More New Normal News.... Europe fixed ? Certainly not Spain !

Spanish Bad Loans Soar To New Record High

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/18/2013 08:22 -0400

Despite the onslaught of confidence-inspiring flim-flam from leadership in Europe and a Spanish Prime Minister (and finance minister) desperate to distract with "soft" survey based data, the hard numbers keep coming in and keep getting worse and worse. The latest, seemingly confirming the IMF's fearsome forecast that European banks face massive loan losses in the coming years, is Spain's loan delinquency rate. Bad loans across Spanish banks amounted to $247 billion in August - a new record-breaking 12.12% of all loans outstanding (now 30% higher than any previous crisis in the history of Spain). Credit creation continues to implode with a 12.3% plunge in total loans outstanding but of course, none of that matters (for now), as Spanish bond spreads (and yields) press back towards pre-crisis lows...

Charts: Bloomberg

and on to the gold report...... Where did JP Morgan find the gold for this big deposit ?

http://www.caseyresearch.com/gsd/edition/ted-butler-j.p.-morgans-perfect-silver-manipulation-cannot-last-forever

¤ YESTERDAY IN GOLD & SILVER

The gold price didn't do much in Far East trading on their Thursday, but the moment that London opened, a rally began that went vertical a few minutes before 9 a.m. BST. But a seller of last resort appeared, and volume exploded. Even before the London a.m. fix was in, volume was over 80,000 contracts, which is the biggest number I can ever remember seeing at that time of day. From that information alone, you can easily surmise that the price would have blown sky high if JPMorgan et al hadn't been there.

Gold traded sideways from 9 a.m. until the noon silver fix, and then began to rally anew. The smallish price spike at the 8:20 a.m. EDT Comex open got dealt with in the usual manner, as did the tiniest rally after that. After the high was in, the gold price sold off a few dollars into the 5:15 p.m. electronic close.

According to the CME, the low December tick was $1,173.70 just before the London open, and the high tick of $1,324.20 came about 15 minutes before the Comex close in New York.

Gold closed the Thursday session in New York at $1,320.10 spot, which was up $37.40 from Wednesday. Volume, net of October and November, was an eye-watering 219,000 contracts.

Here's the New York Spot Gold [Bid] chart so you can observe how carefully JPMorgan et al micromanaged the price during the Comex trading session.

Silver's price chart was similar, but only up to a point. The price blasted to its $22.18 London high at 9 a.m. BST, and at that point it got hit hard, driving the price back below the $22 spot mark. Once the noon silver fix was in, silver rallied anew, and the second big price spike over $22 at the Comex open also got squashed flat in short order.

From its 9:30 a.m. New York low, silver began to rally very quietly but, like gold, the price was kept on a very short leash. Once the 1:30 p.m. Comex close was in, silver traded sideways to down for the rest of the day.

Silver's low, like gold's low, came shortly before the London open, and the high tick was in less than 10 minutes after the Comex opened. The CME recorded those prices as $21.10 and $22.20 in the December contract, an intraday move of 5%.

Silver closed on Thursday in New York at $21.89 spot, up 47 cents from Wednesday. Volume, net of October and November was pretty chunky at 60,000 contracts.

Here's the New York Silver Silver Spot [Bid] chart so you can see how short the leash really was.

After their smallish 9 a.m. rallies in London, both platinum and palladium quietly worked their way higher in price for the remainder of the day, both closing almost on their highs. Here are the charts.

For the day, gold closed up 2.92%; silver was up 2.19%; platinum and palladium were up 2.80% and 3.22% respectively. And it's obvious to anyone except the willfully blind that both gold and silver would have finished materially higher, if they had been allowed to trade freely, which they obviously weren't.

The dollar index closed on Wednesday afternoon in New York at 80.50. The high of 80.56 came shortly after the index began to trade in the Far East on their Thursday, and it was all down hill from there. By the London open it was down to 80.30, and then collapsed all the way down to 79.90 by 9 a.m. BST, less than an hour later. It continued to decline from there, hitting its low tick of 79.63 shortly before the 4 p.m. London close, which was shortly before 11 a.m. in New York. The index traded flat from there.

You'll note that a large portion of the dollar index decline was in before gold and silver prices went vertical shortly before 9 a.m. BST in London. And the currency moves had zero to do with the price spikes in both metals at the 8:20 a.m. EDT Comex open.

