Thursday 25 June 2015

Hold the Ouzo And Shot Glasses.



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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. 

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