Baltic Dry Index. 611
+01 Brent Crude 49.94
Brexit odds checker.
http://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/eu-referendum/referendum-on-eu-membership-result
Brexit Quote of the Day.
“Dodgy
Dave Cameron: The kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree and then
mount the stump to make a speech for conservation.”
With
apologies to Adlai Stevenson
Despite
the Remainiacs’s Project Fear Brexit campaign attacking pensioners, those in
the military and those on benefits, at the weekend, saying all will be worse off if GB exits the
wealth and jobs destroying EUSSR, little seems to work as intended any more, in
Dodgy Dave’s Remainiac surrender campaign. The world is starting to notice that
Great Britain might actually go off the reservation and vote to leave the dying
Bilderberger United States of Europe asylum, next week. Desperate times call for desperate
measures and Dodgy Dave’s Remainiacs have asked Russia for advice on stuffing
ballot boxes.
Below,
this morning’s bad news from Asia, where Abenomics is getting blown out of the
water as everyone devalues against the yen. In the Asian version of Squidland, the
aftermath of last year’s collapse in China’s casinos is now devastating betting
volumes in all of the regions casinos. Can another stock market crash be very far
away?
Asia Stocks Tumble as Brexit Concerns Spur Move to Safety Assets
June 13, 2016 — 1:15 AM BST Updated on June 13, 2016 — 4:23 AM BST
Stocks sank from Japan to Hong Kong, with Asia’s benchmark index poised
for its biggest decline since April, as uncertainty ahead of central bank
meetings and a vote on the U.K. leaving the European Union sent investors
seeking safety.
The MSCI Asia Pacific Index fell 1.7 percent to 127.91 as of 12:06 p.m.
in Tokyo. Optimism that borrowing costs will remain lower for longer amid tepid
global economic growth is waning as investors grow cautious ahead of a string
events in the next two weeks. The looming meetings of the Federal Reserve and
Bank of Japan later this week, followed by next week’s vote on Britain’s
membership in the European Union, have the potential to roil markets.
“The risk-off stance will continue this week ahead of a multitude of
events,” Bernard Aw, a strategist at IG Asia Pte in Singapore, said by phone.
“The Fed and BOJ meetings as well as the Brexit vote next week will set the
tone for financial markets. With the World Bank recently flagging a slower
global growth outlook for 2016, investors are also on the lookout for monetary
support and fiscal stimulus from major economies.”
Japan’s Topix index tumbled 2.7 percent as the yen strengthened for a
second day. The gauge is heading for the lowest closing level in two months. A
gauge of volatility on the Nikkei 225 Stock Average jumped the most in more
than a month. Short-selling of shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange surged to
47.1 percent on Friday, the highest in records going back to 2008, according to
exchange data compiled by Bloomberg.
South Korea’s Kospi index dropped 1.6 percent. New Zealand’s S&P/NZX
50 Index slipped 0.7 percent. Australia is closed for a holiday. Hong Kong’s
Hang Seng Index sank 2.5 percent. Singapore’s Straits Times Index slipped 1.5
percent.
Markets
in China and Taiwan opened lower after last week’s holiday. The Shanghai
Composite Index slipped 0.6 percent, while the Hang Seng China Enterprises
Index of mainland stocks traded in Hong Kong slumped 2.4 percent, heading for a
two-week low. Taiwan’s Taiex index declined 1.9 percent.
More
Trading Floors Go Quiet Across Asia as Equity Desks Face the Ax
June 12, 2016 — 10:00 PM BST
Even by the boom-bust standards of Asia’s equity business, it’s been a
turbulent 12 months.
At this time last year, the industry was riding high as China’s stock
market soared, volumes jumped to records and some of the biggest names in
finance boosted hiring. Now, turnover is shrinking at the fastest pace since at
least 2006 and banks are under growing pressure to either downsize their Asian
equity desks, or exit parts of the business altogether.
Investors and issuers are retrenching after Chinese shares crashed, the
Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy and divisive political debates from
the U.S. to Britain weighed on sentiment. Revenue from trading stocks in China
and Hong Kong could fall 30 percent to 50 percent in the first half from a
year earlier, according to senior executives at four firms who spoke on
condition of anonymity. Equity derivatives sales in Asia are on track to drop
at least 50 percent, while prime brokerage is down roughly 20 percent, two of
the executives said.
