Baltic Dry Index. 659 +24 Brent Crude 42.75
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.
"If the EU cannot
resolve a small problem the size of Greece, what is the point of Europe?"Romano Prodi, former chief of the European Commission, former Italy Prime Minister.
We
open today with Johnny Foreigner dumping Uncle Scam’s stocks. But on ZIRP and
NIRP corporate buybacks are hiding the damage for now. That this can only end
badly goes without saying. The only question is when. Our deluded central banksters
have not only set off the most gigantic global malinvestment bubble in history,
thanks to the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money, communist money, but thanks
to rigged almost non-existent interest rates, at least to the cronies of the
central banksters at the Fed, they have also set in motion a massive debt for
equity scam, that has to blow up as soon as interest rates normalise, not that
the Fed dare normalise interest rates at any time before the US Presidential
election. But new Presidents try to get all the pain over in the first two
years so as to be ready for their re-election campaign. 2017 looks to be that
year of massive pain.
Getting out early always beats getting carried out last.
Johnny Foreigner is getting out early.
Chinese investors dump U.S. stocks, but corporate buybacks offset losses
Published: Apr 18, 2016 10:28 p.m. ET
U.S. corporate stock repurchases to total $450 billion in 2016
Last year, Chinese investors dumped nearly all the stocks that they had
acquired over a span of seven years and are likely to remain cautious this year
amid ongoing financial market volatility at home. But aggressive stock buybacks
by U.S. companies flush with cash will likely offset the sting of waning
Chinese appetite, according to Goldman Sachs.
China accounted for $96 billion in sales of U.S. stocks in 2015, wiping
out almost all of the $97 billion purchased between 2008 and 2014, said David
Kostin, chief U.S. strategist at Goldman Sachs, in a recent report. That is
more than half of the $171 billion in U.S. equities sold by foreigners last
year with much of the Chinese exodus occurring in the fourth quarter.
“Investors in China also sold $130 billion of U.S. debt securities in
2015, suggesting an overall reduction in U.S. investment from China rather than
a rotation from U.S. equities to bonds,” he said.
The steady decline in oil prices accelerated U.S. stock sales with
outflows from Canada and the Middle East hitting their highest levels since
2004.
Canadians sold $80 billion in U.S. stocks, contrasting with $3 billion
in purchases in 2014. Investors from the Middle East sold $39 billion worth
last year, nearly doubling the $20 billion in sales in 2014.
----Goldman Sachs estimates that international investors will divest a total of $50 billion worth of equities this year, the second year in a row that foreigners are net sellers.
Still, corporate buybacks are expected to more than make up for
dwindling foreign interest with U.S. companies projected to repurchase $450
billion in shares this year. That is below 2015’s $561 billion but above the
average of $360 billion buybacks between 2011 to 2015.
More
In
the EUSSR that Dodgy Dave and Chancellor Boy George say are vital to our continued
existence, albeit as serfs to our betters in Berlin and Brussels, reality is
far from the rosy picture painted by Dodgy Dave and his American sidekick Barry
Kenya.
UK Boy Chancellor Ozzie and
his dismal science lads and ladettes at the Treasury are operating on Virtual
Reality = Artificial Inteligence x Chaos Theory. His results speak for
themselves. Chaos = his Virtual Reality divided by his Artificial Inteligence.Atlas and the Herculean Task of Saving Italy's Banking System
April 19, 2016 — 4:00 AM BST
For a sign of the distress in Italy’s financial system, look at some of
the banks that are being called upon to contribute to Atlante, the
government-orchestrated fund devised to save ailing lenders.
Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, which was twice bailed out and has
unsuccessfully sought a buyer for 18 months, is chipping in 50 million
euros ($57 million). Banca Carige SpA, the Genoa-based lender that’s leaking
deposits and scrambling to meet the European Central Bank’s demand for a new
funding plan, is providing as much as 20 million euros.
