About Sovereign Wealth Funds, their Rankings and their Asset Allocations Globally

A Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) is a state-owned investment fund composed of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, or other financial instruments funded by foreign exchange assets.

These assets can include: balance of payments surpluses, official foreign currency operations, the proceeds of privatizations, fiscal surpluses, and/or receipts resulting from commodity exports.

Sovereign Wealth Funds can be structured as a fund, pool, or corporation. The definition of sovereign wealth fund exclude, among other things, foreign currency reserve assets held by monetary authorities for the traditional balance of payments or monetary policy purposes, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the traditional sense, government-employee pension funds, or assets managed for the benefit of individuals.....Read More

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Ziad K Abdelnour

Wall Street, K Street - Understanding the Politics of Money

As the national debt soared from $10.6 trillion on the day Obama took office to over $17 trillion today, I still hear the liberal media blame the debt on the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars. If the Bush tax cuts were so horrific, why did Obama and his minions just make 98% of these tax cuts permanent? Obama’s defense budgets have been larger than Bush’s and he doubled down on our miserable failure in Afghanistan.
 You don’t hear a peep from the liberals about the warmongering Barack Obama who has kill lists and unleashes predator drones, killing women and children across the globe. Liberals pretend to be concerned about the welfare of the citizens, but continue to support a President that uses executive orders to imprison citizens indefinitely without charges, has expanded surveillance on citizens, has kept Guantanamo open, signs the continuation of the Patriot Act, and proposes overturning the Second Amendment by executive order.

 They shriek about the evils of an unregulated Wall Street, while remaining silent as Obama hasn’t prosecuted a single banker for the greatest financial fraud in world history. You don’t hear a peep about Jon Cor zine, who stole $1.2 billion from the accounts of farmers and ranchers. Liberals talk about regulation and then stand idly by while Wall Street lobbyists wrote the Dodd Frank law and insurance and drug company lobbyists wrote the Obama care law. Liberal hypocrisy knows no bounds and is only matched by Noe-Con hypocrisy.

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Thanks

Ziad K Abdelnour

Iron Ore Trading: A review of the State of the Art

Over the last 40 years, iron ore prices have been decided in closed-door negotiations between the small handful of miners and steelmakers which dominate both spot and contract markets. Traditionally, the first deal reached between these two groups sets a benchmark to be followed by the rest of the industry.

This benchmark system has however in recent years begun to break down, with participants along both demand and supply chains calling for a shift to short term pricing. Given that most other commodities already have a mature market-based pricing system, it is natural for iron ore to follow suit.

To answer increasing market demands for more transparent pricing, a number of financial exchanges and/or clearing houses around the world have offered iron ore swaps clearing. The CME group, SGX (Singapore Exchange), London Clearing House (LCH.Clearnet), NOS Group and ICEX (Indian Commodities Exchange) all offer cleared swaps based on The Steel Index's (TSI) iron ore transaction data. The CME also offers a Platts based swap, in addition to their TSI swap clearing. The ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) offers a Platts based swap clearing service also. The swaps market has grown quickly, with liquidity clustering around TSI's pricing. By April 2011, over US$5.5 billion worth of iron ore swaps have been cleared basis TSI prices. By August 2012, in excess of one million tonnes of swaps trading per day was taking place regularly, basis TSI.

We at Blackhawk believe iron ore prices are likely to remain at the current level or move up in the coming months on the back of supply issues in the mining sector, coupled with global cues where also prices are trending up.....Read More

Is the American political system Dysfunctional and Unpredictable

I believe the U.S. has already defaulted … even with the debt ceiling deal being worked out.

The best way to look at this, I think, is that there’s a spectrum of default severities. At one end, you have the outright repudiation of sovereign debt, a la Ecuador in 2008; at the other end, you have the sequester, which involves telling a large number of government employees that the resources which were promised them will not, in fact, arrive.

Both of them involve the government going back on its promises, but some promises are far more binding, and far more important, than others.

Right now, we’ve already reached the point at which the government has broken very important promises indeed: We promised to pay hundreds of thousands of government employees a certain amount on certain dates, in return for their honest work. We have broken that promise. By Treasury’s own definition, it’s reasonable to say that we have already defaulted: surely, by any sensible conception, the salaries of government employees constitute “legal obligations of the US”

My question becomes: Is the American political system the latest bubble?

Read More: http://www.financialpolicycouncil.org/fpcnew/blogdetails.aspx?id=61/Is-the-American-Political-System-the-latest-Bubble

5years after our last Crisis of 2008- The Federal Reserve's Program

It is clear today - five years after our last crisis of 2008 – that the Federal Reserve's program of “Large Scale Asset Purchases” (LSAP) is a losing proposition.

It is undeniable that the Fed has conducted an all-out effort to restore normal economic conditions over the last five years; however, while monetary policy works with a lag, the LSAP shows no measurable benefit. This lapse of time is now far greater than even the longest of the lags measured in the extensive body of scholarly work regarding monetary policy.

As I said it multiple times already, Quantitative easing never helped Main Street or the average American. It only helped big banks, corporations and investors alike. Not only have the Fed not improved matters, they have actually made economic conditions worse with their experiments.

So what’s wrong with the Fed’s policies?

1. The Fed never had a clear policy rule or strategy for asset purchases. Without such a framework, investors do not know the conditions under which (asset buys) will occur or be unwound. This undercuts the efficacy of policy targeted at long-term asset values.

Read More: The Federal Reserve's Program

How do you Reverse this Trend for a Totall Collapse of the US Economy?

As Congressman Ron Paul once said: “It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking”.  Wise words from a wise man indeed.

It is a fact that almost every Fed chairman in the past 60 years has manipulated interest rates to brighten the economic outlook for incumbent presidents or newly elected presidents who won by large margins. The purchasing power of the U.S. dollar has fallen 94 percent in the past 100 years. The only way you can create inflation is by creating more money that is backed by the same reserve assets; the Fed is the only entity that can create more money. Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing (QE) programs have pumped billions of unfunded dollars into the economy, thereby setting us up for massive inflation in the very near future. If this isn’t a form of financial terrorism, it is incompetence of the highest order.

So how do you reverse this trend heading for a total collapse of the US economy?

Listen to Congressman Grayson recent statement in this regard: “A simple solution to the impasse we are going through is to have the Federal Reserve simply cancel the Treasury debt that it owns. The government can just forgive the government’s debt. This wouldn’t solve the debt problem entirely as the Federal Reserve doesn’t own all U.S. government debt; but it owns a significant chunk of it – roughly $2 trillion”

Read More: Collapse of the US Economy?

Thank you.

Message to The People Who Want Enter the Physical Commodities Trading

What do you do when you receive an offer of large amounts of JP-54 and D2 requiring an ICPO with BCL or Soft Probe, NCND and IMFPA up front?

This is pure Broker rubbish - throw it in your rubbish bin. It simply does not exist”.

I know that brokers don’t like to hear it, but I have to tell you that you are filling up peoples’ email systems with nonsense from other clueless brokers and it is spoiling your name. Maybe you are getting these so-called “deals” from good people, but perhaps they are getting them from another Broker “Daisy-chain”.

Please listen to good advice - instead of sending 100 emails with Broker nonsense which does not work, find just one…… only one….. Good deal where you are talking directly to the Seller (legal owner of the product) or his Mandate and you will save yourself (and all of us) a lot of unnecessary work.

Read More: http://www.blackhawkpartners.com/important-message-people-want-enter-physical-commodities-trading-world-dont-know-better/