Baltic Dry Index. 973 +29
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
"The gold standard sooner or later will return with
the force and inevitability of natural law, for it is the money of freedom and
honesty."
Hans F. Sennholz
China’s dodgy export figures to Hong Kong last
month, helped lift China’s last quarter GDP slightly above Bloomberg’s survey
of analysts median estimate. Even so, it was China’s slowest growth rate since
the first quarter of 2009. Absent the dodgy Hong Kong exports, and it’s
anyone’s guess just how fast China is really slowing.
China’s GDP Growth Bolsters Case for Stimulus Restraint
Oct 21, 2014 5:54 AM GMT
China’s economic growth
beat analysts’ estimates last quarter as export demand quickened and services
expanded, bolstering the government’s case for avoiding broader stimulus
measures. Gross domestic product rose 7.3 percent in the July-September period from a year earlier, the statistics bureau said today in Beijing. While that exceeded the 7.2 percent median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of analysts, it was also the slowest expansion since the first quarter of 2009.
China’s leaders have relaxed home-purchase controls and the central bank has pumped liquidity to lenders as they seek to limit a property-induced slowdown. The government has eschewed across-the-board interest rate cuts and signaled it will tolerate a weaker expansion, leaving the economy headed for the slowest full-year growth since 1990.
“Decent exports and the fact that there is more to China’s domestic demand than real estate dampen the overall slowdown,” said Louis Kuijs, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc’s chief Greater China economist in Hong Kong. “Barring a major further slowdown we expect the policy stance to remain relatively restrained.”
More
Longer term, as in a mere five years, China’s growth rate is expected to about halve. Dire times ahead for the industrial commodity exporting countries next decade. We can only hope that they used the boom decades to stash away cash for the rainy days ahead.
China Growth May Slow Sharply From 2020: Conference Board
Oct
20, 2014 7:54 PM GMT
China’s economic growth
will slow to about 4 percent annually after 2020 following decades of rapid
expansion, according to the Conference Board. China faces a “deep structural slowdown and broad uncertainty” in the decade ahead, the New York-based research group said in the report yesterday. China’s development model, based on state direction of capital and growth-fixated monetary policy, generated “deep seated” risks and imbalances, it said.
“The course of China’s growth has always harbored the potential for deceleration at least as rapid as its acceleration,” David Hoffman, vice president of the Conference Board’s China Center for Economics and Business in Beijing and a co-author of the report, said in a press release. “We are beginning to see the signs of this transformation take hold.”
China’s government has signaled it will tolerate slower economic growth this year by refraining from broad stimulus.
----Thirteen of 22 economists polled last week said China will seek expansion of about 7 percent next year, down from this year’s 7.5 percent. Sixteen said the government should change its targeting policy, with nine indicating a range would be better and seven suggesting targets be scrapped altogether in favor of projections or assumptions, as most other nations provide.
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-20/china-growth-may-slow-sharply-from-2020-conference-board.html
In other China news, the recent oil price crash leaves China’s oil refiners inventories under pressure. Just how much of them have been hypothecated for loans?
Triple Whammy Looms for China’s Oil Refiners as Crude Plunges
Oct 21, 2014 2:11 AM GMT
Crude oil’s
steepest crash in almost six years is throwing up a new challenge for China’s refiners -- a plunge in
the value of their stockpiles. The oil price drop is adding up to a triple whammy for earnings prospects through the end of the year, for companies already beset by slowing economic growth and state controls on prices. UOB Kay Hian Ltd. yesterday downgraded China’s oil sector to underweight from overweight, citing weaker demand forecasts and the lower oil price.
“Refiners’ earnings will be
impacted and the main reason for that is inventory losses,” said Duke
Suttikulpanich, a Singapore-based oil and gas analyst at Standard Chartered
Bank. “Contrary to common belief, the sharp drop in oil price does not benefit
refiners’ earnings. And low demand forecasts mean margins aren’t expanding.”
A fall in crude prices, the raw
material used to produce fuels including gasoline and diesel, should typically
reduce expenditure and raise profits for refiners. However, weak demand is
driving down fuel prices and narrowing those margins. At the same time, the
lower oil price is cutting the value of stockpiles accumulated when the market
was higher.
Morehttp://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-21/triple-whammy-looms-for-china-s-oil-refiners-as-crude-plunges.html
Ending on China for the day, a price war is about to wreck the profit margins of the western luxury auto makers in China. Hard times for western car makers are about to get harder it seems.
