Baltic Dry Index. 1048 +39 Brent Crude 57.02
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
The stock market is never
obvious. It is
designed to fool most of the people, most of the time.
Jesse Livermore.
Today our wannabe masters in Berlin, Brussels and Beijing, tell us that everything’s fixed. Greek banks can reopen again, deposits only, no new accounts, as if anyone will. China’s stock markets are commanded to go up once more, fixed by orders not to sell to the major stock owners, and orders to buy more stocks financed by a new state financed margin fund that’s 25 times larger than the stock market bailout rescue fund, that was previously put together by China’s banks. We’ve learned from Britain and America, said China over the weekend. But fixed has a double edged meaning and is apt.
We open with Germany’s Mrs. Merkel offering the new Greek slaves jam tomorrow. Having successfully edged out War Party demonized Russia as continental Europe’s most distrusted nation, this is presumably what passes for a “charm offensive” in the City that sits on the river Spree/Spreva. Mrs. Merkel now seems to have an uppity finance minister. The French “dutchman,” and a gaggle of EUSSR apparatchiks lose the plot. Germany did not just crush Greece merely to become some outer department of France.
Merkel Holds Out Prospect of Limited Greek Debt Relief
July 19, 2015 — 6:22 PM BST
German Chancellor Angela Merkel held out the prospect of limited debt relief
for Greece if it follows through on the terms of a third bailout, while
insisting that Greek membership in the euro precludes a debt writedown.Nations in the 19-member currency union will consider extending maturities and reducing interest rates on Greek bonds only after the first assessment of whether Greece is meeting pledges for more austerity and overhauling its labor market, the German leader said -- “not now, but then.”
Greece’s wish to remain in the euro area rules out a “classic haircut, writing down 30 or 40 percent of the debt,” since it violates European law, she said.
“Just imagine that with any country that has more debt than the Greeks had among euro members -- we would enter a completely hopeless situation,” Merkel said in an interview with German broadcaster ARD on Sunday. “You can’t have that.”
----Merkel defended Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble’s breach of a taboo this month when he floated the idea of suspending Greece from the euro for five years. The proposal was meant to prevent a “catastrophic situation,” Merkel said.
“The option was on the table, but we decided to take another one,” Merkel told ARD. “What counts is the result of these negotiations that took such a long time.”
The chancellor played down a disagreement between herself and Schaeuble a day after her finance minister confirmed differences between the two. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Schaeuble also said he’d quit if he were to conclude that he no longer had a say in her government.
More
France’s Hollande Proposes Creation of Euro-Zone Government
July 19, 2015 — 2:20 PM BST
French President Francois Hollande said that the 19 countries using the euro
need their own government complete with a budget and parliament to cooperate
better and overcome the Greek crisis.“Circumstances are leading us to accelerate,” Hollande said in an opinion piece published by the Journal du Dimanche on Sunday. “What threatens us is not too much Europe, but a lack of it.”
While the euro zone has a common currency, fiscal and economic policies remain mostly in the hands of each member state. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi made a plea this week for deeper cooperation between the euro members after political squabbles over Greece almost led to a rupture in the single currency.
Countries in favor of more integration should move ahead, forming an “avant-garde,” Hollande said.
“Europe has let its institutions weaken and the 28 European Union member countries are struggling to agree to move ahead,” Hollande said on Sunday in a text which was also a homage to his mentor Jacques Delors, a former European Commission President who proposed similar ideas.
Draghi called for the creation of a shared treasury within 10 years in a joint proposal with politicians including European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem last month.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-19/france-s-hollande-proposes-creation-of-euro-zone-government
Greece crisis: long queues expected as banks reopen on Monday
Greek banks are preparing to open again for the first time in three weeks, although cash withdrawal limits will remain
Queues are expected to form across Greece on Monday as the troubled
country prepares to re-open its banks for the first time in three weeks,
although cash withdrawal limits will remain.
Senior banking officials said they expect long queues as people line up
to withdraw money from their safety deposit boxes, which have been closed to
customers while bank shutters have been in place.
However, Greeks were also urged to put their money back into their
accounts to give the economy a much-needed boost.
“If we take our money out of chests and from our homes - where they are
not safe in any case - and we deposit them in the banks, we will strengthen the
liquidity of the economy,” Louka Katseli, the head of Greece’s banking
association, said in a television interview on Sunday.
Banks will not offer a full service. Customers will continue to face
restrictions on cash withdrawals, with a weekly cap of €420 replacing the daily
limit of €60. A ban on money transfers to foreign banks and a block on the
opening of new accounts will continue.
Morehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11749712/Greece-crisis-long-queues-expected-as-banks-reopen-on-Monday.html
The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.
Jesse Livermore.
China must learn lessons from stock market rout: vice finance minister
China must learn lessons from its stock market rout, the country's vice finance minister said on Saturday, signaling his intent to focus on supervision and the development of new frameworks to make it possible to weather any future market turbulence.China's stock market plunged by nearly a third at one stage earlier this month from a mid-June peak, wiping around $4 trillion from share values as investors were spooked by speculation that China's central bank was about to end its monetary policy easing.
