Gold shipment valued at $625,000 vanishes from Miami airport

 

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  American Airlines planes taxi past a terminal at Miami International airport in Miami, Florida. (Reuters)
  

A shipment of gold valued at $625,000 vanished in a suspected heist after arriving in Miami on an American Airlines flight, authorities announced Thursday.
A police report says the gold, which arrived in a box, was brought on the flight from Guayaquil, Ecuador to the Miami International Airport early Tuesday, WSVN reports.
The plane's cargo was unloaded by five crew members, but the box containing the gold disappeared after apparently being loaded onto a motorized luggage cart or tug, the report said.
The cart was found in front of a gate of the same terminal were the flight from Ecuador was unloaded, about an hour after workers emptied the cargo hold, but without the box containing the gold.
The police incident report did not say who owned the gold or what its final destination was and an American Airlines security official at the airport declined to comment to Reuters on the case, saying only that it was being investigated by the FBI.
"The FBI is aware of the situation," FBI spokesman Michael Leverock told Reuters in an email.
Miami International serves as a major trans-shipment point for large quantities of gold produced in South America and exported primarily to Switzerland for refining.
The city has seen the trans-shipment of gold rise sharply in recent years as investors have turned to gold and its price has risen.
Gold is Miami's No. 1 import valued at almost $8 billion last year, mostly from Mexico and Colombia, and almost all destined for Switzerland, according to World City, a Miami-based publication that tracks trade data.

Senate panel OKs tax-welfare benefits for newly legal immigrants

The SenateJudiciary Committee voted Monday to allow illegal immigrants who get legal status to begin collecting tax-welfare payments, as the panel spent a fourth day working through amendments to the massive immigration bill and party-line splits began to emerge.
In one major change, the committee voted 17-1 to make a third drunken-driving conviction a deportable offense for the newly legalized immigrants if at least one of those offenses occurs after they are approved for legal status.

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But immigrant-rights groups called that a rollback of due-process rights for the immigrants and said a drunken-driving incident shouldn’t cost someone a chance at citizenship.
“We cannot and will not support hard-line proposals that take away discretion and limit an individual’s ability to pursue the pathway to citizenship,” said Paromita Shah, associate director of the National Lawyers Guild’s National Immigration Project.
Overall, the committee continued to maintain the delicate balance struck by the “Gang of Eight” senators who negotiated the 867-page bill: Quick legal status for illegal immigrants, but delaying citizenship rights until after the administration spends more money on border security, puts in place a new electronic verification system to check workers’ status, and enacts an entry-exit system to check visas at airports and seaports.
In previous days’ action, two Republican members of the Gang of Eight — Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona — joined with Democrats to block a series of GOP amendments to stiffen the bill’s security.
But on Monday, the two Republicans sided with their party colleagues on key questions on giving illegal immigrants public benefits.
The 10 Democrats on the committee still outnumber the newly unified Republicans, but the votes signaled tough fights ahead on the Senate floor.

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In one vote, Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, tried to prevent anyone but citizens and green-card holders from being able to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, which uses the tax code to transfer money to the poor.
But Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said that would deny the tax credit not only to legalized immigrants but also refugees, asylum-seekers and other legal workers.
And Sen. Mazie K. Hirono, Hawaii Democrat, said denying the tax credit to legalized immigrants would hurt their children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.
The committee avoided what likely would have been a bitter fight over guns and whether those on the government’s terrorist watch list should be allowed to buy firearms when Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island Democrat, withdrew his amendment.
“Evidently we think it’s OK for people on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun,” Mr. Whitehouse said.
He said he would try again later when the bill comes to the Senate floor.

Nobel Laureate Phelps Warns Against EU as Iceland Abandons Talks

Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps warned against the dangers of European Union membership as Iceland became the latest nation to question the sense of affiliation with a bloc mired in economic crisis.
Iceland’s new government said yesterday it will halt its EU bid and drop the previous coalition’s goal of euro adoption. Prime Minister-elect Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, whose Progressives won last month’s vote together with the Independence Party, said he doesn’t want to join a bloc in crisis as his own economy recovers. According to Phelps, the decision will spare Iceland many of the risks plaguing the EU.

Enlarge image

Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, seen here right, who will take over as prime minister this week, has decided that a January decision to freeze EU membership talks will be extended indefinitely, his political adviser Johannes Thor Skulason said. Photographer: Halldor Kolbeins/AFP via Getty Images

“We’re still learning about the European experiment and to what extent it’s going to succeed,” Phelps, 79, said in a telephone interview. “The possibility is not foreclosed that the experiment is going to prove unworkable, unsuccessful.”
The appeal the EU once held to nations seeking economic stability and access to free trade is crumbling as the region fails to emerge from its crisis. The U.K. is now openly questioning its allegiance with the EU while other members like Denmark have distanced themselves from the goal of euro adoption to protect their economies. Iceland, which in 2008 became the first nation to succumb to the global financial crisis, now enjoys faster economic growth than the EU average.
“I can’t believe that anybody’s serious about joining the EU right now,” Phelps said. “It’s like saying: ‘it’s a beautiful house -- it happens to be on fire at the moment -- we should buy it!’”

