Baltic Dry Index. 710
-05 Brent Crude 48.09
Brexit odds checker.
http://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/eu-referendum/referendum-on-eu-membership-result
Brexit Quote of the Day.
No
real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a
political economist.
Walter
Bagehot.
With Brent crude trading above 48 dollars and a long
Mayday weekend ahead, if I had put on synthetic double options ahead of the
Doha meeting, I would now take profits and close out the position. There may
well be more upside ahead, but there will always be another opportunity ahead.
It is never wrong to take the money and close out.
Do they ring a bell at the
top? Well maybe not a bell, but a whole lot of container ships are blowing off
steam. Meanwhile in Swizzerland, their flagship
“shower-toilet, hybrid model,” whatever that is, has taken something of a dump,
as the formerly flush Ritzy tourists stay away from expensive Switzerland. Or
maybe even the Russians have found the Swiss push button, indoor shower-toilet
machine, a luxury too far. Outside of
Switzerland, the shower-toilet bathroom fitting, is also something of hard
sell. Push buttons, it didn’t.
What Global Growth Rebound? Ports Quiet, Containerships Losing Steam
by Wall Street Journal • April
27, 2016
At a logistics park bordering Shanghai’s port last month, the only goods
stored in a three-story warehouse were high-end jeans, T-shirts and jackets
imported from the U.K. and Hong Kong, most of which had sat there for nearly
two years.Business at the 108,000-square-foot floor warehouse dwindled at the end of 2015 after several Chinese wine importers pulled out, said Yang Ying, the warehouse keeper, leaving lots of empty space. The final blow came after a merchant turned away a shipment in December at the dock.
“The client told the ship hands, just take the wine back to France,” Ms. Yang said. “Nobody wants it.”
Pain is increasing among the world’s biggest ports—from Shanghai to Hamburg—amid weaker growth in global trade and a calamitous end to a global commodities boom. Overall trade rose just 2.8% in 2015, according to the World Trade Organization, the fourth consecutive year below 3% growth and historically weak compared with global economic expansion.
The ancient business of ship-borne trade has been whipsawed, first by a boom that demanded more and bigger vessels, and more recently by an abrupt slowing. That turnabout has roiled the container-shipping industry, which transports more than 95% of the world’s goods, from clothes and shoes to car parts, electronic and handbags. It has set off a frenzy of consolidation and costs cutting across the world’s fleets.
Ashore, it is also slamming ports and port operators, the linchpin to global commerce. Nowhere is the carnage more painful than along the Europe-Asia trade route, measuring roughly 28,000 miles round trip. A cooling Chinese economy and a high-profile crackdown by Beijing on corruption has damped demand for everything from commodities like iron ore to designer scarves and shoes. Meanwhile, Europe’s still sputtering recovery from the global economic crisis is hitting the flow of goods in the other direction.
On Friday, the Hong Kong Marine Department reported throughput for its port in the first quarter was off 11% from the first three months of last year. Throughput for all of 2015 also dropped 11%.
“It is the first time you see people in shipping being really scared,” said Basil Karatzas, of New York-based Karatzas Marine Advisors and Co.
Chinese imports from the European Union fell nearly 14% in 2015. Chinese exports to Europe were down 3%. This year isn’t starting any better. In the first quarter, Chinese imports from the EU fell 7% from a year earlier, a decline matched by exports to Europe.
More
Strong Franc Hits Swiss Toilets as Geberit's Hotel Market Slows
April 28,
2016 — 10:51 AM BST
Geberit AG, a Swiss maker of urinals, forecast stagnating demand in
Switzerland this year as hotels postpone bathroom improvements due to a revenue
slowdown caused as the strong franc puts off tourists.Switzerland’s tourism industry is suffering after the Swiss National Bank in January 2015 removed its cap on the currency of 1.20 per euro. Last year, demand from European guests was at its weakest in almost 60 years, with overnight stays by visitors from Europe falling nearly 10 percent, according to the Federal Statistics Office.
