Baltic Dry Index. 855 +11 Brent Crude 45.39
“When
dew is on the grass,
Rain will never come to pass.”
Rain will never come to pass.”
We open with Asian markets largely in an early summer drift.
The pause before the big breakout, or the pause before the big drop? To me it’s
hard to see a big breakout from here, unless the central banksters intend to
buy more of everything. But even if they do, given the lack of breadth in the
markets, my guess is that insiders will just use the central bankster buying as an
opportunity to sell out near the top.
Below, Asia sleepwalks into the weekend. Crude oil attempts
to hold near the lows. In the northern hemisphere, it’s too darned hot. What
will that do to the inflation figures?
“When
clouds appear
Like rocks and towers,
The Earth’s refreshed
With frequent showers.”
Like rocks and towers,
The Earth’s refreshed
With frequent showers.”
Asian Stocks Mixed While Oil Halts Losing Streak: Markets Wrap
By Adam Haigh and Fox Hu
22 June 2017, 23:18 GMT+1
Asian equities are ending the week on a tepid note, with oil remaining
below $43 a barrel, after a series of Federal Reserve speakers did little to
alter projections for the path of U.S. interest-rate increases.
Chinese companies trading in Hong Kong advanced while stocks in Japan
fluctuated within a narrow range. Chinese equities remain in the limelight as
the nation’s banking watchdog raises scrutiny on some of the biggest
dealmakers. Crude halted a losing streak after tumbling into a bear market, but
concerns of a supply glut persisted, helping gold to continue climbing back
from a one-month low.
----"The
market is taking a pause at a relatively high level," said Hao Hong, chief
strategist at Bocom International Holdings Co. in Hong Kong. "Investors
need to watch for signs of economic slowdown and see whether the Fed will
adamantly carry on rate hikes."
China
stocks are closing out a rocky week. They got a boost from
MSCI Inc.’s decision to include domestic shares in its indexes, but regulatory
surprises created upheaval. Shares slumped on news that the government had
stepped up scrutiny of the nation’s most active overseas acquirers. Then,
China’s broadcasting regulator ordered Weibo Corp. and two other internet media
firms to halt video and audio webcasting, accusing them of operating without a
license and disseminating opinions potentially harmful to social stability.
Weibo shares sank 6.1 percent in New York.
----Friday’s
session in the U.S. will probably be one of the busiest of the year for equity
traders as the annual Russell reshuffle is set to take effect. The FTSE
Russell’s rebalancing of stock indexes reliably boosts trading, though it
rarely triggers big price swings in the market.
More
In wealth and jobs destroying EUSSR news, paymaster Germany
wants the lion’s share of the Brexit spoils. What Germany wants, Germany
usually gets, one way or another. Shame about all the other also-rans in the
German run rump-EU.
Brexit could strengthen EU, Germany as business location - German official
Britain's departure from the European Union could strengthen the bloc's
political integration and make Germany more attractive as a business location,
German Deputy Finance Minister Thomas Steffen said on Thursday.
At their first meeting in Brussels on Monday, British and EU negotiators
agreed on a timetable for the Brexit talks. Both sides stressed their goodwill
but also acknowledged the task's huge complexity and tight deadline.
"The decision by the United Kingdom to leave the EU is
unfortunate," Steffen said in the editorial of the finance ministry's
monthly report.
In the forthcoming negotiations, the remaining EU member states will be
faced with the challenge of preserving the unity of the EU-27 and the coherence
of the EU's internal market while also limiting the damage to citizens and
businesses, he said.
Steffen said that the EU-27 were determined to remain united and to put
future relations on a new common basis. "The Brexit process could also
bring opportunities for a stronger EU and for Germany as a business
location," he added.
Germany has thrown its hat into the ring to host the London-based
European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Banking Authority (EBA)
following Britain's departure from the EU, though diplomats say both will not
go to a single country.
In its monthly report, the finance ministry said Germany could benefit
from Brexit as the future relationship with the UK was still unclear and
London's market access was not secured.
The location question is therefore already present for many financial
services companies and Germany can offer a good alternative with Frankfurt as
one of the leading financial centres in Europe, it said.
The ministry pointed to the proximity to the European Central Bank and
its banking oversight. "The role of Frankfurt as the centre of banking
supervision in Europe could be further strengthened and completed by a shift of
the European Banking Supervisory Authority, which is still based in
London," it said.
