Steve Bull's Blog, page 1330
August 28, 2017
Gas Games in the Eastern Mediterranean are Threatening Europe
Gas Games in the Eastern Mediterranean are Threatening Europe
The European Commission is offering European consumers the so-called Southern Gas Corridor, which provides for the supply, in particular, of Azerbaijani and Central Asian gas along the Turkey–Greece–Italy route. The project’s potential participants have their own interests, however, and are divided by long-standing antagonisms that are turning the corridor into a military and political delayed-action mine.
Turkey, which is traditionally reluctant to play by the European Union’s rules, is playing a particular role here. Ankara’s plans to build an Israel–Turkey pipeline are being superimposed on the desire of the Turkish elite to occupy key positions in the development of offshore natural gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, primarily around Cyprus. These plans are unleashing a whole host of problems between Cyprus, Greece and Turkey, while, at the same time, affecting the interests of Israel, as well as Egypt and Libya, which are claiming their rights to the continental shelf. The world’s leading oil and gas companies are also pursuing their own economic objectives in the region, the most active of which are the French company Total and the Italian company ENI.
The current focus of contention is the offshore «Block 11», situated in the territorial waters of Cyprus. Turkey, which is also speaking on behalf of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, has already sent a frigate, TCG Gökçeada, to the region. The frigate’s commander has been ordered to use whatever measures necessary to counteract ‘undesirable’ activity around the continental shelf. But any actions by Nicosia and Athens in support could be deemed ‘undesirable’, since Turkey’s official position is that all the gas resources on Cyprus’ continental shelf belong not only to the Greek Cypriots, but also to the Turkish Cypriots. And by the latter is meant the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Death Of Cash – New Tech To Revolutionize The Payments Industry
The world has had enough of paper money.
Now that consumers are done with physical wallets, the multi-billion-dollar mobile pay app market is minting new digital barons at breakneck speed.
And we’ve just identified one company at the forefront of the revolution which has a very compelling story.
Glancepay is already the no. 1 mobile payment app in Canada, ranking at over 92 percent of mobile payment app downloads. It’s also making big waves across North America, where it ranks 37 percent of all mobile payment app downloads.
This could be a timely opportunity for early investors who understand what’s about to happen.
For example, when Alipay hit the Chinese market with its instant mobile app pay features, it was an overnight sensation. Now, it’s conducting a massive $1.7 trillion in business annually in China.
And this story is very exciting because GlancePay (CSE:GET; OTC:GLNNF) is also making inroads in the billion-dollar cannabis market in a deal that gives them direct ownership in Canapay Financial Inc. and they are planning moves into cryptocurrency markets, too.
Mobile payment technology is one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, and GlancePay is hoping to be the major market disrupter—filling a gap that not even the trillion-dollar Chinese turnover is filling, nor major players on the North American scene.
How? By focusing equally on merchants and consumers, losing cumbersome and security-plagued hardware, and offering much more than just one-click payments: rewards, choices, and even tab-splitting.
In short, GlancePay (CSE:GET) has apps that can simply take a glance at where you are… using proprietary and patented GPS / micro-location and image identification technology… and pays your merchant…in seconds.
It’s holistic, streamlined, and has the technology with patents to protect it, an issue that has kept major players from securing greater market share over the past few years.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Peak US Asset Prices? Japanese Acquisitions Hit Record
Their buying binge in the US goes into the “Contrarian Indicators” category.
After eight phenomenal years of surging stock prices in the US, buyers are getting cold feet: Acquisitions targeting US companies dropped 15% so far this year, to $789 billion, according to Dealogic. In Japan, it’s worse: Acquisitions targeting Japanese companies have plunged 41% to $33.6 billion.
But despite the M&A downturn in both countries, there is one peculiar element that is booming: Japanese companies are acquiring US firms at record pace. This year’s 141 deals exceed the prior record for this time of the year by 18%.
In a deal announced on August 24, SoftBank, a Japanese multinational telecommunications and Internet conglomerate that already owns some US jewels such as Sprint and has $135 billion in interest-bearing debt, invested $4.4 billion in US startup WeWork. The deal is rumored to value WeWork at $20 billion.
The deal, done via SoftBank’s Vision Fund, has two parts: $1.4 billion in funding to help WeWork expand in Asia (which includes the previously announced $500 million investment in WeWork China), and $3 billion in funding for WeWork’s parent company.
US commercial real estate – the sector WeWork is in – boomed for seven years straight and prices reached such highs that even the Fed is now consistently mentioning it as one of the big reasons for removing “accommodation” and unwinding QE. It’s worried about $4 trillion in debt that is collateralized by this inflated commercial real estate.
So just in the nick of time. According to Dealogic, SoftBank’s $4.4 billion deal is Japan’s largest outbound real estate deal on record.
