Baltic Dry Index. 384 +08 Brent Crude 40.26
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
Brexit odds checker. http://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/eu-referendum/referendum-on-eu-membership-result
Brexit Quote of the Day.
“Cameron:
He was a great man in an era of small events.”
With
apologies to Winston Churchill.
However, a deflationary recession may differ in one respect from
"normal" recessions in which the inflation rate is at least modestly
positive: Deflation of sufficient magnitude may result in the nominal interest
rate declining to zero or very close to zero.2 Once the
nominal interest rate is at zero, no further downward adjustment in the rate
can occur, since lenders generally will not accept a negative nominal interest
rate when it is possible instead to hold cash. At this point, the nominal
interest rate is said to have hit the "zero bound."
Ben Bernanke, 21 November 2002. Quack.
Today
is Pie day, more correctly Pi Day, at least under the American way of writing
down dates, 3.1416. Strictly speaking 3.14159…. but you get the idea. But what
is Pi? The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. But enough
of trivia, there’s a major revolution underway across Europe. Heads will roll next.
Mad
Merkel’s Migrant Madness, led her to a disaster at the polls yesterday. AfD a
three year old upstart party that wants to undo the Euro, had its best showing
so far. Merkel’s CDU support is in free fall since January, and all those moslem
migrant sexual assaults across Europe. Mainstream Europe is coming to its senses.
Bilderberger Europe is dead on the floor.
Europe’s own version of Trump-mania
is rising. Euros anyone? Stay long fully paid up physical gold and silver, held
outside of the financial house of cards.
From America, to Europe, to China, to the emerging markets, the Great
Nixonian Error of fiat money, communist money, is undergoing an
earthquake. Bancors next? Only over
Uncle Scam’s dead body.
Merkel's CDU Loses Support in Elections Swayed by Refugee Crisis
March 13, 2016 — 5:12 PM GMT Updated on March 13, 2016 — 11:00 PM GMT
Chancellor Angela Merkel faces an increasingly splintered political
landscape after voters punished her party and lifted the anti-immigration
Alternative for Germany to its best showing yet in three state elections
dominated by the refugee crisis.
Support for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union tumbled across the board
Sunday as her candidates failed to capture two western states including
Baden-Wuerttemberg, home to carmaker Daimler AG. Her party hung on to win the
most votes in Saxony-Anhalt in the formerly communist east, though Alternative
for Germany, or AfD, upended the coalition math there by winning about 24
percent support in its first attempt in the state.
While Merkel didn’t make the rounds of evening talk shows, CDU party
officials signaled she won’t renounce her stance of fighting for open travel
and commerce within the European Union and a deal with Turkey to stanch the
flow of refugees from war-torn Syria. Merkel will chair a meeting of her
party’s national leadership on Monday to assess the election results and plans
to hold a news conference at 1:15 p.m. in Berlin.
The election outcome will add to the unease within Merkel’s party about
her migration policies “but even this protest vote is unlikely to put her job
as chancellor at risk,” said Holger Schmieding, Berlin-based chief economist at
Berenberg Bank. “Whereas the debate about migration in Germany could get more
noisy near-term, by far the most likely scenario remains that Merkel stays in
office until the next federal election in September 2017 –- and probably
beyond.”
----“None of the established parties with seats in the Bundestag had a particularly good night,” Michael Grosse-Broemer, parliamentary whip for Merkel’s party bloc in the federal parliament, said on ARD television, dismissing the AfD as a “protest party.” Peter Tauber, the CDU’s secretary general, said “I don’t see” the need for Merkel to change course.
The CDU fell to its worst result of the postwar era in
Baden-Wuerttemberg, compounding the party’s shock at its loss to the Greens in
2011 after more than half a century governing the state. The chancellor’s
problem is that polls suggested her party had a lock on all three states as
recently as last fall, before the impact of the refugee crisis on Germany
upended the contest.
More
Greens Recapture Biggest Prize With First German State Victory
March 13, 2016 — 7:25 PM GMT
Germany’s Green party for the first time won a state election outright,
capturing the most votes in Baden-Wuerttemberg to lay claim to govern the
southwestern region for another five years.
Support for the Greens in the state, the biggest of three that voted on
Sunday, was 30.7 percent, followed by 27.3 percent for German Chancellor Angela
Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, according to projections from public
broadcaster ZDF as of 8:09 p.m. local time. While the Greens dislodged the
CDU in the last election in 2011, they did so after placing second and
forging a coalition with the third-placed party.
