Baltic Dry Index. 747 -07 Brent Crude 48.79
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
The
good times too of high price almost always engender much fraud. All people are
most credulous when they are most happy; and when much money has just been
made, when some people are really making it, when most people think they are
making it, there is a happy opportunity for ingenious mendacity. Almost
everything will be believed for a little while, and long before discovery the
worst and most adroit deceivers are geographically or legally beyond the reach
of punishment.
Walter Bagehot. Lombard Street. 1873
For better or worse, there is a massive sea change underway in global politics. From Canada to Catalonia, from Donald Trump in America, to Jeremy Corbin in England, voters are voting for change. I would argue that it’s a reaction to the perceived failure of the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money, which broke down in the great recession of 2007-2009, and hasn’t recovered since. The giant malinvestment bubble of 1971-2014 is in its death throes. An unprepared voting public, is desperate, disillusioned, and mostly unaware of the cause of the decline in their lifestyle. We seem to have entered a new era of “solutions” from the far right and far left. Stay long fully paid up physical gold and silver. Globally we see, to have run out of road and talent.
Below, Canada opts for its version of change we can believe in. We hope it works out better north of the US/Canada border than it did south. With oil set to collapse again as Iranian oil flood nears, Canada’s Liberals seem to be joining in the currency wars.
Canada's Trudeau topples PM Harper in stunning election win
Canada's Liberal leader Justin Trudeau rode a late campaign surge to a
stunning election victory on Monday, toppling Prime Minister Stephen Harper's
Conservatives with a promise of change and returning a touch of glamor, youth
and charisma to Ottawa.
The Liberals seized a Parliamentary majority, an unprecedented turn in
political fortunes that smashed the record for the number of seats gained from
one election to the next. The Liberals had been a distant third place party in
Parliament before this election.
Harper conceded defeat, ending his government's nine-year run in power
and the 56-year-old's brand of fiscal and cultural conservatism.
Trudeau, 43, the photogenic son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau,
pledged to run a C$10 billion annual budget deficit for three years to invest
in infrastructure and help stimulate Canada's anemic economic growth.
This rattled financial markets ahead of the vote and the Canadian dollar
weakened on news of his victory.
---- Trudeau vaulted from third place to lead the polls in the final days of the campaign, overcoming Conservative attacks that he is too inexperienced to govern to return to the Prime Minister's residence in Ottawa where he grew up as a child.
"When the time for change strikes, it's lethal," former
Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said in a television interview.
"I ran and was successful because I wasn't Pierre Trudeau. Justin is
successful because he isn't Stephen Harper."
The Conservatives were projected to become the official opposition in
Parliament, with the left-leaning New Democratic Party in third.
More
Asia slips as commodities languish, Canada vote weighs on loonie
The euro hovered near a 10-day low ahead of a European Central Bank meeting that could open the door for yet more monetary easing.
With risk appetite flagging in Asia, spreadbetters expected a slightly lower open for Britain's FTSE .FTSE, Germany's DAX .GDAXI and France's CAC .FCHI.
The Canadian dollar, already under pressure from sliding crude oil prices, faced extra headwinds as Canada's Liberal Party was tipped to won Monday's general election which would pave the way for increased government spending.
---- The Canadian dollar, or loonie, weakened 0.2 percent to C$1.3039 to the dollar CAD=D4 after slumping 0.9 percent overnight on the prospect of voters opting for a prime minister who plans to run deficits to increase infrastructure spending.
"CAD is under modest downside pressure versus USD and AUD after the Liberals unexpectedly won (based on projections) a majority government for the first time since 2004. The Liberals have a mostly inexperienced team about to govern the country and that may be unsettling the markets a bit," said Elias Haddad, director of currency and international economics at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS shed 0.5 percent.
Shanghai shares .SSEC dropped 0.1 percent and Hong Kong's Hang Seng .HSI retreated 0.5 percent. Japan's Nikkei .N225 bucked the trend and gained 0.4 percent.
Australian stocks lost 0.6 percent as worries about China weighed on mining and energy stocks following Monday's China GDP data.
More
In business news it was more of the same yesterday. Bad news is good
news until eventually it isn’t.
IBM revenue falls more than expected, cuts profit forecast
It was the 14th quarter in a row that IBM has posted a reduction in revenue, as the world's largest technology services company gets rid of low-margin businesses, but has so far failed to make up the shortfall with newer initiatives in the more lucrative area of cloud computing.
Shares of IBM fell 4.8 percent in after-hours trading to $141.95.
"This is another example of the massive headwinds that large-cap traditional tech stalwarts are seeing in this ever-changing environment, as more customers move to the cloud," FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives said.
