Baltic Dry Index. 855 +06 Brent Crude 45.74
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
Eurasian Snow cover. (How bad will
winter be?)
If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.
Mark Twain
It is D-Day minus one, but is it Donald
Day minus one? Not if the FBI can affect it. Anyway, the polls from America
suggest that it isn’t. The polls suggest that Hillary Clinton should have an
easy stroll to a majority in the Electoral College. If so, Wall Street,
currencies, and Mexico will breathe a big sigh of relief. But it’s never over
until it’s over, and so we all await Wednesday morning. In the interim, only
the brave and foolhardy will enter the central banksters casinos. We long ago
left capitalism for the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money, communist money,
and central bank rigged stock and commodity markets.
We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter
hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the
wisdom to make the right choice.
Woody Allen
FBI Absolves Clinton Again, Two Days Ahead of U.S. Election
November 6,
2016 — 8:31 PM GMT Updated on November 7, 2016 — 12:58 AM GMT
The
FBI’s decision to stick by its finding that Hillary Clinton didn’t commit a
crime in her handling of e-mails as secretary of state again roiled the U.S.
presidential race and markets, two days before the election. Rival Donald Trump
implored his followers to overcome a “rigged system” that he said protected
Clinton from prosecution.
FBI Director James Comey informed Congress in a letter on Oct. 28 that
the agency, which had ended its probe in July, was examining new e-mails
potentially related to its investigation of Clinton’s use of a private e-mail
server. Since then, “the FBI investigative team has been working around the
clock to process and review” the material, Comey said in a second letter to
members of Congress, dated Sunday. The letter was released by Representative
Adam Schiff, a California Democrat.
“During that process, we reviewed all of the communications that were to
or from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State,” Comey wrote. “Based
on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July
with respect to Secretary Clinton.”
Comey’s initial announcement breathed new life into Trump’s candidacy at
a time most polls showed Clinton with a wide lead. The race has since tightened,
though Clinton maintains a 2.2 percentage-point lead, according to an average
of polls by RealClearPolitics.
More
Mexican Peso Rises With Asian Stocks as FBI Gives Clinton a Pass
November 6, 2016 — 9:18 PM GMT Updated on November 7, 2016 — 6:23 AM GMT
Mexico’s peso gained with Asian equities and U.S. stock index futures
after the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it maintains the view that
Hillary Clinton’s handling of her e-mails wasn’t a crime. The yen and Swiss
franc retreated with gold.
Mexico’s currency, which has tended to strengthen on signs Republican
presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign is faltering, was set for its
biggest jump since September and the MSCI Asia Pacific Index rebounded
from a seven-week low ahead of Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election. The yen
sank by the most in two months, U.S. Treasuries fell and gold dropped for the
first time in eight days as investors shunned haven assets. Hong Kong’s
property developers tumbled after the government stepped up efforts to cool the
housing market, while nickel led a rally among industrial metals.
----“The market is viewing the latest
Hillary Clinton news as a positive, at least in the short term,” said Richard
Sichel, chief investment officer at Philadelphia Trust Co., which oversees $2
billion. “It may still be a close call in the end, but the market for the time
being is acting as if some of the uncertainty is gone.”
More
Hillary Clinton’s Quebec ancestry dates back to New France
Clinton's family ties to Canada make her a distant relative
of prominent Quebecers, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, genealogists
have said.
Sun., Nov. 6, 2016
MONTREAL — If Hillary
Clinton wins Tuesday’s election, Canada’s relationship with the White House
could soon be cast as a family affair, thanks to the presidential candidate’s
well-documented French-Canadian ancestry.
Clinton’s family ties to Canada stretch back to the
days of New France, making her a distant relative of many prominent Quebecers,
including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Céline Dion, genealogists have
noted.
Gail Moreau-Desharnais of the French-Canadian Heritage
Society of Michigan has traced a branch of Clinton’s family tree all the way
back to the Filles du Roi or “King’s Daughters,” a group of young women who
were sent from France in the 17th century to help populate the colony.
Clinton briefly mentioned her maternal grandmother’s
French-Canadian roots in her 2003 memoir, “Living History.” But as she
researched the connection, Moreau-Desharnais says she was surprised by how deep
those roots went.
“She really has a good French-Canadian line,” she said
in an interview. “And when you trace her matrilineal line, or female to female
to female, her ultimate female ancestor is Jeanne Ducorps, one of the Filles du
Roi.”
