Baltic Dry Index. 867 -19
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
Creative
destruction describes the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly
revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the
old one, incessantly creating a new one."
Joseph
Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
(1942)
For more on Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction,
scroll down to Crooks Corner where we cover the destruction coming soon to the
existing electric power industry. The 21st century should be the age
of cheap available electric generation and storage, and it has nothing to do
with coal, oil, gas or nuclear power.
But first this glimmer of hope for the 21st
century.
Dawn of bionic age? Paralysed man becomes first to use power of thought to move hand
Ohio doctors insert microchip into Ian Burkhart’s brain allowing him to move hand for first time since accident
A young American paralysed in a
swimming accident has become the first patient to move his hand using the power
of thought after doctors inserted a microchip into his brain.
Ian Burkhart was able to open and
close his fist and even pick up a spoon during the first test of the chip,
giving hope to millions of accident victims and stroke sufferers of a new
bionic era of movement through thought.
Onlookers described the moment he
was able to move by the sheer force of concentration as like watching “science fiction
come true”.
Doctors at the Ohio State
University Wexner Medical Center created the “Neurobridge” technology, whereby
a microchip reads patients’ thoughts in order to replace signals no longer
transmitted by their broken bodies, in conjunction with engineers from
Battelle, a non-profit research centre.
While doctors have seen some
success in recent years in getting stroke victims to manoeuvre robotic arms
using their thoughts, Mr Burkhart is the first to move his own body.
More
We open properly today with a little nervousness
surfacing in stocks. What if the Yellen Put is overwhelmed by real events in
the real world? Couldn’t happen could it?
"Liquidation
sometimes is orderly, but more frequently degenerates into panic as the
realization spreads that there is only so much money, not enough to enable
everyone to sell out at the top."
Charles
P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes.
June 24, 2014, 4:36 p.m. EDT
U.S. stocks fall; Dow in triple-digit loss
Energy stocks hit hard; CBOE Vix index jumps 10%
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — A late afternoon selloff on Wall
Street sent U.S. stocks lower on Tuesday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling by the most
points in more than a month.
Some analysts pointed to escalation in Iraq as a possible trigger, while
others said that it was a mere profit-taking at the end of the quarter.
---- “Investors
have generally paid little attention to the fighting in Iraq. But stocks
dropped today due to the possibility of escalating violence and slightly higher
oil prices,” said Kate Warne, investment strategist at Edward Jones.
Channing Smith, managing director
at Capital Advisors, doubted it was Iraq news that triggered a selloff.
“If Iraq is a concern, why energy
sector is sharply down? I think markets simply have been overbought and are now
taking a breather, with investors taking profit at the end of the quarter”
Channing said.
Stocks initially rose on the back
of positive economic reports, including new-home sales, home prices and
consumer confidence data, but gains evaporated by afternoon.
More
Asian Stocks Decline as Middle East Violence Escalates
Jun 25, 2014 4:35 AM GMT
Asian
stocks fell, led by material shares, as escalating violence in
the Middle East sapped demand for riskier assets.
---- The MSCI Asia Pacific Index (MXAP) dropped 0.3 percent to 144.35 as of 12:32 p.m. in Tokyo, with eight of its 10 industry groups declining. The gauge has slid since reaching a six-year high on June 19. U.S. stocks closed lower after the Wall Street Journal reported that Syrian warplanes struck targets in western Iraq, killing at least 50 people.
“A surge in oil prices can weigh on the global economy and that’s why the Iraqi conflict gets attention,” said Osamu Koizumi, Tokyo-based executive officer at Meiji Yasuda Asset Management Co. “Investors want to sell into the market near a high level, but I don’t think a correction will be big because fundamentals are good.”
West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures are on course for a 3.9 percent jump this month and closed at a nine-month high on June 20.
Japan’s Topix (TPX) index fell 0.3 percent.
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-25/asian-stocks-decline-as-middle-east-violence-escalates.html
Elsewhere, the Great Russian Rally is now underway.
