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Colin Bennett

FBI: Copper thieves threaten national security - 0 views

www.abcactionnews.com/...5S6ND-q6hEmUA4zXpcrneg.cspx

trends copper theft

shared by Colin Bennett on 05 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 05 Dec 08
     
    The agency's intelligence report on copper thefts says the thieves are now impacting critical infrastructure in the U.S. The threat assessment, released Thursday, cites a crime committed at a Polk County electrical substation as a prime example.
Colin Bennett

Credit crisis make precious metals juniors prime acquisition targets - 0 views

www.mineweb.com/...page66

copper finance mining trends

shared by Colin Bennett on 03 Oct 08 - Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 03 Oct 08
     
    "Cash is now king and grassroots exploration is ill-advised until market sentiment improves," Haywood Securities warned junior mining sector investors. Nevertheless, Haywood views current valuations "as a fishing opportunity."
Wade Ren

The end of Bretton Woods 2? - 0 views

blogs.cfr.org/...the-end-of-bretton-woods-2

2008-crisis economics

shared by Wade Ren on 29 Oct 08 - Cached
  • The Bretton Woods 2 system – where China and then the oil-exporters provided (subsidized) financing to the US to sustain their exports – will come close to ending, at least temporarily. If the US and Europe are not importing much, the rest of the world won’t be exporting much.
  • And rather than ending with a whimper, Bretton Woods 2 may end with a bang. In some sense Bretton Woods 2 has been on life support for a while now. China’s recent export growth has depended far more on Europe than on the US. US demand for non-oil imports peaked in 2006. One irony of the past year is that the US was borrowing far more from China that it was buying from China. Campaign rhetoric that the US was paying for Saudi oil with funds borrowed from China isn’t far off – though it leaves out the fact that the US also borrows from Saudi Arabia to pay for Venezuelan, Mexican and Nigerian oil.
  • If Bretton Woods 2 ends in 2009 – if US demand for imports falls sharply in the last part of 2008 and early 2009, bringing the US trade deficit down – it won’t have ended in the way Nouriel and I outlined back in late 2004 and early 2005. We postulated that foreign demand for US debt would dry up – pushing up US Treasury rates and delivering a nasty shock to a housing-centric economy. As Brad DeLong notes, it didn’t quite play out that way. The US and European banking system collapsed before the balance of financial terror collapsed. Dr. DeLong writes: All of us from Lawrence Summers to John Taylor were expecting a very different financial crisis. We were expecting the ‘Balance of Financial Terror’ between Asia and America to collapse and produce chaos. We are not having that financial crisis. Instead we are having a very different financial crisis. Catastrophic failures of risk management throughout the entire banking sector caused a relatively minor collapse in housing prices to freeze up global finance to a degree that has not been seen since the Great Depression. The end result of this crisis though could be rather similar: a sharp contraction in credit, a fall in US economic activity, a fall in US imports and a fall in the amount of foreign financing the US needs.* The US government is (possibly) trying to offset the fall in private demand by borrowing more and spending more — but as of now there is realistic risk that the fall in private activity will trump the fiscal stimulus.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Or, to put it more succinctly, Bretton Woods 2, as it evolved, hinged both on the willingness of foreign central banks to take the currency risk associated with lending to the US at low rates in dollars despite the United States large current account deficit AND the willingness of private financial intermediaries to take the credit risk associated with lending at low rates to highly-indebted US households.
  • But now US financial institutions are neither willing nor able to take on the risk of lending even more to US households. For a while the US government was able to ramp up its lending to households (notably through the Agencies) and in the process effectively take over the function previously performed by the private financial system (over the last four quarters, the flow of funds data indicates that the Agencies provided around $800 billion of net credit to US households). But now the US government is struggling to keep the financial system from collapsing. It doesn’t seem like it will able to avoid a sharp fall in the overall availability of credit.
  • It is now clear how the financial sector kept profits up: it took on more risk, as it shifted from borrowing short to buy safe long-term assets (Treasuries and Agencies) to borrowing short to buy risky long-term assets. Leverage in the system also increased (and for some broker dealers that seems to be an understatement), as more and more financial institutions believed that the US had entered into an era of little macroeconomic or financial volatility. The net result seems to have been a truly explosive concentration of risk in the hands of a core set of financial intermediaries in the US and Europe. Securitization – it seems – actually didn’t disperse risk into the hands of institutions able to handle it.
  • I hope that the process of adjustment now underway isn’t as sharp as I fear. The US economy gradually can shift from producing MBS for sale to US investors flush with cash from the sale of safe securities to China and Saudi Arabia to producing goods and services for export – but it cannot shift from churning out complex debt securities to producing goods and services overnight. Indeed, in a slowing US and global economy, improvements in the US deficit will likely come from faster falls in US imports than in US exports – not from ongoing growth in US exports.
  • But right now it looks like there is a real risk that the adjustment won’t be gradual. And it certainly looks like the flow of Chinese (and Gulf) savings to US households over the past few years has produced one of the largest misallocations of global capital in recent history.
  • US taxpayers are going to be hit with a large tab for the credit risk taken on by undercapitalized financial intermediaries. Chinese taxpayers may get hit with a similar tab for the losses their central bank incurred by overpaying for US and European assets as part of its policy of holding its exchange rate down. The TARP is around 5% of US GDP. There are plausible estimates that China’s currency losses will prove to be of comparable magnitude. Charles Dumas puts the cost at above 5% of GDP: “Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research estimates that China makes 1-2 per cent on its (largely) dollar reserves. It then loses up to 10 per cent on the exchange rate and suffers a Chinese inflation rate of 6 per cent for a total real return in renminbi of about minus 15 per cent. That is a loss of $270bn a year, or a stunning 7-8 per cent of gross domestic product.”
  • Jboss — if some of the Chinese inflow could be redirected into investment in alternative energy, that would indeed be a win/ win. Some infrastructure bank style ideas have promise in my view — basically, the flow that used to go to freddie/ fannie could go to wind farms and the like. I would rather see more adjustment in china (i.e. more investment in Chinese infrastructure) but during the transition, if there is one, to a lower Chinese surplus, redirecting chinese financing toward new energy tech would be offer real benefits.
  • China likes 3rd generation nuclear power. Safe, lower cost than NG or coal, very much lower cost than coal with carbon sequestering, and zero carbon footprint. Wind is about 4X more expensive than our electric costs now. That’s in an area with consistent wind. Solar is worse. I don’t know if we can sucker them into investing in our technical fairy tales. Here’s a easy primer on 3rd gen nukes. http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeCostOfNuclearPower
    • Wade Ren
      Wade Ren on 29 Oct 08
       
