Halliburton and Baker Hughes are ditching their plans to merge after the Department of Justice moved to block the oil and gas industry giants from consolidating.
…read more
Source: Halliburton calls off plans to acquire Baker Hughes
The price of gold shot up over $60 this week. The price of silver moved up proportionally, gaining over $0.85. The mood is now palpable. The feeling in the air is that of long suffering suddenly turned to optimism. Big gains, if not the collapse of the price-suppression cartel, are now inevitable.
The headlines and articles, screaming for gold to hit $10,000 to $50,000, are pervasive. Today we won’t dwell on our favorite point that if the price of gold hits $50,000 then that means the price of the dollar has collapsed. If you own an ounce of gold, then you may have a lot more dollars. But unfortunately, each of those dollars is worth a lot less.
Today, we want to look at this new alleged precious metals bull market. Does it have legs? Are we likely to see silver hit $20, much less $1,000? We will support our analysis with a new graph to show the big picture.
Let’s look at the only true picture of supply and demand fundamentals. But first, here’s the graph of the metals’ prices.
The Prices of Gold and Silver
Next, this is a graph of the gold price measured in silver, otherwise known as the gold to silver ratio. The ratio was down slightly this week.
The Ratio of the Gold Price to the Silver Price
For each metal, we will look at a graph of the basis and cobasis overlaid with the price of the dollar in terms of the respective metal. It will make it easier to provide brief commentary. The dollar will be represented in green, the basis in blue and cobasis in red.
Here is the gold graph.
The Gold Basis and Cobasis and the Dollar Price
We actually had to expand the range of both axes. The price of the dollar fell off the bottom, currently about 24mg. The cobasis (which is our measure of the scarcity of gold) also fell off the bottom, while the basis (which is our measure of abundance) rose above the top.
As the price of gold continues to rise, it becomes more abundant. Indeed, we can hardly say “scarcity” any more with a cobasis below -1%.
Look, the supply and demand fundamentals could change at any time. However, as of this moment, the picture painted by the basis is not $10,000 or $50,000. It’s more like $1,235. More on this below.
First let’s turn to silver.
The Silver Basis and Cobasis and the Dollar Price
The first thing you’ll notice is that the red cobasis line (i.e. scarcity) has not been falling to match the falling price of the dollar measured in silver (i.e. rising price of silver, measured in dollars) the way it has in the gold chart above. However, two factors mitigate this. One, the silver cobasis is much lower on an absolute …read more
Source: Paper Gold Is Rising, Report 1 May, 2016
The latest “Game of Thrones” episode added a fresh twist to the question of whether popular character Jon Snow was dead. …read more
Source: In ‘Game of Thrones’ twist, Jon Snow is…
By Tyler Durden
Authored by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org,
The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books (“Whose Sarin?” and “The Red Line and the Rat Line”) has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles. Hersh also said that a secret agreement in 2012 was reached between the Obama Administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, to set up a sarin gas attack and blame it on Assad so that the US could invade and overthrow Assad.
“By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”
Hersh didn’t say whether these 'arms' included the precursor chemicals for making sarin which were stockpiled in Libya, but there have been multiple independent reports that Libya’s Gaddafi possessed such stockpiles, and also that the US Consulate in Benghazi Libya was operating a “rat line” for Gaddafi’s captured weapons into Syria through Turkey. So, Hersh isn’t the only reporter who has been covering this. Indeed, the investigative journalist Christoph Lehmann headlined on 7 October 2013, “Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria” and reported, on the basis of very different sources than Hersh used, that:
“Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia?s Interior Ministry.”
And, as if that weren’t enough, even the definitive analysis of the evidence that was performed by two leading US analysts, the Lloyd-Postal report, concluded that:
“The US Government’s Interpretation of the Technical Intelligence It Gathered Prior to and After the August 21 Attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.”
Obama has clearly been lying.
