Baltic Dry Index. 874 +21 Brent Crude 57.60
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
Europe, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.
Juncker, with apologies to Homer Simpson.
“Capitalism’s broken,” wailed fallen former guru Greenspan, back in the mid 90s. Today Europe’s broken could be a similar cry. After marathon meetings in Brussels by every European politician above the rank of dog catcher, so far Europe’s greatest and goodest have failed miserably at solving the problem of tiny bankrupt Greece. Just wait until they have to tackle Belgium, France, Italy and Spain. Why would anyone want to remain in a European disaster union like this? Brexit gets better by the hour.
Below, the great, dying, Bilderberger envy project to humble the United States of America, shows just how dysfunctional and dangerous it has become. Deadly for any European under 25. Western Ukraine when it joins, should feel right at home.
All my life I've had one dream, to achieve my many goals.
Europe, with apologies to Homer Simpson.
EU Demands Complete Capitulation From Tsipras
July 12, 2015 — 9:23 PM BST Updated on July 13, 2015 — 4:59 AM BST
European leaders gave Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras a
straightforward choice: ditch his principles or quit the euro.
Tsipras was presented with a laundry list of unfinished business from
Greece’s previous bailouts at an emergency summit that stretched in its 14th
hour by 5:59 a.m. Monday in Brussels. Euro-area chiefs gave Tsipras three days
to enact their main demands to keep alive chances of adding bailout funds of as
much as 86 billion euros ($96 billion) to earlier commitments of 240 billion
euros.
With Greece running out of money and its banks shut the past two weeks,
the gathering was billed as the country’s last chance to stay in the euro.
Tsipras, who says he wants to keep Greece in the currency union, has been in
financial limbo since his government missed a payment to the International
Monetary Fund and allowed its second rescue package to lapse on June 30.
“The situation is extremely difficult if you consider the economic
situation in Greece and the worsening in the last few months, but what has been
lost also in terms of trust and reliability,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel
told reporters.
With the final sticking points the role of the IMF and Europe’s demand
for a fund to hold Greek state assets for sale, the euro slid 0.3 percent to
$1.1130 by 12:49 p.m. in Tokyo. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures fell
0.2 percent.
The summit and the finance ministers’ meeting that preceded it featured
skirmishes pitting hardliners led by Germany against others. French President
Francois Hollande rejected the notion of suspending Greece from the currency.
Earlier, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble snapped at European Central
Bank President Mario Draghi.
An official in Brussels said the document was very bad for Tsipras and the Greek people. “They want to wreck us,” Defense Minister Panos Kammenos posted on Twitter. “Enough is enough.”
“This Eurogroup list of demands is madness,” Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote on his blog. “It’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for.”
In addition to requirements to cut pensions and raise sales taxes, measures that Tsipras accepted last week, the memo demanded that creditor representatives return to Athens with full access to ministers and a veto over relevant legislation.
Euro-area leaders also want Tsipras to transfer as much as 50 billion euros of state assets to a Luxembourg-based company for sale and make him fire workers he hired in defiance of previous bailout commitments.
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-12/eu-demands-tsipras-s-capitulation-as-greek-bailout-costs-spiral
Greece Needs $25 Billion to Get Through August, Scicluna Says
July 12, 2015 — 6:39 PM BST
Greece needs an infusion of 22 billion euros ($25 billion) to pay its
bills through the end of August, Maltese Finance Minister Edward Scicluna said.
This figure includes 7 billion euros by July 20, when Greece owes about
3.5 billion euros to the European Central Bank, Scicluna said in an interview.
It includes 10 billion euros for banks and 5 billion euros for other needs. He
spoke on the sidelines of Sunday’s euro-area summit after finance chiefs
concluded their session.
“The Greeks have finally understood that unless they get an injection of
cash they are faced with a doomsday scenario,” Scicluna said.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government has said it could submit
legislation to parliament on Monday for a vote by Wednesday. In its July 8
letter requesting a bailout, Greece said it could implement pension and tax
reforms as early as the start of the coming week.
Morehttp://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-12/greece-needs-25-billion-to-get-through-august-scicluna-says
France is the sick man of Europe, says former French prime minister François Fillon
“Sick” France needs urgent reform, says former centre-Right prime minister, calling for major reforms to stop the “pauperisation” of the country
By David Chazan, Paris 3:06PM BST 12 Jul 2015
France is “the sick man of Europe”,
François Fillon, the former centre-Right prime minister, has said in an open
letter to French president Francois Hollande,
calling for urgent economic reforms.“The Greek tragedy shows that the threat of bankruptcy is not abstract,” according to Mr Fillon, who headed the government of former president Nicolas Sarkozy until 2012.
Mr Hollande’s efforts to save Greece from exiting the eurozone have “temporarily eclipsed our own economic, social and financial failures,” Mr Fillon said.
Several French commentators writing about the Greek crisis in recent days have pointed out that France’s own national debt of more than €2 trillion (£1.4 trillion), amounting to 97.5 per cent of GDP, places it in the same league as Spain and other southern European countries.
