Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 31, 2011

So you want your power to come from a nuclear reactor do you……A nuclear expert has warned that it might be 50-100 years before melting fuel rods can be safely removed from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant.  Two new experts say capping the damaged reactors with concrete is not an option.  They had better get together with the japanese government which just yesterday seemed to have a different idea on the matter of capping the reactor in cement.

Water is still being poured into the damaged reactors to cool melting fuel rods.

But one expert says the radiation leaks will be ongoing and it could take 50 to 100 years before the nuclear fuel rods have completely cooled and been removed.

“The final thing is that the reactors will have to be closed and the fuel removed, and that is 50 to 100 years away.

“It means that the workers and the site will have to be intensely controlled for a very long period of time.”

Two new experts agree capping the damaged reactors with concrete is not an option.

Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal says it has obtained disaster-readiness plans which show the facility only had one satellite phone and a single stretcher in case of an accident.

Category: Commentary, National News, World News | 49 Comments »
Tags: Japan Nuclear Reactor, Nuclear disaster, Nuclear Experts

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 31, 2011

Wait a minute, hasn’t the government been saying inflation wouldn’t be a problem?   Yes, they have… it won’t be the first time that they’ve lied to us. 

Food shortages are coming this summer……along with serious price increases.  U.S. consumers face “serious” inflation in the months ahead for clothing, food and other products, the head of Wal-Mart’s U.S. operations warned Wednesday talking to USA Today.

 

The world’s largest retailer is working with suppliers to minimize the effect of cost increases and believes its low-cost business model will position it better than its competitors.

Still, inflation is “going to be serious,” Wal-Mart U.S. CEO Bill Simon said during a meeting with USA TODAY’s editorial board. “We’re seeing cost increases starting to come through at a pretty rapid rate.”

Along with steep increases in raw material costs, John Long, a retail strategist at Kurt Salmon, says labor costs in China and fuel costs for transportation are weighing heavily on retailers. He predicts prices will start increasing at all retailers in June.

“Every single retailer has and is paying more for the items they sell, and retailers will be passing some of these costs along,” Long says. “Except for fuel costs, U.S. consumers haven’t seen much in the way of inflation for almost a decade, so a broad-based increase in prices will be unprecedented in recent memory.”

Consumer prices — or the consumer price index — rose 0.5% in February, the most since mid-2009, largely because of surging food and gasoline prices. Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, rose a more modest 0.2%, though that still exceeded estimates.

Add to this the shock that was today’s grains report:

Farmers will struggle to replenish rapidly shrinking U.S. grain stocks this year, despite plans to sow the most land to corn since World War Two and near-record acreage to soybeans, two U.S. government reports showed on Thursday.

Chicago corn prices surged their daily limit, while soybeans and wheat jumped more than 3 percent as traders looked past higher-than-expected figures in the Department of Agriculture’s annual planting survey to focus on inventories, which fell much more than forecast.

The report underscored the fact that U.S. farmers are now reaching the limits of arable land in the world’s biggest crop exporter, with increased corn sowing coming at the expense of soybeans and cotton. The spring wheat crop, while among the biggest in decades, could yet shrink.

This year’s spring planting season in the world’s biggest crop exporter is being watched more closely than ever by countries fearful that further increases in already record-high food prices could stoke unrest.

An analysis of the data based on the acreage estimates and historical yields suggested that the corn harvest could be the largest ever and soybeans the third-largest.

But that would still leave corn inventories at the end of the 2011/12 season at the equivalent of just three-weeks’ supply, and soybeans would dwindle to scarcely 10 days’ cover. Analysts say prices must rise high enough to reduce demand.

“This turns us back to having to ration the corn,” said Charlie Sernatinger, analyst at ABN Amro.

May corn jumped 30 cents to $6.93-1/4 a bushel, hitting the daily exchange limit; options trading suggested further gains to more than $7.15, near the post-2008 peak of $7.35 hit on March 4. Soybeans jumped to over $14.18 and wheat recouped part of its 20 percent slump since mid-February.

Category: Commentary, Commodities, Economy, National News, Wall Street, World News | 722 Comments »
Tags: Commodities Shortages, Consumer Inflation, Crop Inflation, Walmart Inflation

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 30, 2011

Some sound advice….It’s going to be a long negative haul for housing and there is nothing on the horizon, such as an improving economy, lower unemployment, or climbing wages to stem the flow. There were simply too many homes built during the boom phases at affordability rates that didn’t make sense. Those who can afford to buy a home under the new loan standards will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the bust. But, why rush?

According To Real Estate Data Analytics Firm CoreLogic:

11.1 million residential properties, or 23.1% of all U.S. homes, were in negative equity at Dec. 31 [Q4], up from 10.8 million, or 22.5%, the prior quarter. The total negative equity held by the nation’s homeowners rose to $751 billion for the fourth quarter from $744 billion at Sept. 30, but down from $800 billion a year earlier. The number of upside down mortgages declined through the first three quarters of 2010, as more properties were foreclosed upon. …

The data analytics firm said another 2.4 million homeowners had less than 5% equity in their property in the fourth quarter, indicating 27.9% of all mortgages are in negative equity or near-negative equity.

CoreLogic said total negative equity is set to rise another 10 points if home prices fall 5% to 10% as projected in 2011.

That means that 13.5 homeowners (27.9%!) are in serious trouble with their homes.

Banks’ REO inventory is now 30x greater than foreclosure sales volume. That won’t help either.

It’s going to be a long negative haul for housing and there is nothing on the horizon, such as an improving economy, lower unemployment, and climbing wages to stem the flow. There were simply too many homes built during the boom phases at affordability rates that didn’t make sense (malinvestment). Those who can afford to buy a home under the new loan standards will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the bust. But, why rush?

Category: Commentary, Economy, Finance, Interest Rates, Bonds, National News, Real Estate, Wall Street | 350 Comments »
Tags: CoreLogic, Data Analytics Real Estae, Real Estate

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 30, 2011

Looks like the Japanese nuclear power plant is going to be a total loss and we haven’t been told the whole story about Japan’s nuclear disaster…..so here we go with an update.  Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano ruled out the possibility that the two undamaged reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s six-unit Dai-Ichi plant would be salvaged.  Dismantling the plant and decontaminating the site may take 30 years and cost Tokyo Electric more than 1 trillion yen ($12 billion), engineers and analysts said. The government hasn’t ruled out pouring concrete over the whole facility. 

Japan will consider pouring concrete into its crippled Fukushima atomic plant to reduce radiation and contain the worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano yesterday ruled out the possibility that the two undamaged reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s six-unit Dai-Ichi plant would be salvaged. Units 1 through 4 suffered from explosions, presumed meltdowns and corrosion from seawater sprayed on radioactive fuel rods after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami cut power to reactor cooling systems.

Workers have averted the threat of a total meltdown by injecting water into the damaged reactors for the past two weeks. The complex’s six units are connected with the power grid and two are using temporary motor-driven pumps. Work to repair the plant’s monitoring and cooling systems has been hampered by discoveries of hazardous radioactive water.

The risk to workers might be greater than previously thought because melted fuel in the No. 1 reactor building may be causing isolated, uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions, Denis Flory, nuclear safety director for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said at a press conference in Vienna.

Dismantling the Plant

Tokyo Electric mixed boron, an element that absorbs neutrons and hinders nuclear fission, with emergency cooling water to prevent accidental chain reactions, Kathryn Higley, head of nuclear engineering and radiation health physics at Oregon State University in Corvallis, said in an e-mail.

Dismantling the plant and decontaminating the site may take 30 years and cost Tokyo Electric more than 1 trillion yen ($12 billion), engineers and analysts said. The government hasn’t ruled out pouring concrete over the whole facility as one way to shut it down, Edano said at a press conference.

Dumping concrete on the plant would serve a second purpose: it would trap contaminated water, said Tony Roulstone, an atomic engineer who directs the University of Cambridge’s masters program in nuclear energy.

Immobilizing the Water

“They need to immobilize this water and they need something to soak it up,” he said. “You don’t want to create another hazard, but you need to get it away from the reactors.”

The process will take longer than the 12 years needed to decommission the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania following a partial meltdown in 1979, said Hironobu Unesaki, a nuclear engineering professor at Kyoto University.

Tokyo Electric’s shareholders may be wiped out by clean-up costs and liabilities stemming from the nuclear accident, the worst since Chernobyl. The company faces claims of as much as 11 trillion yen if the crisis lasts two years and potential takeover by the government, according to a March 29 Bank of America Merrill Lynch report.

Among proposals being considered to contain the disaster, Japan may use a special fabric to cover reactors and curb the spread of airborne radiation. The plant probably is covered by a layer of radioactive dust that may contain plutonium, a radioactive element that can cause cancer when inhaled, Higley said.

www.bloomberg.com

Category: Commentary, National News, World News | 42 Comments »
Tags: Japanese Nuclear Disaster, Nuclear disaster

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 29, 2011

Robert Shiller today said that inflation adjusted economic statistics are clearly in the double dip.  U.S. single family home prices fell for the seventh month in a row in January, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index of prices.  

