Baltic Dry Index. 688
+03
Brent Crude 55.75
“I’m just a banker doing God’s work”
Lloyd
Blankfein’s CEO Goldman Sachs, “Mr.
Goldman Sacks.”
We open with Goldie busy talking up its
China book. “Move along now, nothing to see here. Everything’s fine. Buy more.”
Goldman Warns of China Economy Risks During Year of the Rooster
by Enda Curran 15 February 2017, 04:02 GMT China’s economy may have slipped down the global worry list, but significant risks remain, including an abrupt end to a massive credit boom or an overly aggressive policy response if inflation should speed up, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.While a hard landing isn’t the New York-based bank’s base case for 2017 -- it expects only a modest slowdown -- economists warn that a push to rein in cheap loans will weigh on key sectors such as housing. Officials are trying to keep a lid on frothy house prices without harming the wider economy, where growth remains heavily reliant on government spending.
The scale of the lending boom was laid bare in data Tuesday showing China added more credit in January than the equivalent of Swedish or Polish economic output, fueling worries about the spree’s sustainability. Aggregate financing, the broadest measure of new credit, climbed to a record 3.74 trillion yuan ($545 billion). Despite the headline number, the growth of total credit continues to ease moderately, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
Policy makers have begun to tighten money market rates and analysts expect further measures to cool lending without choking the wider economy, especially amid important political changes with a major Communist Party leadership reshuffle set for later this year.
Economic threats aren’t all home grown. External risks include a sharp drop in exports due to slowing demand or rising trade barriers -- U.S. President Donald Trump has promised tariffs on Chinese goods -- and faster-than-expected rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.
More
Elsewhere Trumpmania is on a roll. Who knew “the Donald” and Putin bullish, the Hillbillies, and their Goldmanites, Silly Con Valley moguls & Hollywood pornographers, bears.
Stocks Surge to Records, Bonds Fall on Growth Bets: Markets Wrap
by Jeremy Herron
More
evidence that inflation has taken
hold in the U.S. economy spurred bets that the economy can withstand higher
interest rates as it waits for stimulus from the Trump administration, fueling
a rally that took global equities toward a record and a selloff in Treasuries.
MSCI’s
broadest measure of global equities closed at a record for the first time since
May 2015, while the S&P 500 Index capped its longest winning streak in
three years, as retail sales in the U.S. advanced more than forecast,
suggesting consumers are positioned to buttress economic growth. The 10-year
Treasury yield topped 2.50 percent as the cost of living increased in January
by the most since February 2013, adding to a raft of readings showing faster
inflation in major economies. Emerging-market stocks jumped, while the dollar
slipped with crude.
Wednesday’s data lifted the odds for a Fed rate hike in March to 42
percent from 30 percent two days ago, helped by Fed chair Janet Yellen’s
testimony that the central bank doesn’t need to wait for Donald Trump to
outline plans on fiscal stimulus before resuming rate hikes. Her case got a
boost after the U.S. inflation reading came in at 2.5 percent for January, the
fastest pace since 2012.
“The January US CPI report is a strong set of data which justifies the
belief that reflationary forces have been building within the US economy in
recent months well in advance of any legislative program being enacted by the
new administration,” Michael Shaoul, chief executive officer at Marketfield
Asset Management wrote in a note to clients.
Before Yellen’s testimony, traders anticipated the Fed would start
raising U.S. borrowing costs in June. Now they see one as early as May,
according to futures data compiled by Bloomberg.
More
In harsh reality EUSSR news, Europe’s diesel bomb rules out a
Greece bailout deal by the coming Euroland finance meeting."If the EU cannot resolve a small problem the size of Greece, what is the point of Europe?"
Romano Prodi, former President of the European Commission, former Italy Prime Minister.
Eurogroup's Dijsselbloem rules out Greek bailout deal by Feb. 20
Greece and its international lenders are not expected to reach agreement
on the country's bailout progress before a meeting of euro zone finance
ministers next Monday, Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem said on Tuesday.
Talks between Athens, its European
Union lenders and the International Monetary Fund over labor and energy
reforms, fiscal targets and debt relief have dragged on for months rekindling
fears of a new crisis in the single-currency bloc.
"People think that because there's a Eurogroup next week we have to
have it worked out. But that's never been my timeframe. It's unthinkable,"
Dijsselbloem told Dutch television, adding: "The IMF must also be on
board".
Athens wants a deal soon to join the European Central Bank's bond-buying
program in March and lure back investors.
