Baltic
Dry Index. 2139 +44 Brent Crude 97.17
Spot Gold 4744 Spot Silver 74.25
US 2 Year Yield 3.79 -0.02
US Federal Debt. 39.094 trillion
US GDP 31.310 trillion.
As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
8:00 AM Update.
Brent oil spot price above $120 in sign that Iran
ceasefire can’t solve deep disruption
Published Wed, Apr 8 2026 6:13 PM EDT Updated
Wed, Apr 8 2026 7:46 PM EDT
The spot price for cargos of Brent crude
oil came in at $124.68 per barrel on Wednesday in a sign that the Iran
ceasefire agreement is unlikely resolve the deep supply disruption triggered by
the five-week war.
The spot price governs Brent oil for
delivery in the next 10 to 30 days, in contrast to futures contracts for
delivery in June and beyond.
The spot price has fallen $19.75 after the
two-week ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran, according to S&P
Global, which tracks the data.
But it is still nearly $30 above the Brent
June futures contract that closed at $94.75 on Wednesday. The higher price for
actual cargo demonstrates that oil supplies will remain tight for some time
even if the ceasefire agreement holds.
The spot price for actual cargo reflects
the reality on the ground and the high seas, said Amrita Sen, founder of Energy
Aspects. Middle East oil producers have shut down 13 million barrels per day of
production because tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has plunged, Sen
said.
Most tankers are now pointing toward the
U.S. to pick up oil there, Sen said. It could take until June to redirect those
ships back to the Middle East, she said.
“It’s a complete mess,” Sen told CNBC’s “The Exchange” on Wednesday.
Hundreds of millions of barrels of oil
have been taken off the market due to the war, said Amena Bakr, an expert on
the Middle East and OPEC at Kpler. It could take as long as five months to
restore capacity, Bakr told CNBC.
“It is contingent on how long this
ceasefire lasts” and whether it leads to a peace agreement, Bakr told CNBC’s “Morning Call” on Wednesday.
The CEO of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation
said in March it would take as long as four months for the Gulf Arab producers
to fully restore their production to pre-war levels. Kuwait was producing about
2.6 million barrels per day prior to the war, the fifth-largest producer in
OPEC.
More
Brent
oil spot price above $120 as ceasefire fails to solve deep disruption
Day two of the supposed ceasefire between, Israel, the USA and Iran, but is Israel deliberately trying to end it?
Or perhaps it’s just Trump’s USA negotiating in bad faith for a third time. The June 2025 bombing of Iran took place amid USA/Iran negotiations. The Feb 28th bombings similarly took place amidst supposed negotiations. Can Trump’s USA be trusted in negotiations or comply with any supposed deals?
Such is the state of the world in Trump world 2.0.
President Trump is again threatening Denmark’s Greenland and threatening to leave NATO. The only winners, Russia, China and India.
The Gulf states and Jordan have lacked US protection so far, suggesting Henry Kissinger was right.
To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.
Henry A. Kissinger
Asia markets trade lower as investors assess
fragile Iran-U.S. ceasefire deal
Published Wed, Apr 8 2026 7:52 PM EDT
Asia-Pacific markets traded lower
Thursday, after Iran’s parliamentary speaker charged the U.S. of breaching the
terms of the two-week
ceasefire agreement.
On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump
had announced a “double sided” ceasefire, more than a month into a war with
Iran.
“I agree to suspend the bombing and attack
of Iran for a period of two weeks,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “We received a 10-point proposal from
Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate.”
The ceasefire was contingent on Iran
agreeing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran had said that it would stop
“defensive” operations if attacks on the country were halted, according
to a statement from Iran’s Foreign Minister. Israel has
also agreed to the ceasefire, media reports said.
Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammed
Bagher Ghalibaf subsequently accused the U.S. of breaching
the ceasefire deal. The violations highlighted were denial of the Islamic
Republic’s right to enrich uranium and Israel’s continued attacks on Lebanon, a
drone’s entry into Iranian airspace, he said.