      is this true?
  • btw, solar thermal installations are so easy & affordable to retrofit onto existing structures, it’s amazing that there aren’t more of them here…until you realize that they work to decentralize energy. cedric — china is already doing it in china. they are way ahead of the curve over there. my partner brought back some photos of shanghai — rows of middle class homes each with a small solar panel on top. and that’s just the tip of the iceberg — an architect friend just came back from beijing and wants to move to china (he’s into designing self-powering structures and is incredibly frustrated by the bureaucracy and cost-prohibitive measures in the US).
  • I went to engineering school right after the Arab Oil Embargo, and alternative energy was a hot topic then. All the same stuff you hear of nowadays. They even offered entire courses on it , which I took. Then my first mini career was in the power plant biz, before Volker killed it with interest rates and the Saudies killed any interest in alt. energy with their big oil field discovery. For the last 5 years I’ve been researching what’s changed, and it is frighteningly little. Solar cells are still expensive and only have a 15% conversion efficiency. They developed the new cost reduced film technology, but that knocks down efficiency to 7%. Wind power works where there is wind constantly. Generators are mature technology and are already 90 some percent efficient. Geothermal, tidal, ect. work where they are available. Looks like coal gasification and synfuel is out because it makes too much CO2. Good news is 3rd gen nuclear is way better than 1st gen plants. Hybrid cars are good, and battery technology is finally getting barely good enough for all electric cars to be practical.
  • According to news report today, Japan’s trade surplus is less than 1 billion $ in September 08, a whopping 94% decrease compared to September 07. Does it imply that going forward Japan can not buy as much treasury as before?
Colin Bennett

India follows China in grab for Australia's minerals : Business - 0 views

www.earthtimes.org/...b-for-australias-minerals.html

china trends

shared by Colin Bennett on 23 May 08 - Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 23 May 08
     
    ndia has followed China in making strategic investments in Australian companies to secure long-term supplies of the minerals its factories need.
Colin Bennett