***

The CME's Daily Delivery Report showed that 13 gold and three silver contracts were posted for delivery on Monday. As I said earlier this week, barring an unforeseen surprise delivery requests, the balance of the October delivery month should be very quiet.

Another day, and another withdrawal from GLD. This time it was 106,174 troy ounces. And as of 10:21 p.m. EDT yesterday evening, there were no reported changes in SLV.

Joshua Gibbons, the "Guru of the SLV silver bar list" updated his website yesterday with the latest report from SLV. Here is what he had to say: "Analysis of the 16 October 2013 bar list, and comparison to the previous week's list -- 1,927,746.3 troy ounces was removed (all from Brinks London), and no bars had a serial number change. The bars removed were from: Russian State Refineries (0.7M oz), Kazakhmys PLC (0.5M oz), KGHM (0.3M oz), and three others."

"As of the time that the bar list was produced, it was over-allocated 276.4 troy ounces. There were withdrawals of 1,927,232.0 oz. on Monday and 1,734,440.4 oz. on Tuesday that have not yet been reflected on the bar list, that should appear on the next bar list (as it normally takes a day or two for the bar list to get updated)." The link to Joshua's website is here.

The U.S. Mint had another small sales report yesterday. They sold 1,000 ounces of gold eagles and another 1,000 one-ounce 24K gold buffaloes. They also reported selling 50,500 silver eagles.

Over at the Comex-approved depositories on Wednesday, they reported receiving 83,024 troy ounces of gold, and didn't ship any out. All of the action was at HSBC USA, and the link to that is here.

Once again there was more big activity in silver at these same depositories on Wednesday. HSBC USA received 1,092,107 troy ounces, and Brink's, Inc. shipped out 11,343 troy ounces. The link to that action is here.

Here's a chart that Nick Laird slid into my in-box in the wee hours of this morning. Along with the comment that "I see the premiums hit 30%. The Indians are paying $350 more than the U.S. gold price."

***

Selected news and views.....

Another day, and another withdrawal from GLD. This time it was 106,174 troy ounces. And as of 10:21 p.m. EDT yesterday evening, there were no reported changes in SLV.

The U.S. Mint had another small sales report yesterday. They sold 1,000 ounces of gold eagles and another 1,000 one-ounce 24K gold buffaloes. They also reported selling 50,500 silver eagles.

Over at the Comex-approved depositories on Wednesday, they reported receiving 83,024 troy ounces of gold, and didn't ship any out. All of the action was at HSBC USA, and the link to that is here.

System Failure: U.S. Democracy Is Nearing its Limits

The United States has temporarily avoided federal default. As the Republicans lick their wounds, the Democrats are triumphant. But no one should be happy, because the debacle has exposed just how broken the American political system truly is.

The president kept things short, speaking for only three minutes on Wednesday night to praise the debt compromise reached by Congress. After he finished, a reporter called after him: "Mr. President, will this happen again in a couple of months?" Barack Obama, who was on his way out the door, turned and answered sharply, "No."

But such optimism has proven to be unrealistic in the past. With his re-election in 2012, Obama thought he could break the Republican "fever." Instead, the conservatives paralyzed the government and risked a federal default just so they could stop Obama's signature project: health care reform. And this despite the fact that "Obamacare" had been approved by a majority of both houses of Congress, was upheld by the US Supreme Court, and was endorsed by the American people in the voting booths.

No, the democratic process cannot reduce this "fever," and probably won't during the next fight, either. On the contrary, the political crisis has turned out to be a systemic crisis.

This commentary was posted on the German website spiegel.deduring the European lunch hour yesterday...and it's the second offering in a row from Roy Stephens. It's original headline read "U.S. Budget Shutdown has exposed deep political flaws."

U.S. debt ceiling is more than raised -- it is entirely suspended until Feb. 7

There’s no actual debt ceiling right now.

The fiscal deal passed by Congress on Wednesday evening to re-open the government and get around the $16.4 trillion limit on borrowing doesn’t actually increase the debt limit. It just temporarily suspends enforcement of it.

That means Americans have no idea how much debt their government is going to rack up between now and Feb. 7, when the limits are supposed to go back into place and will have to be raised.

This short article appeared on the dailycaller.com Internet site yesterday...and I found it in a GATA release that I received just minutes before I hit the 'send' button on today's column.

Marine Le Pen: E.U. will collapse like the Soviet Union

Marine Le Pen, buoyed by a weekend by-election triumph in southern France, criticised the EU as a “global anomaly” and pledged to return the bloc to a “cooperation of sovereign states”.