South Korea’s Kospi was down 1.53% while the small-cap Kosdaq declined 1.38%.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell
by 0.77%, while the Topix was 0.78% lower. Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki
Katayama on Thursday warned about the effect of cross-market volatility on
interest rates, Reuters reported. “Interest-rate increases transmitted from
other markets can materialize much more rapidly than we anticipate,” she said.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 was flat.
China’s CSI 300 fell 0.64%, tracking broad losses among other Asian markets.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index declined 0.30%.
India’s Nifty 50 was 0.3% lower. On Wednesday, the country’s central bank warned
that the Iran war had raised inflation worries while also flagging
risks to economic growth.
Oil futures extended gains. The West Texas Intermediate futures
for May traded at 2.85% higher to $97.10 per barrel by 9:06 p.m. ET.
International benchmark Brent June
futures gained 1.97% to $96.62 per barrel.
S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures slipped
0.1%. Futures tied to the Dow
Jones Industrial Average fell by 32 points, or less than 0.1%.
Overnight in the U.S., stocks surged after President Donald Trump suspended
attacks on Iran for two weeks, pausing a five-week conflict that closed a
crucial waterway for global energy supplies.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average ripped
1,325.46 points higher, or 2.85%, to 47,909.92. That was the benchmark’s best
day since April
2025, when Trump first backed down from the severity of his initial
tariff announcement.
The S&P 500 popped 2.51% to
6,782.81, and the Nasdaq
Composite surged 2.80% to 22,635.00.
Asia-pacific
markets: U.S., Iran, Negotiations
Oil prices resume gains after Iran accuses U.S. of
breaching ceasefire deal
Published Wed, Apr 8 2026 8:36 PM EDT
Oil prices rose Thursday after Iran
accused the United States of violating elements of a two-week ceasefire
agreement, raising concerns that tensions could escalate again and disrupt
energy supplies.
International benchmark Brent crude futures for
June delivery added 2.08% to $96.83, while the U.S. West Texas Intermediate
crude futures for May rose 2.86% to $97.27.
The moves come a day after U.S. crude oil
posted its biggest single-day drop since 2020.
More
Oil
prices: WTI, Brent, Iran accuse U.S. of ceasefire breach
Iran War Ceasefire in Doubt as Bombing Continues
With reports of Gulf drone strikes,
Israeli bombing and a quiet Strait of Hormuz, it’s unclear what happens next.
April 8, 2026 at 11:01 PM GMT+1
With reports from Gulf nations of continued
drone strikes, Israel’s insistence it can keep bombing Lebanon and traffic in
the Strait of Hormuz reportedly
at a standstill, it would seem Donald Trump’s dramatic announcement last
night of a ceasefire in the war with Iran might
have been premature.
In fact, some Israelis say they want
the war to continue to fully eliminate the regional threat they say is
posed by Tehran. But on Wednesday it was Lebanon that Israel was bombing, its
largest assault on that country since the start of its recent invasion. Israeli
attacks said to be aimed at Iran-aligned Hezbollah have killed at least 1,500
people there since the war began. Iran today pushed back on any de-escalation
of the war that doesn’t include Lebanon.
“The Iran–U.S. Ceasefire terms are
clear and explicit: the U.S. must choose—ceasefire or continued war via
Israel. It cannot have both,” Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said
in a social media post. —David
E. Rovella
What You Need to Know Today
Among the many long-term consequences of the war,
including potentially elevating
Russia and China at the expense of American credibility, a big one may be
the continued splintering of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Trump has
attacked NATO for not assisting with the conflict or its consequences, adding
to his long list of grievances concerning the defensive alliance.
Now the US president is again talking
about leaving NATO (though he
does not have the legal power to do so). One man, however, has been making
it his mission to preserve NATO’s integrity, in part by showing some support
for Trump. But as the grim economic and political fallout of the war becomes
clear, Secretary
General Mark Rutte’s strategy is coming under fire.
It’s been said that no one profits from a
prolonged conflict,
but a well-timed bet on an erstwhile ceasefire? That could pay off. As with the
US military’s surprise attack on Venezuela and its rendition of President
Nicolas Maduro, it’s looking like some people with serious luck—or perhaps
inside information—could make big money on yesterday’s announcement by Trump.