Renewable Energy Marketers Form Trade Association - 0 views

www.alternative-energy-news.info/...renewable-energy-marketers

shared by Colin Bennett on 18 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 18 Apr 08
     
    (Washington, DC) Some of the most influential and competitive organizations in the renewable energy industry have now joined together to create the first trade association for organizations that market renewable energy. The Renewable Energy Marketers Association (REMA) has formed to vigorously promote the economic and national security benefits of domestic renewable energy.
Colin Bennett

Energising Europe - 0 views

speakup-energy.blogactiv.eu/...energising-europe

regulation

shared by Colin Bennett on 03 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 03 Apr 08
     
    The European Commission has adopted a third package of legislative proposals to ensure a real and effective choice of supplier and benefits to every single EU citizen. The Commission's proposals put consumer choice, fairer prices, cleaner energy and security of supply at the centre of its approach.
Colin Bennett

Copper recyclers ready for overhaul-China Mining - 0 views

www.chinamining.org/...1238378798d23053.html

trends copper china recycling

shared by Colin Bennett on 30 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 30 Mar 09
     
    Most of Wang's neighbors were not so fortunate. Recyclers in Qingyuan have lost an estimated $4.4 billion since the bottom dropped out of the marketWidely known as a copper recycling center, Qingyuan once had a workforce of 80,000, employed by 22 national companies and more than 150 medium-sized enterprises. Of those, 20 percent have gone bankrupt, 50 percent have been cut in half, and the remainder has lost about one-third of their market value, according to a local recycling association. For Qingyuan, the disaster was unpredictable, but instructive. Recyclers typically locked in the price when they signed a contract with foreign suppliers. Saddled with fixed operating costs, that left them nowhere to go when the price for their product dropped, according to Yan Jinming, general manager of CITIC Securities Futures.
Panos Kotseras

China - Copper demand may grow strongly in Q4 - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...news

China copper demand

shared by Panos Kotseras on 05 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Panos Kotseras on 05 Jun 09
     
    According to a statement made by JP Morgan Securities, copper demand in China may experience strong growth in Q4. This argument is based on the fact that the large amount of accumulated copper inventories in China will be processed. As a result, copper stockpiles will run down. The forecast projected an annual growth in Chinese copper demand of 7-8% for 2009, backed by robust demand in power infrastructure. Chinese copper imports in April reached 400,000t, an increase of 7% compared with March.
Colin Bennett

Efficiency debate: The pros and cons of consumer electronics - 0 views

www.cleanbreak.ca/...d-cons-of-consumer-electronics

trends copper efficiency electronics

shared by Colin Bennett on 15 May 09 - Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 15 May 09
     
    The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy issued a report yesterday touting the role that semiconductor-based technologies have played in making the U.S. economy more efficient. At the same time, the International Energy Agency issued its own report calling on governments around the world to be more aggressive with efficiency standards for ICT and consumer electronics, which are expected to demand twice as much power by 2022 and three times as much by 2030 - creating a need for another 280 gigawatts of power generation (i.e. like adding another Japan to the world, or more than 230 nuclear reactors). "This will jeopardize efforts to increase energy security and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases," according to an IEA news brief.
Panos Kotseras

Italy - Prysmian secured EU approval to acquire Draka - 1 views

www.reuters.com/...draka-eu-idUSBRQ01007820110209

Prysmian Draka

shared by Panos Kotseras on 10 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Panos Kotseras on 10 Feb 11
     
    Prysmian secured EU regulatory approval for the proposed acquisition of Draka. According to the statement released by the EU antitrust regulator, "The Commission's investigation has shown that the merged entity will continue to face effective competition in the production of optical fibre cables and general wiring despite becoming the European leader in the markets concerned." It was reported that the European Economic Area consists of a number of smaller suppliers, and therefore Prysmian will continue to have a sufficient number of competitors in its markets.
Colin Bennett

DNV GL continues drive for risk and cost reduction in global wind industry via three ne... - 0 views

www.yourgeneratornews.com/ndustry+initiatives_36694.html

trends copper renewables wind

shared by Colin Bennett on 19 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 19 Mar 15
     
