2002
Bought a Ford Focus after getting new job after retrenchment from JPM
One weekend about a year later driving to town, after rain
Going down ECP exit to Rochor Road, and let car drift & went too fast. Skidded and rammed into steel divider (a few years later that bend was straigthened). front of car was totally wrecked. luckily no injuries, air bag deployed
Submitted insurance claim to NTUC Income.
2 officers called me over the phone to make their offer which was $1,000 above the 'residual value' of the car. Residual value is the amount of money the government would return to owner when the car is scrapped.
I then told them to make their offer on paper. They faxed me their offer letter but with compensation raised by $2,000 or 3,000! Told them I would not accept as the compensation was not enough to buy an equivalent car in the martket and asked them to give me another car of same age instead.
While sorting insurance claim, I went to Ubi used car mart to shop for a second hand car. (finally bought 2nd hand Peugeot 206 from a young guy & paid him $1,000 above his asking price because he claimed he had an offer - a likely lie - but that car was a lemon. Had to overhaul engine a few months later for $3,000+)
Related insurance story to a 2nd hand car salesman and he said that that was a common trick by NTUC Insurance. A client of his had similar case. NTUC people called the wife to make their verbal offer which the woman accepted (she did not understand the residual value concept and thought it was a good deal).
When the husband found out that she had agreed, he got angry and called NTUC Income to reject the offer. NTUC Income then changed their settlement amount.
Took me a year to sort out the case.
After the initial verbal offer and the later better paper offer, I asked to speak to their 'head' and that guy told me that their offer was the best. Then sent email to reject the offer and cc to NTUC Income head.
The next thing I got was a mail from their legal department telling me basically to be careful with what I say! (NTUC Income head left a few years later)
A year later, got about $8,000 above residual value.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Woman Everyone Call Mad
[2016 Feb Update: At prata dinner on day of mom's funeral (CNY eve), heard that Tian won a consolation prize for writing. The topic was her mom not allowing her to go to her grandpa's home. At breakfast 2nd CNY day, I was surprised her dad was not happy with me reminding the kids a few of the things I taught her which included 'beware of people who hee-hee-ha-ha with you all the time. That applies to home, school, work, and between countries' He pointed a finger at me and walked off. May have to do with this.... Also saw a new face last year at Tian's grandpa house and that red flag got much bigger!]
Driving home with CPM for dad's 7th week commemoration. Discussed various things. Told her about my exchange with CPQ (when dad passed away) on not to be so simplistic with reading other people. This world is not as simplistic as people like CPQ thinks.
I was trying to teach kids to beware when dealing with religious organisations as history shows that they are no different from any money making institutions and may be worse because most normal businesses offer real products and services for a price but religious organisations offer not just only nice and comforting words (which cost them nothing) but are also convenient hiding places for many dubious characters and dirty business (like paedophiles) because simplistic people take them as 'holy'.
Throughout history, all religions have to offer humanity is nice words but they cannot provide real improvement to our lives - Isaac Assimov (roughly as I remembered it from one of his books)
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion - Arthur C. Clarke
As regards the skill of reading people, I told CPM that most people (80%) cannot do so accurately. Such skills are rare and experts are well paid. If CPQ was so good as to tell me that she was sure that all the people she met casually at Fa Gu San were good people, she would be sitting on some well paid job!
(During a character typing session at work, the facilitator said the Singapore government deploys highly paid spotters well trained in reading body language at Changi Airport. That's one reason why there is no need for strict baggage checks. The spotters do the first screening and they only do thorough checks on those picked up by those spotters)
Explained to her that's why I warned Tian a few months back when she told me about a 'mad' woman in her paternal side of family. Gave her the background below.
But despite all those 'signs' I recounted, CPM still argued with me and said my conclusion was wrong.
She said man showed her messages from woman that proved that woman was not normal etc and look like him does not mean his etc.
I said don't be stupid. I looked more like my father than his brother and his brother's son looked like him and not my father! I have not seen that woman's husband so CPM can compare the looks herself and decide.
I am very sure of it and it would be stupid of her to refuse to heed my view and at least exercise caution. Warned her that I have nothing at stake whichever way the truth is but she has something at stake - her daughter! If my view is indeed the case, who knows what's the limit.
Background:
A few months before dad's passing, I was talking Tian's father and somehow one of her uncle was mentioned. Tian who was next to us suddenly interjected and said one of her aunt-in-laws is mad. Curious, I asked her what she meant.
Apparently, that woman claimed she had a 'special' relationship with that uncle who is the younger brother of that woman's husband. So I asked Tian if that woman made the same claim about her father. She said no. Then how about other uncles. No.
I then told her that in that case that woman is not mad. Mad people makes wild accusations against people at random and not against a specific individual. Reminded her about a woman at nearby coffee shop that scolded her mother recently. That, I told Tian, was a mad woman. She just picked anyone off the street.
I noticed that her father also kept quiet all the while and pretended not to hear anything! Which confirms a suspicion I had for many years.
I first met that uncle when Tian was about 4 or 5 years old. I was not familiar with who is who within that family then. Pointing to a boy at her grandfather's home, I asked him an innocuous question: is that your son? He said no and walked off. I immediately realized I hit something raw. I asked that because that boy looked very much like him (not Tian's father for example)! His response raised a red flag.
After that, when I run into him during my other visits I noticed he would avoid me or discussion (see Fifth Amendment). Which to me was more red flags!
As a result, I was quite certain my initial suspicion was right.
Now 8-9 years later Tian had given me the final confirmation I needed. So I gave her below tip in front of her father who remained silent throughout.
When accused by another of being a thief, the thief would be stupid to admit it. Instead, thief will say accuser is mad. If one does not know the truth, don't follow blindly and call the accuser mad. It should instead be taken as a red flag and one should stay vigilant with the accused!
Another thing added more red flags.
On one visit, I was sitting in Tian's house when I saw that man bringing on a leash a male dog from her gandpa's house (a few hundred meters away) towards her house (which was owned by another uncle) but when I went out to the porch to say hello he did the same as above and quickly went off with the dog. Tian's house had a female Tibetan mastiff. This event was another red flag but I was yet to figure it out then.
Next visit months later, was told by Tian that female dog gave birth to a pup but she doesn't know how dog got pregnant. I clicked immediately but pretended not to know and asked if anyone told her how that came about (to see if anyone owned up). She said may be some dog sneaked into her house. I kept quiet and told myself 'sneaky bastard'.
Driving home with CPM for dad's 7th week commemoration. Discussed various things. Told her about my exchange with CPQ (when dad passed away) on not to be so simplistic with reading other people. This world is not as simplistic as people like CPQ thinks.
I was trying to teach kids to beware when dealing with religious organisations as history shows that they are no different from any money making institutions and may be worse because most normal businesses offer real products and services for a price but religious organisations offer not just only nice and comforting words (which cost them nothing) but are also convenient hiding places for many dubious characters and dirty business (like paedophiles) because simplistic people take them as 'holy'.
Throughout history, all religions have to offer humanity is nice words but they cannot provide real improvement to our lives - Isaac Assimov (roughly as I remembered it from one of his books)
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion - Arthur C. Clarke
As regards the skill of reading people, I told CPM that most people (80%) cannot do so accurately. Such skills are rare and experts are well paid. If CPQ was so good as to tell me that she was sure that all the people she met casually at Fa Gu San were good people, she would be sitting on some well paid job!
(During a character typing session at work, the facilitator said the Singapore government deploys highly paid spotters well trained in reading body language at Changi Airport. That's one reason why there is no need for strict baggage checks. The spotters do the first screening and they only do thorough checks on those picked up by those spotters)
Explained to her that's why I warned Tian a few months back when she told me about a 'mad' woman in her paternal side of family. Gave her the background below.
But despite all those 'signs' I recounted, CPM still argued with me and said my conclusion was wrong.
She said man showed her messages from woman that proved that woman was not normal etc and look like him does not mean his etc.
I said don't be stupid. I looked more like my father than his brother and his brother's son looked like him and not my father! I have not seen that woman's husband so CPM can compare the looks herself and decide.
I am very sure of it and it would be stupid of her to refuse to heed my view and at least exercise caution. Warned her that I have nothing at stake whichever way the truth is but she has something at stake - her daughter! If my view is indeed the case, who knows what's the limit.
Background:
A few months before dad's passing, I was talking Tian's father and somehow one of her uncle was mentioned. Tian who was next to us suddenly interjected and said one of her aunt-in-laws is mad. Curious, I asked her what she meant.
Apparently, that woman claimed she had a 'special' relationship with that uncle who is the younger brother of that woman's husband. So I asked Tian if that woman made the same claim about her father. She said no. Then how about other uncles. No.
I then told her that in that case that woman is not mad. Mad people makes wild accusations against people at random and not against a specific individual. Reminded her about a woman at nearby coffee shop that scolded her mother recently. That, I told Tian, was a mad woman. She just picked anyone off the street.
I noticed that her father also kept quiet all the while and pretended not to hear anything! Which confirms a suspicion I had for many years.
I first met that uncle when Tian was about 4 or 5 years old. I was not familiar with who is who within that family then. Pointing to a boy at her grandfather's home, I asked him an innocuous question: is that your son? He said no and walked off. I immediately realized I hit something raw. I asked that because that boy looked very much like him (not Tian's father for example)! His response raised a red flag.
After that, when I run into him during my other visits I noticed he would avoid me or discussion (see Fifth Amendment). Which to me was more red flags!
As a result, I was quite certain my initial suspicion was right.
Now 8-9 years later Tian had given me the final confirmation I needed. So I gave her below tip in front of her father who remained silent throughout.
When accused by another of being a thief, the thief would be stupid to admit it. Instead, thief will say accuser is mad. If one does not know the truth, don't follow blindly and call the accuser mad. It should instead be taken as a red flag and one should stay vigilant with the accused!
Another thing added more red flags.
On one visit, I was sitting in Tian's house when I saw that man bringing on a leash a male dog from her gandpa's house (a few hundred meters away) towards her house (which was owned by another uncle) but when I went out to the porch to say hello he did the same as above and quickly went off with the dog. Tian's house had a female Tibetan mastiff. This event was another red flag but I was yet to figure it out then.
Next visit months later, was told by Tian that female dog gave birth to a pup but she doesn't know how dog got pregnant. I clicked immediately but pretended not to know and asked if anyone told her how that came about (to see if anyone owned up). She said may be some dog sneaked into her house. I kept quiet and told myself 'sneaky bastard'.
Monday, October 29, 2012
1st Hand View on Medical Care in 1st World
Late cancer victim's inspiring video goes viral
Yahoo! News 29 October 2012
There are videos, and then there are VIDEOS.
And this one may just end up changing your life.
Singaporean Dr Richard Teo, a successful opthamologist-turned-cosmetic surgeon, succumbed to Stage Four terminal lung cancer earlier this month at the age of 40.
But since his death, a 22-minute heart-wrenching video featuring his thoughts on life and the ceaseless pursuit of materialism and success is going viral online.
During the talk given to class of medical students, the former Raffles Junior College and National University of Singapore student shares with painful, brutal honesty how his driving ambition since childhood was to be successful at all costs.
And given Singapore's societal and educational context, that meant making lots and lots of money and amassing enough status symbols to last a lifetime.
"I am a typical product of today's society. From young, I was told by the media... and people around me that happiness is about sucess. And that success is about being wealthy," he shared in a voice made hoarse by rounds of chemo.
In the grainy amateur video, which was shot in January, a frail-looking and slightly balding Teo goes on to detail how he ditched public service to become an aesthetic surgeon to "make millions".
That is until his "perfect" life fell apart on the day he learned about his illness and how, in the final months of his life, all his wealth, toys -- supercars, bungalows -- and glam lifestyle meant nothing to him and gave him precious little comfort.
Instead, he found comfort in spending time with family and fellow patients, sharing their pain and suffering. In his final message, he urged the classroom of medical students never to lose their moral compass and never to lose sight of the patients they treated.
The video, which was uploaded last Thursday, has been viewed nearly 70,000 times to date. And his story, which was first featured on The New Paper on Sunday (TNPS), has got people talking.
His wife, Mrs Teo, who was married to him for six years, told TNPS, "I'm proud of him for leaving a legacy. I wish I could be like him. He is the best teacher God has sent to me."
Yahoo! News 29 October 2012
There are videos, and then there are VIDEOS.
And this one may just end up changing your life.
Singaporean Dr Richard Teo, a successful opthamologist-turned-cosmetic surgeon, succumbed to Stage Four terminal lung cancer earlier this month at the age of 40.
But since his death, a 22-minute heart-wrenching video featuring his thoughts on life and the ceaseless pursuit of materialism and success is going viral online.
During the talk given to class of medical students, the former Raffles Junior College and National University of Singapore student shares with painful, brutal honesty how his driving ambition since childhood was to be successful at all costs.
And given Singapore's societal and educational context, that meant making lots and lots of money and amassing enough status symbols to last a lifetime.
"I am a typical product of today's society. From young, I was told by the media... and people around me that happiness is about sucess. And that success is about being wealthy," he shared in a voice made hoarse by rounds of chemo.
In the grainy amateur video, which was shot in January, a frail-looking and slightly balding Teo goes on to detail how he ditched public service to become an aesthetic surgeon to "make millions".
That is until his "perfect" life fell apart on the day he learned about his illness and how, in the final months of his life, all his wealth, toys -- supercars, bungalows -- and glam lifestyle meant nothing to him and gave him precious little comfort.
Instead, he found comfort in spending time with family and fellow patients, sharing their pain and suffering. In his final message, he urged the classroom of medical students never to lose their moral compass and never to lose sight of the patients they treated.
The video, which was uploaded last Thursday, has been viewed nearly 70,000 times to date. And his story, which was first featured on The New Paper on Sunday (TNPS), has got people talking.
