News, Rumors, and Opinions Thursday Morning 3-17-16

KTFA:

Mountainman: Keep Your EYE on the Red Dragon.....Fire is about to Explode.....OCTOBER 1,2016.....They enter the SDR Basket.......Meanwhile they have been and are Buying Up US Businesses and Many Other Areas of Real Estate etc.....Do You know What you have w/the Number 1 - 2 Economies on the Global Stage???.....A "Powerful" (12)........and that is THE Moral of the Story.......(COORPORATION) Makes "It" happen......and we are About to See WHY???......LOL.......IMO

China's Li pledges more reform, tries to reassure on growth

The Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday promised more market-opening reforms and said Beijing can keep slowing growth on track, seeking to reassure jittery global markets about the outlook for the world's No. 2 economy.
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Speaking at a news conference, Li promised to shrink bloated steel and coal industries, make the financial system more market-oriented and reduce the government's role in business. He expressed confidence that despite such wrenching change, the world's second-largest economy can achieve its official growth target of 6.5 to 7 percent and avoid mass job losses.

"So long as we stay on the course of reform and opening up, China's economy will not suffer a 'hard landing'," Li said at the event capping the annual meeting of China's ceremonial legislature.

In the wide-ranging televised event lasting nearly two hours, the premier also said U.S.-Chinese cooperation will grow regardless of who wins this year's U.S. presidential election. Asked about tensions over conflicting claims to portions of the South China Sea by Beijing and other governments, Li said China wants "harmonious coexistence" with its neighbors.

Chinese leaders have spent the past three weeks making unusually high-profile declarations about economic stability following stock and currency turmoil that dented their reputation for adeptly managing growth. At a February meeting of global finance officials in Shanghai, both U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said the reflexively secretive communist government needed to do a better job of explaining policy changes.

The repeated Chinese reassurances have started to quell anxiety, but Beijing has some way to go to calm global markets, private sector analysts said.

As for promises of stability, "we perceive it as fake," said Stephen Innes, a currency trader for OANDA in Singapore. "I think the Chinese economy is struggling and will continue to struggle over the next year."

At the news conference, Li acknowledged China's slowing growth and regulatory shortcomings, possibly hoping reassure investors and consumers with a show of candor.
China's ruling Communist Party is navigating a years' long shift from a worn-out growth model based on exports and investment to a more sustainable approach driven by domestic consumption.

An unexpectedly sharp downturn over the past two years raised the threat of politically dangerous job losses. Beijing has countered with repeated interest rate cuts and injections of money through higher spending on public works construction — setbacks for its campaign to reduce reliance on investment.

Analysts say the growth target, down from last year's "about 7 percent," will be hard to meet without more stimulus. The IMF and other forecasters say it will likely fall to 6.3 percent or lower from last year's 6.9 percent.

The economy suffers from "government overreach," Li said, referring to complaints over the dominance of state companies in areas from energy to finance to telecoms. He said Beijing is failing to do "an adequate job of ensuring a level playing field" for entrepreneurs who generate most of China's new wealth and jobs.

Li promised to make it easier to set up new businesses. He said the state-dominated financial system would become more market-oriented to support growth.

The latest jitters over China began with a share sell-off in June that wiped out some $5 trillion. The government spent heavily to buy shares to stop the slide.

The surprise introduction in August of a new mechanism for setting the yuan's state-controlled exchange rate fueled fears Beijing would weaken the currency to boost exports. The yuan slid against the dollar and capital flowed out of China, limiting Beijing's ability to support the economy with interest rate cuts without causing more turmoil.
Official efforts to calm markets have had mixed success.

Central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan's pledge to avoid "competitive devaluation" calmed depreciation expectations enough to cut interest rates, economist Prakash Sakpal of ING said in a report.

Traders are losing interest in the yuan thanks to abrupt central bank policy changes aimed at preventing them from betting against the Chinese currency.