The EU and the IMF are at odds over the country's fiscal targets and the
fund has yet to decide if it will join Greece's third bailout program. Berlin
has made IMF participation a condition for approving new loans.
Dijsselbloem said EU and IMF mission chiefs would first need to return
to Greece to agree the reforms the leftist-led government should adopt before a
deal is approved by euro zone finance ministers. A date has not yet been set
for the mission chiefs' return to Athens.
With elections this year in the Netherlands, France and Germany, Greece
and its lenders have a few weeks to cobble together a deal, which will help
Athens stave off a default on bailout loan repayments in July.
European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs Pierre
Moscovici was expected in Athens on Wednesday to help conclude the review.
Greek government spokesman Dimitris Tzanakopoulos said Greece would not
cave in to demands for more austerity.
"We expect the IMF ... to adopt a more realistic and a more
constructive approach in the immediate future," Tzanakopoulos said.
"We expect the same from Germany's Finance Ministry."The IMF says it
will not participate in Greece's bailout until it has assurances Greece's debt
is sustainable. Germany, Europe's paymaster, rejects the idea of granting
Greece substantial debt relief.
More
“If we went back on the gold standard and we adhered to the actual structure of the gold standard as it existed prior to 1913, we’d be fine. Remember that the period 1870 to 1913 was one of the most aggressive periods economically that we’ve had in the United States, and that was a golden period of the gold standard. I’m known as a gold bug and everyone laughs at me, but why do central banks own gold now?”
Alan Greenspan. June 28, 2016.
At the Comex silver depositories
Wednesday final figures were: Registered 30.27 Moz, Eligible 153.33 Moz,
Total 183.60 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, more on the American War Party’s botched
coup in the Ukraine. The presidency may have changed hands, but the AWP is
deeply embedded in the “deep state” machinery, and still is trying to slice and
dice up Russia and contain China. If that means destroying President Trump and
his team, apparently that’s just acceptable collateral damage. How dare a US
election interfere with their schemes!
"On
the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the
time.”
George
Orwell.
Trump expects Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine: White House
U.S. President Donald Trump made it clear he expects Russia to return
Crimea to Ukraine and reduce violence in Ukraine, White House spokesman Sean
Spicer said on Tuesday.
"President Trump has made it very
clear that he expects the Russian government to de-escalate violence in the
Ukraine and return Crimea," Spicer said at a daily news briefing. "At
the same time, he fully expects to and wants to get along with Russia."
Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea in 2014.
Russian foreign ministry says Crimea will not be returned to Ukraine
Russia will not hand back control of Crimea to Ukraine, Russia's foreign
ministry said on Wednesday, responding to comments from the White House that
the United States expected the Black Sea peninsula to be returned.
"We don't give back our own territory. Crimea is territory
belonging to the Russian Federation," Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the
Russian Foreign Ministry, told a news briefing.
On Tuesday, the White House said U.S. President Donald Trump had made it
clear that he expects Russia to relinquish control of the territory.
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, prompting the United States and the
European Union to impose sanctions on Russia, plunging Western relations with
the Kremlin to their worst level since the end of the Cold War.
NY Times says Trump campaign had repeated contact with Russian intelligence
Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald Trump's
presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with
senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, the New
York Times reported on Tuesday, citing four current and former U.S. officials.
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the
communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia
was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic
National Committee, three of the officials said, according to the Times.
The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump
campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to
influence the election, the newspaper said.
The officials interviewed in recent weeks said they had seen no evidence
of such cooperation so far, it said.
However, the intercepts alarmed U.S. intelligence and law enforcement
agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while
Trump was speaking glowingly about Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations
last year between Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser, and
Sergei I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, the Times said.
During those calls, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama
administration imposed on Russia in December. Flynn misled the White House
about those calls and was asked to resign on Monday night.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters
for comment on the Times story.
The Times reported that the officials said the intercepted
communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other
Trump associates.
On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the Russian
government outside the intelligence services, the officials told the Times. All
of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because
the continuing investigation is classified, the newspaper reported.
The officials said one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul
Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and
had worked as a political consultant in Russia and Ukraine, the Times said. The
officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.
Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, dismissed the
accounts of the U.S. officials in a telephone interview with the Times on
Tuesday.
More
In US civil war news, it’s all turning very party
political. J. Edgar Hoover seems to be making a comeback. Who else has the
“deep state” been bugging, for whom and why? Blackmail comes to mind. Police
state comes to mind. The Stasi comes to
mind. What did Obama and the Hillbillies know, and when did they know it? This
swamp doesn’t want to be drained.
"Get a good
night's sleep and don't bug anybody without asking me."
