In what appears to be a material shift in the perceived OPEC balance of power, while Iran (and Iraq) have so far refused to concede to Saudi demands for production cuts, moments ago Reuters reported that in what can only be described as a demonstration of power, Iran proposed that it be Saudi Arabia that foots the entire proposed production cut, by reducing its own production to 9.5 million barrels.

• IRAN PROPOSES IN LETTER TO OPEC THAT SAUDI ARABIA CUT OIL OUTPUT TO 9.5 MLN BPD – OPEC SOURCE

As a reminder, in October Saudi Arabia produced 10.625mmbpd, implying that according to Iran it is Saudi Arabia that should foot the entire production cut “agreed” upon in Algiers.

And at roughly the same time, Iran’s Shana news agency, issued an article titled “Irregularities of Regular OPEC Meeting“, in which Iran invoked none other than Donald Trump.

This article takes a sketchy look into general condition of the oil market, focusing on stances of three important OPEC and non-OPEC states, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Russia. Saudi Arabia’s stances are specially worth contemplating because it has reduced its oil production due to economic conditions and problems facing its oil industry, while trying to compromise with Iran. However, due to political competition of the country with Iran and the tough conditions that election of US President Donald Trump has posed to Saudi Arabia, the country might seek an excuse to harm Algeria agreement and accuse Iran and perhaps Iraq and Russia of defeating OPEC conference in cutting the production ceiling and restoration of stability in the oil market around the acceptable prices.

 

Global oil prices are affected by a collection of fundamental and non-fundamental variables, including world political developments that affect oil prices through forming expectations in the financial markets.

 

Over recent weeks, outcome of the US elections, appreciation of dollar compared to other forexes and growth of the indices of the capital and notary bond markets, affected oil prices. Trump victory in the US presidential elections led to growing insecurities in the market because he had in election campaigns pointed to energy policies and directives, which if they are enforced they would entail wide and contradictory consequences for OPEC and the world oil markets. In the past months, the US has imported 107 million barrels per month crude oil and oil products from OPEC on the average, which is 3.6 million barrels per day on the average. Saudi Arabia with 1.2 million barrels per day and Venezuela with 830,000 barrels per day supplied the highest amount of crude oil and related products to the US. So, any restriction on import of OPEC crude by the US would lead to a two-layer market worldwide and encourage harsh competition among the countries to gain a quota in other important oil markets such as China, Japan, India and the like.

 

So, the OPEC session will be held under conditions that international relations have changed as a result of the unexpected result of US elections and complicated relations among the OPEC members, especially political competitions of the Saudi government in the region with the Islamic Republic of Iran can affect the talks. Generally speaking, oil markets face global demand despite growing insecurities. However, the market faces oversupply and waits OPEC decision on November 30 so as to see whether the oversupply to the market will be removed. Oil market equilibrium is highly fragile now; due to the same reason, failure of OPEC in reaching a consensus for cut in the production to the level of 32.5 million barrels per day will result in the price decline. The main reason for fall in the oil prices will eventually culminate in oversupply to the market and the oversupply is expected to continue until end of 2017 in case of OPEC failure to reach an executive accord to cut the production to the specified level.

* * *

Oil market experts cite several reasons for seriousness and insistence of Saudi Arabia to reach an executive accord to cut the OPEC oil production ceiling. Of course, Saudi conduct after Trump election as US President has been to some extent different with that previously.

As a result, what until just a few days ago was seen a “sure thing” agreement by OPEC tomorrow, now appears to be on the edge of collapse.

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The company reported an excellent quarter and the stock is higher by 6.5% early on. However, they issued a warning due to its flagship NYC store undergoing notable softness, thanks to all of the progressives protesting the democratically elected candidate for President of the United States, Donald J. Trump — right next door at Trump Tower.

An analyst from Cowen believes foot traffic could be halved, due to the wanton fuckery that is pervasive and ongoing outside the building. Truly, this cannot be happening at a worse time for Tiffany’s, especially when considering the business climate is robust for their overpriced wares and idiot bracelets.