Ducorps was one of more than 700 women sent to New
France — often against their will — by King Louis XIV between 1663 and 1673 to
serve as brides for the men in the colony.
Many were orphans or had been abandoned in refuge
houses, and were sometimes unfairly labelled “women of ill repute,” according
to the president of a historical society dedicated to studying them.
“For the most part (the King’s Daughters) were girls
who didn’t have a lot of future in France,” Irene Belleau said in a telephone
interview.
But while a small percentage had worked as prostitutes and many were poor, she
said others arrived in New France with possessions or furniture, implying a
slightly higher status.
What they had in common was a mission: all were given a
sum of money and chosen or obligated to come to New France with a “royal
mandate” to marry and help populate the colony, which was overwhelmingly male.
And populate they did: Belleau says most of the women
found husbands quickly and had a total of 4,459 children, earning them the
nickname “mothers of the nation.”
Ducorps is not the only King’s Daughter found in
Clinton’s family tree. She also traces her ancestry back to Madeleine Niel,
Madeleine Plouard and Catherine Paulo, who were also part of the group.
The tentative biographies compiled by Belleau provide a
glimpse into their lives.
Ducorps, who arrived in 1667, married a blacksmith
named Martin Masse and had eight children, including at least three who died
before reaching adulthood.
Niel, a 16-year-old orphan when she arrived in 1667,
married a soldier less than a month later. She and Etienne Charles went on to
have 12 children. All but one survived and married.
Paulo, who was an illiterate 18-year old when she
married Etienne Campeau, went on to have 15 children, one of whom is considered
one of the founders of Fort Detroit.
Although Clinton’s Quebecois ancestry may be
interesting, it’s not unique.
Belleau, herself a proud descendant of a King’s
Daughter, says some 95 per cent of so-called “old stock” Quebecers can find at
least one of the women in her family tree, as can a significant percentage of
Canadians and Americans.
An article published in 2008 by the New England
Historic Genealogical Society noted that most French-Canadians are distantly
related thanks to a small group of 17th century French immigrants.
Author Gary Boyd Roberts pointed out that Clinton is a
distant cousin of not only Pierre Elliott Trudeau (and by extension, Justin)
but also Dion, writer Jack Kerouac, singer Madonna and actress Angelina Jolie.
Moreau-Desharnais says most of Clinton’s Quebec
ancestors migrated to the United States through what is now Windsor, Ont.,
where many became “the stalwarts who were so prominent in Detroit and helped to
make it what it is.”
More
Betting sites see record wagering on U.S. presidential election
The raucous, passionate and unpredictable 2016 U.S. presidential
election is on track to notch another distinction: the most wagered-upon political event ever.
With many opinion polls showing a tight race just one day before
Tuesday's election, record numbers of bettors are pouring millions into online
platforms from Ireland to Iowa in the hope of capturing a financial windfall
from a victory by Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump.
UK-based internet betting exchange Betfair said on Sunday its "Next
President" market was set to become the most traded it had ever seen and
expected to surpass even Brexit, the contentious UK referendum to leave the
European Union.
By Sunday, roughly $130 million had been traded on who will become the
next U.S. president, compared with $159 million on the Brexit referendum,
Betfair spokeswoman Naomi Totten said. The amount bet so far on the 2016
contest dwarfs the roughly $50 million laid on the 2012 race.
"We think it is because (of) how raw the Brexit (vote) is in
people's minds - they're not convinced yet that it's a done deal," Totten
said.
Most polls leading into Britain's June 23 referendum predicted Britons
would choose to remain in the EU. Instead, they voted to leave by a 52 percent
to 48 percent margin.
Betfair's "Next President" market was by far the largest of
more than 70 markets on the site related to the U.S. election. As of Friday,
some $140 million has been put into play on markets ranging from who will win
the popular vote to how many states each party will carry.
On Ireland's Paddy Power, which merged with Betfair earlier this year,
the U.S. presidential election "is definitely on course to be the biggest
political event," said spokesman Féilim Mac An Iomaire. The site has had
about $4.38 million bet on the race so far.
For Paddy Power, sporting events remain the site's "bread and
butter," with politics more of a "niche market," Mac An Iomaire
said. Nonetheless, he expects the 2016 race to be among the top 10-most-traded
events on the site.
Even people with no knowledge of politics know who Trump is, said Mac An
Iomaire said, explaining the runaway popularity of the U.S. election in betting
markets. "Trump is such a huge celebrity."