The slide sparked China's biggest rescue effort of its equity market, with the government launching a series of moves that included halting flotations and banning companies and their executives from selling shares.
Zhu Guangyao told Reuters Beijing was considering new policies.
"There is a mismatch for supervision, and that is a real challenge," he said in an interview at the Chinese Embassy in London. "After the big up and the big down we saw, we need to learn from other countries, mature stock markets including the U.S. and U.K."
The market has bounced in recent sessions and the CSI300 index .CSI300 of the largest listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen rose 3.9 percent on Friday to 4,151.50, up 1.1 on the week.
Zhu said China's intervention to stabilize the market was justified given the level of turbulence and that there would now be an evaluation of what had happened to help draw up policies to handle any future market turmoil.
However he did not say what other policies might be considered.
Some investors have said market reforms and a move towards a market-driven economy, rather than short-term steps such as limiting share sales, are what will nurse markets back to health.
Even before panic spread through China's equity market in mid-June, it was shaping up to be a difficult year for the world's second-largest economy, feeling the pinch from slowing growth in trade, investment and domestic demand which was compounded by a cooling property sector and deflationary pressures.
More
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/18/us-china-markets-regulation-idUSKCN0PS0JA20150718
We close for the day with the UK’s once respected Daily Telegraph just getting silly. Australia will never be Greece. For one thing it’s much bigger with mountains of real natural resources. For another its people are anything but tax and work shy. And it’s not trapped in a wealth and jobs destroying European monetary union.
Commodities crash could turn Australia into a new Greece
The commodities boom made Australia the lucky country but rising debt and a slump in Chinese demand for resources signal tough times ahead Down Under
Last month Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest woman and matriarch of Perth’s Hancock mining dynasty delivered an unwelcome shock to her workers in Western Australia: accept a possible 10pc pay cut or face the risk of future redundancies.Ms Rinehart, whose family have accumulated vast wealth from iron ore mining, has seen her fortune dwindle since commodity prices began their inexorable slide last year. The Australian mining mogul has seen her estimated wealth collapse to around $11bn (£7bn) from a fortune that was thought to be worth around $30bn just three years ago.
This colossal collapse in wealth is symptomatic of the wider economic problem now facing Australia, which for years has been known as the lucky country due to its preponderance in natural resources such as iron ore, coal and gold. During the boom years of the so-called commodities “super cycle” when China couldn’t buy enough of everything that Australia dug out of the ground, the country’s economy resembled oil-rich Saudi Arabia.
While the rest of the world suffered from the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Australia’s economy – closely tied to China – appeared impervious, with full employment and a healthy trade surplus.
However, a collapse in iron ore and coal prices coupled with the impact of large international mining companies slashing investment has exposed Australia’s true vulnerability. Just like Saudi Arabia, which is now burning its foreign reserves to compensate for falling oil prices, Australia faces a collapse in export revenue
Recently revised figures for April show that the country’s trade deficit
with the rest of the world ballooned to a record A$4.14bn (£2bn). That gap
between the value of exports and imports is expected to increase as the value
of Australia’s most important resources reaches new multi-year lows. Iron ore
is now trading at around $50 per tonne, compared with a peak of around $180 per
tonne achieved in 2011. Thermal coal has also suffered heavy losses, now
trading at around $60 per tonne compared with around $150 per tonne four years
ago.
For an economy which in 2012 depended on resources for 65pc of its total
trade in goods and services these dramatic falls in prices are almost
impossible to absorb without inflicting wider damage.
Morehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/mining/11749706/Commodities-crash-could-turn-Australia-into-a-new-Greece.html
There is nothing new on Wall Street or in stock speculation. What has happened in the past will happen again, and again, and again. This is because human nature does not change, and it is human emotion, solidly build into human nature, that always gets in the way of human intelligence.
Jesse Livermore.
At the Comex silver depositories Friday
final figures were: Registered 58.96 Moz, Eligible
119.92 Moz, Total 178.88
Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
As China moves to rig it stock markets after a 30
percent fall in June wiped out over 3 trillion dollars in fake wealth, another
wealth destruction market has appeared. It’s a funny old, wealth destroying
world, on Red capitalism.
Bamboozled Chinese investors may have lost billions on a mysterious metals-trading scheme
July 16, 2015 (Source: Quartz) — China’s volatile stock markets aren’t the only places where retail investors are losing huge amounts of money these days. Thousands of investors may be out billions of dollars after investing in a Chinese company that grew to become the world’s largest rare metals trading exchange in just four years.
