Baltic Dry Index. 1207 +38 Brent Crude 50.52
The
Grand Old Duke of York he had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.
When they were up, they were up
And when they were down, they were down
And when they were only halfway up
They were neither up nor down.
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.
When they were up, they were up
And when they were down, they were down
And when they were only halfway up
They were neither up nor down.
The big story this
morning, is that North Korea seems to have won the recent game of bluff with
President Trump’s White House team. Though Trump huffed and puffed up a good
storm of words, South Korea’s President Moon vetoed any new war without his
consent which was withheld; China vetoed any USA first strike by threatening to
come to North Korea’s aid with their defence treaty, and vetoed any NK first
strike by threatening not to come to NK’s defence; and there was simply no will
in the American public to get involved in any new Korean War misadventure with
an uncertain outcome.
Below, in typical
Trump White House fashion, the US administration flashed both a red and green
signal for war, but only the red signal was taken seriously. Any new war, if it
ever happens at all, will now be delayed until after NK clearly demonstrates it
has a viable nuclear tipped, re-entry survivable, ICBM capability. Just what
they make of it all in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and Tokyo, I dread to think.
A whole slew of other capitals will be drawing conclusions too.
Below, in what might
be his final act, President Trump’s chief strategist gets realistic over North
Korea, but fires both barrels of a shotgun at China’s trade policies. The
potential shooting war over, the trade war is just starting, it seems. At least
no one actually dies in a trade war, though trade usually becomes a big
casualty.
Steve Bannon: ‘We’re at economic war with China,’ there’s no North Korea solution
Published: Aug 16, 2017 11:36 p.m. ET
Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, said in a
surprisingly candid report Wednesday that the U.S. is at economic war with
China, there’s no military solution to North Korea and that infighting is an
everyday occurrence in the White House.The interview, published by the liberal-leaning American Prospect, is likely to cause more problems for Bannon, who is reportedly on thin ice in the Trump administration.
In an interview that included a wide range of topics, Bannon said “We’re at economic war with China,” and that the U.S. is at risk of losing. “If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, 10 years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”
Bannon reportedly never meant for the conversation to go public, even though he was the one who called America Prospect editor Robert Kuttner on Tuesday, and did not ask for his statements to be off the record. “The question of whether the phone call was on or off the record never came up,” Kuttner wrote in his report, which he called “puzzling” since “[Bannon is] probably the most media-savvy person in America.”
In the interview, Bannon urged tough trade sanctions against Beijing, and said China is unlikely to force North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.
On the topic of North Korea, Bannon was blunt: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”
Bannon continued, saying he’s working to get East Asia “hawks” installed in positions at the Defense and State departments, despite opposition from within the White House and on Wall Street.
“That’s a fight I fight every day here,” he said. “We’re still fighting. There’s Treasury and [National Economic Council chair] Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying. We gotta do this. The president’s default position is to do it, but the apparatus is going crazy. Don’t get me wrong. It’s like, every day.”
Bannon belittled white supremacists, but dodged suggestions that as the onetime executive chairman of Breitbart News he had helped fuel the current white-nationalist movement.
“Ethno-nationalism — it’s losers. It’s a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it. These guys are a collection of clowns,” he said.
The report left some of Bannon’s colleagues stunned. One told Axios on Wednesday night: “Since Steve apparently enjoys casually undermining U.S. national security, I’ll put this in terms he’ll understand: This is DEFCON 1-level bad.”
August 17, 2017 / 4:50 AM
South Korea's Moon says North Korean nuclear-tipped ICBM is a 'red line'
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea would be "crossing a red line"
if it put a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile, South
Korea's president said on Thursday, but the United States had promised to seek
Seoul's approval before taking any military action.
North Korea's rapid progress in developing nuclear weapons and missiles
capable of reaching the U.S. mainland has fuelled a surge in tensions in recent
days. Pyongyang has threatened to fire missiles towards the Pacific island of
Guam and U.S. President Donald Trump has warned it would face "fire and
fury" if it threatened the United States.
"I would consider that North Korea is crossing a red line if it
launches an intercontinental ballistic missile again and weaponises it by
putting a nuclear warhead on top of the missile," South Korean President Moon
Jae-in said at a news conference marking his first 100 days in office.
Moon has repeatedly urged North Korea not to "cross the red
line" but had not previously elaborated what that would constitute.
Trump had promised to seek negotiations and approval from South Korea
before taking any options regarding North Korea, Moon also said.
The United States and South Korea remain technically still at war with
North Korea after the 1950-53 Korean conflict ended with a truce, not a peace
treaty.
U.S.
Vice President Mike Pence told reporters in Chile on Wednesday that "all
options" remained on the table with regards to North Korea, and he called
on Latin American nations to break ties with Pyongyang.