The flagship NYC store accounts for about 8% of overall sales.

Here’s the scene outside of Trump Tower.
https://youtu.be/CPcud6G-Fto
 
Source: Bloomberg

Tiffany & Co. said the protests and heightened security around the residence of President-elect Donald Trump have hurt customer traffic at its flagship New York store — and the company isn’t sure when things will get better.
 
The shop on Fifth Avenue, next to Trump Tower, has seen “sales softness” compared with the year before and relative to the company’s other U.S. stores, Tiffany said in a statement Tuesday. The location is Tiffany’s largest.
 
“The company cannot provide any assurance that sales in that store will not be negatively affected by this activity in the fourth quarter or in any future period,” the jeweler said.
 
Traffic at the store, which has an entrance next to Trump Tower’s, could be cut in half, Cowen & Co.’s Oliver Chen said in a note this month. The analyst trimmed his fourth-quarter earnings forecast for Tiffany by 3 cents a share.
 
“Donald Trump’s election victory may cause an unforeseen headwind to the business in the fourth quarter,” and the disruption could linger and deter foot traffic through the key holiday selling season, Ike Boruchow, an analyst at Wells Fargo & Co., said in a note.
 
Anti-Trump protests have broken out near the residence of the president-elect, and barricades have been erected around the building to control traffic and pedestrians. Tiffany, whose corporate offices also are based in New York, has encouraged customers to enter its store through a side entrance.
 
Elsewhere, Tiffany’s business showed signs of improvement. The company posted third-quarter earnings and sales that topped analysts’ estimates — led by rebounding demand in Asia — sending the shares up in early trading.

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Black Friday, Fake News and Gold

Posted with permission and written by Rory Hall & Dave Kranzler CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL)

Black Friday and “Black Friday” weekend have largely become irrelevant. Every retailer in the U.S., from auto dealers to furniture stores to online tennis apparel shops have been advertising “Black Friday” sales since November 1st.

We have no doubt that the Census Bureau will concoct phony holiday sales for November (reported December 14) and December (reported in January). But the truth – the non-Russian influenced truth – is that retail sales spending per capita this holiday on an inflation-adjusted basis is going to be less than in 2015.

Already the National Retail Federation has announced that spending per person over Thanksgiving weekend was $289.19, down 3.4% from $299.60 last year. Gallup released a survey of shoppers and determined that Americans intend to spend an average of $752 on holiday gifts this year, down from $830 in 2015. Gallup, looking for a “silver lining” in the survey, stated that this matches the average for the last seven years since 2010. Of course Gallup fails to note that on an inflation-adjusted basis, the number for 2016 would be significantly below the average.

Turning to the “fake news” witch hunt, Gallup blames the results above on unseasonably warm weather. This is a perfect example of propagandized fake news. The average household is spending less money this year because the real median household income is lower now than in 2007. Consumers faced higher gasoline prices in October and November which cut into disposable spending budgets, as well as facing the prospect of huge increases in their health insurance premiums.

The establishment has implemented a full-court press in the hunt for “fake news” purveyors. This is the clearest sign that the alternative media bloggers have touched the raw nerve of truth and the elitists do not like it. The latest attempt is from Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, which featured an organization called PropOrNot, which purports to use “manual and automated” analysis to determine that several hundred Alternative Media websites were “Russian propaganda outlets.”

If the Washington Post is reporting it, it must be authentic, right? The truth is that this is nothing more than the rebirth of Joseph McCarthy’s 1950’s communist witch hunt – the Red Scare. “McCarthyism” is defined as, “the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence.” It also means “the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism”

In truth, the U.S. Government is the biggest purveyor of fake news in an effort to control the flow of information made available to the masses and to coerce their perception of reality. It’s yet another form and implementation of insidious propaganda in a manner quite similar to the use of propaganda by the Nazi Party.

Finally, there are many indications that the systematic and methodical take-down of the precious metals sector since mid-August has reached its limits. Today, for example, the mining stocks experienced big rally on huge volume. The volume in many stocks was triple the 10 and 90-day average volumes.

