Baltic Dry Index. 780 +18 Brent Crude 48.11
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
Poverty is not socialism. To
be rich is glorious.
Deng Xiaoping.
Today we open with “is bad news still good news” in our central bankster
scripted stock market gambling dens? If so there seems to be a surfeit of bad
news around. Who knew, big multi-national companies have to pay taxes after
all! Yesterday’s EU tax ruling will likely put Luxembourg and Ireland out of
the tax avoidance scam.
Oil drops to a nearly 3-week low as crude supplies jump
Published: Oct 21, 2015 2:56 p.m. ET
Oil futures settled at their lowest level in nearly three weeks on Wednesday
after U.S. government data revealed a jump in weekly crude supplies, just as
some of the world’s top crude producers met in Vienna to discuss ways to
support prices. At the special meeting, members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and nonmembers such as Russia and Mexico discussed the fall in oil prices, which have tumbled by more 50% since last summer. Analysts, however, hadn’t expected the summit to result in any crude-oil production cuts.
December West Texas Intermediate crude CLZ5, +0.42% fell $1.09, or 2.4%, to settle at $45.20 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. That was the lowest settlement for a most-active contract since Oct. 1. Brent crude LCOZ5, +0.52% declined by 86 cents, or 1.8%, to $47.85 a barrel on London’s ICE Futures exchange.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported an increase of eight million barrels in crude supplies for the week ended Oct. 16. Analysts polled by Platts expected supplies to be up by 2.7 million barrels, while the American Petroleum Institute Tuesday said inventories rose 7.1 million barrels.
More
American Express profit drops, spending increases
Published: Oct 21, 2015 4:23 p.m. ET
American Express Co. said its third-quarter earnings fell 14% on
sluggish revenue ahead of the end of its exclusive U.S. partnership with Costco
Wholesale Corp. next year.
The card company said it increased spending on marketing and technology
ahead of the end of that relationship, seeking to attract new card members and
spending across its network.
Shares fell 2% to $75 in recent after-hours trading as per-share
earnings and revenue missed expectations.
For the year, the company now expects per-share earnings of $5.20 and
$5.35, compared with its previous estimate for per-share profit to be flat or
lower than the $5.56 reported for 2014.
"We continue to expect quarterly earnings performance to be more
uneven than it has been historically," Chief Executive Kenneth Chenault
said.
More
Valeant shares plunge on short-seller scrutiny of pharmacy revenue
Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc's stock plunged as much as 40
percent on Wednesday after an influential short-seller accused the company of
using specialty pharmacies to inflate its revenue, an allegation that the
drugmaker denied.
Citron Research, a short-selling firm run by Andrew Left, alleged that
Valeant's previously undisclosed ties to specialty pharmacies, including
Philidor and R&O Pharmacy Inc, helped the company create "phantom
sales" of its products or push more product through distribution channels
than sales would warrant.
“Citron believes the whole thing is a fraud to create invoices to
deceive the auditors and book revenue,” the research note said.
In response, Valeant said it does not record sales of drugs that are
stocked as inventory at such pharmacies in its consolidated financial reports
and said sales are recorded only when the product is dispensed to the patient.
"We categorically deny the allegations made in the Citron
report," a Valeant spokesperson said.
More
ESPN to lay off about 300 employees
Published: Oct 21, 2015 11:43 a.m. ET
ESPN said it would lay off nearly 300 employees at the company, or nearly 4%
of its workforce, as the sports-media company looks to control costs in a
challenging pay-TV landscape and reorganize for digital growth.The layoffs will affect departments across the company, including distribution, advertising, technology, administration, content and others, a person close to ESPN said.
In distribution, ESPN is consolidating teams to reflect the fact that cable TV providers have also dwindled to fewer players due to big mergers over the past few years. It is also creating a reorganized distribution team that will deal with both traditional and digital distributors of ESPN channels.
ESPN is majority owned by Walt Disney Co. DIS, +0.23%
Apple Stakes Raised as EU Orders Starbucks, Fiat Tax Repayments
October 21, 2015 — 10:00 AM BST Updated on October 21, 2015 — 4:03 PM
BST
Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. got a preview of what the European Union may
have in store for them after regulators ordered Starbucks Corp. and a Fiat
Chrysler Automobiles NV unit to repay millions of euros in back taxes.The EU said the coffee company and the Italian carmaker were handed illegal fiscal deals by the Netherlands and Luxembourg and ordered them to repay as much as 30 million euros ($34 million). Wednesday’s decision sets up a showdown with Apple and Amazon, which are also embroiled in the tax probe.