"Because overall revenue is down, further cuts are likely across
the industry,” said Taichi Takahashi, Asia-Pacific head of equities at UBS
Group AG in Hong Kong. “Some second-tier players will throw in the towel
because their market share is shrinking."
Asian equities units could be facing their worst year since 2012, when
the European credit crisis roiled markets, according to two of the executives
interviewed for this story, who asked not to be identified because global banks
don’t break out results for regional equities operations.
Revenue for the industry in Asia slumped 32 percent to $2.6 billion in
the first quarter from a year earlier, compared with a 20 percent drop
worldwide, according to estimates from Coalition, a banking research firm.
Regional equities headcount dropped by about 300, or 6 percent, Coalition
figures show.
Turnover on Asia’s 10 biggest exchanges has declined 69 percent from last year’s peak in May, the deepest slump over any period of the same length since Bloomberg began tracking the data in 2006. Equity capital markets deals have also slowed, with Asia playing host to just two billion-dollar initial public offerings this year.
Investment banks geared to Asian stocks, including UBS, Societe Generale SA and Credit Suisse Group AG, will probably underperform, JPMorgan Chase & Co. analysts led by Kian Abouhossein wrote in a May 19 research note.
It’s hard to blame traders for pulling back. China’s economy shows few signs of recovering from the weakest annual expansion since 1990, while analysts predict the Fed will boost borrowing costs again this year after lifting rates in December. Britain’s June 23 referendum may lead to the country’s exit from the European Union, just months before a U.S. presidential election that could put former reality-TV star Donald Trump in the White House.
More
We end with a warning from the oil
patch, where the recent rise in the crude oil price has American frackers
completing previously drilled oil wells again. As Canada’s tar sands
increasingly come back on-stream, and Iran gears up to start modernising its
oil sector, did the crude oil rally just peak last week?
Why the Oil Price Rally Might Falter
By
Julian
Lee June 12, 2016 8:00 AM GST
Last year's oil price rally ran out of steam in early May after 112
days. This year's has already lasted longer (140 days so far) and prices have
risen further, but there are worries that, it, too, may be running ahead of
market fundamentals. While prices seem unlikely to collapse again, there are
good reasons to expect a pause in their upward march.
Crude prices have nearly doubled from the lows reached in mid-January.
Brent rose above $50 a barrel last Monday and stayed there all week. West Texas
Intermediate crude narrowly failed to do the same after breaking through the
psychological barrier on Tuesday. Brent prices have risen an average
18 cents a day since mid-January, remarkably similar to the 19 cents a day
early last year.
Sure,
there's a real risk of structural supply shortages down the road, as oil
companies have slashed spending on new projects, but they're not here yet.
What we do have is a number of unforeseen disruptions, most recently in
Canada and Nigeria, with a further deterioration in Libya, which have
helped eliminate the surplus.
----The biggest new disruption is already being resolved: the wildfire that swept through Alberta's oil sands and cut daily production by about 1.2 million barrels. Canadian production is returning slowly and will continue to add supply.
And while even the cheeriest optimist would hesitate to call an end to U.S. output declines, production there has just risen for the first time in three months on a week-by-week basis. Continental Resources has started fracking wells that it had drilled, but left uncompleted as prices collapsed. There were 4,290 such wells in the U.S. at the end of 2015 and others may follow Continental's lead, although Bloomberg Intelligence's Peter Pulikkan believes crude may need to rise another $5-$10 per barrel before that happens.
----Yet despite
the outages, the EIA still sees global inventories building through August. The
resumption of Canadian supply, or any lasting evidence that U.S. output has
stopped falling, could quickly tip bullish sentiment bearish again. Doubly so
if there's any improvement in Nigeria or Libya. Crude's upward
trajectory is still a fragile thing.