In four cities, prices were at their lowest for 11 years, with the overall index down 0.2% between December and January.  The average annual price fall across the 20 cities was 3.1%.

S&P’s David Blitzer said there could be worse to come: “The housing market recession is not yet over, and none of the statistics are indicating any form of sustained recovery.”Keeping with the trends set in late 2010, January brings us weakening home prices with no real hope in sight for the near future.”

“The February Mortgage Monitor report released by Lender Processing Services, Inc. (NYSE: LPS) shows that while delinquencies continue to decline, an enormous backlog of foreclosures still exists with overhang at every level. As of the end of February, foreclosure inventory levels stand at more than 30 times monthly foreclosure sales volume, indicating this backlog will continue for quite some time. Ultimately, these foreclosures will most likely reenter the market as REO properties, putting even more downward pressure on U.S. home values,  more troubling is that the Option-ARM trap is finally slamming shut: “February’s data also showed a 23 percent increase in Option ARM foreclosures over the last six months, far more than any other product type. In terms of absolute numbers, Option ARM foreclosures stand at 18.8 percent, a higher level than Subprime foreclosures ever reached.  In addition, deterioration continues in the Non-Agency Prime segment. Both Jumbo and Conforming Non-Agency Prime loans showed increases in foreclosures and were the only product areas with increases in delinquencies.”

Category: Commentary, Economy, Interest Rates, Bonds, National News, Real Estate, Wall Street | 397 Comments »
Tags: house delinquency, real estate bank owned, real estate foreclosures, Shiller

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 29, 2011

We’ve been looking for big changes in Cuba, and in fact we know of a particular person that went to Cuba to visit relatives recently and has returned back to the U.S., He says things are turning for the better, it’s definitely different.  One thing is for certain,  the money will pour into Cuba when the changes come.  Why you say….simply because there are a lot of rich Cubans living in the U.S.,  that’s official!

Dividing Old Havana from Chinatown is Cuba’s Capitolio Nacional, a monumental edifice with a fateful past. El Capitolio was conceived during the Roaring ’20s, when the island led the world in sugar exports and the future seemed sky blue.

President Gerardo Machado dreamed of turning Cuba into the Switzerland of the Americas. He decided that his 4 million countrymen needed a domed capitol building even taller and more ornate than the one he toured in Washington. So Cuba’s Congress dutifully poured 3% of the country’s GDP into their new home. (This would be akin to the US Congress spending $420 billion for a new office today, but let’s not give them any ideas…)

It took 8,000 skilled Cuban laborers just three years to complete El Capitolio, which featured gilt ceilings, a giant diamond embedded into the pristine marble floor and the world’s third-largest indoor statue. However, the showy project couldn’t have been more poorly timed. Work completed in 1929, just as America’s stock market crashed and the Great Depression unfolded.

The Smoot-Hawley tariffs crushed Cuban sugar prices by 74%. When El Capitolio’s ribbon was cut in 1931, Cuba’s economy lay in tatters. Machado was forced out of office, and his dream building would perform congressional service for only 28 years before Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries swept into Havana and opted for more austere premises. I don’t need to recite the history from here, which you probably well know.

The winds of change are gathering in Cuba, though. Since Fidel Castro’s health nearly failed in 2006, power has passed to his younger brother, Raul Castro. Raul has quietly reshuffled more than 30 cabinet members to prepare his party and people for a sweeping economic policy overhaul – Perestroika al Cubano. Even the semi-retired Fidel seems to have glumly accepted that change is inevitable, candidly admitting to a visiting US journalist that “the Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”

The global economic crisis whacked Cuba hard. Venezuela cut back on its largesse as its own economy worsened. Tourism and remittances softened, while nickel export prices tanked. Furthermore, three severe hurricanes left a wake of destruction in 2008. Unable to service Cuba’s estimated $21 billion foreign debt, and running out of generous leftist patrons to hit up, Raul Castro has, apparently, decided he has little choice but to pry open Cuba’s economy.

Castro’s wild card is Cuba’s oil and gas reserves. The island currently produces 60,000 bbl a day. But its US-facing northern waters hold an estimated 5-20 billion barrels of oil and 20 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. (Note: This compares with 29 billion barrels of oil reserves in the entire US.) Accessing this undersea oil requires the sophisticated drilling technology the US excels in. But as long as sanctions remain in place, the US oil majors are excluded from that bonanza. Amidst the applause of oil industry lobbyists, the dance for reengagement has begun, with both partners taking some unprecedented steps.

Raul Castro has issued a far-reaching five-year road map for Cuba’s future economic reform. The proposed changes would put Cuba on a very similar path to that taken by China in the 1980s and Vietnam in the 1990s. Here are some of the ideas: permit real estate transactions amongst Cubans, merge the two-tier currency system, close down inefficient state enterprises, decentralize state ownership, facilitate private ownership of businesses, distribute idle land to farmers, open state-owned wholesale markets and further encourage foreign investment – particularly in tourism.

In recent months, some planned reforms have already been implemented in an effort to delay Cuba’s impending insolvency. Costly subsidies on sugar and personal care products are being scaled back. The government announced plans to shed 500,000 state workers (that’s 10% of the country’s government work force in a country where 85% of workers work for the state) and guide them somehow into the private sector.

Cubans are being encouraged to grow and sell their own fruits and vegetables. The government is inviting foreign investors to develop 10 golf course estates in Cuba, with a new law allowing 99-year land leases to foreign buyers of plots in such projects. In the old days of Fidel’s revolution, such policies were unthinkable.

So what is the potential for a liberalized Cuban economy?

Just look 90 miles across the straits to Florida. A million Cuban- Americans call Miami home. Cuba has 60% of Florida’s population and 80% of its landmass, but greater natural resources and a much longer coastline, so one might conclude that the two are of comparable overall potential.

Perhaps to underscore their similarities, remember the fact that England and Spain cleanly swapped the two in 1763. Today, Florida’s economy is 12 times larger than Cuba’s. One reason is that Florida gets 20 times as many tourists as Cuba, plus an inflow of affluent retirees.

When the US government stops restricting its citizens from traveling to Cuba, the island will become an instant tourist magnet. Offering short flights, sunny beaches, cool music, “old world” architecture and cheap surgery, Cuba should have no problem drawing several million American tourists a year, as further-away destinations like Costa Rica have done.

Should reforms become comprehensive enough, agriculture seems an obvious investment play: Half the land is arable, labor is cheap and rain is plentiful. Cuba’s once-vaunted sugar industry stands in disarray, with 80% of the old mills shut down. However, today’s high sugar prices provide ample incentive to revive the sector, along with other traditional crops such as cigar tobacco.

Despite its long coastline, fisheries and aquaculture remain largely overlooked. Cuba is a world-class producer of nickel, but other mineral deposits remain underexploited. And then there’s the oil. The entire power system needs to be updated, financial services developed, retailing expanded – the opportunities seem endless.

Beyond the subsidized basics, most consumer goods have to be imported, and imports draw heavy duties. Telecom services are costly due to government monopolization and inefficiency. The list goes on. In this environment, it is tough for most Cubans to get by unless they receive remittances, tourist gratuities or tea money.

All in all, we eagerly await the implementation of Cuba’s economic reforms. As this process unfolds, Cuba could transform into one of the world’s most attractive frontier investment destinations. America has a long track record of turning bitter rivals into productive partners (a recent example being Vietnam), and re-engagement with Cuba could be one of Obama’s most notable foreign policy legacies.

Some frontier investors are not waiting for that and are already investing in Cuba. While 100% foreign ownership is permitted, most investors enter joint ventures with Cuban state enterprises, which typically contribute land, labor and sometimes capital. Over 250 such joint ventures exist, mostly for specific sectors or projects. Investments are made in foreign currency, eliminating exchange rate issues, and there are no restrictions on capital repatriation. Corporate income tax is 30% for joint ventures and 35% for wholly owned foreign companies, but tax holidays of five-seven years are available.

A few Cuba-focused investment groups have been established that non-US investors can access. Canada-listed Sherritt Group is a major player in Cuban nickel mining and, formerly, telecoms. A private investment group backed by European investors, Coral Capital has restored Havana’s historic Saratoga Hotel, which was recently ranked by Conde Nast as the 16th best hotel in the world. Coral is now planning a number of golf course, marina, housing and hotel projects, as is Leisure Canada, a Canada-listed investment vehicle.

Regards,

 

Category: Commentary, Economy, National News, Wall Street, World News | 2 Comments »
Tags: Changes In Cuba, Cuba, Cuba Changes, Cuba Investment, Free Cuba

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 29, 2011

News is leaking out of Japan on the nuclear reactors, no pun intended…..General Electric experts are talking of  a blob of nuclear lava as an end result of a total melt down on unit 2 which appears to be a total loss.  If true, the “experts” say it should take away the risk of explosion!  Workers are still trying to cool three other ractors involved to keep the fuel rods from melting down.

