Here's my summary of the key news overnight in 90 seconds at 9 am, including news markets showed some resilience overnight.
In the US, housing starts climbed in March to the highest level in almost five years, propelled by a surge in multifamily building and are now growing at over 1 million extra homes a year. And US consumer prices declined 0.2% in March following a 0.7% rise in February as the cost of petrol fell sharply and food prices were unchanged.
Oil is down 1% today, and Brent crude has fallen below US$100/barrel. Gold has bounced up minorly but is still only at US$1,369/oz. Aluminium prices are holding, but copper is down sharply again.
Equities bounced back after a steep decline the day before, following solid corporate earnings reports and that drop in conumer prices. The Dow is up almost 1% in mid-day trade.
The IMF reduced its global growth forecast and urged European policy makers to use "aggressive" monetary policy as a second year of contraction leaves the euro area’s recovery lagging behind the rest of the world.
European politicians approved major new rules on Tuesday to cap the amount that bankers at the region's largest institutions can receive in bonuses.
The latest Fonterra dairy price auction showed only a tiny rise overall, consolidating the sharp price increases we have seen in the previous three auctions. However, ingredients other than milk powders did well, catching up with the previous jump in powder prices.
The Kiwi dollar starts today at 85.1 USc, 81.9 AUc, the Japanese yen has risen again to 83, and our TWI is at 78.0.
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6 Comments
Gold...buy buy buy oops no wait..sell sell sell...
"So the timeline here is easy to follow. The bullion banks:
1.Amass a huge short position early in the game
2.Begin telling everyone to go short (wink, wink) to get things moving along in the right direction by sowing doubt in the minds of the longs
3.Begin testing the late night markets for depth by initiating mini raids (that also serve to let experienced traders know that there's an elephant or two in the room)
4.Wait for the right moment and then open the floodgates to dump such an overwhelming amount of paper gold and silver into the market that lower prices are the only possible result
5.Close their positions for massive gains and then act as if they had made a really prescient market call
6.Await their big bonus checks and wash, rinse, repeat at a later date"
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article39982.html
Further on the dumping of paper contracts in precious metals.....
"Five hundred tons of paper gold contracts were sold dumped into the market on Friday. That is a lot of gold. In short, some people sold gold like they had a gun to their heads, in such a quantity and with such ferocity that the likelihood of their being a for-profit seller is right up there with my chances of winning this week's Masters". John Mauldin
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/thomaspascoe/100024081/the-gold-pr…
Smack Down Time
http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/smack-down-time.html#more
Howard Kunstler says it so well:
What a humdinger last week was in a money world that is chugging toward maximum velocity and turbulence. Readers know (and may be sick of hearing) that I'm allergic to conspiracy theories, but my allergy is not absolute or total and there are excellent reasons to believe that the smack down of gold and silver was an orchestrated event. By whom? So far, in the opaque realm of paper gold sales, we don't know, except that it was a 500-ton dump that set off the larger skid, and it is even quite possible, as one anonymous wag put it on James Sinclair's website, that the buyer and seller were virtually the same entity -- meaning that the probable naked short transaction only amounted to a mere bookkeeping jot when all was said and done. ----- I hate the term The Powers That Be, with its odors of recycled paranoia and lumpen extremism, but signs of collusion abounded last week. First, on Wednesday, Goldman Sachs issued an advisory to short gold as the price flirted with $1600/oz. Then on Thursday, The New York Times planted a front-page story headlined: "GOLD, LONG A SECURE INVESTMENT, LOSES ITS LUSTER." The story featured a quote by supreme market manipulator and world-class schmikler George Soros: "Gold was destroyed as a safe haven, proved to be unsafe," Mr. Soros said in an interview last week with The South China Morning Post of Hong Kong. "Because of the disappointment, most people are reducing their holdings of gold." Well, there you have it. Soros sez: Gold = shit. If you get some on your shoe, scrape it off. All that set the stage for the Friday smack down. Notice how falling gold and silver prices make the US dollar look good -- it takes fewer dollars to buy more precious metal. The dollar must therefore be sound!
"Stephen Smith, former director of the failed Belgrave Finance, has pleaded guilty to 25 charges of fraud related to the collapse of the company in 2008....................Smith has been remanded in custody pending a bail hearing later today and will appear for sentencing on June 7..... $22 million to about 1,000 investors. It was placed in liquidation in April 2010." herald
The postie got 18 months...what should Smith get?
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