Baltic Dry Index. 1433 +15 Brent Crude 56.45
And there seems to be no sign
of intelligent life anywhere.
Buzz Lightyear, stocks pedlar.
Today something a
little different. Are we ready for the age of automation? But what will we do
with all the teeming masses without jobs. How about a cashless society?
But first this bubble
update from Asia. Tulips made decade
highs again on little news, fake or real. There will always be a greater fool ready
to buy bubblicious stocks forever. Hopium forever, until the crash.
"To infinity… and beyond."
Buzz
Lightyear, stocks pedlar.
October 12, 2017 / 1:50 AM /
Updated 3 hours ago
Asia stocks hit decade-high on global equity surge, dollar sags
TOKYO
(Reuters) - Asian stocks were near a decade high on Thursday, riding the bull
run in global equity markets, while the dollar sagged after the Federal Reserve
showed a guarded view towards inflation.
MSCI’s
broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS rose to its
highest since December 2007 and was last up 0.2 percent.
Japan's Nikkei .N225 was up 0.5 percent after brushing 20,980.92, its highest since December 1996. South Korea's KOSPI .KS11 added 0.2 percent to mark a fresh record peak and Hong Kong's Hang Seng .HSI scaled a decade-high before dipping 0.05 percent.
Asia took cues from Wall Street, where major indexes rose to
yet another set of record closing highs overnight following a report that a
market-friendly candidate was being pushed as successor to Janet Yellen at the
helm of the Fed. [.N]
Broader investor risk sentiment has improved this week after
Catalonia dialled back plans to break away from Spain, with MSCI’s 47-country
world stocks index .MIWD00000PUS reaching a record high.
Global equities now appear to be taking geopolitical
developments such as the secessionist push in Spain and tensions on the Korean
peninsula in their stride, to reach those record tops.
“Fundamentally, the global economy is in decent shape. Corporate sentiment is also sound as evidenced by strong data like the Chinese PMI, U.S. ISM and Japanese tankan. All these factors are leading to the rise in global stocks,” said Masahiro Ichikawa, senior strategist at Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management in Tokyo.
“Financial markets will remain wary of geopolitical headlines. But
barring actual military conflicts, negative responses by equities are expected
to be short-lived.”
The dollar index against a basket of six major currencies slipped to a
two-week low of 92.839 .DXY following the release of the minutes from the Fed’s
last policy meeting on Sept. 19-20.
More
Now back to our fast
arriving, lifestyle changing, future, pardon the weak pun.
Woody: Buzz, you're flying!
Buzz Lightyear: This isn't
flying, this is falling with style.
Self-Flying Planes May Arrive Sooner than You Think. Here's Why
The technology is here, but will we trust planes without pilots?
by Dan Falk /
With self-driving
cars and trucks coming on fast, it’s only natural to wonder if self-flying
planes might be next. In fact, the aviation industry is pushing to make
autonomous passenger aircraft a reality — and sooner than you might think.
Airbus is developing an autonomous air taxi dubbed Vahana.
The tilt-wing, multi-propeller craft is designed to take off and land in tight
spaces and able to fly about 50 miles before its batteries need recharging.
Vahana is intended for short urban hops — but what about
long flights? How far away are we from a pilotless airliner?
Airbus’s main rival, Boeing, has hinted that such a craft might be on the way. At the Paris Air Show last summer, Mike Sinnett, the company’s vice-president of product development, said “the basic building blocks of the technology clearly are available.” Key elements, including the artificial intelligence system “that makes decisions that pilots would make,” will be tested next year.
Even before truly pilotless airliners show up, we may see a
reduction in cockpit crew numbers.
“What the industry is telling me is that they would like to remove one of
the pilots fairly soon, and re-design the cockpit around a single pilot,” says
Stephen Rice, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona
Beach, Florida. That would involve at least a modest cockpit redesign, so that
a single pilot is able to operate all of the controls. “There might also be a
remote-control pilot on the ground, in case of emergencies, like a heart
attack,” he adds. “This remote pilot could monitor many airplanes [at once].”
But eventually “they would like to remove the last pilot.”
This wouldn’t be the first time the aviation industry has
cut back on crews. In the 1950s, it took five people to fly an airliner — two
pilots, a flight engineer, a radio operator, and a navigator. By the 1960s, the
radio operator and navigator were gone. In the 1990s, flight engineers
disappeared. Given this trend, fully automated aviation may seem inevitable.
One motive for the trend, not surprisingly, is financial. A
report released last August suggests that by transitioning to self-flying
aircraft the aviation industry could save
$35 billion a year.
Whether air travelers are ready to board a pilotless plane is another
matter. The same report found that only one in six passengers would feel
comfortable in a fully automated plane.
Of course, passengers may not realize just how much a pilot’s job has
already been automated. “On an average flight, the pilots manually control the
plane for about three to six minutes, and the rest is autopiloted,” says Rice.