She said Europe’s population had “no control” over their economy or currency, nor over the movement of people in their territory.

“I believe that the EU is like the Soviet Union now: it is not improvable,” she said. “The EU will collapse like the Soviet Union collapsed.”

This is another news item from The Telegraph's website...this one from early Wednesday evening as well. I found it all by myself! It's certainly worth skimming.

Five King World News Blogs/Audio Interviews

1. Michael Pento: "Complete Collapse and Economic Meltdown Will Shock the World". 2. Robin Griffiths: "There Is No Question This Will End in Disaster". 3. Keith Barron: "The Frightening Reality About What is Happening in the U.S.". 4. Tom Fitzpatrick: "The Scary Chart That Has Everyone in Washington Terrified". 5. The audio interview is with Rob Arnott.

Draghi On Gold "I Never Thought It Wise To Sell"

While Ben Bernanke would prefer not to discuss the barbarous relic, having noted in the past that "nobody really understands gold prices," it would seem his European brother-in-arms has a different opinion. When asked this week, by Bull Market Thinking's Tekoa Da Silva, his thoughts on precious metals as reserve assets (and central banks around the world increasing their allocations), none other than the ECB head himself Mario Draghi explained "I never thought it wise to sell [gold], because for Central Banks this is a reserve of safety." But Draghi did not stop there, and perhaps enlightened by the farce in Washington this week, the unusually truthful central banker explained, "in the case of non-USD countries, it gives you good protection against fluctuations of the USD." Perhaps that is why China continues to import gold at a record pace? Oh, and don't fight the ECB...

This 1:48 minute video was posted on the Zero Hedge website yesterday...and it's definitely worth watching. The first person through the door with this clip was Italian reader "Osvaldo"...and I thank him on your behalf.

Ted Butler: J.P. Morgan’s Perfect Silver Manipulation Cannot Last Forever

Silver manipulation – a lot has been written about the subject, not many have grasped how it works exactly. The age of algorithm trading (best known as High Frequency Trading, or HFT) allows for manipulative tricks to be rolled out in a very clever way. The “intuitive” way to manipulate the price of a commodity to the downside is to go short when prices are rising. Not so with JP Morgan. It is no coincidence that their manipulation strategy is so clever that most do not understand the mechanics; it is a perfect manipulation.

In COMEX silver, JPMorgan has behaved differently. Instead of selling short silver at declining prices, as it did in the London Whale case, JPMorgan has only sold short additional quantities of silver on increasing prices. After these additional short sales have satiated all new buying interest, JPMorgan then causes prices to decline (through the manipulative device of HFT) and buys back its short sales at lower prices and great profit.

This article brings clarity in the precise mechanics of JP Morgan’s silver price manipulation. It goes to the heart of the manipulative tricks. The author is obviously Ted Butler, with four decades of experience in the precious metals markets, specialized in the paper (futures) market. The mechanics described in this article have been explained in such a way rarely before. It makes it a must read for precious metals enthusiasts, but also for professional and individual investors because the ongoing manipulation must come to an end resulting in much higher prices.

This is an excerpt from 40-year veteran silver analyst Ted Butler’s premium subscription service...and is from his mid-week commentary posted on his Internet site on Wednesday. Taki Tsaklanos, the proprietor over at goldsilverworlds.com was kind enough to send it my way yesterday. It's an absolute must read...and you should read it every day until you 'get it'. I consider Ted Butler to be the ultimate authority on this subject.

¤ THE WRAP

While I try to avoid short term price predictions, the recent price action seems to also indicate a sooner rather than later end to the silver manipulation. The recent sudden price take-downs and dismal price action seem indicative of a market washed out to the downside. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine a market (silver and gold) with more extreme negative sentiment, also a sign of a washout and price bottom. If the CFTC had moved against JPMorgan for manipulating silver instead of credit default swaps, we’d be over $100 silver right now. That the agency didn’t just means it will take a little longer. - Silver analyst Ted Butler -- 16 October 2013

One can only imagine what the closing precious metal prices would have been if JPMorgan et al hadn't show up in early London trading, and also at the Comex open. If you read, and even more importantly, understood what Ted Butler was saying in today's last story, it's obvious [at least to me] "Da Boyz" threw everything they had at both gold and silver yesterday to prevent them from exploding to the outer edges of the known universe, especially at the London open where volume blew out by a stunning amount. So, for the moment, the price management scheme is still on.

