- Is This The End Of The U.S Dollar? Geopolitical Moves "Obliterate U.S Petrodollar Hegemony"
Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,
It seems the end really is nigh for the U.S. dollar.
And the mudfight for global dominance and currency war couldn’t be more ugly or dramatic.
The Saudis are now openly threatening to take down the U.S. economy in the ongoing fallout over collapsing oil prices and tense geopolitical events involving the 9/11 cover-up. The New York Times reports:
Saudi Arabia has told the Obama administration and members of Congress that it will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
China has been working for years to establish global currency status, and will strengthen the yuan by backing it with gold in moves clearly designed to cripple the role of the dollar. Zero Hedge reports:
China’s shift to an official local-currency-based gold fixing is “the culmination of a two-year plan to move away from a US-centric monetary system,” according to Bocom strategist Hao Hong. In an insightfully honest Bloomberg TV interview, Hong admits that “by trading physical gold in renminbi, China is slowly chipping away at the dominance of US dollars.”
Putin also waits in the shadows, making similar moves and creating alliances to out-balance the United States with a growing Asian economy on the global stage.
Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange asks “Is This The End of the U.S. Dollar?” in the video below.
He writes:
In this video Luke Rudkowski reports on the breaking news of both China and Saudi Arabia making geopolitical moves that could cause a U.S economic collapse and obliteration of the U.S hegemony petrodollar. We go over China’s new gold backed yuan that cannot be traded in U.S dollars and rising tension with Saudi Arabia threatening economic blackmail if their role in 911 is exposed.
Visit WeAreChange.org where this video report was first published.
The Federal Reserve, Henry Kissinger, the Rockefellers and their allies created the petrodollar and insisted upon the world using the U.S. dollar to buy oil, placing debt in American currency and entire countries under the yoke of the West.
But that paradigm has been crumbling as world order shifts away from U.S. hegemony.
It is a matter of when – not if – these events will change the U.S. financial landscape forever.
As SHTF has warned, major events are taking place, and no one can say if stability will be here tomorrow.
Stay vigilant, and prepare yourself and your family as best as you can.
- FBI May "Leak" Clinton Email Probe If DOJ Blocking Continues
The feud between the FBI and the Department of Justice over whether or not to proceed with charges against Hillary Clinton in the ongoing email investigation just took an unexpected turn.
Recall that one month ago, we found out that on one hand, the FBI is seemingly hell-bent on chasing down every possibly angle involving Hillary’s email abuse, when we reported that one hundred forty-seven FBI agents have been deployed to chase down clues and leads and that the FBI has accelerated the investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any action too close to the election. A former Clinton staffer is also cooperating with that investigation, and it’s believed Clinton herself will be questioned.
The flipside has been the Department of Justice which has been stonewalling the probe every step of the way. It hasn’t been alone in its unwillingness to pursue Hillary: on April 1, the state department announced that it is suspending its probe of “top secret” Clinton emails.
The divergence of these two paths, one which wants to get to the bottom of Hillary’s email probe and the other which is dead set on blocking it, has led online betting markets such as PredictIt to put the the odds of federal charges being filed against Hillary at record lows.
Which, paradoxically, could be bad news for Hillary.
On Friday, US Senator Chuck Grassley who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, and who has pushed for additional scrutiny of Clinton’s email use during her tenure as secretary of state, dropped a dramatic “hint” during a breakfast meeting with the Des Moines A.M. Rotary club when he suggested that the FBI “might leak”, hypothetically-speaking of course, reports of its investigation into presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state.
In practically laying out the next steps in Hillarygate, Grassley said “an anonymous and unauthorized release of FBI investigative materials could result if officials at the agency believed prosecution of Clinton was stymied for political reasons” according to the Des Moines register.
“Is there going to be political interference? If there’s enough evidence to prosecute, will there be political interference?” Grassley wondered aloud on Friday. “And if there’s political interference, then I assume that somebody in the FBI is going to leak these reports and it’s either going to have an effect politically or it’s going to lead to prosecution if there’s enough evidence.“
The senior senator’s musing came in response to a long answer to a very general question from one of the Rotarians about the status on inquiries into the email server and Clinton’s handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on a diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.
Which, of course, would be potentially devastating for Hillary as not only would her misdeed as chronicled by the Feds be fully in the open and ammo for any of her competitors in the presidential race, but would also confirm that the Department of Justice is anything but, and has led to such a dramatic perversion of the law as being forced to leak evidence of criminality in the public arena just so the population can be made aware of Hillary’s actions.