Nobel Prize

Phelps, who won the Nobel Economics Prize in 2006 for his theories on the interplay between inflation expectations and unemployment, questions the future of the euro -- and the larger EU -- after three years of debt crisis have left five nations relying on bailouts.
Since emerging from its 2008 banking meltdown, Iceland’s $14 billion economy has outpaced the euro zone’s and the government has tapped international debt markets twice. Unemployment in the Atlantic island is less than half the average in the euro area and credit derivatives show a smaller likelihood of default than in Italy or Spain, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Iceland froze EU accession talks in January as parliament awaited the outcome of parliamentary elections. Though the winners of April 27 elections say Iceland will survive better on its own, the central bank has argued a free floating krona will be difficult to maintain once capital controls are lifted.

Main Hurdle

One of Iceland’s main economic hurdles now is to exit its currency controls, according to Bjarni Benediktsson, the leader of the Independence Party and the country’s new finance minister. Euro membership would offer no protection from the kind of capital flight currency restrictions are designed to stem, Phelps said.
“It’s clear that there are huge blanks, huge gaps, in what they’ve done so far” in the euro area, Phelps said in the May 16 interview. “We’re seeing now that each country is subject to a flight of capital, currency flight; flight out of the currency, flight out of bank deposits into other countries.”
Cyprus in March resorted to the first ever capital controls inside the euro area in an effort to stem a run on its banks. In Iceland, similar controls intended to be temporary following a krona sell-off have now been in place for almost five years.
While any steps closer to the EU and the euro would be ill-advised, Iceland would be better off considering exchange rate regimes that link it to other currencies, including the Canadian dollar or the Norwegian krone, Phelps said.
“It’s certainly worth a look,” he said. “Of course, once you ask that question it leads naturally to other possibilities. What about Australia or Switzerland? Or, by the way, what about the U.S. dollar? I’ve seen worse currencies in the world.”
Iceland should ask itself whether linking its krona to Canada’s dollar would be any better than tracking the U.S. dollar, he said. “Has America grown so unpopular that the dollar is dismissed out of hand?”

Thanks To QE Bernanke Has Injected Foreign Banks With Over $1 Trillion In Cash For First Time Ever

Source: Zero Hedge

Two years ago, Zero Hedge first made the observation that the bulk of Fed reserves (also known simply as “cash created out of thin air” because money is first and foremost fungible no matter what textbook theoreticians may claim, and the only cash allocation preference is the capital allocation IRR analysis) had been parked not with US banks, but with foreign banks with US-based operations. We followed that with more analyses, showing explicitly how the Fed was providing a constant cash injection to foreign bankscourtesy of the rate on overnight reserves which is the amount Fed pays to banks that hold reserves with it, as the bulk of reserves continued to end up with foreign banks – a situation set to become a huge political storm some time in 2014-2015 when the IOER has to rise and the Fed is “found” to have injected tens of billions of “interest” not into US banks but in foreign banks operating in the US, and which then can upstream the “profits” to insolvent offshore domiciled holding companies.
So it was our expectation that while if not slowing down its rate of money-creation (i.e., reserve-production) – something that won’t happen for a long time as it would crash the stock market – the Fed’s reserves would at least revert to being accumulated at US-based banks. No such luck. In fact as the latest H.8 report demonstrates, as of the most recently weekly data, the Fed’s policies have led to foreign banks operating in the US holding an all time high amount of reserves, surpassing $1 trillion for the first time, or $1,033 billion to be precise.

This means that, as we expected several months ago, the only recipient of ongoing Fed money printing are not US banks, but foreign banks operating in the US. For those confused about the big picture, here is a chart showing the breakdown of cash held by big and small US banks as well as foreign banks, superimposed to total reserves created by the Fed since the start of the Great Financial Crisis. The correlation is 100%.

And just to prove that ALL the unsterilized cash from both QE2 and QEternity has essentially gone to support offshore banks, here is the conclusive chart showing the change in Fed reserves and cash held by foreign banks:

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Finally, tying it all together, here is chart showing cash at US banks vs cash at foreign banks operating in the US. At $1.03 trillion in foreign cash, the Fed’s policies have once again led to more cash being held by foreign banks than all cash held by domestic banks.