As Ted pointed out on the phone yesterday, no important moving averages were violated to the upside with yesterday's price action, and it's hard to say what will happen when that finally occurs. Here are the six-month charts for both gold and silver so you can see the lay of the land as of yesterday's close.

Ted informed me that there will be no Commitment of Traders or Bank Participation Reports today, so we'll obviously have to wait until next Friday. By the time that day rolls around, we'll have been without a COT Report for a whole month.

Gold and silver prices did nothing in Far East trading on their Friday, and the smallish rallies that began an hour or so before the London open earlier this morning were dealt with in the usual manner when trading began at 8 a.m. BST. Volumes in both metals, which had been pretty light up until that time, quickly blew out as the high-frequency traders did the dirty. So these tiny rallies didn't go unopposed, either. The dollar is basically flat as of 4:07 a.m. EDT as I write this paragraph.

And as I hit the send button on today's column at 5:20 a.m. EDT, I note that all four precious metals are now trading sideways, and volumes have really tapered off. The dollar index is still comatose.

It beats me what the rest of today's trading action will bring. But considering all the bad news out there, along with that fact that it's a Friday, nothing will surprise me, nor should it surprise you.

Enjoy your weekend, or what's left of it if you live west of the International Date Line, and I'll see you here tomorrow.

And back to the New Normal.....

18 OCTOBER 2013

Historical Perspective: The Crisis Last Time

Each crisis has familiar facets, but also has its unique characteristics that do make things somewhat different with their own particular outcomes.

One of the great differences in this current financial crisis in the Western world, and I do mean to say 'current' since it has hardly been resolved, has been the policy actions of the governments of the world.

By forestalling a collapse of the banking system, the emerging markets have been somewhat insulated, at least for now, from the economic carnage that has occurred in the more developed nations. China, Brazil, India, and Russia are doing better than one might expect if there were a worldwide Depression. However I do think that those countries that rely on exports are clutching a viper to their breast. For the global trade regime is much more fragile than you might think, although few have yet seen it.

For the moment at least the G7, the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan, have also been spared most of the pain that characterized The Great Depression. Quite a bit of this has to do with their central banks, and the eschewing of liquidationism, which these days might be compared to austerity, although it was not quite the same thing.

Where austerity has been applied, selectively forced from the outside in most cases, it has wreaked havoc with the people and the economies of those countries. And it is giving rise to the extremism in political reactions that was quite common in the 1930's, in Italy, Germany and Japan most notably, although it was much more pervasive than other nations would care to admit.

That is not to say that things cannot go from bad but tolerable, to much worse. We are not yet out of this financial crisis, because the reforms have not yet been made. We are in a crisis in slow motion, if you will, and it can still go either way.

The actions that have been taken to prop up the banking system have only delayed the reckoning that will occur when the economic fallacies and policy errors of the last thirty years that overturned many of the safeguards that fellows like Berle had helped to create, are exposed for what they are, and a progressive spirit of government replaces the tired propaganda of deregulation and the natural goodness of oligarch dominated markets.

I do expect things to remain unsettled, and for hysteria to remain high, especially at the edges of the political spectrum. I do not expect to see a rise of fascism in the US or Germany per se, but remain more concerned about Spain, Greece, and Portugal.

It is fortunate perhaps that communism does not represent such a spectre for the oligarchs to incite the people against. Although it is painfully clear that many groups are searching for a workable 'other,' even one that is largely imaginary, that helps the unscrupulous demagogues to tap into the darkest impulses of a troubled people.

The Crisis Last Time
By Richard Parker
November 7, 2008

For writers who seek to influence public affairs, timing plays a paramount role. And few writers have had better timing than Adolf Augustus Berle.

In the summer of 1932, with America trapped in the greatest financial crisis in its history, Berle published “The Modern Corporation and Private Property,” a scholarly yet readable analysis of America’s largest companies and their managers. Berle is largely forgotten today, yet with that book he succeeded in persuading Americans to see their economic system in a new way — and helped set the stage for the most fundamental realignment of power since abolition.

The stock market had plunged vertiginously three years earlier, and by 1932 Americans were desperate to reverse the much wider collapse that had ensued — and to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. The New Republic was soon hailing “The Modern Corporation” as the book of the year, while The New York Herald Tribune pronounced it “the most important work bearing on American statecraft” since the Federalist Papers. Louis Brandeis would cite its arguments in a major Supreme Court ruling on corporate power. Running for president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt recruited Berle — a Republican Wall Street lawyer who had supported Hoover — to join his “brain trust,” and that fall entrusted him with drafting what became the most important speech of the campaign. After the election, Berle remained in New York, yet his connection to the president he audaciously addressed as “Dear Caesar” was such that Time would characterize “The Modern Corporation” as “the economic bible of the Roosevelt administration.”

