Yes, it is supposedly distributed, but that does not prevent BTC trading platform MtGox from halting trading for a bit, or 12 hours as the case may be.
In other news, according to today’s leaked memo from the bearded chairman, one should move out of the BitCoin bubble and boldly go into the S&P bubble.
…The Central Bank of Cyprus (CBC) said last night however that selling the island’s gold had not been on the table.
“Such an issue has not been raised, has not been discussed and is not being discussed at the moment,” CBC spokeswoman Aliki Stylianou said.
Stylianou added that sale of the gold was a matter handled exclusively by the CBC board.
A spokesperson for the Central Bank of Cyprus told the Cyprus News Agency (CNA) that reports of the $523 million gold sale have not been, “raised, discussed or debated,” with the bank’s board of directors.
The Central Bank of Cyprus denied the gold sale after reports on Reuters said that Cyprus officials had agreed to sell around 400 million euros in excess gold reserves to contribute to the country’s bailout. Stylianou, the spokesperson for the Central Bank of Cyprus said that the gold sale was, “never discussed nor are there current or future plans to do so on the board’s agenda.” Reuters based its story on a draft report from the European Commission which assessed the nation’s financing needs.
A stunning piece of information was brought to my attention yesterday. Amid all the mainstream talk of the end of the gold bull market (and the end of the gold mining industry), something has been discretely happening behind the scenes.
Over the last 90 days without any announcement, stocks of gold held at Comex warehousesplunged by the largest figure ever on record during a single quarter since eligible record keeping began in 2001 (roughly the beginning of the bull market). See chart below.
Total drainage of physical inventories reached nearly 2 million oz.’s of gold, which at today’s prices represent roughly $3,000,000,000 dollars.
Reported U.S. food inflation has been a paltry 1.6% over the last 12 months, one of the lowest growth rates in food & beverage CPI since late 2010. However, ConvergEx’s Nick Colas notes that the severe drought in the Midwest over the summer of 2012 will likely drive up food costs this year 3-4% across the board, by the USDA’s estimates. These headline numbers, however, don’t accurately reflect the prices of the real “basket of goods” that we bring to the checkout counter every week at the grocery store. Consequently, Colas warns, the CPI report doesn’t necessarily mirror the increase in our grocery bill. Nor does it take into accountdifferent food choices (e.g. healthy vs. junk food), farm prices, or demographics, all of which the USDA publishes separately. The actual, visible inflation at the checkout counter may lead the American consumer to think – perhaps inaccurately – that overall CPI is rising or falling at a similar pace. For a more detailed, accurate reflection of food CPI, then, we have to aggregate all of these indicators to see how they compare to overall CPI. In short, inflationary expectations may well be set to rise dramatically in 2013: “shopping cart inflation” was upwards of 1.3% last month, almost double the 0.7% overall CPI.
Think the great BitCoin drama is over? After plunging by over 60% intraday, touching $100 from an all time high of $265 earlier, BitCoin was just getting started, posting a just as epic rebound to $200 in mere hours… before tumbling once more to $125… before rebounding again to $180… before sliding to $140… and so on. As the vomit-inducing sequence above hints, merely following every twist and turn of the real time tragicomedy that is the minute chart of BTC is a full-time job. And with the bulk of assorted BTC price charts DDoSed into oblivion, or merely down due to record traffic, the only remaining real-time chart may be the following from Clark Moody: we suggest using 1 Minute resolution. Perhaps what is most fascinating, is that unlike regular stock, FX or commodity charts which are largely dominated by robots, algos and other electronic traders, the trading in BTC is purely carbon-form based. So for those who enjoy some seriously hypnotic after hours undulations, this chart’s for you.
But the real story here isn’t that I accurately made this dire prediction less than 24 hours before it took place; the real story is that this crash was almost certainly caused by a covert central bank “stress test” of the pliability of the bitcoin market. That’s all explained below. (This is a Natural News exclusive. Nobody else has realized this yet…)
Time to rename it BitCrash… or will it stage an amazing recovery? Alas, for this particular bubble, there are no NYSE circuit breakers nor is there a Federal Reserve-mandated “plunge protection team.” And why should there be? The central banks hate all currency alternatives. Firehats: on, especially since the volume is still relatively lite.
Bitcoin is undergoing a classic correction after quintupling in price over the past 30 days. The currency, which was trading as high as $265 earlier today on Mt. Gox, plummeted and is now trading at around $150.