"It is therefore self-evident that the state of Hesse and the
federal government are committed to get the European Banking Authority to
Frankfurt," the finance ministry concluded.
Next, Paris Airshow
news. Victory for Boeing over Airbus, albeit with a large amount of fudge in
the numbers.
Boeing wins hot Paris order race
Boeing (BA.N) won a red hot race for new business at the Paris Airshow, rolling out a new model of its best-selling 737 airliner that helped it claim back the order crown from rival Airbus (AIR.PA)After a show in which both manufacturers did brisk business under a sweltering sun, the European planemaker said on Thursday it won 326 net new orders and commitments while U.S. rival Boeing said its total was 571.
That included 147 new orders and commitments for the 737 MAX 10, plus 214 conversions to the MAX 10 from other models to support the launch of the new plane.
"The MAX stole the show," Ihssane Mounir, vice president of sales and marketing at Boeing's commercial aircraft division, told journalists. "This is probably one of our busiest air shows."
Asked if Airbus had lost momentum after years in which it often trounced Boeing at annual industry gatherings, sales chief John Leahy said the slowdown in orders had been expected.
"Is this a slower show than previous years? Yes, it is. Are we conceding that Boeing sold a few more airplanes than we did? Yes," he told a news conference.
In a late flurry on Thursday morning, Airbus signed deals for almost 100 aircraft, with AirAsia and privately-owned Iranian carriers Zagros Airlines and Iran Airtour.
Boeing topped up its tally by announcing a firm order for 125 737 MAX 8 airplanes with an undisclosed customer and another deal with lessor AerCap (AER.N) to convert 15 of its MAX 8 orders into the larger MAX 10. It also added a memorandum of understanding from Chinese domestic Riuli Airlines for 20 737 MAX 8 aircraft.
Analyst Richard Aboulafia, of Virginia-based Teal Group, said commercial activity had been better than expected and was reminiscent of shows in 2009 and 2011, when the aircraft industry had bucked a retreating world economy.
"This time we've got instability and uncertainty in many regions of the world, but airline traffic is strong, and as we've seen at this show, airlines want jets and the finance people are certainly happy to help."
More
In other news, the
extreme early summer heat is affecting much of the northern hemisphere,
generating real concern over the outcome of this year’s crops in China. Will
China drive grain prices later this year? Will food price inflation drive the
second half of 2017?
“Rain
before seven,
Clear before eleven.”
Clear before eleven.”
Extreme heat grips Northern Hemisphere on summer solstice
Extreme heat across large tracts of the Northern Hemisphere raised fears
for crops in China, fuelled forest fires in Portugal and Russia's Far East,
forced flight cancellations in the Southwest U.S., and melted tarmac on roads
in Britain.
As Wednesday marked the summer solstice - the longest day of the year -
forecasters said temperatures in Paris were expected to hit 37 Celsius (100
Fahrenheit), Madrid could see 38C, and London was set for 34C with warnings of
thunderstorms.
Rounding up the record temperatures set in the past two months, the
World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the Earth was experiencing
"another exceptionally warm year" and the heatwaves were unusually
early.
"Parts of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the United
States of America have seen extremely high May and June temperatures, with a
number of records broken," the WMO said late on Tuesday.
The trend seen during the past two months has put average monthly global
temperatures among the highest ever recorded since data began to be collated in
1880.
Even before this month, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) data showed Europe, the United States and Northeast Asia
- including eastern China, Japan and South Korea - had experienced unusually
warm weather between March and May.
In China, the world’s top grain producer, hot and dry conditions in the
main corn belt have delayed plantings and stunted crop development, especially
in the province of Liaoning where soil moisture levels are at their lowest in
at least five years.
Thomson Reuters Eikon data shows that precipitation in Liaoning for the
past month has been between 40 and 60 percent below the seasonal norm.
"The drought that hit parts of China’s northeast is the worst for
this time of the year in the past decade, in the breadth of areas it has
affected and the length of time it has lasted," Ma Wenfeng, analyst at
Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultancy, said.
More
Lastly today, an update on Beijing’s massive new
airport, due to open in 2019.