From the Guardian:

The radioactive core in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power  plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor, experts say, raising fears of a major release of radiation at the site.

The warning follows an analysis by a leading U.S. expert of radiation levels at the plant. Readings from reactor two at the site have been made public by the Japanese authorities and Tepco, the utility that operates it.

Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electricwhen the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian workers at the site appeared to have “lost the race” to save the reactor, but said there was no danger of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe.

Workers have been pumping water into three reactors at the stricken plant in a desperate bid to keep the fuel rods from melting down, but the fuel is at least partially exposed in all the reactors.

At least part of the molten core, which includes melted fuel rods and zirconium alloy cladding, seemed to have sunk through the steel “lower head” of the pressure vessel around reactor two, Lahey said.

“The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell,” Lahey said. “I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards.”

The good news is that the next step will not be a Chernobyl type explosion, or so the GE expert believes, but a far more “benign” radioactive lava escalation.

The major concern when molten fuel breaches a containment vessel is that it reacts with the concrete floor of the drywell underneath, releasing radioactive gases into the surrounding area. At Fukushima, the drywell has been flooded with seawater, which will cool any molten fuel that escapes from the reactor and reduce the amount of radioactive gas released.

Lahey said: “It won’t come out as one big glob; it’ll come out like lava, and that is good because it’s easier to cool.”

The drywell is surrounded by a secondary steel-and-concrete structure designed to keep radioactive material from escaping into the environment. But an earlier hydrogen explosion at the reactor may have damaged this.

www.zerohedge.com

Category: Commentary, Economy, National News, National Security, World News | 2 Comments »
Tags: G.E. Nuclear, Japan Nuclear Core Meltdown, nuclear power

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 28, 2011

Category: Charts and Graphs, Commentary, National News, Wall Street | 12,537 Comments »
Tags: walmart, Walmart's Second Biggest Market

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 28, 2011

They gotta be kidding…… Nope                                                          

Question: Why can’t Japanese electrical power be moved around such a small country? 

Answer:  Electrical power can’t be moved for a simple, stunning reason. The northern half of Japan uses 100 volt, 50 hertz (cycles per second) electricity and the southern half uses 100 volt, 60 hertz. If you pump 60 hertz electricity into a 50 hertz system (or vice versa) you’ll burn out motors and start fires. It simply cannot be done. Tokyo sits near the southern edge of the 50 hertz area and there are only four converting stations that can convert power into the other hertz. The bottom line is that it may never had mattered, except for the perfect storm.

James Anderson  MAR 28, 2011

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Sunday it will resume implementing rolling blackouts partially Monday morning in the Kanto region, and depending on the demand situation for electricity, it may carry them out in the late afternoon and evening as well.

Looking at a map, Kanto is the Tokyo metropolitan area. The earthquake was 17 days ago, and the damage in the Tokyo area was not that severe. Granted, the nuclear plants are down, but Japan isn’t a very big country. Why can’t power be moved from the southern/western parts of Japan to Tokyo which, in my humble opinion, seems to be a pretty important part of the Japanese economy?

The answer is electrical power can’t be moved for a simple, stunning reason. The northern half of Japan uses 100 volt, 50 hertz (cycles per second) electricity and the southern half uses 100 volt, 60 hertz. If you pump 60 hertz electricity into a 50 hertz system (or vice versa) you’ll burn out motors and start fires. It simply cannot be done. Tokyo sits near the southern edge of the 50 hertz area and there are only four converting stations that can convert power into the other hertz. Here’s a map of the country and a geographic breakdown.

The four converting plants can convert 60 hertz to 50 hertz, but their capacity is too small to alleviate the power shortage in the Tokyo area. Thus, you get rolling blackouts every business day. To make matters worse, it’s spring. Power demands are lower than the summer when air-conditioning demand peaks. Trying to build new converting plants will take a long time, quite possibly years, as will any new power plants.

A quick search of global electrical systems by country seems to indicate that Japan is the only country with a split electrical grid. It’s actually mind boggling. It’s worse than third world. How their political system let this happen is beyond the scope of this article, but the bottom line is that Tokyo, the city, is in for a long period of very difficult business conditions that has to affect Japan’s GDP. Tokyo Electric, the utility, will be under intense pressure to get back its generating capacity, and I have to believe they will try to get the “undamaged” units 5 and 6 back on line. How that plays out will be very interesting to watch. In the mean time, I’m not buying into any GDP bounce from increased construction activity when the Tokyo metropolitan area continues with rolling blackouts for months, if not a couple of years.

http://www.minyanville.com/articles/print.php?a=33590

Category: Commentary, Economy, National News, National Security, Wall Street, World News | 95 Comments »
Tags: japan, Japanese Electrical Grid

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 26, 2011

Category: Commentary, National News | 79 Comments »
Tags: Map Of Nulear Power, Nuclear Power Map

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 24, 2011

Our only questions is: Why is this drop unexpected?

Orders for long-lasting goods unexpectedly fell in February, raising concern over the sustainability of the rebound in U.S. business investment.

Bookings for goods meant to last at least three years dropped 0.9 percent after a 3.6 percent gain the prior month that was larger than initially reported, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Other reports showed fewer Americans filed claims for jobless benefits last week, and consumer comfort dropped to the lowest level in seven months.

The data on orders stands in contrast to other reports this month that showed production picked up in February and factory purchasing managers were more optimistic. While rising exports to China and other emerging economies will benefit manufacturers like Texas Instruments Inc. (TXN), the need for U.S. companies to replace outdated equipment may not be as pressing as earlier in the recovery.

“There is a risk that capital spending will be flat in the first half of the year,” said Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist at UniCredit Global Research in New York.

www.bloomberg.com

Category: Commentary, Economy, National News, Wall Street | 39 Comments »
Tags: Durable Goods

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 23, 2011

We have world changes in the Middle East.  We have peak oil production. We have inevitable hyperinflation. But all the attention is currently on Japan,  as markets forget the growing foundation of international dislocation.

Stay focused…… Stay disciplined.

www.jsmineset.com

Category: Commentary, Economy, Gold and Silver, National News, National Security, Oil and Nat Gas, Wall Street, World News | 11,680 Comments »
Tags: dominoes, gold, Middle East

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 23, 2011

Of course nobody is going to own up to it…….The Coast Guard has yet to put forth an official estimate of the volume of crude that has made landfall, but Mr. Edwards said that it “appears to be more than a few gallons of oil.”

HOUSTON — The U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday that oil that has recently washed onto Louisiana beaches is similar to crude that leaked over the weekend from an oil company’s idle offshore platform. But the company, Houston-based Anglo-Suisse Offshore Partners LLC, begs to differ.

Initial tests show that oil fouling a half mile worth of beaches, spread over 30 miles of shoreline, and a crude release from the Anglo-Suisse platform “are a close match,” Chief Petty Officer John Edwards told Dow Jones Newswires. But Anglo-Suisse said through a spokeswoman that fewer than five gallons of oil spilled from the well, which it was trying to permanently seal over the weekend; the company says it has begun an investigation in order to prove that the crude that began washing ashore is not its fault. The well, drilled in shallow water, is located 30 miles offshore.

In a written statement, Anglo-Suisse said it was “surprised by this suggestion” that its oil could have ended on the shore, but the company said it was nevertheless helping clean up the spill.

The spat further muddles the mystery about the origin of the crude, a hard puzzle to solve in a region that’s full of underwater pipelines, platforms and wells, many of them decades old. Anglo-Suisse’s willingness to help despite its misgivings also illustrates the heightened sensitivity that has followed every potential oil spill since BP PLC’s Deepwater Horizon disaster last year. The Coast Guard has downplayed the theory that the oil that just washed ashore could come from the Deepwater Horizon spill, saying that it isn’t weathered enough.

Previously the Coast Guard had been paying for clean-up and containment efforts from the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which holds oil royalties for such incidents.

Kelly Kimberly, a spokeswoman for Anglo-Suisse said that the five gallons of oil leaked from the well over the course of three days starting Friday, as crews worked to permanently seal a platform that hadn’t been producing oil since 2005.

The Coast Guard has yet to put forth an official estimate of the volume of crude that has made landfall, but Mr. Edwards said that it “appears to be more than a few gallons of oil.”

Category: Commentary, Economy, National News, Oil and Nat Gas, World News | 7,326 Comments »
Tags: Gulf Of Mexico Oil Slick, New Gulf Oil Leak

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 23, 2011

Well, records are made to be broken…..At just 250,000 annualized, this was the lowest annualized new home sales number ever.  The government continues to say we have a recovery, they are right to some degree. The problem is the whole recovery is being supported by the government….anyone care to guess what will happen without that support. 

