Baltic Dry Index. 829 +39 Brent Crude 63.65
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
Ouzo is traditionally mixed with water, becoming cloudy white, sometimes with a faint blue tinge, and served with ice cubes in a small glass. Ouzo can also be drunk straight from a shot glass.
First the good news. The Baltic Dry index soared above 800 yesterday,
and Brent crude oil continued wobbling between 63-65 dollars a barrel. With
Bonnie Scotland about to cut back on the Queen’s pay, Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth nominated herself in Berlin to be Queen of Europe, should the
position become available. (CVs by
invitation only.) That way, presumably, she could replace the missing Scots
Pounds with German euro, and spend some time with her Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
relatives while Buck Palace gets a lick of paint, new plumbing and new wiring.
The last update done under the post war austerity of the very early 50s, leaves
the footmen in shock after turning on the lights.
Now the bad news, the Greek conjurer not only failed to pull a white
rabbit out of his top hat yesterday, but a dead rabbit was left lying on the
floor, and everybody went back to calling each other unprintable names. Below,
what passes for grown up government in 21st century Europe in the EUSSR.
Tonight’s “Great Leaders” dinner in Brussels looks like being feisty. Brexit looks better by the day.
Mr
Tsipras said: “The repeated rejection of equivalent measures by certain
institutions never occurred before, neither in Ireland nor Portugal. This odd
stance seems to indicate that either there is no interest in an agreement or
that special interests are being backed.”
Greece Lurches Closer to Default
June 25, 2015 — 1:09 AM BST Updated on June 25, 2015 — 4:16 AM BST
Greece stumbled closer to default as another day of negotiations ended in
the early hours without a deal to end the standoff over bailout aid.With the Greek government saying it held firm in the flurry of meetings in Brussels on Wednesday, European Union officials said the talks yielded little progress and no breakthrough was in sight. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and the heads of the three creditor institutions agreed to reconvene first thing on Thursday after a few hours’ sleep.
The race for a deal is accelerating as Greece moves nearer to the June 30 expiry of its euro-area bailout without any agreement in place ensuring it can meet a payment of 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) to the International Monetary Fund that falls due the same day.
“It’s going to the wire,” Finland’s Alexander Stubb told reporters after a meeting of euro-area finance chiefs in Brussels broke up early Wednesday. Ministers will resume at 1 p.m. Thursday, by which time “we hope to have a concrete proposal,” he said. “It’s important to keep the process going.”
Stocks retreated around the globe amid concern the Greek impasse will fester, with disagreement persisting over the conditions attached to a resumption of aid for Europe’s most indebted nation. Sticking points include pensions, sales taxes, debt relief and getting the plan passed by the Greek parliament.
More
Last-ditch Greek rescue hopes dashed as Alexis Tsipras faces austerity ultimatum
Fundamental differences force finance ministers meeting to be aborted as creditors demand more cuts from the cash-strapped country
Greece's eurozone future was thrown into fresh turmoil on Wednesday
night as talks broke down after creditor powers demanded further austerity
measures to release the funds the country needs to avoid a debt default.
Dashing tentative hopes that an agreement could be struck at European
Union leaders summit on Thursday, a meeting of finance ministers was suspended
after only an hour as Prime Minister Tsipras was summoned for further late
night talks with his bail-out chiefs.
Earlier in the day, Greece's three lending institutions rejected Athens'
€8bn reform plans, despite widely hailing it as a positive step forward only
days ago. Greece now faces an imminent debt default and expiration of its
bail-out June 30.
In a five-page set of counter proposals, creditors instead demanded Athens'
Leftist government carry out more spending cuts, abolish exemptions on VAT and
implement a root and branch overhaul of its pensions system.
The breakdown came after Athens seemed to renege on its previous
commitments to end tax privileges for its islands and phase out supplementary
pensions for the poorest.
But the government was quick to reject the new demands, attacking them
as "absurd" and sure to bring "Armageddon" to the
beleaguered economy .
Having been hauled back to Brussels on Wednesday morning, a wounded Mr
Tsipras released an ambiguous statement suggesting ulterior motives behind
lenders' fresh demands.
More
Queen wades into Europe debate as she says division is 'dangerous'
Her Majesty emphasises Britain’s 'key part' in shaping of continent in Berlin speech that left little doubt of which way she would vote in referendum
The Queen said that division in Europe was “dangerous”, ahead of crucial
negotiations in Brussels that could shape the future of the EU.
In a speech at a state banquet in Berlin, attended by David Cameron and
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, Her Majesty emphasised Britain’s “key
part” in the shaping of the Continent.
She also lauded Britain’s “irreversible” friendship with Germany since
the Second World War.