His wife, Mrs Teo, who was married to him for six years, told TNPS, "I'm proud of him for leaving a legacy. I wish I could be like him. He is the best teacher God has sent to me."
Friday, October 05, 2012
BUMI Resources
Last few days, I bought 30,000 shares in Bumi Resources PLC (listed in London Stock Exchange - LSE) at GBP 1.50-1.70 after reading about a big drop in the share price because the company initiated an investigation into some malinvestments in the Indonesian coal mining companies which it has a share.
As of Sep 2012, Bumi PLC owns 85% of PT Berau and 29% of PT Bumi Resources (both listed in Jakarta Stock Exchange - JSE). Rothshild owns 12% of Bumi plc.
PT Bumi is largest thermal coal producer in Indonesia and world largest (10%) thermal coal exporter (Indonesia is 4th producer in world), and owns a 65 percent stake in Kaltim Prima Coal operation, or KPC, and 70 percent of the Arutmin mine (the other 30% of both companies owned by Tata Power Co. of India)
PT Berau is 5th largest coal producer in Indon.
My Read of What is Happening:
Those Indons screwed some whitemen (who probably got those assets cheap too) and their own country in 2001-03 by expropriating the assets for 'pennies on the dollar' (see American embassador's comments below)
Now either the Indons had been trying to screw the British Jew (by draining money from the Indon entities) or it is the other way round (by forcing Indons to sell cheap by pressing the Indon's share price and credit rating down, and triggering margin calls on the Indons whose callateralised shares may be sold off by their creditors - Credit Suisse - at low prices).
http://londonminingnetwork.org/2012/09/bumi-we-said-so-didnt-we/
If the former, the Indons will not get to live long!! With their shares listed in London, they would have to travel there regularly where the Jews will be able to get them (unless they sell off their London shares).
The latter possibility is backed by history - see Historical Notes at bottom - in fact, that was reportedly the view of the Bakries and their people (see chronology of events below).
In addition that 'kill' must be done before 2014 when the big brother of Bakrie Group will be standing for presidential election.
Whiteman - BHP used to own Bumi's Arutmin mine, Billiton used to be part of Shell in 1970s and the Rothshilds owns Shell - no doubt already eager for payback for the Bakries grabbing their assets in 2001-3. The Bakries must be politically neutered for this 'screw' to last (otherwise, they can always re-nationalise the assets again when they get to power!)
But the Indons seemingly got away by selling half their holding to chinaman (Tan) at 40% premium to market price. Question: why Chinaman paid premium to buy from distressed seller? Political pressure and/or to buy protection?
Then came rumours of split with between Chinaman and Indon, and Chinaman joining up with Rothshild to initiate the probe by Bumi plc (without Chinaman's vote, Jew & gang's vote is lesser than Indon & partner's) because Chinaman was not happy with 80% drop in value of his investment.
Or just a classic attempt to break-up the pairing?
To add on the pressure, Chinaman may also be squeezed by his creditor Standchart (since his $1B loan was also backed by the now 80% lower Bumi plc shares), and Jews offered him a deal he could not refuse...
A similar Indonesian view:
http://sahambumi.wordpress.com/category/bursa-bumi/
P/E Estimate = less than 5
2012 production: PT Bumi 45m tons; PT Berau 30m tons
Total Bumi plc share of production = 15m (29% PT Bumi) + 25m (85% PT Berau) = 40m tons
Assuming profit of $3/ton (out of coal price of $80-$120/ton),
profit attributable to Bumi plc = $3 x 40m = $120m giving PE of less than 5
(Bumi plc market cap is $550m based on 240m share @ 150p)
In 2011 Nov, Bumi plc announced target production of 140m tons/year by 2014 (PT Bumi 110m)
Operating margin is 30% but brought down by cost of financing.
Value Estimate based on coal reserves = at least $3 B = $12/share
Total coal reserves attributable to Bumi plc = 1 to 1.4 B tons or $3 to $4 B in profit (before other minerals)
PT Bumi coal reserves = 1.4 to 2.8 B tons. Bumi plc 30% share = 0.5 to 0.9 B tons
- marketing agents: Glencore for Arutmin; BHP for KPC
PT Berau reserves = 500m tons
Value estimate based on plan sale of FBS (2012 Oct 8) = $120/share
FBS has 14m tons of coal reserves, giving value per ton of $200m/7m tons = $30/ton
implying that value of Bumi plc's share of coal reserves (1B tons) = $30 B!
Value Estimate based on market cap of underlying = 30% of $700 + $500m = $730m = $2.5/share
Holding Structure:
Profit NAV (2011)
$200m $700m - PT Bumi (29%)
- PT KPC (65%)
- PT Arutmin (75%)
? - PT Recapital (?%)
- PT Bumi Resorces Minerals (87% with historical book value of $1.5B)
- Newmont Nusa Tenggara(24%) + other mines
- Gallo Oil (20%) in Yemen - sold @ $280m write off in 2011Q1
$130m $500m - PT Berau (85%)
Shareholding as of Oct 2012:
- Bakries (24%)
- Roeslani (10%?) - Bakrie's partner
- Samin Tan (24%)
- Rothschild (12%)
- Others like Blackrock, Shroeders, ADIA? (13%)
Analyst estimates:
2011Q1 Merril on PT Bumi: PE=10 @ Rp2,900
BUMI's CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS:
1998 : Bakrie family defaulted on loans during Asian Financial Crisis. Credit Suisse gave lifeline
2001-2003 : Bakrie family used borrowed money to take over KPC from Rio Tinto and BP for $500m, and Arutmin from BHP for $190m with the help of 'pressure from nationalists to divest the assets to local interests'
("Our contacts at the time told us these deals undervalued the companies at pennies on the dollar," said the U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, Cameron Hume, in a November 2007 classified diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks. Bakrie group executives, Hume added, have said they hoped to do more of these "value-oriented acquisitions."
"In the mining sector, cabinet minister Aburizal Bakrie has been most successful in using nationalism for his private personal gain," Hume noted in that cable.)
200?? : Bakrie family then sold the assets to Bakrie Group which then listed their coal holdings in PT Berau & PT Bumi in JSE. PT Bumi was bought from Bakrie family at $3.4B.
2005: Coal price = $36/ton
2006 Sep : US$3.2 B deal to sell PT Bumi to Samin Tan's company aborted. If successful, it would have made Bakrie family $2.5 B (their cost was $700m - see above)! Coal price = $52/ton
(Samin Tan used to work for HTM which was auditor for Indonesia's 1997 Crisis bank restructuring body IBRA)
2006 Dec : Drilling by Bakrie owned gas exploration company Lapindo Brantas resulted in 'Lapindo mud flow' with mud hole less than 500m from company's exploration well
2008 : Financial Crisis forced Bakrie Group to sell assets etc to answer margin call of $1.2 B. China Investment Corp (CIC) lent PT Bumi US$1.9 B @ 12% and LIBOR +6.67% (after Chinalco failed to purchase a stake in BHP Billiton because of political objections). Other PT Bumi loans @ 10%-12%
2008 Nov : Bakrie Group sold 35% of PT Bumi for $1.35 B (& supposedly at 61% discount from what Bakrie Group paid to Bakrie family) to PT Tambang Batubara Bukit Assam & TPG affiliate Northstar (which also controls PT Bank Tabungan Pensiunan, lender to Indonesia state pension fund)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a3BbI81lzcPA
2009 Feb : Report of Northstar plan to convert bonds into share in PT Bakrie & Brothers and PT Bumi
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/business/northstar-to-convert-trikomsel-bonds-into-equity/308658
2009 Nov : PT Multicapital (a subsiidiary of PT Bumi) led a consortium to buy 24% of Newmont Nusa Tenggara which owns Batu Hijau (gold & copper) mine and other proven copper and gold reserves (all valued at $3.5B conservatively). Also, report of plan by PT Recapital (of Bakrie Group) to buy major stake in PT Berau for $1.5B
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/business/the-bakrie-group-coal-hard-cash-and-chinese-whispers/345131
2010 May : Indon tax authority charged PT Kaltim Prima Coal (KPC) of tax evasion by using transfer-pricing to sell product cheaply to a Cayman entity. Finance minister Sri Mulyani was later ousted
2010 Jun : Nathaniel Rothschild & Bakrie Group made US$3 B deal to list above Indon entities in LSE via Rothschild's shell company Vallar plc. Aim was to be create an Indon global resource company like BHP which have dual listing in home country and London.
("Vallar was the name of the coin given to the first Roman foot soldier who successfully stormed an enemy encampment and survived,” Rothshild told the WSJ in an interview in 2011
Rothshild did same 'reverse takeover' trick with another shell called Vallares in June 2011 with ex-BP fella and oil assets in Iraqi Kurdistan and made $230m - company renamed to Genel Energy plc in Nov 2011)
2010 Jul : Vallar plc raised GBP 707m @ 1000p/share in IPO. It then bought 85% of PT Berau for US$1.6B (= $740m + 52m shares @ 1000p) and 29% of PT Bumi for US$1.4B, and its name was changed to Bumi PLC in Aug 2011. Bakrie Group became largest shareholder with 48% of Bumi plc. Bumi plc price = 1000p
A report said Rothshild and 2 partners' original investment in Vallar was GBP20m but another report said Rothschild alone put in GBP 100m ($180m). One partner was ex-UBS banker, the other ex-head of coal mining in Anglo-American (so these fellas know what they are going after! Read also FT report in next link below)
http://ftalphaville.ft.com//2011/10/05/693766/bumi-and-the-bakrie-brothers/
Other big investors in Vallar include Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and Shroeders Bank
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/3a8cd690-1ebd-11e0-a1d1-00144feab49a.html#axzz28ckd7jlB
2011 Mar : Bakrie Group consolidated all their debts via $1.35 B loan (from 20 lenders) led by Credit Suisse backed by by 50m (about half of their 48%) Bumi plc shares at minimum price of 850p (otherwise breach covenant?)
2011 May : PT Bumi announced that it was in talks to repay its CIC loan early as part of wider plan to reduce financing costs. Why specifically mention Chinaman? Bumi plc price = 1440p (PEAK!)
2011 Sep : Global share market collapse caused Bumi plc share to drop to 850p & triggered margin call on Bakrie Group's loans. Rumour that Rothschild was looking for other Indon partners to replace Bakrie.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/14/us-rothschild-bakrie-idUSTRE7AC00420111114
2011 Oct : PT Bumi cancelled $2 B deal (announced in June 2011) to sell 75% of PT Bumi Resources Minerals to Bumi plc. PT BRM is 87% owned by PT Bumi. Plan was for Bumi plc to exchange it with $2B CB to PT Bumi which will in turn swap CB (coupon 2% & conversion price 1588p) with existing CIC loans costing 19% interest
2011 Oct 6 : Report that Credit Suisse sold Bakrie's PT Bumi shares in 'crossing trades' (i.e. off-martket sale) to the bank's own clients - wonder who? - of 1.2m lots @ Rp2,250 valued at IDR 1.36T (= US$150m)
http://en.bisnis.com/articles/bakrie-and-brothers-to-get-new-debt-to-refinance-us$597-million-loan
2011 Nov : Bakrie Group sold half of 48% share (at 1090p/share or 40% premium to market) in Bumi plc to PT Borneo Lumbung Energi (coking coal company controlled by Samin Tan) for US$1 B (financed by Standchart) to payoff most of $1.35 B debt to Credit Suisse. Bumi plc price = 750p; Coal spot price = $100/ton
2011 Nov : Rothschild made public via Financial Times his letter to PT Bumi CEO urging 'radical cleaning up' of PT Bumi and a timetable for the “repatriation of funds deposited with connected parties”. (CCK: because he was pissed he could not get his hands on Indon's share??)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/14/us-rothschild-bakrie-idUSTRE7AC00420111114
(Note: The FT is considered by many as the mouthpiece of the big money interests and often used to further their interests. See LIBOR manipulation writeup http://cckplanetblog.blogspot.sg/2012/07/libor-manipulation.html)
2011 Dec : Bumi plc wrote off its share of 'extensive development funds' (of $400m) in PT Bumi and an asset in PT Berau after its auditor PWC said they were 'unable to verify the underlying assets'. Writeoff = US$637m but rumours that total involved may be $1.1 B
2012 Feb : Indonesia government enacted law requiring at least 51% local ownership of mines by their 10th year of operation. Another law enacated in Jan stops export of some raw metals by 2014 (coal exempted)
http://www.4-traders.com/FREEPORT-MCMORAN-COPPER-12574/news/Indonesia-says-mine-rules-not-just-aimed-at-Freeport-14204612/
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/02/06/nat-rothschild-and-the-bakries-its-complicated/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/16/us-bumi-idUSTRE81F1H620120216
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-20/rothschild-likely-to-remain-on-bumi-plc-board-bakrie-group-says.html
2012 Mar : Bumi pls announced Rothshild ended co-chairman role - replaced by Samin Tan (PT Borneo Lumbung) - and became independent director, and 2011 loss of $282m (after adjusting operating profit of $280m with one-time writeoffs relating to setup of Bumi plc). Bumi plc price went up to 725p
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/03/28/bumi-plc-restructures-top-positions-end-infighting.html
2012 Apr : Bakrie breached loan covenant for $440m loan from Credit Suisse led lenders backed by 24% share in Bumi plc resulting in margin call of $100m. In June, Bakrie asked banks for more time to resolve financing issue. Bumi plc price fell 8.5% to 435p
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-23/bakrie-creditors-ask-for-extra-100-million-as-bumi-shares-fall.html
2012 H1 : Coal prices at Australia’s Newcastle port, an Asian benchmark, have fallen 21 percent this year as the Chinese economy slowed and after U.S. and South African producers shifted coal sales to Asia amid the debt crisis in Europe.