SoftBank is all over the place. In June, it announced that it would take two robotics firms – Boston Dynamics and Schaft – off Alphabet’s hands, after Alphabet tried to unload them for a year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
August 27, 2017
Why Decentralized Militias Matter
In 1852, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Springfield, Illinois in which he talked about the attempts at required militia training. He described how much of a joke the citizens made of any attempt at mandatory militia training. “No man,” Lincoln said, citing the rules, “is to wear more than five pounds of cod-fish for epaulets, or more than thirty yards of bologna sausages for a sash; and no two men are to dress alike, and if any two should dress alike the one that dresses most alike is to be fined.” He also described the militia figure of “our friend Gordon Abrams” at a militia training, “on horse-back . . . with a pine wood sword, about nine feet long, and a paste-board cocked hat, from front to rear about the length of an ox yoke, and very much the shape of one turned bottom upwards.”1
Lincoln was attempting to ridicule the dismissive attitudes of his fellow Illinoisans toward compulsory militia training. The conventional wisdom in military theory is that, for effective defense, the military must be centralized and continually maintained in the form of a compulsory standing army. Even from supposed “small government” advocates, this notion is never contested. However, the evidence from the time suggests that had it not been for the decentralized and voluntary militia system, Lincoln himself may have had significantly more trouble at the beginning of the Civil War.
During the Jacksonian era, the militia system in the states shifted largely from a compulsory to a voluntary system. Because of this, the Mexican War was first war fought by the United States that did not require a draft (the Civil War drafts are often cited as the first cases of conscription in the United States, but this ignores conscription administered by the states that took place during the Revolutionary War and War of 1812). During the Mexican War, roughly 50,000 troops were raised, all of whom enlisted without any compulsory measures.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The American Way: Mindless Pursuit
It’s actually embarrassing if I’m to be frank and honest in my opinion. How many times during my adult life did I hear ‘leadership’ proclaim they are simply defending ‘The American Way’ without ever really thinking about what constituted the way “We the People” live?
Sure I gave passing consideration now and then, but I always remained safely within the pro-programmed thought box promoted by those who claimed to be defending me and my ‘way’. Therefore when I was younger the answer was simplicity at its finest: baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet.
In other words, the mindless pursuit of all things pleasurable.
Of course, this is an over simplification of a complex situation. Then again, maybe not. There are several trigger words in my statement, any one of which can be endlessly argued to death. And if there is one thing I’ve learned in my advancing age it is this. When I don’t wish to confront an unpleasant situation I will argue the piss out of the details until I have convinced myself it doesn’t apply and I can ignore it completely.
A person engaged in mindless pursuit must always be in pursuit of mindlessness. Anything that interferes with this objective is perceived as a disturbance in the force and must be eradicated as quickly as possible. Again, plenty of trigger words in this statement, affording everyone the opportunity to stop reading and find something more pleasurable to do.
I am aware that when you are a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail just begging to be pounded. Since I am a recovering alcoholic, I tend to see the world through the eyes of a recovering addict. And what I see through my admittedly biased baby blues is an America full of addicts in various stages of obsessive compulsive obliviousness.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Gasoline Spikes To 7-Month Highs After Harvey; Heating Oil, Crude Jump
The entire energy futures complex is notably higher at the open with RBOB Gasoline spiking over 4% to its highest since January amid the carnage of Hurricane Harvey.
Bloomberg reports that as a result of Harvey, which was the strongest storm to hit the U.S. since 2004, some 2.26MM b/d of crude, condensate refining capacity in Texas remain shut while nearly 300,000 Texas customers are without power as of 12:30pm CDT. Major terminals and pipelines that move crude and fuel into and out of Houston-area refineries were also shut, potentially stranding some crude in West Texas and starving New York Harbor of gasoline.
“Gasoline prices are going to continue to rise this week as we expect another three days of rain in the Houston area,” Andy Lipow, president of consultant Lipow Oil Associates LLC in Houston, said by telephone.
“With pipeline operators beginning to shut down their crude oil and refined product infrastructure, I expect to see further curtailment of refinery operations, resulting in less product being available. A spike in gasoline and diesel prices will drag up crude oil prices.”
WTI is also higher as ~378.6k b/d of oil output from Gulf of Mexico is shut, pushing RBOB Gasoline and WTI higher.
Sept RBOB is exploding:
And Oct RBOB at its highest since Jan 2017:
The Oct. Nymex RBOB-WTI crack spread has spiked to $19.94:
NatGas and Heating Oil are also up:
And just in case it wasn’t obvious, prices will likely rise “just because of worries, but the real impact might not be clear for a couple of days,” Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research told Bloomberg.
For now, the RBOB curve implies the system will be affected for at least 3 months…
My prediction: the coming collapse of China’s Ponzi scheme economy
So much production in industries like steel is based on demand for more production, but should that demand falter, the whole system could come crashing down
Friends who have a greater interest than I do in reading the tea leaves in Beijing tell me that the emphasis in relations with Hong Kong from now on will be on one country rather than two systems.I think this phrases things the wrong way. The one country bit was never in issue.
What they actually mean to say is that Beijing’s system of state command of the economy will become dominant and Hong Kong’s more freewheeling system will fade away.
I don’t think it will happen.
