Elsewhere on Friday,
- So much for those ‘green shoots’.
- How to read US employment figures.
- Smells like deflation.
- How AIG FP brought down the world.
- Statistics and basketball for beginners.
A startling spike in oil prices on Tuesday to their highest this year was caused by a rogue broker who placed a massive bet in the Brent oil market, triggering almost $10m (€7m) of losses for his company.
Two of China’s biggest oil groups have approached Repsol YPF, the Spanish oil company, over possible asset purchases and joint ventures worth billions of dollars. Repsol is discussing a possible sale of its 75% stake in YPF,
We have confirmation of the PVM rogue broker story via an e-mailed statement from the company to the wires.
The flashes from Dow Jones read:
*DJ PVM Oil: Victim Of Unauthorized Oil Trading Tuesday
*DJ PVM Oil:
London-based oil brokerage PVM Oil Associates is understood to have parted company with one of its senior long-standing derivatives brokers after allegedly detecting a large unauthorised Brent ICE position on his book.
Breaking pre-market news on Thursday,
- Intermediate Capital announces rights issue to raise net £351m — statement.
- Carpathian completes €235m debt restructuring — statement.
- Rio Tinto rights issue receives acceptances for 96.97 per cent of rights issue — statement.
Rio Tinto’s $15.2bn rights offer, the fifth-biggest on record, on Thursday generated strong demand from UK investors who snapped up almost 97% of the 524m new shares offered in London at £14 per share – raising about £7.1bn,
Wednesday’s dollar dive (as illustrated below by the movements of the dollar index) is, according to some reports, being put down to yet more rather non-dollar friendly signals from China.
Specifically,
Breaking pre-market news on Wednesday,
- Tesco is a “potential bidder” for Northern Rock — Times.
- Cattles terminates employment of six senior execs after independent review — statement.
- Greg Hutchings to step down from Lupus following negotiation of new banking arrangements — statement.
The second quarter may well have marked the bottom. But it could also descend into infamy as the most deceptive three months in economic memory. Certainly all the talk of a second Great Depression has vanished.
From Bloomberg:
June 29 (Bloomberg) — Investors are moving in lockstep like never before, driving up stocks, commodities and emerging markets and risking a replay of last year, when they all plunged the most since World War II.
Willem Buiter presents some interesting thoughts regarding the ECB’s one-year liquidity operation last week. What particularly strikes us is the following paragraph (our emphasis):
You may think that this implies that the cost to the banks of borrowing from the Eurosystem for a year - 1.00% - does not imply a subsidy,
Elsewhere on Tuesday,
- The paradox of strategic defaults.
- Madoff: 150 years is not enough.
-Western pension funds love stocks too much.
- Inflation and you: partners in freedom.
- “Australia - I like it.
Breaking pre-market news on Tuesday,
- Nationwide says house prices rose by 0.9 per cent in June — statement.
- Yell Group starts refinancing, Q1 revenue to be 20 per cent lower — statement.
- Aminex announces placing to raise $11.5m and open offer to raise $3m — statement.
The world’s biggest miners were on Monday night locked in tense talks with Chinese steelmakers over a new iron ore supply deal, with Rio Tinto threatening to sell the ore into spot markets if no agreement is struck on Tuesday.
The “inflation or deflation” debate rages on.
We quite liked Gregor Macdonald’s view a few weeks ago that we could be headed into an environment where both inflation and deflation take hold — an economic climate we termed “compartflation”.
Anglo American is sounding out potential investors for its Brazilian ore assets as it prepares a detailed response to Xstrata’s £40bn merger proposal and steps up the search for a new chairman. The UK-based miner has held informal talks with Gulf Industrial Investment Company,
Elsewhere on Friday,
- The shorts are coming back.
- History lesson: The dubious birth of MBS.
- Regulating derivatives.
- The worst CEOs - ever.
- Bursting the bubble of bearishness.
- Behind the demand for US Treasuries.
Elsewhere on Thursday,
- Citi’s pay-rises - good or bad?
- At the ECB, forget the helicopter drops.
- Conclusive evidence that the US stock market is highly inefficient.
- Hedge-fund guy points to ‘Z’-shaped recovery.
China highlighted its ambitions to expand in the resources sector on Thursday when state-owned Sinopec - one of China’s largest oil companies - agreed to a C$8.3bn ($7.2bn) takeover of Addax, a Swiss-based oil company listed in Toronto and London with interests in Africa and Iraqi Kurdistan.
Xstrata stepped up pressure on Anglo American to join merger talks on Wednesday, publishing the letter it sent to the rival miner outlining $1bn of possible cost savings and other synergies. It came as Cynthia Carroll,
The epic flows of the last few months into the United States Natural Gas Fund ETF may be very counter-intuitive as far as predicting an upturn in the price of natural gas.
That, at least, is the message from Goldman Sachs on Wednesday,
China’s trade row with the rest of the world over bauxite, phosphorous and chickens is Punch and Judy politics on a global scale. Its real significance, though, is the growing engagement of the world’s third-largest economy with its most important international trade tribunal,
Here’s a funny one, just when crude fundamentals actually turn somewhat bullish, what does the price of crude do on Monday? It falls.
So what is going on? A lot of it probably lies in the realms of the gasoline market.
IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard has been engaging in some green-shoot whacking of late, not least with his views on what is really needed to propel a US recovery.
In one word: exports.
Bank of New York Mellon flag up this particular quote on Tuesday:
Japan may cancel a planned $1.5bn loan for Venezuela’s El Palito and Puerto La Cruz oil refineries after the South American nation seized Japanese company assets, reports Bloomberg. The Japan Bank for International Cooperation is reviewing loans for the upgrades after Venezuela seized Japanese iron and chemicals assets and fell behind on payments to oil-service contractors.
Anglo’s response has been typically grumpy - and it’s not clear that Xstrata can pay enough to win it over.
If overlapping businesses were combined, logistics shared and Anglo’s bloated head office subsumed into Xstrata’s mergers and acquisitions boutique,
Elsewhere on Monday,
- Don’t believe that hyperinflation hype.
- Musings on FIASCO - and the customer as chump.
- On the uselessness of LIBOR.
- Michael Milken says “do no harm” — and he ought to know.
There’s just one thing missing from Friday’s news that Glencore, the ultra secretive Swiss trading house, is exploring a stock market flotation, and that’s a concrete sense of where it might list.
London is mentioned in passing but we wonder if a dual listing here and in Switzerland is the most likely option.
Filed with the CFTC on June 16th (H/T Olivier Jakob at Petromatrix), emphasis FT Alphaville’s:
Read the full document here.
Related links:
Cramer doesn’t get the UNG - FT Alphaville
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