As for Grassley’s unorthodox “suggestion”, when asked by Radio Iowa reporter O. Kay Henderson after the breakfast if he was suggesting the FBI should leak investigative findings, Grassley expounded on his comment.
“I wouldn’t be encouraging it because if it’s a violation of law, I can’t be encouraging a violation of law,” he said. “This is kind of my own opinion, this is something I’ve heard.”
Yes, Chuck, we get it. And now we wonder how long before a treasure trove of “leaked” FBI documents exposing the full extent of Hillary’s action is leaked, although we can’t help but wonder that just like the Panama Papers dump, the media will be prepared and will promptly redirect the public’s attention to Vladimir Putin once again as the guilty party behind it all.
- Kim Jong Un Forces Starving North Koreans To Watch Gourmet Cooking Competition
One way to deal with bouts of projectile dysfunction is either to launch even more ballistic missiles, or just to call in a thousand of your country’s top cooks and have them make comfort food for you.
According to the Post, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un broadcast a “master chef” style competition to find the country’s top chef, as well as to gorge on food as millions of starving viewers looked on.
More than 1,000 people entered the competition, with the Pyongyang Times reporting: “The festival was comprised of the exhibitions of gastrological [sic] hits, famous and local special dishes and compulsory dishes and the technical contest and demonstration of top chefs and waiters and waitresses.
“The participants presented famous local and foreign dishes and specialties of their units and local areas.” The TV menu included some European dining options including pizza and spaghetti as well as a five-pheasant dish and “broccoli five ways.”
The ultimate arbiter of the food was the tubby tyrant, who by sampling the wares was one step closer to his esthetic ideal: according to defectors from the Communist country he is fattening himself up to look like his grandfather, Eternal President Kim Il-sung, who is still the reclusive county’s head of state despite having been dead since 1994.
And while young Kim was pointing and looking at machines that do “stuff” and deciding between five-pheasant dish and “broccoli five ways” or to go straight to desert, he conveniently forgot yet again that his country remains on the verge of a famine.
- Hybrid War Hyenas Are Tearing Brazil Apart
Authored by Pepe Escobar, Op-Ed via RT.com,
The gloomy and repulsive night when the female president of the 7th largest economy in the world was the prey of choice fed to a lynch mob of hyenas in a drab, provincial Circus Maximus will forever live in infamy.By 367 votes for and 137 against, the impeachment/coup/regime change-light drive against Dilma Rousseff cleared the Brazilian Congressional circus and will now go to the Senate, where a “special commission” will be set up. If approved, Rousseff will then be sidelined for 180 days and a low-rent tropical Brutus, Vice-President Michel Temer, will ascend to power until the Senate’s final verdict.
This lowly farce should serve as a wake-up call not only to the BRICS but to the whole Global South. Who needs NATO, R2P (“responsibility to protect”) or “moderate rebels” when you can get your regime change just by tweaking a nation’s political/judicial system?
The Brazilian Supreme Court has not analyzed the merit of the matter – at least not yet. There’s no solid evidence anywhere Rousseff committed a “crime of responsibility”; she did what every American President since Reagan has done – not to mention leaders all across the world: along with her vice-president, the lowly Brutus, Rousseff got slightly creative with the federal budget’s numbers.
The coup has been sponsored by a certified crook, president of the lower house Eduardo Cunha; reportedly the holder of several illegal accounts in Switzerland, listed in the Panama Papers and under investigation by the Supreme Court. Instead of lording over near-illiterate hyenas in a racist, largely crypto-fascist circus, he should be behind bars. It beggars belief that the Supreme Court has not launched legal action against Cunha. The secret of his power over the circus is a gigantic corruption scheme lasting many years, featuring corporations contributing to his and others’ campaign financing.
And that’s the beauty of a regime change-light/color revolution of Hybrid War when staged in such a dynamically creative nation such as Brazil. The hall of mirrors yields a political simulacrum that would have driven deconstructionists Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco, if alive, green with envy; a Congress crammed with fools/patsies/traitors/crooks, some of whom are already being investigated for corruption, has conspired to depose a president who is not under any formal corruption investigation – and has not committed any “crime of responsibility”.