And it’s “Mission Accomplished” in Japan. With endless free money from the
Fedsters, it is all getting too silly for words.
There can be few fields of human endeavour in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.
J. K. Galbraith
World’s Best Stock Rally in Russia Fed by Putin Detente
Jun 25, 2014 4:10 AM GMT
Russian stocks are headed for the best performance among the world’s major
equity markets for a second straight month as President Vladimir Putin pulls
back from the confrontation in neighboring Ukraine. The dollar-denominated RTS Index (RTSI$) has rallied 9.7 percent to 1,421.07 in Moscow this month after adding 12 percent in May. The measure has gained 16 percent this quarter, making it the best performer among 93 equity gauges globally over that time after benchmarks in Argentina and Peru. The Bloomberg Index of the most-traded Russian shares in the U.S. has climbed 7.8 percent in June.
Putin asked lawmakers to revoke his authority to use force in Ukraine, in a conciliatory move that follows his meeting with the Ukrainian president on June 6. Investors dumped Russian assets, pushing the RTS index into a bear market on March 3, as the annexation of Crimea prompted the U.S. and European Union to impose sanctions on Russian businessmen and companies linked to Putin’s inner circle. The gauge entered a bull market on May 19 as Putin ordered a troop pullback at the Ukrainian border.
“The
time is right to invest in Russia,” Luis Saenz, head of equity sales and trading at BCS
Financial Group in London, said by phone yesterday. “The worst in the Ukraine
crisis is over. Putin’s request for lawmakers to cancel the permission gives
more confidence the de-escalation of the crisis is fully on its way. These are
words, and actions will follow.”
More
Abe Declares End of Deflation as Growth Plan Confronts Skeptics
Jun 25, 2014 12:00 AM GMT
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the deflation that wiped out much of Japan’s growth the
past 15 years and so stunted the economy that it slipped to No. 3 behind China, has ended and
will be thwarted by new government policies designed to encourage business
expansion. “Through bold monetary policy, flexible fiscal policy and the growth strategy we have reached a stage where there is no deflation,” Abe, 59, said in an interview yesterday at the prime minister’s official residence in Tokyo. With the first sales tax rise since 1997 that took effect in April, “this was an extremely difficult time for management of the economy, but I believe we were somehow able to overcome it.”
Abe was speaking before his cabinet endorsed the most specific measures yet to deliver on his growth strategy -- the third part of a campaign to end declines in consumer prices and stoke investment. The government plans corporate-tax cuts, trade liberalization, reduced barriers for agricultural land consolidation, special zones of lighter regulation and the study of casinos as a way of spurring record numbers of tourists.
More
In other real news, what could possibly trump the
Yellen Put? Below, the moslem world continues its decline into murderous chaos.
The Russian Bear says, “who’s been eating my porridge?”
Pakistan Plane Carrying 196 Fired on While Landing; One Dead
Jun
25, 2014 6:27 AM GMT
A female passenger was killed and two flight attendants were injured when a Pakistan
International Airlines plane came under fire while landing in the country’s
northwestern city of Peshawar. As many as 12 gunshots hit Flight PK-756 coming from Saudi Arabia at about 11 p.m. local time yesterday as it approached Peshawar International Airport, PIA spokesman Mashhood Tajwar said by phone from Karachi. The plane was carrying 196 passengers, he said, adding the woman who was killed was a Pakistani citizen.
“This is the first time a passenger plane has been fired on mid-air,” Tajwar said in comments to state-run Pakistan Television. “It remains to be seen what type of weapon was used and from what range the plane was fired on.”
No one has yet claimed the responsibility for the attack, which came two weeks after the attack on Pakistan’s biggest airport in the city of Karachi that killed 36 people, including 10 assailants. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, known as the TTP, claimed the responsibility for the Karachi airport assault.
---- Prompted by the Karachi airport attack, Pakistani military on June 15 began a major operation in the North Waziristan tribal region near the border with Afghanistan, which is a major sanctuary for Taliban militants and their allies. A day later, Taliban spokesman Shahidullah Shahid warned foreign investors, airlines and multinational companies to cut off business with Pakistan.
