Baltic Dry Index. 345 - 09 Brent Crude 31.60
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"We're
going to win so much -- win after win after win -- that you're going to be
begging me: 'Please, Mr. President, let us lose once or twice. We can't stand
it any more.' And I'm going to say: 'No way. We're going to keep winning. We're
never going to lose. We're never, ever going to lose."
Donald
Trump. January 10 2016. Reno Speech.
Today reall life snakes and
ladders. If “The Donald” makes it all the way to POTUS, global life looks
likely to be different and interesting all at the same time. Telling all the
rest of the world you’re all going to be losers, losers, losers, under my
Presidency, is a novel, untried way, in international diplomacy. A least when
Mitt Romney wrote off people in 2012, in his biggest election gaffe, it was only
in writing off about 150 million poor Americans, some of whose votes it tyrned
out he actually needed, rather than writing off over 6.5 billion rest of the
worlder’s, some whose help POTUS Trump might one day need. As Romney’s
unorthodox strategy went, it went over like a lead balloon with US voters.
Hopefully a POTUS Trump will find a little more success with the rest of the
world.
“There
are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.
All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon
government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a
responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health
care, to food, to housing, to you name it. My job is not to worry about those
people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and
care for their lives.'”
Mitt
Romney 2012.
Hedge funds betting against China eye 'Soros moment'
A handful of mainly U.S.-based macro hedge funds have led bets against
China's yuan since late last year and the coming weeks should tell how right
they are in predicting a devaluation of between 20 and 50 percent.
Since at least last September, Texas-based Corriente Partners, which
made hundreds of millions of dollars foreseeing Europe's debt crisis, has been
accumulating tailored "low delta" options - essentially bets with
long odds - that provide for an up to 50 percent fall in the yuan.
The firm reckons rush by domestic savers and businesses to withdraw
money from China will prove too strong for authorities to resist and control,
even with $3.3 trillion in FX reserves, the biggest ever accumulated.
London-based Omni Macro Fund has been betting against the yuan since the
start of 2014. Several London-based traders said U.S. funds
, including
the $4.6 billion Moore Capital Macro Fund, have also swung behind the move.
, including
the $4.6 billion Moore Capital Macro Fund, have also swung behind the move.
Data from Citi, meanwhile, shows leveraged funds have taken money off
the table since offshore rates hit 6.76 yuan per dollar three weeks ago.
Many players say that whether outflows resume in earnest after the
Chinese New Year break in the second week of February should show whether funds
are right to expect more dramatic declines.
That has prompted comparisons with the victories of George Soros-led
funds over European governments in the early 1990s. Chinese state media on
Tuesday warned Soros and other "vicious" speculators against betting
on yuan falls.
"China has an opportunity now to allow a very sharp devaluation.
The wise move would be to do it quickly," Corriente chief Mark Hart said
on Real Vision TV this month.
"If they wait to see if things change, they will be doing it
increasingly from a position of weakness. That's how you invite the speculators.
Every month that they hemorrhage cash, people look at it and say, 'well now if
they weren't able to defend the currency last month, now they're even
weaker'."
---- Derivatives traders say large bets
have been placed in the options market on the yuan reaching 8.0 per dollar and
data shows a raft of strikes between 7.20 and 7.60. The big division is over
pace and scale.
Corriente and Omni both say if China continues to resist, it may be
forced this year into a large one-off devaluation as reserves dwindle.
That points to buying low delta, out of the money options, which pay out
on moves towards the target price.
More
Blue skies over Beijing? Decaying suburbs bear cost as China cuts pollution
On the outskirts of Beijing, the disused factories of Chaomidian show
the impact of China's drive to shut down thousands of small firms causing big
pollution. Amid scrapheaps and idle machinery, the community has clean air
these days - and no jobs.
After a three-year campaign, China's push to cut smog appears to be
paying off, whatever the localised cost, just as economic growth weakens to its
slowest pace in 25 years. Chinese cities saw an average 10 percent drop in key
pollutants last year, according to Greenpeace.
While a World Health Organization report in 2014 found 13 of the world's
20 dirtiest cities were in India, a still smog-bound Beijing issued its first
pollution "red alerts" last month. Soon after, the capital said it
would shut down 2,500 more small firms this year,
leaving communities like Chaomidian, in the southwest suburb of Fangshan, in
the firing line.
this year,
leaving communities like Chaomidian, in the southwest suburb of Fangshan, in
the firing line.