The
state -- boasting the country’s lowest unemployment, fine wines, the fabled
Black Forest and the home of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz -- was run by the CDU
for 58 years until the Greens took control in a proxy ballot on Merkel’s
about-face on nuclear power in the wake of the nuclear accident in Fukushima,
Japan. Even as late as January, the CDU appeared on track to recapture the
state. The Greens were aided in their win Sunday by the popularity of their
regional leader and state premier, Winfried Kretschmann.
More
Germany Wakes Up to Politics Trump-Style as AfD Takes on Merkel
March 13, 2016 — 6:02 PM GMT Updated on March 13, 2016 — 11:00 PM GMT
If you think Donald Trump has some outrageous ideas, wait until you meet
Germany’s AfD party.The Alternative for Germany, to give the party its full name, has shaken up the country’s consensus-driven politics with headline-grabbing policies that include telling Germans to have more children to avoid the need for immigration. Frauke Petry, the AfD’s co-leader, has said that police must “prevent illegal border crossings, using firearms if necessary.”
Like Trump, her rhetoric hasn’t damaged AfD support but rather struck a chord with those disgruntled with the establishment parties, in particular nabbing voters unhappy with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policy for refugees. The party surged to record support in Sunday’s regional elections, taking seats in all three states that voted and boosting its representation to half of Germany’s 16 state assemblies. The AfD had its strongest showing in Saxony-Anhalt with 24.3 percent, making it the second-biggest party in the former communist eastern state, according to TV projections.
The rise of the AfD in Germany mirrors growing support for populist politicians such as National Front leader Marine Le Pen in France and Trump, who has called for banning Muslims from emigrating to the U.S.
Like Trump, Petry spars regularly with the media that follows her every word. One German newspaper even ran a quiz asking readers to attribute statements to Trump or Petry.
“We have fundamental problems in Germany that led to this outcome,”
Petry said on broadcaster ARD Sunday to explain the party’s surge. “Now we want
to force the other parties into a substantive debate.”
The German political establishment is having none of it, vowing instead
to band together to keep the AfD out of government. Petry has responded by
saying her party plans to take on an opposition role to push AfD policies in
the face of what they see as a cartel of established politicians.
The
AfD began in 2013 out of opposition to the euro and taxpayer-funded bailouts of
countries such as Greece. Co-founder Bernd Lucke, an economics professor who
focused the party on the euro, quit last year after losing a power struggle
with rivals including Petry, 40, an East German-born chemist. The AfD failed to
win seats in the German parliament in 2013, though it entered the European
Parliament the following year. It still wants to dissolve the 19-nation euro
area.
More
And in Brexit news, Yankee Doodle aka Barry
Kenya’s meddling is fuelling an all too predictable GB voter backlash. Now if
the Clinton’s will just come out ordering Britain to vote “Remain” in the
EUSSR, Brexit will become a betting certainty.
Americans would never accept EU restrictions – so why should we?
Barack Obama's plan to urge voters to remain in the European Union is a 'piece of outrageous and exorbitant hypocrisy', Boris Johnson writes
I
love America. I believe in the American dream. Indeed, I hold that the story of
the past 100 years has been very largely about how America rose to global
greatness – and how America has helped to preserve and expand democracy around
the world. In two global conflicts, and throughout the Cold War, the United
States has fought for the founding ideals of the republic: that government of
the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.
So it is on the face of it a bit peculiar that US government officials
should believe that Britain must remain within the EU – a system in which
democracy is increasingly undermined. Some time in the next couple of months we are told that President Obama himself is going to arrive in this country, like some deus ex machina, to pronounce on the matter. Air Force One will touch down; a lectern with the presidential seal will be erected. The British people will be told to be good to themselves, to do the right thing. We will be informed by our most important ally that it is in our interests to stay in the EU, no matter how flawed we may feel that organisation to be. Never mind the loss of sovereignty; never mind the expense and the bureaucracy and the uncontrolled immigration.
The American view is very clear. Whether in code or en clair, the
President will tell us all that UK membership of the EU is right for Britain,
right for Europe, and right for America. And why? Because that – or so we will
be told – is the only way we can have “influence” in the counsels of the
nations.
It is an important argument, and deserves to be taken seriously. I also
think it is wholly fallacious – and coming from Uncle Sam, it is a piece of
outrageous and exorbitant hypocrisy.