Bets on a ceasefire have sent more than
$170 million coursing through Polymarket, making it one of the largest
geopolitical wagers in the short history of prediction markets. Now, the
aftermath is raising the same questions that have dogged these platforms for
months: whether bettors are trading on nonpublic tips, and whether the
platforms can
cleanly settle their contracts.
Iran
War Ceasefire in Doubt as Bombing Continues - Bloomberg
U.S. has violated ceasefire agreement, Iran
parliamentary speaker says
Published Wed, Apr 8 2026 2:42 PM EDT
Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad
Bagher Ghalibaf, accused the U.S. on Wednesday of violating the two-week
ceasefire agreement.
“The deep historical distrust we hold
toward the United States stems from its repeated violations of all forms of
commitments — a pattern that has regrettably been repeated once again,”
Ghalibaf said in a statement posted on social
media.
Three parts of Iran’s 10-point ceasefire
proposal have been violated, Ghalibaf said. The violations are Israel’s
continued attacks on Lebanon, the entry of a drone into Iranian airspace, and
the denial of the Islamic Republic’s right to enrich uranium, he said.
“In such situation, a bilateral ceasefire
or negotiations is unreasonable,” the parliamentary speaker said.
President Donald Trump said
Tuesday that Iran’s proposal was a workable basis for negotiations.
Vice President JD Vance addressed
Ghalibaf’s allegations while traveling in Hungary on Wednesday.
“Ceasefires are always messy,” Vance said
in response to the alleged drone incursion into Iran’s airspace. The vice
president said the U.S. position is that Iran cannot enrich uranium. The
ceasefire extending to Lebanon was never part of the agreement, he said.
----A large gulf has emerged between the
U.S. and Iranian interpretations of the ceasefire since the agreement was
announced Tuesday evening, particularly over the strait.
Trump said Tuesday that the ceasefire was
subject to the complete, immediate and safe opening of the strait. But
Iran plans to demand that ships pay tolls to pass through the vital sea route,
according to a report in The Financial Times.
Trump wants the strait open “without
limitation, including tolls,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told
reporters Wednesday.
Iran state news agency Fars said earlier
that oil tanker traffic through the strait has been halted as Israel continues
to attack Lebanon.
The amount of tanker traffic through the
strait has plunged during the war due to Iranian attacks, triggering the
largest crude oil
supply disruption in history. About 20% of global oil supplies passed
through the strait before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28.
Ship
traffic through the strait has not picked up beyond the slow trickle
observed during most of the war, freight and oil analysts have told CNBC.
U.S. has
violated ceasefire agreement, Iran parliamentary speaker says
‘Poorly run, piece of ice’: Trump targets
Greenland again as Iran war deepens NATO rift
Published Wed, Apr 8 2026 10:10 PM EDT
U.S. President Donald Trump appears
to have set his eyes on Greenland again while venting frustration at NATO, as
the diplomatic fallout from Iran war exposes rifts in Washington’s ties with
the security alliance.
In a Truth Social post Wednesday evening stateside, Trump
said that “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE
NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!”
The latest broadside comes after Trump
announced a 2-week
ceasefire after more than a month of fighting with Iran. Trump has
repeatedly criticized NATO members for not joining the war effort in Iran,
saying his call for action was “a
great test,” while threatening to pull out of the alliance.
Trump has taken aim at NATO and Greenland
in recent days. “It all began with, if you want to know the truth,
Greenland,” Trump told
reporters at a White House press conference Monday. “We want
Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said, ‘bye, bye.’”
U.S. relations with European allies have
frayed after Trump threatened
tariffs on European countries and signaled
military action to acquire Greenland, a Danish autonomous
territory. In January, Trump said he and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte had
reached “the
framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland.”
The Iran war has brought fresh tensions in
the diplomatic ties, as several NATO members have resisted supporting the U.S.-Israeli
military campaign against Iran, denying American military aircraft use of their airspace and declining to
contribute naval forces to efforts aimed at reopening the Strait
of Hormuz to energy shipping.
Trump’s comments Wednesday followed a
meeting with Rutte at the White House earlier in the day, with spokeswoman
Karoline Leavitt reportedly saying that NATO had “turned their backs on
the American people.”