Ladbrokes, a UK-based gambling company, said about 5 million pounds, or
a little over $6 million, had been bet on the 2016 presidential election since its
markets on the race opened four years ago. A Ladbrokes spokesman said that
amount was "at least double" the amount wagered on the 2012 election.
The three sites all reported an 83 percent probability of a Clinton
victory on Tuesday. Her probability shot up a few percentage points on Sunday
after the FBI stood by its earlier recommendation that no criminal charges were
warranted against Clinton in her use of a private email server.
More
Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if
I’m going to pay for a landslide.
Joseph P. Kennedy
At the Comex silver depositories Friday
final figures were: Registered 30.46 Moz, Eligible 143.08 Moz,
Total 173.54 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today Deutsche Bank, the poster child of what went
wrong in global casino banking under disgraced fallen former guru Greenspan and
his sidekick Bernocchio. When the
Ebenezer Squids took over banksterism. The whole long article is well worth the
read. Here Part 7.
"We
shouldn't pour cold water on everything.
We, the eight or nine players in global investment banking, have a very
good future."
Deutsche
Bank, CEO Josef Ackermann. Davos, January 2007.
The Deutsche Bank Downfall How a Pillar of German Banking Lost Its Way
October 28, 2016 11:02 AM
VII. Easy Come, Easy Go
Deutsche Bank's balance sheet and
its total results as an investment bank: A sober look at the books.
Several million numbers flow into Deutsche Bank's balance
sheet and the most recent annual report for 2015 is 500 pages long. But if you
take a closer look at the bank's annual report over the years, you can find
numbers that tell the tale of the institution's metamorphosis.
The bank has become much larger since 1994, but it
has lost value. It began taking much greater risks, which ultimately proved not
to be worth it. The final analysis of Operation "Deutsche Bank
Rebirth" is rather sobering.
In 1994, the bank had 73,450 employees,
three-quarters of them in Germany. But by 2001, there were 94,782 people
working for Deutsche Bank, half of them abroad. In 2007, at the apex of the
boom, fully two-thirds of the bank's employees were outside of Germany -- and
not even one-third of the company's revenues came from Germany.
The balance sheet climbed from 573 billion deutsche
marks in 1994 to 2.2 trillion euros in 2007, an unbelievable expansion. But
size alone isn't necessarily indicative of value. The value of a financial
institution is determined by its stock price and market capitalization. And
here, the results aren't nearly as impressive. There was a time under Breuer
and again under Ackermann when the bank's value had temporarily doubled
relative to 1994, but today Deutsche Bank is worth less than it was before it
completely revamped its approach.
Other numbers provide an indication for why that
is. The bank has a completely different internal structure. In 1994, most of
the bank's earnings came from traditional commercial banking. But by the 2007
peak of the speculation party, the investment division's share of the bank's
earnings, often made with the help of particularly risky deals, had climbed to
over 70 percent.
Ackermann's strategy initially seemed successful.
At the peak of its success, the bank achieved a 31 percent pre-tax return on
equity, which is estimated to be twice as high as it was in 1994. Return on
equity measures the profit earned on the investment of the bank's own equity.
It was Ackermann's longtime and oft-stated dream to achieve a return of 25
percent. At the time, he was unfairly berated as a greedy, unscrupulous shark.
Before 2008, Ackermann's 25 percent wasn't an unusually high return.
What was unusual, and unsavory, were the tricks and
the brutality Ackermann used to achieve his target. Return on investment
climbs, of course, as profits rise -- but it also rises when the amount of
equity invested is lowered. And if both happen at the same time, the bottom
line becomes quite attractive indeed.
Ackermann continually demanded that his people buy
back Deutsche Bank stock and destroy it. Doing so is not against the law;
indeed stock corporations do it quite regularly to reduce their proprietary
equity. But seen another way, Ackermann was hurting the company's long-term
prospects for the sake of short-term balance sheet figures.
At the beginning of the Ackermann era, the bank's
core capital quota stood at 10 percent. By the highpoint of the boom and the
onset of the crisis, Ackermann had pushed it down below 9 percent. That means
that the bank's capital buffer was shrinking, which increases risk. In the
language of the branch, Deutsche Bank was highly leveraged, investing with more
of other people's money (debt) and less of its own. At Deutsche, this
debt-to-equity ratio would sometimes reach as high as 40:1 in those days.