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Italian banking authorities are calling
for these lifelines as they race to shore up a financial system burdened by 360
billion euros of doubtful loans, an amount equivalent to almost a quarter of
the nation’s gross domestic product. And even if the rescue fund of about
5 billion euros unveiled last week does stabilize the system -- which analysts
have questioned given its small size -- rooting out the poor governance and
lending practices that created the mess remains a herculean task.
"It’s necessary to have some form of bailout to save the banking
system, but at the same time you have to fix the deeper problems," says
Luigi Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School
of Business. "You can’t have one without the other."
Unlike in Ireland, Spain or the U.K., the Italian banking system’s woes
weren’t born out of a real estate bubble. Instead, they built up over decades,
partly as regional and local lenders used loans to curry favor and exert
influence, often with little accountability.
“While formal underwriting methodologies existed, many bankers knew how
to circumvent the system,” says Marco Elser, the head portfolio manager at
Lonsin Capital Ltd., a London-based asset-management firm.
“This is the main
reason why we have so many problem debts inside the aching stomachs of Italian
banks.”
----By the time government ministers, Bank of Italy officials and senior executives convened a meeting in Rome on the evening of April 11, the stocks of Italian banks had slid an average of 44 percent this year, erasing more than 40 billion euros in market value, according to Bloomberg Intelligence data. That night, officials unveiled an experimental fund designed to save the banks and comply with the new bail-in rules.
Backed with contributions from lenders led by UniCredit SpA and Intesa Sanpaolo SpA, the fund can buy shares of troubled banks trying to raise capital and help them sell bad debt through securitizations. The program is dubbed Atlante, the Italian word for Atlas, the Greek titan fated to hold up the heavens for eternity. Clearly, the fund’s sponsors are hoping it won’t take nearly that long to rekindle confidence in Italy’s banking system.
In a first step, Atlante said on Monday it will buy any unsold shares in the 1.8 billion-euro stock sale of Banca Popolare di Vicenza SpA, a troubled lender in northeastern Italy. The offering is scheduled to begin this week after an ultimatum from the ECB to increase capital.
“Without the fund, Vicenza would risk a bail-in, an event that would hit the entire Italian banking system and possibly lead to a domino effect,” says Gianluca Ziglio, a strategist at Sunrise Brokers LLP, a derivatives dealer in London.
Even
so, some investors doubt the fund, at an estimated 4 billion euros to 6 billion
euros, is big enough to address a 360 billion-euro problem.
More
Draghi's Low Rates Leave Germans Worried About Dwindling Savings
April 18, 2016 — 11:01 PM BST
German pensioner Dorothea Dahm spent decades diligently putting away for
retirement and never really worried about it -- until European Central Bank
President Mario Draghi’s zero-interest rate policy hit her savings.“My generation was raised with the belief that we should save money for uncertain times and to help the next generation,” the 68-year-old former advertising executive said by phone from her home in the western German town of Flammersfeld. The lack of interest income these days on savings accounts as a result of ECB monetary policy is “very discomforting,” she said.
The ECB’s record-low rates have cost Germans -- who are generally more conservative with their money and therefore more likely to stick it in savings accounts than real estate or the stock market -- 125 billion euros ($141 billion) in interest income since Draghi took over in 2011, according to analysis by Deutsche Postbank AG. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said this month that concern about Draghi’s policies has stoked distrust of European institutions and handed fodder to populist groups like Alternative for Germany, or AfD. The party last month grabbed voters from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union in three state elections.
“The issue has the potential to become politically explosive,” Marcel Fratzscher, president of the DIW economic research institute in Berlin, said regarding savings. “The German economy seems to be doing fine and that’s why many elderly people ask themselves: Why can’t I benefit from that?”
“The letters are sometimes very emotional, often handwritten and rarely
exaggerated,” Rehberg said. "You have to take peoples’ concerns
seriously.”