We are confident that we speak for all when we say: “Thank you Ben – insolvent foreign banks appreciate your ongoing QE2 and QEternity-funded generosity“

Gold spikes then drops on Bernanke talk

GCM3
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Gold futures GCM3 +0.56%  went on a wild ride as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke testified on Capitol Hill Wednesday, with prices going on a 40 point swing in minutes as markets struggled to interpret when the FOMC will begin to curb its accommodative policies.
Initially, gold GCM3 +0.56%  spiked as Bernanke began to talk, particularly as he said ”A premature tightening of monetary policy could lead interest rates to rise temporarily but would also carry a substantial risk of slowing or ending the economic recovery and causing inflation to fall further.”
But after quickly rising to $1,410 an ounce, the precious metal began a sharp retreat, falling more than $40 an ounce to below $1,370 as Bernanke went on to say that Federal fiscal austerity measures are hurting the economy and that “with short-term interest rates already close to zero, monetary policy does not have the capacity to fully offset an economic headwind of this magnitude.” 
In recent action, gold has been trading below $1,380 an ounce.
– Tom Bemis

QE-INFINITY: Will take at least 3 to 4 months before Fed even Thinks about Tapering. Goldman Sachs goes Uber Bullish!

RIDE THE STOCK MARKET GRAVY TRAIN ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK.
New York Fed President William Dudley said Tuesday that it will take three to four months to know if the Federal Reserve will be in the position to decide on tapering its asset purchases adding that it is “too soon” to make that determination and depends on how the economic outlook evolves.
https://www.mr-topstep.com/index.php/layout/market-updates/2942-fed-s-dudley-will-take-3-to-4-months-to-decide-on-tapering

S&P 500 Projections – Goldman Sachs goes uber bullish on equities and raises S&P targets for multiple years: 
“Our positive 2013 outlook for S&P 500 has played out much faster than we expected. Our earnings estimates remain unchanged but we raise our dividend estimates and index return forecasts for 2013 through 2015. We expect S&P 500 will rise by 5% to 1750 by year-end 2013, advance by 9% to 1900 in 2014, and climb by 10% to 2100 in 2015. Our 2013 return implies a year-end P/E of 15.0x, a one multiple point premium to our fair-value estimate. We forecast dividends will rise by 30% during next two years. Dividend yield is likely to stay around 2%, in line with the 20-year average.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/05/21/goldman-sachs-turns-even-more-bullish-on-stocks/
The bears cannot catch a break. 
Yesterday is the latest frustration as the 8 MA attempts to drop through the 34 MA but Fed’s Bullard says full steam ahead with QE stick-saving the markets (pink box).
The pink boxes show the downside teases resulting in save after save.
The 8 MA remains above the 34 MA signaling bullishness for the hours ahead.
The Fed will not allow a market correction.
http://thekeystonespeculator.blogspot.com/

Once they stop printing, interest rise, then next leg down
http://www.dailyjobcuts.com/


What’s behind heavy VXX put buying
Traders are looking for the iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures Note to continue its slide.
optionMONSTER systems detected the purchase of 7,859 January 13 puts for the ask price of $1.30 yesterday. Earlier in the session a a block of 6,000 August 15 putstraded for $0.64, also apparently bought. Volume was multiples of the previous open interest at each strike, so these are new positions.
http://www.optionmonster.com/news/article.php?page=whats_behind_heavy_vxx_put_buying_81860.html
Stocks keep climbing before Bernanke
http://www.optionmonster.com/news/article.php?page=pmc/stocks_keep_climbing_before_bernanke_81868.html

DB

JAPAN: The Beginning of it’s Economic End – Get Ready To Short Japanese Equities And Expect Another Real-Estate Bubble Burst

Just got this very reliable financial intel.
Get ready to short Japanese equities and expect another real-estate bubble burst.

Christine Hughes, President and Chief Investment Strategist, discusses details of Japan’s radical monetary policy.
the key part of the video, for ease of viewing:

The USDJPY has is trying to break the 103 barrier again after the BoJ meeting and Cabinet Secretary Suga commented the “BoJ should continue to steadily strive to reach inflation targets as soon as possible”.
https://www.mr-topstep.com/index.php/layout/forex/2937-eur-fed-watching
Abenomics in Review: Yen, Inflation, Exports, Imports
With the Yen collapsing vs. all other currencies, inquiring minds may be wondering how prime minister Shinzo Abe’s inflation policy is working out in practice. Let’s start with a look at the Yen.
Yen Daily Chart for One Year


In the last year, the Yen has fallen from 124.79 to 97.56. That is a decline of 21.82%. Recall that Abe’s policy is an attempt to raise inflation and spur exports.
Japan Still in Deflation 
On May 19, Reuters reported Japan’s Amari: core core CPI showing signs of turning positive due to BOJ.

 Japanese Economics Minister Akira Amari said on Monday that core-core consumer prices, which exclude fresh food and energy, are showing signs of turning positive due to the Bank of Japan’s aggressive monetary easing. Amari, speaking to reporters, also said the government still judges Japan to be in mild deflation as other measures of consumer prices are still falling when compared to the same period a year ago.

Fancy that. Consumer prices are still falling in spite of a 21% plunge in the currency. OK, but what about exports and imports?
Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2013/05/abenomics-in-review-yen-inflation.html#hhvuvFPRuEP2eI9Z.99

JAPAN “voted unanimously to stick with April’s massive QE” – big reason stocks have not corrected in 2013
https://twitter.com/CiovaccoCapital