2012 Jun : PT Bumi announced contract to sell 50m tons in 2012 @ $80/ton (vs market forecast of $130-$140?)
2012 Aug : PT Bumi announced loss of US$322m for 2012H1 (vs $232 profit 2011H1), and that subsidiary PT Recapital failed to return $231m investment to the parent company. PT Bumi share dropped 12%. Bumi plc price = 300p; Coal price = $90/ton
2012 Sep 19 : PT Borneo reported to be in discussion to sell 20% stake in its coal mining unit to Posco for $500m to reduce its $1 B debt for Bumi plc deal
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/1-indonesia-miner-borneo-lumbung-105932916.html
2012 Sep 24 : Bumi plc announced start of investigation on above bad investment. Share price dropped from GBP 2.80 to 1.50. Indonesian directors of Bumi plc complained that they were not informed of that decision beforehand. Over next 2 days, S&P and Moody's cut their credit ratings on PT Bumi due to concerns about ability to repay debts. Bumi plc price = 150p
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/10452864
PT Bumi total long-term debt = $3.9B; $400m due 2013.
PT Bumi 2017 bonds with 10.5% coupons dropped by 25c to 68c giving effective interest of 20%!!
2012 Sep 27 : MSN report rumours that Bakrie and Tan may split due to all the problems and share price drop, and Tan may link up with Rothshild. (CCK: may be chinaman also found out he was being screwed by Indon!)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49194021/ns/business-world_business/t/exclusive-indonesias-bakries-could-split-tycoon-tan-over-bumi-dispute/
2012 Sep 27 : PT Bumi issued statement that "There is an attempt to damage the inherent value of our business by orchestrating internal issues publicly--for motives which appear dubious." (CCK: Just 3 years short of 200th anniversary of the 'Waterloo Screw'!)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-27/bumi-resources-questions-motives-of-london-probe-southeast-asia.html
A week laterm the President Director of PT Bumi who resigned as board memeber of Bumi plc said some thing similar to the Indonesian press
http://www.theindonesiatoday.com/news/finance-news/item/884-bumi-deplores-bumi-plc.html
2012 Oct 1 : Bakrie Group announced they will repay $437m loan to Credit Suisse
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/01/us-bakrie-debt-idUSBRE8900ED20121001?type=companyNews
2012 Oct 2 : PT Bumi issued statement that it is considering sale of assets and rights issue to accelearate pay off debts.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-02/bumi-resources-to-raise-cash-to-pay-debt-after-exchange-query.html
2012 Oct 8 : Report of talks to sell half of PT Fajar Bumi Sakti (FBS, a unit of PT Bumi) for $200m
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/09/us-bumi-sampoerna-idUSBRE89803120121009?feedType=RSS&feedName=innovationNews&rpc=43
http://www.theindonesiatoday.com/news/resources-news/resources-photo/item/887-bumi-to-divest-fajar-bumi-this-year.html
2012 Oct 12 : Bakries offered to buyback Bumi Plc's holdings in the Indonesian coal companies
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-11/bumi-plc-gets-proposal-from-bakrie-group-on-bumi-resources-swap.html
HISTORICAL NOTES :
For hundreds of years, big time financiers made big money by being bankers to big time borrowers by lending money to those people (especially sovereigns since they controlled the most assets but are the least financially savvy of the lot) with mining shares as collaterals and ending up taking over those hard assets and becoming filthy rich after the borrowers defaulted on their loans.
Examples were the Fuggers family of Europe in 15th century, Rothschilds in 17-18th century, and the Russian oligarghs of the 1990s (after collapse of USSR).
In the late 19th century after the invention of the petrol engine, petroleum oil was where the big money was and thus where the big financiers of that time (like Rockefellers and Rothschilds) were zooming in to control.
The Caspian region in Russia was then the largest producer of oil - that area produced half of the world's oil in 1900.
While the Rockefellers controlled most of the US oil market (which was therefore out of reach), the Rothschilds muscled into the Caspian region and later Indonesia (initially controlled by Royal Dutch Petroleum).
Even though the largest Caspian oil producer then was the Nobel family's Branobel - 'Brothers of Nobel' - (that's where the money for Nobel prizes came from), the Rothschilds' Royal Dutch Shell was 2nd largest and controlled 36% of its foreign exports.
Royal Dutch Shell was formed in 1907 when the Shell Transport and Trading Company (a shipping company owned by Rothschilds' agent Marcus Samuel to ship Caspian oil to Asia) merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum supposedly to counter competition from Standard Oil controlled by Rockefeller which were also trying to get to the oil assets outside of the US.
Shell bought the mining company Billiton in 1970 but sold it later to form BHP Billiton (who control this company?).
After Lenin nationalised the Caspian oil assets (which by then were 70% controlled by the Americans and west Europeans), the head of Shell (backed by who else?) announced that the Russian communists will not last more than 6 months. They obviously knew how much power they possessed.
During the Russian revolution, Lenin & his deputy Trotsky were not even in Russia i.e. the revolution was other people's work and not theirs. Lenin returned from Switzerland and Trotsky from US only after the revolution was successful. Like Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and al-Maliki of Iraq, they were 'posted' there by outside powers - as a result, 'return of favours' was expected.
The deal maker behind Vallar (later renamed Bumi plc), Nathaniel Philip Rothschild (Nat) is the youngest of four children and the only son of Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild. He is also the bearer of a name that links him indelibly with the 19th-century founder of the eponymous family bank: the buccaneering Nathan Mayer Rothschild.
Established in London via a Frankfurt ghetto, Nat’s Georgian ancestor built his fortune by shipping bullion to Wellington’s army in Portugal and Spain. In doing so, he cemented an image of savvy financier which has been associated with the family ever since. Legend has it that Nathan, on receiving news of Napoleon’s fate in the Battle of Waterloo (June 1815) in advance of the British government, sold stocks to cause market panic before buying them back on the cheap - news of Wellington's death was spread causing people to think that Britain had lost the battle and therefore dumped their London stocks.
Can see how some people get to buy things on the cheap? It is certainly not through hard work or fair play.
Life Lesson 1:
Great riches come from controlling rich resources and finances.
Most of the richest people/families in history get rich by controlling the extraction of key resources or financing such operations. Examples in history: Fuggers (15th century central European mining), Rothschilds (19th centruy Caspian Oil and Shell), Rockefellers (Standard Oil)
It is the reason why throughout history people invade foreign lands - to loot and control other people's resources. People like Alexander the Great, Arabs, Turks, Spanish Conquistadors etc invade Persia, Egypt etc. largely to loot the wealth (esp. gold and silver) of those rich empires.
Another example: Australia, despite their huge natural resources from their large island, still go to rob from East Timor. They did not support East Timor's independence from Indonesia in 1998 because of some moral reason. It was because large oil and gas deposits were discovered in the early 1990s in the seas between Australia and East Timor. In a dispute on who gets to own more of the resources there, it is always better to deal with a smaller and weaker country (East timor) compared to a larger one (Indonesia) - oil and gas fields do not follow man-made borders.
Similar example: Qatar's North Field (controlled by Exxon Mobil) and Iran's South Pars gas fields are part of the same natural gas structure. One can then see why some people want to keep Iran from selling oil and gas through sanctions (on pretext that Iran is developing nuclear arms etc.). 1 party drawing from an oil tank is better than 2 profiting from it - it is called 'monopoly'.
Life Lesson 2:
Banks make profits only if borrowers return their money with interest. Defaults or non-return of money bankrupt the banks.
For that reason, banks go to great lengths to make sure they get their money back and potential defaulters think thrice before doing so. That is why only big banks would lend money to big-time and powerful operators (like dirty Indonesian politicians). Only big banks can 'guarantee' protection of their loans - by buying influence in powerful countries and organisations which can help them get their money back or teach defaulters a 'lesson'.
There is a saying that 'if you owe the bank $100 it is your problem but if you owe the bank $100m it is the bank's problem!'
In condeming the various foreign invasions he was personally involved in, Smedley Butler (the most decorated military man in US history) said that 'War is a Racket' (also title of his book) and the US military acted as 'gangster for capitalism'.
http://ocoathkeepers.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/general-smedley-butler-war-is-a-racket/
Life Lesson 23
Good men always acknowledge and tell the truth, and speak up for what is right. (read Smedley Butler)
As of Sep 2012, Bumi PLC owns 85% of PT Berau and 29% of PT Bumi Resources (both listed in Jakarta Stock Exchange - JSE). Rothshild owns 12% of Bumi plc.
PT Bumi is largest thermal coal producer in Indonesia and world largest (10%) thermal coal exporter (Indonesia is 4th producer in world), and owns a 65 percent stake in Kaltim Prima Coal operation, or KPC, and 70 percent of the Arutmin mine (the other 30% of both companies owned by Tata Power Co. of India)
PT Berau is 5th largest coal producer in Indon.
My Read of What is Happening:
Those Indons screwed some whitemen (who probably got those assets cheap too) and their own country in 2001-03 by expropriating the assets for 'pennies on the dollar' (see American embassador's comments below)
Now either the Indons had been trying to screw the British Jew (by draining money from the Indon entities) or it is the other way round (by forcing Indons to sell cheap by pressing the Indon's share price and credit rating down, and triggering margin calls on the Indons whose callateralised shares may be sold off by their creditors - Credit Suisse - at low prices).
http://londonminingnetwork.org/2012/09/bumi-we-said-so-didnt-we/
If the former, the Indons will not get to live long!! With their shares listed in London, they would have to travel there regularly where the Jews will be able to get them (unless they sell off their London shares).
The latter possibility is backed by history - see Historical Notes at bottom - in fact, that was reportedly the view of the Bakries and their people (see chronology of events below).
In addition that 'kill' must be done before 2014 when the big brother of Bakrie Group will be standing for presidential election.
Whiteman - BHP used to own Bumi's Arutmin mine, Billiton used to be part of Shell in 1970s and the Rothshilds owns Shell - no doubt already eager for payback for the Bakries grabbing their assets in 2001-3. The Bakries must be politically neutered for this 'screw' to last (otherwise, they can always re-nationalise the assets again when they get to power!)
But the Indons seemingly got away by selling half their holding to chinaman (Tan) at 40% premium to market price. Question: why Chinaman paid premium to buy from distressed seller? Political pressure and/or to buy protection?
Then came rumours of split with between Chinaman and Indon, and Chinaman joining up with Rothshild to initiate the probe by Bumi plc (without Chinaman's vote, Jew & gang's vote is lesser than Indon & partner's) because Chinaman was not happy with 80% drop in value of his investment.
Or just a classic attempt to break-up the pairing?
To add on the pressure, Chinaman may also be squeezed by his creditor Standchart (since his $1B loan was also backed by the now 80% lower Bumi plc shares), and Jews offered him a deal he could not refuse...
A similar Indonesian view:
http://sahambumi.wordpress.com/category/bursa-bumi/
P/E Estimate = less than 5
2012 production: PT Bumi 45m tons; PT Berau 30m tons
Total Bumi plc share of production = 15m (29% PT Bumi) + 25m (85% PT Berau) = 40m tons
Assuming profit of $3/ton (out of coal price of $80-$120/ton),
profit attributable to Bumi plc = $3 x 40m = $120m giving PE of less than 5
(Bumi plc market cap is $550m based on 240m share @ 150p)
In 2011 Nov, Bumi plc announced target production of 140m tons/year by 2014 (PT Bumi 110m)
Operating margin is 30% but brought down by cost of financing.
Value Estimate based on coal reserves = at least $3 B = $12/share
Total coal reserves attributable to Bumi plc = 1 to 1.4 B tons or $3 to $4 B in profit (before other minerals)
PT Bumi coal reserves = 1.4 to 2.8 B tons. Bumi plc 30% share = 0.5 to 0.9 B tons
- marketing agents: Glencore for Arutmin; BHP for KPC
PT Berau reserves = 500m tons
Value estimate based on plan sale of FBS (2012 Oct 8) = $120/share
FBS has 14m tons of coal reserves, giving value per ton of $200m/7m tons = $30/ton
implying that value of Bumi plc's share of coal reserves (1B tons) = $30 B!
Value Estimate based on market cap of underlying = 30% of $700 + $500m = $730m = $2.5/share
Holding Structure:
Profit NAV (2011)
$200m $700m - PT Bumi (29%)
- PT KPC (65%)
- PT Arutmin (75%)
? - PT Recapital (?%)
- PT Bumi Resorces Minerals (87% with historical book value of $1.5B)
- Newmont Nusa Tenggara(24%) + other mines
- Gallo Oil (20%) in Yemen - sold @ $280m write off in 2011Q1
$130m $500m - PT Berau (85%)
Shareholding as of Oct 2012:
- Bakries (24%)
- Roeslani (10%?) - Bakrie's partner
- Samin Tan (24%)
- Rothschild (12%)
- Others like Blackrock, Shroeders, ADIA? (13%)
Analyst estimates:
2011Q1 Merril on PT Bumi: PE=10 @ Rp2,900
BUMI's CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS:
1998 : Bakrie family defaulted on loans during Asian Financial Crisis. Credit Suisse gave lifeline
2001-2003 : Bakrie family used borrowed money to take over KPC from Rio Tinto and BP for $500m, and Arutmin from BHP for $190m with the help of 'pressure from nationalists to divest the assets to local interests'
("Our contacts at the time told us these deals undervalued the companies at pennies on the dollar," said the U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, Cameron Hume, in a November 2007 classified diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks. Bakrie group executives, Hume added, have said they hoped to do more of these "value-oriented acquisitions."
"In the mining sector, cabinet minister Aburizal Bakrie has been most successful in using nationalism for his private personal gain," Hume noted in that cable.)
200?? : Bakrie family then sold the assets to Bakrie Group which then listed their coal holdings in PT Berau & PT Bumi in JSE. PT Bumi was bought from Bakrie family at $3.4B.
