Congressional negotiators on Tuesday wrapped up a sprawling deal to keep the U.S. government operating through next September, while setting new policies ranging from repealing a 40-year-old ban on oil exports to making many business tax breaks permanent, according to Republican lawmakers.

House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan told his rank-and-file Republicans that weeks of negotiations with Democrats had culminated in a deal that would eliminate any possibility of government shutdowns until at least next October, according to lawmakers present.

"That's my understanding, that there is agreement on both tax extenders and the omnibus" spending bill," Representative John Kline told reporters upon leaving a closed-door meeting of House Republicans.

Republican lawmakers added that Ryan will put the tax and spending bills to a vote on Thursday, just before they leave town for the rest of the year. The Senate is also expected to vote by week's end.

A senior Senate Democratic aide told Reuters that the legislative language was being reviewed to make sure it "reflects the negotiations."

Even some of the most conservative House Republicans, who leveled searing criticisms of former Speaker John Boehner before he resigned in October, left the meeting with Ryan upbeat.

Representative Steve King said he thought it would be difficult to pass the spending bill in the Republican-controlled House. But he told reporters that Ryan "got the best bargain that I think can be negotiated."

Representative Ann Wagner confirmed that in return for a repeal of the oil export ban, Democrats won temporary tax breaks to boost wind and solar development, an important priority for President Barack Obama in the aftermath of a Paris climate change deal that calls for significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-fiscal-idUSKBN0TY1UD20151216

---

Attached Files

Stop the presses! There’s cheating going on in China’s official statistics!

China’s official numbers have long been viewed skeptically in and outside of China. As party secretary of northeastern Liaoning province in 2007, China’s current premier, Li Keqiang, was quoted in a leaked diplomatic cable telling U.S. officials that Chinese provincial statistics were “manmade” and therefore unreliable.

So the disclosures in recent days by the official Xinhua News Agency and People’s Daily that gross domestic product figures in China’s northeastern rust-bowl region were doctored was less surprising. What was noteworthy was that official media made the episode so public, suggesting official tolerance for official fudging is on the wane.

The articles cite an anticorruption investigation after which they said local officials in the northeast provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning admitted they had been falsifying economic data for years. The practice has encouraged corruption, undermined faith in the Communist Party-led government and led to distorted policy decisions, the articles said, without providing specific examples.

The scale was such that the official data generated by some counties alone suggested that their economies rivaled Hong Kong’s in size, Xinhua said, quoting Jilin lawmaker Zhao Zhenqi. Mr. Zhao couldn’t be reached.

For many years, the sum of China’s provincial growth figures exceeded the national total by as much as 11%. In recent months, under the banner of slower “new normal” growth, fudging has become less fashionable.

Economists and analysts said they read a few things into the timing of the disclosures. While massaging figures is common among Chinese provinces, the practice appears more pronounced recently in the northeast – China’s slowest-growing region this year — given weak exports, stumbling resource and manufacturing industries and struggling real estate investment, some said.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/12/15/northern-exposure-china-names-and-shames-provinces-for-fudging-gdp/

Back in July, we asked if Olympians at the upcoming summer games in Rio would be swimming in feces. “Extreme water pollution is common in Brazil, where the majority of sewage is not treated. Raw waste runs through open-air ditches to streams and rivers that feed the Olympic water sites,” AP explained. “As a result, Olympic athletes are almost certain to come into contact with disease-causing viruses that in some tests measured up to 1.7 million times the level of what would be considered hazardous on a Southern California beach.”

Obviously, spending billions on modernizing the country’s basic sanitation infrastructure isn’t in the cards now that the government is mired in a fiscal crisis and desperately needs to cut spending in order to hit what certainly look like unrealistic primary surplus targets.

We’ve long predicted that the country’s economic and political strife would end up having an adverse impact on the games and sure enough, we found out earlier this month that athletes in Olympic village will be asked to pay for their own air conditioning and will not have televisions in their rooms. In short, organizers can no longer depend on the government (and who knows what the government will look like by the time the games commence) to fund cost overruns. That means spending only as much as Brazil expects to take in from sponsorships, ticket sales, and a grant from the International Olympic Committee.

Apparently, the games were already some $520 million over budget. The government was supposed to cover that (and more) but obviously that’s out of the question given Brazil’s worsening fiscal crisis. “By the time the Games begin, the committee plans to have 500 fewer paid staff than the 5,000 it originally expected,” Bloomberg said, adding that “the deepest cuts will probably come from operational areas like catering, transportation and cleaning services.”

Well, if you thought all of the above was bad, consider that now, a major supplier of power has reportedly backed out of the event, suggesting that in addition to unsanitary conditions and no air conditioning, athletes could well run out of energy - literally.

As Reuters reports, “longtime Olympic power provider Aggreko has pulled out of a tender to supply generators for the games in Rio de Janeiro next year, dealing a major blow to organizers rushing to secure an energy source for the world's largest sporting event.”

With Glasgow-based Aggreko, it’s the experience that counts. The company has helped power nine Olympics and six World Cups and although Rio 2016 spokesman Mario Andrada told Reuters he was comfortable with the companies still competing for the tender, some say he probably shouldn’t be.

"There is increased risk of it going to someone who doesn't have the experience. Are there people out there with enough equipment? Probably. But in terms of the operational side of things, Aggreko are pretty good at this," said Will Kirkness, an analyst at Jefferies.

While Aggreko didn’t give a reason for pulling out, Reuters suggests they may have become exhausted with the planning process which, if you go by the 2012 London games, is behind by about 12 months.

Of course it’s also likely that Aggreko worried it wouldn’t get paid. As noted above, and as we discussed two weeks ago, the government can’t fund cost overruns, which means that if the planning committee exceeds the budget, it’s not clear who would cover the bill.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-15/dark-days-ahead-main-power-supplier-brazil-olympic-games-pulls-out

“We are well positioned — the strongest balance sheet, the least debt of any of the majors,” Sam Walsh, chief executive officer of the second-biggest mining company, said in a Bloomberg Television interview in London. “It puts the dividend in a strong position.”

Anglo American, Glencore and Vedanta have scrapped payouts in recent months as they battle a slump in prices for industrial metals to a six-year low. Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are the only major miners still vowing to pay higher dividends each year, a policy viewed by some analysts as unsustainable given the ups and downs of the industry.

“Dividends are very high on our radar screen,” said Walsh, 65, who became CEO in 2013. “Personally, for me, they are very, very important. We have shareholders who are invested in our business. They put their faith in us and I believe they need a fair return. At the end of the day, it’s a board decision, it’s not my decision.”

Rio Tinto’s first priority in spending cash is sustaining global mining operations, costing about $2.5 billion a year, then the progressive dividend, Walsh said. New mines and operations are next, then paying down debt and more returns to shareholders, he said.

The company raised its dividend payment 12% in the first half to $2.2 billion even as underlying earnings plunged 43% to $2.9 billion. Full-year profit is set to slide 48% to $4.85 billion, according to the average of 14 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Iron-ore prices are down 45% this year. The steelmaking raw material contributed $2.1 billion, or 72%, of Rio’s underlying earnings in the first half.

“Quite frankly we haven’t finished the business improvement, there’s more ahead of us. You can’t turn around a business in two-and-a-half years, it takes longer than that,” Walsh said. “2016 is going to be tough again.”

http://www.mineweb.com/news-fast-news/rio-tinto-ceo-says-dividend-in-strong-position/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20MasterGold%20%28Gold%20News%29&utm_term=MasterMetals