The neoliberal restoration
Still, without a popular vote, the massively rejected tropical Brutus twins, Temer and Cunha, will find it impossible to govern, even though they would perfectly incarnate the project of the immensely arrogant and ignorant Brazilian elites; a neoliberal triumph, with Brazilian “democracy” trampled down six feet under.
It’s impossible to understand what happened at the Circus Maximus last Sunday without knowing there’s a gaggle of Brazilian political parties that are seriously threatened by the non-stop overspill of the Car Wash corruption investigation. To ensure their survival, Car Wash must be “suspended”; and it will, under the bogus “national unity” proposed by lowly Brutus Temer.
But first, Car Wash must produce a high-profile scalp. And that has to be Lula in jail – compared to which the crucifixion of Rousseff is an Aesop fable. Corporate media, led by the noxious Globo empire, would hail it as the ultimate victory, and nobody would care about Car Wash’s enforced retirement.
The 54 million-plus who voted for Rousseff’s reelection in 2014 voted wrong. The overall “project” is a government without vote and without people; a Brazilian-style parliamentary system, without bothering with pesky “elections” and crucially, including very “generous” campaign financing flexibility not bound to incriminate powerful companies/corporations.
In a nutshell, the ultimate aim is to perfectly “align” the Brazilian Executive, Legislative, Judiciary and corporate media interests. Democracy is for suckers. Brazilian elites remote controlling the hyenas know very well that if Lula runs again in 2018, he will win. And Lula has already warned; he won’t buy any “national unity” crap; he’ll be back in the streets fighting whatever illegitimate government pops up.
We’re now open for plundering
As it stands, Rousseff runs the risk of becoming the first major casualty of the NSA-originated, two-year-long Car Wash investigation. The President, admittedly an incompetent economic manager and lacking the right stuff of a master politician, believed that Car Wash – which practically prevented her from governing – would not reach her because she is personally honest. Yet Car Wash’s not so hidden agenda was always regime change. Who cares if in the process the nation is left on the verge of being controlled exactly by many of those indicted by the anti-corruption drive?
Lowly Brutus Temer – a vanity case version of Argentina’s Macri – is the perfect conduit for the implementation of regime change. He represents the powerful banking lobby, the powerful agribusiness lobby and the powerful federation of industries in Brazil’s economic leader, the state of Sao Paulo.
The neo-developmentalist project for Latin America – uniting at least some of the local elites, invested in developing internal markets, in association with the working classes – is now dead, because what may be defined as sub-hegemonic, or peripheral, capitalism is mired in crisis after the 2008 Wall Street-provoked debacle. What’s left is just neoliberal restoration. TINA (“there is no alternative”). This implies, in the Brazilian case, the savage reversion of Lula’s legacy; social policies, technological policies, the drive to globally expand large, competitive Brazilian companies, more public universities, better salaries.
In a message to the nation, Brutus Temer admitted as much; “hope” after impeachment will be absolutely swell for “foreign investment”, as in let them plunder the colony at will; back to the trademark history of Brazil since 1500.
So Wall Street, US Big Oil and the proverbial “American interests” win this round at the circus – thanks to the, once again proverbial, vassal/comprador elites. Chevron execs are already salivating with the prospect of laying their hands on the pre-salt oil deposits; that was already promised by a trusted vassal in the Brazilian opposition.
The coup goes on. The real hyenas haven’t yet pounced. So it's far from over.
- Guess Who's On The Front Of The New $20 'Trillion Debt' Bill
- Beware The Bubble In China's Domestic Commodity Market
We just see another bubble building up in China, aka the domestic commodity market. On April 21st, led by bellwether Rebar Steel futures, other 7 commodities were lifted to the up limit (5% to 7%), including iron ore, HRC steel, met coal, asphalt, methanol, cotton, and egg (yes, it’s egg! No one has idea why even eggs go up together with other commodities). The endless money just flood everywhere in the domestic commodity market, especially for those lagged behind, and fundamentals do not matter here. The case of Rebar major contract RB1610 (settle in Oct 2016) can tell you how crazy the market is. On April 21st, RB1610’s trading volume is 22M contracts (equal to 220M tn of rebar steel), but China only produces 200M tn rebar in 2015 (China total steel production is around 850M tn per year). So the Chinese trades one year production volume for the underlying commodity in a single day, for a specific contract (Oct 2016) only!
Below is the YTD performace of the major commodities trading in the China domestic futures market.
