A Chinese delegation has arrived in Moscow to discuss the closure of Cherkizovsky Market where 60,000 Chinese traders worked.  Putin has told Sberbank to continue lending, saying, 'a significant part of the (branch) network is not profitable but you cannot abandon it. This is your payment for the state support'.  Sberbank head German Gref has complained that the idea of continuing to offer loans cheaply is unrealistic.  Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak has cut another 5% from the construction costs for the 2014 Sochi Olympics.  Avtovaz may stop car manufacturing for a month starting Aug. 3 because of a sharp decrease in demand.  Gaz will receive $180 million in state aid to build a diesel engine factory.  The German government has asserted that it is still backing the Magna-Sberbank deal for Opel.  An op-ed piece ...

Gold firmed today, Thursday, as weakness in the dollar prompted interest in the precious metal as a currency hedge, with some physical demand after the previous session’s fall also supported prices.

Spot gold was bid at $912.50 an ounce at 1417 GMT, against $908.45 an ounce late in New York on Wednesday. U.S. gold futures for August delivery on the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange rose $3.50 to $912.80 an ounce.

Gold sold off on Wednesday in line with other commodities, slipping to an eight-week low, after the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission said it was considering a clampdown on excessive speculation in commodities.

Afshin Nabavi, head of trading at MKS Finance in Geneva, said the slip was met with some light physical buying in the Far East and Europe.

“We saw some small demand out of the Far East this morning,” he said. “But India and the Middle East is still very

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Through the tangle of green shoots and sprouting mustard seeds, a certain nervous view persists that the arc of events is taking us to places unimaginable.  The collapse of General Motors and Chrysler signifies more than the collapse of US car manufacturing.  It spells the end of the motoring era in America per se and the puerile fantasy of personal liberation that allowed it to become such a curse to us.

Of course, many Nobel prize-winning economists would argue that it has only been a blessing for us, but that only shows how the newspapers are committing suicide-by-irrelevance. And if other societies, such as China’s late-entry industrial start-up, want to adopt a similar fantasy, they will only find themselves all the sooner in history’s garage with a tailpipe in their mouths.

Here in the USA, we will mount the most strenuous campaign to keep the motoring system going — in fact, we’re

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Well, the wonderful rally we had on Tuesday was not allowed to blossom into anything on Wednesday. The high of the day was about 15 minutes after trading began on the Globex trading system at the start of the business day in Sydney, very early Wednesday morning. From there, the price oscillated between $750 and $760…until half an hour after the London p.m. fix. Then, the $20 price spike that we had on Tuesday at that time, was completely reversed…almost to the penny. In silver, every rally ran into a not-for-profit seller. I counted eight price reversals in that 24 hour period…from when the Globex opened in early morning trading in the Far East…right up until Globex trading ended in New York yesterday afternoon about 5:15 p.m. That’s the last six hours of the blue trace and the next 17 hours of the red trace on the Kitco chart below.

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