    "Targeted outcomes include state-of-art industrial accepted methods to reduce risk and cost Continued effort on cost reduction needed to help secure future of global wind business - especially offshore"
Colin Bennett

A new Energy Policy for the new European Commission? - 0 views

www.energypolicyblog.com/...or-the-new-european-commission

trends copper energy politics EU Europe

shared by Colin Bennett on 05 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 05 Dec 14
     
    "The collapse of key energy policy pillars of Barroso's decade 1. The world has cheaper and more abundant fossil fuels than expected. 2. The EU internal Market conceived for gas-fuelled plants competition (CCGTs) has to deal with a fierce RES subsidised push. 3. The EU Green Revolution (to push us as world R&D and leading manufacturer of a decade-long green growth) is gone. 4. Carbon pricing originated in the EU and was adopted to some degree here and there but ceased to offer any incentive to change the EU vis-à-vis GHG emissions. 5. The EU Supply Security is lower than at the fall of the Soviet Union, or before the Bush-Blair invasion in Iraq; and the EU has to address it by itself. Then what are the key components that can put EU energy policy back on track toward reaching our 2020-2030 goals? The following policy brief offers a new vision of the energy policy for our new Commission from an independent, academic point of view."
Colin Bennett

Railway Cable Theft Prevention - Cable Band Straps - 0 views

www.cablejoints.co.uk/...cable-theft-prevention-panduit

trends copper theft railway

shared by Colin Bennett on 10 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 10 Feb 15
     
    "To prevent the theft of these cables, Network Rail have specified Panduit super heavy duty stainless steel banding to wrap around the cables and securely strap them to the cable trough. This measure will make the cables more difficult to access and extract therefore deterring thieves owing to the considerable extra time and effort involved and the added risk of detection, apprehension and arrest. The frequency of Panduit cable locking needs to be balanced with cost and the need to maximise the quantity of locked cables as quickly as possible. As a result of this, the below table sets out how often Panduit stainless steel rail cable bands should be used."
Colin Bennett

Military ship technological advancements - 0 views

nextbigfuture.com/...0-year-ship-plans-include.html

trends copper military technology

shared by Colin Bennett on 10 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 10 Feb 15
     
    "Advanced weapons and sensors with higher power demands as well as energy security will continue to be the primary electrical requirement drivers during this period. "
Colin Bennett

XVII Plastic Pipes Conference - 0 views

www.ppxvii.org

trends copper tube

shared by Colin Bennett on 17 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 17 Feb 15
     
    That plastic pipe systems continue to gain market share through supplanting competing pipe materials such as copper, concrete and steel due to easy and low cost installation as well as long term performance, Stephen Boros who is also VP Engineering for Pipelines Plastics, LLC explained. "In North America, these inherent advantages are now further supported by the development of the shale oil and gas industry. This development not only benefits the energy market but also represents a more secure long‐term supply and cost advantage from a power costs to raw materials stand point. Technology transfer will undoubtedly propel the growth of demand for plastic pipe systems in other world markets."
Colin Bennett

In the fight against metal theft, focus of efforts needs to be on thieves, not recyclers - 0 views

www.recyclingproductnews.com/...to-be-on-thieves-not-recyclers

trends copper theft

shared by Colin Bennett on 18 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Colin Bennett on 18 Sep 18
     
    Beginning with prevention, Hydro One taught employees how to better secure materials, and it began replacing copper groundings with a copper-clad alternative that has little scrap value. Alongside this material swap, signage was installed to inform thieves that the material they were targeting was not pure copper and had little value.
Matthew Wonnacott

Taihan Electronic Wire clinches another overseas deal - 0 views

english.yonhapnews.co.kr/...00000AEN20121129004400320.HTML

cable wire Korea Copper

shared by Matthew Wonnacott on 03 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Matthew Wonnacott on 03 Dec 12
     
    Taihan Electronic Wire Co., South Korea's second largest wire and cable maker, announced on 29th November that it had successfully secured a US$44M contract to supply and install power cables in Saudi Arabia. The deal, which will involve laying 13.4km of 380kv high voltage cable, will provide the power infrastructure connecting Jeddah's international airport to a substation in the northeast of the city. The latest deal adds to the company's strong overseas sales in 2012 which have totalled US$250M, a 20% increase on 2011.
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