The Swiss and Guns
December 4th, 2009What to Do About Europe’s Secret Nukes
December 3rd, 2009Via: Time:
Is Italy capable of delivering a thermonuclear strike? Could the Belgians and the Dutch drop hydrogen bombs on enemy targets? And what about Germany — a country where fear of atomkraft is so great that the last government opposed all civilian nuclear power? Germany’s air force couldn’t possibly be training to deliver bombs 13 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, could it?
It is Europe’s dirty secret that the list of nuclear-capable countries extends beyond those — Britain and France — who have built their own weapons. Nuclear bombs are stored on air-force bases in Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands — and planes from each of those countries are capable of delivering them. The Federation of American Scientists believes that there are some 200 B61 thermonuclear gravity bombs scattered across these four countries. Under a NATO agreement struck during the Cold War, the bombs, which are technically owned by the U.S., can be transferred to the control of a host nation’s air force in times of conflict. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dutch, Belgian, Italian and German pilots remain ready to engage in nuclear war.
Large Petroleum Products Market Participants Storing Distillates at Sea, Distorting the Demand Picture
December 3rd, 2009I like one of the comments on the source page:
“You won’t see any boats loaded with gold stuck in the ocean.”
HAR!
Via: Globe and Mail / Reuters:
Oil product tankers idling in quiet waters of the world’s oceans are unlikely to move on until well into 2010 when more refinery shutdowns could curb production and force vessels to unload.
Floating oil product volumes, comprising mostly distillates such as diesel and the heating fuel gas oil, have surged to unprecedented levels of about 100 million barrels, but refiners are still pumping out more than the world can consume.
“We see no quick solution for the floating storage issue. It might run into the third quarter of next year,” said analyst David Wech at JBC Energy, adding, “the high contango reflects the supply-demand imbalance which is most dramatic in distillates.
Banks, oil majors and trading companies with access to cheap credit are looking to reap the benefits of a market structure known as contango, where future prices are higher than the prompt, that tends to emerge in times of oversupply.
They are buying gas oil, storing it on idle tankers in sheltered parts of the English Channel, Singapore and the Mediterranean and selling it at a higher price later.
Buying for storage at sea, dubbed “floating storage demand” by physical traders, creates the illusion of consumption in the products market, and keeps profit margins for distillates positive. This in turn sends a false signal to refiners to keep churning it out.
A senior official at French oil major Total said in an interview with Reuters in November that the market will have to accept high levels of floating storage until at least the middle of next year.
While the contango on crude futures has been volatile and as slender as 3 cents in October, the spread between the front two contracts of the gas oil curve on the IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) has widened since the summer.
Crude oil volumes in floating storage are estimated at around 35 million barrels.
The prompt spread of ICE gas oil futures flipped to contango in November last year from narrow backwardation and has grown steeper.
Last month, the contango was the second highest since the latest sea storage trend began in early 2009 at an average of $10 (U.S.) a tonne.
Trade sources estimate the contango storage play will be profitable until the contango narrows to around $7 a tonne.
“Some guys with deeper pockets are still looking to put more into storage and they can keep doing so until we get to $7 a tonne,” said a London-based distillates trader.
Eventually, deep refinery run cuts to near 80 per cent in Europe and the United States could slow the build of floating storage while further refinery shutdowns and the emergence of real demand could drain them, analysts said.
“It is tough to see an end to this situation. We need to see further shutdowns of refineries,” said Petromatrix analyst Olivier Jakob.
Many refineries in Europe and the United States are already up for sale or idled because of depressed demand since the start of the global economic slowdown.
For some analysts, sea storage at present levels is so high it could meet all of the expected oil demand growth for next year.
“The current stocks afloat should meet most of next year’s demand increase, which would leave onshore stocks basically unchanged from the current record highs,” said Mr. Jakob.
“An adjustment in forward demand should be made for this amount of oil sitting idle at anchor.”
Pilot for 9/11 Flight School Considered Grave Threat to National Security
December 3rd, 2009Via: Mad Cow Productions:
A U.S. Customs Agent on duty when controversial drug pilot and “soldier of fortune” Michael Brassington attempted to re-enter the US through Fort Lauderdale International Airport in April of 2004 was instructed by a Supervisor at Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to treat Brassington—a long-time employee and business associate of Wallace J. Hilliard, owner of the flight school that taught Mohamed Atta to fly— as a “grave threat to national security.”
…
A notation had been placed after Brassington’s name on his computer screen, Sanders said.
It provided—at long last—official confirmation of our reporting.
“Brassington had an “active lookout” for narcotics,” sander explained. “And there was the date, July 25, 2000, that he’d got caught.”
“Come to find out later, he’d been working for a 9/11 flight school owner named Wally Hilliard. But I only found that out after I discovered your website, www.madcowprod.com. Its kind of strange that the whole subject never came up while I was working down there. And I just couldn’t have imagine that this was all connected to 9/11.”