The bulls talk about inflation trade, while the bears talk about deteriorating fundamentals. Apparently, both side speak in different languages, and in the short term, the side with stronger fire power (money) wins. The Shanghai Chaos Fund, which was famous for shorting big in copper in 2015, is reported to lose around $80M a day on April 20th as it holds 120k contracts short position in Rebar. One of its flagship funds, Chaos Value I which invests in A share and commodities, has declined 19% YTD.
We all know China created $1 tn credit in Q1 to stimuluate the economy, and apparently part of the money flows into the commodity market (the infamous A share equity market is deemed as “bear market” now and the speculators don’t even bother to trade there). As indicated by the chart below, the total China domestic commodity daily trading amount is RMB1.4tn per day in 2016 (YTD), compared to RMB1.1tn per day in 2015, a 27% increase. On Apirl 20th, its trading amount hits RMB2.9 tn, compared to the A share market’s RMB0.5tn amount.
Trading amount in Chinese domestic commodity market (value in RMB100M)
Seeing the great “opportunities” of the fantasty commodity bull markets, Chinese retails investors rush to the brokers to open new accounts. It’s reported that the new accounts number in April is double or triple of the normal days. Does it smell the same as 2015’s A share market?
But wait, the leverage in the commodities market (easily 10x) is much higher than that in the A share market (normally 2-4x). If the investors still remember the lesson in 2015, they should pay extra attention now. When the music stops, the collapse of price can be faster and steeper than the pace of going up. 2009 already showed us a real example in the Rebar market.
White line: Rebar price in 2009 (lhs), Purple line: Rebar price in 2016 (rhs)
Is the Rebar rally sustainable? The A share equity investors gives their own answer. The orange line (below) is China’s rebar price and the purple line is the share price of Baosteel, the flagship Chinese steel company.
Apparently the equity investors don’t believe the rally is sustainable. However, the funny thing is the North American equity investors are chasing the most leveraged commodities equity names (green line is US Steel and blue line is Teck Resources). They must hope the comodity rally can continue and hold at high level for a while. So we will see who is right, the Chinese commodity speculators or North American equity investors.
- One Reader Tried To Get A Transcript Of What Obama Said To Yellen; This Is What The Fed Replied
One month ago we showed something curious: literally, the very hour the market was hitting its February lows, Janet Yellen was on the phone with Bank of England governor (and former Goldman Sachs employee) Marc Carney, followed the very next day by a conversation with ECB president (and former Goldman Sachs employee) Mario Draghi.
One reader tried to get to the bottom of the content of these phone calls and sent a FOIA to the Fed in which he requested the audio file or any documentation of the nature of the telephone call between Yellen and Carney and, subsequently, Draghi.
The Fed’s response: a resounding “no”, for the following reason: “the responsive document contains nonpublic commercial or financial information” and while “the document containing the exempt information was reviewed… no reasonably segregable nonexempt information was found.” Case closed.
This came from the “most transparent Fed ever.”
A few days later, another very important and once again “behind closed doors” event took place: Yellen met with both Obama in the afternoon of April 10, just hours after the Fed held an emergency meeting under expedited procedures to discuss “rates.” That meeting too was confidential.
While clearly the detailed contents of the meeting would not be revealed, the White House was kind enough to issue the following three sentence summary:
The President and Chair Yellen met this afternoon in the Oval Office as part of an ongoing dialogue on the state of the economy. They discussed both the near and long-term growth outlook, the state of the labor market, inequality, and potential risks to the economy, both in the United States and globally. They also discussed the significant progress that has been made through the continued implementation of Wall Street Reform to strengthen our financial system and protect consumers.
This in turn came from the “most transparent administration ever.” Sarcasm aside, the above was far more “transparent” than what the Fed provided following Yellen’s meeting, which was nothing.
Which is why one reader decided to once again give it a try, and get to the bottom of what was said during the Yellen-Obama meeting asking for the minutes from said meeting.
The Fed’s response: “we don’t keep those.”
And that, dear readers, is how fully and thoroughly accountable to the public both the White House and the Federal Reserve truly are.