“We have weak demand from hotels,” Geberit Chief Executive Officer Christian Buhl said on a call with analysts and journalists. “We are not all that optimistic about growth in Switzerland, but we don’t expect a decline.”
Any decline in the local hotel trade is a blow to Geberit as Switzerland is among the top markets for its flagship shower-toilet, a hybrid model combining the benefits of a bidet and a more traditional toilet, all at the touch of a button.
Restrictions on building second homes, including holiday homes, has also damped demand in the residential sector in Switzerland, leading to “a collapse of building activity in tourist regions”, Buhl said. Switzerland, Geberit’s second-largest market, contributed about 11 percent of net sales in 2015.
More
Guerrillas and Rebels Do for Oil Market What Producers Couldn't
April 28, 2016 — 11:00 PM BST Updated on April 29, 2016 — 5:48 AM BST
Leftist guerrillas in Colombia, rebels in Libya and militants in Nigeria
are succeeding where the world’s biggest oil producers failed, helping keep a
1.5 million-barrel crude surplus from expanding.
While Saudi Arabia, Russia and other major producers couldn’t agree on a
production freeze earlier this month, disruptions ranging from pipeline attacks
to field shutdowns have taken 800,000 barrels a day of crude supply
offline this year, according to energy-industry consultant FGE. As the collapse
in oil prices cuts their revenue, producers in some parts of the world are
finding it harder to keep supplies flowing, according to Citigroup
Inc.
“The fact of the matter is that the oversupply in the market is very
narrow,” said Ed Morse, head of commodities research at Citigroup. “The world
has become highly prone to disruptions of supply in vulnerable petro states.”
An effort by the largest oil-producing countries to seal a deal to
freeze production failed after an April 17 meeting among OPEC members and
nations outside the group in Doha, Qatar, ended without producing an agreement.
“The focus on Doha did miss the biggest elephants not in the room,” said Morse,
referring to the supply disruptions, which have helped drive a surge in prices
since February.
More
We end for the long Mayday holiday weekend, with
Manchester United the only thing standing in the way of the biggest mispricing
of odds payoff, since Joe Cassano blew up AIG, via the sale of mispriced Credit
Default Swaps in London. So mispriced at AIG London, no one ever thought that
they’d ever have to pay out. With no pay outs ever possible, why bother to put
any collateral behind them, or to hedge them? So they didn’t. Unlike Bernie
Madoff, AIG got a 85 billion bailout from Uncle Scam’s hapless taxpayers,
rather than “a Bernie,” 150 years in jail.
“It is hard for us,
without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of
reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions.”
Joseph J. Cassano, a
former A.I.G. executive, August 2007
Bookies Vow Never Again as 5,000-1 Leicester Closes on Title
April 28,
2016 — 7:16 AM BST Updated on April 28, 2016 — 10:41 AM BST
William Hill Plc and other bookmakers gave better chances to finding Elvis
Presley alive (2,000-1) or discovering the Loch Ness monster (500-1)
than to Leicester
City F.C. winning this season’s English Premier League soccer title. It
won’t make that mistake again.On Sunday, the Foxes of Leicester City could capture their first Premier League title in their 132-year history -- with early bets at 5,000-1 odds.
If the team’s core of unknown and journeyman footballers defeat 20-time champion Manchester United, William Hill would lose 2 million pounds ($2.9 million), according to company spokesman Rupert Adams. The bookmaker took 58 pounds in bets on Thai-owned Leicester City at odds of 5,000-1, and would have to pay out 750,000 pounds to gamblers who bet later in the season when the odds dropped to 1,500-1.
“We are going to lose 2 million quid when Leicester win it,” Adams said in a phone interview. “As it stands, the biggest price for anyone next year is 1,000-1.”
William Hill represents about 20 percent of the U.K. betting market, meaning a Foxes victory will cost bookmakers across the country about 10 million pounds, Adams said. And even celebrities could be getting a payout. Actor Tom Hanks this week said he bet 100 pounds on the Foxes, and now stands to win 500,000 pounds if Leicester City wins.
