Baltic Dry Index. 960 -20 Brent Crude 52.01
Juncker Shot Down Over London.
We open
today with Trump trumped. Did loose cannon President Trump just broadside himself?
Is 2017 about to repeat 1974? As someone on Wall Street in 1974, it seems
unlikely to me, but the “deep state” has gone all out since last November to
try to break President Trump. With the deep state now going in for the kill, I
suspect that this war will go nuclear on both sides next.
But will it be the
trigger for the next Lehman? Did the deep state just kill the golden goose?
Possibly. Since getting out early beats carried out last, a trickle of nervous speculators
yesterday headed for the exits. If this
growing war turns nuclear, that trickle will become an exodus. But if the deep
state just killed the golden goose, the Dow hasn’t seen anything yet. Did the
Democrats just trigger the next recession?
True, governments can reduce the rate of interest in the short run,
issue additional paper currency, open the way to credit expansion by the banks.
They can thus create an artificial boom and the appearance of prosperity. But
such a boom is bound to collapse soon or late and to bring about a depression.
Ludwig
von Mises.
Dow Falls 370 Points, Bonds Rally on Trump Turmoil: Markets Wrap
by Jeremy Herron and Dani Burger
16 May 2017, 23:09 GMT+1
The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled more than 370 points, Treasuries
rallied the most since July and volatility spiked higher as the turmoil surrounding the Trump
administration roiled financial markets around the globe.Major U.S. stock indexes had the worst session in eight months, while the CBOE Volatility Index jumped the most since the U.K. voted to leave the European Union last June, shattering the calm that gripped markets in the past month as the crisis threatened to derail the policy agenda that helped push equities to records as recently as Monday.
The 10-year Treasury yield sank to 2.22 percent in its steepest decline since July. The spread between 10-year and two-year yields narrowed to the flattest since before Trump’s election. The dollar weakened to a level last seen in November. Emerging-market equities halted a seven-day rally. Gold futures extended a rally to six days.
“What has been setting in over the course of the day is that political uncertainty is something that’s likely going to be with us for a significant amount of time,” said Dennis Debusschere, Evercore ISI’s head of portfolio strategy and quant. “We may be looking at a higher volatility backdrop with a trending lower market for the next couple of months.”
Wall Street finally took notice of political wrangling in Washington as
investors began to question the Trump administration’s ability to focus on
policy as it careens from one crisis to another. Many of the trades sparked by
the president’s shock election have reversed in recent days, with the dollar
all but erasing its post-election rally. The S&P 500 Index remains 10
percent higher since then, but stocks most sensitive to Trump policy
prescriptions have begun to wobble.
“If he’s preoccupied defending himself and if it goes a lot further,
then any hope of his legislative agenda coming to the fore is going to be
reduced,” John Stopford, the London-based head of fixed-income at Investec
Asset Management Ltd., said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “Clearly at the
margin it’s a negative. At the moment there’s a classic environment for yields
to rally a bit further and for the dollar to sell off.”
More
Wall Street Wonders What’s Next After Trump Jolts Markets
by Dani Burger, Brian Chappatta, and Nabila Ahmed
17 May 2017, 21:51 GMT+1
For the first time, a Wall Street that’s been giddy over Donald Trump
is starting to ask some hard questions.From Day 1, markets have rallied, defying what many of the same Wall Street types said would be a disastrous election outcome. Since then, U.S. stocks have hit record after record, driving up shares of Goldman Sachs to JPMorgan Chase to Apple, as investors quickly focused on what his pro-business, tax-cutting agenda would mean for corporate profits.
But the steady drumbeat of bad news may finally be taking its toll. On Wednesday, stocks tumbled, Treasuries soared and volatility came roaring back as a series of damaging revelations -- from Trump’s disclosure of classified information to Russian officials to reports that he pressed FBI Director James Comey to drop a probe into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn -- prompted many on Wall Street to wonder whether the turbulence that has shattered the market’s calm might be the start of something bigger. And that was before news broke that former FBI Director Robert Mueller was named special counsel to oversee the probe of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election.
It’s all also left many to ask whether the market was blinded by its own optimism over Trump’s business-friendly agenda.
“Crazy times, huh?” said Matt Maley, an equity strategist at Miller Tabak & Co. “I’ve talked to a few personal friends and a few customers who I know are supportive of Trump that are saying, boy, this isn’t good.”
Of course, financial markets are often punctuated by bouts of alarm that have unsettled traders during normal times. And up to now, it’s been easy to dismiss the president’s missteps as the price of electing an outsider. But now, the biggest question is whether Trump’s presidency is in trouble.