- Japan's Keynesian Death Spiral – How Central Planners Crippled An Economy
Submitted by Yonathan Amselem via The Mises Institute,
The greatest tragedy of the 2008–2009 financial meltdown was not that it happened. The collapse of asset prices was the necessary result of near zero interest rates. No, the most devastating aspect of the financial meltdown is that central planning alchemy lost no credibility. Policymakers around the world are still turning to Keynesian and socialist interventionism to address problems caused by Keynesians and socialists. The twin sledgehammers of central banking and almost unlimited state power have so distorted global markets (again) that some economies are now terminal. The latest victim of the interventionists and micromanagers is the nation of Japan. A once genuinely productive and innovative nation has, over the years, slowly succumbed to the cancerous rot of interventionism.
Japan’s World War II defeat left behind a barren rocky island whose industrial capacity, infrastructure, and labor force were devastated by Allied bombs. Japan’s flattened cities and smoldering factories may have painted a gloomy future but Japan had the thing that mattered most — a population largely free to organize and rebuild. The American military and remnants of central Japanese authority tried to lead the rebuilding of Japan through the political process but lines of communication and the transportation infrastructure were so damaged that many population centers away from Tokyo were left relatively free to rebuild. The resulting Japanese economic boom catapulted Japan’s living standards to a level on par with most Westernized nations. This explosive growth, described as a “miracle,” was no such thing. Japan’s new-found prosperity was simply what happens when markets are allowed to function. Unfortunately, the central planners in banking and government couldn’t resist the statist urge of heavy-handed interventionism. If there’s anything the political elite hate, its free people making voluntary decisions without their forceful input.
Central Planning Has Turned Japanese Corporations into Welfare Queens
The central planners imposed a number of zany anti-market schemes on the Japanese economy that have never been substantively reformed to this day. Legislators shielded Japan’s massive industrial base from foreign competition through protectionist tariffs and even subsidized some overseas exports. On the domestic front, nascent Japanese companies were heavily burdened by onerous regulations and very high taxes — this made it nearly impossible for start-ups to get off the ground and challenge the corporate establishment’s market share. As if this was not enough, exporters were further coddled by the Bank of Japan (BOJ). The BOJ has been fervently trying to turn the yen into toilet paper for the last thirty years. A cheap currency means artificially high profits for companies that export goods and artificially high costs for companies that import goods. After all, no government scheme could rightfully call itself a government scheme if it didn’t enrich somebody at the direct expense of others. The destructive effects of these policies have massively eroded Japanese productivity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
As happens in all industrialized economies with a powerful state and central bank, Japan’s largest corporations became agents or semi-agents of the state. Japanese automakers, shippers, and other producers could reliably be expected to carry out carry out government labor or production policy in exchange for direct access to politicians, cheap loans, anti-competitive legislation, guaranteed profits, and bail outs. Japanese companies (particularly manufacturers) are deeply entrenched and largely immune to domestic and foreign competitors. Government protectionism turned once productive Japanese companies slow and arthritic. The few actually productive sectors of Japan have been forcefully shrunken by taxes to subsidize an outrageously bloated government and the multitude of corporate parasites huddled around its teats. The result is that Japanese companies are increasingly noncompetitive in a global marketplace shared by dynamic companies from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and other more-market-oriented economies.
Keynesian Alchemy in Japan
Japan’s Keynesian death spiral began almost three decades ago. In 1986 the value of the Japanese yen almost doubled relative to the US dollar. Consequently, Japan’s mammoth export sector took a beating. Businesses with political influence found they could achieve higher returns not by innovating or cutting costs, but rather, by pressuring the political and monetary elite to flood the market with cheap credit. The BOJ and short-sighted politicians were happy to oblige. The result was a bubble unlike anything Japan had ever experienced. The land value of Tokyo surpassed the land value of the entirety of the United States. In just a few short years, the Nikkei quadrupled in size and an enormous Japanese financial sector came into existence. The overfinancialization of an economy is among the first signs of a malignant central bank sized tumor. The rise of gargantuan investment banks and multimillion dollar derivatives traders in the United States correlated almost exactly with the death of sound (ish) money in 1971 (Nixon’s administration took the United States completely off the gold standard). Japan’s monetary madness resulted in corporations and households assuming record levels of debt that were financed by zero savings in the private economy.