There was a brief period of confusion for a while when Goldman didn’t have clear muppet-stomping trades on the book, and those who wished to frontrun the Goldman prop desk (and do the opposite of the muppet flow) were stuck furiously scratching their head. And granted while it’s not a “Stolper”, tonight we got two gifts (in the parlance of Whitney Tilson) with Goldman first telling its clients to sell gold following Goldman’s lowering of its price target for the yellow metal (which as always means the hedge fund known as Goldman is buying what its clients are selling). And then, moments ago, we also learned that Goldman is also selling the 10 Year, which it advise muppets to buy.
It seem like it was only yesterday that Bitcoin crossed $200 for the first time. Oh wait, it was. It is now 24 hours later, and as parabolic rises imply, it is only “fair” that the price of the electronic currency (expressed in the same currency that incidentally can be created out of thin air and is used to transact for BTC) is some 25% higher, or well over $250…. In one day.
As before we will merely continue to watch in quiet amazement as the parabolic chart gets parabolic-er, but we will suggest this: those who absolutely must chase this runaway chart should not “invest” one penny more than they are comfortable losing, and as we said before, “This leaves us with the question, which line item on the Fed’s Balance Sheet is ‘Virtual Currency Transactions’… what better way to destroy an up and coming currency competitor than to blow a bubble in it and explode it?” Because the fervor for BTC now will only turn to all out loathing and disgust if and when one of the major buyers in the illiquid market decided to take out all stops to the downside (if only Mt Gox had stops that is) and send the price of BTC, expressed in paper money and thus analyzed not as a currency but as an asset, plunging.
Curious why every bank and their grandmother, and most recently Goldman today, has been lining up to push the price of gold as low as possible? Here’s why:
CYPRUS TO SELL 400 MLN EUROS WORTH OF GOLD RESERVES TO FINANCE PART OF ITS BAILOUT – TROIKA DOCUMENTS – RTRS
Or about 10 tons of gold. But… the bailout was prefunded and there was no need to provide any additional cash? What happened: was the deposit outflow discovered to have been even greater than the worst case scenario and thus Cyprus needed even more cash? As for the buyers? We will venture a guess: central banks buying at the lows.
Finally: congratulations Cypriots. You are now handing over your gold for the one time, unbeatable opportunity to remain a vassal state to the Eurozone. But at least you have your €.
The good news: Cyprus will have at least another 4 or so tons after selling the 10 demanded now, before the Troika kindly requests that Cypriot citizens sell a kidney or two to pay for the ongoing deposit outflow from its insolvent banks, and indirectly, the endless bailout of the Euro.
Helmut Kohl, Germany’s former chancellor, has admitted that he acted like a “dictator” to bring in the single currency to the country, otherwise he “would have lost” had he held a referendum.
“We would have lost a referendum on the introduction of the euro,” said former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl
In an interview conducted for a journalist’s PhD thesis, Germany’s longest-serving postwar chancellor said that he would have lost any popular vote on the euro by an overwhelming majority.
“I knew that I could never win a referendum in Germany,” he said. “We would have lost a referendum on the introduction of the euro. That’s quite clear. I would have lost and by seven to three.”
The interview was conducted by Jens Peter Paul, a German journalist in 2002, the year when the Deutsche Mark was replaced by euro notes and coins, but has only been published now.
In it, Mr Kohl describes adopting the euro as an emblem of the European project, which he said had prevented war on the continent. Born in 1930, Mr Kohl’s politics were shaped by his country’s history in the 1930s and 1940s; his final years in power were focused on promoting European unity.
In the interview, he said: “If a Chancellor is trying to push something through, he must be a man of power. And if he’s smart, he knows when the time is ripe. In one case – the euro – I was like a dictator … The euro is a synonym for Europe. Europe, for the first time, has no more war.”
Mr Kohl justified overcoming the German public’s reluctance to relinquish the Deutsche Mark by saying that democratic politics had to be based on convictions rather than the ebb and flow of elections.
The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.
The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.
And that brings us to a real unemployment rate of about 23%:
The current job-creation numbers are meaningfully below the level we might expect during a period of record corporate earnings and the reaching of new peaks in the major stock market indices.
Let’s go to the videotape –
The unemployment rate is 7.7%. But, there is another 0.6% of discouraged workers,(about 800,000) mainly the young, minorities and those without the all-necessary high school diploma. Another 0.9% are only marginally employed (whatever that means) and have mostly stopped looking for a job recently. More crushing is the 5.1% of the workforce most impacted by the 2008 downturn, who are working only part-time and would prefer to have a full-time position. That 5.1% part-time workers total 8 million people, who mostly are having trouble making ends meet and most likely have no health plan from their employer, according to Bob Eisenbreis, vice chairman and chief monetary economist at Cumberland Advisers, a New York-based investment firm that makes useful comments on the economy.