More
'Poorly
run, piece of ice': Trump targets Greenland again as Iran war deepens NATO rift
Canada Can’t Pretend America Is Still the Good Guy
The lesson of Iran is that our closest
ally may no longer share the same assumptions about right and wrong
Updated 9:26, Apr. 7,
2026 | Published 6:30, Apr. 6, 2026
----Do we know who the
good guys are here?
On the last day of February, without so
much as a heads-up to their traditional allies, or to the United Nations, the
US and Israel launched devastating attacks on Iran’s leadership and military
architecture. In the process, they destroyed a girls’ school with a Tomahawk
missile and killed over 100 of its students. Their tiny bodies would be buried
row by row in tiny graves.
The war isn’t legal by US domestic
standards. Congress has the sole authority to declare war, according to the US
Constitution. It isn’t legal by international standards either. The UN Security
Council must authorize a necessary and proportional response to an imminent
threat. This was an unprovoked war of aggression. A dream come true for Israeli
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a genocidal accused war criminal who has
“longed” for this for forty years due to Iran’s support of terrorist groups
Hamas and Hezbollah and their pursuit of nuclear weapons, which, for forty
years, have been months or weeks away from being realized.
US secretary of war Pete Hegseth has said
that “no quarter” will be shown to Iran—“no mercy” as the US and Israel wage a
campaign of “maximum lethality” under “maximum authorities on the battlefield.”
Such a policy, a policy of annihilation, is also illegal under the Hague
Convention, as well as US domestic laws.
More
Canada
Can’t Pretend America Is Still the Good Guy | The Walrus
Initial post-ceasefire transits recorded as
fighting continues; shipping agencies warn of Hormuz hazards
08 Apr 2026 by Jamey Bergman
Two bulk carriers have departed from the
west side of the Iranian-controlled Strait of Hormuz and exited the Strait into
the Gulf of Oman to the east of the maritime chokepoint that has become Iran’s
main leverage in negotiations to halt a war begun by the US and Israel on 28
February.
According to vessel tracking service
MarineTraffic, the passages through the Strait by Greek-owned and
Liberia-flagged bulk carriers Daytona Beach and NJ
Earth were the first vessel transits since US President
Donald Trump took to social media to announce what he called ’A big day for
World Peace!’, with a two-week ceasefire agreed by the US and Israel in
ongoing negotiations brokered by Pakistan.
In a visualisation of vessel activity by
Belgium-based commodities data and analysis firm Kpler’s MarineTraffic,
"bulk carrier NJ Earth crossed the Strait at 08:44 UTC,
while... Daytona Beach transited earlier at 06:59 UTC, shortly
after departing Bandar Abbas at 05:28 UTC".
Vessel movements resume in the Strait of
Hormuz following the ceasefire announcement.
Both vessels transited by way
of a de facto shipping corridor that runs near Iran’s
coastline and through apparent checkpoints reportedly administered by
the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) around Larak, Qeshm and Hormuz
islands near the narrowest point of the Strait of Hormuz.
British-Israeli maritime intelligence
consultancy Windward AI pointed to a transit by an unnamed bulk carrier
"outbound via Larak Island alongside several other early
movers".
Despite the initial transits by bulk
carriers, independent crude tracking firm TankerTrackers cited Kpler tracking
data in pointing to a lack of transits by tankers and transits
remaining limited to vessels that had begun voyages in Iran.
Kpler counted 187 laden tankers on the
water in the Persian Gulf, carrying some 172M barrels of oil (Mbbl), and said
that crude oil and condensates account for 132.2 Mbbl. VLCCs are carrying the
majority of the oil, at 115.1 Mbbl, with the remainder on Suezmax and LR3
vessels.
"This concentration indicates that a
relatively small number of vessels account for a large share of barrels
currently awaiting transit, reinforcing that crude cargoes dominate the
Gulf’s on-water exposure," Kpler’s analysis showed.
A MarineTraffic post on X tallied
"hundreds of vessels," including 426 tankers, 34 LPG carriers and 19
LNG carriers, "many of which had been effectively stranded" during
the war.
Kpler’s Strait of Hormuz tracking
indicates that the corridor has remained open on what the firm called a
selective basis.