----North Korean media reported on Tuesday that Kim had delayed the decision on firing four missiles towards Guam, a U.S. territory home to a vital air base and Navy facility, while he waited to see what the United States did next.
"Kim Jong Un of North Korea made a very wise and well reasoned
decision," Trump wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. "The alternative
would have been both catastrophic and unacceptable!"
Below how the global
stock markets reacted, mostly with a big yawn. For all President Trump’s
blowhard bluster over North Korea, few in the markets ever expected any follow
up action. The same position was taken successfully by North Korea too. But has
the massive bubble already become compromised? Are we in for a repeat of 1987?
Dow extends win streak to reclaim 22,000-mark on Fed minutes
Published: Aug 16, 2017 4:37 p.m. ET
U.S. stocks closed moderately higher Wednesday, restoring the Dow above the
psychologically-important 22,000 mark, after Federal Reserve minutes suggested
that the central bank is wrestling with sluggish inflation but eager to commence
an unwind of its $4.5 trillion asset portfolio.The market’s gains came after a volatile session, reflecting uncertainty about the strategic path for the central bank and political tensions facing President Donald Trump that could disrupt his pro-growth agenda.
The S&P 500 SPX, +0.14% rose 3.5 points, or 0.1%, to close at 2,468.11, with the materials sector leading, while energy fell 1.1%.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.12% climbed 25.88 points, or 0.1%, to end at 22,024.87, extending its winning streak to a fourth session. The technology-laden Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.19% rose 12.10 points, or 0.2%, to close at 6,345.11.
The minutes from the Fed’s meeting in July showed that most Fed officials wanted to wait until the next monetary meeting to unveil details on its planned unwinding of its $4.5 trillion in bondholdings, indicating an announcement is possible in September. The Fed also discussed the surprisingly low inflation readings, with a few officials noting that the Fed could be patient before raising interest rates again
More
Asian stocks broadly bounce higher on tech gains
Published: Aug 16, 2017 10:33 p.m. ET
Equities extended this week’s gains a bit further early Thursday as minutes
of the Federal Reserve’s meeting revealed a deeper-than-expected divide on the
timing of the next interest rate increase.The prospect of a slower pace of additional rate increases pressured the dollar in Wednesday afternoon U.S. trading, and the subsequent gain in the yen weighed on Japanese stocks early Thursday. The Nikkei NIK, +0.03% was recently down 0.2% at the dollar JPYUSD, +0.300377% fell to session lows of ¥109.80 in Asian trading, the greenback’s lowest level since Tuesday.
Still, this year’s rebound for the yen doesn’t seen to be hitting Japan’s economy. Exports rose 13% in July
from a year ago, the eighth-straight monthly gain, government data showed Thursday. Japanese stocks often fall when the yen strengthens amid fears that a stronger currency will hit exporters — a key facet of the country’s economy.
Stocks elsewhere in Asia were generally slightly higher Thursday, mirroring modest gains in U.S. equities overnight.
While Rob Carnell, head of Asia research at ING, said, “Confusion reigns at the Federal Reserve,” he added Asian markets were likely to take comfort in additional rate increases are likely to come “at worst at a very-modest pace.”
Gains of 0.2% to 0.4% were seen in the likes of Australia XJO, -0.01% , South Korea SEU, +0.46% and New Zealand NZ50GR, +0.22% — the latter having set record closing highs each of the past two sessions. Meanwhile, helping Korea’s Kospi was a 1.8% rebound in Samsung 005930, +2.03% amid broad early strength for tech stocks in general.
More
Back in the real
world, cyber attacks don’t come cheap. Maersk thinks the June attack will cost
it about 300 million dollars.
Maersk Says June Cyberattack Will Cost It up to $300 Million
By Christian Wienberg
16 August 2017, 07:31 GMT+1 16 August 2017, 12:15 GMT+1
A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S said a cyberattack that
hit the owner of the world’s biggest container shipping company at the end of
June will wipe as much as $300 million off profits in the third quarter.The announcement was made in connection with second-quarter earnings, which showed Maersk missed analyst estimates after taking a writedown at the tankers unit that’s part of the energy business management has said it wants to get rid of.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Chief Executive Officer Soren Skou said the industry outlook was bright, despite the disruptions of cyberattacks and writedowns. Management at the Danish company sees “very healthy fundamentals” for container shipping, Skou told Bloomberg’s Matt Miller and Guy Johnson.
Frode Morkedal, the managing director of Clarksons Platou Securities, said the report was “slightly on the negative side, but we find solace in their positive market comments,” in a note to clients. Of the 31 Maersk analysts tracked by Bloomberg, 15 are telling investors to buy the stock, 12 suggest holding on to it, and four say clients are better off selling.
