The Japanese have received via FAX from Russia's metals export agency, Almaz, word that the Russians have approval and are ready to begin negotiations and shipments for the annual platinum supply contracts.Any mention of palladium was conspicuously omitted. Reuters reports that this brought speculators into the market for palladium, pushing the metal up nearly $15 while platinum declined.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

Lear:...Get thee glass eyes;

And like a scurvy politician, seem

To see the things thou dost not...

http://www.gh.cs.usyd.edu.au/~matty/Shakespeare/texts/tragedies/kinglear_0.html

To get to the home page delete everything after Shakespeare

You might find this site even more interesting than 6 years in the trenches with JS. ( Thank goodness there's no laugh-o-meter on this site, where we have to pay a bit of gold each time you crack us up! )

I really found their analysis of Russia's handling of Kosovo interesting.

http://www.stratfor.com/services/gintel/region/index.html

except for you, blooper. Please step outside for a moment. There are a couple of hundred Soccer Moms* out back who want to have a word with you.

Soccer Moms: That last bastion of conservatism, the women who abandoned careers to stay home, raise their kids, and ( gasp! ) occasionally bake cookies, winning the direct disparagement of HRC during the 1992 election. They have been blamed for everything from Rush Limbaugh to the tobacco industry's control of congress, but never, never for Clinton's presidency.

Did you bring us all some of that , which brings forth such golden words ?

How the heck have you been?

http://www.usmint.gov/Bullion/sales1997.cfm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/the_economy/newsid_118000/118208.stm

http://x500us.fed.gov/

'Big 3' Exporters' Accord to Cut Oil Output Signals Seismic Shifts

By STEVE LIESMAN, BHUSHAN BAHREE and JONATHAN FRIEDLAND

Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

As oil prices plunged in March, the Saudis weren't talking to the Mexicans. The Venezuelans weren't talking to the Saudis. The Mexicans and the Venezuelans were kind of talking -- though they disliked each other -- but both knew they needed Saudi help. Then Robert Mabro, the head of Britain's Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and a man known in the oil business as a neutral party, got a surprise phone call. The Mexicans wanted to know whether, if they called to discuss a three-way truce, would the Saudis talk? The 64-year-old Mr. Mabro phoned Riyadh to find out. An aide put the question to Energy Minister Ali Naimi. Yes, the reply came back, the Saudis were open to discussions. Thus began a series of clandestine meetings among three countries that together account for nearly 48% of U.S. oil imports. Those talks led to the first round of concerted cuts in oil output in more than a decade. Now known as the Riyadh Pact, the agreement eventually led to pledges to take 1.5 million to two million barrels a day off the market, about 2% to 3% of world production of 73 million barrels a day. The amount of crude withheld from the market could grow even more when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries holds its semiannual meeting in Vienna Wednesday. Benchmark crude-oil prices rose strongly Monday, climbing 48 cents to $13.65 a barrel. But what caught the market's attention even more than the agreement itself was the fact that the talks took place outside the confines of OPEC; Mexico isn't even a member. The agreement raised the possibility that the troika could become a de facto market regulator and supersede the increasingly enfeebled OPEC and its unwieldy quota system. Venezuelan Energy Minister Erwin Arrieta called the pact a new vision designed to create healthy conditions for market forces to work.

Maybe. It could also become yet another new paradigm that soon will be forgotten as producers return to cheating on quotas. But this much is for sure: The events leading up the Riyadh Pact say a lot about the changes in global power, the state of the oil industry and the very different kinds of people who control the world's spigots these days.

A Vastly Different Industry

From technology to economics to politics, the industry is vastly different from what it was 12 years ago, when oil prices last tested price levels this low. And it is even further removed from 1973, when OPEC used oil as a weapon to bring the industrialized world to its knees. Global oil production has grown 14% in the 1990s, but OPEC's share of it has dwindled to about 40% of the total from 50%. Once-closed countries such as Venezuela and Algeria have in recent years opened up their fields to private-sector joint ventures. Others are expected to join them in coming months: Iran will probably open its on-shore production to foreign partners. Iraq, which has huge proven reserves, is expected to give the green light to bring in other producers as soon as United Nations export sanctions are lifted.