In my view human society is so dynamic that no command system can last long in charge of an economy. Attempts at this particular form of hubris inevitably end in either war or financial crisis. For the Soviet Union it was financial crisis. I think the same fate awaits Beijing.
Consider crude steel production, a test-tube example of how command economies get it wrong. In the mainland this stood in June at an all time monthly record of 73 million tonnes, five times the total production in all of Europe.
Steel was recently targeted for a reduction in capacity but then a regime of easy money intended to help the industry overcome a difficult period of contraction instead stimulated production.
As long as it keeps growing everything is fine. When it stops growing it collapses
It has happened across the mainland’s rust belt industries.
Why is so much steel needed?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
YouTube “Economically Censors” Ron Paul, Labels Videos “Not Suitable” For All Advertisers
Former US Congressman Ron Paul has joined a growing list of independent political journalists and commentators who’re being economically punished by YouTube despite producing videos that routinely receive hundreds of thousands of views.
In a tweet published Saturday, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange tweeted a screenshot of Paul’s “Liberty Report” page showing that his videos had been labeled “not suitable” for all advertisers by YouTube’s content arbiters.
Assange claims that Paul was being punished for speaking out about President Donald Trump’s decision to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, after Paul published a video on the subject earlier this week.
The notion that YouTube would want to economically punish a former US Congressman for sharing his views on US foreign policy – a topic that he is unequivocally qualified to speak about – is absurd. Furthermore, the “review requested” marking on one of Paul’s videos reveals that they were initially flagged by users before YouTube’s moderators confirmed that the videos were unsuitable for a broad audience.
Other political commentators who’ve been censored by YouTube include Paul Joseph Watson and Tim Black – both ostensibly for sharing political views that differ from the mainstream neo-liberal ideology favored by the Silicon Valley elite.
Last week, Google – another Alphabet Inc. company – briefly banned Salil Mehta, an adjunct professor at Columbia and Georgetown who teaches probability and data science, from using its service, freezing his accounts without providing an explanation. He was later allowed to return to the service.
Conservative journalist Lauren Southern spoke out about YouTube’s drive to stifle politically divergent journalists and commentators during an interview with the Daily Caller.
“I think it would be insane to suggest there’s not an active effort to censor conservative and independent views,” said Southern.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“Unloading Dollar Assets Would Be Most Effective” – Chinese State Media Unveils Trade War ‘Countermeasures’
After President Trump declared “economic war” with China, seemingly following Bannon’s strategy to maintain hegemony…
“We’re at economic war with China,” he added. “It’s in all their literature. They’re not shy about saying what they’re doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path.”
Bannon said he might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the peninsula, but such a deal seemed remote. Given that China is not likely to do much more on North Korea, and that the logic of mutually assured destruction was its own source of restraint, Bannon saw no reason not to proceed with tough trade sanctions against China.
“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”
China state media immediately signaled the nation would hit back against any trade measures, as it has done in past episodes, and now, thanks to a treatise in Chinese official mouthpiece, China People’s Daily newspaper, we have an idea of what those countermeasures could be…
China could take three countermeasures against the recent “Section 301” investigation initiated by the U.S. government, experts told Chinanews.com.
With growing trade friction between the two largest economies, the spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Commerce made a strong response on Monday, saying China strongly opposes unilateral and trade protectionism acts conducted by the U.S., and will take all appropriate measures to safeguard its legitimate interests.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Why The Shale Oil “Miracle” Is Becoming A “Debacle”
klublu/Shutterstock
Why The Shale Oil “Miracle” Is Becoming A “Debacle”
Dispelling the magical thinking behind the hype
Energy is everything.
This is an amazingly important concept. Yet it’s almost universally overlooked.
Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate the magical role energy plays in our daily lives because most of what we experience is a derivative of it. The connection is hidden from direct view. Because of this, most people utterly fail to detect or appreciate the priceless and irreplaceable role of high net-energy fuel sources (such as oil and gas) to our modern lifestyle.
With high net-energy, society enjoys increasing complexity and technological advances. It’s what enables us to pursue massive goals like desalinating billions of gallons of seawater, or going to Mars. But without high net-energy fuel sources, our capabilities quickly regress to those of decades — or even centuries — past.
Which is why understanding where we truly are in the ‘net-energy story’ is so incredibly important. Is the US on the cusp of being “energy independent” from here on out? Is the “shale miracle” ushering in a glorious new ‘boom’ era that will vault America to unprecedented prosperity?
No. The central point of this report is that the US is deluding itself when it comes to energy abundance (generally) and oil (specifically).
Yet that’s not what we hear from the cheerleaders in the industry or in our media. From them, we hear a silver-tongued narrative of coming riches — a narrative that contains some truth, some myth, and a lot of fantasy.
It’s those last two parts — the myths and fantasies — that are going to seriously hurt many investors, as well cause a lot of extremely poor policy and investment decisions.
The bottom line is this: The US shale industry resembles a fraudulent Ponzi scheme much more so than it does any kind of “miracle”.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