For some of the world’s largest banks, Trump’s firing of Comey last week was a signal moment. At least two global firms have started mapping out how financial markets might react to an impeachment -- a scenario they still saw as improbable, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who declined to speak publicly because such deliberations are politically sensitive. While their work is just beginning and it’s too early to draw conclusions, the people said, it’s a telling sign of just how serious things have become.
More
World's 500 Richest People Lose $35 Billion From Trump Turmoil
by Brendan Coffey and Jack Witzig 17 May 2017, 22:16 GMT+1
The world’s richest people lost $35
billion Wednesday when global equity markets were rocked by political
turmoil in the U.S., according to the Bloomberg
Billionaires Index.
Bill Gates, the world’s richest
person with $86.8 billion, lost $1 billion as shares of Microsoft Corp., his largest
holding, tumbled 2.8 percent, the most in almost a year. Amazon.com Inc. co-founder Jeff Bezos, who came within $4 billion of taking the top
spot from Gates earlier this week, dropped to No. 3 after losing $1.7 billion
as shares of the online retailer slid 2.2 percent. Spanish retailing tycoon Amancio Ortega lost $355 million to end the day in the
second position with $83.2 billion.
----Facebook Inc. founder Mark
Zuckerberg was hardest hit in the tumult, dropping $2 billion when the
social media giant dropped 3.3 percent. Zuckerberg is the fifth-richest person
on the planet with $62.3 billion, according to the index. Trump, the first
billionaire to serve as U.S. president, has a net worth of $3 billion and
doesn’t have a spot on the Bloomberg index, a daily ranking of the world’s 500
richest people. They have a combined net worth of $4.9 trillion, up $455
billion in 2017.
Elsewhere, in EUSSR
madness, that jobs and wealth killing financial transaction tax is back on the
agenda again. Macron’s all for it, and so is his German clone Schulz. It’s not
even certain that is Chancellor Merkel wins the German election in September,
that she will continue blocking the business killing tax. If Germany does a tax
U-turn, all those bankster jobs leaving London will soon be all heading for
Asia and America.
Financial transaction tax could go into European budget: Schelling
A European Union-wide financial transaction tax could be accounted for
in the European budget and be offset against other national contributions,
Austrian Finance Minister Hans Joerg Schelling, who spearheads work on such a
tax, said on Tuesday.
The current EU budget, totaling around 1 trillion euros, runs from 2014
till 2020. The EU is keen to consider alternative revenues, especially in view
of Britain's planned departure from the union, one of the largest contributors
to its budget.
"I believe that Europe now has a window of opportunity to debate
questions of European revenue," Schelling told Austrian parliamentarians,
adding that a financial transaction tax would only work if all EU states took
part.
"I support the idea that one says 'Let's take the financial
transaction tax as a contribution to the European budget and alleviate national
budgets'. Then the discussion would be off the table about whether such a tax
would trigger competition between the national states."
EU states have traditionally guarded very jealously their right of veto
over tax policy, especially when facing tight financial constraints.
Germany's Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said earlier this year he
did not expect an agreement on the levy, whose implementation has been
repeatedly delayed, in the near future and while the bloc is dealing with
Britain's exit.
It
is unlikely Schaeuble will change his stance until German parliamentary
elections in September.
More
We close for the day with more computer news. No not another hack attack, at least not an intentional one, just a “tricky” one. On the upside, thousands of Americans and Canadians got a break from high priced coffee yesterday. Unintentionally, Starbucks made the case for keeping cash.
“The
trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing
until it’s too late.”
Seymour
Cray
Outage hits Starbucks stores in U.S. and Canada
@jdisisMay 16, 2017: 5:02 PM ET
A computer outage crippled some Starbucks stores in the
United States and Canada on Tuesday.
The outage happened after the company ran a regular
technology update on cash registers overnight.
Starbucks (SBUX)
spokesman Reggie Borges said the chain was not compromised by a cyberattack. He
said tech updates "can be tricky sometimes."
Starbucks would not say how many of its stores were affected -- only that it was a "limited number." The company confirmed that most locations were back online by the end of the day. There are about 14,500 Starbucks stores in the United States and Canada.
Customers across the United States tweeted about problems.
Some people said baristas were accepting only cash. A television reporter in El Paso, Texas, tweeted a picture of a sign at a Starbucks that said a "national outage" restricted their offerings to hot brewed coffee, iced coffee and tea.
More
http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/16/news/companies/starbucks-register-outage/index.html?iid=hp-stack-dom
"I
don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!"
