Baltic Dry Index. 816 -11 Brent Crude
55.14
“The Democrats haven’t been this upset since Republicans took their slaves away.”
Anon.
We open this last day of January 2017
with high drama in the USA. President Trump has promptly fired holdover Acting
Attorney General for, in effect, party political rebellion. The Dems still haven’t come to terms with the
fact that they lost the election in November. It may be pale compared to
President Nixon’s “Saturday night massacre,” or President Reagan’s destruction
of the union Patco, but it sends a clear signal to democrats in the civil
service, insubordination won’t be tolerated.
Since love and fear can
hardly coexist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be
feared than loved.
Niccolo Machiavelli.
Trump fires acting attorney general who wouldn’t defend travel ban
By Devlin Barrett and Damian
Paletta Published: Jan 30, 2017 11:52 p.m. ET
Trump says Sally Yates ‘betrayed’ Department of Justice
The White House on Monday fired Acting Attorney
General Sally Yates, after she instructed Justice Department attorneys not to
defend in court an executive order signed by President Donald Trump suspending
immigration from seven majority Muslim countries.
Yates
learned of her firing Monday evening, in a hand-delivered letter from the White
House’s Office of Personnel, according to a person familiar with the matter
In a statement, the White House said Yates “betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States.’’
----Yates was replaced by Dana Boente, the U.S.
attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, until Trump’s attorney general
nominee, Jeff Sessions, is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, which could happen
next week.
The
decision by Sally Yates, who became the acting head of the Justice Department
when Loretta Lynch stepped down as attorney general this month, was in response
to the series of lawsuits that were filed in the first 24 hours in which
immigration officials began enforcing Trump’s order.
More
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/justice-department-wont-defend-trumps-travel-ban-for-now-2017-01-30
It looks like trouble ahead in the EUSSR, in the clash
between the loose ECB pushing inflation, and Germany heading towards a key
general election in the Autumn. In the EUSSR Paymaster vs The Italian Bankster
from Goldie, it’s like picking between which Sopranos mobster family you want
in control. Another unintended consequence of nearly 50 years on the Great
Nixonian Error of fiat money, communist money.
German Inflation at Highest Since 2013 Puts ECB in Spotlight
by Carolynn Look
30 January 2017, 13:00 GMT
German inflation accelerated to the fastest pace in three and a half years
in January, providing ammunition for critics of the European
Central Bank’s stimulus measures.Consumer prices rose 1.9 percent from a year ago, data from the Federal Statistics Office showed on Monday. That’s up from 1.7 percent the previous month and the highest rate since July 2013, though below the median estimate of 2 percent in a Bloomberg survey. Prices slid 0.8 percent from December.
The surge in German inflation since the end of last year is a potential
political flashpoint in the country, which faces elections in September, as
savers remain burdened with near-zero deposit rates. Calls are mounting for the
ECB to start talks over winding down its bond-buying program, which is
scheduled to run until at least the end of this year, though policy makers have
generally urged caution until it’s clear price increases are being sustained in
the euro area as a whole.
“Monetary policy can’t just cater to one country but to the entire
euro-zone economy,” Ewald Nowotny, governor of Austria’s central bank said on
Monday in Vienna before the data were published. “German developments are
watched, but they are just a part.”
Nowotny said that while the ECB’s Governing Council will “surely” have
to take a decision on the future of quantitative easing before the end of 2017,
he doesn’t expect that to happen until after the summer.
ECB
President Mario Draghi said this month that Germans should demonstrate patience
as the region’s recovery solidifies, noting that there are “no convincing
signs” yet that underlying inflation is picking up. At the same time, Executive
Board member Sabine Lautenschlaeger and Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann
have signaled that the time is near to start a discussion about how to
gradually normalize policy, and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has
warned that the ECB’s stance could cause “political problems.”
German inflation, calculated using a national measure, was led by a 5.8
percent gain in energy costs, the statistics office’s report showed. Goods
prices climbed 2.7 percent and services rose 1.2 percent.
Inflation in the euro area probably accelerated to 1.5 percent in
January from 1.1 percent the previous month, a separate Bloomberg survey shows.
Eurostat will release those figures on Tuesday.