But the Leicester City Miracle isn’t all bad news for bookies. Until Christmas, the Foxes upset the odds week after week by beating teams they were supposed to beat -- and ruining several so-called accumulator, or parlay, bets in which gamblers select a slate of results over a weekend of games.
The market for preseason betting will also grow by as much as five times next season, said Alex Donohue, a spokesman for Ladbrokes Plc, which with William Hill operates half of the U.K.’s licensed betting shops. His company faces a similar 3 million-pound payout to bettors. Each company took about 1 million pounds worth of bets on the Premier League Title winners.
“Next year it will be colossal,” Donohue said. “Imagine if you support Bournemouth or Norwich or Crystal Palace, you’ll think if Leicester can do it why can’t we. I’m sure there will be incredible volume from next season.”
In Ladbrokes’ 130-year existence, the company has never paid out bets on odds of 5,000-1. The company accepted 47 bets at 5,000-1, and 23 of them are still live, with others deciding to cash out.
More
Behind Insurer’s Crisis, Blind Eye to a Web of Risk
Two weeks ago, the nation’s most powerful regulators
and bankers huddled in the Lower Manhattan fortress that is the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, desperately trying to stave off disaster.
As the group, led by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.,
pondered the collapse of one of America’s oldest investment banks, Lehman Brothers, a more
dangerous threat emerged: American
International Group, the world’s largest insurer, was teetering. A.I.G.
needed billions of dollars to right itself and had suddenly begged for help.
One of the Wall Street chief executives participating
in the meeting was Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs,
Mr. Paulson’s former firm. Mr. Blankfein had particular reason for concern.
Although it was not widely known, Goldman, a Wall
Street stalwart that had seemed immune to its rivals’ woes, was A.I.G.’s
largest trading partner, according to six people close to the insurer who requested
anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. A collapse of the insurer
threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman’s side, several
of these people said.
Days later, federal officials, who had let Lehman die
and initially balked at tossing a lifeline to A.I.G., ended up bailing out the
insurer for $85 billion.
5 Years Ago Bernie Madoff Was Sentenced to 150 Years In Prison – Here's How His Scheme Worked
Five years ago Sunday, Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in
prison for running the biggest fraudulent scheme in U.S. history. Even now,
only a few of his victims have since regained all of their losses.
A well-respected financier, Madoff convinced thousands of investors to
hand over their savings, falsely promising consistent profits in return. He was
caught in December 2008 and charged with 11 counts of fraud, money laundering,
perjury, and theft.
Here's how Madoff conned his investors out of $65 billion and went
undetected for decades:
Madoff used a so-called Ponzi scheme,
which lures investors in by guaranteeing unusually high returns. The name
originated with Charles Ponzi, who promised 50% returns on investments in only
90 days.Ponzi schemes are run by a central operator, who uses the money from new, incoming investors to pay off the promised returns to older ones. This makes the operation seem profitable and legitimate, even though no actual profit is being made. Meanwhile, the person behind the scheme pockets the extra money or uses it to expand the operation.
To avoid having too many investors reclaim their "profits," Ponzi schemes encourage them to stay in the game and earn even more money. The "investing strategies" used are vague and/or secretive, which schemers claim is to protect their business. Then all they need to do is tell investors how much they are making periodically, without actually providing any real returns.
Ponzi schemes aren't usually very sustainable. The setup eventually falls apart after: (1) The operator takes the remaining investment money and runs. (2) New investors become harder to find, meaning the flow of cash dies out. (3) Too many current investors begin to pull out and request their returns.
In Madoff's case, things began to deteriorate after clients requested a total of $7 billion back in returns. Unfortunately for Madoff, he only had $200 million to $300 million left to give.
Another reason Madoff managed to fly under the radar for so long (despite multiple reports to the SEC about suspicions of a Ponzi scheme), is because Madoff was a well-versed and active member of the financial industry. He started his own market maker firm in 1960 and helped launch the Nasdaq stock market. He sat on the board of National Association of Securities Dealers and advised the Securities and Exchange Commission on trading securities. It was easy to believe this 70-year-old industry veteran knew exactly what he was doing.