Earlier today (July 16), nearly 200 investors in Shanghai
gathered to demand their money back from officials at Fanya Metals Exchange, a
trading platform-turned-asset manager that counts China’s biggest banks and
metals companies among its partners. They join the 800 or so people who
demonstrated outside Fanya’s Kunming headquarters on July 13, outraged that for
months they’ve been unable to access billions of dollars worth of investments,
reports Metal Bulletin (paywall).
At issue is an investment called Ri Jin Bao, a
financial product guaranteed by Fanya that promises retail investors annualized
returns as high as 13.7%, and the right to withdraw funds at any time. Those
funds have been frozen since April, when Fanya said it ran into “liquidity
problems,” according to Caixin (link in Chinese). A reported 40 billion yuan
($6.4 billion) owed to 220,000 investors nationwide has been frozen.
“I think Fanya breached a unilateral contract when selling
Ri Jin Bao,” one of the protesting investors told Metal Bulletin. “It’s unfair
for us.”
Why did hundreds of thousands of individual investors sink
millions of yuan into a derivative product linked to indium, bismuth, and other
metals few have ever heard of? The answer highlights how Chinese government
regulations make it hard for middle-class households to safely grow their savings.
It also reveals how easily China’s out-of-control borrowing creates wealth from
nothing—and how quickly that wealth can collapse.
Chinese middle-class households have long been in a tough
spot. To subsidize its investment-driven economy, the Chinese government sets
the savings deposit rate artificially low. It also all but bars individuals
from investing outside of China, leaving local property and stocks as the most
obvious ways of growing their wealth.
Investors looking for alternatives to these crowded and
incredibly volatile markets throw their cash into everything from pu’er tea to
liquor—and, evidently, indium, bismuth, and other “minor metals” that Fanya
specialized in.
The “minor” moniker is in part because these metals are
usually the byproduct of other, more commonly traded metals. Indium, for
instance, comes from zinc and lead. More commonly traded minor metals are used
in a range of niche technologies—everything from LCD screens and solar panels
to makeup and pharmaceuticals. These two factors make them a tricky industry to
understand, says Anthony Lipmann, managing director of Lipmann Walton & Co,
a UK-based metals trading firm.
“It is a market for trade parties, people like us who
spend a lifetime to understand where metals such as rhenium, zirconium,
hafnium—or Fanya-listed items such as bismuth, antimony, indium, cadmium,
etc.—arise and are used,” he tells Quartz via email. “They are not suitable
vehicles for investment by widows and orphans.”
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?
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand,
more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the
lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
Nicolo Machiavelli
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Trina Solar to Supply 51 MW of Dual Glass Modules to Tea Plantation PV Power Project in Yunnan
CHANGZHOU,
CHINA--(eSolarEnergyNews)-- Trina Solar, a global leader in photovoltaic
("PV") modules, solutions, and services, today announced that it has
signed an agreement to supply 51 MW of its Dual Glass Modules to Yunnan
Electric Power Design Institute, a subsidiary of China Energy Engineering Group
Co., Ltd., and the EPC provider for the agricultural PV power plant project
located in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province in China. The plant will be used to
power equipment in tea plantations, and will be the first of its kind within
China.
The agricultural PV project has the capacity of 100 MW totally. Phase 1 of the project will be 51 MW and will utilize Trina Solar's dual glass modules, including approximately 43,516 of Trina Solar's TSM-255 modules and 154,284 of the Company's TSM-260 modules. These dual glass frameless modules are extremely durable, made with front and back layers of heat-strengthened glass, providing strong protection against environmental factors such as heavy humidity and pesticide use, while maintaining a high rate of sunlight transmission and efficiency. They excel in greenhouse environments, where properly maintaining temperature is crucial to the success of crop growth. The shipments are expected to complete in Q3 2015.
Jichun Zhang, Deputy General Manager of Yunnan Electric Power Design Institute commented: "We are very pleased to cooperate with Trina Solar, an industry leader with a vision to build a greener world, for apioneer project in China to put solar power to work on the tea plantations. I believe with Trina Solar's leading technology and highly reliable products, the tea plantations can be more efficient with increasing self-reliance and less pollution."
The agricultural PV project has the capacity of 100 MW totally. Phase 1 of the project will be 51 MW and will utilize Trina Solar's dual glass modules, including approximately 43,516 of Trina Solar's TSM-255 modules and 154,284 of the Company's TSM-260 modules. These dual glass frameless modules are extremely durable, made with front and back layers of heat-strengthened glass, providing strong protection against environmental factors such as heavy humidity and pesticide use, while maintaining a high rate of sunlight transmission and efficiency. They excel in greenhouse environments, where properly maintaining temperature is crucial to the success of crop growth. The shipments are expected to complete in Q3 2015.
Jichun Zhang, Deputy General Manager of Yunnan Electric Power Design Institute commented: "We are very pleased to cooperate with Trina Solar, an industry leader with a vision to build a greener world, for apioneer project in China to put solar power to work on the tea plantations. I believe with Trina Solar's leading technology and highly reliable products, the tea plantations can be more efficient with increasing self-reliance and less pollution."
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