
sell-off of these drastically over-priced securities, the bailout state
swings into action indiscriminately propping up the gamblers.
That’s what the Fed and TARP did in behalf of Morgan Stanley and Goldman
back in September 2008. And it’s what the troika did in behalf of the
French, German, Dutch, Italian and other European banks, which were stuffed
with unpayable Greek and PIIGS debt, beginning in 2010.
Needless to say, repeated and predictable bailouts create enormous moral
hazard and extirpate all remnants of financial discipline in financial
markets and legislative chambers alike. Since 2010, the Greeks have done
little more than pretend to restructure their state finances and private
economy, and the Italians, Portuguese, Spanish and Irish have done virtually
nothing at all. The modest uptick in the reported GDP of the latter two
hopeless debt serfs are just unsustainable rounding errors—–flattered by
the phony speculative boom in their debt securities that was temporarily fueled
by Draghi’s money printing ukase that is presently in drastic retreat.
So this Monday morning push has come to shove; Angela Merkel
and her posse of politicians and policy apparatchiks were not able to kick
the can one more time after all.
Instead, the troika’s authoritarian bailout regime has stimulated
political revolt throughout the continent. Tsipras’ defiance is only the
leading indicator and initial actualization–the match that is lighting the fire
of revolt..
More
"When paper money systems begin to crack at the seams, the run to gold could be explosive."
Harry Browne
At the Comex silver depositories Monday
final figures were: Registered 57.87 Moz, Eligible 124.54 Moz, Total 182.41
Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Not that it’s much comfort to the Greeks, but they
seem to have an American twin in the Caribbean.
Puerto Rico’s Governor Says Island’s Debts Are ‘Not Payable’
Puerto Rico’s governor, saying he needs to pull the
island out of a “death spiral,” has concluded that the commonwealth cannot pay
its roughly $72 billion in debts, an admission that will probably have
wide-reaching financial repercussions.
The governor, Alejandro García Padilla, and senior
members of his staff said in an interview last week that they would probably
seek significant concessions from as many as all of the island’s creditors,
which could include deferring some debt payments for as long as five years or
extending the timetable for repayment.
“The debt is not payable,” Mr. García Padilla said.
“There is no other option. I would love to have an easier option. This is not
politics, this is math.”
It is a startling admission from the governor of an
island of 3.6 million people, which has piled on more municipal bond debt per capita
than any American state.
A broad restructuring by Puerto Rico sets the stage
for an unprecedented test of the United States municipal bond market, which
cities and states rely on to pay for their most basic needs, like road
construction and public hospitals.
That market has already been shaken by municipal
bankruptcies in Detroit; Stockton, Calif.; and elsewhere,
which undercut assumptions that local governments in the United States would
always pay back their debt.
Puerto Rico’s bonds have a face value roughly eight
times that of Detroit’s bonds. Its call for debt relief on such a vast scale
could raise borrowing costs for other local governments as investors become
more wary of lending.
Perhaps more important, much of Puerto Rico’s debt is
widely held by individual investors on the United States mainland, in mutual
funds or other investment accounts, and they may not be aware of it.
Puerto Rico, as a commonwealth, does not have the
option of bankruptcy. A default on its debts would most likely leave the
island, its creditors and its residents in a legal and financial limbo that,
like the debt crisis in Greece, could take years to sort out.
Still, Mr. García Padilla said that his government
could not continue to borrow money to address budget deficits while asking its
residents, already struggling with high rates of poverty and crime, to shoulder
most of the burden through tax increases and pension cuts.
He said creditors must now “share the sacrifices” that
he has imposed on the island’s residents.
MoreSolar & 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?
New process could usher in "graphene-driven industrial revolution"
It's hard to find an article about graphene that doesn't include the words "wonder material" somewhere within it. Less wondrous, unfortunately, is the expensive and time consuming chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process used to produce it industrially. Now researchers from the University of Exeter claim to have discovered a new low-cost technique to produce high quality graphene that could see the wonder material start to realize its potential.The new system is based on technology already used in the manufacture of semiconductors, providing the potential to mass produce graphene using existing facilities instead of sinking money into completely new plants. It involves growing graphene in an industrial resistive-heating cold wall CVD system developed by UK-based company, Moorfield Nanotechnology. The researchers say this so-called nanoCVD system can grow graphene 100 times faster than conventional CVD systems, cuts costs by 99 percent, and produces graphene boasting enhanced electronic qualities.
The Exeter researchers, led by Professor Monica Craciun, have used this new technique to create a graphene-based touch sensor that is flexible and transparent. In addition to more flexible electronic devices, the researchers believe such sensors will also enable truly flexible electronic skin for use in robots.
"Emerging flexible and wearable technologies such as healthcare electronics and energy-harvesting devices could be transformed by the unique properties of graphene," says Dr Thomas Moorfield, a former PhD student at Exeter who is now working at Moorfield. "The extremely cost efficient procedure that we have developed for preparing graphene is of vital importance for the quick industrial exploitation of graphene."
The team's research findings appear in the journal Advanced Materials.
Source: University of Exeter
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: +107 Down. NASDAQ:
+195 Down. SP500: +139 Down.
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