Beijing's New Mega Airport Will Challenge Air China's Dominance
Bloomberg News
21 June 2017, 22:00 GMT+1
Like ancient warlords, China's three biggest airlines have dominated their
regional cities: Air China Ltd. controlling Beijing, China Eastern Airlines
Corp. holding sway in the financial center of Shanghai, and China Southern
Airlines Co. ruling the roost down in export gateway Guangzhou. Until now.Rising on a plain south of Beijing is a mega airport that is about to change the balance, bringing all three head to head in the capital as it becomes the world's biggest aviation hub.
The new airport, due to open in 2019, has been designated by authorities as the hub for members of the SkyTeam alliance, a global group of airlines that includes China Eastern and China Southern. The two Chinese carriers will each be allowed to capture 40 percent of the airport's passengers, gaining coveted time slots to Europe and the U.S. in Air China’s backyard.
"This is an absolute game-changer for China Eastern and China Southern," said Corrine Png, chief executive officer of Crucial Perspective in Singapore. "Having all the SkyTeam alliance members under one roof will enable seamless flight connections."
The invasion of Air China's regional rivals has repercussions beyond China. As well as dominating their home bases, the big three Chinese players have each carved out a position abroad. Air China, through its Star Alliance ties with Deutsche Lufthansa AG and United Continental Holdings Inc., commands many of the routes to Europe and North America. China Eastern is the biggest carrier to Japan and South Korea. And China Southern is strong in Australia and Southeast Asia.
With access to more slots in Beijing, China Southern and China Eastern would potentially get more access to lucrative North American routes while their SkyTeam partners would get better access to the Chinese capital. In addition, China Southern, the nation's biggest airline, would be able to draw traffic from its Southeast Asian links to fly via Beijing to the U.S.
---- The new $12.9 billion airport in the southern suburb of Daxing, which was approved in 2014, would accommodate up to 100 million passengers a year with as many as seven runways. Liu estimates that by 2025, the two Beijing airports would share 170 million passengers, including 25 million on international flights.
More
“When
the wind is in the east,
It’s good for neither man nor beast.
When the wind is in the north,
The old folk should not venture forth.
When the wind is in the south,
It blows the bait in the fishes’ mouth.
When the wind is in the west,
It is of all the winds the best.”
It’s good for neither man nor beast.
When the wind is in the north,
The old folk should not venture forth.
When the wind is in the south,
It blows the bait in the fishes’ mouth.
When the wind is in the west,
It is of all the winds the best.”
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Fake online stores fronting money laundering! Who’d have thought it.
Exclusive - Fake online stores reveal gamblers' shadow banking system
A network of dummy online stores offering household goods has been used
as a front for internet gambling payments, a Reuters examination has found.
The seven sites, operated out of Europe, purport to sell items
including fabric, DVD cases, maps, gift wrap, mechanical tape, pin badges and
flags. In fact, they are fake outlets, part of a multinational system to
disguise payments for the $40 billion (31.6 billion pounds) global online
gambling industry, which is illegal in many countries and some U.S. states.
The findings raise questions about how e-commerce is policed worldwide.
They also underline a strategy which fraud specialists say regulators, card
issuers and banks have yet to tackle head-on.
That strategy is "transaction laundering" - when one online
merchant processes payment card transactions on behalf of another, which can
help disguise the true nature of payments.
Credit card companies including Visa and Mastercard require all online
purchases to be coded so they can see what type of purchase is being processed
and block it if it is illegal in a particular country. The codes are known as
Merchant Category Codes. Gambling transactions, for example, are given the code
of 7995 and subject to extra scrutiny.
The scheme found by Reuters involved websites which accepted payments
for household items from a reporter but did not deliver any products.
Instead, staff who answered helpdesk numbers on the sites said the outlets did
not sell the product advertised, but that they were used to help process
gambling payments, mostly for Americans.
Categorising a gambling transaction as a purchase of something else is
against the rules of card issuers including Visa and Mastercard, the card
companies said in response to Reuters' findings.
"Transaction laundering is serious misconduct - often
criminal," said Dan Frechtling, head of product at G2 Web Services, a
financial compliance company which works with leading banks and card issuers.
"It violates the merchant's agreement with its acquirer, allows prohibited
goods and services to enter the payment system, and may flout anti-money laundering
laws."
Three other fraud experts consulted by Reuters said transaction
laundering helps online merchants trade in areas that credit card issuers and
banks may otherwise bar as "high risk," such as gaming, pornography
or drugs. Some of them say thousands of online merchants may be using
similar techniques to move billions of dollars that card companies would
otherwise block.
