Steve Bull's Blog, page 1304
September 25, 2017
The Demise Of The Dollar As We Know It: “A Break Is Coming… On A Worldwide Basis”
The significance of the shift taking place on a geo-political basis to unseat the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency cannot be understated. It is, by all means, a complete upending of the financial and economic systems as we have come to know them. According to Keith Neumeyer, the Chairman of First Mining Finance and Chief Executive Officer of First Majestic Silver, the world’s purest silver producing mining company, the move is already taking place with countries like China, Russia, Venezuela and Iran already beginning to trade commodities with Yuan, Rubles and gold.
Amid a recent announcement about developments in the gold and silver mining industry discussed in the following interview with SGT Report, Neumeyer, who previously called out, in very public fashion, the manipulation of precious metalsby a small concentration of market players, says that the global currency wars currently playing out on the monetary battlefield will lead to significant price increases in the world’s most trusted hard assets of last resort.
We’re seeing Chinese and Russians trading in gold for oil… there’s a real move on a worldwide basis… There is a break coming…
It has to… It’s just time… The United States is a very powerful country… it has a very powerful military and they want to keep the system that’s in place because a lot of people have made a lot of money in the current system…
I think as the world develops and gets off oil, I think that’s going to help facilitate a break from the Petrodollar system… and everything that’s going on in the world is very supportive of much, much higher gold prices… I do contend that silver is going to far exceed the move in gold.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Silencing of Dissent
The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and purveyors of “fake news.”
No dominant class can long retain control when the credibility of the ideas that justify its existence evaporates. It is forced, at that point, to resort to crude forms of coercion, intimidation and censorship. This ideological collapse in the United States has transformed those of us who attack the corporate state into a potent threat, not because we reach large numbers of people, and certainly not because we spread Russian propaganda, but because the elites no longer have a plausible counterargument.
The elites face an unpleasant choice. They could impose harsh controls to protect the status quo or veer leftward toward socialism to ameliorate the mounting economic and political injustices endured by most of the population. But a move leftward, essentially reinstating and expanding the New Deal programs they have destroyed, would impede corporate power and corporate profits. So instead the elites, including the Democratic Party leadership, have decided to quash public debate. The tactic they are using is as old as the nation-state—smearing critics as traitors who are in the service of a hostile foreign power. Tens of thousands of people of conscience were blacklisted in this way during the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s. The current hyperbolic and relentless focus on Russia, embraced with gusto by “liberal” media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC, has unleashed what some have called a virulent “New McCarthyism.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Going Off the Grid to Cost Others
GOING OFF THE GRID TO COST OTHERS
Victorian power company AusNet Services is sharing evidence of parliamentary pushing to update the industry that is ever-changing and incredibly innovative. AusNet is one of the five distributing companies of electricity in Victoria and covers the outer northern and eastern suburbs, as well as the eastern portion of the state. AusNet says that a Federal Parliamentary committee is attempting to modernize Australia’s electricity grid, which is causing havoc amongst some customers.
Many households are moving onto more environmentally friendly and long-term cost-effective strategies when it comes to consuming energy. Some of the popular alternatives are battery storage and solar power. The move from grid connection to unconnected electric distributions is being called grid defection. The issue at hand is that this grid defection is going to raise the cost for those that choose to, or need to, stay apart of the grid. The rise in cost will stem from recovering costs to operate the system from fewer customers. This will particularly affect those residents that don’t have the monetary means to switch from grid use to the up-front costly alternatives. The low-income households will suffer the most from this push to modernization.
Aside from those who cannot afford to break away from the grid, some residents won’t have the opportunity at all to move to alternative electricity distributors because of its lack of feasibility. The company denies that they are sending these messages to the public for their own good, but claim that they want to inform the public and allow them to make decisions based on the greater good of the community. Alister Parker of AusNet says that the company expects future advancements regarding solar power and electric cars to be adopted by consumers, but not in the way that is going to cost the less fortunate half of the community.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Chaz Peling: Backup Power Solutions
Be prepared if the lights suddenly go out
Over the past month, the Americas have sustained extensive damage from 3 major Atlantic hurricanes and 2 major earthquakes in Mexico. In terms of destroyed houses and businesses, ruined cars, and lost lives, it has been an extremely costly couple of weeks.
One common factor present in the aftermath of each of these disasters has been the loss of electrical power. Harvey knocked out power for 250,000 people. Irma topped 4 million. Maria has deprived 3.5 million people of electricity in Puerto Rico alone. The earthquakes in Mexico City and Oaxaca resulted in blackouts for well over 5 million.
Without electricity, our capability to conduct our modern way of life becomes immediately and severely curtailed. Communication instantly stops. Food quickly spoils. Sundown puts an end to all activity. Air conditioning and water well pumps no longer function.
And as prolonged blackouts often go hand-in-hand with gas shortages, disaster victims are often truly forced into a “dark ages” lifestyle.
