Baltic Dry Index. 829 Unch Brent Crude 63.40
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
“The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.”
“Adam Smith” aka George Goodman.
We have reached yet another dress-up Friday, perhaps the most important US
dress-up the stock markets day of the year. Below Marketwatch covers the event
bigger than what happens to Greece and the friendless Greeks. But watch out for
China. China’s NASDAQ seems to be going the way of that other “stock market of
the next 100 years.”
Why Friday could be the year’s biggest trading day
Published: June 25, 2015 4:40 p.m. ET
Stock-trading volume to surge on changes to Russell indexes
Stock-trading volume is expected to surge in Friday’s last moments of trading, as the Russell indexes go through their annual routine of adding and removing stocks.A massive amount of money is linked to the small-cap Russell 2000 RUT, -0.05% the large-cap Russell 1000 RUI, -0.29% and their siblings. The index funds that track these benchmarks must buy or sell stocks as result of this summertime shakeup that’s finalized Friday. Traders also try to play the Russell reconstitution, with Reuters noting that Schwab has promoted buying possible additions in March, then selling them in June.
There is about $800 billion in investor money in index funds and ETFs that track Russell indexes, according to Rolf Agather, managing director of North America research for FTSE Russell. The iShares Russell 2000 ETF IWM, -0.05% and the iShares Russell 1000 Growth ETF IWF, -0.26% each have attracted more than $30 billion, according to ETFdb.com data. Plus trillions of fund assets are benchmarked to these indexes, which refers to an active fund manager getting compared to a Russell product when he or she is asked “Did you beat your index?” (The answer is usually “No,” by the way.)
How much trading on Friday: “It's generally the single-biggest trading day in U.S. markets,” Agather told MarketWatch. He said stock-market trading also ought to be “very orderly,” as his company has been providing updates for a month on which stocks are being added or deleted.
More
Elsewhere in stocks, China’s state run, one way bet, stock bubble seems to have burst. Now comes the game of guessing the losses and where they’ll show up. But will the Chinese Communist Party really pull off the world’s biggest pump and dump? “Capitalism’s broken,” wailed fallen former guru Greenspan back in the late 90s. On the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money, we long ago left capitalism for rigged markets, crony bailouts, and reckless leveraged gambling. Stay long fully paid up physical precious metals. The game ends in a massive bust, we just don’t know when or what event triggers it.
Chinese Stock Plunge Leaves State Media Speechless
June 26, 2015 — 3:06 AM BST
Rising up from the center of Beijing, not far from the Temple of Heaven, is
the loudest voice in the wild east of the Chinese stock market.It’s neither a bank nor a brokerage -- it’s the headquarters of Xinhua News Agency, long considered the “throat and tongue” of the Chinese government.
With the heady exuberance over Chinese stocks starting to fade, sowing fears of worse to come, investors are scouring state media for clues to the Communist Party’s thinking.
Only months ago, encouraging words from Xinhua sent stocks soaring. Now, with markets sinking, that official line has gone quiet, leaving many wondering how -- or whether -- Beijing might respond.
Just how much China’s state media are used to telegraph government views on the markets is the subject of debate. Xinhua, founded in 1931 as the Red China News Agency, didn’t answer calls to its news hotline seeking comment.
But analysts agree that Xinhua, a ministry-level government department, is too powerful to ignore. If nothing else, reports and commentary by state media sway investor psychology and can turn a rout into a rally -- or vice versa.
“Investing in China stocks means you have to follow state media,” said Nelson Yan, the chief investment officer at the Hong Kong unit of Changjiang Securities Co. Government policy, after all, has been largely behind the world-beating 124 percent market gain of the past 12 months.
The recent quiet has prompted speculation that Chinese authorities are willing to tolerate greater market volatility. On Tuesday, for instance, the Shanghai Composite Index fell as much as 4.8 percent before more than wiping out its losses in the biggest same-day recovery in eight years.
Not long ago, Xinhua and others leapt into action when the market swooned. In January and again in May, Xinhua responded to steep declines within hours. Its reassuring takeaway: the record rally was alive and well. In both instances, the Shanghai index rebounded more than 7 percent within a week.
Given that history, many looked to the state media after the index plunged 6.4 percent last Friday. So far, Xinhua has provided no take on what that decline might mean.
Xinhua isn’t the only state source that matters. The government and the Communist Party also run newspapers with varying degrees of influence. Some of those outlets have weighed in following the recent selloff.
In a front-page commentary on Tuesday, the China Securities Journal said the nation’s “liquidity bull market” was “taking a break.” Future gains would be “slow” and driven by government efforts to reform state-owned companies, the paper said, echoing an earlier article by the state-run Securities Times.
