Baltic Dry Index. 1181 -22 Brent Crude 50.82
“If
economists [ your central bank here] could manage to get themselves thought of
as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.”
John Maynard Keynes.
Sleep peacefully,
everything’s well. We know that’s true, because everyone says it’s true. From
bent dodgy central banksters, the BIS excepted, to even more dodgy Wall Street
and City of London stock pedlars, everyone says buy more stocks. What could
possibly go wrong, well Houston I suppose, but that’s an act of God, and not a
central bankster problem. Besides, we’ve reached the end of the month in the
second month of the third quarter, it’s dress up stocks time, to goose the
numbers and boost the bonuses. Risk on, risk on!!! I’ll stay with risk off. The
glass is half empty to me, and looks like emptying some more.
China nonmanufacturing PMI falls a second month
Published: Aug 31, 2017 12:47 a.m. ET
BEIJING--China's official nonmanufacturing purchasing-managers' index, a
measure of activity outside the nation's factory gates, fell for a second
straight month to 53.4 in August from 54.5 in July, the National Bureau of
Statistics said Thursday.
The result, though it remained in expansion, marked the slowest growth
in the sector since May of last year, according to the official data.
The subindex for services dropped to 52.6 from 53.1 in July while the
subindex for construction decreased to 58.0 from 62.5, the bureau said.
The new-orders subindex for the entire sector fell to 50.9 from 51.1.
The official manufacturing PMI, also released Thursday, rose to 51.7 in
August from 51.4 in July.
The nonmanufacturing PMI covers services including retail, aviation and
software as well as the real-estate and construction sectors.
The data are based on replies to monthly questionnaires sent to
purchasing executives at 4,000 companies in 27 nonmanufacturing sectors.
More
August 31, 2017 / 3:49 AM
Nikkei rises to 2-week highs as U.S. data bolsters dollar-yen
TOKYO, Aug 31 (Reuters) - Japan’s Nikkei share average rose to two-week
highs on Thursday morning after the dollar rose against the yen helped by
bright U.S. economic data, lifting cyclical stocks such as automakers and
financial companies.
The Nikkei gained 0.7 percent to 19,642.76 by the midday break after
reaching as high as 19,661.39, the loftiest level since August 17.
Japanese exporters benefited from a weaker yen, as the dollar gained on
strong U.S. gross domestic product data and U.S. private-sector employers that
bolstered expectations for a solid U.S. jobs report later this week.
Subaru Corp rose 1.3 percent, Honda Motor Co gained 1.0 percent, Hitachi
Ltd soared 1.5 percent and Keyence Corp surged as much as 1.7 percent to a
record high of 58,340 yen.
Investors, however, remain nervous about the prospect of a U.S.
government shutdown, and a potential debt default if lawmakers don’t raise the
nation’s debt ceiling by the end of September.
“The market is still careful about taking large positions with ongoing U.S.
political woes, which could pressure the dollar to the yen again,” Hiroyuki
Nakai, chief strategist at Tokai Tokyo Research Center said. “We don’t know how
much fall the Nikkei will see then.”
More
August 30, 2017 / 1:45 AM
Global stocks, dollar rise after upbeat U.S. data
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks and the dollar rose on Wednesday after
economic data indicated solid momentum, keeping alive the prospect of a U.S.
interest rate increase in December.
Gasoline futures surged and crude oil was down, as flooding and damage
from Tropical Storm Harvey shut nearly a quarter of U.S. refinery capacity,
curbing demand for crude while raising the risk of fuel shortages.
Gross domestic product data on Wednesday showed the U.S. economy grew
faster than initially thought in the second quarter, while a separate report
showed U.S. private-sector employers added 237,000 jobs in August, the biggest
monthly increase in five months.
MSCI’s world index .MIWD00000PUS, which tracks shares in 46 countries,
was up 0.13 percent, taking strength from a rally on Wall Street.
“I have doubts how sustainable the macro economy is, but perceived
fundamentals are still OK. GDP confirmed that,” said John Velis, macro
strategist at State Street Global Markets in Boston.
----The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose 27.06 points, or 0.12 percent, to close at 21,892.43, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 11.29 points, or 0.46 percent, to finish at 2,457.59 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 66.42 points, or 1.05 percent, to end at 6,368.31.
European stocks rose in a relief rally a day after geopolitical concerns caused a sharp dip across equity markets. The pan-European STOXX 600 closed 0.7 percent higher.