Her comments are likely to be interpreted as a plea for Britain to
remain a member of the European Union, with a referendum due on the issue
before the end of 2017
The Prime Minister will today travel to Brussels to finally present the
outline of his plans for reforming Britain’s relationship with the EU at a
dinner of European leaders.
After the Queen’s intervention, Joachim Gauck, the German president,
urged Mr Cameron to do everything he could to secure a “yes” vote in the in-out
referendum, saying that “the European Union needs Britain”.
The Queen, who spent much of the day with Mrs Merkel, is officially
politically neutral, and Buckingham Palace insisted her speech was about Europe
as a continent, rather than as a political entity. However, the carefully
worded statement came amid a growing crisis at the heart of the EU.
More
In Great Disconnect news, it was pile on more disconnect. Prepare for
the Great Car Crash in H2 2015.
The Money Printers’ M&A Ball——Where The Debt Zombies Go To Mate
by David Stockman •
Fed governor Jerome Powell is living proof that we are heading for another
calamitous financial meltdown. This clueless monetary apparatchik averred
yesterday that the Wall Street casino is in the pink of good health with no
evidence of irrational exuberance in sight. Said the former LBO guy from
Carlyle Group,
“Things are fully priced, but I really don’t see bubble territory,”
Powell said. “I can’t say we’re at significant risk of financial
instability.”
Maybe he should glance at the financial papers, starting
with the Merger Monday stories. Comes word this week that two more
bloated debt zombies plan to mate—–and their financials scream bubble
mania.
To wit, Energy Transfer Equity (ETE), which has a TEV (total
enterprise value of market equity plus debt) of $89 billion, plans to acquire
Williams Companies (WMB), which sports a TEV of $79 billion. Needless
to say, this is not about smart new technology or some other cutting
edge mousetrap.
The resulting TEV of $168 billion—-or a tad less than the
GDP of Greece’s woebegone 11 million citizens—–is all about
rolling-up dumb old technology into a bigger bundle.
The proposed merger’s massive TEV purportedly measures the
value of approximately 100,000 miles of steel pipe; a
few thousand pumping stations which are based on 50-year old
natural gas engine designs that work by the simple expedient
of siphoning fuel from the flowing gas; and various and sundry
liquefaction and gasification plants that extract liquids along the way.
But what this combination really measures is the degree to
which the Fed’s insane QE and ZIRP policies have transformed business
executives into deal junkies and the corporate securities market into an
out-of-control arena of rank speculation.
Let’s start with the cash flow of this pending nuptial. In the LTM
ending in March, the combined companies generated exactly $10
billion of EBITDA. That doesn’t seem like much against
$168 billion of TEV, but that’s not the half of it. It seems that the
combo also consumed $6.2 billion of cash on CapEx——that is, laying pipe
and maintaining pumping stations.
So we are in fact talking about just $3.8 billion of net cash flow to
service the return requirements of $168 billion of capital. That
makes the EBITDA less CapEx multiple 44X.
More
We end for today with more on our developing Dalton Minimum in sunspots.
It’s more likely to be a much more severe Maunder Minimum suggests Forbes
below. Not to worry though, despite the coming “little ice age,” Forbes still
manages to stay on message with the New Age religion of man-made global
warming, since rebranded and relaunched as the much more sellable “climate
change.” Toss in a 2015-2016 developing Strong El Nino, and ahead of the new little
ice age comes a world wracked by droughts and floods.
Sun Flatlining Into Grand Minimum, Says Solar Physicist
6/20/2014 @ 1:32AM
----Weather isn’t climate, but circumstantial evidence indicates our sun may be entering a grand minimum of sunspot activity, not unlike the Maunder Minimum that some climatologists think caused record low winter temperatures in Northern Europe during the latter half of the 17th century.
“My
opinion is that we are heading into a Maunder Minimum,” said Mark Giampapa,
a solar physicist at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona.
“I’m seeing a continuation in the decline of the sunspots’ mean magnetic field
strengths and a weakening of the polar magnetic fields and subsurface flows.”
Theoretical details of how sunspots are actually produced continue to be debated. But one popular idea is that they are generated as the result of concentrated and twisted solar magnetic fields blocking internal convection in the outer third of the sun’s interior. This, in turn, gives the sunspots their dark appearance, since on average they are 2000 degrees cooler than the surrounding solar plasma.
----“At the end of a sunspot cycle about all you have left are magnetic fields at the solar poles,” said Hathaway. “We’re at the sunspot maximum of Cycle 24. It’s the smallest sunspot cycle in 100 years and the third in a trend of diminishing sunspot cycles. So, Cycle 25 could likely be smaller than Cycle 24.”
Another indicator pointing to an imminent grand minimum is that the
current solar cycle shows some signs of hemispheric asymmetry, says Steve
Tobias, an applied mathematician at the University of Leeds in the U.K.
