Saturday, 31 October 2015

Weekend Update – Recession Watch.



You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don't understand that's going to happen, then you're not ready, you won't do well in the markets.

Peter Lynch

To our central bankster spivs pushing stock market bubbles, everything is zipping along just fine. By heroic efforts of the Peoples Bank of China and the New York Fedster’s team of riggers and fix-its, the Chinese and US stock markets made it through crash season without missing a beat. Shame about reality though, which continues to get worse with each passing weak, pun intended.

While America’s “talking chair” and her gaggle of voodoo specialists at the Fed see an economy needing an interest rate hike in December, this old trading dinosaur sees disaster arriving in spades, from his position on the boat deck of the RMS Titanic.  Stock markets never see a recession in advance.

Below, yet more reasons to be out of stocks before disaster strikes.

U.S. Consumer Spending Rose Less Than Forecast in September

October 30, 2015 — 12:34 PM GMT Updated on October 30, 2015 — 12:43 PM GMT
Household spending rose less than forecast in September, showing the biggest part of the U.S. economy ended a strong quarter on a weak note.

Purchases increased 0.1 percent, the smallest gain since January, after rising 0.4 percent in August, Commerce Department figures showed Friday in Washington. The median forecast of 75 economists in a Bloomberg survey called for a 0.2 percent advance. The first drop in prices since January helped take some of the sting out of a smaller-than-projected advance in incomes.

Americans pulled back amid turmoil in financial markets caused by signs that global growth was weakening. It will take a pickup in wage growth to ensure American households remain the linchpin of economic growth heading into the all-important holiday shopping season.
More

Iron Ore Below $50 Hits Miners as Rio Tumbles 5.1% This Week

October 30, 2015 — 1:53 AM GMT Updated on October 30, 2015 — 1:27 PM GMT
Iron ore is rounded out another poor week, capping another bad month in what’s shaping up to be another tough year as the world’s largest miners boost low-cost output while China’s steel demand contracts.

Prices recorded a third weekly loss after falling below $50 a metric ton and are 12 percent lower in October, the biggest monthly drop since March. Rio Tinto Group lost 5.1 percent in Sydney this week, while Fortescue Metals Group Ltd. plummeted 19 percent, the most since 2008.

“We may see iron ore ultimately declining to between $40 and $45,” Dang Man, an analyst at Maike Futures Co. in Xi’an, China, said by phone on Friday. “Mills are expected to cut production. Once that happens, the effect of weakening demand will be felt more strongly in iron ore.”

This week iron ore breached a trading range of $50 to $60 that’s held for more than three months, pulled lower by the twin factors of surging supply from producers including Rio Tintoand weaker consumption in China. Steel demand is shrinking at an unprecedented speed and mills are losing money, according to the China Iron & Steel Association. Iron ore may stay below $50 for some time, Capital Economics Ltd. said, while Clarkson Capital Markets LLC sees an average of $47 this quarter.
More

U.S., Russia, Asia Nations Hit With 5-Year EU Steel Measures

October 30, 2015 — 10:52 AM GMT
The European Union imposed five-year trade protection against electrical steel from the U.S., Russia, Japan, China and South Korea in a bid to curb competition for producers in the bloc such as ArcelorMittal and ThyssenKrupp AG.

The EU fixed minimum-import prices on American, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean shipments of grain-oriented electrical steel -- or GOES -- until late 2020. The measures on this niche steel product, which is used in power transformers, are meant to punish exporters in the five countries such as AK Steel Corp., Novolipetsk Steel OJSC, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp., Baoshan Iron & Steel Co. and Posco for allegedly having sold it in the EU’s 400 million-euro ($440 million) market below cost, a practice known as dumping.

The five-year protection follows provisional European measures introduced in May that took the form of ad valorem duties as high as 35.9 percent. Under the system of minimum-import prices, GOES sold below the price floors are subject to EU tariffs. The duty rates amount to the difference between the minimum prices and any lower import prices.

The minimum import prices will “allow the union producers to return to sustainable profit levels,” the European Commission, the 28-nation EU’s trade authority in Brussels, said on Friday in the Official Journal. The decision will take effect on Saturday.

The GOES trade dispute became a test of lobbying power in the EU between European electrical-steel makers, which also include Tata Steel U.K. Ltd., and users such as Siemens AG in Germany, ABB AB in Spain and Alstom Grid U.K. Ltd. in Britain. The European Steel Association said the planned five-year EU trade protection would safeguard “a vital strategic subsector” of the steel industry, whereas a group representing transformer manufacturers argued the measures would set GOES prices at “unreasonably high” levels and force large transformer producers to shrink or move their factories outside the bloc.
More

Chevron Cuts Jobs, Spending, Growth Target as Slump Persists

October 30, 2015 — 12:32 PM GMT Updated on October 30, 2015 — 3:15 PM GMT
Chevron Corp. said it’s cutting about 10 percent of its workforce and scaled back its long-term production target amid the worst oil-market slump since the 1980s even as the company posted third-quarter profit that surpassed analysts’ expectations.

Chevron said in a statement Friday that it will eliminate 6,000 to 7,000 jobs, the deepest cuts since the 2001 Texaco Inc. merger that created the company in its modern incarnation. Those numbers include a workforce reduction of 1,500 announced earlier this year. Oil and gas output will rise by 13 percent to 15 percent through the end of 2017, rather than the previously forecasted 20 percent production growth, the company said in a slide presentation.

The company earned $1.09 a share, 33 cents more than the average of 21 analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Profit from refining oil into fuels jumped 59 percent to $2.2 billion. Spending in 2016 will be 25 percent less than this year, said Chevron Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Watson in the statement.

“The concern for investors has been that they’ve been outspending cash flow, so anything they can do to alleviate those concerns will be looked upon favorably,” Brian Youngberg, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. in St. Louis, said in an interview.

The price of Brent, the benchmark crude used by most of the world, declined by half since June 2014 to an average of $51.30 during the July-to-September period. After a brief rebound, oil entered its second bear market in a year after an avalanche of supplies from U.S. shale fields and the Persian Gulf flooded markets at a time of faltering demand growth in China and other developing economies.

"We expect further reductions in spending for 2017 and 2018," Watson said.
More

We end for the weekend with MSM pushing hopium. The stock price fell because trading conditions have and are continuing to deteriorate, buy more!  Below, main stream media knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If America and the rest of us are entering a new recession, stocks in general, and transport and commodity stocks in particular, have very much further to fall, to this old dinosaur trading since the late 60s.

Battered transport stocks could attract on price

Fri Oct 30, 2015 10:48pm EDT
Though the stock market has broadly recovered from its August swoon, the same can't be said of transport stocks. Continuing weakness in railroad and trucking companies have pushed the Dow Jones Transport Average index away from the S&P 500, a divergence that often is seen as a broad sell sign.

Not this time around, according to analysts. They say the transports, down 11 percent in 2015 compared with the S&P 500's 1.5 percent gain, might be oversold on sector-specific issues rather than from a marketwide problem.

"There is no 'sell' signal as far as I'm concerned," said Katie Stockton, chief technical strategist at BTIG in New York. "The divergence is certainly something to make a note of, in terms of your positioning in the transportation sector, but I don't see it as a message in regard to the broader market."
More

The difference between playing the stock market and the horses is that one of the horses must win.

Joey Adams

No comments:

Post a Comment