@JamesGRicakrds Interview - Death of Money

@JamesGRickards Interview

RTS bourse to start trading oil, oil products, gold on June 8

16:03 22/05/2006

MOSCOW, May 22 (RIA Novosti) - The Russian Trading System, Russia's premier stock market, announced Monday that it would start trading in gold, oil and oil products on June 8.

The announcement comes in the wake of President Vladimir Putin's state of the nation address May 10, when he said Russia, as a leading oil exporting nation, should establish its own oil exchange to trade crude and petroleum products for rubles.

"The first trading in contracts for gold will commence in Russia on June 8," the RTS said in a statement.

The stock exchange also said it would start trading in futures and options on oil and oil derivatives, including Urals brand, diesel fuel, jet fuel and fuel oil. Trade will be in rubles based on prices calculated by the Platts agency. The settlement period for a contract is one month and the minimum security guarantee on a contract is 10% of its overall value.

The derivatives section of the RTS, known by its Russian acronym Forts, will trade futures and options on gold in rubles based on the London Stock Exchange evening fixing rate. The settlement period for a contract is one month and the minimum security guarantee on any contract is 5% of its overall value.

The statement said RTS would collect a 1-ruble commission for each concluded contract.

http://scgnews.com/s/13366/lay?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Gerald Celente on Ukraine

EU officials plotted IMF attack to bring rebellious Italy to its knees

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Economics Last updated: May 15th, 2014

The revelations about EMU skulduggery are coming thick and fast. Tim Geithner recounts in his book Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises just how far the EU elites are willing to go to save the euro, even if it means toppling elected leaders and eviscerating Europe’s sovereign parliaments.

The former US Treasury Secretary says that EU officials approached him in the white heat of the EMU crisis in November 2011 with a plan to overthrow  Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s elected leader.

"They wanted us to refuse to back IMF loans to Italy as long as he refused to go," he writes.

Geithner told them this was unthinkable. The US could not misuse the machinery of the IMF to settle political disputes in this way. "We can't have his blood on our hands".

This concurs with we knew at the time about the backroom manoeuvres, and the action in the bond markets.

It is a constitutional scandal of the first order. These officials decided for themselves that the sanctity of monetary union entitled them to overrule the parliamentary process, that means justify the end. It is the definition of a monetary dictatorship.

Mr Berlusconi has demanded a parliamentary inquiry. “It’s a clear violation of democratic rules and an assault on the sovereignty of our country. The plot is an extremely serious news which confirms what I've been saying for a long time," he said.

There has been a drip-drip of revelations. Italy’s former member on the ECB’s executive board, Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi, suggested in his book last summer that the decision to topple Berlusconi (and replace him with ex-EU commissioner Mario Monti) was taken after he started threatening a return to the Lira in meetings with EU leaders.

I have always found the incident bizarre. Italy had previously been held up an example of virtue, one of the very few EMU states then near primary budget surplus. It was not in serious breach of deficit rules. It was in crisis in the Autumn of 2011 because the ECB had raised rates twice and triggered what was to become a deep double-dip recession.  Yet the blame for this disastrous policy error was displaced on to Italy’s government.

Fresh details emerged this week in a terrific account of the crisis by Peter Spiegel in the Financial Times.

The report recounts the hour-by-hour drama at the G20 Summit in Cannes  as the euro came close to blowing up. It culminates in the incredible scene when President Barack Obama takes over meeting and tells the Europeans what to do, causing Chancellor Angela Merkel to break down in tears: “Ich bringe mich nicht selbst um.” I won’t commit suicide.

That particular spasm of the crisis – and there have been three episodes (May 2010, Nov 2011, and July 2012)  when the would have splintered without drastic action – was set off by the shock decision of Greek premier Georges Papandreou to call a referendum on the austerity terms of his country’s bail-out. He thought a vote was needed to stop Greece spinning out of control, and to pre-empt a possible military coup (as he saw it).

Papandreou was hauled before the star chamber and literally crushed into silence by French leader Nicolas Sarkozy, who was waving his “Position commune sur la Grèce” like an indictment sheet.

The FT report then reveals that the Commission’s  Jose Manuel Barroso took charge of the executive details, orchestrating the Putsch that ousted Papandreou in Greece. In this case the EU picked ECB veteran Lucas Papademos to take over.

Parliamentary formalities were upheld in both Italy and Greece. The presidents appointed the new leaders in each of the two countries. Both Monti and Papademos are honourable and dedicated public servants. Yet these were clearly coups d’etat in spirit, if not in constitutional law.