"It is the digital evolution of money laundering," said Ron
Teicher, CEO of Evercompliant, a cyber-intelligence firm that works with banks
to identify suspect sites. "The only thing is it is much easier to do, and
much harder to get caught."
The dummy stores came to Reuters' attention in late 2016, when an
anonymous document posted on the internet pointed to three online outlets that
advertised products but did not actually deliver any. In December, a reporter
placed an order for a yard of burlap cloth on one of the sites,
myfabricfactory.com, a website run by a UK company called Sarphone Ltd. The
fabric, advertised in U.S. dollars at $6.48 per yard, has "many uses
including lightweight drapes," the website says. Sarphone did not respond
to requests for comment.
This order went unmet. After a few weeks an email from My Fabric Factory
arrived saying the product was out of stock. The payment was refunded.
When a reporter called the helpline number given on the site, the call
was answered by someone who gave her name as Anna Richardson. She said she was
employed by Agora Online Services, a payment services provider. Payment
services providers (PSPs) verify, process and code card transactions.
Richardson said Agora processes payments for poker and works with
"hundreds" of online gambling sites. Asked which references on the
reporter's card statement would be for online gambling, Richardson said,
"If you have been using a betting site of any sort ... they are normally
processed by us."
More
“When
your joints all start to ache,
Rainy weather is at stake.
Rainy weather is at stake.
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?
Future Energy: China leads world in solar power production
22 June 2017
So he headed for China. "The solar industry was fairly small and there weren't a lot of jobs," he remembers. "Just a few for installation." But the Chinese government had big ambitions to expand solar and Moser saw his chance.
He spent some years accumulating knowledge about the Chinese solar industry, before co-founding Symtech Solar, which designs solar panel systems using Chinese parts.
The idea is to make it easy for organisations outside China to access components without the hassle of having to source and assemble lots of different parts.
"You don't want to buy a car door or a car engine, you want to buy a car," he explains.
Symtech now has a portfolio of small projects dotted around the world and it is hoping to increase installations in the Middle East, thanks to a new office in Oman.
Moser isn't the only US entrepreneur who turned to China. Alex Shoer, of Seeder, helped to launch a business that brings solar panels to the roofs of buildings within the country.
He deals with foreign businesses who, say, want to make their Beijing office a little greener. The firm says it has so far erected three megawatts' worth of solar installations, with another 28 megawatts on the way for various clients.
"We will source the capital to finance, pay for the whole project and then sell the power at a discount," Shoer says. Again, the model relies on sourcing the right parts at a favourable cost.
These kind of installations are known as "distributed generation" projects, in which electricity is produced on a small scale, at or very near to a specific point of consumption.
Within China, distributed generation is growing at an extraordinary rate, driven in large part by farmers who use the panels to power agricultural equipment that might not be connected to the grid.
----China's rapid expansion of renewable energy facilities has since caught headlines around the world.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the country installed more than 34 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2016 - more than double the figure for the US and nearly half of the total added capacity worldwide that year.
Early figures for 2017 show China has added another eight gigawatts in the first quarter alone.
"It's a huge market," says Heymi Bahar at the IEA. Most of the world's solar cells are made in China and Taiwan, he adds - more than 60%.
The impressive scale doesn't stop there. The largest solar farm in the world - Longyangxia Dam Solar Park, all 30sq km of it - is a Chinese project. And the country recently opened the world's largest floating solar farm, in Huainan, Anhui Province.
More
Another weekend, with
Brexit talks finally underway, if with low expectations and no pace. Another
weekend of UK’s media piling in on the tragedy of the Grenfell tower block
fire, everyone’s now a victim, except everyone the media chooses to demonise as
a killer. Never let facts, which we still largely don’t have, get in the way of
a good story. Shame about the real victims though, but it’s great for the
ratings and advertising revenue. Have a great weekend everyone.
Whether
the weather be fine
Or whether the weather be not,
Whether the weather be cold
Or whether the weather be hot,
We'll weather the weather
Whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not.
Or whether the weather be not,
Whether the weather be cold
Or whether the weather be hot,
We'll weather the weather
Whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not.
Anon.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: 21,009 +157 Up. NASDAQ: 6,199 +219 Up. SP500: 2,412 +161 Up.
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