"Rather than fully closed, from 1
March through 7 April, Kpler data show 70 outbound laden crossings for
crude," the analysis said, "carrying approximately 87 Mbbl in
total..., with Iranian-origin cargoes dominating outbound crude movements."
UK-based maritime security consultancy
EOS Marine head of advisory Martin Kelly cited an
Iranian state-run broadcaster reporting that Iran’s Lavan oil refinery was
"attacked by the enemy" during the morning of 8 April and that
Kuwaiti and UAE authorities reported intercepting more than two dozen drones,
with damage to oil, energy and desalination infrastructure reported in Kuwait.
Mr Kelly advised in a LinkedIn post that
transit through the Strait of Hormuz "is not unrestricted".
More
Tankers to avoid Strait of Hormuz despite US-Iran
ceasefire
8 April 2026
Oil tankers are expected to avoid the
Strait of Hormuz despite the US and Iran agreeing a deal to reopen the crucial
Gulf shipping route.
Experts said vessel owners were not likely
to send tankers back to the Strait because of fears that the ships could become
stranded if the two-week ceasefire failed to hold.
It means vital oil and gas supplies from
the Middle East will continue to be disrupted. A fifth of the world’s supplies
normally pass through the crucial waterway.
Lars Jensen, a shipping analyst, said:
“Technically speaking they could pull anchor and start moving now, but that is
not what is likely to happen.
“I expect that what we will see in the
next few days, if the ceasefire holds, is a lot of vessels exit the Persian
Gulf but not very many vessels enter into the Persian Gulf.
“Shipping lines would be hesitant in
trusting the longevity of the ceasefire at this point and therefore [would] try
to get vessels out, so they can use them, but not risk putting new vessels into
the Gulf that might then be trapped if the ceasefire breaks down.”
Mr Jensen said most ship owners would want
to see details of the ceasefire and receive reassurances about the terms for
passing through the Strait before committing. Any Iranian
demands for payments are
also likely to prove problematic.
He told BBC Radio 4: “The Iranians have
said yes, you can pass through freely, but you need to coordinate with the
Iranian military forces, and it’s unclear exactly what that means.
“The challenge would be if you pay a toll
for going through you might actually be in violation of some of the US
sanctions on Iran, which would have other repercussions.”
Peter Sand, a container shipping analyst
at logistics specialist Xeneta, said the focus would be on getting all trapped
vessels – including 130 container carriers – out of the Gulf, shipping as much
oil and gas for export as possible, and sending supplies to cities such as
Dubai, which have been largely starved of goods since the start of the war.
However, he said owners would want to be
sure that any inbound ships could be extricated if the ceasefire broke down.
That would limit sailings to vessels close enough to get into the Gulf, unload
and get out again during the two weeks. That would mean ships already in
Pakistan, India and ports such as Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania.
Even then, Mr Sand said most ships were
likely to go no further than DP World’s Jebel Ali facility on the outskirts of
Dubai – a container facility rather than an oil terminal – so that they can
perform a quick turnaround if need be.
More
Tankers to avoid
Strait of Hormuz despite US-Iran ceasefire
In US auto news, a Tesla warning.
JP Morgan Concerned Tesla Stock Will Crash by 60
Percent in Face of Ongoing Business Failures
Tue, 7 April 2026 at 6:19 pm BST
Tesla’s first quarter results this year
left plenty to be desired. The embattled EV maker’s sales fell short of Wall
Street’s expectations, the second-worst
quarter of sales since
2022.
The Elon Musk-led company has struggled
for two years now to keep its core business alive as competitors, particularly
from China, continue to eat its lunch, taking over vast swathes of the
international electric car market.
Meanwhile, the company’s mercurial CEO —
whose extremist rhetoric and embrace of far-right idealism has proven alienating to say the
least — kicked off what could be a long
and arduous pivot away from EV sales towards robotaxis and humanoid
robots. The company’s progress on the former remains far behind the
competition,
while the latter is likely still years from going on sale.
In other words, the short-term prognosis
isn’t exactly glowing. To underscore those jitters, JP Morgan analysts now
warning that the company’s share price — which remains massively inflated
compared to its business fundamentals with a price-to-earnings ratio of well
over 300 — could drop by a whopping
60 percent.
