Dear Friends:

Following my joining the board of Elate Partners, www.elateinvest.com – a Chinese investment group backed by large institutional, strategic and wealthy individual investors from China – a lot of you have been asking me about the kind of deals Elate would be interested to invest in in partnership with Blackhawk.

Without further delays, here is the short list as per below

Guidelines

•  Western Investment:
  • Hard asset-based deals that have “intrinsic values” of their own, for example mines, oil field, certain real estate;
  • Businesses with potential synergy with China;
  • Generally shy away from businesses that rely on services for revenue due to a lack of expertise
• China Expansion:
•  Technology-based and other businesses that could be transferred to China sometime in the future (regardless whether the US operation is kept intact or not);

For More: http://ziadabdelnourblackhawk.com/our-investment-criteria-and-interests-for-2016-and-beyond/

Thank you,

DALLAS, Dec. 3, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Elate Partners, with offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, China; in conjunction with its sister company, PA Asset Advisors in Dallas, Texas; is pleased to announce that Ziad K Abdelnour, President & CEO of Blackhawk Partners, New York, NY, has agreed to serve as a board member at Elate Partners. Mr. Abdelnour is very connected in Wall Street financial circles, has a wide network in American politics, and will help guide Elate’s Asset Monetization business.

The partnership will focus on the interests of Blackhawk’s clients, from oil, gas, mines and specialty real-estate, to technology-based alternative energy, high-end equipment manufacturing, medical and biotechnology, modern agriculture, and aerospace.

Mr. Abdelnour stated, “I am very pleased about the opportunity this partnership will create for both of our companies. Such a collaboration will help western companies expand into the vast Chinese market, allow western financiers access to China’s huge untapped asset base, and match needs of Chinese companies with western solutions.”

“We’re very excited to have someone of Mr. Abdelnour’s caliber on board as we continue our mission of globalizing China’s tremendous potential.”

For More:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elate-partners-and-sister-company-pa-asset-advisors-announce-new-partner-300187196.html

Thank you,

The two worst things our government can do to someone are to conscript him for military service and deprive him of his liberty.

Losing or being threatened with loss of liberty is an ordeal increasingly suffered by average, law-abiding Americans.  We have become a nation of “No,” of the ever-present threat of criminal prosecution — even, perversely enough, in an era of “yes” and permissiveness on someone else’s dime.  The routine trip to the doctor’s office comes with the warning that “false statements” on the insurance form can result in prosecution.

Anything you do that involves either your receipt of money or ever-growing duties and responsibilities owed to customers, lenders, clients or the general public, now comes with the risk of being suspected, investigated and accused of a “crime.”

Thank You,

There has been much fuss lately as to the huge impact a deal with Iran will have on oil prices globally.

I personally see the near-term impact on oil markets likely to be far less significant than most oil analysts predict, despite Iran’s large natural gas and oil reserves.

The bottom line is that a deal with Iran would likely add only about 500,000 barrels/day to the 90-million-barrel daily oil market over the next 12 months. This would be a non-trivial amount, but clearly not a “game changer”.

The baseline is for prices to return to about $70 for a barrel of Brent Crude in 2016. Additional supply from Iran would knock roughly $5/barrel off expectations – or less than one-quarter of a standard deviation. Said another way, additional Iranian output could move prices lower, but many other factors, such as changes in global GDP or the return of Libyan oil, could prove more meaningful over the next year. What’s more, recent trading suggests the market has already priced in much of this risk.

Over the longer term, I believe an increase in Iranian output could be for sure significant. With investment and time, Iran could meet a greater share of global demand for oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG). It also could ship natural gas to Europe via pipeline, challenging Russia’s dominance.

The details of the contracts Iran signs with international oil companies will be telling. Depending on the terms offered to Western companies, other oil producing nations – Iraq, in particular – could feel the pressure. Increased competition for investment would be a material signal that lower prices will endure longer.

I still though believe that the key factor in the global geopolitical game of oil will be China, not Iran.

China is today the second largest importer of oil in the world and its appetite for oil is all but insatiable, growing at 8 percent a year. They decided to go with cars instead of sticking with mass transit. Plus, factories that produce cars can easily be converted to military needs. I believe within twenty years they’ll have more cars than the U.S. and that same year they’ll be importing just as much oil as we do. So here’s the deal. They don’t have it. Want to guess where they get it from? Iran. They signed a deal saying if Iran would give them lots of oil, China in return would block any American effort to get the United Nations Security Council to do anything significant about its nuclear program. They’ve been doing a lot of deals with each other ever since. Oh yeah, these two countries are very cozy indeed. Anyway, China gets most of its oil from Iran. And they don’t just need oil—they need “cheap oil” because they sell the least expensive gasoline in the world. I think that’s to keep everybody happy driving all those new cars.

Bottom Line: Iran’s agreement with major world powers to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions opens up the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves, second-largest natural gas reserves and an 80 million population to multinationals. But the strict, decades-old U.S. restrictions on doing business with Tehran, which predate the nuclear crisis and relate to other concerns such as terrorism support and human rights abuses, will remain in place.

What will be particularly difficult for American companies is if they are the only ones that are prohibited whereas the rest of the world will be trading? Problematic because every time you’re at a disadvantage relative to your foreign counterparts, you lose market share.