More
From Stocks to Bonds, the Bear-Market Signals Are Multiplying
By Cormac Mullen
30 August 2017, 10:38 GMT+1
Risks are stacking up for markets attempting to recover from the latest provocation by North Korea and the mounting damage of Tropical Storm
Harvey.Citigroup Inc. strategists including Jeremy Hale cite “worrying developments” that may signal the approach of a correction in stocks, while Commerzbank AG finds growing evidence of bearish sentiment in bond funds.
Here are some of the red flags:
Correlations
The pairwise correlations between the S&P 500 and its industry sectors have fallen near levels that preceded the last two bear markets, according to the Citigroup strategists. The previous downturns in stocks started when correlations re-established themselves.Transport Stocks
Underperforming transport stocks are another concern. The Dow Jones Transportation Average, a gauge of airline, railroad and trucking companies, has fallen about 5 percent from its July 14 high. The index’s decline from its 2014 peak led a similar move in the S&P 500 by about seven months.
More
In the Hurricane Harvey,
never ending disaster tragedy, yet more bad news.
Hurricane Harvey a Trash, Logistics Disaster
Businesses in and around Houston that have been focusing on reducing waste in recent months may have discovered an unexpected benefit this week: with Waste Management having canceled trash collection for customers in several areas, those companies are less likely, at least, to have overflowing dumpsters as the week goes on.Waste Management canceled trash removal for customers in areas including Houston, the Woodlands, Jacinto City and Galveston, the company’s website announced (via the Wall Street Journal). Getting to landfills was “next to impossible,” according to a Waste Management spokesperson. The company had reopened three of six landfills in Houston on Monday, but closed them again later in the day.
In fact, all City of Houston Solid Waste Management Department services were closed as of yesterday and at least through Tuesday, including recycling centers and the Reuse Warehouse. The City reminds businesses and residents that collection schedules may be adjusted after a declared storm.
Collection of a business’s normal trash may just be the tip of the iceberg, however. The trash and debris left behind by Harvey is likely to take years to clean up, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Waste Dive reports.
---- Trash removal, however, is likely not the top concern for businesses in the area, as flood waters force hundreds of thousands of employees to stay home, closed most businesses in the Houston area, and curtailed business operations even at locations where flooding did not cause closures.
Anheuser-Busch InBev, for example, said that while facilities were undamaged, its larger brewery in the area had to stop production over the weekend because it ran out of packaging materials. Supply lines throughout southeast Texas are snarled in what may turn out to be an unprecedented event, according to Mark Rourke, CEO at Green Bay, Wis.-based trucking company Schneider National Inc.
With long stretches of highways and railroad tracks threatened by flooding, freight transportation in the area has come to a virtual standstill, the Wall Street Journal writes. Trucking runs in the area plummeted by 80% on Sunday. Union Pacific axed all freight rail traffic headed for the area, and UPS curtailed all trucking. In fact, the storm has so far affected up as much as 10% of the country’s trucking capacity, chief economist Noel Perry with Truckstop.com told the WSJ.
That means that not only will businesses like Anheuser-Busch struggle to bring in the goods they need to operate, but they will also likely struggle to line up enough trucks to ship their goods out.
And shipping costs are expected to rise as much as 22%, Perry said, basing his predictions on other natural disasters including Hurricane Katrina.
More
https://www.environmentalleader.com/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-trash-logistics-disaster/
Houston drainage grid 'so obsolete it's just unbelievable'
City is unique in that it gets regular massive floods and has an inability to cope with them
August 29, 2017Houston's system of bayous and reservoirs was built to drain a tabletop-flat city prone to heavy rains. But its Depression-era design is no match for the stresses brought by explosive development and ever-wetter storms.
Nearly any city would be overwhelmed by the more than 1.2 metres of rain that Hurricane Harvey has dumped since Friday, but Houston is unique in that it gets regular massive floods and has an inability to cope with them. This is the third 100-year-or-more type of flood in three years.
Experts blame too many people, too much concrete, insufficient upstream storage, not enough green space for water drainage and, especially, too little regulation.
"Houston is the most flood-prone city in the United States," said Rice University environmental engineering professor Phil Bedient. "No one is even a close second — not even New Orleans, because at least they have pumps there."
The entire system is designed to clear out only 30 centimetres of rain per 24-hour period, said Jim Blackburn, an environmental law professor at Rice University: "That's so obsolete it's just unbelievable."
Also, Houston's Harris County has the loosest, least-regulated drainage policy and system in the entire country, Bedient said.
How the system is supposed to work
Here's how the system is supposed to work: The county that encompasses Houston has 2,500 miles of bayous and channels and more than 300 stormwater holding basins, which are designed to fill up during intense downpours and drain slowly as high waters recede.