 U.S. New-Home Sales Unexpectedly Fall to Lowest on Record

Purchases of new U.S. homes unexpectedly declined in February to the slowest pace on record and prices dropped to the lowest level since December 2003, adding to evidence the industry is floundering.

Sales decreased 16.9 percent to a 250,000 annual pace, figures from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News projected a gain to a 290,000 rate, according to the median estimate. The median price fell 8.9 percent from the same month in 2010.

Builders are struggling to compete with existing homes as foreclosures add to the overhang of unsold properties and drive down values. The figures underscore the Federal Reserve’s view that the housing market “continues to be depressed” even as the rest of the economy improves.

“We’ve got this tug of war going on where we’ve got this very weak housing sector and a manufacturing sector that’s doing fine,” said Brian Jones, an economist at Societe Generale in New York, whose 240,000 forecast was the lowest in the Bloomberg survey. “The new and existing home sales numbers were abysmal”.

Previously owned home purchases dropped 9.6 percent in February, figures from the National Association of Realtors showed two days ago. The median home price fell to a 9-year-low, while the supply of unsold properties rose.

Purchases in February declined to record lows in three of the four U.S. regions. Sales slumped 57 percent in the Northeast, 28 percent in the Midwest and 15 percent in the West. The South showed a 6.3 percent decrease.

The median sales price dropped to $202,100 in February from $221,900 a year earlier, today’s report showed. Last month’s median price was the lowest since $196,000 in December 2003. The share of homes sold for $500,000 or more fell in February, matching January 2009 as the lowest on record.

The supply of homes at the current sales rate rose to 8.9 month’s worth from 7.4 months in January. There were 186,000 new houses on the market at the end of February, the same as a month earlier.

Category: Commentary, Economy, Interest Rates, Bonds, Real Estate, Wall Street, World News | 405 Comments »
Tags: New Home Sales, Real Estate

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 23, 2011

The Middle East is on fire…….Israel next up.  One mishap and the whole Middle East could go up in smoke!

• INTERIOR MINISTER ELI ISHAI SAYS SITUATION DETERIORATING
• ISHAI SAYS ISRAEL MAY HAVE TO ACT IF DETERIORATION CONTINUES
• ISHAI LINKS JERUSALEM BOMBING TO ITAMAR STABBING, GAZA VIOLENCE
• ISHAI SPEAKS ON ISRAEL ARMY RADIO

Category: Commentary, National News, Wall Street, World News | 2,725 Comments »
Tags: Israel, Middle East

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 23, 2011

Next Up: Government resignation, crisis, bail out, etc. We’ve already seen the drill elsewhere…….

Just In: Portugal’s Prime Minister José Sócrates tendered his resignation after Parliament rejected a new government austerity plan.

PORTUGUESE PARLIAMENT REJECTS GOVERNMENT’S DEFICIT-CUTTING PLAN
PORTUGAL’S PARLIAMENT BACKS RESOLUTION AGAINST GOVERNMENT PLAN

Category: Commentary, Economy, National News, Wall Street, World News | 3 Comments »
Tags: Portugal Votes No On Austerity

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 22, 2011

The United States is on a fiscal path towards insolvency and policymakers are at a “tipping point,” according to Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher.

“If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put us, we will become insolvent, the question is when,” Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said in a question and answer session after delivering a speech at the University of Frankfurt. “The short-term negotiations are very important, I look at this as a tipping point.”  But he added he was confident in the Americans’ ability to take the right decisions and said the country would avoid insolvency.  “I think we are at the beginning of the process and it’s going to be very painful,” he added.

Fisher earlier said the U.S. economic recovery is gathering momentum, adding that he personally was extremely vigilant on inflation pressures.

“We are all mindful of this phenomenon. Speaking personally, I am concerned and I am going to be extremely vigilant on that front,” Fisher said in an interview with CNBC.

He added that he does not support the Fed embarking on an additional round of quantitative easing.

“Barring some extraordinary circumstance I cannot forsee…I would vote against a QE3,” Fisher told CNBC. “I don’t think it’s necessary. Again, we have a self-sustaining recovery.”

More at: http://www.cnbc.com/id/42209447

Category: Commentary, Economy, Finance, Interest Rates, Bonds, National News, Wall Street, World News | 48 Comments »
Tags: Dallas Fed Fisher, Fed Tipping Point, federal reserve

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 21, 2011

We have a long long way to go before this problem goes away!

TEPCO managed to restore the power supply to its radioactive power plant. The key problem at hand has not been fixed at all. Not even close. According to New York Daily News: “Cooling pumps at one of Japan’s crippled nuclear reactors are damaged beyond repair and will need to be replaced, officials learned Monday. The revelation dashed hopes for a quick resolution to the ongoing nuclear catastrophe at the leaking Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. An emergency order has been placed for new pumps for Unit 2 at the plant, but it’s unclear how quickly they would arrive, officials said.”

More from New York Daily News:

Engineers have worked around the clock to restore power to the facility, but damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami means it may take weeks to repair the required systems, officials warn.

“We have experienced a very huge disaster that has caused very large damage at a nuclear power generation plant on a scale that we had not expected,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

Although some headway was made toward bringing less-affected reactors on-line, conditions at the plant remained volatile.

Workers were temporarily evacuated Monday after plumes of mysterious gray smoke rose from a leaking reactor.

Officials said there was no sign of an explosion and that they had not detected any rise in radiation levels.

Meanwhile, officials with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission upgraded their assessment of the situation at the plant, saying it appeared the reactor cores at the most damaged facilities remained contained.

“I would say optimistically that things appear to be on the verge of stabilizing,” said Bill Borchardt, the NRC’s executive director for operations.

www.zerohedge.com

Category: Commentary, Economy, National News, National Security, Wall Street, World News | 936 Comments »
Tags: Japan Nuclear Accident, TEPCO

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 21, 2011

Black Swans everywhere……

• ISRAELI WARPLANES HIT HAMAS MILITARY SITE IN GAZA, XINHUA SAYS
• ISRAELI GAZA ATTACKS INJURE FIVE PEOPLE, AL-ARABIYA REPORTS
• ISRAELI WARPLANES FLYING OVER GAZA, AL-ARABIYA REPORTS

Category: Commentary, National News, National Security, Wall Street, World News | 42 Comments »
Tags: Israelb Bombs Hamas

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 21, 2011

Category: Commentary, Economy, Finance, National News, Real Estate, World News | 872 Comments »
Tags: home prices, Home Sales, Real Estate, real estate cycles

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 19, 2011

Question….Do governments ever tell the truth?  Doesn’t seem so.

The NRC said in the 1980’s that it was estimated that there was a 50% chance of a nuclear meltdown within the next 20 years,  which would be so large that it would contaminate an area the size of the State of Pennsylvania, and would result in huge numbers of a fatalities, and which would cause damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars (in 1980s dollars). Those reports were kept secret for decades.

From The Washington Blog……..

Santa Susana

As a History Chanel special notes, a nuclear meltdown occurred at the world’s first commercial reactor only 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles, and only 7 miles from the community of Canoga Park and the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles.

Specifically, in 1959, there was a meltdown of one-third of the nuclear reactors at the Santa Susana field laboratory operated by Rocketdyne, releasing – according to some scientists’ estimates – 240 times as much radiation as Three Mile Island.

But the Atomic Energy Commission lied and said only there was only 1 partially damaged rod, and no real problems. In fact, the AEC kept the meltdown a state secret for 20 years.

There were other major accidents at that reactor facility, which the AEC and Nuclear Regulatory Commission covered up as well.

Kyshtm

Two years earlier, a Russian government reactor at Kyshtm melted down in an accident which some claim was even worse than Chernobyl. The Soviet government hid the accident, pretending that it was creating a new “nature reserve” to keep people out of the huge swath of contaminated land. Journalist Anna Gyorgy alleges that the results of a freedom of information act request show that the CIA knew about the accident at the time, but kept it secret to prevent adverse consequences for the fledgling American nuclear industry.

1980s Studies and Hearings In 1982, the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs received a secret report received from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission called “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences 2”. In that report and other reports by the NRC in the 1980s, it was estimated that there was a 50% chance of a nuclear meltdown within the next 20 years which would be so large that it would contaminate an area the size of the State of Pennsylvania, which would result in huge numbers of a fatalities, and which would cause damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars (in 1980s dollars). Those reports were kept secret for decades. Admission By Former Russian Leader Former soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said on camera for a Discovery Network special (“The Battle of Chernobyl”) that the Soviets and Americans have each hidden a number of nuclear accidents from the public.

In light of the foregoing, the following quote from the San Jose Mercury News may not seem so far-fetched:

EPA officials, however, refused to answer questions or make staff members available to explain the exact location and number of monitors, or the levels of radiation, if any, being recorded at existing monitors in California. Margot Perez-Sullivan, a spokeswoman at the EPA’s regional headquarters in San Francisco, said the agency’s written statement would stand on its own.Critics said the public needs more information.”It’s disappointing,” said Bill Magavern, director of Sierra Club California. “I have a strong suspicion that EPA is being silenced by those in the federal government who don’t want anything to stand in the way of a nuclear power expansion in this country, heavily subsidized by taxpayer money.”

