Baltic Dry Index. 725 +44 Brent Crude 64.27
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
“What we've got here is failure to communicate.”
International Monetary Fund Managing Director Lagarde, with apologies to Cool Hand Luke.
As I write this morning, there are unconfirmed rumours coming out of Athens that some sort of deal has been reached to keep Greece in the Euro. Time will tell across the day.
The never ending Greek Grexit, looks like ending next Monday. This morning it looks like Greece will stay in the destructive, monetary union for at least one more wealth and jobs destroying weekend. Hapless Greeks with anything still left in the bank, have three days more to empty their bank account and purchase, gold and silver coins, antiques, cars and trucks, food and drink, and anything else with intrinsic value that’s relatively easily transported and marketable.
This weekend the ball is very definitely in Mrs. Merkel’s court. Only Germany can now alter the outcome of Grexit. If Germany wants, some face saving formula will be twisted out over the weekend to give Greece the money for the month end payments and repayments, and we all stagger forward to the next repeat instalment, probably at the end of August. All the lesser entities in the Eurozone will have to bow to paymaster Germany’s will. If Germany wants Grexit, Germany gets Grexit sometime next week, just by doing nothing meaningful over this weekend. By skilfully playing the blame game, Germany still has an outside chance that Greece, the IMF and the ECB will get the blame for Grexit. Far more likely, a massive all against all blame game will ensue, much to the amusement of all outside of the dying Eurozone.
The Great Bilderberger European envy project to replace dollar hegemony in global trade has come crashing down to this. The Tower of Babel comes to mind. Below, Bloomie on the Great European Euro Fiasco. Why would anyone want to be in a monetary union like this?
EU Calls Emergency Summit as Greece Runs Out of Time
June 18, 2015 — 6:50 PM BST Updated on June 19, 2015 — 12:27 AM BST
Greece lurched closer to an exit from the euro as a meeting of finance
officials to reach a deal over aid dissolved in acrimony, forcing leaders to
call for an emergency summit for Monday.As the European Central Bank prepared for its own emergency session on Friday to discuss Greece’s liquidity, thousands of Greeks piled outside parliament in Athens asking for the nation to be saved from default as Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government blamed a conspiracy to blackmail Greece for the rancorous breakdown in talks.
With the specter of capital controls looming, key players deciding Greece’s fate voiced their exasperation with Greece’s top negotiators while the silence of others, such as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, also spoke volumes.
“The key emergency is to secure a dialogue with adults in the room,” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said after listening to Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis expound in Luxembourg on Thursday. “What we lack is a dialogue.”
Greece and its creditors -- the ECB, the IMF, and the European Commission -- seem further apart than ever after four hours of closed-door talks. Without a settlement, the ties still binding Greece to the currency bloc may begin to unravel with funding keeping Greek banks afloat under scrutiny.
“The extreme economic uncertainty coupled with fears of currency change
have driven withdrawals to unprecedented levels, wiping in four days the
cushion of about 3 billion euros of the Greek banking system,” said Nicholas
Economides, professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of
Business.
Asked if he could imagine Greece being forced out of the euro, Jeroen
Dijsselbloem, the Dutch minister who leads the group of euro-area finance
chiefs, said, “The way it goes now we’re going in that direction.”
----Increasingly isolated among his European peers, Tsipras was in St. Petersburg to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin though there was little sign any financial help would come out of it. Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev said Russi a wasn’t ready to buy Greece’s debt or bonds.
The gathering in Luxembourg highlighted the disconnect between what the Greek leadership sees as its truth -- vulturous creditors out to squeeze a small, vulnerable country -- and what the rest of the euro members say is the reality: Without further belt-tightening, it’s over for Greece.
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-18/euro-area-leaders-to-hold-summit-on-monday-to-discuss-greece
Austria First to Say Game Over for Greece as Merkel Sees Chance
June 18, 2015 — 3:26 PM BST
With the Greek government approaching the June 30 expiry of its
euro-area bailout and no alternative financing in sight, Austrian Finance
Minister Hans Joerg Schelling was the first to declare the effort to broker an
aid deal has failed.
“The game is finished,” Schelling told reporters before a Eurogroup
meeting in Luxembourg. Greece can’t “simply reject every proposal,” he said.
