Baltic Dry Index. 1503 +01 Brent Crude 59.35
“If
you're not gonna pull the trigger, don't point the gun.”
James
Baker. United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan,
and U.S. Secretary of State and White House Chief of Staff under President
George H. W. Bush.
We are
now just one misstep away from war on the Korean peninsula. Both President
Trump and Kim Jong-un seem determined to talk themselves into war. Our
complacent markets still think war in Korea won’t happen, despite all the heated
rhetoric, it’s all just posturing, huffing and puffing with little chance of a
misreading or miscalculation. China and Russia aren’t so sure. Is the
continuing rally in crude oil prices signalling something more might be
underway?
Time
for risk off again, it seems to this old dinosaur market watcher. The reward
nowhere near matches the risk of an error, or mistake triggering a new Korean
war.
September 24, 2017 / 9:33 AM /
Updated an hour ago
North Korea bolsters defences after flight by U.S. bombers, rhetoric escalates
SEOUL/NEW YORK (Reuters) - North Korea has been boosting defences on its
east coast, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said on Tuesday, after the North
said U.S. President Donald Trump had declared war and that it would shoot down
U.S. bombers flying near the Korean peninsula.
Tensions have escalated on the Korean peninsula since North Korea
conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test on Sept. 3, but the rhetoric
has reached a new level in recent days with leaders on both sides exchanging
threats and insults.
North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said Trump’s Twitter comments,
in which the U.S. leader said Ri and leader Kim Jong Un “won’t be around much
longer” if they acted on their threats, amounted to a declaration of war and
that Pyongyang had the right to take countermeasures.
Yonhap suggested the reclusive North was in fact bolstering its defences
by moving aircraft to its east coast and taking other measures after U.S.
bombers flew close to the Korean peninsula at the weekend.
The unverified Yonhap report said the United States appeared to have
disclosed the flight route of the bombers intentionally because North Korea
seemed to be unaware. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service was unable to
confirm the report immediately.
Ri said on Monday the North’s right to countermeasures included shooting
down U.S. bombers “even when they are not inside the airspace border of our
country”.
“The
whole world should clearly remember it was the U.S. who first declared war on
our country,” he told reporters in New York on Monday, where he had been
attending the annual United Nations General Assembly.
More
September 25, 2017 / 8:21 PM /
Updated 10 hours ago
China's U.N. envoy says North Korea, U.S. rhetoric 'too dangerous'
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Reacting to remarks by North Korea’s foreign
minister on Monday, China’s U.N. Ambassador Liu Jieyi told Reuters the
escalating rhetoric between North Korea and the United States was getting too
dangerous and the only solution was negotiations.
North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho told reporters that President
Donald Trump had declared war on North Korea and Pyongyang reserves the right
to take countermeasures, including shooting down U.S. bombers even if not in
its air space.
“We want things to calm down. It’s getting too dangerous and it’s in
nobody’s interest,” Liu told Reuters.
“We certainly hope that (the United
States and North Korea) will see that there is no other way than negotiations
to solve the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula ... The alternative is a
disaster.”
Stocks in Asia Lower as Safe-Haven Rally Subsides: Markets Wrap
By Adam HaighStocks in Asia were broadly lower, though declines were modest, as gains in gold and the yen petered out. North Korea had injected a note of caution to markets on Monday after its foreign minister declared that the nation can shoot down U.S. warplanes. Focus remains on Chinese property developers, as one of the world’s most extreme stock rallies gets a reality check.
North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho described President Donald Trump’s recent comments as tantamount to a declaration of war. The White House denied it has declared war on Pyongyang, while China’s ambassador to the UN told Reuters the situation is "getting too dangerous."
“This does represent a significant escalation in rhetoric and raises the risk of a tactical misstep,” said Tapas Strickland, a Sydney-based economist at National Australia Bank Ltd.
A speech by Federal Reserve Chair Janet
Yellen on Tuesday will be parsed as policy makers continue to disagree on whether to raise U.S.
interest rates again this year. New York Fed President William Dudley argued
the U.S. central bank should stick with its strategy of gradual monetary policy
tightening, a view echoed by Yellen. Meanwhile, Chicago Fed President Charles
Evans urged caution as did Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari. Investors
see a roughly 60 percent chance that rates will be increased again in December
following moves in March and June.
More
In oil
news, Citi issues a supply warning for 2018. If Citi’s right, lack on new oil
investment due to low prices, is about to catch up with the world. If Citi’s
right, our gormless central banksters are in for the unwanted return of
inflation. If Citi’s halfway right, 2018 will be a year of labour unrest.