President Richard M. Nixon.
(To re-election campaign manager Clark MacGregor.)
FBI needs to explain why Flynn was recorded, Intelligence Committee chairman says
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that the most significant question posed by the resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn is why intelligence officials eavesdropped on his calls with the Russian ambassador and later leaked information on those calls to the press.“I expect for the FBI to tell me what is going on, and they better have a good answer,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which is conducting a review of Russian activities to influence the election. “The big problem I see here is that you have an American citizen who had his phone calls recorded.”
Flynn resigned Monday night, days after The Washington Post reported that intelligence officials had recorded Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. before Trump took office. Those recordings, The Post reported, appeared to contradict Flynn’s own claims that he had not discussed easing U.S. sanctions on Russia.
Although it remains unclear whether Flynn himself was being monitored for any reason, his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were intercepted because the Russians’ calls are routinely monitored.
More
The
quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
George
Orwell.
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?
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Borrego Solar Closes 2016 with 76% Growth in Megawatts Installed
SAN
DIEGO, CA -- (eSolarEnergyNews) Borrego Solar Systems, a leading
engineer, developer, installer, financier and operator of grid-tied solar
photovoltaic and energy storage systems, today announced another record year in
which it saw a 76 percent increase in total megawatts (MW) installed from 2015.
The company achieved a 100 percent increase in profits, representing its eighth
consecutive year of profitable growth.
“The tremendous growth we’ve had in 2016 is a testament to the incredible team we have assembled at Borrego Solar. The people who work here are passionate about renewable energy and dedicated to finding ways to reduce the cost of solar for our customers. We’re thankful for the trust that our customers across the country placed in us to engineer, construct and maintain high performing solar projects,” said Mike Hall, CEO of Borrego Solar. “In addition we are very grateful to our partners who worked so closely with us to make this happen. We have built relationships with a great network of subcontractors and suppliers who work with us consistently across our three core markets. We look forward to many more years of profitable growth together.”
Borrego Solar was once again among the top commercial developers nationally and held the largest market share in two of its key geographic markets, Massachusetts and New York, according to GTM Research’s Leaderboard.
“The tremendous growth we’ve had in 2016 is a testament to the incredible team we have assembled at Borrego Solar. The people who work here are passionate about renewable energy and dedicated to finding ways to reduce the cost of solar for our customers. We’re thankful for the trust that our customers across the country placed in us to engineer, construct and maintain high performing solar projects,” said Mike Hall, CEO of Borrego Solar. “In addition we are very grateful to our partners who worked so closely with us to make this happen. We have built relationships with a great network of subcontractors and suppliers who work with us consistently across our three core markets. We look forward to many more years of profitable growth together.”
Borrego Solar was once again among the top commercial developers nationally and held the largest market share in two of its key geographic markets, Massachusetts and New York, according to GTM Research’s Leaderboard.
In
Massachusetts, the company installed more than 90 MW in 2016, a 144 percent
increase from 2015, bringing its total installed capacity to 213 MW. In New
York, the company installed 28 MW, a slight uptick from 2015, bringing its
total capacity to 55 MW—an amount achieved just two years after fully entering
the market. In California, Borrego Solar installed 45 percent more MW than in
2015, bringing its total capacity in the state to more than 86 MW.
In 2017, the company will continue to focus on reducing the cost of solar for its customers. While solar is already delivering meaningful savings compared to conventional power in all of Borrego Solar’s major markets, the company's goal is to enable more market segments and geographies to benefit from low-cost renewable energy.
Energy Storage and O&M
In 2016 Borrego Solar expanded beyond solar with the launch of its energy storage division. Led by General Manager Dan Berwick and Director of Technology and Operations John duPont, the energy storage division is offering energy storage solutions to both solar and non-solar customers. The company aims to leverage storage in order to enable higher penetration of renewable energy on the grid.
In 2017, the company will continue to focus on reducing the cost of solar for its customers. While solar is already delivering meaningful savings compared to conventional power in all of Borrego Solar’s major markets, the company's goal is to enable more market segments and geographies to benefit from low-cost renewable energy.
Energy Storage and O&M
In 2016 Borrego Solar expanded beyond solar with the launch of its energy storage division. Led by General Manager Dan Berwick and Director of Technology and Operations John duPont, the energy storage division is offering energy storage solutions to both solar and non-solar customers. The company aims to leverage storage in order to enable higher penetration of renewable energy on the grid.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished January
DJIA: 19864
+92 Up NASDAQ: 5615 +95 Up. SP500: 2279 +95 Up
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