The ministers are meeting Thursday in an effort to overcome a deadlock
over the release of as much as 7.2 billion euros ($8.2 billion) of aid from
Greece’s 240 billion-euro bailout. European Union
President Donald Tusk warned
Greece last week that creditors were ready to throw in the towel and since then
there has been little movement in negotiations.
“The day is coming, I am afraid, that someone says the game is over,”
Tusk said on June 11 in Brussels.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday she still sees the
possibility of a deal, although it will require Greece to bow the demands of
its creditors.
The euro area’s bailout deal with Greece expires the same day about 1.5
billion euros is due to the International Monetary Fund. Finnish Finance
Minister Alexander Stubb went almost as far as his colleague from Austria in
his assessment of the outlook.
“I always believed that at the end of the day we could find some kind of
deal,” Stubb said. “I think we have come pretty much to a dead end.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-18/austria-first-to-say-game-over-for-greece-as-merkel-sees-chanceIn its panic not to take the blame for the wreckage of Greece, the Italian run, Goldmanite, ECB is now on the hook to Greece for 84 billion euros of Emergency Liquidity Assistance, with another 3 billion pending. The ECB can either pay up today or cut Greece off today, sparing Germany a troublesome weekend and the blame for Grexit. My bet is on Greece getting 3 billion more tipped down the rat hole. Germany is not likely to get an ECB walk.
ECB Said to Plan Emergency Greek Aid Call Amid Deposit Flight
June 18, 2015 — 9:57 PM BST
The European Central Bank plans to hold an emergency session of its
Governing Council on Friday to discuss the deteriorating liquidity situation of
Greek banks, three people familiar with the matter said.The call is scheduled for noon Frankfurt time on Friday, and the officials will consider a Bank of Greece request for an increase of more than 3 billion euros in Emergency Liquidity Assistance, one of the people said. All three asked not to be identified as the plans aren’t public. An ECB spokesman declined to comment.
The request comes just a day after Greece received an increase in its liquidity line of 1.1. billion euros ($1.25 billion), which raised the limit to 84.1 billion euros.
The short interval may be a signal that deposit flight is accelerating
as the latest bailout talks ended without progress on Thursday. With Greece cut
off from global markets, the country’s financial system depends on central-bank
liquidity to replace deposits withdrawn amid the political uncertainty over the
country’s place in the euro.
The total level of available ELA has risen from less than 60 billion
euros in February, when the ECB effectively locked Greek banks out of regular
refinancing operations. The Governing Council reviews the amount weekly and can
restrict the funding. It also has the power to insist on higher discounts on
the collateral banks post to receive the cash.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-18/ecb-said-to-plan-emergency-greek-aid-call-amid-deposit-flight
As we await developments today and over the weekend, we suggest risk-off and enjoying the summer/winter weekend, depending on location, without unnecessary stress.
At the Comex silver depositories
Thursday final figures were: Registered 57.84 Moz, Eligible 122.85 Moz, Total
180.69 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
We close for the week with an innovation that if
true, might just go a long way to helping with gold’s return to official money.
The Great Nixonian Error of fiat money, might be about to get serious
competition from metallic money in the decades ahead. Euros anyone?
Eureka! A solid gold solution to make Archimedes proud
‘Eureka! We’ve found a way to produce cyanide-free gold!’We’ve been working with an American company, Barrick, at their Goldstrike plant in Nevada, to produce the first ever gold bar that doesn’t involve the use of cyanide extraction. Cyanide is, of course, highly toxic and a potential environmental hazard. The new process we’re so excited about uses a chemical called thioshulphate, which will greatly reduce the environmental risks and costs associated with gold production.
Thiosulphate has long been seen as a potential alternative to cyanide
for liberating gold from ores, but it has proved difficult to master – until
now. Thanks to the new process, which incorporates patented technology
we’ve developed with Barrick, the company will be able to process and
profit from four million tonnes of stockpiled ore that was uneconomic to
process by traditional methods.
As part of the thiosulphate process at Goldstrike, gold-bearing ore is
heated in large pressure chambers, or autoclaves. It’s then pumped as a
thick slurry of ore, air, water and limestone into the new ‘resin-in-leach’
circuit that takes place inside large stainless steel tanks.