“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 Friday final figures were: Registered 22.48 Moz, Eligible 128.32 Moz, Total 150.80 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Back in the wild west 90s, “capitalism’s broken,”
wailed fallen former guru Greenspan, the man that up until then was mostly
responsible for breaking it. Now, the central banksters, casino banksters and
Great Vampire Squids, have totally lost the plot in currencies and derivatives.
Nothing is working as modern monetary theory says it should, and no one seems
to know why. To me it’s just another unintended consequence of the Great
Nixonian Error (GNE) of fiat money, communist money, casino money, adopted all
the way back on August 15, 1971, when Bretton Woods 1.0 went bust for the first
time. On communist money, communism went bust. Why should we in the west be any
different on communist money?
Capitalism without
financial failure is not capitalism at all, but a kind of socialism for the
rich.
James Grant, Grant's Interest Rate Observer
A Breakdown in Old Rules Leads to a Rethink on How Global Markets Work
June 9, 2016
— 7:46 PM BST Updated on June 9, 2016 — 8:00 PM BST
A standard textbook relationship that every student of economics learns
in school has been flipped on its head, and it’s leading to a major rethink on
the connection between bank balance sheets, exchange rates, global asset
prices, and monetary policy.The prices of derivatives used for hedging currency risk are violating no-arbitrage rules, a development that points to a significant decline in global banks’ ability to intermediate capital flows from global investors, in part because of new regulations that have been introduced in recent years.
That decline in intermediation capacity appears to have heightened the sensitivity of exchange rates and global asset prices to monetary policy since the crisis, and helps explain some of the unusual gyrations witnessed recently in markets — like extreme moves in the so-called cross-currency basis, which according to traditional theory should be non-existent, and mostly was before the crisis that began in 2007.
"Financial markets, for their part, appear to be tethered more closely than ever to global events, and the real economy appears to dance to the tune of global financial developments, rather than the other way round," Hyun Song Shin, head of research at the Bank for International Settlements, said Wednesday in a speech on the topic during a gathering at the World Bank in Washington.
Shin cited recent research from New York University economist Xavier Gabaix and Harvard economist Matteo Maggiori, who developed a theory of exchange-rate determination based on capital flows in the presence of constraints on bank balance sheets.
"Since financiers require compensation for holding currency risk in
the form of expected currency appreciation, exchange rates are jointly
determined by capital flows and by the financiers’ risk bearing capacity,"
Gabaix and Maggiori say. "Financiers both act as shock absorbers, by using
their risk bearing capacity to accommodate flows that result from fundamental
shocks, and are themselves the source of financial shocks that distort exchange
rates."
This is not at all the traditional understanding of what determines
exchange rates, which has largely to do with macroeconomic fundamentals. The
theory, however fits well with what we see in the foreign-exchange derivatives
market, where a long-standing relationship known as covered interest parity, or
CIP — which states that the interest rate implied by the forward exchange rate
in a currency swap should match the short-term interest rate in the home
country of the currency that is borrowed in the swap — has completely broken
down.
More
The Great Nixonian Error of fiat money, communist
money, first went bust in the stock market crash of October 19, 1987. Fallen
guru Greenspan and his cronies then rigged the market opening the next day, and
over the next few days and weeks, the Muppets trooped back into the casinos
secure in belief that the Fed had given them all a “put.” The market next went bust, in the great bond
market massacre of early 1994, when fallen former guru Greenspan misjudged the
bond market and raised interest rates, oblivious to the fact that everyone was
now trading the Fed. Another Fedster market rig was the result, with the
Muppets became even more convinced that a Fed Put was in place.
But that “fix” only lasted until Long Term Capital
Management blew up in the casino in 1998, losing $4.6 billion in four months by
September, and threating to crash many
of the other Muppets gambling in the casino. Another hurried “too big to fail”
Fedster market rig bailout was put in place. By now former guru Greenspan was
gun shy of crashes, so he set out on a policy of encouraging market bubbles.
And that’s been central bankster policy ever since. But by the time Bear
Stearns crashed in March 2008 the casino was now so crooked and reliant on the
Fedster’s, that the whole daisy chain of derivatives came crashing down in
September 2008, when Lehman Brothers failed, blowing up Joe Cassano, and giant
insurer AIG’s Credit Default Swaps book to the tune of $30 billion.