At first glance, the book would hardly seem to merit such broad acclaim. But if the topic was limited, Berle’s analysis was not. He used the data compiled by his co-author, the economist Gardiner Means, to examine how markets had become concentrated in just a few hundred firms and how senior managers had wrested power from the companies’ legal owners, the shareholders. No radical, Berle was eager to preserve the corporate system, which he called “the flower of our industrial organization.” But he now believed that new controls would have to balance “a variety of claims by various groups in the community” — not just its managers or shareholders — and assign “to each a portion of the income stream on the basis of public policy rather than private cupidity.”

In 1932, as in our own moment of financial crisis, most Americans could see that something needed to be done because these new behemoths — which had turned America from a nation of farmers into the world’s largest industrial power — were on the verge of collapse, poised like Samson to pull the entire economy down with them. Berle’s genius in “The Modern Corporation” was to align his professional insights with the public’s fears, and its anger. As he starkly put it in his preface, “Between a political organization of society and an economic organization of society, which will be the dominant form?”

In Theodore Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s era, reformers like Brandeis had argued that strict antimonopoly and anti-collusion laws could return America to a place of small firms and farms, the beau ideal of Adam Smith’s market model. But Americans continued rushing to the cities, spurring an explosion in mass consumption, financed by a boom in cheap consumer credit and easy home loans. Then, in 1929, the markets crashed.

The crash for a time reinvigorated not only the anti-monopolists, but also union organizers, socialists, agrarian populists and crackpot utopians. It also brought forth “forward looking” chief executives like Gerald Swope of General Electric, who supported progressive corporatism — a world of government-mandated business cartels in exchange for higher wages, improved working conditions, and corporate-based workers’ compensation, pension and unemployment plans. Berle, however, was keen on none of these solutions. In his book, he explained that giant corporations were not “natural” economic institutions but recent inventions of the law, cobbled together on the remains of the medieval corporation, a quite different institution. What the Depression showed, he argued, was that modern corporations had failed not only stockholders, but the public — and would do so again, if left unregulated.

But what sort of regulation was required? On details, Berle was maddeningly but deliberately vague. What he did say clearly was that government needed to bear final responsibility for the economy by using its powers to balance supply and demand. It would also need to require corporate directors to manage the managers, not just for shareholders’ benefit but in accordance with new rules codifying the collective rights of stakeholders and the broader social responsibilities of corporations.

The impact of Berle’s ideas was no doubt enhanced by his decidedly nonradical biography. The son of a reform-minded Congregational minister and his wealthy wife, he had entered Harvard at 14 and finished Harvard Law School at 21 — at the time its youngest graduate ever. (Arrogant as well as gifted, he once showed up in Felix Frankfurter’s class the semester after completing it. Puzzled, Frankfurter asked him why he was back. “Oh,” Berle replied, “I wanted to see if you’d learned anything since last year.”) After a year at Louis Brandeis’s firm, he briefly did public-interest legal work before marrying well and settling down to a prosperous career in Wall Street corporate law.

As clients flocked to him, however, he began questioning the very system that was making them (and him) rich. In 1923, alarmed by the venality, the chicanery and frequently the stupidity of Wall Street, he started writing articles that over the next several years would virtually invent the modern field of corporate finance law, emphasizing moderate solutions. After Columbia Law School offered him a job in 1927, he began cycling between his lucrative practice downtown and his teaching uptown.

But the Great Crash — and the subsequent revelations of market manipulation, fraud and reckless risk-taking — forced Berle to change sides. He was a Mugwump Republican, but the economic chaos of the Depression, and the threat it posed to American democracy, convinced him a new sort of regulation was now unavoidable.

In late 1931, Franklin Roosevelt, then governor of New York, called on the Columbia political scientist Raymond Moley. Roosevelt was weighing a run for president and was looking for fresh ideas. Moley quickly approached Berle and connected the two ambitious Harvard men.

A month after “The Modern Corporation” appeared, Berle drafted Roosevelt’s famous Commonwealth Club address, delivered in September 1932. Proclaiming that “the day of enlightened administration has come,” Roosevelt articulated the rationale for much of the New Deal’s financial and corporate reforms, including deposit insurance and securities regulation. He defended the coming government interventions as protecting individualism and private property against concentrated economic power. Calling for a new “economic constitutional order,” he declared it our common duty to “build toward the time when a major depression cannot occur again.”