Within the tanks, the slurry interacts with thiosulphate and a fine,
bead-like substance called resin that collects the gold. At full capacity,
13,400 tons of ore can be processed daily, with leaching taking place
simultaneously in two sets of seven tanks.
Our very own minerals expert Danielle Hewitt had a hands-on role in
developing and proving the CSIRO technology incorporated at the Goldstrike
plant. But for security reasons, it was strictly hands-off the resulting
gold bar.
“This was a golden moment more than 20 years in the making, including
three years working with Barrick to refine the commercial process,” said
Danielle.
She said the new process will contribute an average of
350 to 450 thousand extra ounces of gold each year to the operation, allowing
the large plant to keep operating.
The new technology could also have some benefits closer to home, with
the potential to safely recover gold in Australia where cyanide would
otherwise pose a significant environmental risk and environmental protection
cost.
In other trading news. One law for American flash crashers in
manipulated gold futures, another for hapless Anglo-Indians in e-mini S&Ps.
The 1800s Royal Navy Atlantic press gang comes to mind. Still think any markets aren’t rigged, or that
Greece should repay its German/IMF Shylocks? Dollar hegemony anyone in Russia
or China?
The Mysterious "Massive" Seller Who Flash Crashed Gold In 2014 Has Finally Been Revealed
06/18/2015 17:41 -0400
Back in late 2013 and early 2014, the gold (and silver) market was
stunned by a series of massive, unprecedented "stop" or
"velocity logic" sales which sent the price of the precious metal
crashing so furiously they halted the entire gold futures market anywhere
between 10 and 20 seconds. Some examples:- September 12, 2013: Vicious Gold Slamdown Breaks Gold Market For 20 Seconds
- October 11, 2013: "Stop Logic" Gold Slam Was So Furious It Shut Down CME Trading Again
- and January 6, 2014: Gold Flash Crashes, Halts Trading As "Velocity Logic" Circuit Breakers Triggered
As a reminder, only recently did regulators finally realize just how manipulated the gold market is when in early May, after a Zero Hedge post explicitly showed just how "someone" was spoofing gold, both the CME and the CFTC cracked down on the manipulator. However the moves that had seen regulatory intervention were paltry and largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of gold "price discovery."
Until today.
In Notice of Disciplinary action, COMEX 14-9807-BC, the CME charged Mirus Futures, which one year ago was bought by NinjaTrader with "disruptive and rapid price movement in the February 2014 Gold Futures market" which prompted the abovementioned Velocity Logic event which halted the market for ten seconds.
From the allegation:
Pursuant to an offer of settlement Mirus Futures LLC (“Mirus” or the “Firm”) presented at a hearing on June 16, 2015, in which Mirus neither admitted nor denied the rule violations upon which the penalty is based, a Panel of the COMEX Business Conduct Committee (“BCC”) found that it had jurisdiction over Mirus pursuant to Exchange Rule 418 and that on January 6, 2014, Mirus failed to adequately monitor the operation of its trading platform (Zenfire), and connectivity of its trading system (Zenfire) with Globex. This failure resulted in unusually large and atypical trading activity by several of the Firm’s customers and caused the mass entry of order messages by Zenfire, which resulted in a disruptive and rapid price movement in the February 2014 Gold Futures market and prompted a Velocity Logic event.
The Panel found that as a result, Mirus violated Rules 432.Q. (Conduct Detrimental to the Exchange) and 432.W. (Failure to Supervise).
Incidentally, this is precisely the event we described in the January 6, 2014 post, which sent gold plummeting from $1245 to under $1215 in under 100 milliseconds.
---- The punishment for the manipulators with the "faulty" trading platform?
- In accordance with the settlement offer, the Panel ordered Mirus to pay a fine to the Exchange in the amount of $200,000.
So Nav Sarao may spend 380 years in jail for spoofing the S&P lower,
but some bucket prop trading shop executing some "unknown" client's
orders gets away with $200K. Brilliant.
In any event, with an 18 month delay we finally know precisely who
caused the January 6, 2014 gold flash crash: something the CME could have revealed
the very next day, and yet it chose to keep quiet.
