You are here
Treasury prepares for negative-rate bidding in bond auctions
The more that real interest rates are negative, the more "financial repression" and gold price suppression are required to keep the currency alive and defend it against competitors that don't depreciate so quickly.
* * *
U.S. Treasury Plans Floating-Rate Notes in Year or More
By Meera Louis and Cheyenne Hopkins
Bloomberg News
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-01/treasury-plans-floating-rate-no...
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Treasury Department said today it is developing a floating-rate note program that could be operational in a year or more, while it is preparing for possible negative-rate bidding.
The Treasury also plans to sell $72 billion in notes and bonds in next week's refunding, it said in a statement. The Treasury intends to auction $32 billion in 3-year notes on Aug. 7, $24 billion in 10-year notes on Aug. 8, and $16 billion in 30-year bonds on Aug. 9.
The floating-rate notes would be the first new U.S. government debt security since Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, known as TIPS, were introduced in 1997. With a budget deficit estimated at $1.21 trillion this year, the Treasury needs to expand its base of investors, and the notes may appeal to those who are seeking to protect themselves from a possible increase in interest rates or faster inflation stemming from the Federal Reserve's unprecedented stimulus.
... Dispatch continues below ...
Prophecy Platinum Announces Wellgreen Preliminary Economic Assessment:
38% Pre-Tax IRR, $3.0 Billion NPV, and a 37-Year Mine Life
Company Press Release
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Canada -- Prophecy Platinum Corp. (TSX-V: NKL, OTC-QX: PNIKF, Frankfurt: P94P) reports the results of an independent NI 43-101-compliant preliminary economic assessment for its fully owned Wellgreen nickel-copper-platinum group metals project in the Yukon Territory.
The independent assessment, prepared by Tetra Tech, evaluated a base case of an open-pit mine (with a mining rate of 111,500 tonnes per day), an on-site concentrator (with a milling rate of 32,000 tonnes per day), and an initial capital cost of $863 million. The project is expected to produce (in concentrate) 1.959 billion pounds of nickel, 2.058 billion pounds of copper, and 7.119 million ounces of platinum, palladium, and gold during a mine life of 37 years with an average strip ratio of 2.57.
The financial highlights of the preliminary economic assessment, shown in U.S. dollars, are as follows:
Payback period: 3.55 years
Initial capital investment: $863 million
IRR pre-tax (100% equity): 38 percent
NPV pre-tax (8% discount): $3 billion
Mine life: 37 years
Total mill feed: 405.3 million tonnes
Mill throughput: 32,000 tonnes per day
Prophecy Chairman John Lee says: "We are pleased with the preliminary economic assessment results. The numbers indicate that Wellgreen is one of most exciting mineral projects in the Yukon. The company is drilling to upgrade and expand the resource base. The infrastructure is excellent as the project is only 1,400 meters in altitude and 14 kilometers from the paved Alaska Highway, which leads to the Haines deep seaport. Discussions are under way with support from local stakeholders regarding permitting and logistics."
For the complete press release, please visit:
http://prophecyplat.com/news_2012_june18_prophecy_platinum_announces_res...
"People are nervous about fixed-rate instruments because of rising rates," said William Larkin, a fixed-income money manager who helps oversee $500 million at Cabot Money Management Inc. in Salem, Massachusetts. "The floating-rate notes remove that risk for investors, so it makes the Treasury's source of capital a little bit more stable."
The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, the bond dealers and investors who meet quarterly with department officials, said it unanimously supports the introduction of the notes as soon as possible. The group predicted "strong, broad-based demand for the product."
Capital and liquidity requirements from the 2010 overhaul of financial regulation in the Dodd-Frank Act, and from the Basel III global rules, have increased demand for short-term, high-quality debt at a time when supply has diminished.
"Treasury plans to develop a floating-rate note program to complement the existing suite of securities issued and to support our broader debt-management objectives," the department said. It said the first auction "is estimated to be at least one year away."
Still, floating-rate notes pose risks for the Treasury, according to Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in Durham, North Carolina. If interest rates rise from historic lows, the Treasury will need to pay investors more to borrow, he said in an April interview.
The yield on benchmark 10-year Treasury note rose to 1.51 percent at 11:55 a.m. New York time from 1.47 percent late yesterday. Ten-year U.S. yields fell to a record 1.379 percent on July 25.
The Treasury also said it is "in the process of building the operational capabilities to allow for negative-rate bidding in Treasury bill auctions, should we make the determination to allow such bidding in the future."
Investors who bid at auctions for Treasury bills at negative yields would pay more than face value for the securities, ensuring that if they hold the debt to maturity they will get back less than they paid.
The Treasury also said that the U.S. debt limit is likely to be reached at the end of this year, and it expects to use "extraordinary measures" to fund the government into early 2013.
The Obama administration said July 27 it is forecasting the federal budget deficit will be $1.21 trillion this year, down from $1.33 trillion projected in February. The U.S. faces a so- called fiscal cliff of higher taxes and reductions in spending on defense and other government programs that will take effect at year-end unless Congress acts.
Congressional leaders said yesterday they will vote in September on a $1.047 trillion, six-month stopgap measure that would keep the government operating after the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1. The measure would give lawmakers more time to debate how to avoid about $600 billion of spending cuts and tax increases.
* * *
Join GATA here:
Toronto Resource Investment Conference
Thursday-Friday, September 27-28, 2012
Toronto Sheraton Centre Hotel
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
http://www.cambridgehouse.com/event/toronto-resource-investment-conference
New Orleans Investment Conference
Wednesday-Saturday, October 24-27, 2012
Hilton New Orleans Riverside Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana
http://www.neworleansconference.com/
* * *
Support GATA by purchasing DVDs of our London conference in August 2011 or our Dawson City conference in August 2006:
http://www.goldrush21.com/order.html
Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt:
Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009:
http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal
Help keep GATA going
GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at:
To contribute to GATA, please visit:
Sona Discovers Potential High-Grade Gold Mineralization
at Blackdome in British Columbia -- 13.6g over 1.5 Meters
From a Company Press Release
November 22, 2011
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- With its latest surface diamond drilling program at its 100-percent-owned, formerly producing Blackdome gold mine in southern British Columbia, Sona Resources Corp. has discovered a potentially high-grade gold-mineralized area, with one hole intersecting 13.6 grams of gold in 1.5 meters of core drilling.
"We intersected a promising new mineralized zone, and we feel optimistic about the assay results," says Sona's president and CEO, John P. Thompson. "We have undertaken an aggressive exploration program that has tested a number of target zones. Our discovery of this new gold-bearing structure is significant, and it represents a positive development for the company."
Sona aims to bring its permitted Blackdome mill back into production over the next year and a half, at a rate of 200 tonnes per day, with feed from the formerly producing Blackdome mine and the nearby Elizabeth gold deposit property. A positive preliminary economic assessment by Micon International Ltd., based on a gold price of $950 per ounce over eight years, has estimated a cash cost of $208 per tonne milled, or $686 per gold ounce recovered.
For the company's complete press release, please visit:
http://www.sonaresources.com/_resources/news/SONA_NR18_2011-opt.pdf
