Monday 14 August 2017

The World’s Biggest Fraud.



Baltic Dry Index. 1138 +46     Brent Crude 52.01

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

John Kenneth Galbraith.

We open with some “normality” returning to global markets. President Trump can huff and puff away at North Korea, but he isn’t about to start a new Korean war, that will quickly bring in China, so say the markets. Nor is he about to invade the socialist collapsed state of Venezuela. Venezuela is only a threat to itself and its hapless citizens. Slowly our world is going to just have to get used to President Trump mouthing off, with nothing in the way of follow up, although there’s always the potential for spectacular error. Something about Aesop and the Boy who Cried Wolf, comes to mind.

Below, a new reality starts to intrude in the markets.

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

John Kenneth Galbraith

North Korea could take back seat as stocks face big week for consumer data

Published: Aug 12, 2017 8:00 a.m. ET

U.S. retail sales data, retailer earnings put spotlight on consumer health

While investors have been rattled by escalating tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, the market is more likely to hinge on something more pedestrian in the coming week, namely, how much U.S. consumers are actually fueling economic growth.

Stocks finished down for the week Friday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.07%  declined 1.1%, the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.13%  dropped 1.4%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.64%  fell 1.5%, following a rough period where saber-rattling between the U.S. and North Korea inspired a pullback from record high levels. The CBOE Volatility VIX, -3.30%  urged 55% over the week to finish at 15.51, largely considered to be a “normal” range of stock market volatility.

Tuesday not only brings with it the Commerce Department’s U.S. retail sales data for July, but also a number of traditional retailers will cap off earnings season with their reports. U.S. retail sales logged declines for both May and June.

With consumer spending estimated to fuel about two-thirds of the economy, Tuesday’s figures will be watched closely. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch expect a 0.2% decline in July retail sales.

It’s the growing disparity between how consumers feel about the economy and whether they actually open up their wallets that’s of concern to Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial Network, in an interview.

“Even though there are high levels of consumer confidence, consumers still aren’t spending, so that gap between the walk and the talk is only getting more worrisome,” said McMillan.
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August 14, 2017 / 1:52 AM / 2 hours ago

Asian shares bounce after losses, dollar sags on weak U.S. CPI

TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian stocks bounced on Monday after three losing sessions, tracking a firmer Wall Street, while the dollar was weighed down by tensions on the Korean peninsula and weak U.S. inflation data which dampened prospects of another Federal Reserve interest rate hike later this year.

Overall reaction was subdued to Monday's Chinese data which were generally weaker than forecast, and reinforced views that the world's second-largest economy is starting to lose a bit of steam as lending costs rise and the property market cools.

MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS was up 0.7 percent. The index had fallen for three straight days previously, losing a combined 3 percent, on escalating tensions between the United States and North Korea.

Australian stocks rose 0.5 percent and South Korea's KOSPI .KS11 climbed 0.4 percent.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng .HSI was up 0.8 percent and Shanghai .SSEC added 0.2 percent.

----Geopolitical risks were expected to remain a key theme for the global markets in the near term, as North Korea celebrates Liberation Day on Tuesday to mark the end of Japanese rule.

Investors also braced for tensions ahead of Aug. 21, when an annual joint U.S.-South Korean military exercise is due to begin.

"Due to caution towards a further escalation in tensions over North Korea, U.S. yields and equities are expected to decline and the yen is likely keep appreciating this week," said Masafumi Yamamoto, chief forex strategist at Mizuho Securities in Tokyo.

Japan's Nikkei .N225 bucked the trend and fell 1 percent as a stronger yen overshadowed much better-than-expected second quarter economic growth.
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August 14, 2017 / 3:13 AM

Robust China economic growth shows signs of fading in July

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's strong economic growth showed visible signs of fading in July as lending costs rose and the gravity-defying property market cooled, though activity levels generally remained solid, propped up by a year-long construction spree.

Industrial output, investment, retail sales and trade all grew less than expected last month, after the world's second-largest economy put in a surprisingly strong showing in the first half, adding fuel to a global recovery.

But economists do not expect any hard landing, with the government keen to ensure stability ahead of a once-in-five-years Communist Party leadership reshuffle in the autumn.

"The upshot is that both foreign and domestic demand appear to have softened at the start of the third quarter," said Julian Evans-Pritchard, China economist at Capital Economics.

"A few sectors, such as steel, seem to have defied this slowdown in economic activity. But the strength in these areas likely won't last given that policy tightening is set to further weigh on infrastructure and property investment in coming months."

Factory output rose 6.4 percent in July from a year earlier, the slowest pace since January, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics on Monday.

Analysts polled by Reuters had predicted output would grow 7.2 percent, down from a better-than-expected 7.6 percent in June.

----In a sign that economic momentum could slow further, fixed-asset investment grew 8.3 percent in the first seven months of the year, cooling from 8.6 percent in the first half of the year. Analysts had expected the pace to remain steady.

Property investment, in particular, showed signs of fatigue after local governments were forced into repeated rounds of cooling measures to curb soaring home prices.