Here is what we don't know:
More
"For more than two thousand years gold's natural qualities made it man's universal medium of exchange. In contrast to political money, gold is honest money that survived the ages and will live on long after the political fiats of today have gone the way of all paper."
Hans F. Sennholz
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?
Is BMW working on an electric car that could do 706 miles per gallon? Hybrid may also reach 111mph, rumours suggest
Rumours suggest BMW's
working on a prototype that can do a staggering 706 miles per imperial gallon
(588 miles per US gallon)
Fabled motor will be
lighter than the automaker's new i8 hybrid sports car
Car will be a
four-seater with a carbon fibre enforced shell, like the i8
It's thought the car
will never go on sale, but technology could trickle down
It may be less than a year since BMW launched its
i8 hybrid sports car, but rumours are already swirling about an even more
efficient model.
They claim the German automaker is developing a
prototype car that can do a staggering 706 miles per imperial gallon (588 miles
per US gallon).
It’s said that the rumoured hybrid will be lighter
than the i8 but less performance focused, making it slower than the new sports
car.
By comparison, the i8 plug-in hybrid
does 134.5 mpg (112 US mpg) thanks to its frugal 1.5 litre, three
cylinder, 231 brake horsepower petrol engine and 131 brake horsepower electric
unit.
Not much is known about the unnamed new vehicle’s
engine, but it doesn't seem it will be a fully electric model.
It would instead combine a two cylinder petrol
engine that runs as a range-extending generator with an electric motor situated
on the car’s rear axle.
This would make the powertrain similar to the
company’s i3 Rex model, Green
Car Reports noted.
Sources also suggest the car will be a four-seater
with a shell that’s reinforced with carbon fibre – like its i3 and i8
production cars.
It could would less than 2,645 lbs (1,200kg),
compared to the i8, which is 3,455 lbs (1,567 kg).
And while it won’t be performance-focused it would
still have a top speed of 112mph (180km/h).
The only other comparable concept car is
Volkswagen’s XL1, which is a plug-in diesel hybrid that can do 313 mpg.
More
Ultra-Efficient BMW Four-Seat Plug-In Hybrid For Research Only, Not Sales: Report
Jun 17, 2015
The limited-production Volkswagen XL1 ultra-economy two-seater gets
astounding fuel efficiency
from its two-cylinder diesel plug-in hybrid
powertrain.It's well over 100 miles per gallon if you use the European test cycle (which differs from U.S. tests).
But at a six-figure price
and a production limited to a few hundred, it's not likely to have a huge
impact on the car
market.Now comes news from German auto site Automobilwoche (via Auto Motor und Sport) that BMW
is considering its own lightweight, ultra-efficient car.Details are sketchy, but it is said to be a four-seater, with a structure largely made of carbon-fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) just like that used in the BMW i3 and i8 electric cars
.
More
Unconventional Energy
America’s unconventional gas and oil resources are a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enhance the nation’s economic competitiveness while minimizing environmental impacts, and making major progress toward reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. But there is a real risk that American citizens, companies, and communities will fail to capitalize on this opportunity because of misunderstanding and distrust. Unconventional energy production is mired in political gridlock and consumed by public and stakeholder frustrations on local community and environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing, as well as climate concerns.In a joint research effort, Harvard Business School (HBS) and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have put forward a comprehensive plan that dispels false notions about trade-offs involved in unconventionals development. The report, America’s Unconventional Energy Opportunity: A Win-Win Plan for the Economy, the Environment, and a Lower-Carbon, Cleaner-Energy Future, outlines a strategic, fact-based approach to developing America’s new energy advantage such that it increases U.S. competitiveness and drives much-needed job and economic growth, while reducing environmental impacts and accelerating progress on climate change.
Based on an extensive review of existing studies, new primary research, and interviews across all stakeholder groups, the report provides a comprehensive fact-base and analysis that shows:
More
For some musical accompaniment to help focus with the light
reading.
Will Greece be free by Month end? We certainly hope so! Have a
great weekend everyone.
The more you observe politics, the more
you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other.
Will Rogers.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: +107 Down. NASDAQ:
+195 Down. SP500: +139 Down.
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