These numbers added together suggest that the true unemployment level– when part-time workers are included– is 14.3%–meaning that one in seven of every potential full-time employee in the U.S. economy is not able to earn a proper living wage–and thereby contribute to the snails-pace of economic growth.To my way of thinking the dropout rate is the most perplexing, because how do these people survive? Moreover, the percentage of people employed is only 58.5%, down from 61%, the level hit in 2008 when Obama was first elected–and to be fair before the meltdown on Wall Street. And the jump in first-time unemployment claims last week was the highest level since last November.
Did you know that there are thousands upon thousands of homeless people that are living underground beneath the streets of major U.S. cities? It is happening in Las Vegas, it is happening in New York City and it is even happening in Kansas City. As the economy crumbles, poverty in the United States is absolutely exploding and so is homelessness. In addition to the thousands of “tunnel people” living under the streets of America, there are also thousands that are living in tent cities, there are tens of thousands that are living in their vehicles and there are more than a million public school children that do not have a home to go back to at night. The federal government tells us that the recession “is over” and that “things are getting better”, and yet poverty and homelessness in this country continue to rise with no end in sight. So what in the world are things going to look like when the next economic crisis hits?
When I heard that there were homeless people living in a network of underground tunnels beneath the streets of Kansas City, I was absolutely stunned. I have relatives that live in that area. I never thought of Kansas City as one of the more troubled cities in the United States.
The jobs recovery is a complete and total myth. The percentage of the working age population in the United States that had a job in March 2013 was exactly the same as it was all the way back in March 2010. In addition, as you will see below, there are now more than 101 million working age Americans that do not have a job. But even though the employment level in the United States has consistently remained very low over the past three years, the Obama administration keeps telling us that unemployment is actually going down. In fact, they tell us that the unemployment rate has declined from a peak of 10.0% all the way down to 7.6%. And they tell us that in March the unemployment rate fell by 0.1% even though only 88,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy. But it takes at least 125,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. So how in the world are they coming up with these numbers? Well, the reality is that the entire decline in the unemployment rate over the past three years can be accounted for by the reduction in size of the labor force. In other words, the Obama administration is getting unemployment to go down by pretending that millions upon millions of unemployed Americans simply do not want jobs anymore. We saw this once again in March. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 600,000 Americans dropped out of the labor market during that month alone. That pushed the labor force participation rate down to 63.3%, which is the lowest it has been in more than 30 years. So please don’t believe the hype. The sad truth is that there has been no jobs recovery whatsoever.
In more than a dozen states, legislators are pushing for a movement back to a world where gold is considered money. As Bloomberg reports, lawmakers in Arizona are poised to follow Utah, which authorized bullion for currency in 2011. Similar bills are advancing in Kansas, South Carolina and other states to recognize gold and silver coins as legal tender. “The legislation is about signaling discontent with monetary policy and about what Ben Bernanke is doing,” which seems confirmed by the recent shift in Texas to bring its gold back from the New York bank warehouse. The new measures would give “people the option of using money that won’t lose any purchasing power to inflation,” one supporter of the bill explained, with another adding, “there is a fear that the government, or Bernanke in particular and the Federal Reserve, is pursuing a policy that will lead to the collapse of the dollar.” The U.S. Constitution bars states from coining money and also forbids them from making anything except gold and silver coin tender for paying debts. Advocates say that opens the door for the states to allow bullion as legal tender.
Distrust of the Federal Reserve and concern that U.S. dollars may become worthless are fueling a push in more than a dozen states to recognize gold and silver coins as legal tender.
Lawmakers in Arizona are poised to follow Utah, which authorized bullion for currency in 2011. Similar bills are advancing in Kansas, South Carolina and other states.
…
“The legislation is about signaling discontent with monetary policy and about what Ben Bernanke is doing,” said Gatch, who studies alternative currencies at the Edmond, Oklahoma-based school. “There is a fear that the government, or Bernanke in particular and the Federal Reserve, is pursuing a policy that will lead to the collapse of the dollar. That’s what is behind it.”