Growth in property investment, which mainly focuses on residential real estate but includes commercial and office space, eased to 4.8 percent in July from a year earlier, versus 7.9 percent in June, Reuters calculations based on official data showed.
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We close with the biggest fraud on the world, LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate, the core interest rate that sets $350 trillion of interest rates around planet earth.

Below, Matt Taibbi covers the bankster’s fraud that turns Bernie Madoff into a nickel and 
dime fraudster.  Food for thought, are contracts based on a fraud enforceable? And even if so, what remedy exists in equity for mitigating the damage of the fraud? If the courts held the fraud mispriced LIBOR by ten percent, who pays who the $35 trillion, and how?   

Do the banksters even have 35 trillion dollars? How much would Europe’s dodgy giant Deutsche Bank need to come up with? Would they just get it from the electrons at the ECB?

Oh, what a tangled web we weave...when first we practice to deceive.”

The Bank of England, with apologies to Sir Walter Scott.

Taibbi: Is LIBOR, Benchmark for Trillions of Dollars in Transactions, a Lie?

While nuke kooks rage, British regulators reveal rip in financial space-time continuum and $350 trillion headache
By Matt Taibbi  August 11 2017

-----A 2009 study by the Cleveland Fed found that 60 percent of all mortgages in the U.S. were based on LIBOR. Buried somewhere in your home, you probably have a piece of paper that outlines the terms of your credit card, student loan, or auto loan, and if you peek in the fine print, you have a good chance of seeing that the rate you pay every month is based on LIBOR.

Years ago, we found out that the world's biggest banks were manipulating LIBOR. That sucked.
Now, the news is worse: LIBOR is made up.

Actually it's worse even than that. LIBOR is probably both manipulated and made up. The basis for a substantial portion of the world's borrowing is a bent fairy tale.

The admission comes by way of Andrew Bailey, head of Britain's Financial Conduct Authority. He said recently (emphasis mine):

"The absence of active underlying markets raises a serious question about the sustainability of the LIBOR benchmarks. If an active market does not exist, how can even the best run benchmark measure it?"

As a few Wall Street analysts have quietly noted in the weeks since those comments, an "absence of underlying markets" is a fancy way of saying that LIBOR has not been based on real trading activity, which is a fancy way of saying that LIBOR is bullshit.

LIBOR is generally understood as a measure of market confidence. If LIBOR rates are high, it means bankers are nervous about the future and charging a lot to lend. If rates are low, worries are fewer and borrowing is cheaper.

It therefore makes sense in theory to use LIBOR as a benchmark for borrowing rates on car loans or mortgages or even credit cards. But that's only true if LIBOR is actually measuring something.

Here's how it's supposed to work. Every morning at 11 a.m. London time, twenty of the world's biggest banks tell a committee in London how much they estimate they'd have to pay to borrow cash unsecured from other banks.

The committee takes all 20 submissions, throws out the highest and lowest four numbers, and then averages out the remaining 12 to create LIBOR rates.

Theoretically, a fine system. Measuring how scared banks are to lend to each other should be a good way to gauge market stability. Except for one thing: banks haven't been lending to each other for decades.

Up through the Eighties and early Nineties, as global banks grew bigger and had greater demand for dollars, trading between banks was heavy. That robust interbank lending market was why LIBOR became such a popular benchmark in the first place.

But beginning in the mid-nineties, banks began to discover that other markets provided easier and cheaper sources of funding, like the commercial paper or treasury repurchase markets. Trading between banks fell off.

Ironically, as trading between banks declined, the use of LIBOR as a benchmark for mortgages, credit cards, swaps, etc. skyrocketed. So as LIBOR reflected reality less and less, it became more and more ubiquitous, burying itself, tick-like, into the core of the financial system.

The flaw in the system is that banks don't have to report to the LIBOR committee what they actually paid to borrow from each other. Instead, they only have to report what they estimate they'd have to pay.

The LIBOR scandal of a few years ago came about when it was discovered that the banks were intentionally lying about these estimates. In some cases, they were doing it with the assent of regulators.

In the most infamous instance, the Bank of England appeared to encourage Barclays to lower its LIBOR submissions, as a way to quell panic after the 2008 crash.

It later came out that banks had not only lied about their numbers during the crisis to make the financial system look safer, but had been doing it generally just to rip people off, pushing the number to and fro to help their other bets pay off.
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If the financial system goes down, our business is going down and, trust me, yours and everyone else's is going down, too.
Lloyd Blankfein’s CEO Goldman Sachs, threat 2008. “Mr. Goldman Sacks.” 

Crooks and Scoundrels Corner

The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.

In America Liberalism’s already failed.  In GB, it won’t fail until Comrade Corbyn, and his New Communist Labour Party Red Guards get into power.

Liberalism’s Summer of ’17

Liberals whine about being governed by Trump. Pity those governed by them.

By Daniel Henninger Aug. 9, 2017 7:10 p.m. ET
Liberals whine and wail about being governed by Donald Trump. But what about the millions who wake up every day to be governed by liberals?