Category: Commentary, National News, National Security, Technology, Wall Street, World News | 4 Comments »
Tags: AEC Lies, Freedom of Information Act, Meltdown, NRC Lies, Nuclear Lies, nuclear power

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 19, 2011

Are we seeing the start of WW III…..?

U.S. and coalition forces launched military strikes against Libya, gambling that a rapid and substantial attack could knock out loyalist support for Gadhafi.

Gaza Fires 50 Mortars Into Israel, Heaviest Barrage In Two Years…..

Israel is sure to bring even more geopolitical tension, especially with Iran adn Syria already on edge following their own violent protests (and arguably looking for a political scapegoat).

BBC reports that “Palestinian militants in Gaza have fired dozens of missiles into southern Israel in what appears to be their heaviest such barrage in two years. About 50 mortars were fired – two Israelis were hurt, Israel says.” Never one to step away from an escalation, Israel replied in kind: “Israeli tanks later shelled targets in the coastal strip, wounding at least five people, Palestinian officials say.”

Category: Commentary, National News, National Security, Wall Street, World News | 18 Comments »
Tags: Libya Oil;Libya Gaddafi, Middle East Powder Keg, WW III

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 19, 2011

Notice if you will, the house in the chart below is upside down…..how appropriate!

One hundred years of the government’s attempts to mute the natural business cycle are slowly and painfully coming to an end.  A period where the government proactively encouraged consumption until it became 70% of the economy, we produced very little, and our savings rate reached zero.  A period where home ownership was promoted as the ultimate supreme goal until the last citizen that could fog a mirror yet was least able to afford it was suckered in.  As this leveraged consumption pyramid is finally ending, the government and central bank have embarked on one final mission to prop it up using the same tools that got us here in the first place: more leverage.  Only this time on a logarithmic scale.  Unfortunately, the scale is so large that it will not only guarantee an endgame, but it will accelerate it.  The visual below contains a few pieces of evidence that seem to confirm this, namely that over a ten year period: the consumer is stuck with an underwater balance sheet and the Fed’s attempt to create yet another bubble is only making it worse; outside of government efforts, the economy is unable to generate  sustainable job growth; and finally, the leverage scheme is so large that it no longer has a positive impact on growth (“debt saturation”).

www.zerohedge.com

Category: Charts and Graphs, Economy, Finance, Interest Rates, Bonds, National News, Personal Net Worth, Real Estate, Wall Street | 4,494 Comments »
Tags: Keynesian Cycle, Keynesian End Game, net worth, personal net worth

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 19, 2011

Defaults have lopped $822 billion off U.S. household debt since mid-2008!  These loans were not payed off, but it looks that way with many of the statistics…..

One of the puzzles of the recovery has been how U.S. households have managed to shed some $658 billion in mortgage, credit-card and other consumer debt over the past two and a half years: Are they really paying it down, or are they just giving up and defaulting?

The latest data from the Federal Reserve suggest defaults have played a big role in debt declines and that “paying down” would be a misnomer.  Based on the Fed data, banks’ and investors’ charge-offs, the result of defaults, have lopped $822 billion off households’ debt load from mid-2008 to the end of 2010. In other words, net of defaults consumers actually only borrowed an added net $163 billion.

That calculation alone, though, doesn’t provide a full picture of consumers’ change in behavior. They may be adding debt, but they’re doing so at a much slower pace than during the housing and credit boom. Net of defaults, household debt grew at an average annualized rate of only about 0.5% from mid-2008 to the end of 2010. That compares to about 10.5% in the preceding decade, a difference of 10 percentage points.

Category: Charts and Graphs, Commentary, Economy, Finance, National News, Wall Street | 1 Comment »
Tags: bank loans, consumer debt, household debt

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 18, 2011

It looks like the Middle East is heating up again….

SAN’A, Yemen—Armed men opened fire on crowds of antigovernment protesters Friday in Yemen’s capital, killing an estimated 45 people and injuring hundreds—prompting Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to declare a state of emergency and suggesting his government has shifted to a hard line against its hardening opposition.

Friday’s bloodshed marked the most significant escalation in violence in Yemen’s capital since protesters began in January to call for the end of Mr. Saleh’s 32-year regime. The one-day death toll stood higher than the estimated 40 demonstration-linked fatalities in Yemen until now.

The day’s violence began after Friday prayers, a time city residents have in recent weeks joined protesters who are camped near San’a University. Several people who saw Friday’s crowds estimated the demonstrators numbered 100,000 or more, San’a’s largest protests yet.

Category: Commentary, National News, World News | 11,889 Comments »
Tags: Middle East Problems, Yemen Declares State Of Emergency

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 18, 2011

Technology growth in wireless is going to evolve into next generation wireless….. and its growth will be breathtaking!

Mobile data growth is expected to grow at a 92% compound annual growth rate over the next five years. All that traffic growth won’t be coming from existing devices, of course. It will be coming from brand-new ones.

Although the bulk of data traffic will still be on laptops and netbooks in 2015, as you can see, the mix of devices will look quite different. While per user growth for laptops and netbooks will grow at a very healthy 42% annual clip, smartphones will do well too, at 24%. Finally, tablets will be growing at a breakneck compound annual growth rate of 105%.

More interesting yet, is the operating system of choice for mobile platforms. The biggest gainer here is Google’s Android, which grew at a monthly average of 56.7% for the first nine months of 2010. The second strongest operating system, Nokia’s Symbian, managed only 37.9% by comparison. However, following Nokia’s recent announcement that it will switch to Microsoft’s mobile OS, Symbian will now be relegated to the dustbin.

And….In a recent Forbes interview, George Gilder, senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, explained how crucial “deep packet inspection” (DPI) technology will be to grow the wireless Internet. He said:

Deep packet inspection is absolutely critical to our technology and the advance of digital technology, because you can’t really have cloud computing, you can’t really have video teleconferencing, you can’t do any of the new promise of broadband without having ways to differentiate among different packets.

 

Here is a little background on this…..

DPI combines the functionality of an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) with a traditional stateful firewall. This combination makes it possible to detect certain attacks that neither the IDS/IPS nor the stateful firewall can catch on their own. Stateful firewalls, while able to see the beginning and end of a packet flow, cannot on their own catch events that would be out of bounds for a particular application. While IDSs are able to detect intrusions, they have very little capability in blocking such an attack. DPIs are used to prevent attacks from viruses and worms at wire speeds. More specifically, DPI can be effective against buffer overflow attacks, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, sophisticated intrusions, and a small percentage of worms that fit within a single packet.

DPI-enabled devices have the ability to look at Layer 2 and beyond Layer 3 of the OSI model, in cases DPI can be evoked to look through Layer 2-7 of the OSI model. This includes headers and data protocol structures as well as the actual payload of the message. DPI functionality is evoked when a device looks or takes other action based on information beyond Layer 3 of the OSI model. DPI can identify and classify traffic based on a signature database that includes information extracted from the data part of a packet, allowing finer control than classification based only on header information. End points can utilize encryption and obfuscation techniques to evade DPI actions in many cases.

www.thedailyreckoning.com

Category: Commentary, Economy, National News, Technology, Wall Street | 55 Comments »
Tags: Next Generation Wireless, Wireless Deep Packet Inspection

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 18, 2011

Tomorrow’s moon will be the closest to earth in almost 20 years.  Add to that we have an eclipse and Vernal Equinox this weekend.  This will bring very high tidal pressures and increased earthquake watch. ….and Solar activity may spike.  Good seats, hey buddy!

Category: Commentary, National News, Tid Bits | 40 Comments »
Tags: Moon news, Td Bits, Vernal Equinox

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 17, 2011

So what happened to deflation…..ah, it’s deflation for the old folks on social security, no cost of living raises for them….but there is inflation for our esteemed congress, so of course they voted themselves an inflationary raise!  It’s pretty basic politics, come to think of it!

A special index created by the Labor Department to measure the actual cost of living for Americans hit a record high in February, according to data released Thursday, surpassing the old high in July 2008. The Chained Consumer Price Index, released along with the more widely-watched CPI, increased 0.5 percent to 127.4, from 126.8 in January. In July 2008, just as the housing crisis was tightening its grip, the Chained Consumer Price Index hit its previous record of 126.9.

 “The Federal Reserve continues to focus on the rate of change in inflation,” said Peter Bookvar, equity strategist at Miller Tabak. “Sure, it’s moving at a slower pace, but the absolute cost of living is now back at a record high in a country that has seven million less jobs.”

 The regular CPI, which has already been at a record for a while, increased 0.5 percent, the fastest pace in 1-1/2 years. However, the Fed’s preferred measure, CPI excluding food and energy, increased by just 0.2 percent.