“With expectations for Tesla performance
having collapsed for all financial and performance metrics across all time
periods through the end of the decade, the +50 percent rise in Tesla shares and
+32 percent increase in analyst price targets as this collapse has taken place
implies an expectation for a sharp pivot to materially better than earlier
expected performance in the time beyond this decade,” JP Morgan analyst Ryan
Brinkman wrote in a Monday note.
“We advise investors cautiously approach
this expectation within the context of both execution risk and the time value
of money,” he added.
He’s right that many signs point towards a
major correction. The company’s shares are down over 20 percent over the past
six months, but remains up an astonishing 44 percent over the last 12 months.
Following its Q1 delivery miss and JP
Morgan warning of a share collapse, investors are clearly unimpressed, sending
the stock sliding over five percent over the last five days.
It’s not just JP Morgan ringing the alarm
bells. Last week, HSBC stock analyst Mike Tyndall reiterated a
“reduce” rating on Tesla, also predicting that the company’s shares could
crash by around 60 percent.
More
JP Morgan
Concerned Tesla Stock Will Crash by 60 Percent in Face of Ongoing Business
Failures
GM, Ford sales fall sharply in first quarter as
affordability, tariff impacts drag down results
Rough weather in Q1 also hurt customer
foot traffic, while affordability issues remain a key concern.
Updated Mon, April 6, 2026 at 3:33 PM
GMT+1
Ford (F) reported a rough start to 2026, though
the automaker said the numbers are more a reflection of last year than this
one, as affordability remains a key concern for automakers heading into the
second quarter.
Ford posted first quarter US sales of
457,315 vehicles — down 8.8% compared to a year ago, which follows rival GM’s (GM) sales drop in Q1.
A year ago, US car buyers rushed into
showrooms ahead of anticipated auto tariffs, pushing the industry’s sales rate
to 18.4 million vehicles in March 2025 alone — the highest monthly pace since
April 2021.
That buying spree pulled massive demand
forward, making Q1 2026 a difficult comparison, Ford said. GM noted yesterday
that severe winter weather in much of January and February made things worse.
Ford’s F-Series trucks, the No. 1 selling
vehicle in America, felt the biggest hit, with sales down 16% in Q1 to 159,901
units.
Ford attributed part of that decline to a
retiming of commercial truck production tied to last year's aluminum plant
fires, which constrained supply. The company expects the recovery to be uneven,
with more volume coming in the back half of the year.
Still, Ford managed to grow its estimated
retail market share to 11.6%, up 0.2 percentage points from a year ago, as its
large SUV lineup scored with consumers. Explorer sales jumped 29.7% to 61,387
units, while Expedition sales were up 30.2% to 17,554 — the best combined start
for those two models since 2002.
The Bronco Sport had its best-ever first
quarter with 35,021 vehicles sold, though full-size Bronco sales dipped 4%
following multimonth sales gains.
----Ford's EV business continued to
struggle, with sales tumbling 70% year over year to just 6,860 units, with the
now-canceled F-150 Lightning sales plunging from 7,187 to 2,060.
Hybrid sales also fell 19.4% to 41,159
vehicles, a notable reversal for a segment that had been one of Ford's biggest
growth stories heading into the year, though this could again be due to a big
comp from last year.
Ford said the phase-out of the popular
Escape SUV also weighed on the results, with that model down 66.8% as Ford
winds down production. However, Ranger midsize pickup sales rose 19.2%, and the
Bronco Sport's entry-level trim posted a 10.3% gain, reflecting what Ford
called continued "customer demand for affordability."
More
GM, Ford sales
fall sharply in first quarter as affordability, tariff impacts drag down
results
In other news, get ready for El Nino food
production problems ahead.
A Super El Niño is coming. Here’s how a hotter
ocean could change the weather near you
Andrew Freedman, CNN Tue, April 7, 2026 at 9:18 PM
GMT+1
Get ready to hear a lot more about El Niño
during the next several months — and maybe even longer — as the infamous
climate cycle returns again, developing and intensifying in the Pacific Ocean
near the equator. If it forms as expected, this El Niño will redraw global
weather maps, sparking flooding for some and drought and wildfires for others —
all while simultaneously speeding up the pace of global warming.
