Wednesday 24 June 2015

The White Rabbit.



Baltic Dry Index. 790 +11     Brent Crude 64.44

LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000.  Revised due to QE programs.

There's many a slip 'twixt cup and the lip.

English proverb

According to mainstream media, all that’s left is to dot a few “i”s and cross a few “t”s. After 5 months of often acrimonious arguing and bickering, Greece’s novice conjurer is finally about to pull the elusive white rabbit from his top hat. Peace and prosperity are finally about to descend on Greece from the troika, in the form of a new agreement that will shower Greece in enough new money to pay back the IMF next Tuesday. Stock and bond markets loved it. What’s not to like when a magician pulls a white rabbit from an obviously empty top hat.

And yet what does the trick really accomplish for Greece? Won’t Greece be back in the same position come the middle of August? Will peace and prosperity really descend on homeless and bankrupt Greeks, rather than just on those with accounts in Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Switzerland?  Greece is promising to raise taxes on the “rich” and corporations. Does anyone really think that’s going to work or make much difference. Even the dumbest Greek knows to outsource real profits to the EC’s Juncker, tax crooked Luxembourg.

Below, Bloomie on the White Rabbit due out later today.  Drum roll please.

Greece Inches Closer to a Deal

June 23, 2015 — 6:15 PM BST Updated on June 23, 2015 — 11:39 PM BST
Euro-area finance ministers will meet for the third time in a week on Wednesday to try to secure an agreement to avert a default in Greece.

With a week to go before the country’s bailout expires, a deal appeared within reach after Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras signaled he was ready to end a bitter five-month standoff and reach agreement with creditors to unlock aid. While hurdles remain -- including votes in the German and Greek parliaments, and figuring out how to pay the International Monetary Fund -- analysts say a solution will be found.

“We have now seen enough progress for the finishing line to have become visible,” Erik Nielsen, a Unicredit SpA economist in London, wrote in a note to clients. “Failure from here is difficult to envisage. This means that various liquidity measures will be employed, as needed, until it’s all signed off -- and the risk of arrears has significantly declined.”

Tsipras will fly into Brussels Wednesday to meet with European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and two top European Union officials to discuss further steps, an EU official said.
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-23/greek-crisis-talks-face-hurdles-as-finance-chiefs-ready-to-meet

Embattled Alexis Tsipras faces domestic revolt over plans to implement 'harsh' austerity blitz

Leftist party is forced to defend its plans from extreme left and right-wing critics amid prospect of a government collapse over concessions to creditors

Embattled Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras is facing a revolt within his radical Left party over austerity measures the country must approve to secure its future in the euro.

Following a late-night emergency summit in Brussels on Monday, Athens laid out plans to carry out a series of economic reforms worth €8bn over the next two years. They included a rise in VAT for restaurants, abolition of tax exemptions for Greek islands and plans to end early retirement in the country.

The Greeks were told the measures were a good basis for talks, which will continue with finance minsters in Brussels on Wednesday.

But the measures are likely to prove a hard sell to Mr Tsipras's parliamentarians, as they cross a number of the "red lines" that have led to a five-month impasse in negotiations.

Syriza MP Yannis Michelogiannakis called the proposals a "tombstone" around the country's neck.
"How can you cut a deal that will increase suicides and make people poorer?" he told Greek television.

The anti-austerity government admitted its plight had forced it into a position to carry out “harsh” proposals.

"There is full comprehension that there are measures in the proposal that are harsh, and they are measures that, under different circumstances, if it was up to us there was no way we would have taken," said government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis.

Leftist parliamentarian Costas Lapavitsas said the tax blitz was a "recessionary measure" that would hurt economic growth at a time when the country had fallen back into recession.

Any rescue deal will have to be ratified by the Greek parliament if an agreement is struck in the coming weeks. But with only a 12-seat majority in parliament, Mr Tsipras's five-month government faces a collapse should he fail to secure a majority.
More
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11694357/Embattled-Alexis-Tsipras-faces-domestic-revolt-over-plans-to-implement-harsh-austerity-blitz.html

Below, David Stockman on what really happened to Greece and could all to easily happen to the rest of us when the central banksters’ ZIRP masterplan goes poof.