“This speaks to the need for the Fed to include food and energy when they look at inflation rather than regard them as transient costs,” said Stephen Weiss of Short Hills Capital. “Perhaps the best way to look at this is to calculate a moving average over a certain period of time in order to smooth out the peaks and valleys.”

The so-called core CPI is used by the central bank because food and energy prices throughout history have proven to be volatile. However, one glance over the last two years at a chart of wheat or corn shows they’ve gone in one direction: up. And many traders say Fed Chairman Bernanke’s misplaced easy money policies are to blame.

Over time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has made changes to the regular CPI that it feels make it a better measure of inflation and closer to a cost of living index. It improved the way it averages out prices for items in the same category (e.g., apples) and also uses the often-criticized method of hedonic regression (if you’re curious, you can learn more about that here) to account for increases in product quality.

In 2002, the BLS created this often-overlooked cost of living index in order to account for the kinds of substitutions consumers make when times are tough. It is supposed to be even closer to an actual “cost of living” measure than the regular CPI.

“For example, pork and beef are two separate CPI item categories,” according to the BLS web site. “If the price of pork increases while the price of beef does not, consumers might shift away from pork to beef. The C-CPI-U (Chain Consumer Price Index) is designed to account for this type of consumer substitution between CPI item categories. In this example, the C-CPI-U would rise, but not by as much as an index that was based on fixed purchase patterns.”

“As the cost of living increases, we are headed toward a bigger problem with the slowing of housing permits,” said JJ Kinahan, chief derivatives strategist at thinkorswim, a division of TD Ameritrade. “As the staples start to cost more, this could lead to a quick slowdown in the auto and technology sectors as an iPad is an easy thing to pass on if you are paying more for your gas and food and need to cut back somewhere.”

To be sure, it’s nearly impossible to get a perfect “cost of living” measure, and the BLS acknowledges this on their web site: “An unconditional cost-of-living index would go further, and take into account changes in non-market factors, such as the environment, crime, and education.”

Still, states will be cutting back services drastically this year at the very same time they are raising taxes in order to close enormous budget deficits and avoid a muni-bond defaults crisis. So while it may be the missing link to a perfect cost of living measure, one can assume that Americans will be paying more for unquantifiable services such as police enforcement and education, but getting them at a lesser quality.

More at: http://www.cnbc.com/id/42130406

Category: Commentary, Commodities, Economy, National News, Wall Street, World News | 554 Comments »
Tags: Cost Of Living Index, CPI

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 16, 2011

The diagram at the bottom below shows all six stricken reactors. Reactors one to four have been over-heating since the tsumani. But reactors five and six, on a separate part of the site today began heating up as well.

‘We’re very close now to the point of no return,’ Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, said. ‘It’s gotten worse. We’re talking about workers coming into the reactor perhaps as a suicide mission and we may have to abandon ship,’ he told ABC.

Fears of ‘an apocalypse’ were raised by European officials as radiation levels soared. In another attack, French Industry Minister Eric Besson said: ‘Let’s not beat about the bush. They have visibly lost the essential of control (of the situation). That is our analysis, in any case, it’s not what they are saying.’

Those fears are stoking a mass exodus from the country, with wealthy foreign experts engaged in a scramble to book private jets.

Charter companies reported charging as much as $160,000 for a flight to Tokyo. with one saying it had a request from 14 bankers who ‘did not care about price.’

Terrified passengers also crammed into Tokyo’s Narita international airport, 150 miles from the stricken plant, in a desperate bid to escape the country. Lufthansa and KLM today became the first airlines to cacnel flights to Tokyo. 

In a sign of mounting panic, Cabinet Secretary Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano has already warned that the cooling efforts may not work.

He said: ‘It’s not so simple that everything will be resolved by pouring in water. We are trying to avoid creating other problems.’

Nuclear experts said the solutions being proposed to quell radiation leaks at the complex were last-ditch efforts to stem what could well be remembered as one of the world’s worst industrial disasters.   

The biggest concerns centre around the four over-heating reactors, and in particular radioactive steam pouring out of the plutonium-fuelled reactor number three which exploded on Monday.

Plutonium is far more hazardous to health than uranium, which is used to power the other five reactors on the site.   

There has been damage to four reactors at the Fukushima , three of which were hit by explosions and another caught fire.

Reactor number four is the second highest concern after a nuclear fuel storage pond was exposed to the atmosphere after a fire.

A fifth and six reactor, which were previously unharmed, were today being sprayed.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366670/Japan-earthquake-tsunami-French-claim-scale-nuclear-disaster-hidden.html

Category: Commentary, National News, Wall Street, World News | 48 Comments »
Tags: Japan Nuclear Meltdown, Japan Nuclear Plant Map, Nuclear Meltdown, Nuclear Plant Japan

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 15, 2011

John Williams doesn’t speak blindly, he has been a frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, Barrons etc, and he has multitudes of statistics to back up his “seemingly outlandish” but more than likely correct forecast……By the way, Williams time frame falls into the period leading up to 2014, similar to the Kress Economic Cycle that takes us down hard from 2012-2014.

Williams suggests “building a store of key consumables, such as food and water, and moving assets into physical precious metals and outside of the U.S. dollar.”

A lot of very smart people have voiced similar ideas. Best to pay attention to the economic road out there folks!  If it’s wrong, the cost is minimal, if it is right….you may be able to stay afloat while everyone else is sinking.

John Williams – The Great U.S. Collapse Nears

March 15, 2011

John Williams:

 With the dollar remaining weak John Williams of Shadowstats had this to say in a special report, “The U.S. economic and systemic-solvency crises of the last four years only have been precursors to the coming Great Collapse: a hyperinflationary great depression.  Such will encompass a complete collapse in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar; a collapse in the normal stream of U.S. commercial and economic activity; a collapse in the U.S. financial system as we know it; and a likely realignment of the U.S. political environment.”

“Outside timing on the hyperinflation remains 2014, but there is strong risk of the currency catastrophe beginning to unfold in the months ahead.  It may be starting to unfold as we go to press in March 2011, but moving into a full blown hyperinflation could take months to a year, beyond the onset, depending on the developing global view of the dollar and reactions of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve.

Prerequisites to the crisis unfolding include: the Federal Reserve moving to monetize U.S. Treasury debt; the U.S. dollar losing its traditional safe-haven status; the U.S. dollar losing its reserve status; the federal budget deficit and Treasury funding needs spiraling out of control.  The Fed moved to monetize Treasury debt in November 2010. 

A much-diminished U.S. dollar safe-haven status has become evident in early March 2011, along with serious calls for a new global reserve currency.  The economy is not in recovery and should display significant new weakness in the months ahead, with severely expansive implications for the federal deficit, Treasury funding needs and requisite Fed monetization of debt.

As the advance squalls from this great financial tempest come ashore, the government could be expected to launch a variety of efforts at forestalling the hyperinflation’s landfall, but such efforts will buy little time and ultimately will fail in preventing the dollar’s collapse.  The timing of the onset of full blown hyperinflation likely will be coincident with a broad global rejection/repudiation of the U.S. dollar.   

With no viable or politically-practical way of balancing U.S. fiscal conditions and avoiding this financial economic Armageddon, the best that individuals can do at this point is to protect themselves, both as to meeting short-range survival needs as well as to preserving current wealth and assets over the longer term.  Efforts there, respectively, would encompass building a store of key consumables, such as food and water, and moving assets into physical precious metals and outside of the U.S. dollar.”

www. ShadowStats.com

KingWorldNews.com

Category: Commentary, Economy, Finance, National News, News Letters, Wall Street, World News | 97 Comments »
Tags: John Williams, Kress Cycles, Shadow Stats

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 15, 2011

One would guess some rather important changes may be made to new currently under construction nuclear power plants…

The map below, courtesy of the World Nuclear Association, identifies the locations of nuclear power plants that are currently under construction. Of these, 42% reside in China; 16% in Russia and 11% in India. The G-7 countries, combined, account for only 3% of all nuclear plants currently under construction!

Category: Commentary, Economy, National News, Wall Street, World News | 155 Comments »
Tags: New Nuclear Plants;Nuclear Power Newest

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 15, 2011

03-15-2011

Japan, The Persian Gulf And Energy 

By George Friedman

Over the past week, everything seemed to converge on energy. The unrest in the Persian Gulf raised the specter of the disruption of oil supplies to the rest of the world, and an earthquake in Japan knocked out a string of nuclear reactors with potentially devastating effect. Japan depends on nuclear energy and it depends on the Persian Gulf, which is where it gets most of its oil. It was, therefore, a profoundly bad week for Japan, not only because of the extensive damage and human suffering but also because Japan was being shown that it can’t readily escape the realities of geography.

Japan is the world’s third-largest economy, a bit behind China now. It is also the third-largest industrial economy, behind only the United States and China. Japan’s problem is that its enormous industrial plant is built in a country almost totally devoid of mineral resources. It must import virtually all of the metals and energy that it uses to manufacture industrial products. It maintains stockpiles, but should those stockpiles be depleted and no new imports arrive, Japan stops being an industrial power.