“When the field is about to enter a minimum or is leaving a minimum,”
said Tobias, “we see more sunspots in one solar hemisphere than the other.”
Yet during the 1645 — 1715 Maunder Minimum itself, sunspots basically
disappeared and as documented in paintings from the era, Northern Europe
suffered unusually cold winter temperatures.
Such minima are thought to be a part of the normal life of a sunlike
star, however. And from recent surveys of several solar analogues in the open
stellar cluster M67, Giampapa and colleagues see indications that such grand
minima take place up to 15 percent of the time.
Hathaway says that the observed effects of the sunspot cycle in
radioisotopes; in ice cores; and in tree rings indicate that some 10 to 15
percent of the time the sun is in “something like a Maunder Minimum.”
“If we’re entering a Maunder Minimum, it could persist until the 2080s,”
said Giampapa, who points out that if such a minimum’s primary effect is
cooling, it could wreak havoc by curtailing agricultural growing seasons which,
for instance, could lead to lower wheat production in breadbasket economies.
But Giampapa says it could also mean a global excursion from the mean,
resulting in local climate extremes in terms of both anomalous temperatures and
precipitation.
Could a Maunder Minimum mitigate a warming climate?
Not likely, says Hathaway.
Although the rise of global temperatures seen in “the last decade or so
seems to have currently leveled off,” says Hathaway, he notes that even a
Maunder Minimum would still not be enough to counter the warming effects of
anthropogenic climate change.
If anything, a Maunder Minimum may simply make existing weather and
short term climate even more unusual and difficult to predict.
More
In a
time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
George
Orwell.
At the Comex silver depositories
Wednesday final figures were: Registered 57.84 Moz, Eligible 123.27 Moz, Total
181.11 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Update tomorrow after the Crooks and Scoundrels dinner in Brussels.
"On
the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the
time.”
George
Orwell.
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?
Today, it looks
like Elon Musk has some serious competition. That can only be good for driving
technology forward.
New manufacturing approach slices lithium-ion battery cost in half
June 23, 2015 (Source: MIT) — An advanced manufacturing approach for lithium-ion batteries, developed by researchers at MIT and at a spinoff company called 24M, promises to significantly slash the cost of the most widely used type of rechargeable batteries while also improving their performance and making them easier to recycle.“We’ve reinvented the process,” says Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics at MIT and a co-founder of 24M (and previously a co-founder of battery company A123). The existing process for manufacturing lithium-ion batteries, he says, has hardly changed in the two decades since the technology was invented, and is inefficient, with more steps and components than are really needed.
The new process is based on a concept developed five years ago by Chiang and colleagues including W. Craig Carter, the POSCO Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. In this so-called “flow battery,” the electrodes are suspensions of tiny particles carried by a liquid and pumped through various compartments of the battery.
The new battery design is a hybrid between flow batteries and
conventional solid ones: In this version, while the electrode material does not
flow, it is composed of a similar semisolid, colloidal suspension of particles.
Chiang and Carter refer to this as a “semisolid battery.”
This approach greatly simplifies manufacturing, and also makes batteries
that are flexible and resistant to damage, says Chiang, who is senior author of
a paper in the Journal of Power Sources analyzing the tradeoffs
involved in choosing between solid and flow-type batteries, depending on their
particular applications and chemical components.
----In addition to streamlining manufacturing enough to cut battery costs by
half, Chiang says, the new system produces a battery that is more flexible and
resilient. While conventional lithium-ion batteries are composed of brittle
electrodes that can crack under stress, the new formulation produces battery
cells that can be bent, folded or even penetrated by bullets without failing.
This should improve both safety and durability, he says
The company has so far made about 10,000 batteries on its prototype
assembly lines, most of which are undergoing testing by three industrial
partners, including an oil company in Thailand and Japanese heavy-equipment
manufacturer IHI Corp. The process has received eight patents and has 75
additional patents under review; 24M has raised $50 million in financing from
venture capital firms and a U.S. Department of Energy grant.
The company is initially focusing on grid-scale installations, used to
help smooth out power loads and provide backup for renewable energy sources
that produce intermittent output, such as wind and solar power. But Chiang says
the technology is also well suited to applications where weight and volume are
limited, such as in electric vehicles.
----Venkat Viswanathan, an assistant
professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who was not
involved in this work, says the analysis presented in the new paper “addresses
a very important question of when is it better to build a flow battery versus a
static model. … This paper will serve as a key tool for making design choices
and go-no go decisions.”
Viswanathan adds that 24M’s new battery design “could do the same sort
of disruption to [lithium ion] batteries manufacturing as what mini-mills did
to the integrated steel mills.”
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: +107 Down. NASDAQ:
+195 Down. SP500: +139 Down.
No comments:
Post a Comment