There is no country in the world that defends its own sovereignty with
such hysterical vigilance as the United States of America. This is a nation
born from its glorious refusal to accept overseas control. Almost two and a
half centuries ago the American colonists rose up and violently asserted the
principle that they – and they alone – should determine the government of
America, and not George III or his ministers. To this day the Americans refuse
to kneel to almost any kind of international jurisdiction. Alone of Western
nations, the US declines to accept that its citizens can be subject to the
rulings of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. They have not even
signed up to the Convention on the Law of the Sea. Can you imagine the
Americans submitting their democracy to the kind of regime that we have in the
EU?
Think
of Nafta – the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement – that links the US with
Canada and Mexico. Suppose it were constituted on the lines of the EU, with a
commission and a parliament and a court of justice. Would the Americans knuckle
under – to a Nafta commission and parliament generating about half their
domestic law? Would they submit to a Nafta court of justice – supreme over all
US institutions – and largely staffed by Mexicans and Canadians whom the people
of the US could neither appoint nor remove?
No way. The idea is laughable, and
completely alien to American traditions. So why is it essential for Britain to
comply with a system that the Americans would themselves reject out of hand? Is
it not a blatant case of
“Do as I say, but not as I do”?
More
Bancor
The bancor
was a supranational currency that John Maynard Keynes and E.
F. Schumacher[1]
conceptualised in the years 1940-42 and which the United
Kingdom proposed to introduce after World
War II. This newly created supranational currency would then be used in
international trade as a unit of account within a multilateral clearing system – the International Clearing Union – which
would also have to be founded.
----Bancor
would not be an international currency. It would rather be a unit
of account used to track international flows of assets and liabilities. Gold could be
exchanged for bancors, but bancors could not be exchanged for gold. Individuals
could not hold or trade in bancor. All international trade would be valued and
cleared in bancor. Surplus countries with excess bancor assets and deficit
countries with excess bancor liabilities would both be charged to provide
symmetrical incentives on them to take action to restore balanced trade.
----Since
the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008
Keynes's proposal has been revived: In a speech delivered in March 2009
entitled Reform the International Monetary System, Zhou
Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China called Keynes's
bancor approach "farsighted" and proposed the adoption of International Monetary Fund (IMF) special drawing rights (SDRs) as a global
reserve currency as a response to the financial crisis of 2007–2010. He
argued that a national currency was unsuitable as a global reserve currency
because of the Triffin dilemma - the difficulty faced by reserve
currency issuers in trying to simultaneously achieve their domestic monetary
policy goals and meet other countries' demand for reserve currency.[2][3] A similar
analysis can be found in the Report
of the United Nation's "Experts on reforms of the international monetary
and financial system" [4] as well
as in the IMF's study published on 13 April 2010.[5]
Cameron: a
hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are
an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles, or
whether you ever had any?
With
apologies to Thomas Paine on George Washington.
At
the Comex silver depositories Friday final figures were: Registered 28.71 Moz, Eligible 126.37 Moz, Total 155.08 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, just how secure are our central banks and
our electronic, easy come easy go, Nixonian fiat money.
Like
gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited
in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press
(or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S.
dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S.
dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government
can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is
equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We
conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always
generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.
Ben
Bernanke. November 21, 2002
Malware suspected in Bangladesh bank heist: officials
Investigators suspect unknown hackers installed malware in the
Bangladesh central bank's computer systems and watched, probably for weeks, for
how to go about withdrawing money from its U.S. account, two bank officials
briefed on the matter said on Friday.
More than a month after hackers breached Bangladesh Bank's systems and
attempted to steal nearly $1 billion from its account at the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, cyber security experts are trying to find out how the hackers
got in.
FireEye Inc's Mandiant forensics division is helping investigate the
cyber heist, which netted hackers more than $80 million before it was uncovered.
The hackers appeared to have stolen Bangladesh Bank's credentials for
the SWIFT messaging system, which banks around the world use for secure
financial communication.
In a statement Friday, Belgium-based SWIFT said: "SWIFT and the
Central Bank of Bangladesh are working together to resolve an internal
operational issue at the central bank. SWIFT’s core messaging services were not
impacted by the issue and continued to work as normal."
Banks and other businesses are eager to learn more about how the central
bank was compromised so they can review their own networks for signs that they
are vulnerable to similar attacks or might already have been breached, security
professionals and bank executives told Reuters.
The incident could prompt central banks worldwide to beef up security
and regulate financial institutions more tightly to prevent similar attacks,
said Aviv Raff, chief technology officer with the cyber security firm Seculert.
---- Investigators suspect that malicious software
code, often referred to as malware, which allowed hackers to learn how to
withdraw the money could have been installed several weeks before the incident,
which took place between Feb. 4 and Feb. 5, said Bangladesh Bank officials
briefed on the matter.