China was particularly hard hit, with fewer big deals causing revenue from that country to fall 17 percent, IBM's chief financial officer said on a conference call with analysts. Sales in Brazil, Russia, India and China combined were down 30 percent.
Armonk, New York-based IBM, which gets more than half its business from overseas, said overall revenue from continuing operations was cut 9 percent by a strong U.S. dollar .DXY, which is up about 17 percent from a year ago against a basket of currencies.
The company's total revenue fell 13.9 percent to $19.28 billion in the quarter, below analysts' average forecast of $19.62 billion.
More
Next, more on the falling crude oil price collapse, and next year comes the
flood of Iranian oil.
Kazakh President Nazarbayev Warns That 'Real Crisis' Is Coming
October 19, 2015 — 3:07 PM BST
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled Central Asia’s biggest
energy producer for a quarter of a century, warned the government to prepare
for economic pain, saying a “real crisis is coming.”Improvement is “impossible to forecast” for the near term, and the population may be hurt worse than in 2007-2009, Nazarbayev told Prime Minister Karim Massimov. Budget revenue has dropped 40 percent after oil prices collapsed, he said, according to a statement on his website Monday.
“Our people must know the current situation, which means a decline in our companies’ profits, a drop in incomes and the possibility of job cuts,” Nazarbayev said. “We must have a program to support socially vulnerable groups.”
Kazakhstan abandoned its managed exchange rate in August as concern about China’s slowing growth hobbled oil prices. Policy makers resumed interventions in September after the tenge’s volatility surged to the highest in the world and the currency weakened to a record low of 299.99 to the dollar, down about 34 percent from a month earlier, and closed at 276.95 on Monday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. On Oct.15, the central bank said $3 billion will be sold from the National Oil fund on the open market, after the regulator spent $1.7 billion to smooth the tenge’s swings.
In 2009, Kazakhstan devalued the tenge by about 20 percent and spent $10 billion to prop up the economy, while three lenders acquired by the state restructured about $20 billion of debt.
To help stimulate the growth, Kazakhstan plans to use 686 billion tenge ($4 billion) from the National Oil fund this year to fund its Nurly Zhol, or Path to the Future, program, according to the prime minister’s website. Nazarbayev told Massimov that money should help boost industrial production and ensure existing capacity is used, not to support ailing companies.
Nazarbayev said his views on global economic woes are based on talks with leaders of Russia and China, Kazakhstan’s biggest trading parters, as well as U.S. officials. Russia is struggling with its first recession since 2009, while China’s third-quarter economic growth decelerated to its slowest pace since 2009.
We close for the day with
Bloomberg, thinking the unthinkable on Volkswagen.
VW's 12-Brand Behemoth Under Scrutiny as Costs of Scandal Mount
October 19, 2015 — 11:01 PM BST
Faced with billions of euros in costs for its emissions cheating scandal,
Volkswagen AG may have to consider an overhaul of a 12-brand empire built in
the last two decades that makes everything from cheap cars to motorbikes to
heavy trucks.While VW in the past could afford to prop up financially struggling divisions such as the Spanish Seat unit, Bugatti super-car nameplate and MAN heavy trucks with robust profit from Porsche and Audi, that money will now need to help cover costs linked to the crisis.
“VW has several brands that fall into the ‘nice to have’ category,” said Stefan Bratzel, director of the Center of Automotive Management at the University of Applied Sciences in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, who estimates the scandal will cost VW as much as 30 billion euros ($34 billion). “Bugatti, Lamborghini, Ducati too -- they’re not core to the company in terms of making money.”
New Chief Executive Officer Matthias Mueller said this month that, while VW doesn’t need a revolution, he’s delaying or canceling non-essential projects to cut costs following the disclosure that VW cheated on U.S. diesel emissions tests. The automaker last week announced a recall of 8.5 million diesel vehicles in Europe, and Mueller says the fallout from the scandal will cost much more than than the 6.5 billion euros the automaker has already set aside. A VW spokesman declined to comment on the brand structure.
Italian motorbikes maker Ducati was added in 2012 at a cost of 860 million euros to compliment a stable of ultra-luxury brands that included Italian sports-car manufacturer Lamborghini, U.K. premium brand Bentley and Bugatti. Hit by slowing sales in China, Bentley’s first-half operating profit dropped 43 percent to 54 million euros. While VW doesn’t report specific financial figures for Lamborghini or Bugatti, neither are significant contributors to the bottom line. Bugatti, which has built just a handful of cars that sell for 1 million euros each, has never been profitable since VW bought the rights to the French brand in 1998.
More
“It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity. If there must be madness something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."