He says some airlines don’t let their pilots fly manually once the plane has
reached cruising altitude “because they understand that the autopilot is
actually safer.”
More
Up next, bankster and bent politician heaven, the cashless
world, where every transaction leaves a tax trail, until one day something
turned off the power.
Woody: Buzz? Buzz Lightyear,
you're not worried are you?
Buzz Lightyear: Me? Oh no, no,
no, no, no. Are you?
In a Cashless World, You'd Better Pray the Power Never Goes Out
10/10/2017
When Hurricane Maria knocked out power in Puerto Rico, residents there
realized they were going to need physical cash — and a lot of it.Bloomberg reported yesterday that the Fed was forced to fly a planeload of cash to the Island to help avert disaster:
William Dudley, the New York Fed president, put the word out within minutes, and ultimately a jet loaded with an undisclosed amount of cash landed on the stricken island...
[Business executive in Puerto Rico] described corporate clients’ urgent requests for hundreds of thousands in cash to meet payrolls, and the challenge of finding enough armored cars to satisfy endless demand at ATMs. Such were the days after Maria devastated the U.S. territory last month, killing 39 people, crushing buildings and wiping out the island’s energy grid. As early as the day after the storm, the Fed began working to get money onto the island,
For a time, unless one had a hoard of cash stored up in one's home, it was impossible to get cash at all. 85 percent of Puerto Rico is still without power, as of October 9. Bloomberg continues: "When some generator-powered ATMs finally opened, lines stretched hours long, with people camping out in beach chairs and holding umbrellas against the sun."
In an earlier article from September 25, Bloomberg noted how, without cash, necessities were simply unavailable:
“Cash only,” said Abraham Lebron, the store manager standing guard at Supermax, a supermarket in San Juan’s Plaza de las Armas. He was in a well-policed area, but admitted feeling like a sitting duck with so many bills on hand. “The system is down, so we can’t process the cards. It’s tough, but one finds a way to make it work.”
The cash economy has reigned in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria decimated much of the U.S. commonwealth last week, leveling the power grid and wireless towers and transporting the island to a time before plastic existed. The state of affairs could carry on for weeks or longer in some remote parts of the commonwealth, and that means it could be impossible to trace revenue and enforce tax rules.
Note the deep concern with "trac[ing] revenue" and "enforc[ing] tax rules" — as if making payroll for ordinary people were not the real problem here.
Puerto Rico has been fortunate that the United States, so far, has not attempted to implement many anti-cash measures that have been popular among central bankers in recent years.
Abolishing cash, of course, has become de rigueur among mainstream economists who have long argued that physical cash is an impediment to "nontraditional" monetary policy like negative interest rates. Moreover, advocates claim, physical cash makes it harder to control the flow of money, collect taxes, and control black markets.
This drive to supposedly fight crime and corruption was given as the justification for the disastrous war against cash in India in 2016. Hatched as a scheme to assert more government control over the economy, the Indian government removed mostly large bills from circulation in India, which accounted for 85% of its physical cash by value.
The demonetization badly damaged the economy. The Wall Street Journal reported in December:
Not surprisingly, shock waves from the announcement continue to crash through the economy. The Asian Development Bank cut its growth estimate for India for the financial year ending March 31 to 7% from 7.4%. JP Morgan expects growth to decline by half a percent to 6.7%.
Meanwhile, falling sales have begun to translate into layoffs spanning various sectors, including construction, textiles and jewelry. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy estimates the transaction costs alone of swapping out an estimated 14.2 trillion rupees’ worth of currency to be 1.28 trillion rupees, or about $19 billion.
India’s economy will eventually recover from this self-inflicted wound, but there’s no question that demonetization has created doubts about Mr. Modi’s competence. The decision, reportedly hatched in secret with a coterie of trusted bureaucrats, showcases the prime minister’s faith in the command-and-control ethos of the civil service rather than in the “minimum government” he once promised.
One can only imagine how much more grim matters would be for Puerto Rico if most physical cash were made illegal as happened in India.
It's unlikely, however, that any well-known economists — such as Kenneth Rogoff who has deemed physical cash "a curse" — will be recanting their anti-cash views.
If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs, and while some of the "little people" like Indian peasants and Puerto Rican workers might have to suffer greatly whenever the power goes out, we all have to make sacrifices.
Perhaps this is what Richard Thaler — the newly announced economics Nobel-Prize winner — had in mind when he came in out in favor of demonetization in India.
We close for the day
with a special for our UK readers. A picture of life in GB after Comrade Corbyn
and his “magic money-tree” New Communist Labour Party seize power.
Woody: Shut up, just shut up,
you idiot!
Buzz Lightyear: Sheriff, this
is no time to panic.
Woody: This is the perfect
time to panic!