“These first two decisions may just be testing the waters to see what the reaction will be, before they start with the really big ones -- Apple and Amazon,” said Marc Sanders, a partner at Taxand, a global firm of tax advisers. The Apple and Amazon cases “will have the same results, potentially with higher recoveries.”
Starbucks, Fiat, Apple and Amazon may be the tip of the iceberg after revelations of widespread use of sweetheart tax deals hit the headlines last year. Documents leaked by a group of investigative journalists showed that Luxembourg alone struck hundreds of secret fiscal deals known as tax rulings with companies from around the world, from PepsiCo Inc. to Walt Disney Co. Amazon, which has more than 1,000 people working in the tiny nation, said in a U.S. filing in July that its taxes could increase following a negative EU decision.
“Tax rulings that artificially reduce a company’s tax burden are not in line with EU state-aid rules. They are illegal,” said Margrethe Vestager, the EU competition commissioner. “I hope that, with today’s decisions, this message will be heard by member state governments and companies alike. All companies, big or small, multinational or not, should pay their fair share of tax.”
The Dutch and Luxembourg tax authorities must work out the actual amounts to be recouped based on a method provided by the European Commission. The recovery orders may also have an impact across the Atlantic where tax credits can in theory be granted when multinationals repatriate earnings from subsidiaries, according to a U.S. Treasury Department official.
Still, “any amount repaid will not automatically qualify for credit against the group’s U.S. tax bill -– it will be a complex question depending on the company’s particular circumstances,” said Heather Self, a tax partner at law firm Pinsent Masons LLP.
More
We end for the day in increasingly austere China. Golf and gluttony are out for Communist Party of China apparatchiks. As for sex, are you mad? Is that a Rolex on your wrist? Now might not be a good time to buy a new Merc or Beamer.
Reform is China's
second revolution.
Deng Xiaoping.
Golf and gluttony listed as violations as China tightens graft rules
China's ruling Communist Party has listed golf and gluttony as
violations for the first time as it tightens its rules to prevent officials
from engaging in corrupt practices, while also turning an even sterner eye
against sexual impropriety.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has launched a sweeping crackdown on
deep-rooted graft since taking over the party's leadership in late 2012 and the
presidency in 2013. Dozens of senior officials have been investigated or
jailed.
Tales of graft and officials' high living, including extravagant
banquets, have prompted widespread public anger because bureaucrats are meant
to live on modest sums and lead morally exemplary lives.
The new rules are an update of existing regulations and are designed to
better codify exactly what constitutes a violation of discipline, the official
Xinhua news agency reported late on Wednesday.
More
Keep a cool head and maintain
a low profile. Never take the lead - but aim to do something big.
Deng Xiaoping
At the Comex silver depositories
Wednesday final figures were: Registered 43.54 Moz, Eligible 118.92 Moz, Total
162.46 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Volkswagen’s dirty killer diesels again. Bloomberg tells the story
of the fraud so far.How Could Volkswagen’s Top Engineers Not Have Known?
October 21,
2015 — 11:00 AM BST
For the gearheads at West Virginia University, it was a minor commission. An
environmental group, the International Council on Clean Transportation, had
asked the school’s Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions to test
the tailpipes of diesel cars in the U.S., such as those sold by Volkswagen and
BMW.Studies suggested that automakers’ diesel cars polluted more on the road than in the lab, and curiously, more in Europe than in the U.S. ICCT wanted to figure out what the automakers had done to meet America’s tougher emissions standards and how to repatriate these improvements for European car buyers.
The center, founded in 1989, is based on the rolling WVU campus in the foothills of Appalachia and occupies a warehouselike space full of young men in T-shirts and jeans fiddling with jury-rigged equipment, and it smells like a gas station. Run by Daniel Carder, a West Virginia native, it mostly tests heavy-duty engines for trucks and locomotives. Taking sleek little passenger sedans on a road trip was a novelty. One student at the lab, Marc Besch, thought it sounded interesting and asked to work on the project. Besch grew up in Switzerland, and his family ran a dealership that sold mostly Opels, a German competitor to Volkswagen.
