>
> (email exchange)
>
> On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 10:21 AM, John wrote:
>
> Norway’s oil sovereign wealth fund has sold all its holdings of Irish and Portuguese
> government debt and reduced its ownership of Spanish and Italian bonds as part of a
> continuing protest over its forced participation in Greece’s debt restructuring. The
> fund also reduced its Italian sovereign debt position from about EUR 8bn in the middle
> of 2011 to about EUR 3.5bn at the end of March this year.
>
Daily Archives: May 8, 2012 @ 10:30 am (Tuesday)
PSI/Bond tax- the 800 lb gorilla?
Greece did it, and sanctioned by the EU. They cut their deficit by 100 billion euro by decree, by what was called ‘private sector involvement’ which was, functionally, a bond tax.
Instead of another 100 billion of public sector service cuts and tax hikes on the population, they just taxed the holders of Greek bonds. And ostensibly nothing ‘bad’ happened, apart from a few banks changing a few numbers down on their books. Nor did the euro go down or inflation go up or anything else ‘monetary’ go wrong.
Pretty tempting for a new socialist govt in any euro member nation?
No more austerity, just a bond tax instead?
If Greece doesn’t have to pay, why do we?
But, so far, not a word from any of them.
The silence is deafening.
The risk very real.
Oil a ‘Little Bit High,’ Saudi Arabia’s Al-Naimi Says
As swing producer/price setter, they call the tune. But what they say publicly isn’t always what they do privately. I had thought they may be holding Brent at 120 and letting WTI converge to it as the new pipeline scheduled to begin May 15 worked to equalize prices. But it’s certainly possible they could converge at a lower price, if the Saudis so choose.
Oil a ‘Little Bit High,’ Saudi Arabia’s Al-Naimi Says
By Jacob Adelman and Yuji Okada
May 8 (Bloomberg) — Saudi Arabia is storing as much as 80 million barrels of crude to boost supplies amid international prices that are “still a little bit high,” according to the country’s oil minister Ali al-Naimi.
The nation, the world’s largest oil exporter, has set aside supplies “on shore in Saudi Arabia, in pipelines, in tanks,” al-Naimi said in Tokyo today before board meetings of state- owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co., of which he is chairman.