2005: Coal price = $36/ton
2006 Sep : US$3.2 B deal to sell PT Bumi to Samin Tan's company aborted. If successful, it would have made Bakrie family $2.5 B (their cost was $700m - see above)! Coal price = $52/ton
(Samin Tan used to work for HTM which was auditor for Indonesia's 1997 Crisis bank restructuring body IBRA)
2006 Dec : Drilling by Bakrie owned gas exploration company Lapindo Brantas resulted in 'Lapindo mud flow' with mud hole less than 500m from company's exploration well
2008 : Financial Crisis forced Bakrie Group to sell assets etc to answer margin call of $1.2 B. China Investment Corp (CIC) lent PT Bumi US$1.9 B @ 12% and LIBOR +6.67% (after Chinalco failed to purchase a stake in BHP Billiton because of political objections). Other PT Bumi loans @ 10%-12%
2008 Nov : Bakrie Group sold 35% of PT Bumi for $1.35 B (& supposedly at 61% discount from what Bakrie Group paid to Bakrie family) to PT Tambang Batubara Bukit Assam & TPG affiliate Northstar (which also controls PT Bank Tabungan Pensiunan, lender to Indonesia state pension fund)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a3BbI81lzcPA
2009 Feb : Report of Northstar plan to convert bonds into share in PT Bakrie & Brothers and PT Bumi
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/business/northstar-to-convert-trikomsel-bonds-into-equity/308658
2009 Nov : PT Multicapital (a subsiidiary of PT Bumi) led a consortium to buy 24% of Newmont Nusa Tenggara which owns Batu Hijau (gold & copper) mine and other proven copper and gold reserves (all valued at $3.5B conservatively). Also, report of plan by PT Recapital (of Bakrie Group) to buy major stake in PT Berau for $1.5B
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/business/the-bakrie-group-coal-hard-cash-and-chinese-whispers/345131
2010 May : Indon tax authority charged PT Kaltim Prima Coal (KPC) of tax evasion by using transfer-pricing to sell product cheaply to a Cayman entity. Finance minister Sri Mulyani was later ousted
2010 Jun : Nathaniel Rothschild & Bakrie Group made US$3 B deal to list above Indon entities in LSE via Rothschild's shell company Vallar plc. Aim was to be create an Indon global resource company like BHP which have dual listing in home country and London.
("Vallar was the name of the coin given to the first Roman foot soldier who successfully stormed an enemy encampment and survived,” Rothshild told the WSJ in an interview in 2011
Rothshild did same 'reverse takeover' trick with another shell called Vallares in June 2011 with ex-BP fella and oil assets in Iraqi Kurdistan and made $230m - company renamed to Genel Energy plc in Nov 2011)
2010 Jul : Vallar plc raised GBP 707m @ 1000p/share in IPO. It then bought 85% of PT Berau for US$1.6B (= $740m + 52m shares @ 1000p) and 29% of PT Bumi for US$1.4B, and its name was changed to Bumi PLC in Aug 2011. Bakrie Group became largest shareholder with 48% of Bumi plc. Bumi plc price = 1000p
A report said Rothshild and 2 partners' original investment in Vallar was GBP20m but another report said Rothschild alone put in GBP 100m ($180m). One partner was ex-UBS banker, the other ex-head of coal mining in Anglo-American (so these fellas know what they are going after! Read also FT report in next link below)
http://ftalphaville.ft.com//2011/10/05/693766/bumi-and-the-bakrie-brothers/
Other big investors in Vallar include Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and Shroeders Bank
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/3a8cd690-1ebd-11e0-a1d1-00144feab49a.html#axzz28ckd7jlB
2011 Mar : Bakrie Group consolidated all their debts via $1.35 B loan (from 20 lenders) led by Credit Suisse backed by by 50m (about half of their 48%) Bumi plc shares at minimum price of 850p (otherwise breach covenant?)
2011 May : PT Bumi announced that it was in talks to repay its CIC loan early as part of wider plan to reduce financing costs. Why specifically mention Chinaman? Bumi plc price = 1440p (PEAK!)
2011 Sep : Global share market collapse caused Bumi plc share to drop to 850p & triggered margin call on Bakrie Group's loans. Rumour that Rothschild was looking for other Indon partners to replace Bakrie.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/14/us-rothschild-bakrie-idUSTRE7AC00420111114
2011 Oct : PT Bumi cancelled $2 B deal (announced in June 2011) to sell 75% of PT Bumi Resources Minerals to Bumi plc. PT BRM is 87% owned by PT Bumi. Plan was for Bumi plc to exchange it with $2B CB to PT Bumi which will in turn swap CB (coupon 2% & conversion price 1588p) with existing CIC loans costing 19% interest
2011 Oct 6 : Report that Credit Suisse sold Bakrie's PT Bumi shares in 'crossing trades' (i.e. off-martket sale) to the bank's own clients - wonder who? - of 1.2m lots @ Rp2,250 valued at IDR 1.36T (= US$150m)
http://en.bisnis.com/articles/bakrie-and-brothers-to-get-new-debt-to-refinance-us$597-million-loan
2011 Nov : Bakrie Group sold half of 48% share (at 1090p/share or 40% premium to market) in Bumi plc to PT Borneo Lumbung Energi (coking coal company controlled by Samin Tan) for US$1 B (financed by Standchart) to payoff most of $1.35 B debt to Credit Suisse. Bumi plc price = 750p; Coal spot price = $100/ton
2011 Nov : Rothschild made public via Financial Times his letter to PT Bumi CEO urging 'radical cleaning up' of PT Bumi and a timetable for the “repatriation of funds deposited with connected parties”. (CCK: because he was pissed he could not get his hands on Indon's share??)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/14/us-rothschild-bakrie-idUSTRE7AC00420111114
(Note: The FT is considered by many as the mouthpiece of the big money interests and often used to further their interests. See LIBOR manipulation writeup http://cckplanetblog.blogspot.sg/2012/07/libor-manipulation.html)
2011 Dec : Bumi plc wrote off its share of 'extensive development funds' (of $400m) in PT Bumi and an asset in PT Berau after its auditor PWC said they were 'unable to verify the underlying assets'. Writeoff = US$637m but rumours that total involved may be $1.1 B
2012 Feb : Indonesia government enacted law requiring at least 51% local ownership of mines by their 10th year of operation. Another law enacated in Jan stops export of some raw metals by 2014 (coal exempted)
http://www.4-traders.com/FREEPORT-MCMORAN-COPPER-12574/news/Indonesia-says-mine-rules-not-just-aimed-at-Freeport-14204612/
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/02/06/nat-rothschild-and-the-bakries-its-complicated/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/16/us-bumi-idUSTRE81F1H620120216
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-20/rothschild-likely-to-remain-on-bumi-plc-board-bakrie-group-says.html
2012 Mar : Bumi pls announced Rothshild ended co-chairman role - replaced by Samin Tan (PT Borneo Lumbung) - and became independent director, and 2011 loss of $282m (after adjusting operating profit of $280m with one-time writeoffs relating to setup of Bumi plc). Bumi plc price went up to 725p
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/03/28/bumi-plc-restructures-top-positions-end-infighting.html
2012 Apr : Bakrie breached loan covenant for $440m loan from Credit Suisse led lenders backed by 24% share in Bumi plc resulting in margin call of $100m. In June, Bakrie asked banks for more time to resolve financing issue. Bumi plc price fell 8.5% to 435p
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-23/bakrie-creditors-ask-for-extra-100-million-as-bumi-shares-fall.html
2012 H1 : Coal prices at Australia’s Newcastle port, an Asian benchmark, have fallen 21 percent this year as the Chinese economy slowed and after U.S. and South African producers shifted coal sales to Asia amid the debt crisis in Europe.
2012 Jun : PT Bumi announced contract to sell 50m tons in 2012 @ $80/ton (vs market forecast of $130-$140?)
2012 Aug : PT Bumi announced loss of US$322m for 2012H1 (vs $232 profit 2011H1), and that subsidiary PT Recapital failed to return $231m investment to the parent company. PT Bumi share dropped 12%. Bumi plc price = 300p; Coal price = $90/ton
2012 Sep 19 : PT Borneo reported to be in discussion to sell 20% stake in its coal mining unit to Posco for $500m to reduce its $1 B debt for Bumi plc deal
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/1-indonesia-miner-borneo-lumbung-105932916.html
2012 Sep 24 : Bumi plc announced start of investigation on above bad investment. Share price dropped from GBP 2.80 to 1.50. Indonesian directors of Bumi plc complained that they were not informed of that decision beforehand. Over next 2 days, S&P and Moody's cut their credit ratings on PT Bumi due to concerns about ability to repay debts. Bumi plc price = 150p
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/10452864
PT Bumi total long-term debt = $3.9B; $400m due 2013.
PT Bumi 2017 bonds with 10.5% coupons dropped by 25c to 68c giving effective interest of 20%!!
2012 Sep 27 : MSN report rumours that Bakrie and Tan may split due to all the problems and share price drop, and Tan may link up with Rothshild. (CCK: may be chinaman also found out he was being screwed by Indon!)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49194021/ns/business-world_business/t/exclusive-indonesias-bakries-could-split-tycoon-tan-over-bumi-dispute/
2012 Sep 27 : PT Bumi issued statement that "There is an attempt to damage the inherent value of our business by orchestrating internal issues publicly--for motives which appear dubious." (CCK: Just 3 years short of 200th anniversary of the 'Waterloo Screw'!)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-27/bumi-resources-questions-motives-of-london-probe-southeast-asia.html
A week laterm the President Director of PT Bumi who resigned as board memeber of Bumi plc said some thing similar to the Indonesian press
http://www.theindonesiatoday.com/news/finance-news/item/884-bumi-deplores-bumi-plc.html
2012 Oct 1 : Bakrie Group announced they will repay $437m loan to Credit Suisse
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/01/us-bakrie-debt-idUSBRE8900ED20121001?type=companyNews
2012 Oct 2 : PT Bumi issued statement that it is considering sale of assets and rights issue to accelearate pay off debts.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-02/bumi-resources-to-raise-cash-to-pay-debt-after-exchange-query.html
2012 Oct 8 : Report of talks to sell half of PT Fajar Bumi Sakti (FBS, a unit of PT Bumi) for $200m
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/09/us-bumi-sampoerna-idUSBRE89803120121009?feedType=RSS&feedName=innovationNews&rpc=43
http://www.theindonesiatoday.com/news/resources-news/resources-photo/item/887-bumi-to-divest-fajar-bumi-this-year.html
2012 Oct 12 : Bakries offered to buyback Bumi Plc's holdings in the Indonesian coal companies
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-11/bumi-plc-gets-proposal-from-bakrie-group-on-bumi-resources-swap.html
HISTORICAL NOTES :
For hundreds of years, big time financiers made big money by being bankers to big time borrowers by lending money to those people (especially sovereigns since they controlled the most assets but are the least financially savvy of the lot) with mining shares as collaterals and ending up taking over those hard assets and becoming filthy rich after the borrowers defaulted on their loans.
Examples were the Fuggers family of Europe in 15th century, Rothschilds in 17-18th century, and the Russian oligarghs of the 1990s (after collapse of USSR).
In the late 19th century after the invention of the petrol engine, petroleum oil was where the big money was and thus where the big financiers of that time (like Rockefellers and Rothschilds) were zooming in to control.
The Caspian region in Russia was then the largest producer of oil - that area produced half of the world's oil in 1900.
While the Rockefellers controlled most of the US oil market (which was therefore out of reach), the Rothschilds muscled into the Caspian region and later Indonesia (initially controlled by Royal Dutch Petroleum).
Even though the largest Caspian oil producer then was the Nobel family's Branobel - 'Brothers of Nobel' - (that's where the money for Nobel prizes came from), the Rothschilds' Royal Dutch Shell was 2nd largest and controlled 36% of its foreign exports.
Royal Dutch Shell was formed in 1907 when the Shell Transport and Trading Company (a shipping company owned by Rothschilds' agent Marcus Samuel to ship Caspian oil to Asia) merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum supposedly to counter competition from Standard Oil controlled by Rockefeller which were also trying to get to the oil assets outside of the US.
Shell bought the mining company Billiton in 1970 but sold it later to form BHP Billiton (who control this company?).
After Lenin nationalised the Caspian oil assets (which by then were 70% controlled by the Americans and west Europeans), the head of Shell (backed by who else?) announced that the Russian communists will not last more than 6 months. They obviously knew how much power they possessed.
During the Russian revolution, Lenin & his deputy Trotsky were not even in Russia i.e. the revolution was other people's work and not theirs. Lenin returned from Switzerland and Trotsky from US only after the revolution was successful. Like Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and al-Maliki of Iraq, they were 'posted' there by outside powers - as a result, 'return of favours' was expected.
The deal maker behind Vallar (later renamed Bumi plc), Nathaniel Philip Rothschild (Nat) is the youngest of four children and the only son of Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild. He is also the bearer of a name that links him indelibly with the 19th-century founder of the eponymous family bank: the buccaneering Nathan Mayer Rothschild.
Established in London via a Frankfurt ghetto, Nat’s Georgian ancestor built his fortune by shipping bullion to Wellington’s army in Portugal and Spain. In doing so, he cemented an image of savvy financier which has been associated with the family ever since. Legend has it that Nathan, on receiving news of Napoleon’s fate in the Battle of Waterloo (June 1815) in advance of the British government, sold stocks to cause market panic before buying them back on the cheap - news of Wellington's death was spread causing people to think that Britain had lost the battle and therefore dumped their London stocks.
Can see how some people get to buy things on the cheap? It is certainly not through hard work or fair play.
Life Lesson 1:
Great riches come from controlling rich resources and finances.
Most of the richest people/families in history get rich by controlling the extraction of key resources or financing such operations. Examples in history: Fuggers (15th century central European mining), Rothschilds (19th centruy Caspian Oil and Shell), Rockefellers (Standard Oil)
It is the reason why throughout history people invade foreign lands - to loot and control other people's resources. People like Alexander the Great, Arabs, Turks, Spanish Conquistadors etc invade Persia, Egypt etc. largely to loot the wealth (esp. gold and silver) of those rich empires.