There was one problem: Carder, Besch, and their team couldn’t find any diesel cars in West Virginia. So they plotted test routes in California, where lots of consumers have bought into the marketing promise of “clean diesel,” which touts remarkable fuel efficiency without sacrificing muscular acceleration. Out west, they could also use the California Air Resources Board’s dynamometers, the hulking apparatuses used to measure the exhaust coming out of a stationary car.
From February through April 2013, they tested three diesel cars: a Volkswagen Jetta, a Volkswagen Passat, and a BMW sedan. Besch took charge of the initial assessment, using the dynos, and he was impressed. The cars emitted almost nothing, prompting some crowing from Besch about European engineering. When Besch’s fellow investigator, Arvind Thiruvengadam, joined him to take the cars on the road, however, the results were different. The road tests captured a variety of conditions: high elevations up Mt. Baldy; stop-and-go urban errand-running in San Diego; freeway driving around Los Angeles. The two
Volkswagens’ emissions exceeded standards by 5 to 35 times. The BMW’s didn’t.
First, they assumed the results were wrong, so the team recalibrated the instruments and kept on driving. Eventually they realized that, yes, they were seeing something noteworthy, if not exactly shocking. What comes out of a tailpipe on the road is always going to differ somewhat from regulatory targets met in tightly controlled environments. Speed, elevation, and temperature all affect the result. To isolate the cause, Besch pored over a two-part paper, published by Volkswagen’s top engineers in 2008, that described purportedly groundbreaking emissions control achieved by the new TDI 2.0 liter engine. And he pursued a theory related to the exhaust filtering system. He still couldn’t explain the full extent of the emissions.
On March 31, 2014, Besch, Carder, and the rest of the WVU researchers
presented their findings in San Diego, at the most important conference in the
car-exhaust field, the Real World Emissions Workshop. They didn’t name which
cars they’d tested, but the technical specs and use of the Lean NOx capture
system meant it could only be a Volkswagen.
Sitting in the audience was Jens Borken-Kleefeld, who studies emissions
at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. He’d
made the trip for the same reason ICCT had commissioned its study: to
understand why the diesel technologies seemed to be cleaner in the U.S. than in
Europe. Borken-Kleefeld says the U.S. audience seemed to miss the significance
of the findings. “For me, it was a big deal,” he says. “I was expecting to see
‘clean diesel’—and I realized that on the other side of the pond, it’s the same
technology and the same underperformance.”
More
The United States brags about
its political system, but the President says one thing during the election,
something else when he takes office, something else at midterm and something
else when he leaves.
Deng Xiaoping.
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?Half of Australian homes to adopt solar power and move 'off grid' from 2018
New battery technology could allow Australian homes to generate and store solar-powered energy more cheaply than traditional electricity suppliers by 2018, says report
By Jonathan Pearlman, Sydney 10:40AM BST 21 Oct 2015
Australians
will be able to use solar panels and batteries to cheaply produce and store
electricity within three years, in a “dramatic” development that is expected to
revolutionise the nation’s power generation. A report by The Climate Council, a non-government organisation, found that improvements in battery technology could make homemade electricity cheaper than buying it within three years and could allow half of the nation to start moving “off the grid”.
Australia already has the highest rate of household solar panel use in the world. About 15 per cent of homes have panels installed, roughly double the rate in Belgium, which is believed to have the second highest usage.
The panels have led to big electricity savings for the 1.4 million householders who have installed them, but only about 500 people currently have batteries to store the solar power.
The Climate Council said the cost of producing lithium-ion batteries will fall “dramatically” in the coming years and that each battery’s capacity will grow 50-fold within a decade.
It said a household which spent £5,000 on a battery would make back the money within ten years and that, at such a cost, about half the nation could start adopting solar panels with battery systems.
“By 2018, going off-grid by installing battery storage could be cost-competitive with staying connected as the price of battery storage falls and grid electricity remains expensive,” the council’s report said.
“Together with rooftop solar, battery storage presents an opportunity for Australian households to use a much greater proportion of the solar photovoltaic electricity they generate and minimise the need to purchase expensive electricity from the grid.”
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished September
DJIA: +41 Down. NASDAQ:
+138 Down. SP500: +65 Down.
No comments:
Post a Comment