Alexis Tsipras—-Angel Of Mercy Or “Trusty” Of The Central Bankers’ Debt Prison?

by David Stockman • 
Greece, Europe and the world are being crucified on a cross of Keynesian central banking. The latter’s two-decade long deluge of money printing and ZIRP has generated a fantastic worldwide financial bubble, and one which has accrued to just a tiny slice of mankind. That much is blindingly evident, but there’s more and it’s worse.

The present replay of high noon on Greece’s impossible mountain of debt clarifies an even greater evil. Namely, that the central bank printing presses have also utterly destroyed the fundamental requisite of fiscal democracy.

To wit, in the modern world of massive, interventionist welfare states, fiscal governance desperately needs an honest bond market. The latter is the only mechanism capable of taming the modern state’s primal urge to entitle, transfer, indulge, placate, subsidize and spend without the parallel pain of a commensurate burden of taxation.

Soaring bond yields and the fear of losing debt market access, therefore, are the one force that can cause the politicians, thieves and charlatans who man the machinery of democracy to sober-up and acknowledge the facts; and then to weigh the difficult options and tradeoffs, congeal a consensus and close the deal.

----But three decades latter, the world has been turned upside-down. The bond vigilantes who kept politicians semi-honest in days of yore have been exterminated by central bankers wielding giant bond buying bazookas. Sovereign debt markets have become financial whore houses.

That baleful condition is owing to the usurpation of the world’s central banking machinery by Keynesian academics and apparatchiks. The whole modus operandi of the latter is nothing less than effecting the deep, chronic and unrelenting falsification of bond prices.

And they accomplish this falsification not merely by direct bond buying in the guise of QE. That is bad enough, of course, as underscored by the fact that the world’s central banks have expanded their collective balance sheet from $6 trillion to $22 trillion over the past decade or so. That’s a whole lot of monetization——-and almost all of that $16 trillion of central bank credit conjured from thin air went into the purchase of sovereign bonds, notes, bills and numerous forms of other state guarantied debt.

These crackpots tell you, of course, that a brobdingnagian $16 trillion thumb on the scale has nothing to do with the price and yields of public debt. We are supposedly suffering from a “savings glut”, according to Bernanke and Greenspan; and by the lights of the greatest Keynesian gasbag of our times, Professor Larry Summers, ultra-low rates are owing to a mysterious secular stagnation that has induced investors to beg governments to issue them negative yield securities.

Right! Still, this massive direct monetization of sovereign debt is only the half of it. ZIRP is the dastardly accomplice of QE. Even more price falsification is introduced into the government bond market when the johns who run the whorehouse finance their speculations in the repo and other liquid money markets.

The expense of carry on the 95% or so of the bond’s purchase price which is borrowed amounts to the cost of production (COGS) for bond market speculators. Make that COGS zero for 80 months running and pledge on a stack of post-FOMC meeting statements that you will not allow money market rates off the zero bound without ample warning and you have a no-brainer yield curve arbitrage like never before imagined. And do this on a global scale, and you get the recent absurdity of the 10-year German bund trading at 5 bps of yield, or the long-term issues of the quasi-bankrupt state of Italy trading at under 1%.

So rather than loathing monetization as did much of Wall Street during Ronald Reagan’s day, today’s traders feast on it and worship it. Instead of acknowledging the false price signals and free lunch corruption it introduces into the fiscal arena, our Keynesian central bankers dismiss the danger by resorting to a red herring. Namely, that massive monetization has not caused CPI inflation to accelerate. So do not be troubled.

That is pathetic beyond words and today’s Greek showndown provides a striking example of how this monetary evil-doing imperils the very essence of political democracy. In a word, Greece bankrupted itself years ago because its politicians were served up heaping piles of cheap bonds by a so-called debt market that had been falsified  by the ECB.
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"Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood. For these few gold has been the asset of last resort."

Antony C. Sutton

At the Comex silver depositories Tuesday 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.
Today more on why all who are not destitute, need a little fully paid up, physical, gold and silver held outside of the banking and MF Global’s of the world, against the day that the out of control Keynesian Ponzi Scheme comes crashing back down to earth.
"When paper money systems begin to crack at the seams, the run to gold could be explosive."