There are increasing indications that an
El Niño is not only imminent — setting in by late summer or early fall — but
that it could be a significant one, too.
In fact, this might even qualify as a
“Super El Niño,” which would significantly increase impacts felt around the
world. Such extremely intense El Niños are rare.
To declare an El Niño, in general, ocean
temperatures in a particular region of the tropical Pacific must clear 0.5
degrees Celsius above the long-term average. A Super El Niño, in contrast,
happens when temperatures are more than 2 degrees C above the average. Some
typically reliable computer models, like the European modeling suite, are
projecting just such an outcome for this go-around.
The baddest kids in town
El Niño and La Niña, names that translate
to “the Boy” and “the Girl”, are recurring climate cycles in the tropical
Pacific Ocean that happen every few years and can have profound effects on
global weather patterns. In the case of El Niño, the cycle can bring both
flooding and drought to different parts of Africa, help pummel the U.S. West
Coast with winter storms and lead to more heat extremes globally.
El Niño is characterized by unusually warm
waters along the equatorial tropical Pacific Ocean, and a related series of
shifts in winds and precipitation patterns in the atmosphere. It is a so-called
coupled phenomenon, meaning that to get an El Niño, both the ocean and the
atmosphere must be responding to one another in characteristic ways.
The atmosphere tends to react to the
warmer waters by shifting areas of heavy precipitation closer to that hot
region of the ocean. The trade winds that typically blow from east to west near
the equator can slacken and then reverse direction as well. Those shifts are
significant enough to affect
weather around the world, like a series of dominoes toppling over.
Right now, huge volumes of unusually warm
water are spreading under the ocean surface from the Western to the Eastern
tropical Pacific, where that water slowly rises to the surface in a clear
precursor to El Niño. Periodic areas of wind blowing from the west to the east
have helped transport this water, in what are appropriately known as westerly
wind bursts.
While El Niño and La Niña, El Niño’s
cooler sibling, are fascinating from a meteorological perspective, we care
about them because of the ways in which they can affect extreme weather events
around the world. In fact, they can cause billions of dollars in damages, and a
stronger El Niño would likely make the usual impacts more severe.
Spotting an El Niño in formation and
predicting its evolution “gives us an early heads up on changing risks for many
weather-related phenomena, including floods, droughts, heatwaves, hurricanes
and severe thunderstorms,” said Nat Johnson, a meteorologist at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
“These weather and climate impacts modify crop yields, disease spread, coral
bleaching, fisheries and many other parts of the earth system that affect our
daily lives.”
More
A Super El Niño is
coming. Here’s how a hotter ocean could change the weather near you
Global Inflation/Stagflation/Recession
Watch.
Given
our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians.
Top economist Mark Zandi says the indicator that has called every
recession since WWII just signaled we’re already in one
7 April 2026
Economists have spent
months debating whether a recession is on the horizon. One economic indicator
predicts most of those arguments are already moot.
Mark Zandi, the top
economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the U.S. economy could already be in a
recession, according to the Vicious Cycle Index (VCI), an economic indicator
Zandi and his colleagues created.
The measure is a tool
used to identify when the economy has entered a recession by measuring how
quickly unemployment is rising. It’s a labor-force adjusted version of
the Sahm rule—which signals a recession if the three-month average of the unemployment
rate increases by more than half a percentage point above its lowest point in
the previous 12 months. The VCI uses the five-year moving average of the
labor-force participation rate to adjust the unemployment rate, and flashes red
when the three-month average rises more than one percentage point over the past
year. According to Zandi, the VCI has increased by more than a percentage point
in January and has remained elevated over the last three months.
“It has nailed every
recession since WWII without falsely predicting a downturn,” Zandi wrote in
a LinkedIn post about the VCI. “If it is triggered, it may
take a while for the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of
Economic Research to confirm it, but we are already in a recession.”