More
In never ending Greece saga news, it was yet another day of more of the same. The parties previous near agreement went the way of all previous attempts at a final agreement, and Mrs Merkel now says that Saturday is the final, final, final, day for Greece surrendering to the German run troika. We shall see, though if I was a work and tax shy Greek, I would have all of my money out of a Greek bank before closing time today. The FT, the Institute of Directors, and all the City’s banksters, all forecast doom for GB, if GB didn’t join the now dying euro right from the start. It was only then Chancellor Gordon Brown’s fanatic hatred of the Prime Minister Tony Blair, that kept GB out of the euro and Blair out of his coveted EU Presidency job. (They have five!) Britain relatively boomed as Euroland turned into a massive wealth and jobs destroying machine. With Brexit looking better by the day, expect the same doom spreaders to reappear in droves, fuelled by mountains of EUSSR cash, as Brexit gets nearer to a GB vote.
Tiny Greece’s Threat to Currency Credibility Is Why It Matters
There's a reason so much time and
effort has been spent keeping them in the union
June 25, 2015 — 8:04 PM BST Updated on June 25, 2015 — 10:23 PM BST
To understand why Europe is investing so much time and effort on keeping
Greece in the euro area, look no further than Mario Draghi’s celebrated speech
three years ago.At the height of the euro area’s sovereign-debt crisis in July 2012, the central bank president’s pledge to do whatever was needed to keep the region together underscored the principle at the heart of the currency bloc -- that membership is irreversible.
The risk of undermining that message may explain why a country that accounts for less than 2 percent of the bloc’s output has such a hold on policy makers and officials. It may also protect Greece, which has a population smaller than that of Ohio, from the risk of default and a euro-area exit.
“There’s a lot of political capital invested in the euro area to keep it whole,” said Elwin de Groot, a senior market economist at Rabobank International in Utrecht, Netherlands. “Indeed, when we allow Greece to get out of this, in a way it makes it clear to the market that the euro zone is no longer whole, it can be changed and is no longer irreversible.”
What’s at stake may also explain the relative lack of panic in financial markets even as talks on Greece’s future fail to make a decisive breakthrough. The euro was little changed against the dollar on Thursday and Italian and Spanish government bonds managed to eke out some gains by market close.
Conversely, a failure to keep Greece in the 19-member currency union would risk investor speculation that other nations could leave in the future, posing an existential threat to the euro project. Just as happened before Draghi’s speech in 2012, investors may demand higher yields to own countries’ bonds, threatening their economic recovery.
Marine Le Pen of the National Front party, a frontrunner in France’s 2017 presidential election, said Tuesday that she supports an orderly breakup of the common currency.
More
Greece talks to go down to the wire amid fears of imminent banking collapse
Talks will spill over into the weekend as Angela Merkel tells Alexis Tsipras to "shut up" and vows not to submit to Athens' 'blackmail'
More
In GB news, the UK’s never been older according to latest statistics. For
once I have to agree. Personally I have never been older, though I am younger
today than I will be tomorrow. Sadly the UK is a terrible place to live. On a
par with polluted China, rust belt America, and darkest Africa. Statistics also
show, that despite or because of the NHS, no one gets out of here alive!
Ageing population: The UK's average age has reached an all-time high as population grows at an above-average rate
25 June 2015 10:11am
The UK is
older than it has ever been before.
Figures
published today show the average age of the population now stands at 40 – the
highest ever estimated. In 1974, the average person was a mere puppy, aged
33.9 years.
Wales has
the oldest population within the union at 42.1 years, while Northern Ireland is
the most youthful at 38 years, according to the ONS.
This growth
of the older age groups has not happened equally for both sexes, however.
Because
there has been more of an improvement in mortality rates for men, the number
aged 75 and over has grown by 149 per cent since 1974. For women, that group
has grown a relatively smaller 61 per cent.
Men have
benefited from a drop in the number of smokers and advances in health
treatments for circulatory illnesses, as well as their jobs becoming “less
physical and safer”.
The same
figures show that last year the UK's population grew at an above-average rate,
boosted by a spike in net immigration.
As at the
end of June 2014, the country's population is estimated at 64,596,800 – a 0.77
per cent increase on the previous year, according to the ONS.
This is
above the 0.75 per cent growth of the past decade.
“Natural
growth” - ie births and deaths – stood at 226,200 people, a drop of 1.9 per
cent on last year.
Net
immigration, meanwhile, accounted for 259,700 people during the 12 months – the
highest level since 2011, and an increase of 41 per cent on the previous
year.
"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
At the Comex silver depositories
Thursday final figures were: Registered 57.86 Moz, Eligible 123.85 Moz, Total
181.71 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Bad News today from the land of the free and home
of the intimidated and gaged, brave. But in a day and age where Uncle Scam’s
torturers and water boarders freely roam the land, what should one expect.
6.25.155:15
AM ET
How the Feds Asked Me to Rat Out Commenters
Reason.com, the
website I edit, was recently commanded by the feds to provide information on a
few commenters and not discuss it. Here’s why we’re speaking out.
Is there anything more likely to make you shit your pants out of a mix
of fear and anger than getting a federal subpoena out of the blue?