While Customs Agent Sanders was examining his narcotics record in the computer Brassington began brandishing a letter from a top official in the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security.
“I was looking at Brassington’s narcotics record on the computer,” says Sanders, still incredulous at the memory, “when he handed me a letter from Washington!”
Despite Brassington’s ongoing participation in a criminal enterprise, the letter seemed clearly designed to smooth his re-entry into the U.S.
…
“Bright was a local ICE Agent and I guess he was tracking Brassington,” said Sanders. “So I called him up, and I told him about the letter.
“He said you can just disregard the letter, and told me to ignore it. And he described Mike Brassington to me as a ‘grave threat to national security. He told me that I needed to check him, search him, and search all his passengers.”
Chinese Government Allegedly Doesn’t Chase Gold Rallies
December 3rd, 2009Via: Telegraph:
News that the rising powers of Asia are shifting a chunk of their fast-growing reserves into gold in a flight from Western paper currencies has emboldened investors to take out large gold bets on the futures markets or through exchange traded funds (EFT), leading to the parabolic rise in price over recent weeks.
However, officials in Beijing are aware that China’s $2.3 trillion reserves are now so enormous that the central bank cannot buy much gold without distorting the price, so they have adopted a de facto policy of buying in a calibrated fashion each time prices fall back to their rising trend line – “buying the dips” in trading parlance. Experts say that China is putting a floor under the gold price but does not chase rallies once they are under way.
Chelsea Clinton Engaged to Goldman Sachs Investment Banker
December 3rd, 2009Via: CBS News:
Chelsea’s fiancé is an investment banker who works for Goldman Sachs.
The two met in Washington as teenagers and both attended Stanford University. Mezvinsky, Miller said, is no stranger to life in the public eye. Both of his parents served in Congress, and his father, Ed Mezvinsky, served time in federal prison for bank and wire fraud.
European Banks Growing Bigger ‘Sowing the Seeds’ of Next Crisis
December 3rd, 2009Via: Bloomberg:
European banks are emerging from the credit crisis bigger than before, posing more risk to their national economies.
BNP Paribas SA, Barclays Plc and Banco Santander SA are among at least 353 European lenders that have increased in size since the beginning of 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Fifteen European banks now have assets larger than their home economies, compared with 10 lenders three years ago.
While the European Union has grabbed headlines for breaking up bailed-out banks, regulators haven’t reined in firms that shunned state aid and are too big to fail. European bank assets have grown 25 percent since the start of 2007, compared with a 20 percent increase at U.S. lenders, Bloomberg data show.
“We are sowing the seeds for the next crisis,” said David Lascelles, senior fellow at the London-based Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, a research group. “What we have been doing in the last two years is making banks much bigger. It really goes against the currents of the time.”
Vanity Fair on Blackwater’s Erik Prince
December 3rd, 2009Blackwater is a CIA cutout that got so big that it just happened to become a household name.
—Feds Investigating Blackwater USA for Selling Weapons to Iraqi Insurgency
We get into the Coincidence? category because the article just happens to be written by a “former” CIA attorney.
Via: Vanity Fair:
The truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence.
Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse’ Consumers
December 3rd, 2009Via: Wired:
Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?
That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.
Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”
“Therefore, release of Yahoo!’s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies,” the company writes.
Verizon took a different stance. It objected to the release (.pdf) of its Law Enforcement Legal Compliance Guide because it might “confuse” customers and lead them to think that records and surveillance capabilities available only to law enforcement would be available to them as well — resulting in a flood of customer calls to the company asking for trap and trace orders.
“Customers may see a listing of records, information or assistance that is available only to law enforcement,” Verizon writes in its letter, “but call in to Verizon and seek those same services. Such calls would stretch limited resources, especially those that are reserved only for law enforcement emergencies.”
Other customers, upon seeing the types of surveillance law enforcement can do, might “become unnecessarily afraid that their lines have been tapped or call Verizon to ask if their lines are tapped (a question we cannot answer).”
Verizon does disclose a little tidbit in its letter, saying that the company receives “tens of thousands” of requests annually for customer records and information from law enforcement agencies.
Warning on U.S. Muni Market Threat
December 2nd, 2009Via: Financial Times:
States need to consider permanent budgetary changes to close ballooning deficits or risk “significant cracks” in the municipal bond market, the lieutenant governor of New York said on Monday.
Richard Ravitch said New York and other states had historically relied on temporary measures to balance budgets in downturns as a bridge to recovery, a strategy that was unsustainable.
“If nothing changes, you will see significant cracks in the $3,000bn [municipal bond] market,” said Mr Ravitch, a long-time fixture in New York public office who served as an adviser to the governor during New York City’s financial crisis in the 1970s. He is now devising a four-year financial plan for New York state.
The US recession has sapped state tax receipts, with revenue falling for four consecutive quarters, says the Nelson A Rockefeller Institute of Government, a research group. That has left states grappling with budget shortfalls projected to reach $350bn in the fiscal years 2010 and 2011, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