Harry Browne

Gold in the Age of Soaring Debt

June 18, 2015
Ever wonder how much gold has ever been exhumed in the history of the world? The GFMS Gold Survey estimates that the total amount is approximately 183,600 tonnes, or 5.9 billion ounces. If we take that figure and multiply it by the closing price on June 16, $1,181 per ounce, we find that the value of all gold comes within a nugget’s throw of $7 trillion.

This is an unfathomably large amount, to be sure, yet it pales in comparison to total global debt.

According to management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the world now sits beneath a mountain of debt worth an astonishing $200 trillion. That’s greater than twice the global GDP, which is currently $75 trillion. If we were to distribute this amount equally to every man, woman and child on the face of the earth, we would each owe around $28,000.

More surprising is that if gold backed total global debt 100 percent, it would be valued at $33,900 per ounce.

Try convincing your gold dealer of this next time you want to sell a coin.

http://www.usfunds.com/investor-library/frank-talk/gold-in-the-age-of-soaring-debt/#ixzz3doDZK0IH 

'It's time to hold physical cash,' says one of Britain's most senior fund managers

It may be time to put money under the mattress. High profile fund managers explain how to prepare for a 'systemic event'

The manager of one of Britain’s biggest bond funds has urged investors to keep cash under the mattress.

Ian Spreadbury, who invests more than £4bn of investors’ money across a handful of bond funds for Fidelity, including the flagship Moneybuilder Income fund, is concerned that a “systemic event” could rock markets, possibly similar in magnitude to the financial crisis of 2008, which began in Britain with a run on Northern Rock.

“Systemic risk is in the system and as an investor you have to be aware of that,” he told Telegraph Money.

The best strategy to deal with this, he said, was for investors to spread their money widely into different assets, including gold and silver, as well as cash in savings accounts. But he went further, suggesting it was wise to hold some “physical cash”, an unusual suggestion from a mainstream fund manager.

His concern is that global debt – particularly mortgage debt – has been pumped up to record levels, made possible by exceptionally low interest rates that could soon end, and he is unsure how well banks could cope with the shocks that may await.

He pointed out that a saver was covered only up to £85,000 per bank under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme – which is effectively unfunded – and that the Government has said it will not rescue banks in future, hence his suggestion that some money should be held in physical cash.
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"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

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?

The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change Forever

These six shifts will transform markets over the next 25 years

June 23, 2015 — 12:00 PM BST
The renewable-energy boom is here. Trillions of dollars will be invested over the next 25 years, driving some of the most profound changes yet in how humans get their electricity. That's according to a new forecast by Bloomberg New Energy Finance that plots out global power markets to 20401.

Here are six massive shifts coming soon to power markets near you:

1. Solar Prices Keep Crashing

The price of solar power will continue to fall, until it becomes the cheapest form of power in a rapidly expanding number of national markets. By 2026, utility-scale solar will be competitive for the majority of the world, according to BNEF. The lifetime cost of a photovoltaic solar-power plant will drop by almost half over the next 25 years, even as the prices of fossil fuels creep higher.
Solar power will eventually get so cheap that it will outcompete new fossil-fuel plants and even start to supplant some existing coal and gas plants, potentially stranding billions in fossil-fuel infrastructure. The industrial age was built on coal. The next 25 years will be the end of its dominance.

2. Solar Billions Become Solar Trillions

With solar power so cheap, investments will surge. Expect $3.7 trillion in solar investments between now and 2040, according to BNEF. Solar alone will account for more than a third of new power capacity worldwide. Here's how that looks on a chart, with solar appropriately dressed in yellow and fossil fuels in pernicious gray:

3. The Revolution Will Be Decentralized 

The biggest solar revolution will take place on rooftops. High electricity prices and cheap residential battery storage will make small-scale rooftop solar ever more attractive, driving a 17-fold increase in installations. By 2040, rooftop solar will be cheaper than electricity from the grid in every major economy, and almost 13 percent of electricity worldwide will be generated from small-scale solar systems.
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The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May

DJIA: +107 Down. NASDAQ: +195 Down. SP500: +139 Down. 

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