However, now, for the first time, Hersh has implicated Hillary Clinton directly in this 'rat line'. In an interview with Alternet.org, Hersh was asked about the then-US-Secretary-of-State’s role in the Benghazi Libya US consulate’s operation to collect weapons from Libyan stockpiles and send them through Turkey into Syria for a set-up sarin-gas attack, to be blamed on Assad in order to ‘justify’ the US invading Syria, as the US had invaded Libya to eliminate Gaddafi. Hersh said:
“That ambassador who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody, who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there’s no way somebody in that …read more
Source: Seymour Hersh Says Hillary Approved Sending Libya’s Sarin To Syrian Rebels
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By Tyler Durden
What a bunch of worry warts.
Just because the Fed and Wall Street have driven home ownership rates to an all-time low and increased the number of renters to an all-time high through their warped monetary schemes, while driving rents up at an annual pace of over 8%, why worry?
Just because your monthly rent is at an all-time high, while real median household income is at the same level it was in 1989, why worry?
Just because your healthcare costs are rising at an annual rate of 10% or more, why worry about making your rent payment?
Just because you have $40,000 of student loan debt and a waiter job at Applebees, why worry about that silly rent payment?
Just because filling up your leased SUV is 30% more expensive than it was in mid-February, why worry about rent?
Don’t worry, be happy.
Via Jim Quinn's Burning Platform blog
Source: Why So Worried?
By Tyler Durden
Just two days after Deutsche Bank fired the head of its “integrity committee”, Georg Thoma who had been originally tasked with clearing up the bank’s past scandals, because according to DB’s vice chairman Alfred Herling, Thoma had been “overzealous” and “goes too far when he demands ever wider investigations and more and more lawyers come marching up”, today the UK financial watchdog agency FCA announced that Germany’s biggest bank has “serious” and “systemic” failings in its controls against money laundering, terrorist financing and sanctions, the Financial Times reported.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), has now ordered a separate independent review, the FT reported the letter as saying. The FCA declined to comment.
In other words instad of firing it “Chief Ethics Officer” (sic), Deutsche should have ideally hired a few more because as a result of this latest probe it is most likely looking at billions more in settlement charges over the next 6 – 12 months.
“Our overall conclusion was that Deutsche Bank UK had serious AML (anti-money laundering), terrorist financing and sanctions failings which were systemic in nature,” the FCA letter, dated March 2, reportedly said.
“Effective senior management engagement and leadership on financial crime had been lacking for a considerable period of time.” And where there is effective senior management, the board makes sure to get rid of said management, because if it actually followed the law how could this megabank ever make money in Europe’s monetary twilight zone.
Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank said it is cooperating with regulators to fundamentally reform its anti-financial crime program.
“We understand the importance of this issue and are committed to and engaged in fixing it”, a company spokesman said in an emailed statement on Sunday.
This is only the latest brush-up between DB and the FCA: in late 2014, the UK regulator put Deutsche Bank’s London office under enhanced supervision owing to concern about the bank’s governance and controls. Enhanced supervision procedures are normally kept private and can follow fines. Following its review, Reuters reports, the FCA ordered a so-called skilled persons report – also called a Section 166 report – to assess remedial work Deutsche must now carry out.
Deutsche Bank’s new chief executive, John Cryan, who took over in July, has embarked on a deep restructuring of the bank, which includes an overhaul of governance procedures.
Cryan announced in November a review of its know-your-client mechanisms and its vetting procedures when taking on new clients. It has also suspended taking on new customers from 109 countries which it has defined as high risk, compared with 30 countries it had earlier classified as too risky.
The report on the FCA letter comes not only days after the abovementioned acrimonious public squabble among members of Deutsche Bank’s supervisory board and the ejection of the man heading the supervisory board’s Integrity Committee, but also just weeks after Deutsche became the first bank to settle and admit to charges that it had manipulated the gold market, and had also agreed to expose other …read more
By Tyler Durden
Presented with no comment…
Source: @SOBL1
Source: Two Americas – One Photo
A generous community helped Akbar Hossain to realize his American Dream. Now Akbar is studying law and hopes to help immigrants from low-income communities, much like his own family.