Water is supposed to flow west to east through bayous, which are tidal
creeks that often have concrete improvements to make water flow and are
connected to the Galveston Bay.
When big rains come, officials also activate two normally dry
reservoirs, closing the floodgates to collect the water and keep it from
overwhelming the downtown area.
But the main bayou through downtown Houston, Buffalo Bayou, "is
pretty much still a dirt mud channel like you would have seen 100 years ago,
just a little cleaned out," said U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Jeff
East, who is based in Houston.
And because the coastal plain is so flat, only sloping about 30
centimetres per mile, the water doesn't flow out of the bayous fast, Bedient
said.
More
Before and After Photos Capture Devastating Flooding in Houston
Date of Publication:
08.29.17.
https://www.wired.com/2017/08/photos-capture-devastating-flooding-houston?mbid=nl_083017_daily&CNDID=%%CUST_ID%%In EUSSR news, good news at last! Only 68 German banks failed the German stress tests. In most unusual German understatement, “We know who those 68 banks are and that’s why we’re quite relaxed sitting here,” Raimund Roeseler, executive director for banking supervision at BaFin said. Stay relaxed Raimund, deficits didn’t matter until one day they did. Besides, it’s the gambling monster bank Deutsche Bank that’s the problem, when they go bust after the next Lehman, everything else in Germany goes bust with them.
"We
shouldn't pour cold water on everything.
We, the eight or nine players in global investment banking, have a very
good future."
Deutsche
Bank, CEO Josef Ackermann. Davos, January 2007.
68 Small and Medium-Sized German Banks Fail National Stress Test
By Steven Arons and Carolynn Look
30 August 2017, 11:16 GMT+1 30 August 2017, 12:50 GMT+1
Almost 5 percent of small and medium-sized German banks missed regulatory
capital requirements in a stress test conducted by Germany’s two top financial
watchdogs.The impact of the simulation carried out by the Bundesbank and BaFin would have been higher if the stress test had factored in contagion effects, Bundesbank board member Andreas Dombret said at a press conference in Frankfurt. He presented the results of the survey of about 1,500 banks together with Raimund Roeseler, executive director for banking supervision at BaFin.
“The stress test shows that the banks should very carefully assess how well they are prepared to cope with the risks” identified in the survey, Dombret said. “The message of our survey and our stress test to banks and savings banks is: those who want to safeguard vitality in the long run should make preparations.”
German banks have long suffered from comparatively low profitability in a fragmented market that has been exacerbated by low -- and sometimes negative -- interest rates. The banks said in the survey that they expect their profit before tax to fall by 9 percent over the next five years.
The stress test applied by the financial watchdogs simulated different scenarios, including market risks, credit risks, and what would happen to bank balance sheets if the European Central Bank changed interest rates. Under a stress scenario, 68 of the surveyed banks would fall under the capital requirements set by regulators.
“We
know who those 68 banks are and that’s why we’re quite relaxed sitting here,”
Roeseler said.
More
“Europe exemplifies
a situation unfavourable to a common currency. It is composed of separate
nations, speaking different languages, with different customs, and having
citizens feeling far greater loyalty and attachment to their own country than
to a common market or to the idea of Europe".
Professor Milton Friedman, The Times 19 November
1997.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, back to that old socialist/communist “something for everyone, and
for nothing,” fake economics again. Lying to the many (poor,) to get the few
elected to power.
Below, when the bill comes in for the Great Nixonian Error of Fiat
Money, “free lunch.”
“They pretend to pay us. We pretend to work.”
Old USSR joke.
As Poverty Surges in Italy, Populists Propose a ‘Citizens’ Income’
With almost 11 percent
of the country unemployed, the Five Star Movement sees its chance.
By John
Follain 30 August 2017, 05:01 GMT +1
From
his perch at a waterfront bar in the Italian port of Livorno, Marco Di Tanto
sees far more despair than charm. Although the center of town—an area called
New Venice—has scenic streets and winding canals similar to its namesake, the
Tuscan city is still reeling from the shutdown of the vast Orlando shipyard in
2002 and the shift of most freight traffic to bigger container ports in Genoa
and Naples over the past two decades.
“There’s no real work in Livorno
anymore,” says Di Tanto, 58, who in 2009 lost his job as a forklift driver at
the docks and now picks up informal construction work when he can. “I’ve seen
my old colleagues queuing at the soup kitchen.”
