Diamond News Archives
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The albatross of $617 billion in bonds that mature in over 10 years.
Over the next few months, the Fed is expected to announce its new plan for its balance sheet. Meanwhile, as we’re riveted to the edge of our seat, the old plan continues on autopilot, and February was one of the few months when the Treasury “roll-off,” as Chairman Jerome Powell likes to call it, hit the “caps.”
In February, the Fed shed $57 billion in assets, according to the Fed’s balance sheet for the week ended March 6[1], released this afternoon. This slashed the assets on its balance sheet to $3,969 billion, the lowest since December 2013. Via its “balance sheet normalization,” the Fed has now shed $501 billion. And since peak-balance-sheet at the end of 2014, the Fed has shed $547 billion:
During peak-balance-sheet at the end of 2014, total assets ($4.52 trillion) amounted to 26% of GDP. Today’s assets amount to 19.4% of GDP. In the years before QE started, the balance sheet ran around 6% of GDP.
By comparison, the ECB’s balance sheet assets now exceed 40% of GDP, and the Bank of Japan’s assets amount to 101% of GDP[2].
February’s drop of $57 billion is larger than the scheduled QE unwind that is capped at $50 billion. But the Fed has other activities that impact the balance sheet. QE revolved around Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities (MBS). And so does the QE unwind.
According to the Fed’s plan revealed in 2017, the QE unwind is supposed to take place on automatic pilot, based on a formula by which the Fed is scheduled to shed “up to” $30 billion in Treasuries and “up to” $20 billion in MBS...
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Alrosa, (MCX:ALRS) the world's top diamond producer by output, reported Thursday that total sales of rough and polished diamonds increased to $345.6 million, up 23% compared to January 2019 (up $64.1 million).
Rough diamonds sales in February increased to $340.6 million, compared to $278.2 million in January 2019, while polished diamond sales grew to $5 million, compared to $3.4 million a month ago.
"We see Indian mid-streamers’ activity gradually recover, despite some challenges hampering access to bank financing for the industry in this country,” Sergey Ivanov, Alrosa CEO said in a statement. “This sentiment is particularly noticeable for small and medium-sized rough diamonds. The company has moderately optimistic expectations of further smooth growth in demand and market activity."
Alrosa's total rough and polished diamond sales in January-February 2019 amounted to $627 million. The value of rough diamonds sold was $618.8 million for two months, and polished diamonds sales reached $8.3 million.
The post Alrosa’s February diamond sales up 23% over January appeared first on MINING.com....
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It turns out September, not April, may be federal taxpayers’ worst nightmare.
The end of the government’s fiscal year usually brings an orgy of spending as agencies look at their budgets, see extra cash lying around, and figure they’d better use it all up or risk it getting cut in the future.
The “use it or lose it” mentality explains why the Defense Department[1] spent $9,241 on a Wexford leather chair, $2.3 million on crab and another $2.3 million on lobster tails in September, according to a study released Thursday by OpenTheBooks.
Taxpayers shelled out $97 billion on contracts in September, including a staggering $53 billion in the final week — seven days that cost more than the entire month of August.
“In the final month of the fiscal year, federal agencies scramble to spend what’s left in their annual budget; agencies worry spending less than their budget allows might prompt Congress to appropriate less money in the next fiscal year,” said the report from the government-spending watchdog group. “To avoid this, federal agencies choose to embark on an annual shopping spree rather than admit they can operate on less.”
As might be expected, the Defense Department[2] was the biggest spender, and the most money went to big-ticket necessities such as fixed-wing aircraft.
But there were also the lobster tail and crab, $163,636 spent on paint brushes, and $7.6 million on workout equipment — including ski equipment for “adults and junior” earmarked to Misawa Air Base in Japan.
The lobster tail purchases in September were a bit more than 10 percent of what the federal government spent on the delicacy the entire year, suggesting only a slightly elevated rate of spending.
But more than...
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Diamond rich Botswana expects mineral revenues in the 2019/20 fiscal year to drop by 4 percent to 13.6 billion pula ($1.26 billion) due to a decline in royalties and dividends, a minerals ministry budget document showed on Thursday.
Mineral Resources Minister Eric Molale said in the document that global diamond demand was showing signs of slowing down. Retail jewellery sales fell during the last quarter of 2018, he said, while polished prices continued to decline into the beginning of 2019, albeit at a slower rate.
"Trading and prices of diamonds are expected to remain subdued during the first quarter of 2019 due to significant overstocking of small polished diamonds," Molale said in the document presented to parliament late on Wednesday.
Debswana, a joint venture between Anglo American's De Beers and Botswana, produced 24.1 million carats of diamonds in 2018, a 6 percent jump from the previous year.
The company is the largest contributor to Botswana's government revenues.
($1 = 10.7527 pulas)
(By Brian Benza; Editing by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo and Kirsten Donovan)
The post Botswana sees lower mineral revenues in 2019 appeared first on MINING.com....
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The eurozone is beginning to resemble Japan with its low-growth and low-inflation environment, coupled with still very loose monetary policy, according to economists at ING.
This raises questions about the European Central Bank's tool kit and firing power.
Interest rates haven’t gone up in either the eurozone or Japan since the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Conversely, the Federal Reserve has raised rates nine times since the crisis years, presumably giving it room to cut them again should the economy need a boost.
The Bank of Japan is considered the most hesitant of its peers to normalize monetary policy. And already since the mid-1990s, Japan has been struggling with a high public debt ratio and stubbornly low inflation and growth rates. None of that bodes well for a hawkish central bank approach.
The eurozone looks like it entered a similar trend of late, said ING economists Carsten Brzeski and Inga Fechner, one day ahead of the European Central Bank’s next policy update.
Don’t miss: Draghi increasingly likely to leave ECB without ever delivering a rate hike[1]
“An end to current unconventional monetary policy, i.e. the negative deposit rate and ample liquidity, is not insight and the ECB is expected to do everything it can to avoid an unwarranted tightening of its monetary stance.”
Opinion: ECB has a plan for markets and is looking for reasons to act[2]
“Last year, Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio stood at 238%, and since 1994, headline inflation has been negative for almost half of the time. This trend has also emerging in the eurozone in recent years,” said Brzeski and Fechner, pointing at Greece, as well as Spain and Italy, in the aftermath of the...