Well, yes, there is: getting a gag order that prohibits you from
speaking publicly about that subpoena and even the gag order itself. Talk about
feeling isolated and cast adrift in the home of the free. You can’t even
respond honestly when someone asks, “Are you under a court order not to speak?”
Far more important: talk about realizing that open expression and press
freedom are far more tenuous than even the most cynical of us can imagine! Even
when you have done nothing wrong and aren’t the target of an investigation, you
can be commanded, at serious financial cost and disruption of your business, to
dance to a tune called by the long arm of the law.This all just happened to my colleagues and me at Reason.com, the libertarian website I edit. On May 31, I blogged about the life sentence given to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the “dark web” site Silk Road, by Judge Katherine Forrest. In the comments section, a half-dozen commenters unloaded on Forrest, suggesting that, among other things, she should burn in hell, “be taken out back and shot,” and, in a well-worn Internet homage to the Coen Brothers movie Fargo, be fed “feet first” into a woodchipper.
The comments betrayed a naive belief in an afterlife and karma, were grammatically and spelling-challenged, hyperbolic, and… completely within the realm of acceptable Internet discourse, especially for an unmoderated comments section. (Like other websites, Reason is not legally responsible for what goes on in our comments section; we read the comments sometimes but don’t actively curate them.)
But the U.S. attorney for U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York thought differently and on June 2 issued a grand jury subpoena to Reason for all identifying information we had on the offending commenters—things such as IP addresses, names, emails, and other information. At first, the feds requested that we “voluntarily” refrain from disclosing the subpoena to anybody. Out of sense of fairness and principle, we notified the targeted commenters, who could have moved to quash the subpoena. Then came the gag order on June 4, barring us from talking about the whole business with anyone outside our organization besides our lawyers.
You can read a detailed account of how events, including the lifting of the gag order, played out here. As the legal blogger Ken White of Popehat has argued, the episode is plainly a huge abuse of power.
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?
What it’s like to use an off-grid solar-and-battery system in your home
Published: June 22, 2015 10:13 a.m. ET
Many Hawaiian homeowners already use the off-grid solar-and-battery systems
championed by Tesla’s TSLA,
+3.03% Elon Musk and others — and
their experience shows what hurdles the technology must clear to become widely
accepted by consumers. Hawaiians are eager to do anything they can to cut their power bills. Residential electricity prices in the Aloha State averaged 31.2 cents per kilowatt hour in May, federal data shows. That was 2½ times the average U.S. price. Per kilowatt hour prices are even higher outside Oahu, and have topped 40 cents on the Big Island.
Because of the state’s high power prices, real estate agents use homes’ off-grid generating systems as a selling point. “It just kind of makes sense not to have that bill,” said Tanya Sunshine, a Big Island real estate agent who focuses on off-grid properties. Off-grid systems are also a good option for new construction, since hooking into the power grid is expensive by itself. “Just to pull a wire over a pole costs $5,000,” Sunshine said.
With a solar-and-battery off-grid system, solar panels make enough electricity in daylight to charge batteries that keep appliances humming after the sun goes down.
No one is sure exactly how many Hawaiian homes use off-grid systems.
Kawika Stevens, sales manager and chief solar technician for Off-Grid Solar
Specialists, guesses that there are around 2,000 off-grid installations in the
state. Off-Grid Solar, which has been in business for seven years in the Hilo
area on the Big Island, has installed 200 to 300 of those systems, Stevens
says.
Stevens lives off-grid, and he and his family want for nothing
electrically — “you can’t keep your girls from wanting to use hair dryers and
their gadgets.”
But off-grid homeowners face some unique issues. Here are five of them:
Initial costs
Prices vary, but Stevens says a solar-and-battery system big enough to
power a typical Hawaiian home can cost around $32,000. That’s only about $2,000
more than a more common grid-connected solar setup. Competition among
installers is lowering costs of off-grid systems, Stevens said.
Rule of thumb: Hawaiian homeowners recover the costs of their off-grid
systems after about five years — but the systems themselves last 20 to 25
years. With current technology, the batteries might need to be swapped out
after 10 or 15 years, Stevens says. But the bottom line is that after five years,
homeowners are powering their homes for free.
Special appliances
Solar panels produce direct current, while modern home appliances use
alternating current. That’s a problem with major appliances like refrigerators
or power-consuming devices like water pumps, since a lot of power is lost to
the inverters that convert the panels’ direct current to alternating current.
More
Another weekend, and another make or break final weekend for Greece. The umpteenth since the start of the year but who’s counting? Will Germany really go nuclear on Greece tomorrow? Will the ECB really row back from “whatever it takes?” Does anyone outside of Greece really care? Euros anyone? Have a great weekend.
"Until government administrators can so identify the interests of government with those of the people and refrain from defrauding the masses through the device of currency depreciation for the sake of remaining in office, the wiser ones will prefer to keep as much of their wealth in the most stable and marketable forms possible - forms which only the precious metals provide."
Elgin Groseclose
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: +107 Down. NASDAQ:
+195 Down. SP500: +139 Down.
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