"Every day, they seem to be switching back and forth," said Innes of OANDA. "That is still causing a lot of grief for investors out there."

In Japan, Asia's second-largest economy, the comments by Chinese leaders do little to defuse concern about the spillover of the slowdown, said Harumi Taguchi of IHS Economics.
"The slowdown has become much more evident and it will continue this year," she said.
The legislature ended with no announcements of major new initiatives, though none were expected. The ruling party gave itself until 2018 to show first results from the campaign to make state companies more efficient and competitive. No significant new changes are likely until after 2017, when a new Cabinet is scheduled to take office.

Excess production capacity in industries including steel and coal has led to price-cutting wars, pushing companies toward bankruptcy and prompting complaints from reform advocates that propping up companies is a waste of public money. Exports of excess steel anger China's trading partners.

The government plans to cut 1.8 million steel and coal jobs, but Li promised authorities would help those workers find new jobs. The government previously announced it would create a 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) fund to pay for that.

"We will ensure there are no massive job losses," Li said.

That reluctance to "tolerate the pain associated with significant change" might weigh on growth, Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics said in a report.
"The leadership's continued tentative approach to structural reform raises doubts about growth prospects over the medium term," said Evans Pritchard.

The premier acknowledged concerns about rising debts and potential bad loans at banks but said debt levels are manageable given the large reserves held by financial institutions and China's high savings rate.

"We are still in a good position to defuse debt risks," he said.

AP Business Writer Elaine Kurtenbach in Tokyo contributed.

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Samson:    Fantastic Article

Vietnam—Gearing Up for the Next Transformation

By Christine Lagarde, Managing Director, IMF

National Economic University, Hanoi, March 17, 2016

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Walkingstick:  Urgent Integrity: Implementation of arrest warrants against 117 ministers and those who are Badrjtah for involvement of corruption during 2015

17.3.2016

{Baghdad: Euphrates News} A report by the board's annual Integrity for 2015, on the implementation of arrest warrants against 40% Pench involved corruption cases, including 17 ministers and one hundred accused of directors general and special grades ..itba ..

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Dnari131:  TICK TOCK MARCH MADNESS!

J.P. Morgan, Citi Shareholders to Vote on Potential Breakup Plans

The Wall Street Journal.

Emily Glazer, Christina Rexrode2 hrs ago

How perceptions of US economy have changed in 3 months

Shareholders of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. will get to vote later this year on one of the most popular questions on the campaign trail: Should the banks break up into smaller pieces?

The question will be included in the proxy filings for the two big U.S. banks and voted on at shareholder meetings later this year, according to people familiar with the matter.
Analysts have said it is highly unlikely that shareholders will support a proposal to break up the banks. A similar proposal at Bank of America Corp. last year gained about 4% of the votes.

The shareholder votes were requested by Bartlett Naylor, a shareholder activist and a financial policy advocate at the liberal lobbying group Public Citizen. He and others have raised the issue multiple times in previous years as well, without getting much traction.
Mr. Naylor, a small shareholder in both Citigroup and J.P. Morgan, said he believes the firms should split into smaller pieces because that could boost shareholder value if they are easier to manage. He said he continues pressing the case because “obvious problems demand obvious answers, or at least obvious questions.”

Whether banks are too big has become a flashpoint since the financial crisis, and this year Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has made the issue a central part of his campaign. Nearly all current or former Republican presidential candidates have knocked the big banks as well. U.S. regulators have also made it clear that they are wary of giant banks, imposing higher capital requirements on the biggest firms as an incentive for them to slim down.

The banks have generally defended their size, saying they need scale to compete with banks in China and around the globe. They also say they need to offer a wide breadth of services, including both investment banking and retail banking, to meet their clients’ needs and that breakups would be hugely complicated.

“The synergies (of being big) are huge, both expense and revenue,” J.P. Morgan Chief Executive James Dimon said last year. In the event of a breakup, “the unscrambling would be extraordinarily complex…in debt, in systems, and technology and people.”