Citi Says Get Ready for an Oil Squeeze
By Sharon Cho and Serene Cheong
Those in the oil market fearing a flood of OPEC supply next year will probably
be better off preparing for a shortage, according to Citigroup Inc.
Five countries in the group -- Libya, Nigeria, Venezuela, Iran and Iraq
-- may already be pumping at their maximum capacity this year, Ed Morse, the
bank’s global head of commodities, said in an interview. Rather than a surge in
output, there’s a risk of a market squeeze emerging as early as 2018, driven by
those nations because of weaker investment in exploration and development, he
said.
“Fear in the market has been that OPEC production will rise
dramatically,” said Morse. However, “there could be a supply gap emerging,
which could point to a tighter market,” he said in Singapore on the sidelines
of the S&P Global Platts APPEC Conference.
Crude is still trading more than 50 percent below mid-2014 levels amid concern over whether output curbs by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will be enough to eliminate a global glut. A gathering in Vienna last week between OPEC and its allies ended with no decision on an extension or deepening of the cuts beyond the first quarter of 2018, while the potential revival of U.S. shale production is also weighing on the outlook for prices.
If the output reductions are prolonged, that would only hasten the prospect of a tighter market, said Morse, adding that the source of the supply squeeze will probably be OPEC rather than producers outside the group. “There’s no room for them to do more,” he said, referring to the five nations.
“We’re seeing more and more evidence that it’s not the international oil companies, it’s not the independent oil companies that are lagging new investments, but it’s OPEC countries lagging, particularly those five,” he said.
More
September 26, 2017 / 6:48 AM /
Updated 4 minutes ago
Oil prices to rise to $60 as OPEC likely to extend cuts - former Saudi adviser
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil prices may rise to $60 a barrel by the end of
this year or by early 2018 as OPEC and non-OPEC producers are expected to
extend supply cuts beyond March, while oil inventories continue to decline, a former
Saudi energy ministry official said in a speech Washington on Monday.
“With the current arrangement and commitment of major producers, and
their willingness to adjust and extend the agreement, I believe as commercial
oil stocks continue to contract, oil prices will gradually increase. We even
might hit $60 per barrel before the end of this year or the beginning of next
year,” Ibrahim al-Muhanna said, according to a transcript of the speech
received by Reuters.
Global commercial stocks are being drawn down gradually, more slowly
than initially hoped, and oil demand is growing by more than 1.5 million
barrels per day this year, with robust growth forecast for next year, Muhanna
said.
“Some market analysts have argued that once the agreement ends, the producers
will flood the market with new supplies but this view is shortsighted. After
all, it is in the best interest of producers to create a soft landing and not
disrupt the market’s newfound balance,” he said.
Muhanna, who spoke at an industry event in Washington, is now an
independent consultant after recently retiring as an adviser to the Saudi
Energy Ministry.
In
EUSSR news, Spain’s Rajoy seeks endorsement from President Trump. It’s over,
thinks former Greek finance
minister Yanis Varoufakis. Macron to gets set out his wish list. It’s all moot
if America and North Korea talk themselves into war.
Spain's Rajoy Meets Trump as Catalans Vow to Hold Illegal Vote
By Esteban DuarteSpain’s premier will visit the White House five days before Catalonia’s regional government tries to open ballot stations for an illegal up-down vote on independence, in the biggest challenge to the country’s constitution in more than three decades. U.S. companies including Procter & Gamble Co. and DowDuPont Inc. are among the largest foreign investors in Spain and have operations in Catalonia.
Rajoy is scheduled to hold a joint press conference with the U.S. leader at 1:45 p.m. eastern time, followed by a working lunch between the two delegations. Among the topics for discussion are Spain’s role in the core of the European Union and its commitment to NATO as Trump pushes for European partners to increase their defense expenditure to at least 2 percent of yearly output. Catalonia is not on the agenda, a Spanish official said.
All the same, Spanish Defense Minister Maria Dolores de Cospedal said at a briefing in Washington that she’d been informed by her U.S. counterpart James Mattis on Sunday that the Trump administration backs her government’s handling of the Catalonia situation.
Rajoy has taken extraordinary measures to respond this month to the secessionist movement, including taking control of the regional government’s coffers. His administration also sent civil guards and national police to enforce judges’ orders to confiscate and arrest top activists and politicians organizing the vote.
More
'German vote shows federalism has FAILED' Yanis Varoufakis warns of 4 years of EU collapse
FORMER Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has predicted the disintegration of the European Union in the wake of he German election results.
