Baltic Dry Index. 1391 -38 Brent Crude 58.50
But the
U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its
electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it
wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in
circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can
also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is
equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We
conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always
generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.
Ben
Bernanke. 2002.
The big stories of
the next few days will be what happens next in Spain and Catalonia, how much of
continuing disaster Puerto Rico will turn out to be, and of course, what
happens next in North Korea.
But while we await
developments over the weekend, a sea change seems to be under way in the west’s
democracies. Voters from the UK to Japan seem to have woken up to the wonders
of the fiat money “money-tree.” On the
Great Nixonian Error of fiat money, communist money, voters are being seduced
by populist political parties that you can have your cake and eat it too. All
paid for by the modern day goose that lays golden eggs, the incredible free
money wonders, of the central banksters’ money-trees.
Below, Japan’s
politicians get on Comrade Corbyn’s, New Communist Labour Party, “money-tree”
band waggon. If crooked gambling banksters can be bailed out, why not me? If it’s
good enough for Japan, why not Britain, France, Spain and Italy? Since there’s no free lunch on planet Earth,
we all know how this illusion ends, just not when. For now though This old
dinosaur market follower thinks an unstoppable sea change is underway. Time to
stock up on under priced tangible assets with real intrinsic value. A 21st
century repeat of the profligate 1970s is about to get underway.
"In
politics stupidity is not a handicap."
Napoleon Bonaparte, Dictator.
September 29, 2017 / 5:41 AM /
Updated 24 minutes ago
Looming election may be nail in coffin for Japan's fiscal reform
TOKYO (Reuters) - Even as a new party under a populist female leader
scrambles the outlook for Japan’s general election next month, one thing is
clear: the winner will loosen a grip on the government’s runaway debt as
lawmakers forego higher taxes or boost spending.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to use the revenue from a planned
sales-tax hike not to pay down debt but to spend more on education and other
popular programmers.
Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike, whose “Party of Hope” is challenging Abe’s
ruling coalition by effectively absorbing Japan’s largest opposition party,
wants to put off the tax hike altogether.
“Japan has yet to emerge from deflation as consumption, which makes up a
large portion of the economy, remains weak,” she told a briefing on Thursday,
criticising Abe for doing little to prop up household income.
The debate is shifting to how much more to spend and in what areas,
rather than on what is acceptable within the limits set by Japan’s public debt,
which at well over twice the size of its economy is the biggest among
industrialised nations.
“Regardless of who wins, there will be increased spending because that’s
how you win votes,” said Koichi Haji, chief economist at NLI Research
Institute.
“Very few lawmakers call for fiscal reform,” Haji added. “That may be
fine now, but there’s no telling when loss of market trust in Japan’s finances
could trigger a spike in bond yields.”
Japan’s ballooning public debt has not bothered the bond market much so
far, as investors trust the country can repay public debt with its huge current
account surplus and abundant domestic savings.
But the long-term risk is that snowballing social security spending for
a fast-ageing population will strain government finances, making it more
vulnerable to a sudden spike in borrowing costs that would hurt the economy.
Japanese government bond (JGB) prices tumbled on Thursday, with the
benchmark futures posting their biggest fall in three months, as investors
braced for bigger spending.
More
Below, eventually how it all ends, in higher interest rates,
though not in the baby step interest rate increases anticipated now. With the
voters universally tired of austerity and debt, I sense we are on the threshold
of another chapter in the Madness of Crowds. Led by Japan, we are all about to
electronically print up people’s QE to “prosperity.”
Europe's Biggest Fund Manager Expects Higher Interest Rates to Spread
By Cecile Gutscher
Regardless of central bankers’ assurances, higher interest rates are set
to spread in Europe, according to its biggest fund manager.
Sergei Strigo, the London-based head of emerging-market debt at Amundi
Asset Management, is betting that central-bank rates in east Europe’s biggest
economies are more likely to follow the Czech National Bank than the European
Central Bank on the path toward tighter policy.
“Going into next year we see these central banks thinking about interest rate hikes as inflationary pressures build up and growth surprises on the upside,” said Strigo. His Global Emerging Local Currency fund has outperformed 92 percent of peers this year with gains of 15 percent.
With growth gathering pace and consumption on the rise, a growing chorus of investors are seeing a surge in wages feeding through to inflation in the region battered by a labor shortage. Strigo says he’s keeping bond duration lower than the benchmark and using interest-rate swaps to hedge against the possible increases.