Vidiu
Platon.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, a look at the future once global interest
rates start to normalise. If the deep state just killed the golden goose, our
central banksters have no ammunition to fight the arriving recession. Negative
rates will kill off private pensions, annuities, and the insurance industry.
Suddenly we are all living in very dangerous times.
“The boom can last only as long as the
credit expansion progresses at an ever-accelerated pace. The boom comes to an
end as soon as additional quantities of fiduciary media are no longer thrown
upon the loan market.”
Ludwig
von Mises.
Stress in Japanese corporate bonds seen as a sign of things to come
Yields are rising in Japan's tiny corporate bond market as traders
pre-emptively brace for the Bank of Japan to stop being buyer of last resort,
making this market a microcosm of wider fears over the end of Japan's
four-year-long stimulus policy.
Five year corporate bond yields have risen 10 basis points since
mid-April as the 59.2 trillion yen ($521 billion) corporate bond market fretted
that the BOJ could soon reduce its purchases of these securities.
That's a sizeable move in yields in an economy where short-term policy
rates are negative and where the central bank massively buys up securities,
including government bonds and equities, to keep rates near zero.
Most economists also reckon the BOJ is a long way off from exiting that
policy, given it is nowhere close to achieving its 2 percent inflation target.
But the corporate bonds market is becoming uneasy, providing a worrying
glimpse of what lies ahead for the mammoth government bonds sector when the
time comes.
"It is getting difficult for brokers to sell the corporate bonds
they buy in the primary market to the BOJ," said a director at a U.S.
securities house.
"This could be the indirect impact of a reduction in the Bank of
Japan's bond buying," he said, referring to the BOJ's purchases of
Japanese government bonds (JGBs).
While Japan's central bank has for long held that any talk of an exit
from its four-year-old quantitative easing policy is premature, there have been
subtle changes this year.The BOJ has, for example, gradually reduced the pace
of its bond buying. In April, the BOJ bought 8.4 trillion yen of JGBs, compared
to the average of 9.5 trillion yen last year.
Also unusually, two top BOJ officials last week discussed the issue of
an exit from current policy for the first time since the stimulus plan was
unveiled in 2013 with the singular aim of jump-starting Japan's moribund
economy.
Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said the central bank will consider publishing
calculations on how a future withdrawal of massive monetary stimulus could
affect its financial health, while Executive Director Masayoshi Amamiya, seen
as the architect of the stimulus, spoke of the range of tools the BOJ has to
whittle down its gigantic balance sheet.
"The BOJ could be thinking ahead, given that they cannot continue
the current pace of buying," said Makoto Sakuma, researcher at NLI
Research Institute.
More
“But it [the boom] could not last forever
even if inflation and credit expansion were to go on endlessly. It would then
encounter the barriers which prevent the boundless expansion of circulation
credit. It would lead to the crack-up boom and the breakdown of the whole
monetary system.”
Ludwig
von Mises.
Technology 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?
World’s largest wind turbines may double in size before 2024
Jillian
Ambrose17 May 2017 • 12:01am
The wind developer behind the world’s largest working wind turbines has
said the size of its giant offshore blades, currently in UK waters, will double
again within seven years.
Dong Energy will officially open the second phase of its giant Burbo
Bank offshore wind farm off the coast of Merseyside coast later today by
showcasing its 8MW turbines, the largest ever used.
The 258MW Burbo Bank project includes 32 turbines which stand almost 640
feet high, taller than the Gherkin in London, across an area the size of 5824
football pitches.
The Danish wind developer says that the 262 foot blades, each the
equivalent of nine double decker London buses, generates enough electricity
from a single rotation to power the average British home for 29 hours.
But Benj Sykes, the UK boss for Dong Energy wind power business,
has said he may be cutting the ribbon on turbines double this size by 2024.
“If you wind the clock back four or five years this scale of technology
was considered very ambitious. Now, you can see them in reality, commercially
deployed. It’s very difficult to say where we will ultimately get to,” he said.
“We’re already talking about the need to scale up the current turbine
range to between 12GW to 15GW as part of the cost reduction journey. I think we
will see that scale of turbine come in but we’re not sure from who, or when,”
he added.
Wind turbines have already more than doubled in size since Dong Energy
constructed the first phase of Burbo Bank in 2007 with 3.7MW structures. The
rapid increase in size has enabled developers to slash costs almost a decade
faster than Government targets.
The Government is currently undertaking an auction for support contracts
which is expected to fall well below the £85 a megawatt cost target which
Government pinpointed for 2026.
MoreThe monthly Coppock Indicators finished April
DJIA: 20,941 +149 Up. NASDAQ: 6,048 +190 Up. SP500: 2,384 +152 Up.
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