More
Ukraine Seeks EU Talks With Putin as Rebels Shatter Truce
Jun 24,
2014 10:00 PM GMT
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called for immediate talks with leaders
in Russia, Germany and France after
pro-Russian rebels shot down a government helicopter in violation of a
cease-fire. Ukraine will end its weeklong truce early if separatists continue to attack government forces during a cease-fire supported by both Russian President Vladimir Putin and rebel leaders, Poroshenko said on his website late yesterday.
Poroshenko, 48, called on Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande to hold joint talks today to discuss ways to end months of fighting, which has left hundreds dead. Separatists downed an Mi-8 chopper with a shoulder-fired missile in the eastern city of Slovyansk at about 5 p.m. local time, killing all nine people on board, according to the Defense Ministry in Kiev.
---- “We think, and it cannot be avoided, that there is a need to start talks about the future organization of Ukraine itself and guarantee the lawful rights and interests of people who live in the southeast of the country,” Putin said.
Those talks are “extremely
important,” though it’s “senseless” to demand rebels in Ukraine law down their
arms, Putin told reporters in Vienna yesterday. Russia will always protect
Ukrainians who feel “part of the Russian world,” Putin said, adding that he
hopes force won’t be needed.
More
We end with UK news. Brexit looks like getting a big
step nearer this week. Now if we can just exit before France implodes taking
the euro with it. Rump EU minus the UK should do just fine, provided everyone
agrees to live in a German straightjacket, and the failed Luxembourg ex-Prime
Minister doesn’t lie too much.
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie"
Jean-Claude Juncker. Ex-Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar.
Farage Says Juncker Appointment a Gift to UKIP Exit Drive
Jun 24, 2014 11:00 PM GMT
U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage said the appointment of Jean-Claude
Juncker to the European Union’s top executive job over British objections
would add momentum to UKIP’s calls to leave the EU. U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has “misunderstood” the EU’s political determination to install Juncker as European Commission president, an appointment that will undermine Britain’s push to scale back the bloc’s powers, Farage said in an interview yesterday in Brussels.
“The prime minister has gone to war over the appointment of the next commission president -- a war that he’s clearly going to lose,” said Farage. “There is an increasingly bad relationship between Britain’s leaders and the leaders of many other European countries.”
UKIP’s victory in last month’s European Parliament elections, along with gains by other EU-skeptic parties in countries such as France and Greece, suggests Farage’s argument that the 28-nation EU has grown too big and intrusive for Britain to be able to tame resonates with voters.
He says his hand has been further bolstered by Cameron, who risks being out-voted by fellow heads of government at a June 26-27 EU summit after leading a campaign against Juncker. While he shares Cameron’s opposition to Juncker as commission president, Farage said the Luxembourger is a “gift” for UKIP from the domestic political standpoint.
More
"The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe."
Mikhail Gorbachev
At the Comex silver depositories Tuesday final figures were: Registered 57.04 Moz,
Eligible 119.27 Moz, Total 176.31 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Enough with crooked squids, bent banksters and
doubled over politicians. Below, what California does today, America does
tomorrow. What America does today, the rest of us do tomorrow. What Japan invents
yesterday, the rest of us buy the next year. Below, why I think that photovoltaic
solar energy’s time has come. Soon, I
might even be able to afford my winter electricity bill and not have to live
like Bob Cratchit each winter. Advances
in PV solar energy, and efficiency advances in the pipeline, are about to
revolutionise how we generate and store electricity. SunPower Offers Batteries to Hold Solar Power Until Night
Jun 24, 2014 5:00 AM GMT
SunPower
Corp. (SPWR), the second-largest U.S. solar manufacturer, is offering
energy-storage systems to California homeowners that will power houses at night
with electricity generated from sunlight during the day. The company is testing systems that combine rooftop solar panels with battery storage in new homes built by KB Home (KBH), San Jose, California-based SunPower said in a statement today.