“None of Roosevelt’s speeches,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later wrote, “caught up more poignantly the intellectual moods of the early Depression than this one.” It helped assure his landslide victory — and earned Berle a series of ever more important posts in the administration. America began an unprecedented 40-year expansion.

By the Reagan era, however, a new philosophy would take hold, and the public oversight of markets that Berle helped pioneer would over time be swept aside, in confident belief that markets could self-regulate and that government was the problem, not the solution.

Today, that era itself seems to be coming to end, and the question Berle posed — will democracy rule the corporations, or will the corporations rule democracy? — seems a profoundly important one worth asking again.

More New Normal.....

UK Orders WSJ To Withold Names Of Implicated LIBOR Manipulators After Story Already Hits Wires

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/18/2013 08:44 -0400

Australia

Citigroup

In what is a staggering example of not only state meddling in the affairs of the "free press", but worse, sheer state idiocy, yesterday the WSJ posted an article on its website revealing that as many as 24 co-conspirators would be revealed shortly in the ongoing Libor manipulation scandal and divulging the names of various individuals on this list. What promptly followed was truly bizarre. As the WSJ reports shortly after posting the article, "a British judge ordered the Journal and David Enrich, the newspaper's European banking editor, to comply with a request by the U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office prohibiting the newspaper from publishing names of individuals not yet made public in the government's ongoing investigation into alleged manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor." This happened at 7:18 pm London time, after the original WSJ article had already hit the Internet.

The WSJ added that "The order, which applies to publication in England and Wales, also demanded that the Journal remove "any existing Internet publication" divulging the details. It threatened Mr. Enrich and "any third party" with penalties including a fine, imprisonment and asset seizure."

As a result, the media organization decided to comply with this gross example state censorship, and now in the place of the article, one could find the following note:

... but not before protesting vocally.

The article said the government was preparing to name roughly two dozen traders and brokers, adding that prosecutors were still finalizing their plans and that the list could change, citing people familiar with the process. Inclusion on the list doesn't represent a formal accusation of wrongdoing and doesn't mean the individuals will be charged with crimes.

"This injunction is a serious affront to press freedom," said Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal. "We have been left with no choice but to remove the previously published story from WSJ.com and to withhold publication from the print edition of The Wall Street Journal Europe. However, we will continue to vigorously fight the injunction in the coming days."

Yet it is not the censorship that is most shocking here, but the way the UK's SFO went about scrubbing the trail. Because while the European version of the newspaper may have retracted the article from today's print edition, the piece was still in the US version. Furthermore, since the original WSJ article hit the net before it was pulled, it was promptly picked up and reforwarded by either robotic or manned resyndicators of the WSJ. One such example was ValueWalk which took down the salient details that the SFO is so concerned about:

Among those who could be name are several of Hayes’ former coworkers at both Citigroup Inc and UBS AG. Michael Pieri, who was Hayes’ boss while he worked at UBS, was fired by the bank and moved to Australia. Hayes’ former assistant at UBS, Mirhat Alykulov, could also be on the list. Sources said he has been cooperating with investigators from the U.S.

Another name which could be on the SFO’s list is Christopher Cecere, who was Hayes’ boss while he worked in Citigroup’s Tokyo operations. Cecere resigned from his position at Citigroup around the same time Hayes was fired. Other people who could be on the list are ex HSBC Holdings plc trader Luke Madden, former JPMorgan Chase & Co. employee Paul Glands, and former Rabobank employee Paul Robson.

And, of course, the full list is in today's US print edition of the WSJ. Which begs the question: aside from matter of state censorship and free press intervention, what exactly did the UK hope to achieve here? After all, a cursory one minute search would reveal all the names hidden, but now the extra buzz generated by UK's attempt to quash the story, merely made it that much more interesting to all, and whereas some may have skipped it - after all who really cares about Libor manipulation anymore considering the entire market is openly manipulated by the Fed now - now everyone will focus on the names that were purposefully withheld.

Sheer statist stupidity.

The letter sent to the WSJ is below:

Catharsis Ours

Friday, October 18, 2013

Ed Steer's Gold and Silver Report - October 18 , 2013 - Data from October 18 , 2013 , news touching on the precious metals , world news and views touching on the precious metals.