Draghi cut the ECB’s benchmark rate to zero and deposit rate to minus
0.4 percent in March, and a Bloomberg survey of economists published Monday
showed most think he’ll ease policy again after the summer. No new measures are
predicted at the next rate decision on Thursday. Many Germans say the central
bank is ignoring their interests to bolster economically weaker countries in
the 19-member euro area.
More
Dodgy Dave Cameron: Has no one considered my
feelings in all this?
Juncker: What percentage do you want?
Dodgy Dave Cameron: I don't want money. I'm an honest man.
Juncker: You'll have to mend your ways then. This is the EUSSR!
Juncker: What percentage do you want?
Dodgy Dave Cameron: I don't want money. I'm an honest man.
Juncker: You'll have to mend your ways then. This is the EUSSR!
With apologies to Joe
Orton and Loot.
At
the Comex silver depositories Monday final figures were: Registered 32.68 Moz, Eligible 120.78 Moz, Total 153.46 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today Project Fear and Brexit.
The Government is doing everything in its power to rig the EU Referendum
Norman Tebbit18 April 2016 •
9:29am
Spare us another couple of months of
hair-raising panic attacks by Remainers like Stephen Crabb for
whom the days when the British people used to make their own laws and elect
their own governments where back in the dark ages, indeed before he had even
started school.Beware of the reckless fools who advocate Brexit, he warns us. Should we leave the EU he says, our unemployment rate would soar to match those in Greece and Spain. What is more, he quotes all those wise men of the grand economic forecasting who failed to see the last great financial crisis coming, but kept their jobs to get it wrong again.
Well, I offer him and all his Remain colleagues a warning given by
Gladstone 125 years ago:
"The finance of the Country is intimately associated with the
liberties of the Country. It is a powerful leverage by which English liberty
has been gradually acquired ... It lies at the root of English liberty, and if
the House of Commons can by any possibility lose the power of the grants of
public money your very liberty will be worth very little in comparison ... That
powerful leverage has been what is commonly known as the Power of the Purse,
the control off the House of Commons over public expenditure, the root of
English Liberty."
Gladstone ended with a final warning: "If these powers of the
House of Commons come to be encroached upon, it will be by tacit and insidious
methods, and therefore I say that attention should be called to
this."
And during Mr Crabb's lifetime how those liberties have been
encroached upon?
How many of those eminent persons and institutions now forecasting
disaster should we dare to reclaim our right to govern ourselves were, not long
ago, forecasting disaster unless we joined the eurozone?
But nothing restrains the audacity of the Remain faction of our deeply
divided Government.
Last week, just before the rules imposing
limits on expenditure by the authorised Referendum campaign organisations, that
faction splurged
more than £9 million on the distribution of its dodgy dossier to every
household in the country. More than Vote Leave, the Brexit campaign, will be
allowed to spend in the ten weeks of the campaign.It would have been far more informative and certainly more fair had Mr Cameron admitted that the laws made in Brussels override our UK law made in our Parliament and that our "Supreme" Court is inferior to the European Court.
The Government has done everything it can to rig the whole campaign to favour the Remain campaign, but despite that, the polls (for what they are worth) suggest that the two sides are pretty evenly divided and that the outcome may yet be decided by events between now and the referendum.
More
My take: Dodgy Dave tried and completely failed to get meaningful concessions from the EUSSR and even the ones he got were repudiated by Schultzy, head of the EU parliament as being “non binding.” Promising "prosperity in our time" Dodgy Dave now leads a campaign whose only message is that GB is too weak and pathetic to survive outside of the unwelcoming arms of the EUSSR. If we remain, we must rely on the charity of EU strangers, as the best we can do in this world. But remaining guarantees that the UK will be swamped in immigrants from the EU.
Most of the world learns English as a second language including in Turkey, and that makes most EU immigrants likely to head to GB, even if only as a stepping stone to America, Australia and Canada. We have to leave to protect our children and grandchildren's future.