Another example: Australia, despite their huge natural resources from their large island, still go to rob from East Timor. They did not support East Timor's independence from Indonesia in 1998 because of some moral reason. It was because large oil and gas deposits were discovered in the early 1990s in the seas between Australia and East Timor. In a dispute on who gets to own more of the resources there, it is always better to deal with a smaller and weaker country (East timor) compared to a larger one (Indonesia) - oil and gas fields do not follow man-made borders.
Similar example: Qatar's North Field (controlled by Exxon Mobil) and Iran's South Pars gas fields are part of the same natural gas structure. One can then see why some people want to keep Iran from selling oil and gas through sanctions (on pretext that Iran is developing nuclear arms etc.). 1 party drawing from an oil tank is better than 2 profiting from it - it is called 'monopoly'.
Life Lesson 2:
Banks make profits only if borrowers return their money with interest. Defaults or non-return of money bankrupt the banks.
For that reason, banks go to great lengths to make sure they get their money back and potential defaulters think thrice before doing so. That is why only big banks would lend money to big-time and powerful operators (like dirty Indonesian politicians). Only big banks can 'guarantee' protection of their loans - by buying influence in powerful countries and organisations which can help them get their money back or teach defaulters a 'lesson'.
There is a saying that 'if you owe the bank $100 it is your problem but if you owe the bank $100m it is the bank's problem!'
In condeming the various foreign invasions he was personally involved in, Smedley Butler (the most decorated military man in US history) said that 'War is a Racket' (also title of his book) and the US military acted as 'gangster for capitalism'.
http://ocoathkeepers.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/general-smedley-butler-war-is-a-racket/
Life Lesson 23
Good men always acknowledge and tell the truth, and speak up for what is right. (read Smedley Butler)
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
An American View on Living the American Lie
Enligthening. Such people has the great ability of putting things in perspective. See how he checks what is reported on media against what he sees with his own eyes, reconciles the two and against history, and draws the proper conclusions. 'Blindmen and the Elephant' in display...
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/james-quinn/are-you-seeing-what-im-seeing
Are You Seeing What I'm Seeing?
By James Quinn 09/18/2012
Is it just me, or are the signs of consumer collapse as clear as a Lowes parking lot on a Saturday afternoon? Sometimes I wonder if I'm just seeing the world through my pessimistic lens, skewing my point of view. My daily commute through West Philadelphia is not very enlightening, as the squalor, filth and lack of legal commerce remain consistent from year to year. This community is sustained by taxpayer subsidized low income housing, taxpayer subsidized food stamps, welfare payments, and illegal drug dealing. The dependency attitude, lifestyles of slothfulness and total lack of commerce has remained constant for decades in West Philly. It is on the weekends, cruising around a once thriving suburbia, where you perceive the persistent deterioration and decay of our debt fixated consumer spending based society.
The last two weekends I’ve needed to travel the highways of Montgomery County, PA going to a family party and purchasing a garbage disposal for my sink at my local Lowes store. Montgomery County is the typical white upper middle class suburb, with tracts of McMansions dotting the landscape. The population of 800,000 is spread over a 500 square mile area. Over 81% of the population is white, with the 9% black population confined to the urban enclaves of Norristown and Pottstown.
The median age is 38 and the median household income is $75,000, 50% above the national average. The employers are well diversified with an even distribution between education, health care, manufacturing, retail, professional services, finance and real estate. The median home price is $300,000, also 50% above the national average. The county leans Democrat, with Obama winning 60% of the vote in 2008. The 300,000 households were occupied by college educated white collar professionals. From a strictly demographic standpoint, Montgomery County appears to be a prosperous flourishing community where the residents are living lives of relative affluence. But, if you look closer and connect the dots, you see fissures in this façade of affluence that spread more expansively by the day. The cheap oil based, automobile dependent, mall centric, suburban sprawl, sanctuary of consumerism lifestyle is showing distinct signs of erosion. The clues are there for all to see and portend a bleak future for those mentally trapped in the delusions of a debt dependent suburban oasis of retail outlets, chain restaurants, office parks and enclaves of cookie cutter McMansions. An unsustainable paradigm can’t be sustained.
The first weekend had me driving along Ridge Pike, from Collegeville to Pottstown. Ridge Pike is a meandering two lane road that extends from Philadelphia, winds through Conshohocken, Plymouth Meeting, Norristown, past Ursinus College in Collegeville, to the farthest reaches of Montgomery County, at least 50 miles in length. It served as a main artery prior to the introduction of the interstates and superhighways that now connect the larger cities in eastern PA. Except for morning and evening rush hours, this road is fairly sedate. Like many primary routes in suburbia, the landscape is engulfed by strip malls, gas stations, automobile dealerships, office buildings, fast food joints, once thriving manufacturing facilities sitting vacant and older homes that preceded the proliferation of cookie cutter communities that now dominate what was once farmland.
I should probably be keeping my eyes on the road, but I can’t help but notice the telltale signs of an economic system gone haywire. As you drive along, the number of For Sale signs in front of homes stands out. When you consider how bad the housing market has been, the 40% decline in national home prices since 2007, the 30% of home dwellers underwater on their mortgage, and declining household income, you realize how desperate a home seller must be to try and unload a home in this market. The reality of the number of For Sale signs does not match the rhetoric coming from the NAR, government mouthpieces, CNBC pundits, and other housing recovery shills about record low inventory and home price increases.
The Federal Reserve/Wall Street/U.S. Treasury charade of foreclosure delaying tactics and selling thousands of properties in bulk to their crony capitalist buddies at a discount is designed to misinform the public. My local paper lists foreclosures in the community every Monday morning. In 2009 it would extend for four full pages. Today, it still extends four full pages. The fact that Wall Street bankers have criminally forged mortgage documents, people are living in houses for two years without making mortgage payments, and the Federal Government backing 97% of all mortgages while encouraging 3.5% down financing does not constitute a true housing recovery. Show me the housing recovery in these charts.
Existing home sales are at 1998 levels, with 45 million more people living in the country today.
New single family homes under construction are below levels in 1969, when there were 112 million less people in the country.
Another observation that can be made as you cruise through this suburban mecca of malaise is the overall decay of the infrastructure, appearances and disinterest or inability to maintain properties. The roadways are potholed with fading traffic lines, utility poles leaning and rotting, and signage corroding and antiquated. Houses are missing roof tiles, siding is cracked, gutters astray, porches sagging, windows cracked, a paint brush hasn’t been utilized in decades, and yards are inundated with debris and weeds. Not every house looks this way, but far more than you would think when viewing the overall demographics for Montgomery County. You wonder how many number among the 10 million vacant houses in the country today. The number of dilapidated run down properties paints a picture of the silent, barely perceptible Depression that grips the country today. With such little sense of community in the suburbs, most people don’t even know their neighbors. With the electronic transfer of food stamps, unemployment compensation, and other welfare benefits you would never know that your neighbor is unemployed and hasn’t made the mortgage payment on his house in 30 months. The corporate fascist ruling plutocracy uses their propaganda mouthpieces in the mainstream corporate media and government agency drones to misinform and obscure the truth, but the data and anecdotal observational evidence reveal the true nature of our societal implosion.
A report by the Census Bureau this past week inadvertently reveals data that confirms my observations on the roadways of my suburban existence. Annual household income fell in 2011 for the fourth straight year, to an inflation-adjusted $50,054. The median income — meaning half earned more, half less — now stands 8.9% lower than the all-time peak of $54,932 in 1999. It is far worse than even that dreadful result. Real median household income is lower than it was in 1989. When you understand that real household income hasn’t risen in 23 years, you can connect the dots with the decay and deterioration of properties in suburbia. A vast swath of Americans cannot afford to maintain their residences. If the choice is feeding your kids and keeping the heat on versus repairing the porch, replacing the windows or getting a new roof, the only option is survival.
All races have seen their income fall, with educational achievement reflected in the much higher incomes of Whites and Asians. It is interesting to note that after a 45 year War on Poverty the median household income for black families is only up 19% since 1968.
Now for the really bad news. Any critical thinking person should realize the Federal Government has been systematically under-reporting inflation since the early 1980’s in an effort to obscure the fact they are debasing the currency and methodically destroying the lives of middle class Americans. If inflation was calculated exactly as it was in 1980, the GDP figures would be substantially lower and inflation would be reported 5% higher than it is today. Faking the numbers does not change reality, only the perception of reality. Calculating real median household income with the true level of inflation exposes the true picture for middle class America. Real median household income is lower than it was in 1970, just prior to Nixon closing the gold window and unleashing the full fury of a Federal Reserve able to print fiat currency and politicians to promise the earth, moon and the sun to voters. With incomes not rising over the last four decades is it any wonder many of our 115 million households slowly rot and decay from within like an old diseased oak tree. The slightest gust of wind can lead to disaster.
Eliminating the last remnants of fiscal discipline on bankers and politicians in 1971 accomplished the desired result of enriching the top 0.1% while leaving the bottom 90% in debt and desolation. The Wall Street debt peddlers, Military Industrial arms dealers, and job destroying corporate goliaths have reaped the benefits of financialization (money printing) while shoveling the costs, their gambling losses, trillions of consumer debt, and relentless inflation upon the working tax paying middle class. The creation of the Federal Reserve and implementation of the individual income tax in 1913, along with leaving the gold standard has rewarded the cabal of private banking interests who have captured our economic and political systems with obscene levels of wealth, while senior citizens are left with no interest earnings ($400 billion per year has been absconded from savers and doled out to bankers since 2008 by Ben Bernanke) and the middle class has gone decades seeing their earnings stagnate and their purchasing power fall precipitously.
The facts exposed in the chart above didn’t happen by accident. The system has been rigged by those in power to enrich them, while impoverishing the masses. When you gain control over the issuance of currency, issuance of debt, tax system, political system and legal apparatus, you’ve essentially hijacked the country and can funnel all the benefits to yourself and costs to the math challenged, government educated, brainwashed dupes, known as the masses. But there is a problem for the .01%. Their sociopathic personalities never allow them to stop plundering and preying upon the sheep. They have left nothing but carcasses of the once proud hard working middle class across the country side. There are only so many Lear jets, estates in the Hamptons, Jaguars, and Rolexes the .01% can buy. There are only 152,000 of them. Their sociopathic looting and pillaging of the national wealth has destroyed the host. When 90% of the population can barely subsist, collapse and revolution beckon.
What you can’t ignore today is the number of vacant storefronts in these strip malls and the overwhelming number of SPACE AVAILABLE, FOR LEASE, and FOR RENT signs that proliferate in front of these dying testaments to an unsustainable economic system based upon debt fueled consumer spending and infinite growth assumptions. The booming sign manufacturer is surely based in China. The officially reported national vacancy rates of 11% are already at record highs, but anyone with two eyes knows these self-reported numbers are a fraud. Vacancy rates based on my observations are closer to 30%. This is part of the extend and pretend strategy that has been implemented by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, the FASB, and the Wall Street banking cabal. The fraud and false storyline of a commercial real estate recovery is evident to anyone willing to think critically. The incriminating data is provided by the Federal Reserve in their Quarterly Delinquency Report.
The last commercial real estate crisis occurred in 1991. Mall vacancy rates were at levels consistent with today.
The current reported office vacancy rates of 17.5% are only slightly below the 19% levels of 1991.
As reported by the Federal Reserve, delinquency rates on commercial real estate loans in 1991 were 12%, leading to major losses among the banks that made those imprudent loans. Amazingly, after the greatest financial collapse in history, delinquency rates on commercial loans supposedly peaked at 8.8% in the 2nd quarter of 2010 and have now miraculously plummeted to pre-collapse levels of 4.9%. This is while residential loan delinquencies have resumed their upward trajectory, the number of employed Americans has fallen by 414,000 in the last two months, 9 million Americans have left the labor force since 2008, and vacancy rates are at or near all-time highs. This doesn’t pass the smell test. The Federal Reserve, owned and controlled by the Wall Street, instructed these banks to extend all commercial real estate loans, pretend they will be paid, and value them on their books at 100% of the original loan amount. Real estate developers pretend they are collecting rent from non-existent tenants, Wall Street banks pretend they are being paid by the developers, and their highly compensated public accounting firm pretends the loans aren’t really delinquent. Again, the purpose of this scam is to shield the Wall Street bankers from accepting the losses from their reckless behavior. Ben rewards them with risk free income on their deposits, propped up by mark to fantasy accounting, while they reward themselves with billions in bonuses for a job well done. The master plan requires an eventual real recovery that isn’t going to happen. Press releases and fake data do not change the reality on the ground.
I have two strip malls within three miles of my house that opened in 1990. When I moved to the area in 1995, they were 100% occupied and a vital part of the community. The closest center has since lost its Genuardi grocery store, Sears Hardware, Blockbuster, Donatos, Sears Optical, Hollywood Tans, hair salon, pizza pub and a local book store. It is essentially a ghost mall, with two banks, a couple chain restaurants and empty parking spaces. The other strip mall lost its grocery store anchor and sporting goods store. This has happened in an outwardly prosperous community. The reality is the apparent prosperity is a sham. The entire tottering edifice of housing, autos, and retail has been sustained by ever increasing levels of debt for the last thirty years and the American consumer has hit the wall. From 1950 through the early 1980s, when the working middle class saw their standard of living rise, personal consumption expenditures accounted for between 60% and 65% of GDP. Over the last thirty years consumption has relentlessly grown as a percentage of GDP to its current level of 71%, higher than before the 2008 collapse.