The Czech National Bank, which delivered Europe’s first rate hike in August, is debating the timing for its next move to tighten as faster-than-expected economic growth and a shortage of workers drive up salaries and prices. Policy makers voted four to three to keep the benchmark rate at 0.25 percent on Wednesday
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-29/amundi-braces-for-higher-rates-in-europe-but-not-from-draghi
"Someone must stand up to those who say, "Here's the key, there's the Treasury, just take as many of those hard-earned tax dollars as you want.”
Ronald Reagan. So old fashioned, last century, in our new age of money-trees.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Puerto Rico, an island in deep distress. Misled by Hollywood
disaster movies and modern superficial media, things take longer than most
people’s unrealistic expectations. I was in Florida when hurricane Andrew hit,
and saw just how long it took to revive a relatively small, if wrecked, part of
south Florida. And the rest of Florida was still connected by working
Interstates and turnpikes. Puerto Rico was an island already in financial and
other distress before the hurricanes hit, sorting out Puerto Rico will not be quick
or easy, and hurricane season still has two more months to run.
Below, how the modern media shamelessly uses
tragedy for political purposes. Reminds me of the Grenfell Tower tragedy
recently in London.
“I sometimes get the
impression that many U.S. media outlets work according to a principle which was
common in the Soviet Union. Back then, people used to joke that the newspaper
Pravda [Truth] had no truth in it, and the Izvestia [News] paper has no news in
it. I get the impression that many U.S. media operate in the same way.”
Russian Foreign Minister
Lavrov. May 2017.
So many storms: After Harvey and Irma, can a thinly stretched FEMA come through for Puerto Rico?
September 27, 2017
Nibbling on dwindling food stocks, lacking crucial medications, sweltering
in half-wrecked homes with only tainted water for washing and barely any for
drinking: For many in Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria’s aftermath has been
even more harrowing than the mighty storm itself.Amid growing warnings of a potential humanitarian crisis in the Caribbean island territory that is home to 3.4 million U.S. citizens, federal relief efforts were ramping up Wednesday, even as criticism mounted. Among the most urgent priorities were food and water deliveries for isolated, storm-pounded rural communities and distribution of diesel for generators to power vital services such as hospital equipment and sanitation systems.
About 97% of the island's residents still lacked power Wednesday, Gov. Ricardo Rossello said, and about half remain without running water.
On his Facebook page, Rossello posted a photo of a street intersection in the southeast coastal town of Humacao where someone had painted a huge SOS sign with the words, “Necesitamos agua/comida!” — “We need water and food.”
Increasingly desperate local officials have demanded more help from the
federal government, and faster delivery of what aid is coming.
“They’re going very slowly, the aid isn’t getting to people fast enough.
We seem to be losing a lot of time in jurisdictional trifles,” San Juan Mayor
Carmen Yulin Cruz said in an interview Wednesday.
“People are dying,” she said. “We don’t have time for that.”
The White House has fought back hard against complaints that the federal
government’s response in Puerto Rico has been less robust than in
hurricane-hammered Texas and Florida.
“We’ve gotten A-pluses on Texas and on Florida,” Trump told reporters
this week. “And we will also on Puerto Rico.”
Federal officials have cited logistical and geographical challenges in rushing aid to an island territory 1,000 miles from the U.S. mainland. And they
have not discounted the difficulty of trying to mount simultaneous disaster
operations across two states and two U.S. territories.
Since then, relief supplies have begun to arrive at the port, but
getting them where they’re needed is difficult. Unloading cranes, operating on
generators, move at only half-speed. Shipping containers stuffed with disaster
relief items have sat at the port because of a lack of truck drivers. The
Puerto Rico Fire Department took to social media requesting licensed truck and
bus drivers to come forward on Wednesday.
In the meantime, daily life has become an unceasing struggle. Banks
across the island remain closed, so people are cash-strapped. A dusk-to-dawn
curfew is supposed to help restore order, but people are sometimes forced to
break the law as they wait in long gas lines.
Mayor Cruz said two people died because their life support was shut off
when the generator at a San Juan hospital ran out of fuel.
“People in the street are doing what they can to survive,” said U.S.
service member Orlando Sanchez-Matos, part of a San Juan-based military
contingent getting ready to help build a shelter in the capital’s Hato Rey
neighborhood.
About 1.5 million people remained without drinking water, the Pentagon
said. Fifty-nine of the island’s 69 hospitals were operational, it said, but
communications problems have hampered status reporting.
Hospitals, like other institutions, were using couriers to send and
receive information.
San Juan’s Luis Munoz Marin International Airport and nine other
airports were storm-damaged but operating, and three seaports were open as
well, with five more ports in limited use, according to the Pentagon. The
military said it was moving from a sea-based rescue effort to a land-based one,
concentrating on route clearance and aid distribution.