This is the summer of ’17 for people who live in politically blue northern cities, but few would call it the best days of their lives.

New Yorkers are living through the “Summer of Hell,” the phrase that defines a city whose ancient transportation infrastructure has finally hit the wall. It’s hard to say who got the worst of it—the commuters trapped for 45 minutes without air or lights on a southbound F train or the riders in Harlem who were evacuated after the tracks caught fire.

Naturally, Mayor Bill de Blasio says the solution is a $700 million tax increase on “the wealthiest in our city.”

In Chicago, more than 100 people were shot over July Fourth weekend, with 14 ending up dead. So naturally Mayor Rahm Emanuel has filed a sanctuary-cities lawsuit against the federal government to protect the city’s immigrants.

Hartford, Conn., at the brink of insolvency, last month hired a law firm specializing in bankruptcy. The owners of dozens of destroyed businesses sued the city of Baltimore in June for mishandling the mayhem, two years after the riots ended.

For decades, urban liberalism has sold itself as a compact between government and taxpayers. The people paid, and with that revenue liberal politicians would deliver infrastructure, services, economic opportunity and civil order. But liberal governance, instead of keeping its side of the bargain, is at a dead end.

Writing in City Journal last year on the widespread fiscal distress of northern cities, Stephen Eide noted a study which found that “among the 1,100 census tracts in major metropolitan areas with poverty rates of 30 percent or more in 1970, only about 100 had seen their poverty rates drop below the national average by 2010.”

----Today, private economic life, especially that of the urban middle class, is no longer a partner in the liberal model. It’s merely a “revenue source” for a system whose patronage is open-ended welfare and largely uncapped public-employee pensions. I’d describe the liberal-progressive governing strategy as ruin and rule.

Not widely noticed is that liberalism’s claimed beneficiaries—black Americans—are also fleeing its failures. Demographers have documented significant black out-migration from New York, Michigan, California and Illinois into Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina. North to south.

Now comes the summer-of-hell infrastructure crisis. Residents of the northeastern slab from New Jersey to Boston have been living off infrastructure created by their grandparents and great-grandparents during the golden age of American capitalism.

They are now asking the federal government, meaning taxpayers who live in parts of the U.S. not hostile to capitalism, to give them nearly $15 billion to replace the 100-year-old train tunnel beneath the Hudson River. Why should they? Why send money to a moribund, dysfunctional urban liberal politics that will never—as in, not ever—clean up its act or reform?
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“When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”

Jean-Claude Juncker. Failed former Luxembourg P.M., serial liar, president of the European Commission. Scotch connoisseur.
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?

New ultrathin semiconductor materials exceed some of silicon's 'secret' powers

Date: August 11, 2017

Source: Stanford University

Summary: Chip makers appreciate what most consumers never knew: silicon's virtues include the fact that it 'rusts' in a way that insulates its tiny circuitry. Two new ultrathin materials share that trait and outdo silicon in other ways that make them promising materials for electronics of the future.

The next generation of feature-filled and energy-efficient electronics will require computer chips just a few atoms thick. For all its positive attributes, trusty silicon can't take us to these ultrathin extremes.

Now, electrical engineers at Stanford have identified two semiconductors -- hafnium diselenide and zirconium diselenide -- that share or even exceed some of silicon's desirable traits, starting with the fact that all three materials can "rust."

"It's a bit like rust, but a very desirable rust," said Eric Pop, an associate professor of electrical engineering, who co-authored with post-doctoral scholar Michal Mleczko a paper that appears in the journal Science Advances.

The new materials can also be shrunk to functional circuits just three atoms thick and they require less energy than silicon circuits. Although still experimental, the researchers said the materials could be a step toward the kinds of thinner, more energy-efficient chips demanded by devices of the future.

Silicon's strengths

Silicon has several qualities that have led it to become the bedrock of electronics, Pop explained. One is that it is blessed with a very good "native" insulator, silicon dioxide or, in plain English, silicon rust. Exposing silicon to oxygen during manufacturing gives chip-makers an easy way to isolate their circuitry. Other semiconductors do not "rust" into good insulators when exposed to oxygen, so they must be layered with additional insulators, a step that introduces engineering challenges. Both of the diselenides the Stanford group tested formed this elusive, yet high-quality insulating rust layer when exposed to oxygen.

Not only do both ultrathin semiconductors rust, they do so in a way that is even more desirable than silicon. They form what are called "high-K" insulators, which enable lower power operation than is possible with silicon and its silicon oxide insulator.

As the Stanford researchers started shrinking the diselenides to atomic thinness, they realized that these ultrathin semiconductors share another of silicon's secret advantages: the energy needed to switch transistors on -- a critical step in computing, called the band gap -- is in a just-right range. Too low and the circuits leak and become unreliable. Too high and the chip takes too much energy to operate and becomes inefficient. Both materials were in the same optimal range as silicon.

All this and the diselenides can also be fashioned into circuits just three atoms thick, or about two-thirds of a nanometer, something silicon cannot do.
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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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