Here's my 90 seconds at 9 am summary of the key news over the weekend in association with Bank of New Zealand, including news Greece has yet to sign a debt restructuring deal with its creditors over the weekend.
Greece had hoped to do a deal with private lenders for a near 70% haircut, but has not finalised a deal, as of this morning.
It wanted to do the deal before a key meeting of European ministers later tonight.
Greece needs to find a solution well before it runs out of money on March 20.
Market nervousness about the euro crisis resurfaced late on Friday as the Greek talks with creditors dragged on, dragging European stocks down slightly.
Sources close to the creditors and the Greek government told Bloomberg that progress has been made, but a deal has not been finalised.
Some fear a default on March 20 would trigger an uncontrolled Greek exit from the Euro, triggering financial chaos across Europe's financial and banking systems.
However, Europe's banking system and its bond markets are in a more stable shape than they were before the European Central Bank printed €489 billion and lent it to European banks at interest rates of around 1% for three years just before Christmas.
Many of those banks, who had pledged government-guaranteed (but less than robust collateral) to get the loans, then promptly used the ECB money to buy Southern European bonds.
This pushed down European government bond yields and has been partly responsible for a rally on stock markets and in growth currencies so far this calendar year.
The New Zealand dollar remained firm over 80.6 US cents this morning, despite low inflation figures and talk of flat to falling interest rates in both Australia and New Zealand.
No chart with that title exists.
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More interesting news on the oil front, this time ethanol.
>>>>
Data on Thursday showed US ethanol production falling for a second straight week last week, by 3,000 barrels a day, although, at 941,000 barrels a day, output remained historically high.
US ethanol stocks rose 4.1% to 19.54m barrels, the highest since June.
in the same article on farm costs are up,
>>>
Ethanol question
The survey added that farmers faced rises in input costs averaging 7.2% this year, well ahead of inflation, although Creighton failed to expand on the forecast.
http://www.agrimoney.com/news/warning-over-us-land-bubble-as-price-grow…
Market Fears?
It's just a collection of wide-eyed gamblers, when you get down to it, that 'market'.
The real momentum in the real world is slow and inexorable, trying to read things from 'the market' is akin to judging when the ship will go down, from the number of passengers mustering on E Deck. This can only be an extend and pretend in the face of an increasing - and permanent - underwrite shortfall.
And the longer it goes on, given the underwrite depletion-rates, the more it is irreversable. Most of my type, expected a bumpy saw-tooth, until after two or three bumps, the system came apart/froze.
AJ - ethanol will be less profitable in comparison to food production, but ethanol is an 'at the margin' local fuel contributor - this is 'cake and eat it too' material.
You still need fuel to make food - 27 calories of oil to one calorie of food - and logic suggests that ethanol wasn't encouraged because of a glut of 'conventional'.
While I agree with your sentiments, it is interesting to note the current hype around low-energy nuclear reactions LENR, especially the 'E-cat' being touted by Rossi. Should his invention work as he says then this will revolutionize things as we know it. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.
- http://technologygateway.nasa.gov/media/CC/lenr/lenr.html
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
Eurozone burns money while the banks fiddle their balance sheets 'Nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/9030025/Eurozon…
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moraymint
Like one M A Rothschild once said, "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes her laws".The central bankers and the whole banking elite are in control. Civil unrest across Europe will be upon us with a vengeance, within a decade, at the most. Our political class has lost the plot (to the bankers) and, having done so, is now slowly but surely relinquishing the compliance and consent of its citizens.
No doubt an historian will put me right, but it's my understanding that no civilisation has ever before mired itself in so much private and state sponsored debt. To make matters worse, the end of mankind's era of cheap oil coupled with other natural resource limits mean that we stand next to no chance of returning to Industrial Age rates of economic growth and, hence, growing our way out of debt. We're in uncharted territory economically and, therefore, socially. Life over the next 10 - 20 years will be truly like we've never experienced before.
It really is just a matter of time before this financial engineering (shenanigans) madness descends into socio-economic chaos. The dynamo of our society and its economy - the decent, honest, hard-working middle class - is being absolutely screwed by all of this. Perhaps an informed and increasingly angry middle-class will mean that the coming years will not be a good time to be a banker or a politician.
We should not tolerate, for a moment longer, what's going on here.
As Liam says, "Are the politicians reining in the banks, putting them in their place and protecting public interests? Are they heck." So, why should we have to tolerate our political caste behaving in this way? Whose side are they on exactly?