More
September 28, 2017 / 1:49 PM /
Updated 2 hours ago
U.S. appoints general to oversee military response to Puerto Rico disaster
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (Reuters) - The Pentagon named a senior general to
command military relief operations in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico on Thursday
and the Trump administration sent a Cabinet emissary to the island as U.S.
lawmakers called for a more robust response to the crisis.
The U.S. territory of 3.4 million people struggled through a ninth day
with virtually no electricity, patchy communications and shortages of fuel,
clean water and other essentials in the wake of Hurricane Maria, the most powerful
storm to hit the island in nearly 90 years.
The storm struck on Sept. 20 with lethal, roof-ripping force and
torrential rains that caused widespread flooding and heavily damaged homes,
roads and other infrastructure.
The storm killed more than 30 people across the Caribbean, including at
least 16 in Puerto Rico. Governor Ricardo Rossello has called the island’s
devastation unprecedented.
The U.S. military, which has poured thousands of troops into the relief
effort, named Lieutenant General Jeffrey Buchanan on Thursday to oversee its
response on the island.
Buchanan, Army chief for the military’s U.S. Northern Command, was
expected to arrive in Puerto Rico later on Thursday. He will be the Pentagon’s
main liaison with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S.
government’s lead agency on the island, and focus on aid distribution, the
Pentagon said in a statement.
FEMA has already placed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in charge of
rebuilding the island’s crippled power grid, which has posed one of the
island’s biggest challenges after the storm.
In yet another move raising the administration’s profile in the crisis,
acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke, whose department includes
FEMA, will visit Puerto Rico on Friday with other senior government officials
to meet the governor, Puerto Rican authorities and federal relief workers, her
office announced.
President Donald Trump again praised the government’s performance,
saying on Twitter FEMA and other first responders were “doing a GREAT job,” but
he complained about media coverage, adding: “Wish press would treat fairly!”
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?
Graphene forged into three-dimensional shapes
Date:
September 26, 2017
Source:
Suomen Akatemia (Academy of Finland)
Summary:
Researchers have discovered how graphene, a single-atom-thin layer of carbon,
can be forged into three-dimensional objects by using laser light. A striking
illustration was provided when the researchers fabricated a pyramid with a
height of 60 nm, which is about 200 times larger than the thickness of a
graphene sheet. The pyramid was so small that it would easily fit on a single
strand of hair.
Researchers from Finland and Taiwan have discovered how graphene, a
single-atom-thin layer of carbon, can be forged into three-dimensional objects
by using laser light. A striking illustration was provided when the researchers
fabricated a pyramid with a height of 60 nm, which is about 200 times larger
than the thickness of a graphene sheet. The pyramid was so small that it would
easily fit on a single strand of hair. The research was supported by the
Academy of Finland and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic
of China.
Graphene is a close relative to graphite, which consists of millions of
layers of graphene and can be found in common pencil tips. After graphene was
first isolated in 2004, researchers have learned to routinely produce and
handle it. Graphene can be used to make electronic and optoelectronic devices,
such as transistors, photodetectors and sensors. In future, we will probably
see an increasing number of products containing graphene.
"We call this technique optical forging, since the process
resembles forging metals into 3D shapes with a hammer. In our case, a laser
beam is the hammer that forges graphene into 3D shapes," explains
Professor Mika Pettersson, who led the experimental team at the Nanoscience
Center of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. "The beauty of the
technique is that it's fast and easy to use; it doesn't require any additional
chemicals or processing. Despite the simplicity of the technique, we were very
surprised initially when we observed that the laser beam induced such
substantial changes on graphene. It took a while to understand what was
happening."
"At first, we were flabbergasted. The experimental data simply made
no sense," says Dr Pekka Koskinen, who was responsible for the theory.
"But gradually, by close interplay between experiments and computer
simulations, the actuality of 3D shapes and their formation mechanism started
to become clear."
"When we first examined the irradiated graphene, we were expecting
to find traces of chemical species incorporated into the graphene, but we
couldn't find any. After some more careful inspections, we concluded that it
must be purely structural defects, rather than chemical doping, that are responsible
for such dramatic changes on graphene," explains Associate Professor Wei
Yen Woon from Taiwan, who led the experimental group that carried out X-ray
photoelectron spectroscopy at the synchrotron facility.
The novel 3D graphene is stable and it has electronic and optical
properties that differ from normal 2D graphene. Optically forged graphene can
help in fabricating 3D architectures for graphene-based devices.
Another weekend and a dramatic one in Spain and
Puerto Rico. We will not have to wait very long for news of the drama. Have a
great weekend everyone.
"In
economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension."
John
Kenneth Galbraith
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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