Investigators believe the attack was sophisticated, describing the use
of a "zero day" and referring to an "advanced persistent
threat," the officials said.
A zero day is a vulnerability in software that has yet to be identified
or patched. This makes it easier for hackers to infect a targeted computer
without the victim's knowledge, even if it is protected with security software.
Advanced persistent threat refers to long-term attacks where hackers
remain inside a network for months or even years.
Security experts said they hope samples of the malware will be made
available to researchers so they can determine whether they are truly advanced,
or if Bangladesh Bank's security protections were not strong enough to block
the attack.
More
Brexit
Quote of the week.
The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.
Benjamin Disraeli.
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?
What Google's grand Go victory means: Technology is about to get a lot smarter
Madhumita
Murgia11
March 2016 • 9:17am
On Wednesday afternoon in Seoul, two players faced off in a game of Go - one
of civilisation’s oldest board games. But this game was different to the
billions played in the game’s 3,000-year history.For the first time ever, a computer program beat the world champion at the strategy game at which previously only humans excelled.
Lee Se-dol, a 33-year-old South Korean legend of Go, has lost two of five matches against the AlphaGo program, built by the Google-owned British company DeepMind. The first 3.5 hour game left even first-time viewers, like me, dumbstruck by its swift outcome, with commentators calling it a “superb” game that would be studied for years to come. AlphaGo won its second game the day after (a victory that left Se-dol, who had originally said it would win one if it were lucky, speechless).
This is probably the first time you’ve ever heard of Go - a fiendishly complex checkers-style game allegedly invented by a Chinese emperor to teach his son about political wiles. So why should we care?
When IBM’s supercomputer DeepBlue beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov
in 1997, it was a huge milestone in the evolution of computers, but then no one
ever heard about DeepBlue again. In fact the machine, which had been built with
the very narrow and specific purpose of playing chess, was completely
dismantled after its victory - it had nothing more to prove.
But AlphaGo is different. Backed by the heft of American tech giant
Google, it’s not just a blue-sky experiment. Its victory might seem like a
slightly obscure triumph for cutting-edge scientific endeavour, but really it’s
the moment that Google is staking its claim to the title of most technologically-advanced
company on Earth.
In the hours before the first game, chairman and former chief executive
Eric Schmidt admitted as much, laughingly saying Google was “all about
performance”. This is no moonshot project. The learning principles that
underpin how AlphaGo plays can be unpicked and re-trained to improve all of
Google’s products - from search to translation, photos, videos and social
networks.
To understand how AlphaGo could be applied broadly, you need to look at
its plumbing. Go is a lot more complex than chess - there are 10 ^761 possible
moves, compared to 10^120 possible in chess. So it can’t be solved by
brute-force calculations that just compute every possible step in the game,
which is what DeepBlue did.
Instead, this algorithm needs to learn the rules of Go, and approximate
human intuition. To do this, it uses a special technique called “reinforcement
learning”. It learns from its own mistakes by playing against itself millions
of times.
This is very similar to how the human brain develops. So AlphaGo
learns how to predict moves, and then gauges which player is ahead at any point
in time. In other words, the machine can simulate “intuition” by making an
informed guess about what moves would be most likely to succeed.
If AlphaGo can win at Go, founder Demis
Hassabis believes it can learn how to do anything from diagnose
life-threatening illnesses earlier than doctors, to predict the impact of
climate change. But before we get to humanity’s biggest problems, machine
learning has already begun to sweep across the Google products we use every
day.In February, John Giannandrea, Google’s head of artificial intelligence, took over Google’s core Search product, merging the two divisions. Machine learning technology is now essential to how Google ranks its search results.
More
Striking back against the machine: Korean Go player beats Google program
South Korean Lee Sedol won his first match against a computer program
developed by a Google subsidiar on Sunday in the ancient board game Go,
denying a clean sweep for the artificial intelligence in a five-match series.
Lee, one of the world's top players and a holder of 18 international titles,
recovered from three consecutive losses against the AlphaGo program developed
by DeepMind.
"This win is invaluable and I would not trade it for anything else
in the world," a jubilant Lee told reporters after the match, thanking
fans for their support.
The 33-year-old professional player has admitted to underestimating
AlphaGo's skills but also said the program was not perfect, asking supporters
to keep watching the contest.
DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis told reporters the loss was a valuable
learning tool and would help identify weaknesses in the program that his team
needed to address.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished February
DJIA: 16517 -23 Down. NASDAQ: 4558 +45 Down. SP500: 1932 -17 Down.
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