Perhaps the best measure to gauge the European recovery is by the soaring number of companies going bust, because only from this perspective is Europe finally “fixed.” As Reuters reports citing a report by Axesor, a record 2,564 companies filed for “insolvency proceedings”, a more palatable version of the word bankruptcy, in the first quarter – an increase of 10% from Q4 and up a whopping 45% from Q1 2012. The reasons given: “tight credit conditions and meager demand.” Or in other words: no actual cash flow to fund demand for products and services. Obviously it will take some truly phenomenal massaging and manipulation to represent GDP as rising in this environment, but we are confident the Spanish authorities are already on it, and somehow the Spanish pension fund, already 97% filled with Spanish government bonds, will somehow have a finger in yet another completely unbelievable economic print which will fool most of the algos most of the time on flashing red Bloomberg headlines.
“Most Spanish businesses did not prepare for a crisis this big or this long, which could be a determining factor,” said Javier Ramos-Juste, head of economic studies at Axesor.
Spain has been in its second recession in five years for the past 18 months and unemployment is more than 25 percent.
“I need to hire more people, but the government won’t let me,” said my friend, an internet entrepreneur in France, one of the intrepid figures still slugging it out over there—in a country whose relentlessly deteriorating unemployment problem is gnawing at the very fabric of society.
We spent an hour and a half on Skype, talking about topics that were a bit, let’s say, delicate under the current regime in France. So he and his company, both well known, will remain unnamed. He has been successful in the startup sense: his company has had two solid rounds of funding from venture capital investors. VCs are another phenomenon that hasn’t gone extinct in France yet, testimony to the mind-boggling human capacity to adapt and survive no matter how hostile the environment.
Data are hard to deal with when your vision is on the wrong side of it. Those wanting to claim there is a recovery underway are having just this problem. These people either have no understanding of economics or they believe falsely that they can inflate “animal spirits” with their hyped reports and that will initiate a recovery.
There will not be an economic recovery given the economic policies of this country. A recovery is not unlikely, I would argue it is closer to impossible if not impossible. The reasons for this position are not complicated. In short, the nation has become an out-of-control welfare state that is rapidly destroying the incentives to work or create jobs. Government policies appear designed toward this end. One doesn’t need a high IQ or an advanced degree in economics to understand the problems.
There are innumerable factors responsible for the decline of the US. Only three important ones will convey why the economy is dying:
Have you ever done something really stupid, just because you were in love? Something you look back on and cringe, thinking “why on earth did I do that?”
As reported late on Friday, just as the market closed, the Portuguese constitutional court decided that several provisions of the country’s 2013 budget were not constitutional. According to the high court, cuts in wages and pensions of public employees were unfair (there’s that word again) because they targeted only the public sector. The court rejected plans to cut one of the 14 paychecks that public workers usually get each year and to slash 6.4% from pensions for retirees. This coincided with the government warning that the court’s decision would put into question the country’s ability to fulfill its €78 billion international bailout program, which in turn would send bondholders of Portuguese sovereign debt scrambling for the exits as suddenly the country may find itself in the ECB’s “dunce” corner, with Draghi preparing to pull a “Berlusconi” on a government which can’t even whip its judicial branch in line. However, of more immediate concern is how will the government now plug a hole of up to €1.3 billion in its €5.3 billion 2013 budget. A solution has, luckily, presented itself:bypass the unconstitutional provisions by paying government workers not in cash, but in government bills! From the WSJ:
The Portuguese government is considering a plan to pay public workers and pensioners one month of their salary in treasury bills rather than cash after a high court ruled out wage cuts, a person familiar with the situation said Sunday.
Lately, when it comes to obtaining an accurate sense of the true state of the US economy, it is as difficult if not more than analyzing the openly-manipulated Chinese data. On one hand, the Fed-juiced market, which has lost its discounting powers, no longer reflects the current or future economic (or corporate) fundamentals, on the other, massive seasonal aberrations, whether purposeful or accidental, have made a mockery of any data series, be it jobs, manufacturing, retail sales, or housing. On the other, the administration – still stuck in the worst economic “recovery” since the Great Depression – is desperate to telegraph an improving economy, most evident in the months leading up to the presidential election, which makes taking any data at face value problematic and naive at best. Yet even the openly-contradicting Chinese data manipulation has its Achilles heel in the form of monthly electricity consumption (and to a lesser extent, production) updates.
So what is the US equivalent of Chinese electricity consumption data? We believe it may be the little-tracked, and thus not nearly as “adjusted” weekly updates from the Energy Information Administration, whose data on barrels of US product supplied of both total petroleum products and just gasoline are as indicative of the true state of the energy-hungry beating heart of the US economy as any other data set, and is likely a far more accurate representation of what is really going on between the lines.
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