The inevitable bursting of the bubble in the early 1990s was truly spectacular. The Nikkei lost over 80 percent of its value, land and home prices almost completely flattened, and GDP growth crashed to an anemic 1 percent. When economists refer to Japan’s “lost decade” they refer to Japan’s post-bubble economy. Yet, Japan now finds itself creeping into a third decade with minuscule growth. The Nikkei and asset prices have never recovered anywhere near their previous highs. Anyone getting into the Nikkei in 1990 would, after twenty-six years, have returns of roughly -50 percent. Keynesians and other economic interventionists would do well to view Japan as the canary in the coal mine. The United States and Europe have doubled down on Keynesian alchemy this last decade but our leaders need only look at the devastation these schemes have brought to Japan — a nation that has tried to borrow, print, and tax itself into prosperity for thirty years. Japan is in the late stages of Keynesian cancer and policymakers in the rest of the developed world would do well to take notice.
Demographics
As if the political elite’s harebrained schemes weren’t doing enough to put a nail in Japan’s coffin, the nation is also suffering a demographic disaster. A country that consumes more adult diapers than baby diapers is a nation on its way to the dustbin of history. There is such a shortage of young, capable labor in Japan that the nation has even started importing “interns” from China to work in its many industries. As is happening in Europe and the United States, endless undergraduate and postgraduate “education” has sheltered young adults more and more from the real skills demanded by the labor market. Young adulthood is financed almost exclusively by debt or capital consumption of their parent’s savings. The hassles of starting and raising a family have become more and more burdensome to unskilled, indebted Japanese couples (with no savings) that probably only enter the workforce for the first time in their mid-twenties.
It Is Not Too Late
Japan has a highly capable workforce, an impressive industrial base, and all the infrastructure necessary to reassert itself as a global commercial powerhouse. Japan’s recovery means cutting taxes, paring down its outrageously expensive mercantile policies, allowing for easier immigration of foreign companies and their employees, and letting the market decide the true value of the yen. The Japanese people need to reject the schemers and planners who are suffocating a great nation.
- It's Now Cheaper To 'Buy' A Dry Bulk Freight Tanker Than A Starbucks Coffee
Just 3 short months ago, we detailed how – thanks to the collapse in China's growth and massive commodity inventory gluts, the cost of renting a Dry Bulk Tanker was less than the cost of renting a ferrari for a day…
As Bloomberg reported at the time,
Rates for Capesize-class ships plummeted 92 percent since August to $1,563 a day amid slowing growth in China. That’s less than a third of the daily rate of 3,950 pounds ($5,597) to rent a Ferrari F40, the price of which has also fallen slightly in the past few years, according to Nick Hardwick, founder of supercarexperiences.com.
The Baltic Exchange’s rates reflect the cost of hiring the vessel but not fuel costs. Ships burn about 35 metric tons a day, implying a cost of about $4,000 at present prices, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
One would think, considering how much the Baltic Dry Index has 'surged' off its all-time record lows – and the noise being spewed by Cramer et al. that this is somehow indicative of the "big comeback" in the Chinese (and world) economies – that the situation would have improved… But it has not!
For the cost of $1 – less than the price of a Grande Black Coffee at Starbucks – you too can be the owner of a 58,429 deadweight tonne bulk carrier…
Goldenport, one of the last shipping companies left on the London Stock Exchange, has delisted from the market and sold off six of its remaining eight vessels for $1…
The giveaway reflects the most dismal shipping conditions in decades, caused by economic slowdown in China combined with an oversupply of vessels due to a building spree during a previous boom and the fact that "average daily hire rates have fallen below even a vessel’s daily operating expenses."
The Greek owners are looking for buyers for two remaining vessels and are taking Goldenport off the stock market, saying it no longer makes sense to list shares which have dropped from highs of $100 in 2007 to less than 2c now.
John Dragnis, the chief executive of Goldenport, said “Dry bulk vessels generally have fallen in value by around 60% over the last year partly because of extreme oversupply and partly because of low demand for coal as China moves towards renewable energy to curb [carbon] emissions," adding that “The prevailing market conditions are probably the worst of the last 30 years."
All of which seems very odd given the aforementioned resurgence of the Baltic Dry – unless that is not reflecting reality (like so many other indicators).which leaves us to wonder if all this exuberant excitement with regard the Baltic Dry Index's resurrection from the dead is just more China-credit-fueled smoke-and-mirrors speculation – just as it was in 2009 when QE unleashed hope, only to be dashed on the shores of demand-doldrum-reality…
Richard Fulford-Smith, the founder of the Affinity shipbroking firm and a leading figure in the London maritime scene, said the bulk shipping markets were in “a sad state” and there could be more bankruptcies and exits before any bounce back. Fulford-Smith, 60, added: “I will probably be retired by the time there is any real recovery.”
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