Madoff really only made off with $20 billion, even though on paper he cheated clients out of $65 billion, according to CNNMoney.
Poverty is an
anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want
dinner do not ring the bell.
Walter Bagehot.
At
the Comex silver depositories Thursday final figures were: Registered 31.96 Moz, Eligible 119.50 Moz, Total 151.46 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
The
whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were
invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter
Bagehot
Ever wonder why the EUSSR never really worked? Below that, continental
Europe is turning weird again. Brexit now, before the “toilet-shower” becomes
mandatory.
The European Union always was a CIA project, as Brexiteers discover
Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard27 April 2016 • 8:18pm
Brexiteers should have been prepared for the shattering intervention of
the US. The European Union always was an American project.
It was Washington that drove European integration in the late 1940s, and
funded it covertly under the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon
administrations.
While irritated at times, the US has
relied on the EU ever since as the anchor to American regional interests
alongside NATO.There has never been a divide-and-rule strategy.
The eurosceptic camp has been strangely blind to this, somehow supposing that powerful forces across the Atlantic are egging on British secession, and will hail them as liberators.
The anti-Brussels movement in France - and to a lesser extent in Italy and Germany, and among the Nordic Left - works from the opposite premise, that the EU is essentially an instrument of Anglo-Saxon power and 'capitalisme sauvage'.
France's Marine Le Pen is trenchantly anti-American. She rails against dollar supremacy. Her Front National relies on funding from Russian banks linked to Vladimir Putin.
Like it or not, this is at least is strategically coherent.
The Schuman Declaration that set the tone of Franco-German reconciliation - and would lead by stages to the European Community - was cooked up by the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson at a meeting in Foggy Bottom. "It all began in Washington," said Robert Schuman's chief of staff.
It was the Truman administration that browbeat the French to reach a modus vivendi with Germany in the early post-War years, even threatening to cut off US Marshall aid at a furious meeting with recalcitrant French leaders they resisted in September 1950.
---- For British eurosceptics, Jean Monnet looms large in the federalist pantheon, the emminence grise of supranational villainy. Few are aware that he spent much of his life in America, and served as war-time eyes and ears of Franklin Roosevelt.
General Charles de Gaulle thought him an American agent, as indeed
he was in a loose sense. Eric Roussel's biography of Monnet reveals how he
worked hand in glove with successive administrations.
It is odd that this magisterial 1000-page
study has never been translated into English since it is the best work ever
written about the origins of the EU.Nor are many aware of declassified documents from the State Department archives showing that US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into the project.
As this newspaper first reported when the treasure became available, one memorandum dated July 26, 1950, reveals a campaign to promote a full-fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the Central Inteligence Agency.
The key CIA front was the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE), chaired by Donovan. Another document shows that it provided 53.5 per cent of the European movement's funds in 1958. The board included Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, CIA directors in the Fifties, and a caste of ex-OSS officials who moved in and out of the CIA.
Papers show that it treated some of the EU's 'founding fathers' as hired
hands, and actively prevented them finding alternative funding that would have
broken reliance on Washington.
There is nothing particularly wicked about this. The US acted astutely
in the context of the Cold War. The political reconstruction of Europe was a
roaring success.
There were horrible misjudgments along the way, of course. A memo
dated June 11, 1965, instructs the vice-president of the European Community to
pursue monetary union by stealth, suppressing debate until the "adoption
of such proposals would become virtually inescapable". This was too clever
by half, as we can see today from debt-deflation traps and mass unemployment
across southern Europe.
More
Germany's Anti-Immigration Party Takes Aim at the ECB
April 28, 2016
Germany’s surging anti-immigration
party isn’t just railing against asylum seekers. It’s also gunning for the
European Central Bank, an alleged “master plan” to eliminate cash and negative
deposit rates that it says amount to financial “repression.”To Alternative for Germany, a proposal by the German Finance Ministry to limit cash transactions to 5,000 euros ($5,670) and ECB considerations to phase out the 500-euro note are more than measures aimed at curtailing criminal activity. They’re a first step in banning paper money and robbing helpless account holders of their privacy, according to Joerg Meuthen, the party’s co-chairman.
