Month: April 2017

Since her awkward March speech in which Hillary vowed she was “ready to come out of the woods,” the world has been anxiously waiting for the two time failed presidential candidate to announce her next move.  In the absence of facts, rumors have swirled that she might consider a run for Mayor of New York, start working on a 2020 presidential bid or just return to the Clinton Foundation.

Now, courtesy of The Hill, it seems we can at least knock a return to the Clinton Foundation off the list of possible future careers.

“She’s taking a look at her life and wants to try some different things,” said one ally who has spoken to Clinton in recent weeks. “She’s not tying herself to something that’s always been an option. She wants to figure out what she wants to do.”

 

Still, those familiar with Clinton’s immediate future say that just because she won’t take an active role in the organization doesn’t mean she won’t give occasional foundation-related speeches or participate in its programs.

 

“Everyone knows they’ll have access to her whenever they need her,” the confidant said. “This has really become President Clinton and Chelsea’s thing.”

Perhaps the true catalyst is that with prospects for a “Clinton” being the next president no longer imminent – unless of course Hillary or Chelsea confirm their plans to run again –  former donors such as Norway and Australia have quietly stopped handing over their cash?

Of course, with the various pay-to-play allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation during her last presidential campaign, including that time she was offered $12 million for a “meeting” in Morocco, it’s not terribly surprising that Hillary would look to distance herself from the organization if she’s considering a return to public life.

Clinton took an active role in the family’s foundation after leaving the State Department in 2013, working on early childhood development and other issues involving women and girls.

 

“I am thrilled to fully join this remarkable organization that [former President] Bill [Clinton] started a dozen years ago, and to call it my home for the work I will be doing,” she said in remarks at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2013.

 

At the same time, in 2013, the foundation changed its name to the Bill, -Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, though it changed back to the Clinton Foundation in 2015.

And while we still don’t know Hillary’s ultimate ambitions, The Hill notes that she’s hard at work making more money and playing with her grandchildren.

For now, Hillary Clinton is focused on her upcoming book, which she is writing with two campaign speechwriters: Dan Schwerin — who also helped write the former secretary of State’s 2014 book, “Hard Choices” — and Megan Rooney.

 

She is also scheduled for several speeches, including a commencement speech in May at her alma mater, Wellesley College.

 

In an interview Tuesday on “CBS This Morning,” Chelsea Clinton was asked what her mother’s plans might look like in the coming months.

 

“She’s focused, thankfully, on her grandchildren,” the former first daughter said. “She’s focused on what she can do to help support work that she’s been engaged in for longer than I’ve been alive, around children, around women, around families.”

Have we seen the end of Hillary’s campaigning days or does she have one more tour of duty in her?  A 2020 rematch could be good fun. 

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Heraeus Gold Refinery Buys Swiss Refiner Argor-Heraeus

– Heraeus gold and precious metals refinery buys Swiss refinery Argor-Heraeus
– Heraeus reported to have paid “few hundred million euros for the remaining Argor shares”
– Argor-Heraeus “goodwill” alone reported to have been valued at over “half a billion Swiss francs”
– Global technology & precious metals refiner Heraeus will acquire stakes from Commerzbank and Austrian Mint
– Heraeus involved with Argor-Heraeus since 1986
– Swiss refinery Argor Heraeus once fully-owned by UBS
– Heraeus to profit from Argor’s competence for gold and silver refining and international footprint
– Prudent Germans know history and love gold

Heraeus, the family owned German global technology and precious metals refining company has announced that it is to buy one of Switzerland’s largest gold and silver refineries, Argor-Heraeus.

Heraeus gold and precious metals refinery is one of the world’s largest provider of precious metals services and Heraeus gold bars are some of the most trusted gold bars in the markets.

It is rumoured to have agreed to pay some €300 million for the 67% stake, taking its total holdings up to 100%. According to the Handelsblatt, goodwill alone “was estimated at around half a billion Swiss francs.”

The move by Heraeus gold refinery to buy the remaining 67% does not change the face of Argor-Heraeus from a Swiss-based refinery to a German one. Whilst is headquartered in Mendrisio (Ticino, Switzerland) it has ‘international branch offices in Germany, Italy and Chile.’