David Kerstens, an equity analyst at Jefferies, said the fact that Maersk Line reported its first profit in five quarters shows that “fundamentals in container shipping continue to improve,” according to a note. Kerstens is among analysts advising clients to buy. Clarksons has a neutral rating on the share.
We close for today,
with that Grand Old Duke of York. If we didn’t have British Royalty and
Parliament for fun and amusement, we’d have to invent them. In America they
have a succession of dodgy Presidents since Clinton.
Grand Old Duke: The greatest scandal never told
Sex, bribery, betrayal, a royal feud and more sex; the only
thing missing from the story of Mary Clarke and the Grand Old Duke of York was
a tabloid press to titillate the nation, reports Andy McSmith
Thursday 1 January 2009
The greatest scandal in the history of the British Parliament had
everything: sex, cash for honours, a feud within the Royal Family, and more –
and all long before Jack Profumo, or Lord Levy or the Princess of Wales was
born. In fact, its bicentenary is just a few days away.
In January 1809, a parliamentary commission held a public inquiry into
allegations of corruption in the Army. It was alleged that, in the midst of a
war with Napoleon, rich young men were buying their way in and out of lucrative
commissions. The main witness before the inquiry was a sensationally attractive
woman named Mary Clarke, whose evidence so transfixed some of her male
listeners that they sent her private notes afterwards seeking a chance to get
to know her better, in more intimate surroundings.
Bribery, betrayal, extravagance, political intrigue and the
aforementioned feud in the Royal Family... the Mary Clarke scandal only lacked
a sensation-driven tabloid press to titillate the nation with daily revelations
but a literate minority were able to follow every sordid detail in the cheap
pamphlets on sale in London.
At its centre was a man who is still a household name – Frederick
Augustus Hanover, that Grand Old Duke of York who had ten thousand men. The
nursery rhyme commemorates his disastrous record on the battlefield. His statue
can be seen on a column 123ft high, near the Mall, just off Trafalgar Square.
The Duke was Commander in Chief, and the favourite son of King George III – the
only one of that monarch's numerous children who showed any talent for
anything. Though he was a bad field commander, he was a competent organiser who
raised the professional level of the army and founded Sandhurst College.
In common with George's other sons, he could not stand his wife. In
1803, he set up house with the lovely Mary Clarke, stepdaughter of a printer,
brought up in Bowling Inn Alley, near Fleet Street. She has a deceptively
innocent expression in her surviving portraits. Innocence, however, was not one
of her many qualities. Married off at 15, she had sent her husband packing
because he drank, and was intent on bringing up her daughters as fashionable ladies
by making money through the only means available to her.
For two years, Mary Clarke's luxurious home was a centre of London
society. At a time when ladies were expected to read romantic novels, Ms Clarke
boasted that she had never read a novel in her life, but she had studied the
works of most of the political essayists and military theorists of her time.
Her private diaries, which are kept in an archive in Reading, are written in
the confident sloping handwriting of a well-educated woman. She was obviously
more intelligent and strong willed than the Duke and it was rumoured that she
had more sway in military matters than was proper for a kept woman. A furious
officer, Major Denis Hogan, even alleged that he had been denied promotion
because he had refused to "kiss the petticoat" – for which he was
sued for libel.
Eventually, the Duke tired of his lively mistress but promised her an
annuity for life of £400 a year so her daughters would not have to follow their
mother's profession. Sadly, he was hopeless with money and extravagant beyond
the means even of a royal prince. In one year, he drank and gambled his way
through £40,000. He could not keep up the payments, and she was left, she
claimed, "pursued by creditors, harassed and distressed by threats, which
afforded my future life no other prospect but the walls of prison".
She took refuge in a house in Hampstead, then a village outside London,
where there was another lodger, named Sir Richard Phillips, a radical, who had
spent time in jail for being a suspected republican. He tipped off Gwyllym
Wardle, the MP for Okehampton, that the aggrieved Ms Clarke had a tale worth
hearing. In January 1809, Col Wardle stood up in the Commons and sensationally
accused the King's son of corruption. He then produced his glamorous witness,
who frankly testified that, throughout the time when she was the Duke's
mistress, she was selling commissions to would-be officers.
More
"Due to the bad economy,
the Queen of England's salary will be frozen for the next four years.
In fact, to make ends meet the
queen is thinking of having a yard sale. Getting rid of a lot of stuff they
don't use anymore, like Canada."
Jay Leno
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Oh no! Any chance of the ECJ giving an honest verdict? Where would they
ever work again? Luckily for the hapless ECJ, they don’t have to decide until
long after the German election and happily for them, long after the ECB stops
its asset buying program. That’ll be relief and Schnapps all round.
August 15, 2017 / 9:05 AM
German challenge to ECB asset buys sent to European Court
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The European Central Bank may be violating laws on
monetary financing in its 2.3 trillion euro ($2.7 trillion) asset purchase
programme, Germany's constitutional court said on Tuesday, and it asked
Europe's top court to make a ruling.