That
economic malaise is increasingly common across Italy, where unemployment tops
11 percent and the number of people living at or below the poverty line has
nearly tripled since 2006, to 4.7 million last year, or almost 8 percent of the
population, according to statistics agency Istat. These woes have made Livorno,
where the Italian Communist Party was founded in 1921, a petri dish for ideas
to help the poor ahead of national elections expected early next year. “Poverty
will be center stage in the campaign,” says Giorgio Freddi, professor emeritus
of political science at the University of Bologna. The populist Five Star
Movement “has imposed the issue on national politics. The mainstream parties
are being forced to play catch-up.”
Five Star is a fast-growing group fueled by anger at the old political
class. Three years ago the movement rode economic concerns to power in Livorno,
ending 70 years of rule by the Communists and other left-leaning parties. The
new mayor, a former engineer named Filippo Nogarin, introduced a €500 ($590)
monthly subsidy to the disadvantaged. That idea is a key plank in Five Star’s national
platform, and the group’s leaders have promised to quickly implement such a
program if they take power. Beppe Grillo, the former television comedian who
co-founded the party, says fighting poverty should be a top priority. A basic
income can “give people back their dignity,” Grillo’s blog declared in April.
“The current government is ignoring millions of families in difficulty.”
The Five Star program echoes universal basic income schemes being
considered around the world. Finland in January started an experiment in which
2,000 unemployed people receive a stipend of €560 per month. And the Canadian
province of Ontario this summer began trials in three cities in which
individuals can get almost C$17,000 ($13,600) per year. Five Star’s version
would give Italians below the poverty line as much as €780 a month. Recipients
must perform several hours of community service each week and actively seek
work, and they’d be cut off after rejecting three job offers. Five Star says
the plan would cost €17 billion a year, funded in part by spending cuts as well
as tax hikes on banks, insurance companies, and gambling.
Opinion polls show Five Star neck and neck with the Democratic Party,
led by ex-Premier Matteo Renzi, and a center-right bloc including Forza Italia,
the party of former Premier Silvio Berlusconi. To keep Five Star from
dominating the debate, Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, a Renzi ally, has
approved a less ambitious plan he calls “the first universal tool against
poverty.” The scheme, dubbed “inclusion income,” would give 1.7 million people
as much as €485 a month as long as they’re actively seeking work, at a cost of
about €2 billion a year.
With industrial output down by about 25 percent from 2008 to 2013 in
Italy’s worst postwar recession, either plan could be helpful, says Giuseppe Di
Taranto, a professor of economic history at Rome’s Luiss University. “We lost
lots of jobs, and poverty has risen so much that we’ve got to experiment.”
More
"The most puzzling development in politics during the last
decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create
the Soviet Union in Western Europe."
Mikhail
Gorbachev
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?
Dethleffs experiments with all-electric, solar-backed motorhome
C.C. Weiss
August 29, 2017
Range
anxiety makes an all-electric motorhome seem like a losing proposition from the
get-go. Is there a greater oxymoron than a boundless, nomadic vehicle that
needs to be hooked to the grid for hours at a time every 100 miles (161 km) or
so? Still, there are electric motorhomes out there, of both the homebuilt and
retail variety, and we can now add another to the list. The Dethleffs e.home
concept explores the possibility of a Type C motorhome with a zero emissions
powertrain, plenty of solar charging capability, and efficient and smart
technologies throughout.
Volkswagen gave those yearning for an electric camper van some good news this month when it announced that the I.D. Buzz concept, an electric spiritual successor to the m``icrobuses of yore, will indeed make it to production. Once it does, it surely won't take long for camper converters to jump all over the Buzz-based production van, adding kitchens, folding beds, pop-up roofs and other amenities. In the meantime, Volkswagen is exploring new camper van innovations with traditional turbo diesel power.
Much like Volkswagen, German camper manufacturer Dethleffs has come to see the all-electric takeover more as a matter of when than if. And while it also recognizes that the e-revolution will take a little longer to penetrate the motorhome market than the passenger car market, it's getting out of the gate early and experimenting with ways of making a viable, efficient all-electric motorhome.
There are plenty of electric vans out there from which you could build an electric camper van (Type B motorhome), but Dethleffs has gone bigger by designing a Type C motorhome around the Iveco Daily Electric chassis. The Daily relies on a 107-hp (80-kW) electric motor and several battery options to offer up to 174 mi (280 km) of range (NEDC), in non-camper trim.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished July
DJIA: 21,891 +207 Up. NASDAQ: 6,348 +250 Up. SP500: 2,470 +171 Up.