“This is a master plan on the road to eliminating cash in order to take complete control over financial transactions,” Meuthen, a professor of economics at the University of Public Administration in Kehl, said in an interview Thursday. “Everything people spend will be completely under surveillance by the state.”
Fresh from sweeping into three German state assemblies in March, the party known most recently for opposing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-border refugee policy and warning against Islamic influence is marshaling a broader list of grievances ahead of a national convention this weekend. The draft party platform includes a ban on minarets, calls for partnership with Russia and rejects international efforts to combat global warming as based on “faulty computer models.” Elsewhere, proposed amendments call for outlawing male circumcision when practiced by Jews and Muslims for religious reasons.
----“These measures are financial repression,” Weidel, an economist, said by phone. “The ECB has become a huge redistribution machine.”
The Frankfurt-based central bank should eventually be abolished, “but
that will happen anyway in the end,” she said, because the 19-country euro area
is doomed to fail.
More
All
the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of
escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to
escape.
Walter
Bagehot.
Brexit
Quote of the week.
Freedom
is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George
Orwell.
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?
Theory establishes a path to high-performance 2-D semiconductor devices
Date:
April 26, 2016
Source:
DOE/National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Summary:
Researchers have uncovered a way to overcome a principal obstacle in using
two-dimensional (2-D) semiconductors in electronic and optoelectronic devices.
Researchers at the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy
Laboratory (NREL) have uncovered a way to overcome a principal obstacle in
using two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors in electronic and optoelectronic
devices.
2D semiconductors such as molybdenum disulfide are only a few layers
thick and are considered promising candidates for next-generation devices.
Scientists first must overcome limitations imposed by a large and tunable
Schottky barrier between the semiconductor and a metal contact. The barrier, at
the metal/semiconductor junction, creates an obstacle for the flow of electrons
or holes through the semiconductor.
The NREL team discovered that the height of the Schottky barrier can be
adjusted-or even made to vanish-by using certain 2D metals as electrodes. Such
adjustments are not possible with conventional three-dimensional metals because
of a strong Fermi level pinning (FLP) effect occurring at the junction of metal
and semiconductor, due to electronic states in the semiconductor band gap that
are induced by the metal.
Increasing the flow of electrons or holes through a
semiconductor reduces power losses and improves the device performance.
The NREL theorists considered a family of 2D metals that could bind with
the 2D semiconductors through van der Waals interaction. Because this
interaction is relatively weak, the metal-induced gap states are suppressed and
the FLP effect is negligible. This means that the Schottky barrier becomes
highly tunable. By selecting an appropriate 2D metal/2D semiconductor pair, one
can reduce the barrier to almost zero (such as H-NbS2/WSe2 for hole
conduction).
They noted that using a 2D metal as an electrode would also prove useful
for integrating into transparent and flexible electronics because the 2D metal
is also transparent and flexible. They also noted that the junction of 2D metal
and 2D semiconductor is atomically flat and can have fewer defects, which would
reduce carrier scattering and recombination.
The work by Yuanyue Liu, Paul Stradins, and Su-Huai Wei, "Van der
Waals metal-semiconductor junction: weak Fermi level pinning enables effective
tuning of Schottky barrier," appears in the new issue of Science
Advances.
The trio of researchers predicts that hexagonal phase of niobium disulfide
(NbS2) is the most promising for hole injection into a 2D semiconductor, and
heavily nitrogen-doped graphene can enable efficient electron injection.
Another
weekend and a wintry one forecast for much of these islands once known as Great
Britain, and now known in Brussels and Berlin as Eurozone Seeloewe. Speaking low German or Parisian
French isn’t yet compulsory, at least until after “Remania.” Have a great
weekend everyone.
Poverty is an
anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want
dinner do not ring the bell.
Walter Bagehot.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished March
DJIA: 17685.09 -18 Down. NASDAQ: 4869.85 +33 Down. SP500: 2059.74 -22 Down.
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