If the consumption had been driven by wage increases, then this trend would not have been a problem. But, we already know real median household income is lower than it was in 1970. The thirty years of delusion were financed with debt - peddled, hawked, marketed, and pushed by the drug dealers on Wall Street. The American people got hooked on debt and still have not kicked the habit. The decline in household debt since 2008 is solely due to the Wall Street banks writing off $800 billion of mortgage, credit card, and auto loan debt and transferring the cost to the already drowning American taxpayer.
The powers that be are desperately attempting to keep this unsustainable, dysfunctional debt choked scheme from disintegrating by doling out more subprime auto debt, subprime student loan debt, low down payment mortgages, and good old credit card debt. It won’t work. The consumer is tapped out. Last week’s horrific retail sales report for August confirmed this fact. Declining household income and rising costs for energy, food, clothing, tuition, taxes, health insurance, and the other things needed to survive in the real world, have broken the spirit of Middle America. The protracted implosion of our consumer society has only just begun. There are thousands of retail outlets to be closed, hundreds of thousands of jobs to be eliminated, thousands of malls to be demolished, and billions of loan losses to be incurred by the criminal Wall Street banks.
My trip to my local Lowes last weekend gave me a glimpse into a future of failure and futility. Until 2009, I had four choices of Lowes within 15 miles of my house. There was a store 8 miles east, 12 miles west, 15 miles north, and 15 miles south of my house. In an act of supreme hubris, Lowes opened a stores smack in the middle of these four stores, four miles from my house. The Hatfield store opened in early 2009 and I wrote an article detailing how Lowes was about to ruin their profitability in Montgomery County. It just so happens that I meet a couple of my old real estate buddies from IKEA at a local pub every few months. In 2009 one of them had a real estate position with Lowes and we had a spirited discussion about the prospects for the Lowes Hatfield store. He assured me it would be a huge success. I insisted it would be a dud and would crush the profitability of the market by cannibalizing the other four stores. We met at that same pub a few months ago. Lowes had laid him off and he admitted to me the Hatfield store was a disaster.
I pulled into the Lowes parking lot at 11:30 am on a Saturday. Big Box retailers do 50% of their business on the weekend. The busiest time frame is from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm on Saturday. Big box retailers build enough parking spots to handle this peak period. The 120,000 square feet Hatfield Lowes has approximately 1,000 parking spaces. I pulled into the spot closest to the entrance during their supposed peak period. There were about 70 cars in the parking lot, with most probably owned by Lowes workers. It is a pleasure to shop in this store, with wide open aisles, and an employee to customer ratio of four to one. The store has 14 checkout lanes and at peak period on a Saturday, there was ONE checkout lane open, with no lines. This is a corporate profit disaster in the making, but the human tragedy far overrides the declining profits of this mega-retailer.
As you walk around this museum of tools and toilets you notice the looks on the faces of the workers. These aren’t the tattooed, face pierced freaks you find in many retail establishments these days. They are my neighbors. They are the beaten down middle class. They are the middle aged professionals who got cast aside by the mega-corporations in the name of efficiency, outsourcing, right sizing, stock buybacks, and executive stock options. The irony of this situation is lost on those who have gutted the American middle class. When you look into the eyes of these people, you see sadness, confusion and embarrassment. They know they can do more. They want to do more. They know they’ve been screwed, but they aren’t sure who to blame. They were once the very customers propelling Lowes’ growth, buying new kitchens, appliances, and power tools. Now they can’t afford a can of paint on their $10 per hour, no benefit retail careers. As depressing as this portrait appears, it is about to get worse.
This Lowes will be shut down and boarded up within the next two years. The parking lot will become a weed infested eyesore occupied by 14 year old skateboarders. One hundred and fifty already down on their luck neighbors will lose their jobs, the township will have a gaping hole in their tax revenue, and the CEO of Lowes will receive a $50 million bonus for his foresight in announcing the closing of 100 stores that he had opened five years before. This exact scenario will play out across suburbia, as our unsustainable system comes undone. Our future path will parallel the course of the labor participation rate. Just as the 9 million Americans who have “left” the labor force since 2008 did not willfully make that choice, the debt burdened American consumer will be dragged kicking and screaming into the new reality of a dramatically reduced standard of living.
Connecting the dots between my anecdotal observations of suburbia and a critical review of the true non-manipulated data bestows me with a not optimistic outlook for the coming decade. Is what I’m seeing just the view of a pessimist, or are you seeing the same thing?
A few powerful men have hijacked our economic, financial and political structure. They aren’t socialists or capitalists. They’re criminals. They created the culture of materialism, greed and debt, sustained by prodigious levels of media propaganda. Our culture has been led to believe that debt financed consumption over morality and justice is the path to success. In reality, we’ve condemned ourselves to a slow painful death spiral of debasement and despair.
“A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” - Chris Hedges
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/james-quinn/are-you-seeing-what-im-seeing
Are You Seeing What I'm Seeing?
By James Quinn 09/18/2012
Is it just me, or are the signs of consumer collapse as clear as a Lowes parking lot on a Saturday afternoon? Sometimes I wonder if I'm just seeing the world through my pessimistic lens, skewing my point of view. My daily commute through West Philadelphia is not very enlightening, as the squalor, filth and lack of legal commerce remain consistent from year to year. This community is sustained by taxpayer subsidized low income housing, taxpayer subsidized food stamps, welfare payments, and illegal drug dealing. The dependency attitude, lifestyles of slothfulness and total lack of commerce has remained constant for decades in West Philly. It is on the weekends, cruising around a once thriving suburbia, where you perceive the persistent deterioration and decay of our debt fixated consumer spending based society.
The last two weekends I’ve needed to travel the highways of Montgomery County, PA going to a family party and purchasing a garbage disposal for my sink at my local Lowes store. Montgomery County is the typical white upper middle class suburb, with tracts of McMansions dotting the landscape. The population of 800,000 is spread over a 500 square mile area. Over 81% of the population is white, with the 9% black population confined to the urban enclaves of Norristown and Pottstown.
The median age is 38 and the median household income is $75,000, 50% above the national average. The employers are well diversified with an even distribution between education, health care, manufacturing, retail, professional services, finance and real estate. The median home price is $300,000, also 50% above the national average. The county leans Democrat, with Obama winning 60% of the vote in 2008. The 300,000 households were occupied by college educated white collar professionals. From a strictly demographic standpoint, Montgomery County appears to be a prosperous flourishing community where the residents are living lives of relative affluence. But, if you look closer and connect the dots, you see fissures in this façade of affluence that spread more expansively by the day. The cheap oil based, automobile dependent, mall centric, suburban sprawl, sanctuary of consumerism lifestyle is showing distinct signs of erosion. The clues are there for all to see and portend a bleak future for those mentally trapped in the delusions of a debt dependent suburban oasis of retail outlets, chain restaurants, office parks and enclaves of cookie cutter McMansions. An unsustainable paradigm can’t be sustained.
The first weekend had me driving along Ridge Pike, from Collegeville to Pottstown. Ridge Pike is a meandering two lane road that extends from Philadelphia, winds through Conshohocken, Plymouth Meeting, Norristown, past Ursinus College in Collegeville, to the farthest reaches of Montgomery County, at least 50 miles in length. It served as a main artery prior to the introduction of the interstates and superhighways that now connect the larger cities in eastern PA. Except for morning and evening rush hours, this road is fairly sedate. Like many primary routes in suburbia, the landscape is engulfed by strip malls, gas stations, automobile dealerships, office buildings, fast food joints, once thriving manufacturing facilities sitting vacant and older homes that preceded the proliferation of cookie cutter communities that now dominate what was once farmland.
Telltale Signs
I should probably be keeping my eyes on the road, but I can’t help but notice the telltale signs of an economic system gone haywire. As you drive along, the number of For Sale signs in front of homes stands out. When you consider how bad the housing market has been, the 40% decline in national home prices since 2007, the 30% of home dwellers underwater on their mortgage, and declining household income, you realize how desperate a home seller must be to try and unload a home in this market. The reality of the number of For Sale signs does not match the rhetoric coming from the NAR, government mouthpieces, CNBC pundits, and other housing recovery shills about record low inventory and home price increases.
The Federal Reserve/Wall Street/U.S. Treasury charade of foreclosure delaying tactics and selling thousands of properties in bulk to their crony capitalist buddies at a discount is designed to misinform the public. My local paper lists foreclosures in the community every Monday morning. In 2009 it would extend for four full pages. Today, it still extends four full pages. The fact that Wall Street bankers have criminally forged mortgage documents, people are living in houses for two years without making mortgage payments, and the Federal Government backing 97% of all mortgages while encouraging 3.5% down financing does not constitute a true housing recovery. Show me the housing recovery in these charts.
Existing home sales are at 1998 levels, with 45 million more people living in the country today.
New single family homes under construction are below levels in 1969, when there were 112 million less people in the country.
Another observation that can be made as you cruise through this suburban mecca of malaise is the overall decay of the infrastructure, appearances and disinterest or inability to maintain properties. The roadways are potholed with fading traffic lines, utility poles leaning and rotting, and signage corroding and antiquated. Houses are missing roof tiles, siding is cracked, gutters astray, porches sagging, windows cracked, a paint brush hasn’t been utilized in decades, and yards are inundated with debris and weeds. Not every house looks this way, but far more than you would think when viewing the overall demographics for Montgomery County. You wonder how many number among the 10 million vacant houses in the country today. The number of dilapidated run down properties paints a picture of the silent, barely perceptible Depression that grips the country today. With such little sense of community in the suburbs, most people don’t even know their neighbors. With the electronic transfer of food stamps, unemployment compensation, and other welfare benefits you would never know that your neighbor is unemployed and hasn’t made the mortgage payment on his house in 30 months. The corporate fascist ruling plutocracy uses their propaganda mouthpieces in the mainstream corporate media and government agency drones to misinform and obscure the truth, but the data and anecdotal observational evidence reveal the true nature of our societal implosion.
A report by the Census Bureau this past week inadvertently reveals data that confirms my observations on the roadways of my suburban existence. Annual household income fell in 2011 for the fourth straight year, to an inflation-adjusted $50,054. The median income — meaning half earned more, half less — now stands 8.9% lower than the all-time peak of $54,932 in 1999. It is far worse than even that dreadful result. Real median household income is lower than it was in 1989. When you understand that real household income hasn’t risen in 23 years, you can connect the dots with the decay and deterioration of properties in suburbia. A vast swath of Americans cannot afford to maintain their residences. If the choice is feeding your kids and keeping the heat on versus repairing the porch, replacing the windows or getting a new roof, the only option is survival.
All races have seen their income fall, with educational achievement reflected in the much higher incomes of Whites and Asians. It is interesting to note that after a 45 year War on Poverty the median household income for black families is only up 19% since 1968.
Now for the really bad news. Any critical thinking person should realize the Federal Government has been systematically under-reporting inflation since the early 1980’s in an effort to obscure the fact they are debasing the currency and methodically destroying the lives of middle class Americans. If inflation was calculated exactly as it was in 1980, the GDP figures would be substantially lower and inflation would be reported 5% higher than it is today. Faking the numbers does not change reality, only the perception of reality. Calculating real median household income with the true level of inflation exposes the true picture for middle class America. Real median household income is lower than it was in 1970, just prior to Nixon closing the gold window and unleashing the full fury of a Federal Reserve able to print fiat currency and politicians to promise the earth, moon and the sun to voters. With incomes not rising over the last four decades is it any wonder many of our 115 million households slowly rot and decay from within like an old diseased oak tree. The slightest gust of wind can lead to disaster.
Eliminating the last remnants of fiscal discipline on bankers and politicians in 1971 accomplished the desired result of enriching the top 0.1% while leaving the bottom 90% in debt and desolation. The Wall Street debt peddlers, Military Industrial arms dealers, and job destroying corporate goliaths have reaped the benefits of financialization (money printing) while shoveling the costs, their gambling losses, trillions of consumer debt, and relentless inflation upon the working tax paying middle class. The creation of the Federal Reserve and implementation of the individual income tax in 1913, along with leaving the gold standard has rewarded the cabal of private banking interests who have captured our economic and political systems with obscene levels of wealth, while senior citizens are left with no interest earnings ($400 billion per year has been absconded from savers and doled out to bankers since 2008 by Ben Bernanke) and the middle class has gone decades seeing their earnings stagnate and their purchasing power fall precipitously.
The facts exposed in the chart above didn’t happen by accident. The system has been rigged by those in power to enrich them, while impoverishing the masses. When you gain control over the issuance of currency, issuance of debt, tax system, political system and legal apparatus, you’ve essentially hijacked the country and can funnel all the benefits to yourself and costs to the math challenged, government educated, brainwashed dupes, known as the masses. But there is a problem for the .01%. Their sociopathic personalities never allow them to stop plundering and preying upon the sheep. They have left nothing but carcasses of the once proud hard working middle class across the country side. There are only so many Lear jets, estates in the Hamptons, Jaguars, and Rolexes the .01% can buy. There are only 152,000 of them. Their sociopathic looting and pillaging of the national wealth has destroyed the host. When 90% of the population can barely subsist, collapse and revolution beckon.