This week, Chaz Peling, founder of Sol Solutions, joins the podcast to share his expertise on residential backup power options. The good news is that recent technology advancements offer more robust and affordable solutions than ever before. The bad news is, you have to invest the effort to procure an install them in advance ofthe next crisis for them to be of use.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
U.S. Shale’s Most Productive Play May Peak By 2021
The world’s top shale play, the Permian, has shown remarkable resilience amid the lower-for-longer oil prices. Permian production has grown and should continue its rise into the foreseeable future.
Technological advances spurred the rapid rise of the Permian, but as drillers are set to continuously develop the hottest U.S. shale play, they may soon start to test the region’s geological limits.
If E&P companies can’t overcome the geological constraints with tech breakthroughs, Permian production could peak in 2021, putting more than 1.5 million bpd of future production in question, and potentially significantly influencing oil prices, energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie said in an analysis this week.
According to EIA’s September Drilling Productivity Report, the Permian will pump 2.580 million bpd of oil this month. Crude oil output is set to rise by another 55,000-bpd next month, to 2.635 million bpd. The Permian, as usual, contributes the most to the expected production growth out of the top U.S. shale plays.
Wood Mackenzie’s report, “Geology vs. technology: how sustainable is Permian tight oil growth?”, modeled three scenarios for the Permian’s production. Under the reference-case scenario, Permian production is set to rise to more than 5 million bpd in 2025. Peak production could increase by 500,000 bpd over WoodMac’s base case in a modeling scenario where new technology adoption accelerates more aggressively, the consultancy said. However, “downside risks related to tighter well spacing and well-on-well interference could bring peak Permian production forward by 4 years compared to the upside case—putting more than 1.5 million b/d of future production in question,” Wood Mackenzie reports.
The analysis points out that many other shale plays prove that the initial years of development are typically the easiest. In order to keep well performance on par with the initial flows, drillers need more tech breakthroughs “to keep their barrels at the bottom of the cost curve.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
You Can Only Choose One: Cheap Oil or a Weak Dollar
When the price of oil rises to the point of pain, just remember the handy-dandy discount mechanism: a much stronger US dollar.
Glance at this chart of the trade-weighted U.S. dollar, and note the swing highs and lows in the price of oil per barrel around each peak and trough. You can look up historical inflation-adjusted prices of oil in USD on this handy chart: Crude Oil Prices – 70 Year Historical Chart (macrotrends.net)
The correlation isn’t perfect, of course. Oil was relatively cheap between 1986 and 2003, due to a relative abundance of supply as Saudi Arabia and new fields ramped up production, with two periods of extreme price action: a brief spike higher in 1990 preceding the First Gulf War, and a collapse to $17 in the 1998 Asian Contagion financial crisis.
Geopolitical crises, wars and supply shocks will move oil prices regardless of the value of the USD. That said, it’s clear that absent such shocks, there is a strong correlation between a stronger USD and lower oil prices (in USD of course) and a weaker dollar and higher oil prices.
The reason why is straightforward: if the dollar gains purchasing power against other currencies, it buys more oil for each dollar.
Conversely, when the USD weakens, its purchasing power declines and it takes more USD to buy an imported barrel of oil.
(Note that the price of domestically produced oil is largely set on the global marketplace. West Texas crude oil may be a few dollars less per barrel than Brent crude oil, but if the global price skyrockets, so does the price of US-produced crude.)
Since oil and gas are the essential resources of the industrial economy, the price paid by consumers and commercial users matter.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Climate Armageddon Revisited
It was only five years ago that Scientific American published this article: Climate Armageddon: How the World’s Weather Could Quickly Run Amok, d/d May 25, 2012. The subheading to that article read: “Climate scientists think a perfect storm of climate ‘flip’ could cause massive upheavals in a matter of years.” Well now….
That 2012 article also explained how the eminent British scientist James Lovelock (98) switched allegiance from his original theory of Gaia, which states that Gaia (Earth) will always compensate for changes in climate by natural occurrence, a self-correcting mechanism, not too hot, not too cold, not to worry. That was back in the 1970s.
Contrariwise, thirty-plus years later in 2006 Lovelock rejected his own theory, ominously stating: “I have to tell you, as members of the Earth’s family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilization, are in grave danger.” (Published in The Independent in 2006), Ibid.
Thus, Lovelock rejected his own Gaia hypothesis of a self-regulating planet and embraced the “flip” school of thought, which refers to dynamic systems or mathematics that describe things that tend to change suddenly, difficult to predict as to timing. Ergo, this refers to the fearsome tipping point, when the climate system suddenly turns wacky like a wild beast poked with a stick (Broecker), self-reinforcing its destructive path, hands-free, no stopping its ruinous behavior! This may already be happening on a scale that is downright scary in fact singularly scary because it’s so soon. This is not normal. The planet is on Speed!