Cheaper Made-in-China Land Rovers in Sight With New Plant
Oct 21, 2014 1:14 AM GMT
Tata
Motors Ltd. (TTMT)’s Jaguar Land Rover will open its first plant in China
today, paving the way for the automaker to cut prices on its $94,000 Evoque
sport-utility vehicle and boost sales in the world’s largest auto market. JLR will open the 130,000-unit-a-year factory in eastern Changshu city, about 110 kilometers (70 miles) northwest of Shanghai. The automaker will probably choose the best-selling Range Rover Evoque as its first local production model, increasing its sales significantly, according to IHS Automotive.
The Tata Motors luxury unit is the latest foreign automaker to set up factories in China to avoid duties that make imported vehicles less competitive. JLR has said it expects local production to cut prices by 15 percent, which may help it extend a lead over Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV (FCA)’s SUV-centric Jeep brand and narrow a gap with Volkswagen AG’s Audi.
“Land Rover has a unique positioning in the market as premium car sales are booming, as are SUV sales,” said Yale Zhang, managing director of researcher Autoforesight Shanghai Co. “A lot of customers in China want to upgrade to premium cars. At the same time, there are enough premium sedans in China, so it won’t be easy for Jaguar.”
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-20/cheaper-made-in-china-land-rovers-in-sight-with-new-plant.html
In dying continental Europe, the ECB is now trying voodoo economics lite. Boldly going where the BOE, PBOC, BOJ and the Fedster’s have massively gone before them, without any noticeable effect except to set off the latest stock market bubble and massive mal-investment in debt to buy back stocks to artificially boost EPS.
Eurozone starts QE-lite as currency bloc faces fresh crisis
The European Central Bank has begun snapping up covered bonds, one part of a three-pronged trident of measures aimed at reviving the flagging eurozone economy
The European Central Bank (ECB) has begun purchases of some French assets, in an attempt to revive a flagging eurozone.Monday’s purchases marked the start of the covered bond purchase programme (CBPP3), and is one of three new tools intended to stimulate the euro area economy.
By buying covered bonds - bonds backed by underlying loans - the ECB intends to expand its balance sheet, and boost demand in the region.
The ECB provided some detail on how the CBPP3 scheme would work on October 17. It’s not only the bonds of one country that the ECB will be buying up. Rather the scheme “should be implemented in a uniform and decentralised manner”.
Alongside CBPP3, the ECB has also
unveiled two further measures to prop up the region - an asset-backed
securities purchase programme, and a series of fixed-rate loans to banks. Jens
Weidmann, president of the German Bundesbank, said that the “ECB asset
purchases suggest a shift to quantitative easing philosophy”.
Morehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11174118/Eurozone-starts-QE-lite-as-currency-bloc-faces-fresh-crisis.html
“The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.”
“Adam Smith” aka George Goodman.
At the Comex silver depositories Monday final figures were: Registered 66.85 Moz,
Eligible 112.41 Moz, Total 179.26 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
No bad news today, just a major medical advance. Hopefully the first of many in our new century.
How a paralysed man's nose was used to help him walk again
World first as man is able to walk following surgery after spinal cord sliced in half
A man completely paralysed from
the chest down after his spinal cord was sliced in half in a stabbing attack is
able to walk again after undergoing pioneering surgery.
The 38-year-old Bulgarian man is
believed to be the first person in the world to recover from complete severing
of the spinal nerves, with sensation now returned to his lower limbs.
Darek Fidyka, who suffered his
injury four years ago, can now walk with a frame and has been able to resume an
independent life, even to the extent of driving a car.
Surgeons used nerve-supporting
cells from his nose to provide pathways along which the broken tissue was able
to grow.
Despite success in the
laboratory, it is the first time the procedure has been shown to work in a
human patient.
Researchers said the man was “not
dancing but absolutely delighted” by the breakthrough.
Professor Geoffrey Raisman, whose
team at University College London's Institute of Neurology discovered the
technique, said: "We believe that this procedure is the breakthrough
which, as it is further developed, will result in a historic change in the
currently hopeless outlook for people disabled by spinal cord injury."
A Polish team led by one of the
world's top spinal repair experts, Dr Pawel Tabakow, from Wroclaw Medical
University, performed the surgery.
The procedure involved
transplanting olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) from the nose to the spinal
cord.
OECs assist the repair of damaged
nerves that transmit smell messages by opening up pathways for them to the
olfactory bulbs in the forebrain.
Re-located to the spinal cord,
they appear to enable the ends of severed nerve fibres to grow and join
together - something that was previously thought to be impossible.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished September.
DJIA: +141 Down. NASDAQ: +289 Down. SP500: +216 Down.
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