Meanwhile, the increased availability of sophisticated technology and cheap financing have enabled a raft of companies, ranging from Britain's Lasmo PLC to Spain's Repsol SA to Argentina's Perez Companc SA, to emerge as formidable mid-size players. With the world awash in oil, prices, before rebounding Monday, had been sliding for months. Last week, they fell below $12 a barrel to the lowest levels in a decade. That left the Big Three exporters staring down a fiscal black hole and desperate to keep their U.S. market shares.

Costly Miscalculation

But the Saudis and Venezuelans weren't thinking about such threats when they made a costly miscalculation at the OPEC meeting last November.

Even as the first tremors of Asia's financial collapse rumbled around them at the meeting -- held in Indonesia -- they bet that growth in world markets and especially in Asia would continue to match rising production levels. They voted to raise OPEC output by 2.5 million barrels a day to 27.5 million barrels a day. That decision was followed by one of the warmest Northern Hemisphere winters on record. Energy use was far less than expected. Oil tankers initially headed for Asia turned for the U.S. Inventories increased rapidly. Prices started to collapse, heading below $15 a barrel in January from $27 a year earlier. Panic set in among finance-ministry officials in Mexico and Venezuela. They looked on in horror as national revenue imploded. In Mexico, for example, each $1 drop in the price per barrel of oil slashes government income by $1 billion. But while Mexico's situation was bad -- it depends on oil for 37% of government revenue and 10% of export income -- Venezuela and Saudi Arabia were even worse off. They rely almost entirely on oil income to keep their economies afloat. Venezuela was watching the disappearance of the $6 billion surplus in its current account -- in its trade in goods and services plus certain financial transfers -- and, with a presidential election looming, the prospect of a currency meltdown. Saudi Arabia's position wasn't much better. Now, economists say, the country's budget deficit will probably double this year and its current account will move from a small surplus to a $10 billion deficit.

But impending crisis still wasn't enough to bring the Big Three together. Animosity had been strong since the beginning of the 1990s, when Venezuela aggressively began grabbing market share, particularly in the U.S. The architect of that strategy, Petroleos de Venezuela SA President Luis Giusti, a pugnacious 55-year-old, has thumbed his nose at the OPEC quota system, vowing to double output by 2006 and to dominate the U.S. market at the expense of the Saudis and the Mexicans.

Saudis Embittered

That stance especially embittered the Saudis. They didn't appreciate Mr. Giusti's flouting of convention at a time when such OPEC members as Nigeria and Indonesia were facing increased financial pressures. And they didn't relish the prospect of seeing their U.S. market share reduced to the point where Washington might have less reason to provide the security blanket that has helped the kingdom ride out the Middle Eastern political turbulence around it. The Saudis made it clear that until Venezuela returned to its agreed-upon OPEC quotas, no compromise would be possible.

By mid-February, however, with prices falling, fear began to displace loathing. Mexico's new energy secretary, Luis Tellez, bridged the gap. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Tellez, 40, was put into the job by his close friend, President Ernesto Zedillo, to modernize Mexico's oil business. Mr. Tellez first met similarly reform-minded Mr. Giusti at an energy ministers' meeting in mid-January and, an aide says, his boss and Mr. Tellez hit it off right away. They are both younger, business-oriented guys, and Tellez saw right away what Giusti has been able to accomplish,the aide says.

At a March meeting of the two in a Miami hotel, the plan for the non-aggression pact began to take shape. The meeting was so hush-hush, Mr. Mabro wrote in a recent study, that the hosts of a conference they were attending didn't know about it. Shortly after, Mr.Mabro received the phone call.