But dodgy Dave is quite wrong about our future outside of the EUSSR. GB is a well educated, hard working, innovative, inventive, entrepreneurial, democratic nation with a proud history of leading in many areas and sectors of industry, trade and research. The successors of the people that stood alone against Hitler for a year, until Hitler made the mistake of attacking the USSR, need no lectures from Barry Obama and his meddling in British interests.
Britain invented, designed, built, and delivered the Mulberry Harbours to the D-Day beaches, making the landings a success, and rescuing Continental Europe. GB invented the modern steam turbine that ushered in the Electric Age and changed shipping forever. The TV. The jet engine. The computer. GB will do just fine inside our outside the EU, but outside is far better and safer.
Brexit
Quote of the week.
"On
the whole Dodgy Dave want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the
time.”
With
apologies to 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?
'Odd couple' monolayer semiconductors align to advance optoelectronics
Date:
April 15, 2016
Source:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Summary:
Scientists synthesized a stack of atomically thin monolayers of two
lattice-mismatched semiconductors and created an atomically thin solar cell.
Epitaxy, or growing crystalline film layers that are templated by a
crystalline substrate, is a mainstay of manufacturing transistors and
semiconductors. If the material in one deposited layer is the same as the
material in the next layer, it can be energetically favorable for strong bonds
to form between the highly ordered, perfectly matched layers. In contrast,
trying to layer dissimilar materials is a great challenge if the crystal
lattices don't match up easily. Then, weak van der Waals forces create
attraction but don't form strong bonds between unlike layers.
In a study led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, scientists synthesized a stack of atomically thin monolayers of two
lattice-mismatched semiconductors. One, gallium selenide, is a
"p-type" semiconductor, rich in charge carriers called
"holes." The other, molybdenum diselenide, is an "n-type"
semiconductor, rich in electron charge carriers. Where the two semiconductor
layers met, they formed an atomically sharp heterostructure called a p-n
junction, which generated a photovoltaic response by separating electron-hole
pairs that were generated by light. The achievement of creating this atomically
thin solar cell, published in Science Advances, shows the promise of
synthesizing mismatched layers to enable new families of functional
two-dimensional (2D) materials.
The idea of stacking different materials on top of each other isn't new
by itself. In fact, it is the basis for most electronic devices in use today.
But such stacking usually only works when the individual materials have crystal
lattices that are very similar, i.e., they have a good "lattice
match." This is where this research breaks new ground by growing high-quality
layers of very different 2D materials, broadening the number of materials that
can be combined and thus creating a wider range of potential atomically thin
electronic devices.
"Because the two layers had such a large lattice mismatch between
them, it's very unexpected that they would grow on each other in an orderly
way," said ORNL's Xufan Li, lead author of the study. "But it
worked."
The group was the first to show that monolayers of two different types
of metal chalcogenides -- binary compounds of sulfur, selenium or tellurium
with a more electropositive element or radical -- having such different lattice
constants can be grown together to form a perfectly aligned stacking bilayer.
"It's a new, potential building block for energy-efficient optoelectronics,"
Li said.
Upon characterizing their new bilayer building block, the researchers
found that the two mismatched layers had self-assembled into a repeating
long-range atomic order that could be directly visualized by the Moiré patterns
they showed in the electron microscope. "We were surprised that these
patterns aligned perfectly," Li said.
Researchers in ORNL's Functional Hybrid Nanomaterials group, led by
David Geohegan, conducted the study with partners at Vanderbilt University, the
University of Utah and Beijing Computational Science Research Center.
"These new 2D mismatched layered heterostructures open the door to
novel building blocks for optoelectronic applications," said senior author
Kai Xiao of ORNL. "They can allow us to study new physics properties which
cannot be discovered with other 2D heterostructures with matched lattices. They
offer potential for a wide range of physical phenomena ranging from interfacial
magnetism, superconductivity and Hofstadter's butterfly effect."
MoreThe monthly Coppock Indicators finished March
DJIA: 17685.09 -18 Down. NASDAQ: 4869.85 +33 Down. SP500: 2059.74 -22 Down.
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