An additional risk that the bank took on during
this time can only be found in more recent annual reports: Penalties or damages
accrued as a result of illegitimate or illegal deals. Such bombs only go off
after a significant amount of time has passed and their effect can first be
seen in an appendix to the 2012 annual report. There, one notices that the line
item for "operational risks/litigation" exploded from 822 million to
2.6 billion euros. At the time, investigations into the Libor affair were
ongoing and penalties were looming. But such risks continued to rise in
subsequent years -- and continue to do so.
Ackermann has defended himself by saying that,
until the financial crisis, he intentionally crept as close as possible to the
line of what was permissible and prides himself on that approach. With capital,
with leveraging, with risk, he took advantage of the full extent of his leeway.
Otherwise, he says, the bank wouldn't have been competitive. But was the
strategy worth it?
The numbers in the annual reports help provide an
answer to that question too. Both the high profits and most of the legal
problems were produced by the Global Markets division under the leadership of
Anshu Jain. In the 15 years between 2001 and 2015, Global Markets earned 25
billion after taxes. But a majority of the more than 12 billion euros that have
been paid out by the bank since 2012 due to the bank's legal troubles must be
subtracted from this: fines, damages and penalties. The bank has set aside an
additional 5.5 billion euros, but analysts believe that the bank could need up
to 10 billion for the payments.
That, though, would mean that almost the entire
profit earned by Global Markets would disappear. The huge investment bank
experiment would result in a goose egg, or, even worse, a lasting burden.
Because in order to keep the traders busy, other divisions were neglected.
Investment in the bank's infrastructure, in its computer systems, was
insufficient. It was only due to regulatory pressure that the bank recently
invested a billion euros in improved control and security systems.
More
Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics
and your opponents will do it for you.
Anon.
Solar & Related Update.
With events
happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this
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?
Adding hydrogen to graphene
Date: November 3, 2016
Source: Institute for Basic Science
Summary: Adding hydrogen to graphene could improve its future
applicability in the semiconductor industry, when silicon leaves off.
Researchers have recently gained further insight into this chemical reaction.
These findings extend the knowledge of the fundamental chemistry of graphene
and bring scientists perhaps closer to realizing new graphene-based materials.
Adding hydrogen to graphene could improve its future applicability in
the semiconductor industry, when silicon leaves off. Researchers at the Center
for Multidimensional Carbon Materials (CMCM), within the Institute for Basic
Science (IBS) have recently gained further insight into this chemical reaction.
Published in Journal of the American Chemical Society, these findings
extend the knowledge of the fundamental chemistry of graphene and bring
scientists perhaps closer to realizing new graphene-based materials.
Understanding how graphene can chemically react with a variety of
chemicals will increase its utility. Indeed, graphene has superior conductivity
properties, but it cannot be directly used as an alternative to silicon in
semiconductor electronics because it does not have a bandgap, that is, its
electrons can move without climbing any energy barrier. Hydrogenation of
graphene opens a bandgap in graphene, so that it might serve as a semiconductor
component in new devices.
While other reports describe the hydrogenation of bulk materials, this
study focuses on hydrogenation of single and few-layers thick graphene. IBS
scientists used a reaction based on lithium dissolved in ammonia, called the
"Birch-type reaction," to introduce hydrogen onto graphene through
the formation of C-H bonds.
The research team discovered that hydrogenation proceeds rapidly over
the entire surface of single-layer graphene, while it proceeds slowly and from
the edges in few-layer graphene. They also showed that defects or edges are
actually necessary for the reaction to occur under the conditions used, because
pristine graphene with the edges covered in gold does not undergo
hydrogenation.
Using bilayer and trilayer graphene, IBS scientists also discovered that
the reagents can pass between the layers, and hydrogenate each layer equally
well. Finally, the scientists found that the hydrogenation significantly
changed the optical and electric properties of the graphene.
"A primary goal of our Center is to undertake fundamental studies
about reactions involving carbon materials. By building a deep understanding of
the chemistry of single-layer graphene and a few layer graphene, I am confident
that many new applications of chemically functionalized graphenes could be possible,
in electronics, photonics, optoelectronics, sensors, composites, and other
areas," notes Rodney Ruoff, corresponding author of this paper, CMCM
director, and UNIST Distinguished Professor at the Ulsan National Institute of
Science and Technology (UNIST).
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished October
DJIA: 18142
+32 Up NASDAQ: 5189 +31 Up. SP500: 2126 +46 Up.
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