The first meeting among the three was hosted by the Saudi oil minister, Mr. Naimi, in tight secrecy at a government guest house in Riyadh. Known as a technocrat who worked his way up through the Saudi company, Mr. Naimi isn't a member of the royal family and is seen as less powerful than some of his predecessors, especially Sheik Yamani, who represented the Saudis from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The U.S. Market

At the top of the meeting's agenda was the U.S. market, where the Saudis control 15% of the imports, the Mexicans 14% and the Venezuelans 18%. Before a pact could be reached, knowledgeable people say, the three had to promise that they wouldn't use the cutbacks to steal U.S. market share from each other. In addition, Mr. Mabro says, the Saudis had to agree that the issue on the table was the current glut and not Venezuela's long-range plan to expand production. In exchange, the Venezuelans agreed, for the first time, to cut output. But as the talks proceeded to the level of the cuts, disagreements arose. The Saudis offered to match the cutbacks of the Mexicans and Venezuelans but wanted to reduce output more sharply than the Latin Americans could stand. Eventually, the three nations agreed on cuts totaling 600,000 barrels a day. Together with other nations' commitments, arranged before the meeting, the three stunned the markets March 22 by announcing total cuts in excess of one million barrels a day.

Moreover, the reductions were based on actual production levels in February, not on the widely ignored OPEC quotas. At first, the market was

impressed,especially because countries as diverse as Norway and Iran agreed to join in later. But soon, traders began to doubt that everyone was keeping to their word. They were right. The International Energy Agency reported a month later that the producers missed their cutback targets, with OPEC alone producing 250,000 barrels a day too much.

Oil prices began to slip again.

The three ministers took a second extraordinary step. On June 4, they met secretly in Amsterdam and announced additional cuts of 450,000 barrels a day. But this time, they didn't have a prior commitment from most other producers. Public grumblings erupted from producers that hadn't been consulted, confusing the markets about whether the Big Three had the

support they needed. Together with traders' built-in skepticism about cutback pledges, the second historic announcement had a less-than-historic impact on prices. What they need to learn is how to talk to this market, Oxford Energy's Mr. Mabro says of the three nations and OPEC in general. They need a spin doctor.

Winning Converts

But gradually, the ministers began to win converts. Since the Amsterdam meeting, Egypt, Qatar and Kuwait, among others, have made new pledges

totaling about 300,000 barrels a day, raising the pledge total to about 750,000 barrels. The figure is still short of the 1.2 million barrels a day traders were looking for in the second round of cuts to soak up the glut.

Finding additional reductions and agreeing to stick to current promises are just some of the issues OPEC ministers will face in Vienna. They also will have to figure out their place in a world in which an ad-hoc committee of three is making decisions for them. They can either rearrange the deck chairs or save OPEC from the scrap heap of history, a U.S. government official says. Mr. Mabro contends that the Riyadh pact actually strengthens OPEC by making Venezuela again a major player after years of estrangement. But he acknowledges that the resentment created by

Mexico's leading role remains a sore point to OPEC countries.

Nevertheless, some observers are betting that in Vienna, the OPEC nations, driven by sheer necessity, will put pride aside in favor of prices. If OPEC agrees to additional cutbacks, many analysts expect the benchmark price to climb back to $16 a barrel by year end. Such a rebound would restore the development budgets of major oil companies, which have begun cutting back in response to the price declines.

But Mexican officials say they aren't under any illusions that the fragile peace they helped broker is anything more than temporary. In a mid-June interview, Mr. Zedillo recounted that when he was a graduate student at Yale University, Nobel laureate Prof. James Tobin used to engage his students in a game to test the limits of oligopolistic behavior.Within a few minutes, somebody would start cheating; it never failed, the Mexican president noted. No market with more than two participants can sustain a cartel.

away...to create a post about TeddO.....in Swan's Island.....Donald, he says send gold not info ;- ) his 'project' will finish OVER budget...I told him to build a BIG 'Why Two Kays ( ? ) ' barn for storing his rice and beans and wheat and water and Honda generator and.....uh.....AK47 and....K-rations and so on and so on and so on..... he told me to piss up a rope....

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