Argor’s gold refining is not purely Swiss either, Argor-Heraeus operates gold refining and gold bar production facilities in Hanau, Hong Kong, and Newark (New Jersey).

The Argor-Heraeus company was founded in 1951 and in 1973 the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) acquired full ownership of the refinery. Hereaus has held a stake in the Swiss refinery since 1986 when UBS and Heraeus Group (Germany) formed a joint venture, creating Argor-Heraeus SA.

Since 1999 UBS has not been involved and Argor-Heraeus has been owned by private companies, with Heraeus holding 33% of Argor-Heraeus shares, Commerzbank holding 32.7% of the equity, the Austrian Mint holding another 30%, and Argor-Heraeus’s management holding the balance of shares.

Heraeus describes itself as a ‘global technology company’ and plan to “fully profit from Argors competence and capacity for gold and silver,” according to Heraeus CEO Jan Rinnert in a statement released this week.

What does AG do?

Heraeus has an annual gold output of 400- 500 tonnes of gold per year, they produce 10% of the roughly 5,000 tonnes of gold refined by the top seven gold refineries.

What is still known as Argor-Heraeus, sits within just a few kilometres of Valcambi (the world’s largest gold refinery) and PAMP.

According to goldbarsworldwide.com Argor-Heraeus has the following facilities:

(1) Gold refining and the recycling of scrap
(2) Gold semi-finished products for the watch & jewellery industries
(3) Gold medals & coins
(4) Gold bars
(5) Precious metals services and logistics

When it comes to gold bars, it is  ‘renowned for its manufacture of customized bars for banks around the world, notably in Europe, CIS and Middle East.’ It is involved in the ‘entire distribution chain for precious metals, from the mine to the end user, to the benefit of all partners involved.’

London Good Delivery

Argor-Heraeus has a close relationship with the LBMA which goes back a long way. In 1952 it became the first LBMA accredited refiner to have ‘manufactured a range of minted bars’.

It has produced London Good Delivery gold bars since 1961. Today it also produces silver, platinum and palladium Good Delivery bars and in 2004 it became one of five London Good Delivery referees appointed by the LBMA, for gold and silver.

Why buy the whole company?

Currently precious metals account for €1.9billion of Heraeus’ €12.9 billion total revenues (2015 financial year). As stated above, the company has been involved with the Swiss refinery business since 1986 and owned 33% of the business, prior to this latest purchase.

In late 2016 it was revealed that other buyers had been sniffing around the Argor-Heraeus business. S&P Global Platts reported that Capvis, a Swiss private equity company, was looking to buy the Swiss refinery for €200 million, by early 2017. However, the deal fell through when the price was deemed too high.

The Capris deal may have fallen through as Heraeus were beginning to make interested noises about buying. The company would clearly had total transparency on all activities within the refinery business and would have been in a better place to make an offer. Interestingly, it knew enough to make it happy to pay over one-third more than Capvis were purportedly considering.

Heraeus describes itself as a ‘global technology company’. When it comes to precious metals its expertise is mainly in the platinum group of metals. In a statement announcing the sale Heraeus CEO Jan Rinnert said the company plans to “fully profit from Argors competence and capacity for gold and silver.”

Rinnert is clearly hoping that Argor-Heraeus’ expertise and infrastructure in the gold and silver market will go a significant way in the parent company’s power across the precious metal industry. Whilst Argor-Heraeus has locations outside of Switzerland (see above) the new owner can complement this with its own infrastructure that extends to Asia, North America and India, as well as its German headquarters. There are obvious synergies there.

The acquisition is yet another one in the Swiss gold and precious metals refining sector. It comes after the acquisition of Neuchâtel based Metalor Technologies by Japanese Tanaka Precious Metals in July 2016. In the summer of 2015, Indian group Rajesh Exports announced the takeover of Ticino-based Swiss gold and silver refiner Valcambi.

Prudent Germans know history and value gold

One thing that hasn’t been covered above, or in any of the press coverage is the consideration Heraeus must have made regarding the outlook for the gold and silver market. Why would you acquire one-third more for a company and pay such a high price for “goodwill” unless you were pretty confident of expected growth and future profits?