Extend, Pretend & Depend
As I drove further along Ridge Pike we passed the endless monuments to our spiral into the depths of materialism, consumerism, and the illusion that goods purchased on credit represented true wealth. Mile after mile of strip malls, restaurants, gas stations, and office buildings rolled by my window. Anyone who lives in the suburbs knows what I’m talking about. You can’t travel three miles in any direction without passing a Dunkin Donuts, KFC, McDonalds, Subway, 7-11, Dairy Queen, Supercuts, Jiffy Lube or Exxon Station. The proliferation of office parks to accommodate the millions of paper pushers that make our service economy hum has been unprecedented in human history. Never have so many done so little in so many places. Everyone knows what a standard American strip mall consists of – a pizza place, a Chinese takeout, beer store, a tanning, salon, a weight loss center, a nail salon, a Curves, karate studio, Gamestop, Radioshack, Dollar Store, H&R Block, and a debt counseling service. They are a reflection of who we’ve become – an obese drunken species with excessive narcissistic tendencies that prefers to play video games while texting on our iGadgets as our debt financed lifestyles ultimately require professional financial assistance.What you can’t ignore today is the number of vacant storefronts in these strip malls and the overwhelming number of SPACE AVAILABLE, FOR LEASE, and FOR RENT signs that proliferate in front of these dying testaments to an unsustainable economic system based upon debt fueled consumer spending and infinite growth assumptions. The booming sign manufacturer is surely based in China. The officially reported national vacancy rates of 11% are already at record highs, but anyone with two eyes knows these self-reported numbers are a fraud. Vacancy rates based on my observations are closer to 30%. This is part of the extend and pretend strategy that has been implemented by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, the FASB, and the Wall Street banking cabal. The fraud and false storyline of a commercial real estate recovery is evident to anyone willing to think critically. The incriminating data is provided by the Federal Reserve in their Quarterly Delinquency Report.
The last commercial real estate crisis occurred in 1991. Mall vacancy rates were at levels consistent with today.
The current reported office vacancy rates of 17.5% are only slightly below the 19% levels of 1991.
As reported by the Federal Reserve, delinquency rates on commercial real estate loans in 1991 were 12%, leading to major losses among the banks that made those imprudent loans. Amazingly, after the greatest financial collapse in history, delinquency rates on commercial loans supposedly peaked at 8.8% in the 2nd quarter of 2010 and have now miraculously plummeted to pre-collapse levels of 4.9%. This is while residential loan delinquencies have resumed their upward trajectory, the number of employed Americans has fallen by 414,000 in the last two months, 9 million Americans have left the labor force since 2008, and vacancy rates are at or near all-time highs. This doesn’t pass the smell test. The Federal Reserve, owned and controlled by the Wall Street, instructed these banks to extend all commercial real estate loans, pretend they will be paid, and value them on their books at 100% of the original loan amount. Real estate developers pretend they are collecting rent from non-existent tenants, Wall Street banks pretend they are being paid by the developers, and their highly compensated public accounting firm pretends the loans aren’t really delinquent. Again, the purpose of this scam is to shield the Wall Street bankers from accepting the losses from their reckless behavior. Ben rewards them with risk free income on their deposits, propped up by mark to fantasy accounting, while they reward themselves with billions in bonuses for a job well done. The master plan requires an eventual real recovery that isn’t going to happen. Press releases and fake data do not change the reality on the ground.
I have two strip malls within three miles of my house that opened in 1990. When I moved to the area in 1995, they were 100% occupied and a vital part of the community. The closest center has since lost its Genuardi grocery store, Sears Hardware, Blockbuster, Donatos, Sears Optical, Hollywood Tans, hair salon, pizza pub and a local book store. It is essentially a ghost mall, with two banks, a couple chain restaurants and empty parking spaces. The other strip mall lost its grocery store anchor and sporting goods store. This has happened in an outwardly prosperous community. The reality is the apparent prosperity is a sham. The entire tottering edifice of housing, autos, and retail has been sustained by ever increasing levels of debt for the last thirty years and the American consumer has hit the wall. From 1950 through the early 1980s, when the working middle class saw their standard of living rise, personal consumption expenditures accounted for between 60% and 65% of GDP. Over the last thirty years consumption has relentlessly grown as a percentage of GDP to its current level of 71%, higher than before the 2008 collapse.
If the consumption had been driven by wage increases, then this trend would not have been a problem. But, we already know real median household income is lower than it was in 1970. The thirty years of delusion were financed with debt - peddled, hawked, marketed, and pushed by the drug dealers on Wall Street. The American people got hooked on debt and still have not kicked the habit. The decline in household debt since 2008 is solely due to the Wall Street banks writing off $800 billion of mortgage, credit card, and auto loan debt and transferring the cost to the already drowning American taxpayer.
The powers that be are desperately attempting to keep this unsustainable, dysfunctional debt choked scheme from disintegrating by doling out more subprime auto debt, subprime student loan debt, low down payment mortgages, and good old credit card debt. It won’t work. The consumer is tapped out. Last week’s horrific retail sales report for August confirmed this fact. Declining household income and rising costs for energy, food, clothing, tuition, taxes, health insurance, and the other things needed to survive in the real world, have broken the spirit of Middle America. The protracted implosion of our consumer society has only just begun. There are thousands of retail outlets to be closed, hundreds of thousands of jobs to be eliminated, thousands of malls to be demolished, and billions of loan losses to be incurred by the criminal Wall Street banks.
The Faces of Failure & Futility
My fourteen years working in key positions for big box retailer IKEA has made me particularly observant of the hubris and foolishness of the big chain stores that dominate the retail landscape. There are 1.1 million retail establishments in the United States, but the top 25 mega-store national chains account for 25% of all the retail sales in the country. The top 100 retailers operate 243,000 stores and account for approximately $1.6 trillion in sales, or 36% of all the retail sales in the country. Their misconceived strategic plans assumed 5% same store growth for eternity, economic growth of 3% per year for eternity, a rising market share, and ignorance of the possible plans of their competitors. They believed they could saturate a market without over cannibalizing their existing stores. Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot and Lowes have all hit the limits of profitable expansion. Each incremental store in a market results in lower profits.My trip to my local Lowes last weekend gave me a glimpse into a future of failure and futility. Until 2009, I had four choices of Lowes within 15 miles of my house. There was a store 8 miles east, 12 miles west, 15 miles north, and 15 miles south of my house. In an act of supreme hubris, Lowes opened a stores smack in the middle of these four stores, four miles from my house. The Hatfield store opened in early 2009 and I wrote an article detailing how Lowes was about to ruin their profitability in Montgomery County. It just so happens that I meet a couple of my old real estate buddies from IKEA at a local pub every few months. In 2009 one of them had a real estate position with Lowes and we had a spirited discussion about the prospects for the Lowes Hatfield store. He assured me it would be a huge success. I insisted it would be a dud and would crush the profitability of the market by cannibalizing the other four stores. We met at that same pub a few months ago. Lowes had laid him off and he admitted to me the Hatfield store was a disaster.
I pulled into the Lowes parking lot at 11:30 am on a Saturday. Big Box retailers do 50% of their business on the weekend. The busiest time frame is from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm on Saturday. Big box retailers build enough parking spots to handle this peak period. The 120,000 square feet Hatfield Lowes has approximately 1,000 parking spaces. I pulled into the spot closest to the entrance during their supposed peak period. There were about 70 cars in the parking lot, with most probably owned by Lowes workers. It is a pleasure to shop in this store, with wide open aisles, and an employee to customer ratio of four to one. The store has 14 checkout lanes and at peak period on a Saturday, there was ONE checkout lane open, with no lines. This is a corporate profit disaster in the making, but the human tragedy far overrides the declining profits of this mega-retailer.
As you walk around this museum of tools and toilets you notice the looks on the faces of the workers. These aren’t the tattooed, face pierced freaks you find in many retail establishments these days. They are my neighbors. They are the beaten down middle class. They are the middle aged professionals who got cast aside by the mega-corporations in the name of efficiency, outsourcing, right sizing, stock buybacks, and executive stock options. The irony of this situation is lost on those who have gutted the American middle class. When you look into the eyes of these people, you see sadness, confusion and embarrassment. They know they can do more. They want to do more. They know they’ve been screwed, but they aren’t sure who to blame. They were once the very customers propelling Lowes’ growth, buying new kitchens, appliances, and power tools. Now they can’t afford a can of paint on their $10 per hour, no benefit retail careers. As depressing as this portrait appears, it is about to get worse.
This Lowes will be shut down and boarded up within the next two years. The parking lot will become a weed infested eyesore occupied by 14 year old skateboarders. One hundred and fifty already down on their luck neighbors will lose their jobs, the township will have a gaping hole in their tax revenue, and the CEO of Lowes will receive a $50 million bonus for his foresight in announcing the closing of 100 stores that he had opened five years before. This exact scenario will play out across suburbia, as our unsustainable system comes undone. Our future path will parallel the course of the labor participation rate. Just as the 9 million Americans who have “left” the labor force since 2008 did not willfully make that choice, the debt burdened American consumer will be dragged kicking and screaming into the new reality of a dramatically reduced standard of living.
Connecting the dots between my anecdotal observations of suburbia and a critical review of the true non-manipulated data bestows me with a not optimistic outlook for the coming decade. Is what I’m seeing just the view of a pessimist, or are you seeing the same thing?
A few powerful men have hijacked our economic, financial and political structure. They aren’t socialists or capitalists. They’re criminals. They created the culture of materialism, greed and debt, sustained by prodigious levels of media propaganda. Our culture has been led to believe that debt financed consumption over morality and justice is the path to success. In reality, we’ve condemned ourselves to a slow painful death spiral of debasement and despair.
“A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” - Chris Hedges
Apple Fool's Day
Apple just released the new iPhone 5.
A few days before Apple showed the market the new iPhone 5, a US reporter disguised an old iPhone 4S as the upcoming iPhone 5 and asked some people on the street what they thought about the new phone. Apparently a man holding his own iPhone 4 on one hand and the 'new' phone on another said that the 'new' phone looks a lot more hardy than the old one!
Fool...
(couldn't find the news report to attach here)
According to reports, the new iPhone 5 has following 'improvements' over iPhone 4:
- larger screen (4 inch vs 3 inch) - my 1 year old Sony HP has 4.3 inch screen!
- lighter & thinner
- new set of adapters i.e. speakers, chargers etc from iPhone 4 cannot be used!
Big deal or just hype?
Life Lesson:
Most people (the 80%) are guided only by hype and what others say. People say 'A' they say 'A' but do not know why or how so. They follow that way of life because it is 'easy' and there is no need to put in effort to find out, learn and understand things. Only fools follow the easy path...
A few days before Apple showed the market the new iPhone 5, a US reporter disguised an old iPhone 4S as the upcoming iPhone 5 and asked some people on the street what they thought about the new phone. Apparently a man holding his own iPhone 4 on one hand and the 'new' phone on another said that the 'new' phone looks a lot more hardy than the old one!
Fool...
(couldn't find the news report to attach here)
According to reports, the new iPhone 5 has following 'improvements' over iPhone 4:
- larger screen (4 inch vs 3 inch) - my 1 year old Sony HP has 4.3 inch screen!
- lighter & thinner
- new set of adapters i.e. speakers, chargers etc from iPhone 4 cannot be used!
Big deal or just hype?
Life Lesson:
Most people (the 80%) are guided only by hype and what others say. People say 'A' they say 'A' but do not know why or how so. They follow that way of life because it is 'easy' and there is no need to put in effort to find out, learn and understand things. Only fools follow the easy path...
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Blindmen and An Apple
Apple sued Samsung for patent infringements all over the world to stop the latter from selling its smart phone models involved in the suits.
(Note: Samsung had overtaken Apple in smart phone sales in just 3 years by leveraging on the Android platform by Google, and Android phones had outsold Apple's iPhones over the same period. Some observers noted that Apple's suit against Samsung is part of its fight to 'destroy' Google's entry into smartphone arena - Apple's founder Steve Jobs had claimed that Android was a copied product.)
On Aug 24 2012, the South Korean court delivered a verdict (probably meant to 'influence' the American one due soon after - see below) that dismissed some claims and counterclaims from both sides while saying there were some infringements by both. The court decided that Apple copied more from Samsung than the other way round and the 'net' settlement was about US$10,000 in Samsung's favour.
A few hours later on the same day, a US jury decided that Samsung infringed on most of what Apple claimed and awarded Apple more than US$1 billion (vs $2.5 billion Apple claimed). As result, Samsung's share price fell by 7.5% (or US$12 billion off its market capitalisation).
Some observations by critics of the US court's decision:
- Samsung says Apple 'abused' US patent laws
- Apple won almost all its claims while Samsung almost none
- the US jury took only 21 hours to make the decision which involved answering a total of 700 questions according to a 109 page instruction guide! A lawyer was quoted as saying that he would need 3 days just to understand the 700 questions let alone answer them!
A week later (31 August), a Japanese court threw out a similar suit by Apple.
Same case, different decisions. Which one is right and should one believe? It is all about money and power. The more powerful (US) can do what they like while the weak (Korean) would have to accept it. Too Bad...
Japanese handphone manufacturer Sony Ericsson also uses Google's Android OS (operation system) and may similarly be wary of simlar threats from Apple, thus their court decision above.
A few weeks later, Samsung filed to void the US judgement on the basis that the lead juror used to be involved in a dispute with a US company subsequently owned by Samsung! The Americans claimed they were not aware of that man's history. Sure...
Reports in technology industry legal issues site:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120824175815101
On The Apple Victory Over Samsung
Apple's victory over Samsung appears... extreme. Since I'm not a lawyer, I can only give my layman's opinion which is likely worth about what you paid for it. Nonetheless, it appears as if the the opinion will be under attack by Samsung shortly (reference Legal analysts suggest Apple-Samsung verdict may not be safe). Whether that attack will be successful is unknown.
Potential Grounds For Reversal?
The jury form was apparently inconsistent, and Samsung's lawyers apparently anticipated such, as can be seen by this motion found on Grollaw:
Apple crushes Samsung in quest for global tech domination
South Korean court finds against Apple and Samsung
http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0824/south-korean-court-finds-against-apple-and-samsung.html
A South Korean court has ruled that Samsung did not copy the look and feel of Apple's iPhone and that Apple had infringed some of Samsung's technology.
However, in a split decision on patents, the panel also said Samsung violated Apple technology and ordered both sides to pay limited damages.
The Seoul Central District Court ruling called for a partial ban on sales of products including iPads and smartphones from both companies, though the verdict did not affect the latest-generation phones - Apple's iPhone 4S or Samsung's Galaxy S3.