11:40, Mon, Sep
25, 2017 | UPDATED: 13:39, Mon, Sep 25, 2017
The celebrated economist, who quit the Greek government in 2015, said
the rise of Germany’s right-wing FDP and Alternative for Germany (AfD) parties
killed off hopes of a more united Europe promoted by leaders such as France’s
Emmanuel Macron.
Mr Varoufakis tweeted: “The 20% plus rise of the FDP & AfD means one
thing: Macron's strategy for a federation lite is dead.
“Four more years of EU disintegration ahead.”
---- The CDU is now likely to form a coalition with the FDP and the Green Party but the uncertainty - along with the rise of the eurosceptic AfP - is hurting the euro.
The AfD's campaign capitalised on a backlash over Mrs Merkel's decision
to open Germany's borders to migrants and refugees in 2015.
The party’s success has shocked Germany's political establishment but Mr
Varoufakis said the Germany’s mainstream ruling parties got what they deserved
at the polls and called for a new style of European democracy.
He said: “The CDU, CSU & SPD reaped the harvest they had sown. Time
for a transnational European Democracy movement.”
Mrs Merkel told supporters said she had hoped for a "better
result".
She said she would listen to the "concerns, worries and
anxieties" of AfD voters and try to win them back.
---- AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland vowed to fight "an invasion of foreigners" into the country.
He said: “We want a different policy.”
Mr Gauland said the AfD - which is expected to take 94 seats to become
the this largest party in the 709-seat federal parliament - had been elected
"to uncompromisingly address" immigration issues.
He said: ”One million people, foreigners, being brought into this
country are taking away a piece of this country and we as AfD don't want that.
"We don't want to lose Germany to an invasion of foreigners from a
different culture. Very simple."
September 22, 2017 / 8:36 PM /
Updated 4 hours ago
After German election, Macron to set out his vision for Europe
PARIS (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron will set out plans
for reforming the European Union on Tuesday, including proposals for a separate
eurozone budget, despite a German election result that is likely to complicate
his far-reaching ambitions.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives saw their support slide
in Sunday’s election, though they remain the biggest parliamentary bloc. She is
expected to seek a coalition with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) - who have
criticised Macron’s ideas for Europe - and the Greens.
Elysee officials said Macron, who has promised sweeping reforms to
Europe’s monetary union in coordination with Merkel, hoped the issues to be
raised in his speech would be taken into account in Germany’s coalition
negotiations.
One Elysee official said a eurozone budget, one of Macron’s most
contentious ideas, would be “necessary in due course” and that the president
would therefore raise the issue in his speech, to be delivered at the Sorbonne
University in Paris.
Since his election in May, Macron has made the overhaul of the EU and
its institutions one of his major themes. As well as his eurozone budget idea,
he wants to see the appointment of a eurozone finance minister and the creation
of a rescue fund that would preemptively help countries facing economic
trouble.
If all
else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
John Kenneth
Galbraith.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, Equifax again, the bungling story that keeps
on giving.
All the Ways Equifax Epically Bungled Its Breach Response
September 24, 2017
The breach of the credit
monitoring firm Equifax, which exposed
extensive personal data for 143 million people, is the worst corporate data
breach to date. But, incredibly, the mistakes and the superlatives don’t
end there. Three weeks since the company first publicly disclosed the
situation, a steady stream of gaffes and revelations paint a picture of
Equifax's deeply lacking response to catastrophe.Equifax's bungles kicked off quite literally on day one, when the company directed potential victims to a separate domain—equifaxsecurity2017.com—instead of simply building pages to handle the breach off of its main, trusted website, equifax.com. Observers quickly found bugs, some of them serious, in that breach-response site. All the while, Equifax asked people to trust the security of the site, and to submit the last six digits of their Social Security number as a way of checking whether their information had been potentially compromised in the breach.
The site also seemed slapdash, even though Equifax says it learned about the mega-breach at the end of July, and took roughly six weeks to disclose it. During that time, the company could have conceivably planned and executed a much more robust and reassuring resource for wary consumers.
"There should have been a very comprehensive set of policies and procedures for what to do to respond," says Jonathan Bernstein, the president of Bernstein Crisis Management, which works on institutional response to all sorts of disasters including data breaches. "It’s going to be more difficult to convince people that they can now safeguard data, because Equifax has undermined their credibility from the way they’ve responded. They made the situation worse."