Such systems will reduce consumers’ reliance on electric utilities and the grid, cutting power bills and providing electricity during blackouts, Chief Executive Officer Tom Werner said yesterday in an interview.
Though the technology isn’t widely used today, and SunPower only expects to install about 10 of the systems in KB Home houses this year, Werner expects it to become standard in less than five years
“The cost of storage is going to come down rather dramatically over the five-year period,” said Werner. “We think of storage as where solar was five to 10 years ago.”
KB Home is initially offering the systems at communities in Irvine, El Dorado Hills and San Diego, California, and will expand the program into additional areas next year.
Homeowners will own the power systems and the costs will be incorporated into their mortgages, said Steve Ruffner, president of KB’s Southern California unit.
----SunPower is also planning to test power-storage systems in Australia this year and in Germany next year. The company has installed about 15,000 rooftop solar systems in the U.S., including almost 3,000 with KB Home.
More
Rooftop Solar Leases Scaring Buyers When Homeowners Sell
Jun
24, 2014 3:03 PM GM
Dorian Bishopp blames the solar panels on his roof for costing him almost 10
percent off the value of the home he sold in March. That’s because instead of owning them he leased the panels from SunPower Corp. (SPWR), requiring the new owner of the house to assume a contract with almost 19 years remaining. He had to shave the asking price for the house in Maricopa, Arizona, to draw in buyers unfamiliar with the financing arrangement.
Leasing is driving a boom in solar sales because most require no money upfront for systems that cost thousands of dollars. That’s made solar affordable for more people, helping spur a 38 percent jump in U.S. residential installations in the past year. Since the business model only gained currency in the past two years, the details embedded in the fine print of the deals are only starting to emerge.
“Homeowners don’t understand what they’re signing when they get into this,” said Sandy Adomatis, a home appraiser in Punta Gorda, Florida, who created the industry’s standard tool for valuing the systems. “You’ve got another layer to add on top of finding a buyer for the house. It’s not a plus.”
For people who own rooftop power systems, solar adds value to the home -- about $25,000 for the average installation in California, according to a study in December by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, funded by the U.S. Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative. (Emphasis mine)
More
Two West Midlands hospitals install solar to combat escalating energy bills
By Peter Bennett 11 June 2014, 8:14 Updated: 11 June 2014,
9:54
The Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust (HEFT) has partnered with
renewable energy installer, Ecolution, to install solar PV arrays at Solihull
Hospital and Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham.Both hospitals are benefiting from the electricity generated from their two 250kWp roof-mounted arrays. HEFT identified solar as a means of saving energy, cutting costs and reducing the hospitals’ carbon footprints.
Initially, HEFT requested over 250kWp for each of the hospitals roof but due to the nature of the feed-in tariff degression bands this would have resulted in a drop in FiT levels of 35% so HEFT elected to cap the installs at 250kWp.
Ecolution chose black-framed Hyundai 250W modules, using over 2,000 panels across 28 roofs – all with varying pitch, orientation, height and covering. The installations were completed in les than six months, in time for the hospitals deadline of March 2014.
The arrays are predicted to deliver over £2 million in associated savings and feed-in tariff payments over the next 20 years.
Solar Frontier interested in ‘booming’ UK PV market
By Peter Bennett 13 June 2014, 9:11 Updated: 13 June 2014,
9:12
Japanese solar manufacturer Solar Frontier has said that it is working on
entering the UK market in the “short future”.Speaking to Solar Power Portal at Intersolar 2014 in Munich, Atsuhiko Hirano, senior vice president of Solar Frontier, explained that the company was keen to enter the UK market, although an official announcement would still be some way off.
Hirano added that the UK commercial and utility-scale PV sectors were particularly interesting. Watch the full interview below:
And coming later this decade, PV solar cells with more than double the best solar cell efficiency of 2014. Who needs nuclear, when we all have the sun?