A swell of headwinds has
blown recession fears back into economic thinking. Many economists have raised
the probability of a recession happening within the next year, including
Zandi himself. That’s because the oil shock from the Iran war has sent jitters across
the economy. Consumer confidence remains low, and up until last month, employers had posted dismal job numbers. Many
economists have even aired concerns of stagflation amid dual fears about growth and unemployment. But even with the
March job report’s better-than-expected 178,000 added jobs, Zandi said those results offer a false picture of
the overall economy.
“Don’t take solace in the
big March payroll employment gain,” Zandi wrote in a post on X. “It comes after a big
decline in February, when brutal winter weather and a labor strike at Kaiser Permanente weighed
heavily on jobs.” Zandi points out that most of those added jobs fail to
reflect the economic injury incurred by the Iran war, and that without health
care, the economy would actually be losing jobs.
Is the U.S. actually in a recession?
In his LinkedIn post, Zandi said
the VCI is near 5%, indicating further headwinds than the March jobs report
lets on. “That suggests there is more slack in the labor market than the
headline unemployment rate implies, as discouraged workers leave the workforce
altogether.”
The VCI reflects the
assessment KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk made of the March job numbers. “The
unemployment rate dropped, but for the wrong reasons: a loss in labor-force
participation,” Swonk told Fortune in a recent interview.
More, including a table
comparing Sahm rule to VCI.
Technology
Update.
With events happening fast in the
development of solar power and graphene, among other things, I’ve added this
section Updates as they get reported.
New Breakthrough in Solar Cell Efficiency Hits 130% Quantum Yield
David Nield Tue, April 7, 2026 at 4:00 PM GMT+1
Scientists are always pushing the boundaries of
solar cell efficiency – how much of the available sunshine gets turned into
electricity – and a new approach to the technology has resulted in an
astonishingly high 130 percent 'quantum yield'.
It's important to note that this is a quantum-level energy return,
so we're not talking about a solar panel converting sunlight into electricity
at a 130 percent rate. However, the breakthrough is an efficiency improvement
in terms of how often a specific event occurs per photon absorbed by the
system.
To break through the 100 percent barrier, the new approach splits
the energy harvested from a single incoming
light photon into two, which then powers two excited states (known as
excitons) in the receiving material.
It's a process known as singlet fission, and as the international
team behind the research explains, it prevents excess energy from being lost as
heat.
That loss is part of the reason that solar cells typically max out
at around the 33 percent mark in terms of overall efficiency, a restriction
known as the Shockley-Queisser
limit.
"We have two main strategies to break through this
limit," says chemist
Yoichi Sasaki, from Kyushu University in Japan.
"One is to convert lower-energy infrared photons into
higher-energy visible photons. The other, what we explore here, is to use
singlet fission to generate two excitons from a single exciton photon."
The researchers used an organic molecule called tetracene to act
as the splitting material here, through which singlet fission can work. Its
properties make it suitable for splitting one high-energy packet into two
lower-energy packets through electron excitation.
Singlet fission isn't a completely new
concept, though, and is only half of the story here. A major stumbling
block in previous experiments had been giving singlet fission enough time to
work before the energy was lost or transferred elsewhere.
This is where the metallic element molybdenum comes in, again
chosen for its particular properties. By mixing it with tetracene, the team was
able to catch the split excitons in the molybdenum compound.
At the tiniest quantum
level, the molybdenum acts as what's called a spin-flip emitter. First,
it locks in energy, and then it uses a quantum spin-flip to turn the invisible
states into light. That gave the team the breakthrough result: 1.3
molybdenum-based metal complexes excited per photon absorbed.
"The energy can be easily 'stolen' by a mechanism called
Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) before multiplication
occurs," says Sasaki.
"We therefore needed an energy acceptor that selectively
captures the multiplied triplet excitons after fission."
"We therefore needed an energy acceptor that selectively
captures the multiplied triplet excitons after fission."
It's worth emphasizing again that these are early lab tests. The
next steps are to convert the liquid solution used here into a solid form that
can be fitted to a solar panel,
reliably and effectively – which the researchers themselves admit will be quite
a challenge.
More
New Breakthrough
in Solar Cell Efficiency Hits 130% Quantum Yield
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt Clocks
(usdebtclock.org)
The function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the
pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried
technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one
in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet
for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