More
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11734627/France-is-the-sick-man-of-Europe-says-former-French-prime-minister-Francois-Fillon.html
In other news, a nuclear deal with Iran is expected to be announced later today, clearing the way for the return of Iranian oil by 2016. The oil glut looks likely to get significantly worse. Crude oil prices are slumping this morning.
Crude Oil Poised for Biggest Weekly Drop Since March on Glut
July 10,
2015 — 12:42 AM BST Updated on July 10, 2015 — 8:23 PM BST
Oil capped its steepest weekly loss since March as the International Energy
Agency forecast prices will need to fall further to curb excess supplies.The world remains “massively oversupplied” before markets tighten in 2016 when output growth outside OPEC grinds to a halt, the IEA said in a monthly report Friday.
Crude has given up this year’s gains following China’s equities rout and the turmoil in Greece. Iran, the fourth-largest producer in OPEC, plans to boost crude exports and recapture market share if international sanctions are lifted. Baker Hughes Inc. reported that the number of rigs drilling for oil in the U.S. increased this week, potentially exacerbating the glut.
“Given the oversupply that we still have in the market, it will be hard
for oil to rally,” said Gene McGillian, a senior analyst at Tradition Energy in
Stamford, Connecticut. “Fundamentally we may test the $50 area next week. Even
if we don’t get a deal with Iran, we still have a supply glut.”
West Texas Intermediate for August delivery fell 4 cents to end at
$52.74 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices slid 7.4 percent
this week.
Gasoline slid 2.86 cents, or 1.4 percent, to $2.0165 a gallon.
Brent for August settlement rose 12 cents to $58.73 a barrel on the
London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange, down 2.6 percent this week.
The number of rigs drilling for oil increased by 5 this week to 645, the
second consecutive gain, oilfield services company Baker Hughes reported today.
U.S. oil production swelled to 9.6 million barrels a day in the week ended July
3, according to a July 8 report from the Energy Information Administration, the
highest in about 40 years.
More
We close for today with a prediction of a mini Ice Age to come in the 2030s. If accurate, our world has just over a decade to prepare for mass migration, food disruption, and the collapse of much of the modern western way of life. Is Denmark showing part of the answer?
Earth heading for 'mini ice age' within 15 years
River Thames could freeze over in 2030s when Northern Hemisphere faces bitterly cold winters, scientists say
The earth is 15 years from a "mini ice-age" that will cause bitterly cold winters during which rivers such as the Thames freeze over, scientists have predicted.Solar researchers at the University of Northumbria have created a new model of the sun's activity which they claim produces "unprecedentedly accurate predictions".
They said fluid movements within the sun, which are thought to create 11-year cycles in the weather, will converge in such a way that temperatures will fall dramatically in the 2030s.
Solar activity will fall by 60 per cent as two waves of fluid "effectively cancel each other out", according to Prof Valentina Zharkova.
In a presentation to the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, she said the result would be similar to freezing conditions of the late 17th century.
“[In the cycle between 2030 and around 2040] the two waves exactly
mirror each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the
sun," she said.
"Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel
each other.
"We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder
minimum'".
Maunder minimum, indicating low sunspot activity, was the name given to
the period between 1645 and 1715, when Europe and North America experienced
very cold winters.
In England during this "Little Ice Age", River Thames frost fairs
were held. In the winter of 1683-84 the Thames froze over for
seven weeks, during which it was "passable by foot", according to
historical records.More
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11733369/Earth-heading-for-mini-ice-age-within-15-years.html
Denmark produces 140 per cent of its electricity needs through wind power
Saturday 11 July 2015
Due to an unusually windy day, wind farms in Denmark managed to produce 140
per cent of the country's electricity needs.By Thursday evening, the Nordic nation's wind turbines were producing 116 per cent of Denmark's electricity needs, a figure that rose to 140 per cent in the early hours of the morning.
As reported by The Guardian, 80 per cent of the surplus power was shared between Germany and Norway, with Sweden taking the 20 per cent left over.
The figures were noticed by the paper on energinet.dk, a site which shows the power output of Denmark's wind farms in real-time
More
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/denmark-produces-140-per-cent-of-its-electricity-needs-through-wind-power-10381648.html
Europe, you've done a lot of great things, but you're a very old continent, and old continents are useless.
Obama, with apologies to Homer Simpson.
At the Comex silver depositories Friday
final figures were: Registered 58.96 Moz, Eligible 121.23 Moz, Total 180.19
Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
All together now, there might be trouble ahead. At
least so thinks Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. Who am I to take on the wisdom
of the Rupert’s Journal?
"On
the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the
time.”
George
Orwell.
Memo to China: Your Market Manipulations Are Doomed to Fail
by Wall Street Journal • July
10, 2015
By JASON ZWEIG at The Wall
Street JournalIn your head, you should suspect it will fail.