In the biggest challenge yet to the ECB's unprecedented effort to revive
growth, the court said bond buys under the scheme may go beyond the bank's
mandate and inhibit euro zone members' activities.
"Significant reasons indicate that the ECB decisions governing the
asset purchase programme violate the prohibition of monetary financing and
exceed the monetary policy mandate of the European Central Bank, thus
encroaching upon the competences of the Member States," the court said.
It said it would ask the European Court of Justice to review the
programme.
The ECB acted swiftly to defend the scheme.
"The extended asset purchase programme is in our opinion fully
within our mandate," it said in a statement. "That is ultimately for
the European Court of Justice to assess."
It said the 60 billion euro per month asset buys would continue as
normal.
The European court has already backed the ECB's more contentious
emergency bond purchase scheme known as Outright Monetary Transactions or OMT
with only relatively minor limitations, suggesting that the challenge - lodged
by several academics and politicians - may face an uphill battle.
The decision to pass the issue over to the ECJ means any final ruling
will come either after the bond purchases end or near the end of the scheme,
which has already been running for over two years and is expected to be wound
down next year.
Seen by some in Europe's biggest economy as a stealth bailout of
indebted south European governments, many Germans have been irked by the
scheme, commonly known as quantitative easing, arguing that Germany taxpayers
have to bear the risk for others.
More
'You
just never know. That unpredictability is the great thing about life. You
change. The world changes. You live in a country where we are still blessed
with enormous opportunity. Leave yourself open to the world of possibility. You
have the ambition, you have the smarts and you have the toughness. So, turn the
page on your biography - you have just started a new chapter in your lives.'
Lloyd
Blankfein, “Mr. Goldman Sacks,” CEO of
Goldman Sachs unintentionally backs Brexit in a US speech to graduates, mid
2016.
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?
Engineers charge ahead on zinc-air batteries
Three-stage method could revolutionize rechargeability
Date:
August 15, 2017
Source:
University of Sydney
Summary:
Researchers have found a solution for one of the biggest stumbling blocks
preventing zinc-air batteries from overtaking conventional lithium-ion
batteries as the power source of choice in electronic devices.
University of Sydney researchers have found a solution for one of the
biggest stumbling blocks preventing zinc-air batteries from overtaking
conventional lithium-ion batteries as the power source of choice in electronic
devices.
Zinc-air batteries are batteries powered by zinc metal and oxygen from
the air. Due to the global abundance of zinc metal, these batteries are much
cheaper to produce than lithium-ion batteries, and they can also store more
energy (theoretically five times more than that of lithium-ion batteries), are
much safer and are more environmentally friendly.
While zinc-air batteries are currently used as an energy source in
hearing aids and some film cameras and railway signal devices, their widespread
use has been hindered by the fact that, up until now, recharging them has
proved difficult. This is due to the lack of electrocatalysts that successfully
reduce and generate oxygen during the discharging and charging of a battery.
Published in Advanced Materials today, a paper authored by
chemical engineering researchers from the University of Sydney and Nanyang Technological
University outlines a new three-stage method to overcome this problem.
According to lead author Professor Yuan Chen, from the University of
Sydney's Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, the new method
can be used to create bifunctional oxygen electrocatalysts for building
rechargeable zinc-air batteries from scratch.
"Up until now, rechargeable zinc-air batteries have been made with
expensive precious metal catalysts, such as platinum and iridium oxide. In
contrast, our method produces a family of new high-performance and low-cost
catalysts," he said.
These new catalysts are produced through the simultaneous control of
the: 1) composition, 2) size and 3) crystallinity of metal oxides of
earth-abundant elements such as iron, cobalt and nickel. They can then be
applied to build rechargeable zinc-air batteries.
Paper co-author Dr Li Wei, also from the University's Faculty of
Engineering and Information Technologies, said trials of zinc-air batteries
developed with the new catalysts had demonstrated excellent rechargeability --
including less than a 10 percent battery efficacy drop over 60
discharging/charging cycles of 120 hours.
"We are solving fundamental technological challenges to realise
more sustainable metal-air batteries for our society," Professor Chen
added.
"When the president met
with Queen Elizabeth, he presented her with an iPod loaded with Broadway show
tunes while she gave him a silver framed picture of her and Prince Phillip.
There were no winners in that gift exchange, because when I think of things an
83-year-old, super-rich British woman would want, an iPod is pretty far down
the list, right between a bus pass and sneakers with the wheels on the bottom.
And when I think of what a
47-year-old, super-cool black dude would want, a picture of an 83-year-old
white lady is last.”
Seth Meyers
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished July
DJIA: 21,891 +207 Up. NASDAQ: 6,348 +250 Up. SP500: 2,470 +171 Up.
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