In today’s episode of the Shadow of Truth, we dissect some of the important events as they unfolded over the long Thanksgiving weekend and explain why we think gold has bottomed:

Please email with any questions about this article or precious metals HERE

Black Friday, Fake News and Gold

Posted with permission and written by Rory Hall & Dave Kranzler CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL)

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Having fallen to a 3-month low in October, Conference Board Consumer Confidence soared to 107.1 in November post-Trump – the highest since July 2007. This confirms Gallup's survey which saw economic confidence at its highest level since before Lehman, swinging positive post-Trump after being almost uniformly negative since Obama's election.

Americans haven't been much more confident than this in decades… (though notably, while plan to buy a home or major appliance gained, plans to buy a car dropped)

And this confirms Gallup's survey results…Americans expressed more positivity about the U.S. economy last week than they have at any other time during the nine years that Gallup has been tracking the U.S. Economic Confidence Index.

Economic confidence has been below zero nearly continuously since 2008, hitting its lowest level of -65 in October 2008 at the onset of the financial crisis. Aside from the recent pair of positive index readings, Gallup's weekly scores were positive several times during a brief, three-month span from late 2014 to early 2015, when U.S. consumers enjoyed a sustained drop in gasoline prices.

Notably, Bloomberg points out that Consumer Confidence declined markedly pre-election in the swing states of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania in the run up to the election…

But November saw quite a spike…

As Gallup concludes, it's too early to tell whether this uptick in Americans' positivity will last as Trump's term begins in January. But two weeks of positive index readings on the heels of his unexpected victory reveals a degree of economic confidence Americans have not expressed since the recession.

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One week after JPM made the exact same forecast, warning that the recent surge in the USDJPY will fade dramatically as Dollar euphoria shifts to concerns about protectionism, overnight UBS Group’s $2 trillion wealth-management arm said yen traders have got the Donald Trump “trade” all wrong, and the yen will strengthen to 98 per dollar by this time next year.

Cited by Bloomberg, the firm’s Tokyo-based head of Japanese equity research Toru Ibayashi echoed warnings first voiced on this website two weeks ago, and says expectations for fiscal expansion have become overblown, and protectionist policies will come first in the new U.S. administration.

The conventional wisdom that has taken hold in the days since Trump’s victory is that since the President-elect campaigned on pledges of “massive” tax cuts and spending of as much as $1 trillion over a decade to rebuild infrastructure, he will send inflation surging while unleashing a new debt-funded fiscal stimulus. This speculation has driven the yen to an eight-month low near 114 on Friday, capping the biggest three-week decline since 1995.

However, Trump also promised to tear up existing trade deals and punish companies that send jobs overseas. It is that part that has the UBS strategist worried.

“The market has latched on to only the juicy bits of Trump’s policies, and wrapped them up with unreasonable euphoria, which we think is pretty much a misinterpretation,” Ibayashi said in a phone interview Monday. “A market that’s been overbought on hope will quickly fall apart.”

UBS and JPM are not the only ones to warn against the market’s uphoria. The firms join bulls including former Japanese currency chief Eisuke “Mr Yen” Sakakibara in forecasting the yen will gradually strengthen to beyond 100 per dollar next year because of Trump’s “America first” stance on trade, even as strategists raised dollar-yen estimates at the fastest pace since January of last year. A reversal of the yen’s post-election slump would negate what has been a welcome tailwind for Japan’s struggling economy.

Among the risks facing the market is that Trump may backtrack on most of his pledges. It’s unclear how much of Trump’s campaign trail promises will translate into policy. He has already backed away from a pledge to build a wall along the southern border paid for by Mexico, saying some parts could be a fence. But he reiterated last week that the Trans Pacific Partnership, also signed by Japan and 10 other nations, would be “a potential disaster for our country.”