Beijing doesn't issue comprehensive lists of the firms it has shut down
to combat pollution, but Reuters research shows those already closed include
Ding Kai Yuan Co among others in Chaomidian, home to about 2,000 people. The
coal-burning brick works was shut in late 2014, 170 workers were laid off, and
the manager left behind to watch over the ghost factory says she is still
waiting for nearly half a million dollars in compensation.
"I'm 53 years old, I grew up in this village," said Han
Fengge. "Right now, I don't have the ability to re-start such a big
investment from scratch, so all I can do is wait," said Han.
The city has promised compensation to firms closed on pollution grounds.
Nationwide, China has earmarked 17 trillion yuan ($2.6 trillion) for investment
in overall environmental protection between 2016 and 2020, Xinhua, the state
news agency, reported in December.
---- "No matter what measures Beijing takes inside
its own city, it cannot effectively eliminate its own pollution, as a huge
source of it comes from coal-fuel and industrial emissions outside of
Beijing," said Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental
Affairs.
Most of the companies that have been, and will be closed, are
comparatively small, and metropolitan Beijing's economy as a whole won't be
seriously squeezed. Yet small and medium-sized enterprises account for
about 60 percent of China's GDP, leaving questions over how closures will
affect future growth potential.
account for
about 60 percent of China's GDP, leaving questions over how closures will
affect future growth potential.
More
Finally, gold continues flowing from the west to
the east. What does China know that we don’t?
China's gold imports via Hong Kong rebound in 2015
Jan 26 China's net gold imports via main conduit Hong Kong rebounded to
nearly 862 tonnes in 2015, data showed on Tuesday, as weak prices lifted the
appetite of the world's top consumer in December.
China's net gold imports rose to 861.7 tonnes last year from 813.1
tonnes in 2014, according to data
emailed to
Reuters by the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department.
emailed to
Reuters by the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department.
Net imports in December jumped to 129.266 tonnes from 79.003 tonnes in
November, the data showed.
To
NASCAR fans, mocking a group of fans wearing plastic
ponchos, “I
like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks.” Also,
trying to everyman it, Romney said, “I have some great friends who are Nascar
team owners.”
At the Comex silver depositories
Tuesday final figures were: Registered 36.12 Moz, Eligible 120.05 Moz, Total
156.18 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, more news on the new age religion of
man-made global warming.
The difference between stupidity and
genius is that genius has its limits.
Albert
Einstein
The Climate Snow Job
A blizzard! The hottest year ever! More signs that global warming and its extreme effects are beyond debate, right? Not even close.
By Patrick J. Michaels Jan.
24, 2016 2:45 p.m. ET
An East Coast blizzard howling, global temperatures peaking, the desert
Southwest flooding, drought-stricken California drying up—surely there’s a
common thread tying together this “extreme” weather. There is. But it has
little to do with what recent headlines have been saying about the hottest year
ever. It is called business as usual.Surface temperatures are indeed increasing slightly: They’ve been going up, in fits and starts, for more than 150 years, or since a miserably cold and pestilential period known as the Little Ice Age. Before carbon dioxide from economic activity could have warmed us up, temperatures rose three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit between 1910 and World War II. They then cooled down a bit, only to warm again from the mid-1970s to the late ’90s, about the same amount as earlier in the century.
Whether temperatures have warmed much since then depends on what you look at. Until last June, most scientists acknowledged that warming reached a peak in the late 1990s, and since then had plateaued in a “hiatus.” There are about 60 different explanations for this in the refereed literature.
That changed last summer, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) decided to overhaul its data, throwing out satellite-sensed sea-surface temperatures since the late 1970s and instead relying on, among other sources, readings taken from the cooling-water-intake tubes of oceangoing vessels. The scientific literature is replete with articles about the large measurement errors that accrue in this data owing to the fact that a ship’s infrastructure conducts heat, absorbs a tremendous amount of the sun’s energy, and vessels’ intake tubes are at different ocean depths. See, for instance, John J. Kennedy’s “A review of uncertainty in in situ measurements and data sets of sea surface temperature,” published Jan. 24, 2014, by the journal Reviews of Geophysics.
