Diamond News Archives
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Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
On Nov. 25, 2008, the Federal Reserve launched the shot heard around the financial world.
The U.S. central bank announced it would start using digitally created money to buy mortgage debt in an effort to drive down interest rates and resuscitate a dead housing market.
Along with a series of cuts that ultimately would take short-term interest rates close to zero, the move was part of an ambitious gambit to take the country out of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It quickly expanded to the purchase of government bonds in a total of three rounds that spanned six years.
Flash forward 11 years later.
The Fed's campaign of "quantitative easing," along with keeping rates historically low, coincided with the longest expansion and most robust Wall Street bull market in U.S. history. Coming at a time of prolonged gridlock in Washington, the Fed's monetary policy moves thrust it front and center as the sole provider of stimulus.
"It was the decade of the central bank," said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial. "Stimulus was wanting, and the burden fell on the central banks to normalize the environment."
Economists can and will debate the effectiveness and the long-term consequences of all the extraordinary moves, but there can be little doubt that in the past decade, the epicenter of economic management was at the Fed, along with its sister central banks around the globe.
No collective entity had greater influence for the past 10 years over the economy and financial markets.
'The extraordinary has become ordinary'
While the desire may have been a normalization of a global economy that had been...
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(Press Release) - The International Gemological Institute (IGI), has joined forces with John Glajz, a Singapore-based authorized partner of Argyle Pink Diamonds for nearly 25 years, to certify these gems, which are some of the rarest in the world, creating The Collector's Edition: An Exclusive Selection of Argyle Pink Diamonds. As the Australian mine that produces the majority of the diamonds is slated to close in 2020, this collection is likely to become more valuable.
IGI grades each diamond attesting to the origin, natural aspect, color and clarity. By using the combination of the fluorescence in ultraviolet light, typical inclusions and the type of graining, IGI can determine with good precision that these diamonds originate from the Argyle mine. In order to maintain a verified chain of custody, the diamonds are then securely sealed by IGI, which is an independent third party, thus ensuring ultimate customer protection.
"To date, IGI has delivered more than 1,000 of these reports and we look forward to continuing to provide a sustainable and secure way for consumers to purchase these diamonds with the utmost confidence," said IGI Antwerp, MD Deborah Pienica.
With a verified Argyle origin and the impending closure of the mine, The Collector's Edition presents an innovative and unique opportunity to own a curated selection of these rare diamonds. To date, the market response to this collection has been overwhelming as it presents an attainable way for consumers to purchase Argyle Pink Diamonds.
"We embarked with IGI on this project in order to preserve the legacy of these rare diamonds beyond their mined life," said John Glajz. "Despite the Australian mine closing in 2020, the limited supply release will become a treasured collectible. As such,...
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Saturday rejected the suggestion that the Trump administration is weaponizing the dollar through its trade-restricting policies with other countries.
"Let me be clear: we are not weaponizing the U.S. dollar," Mnuchin told CNBC's Hadley Gamble at the Doha Forum in Qatar. "If anything I would say the opposite; I take great responsibility that people use the dollar as the reserve currency of the world, and the dollar is quite strong — sometimes the president says the dollar is too strong.
"The dollar is strong because of the U.S. economy and because people want to hold dollars and the safety of the U.S. dollar. So because of that, we take sanctions responsibility very seriously — as a matter of fact, I personally sign off on every single piece of sanction that we do."
Officials in China and Europe have been actively promoting their currencies as substitutes for the dollar when it comes to both reserves and transactions, particularly in the face of expanding U.S. sanctions and protectionist trade policies like tariffs.
The Trump administration has imposed sweeping sanctions including on dollar trade with Iran, North Korea and others in an effort to pressure state actors to rein in behavior that Washington deems destabilizing and against its interests. According to the Treasury Department, there are 6,300 Specially Designated Nationals and more than 20 countries against which some type of U.S. sanctions are in place.
This has stunted the ability of European allies and others to trade with Iran, among other countries and entities. So some states are therefore looking to euros and other alternatives — including Chinese renminbi and cryptocurrencies — to carry out trade free of U.S.-imposed restrictions.
Earlier this year, France, Germany and...
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Home[1] | Wire[2] | Is 150 Years of Bank Credit Expansion Nearing Its End?
Since the turn of the millennium there have been two global bank credit crises: the first was the deflation of the dot-com bubble in 2001–2, and the second the 2008–9 financial crisis that wiped out Lehman Brothers. It was clear from these events that the debate over moral hazard was resolved in favour of supporting not just the banks, but big business and stock market valuations as well. Furthermore, America’s budget deficits were becoming a permanent fixture.
This brings us to the current situation, which increasingly appears to be on the edge of another cyclical crisis. If so, it marks the end of a period of far greater monetary and credit expansion than seen in previous cycles, coinciding with a Smoot-Hawley lookalike in the trade war between the two largest global economies.
The following big-picture factors are relevant to the likely timing for a credit crisis:...
- Global debt has accumulated to an estimated $255 trillion, up from about $173 trillion at the time of the Lehman Brothers crisis An alarming proportion of it is unproductive, being government debt, consumer loans, and funding for financial speculation as well as owed by unviable businesses.
- With annual debt payments already accounting for most of the US budget deficit and that deficit getting larger, any rise in dollar interest rates would be ruinous for Federal government finances. Eurozone governments are in a similarly precarious financial position. Governments are ensnared in a classic debt trap.
- An estimated $17 trillion of global bonds are negative yielding, which is unprecedented. This is a market distortion so extreme that it cannot be normalised without widespread financial disruption
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(IDEX Online) - The Luaxe diamond deposit in Angola could produce 1 million carats of diamonds worth $90 million in 2020. That's according to Russian miner Alrosa, which owns the project with Angola's state-controlled diamond miners Catoca and Endiama.
"It will be one of the largest deposits in the world," Vladimir Marchenko, Alrosa's deputy chief executive in charge of its Africa business, told Reuters.
In 2017, Alrosa said the commercial value of the deposit was over $35 billion.
Alrosa plans to spend $9 million on exploration in Angola in 2020-2022....