The Geography of Oil

There are multiple sources for many of the metals Japan imports, so that if supplies stop flowing from one place it can get them from other places. The geography of oil is more limited. In order to access the amount of oil Japan needs, the only place to get it is the Persian Gulf. There are other places to get some of what Japan needs, but it cannot do without the Persian Gulf for its oil.

This past week, we saw that this was a potentially vulnerable source. The unrest that swept the western littoral of the Arabian Peninsula and the ongoing tension between the Saudis and Iranians, as well as the tension between Iran and the United States, raised the possibility of disruptions. The geography of the Persian Gulf is extraordinary. It is a narrow body of water opening into a narrow channel through the Strait of Hormuz. Any diminution of the flow from any source in the region, let alone the complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz, would have profound implications for the global economy.

For Japan it could mean more than higher prices. It could mean being unable to secure the amount of oil needed at any price. The movement of tankers, the limits on port facilities and long-term contracts that commit oil to other places could make it impossible for Japan to physically secure the oil it needs to run its industrial plant. On an extended basis, this would draw down reserves and constrain Japan’s economy dramatically. And, obviously, when the world’s third-largest industrial plant drastically slows, the impact on the global supply chain is both dramatic and complex.

In 1973, the Arab countries imposed an oil embargo on the world. Japan, entirely dependent on imported oil, was hit not only by high prices but also by the fact that it could not obtain enough fuel to keep going. While the embargo lasted only five months, the oil shock, as the Japanese called it, threatened Japan’s industrial capability and shocked it into remembering its vulnerability. Japan relied on the United States to guarantee its oil supplies. The realization that the United States couldn’t guarantee those supplies created a political crisis parallel to the economic one. It is one reason the Japanese are hypersensitive to events in the Persian Gulf and to the security of the supply lines running out of the region.

Regardless of other supplies, Japan will always import nearly 100 percent of its oil from other countries. If it cuts its consumption by 90 percent, it still imports nearly 100 percent of its oil. And to the extent that the Japanese economy requires oil — which it does — it is highly vulnerable to events in the Persian Gulf.

It is to mitigate the risk of oil dependency — which cannot be eliminated altogether by any means — that Japan employs two alternative fuels: It is the world’s largest importer of seaborne coal, and it has become the third-largest producer of electricity from nuclear reactors, ranking after the United States and France in total amount produced. One-third of its electricity production comes from nuclear power plants. Nuclear power was critical to both Japan’s industrial and national security strategy. It did not make Japan self-sufficient, since it needed to import coal and nuclear fuel, but access to these resources made it dependent on countries like Australia, which does not have choke points like Hormuz.

It is in this context that we need to understand the Japanese prime minister’s statement that Japan was facing its worst crisis since World War II. First, the earthquake and the resulting damage to several of Japan’s nuclear reactors created a long-term regional energy shortage in Japan that, along with the other damage caused by the earthquake, would certainly affect the economy. But the events in the Persian Gulf also raised the 1973 nightmare scenario for the Japanese. Depending how events evolved, the Japanese pipeline from the Persian Gulf could be threatened in a way that it had not been since 1973. Combined with the failure of several nuclear reactors, the Japanese economy is at risk.

The comparison with World War II was apt since it also began, in a way, with an energy crisis. The Japanese had invaded China, and after the fall of the Netherlands (which controlled today’s Indonesia) and France (which controlled Indochina), Japan was concerned about agreements with France and the Netherlands continuing to be honored. Indochina supplied Japan with tin and rubber, among other raw materials. The Netherlands East Indies supplied oil. When the Japanese invaded Indochina, the United States both cut off oil shipments from the United States and started buying up oil from the Netherlands East Indies to keep Japan from getting it. The Japanese were faced with the collapse of their economy or war with the United States. They chose Pearl Harbor.

Today’s situation is in no way comparable to what happened in 1941 except for the core geopolitical reality. Japan is dependent on imports of raw materials and particularly oil. Anything that interferes with the flow of oil creates a crisis in Japan. Anything that risks a cutoff makes Japan uneasy. Add an earthquake destroying part of its energy-producing plant and you force Japan into a profound internal crisis. However, it is essential to understand what energy has meant to Japan historically — miscalculation about it led to national disaster and access to it remains Japan’s psychological as well as physical pivot.

Japan’s Nuclear Safety Net

Japan is still struggling with the consequences of its economic meltdown in the early 1990s. Rapid growth with low rates of return on capital created a massive financial crisis. Rather than allow a recession to force a wave of bankruptcies and unemployment, the Japanese sought to maintain their tradition of lifetime employment. To do that Japan had to keep interest rates extremely low and accept little or no economic growth. It achieved its goal, relatively low unemployment, but at the cost of a large debt burden and a long-term sluggish economy.

The Japanese were beginning to struggle with the question of what would come after a generation of economic stagnation and full employment. They had clearly not yet defined a path, although there was some recognition that a generation’s economic reality could not sustain itself. The changes that Japan would face were going to be wrenching, and even under the best of circumstances, they would be politically difficult to manage. Suddenly, Japan is not facing the best of circumstances.

It is not yet clear how devastating the nuclear-reactor damage will prove to be, but the situation appears to be worsening. What is clear is that the potential crisis in the Persian Gulf, the loss of nuclear reactors and the rising radiation levels will undermine the confidence of the Japanese. Beyond the human toll, these reactors were Japan’s hedge against an unpredictable world. They gave it control of a substantial amount of its energy production. Even if the Japanese still had to import coal and oil, there at least a part of their energy structure was largely under their own control and secure. Japan’s nuclear power sector seemed invulnerable, which no other part of its energy infrastructure was. For Japan, a country that went to war with the United States over energy in 1941 and was devastated as a result, this was no small thing. Japan had a safety net.

The safety net was psychological as much as anything. The destruction of a series of nuclear reactors not only creates energy shortages and fear of radiation; it also drives home the profound and very real vulnerability underlying all of Japan’s success. Japan does not control the source of its oil, it does not control the sea lanes over which coal and other minerals travel, and it cannot be certain that its nuclear reactors will not suddenly be destroyed. To the extent that economics and politics are psychological, this is a huge blow. Japan lives in constant danger, both from nature and from geopolitics. What the earthquake drove home was just how profound and how dangerous Japan’s world is. It is difficult to imagine another industrial economy as inherently insecure as Japan’s. The earthquake will impose many economic constraints on Japan that will significantly complicate its emergence from its post-boom economy, but one important question is the impact on the political system. Since World War II, Japan has coped with its vulnerability by avoiding international entanglements and relying on its relationship with the United States. It sometimes wondered whether the United States, with its sometimes-unpredictable military operations, was more of a danger than a guarantor, but its policy remained intact.

It is not the loss of the reactors that will shake Japan the most but the loss of the certainty that the reactors were their path to some degree of safety, along with the added burden on the economy. The question is how the political system will respond. In dealing with the Persian Gulf, will Japan continue to follow the American lead or will it decide to take a greater degree of control and follow its own path? The likelihood is that a shaken self-confidence will make Japan more cautious and even more vulnerable. But it is interesting to look at Japanese history and realize that sometimes, and not always predictably, Japan takes insecurity as a goad to self-assertion.

This was no ordinary earthquake in magnitude or in the potential impact on Japan’s view of the world. The earthquake shook a lot of pieces loose, not the least of which were in the Japanese psyche. Japan has tried to convince itself that it had provided a measure of security with nuclear plants and an alliance with the United States. Given the earthquake and situation in the Persian Gulf, recalculation is in order. But Japan is a country that has avoided recalculation for a long time. The question now is whether the extraordinary vulnerability exposed by the quake will be powerful enough to shake Japan into recalculating its long-standing political system.

This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR    www.stratfor.com

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Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 15, 2011

Some more thoughts on Japan….we are told, (hopefully correctly), that this is more of a repeat of a Three Mile Island situation where half the fuel rods melted, than Chernobyl where they all did.  And…Small amounts of low radiation cesium and iodine have already been released, which should be measurable on American roof tops in about ten days.

Japan’s economic outlook now appears far more dire than anticipated only a day ago. It looks like GDP growth rate is going to instantly flip from +2% to -3%, a swing of -5%, similar to what we saw after the Kobe earthquake in 1995.  We have just had a “V” shaped economy dumped in our laps, and we have just embarked on a precipitous down leg. Two very weak quarters will be followed by two strong ones. The initial damage estimate is $60-$120 billion, and that will certainly rise.

Kobe had a larger immediate impact because of its key location as a choke point for the country’s rail and road transportation networks and ports. But the Sendai quake has affected a far larger area. Magnifying the impact is the partial melt down at the Fukushima Dai Ichi nuclear power plant, forcing the evacuation of everyone within a 12 mile radius.