…read more
Source: My American Dream: Offering legal help to other immigrants
By Tyler Durden
Update: PR Governor Padilla has spoken…
And of course, demands a bailout…
And then threatens…
As we detailed earlier, It's D-Day in Puerto Rico. As Bloomberg reports, investors are finding little comfort in the Puerto Rico Government Development Bank’s efforts to strike a last-ditch agreement with creditors to soften the blow of a default this weekend. The bonds that mature today (May 1st) have crashed to just 20c (disastrously below the 36-cent recovery rate the commonwealth proposed in March).
It appears investors are not buying what Puerto Rico is selling and prefer to dump the bonds than hold out in hope of a 'deal'…
A default on the $422 million due today is “virtually certain,” S&P Global Ratings said April 11.
No matter which route Puerto Rico takes, credit-rating companies see a default as inevitable. Moody’s Investors Service analysts said last week that any non-payment, even if it’s agreed to by creditors, constitutes a default in their eyes. S&P Global Ratings said a distressed-debt exchange or temporarily withholding interest is synonymous to default.
But as Bloomberg reports, Puerto Rico said its Government Development Bank, which is operating in a state of emergency to preserve its dwindling cash, reached an agreement with some credit unions to delay $33 million of bond payments as the commonwealth rushes toward a potential historic default.
The pact only affects a portion of the $422 million that the bank owes on May 1. The GDB will exchange the $33 million in bonds for new debt that will mature May 1, 2017, Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla’s administration said in a statement Friday. The terms of the agreement are available to other credit unions, called cooperativas, and investors, according to the statement.
“Apart from this private exchange, GDB continues to negotiate a potential transaction related to an exchange of all of GDB’s bond indebtedness, which would require the participation of all creditors of GDB (including the cooperativas),” the administration said in the statement. “The private exchange does not affect, or take the place of, those ongoing negotiations.”
The bank is still negotiating a possible debt exchange on all of its bonds, which would require the participation of all its creditors, according a the statement. The GDB, which structured the island’s debt sales, has $5.1 billion of debt. The governor’s office said Garcia Padilla will speak to the commonwealth in a televised address Sunday at 5 p.m. New York time.
By Tyler Durden
It's D-Day in Puerto Rico. As Bloomberg reports, investors are finding little comfort in the Puerto Rico Government Development Bank’s efforts to strike a last-ditch agreement with creditors to soften the blow of a default this weekend. The bonds that mature today (May 1st) have crashed to just 20c (disastrously below the 36-cent recovery rate the commonwealth proposed in March).
It appears investors are not buying what Puerto Rico is selling and prefer to dump the bonds than hold out in hope of a 'deal'…
A default on the $422 million due today is “virtually certain,” S&P Global Ratings said April 11.
No matter which route Puerto Rico takes, credit-rating companies see a default as inevitable. Moody’s Investors Service analysts said last week that any non-payment, even if it’s agreed to by creditors, constitutes a default in their eyes. S&P Global Ratings said a distressed-debt exchange or temporarily withholding interest is synonymous to default.
But as Bloomberg reports, Puerto Rico said its Government Development Bank, which is operating in a state of emergency to preserve its dwindling cash, reached an agreement with some credit unions to delay $33 million of bond payments as the commonwealth rushes toward a potential historic default.
The pact only affects a portion of the $422 million that the bank owes on May 1. The GDB will exchange the $33 million in bonds for new debt that will mature May 1, 2017, Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla’s administration said in a statement Friday. The terms of the agreement are available to other credit unions, called cooperativas, and investors, according to the statement.
“Apart from this private exchange, GDB continues to negotiate a potential transaction related to an exchange of all of GDB’s bond indebtedness, which would require the participation of all creditors of GDB (including the cooperativas),” the administration said in the statement. “The private exchange does not affect, or take the place of, those ongoing negotiations.”
The bank is still negotiating a possible debt exchange on all of its bonds, which would require the participation of all its creditors, according a the statement. The GDB, which structured the island’s debt sales, has $5.1 billion of debt. The governor’s office said Garcia Padilla will speak to the commonwealth in a televised address Sunday at 5 p.m. New York time.
Source: Puerto Rico Default "Virtually Certain" As Bond Prices Crash To Record Low
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