Further revelations this week indicate that even more basic problems plagued Equifax's handling of its response website. In the weeks since Equifax disclosed the breach, the company's official Twitter account has mistakenly tweeted a phishing link four times, instead of the company's actual breach response page. Lucky for Equifax, the page isn't actually malicious. Developer Nick Sweeting set up securityequifax2017.com—versus the legitimate equifaxsecurity2017.com—to show how easy the site is to spoof, and how ill-advised it was for Equifax to break it away from its main corporate domain. But if it hadn't been a proof-of-conept, the phish Equifax inadvertently promoted could have done a lot of harm. Sweeting says the fake site has had roughly 200,000 page loads.
"When your social media profile is tweeting out a phishing link, that's bad news bears," says Michael Borohovski, the cofounder of the website security firm Tinfoil Security.
Equifax also confirmed this week that it had suffered another, previously disclosed network breach in March, though the company did not provide details on what data, if any, was affected. Complicating things even more, a document from Mandiant (the firm investigating Equifax's more recent incident) obtained by the Wall Street Journal indicates that there was an additional March invasion, likely pulled off by the same attackers who carried out the mega-breach between mid-May and July. The technical details are still murky, but the incidents in March raise new questions about whether Equifax executives who sold almost $2 million in company stock in early August were aware of the breach when they unloaded the assets. Equifax has said that they "had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred at the time they sold their shares."
The accumulation of missteps, slow disclosure, and problematic public response with so many millions of innocent consumers potentially affected deeply troubles security practitioners. "These are all indicators of a company that had a horrible security culture," says Tinfoil Security's Borohovski. "Unfortunately, the only word for it is negligence."
More
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?
Enhancing the sensing capabilities of diamonds with quantum properties
Simple method can give diamonds the special properties needed for quantum applications such as sensing magnetic fields
Date:
September 22, 2017
Source:
American Institute of Physics
Summary:
When a nitrogen atom is next to the space vacated by a carbon atom, it forms
what is called a nitrogen-vacancy center. Now, researchers have shown how they
can create more NV centers, which makes sensing magnetic fields easier, using a
relatively simple method that can be done in many labs.
Pure diamond consists of carbon atoms in a perfect crystal lattice. But
remove a few carbons and swap some others for nitrogen, and you get a diamond
with special quantum-sensing properties. These properties are useful for
quantum information applications and sensing magnetic fields, and as a platform
for probing the mysteries of quantum physics.
When a nitrogen atom is next to the space vacated by a carbon atom, it
forms what is called a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center. Now, researchers have
shown how they can create more NV centers, which makes sensing magnetic fields
easier, using a relatively simple method that can be done in many labs. They
describe their results this week in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP
Publishing.
Magnetic field sensing presents a prime example for the importance of
this sensing. Green light can induce the NV centers to fluoresce and emit red
light, but the amount of this fluorescence changes in the presence of a
magnetic field. By measuring the brightness of the fluorescence, diamond NV
centers can help determine magnetic field strength. Such a device can make
magnetic images of a range of sample types, including rocks and biological
tissue.
The sensitivity of this type of magnetic detection is determined by the
concentration of NV centers while vacancies that are not paired with nitrogen
create noise. Efficient conversion of vacancies into NV centers, therefore, as
well as maximizing the concentration of NV centers, plays a key role in
advancing these detection methods.
Researchers typically purchase nitrogen-doped diamonds from a separate
company. They then bombard the diamond with electrons, protons or other
particles, which strip away some of the carbon atoms, leaving behind vacancies.
Finally, a heating process called annealing nudges the vacancies next to the
nitrogen atoms to form the NV centers. The problem is that irradiation often
requires sending your sample to a separate facility, which is expensive and
time-consuming.
"What is special about our approach is that it's very simple and
very straightforward," said Dima Farfurnik of the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem in Israel. "You get sufficiently high NV concentrations that are
appropriate for many applications with a simple procedure that can be done
in-house."
Their method uses high energy electron bombardment in a transmission
electron microscope (TEM), an instrument accessible to many researchers, to
locally create NV centers. Normally, a TEM is used to image materials down to
subnanometer resolutions, but its narrow electron beam can also irradiate
diamonds.
Others have shown TEMs can create NV centers in specialized diamond
samples, but the researchers in this study successfully tested the method on
several commercially available diamond samples.
More
Comrade Corbyn’s New
Communist Labour Party: "You sell us your vote. We sell you your dreams.”
Delivery aspirational. Lying to the many to elect the few.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished August
DJIA: 21,948 +215 Up. NASDAQ: 6,429 +266 Up. SP500: 2,472 +174 Up.
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