Most major companies, including Toyota, Nissan, Honda, and Sony have shut down all domestic production. Management want to tally death tolls, damage to plant and equipment, and conduct emergency safety reviews. In any case, most employees are unable to get to work because of the complete shutdown of the rail system. Tokyo’s subway system is closed, stranding 25 million residents there.

Electric power shortages are a huge problem. The country’s eight Northern prefectures are now subject to three hour daily black outs and power rationing, including Tokyo. That has closed all manufacturing activity in the most economically vital part of the country.

Panic buying has emptied out every store in the major cities of all food and bottled water. Gas stations were cleaned out of all supplies and reserves, since much of Japan’s refining capacity has been closed. There are 20,000 expatriates waiting at Tokyo’s Narita airport as foreign companies evacuate staff to nearby financial centers in Hong Kong and Singapore. Airlines are diverting aircraft and laying on extra flights to accommodate the traffic.

The Tokyo Stock Exchange was hit with the TOPIX Index down 7%, then the circuit breakers kicked in. Most lead blue chips were down 10%, and 175 stocks never opened. Only construction stocks were up. Most of the selling was being done by foreign institutions and hedge funds. This could be the beginning of a new bear market that will last for many months.

Prime Minister Naoko Kan has asked the Bank of Japan “to save the country.” The central bank responded promptly with ¥15 trillion, or $187 billion worth of credit market purchases. The situation remains fluid.

The global macro call proved spot on. Oil is down $2, plunging to a two week low below $100/barrel, blindsided by shrinking Japanese demand. Equities were sold worldwide. Uranium miners in Australia took a particular pounding, as the nuclear crisis casts a long shadow over this reviving energy source. Insurers were unloaded in London and Zurich.

It looks like we are seeing the first multiple partial nuclear melt downs in history. But a professor at nearby UC Berkeley tells us this is more of repeat of Three Mile Island, where half the fuel rods melted, than Chernobyl, where they all did. Small amounts of low radiation cesium and iodine have already been released, which should be measurable on American roof tops in about ten days. Neighboring countries are enforcing radiation testing of all food imports from Japan.

The death toll is certain to ratchet up considerably. Seaside villages that have been wiped off the face of the earth don’t return phone calls. Japan’s maritime self-defense forces are scouring the seas off of Sendai, rescuing a lucky few clinging to floating debris.  We will have to see how this all pans out.

www.zerohedge.com

Category: Commentary, Commodities, Economy, Finance, Gold and Silver, Interest Rates, Bonds, National News, National Security, Wall Street, World News | 83 Comments »
Tags: Japanese Earthuake Update, Nuclear disaster

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 14, 2011

Should any of these plants go into full meltdown (indications are (2) already have) there will be both a human and economic disaster worse than 1945.

Japan’s nightmare gets even WORSE: All THREE damaged nuclear reactors now in ‘meltdown’ at tsunami-hit power station.
 

By Richard Shears
Last updated at 5:09 PM on 14th March 2011

The Japanese nuclear reactor hit by the tsunami went into ‘meltdown’ today, as officials admitted that fuel rods appear to be melting inside three damaged reactors.

That means there is a risk that molten nuclear fuel can melt through the reactor’s safety barriers and cause a serious radiation leak.

There have already been explosions inside two over-heating reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, and the fuel rods inside a third were partially exposed as engineers desperately fight to keep them under control after the tsunami knocked out emergency cooling systems.

Japanese chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano said it was ‘highly likely’ that the fuel rods inside all three stricken reactors are melting.

Some experts class that a partial meltdown of the reactor, but others would only use that term for when molten nuclear fuel melts through a reactor’s inner chamber – but not through the outer containment shell.

As fuel rods melt, they form an extremely hot molten pool at the bottom of the reactor that can melt through even the toughest of containment barriers.

www.jsmineset.com

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Tags: Japan Nuclear Meltdown, Japan Nuclear Weather Map, Nuclear Meltdown Mode, Nuclear Weather Map, World Weather Nuclear Map

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 13, 2011

From the IAEA Blog:

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Tags: Japanese IAEA Update

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 13, 2011

Let’s review the specific power plant in question, the General Electric design BWR Mark 1. “This is a boiling water reactor. It’s one of the first designs ever developed for commercial reactors in this country, and it’s widely used in Japan as well. Compared to other reactors, if you look at NRC studies, according to calculations, it has a relatively low core damage frequency. (That means the likelihood that portions of the fuel will melt.) And in part that’s because it has a larger variety of ways to get water into the core. So they have a lot of options and they’re using them now. Using these steam-driven turbines, for example. There’s no electricity required to run these steam-driven turbines. But they still need battery electricity to operate the valves and the controls.

“So there’s some advantages to the BWR in terms of severe accidents. But one of the disadvantages is that the containment structure is a lightbulb-shaped steel shell that’s only about 30 or 40 feet across—thick steel, but relatively small compared to large, dry containments like TMI. And it doesn’t provide as much of an extra layer of defense from reactor accidents as containments like TMI. So there is a great deal of concern that, if the core does melt, the containment will not be able to survive. And if the containment doesn’t survive, we have a worst-case situation.”

And just what is that worst-case scenario? “They’re venting in order to keep the containment vessel from failing. But if a core melts, it will slump to the bottom of the reactor vessel, probably melt through the reactor vessel onto the containment floor. It’s likely to spread as a molten pool—like lava—to the edge of the steel shell, and melt through. That would result in a containment failure in a matter of less than a day. It’s good that it’s got a better containment system than Chernobyl, but it’s not as strong as most of the reactors in this country.”

By Steve Mirsky

March 12, 2011 

Category: Commentary, Economy, National News, National Security, World News | 2,835 Comments »
Tags: Earthquake, Japan Nuclear Reactor, Japan'sNuclear Reactor Is GE BMR Mark 1, Massive Earthquake In Japan

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 12, 2011

This may be a very important map!

Category: Commentary, National News, Pictures, Weather | 18 Comments »
Tags: Japanese Weather Map, Nuclear Release Weather Map, Weather Map Nuclear Related

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 12, 2011

A third reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 plant loses its emergency cooling capacity, bringing to six the number of reactors that have failed at the two Fukushima nuclear power plants since the earthquake and tsunami.

So far, the only reactor that seems to pose an immediate risk of widespread danger is one of the two shut-down reactors at Fukushima No. 1, also known as Fukushima Daiichi, which was disabled by an explosion overnight that destroyed the building housing the reactor and the backup cooling system.

Officials with Tokyo Electric Power Co., which owns the facilities about 150 miles northeast of Tokyo, reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency on Saturday that the reactor containment vessel, which houses the radioactive core, remained intact and that they were pumping seawater into the vessel to cool it. The action seems to be working, officials said, and there have been no further reports of radiation escaping from the site.

As part of an automatic safety procedure, control rods were inserted into the cores of the reactors following the earthquake, which stops production of electricity. But the cores continue to generate heat for several days after shutdown and must be continuously cooled by pumping water over them and through cooling towers.

Backup generators powering the pumps at the first five disabled reactors failed almost immediately after the earthquake, apparently inactivated by exposure to seawater from the tsunami that swept through the seaside plants. The facilities had to rely on backup batteries that last up to eight hours until additional batteries and generators could be brought in.

Although the company has released no details about the sixth reactor, it appears the diesel generators there worked for a couple of days before they too finally gave out.

More than 170,000 people have been evacuated from an area within a 12-mile radius of Fukushima No. 1 and within a six-mile radius of Fukushima No. 2, also known as Fukushima Daini, which is about seven miles down the coast from No. 1.

Category: Commentary, Economy, National News, World News | 555 Comments »
Tags: Japan Nuclear Reactors Failing Now At 6, More Japanese Reactors Fail

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 12, 2011

This will continue until the stimulus stops, at that point everything will change, and not for the better!  So, eyes on the road everybody.  New guidance should be coming soon from the Federal Reserve.

Category: Charts and Graphs, Commentary, Economy, National News, Wall Street, World News | 1 Comment »
Tags: federal reserve, stock market, Wall Street

Posted By thestatedtruth.com on March 12, 2011

March 12, 2011

Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said March 12 that the explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 nuclear plant could only have been caused by a meltdown of the reactor core, Japanese daily Nikkei reported. This statement seemed somewhat at odds with Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano’s comments earlier March 12, in which he said “the walls of the building containing the reactor were destroyed, meaning that the metal container encasing the reactor did not explode.”

NISA’s statement is significant because it is the government agency that reports to the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy within the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. NISA works in conjunction with the Atomic Energy Commission. Its role is to provide oversight to the industry and is responsible for signing off construction of new plants, among other things. It has been criticized for approving nuclear plants on geological fault lines and for an alleged conflict of interest in regulating the nuclear sector. It was NISA that issued the order for the opening of the valve to release pressure — and thus allegedly some radiation — from the Fukushima power plant.

www.stratfor.com

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Tags: Stratfor:Japanese Nuclear Melts Down