Mr. Naylor proposed that J.P. Morgan and Citigroup each create an independent board committee to address whether the bank would be more valuable to shareholders by divesting all noncore banking business segments. The committee would be required to report back to shareholders within 300 days.

Citigroup said in securities filings that it “has already substantially implemented” Mr. Naylor’s proposal.

“The board shares the proponent’s goal of divesting noncore assets,” the bank wrote in response to Mr. Naylor, disclosed in securities filings.

In a Wednesday statement, a Citigroup spokesman said the bank “is a much simpler, safer, smaller and stronger institution than before the financial crisis.” He added that the bank has sold more than 60 businesses and shed more than $700 billion in assets, and its board conducts an annual review of the bank’s strategy and progress.

J.P. Morgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets, offered Mr. Naylor a meeting with Chief Financial Officer Marianne Lake in hopes he might withdraw his proposal, Mr. Naylor said, adding that he declined. A person familiar with the matter said it is customary for J.P. Morgan to offer private meetings to shareholders to educate them on different topics.
About two years ago, when Mr. Naylor submitted a similar proposal, J.P. Morgan submitted a roughly 50-page request to the Securities and Exchange Commission asking for permission to leave Mr. Naylor’s proposal off the ballot. The agency granted J.P. Morgan’s request, denying Mr. Naylor’s inclusion on the proxy filing. Banks often make those requests on a variety of shareholder proposals each year.

J.P. Morgan didn’t make a similar request this year, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Naylor’s proposal for Bank of America last year was more prescriptive than what he is proposing for J.P. Morgan and Citigroup. He asked the Bank of America board “to develop a plan for divesting all noncore banking business segments,” rather than just addressing the topic.

Bank of America, the second-largest U.S. bank by assets, opposed Mr. Naylor’s proposal, arguing that it has already shrunk substantially since the financial crisis and has made its trading operation less risky.

Mr. Naylor said he got a small amount of votes because of “bank-controlled voters, self-selected owners who don’t rock votes...and few advocates.”
He said he tried to get the proposal on Bank of America’s ballot again this year, but his request was rejected on a technicality that it didn’t specify that his account owned the bank’s shares.

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TNT:

Appaloosa: I think that everyone's info is starting to align with each other.....gurus are pretty much all turning up the same Intel. That's what excites me

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Dinar Updates:

firefly  I couldn't care less what M [Maliki] is doing.  He is insignificant now...IMO. 

Only articles I'm looking at right now are from the IMF, UN, BIS and WB...IMF stated "Iraq WILL enter the Global Markets in the 1st half of 2016"...Not maybe...WILL 
IMF doesn't lie!

Not just that, there are many countrys involved besides the Paris club and the G20. More to this story than just Iraq IMO.

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WSOMN:

TNMan: I write on my calendar important upcoming events. Dr. Clarke said in Dinar Recaps a few weeks ago that there would be an important financial announcement on the 17th. He didn't say whether US or Iraq or where. Well, today is the 17th. I hope the "financial announcement is the RV. That's all I know about his statement.  

http://ift.tt/1W8IDsc

Wildfire:  Frank says articles are weeks behind if not longer and mosoul was half liberated and things were sensitive and no calls rest of week. he said we are about to see our blessing

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Replay to Wednesday Night CC 3-16-16

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Emailed to Recaps:

High Diving Giraffes:  (While we wait)
 
Apparently done only in Australia. The giraffes don't tour because it costs too much to transport these highly trained and valuable animals. It takes about 2 years to train one giraffe to feel comfortable in the water, and then another 3 or 4 years to get them to perform.      
They also train them using only the reward system, unlike other animal exhibitions where they use techniques which upset the SPCA and PETA.
     
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https://youtu.be/nPrWo5pEvyk

via Dinar Recaps - Our Blog http://ift.tt/1Mp1tpx