Solar Cell Efficiency World Record Set By Sharp — 44.4%
June 23rd, 2013 by MathiasEditor’s Note: In May, Sharp regained the world’s triple-junction, non-concentrator solar cell efficiency record — 37.9%. Now, it has also taken the overall world solar cell efficiency record — 44.4%. Here’s another repost from Solar Love on the news.
A research team at Sharp Corporation has announced that it has created a solar cell capable of converting 44.4% of incoming sunlight into electricity. The solar cell is of the “concentrator triple-junction compound” type, which basically is a lens-based system that focuses sunlight.
The high conversion efficiencies that we see with compound solar cells are due to several photoabsorbing layers typically made from indium and gallium. Sharp’s record-setting solar cell uses three layers (InGaP top, GaAs middle, and InGaAs bottom), as you can see on the illustration below:
More
Quantum dot breakthrough could lead to cheap spray-on solar cells
By Dario
Borghino June 10, 2014
Researchers at the University of Toronto have manufactured
and tested a new type of colloidal quantum dots (CQD), that, unlike previous
attempts, doesn't lose performance as they keep in contact with oxygen. The
development could lead to much cheaper or even spray-on solar cells, as well as
better LEDs, lasers and weather satellites.
A quantum dot is a nanocrystal made out of a semicondutor
material which is small enough to take advantage of the laws of quantum
mechanics. Quantum dots are at the center of a very new and rapidly evolving
field of research, with the promise for applications in highly efficient solar
cells, transistors and lasers, among other things.
In the case of solar cells, quantum dots are used as the absorbing photovoltaic material. The dots have the advantage of having a band gap that can be tuned simply by changing the size of the nanoparticles, and so they can be easily made to absorb different parts of the solar spectrum.
This makes them very attractive for multi-junction solar cells, where you could use a series of quantum dots of different size next to each other to absorb different areas of the spectrum. Crucially, this would drastically cut down the cost and complexity of manufacturing such cells.
----So far, the record efficiency for a quantum dot solar cell is only nine percent, which is roughly half the performance of commercial bulk silicon cells. However, this is a very new field in which progress has been both steady and rapid.
-----Although eight percent efficiency is much less than commercially-available panels, quantum dot solar cells ultimately have the potential to become more efficient than their silicon counterparts because a single photon can be made to excite multiple electrons inside the cell.
With colloidal quantum dots, in which the nanoparticles are evenly distributed, we may eventually have high-efficiency spray-on solar cells that we could apply on our roofs to generate our very own power supply.
A paper detailing the advance was published in the journal Nature Materials.
Source: University of Toronto
In the case of solar cells, quantum dots are used as the absorbing photovoltaic material. The dots have the advantage of having a band gap that can be tuned simply by changing the size of the nanoparticles, and so they can be easily made to absorb different parts of the solar spectrum.
This makes them very attractive for multi-junction solar cells, where you could use a series of quantum dots of different size next to each other to absorb different areas of the spectrum. Crucially, this would drastically cut down the cost and complexity of manufacturing such cells.
----So far, the record efficiency for a quantum dot solar cell is only nine percent, which is roughly half the performance of commercial bulk silicon cells. However, this is a very new field in which progress has been both steady and rapid.
-----Although eight percent efficiency is much less than commercially-available panels, quantum dot solar cells ultimately have the potential to become more efficient than their silicon counterparts because a single photon can be made to excite multiple electrons inside the cell.
With colloidal quantum dots, in which the nanoparticles are evenly distributed, we may eventually have high-efficiency spray-on solar cells that we could apply on our roofs to generate our very own power supply.
A paper detailing the advance was published in the journal Nature Materials.
Source: University of Toronto
Creative
destruction occurs when something new kills something older. A great example of
this is personal computers. The industry, led by Microsoft and Intel, destroyed
many mainframe computer companies, but in doing so, entrepreneurs created one
of the most important inventions of this century. Schumpeter goes so far as to
say that the "process of creative destruction is the essential fact about
capitalism."
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: +181 Down. NASDAQ: +340 Down. SP500: +246 Down. Crisis? What crisis?
No comments:
Post a Comment