pjharvey

Yes it is. It's an extremely effective deterrant.

I'm am rather surprised US Navy are parking big sonar ships outside China's strategic nuclear submarine bases. Hardly subtle espianage.

Oh yes, I love the way this forum always defaults to Tonkin whenever any naval squabble occurs. It's like calling black days on the stock market, one day you'll be right!

The BBC states The incident happened on Sunday as the USNS Impeccable was on routine operations in international waters 75 miles (120km) south of Hainan island, a US statement said. However, they fail to mention that Hainan is home to the People's Liberation Army Navy strategic nuclear submarine naval harbor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan#Military Whats more... The mission of [uSNS Impeccable] is to directly support the Navy by using SURTASS passive and active low frequency sonar arrays to detect and track undersea threats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Impeccable It think its pretty clear what was going on here.

i just got royally buggered by my stops on that big US30 bounce earlier. i would feel sad, but i made twice back on crude oil. fun times.

Well, it's not hard to draw a resistence line of a graph and work out where its going to stop. Cgnaos 'mystic' point was that if it spends more than 3 minutes below this major resistence point, its liking to become a support instead as the chart heads to new lows. Personally, I think the volume is suggesting more upward pressure at this point, and it's likely to rally next week, maybe testing it again later on in the week. Ultimately, it cgnao will be right on this - it will break resistence soon.

I went short at 7412, just got out at 7319. Nice little earner for 2 hours trading. Time for a beer I think. My spreadbet account is up 27% this week.

By the way, this is thread number 100,000 on HPC! Quite the milestone.

Never believe a word Russia says, especially anything regarding gas. Over the past decade Russia has become entirely dependant on energy exports to support its fragile economy. As a result, fluctuations in energy prices have a profound effect on the nation’s income. Last year, with the $100 oil barrel, they did very well. Then it all went a bit wrong for them (again). Energy prices are crashing, but Russia is still contracted to export energy, but not making nearly as much profit on it as they would like. Now if I was Putin, I’d be wanted to do something about this. Somehow get the price of gas back up, and I’d imagine the best way to do this would be to reduce supply. Unfortunately, he’s got those pesky European export contracts to deliver, and a reputation as a trustworthy supplier to maintain. Bring on the Ukraine. The Kremlin is very good at finding contractual faults from seemingly good behaviour, this is how Putin managed to re-nationalise a large amount Russia’s energy industry when he got into power. I would not at all be surprised if this contract issue with Ukraine is another such invented fault. Putin knew that Ukraine could not afford to pay western prices for its energy when previously it was heavily discounted (as it was with all ex USSR states when it fell in 1991), and he knew that he could force them into this situation and use it to his advantage when the time came, and that time is now. I believe Russia is using the Ukraine to reduce energy supply to Europe, and hence prop up prices, without damaging their own reputation. I also suspect that another Kremlin policy is that by reducing supply when energy prices are low, they can force client states to use their own energy reserves and buy from other states with diminishing reserves, hence when prices rise again Russia finds itself with plenty of supply capacity, while others are depleted, again increasing not only energy prices and profit, but also their global political and economic power. With the windfall from the past years of high energy prices, Russia can when well afford this strategy for some time at least. What does the Ukraine get out of this? Continued supply of subsidised energy. By the way, when I refer to the Kremlin I am also referring to Gazprom, as they are 51% owned by the state.

I had a similar problem on satuday night. Trying to get cash out tried all the cash machines in Jesmond in Newcastle, all 'declined my transaction'. There was a long queue of students in front of me all having the same problem, expecting their student loans to have come through. Was amusing watching the queue move from one cash point to another getting more and more irrate. My account is with Barclays have plenty of cleared funds, was working fine the next day. Tempted to go and take out a couple of hundred 'just in case'. If this happens en-masse then big trouble ahead.

There’s another thread making predictions for 2012. I’m thinking about what the next 12 months has in store. I’ve followed the predictions of this forum for years and the prophesies, so to speak, are now coming to fruition. Now I’m making a prediction. Forgot the talk of the WWIII apocalypse scenario, I don’t think we need to be hoarding iodine pills just yet, but I do believe there’s going to be a “big war”. My definition of big war is at least 2 countries on each side, probably more, and those countries not being geographically linked (e.g. a bigger scale than neighbours ganging up, more a case of a couple of countries across the globe trying to take advantage of a weakened west with it’s pants down post this financial crisis). Almost definitely including the UK and USA on one side, not too sure who the other sides shall be – but it’s on the cards. Of course post 12 months this could escalate, but in the short term IMO some kind of mini 'global war' is going to kick off. Do you agree, what other predictions do you have for the next 12 months?

LSE reports that a bizarre electrical anomaly occured at 8.30am, this coming Wednesday. This appeared to knock out connections to their trading partners at 9am this morning.

I need to find a cheap place to rent in Newcastle in August for a single young professional. My current house share contract is coming to an end and theres no way I'm going to renew. (never ever get a shared contract, it's a nightmare if one of you decides to walk mid contract). Anyone know of any areas that are cheap but nice with decent transport to the city centre (I work in the city with nowhere to park to gotta walk, metro or bus it). Looking on rightmove theres lots of these new build apartments in the Gateshead riverside going for 425 a month, where maybe a year ago they were well over 500. Something doesn't feel right about it though.

Utterly useless. If I was in Browns position I'd call a snap election now, making damn sure I'd loose to the Conservatives. Let them suffer through the crash - maybe Labour might preserve some hope of getting elected sometime in the foreseeable future. It would be bizarre if an election was called now and no party wanted to win it for this reason.

Nothing like a good old fashioned shooting war to deal with an economic crisis. It'll boost manufacturing and employment, assuming we can still remember how to build a tank. Give something those hoards of employed chavs to do too. Sadly, some idiot invented nuclear weapons so we can't have a proper war anymore, just in case you know what happens.