Archive - Mar 2011

A "fun" story to watch. Folks are going to squirm...

Following a report earlier that the Uranium at the Fukushima Power Plant may have melted, we sadly bring you this video of the explosion at the Fukushima power plant.

After Julian Assange crashed and burned in his threat to release documents that expose fraud at Bank of America, many thought he had been only bluffing, and that BofA is actually clean. Not so fast. A member of the hacker collective Anonymous, which singlehandedly destroyed "hacker defense" firm HB Gary, who goes under the handle OperationLeakS "is claiming to be have emails and documents which prove "fraud" was
committed by Bank of America employees, and the group says it'll release
them on Monday" reports Gawker. As to the contents of the possible disclosure: ""He Just
told me he have GMAC emails showing BoA order to mix loan numbers to not
match it's Documents. to foreclose on Americans.. Shame." If indeed this makes the case against BofA' foreclosure practices stronger, it certainly explains why the banking consortium is scrambling to arrange a settlement, and also why Bank of America recently split off its $2 trillion in mortgages into "good bank" and "bad bank" entities.

The world is on its way to a Gold standard again. This is not mere conjecture or prediction. It’s fact. Utah has already passed a bill allowing Gold and Silver to be used as legal tender. Similarly, Virginia has passed legislation (though the Governor has yet to sign the bill) that would permit the state to mint its own Gold and Silver coins.

In the fantasy world of right-wing commentators, a bloated public sector has saddled the taxpayer with a £1tn liability for lavish pension payouts for town hall pen-pushers...

Update: It's possible that a meltdown may ALREADY have occurred at one nuclear power plant.

In an interview with Mark Hibbs, a Berlin-based senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonprofit think tank, Newsmax magazine asks - what happens next at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. The answer according to the nuclear expert, is that as Fukushima is now well on its way to a full core-melt nuclear accident, a worst case scenario could possibly lead to the same results last seen in 1986 Chernobyl.

CSI Financial presents a comprehensive look at the last century in US history (98 years to be precise, since the foundation of the Federal Reserve in 1913), highlighting the key events, and critical outcomes, explaining in simple terms how while Japan may have encountered an actual tsunami earlier today, the metaphoric version that has afflicted America is far more dangerous and will have far worse consequences for America's 300+ million citizens.

Kami: "any thing or phenomenon that produces the emotions of fear and awe, with no distinction between good and evil." --Motoori Norinaga from Kojiki Den (Record of Ancient Matters)

Per Reuters, which cites Kyodo news agency, the radiation levels near the main gate at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant are already 8 times normal. This probably supersedes a prior report by Kyodo according to which radiation could already have been released at the plant. That's pretty much a given the rather dramatic surge in ambient gamma waves. And Reuters has just released this unpleasant development: "Radiation levels in Fukushima Daiichi plant central control unit is 1,000 times normal, Kyodo says"

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 11/03/11

A just released report by Goldman's Jeffrey Currie attempts to quantify the impact of the Tsunami on the Japanese economy from a commodity standpoint. Currie summarizes his conclusions as follows: "Assuming that the broader power grid infrastructure has not been permanently damaged, we believe today’s events are likely to put upward pressure on residual fuel oil and diesel cracks, LNG, UK natural gas and rice; downward pressure on naphtha cracks and Dubai spreads relative to other crude grades." Yet the thing we found more interesting than energy related bottlenecks was the disclosure toward the end of the report discussing the threat to the Japanese rice harvest: "In addition to the damage to energy infrastructure from the earthquake, the tsunami also impacted rice producing regions in Japan. While Japanese rice inventories are large, this puts the 2011/12 crop production at risk and may in turn drive Japanese rice imports higher, posing upside risk to current prices." Granted, Japan is not a big exporter of rice, but it is a top 10 consumer. Should the country's consumption (which is estimated at around 9 million metric tons) need to be satisfied by a surge in imports, and with the price of rice already dependent on the margin on speculative money, this could be the catalyst that send the grain, which has plunged in price over the past month, finally break beyond any potential manipulative price suppression schemes.

Oh this will be fun...

As we reported two months ago, the DOJ had secretly subpoenaed the personal information of several "twitters" who may have had a relationship to Wikileaks. Among the people to discover they were the subject of a secret subpoena was Iceland Member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir. Furthermore the only reason those being investigated even realized this was the case is because Twitter notified them, unlike other social networks which may have been also subpoenaed, yet have remained quiet so far. Twitter had said: "We're not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it's our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so." Alas, today AP reports that while this inititial request had been challenged by objects of the inquiry, "a federal magistrate ruled that prosecutors can demand the Twitter account information of certain users in their criminal probe into the disclosure of classified documents on WikiLeaks." Simply said this means that virtually anybody's electronic communication on Twitter, and most certainly elsewhere too, can be intercepted by the DOJ for whatever reason, without anyone having to be notified of this gross privacy breach. It makes one wonder just how many additional benefits is JPM getting from its 10% investment in Twitter?

Nobody seems all that alarmed that the largest bond fund in the world has dumped all of their U.S. Treasuries.