J. K. Galbraith. The Great Crash: 1929.
At the Comex silver depositories Monday
final figures were: Registered 42.87 Moz, Eligible 120.33 Moz, Total 163.20
Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
No crooked banksters, nor
squids or bent politicians today. Today
European football at its incompetent best, with three interesting videos. Some
things are too good not to share.Greek stretcher-bearer falls over and drops injured player twice in farcical scenes
AEL Larissa and Ergotelis match improved with ridiculous stretcher catastrophe
A
Greek second division league game descended into farce as agitated medical
staff forcefully removed Leonardo Kutris from the pitch on a stretcher,
dropping him several times during their attempts to get rid of him.
The incident happened during match between AEL Larissa and Ergotelis,
with the away side leading 1-0 and the majority of their players wasting time
by rolling around the pitch to indicate the severity of the injuries they
believed they had sustained.
Koutris found himself unable to stand up on his feet and had to lie on
his back, such was the level of mild discomfort he was in. Having wasted just
enough time to justify the play acting, as he realised he was going to be made
to leave the pitch on a stretcher, Koutris tried to get back up. Oxi!
Luckily for him, as several players and staff argued on the pitch as to
how best to deal with the situation, the gentleman in the grey with a hat on
"forcefully relocated" the injured player back to the ground and
requested assistance from his fellow professional.
If this weren't enough, the Greek Laurel and Hardy proceeded to struggle
to pick him up again and dropped him once more. Koutris did not enjoy himself
during the performance.
After a third attempt they eventually removed the player from the pitch
and placed him, quite aggressively on the floor from a short height, which he
also did not appreciated.
Time was of the essence and the medial duo hastily tried to exit the
pitch. Unfortunatley, the man with the hat learned all too quickly that he had
underestimated the weight of a fully grown professional Greek footballer and
tumbled to the ground and on to his patient.
More
Solar & Related Update.
With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, 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? DC? A quantum computer next?Scientists demonstrate how to improve ultrathin CIGSe solar cells by nanoparticles
Date:
October 16, 2015
Source:
Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie
Summary:
CIGSe solar cells are made of a thin chalcopyrite layer consisting of copper,
indium, gallium and selenium and can reach high efficiencies. Since indium is
becoming scarce and expensive, it is interesting to reduce the active CIGSe
layer, which however decreases the efficiency quite strongly. Now, scientists
have produced high quality ultrathin CIGSe layers and increased their
efficiency by an array of tiny nanoparticles between the back contact and the
active layer.
Nanoparticles with sizes the order of a wavelength interact with light
in specific ways. A young investigator group at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, led
by Professor Martina Schmid, is inquiring how to use arrangements of such
nanoparticles to improve solar cells and other opto-electronic devices. Now the
scientists report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society ACS Nano
a considerable success with ultrathin CIGSe solar cells.
Problems add up below 1 micrometer
CIGSe solar cells have proven high efficiencies and are established thin
film devices with active layers of a few micrometers thickness. But since
Indium is a rare element, the active layer should be as thin as possible. This
reduces the efficiency, since less light is absorbed. And if the active layer
is thinner than one micrometer, an additional problem arises: more and more
charge carriers meet and recombine at the back contact, getting
"lost."
Ultrathin CIGSe cell with efficiencies of 11.1%
"It took me more than one year to be able to produce ultrathin
layers of only 0.46 micrometer or 460 nanometers which still reach reasonable
efficiencies up to 11.1 %," Guanchao Yin says about his PhD project. He
then started to enquire how to implement nanoparticles between different layers
of the solar cell. His supervisor Martina Schmid discussed this with Prof. Albert
Polman, one of the pioneers in the field of nanophotonics, at the Center for
Nanooptics, Amsterdam, with whom she was in contact for a while already. They
proposed to produce arrays of dielectric nanoparticles by nanoimprinting
technologies.
No big effect by nanoparticles on top
In a first step, the colleagues in Amsterdam implemented a pattern of
dielectric TiO2-nanoparticles on top of Yin's ultrathin solar cells; the idea
was that they would act as light traps and increase absorption in the CIGSe
layer. But this did not increase the efficiency as much as proved in Si-based
solar cells. Yin then continued testing and ultimately found out what worked
best: a nanoparticle array not on top but at the back contact of the cell!
Nanoparticles at the back contact: effiency increases to 12.3%
The colleagues from Amsterdam produced an array of SiO2 nanoparticles,
directly on the Molybdenum substrate which corresponds to the back contact of
the solar cell. On top of this structured substrate the ultrathin CIGSe layer was
grown by Yin, and subsequently all the other layers and contacts needed for the
solar cell. With this configuration, the efficiency increased from 11.1 % to
12.3 %, and the short circuit current density of the ultrathin CIGSe cells
increased by more than 2 mA/cm2. With additional anti-reflective nanoparticles
at the front efficiencies raised even to 13.1%.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished September
DJIA: +41 Down. NASDAQ:
+138 Down. SP500: +65 Down.
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