The ruling affects only the South Korean market and is part of a larger, epic struggle over patents and innovation unfolding in nine countries.
The biggest stakes are in the US, where Apple is suing Samsung for $2.5 billion (€2bn) over allegations it has created illegal knockoffs of iPhones and iPads.
The Seoul ruling was a rare victory for Samsung in its arguments that Apple has infringed on its wireless technology patents, which previously have been dismissed by courts in Europe, where judges have ruled that they are part of industry standards that must be licensed under fair terms to competitors.
"This is basically Samsung's victory on its home territory," said patent attorney Jeong Woo-sung. "Out of nine countries, Samsung got the ruling that it wanted for the first time in South Korea."
The ruling ordered Apple to remove the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad 1 and iPad 2 from store shelves in South Korea, saying that the products infringed on two of Samsung's five disputed patents, including those for telecommunications technology.
The court also denied Apple's claim that Samsung had illegally copied its design, ruling that big rectangular screens in cases with rounded corners had existed in products before the iPhone and iPad.
"It is not possible to assert that these two designs are similar based only on the similarity of those features," the court said in a ruling issued in Korean that was translated into English by The Associated Press.
It also said individual icons in the Samsung products do not appear similar to the icons Apple used in the iPhone.
However the court ruled that Samsung had infringed on one of Apple's patents on the feature that causes a screen to bounce back when a user scrolls to an end image.
The court banned sales of Samsung products using the technology, including the Galaxy S2, in South Korea.
Court spokesman Kim Mun-sung said the court's ruling was to take effect immediately, although companies often request that sanctions be suspended while they evaluate their legal options.
Nam Ki-yung, a spokesman for Samsung, said the company welcomed the ruling.
"Today's ruling also affirmed our position that one single company cannot monopolise generic design features," he said.
Apple did not respond to multiple calls seeking comment.
The court also ordered each company to pay monetary compensation to its competitor. Samsung must pay Apple 25 million won (€17,596) while Apple must pay its rival 40 million won (€28,150).
South Korea is not a big market for Apple, and the ruling is not likely to have a big impact on jury deliberations in the US.
However, some industry watchers expressed concern over the South Korean ruling to protect industry standard patents.
They say the decision could invite a trade war by giving Samsung and fellow South Korean company LG - both industry standard patent holders - more room to block rivals' entrance into South Korea if they do not agree to licensing terms.
"It would mean that foreign companies would either have to bow to Samsung's and LG's demands ... or stop selling in Korea," said Florian Mueller, a patent expert in Munich, Germany who has been closely following the case.
Courts in Europe, including Netherlands, France, Italy and Germany, have rejected similar claims by Samsung that Apple violated its wireless patents, with judges arguing that the patents have become part of industry standards.
Standard-essential patents are a crucial technology for new players to make products compatible with the rest of the market and must be licensed under fair and reasonable terms.
Europe's anti-trust regulator launched an investigation earlier this year into whether Samsung was failing to license those patents under fair and reasonable terms.
In today’s ruling, the South Korean court said Samsung did not abuse its market power as an industry standard patent holder.
Apple filed suit against Samsung in San Diego, California, in April 2011, alleging that some of the South Korean company's smartphones and computer tablets are illegal knockoffs of Apple's iPhone and iPad.
Samsung denies the allegations and argues that all companies in the cutthroat phone industry mimic each other's successes without crossing the legal line.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is suing Samsung for $2.5bn and demanding that the court pull its most popular smartphones and computer tablets from the US market, making the case one of the biggest technology disputes in history.
Jury deliberations in San Diego began Wednesday after three weeks of testimony. The case went to the jury after last-minute talks between the companies' chief executives failed to resolve the dispute.
Shortly after Apple filed its suit in the US, Samsung filed a complaint in South Korea against Apple for allegedly breaching its telecommunications patents.
The battle is all the more complex as Apple and Samsung are not only competitors in the fast-growing global market for smartphones and tablet computers, but also have a close business relationship.
"This is going to go on and on and on," said Barney Loehnis, head of mobile for Asia at public relations firm Ogilvy. "This will never change because the sorts of patents that they're fighting over are such a fundamental essence of using these devices that they're always going to be leapfrogging one over the other."
Samsung, the world's biggest manufacturer of memory chips and liquid crystal displays, supplies some of the key components that go into Apple products, including mobile chips that work as a brain of the iPhone and the iPad.
The South Korean firm overtook Apple in less than three years in smartphone markets.
In the second quarter of this year, Samsung sold 50.2m units of smartphones, nearly twice as much as Apple's 26m units, according to IDC.
Despite the ruling that is widely seen as Samsung's victory, Samsung's share fell 0.9% in Seoul.
(Note: Samsung had overtaken Apple in smart phone sales in just 3 years by leveraging on the Android platform by Google, and Android phones had outsold Apple's iPhones over the same period. Some observers noted that Apple's suit against Samsung is part of its fight to 'destroy' Google's entry into smartphone arena - Apple's founder Steve Jobs had claimed that Android was a copied product.)
On Aug 24 2012, the South Korean court delivered a verdict (probably meant to 'influence' the American one due soon after - see below) that dismissed some claims and counterclaims from both sides while saying there were some infringements by both. The court decided that Apple copied more from Samsung than the other way round and the 'net' settlement was about US$10,000 in Samsung's favour.
A few hours later on the same day, a US jury decided that Samsung infringed on most of what Apple claimed and awarded Apple more than US$1 billion (vs $2.5 billion Apple claimed). As result, Samsung's share price fell by 7.5% (or US$12 billion off its market capitalisation).
Some observations by critics of the US court's decision:
- Samsung says Apple 'abused' US patent laws
- Apple won almost all its claims while Samsung almost none
- the US jury took only 21 hours to make the decision which involved answering a total of 700 questions according to a 109 page instruction guide! A lawyer was quoted as saying that he would need 3 days just to understand the 700 questions let alone answer them!
A week later (31 August), a Japanese court threw out a similar suit by Apple.
Same case, different decisions. Which one is right and should one believe? It is all about money and power. The more powerful (US) can do what they like while the weak (Korean) would have to accept it. Too Bad...
Japanese handphone manufacturer Sony Ericsson also uses Google's Android OS (operation system) and may similarly be wary of simlar threats from Apple, thus their court decision above.
A few weeks later, Samsung filed to void the US judgement on the basis that the lead juror used to be involved in a dispute with a US company subsequently owned by Samsung! The Americans claimed they were not aware of that man's history. Sure...
Reports in technology industry legal issues site:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120824175815101
On The Apple Victory Over Samsung
Apple's victory over Samsung appears... extreme. Since I'm not a lawyer, I can only give my layman's opinion which is likely worth about what you paid for it. Nonetheless, it appears as if the the opinion will be under attack by Samsung shortly (reference Legal analysts suggest Apple-Samsung verdict may not be safe). Whether that attack will be successful is unknown.
Potential Grounds For Reversal?
The jury form was apparently inconsistent, and Samsung's lawyers apparently anticipated such, as can be seen by this motion found on Grollaw:
Late in the process yesterday at the Apple v. Samsung trial, when the parties and the judge were reviewing the jury verdict form, Samsung noticed that there were, indeed, inconsistencies in the jury's verdict form, a possibility Samsung anticipated [PDF]. Here's the jury's Amended Verdict Form [PDF], amended to fix the mistakes. Here's the original [PDF]. Here's the note [PDF] the jury sent to the judge when told to fix the inconsistencies. What are they, they asked? "Please let the jury know," they wrote in the only note ever sent in their deliberations, "of the inconsistencies we are supposed to deliberate on."
In two instances, results were crazily contradictory, and the judge had to have the jury go back and fix the goofs. As a result the damages award was reduced to $1,049,343,540, 1 down from $1,051,855,000. For just one example, the jury had said one device didn't infringe, but then they awarded Apple $2 million for inducement. In another they awarded a couple of hundred thousand for a device they'd ruled didn't infringe at all. This all was revealed by The Verge in its live blog coverage:
The jury appears to have awarded damages for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 LTE infringing — $219,694 worth — but didn't find that it had actually infringed anything....A similar inconsistency exists for the Intercept, for which they'd awarded Apple over $2 million...continue reading here: http://boombustblog.com/blog/item/6158-on-the-apple-victory-over-samsung
Intercept: "The jury found no direct infringement but did find inducement" for the '915 and '163 utility patents. If a device didn't infringe, it would be rather hard for a company to induce said non-existant infringement.
Apple crushes Samsung in quest for global tech domination
A US jury has rubberstamped Apple's exploitation of the patent system. But Samsung's $1bn loss will cost consumers dear
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/25/apple-crushes-samsung-quest-global-tech-dominationSouth Korean court finds against Apple and Samsung
http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0824/south-korean-court-finds-against-apple-and-samsung.html
A South Korean court has ruled that Samsung did not copy the look and feel of Apple's iPhone and that Apple had infringed some of Samsung's technology.
However, in a split decision on patents, the panel also said Samsung violated Apple technology and ordered both sides to pay limited damages.
The Seoul Central District Court ruling called for a partial ban on sales of products including iPads and smartphones from both companies, though the verdict did not affect the latest-generation phones - Apple's iPhone 4S or Samsung's Galaxy S3.
The ruling affects only the South Korean market and is part of a larger, epic struggle over patents and innovation unfolding in nine countries.
The biggest stakes are in the US, where Apple is suing Samsung for $2.5 billion (€2bn) over allegations it has created illegal knockoffs of iPhones and iPads.
The Seoul ruling was a rare victory for Samsung in its arguments that Apple has infringed on its wireless technology patents, which previously have been dismissed by courts in Europe, where judges have ruled that they are part of industry standards that must be licensed under fair terms to competitors.
"This is basically Samsung's victory on its home territory," said patent attorney Jeong Woo-sung. "Out of nine countries, Samsung got the ruling that it wanted for the first time in South Korea."
The ruling ordered Apple to remove the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad 1 and iPad 2 from store shelves in South Korea, saying that the products infringed on two of Samsung's five disputed patents, including those for telecommunications technology.
The court also denied Apple's claim that Samsung had illegally copied its design, ruling that big rectangular screens in cases with rounded corners had existed in products before the iPhone and iPad.
"It is not possible to assert that these two designs are similar based only on the similarity of those features," the court said in a ruling issued in Korean that was translated into English by The Associated Press.
It also said individual icons in the Samsung products do not appear similar to the icons Apple used in the iPhone.
However the court ruled that Samsung had infringed on one of Apple's patents on the feature that causes a screen to bounce back when a user scrolls to an end image.
The court banned sales of Samsung products using the technology, including the Galaxy S2, in South Korea.
Court spokesman Kim Mun-sung said the court's ruling was to take effect immediately, although companies often request that sanctions be suspended while they evaluate their legal options.
Nam Ki-yung, a spokesman for Samsung, said the company welcomed the ruling.
"Today's ruling also affirmed our position that one single company cannot monopolise generic design features," he said.
Apple did not respond to multiple calls seeking comment.
The court also ordered each company to pay monetary compensation to its competitor. Samsung must pay Apple 25 million won (€17,596) while Apple must pay its rival 40 million won (€28,150).
South Korea is not a big market for Apple, and the ruling is not likely to have a big impact on jury deliberations in the US.
However, some industry watchers expressed concern over the South Korean ruling to protect industry standard patents.
They say the decision could invite a trade war by giving Samsung and fellow South Korean company LG - both industry standard patent holders - more room to block rivals' entrance into South Korea if they do not agree to licensing terms.
"It would mean that foreign companies would either have to bow to Samsung's and LG's demands ... or stop selling in Korea," said Florian Mueller, a patent expert in Munich, Germany who has been closely following the case.
Courts in Europe, including Netherlands, France, Italy and Germany, have rejected similar claims by Samsung that Apple violated its wireless patents, with judges arguing that the patents have become part of industry standards.
Standard-essential patents are a crucial technology for new players to make products compatible with the rest of the market and must be licensed under fair and reasonable terms.
Europe's anti-trust regulator launched an investigation earlier this year into whether Samsung was failing to license those patents under fair and reasonable terms.
In today’s ruling, the South Korean court said Samsung did not abuse its market power as an industry standard patent holder.
Apple filed suit against Samsung in San Diego, California, in April 2011, alleging that some of the South Korean company's smartphones and computer tablets are illegal knockoffs of Apple's iPhone and iPad.
Samsung denies the allegations and argues that all companies in the cutthroat phone industry mimic each other's successes without crossing the legal line.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is suing Samsung for $2.5bn and demanding that the court pull its most popular smartphones and computer tablets from the US market, making the case one of the biggest technology disputes in history.
Jury deliberations in San Diego began Wednesday after three weeks of testimony. The case went to the jury after last-minute talks between the companies' chief executives failed to resolve the dispute.
Shortly after Apple filed its suit in the US, Samsung filed a complaint in South Korea against Apple for allegedly breaching its telecommunications patents.
The battle is all the more complex as Apple and Samsung are not only competitors in the fast-growing global market for smartphones and tablet computers, but also have a close business relationship.
"This is going to go on and on and on," said Barney Loehnis, head of mobile for Asia at public relations firm Ogilvy. "This will never change because the sorts of patents that they're fighting over are such a fundamental essence of using these devices that they're always going to be leapfrogging one over the other."
Samsung, the world's biggest manufacturer of memory chips and liquid crystal displays, supplies some of the key components that go into Apple products, including mobile chips that work as a brain of the iPhone and the iPad.
The South Korean firm overtook Apple in less than three years in smartphone markets.
In the second quarter of this year, Samsung sold 50.2m units of smartphones, nearly twice as much as Apple's 26m units, according to IDC.
Despite the ruling that is widely seen as Samsung's victory, Samsung's share fell 0.9% in Seoul.
Japan judge dismisses Apple suit against Samsung
A week after Apple scored a major victory over Samsung, a similar suit has been tossed out by a Japanese court.
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