In yet more news of Europe’s banksters
acting as criminal money launderers, we ask once again why do these criminal
enterprises still hold EU and USA banking licences?
“The
world is a place that’s gone from being flat to round to crooked.”
Mad Magazine
Deutsche Bank Ends N.Y. Mirror-Trade Probe for $425 Million
by Greg Farrell and Keri GeigerThe New York settlement, approved by the bank on Monday, resolves allegations that Deutsche Bank employees used a “mirror-trading scheme” to help wealthy Russians move $10 billion out of that country from 2011 through 2014. The New York regulator said it appears that a close relative of a Deutsche Bank supervisor in Moscow received bribes worth a quarter million dollars so that the supervisor would clear the trades.
The bank is also poised to reach a similar agreement with the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority that will include an additional penalty of several hundred million dollars, a person familiar with the matter said.
The highest-profile probe into the matter is still under way. Federal prosecutors in the U.S. are pursuing a criminal investigation into whether the German lender’s internal controls failed to pick up the scheme, people with knowledge of the matter have said.
In addition to the financial penalty to the New York regulator, the bank will have to hire an independent monitor, its sixth in the U.S., according to Bloomberg research.
“This Russian mirror-trading scheme occurred while the bank was on clear notice of serious and widespread compliance issues dating back a decade,” DFS Superintendent Maria Vullo said in a written statement. “The offsetting trades here lacked economic purpose and could have been used to facilitate money laundering or enable other illicit conduct, and today’s action sends a clear message that DFS will not tolerate such conduct.”
More
Finally, like a bad penny always coming
back, Tepco and Fukishima remind us all why nuclear power is not part of
mankind’s energy solution.
Tepco spots possible nuclear fuel debris at Japan's Fukushima reactor
Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the operator of Japan's wrecked Fukushima
nuclear plant, said on Monday it may have found nuclear fuel debris below the
damaged No. 2 reactor, one of three that had meltdowns in the 2011 disaster.
Should the finding be confirmed, it would mark a significant
breakthrough in attempts to clean up the nuclear plant, after years of delays,
missteps and leaks of radioactive water.
Finding the highly radioactive melted uranium rods may pave the way for
Tepco to develop methods to remove the melted fuel.
Tepco detected a black lump of material directly below the reactor in an
inspection by camera on Monday and could not rule out the possibility it was
melted fuel, an official told a news briefing.
"This is a big step forward as we have got some precious data for
the decommissioning process, including removing the fuel debris," the
official said.
The company will analyze the data to decide whether it could send a
robot into the reactor for further investigation, he said.
In the world's worst nuclear calamity since Chernobyl in 1986, three
reactors at Tepco's Fukushima plant melted down after a magnitude 9 earthquake
struck off the coast of Japan in March 2011, triggering a tsunami that
devastated a large area and killed more than 15,000 people.
About 160,000 people fled their homes after the meltdowns caused
explosions that dumped radioactive materials across a swath of Fukushima
prefecture. Many of those people are unlikely to return.
It took Tepco about two months to admit the reactors had melted down,
confirming what experts had been saying for weeks.
Tepco has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel
rods in one of the damaged buildings. But it has failed to establish the
location of the melted fuel rods in the other three damaged reactors at the
plant.
The utility has been developing robots that can swim under water and
negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel
rods.
But as soon as the robots get close to the reactors, the radiation
destroys their wiring and renders them useless.
In December, the government nearly doubled its projections for costs
related to the Fukushima nuclear disaster to 21.5 trillion yen ($188 billion),
increasing pressure on Tepco to step up reforms and improve its performance.
More
At the Comex silver depositories Monday
final figures were: Registered 29.04 Moz, Eligible 150.57 Moz,
Total 179.61 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Below an old, old, story with never a happy ending.
The moral of this story is, if you’re going to lie, steal, and cheat, and
expect to get away with it, you have to be a US based bankster or Great Vampire
Squid.
Why did I take up stealing? To
live better, to own things I couldn't afford, to acquire this good taste that
you now enjoy and which I should be very reluctant to give up.Cary Grant. To Catch A Thief.
Ex-tycoon Batista held on return to Brazil on graft charges: report
Eike Batista, once Brazil's richest man, flew into Rio de Janeiro on
Monday and was detained by federal police in connection with charges including
an alleged $16 million bribe to a former governor, Globo news television
reported.