There’s something poignantly human about every attempt to make markets behave as we all wish they would: always rising and making us richer, never falling and inflicting pain upon us.
Governments have been trying—and failing—to control markets for centuries. If the Chinese government succeeds, it will be the exception to that rule. If it fails, the results could be dire.
The Chinese authorities made a rising stock market such a priority that they encouraged local investors to buy stocks on margin, or with borrowed money, until total margin loans exceeded $320 billion. That was nearly 9% of the total value of Chinese stocks—and 10% greater than the gross domestic product of Hong Kong.
“Not only were Chinese investors not familiar with the downside risks of [trading on margin], neither were the regulators and policy makers,” says Zhiwu Chen, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management who studies the Chinese capital markets. “As a result of this recent experience, I do think China will go through much rethinking and slow down its efforts to open up its financial markets.”
Other governments have blazed, or bumbled along, the same trail.
After the bursting of the speculative South Sea Bubble in 1720, the British Parliament instituted Sir John Barnard’s Act, which, starting in 1734, banned trading in futures and options. Traders shrugged and kept on speculating; the law remained on the books, bereft and ignored, until it was finally repealed in 1860.
After Wall Street’s first crash, in 1792, the state of New York banned futures trading and short selling; speculators paid no heed. As populism swept the U.S. in the late 19th century after several market panics, state after state banned trading in options. But speculators traded anyway—even in crooked “bucket shops” if they had to.
Even the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1750 B.C.) stipulated that traders who didn’t use the sales contracts mandated by the king “shall be put to death.” Speculators probably pulled their braided beards and found ways to evade the heavy hand of that government, too.
After the Japanese stock market collapsed in 1990, the government introduced “price-keeping operations,” buying billions of dollars’ worth of shares toward the end of the fiscal year. That swelled up the balance sheets of Japan’s biggest banks, which had enormous stockholdings—but it prevented the banks from cleaning up their bad loans. Even now, after a recent binge of stock buying by the Bank of Japan, the Nikkei 225 index lurks 49% below its record level, in 1989, of more than 38900.
In China, too, debt is the problem. “When a bubble pops, it’s leverage that almost always proves so corrosive and destabilizing on the way down,” says Lawrence White, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business who specializes in financial regulation.
By leaving regulations on margin debt loose, the Chinese government is encouraging further speculation in stocks that may still be overpriced.
“If stocks remain above their fundamental value, then all [the Chinese government] is doing with these kinds of interventions is trapping capital rather than letting investors reallocate it to a higher use,” says Eugene White, an economist at Rutgers University who studies the history of financial booms and busts.
And, if that’s the case, this round of interventions may only end up necessitating more.
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?
EDTA – Electric Drive Sales Dashboard
www.electricdrive.org/sales
This week, EDTA released the
electric drive dashboard numbers thru June 2015, the second best month for
plug-in vehicle (PEV) sales this year. There were 10,384 PEVs sold in the
US last month– that number includes 3,409 plug-in hybrids and 6,975 battery
EVs. There were also 32,330 hybrids sold in June, bringing the total
number of electric drive vehicles sold last month to 42,714.
More
Sustainable Aviation Biofuel for 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games
Published on July 10, 2015 at 5:56 AM
Boeing and Japanese aviation industry stakeholders have charted a course to develop sustainable aviation biofuel for flights during the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo, when millions of people are expected to visit Japan.
The Initiatives for Next Generation Aviation Fuels (INAF) – a consortium
of 46 organizations including Boeing, ANA (All Nippon Airways), Japan Airlines,
Nippon Cargo Airlines, Japan's government and the University of Tokyo – laid
out a five-year "roadmap" to develop biofuel by 2020 as a way to
reduce aviation's environmental footprint.
Using sustainably produced biofuel reduces lifecycle carbon dioxide
emissions by 50 to 80 percent compared to conventional petroleum fuel,
according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
More
And in the UK Friday a first. A small step and all that.
Two
e-plane crossings of the English Channel, a first, though both have been
demonstrated at airshows. There would have been a third last week too, if only Siemens hadn't got cold feet. EADS
didn't go with a Li-ion battery pack. EADS two seater went with Li-polymer batteries. EADS aims to be
commercial by 2017-2018, but only in trainer light aircraft form. Some military
uses too, but I think they will have to
leave the pilot on the ground. I'm not sure if it will scale up eventually for
passenger use. If it does, probably more 2025- 2035. If any of them can make an
8 seater, Loganair in Orkney might be the people to call.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/engineering/11729838/Airbus-E-Fan-2.0-set-to-recreate-aviation-history-with-cross-Channel-flight-only-this-time-its-electric.html
http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/worlds-shortest-commercial-flight-is.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/engineering/11729838/Airbus-E-Fan-2.0-set-to-recreate-aviation-history-with-cross-Channel-flight-only-this-time-its-electric.html
http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/worlds-shortest-commercial-flight-is.html
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished June
DJIA: +98 Down. NASDAQ:
+192 Down. SP500: +127 Down.
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