Like I've said on theses pages time and again: the gulf between the rulers and the ruled grows wider by the day in this country and in the countries of Europe. This is not a healthy situation for any society, still less a whole continent.
The most worrying thing is that there is not the slightest sign of recognition of this dysfunctionality of politics and governance amongst our political elite. They continue to exist in a world apart from thee and me.
Perhaps this is because politicians are reliant on bankers for the stupendous amounts of state sponsored debt (exacerbated by the increasing propensity for the politico-banking mafia to sanction the printing of money) that the political class has been tapping for decades to buy votes?
The Rothschilds have been right all along, of course. Now, we're about to reap the consequences
It's all a perception game out there: Always has been
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/market-data/6297132/OCR-signals-act-as-…
More wonderful (long and exhausting) detail on the pile of dog turds the Euro has created. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/subordination-101-walkthru-sovereign-bond…
Since Germany has now very effectively bankrupted those countries foolish enough to share in the Euro folly with it, I do not understand why Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and even Germany's favourite lap dog La France don't just tell them to sod off.
Silly, silly, silly lot, it seems Mrs T was right about the Euro after all.
I realise I may have been a tad too succinct in my reference to Mrs T and the Euro.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100064330/margaret-thatch…
There is a lot more.
BBC defends financiers Last Thursday BBC Newsnight broadcasted an analytical piece about the nature of capitalism.
The issues raised were profound: capitalism as a free market system with seemingly no alternative, "responsible" v "irresponsible capitalism" and so on. It was very insightful.
However all these issues were discussed in the context of the ongoing financial and economic crisis. It was presented as if the current financial mess was a result of a failed system, the current version of capitalism. The truth is much simpler. Indeed it is very basic.
In the same way as the economic system in Albania had nothing to do with the criminally-engineered pyramid schemes which collapsed and caused a huge financial mess in Albania in 1996 - 1997 but much more to do with pure fraud, the current financial mess and resulting the economic crisis have nothing to do with capitalism, socialism, "too greedy capitalism", "irresponsible capitalism" or any economic system or indeed any legal human behaviour. The current financial ills highlighted by the BBC are the result of a huge fraud engineered by the financial industry which is exactly the same mechanism as the one employed in Albania in 1996 - 1997, i.e. it is a pyramid scheme from both a technical and a legal standpoint.
To put this into a small business perspective: it would be the same as discovering a shop where all the money is being stolen from the till by thieving employees and discussing the management practises of a shop owner (the taxpayers for the banking system) or the greedy irresponsibility and the unethical behaviour of the thieving staff (the bankers). Such discussion is obviously important but in the case of our hypothetical situation the shop workers would have been prosecuted for theft. In the real, much more grave situation currently facing us, no-one has seen fit to prosecute the thieving shop workers. The dishonest behaviour continues, under the watching gaze of the powers that be and the public at large, with no-one seemingly aware that any kind of crime is being committed. If the justice system is to mean anything it cannot be more lenient to financiers than it is to ordinary shop assistants.
A discussion about capitalism v socialism, or "responsible capitalism"v "irresponsible capitalism" is generally important. Society will always be looking for an equilibrium that will give it prosperity. However with the BBC Newsnight broadcast, it was the context and timing that mattered. And in this context the discussion was not only vacuous but it was actually a smokescreen. It created an impression that the fraudulent criminal activities (in the technical and legal sense of these words) of the financial industry were not what they were but somehow a result of some systemic failure. The behaviour was maybe irresponsible, maybe immoral, maybe a result of greed, but not a crime. And here is the key to BBC propaganda: you can despise people for being greedy, unethical or irresponsible. They may even be considered as repulsive. But you cannot bring them to justice.
Therefore one cannot consider the programme as simple hogwash. It was in fact, very soft propaganda (therefore quite likely to be effective) which will help, the financial criminals who caused such damage to the economy and brought massive misery to millions, to escape justice. And the BBC seems to be doing a good job of doing this, evading a discussion of the most important historical event that is happening in front of our eyes, i.e. the liberal western democracy, as we know it, is on the ropes.
"Department of Building and Housing sector capability deputy chief executive Alison Geddes said the programme of work being introduced over the coming months would raise standards in the sector while doing away with unnecessary red tape".herald
They have done it by producing new necessary red tape...wider and redder than before.
So from March 1 ...are peasants allowed to replace leaky sheets of steel on their own roof...or does this task need an engineers report , architects drawings and a 4 week delay while a council dreams up ways to delay it longer and charge more to rubber stamp the consent....
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