The refinery makes gold bars and silver bars for all involved in the gold market from central banks through to retail investors. This latest acquisition is one in a line of foreign acquisitions of Swiss refineries and says a lot about confidence in the gold market.

It also shows the value that Germans place on gold. Knowing history and especially monetary history and understanding the vulnerability of paper or electronic currencies that are being debased helps them in this regard.

It is another example of the understanding most German people and business owners have in the importance of and value of gold.

Gold and Silver Bullion – News and Commentary

Gold imports surge as Turks heed Erdogan’s call and vote looms (Reuters.com)

Turkey to give central bank first option on buying domestic gold (Reuters.com)

Gold prices get boost from soft dollar, St. Petersburg blast (CNBC.com)

Gold settles higher for third day as investors await Trump-Xi meeting (MarketWatch.com)

U.S. Stocks Mixed, Dollar Strengthens With Gold (Bloomberg.com)

History Shows Gold Thrives Fed-Rate-Hike Cycles (Zealllc.com)

Key Driver For Gold is Real Interest Rates (Bloomberg.com)

Record $10 Trillion Paper Gold Trading Market Continues To Depress Price (SRSRoccoReport.com)

Gibraltar Spat Shows How Bumpy the Road to Brexit Will Likely Be (Bloomberg.com)

GFMS Gold Survey 2017 – Thomson Reuters (ThomsonReuters.info)

Gold Prices (LBMA AM)

05 Apr: USD 1,252.50, GBP 1,003.88 & EUR 1,174.47 per ounce
04 Apr: USD 1,258.65, GBP 1,011.07 & EUR 1,181.49 per ounce
03 Apr: USD 1,246.25, GBP 997.25 & EUR 1,168.48 per ounce
31 Mar: USD 1,241.70, GBP 996.46 & EUR 1,161.98 per ounce
30 Mar: USD 1,250.90, GBP 1,005.72 & EUR 1,165.34 per ounce
29 Mar: USD 1,252.90, GBP 1,007.71 & EUR 1,161.19 per ounce
28 Mar: USD 1,253.65, GBP 996.15 & EUR 1,154.49 per ounce

Silver Prices (LBMA)

05 Apr: USD 18.26, GBP 14.63 & EUR 17.11 per ounce
04 Apr: USD 18.34, GBP 14.73 & EUR 17.23 per ounce
03 Apr: USD 18.16, GBP 14.52 & EUR 17.05 per ounce
31 Mar: USD 18.06, GBP 14.50 & EUR 16.91 per ounce
30 Mar: USD 18.10, GBP 14.53 & EUR 16.85 per ounce
29 Mar: USD 18.13, GBP 14.58 & EUR 16.81 per ounce
28 Mar: USD 17.94, GBP 14.29 & EUR 16.53 per ounce

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Access Award Winning Daily and Weekly Updates Here

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Apple stock is lower in the premarket, bucking the overall futures trend, following a report from Digitimes according to which Apple may delay the launch of its next-generation iPhone to October or even November, instead of September as usual, citing a Chinese-language Economic Daily News (EDN) report.

As reason for the delay, EDN cites technical issues related to the lamination process of curved OLED panels, and the adoption of a 3D sensing system.

Market sources said that they are watching the pull-in of orders for passive components from the iPhone’s supply chain to see whether production of the new iPhone devices is on track, said the paper, adding that the supply chain should begin to pull in orders for passive components such as MLCCs in June.

Major suppliers included in the iPhone supply chain include TSMC, Foxconn Electronics, Pegatron Technology, Wistron, Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), Largan Precision, Cyntec and Yageo

Meanwhile, as Reuters reports, Apple’s decision to stop licensing graphics chips from Imagination Technologies Group, which sent the stock crashing over 60% this week, is the clearest example yet of the iPhone maker’s determination to take greater control of the core technologies in its products – both to guard its hefty margins and to position it for future innovations, especially in so-called augmented reality.