There are also concerns about pushback from Congress: as reported last week, Republicans have already balked at Trump’s proposal to boost the national debt by as much as $5 trillion over the proposed trendline, and contrary to the House Republicans’ own deleveraging budget.

* * *

For now Sakikibara’s forecast has yet to take hold: he predicted that the yen would strengthen as far as 90 per dollar within six months of Trump’s surprise election victory. Elsewhere, JPMorgan’s Tokyo-based head of Japan markets research Tohru Sasaki sees it at 99 as of the end of 2017.

That said, there is still time: both forecasters were correct in calls made at the start of the year for the yen to appreciate, when most analysts predicted an extension of the currency’s record four years of weakness against the dollar. The yen remains the best performer among its developed-market peers in 2016, strengthening 7.4% against the greenback. That trend is something Trump and other U.S. policy makers won’t be keen to change, according to UBS’s Ibayashi.

“A strong dollar will be a drag on revenue for U.S. businesses,” he said. “It’s a headwind for employment, and Americans would find that unacceptable.”

Finally, and perhaps suggesting that Trump won’t even be necessary to unleash a regional wave of protectionism following the collapse of TPP, Nikkei reported that Japan has proposed stricter tariff rules that would knock five trading partners including China and Mexico off the list of countries receiving preferential treatment for emerging economies.

A finance ministry customs committee said Thursday that the list of nations qualifying for zero or minimal import tariffs on certain goods would be revised to exclude nations that account for 1% or more of world exports or make the World Bank’s list of upper-middle income economies for three years running. Currently, trading partners need to qualify as high-income economies for three years to have preferential status revoked. The rules change would end special treatment for China, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand and Malaysia.

It is only a matter of time before Japan’s trading partners retaliate and – if UBS and JPM are right – undo all the recent Yen losses.

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Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Your crime, as it were, need not be substantiated with evidence; the mere fact you publicly revealed your anti-Establishment thought convicted you.

One of the most remarkable ironies of The Washington Post's recent evidence-free fabrication of purported "Russian propaganda" websites (including this site) is how closely it mimics the worst excesses of the USSR's Stalinist era.

Those unfamiliar with the Stalinist era's excesses will benefit from reading Solzhenitsyn's three-volume masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, The Gulag Archipelago 2 and Gulag Archipelago 3.

One episode is especially relevant to the totalitarian tactics of The Washington Post's evidence-free accusation. Solzhenitsyn tells the story of one poor fellow who made the mistake of recounting a dream he'd had the previous night to his co-workers.

In his dream, Stalin had come to some harm. In Solzhenitsyn's account, the fellow was remorseful about the dream.

Alas, mere remorse couldn't possibly save him. He was promptly arrested for "anti-Soviet thoughts" and given a tenner in the Gulag–a tenner being a ten-year sentence in a Siberian labor camp.

The Washington Post's accusation is based on a "behavioral analysis"–in other words, publicly sharing "anti-Soviet thoughts"–in our era, the equivalent is sharing anti-Establishment thoughts.

Your crime, as it were, need not be substantiated with evidence; the mere fact you publicly revealed your anti-Establishment thought convicted you.

This is the Corporate Media's Gulag of the Mind. We'll tell you what's "true" and what is correct to think and believe. Any deviation from the party line is a threat and must be discredited, marginalized or suppressed.

Where is the Post's hard evidence of Russian ties or Russian influence? There isn't any–but like Stalin's henchmen, the Post has no need for evidence: merely going public with an anti-Establishment thought "proves" one's guilt in the kangaroo court of America's corporate media (a.k.a. mainstream media or MSM).

While The Washington Post is owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the vast majority of what we read, watch and hear is controlled by a handful of corporations loaded with cash and connections to the ruling elite.

This concentration of media control creates the illusion of choice— the same elite-propaganda spin is everywhere you look; our "choice" of "approved" (i.e. corporate) media is roughly the same as that offered the Soviet citizenry in the old USSR.

This is why the billionaire/corporate media is so desperate to discredit the non-corporate media: if an alternative to the corporate media's elite-propaganda catches on, the corporate media will lose its audience, its advert revenues and a substantial measure of its influence.