Batista, a brash entrepreneur who became the face of Brazil's
now-fizzled commodities boom, had been sought since last week by Brazilian
police, who raided his Rio mansion and confiscated his luxury cars as part of
their bribery investigation.
The 60-year-old businessman, who five years ago had a net worth
exceeding $30 billion and was considered among the world's 10 richest people,
arrived aboard an American Airlines flight from New York at Rio's international
airport just after 10 a.m. local time (1200 GMT).
Since the police raid last week, a Brazilian judge declared him a
fugitive and requested his name be added to the wanted list of Interpol, the
international police agency.
"I am returning to answer to the courts, as is my duty,"
Batista said in a brief interview with Brazil's Globo television network at New
York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. "It's time for me to clear
this up."
Batista told Globo he never intended to flee and was in New York on
business. Batista declined to answer a reporter's question about whether he
considered himself guilty or innocent.
Batista's lawyer, Fernando Martins, told Reuters that he did not yet
know to which prison his client would be taken.
Inmates with a college degree - which Batista does not have - are
usually separated from the rest of the population in Brazil's crowded and
chaotic prison system, which has suffered a series of violent riots this year.
A former wildcat gold miner, Batista attracted ravenous demand for
shares in his mining and energy ventures. With the decline in oil and mineral
prices in recent years, Brazil fell into a recession, and Batista's empire
evaporated.
As the bonanza faded, investigators in Brazil discovered large-scale
corruption around many major projects from the boom years.
Starting with a probe into kickbacks around state-run oil company
Petroleo Brasileiro SA, the investigation shed light on a culture of bribery
among government officials, politicians and many big companies, especially
engineering, energy and infrastructure groups reliant on public licenses and
contracts.
Police said last week that Batista had paid roughly $16 million to
former Rio Governor Sergio Cabral in exchange for support of the businessman's
many Rio-based endeavors. Cabral, who resigned from office in 2014, has been
jailed since last year in connection with other corruption charges.
The oil companies OGX Petroleo and OGX Oleo e Gas and mining company
MMX, which were founded by Batista, said on Monday he no longer holds
administrative roles and his arrest would have no material impact on them.
The professors who taught Efficient Market
Theory said that someone throwing darts at the stock tables could select stock
portfolio having prospects just as good as one selected by the brightest, most
hard-working securities analyst. Observing correctly that the market was
frequently efficient, they went on to conclude incorrectly that it was always efficient.
Warren Buffett.
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?
Canal-top solar power plants: One example of Narendra Modi's Gujarat Model that's working well
Jan, 29 2017 12:58:08 IST
Mehsana (Gujarat): As far as the eye can see, line after
line of solar panels stretch out in the midday sun beating down on the village
of Chandrasan here in this eastern Gujarat district, which squeezes in 80 more
people per sq km than India’s already crowded average of 441
people per sq km.But there is no land conflict involved with the Chandrasan installation because the solar panels unfurl over a 750 m length of irrigation canal.
The canal-top solar panels were installed in India’s sunniest state in 2012 and now offer hope for a country three times as densely populated as China, at a time when India aims for almost a nine-fold increase in solar capacity between between 2017 and 2022 to fulfil global climate-change commitments and reduce its dependence on coal-fired power plants.
The canal-top idea was first tabled at a 2011 Vibrant Gujarat Summit by the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, said Bela Jani, a spokesperson at state-owned Gujarat State Electricity Corporation Limited (GSECL). The aim was to utilise the area above the canals, saving the government the cost, time and inconvenience associated with land acquisition.
Gujarat alone has a canal network of 80,000 km. Using even 30% of this network for canal-top solar projects, according to GSECL estimates, 18,000 MW of power could be produced in just Gujarat–almost equal to the current coal-based installed capacity of Delhi, Rajasthan and Telangana–and 90,000 acres of land, or twice the size of Kolkata, could be saved.
In other words, installing solar-panels over 30% of Gujarat’s canals could be used to meet nearly a fifth of India’s solar power targets by 2022.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished December
DJIA: 19763
+74 Up NASDAQ: 5383 +70 Up. SP500: 2239 +75 Up