Massive hurricanes (Harvey, Irma, Maria) and torrential flooding (Houston, Sierra Leone, Bihar-India, Assam-India, Nepal, Mumbai, Southern Asian Noah’s Ark territory) are only telltale signs, minor events in a bigger picture, like canaries in the proverbial mineshaft, warning of a much larger canvas painted with darkened hues, threatening like the distant rumbling of an upcoming mega storm.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Ludwig Von Miss on Collectivist Fallacies and Interventionist Follies
For more than a century the world has been caught in the grip of social engineers and political paternalists determined to either radically remake society from top to bottom in collectivist directions, or to use various government regulatory and redistributive policies to try to modify existing society into desired “social justice” forms and shapes. Both are based on false conceptions of man and society.
One of the leading voices challenging the social engineers and the interventionist-welfare statists in the twentieth century was the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises. In such important works as Socialism (1922), Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (1927), Critique of Interventionism(1929), Planning for Freedom (1952), and in his monumental treatise, Human Action (1949; 1966), Mises demonstrated the economic unworkability and negative unintended consequences resulting from attempts to impose systems of socialist central planning on society, as well as the social quagmire brought about by introducing piecemeal regulations and interventions into the market economy.
But it was in his often-neglected work, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution, that Ludwig von Mises systematically challenged the underlying philosophical premises behind many of the socialist and interventionist presumptions of the last one hundred years. This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Theory and History in 1957, and it seems, therefore, worthwhile to appreciate Mises’s arguments and their continuing relevance for our own time.
The Illusive Search for Meaning and Purpose in Life
The world is a confusing and uncertain place. While we may live in communities and societies the values, traditions, customs and routines of daily life of which we have grown up in and tend to take for granted, and which provide us with degrees of orienting certainty and predictability in our everyday affairs, they still fail to answer a variety of “big questions.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
September 23, 2017
Spain In Crisis: Catalan Police Rejects Madrid Takover, Vows To “Resist”
Spain found itself on the verge of a full-blown sovereign crisis on Saturday, after the “rebel region” of Catalonia rejected giving more control to the central government in defiance of authorities in Madrid who are trying to suppress an independence referendum on Oct. 1.
As tensions rise ahead of the planned Catalan referendum on October 1, and as Madrid’s crackdown on separatist passions took a turn for the bizarre overnight when as we reported Spain’s plan to send boatloads of military police to Catalonia to halt the referendum backfired with dockers in two ports staging a boycott and refused access, on Saturday Spain’s Public Prosecutor’s Office told Catalan Police chief Josep Lluis Trapero that his officers must now obey orders from a senior state-appointed police coordinator, Spanish news agency EFE reported on Saturday.
The Catalan Police, however, disagreed and as Bloomberg reports, the SAP union – the largest trade group for the 17,000-member Catalan Police, known as Mossos d’Esquadra – said it would resist hours after prosecutors Saturday ordered that it accept central-government coordination. The rejection echoed comments by Catalan separatist authorities.
“We don’t accept this interference of the state, jumping over all existing coordination mechanisms,” the region’s Interior Department chief Joaquim Forn said in brief televised comments. “The Mossos won’t renounce exercising their functions in loyalty to the Catalan people.”
The Mossos are one of the symbols of Catalonia’s autonomy and for many Catalans the prosecutor’s decision may be reminiscent of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War and subsequent dictatorship of Francisco Franco, when the Mossos were abolished.
In a joint press conference today with the Catalan home affairs minister Joaquim Forn and the Mossos chief Josep Lluís Trapero, Forn said that the move by Spain was “unacceptable”.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“Thousands Could Die” – Puerto Rico Scrambles To Evacuate River Valley As Dam Fails
Days after Hurricane Maria passed over the island and made its way west toward the Dominican Republican, Puerto Rico is still struggling with the initial response to the storm – rescuing people stranded in remote villages, and moving thousands into government shelters. Meanwhile the island’s first responders are making due without electricity, gas or cell phone service after the storm dealt a knockout blow to its infrastructure.
In what was perhaps the most destructive blow to the island’s aging infrastructure, the NWS warned Friday that the Guajataca Dam in northwest Puerto Rico would soon fail, prompting the agency to issue a flash flood emergency warning for Isabela and Quebradillas municipalities. Now, authorities are scrambling to evacuate the residents of the river valley below the dam before their communities are entirely submurged. If the authorities don’t act quickly, “thousands could die” one official in charge of the rescue response said.
According to federal reservoir data, the lake behind the dam, Lago de Guajataca, rose more than three feet between Tuesday and Wednesday, when the storm was still directly over the island. More recent data were unavailable. With floodwaters gushing into the Guajataca river valley, Reuters reports that emergency officials were scrambling Friday and Saturday to evacuate its nearly 70,000 residents before their villages have been completely submerged.
Video published by CBS shows waters gushing over the top of the 90-year-old dam, sending a wall of water racing into the valley below.
The National Weather Service warned of “imminent failure” and urged residents in the area to “move to higher ground now.”
The evacuation of the valley is perhaps the most high-stakes rescue effort of the past week, according to Abner Gomez, executive director of Puerto Rico’s emergency management agency. Gomez said Friday that the dam’s floodgates suffered mechanical damage during the storm, which made it impossible for authorities to open and let out normal water currents.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