The cornered elite-propaganda beast is lashing out, undermining its waning credibility with every attack on an independent free press. As I noted in a recent conversation with Max Keiser, democracy requires the citizenry to sort out who benefits from whatever narrative is being pushed.

That's what terrifies the elite-propaganda mainstream media: the status quo narrative they've spewed for years doesn't benefit the bottom 95%– rather, it actively impoverishes and disempowers the bottom 95%–and the citizenry is slowly awakening to this reality.

So for goodness sakes, if you have an anti-elitist dream, keep it to yourself or you'll end up on the ruling elite's "enemies list."

The final irony in all this: the real enemy of democracy and freedom of the press is The Washington Post and the rest of the billionaire/corporate media. The only way to escape the Corporate Media's Gulag of the Mind is to stop watching their TV channels, turn off their radio stations and stop reading their print/digital propaganda–except of course if you have a taste for dark humor.

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At least seven members of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s security team and two soldiers were injured in a roadside bombing ambush by suspected Muslim militants. The attack took place ahead of the president’s planned visit to the south of the country, AFP reported citing the president and the Armed Forces.

An explosive device planted along the road detonated when the presidential convoy headed to Marawi, the capital of Lanao del Sur province on the island of Mindanao, the second-largest island of the Philippines. “The truck carrying the president’s advance security detail was hit by an improvised explosive device,” Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said, as cited by Reuters. “There was no firefight.”

“The convoy was ambushed using an IED while traversing from Iligan City to Marawi City,” Armed Forces spokesperson Brigadier General Restituto Padilla said. The injured men were immediately airlifted to safety. Members of the president’s official media team were also in the convoy, but were unharmed.

Soldiers carry on a stretcher a wounded member of Duterte’s presidential security group
who was airlifted at an army camp in Cagayan de Oro after being hit in a roadside bomb attack

Lorenzana said that he advised Duterte to cancel his visit to Marawi, scheduled for Wednesday, as the situation is “still not under control.” The president chose to ignore the advice.

Never one to take the easy way out, the combative Duterte said that “The advice was to postpone. I said no, I will go there. And if possible, take the same route,” the president was cited by Reuters, and added that“Maybe we can have a little gunfight here, gunfight there.”

Philstar newspaper cited Padilla as saying the attack might have been staged by Maute, an Islamist group which pledged allegiance to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).

On Monday, Philippines police found a homemade bomb in a trash bin near the US embassy in Manila. According to National Police Chief Ronald dela Rosa, the Maute group may have been behind the attack. Explosives experts successfully conducted a controlled detonation of the bomb.

Earlier the Philippines military launched raids against Maute members in the mainly-Muslim rural town of Butig, some 800km from Manila and just 50km from Marawi, where Duterte is heading on Wednesday. According to the military, some 35 militants were killed in the operation. Maute was also linked to the bombing in Davao in September this year. That attack claimed 15 lives with dozens more injured.

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Iran just hammered another nail in the coffin of an OPEC ‘deal’ when oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh told reporters in Vienna ahead of OPEC meeting on Wednesday that “Iran won’t cut oil production.” Despite confident comments from Algeria, WTI plunged to within a tick of a $44 handle to 2-week lows…

And this won’t help:

• *SAUDIS SAID READY TO REJECT DEAL IF IRAN-IRAQ DON’T PARTICIPATE
• *SAUDIS SAID TO ONLY ACCEPT CUT EXEMPTIONS FOR NIGERIA, LIBYA

As Bloomberg reports, Saudi Arabia is ready reject a deal unless all OPEC members, excluding Libya and Nigeria, participate in an oil-output agreement, say people familiar with the kingdom’s current position at the talks in Vienna. Saudi Arabia will not insist that Iran and Iraq make the same size reduction as other members and hasn’t decided from which production level they would be asked to cut, the people say, asking not to be identified because the information is private

It seems like Goldman Sachs top-ticked another oil move…

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