The rest as they say is history. Governments
stepped in using taxpayer cash and newly invented money at the central banks to
take over all the failed gambling bets, and started trying to rig markets
higher again. So here we are today. Main Street snake bit and stumbling around
in circles gradually going bust. The one
percenter’s in heaven, with the central bankster’s covering their backs and any
gambling losses, and the whole Great Nixonian Error getting set to blow again. While
2008-2009 was an Atom bomb in the gambling casinos, 2016-2017 will be a
Hydrogen bomb, if not a cobalt Hydrogen bomb in its effects.
"We finished the
year, and we reported that we had $17 billion of cash sitting at the bank's
parent company as a liquidity cushion. As the year has gone on, that liquidity
cushion has been virtually unchanged."
Alan Schwartz, CEO Bear Stearns,
March 12, 2008. Bust March 16, 2008.
Brexit The Animated Movie.
Brexit
Quote of the week.
We hold these
truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness outside of the EUSSR.”
With grateful
thanks to the writers of the US Declaration of Independence.
Solar & Related Update.
With events
happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this
section. Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap
AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards? DC?
A quantum computer next?
Towards building next-generation batteries using a pigment electrode
Electrode design of next-generation batteries using Prussian blue and its analogues
Date:
June 7, 2016
Source:
Toyohashi University of Technology
Summary:
Researchers have demonstrated calcium ion batteries (CIBs) using pigment
electrodes such as Prussian blue and its analogues. The CIBs showed excellent
cyclability of discharge and charge in a calcium-based organic electrolyte.
This is thought to derive from strong atomic bonds in Prussian blue structures,
which possess movable pathways for large-sized ions in three dimensions. Such
unique structures have excellent potential for application in newly designed
batteries.
Calcium ion batteries (CIBs) have attracted much attention as
next-generation batteries to replace lithium ion batteries (LIBs) because the
theoretical capacity of CIBs is twice that of LIBs. This doubled capacity can
be explained by the difference between monovalent and divalent ions. In
addition, CIBs possess advantages such as a lower cost and higher safety
because calcium is more abundant than lithium and because CIBs have a higher
melting point than LIBs. However, there is one major obstacle to the
application in CIBs.
There is no suitable electrode material in which calcium
ions can be inserted and extracted reversibly because of the relatively large
ionic radius of calcium ions (112 pm) as compared to that of lithium ions (76
pm).
In this study, Tomohiro Tojo and his colleagues at the Department of
Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering, Toyohashi University of
Technology, employed Prussian blue (PB) and Prussian blue analogues (PBAs) as
CIB electrodes because they possess large sites for inserting and extracting
large-sized ions, as shown in Fig. 1. Up to now, using PBAs as an electrode
material, the electrochemical behaviors of sodium ions corresponding to the
radius of calcium ions have been examined in organic and inorganic
electrolytes.
These reports have shown reversible insertion and extraction of
sodium ions into and from PBA structures.
The research team investigated the electrochemical performance of
several PBA electrodes in order to determine whether calcium ions in an organic
electrolyte exhibit either reversible or irreversible insertion and extraction
into and from the crystal structure. We found reversible capacities of 40-50
mAh/g at a low current density, as shown in Fig. 2(a). In Fig. 2(b), the
Coulombic efficiencies, which are defined as the ratio of the amount of insertion
(discharge) and extraction (charge) of calcium ions, were observed to have a
constant value of 90% after the 3rd cycle.
The results shown in Fig. 2 demonstrate the excellent cyclability of the
PBA electrodes, even though the reversible capacities were half the theoretical
capacity. The researchers investigated the reason for the high reversibility
using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The
reversibility is explained by the durable structure of the PBAs and their excellent
charge balance during the insertion and extraction of calcium ions.
We propose Prussian blue (PB) and Prussian blue analogues (PBAs) as
feasible electrode materials for CIBs, even though additional investigation is
needed in order to enhance the reversible capacities still further. The
researchers have carried out the further study to utilize CIBs beyond LIBs.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607103407.htm
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: 17787
-20 Up NASDAQ: 4946 +04 Down. SP500: 2097 -18 Up.
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