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Panic setting in with another Comex silver margin increase?

 

Hinde Capital's 'Silver Criticality' study

 

Grandich goes back to fully invested in precious metals

 

In The News Today

Posted: May 05 2011     By: Jim Sinclair      Post Edited: May 5, 2011 at 9:38 am
Filed under: In The News

Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
The technical dollar rally has no legs.

Asian trio to study dollar alternative: report May 4, 2011, 7:59 a.m. EDT
By Chris Oliver, MarketWatch
HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — Officials from China, Japan and South Korea agreed on Wednesday to study a proposal to use their own currencies for regional trade settlement instead of the U.S. dollar, according to a Dow Jones Newswires report.
The report cited a joint communiqué issued in Hanoi.
Finance officials from the three big Asian economies said they were mindful of challenges arising from inflation, noting commodity prices were high while volatile capital inflows were also a concern.
They also agreed to study regional infrastructure financing and disaster risk insurance, the report said.
The finance ministers were meeting alongside an Asia Development Bank annual meeting held concurrently in Vietnam’s capital.
More…

Boehner Says No Debt Ceiling Hike Without "Real Spending Cuts And Budget Reforms" 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/05/2011 11:52 -0400

More political theater out of DC:

• BOEHNER SAYS NO DEBT CEILING HIKE WITHOUT "REAL SPENDING CUTS AND BUDGET REFORMS"
• BOEHNER SAYS TIME TO TALK `ABOUT TRILLIONS' IN SPENDING CUTS
• BOEHNER SAYS `NOTHING OFF THE TABLE' EXCEPT 'RAISING TAXES'

So what exactly budget reform involves doing nothing to the revenue side of the income statement? Oh, the type that cuts spending, something Washington has not really succeeded in doing once in history? Good luck, in the meantime, we look forward to our new debt ceiling of $16.3 trillion to be announced in June or July at the latest, which will then have to be hiked to $18.5 trillion for capacity through March 2013.

A Look At The EURUSD Runaway Covering Train 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/05/2011 12:05 -0400

There are those who are surprised by today's action in the EURUSD. We wonder why that is the case: had these people looked at our post from Saturday indicating the near record divergence between long EUR and short USD position, in which we speculated that the unwind would be fierce, today's Goldman call which we posted earlier, would be very much welcome. And yes, there was no margin hike in either EUR or USD spec contracts either last week or recently. We wonder why. So while we await the start of QE3 rumor reemergence, which will once again kill the dollar, and send the PM complex to the moon, here is what we said then... 

 

 

 

 

A "Whitewashed Buffett" - More Corporate Governance Loose Ends Exposed At Berkshire 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/05/2011 12:59 -0400

The Berkshire-Sokol scandal has once again been drowned away by a variety of secondary noises, which however does nothing to eliminate the latent, and increasingly broader, sentiment that something is very wrong at the firm which for so many years was nothing short of the Oracle's cathedral for the great unwashed. Today, Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil shines a light in another can of worms that has just been exposed courtesy of Berkshire's report on David Sokol's conduct by its "audit committee", letting many new and unexpected cockroaches appear. 

 

 

 

 

Fed's Kocherlakota Advocates 50 bps Interest Rate Hike After Q3 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/05/2011 13:29 -0400

Just out from Minneapolis Fed's Kocherlakota: "A core inflation rate of 1.5 percent is still markedly below the Fed's price stability objective of 2 percent. Accordingly, an increase of 50 basis points in the fed funds rate would still leave the Fed in a highly accommodative stance. First, the fed funds rate would be extremely low—between 50 and 75 basis points. As well, the Fed's holdings of long-term assets would continue to provide significant accommodation. Using estimates from the staff research that I mentioned earlier, we can conclude that the total monetary policy package of the two forms of accommodation would be roughly equivalent to maintaining a fed funds target rate of negative 1.5 percentage points. Such a stance can only be described as being easy monetary policy—just not as easy as late 2010." That said, someone please remind us just how many of these so-called hawks voted against the FOMC action at the last meeting? Yeah, that's what we thought. And yes, Narayana, we will be closely watching your vote during the next FOMC meeting, because we can't shake this nagging feeling that you, just like all other Fed presidents, are mostly full of nothing but hot air.

"If Not Now, When" - SocGen Pushes Back ECB Rate Hike Forecast From June To July 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/05/2011 14:05 -0400

Forgotten how much fun it is to interpret Alan Greenspan's seemingly indecipherable 1024 bit cypher during Q&A? Today, the ECB's Trichet, in a surprisingly incomprehensible press conference filled with equivocation and indecision, reminded everyone just how fun translation central planner talk can be. Luckily, SocGen's James Nixon has released a note helping us make some sense of Trichet's message. In addition, SocGen has now revised its expectation for an ECB rate hike from June to July. Alas, we are confident that when the time comes, July will become August, and so forth, until finally the ECB finally lowers the interest rate, a major slap in the face of the legacy JCT as he is about to replaced by Goldman's Draghi. Yet in the off chance we are wrong, and the ECB has merely taken a one month breather from hiking, today's 300+ pip plunge in the EURUSD could be the buying opportunity of a lifetime. Alas, for that to happen, we would like to see Goldman issue a sell EURUSD note first.