The strategy has already reduced Apple’s dependence on critical outside suppliers like ARM Holdings Plc, now owned by SoftBank Group Corp. Apple once relied heavily on ARM to design the main processor for the iPhone, but it now licenses only the basic ARM architecture and designs most of the chip itself.  More recently, when Apple bought the headphone company Beats Electronics, part of a $3 billion deal in 2014, it ripped out the existing, off-the-shelf communications chips and replaced them with its own custom-designed W1 Bluetooth chip.

“Apple clearly got rid of all the conventional suppliers and replaced about five chips with one,” said Jim Morrison, vice president of TechInsights, a firm that examines the chips inside electronics devices.

“Today we do much more in-house development of fundamental technologies than we used to,” Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri said at a February conference. “Think of the work we do on processors or sensors. We can push the envelope on innovation. We have better control over timing, over cost and over quality.”

Most vendors of consumer electronics products rely on outside suppliers for chip design and development, primarily because it is extremely expensive. That has created huge opportunities for companies like ARM, Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) and Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), which have developed core technologies for processing, communications and graphics that are used by scores of vendors.

Now, though, Apple is so big that it can economically create its own designs, or license small pieces of others’ work and build on it. As with ARM and Qualcomm, the actual manufacturing of the chips is still contracted out to a semiconductor foundry, such as those run by Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd.

For investors this leaves a binary quandary: will Apple acquire its key vendors, or will it simply abandon them, proceeding with inhouse development instead.

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The scorching ADP print may have brought another life into the reflation trade this morning, with TSYs dropping and the dollar rising, pushing S&P futures higher, but that may not be sufficient according to SocGen’s Kit Juckes who points out that as oil prices bounced from their lows under USD 26/bbl and the US economy gathered momentum in the middle of last year, breakeven inflation rates on US Treasuries moved up from a low of 1.2%, eventually reaching a peak just under 2.1% in early 2017. The trendier 5y5y inflation swap rate rose from 1.8% to 2.6% over the same period. Both are now drifting lower, the breakeven inflation rate at 1.96% currently.

If breakeven inflation can’t cling on to the Fed’s 2% inflation target (which is also the average breakeven rate of the last decade), what does that say about investor mindset? The danger is that the longer nominal yields remain in their current range, the greater the pressure on investors to buy longer-dated bonds. And that would not be good for the dollar at all.

Juckes also note that yen bears have plents of reasons to be nervous:

As for EUR/USD, Juckes notes that it remains stuck. The ‘winner’ of last night’s TV debate was apparently Jean-Luc Melenchon, who is chasing down Fancois Fillon for third place. The effective winner seems to be Emmanuel Macron. The big question is still. Whether a large percentage of undecided voters and a low turnout could give Marine Le Pen a chance that is not reflected in any of the opinion polls. The Euro may struggle to rally amid the uncertainty but the fundamental backdrop points more and more to a sharp post-election spike.

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After last month’s private payrolls scorcher, when ADP reported that a whopping 298K jobs were added, the biggest increase in 6 years on a record surge in good producing jobs, this morning ago the momentum continued when ADP reported that in March the US generated 263,000 jobs, smashing expectations of a 185,000 gain, and after a downward revision to the February number from 298K to 245K, this was the highest print since December 2014.

Goods producers added 82,000 while construction jobs swelled by 49,000 and manufacturing added 30,000.

Broken down by firm size:

• Small firms (1-49) added 118k jobs in March
• Medium firms (50-499) added 100k jobs in March
• Firms with over 500 employees added 45k jobs

The details:

“The U.S. labor market finished the first quarter on a strong note,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “Consumer dependent industries including healthcare, leisure and hospitality, and trade had strong growth during the month.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics said, “Job growth is off to a strong start in 2017. The gains are broad based but most notable in the goods producing side of the economy including construction, manufacturing and mining.

Judging by the market’s reaction the reflation trade may be making a comeback, with the dollar rising ahead of Friday’s payrolls release which according to ADP may be another blockbuster report.

Some more visual details:

Change in Nonfarm Private Employment

Change in Total Nonfarm Private Employment

Change in Total Nonfarm Private Employment by Company Size

Finally, the infamous ADP infographic: