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The London Metal Exchange took action to calm turmoil in the copper market late on Tuesday by introducing temporary limits on some prices, after a plunge in stocks of the metal in its warehouses disrupted trading. The LME said it would adjust its rules requiring large holders of the metal to lend it back to the exchange. It also said it would bring in a limit on backwardation — a scenario whereby spot contracts trade at a premium to futures contracts, indicating that the market is undersupplied. Robust demand and rising copper prices pushed inventories of copper on the LME...

“We are not broke as a nation. We are not bankrupt. We can’t go bankrupt. We absolutely cannot go bankrupt because we have the power to create as much money as we need to spend to serve the American people,”

The Fed apologists like to cling to falling lumber prices as proof that the current spate of price inflation is, in fact, "transitory". OK, fine. Lumber prices are back down due to a rush of supply. But what about all the other industrial inputs? What's going on there? Let's start with lumber. The price spiked on a supply shortage and then, once supply re-emerged, price fell. If you use this item as your only indicator of inflation, then yes, the price increase was transitory. But unfortunately for Chairman Powell and his sycophant media, we can't just look at lumber. After...

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Yosmar Sanguino says she struggles to put food on the table for her two daughters and three grandchildren in a low-income neighborhood of Venezuela’s capital. She often whips up arepas — traditional flat, round corn patties — with butter and cheese. But it’s hard to afford even those few ingredients. “There is food, but the money is lacking. Because if you buy one thing, you can’t buy the other,” she said. “If you buy butter, you can’t buy cheese. Or if you buy the cheese, you can’t buy the butter.”

Indonesia and China are closer to reducing their reliance on the US dollar as they plan to start using their own currencies for bilateral trade and investment within weeks. The switch to local currency settlement (LCS) is expected to take place in the third quarter of this year. Bank Indonesia’s head of financial market development, Donny Hutabarat, said the move was part of Indonesia’s effort to diversify currencies used in trade and investment with bilateral partners. So far, Indonesia has agreed on LCS with Malaysia, Thailand and Japan. “So, we do not depend 100 percent on the US dollar anymore,”...

A U.S. Coast Guard crew from Station Key West have recovered a floating tiki hut bar that was reported stolen near in the Florida Keys Unsurprisingly, the person aboard showed signs of intoxication and he was taken into custody by Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Officials said the vessel was located near Hawk’s Channel. Local reports say the man was found slumped over the wheel of the charter tiki hut at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, giving you an indication of how rough his night was. The boat is owned Cruisin’ Tiki Key West, which offers the boats up for...

Some new drone footage shot as the ONE Apus was arriving in Japan last week gives us the first aerial view of the extent of damage on the deck of the ship after its historic cargo loss in the Pacific Ocean. The video was commissioned by W K Webster & Co., a leading global marine and transit claims consultancy. The owners and managers of the containership estimate that 1,816 containers were lost overboard when the ONE Apus encountered severe weather as it sailed towards Long Beach, California on November 30. The number of containers damaged but remaining on deck is...

Way back in time, almost 12,500 years ago, the first canines were becoming domesticated. Through toil and hardship, people had earned the trust of our now beloved best friends. The symbiotic relationship between dog and woman was very groundbreaking, as humans had never been this close to an animal before. Humans would provide shelter and care for the dogs, and in turn, the dogs would hunt and fetch firewood for humans. The reason I am detailing this history for you is so everyone understands the importance of the events that took place all these years ago. According to bio-archaeologist Gregor...

This is a wild video… Apparently a group of U.S. Coast Guard crew members from the USCGC Kimball were having a little swim time while deployed in Oceania when a shark crashed the party. Luckily for them, however, someone was standing shark watch and fired shots just as the shark surfaced and swam towards the swimmers. Luckily for the shark too, they were just warning shots that caused the 6’8” fish to retreat before returning some time later with more of his buddies. But by that time, everyone was out of the water safely, mess call - at either end....

By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali WASHINGTON, May 19 (Reuters) – In an alert that appeared aimed squarely at Iran, the U.S. Navy issued a warning on Tuesday to mariners in the Gulf to stay 100 meters (yards) away from U.S. warships or risk being “interpreted as a threat and subject to lawful defensive measures.”

By Captain George Livingstone – As we witness the COVID-19 crisis spread around the world it seems this big problem could morph and spread into a myriad of problems with the end result being collectively bigger than the original. The crux of the matter being there no clear horizon looking forward. According to livescience.com, In the United States on 4/13/20 there were about 550,000 cases nationally of COVID-19. On 4/20/20 there were about 750,000, a national increase of nearly 30% in one week. At present 15 states are seeing a decline in cases while 35 states are still reporting increases....

Exactly a year after being named after a volcano in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, the USS Mount Hood was lying at berth off Manus island in the Admiralty Islands north of New Guinea. With around 4000 tons of different types of ammunition aboard, USS Mount Hood had travelled from Norfolk, Virginia via the Panama Canal to the Pacific, bringing munitions for ships that would be supporting the Philippines campaign. She was busy this morning, men were in the process of moving ammunition in all five of her holds, but there was time to run 18 men into shore at...

Top exporter Saudi Arabia has chartered an armada of ships to flood the market with additional oil, but in the process has driven freight costs so high refiners are reluctant to take the shipments. That could leave the kingdom stuck with tens of millions of barrels in expensive ships at anchor when the coronavirus outbreak has destroyed oil demand and international prices have lost more than half their value compared with the start of the year.

By Gavin van Marle (The Loadstar) – Freight forwarders sending goods out of Europe to Asia face one of the tightest capacity crunches in living memory over the next few weeks. CMA CGM is set to blank 23 North Europe-Asia sailings from now until 2 June, after last week announcing three further deepsea sailings in the middle of this month had been cancelled, “due to recent demand slowdown in the context of the coronavirus situation”. This month alone, 15 eastbound sailings will not take place as scheduled, and the line said the cancellations were affecting its north-south services that relay...

Dakota Bordeaux had rarely traveled outside his home state of Oklahoma before he joined the Navy in February 2017. He’d certainly never seen the ocean. But only four months later, Bordeaux was standing at the helm of the USS John S. McCain, steering the 8,300-ton destroyer through the western Pacific. Part of the Navy’s famed 7th Fleet, the McCain was responsible for patrolling global hot spots, shadowing Chinese warships in the South China Sea and tracking North Korean missile launches. It filled the high school graduate with pride. “Not many people of my age can say, ‘Hey, I just drove...

Preface On October 11, 2019, an explosion rocked passenger ferry Ytterøyningen while dockside at Sydnes, Norway. The vessel, recently refit with a lithium-ion battery hybrid drive, is part of the new fleet of low and zero emission vessels being deployed across Norway and other parts of the world. The vessel was at dock having been pulled from service the night before due to a fire in the lithium propulsion batteries; a condition known as thermal runaway. The root cause of the fire is still to be announced, but the secondary explosion caused significant structural damage to the vessel; likely a...

Many strange experiments have taken place at the ultra-secret base. But not on aliens. As former workers fight for their lives, we ask: what happened there? [snip] West of the base’s main living quarters, on a piece of ground slightly above the lake bed, a waste dump had been constructed. Vehicles with California license plates would head up to the dump to unload cargoes of waste too secret to dispose of normally. Some of the trucks bore the markings of NDB – a company of which no records appear to exist; rumour on the base had it that it was...

The Port of Corpus Christi is celebrating the start of dredging work in the project to expand the Corpus Christi Ship Channel to prepare the port for the anticipated increase in U.S. crude oil exports overseas. The Port of Corpus Christi Ship Channel Improvement Project will deepen and widen the entrance ship channel from 47 to 54 feet and widen it from 400 to 530 feet. At a special ceremony held Thursday, the Port of Corpus Christi spotlighted the first dredgers in the Gulf. The $93 million dredging contract was awarded to Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company earlier this...

The Instructor, a retired Navy SEAL, spoke with a quite, steady and commanding voice: “Load one nine round magazine, lower the hammer, place your weapon on safe, re-holster, and raise your right hand when you have completed these actions.” Clear and concise. Each of his ten students followed these commands. Soon ten right hands went up. “Now lower your hands, and listen to the following directions. I will give these directions twice, and only twice.” He then enunciated how his students were to draw their weapons, engage targets, how many rounds to place on each target, when to perform a...

Aerial picture of the Soo Locks and International Bridge at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Photo Credit: Creative Commons The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is proceeding with plans to build a new Soo Lock at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan more than three decades after a new lock was first authorized. The construction of a second Poe-size lock large enough to accommodate the largest ships servicing the Great Lakes region is one of the largest Great Lakes infrastructure projects in a generation. The green-lighting of the project came last week in the form of an announcement that the Corps has formally...