Natural Gas

• Greece faces last chance to stay in euro as cash runs out (Reuters)
• Tsipras Begins Brussels Campaign to Keep Greece Inside the Euro (BBG)
• Greek Crisis Shows How Germany’s Power Polarizes Europe (WSJ)
• Eurogroup Head Dijsselbloem Calls for ‘Credible’ Greece Package (BBG)
• Europe Not Playing ‘Domino Theory’ Leaves Markets Calm on Greece (BBG)
• China stocks fall again despite support measures (Reuters)
• Chinese Trading Suspensions Freeze $1.4 Trillion of Shares Amid Rout (BBG)
• Crude Creeps Higher After Downturn (WSJ)

With Greece’s debt situation spiraling downwards, the European project is showing some cracks. The July 5 referendum could end up amounting to a mandate on whether or not Greece stays in the euro. In the meantime, the turmoil offers an opportunity for Russia to advance its interests... and with The Krlemlin reporting that Putin held discussions with Hollande today, it appears something is going on behind the scenes.

... Greeks should be united in their fight for the rule of law and against the cleptocracy, and not divided over a referendum on an absurd question. That division, however, serves the cleptocrats well—they can go about their usual ways unnoticed. Whoever said “divide and rule” knew what they were talking about.

While China is scrambling to launch a plunge protection team after every other initiative to support its burst stock market bubble has failed, one wonders when the real asset bubble will go pop: that, of course, is the global - but mostly US - merger and acquisition bubble.

"U.S. regulators are sounding the alarm about banks’ exposure to oil-and-gas producers, a move that could limit their ability to lend to companies battered by a yearlong slump in prices," WSJ reports, reinforcing the notion that North America's "zero hedged" O&G sector is in for a rough ride.

If it was Greece's intention to crush the Chinese stock market instead of Europe's, well - it succeeded.  Because despite the PBOC and politburo throwing everything but QE at the stock market, China stocks closed down sharply on Thursday after another wild trading day as investors shrugged off regulators' intensified efforts to put a floor under the sliding market, by cutting trading fees and easing margin rules, which has now crashed 25% in about two weeks wiping out $2.5 trillion of the peak $10 trillion in Chinese stock market cap as of June 14. This ultimately resulted with the Shanghai Composite closing under 4000 for the first time since April.

America’s grand strategy, its long-term blueprint for advancing national interests and countering major adversaries, is in total disarray. Top officials lurch from crisis to crisis, improvising strategies as they go, but rarely pursuing a consistent set of policies. Some blame this indecisiveness on a lack of resolve at the White House, but the real reason lies deeper. It lurks in a disagreement among foreign policy elites over whether Russia or China constitutes America’s principal great-power adversary.

When Konstantin Kosachyov, the head of the Russian Federation Council's International Relations Committee, said the protests in Armenia against a 16.7 percent power price hike follow a color revolution scenario sponsored by Western powers, many commentators rushed to compare the crisis in Yerevan with the 2014 protests in Kyiv that toppled the pro-Russian president, Victor Yanukovych. However, the street protests in Armenia have more to do with the overall economic situation in the country than with proxy clashes between foreign countries.

The Syrian "chemical weapons" narrative is back and with it is the confirmaton that Russia will not leave the US dictate middle eastern borders unilaterally. Syria's foreign minister said on a visit to Moscow on Monday that top ally Russia had promised to send political, economic and military aid to his country. "I got a promise of aid to Syria - politically, economically and militarily," Walid al-Moualem said at a televised news conference in Moscow after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Following yesterday's furious market drop in Chinese stocks, just before the overnight open, Morgan Stanley came out with a much distributed report urging investors "Not to buy this dip", and so they didn't. As a result, the Shanghai Composite imploded, at one point trading down 8% while the Chinext and Shenzhen markets crashed even more. This was the single biggest Shanghai Composite one-day drop since 2007, and with a close at 4192.87 the SHCOMP is now on the verge of a bear market, down 19% from its June 12 highs. China's second largest market, Shenzhen, is now officially in a bear market.

Chaos reigns, with contradictory headlines pushing and pulling futures in any one direction, only for the next headline to undo the previous one. And only headline scanning frontrunning algos have any chance of trading any of this...

Some people talk about peak energy (or oil) supply. They expect high prices and more demand than supply. Other people talk about energy demand hitting a peak many years from now, perhaps when most of us have electric cars. Neither of these views is correct. The real situation is that we right now seem to be reaching peak energy demand through low commodity prices.

We have argued that as economic ties between China and Russia deepen Beijing could increasingly look to Moscow to meet China’s energy needs. This would of course only serve to further de-dollarize the global energy trade, dealing yet another blow to the petrodollar system. Sure enough, Russia has, for the first time in history, overtaken Saudi Arabia as China’s top oil supplier.

While Greece is collectively scratching its head why Tsipras et al were at loggerheads with Europe for 4 months, during which time the Greek economy entered a recession and saw its banks not only depleted of all cash but become de facto wards of the ECB, just to reach an "agreement" that could have taken place back in February, and attention shifts to just how Tsipras will pass last night's impromptu capitulation through hard-line leftist parliamentarians, Greece now has another problem: how to unpivot the aggressive pivot toward Russia in the past few months, which culminated with the signing of an energy deal last week in St. Petersburg.