NOAA’s alteration of its measurement standard and other changes produced a result that could have been predicted: a marginally significant warming trend in the data over the past several years, erasing the temperature plateau that vexed climate alarmists have found difficult to explain. Yet the increase remains far below what had been expected.
It is nonetheless true that 2015 shows the highest average surface temperature in the 160-year global history since reliable records started being available, with or without the “hiatus.” But that is also not very surprising. Early in 2015, a massive El Niño broke out. These quasiperiodic reversals of Pacific trade winds and deep-ocean currents are well-documented but poorly understood. They suppress the normally massive upwelling of cold water off South America that spreads across the ocean (and is the reason that Lima may be the most pleasant equatorial city on the planet). The Pacific reversal releases massive amounts of heat, and therefore surface temperature spikes. El Niño years in a warm plateau usually set a global-temperature record. What happened this year also happened with the last big one, in 1998.
Global average surface temperature in 2015 popped up by a bit more than a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit compared with the previous year. In 1998 the temperature rose by slightly less than a quarter-degree from 1997.
When the Pacific circulation returns to its more customary mode, all that suppressed cold water will surge to the surface with a vengeance, and global temperatures will drop. Temperatures in 1999 were nearly three-tenths of a degree lower than in 1998, and a similar change should occur this time around, though it might not fit so neatly into a calendar year. Often the compensatory cooling, known as La Niña, is larger than the El Niño warming.
---- Instead of relying on debatable surface-temperature information, consider instead readings in the free
atmosphere (technically, the lower troposphere) taken by two independent sensors: satellite sounders and weather balloons. As has been shown repeatedly by University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy, since late 1978 (when the satellite record begins), the rate of warming in the satellite-sensed data is barely a third of what it was supposed to have been, according to the large family of global climate models now in existence. Balloon data, averaged over the four extant data sets, shows the same.
It is therefore probably prudent to cut by 50% the modeled temperature
forecasts for the rest of this century. Doing so would mean that the
world—without any political effort at all—won’t warm by the dreaded 3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit by 2100 that the United Nations regards as the climate apocalypse.
More
Only
two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure
about the former.
Albert
Einstein.
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 or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21st century
onwards? DC? A quantum computer next?
Japan Building World's Largest Floating Solar Power Plant
By John Boyd Posted 25 Jan 2016 | 19:00 GMT
Kyocera Corp. has come up with a smart way to build and deploy solar
power plants without gobbling up precious agricultural land in space-challenged
Japan: build the plants on freshwater dams and lakes.
The concept isn’t exactly new. Ciel et Terre, based in Lille, France,
began pioneering the idea there in 2006. And in 2007, Far Niente, a Napa Valley
wine producer, began operating a small floating solar-power generation system
installed on a pond to cut energy costs and to avoid destroying valuable vine
acreage.
Kyocera TCL Solar and joint-venture partner Century Tokyo Leasing Corp.
(working together with Ciel et Terre) already have three sizable water-based
installations in operation near the city of Kobe, in the island of Honshu’s
Hyogo Prefecture. Now they’ve begun constructing what they claim is the world’s
largest floating solar plant, in Chiba, near Tokyo.
The 13.7-megawatt power station, being built for Chiba Prefecture’s
Public Enterprise Agency, is located on the Yamakura Dam reservoir, 75
kilometers east of the capital. It will consist of some 51,000 Kyocera solar
modules covering an area of 180,000 square meters, and will generate an
estimated 16,170 megawatt-hours annually. That is “enough electricity to power
approximately 4,970 typical households,” says Kyocera. That capacity is
sufficient to offset 8,170 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, the amount
put into the atmosphere by consuming 19,000 barrels of oil.
Three substations will collect the generated current, which is to be
integrated and fed into Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) 154-kilovolt
grid lines.
The mounting platform is supplied by Ciel et Terre. The support modules
making up the platform use no metal; recyclable, high-density polyethylene
resistant to corrosion and the sun’s ultraviolet rays is the material of
choice. In addition to helping conserve land space and requiring no excavation
work, these floating installations, Ciel et Terre says, reduce water
evaporation, slow the growth of algae, and do not impact water quality.
More
Learn from yesterday, live for today,
hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert
Einstein
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished December
DJIA: +18 Down. NASDAQ:
+110 Down. SP500: +36 Down.
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