David Marsh from the financial body  OMFIF has called for a “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” to expose the abuses that have occurred in EMU affairs from the beginning. Something must be done to hold accountable those responsible for the fateful error of launching monetary union, and for the chronic mismanagement of the project thereafter.

We are told that the euro crisis is now over. I do not see how one can safely reach that conclusion when Italy and Portugal are contracting again, and France is back to zero growth; or when lowflation/deflation is causing the debt trajectories of Southern Europe to spiral ever higher; all against a background of G2 monetary tightening in the US and China.

There will be another spasm to this crisis. So who will Europe’s  elites topple next, and what other conspiracies will they hatch to perpetuate a monetary venture that serves no worthwhile moral purpose? They must be stopped.

The FT’s Peter Speigel has a follow-up in today’s edition, with lots more details. These include confirmation that  EU leaders not only broached the subject of Greek exit/expulsion from the euro at Cannes, but that this was followed up by a secret Plan Z.

A GREXIT task-force under Germany’s ECB’s board member Jorg Asmussen worked on emergency plans with four clandestine teams and EU lawyers in Brussels. They were careful enough not to reveal anything in emails, which could be leaked.

Merkel’s advisers in Germany were split into the “domino” camp that feared contagion from GREXIT, and the “infected-leg” camp headed by finance minister Wolfgang Schauble that pushed for amputation.

It seems as if Angela Merkel was finally persuaded by Jorg Asmussen that kicking Greece out of the system might snowball and lead all too quickly to a “eurozone of 10”. Greece got its €34bn bail-out in the nick of time.

Though I should not say this about a competing newspaper, it is worth spending £2.50 today on the pink sheet for the story.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100027284/eu-officials-plotted-imf-attack-to-bring-rebellious-italy-to-its-knees/

London Gold Vaults are Empty

Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers

The NSA has been covertly implanting interception tools in US servers heading overseas – even though the US government has warned against using Chinese technology for the same reasons, says Glenn Greenwald, in an extract from his new book about the Snowden affair, No Place to Hide

• The explosive day we revealed Edward Snowden's identity
• The state targets dissenters not just 'bad guys'
• Glenn Greenwald: 'I don't trust the UK not to arrest me'

For years, the US government loudly warned the world that Chinese routers and other internet devices pose a "threat" because they are built with backdoor surveillance functionality that gives the Chinese government the ability to spy on anyone using them. Yet what the NSA's documents show is that Americans have been engaged in precisely the activity that the US accused the Chinese of doing.

The Rogers committee voiced fears that the two companies were enabling Chinese state surveillance, although it acknowledged that it had obtained no actual evidence that the firms had implanted their routers and other systems with surveillance devices. Nonetheless, it cited the failure of those companies to cooperate and urged US firms to avoid purchasing their products: "Private-sector entities in the United States are strongly encouraged to consider the long-term security risks associated with doing business with either ZTE or Huawei for equipment or services. US network providers and systems developers are strongly encouraged to seek other vendors for their projects. Based on available classified and unclassified information, Huawei and ZTE cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems."The drumbeat of American accusations against Chinese internet device manufacturers was unrelenting. In 2012, for example, a report from the House Intelligence Committee, headed by Mike Rogers, claimed that Huawei and ZTE, the top two Chinese telecommunications equipment companies, "may be violating United States laws" and have "not followed United States legal obligations or international standards of business behaviour". The committee recommended that "the United States should view with suspicion the continued penetration of the US telecommunications market by Chinese telecommunications companies".

The constant accusations became such a burden that Ren Zhengfei, the 69-year-old founder and CEO of Huawei, announced in November 2013 that the company was abandoning the US market. As Foreign Policy reported, Zhengfei told a French newspaper: "'If Huawei gets in the middle of US-China relations,' and causes problems, 'it's not worth it'."

But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organisations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones. A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.

The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some "SIGINT tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!)".

Eventually, the implanted device connects back to the NSA. The report continues: "In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network."

It is quite possible that Chinese firms are implanting surveillance mechanisms in their network devices. But the US is certainly doing the same.

Warning the world about Chinese surveillance could have been one of the motives behind the US government's claims that Chinese devices cannot be trusted. But an equally important motive seems to have been preventing Chinese devices from supplanting American-made ones, which would have limited the NSA's own reach. In other words, Chinese routers and servers represent not only economic competition but also surveillance competition.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwald-nsa-tampers-us-internet-routers-snowden

@JamesGRickards Interview with @KeithMcCullough

Matt Taibbi - Minding the Wealth Gap