IMF Says Venezuela's Inflation Rate May Rise Beyond 2,300% in 2018
By Patricia Laya and Catarina Saraiva
October 10, 2017, 2:00 PM GMT+1
Venezuela’s triple-digit annual inflation rate is set to jump to more than
2,300 percent in 2018, the highest estimate for any country tracked by the International Monetary
Fund.An intensifying political crisis that’s spiraled since 2014 has weighed heavily on economic activity. Gross domestic product is expected to contract 6 percent next year, after shrinking an estimated 12 percent in 2017, the IMF said in its latest World Economic Outlook report published Tuesday.
While Venezuela’s central bank stopped publishing inflation data in December 2015, the IMF argues the country’s consumer prices are estimated to leap 2,349.3 percent in 2018, the highest in their estimates, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s 44 percent. As oil production declines and uncertainty increases, unemployment is forecast to increase to about 30 percent in 2018, also the highest and followed by South Africa’s 28 percent and Greece’s 21 percent.
The Bolivarian Republic isn’t current with most of its key economic statistics, leaving economists scant data to crunch. Before Venezuela’s new legislative super body took over the functions of the country’s only remaining opposition-run institution this year, the sidelined National Assembly had started publishing its own inflation index due to the lack of official data. Bloomberg’s Cafe Con Leche Index puts the annual rate at 650 percent.
Ages three and up! It's on my
box! Ages three and up!
Comrade Corbyn, with apologies
to Mr. Potato Head.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
No crooks today. Today an update on poor Puerto
Rico. So how long could you live, without electricity, fresh water, or a job?
Puerto Rico’s economy at ‘a near standstill’ as businesses wither, wait for power
tjohnson@mcclatchydc.comOctober 10, 2017 5:39 PM
SAN JUAN
Economic activity has skidded to a near halt in significant parts of Puerto
Rico, leaving the hurricane-smashed island on a knife’s edge between slow
recovery and partial collapse. Thousands of small businesses are teetering
toward insolvency, unable to operate.
Heading into the fourth week since Hurricane Maria slammed into the
island, barely one out of six clients of the island-wide electric utility has
power. The rest remain in darkness.
The hum of generators has become the new soundtrack of island life.
The large pharmaceutical manufacturing plants that comprise the backbone
of the island’s export economy report major losses, but are slowly returning to
operations, powered by diesel. The Bacardí rum empire reported “no major
losses” and its rum inventories are safe.
“In addition to the physical destruction, Puerto Rico’s economy has
ground to a near standstill,” Rosselló wrote. “Very few businesses are
operating.”
All the stores on a once-busy commercial street in the city of Caguas
were shuttered earlier this week — except for two.
“I’ve got a generator, and they’ve got a generator,” said Antonio López
Martínez, owner of the Personal Defense gun shop, signaling to another store
across the street. “But all the others don’t.” Using generators adds
considerably to operating expenses, he said.
“You’re using 12 to 15 gallons of diesel a day. If you’re working six
days a week, you’re talking about 90 gallons a week at $4 a gallon,” López
Martínez said.
----It’s not just the lack of power. Without running water, few businesses could allow employees on their premises because bathrooms and toilets do not function.
Workers fret on social media whether they even have jobs anymore.
Employees at Saks Fifth Avenue, one of two anchors at the posh Mall of San
Juan, say they’ve been offered jobs off the island. A spokeswoman, Meghan Biango,
said the retailer has not yet been able “to fully assess the impact the
hurricane has had on our store.” The entire mall remains shut down.
A major 543-room resort, the Melia Coco Beach, also told employees in an
Oct. 4 letter that it was closing permanently.
The tourism and hotel sector, which provides around 80,000 jobs and
represents up to nine percent of the island’s economy, has endured a mixed
fate. Some hotels, powered by generators, have been at capacity dealing with
12,000 U.S. soldiers and the influx of federal workers arriving in Puerto Rico.
Others remain shut to deal with damage and lack of water.
----Agriculture, a pillar of the economy, was devastated by the storm. The island has 13,000 small farms that produce sugar cane, rice, tobacco, citrus, meat and dairy and other products.
Agriculture Secretary Carlos Flores told the newspaper El Vocero that
losses could top $2 billion in that sector alone because of damage at
meat-packing plants, chicken farms and other facilities, only a third of them
insured.
“We have a lot of retailers, warehouses, manufacturers that are down
right now,” said William Villafañe, chief of staff to the governor. He lauded
the banking sector, which he said is “improving in huge steps. … We hope that
in a few weeks, they’ll be back to normal.”
Some citizens see things differently. Charles de Jesus Cruz, an
architect, blamed banks for keeping many small businesses from rebounding.
“You look at the banks, they are open only four hours a day. It’s
strangling the economy,” he said, adding that he believes managers are
frightened of crime. “Everyone is in survival mode right now.”
A few sectors are seeing a huge rebound as work teams repair damage to
installations and the island’s roads, electrical grid and telephone systems.
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?
Why lab researchers should talk with industry counterparts
Project reveals benefits of communicating with industry when conducting research
Date:
October 5, 2017
Source:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Summary:
A research team has found both obstacles and lessons from the process of
getting a novel membrane for chemical processing out of the lab into the
commercial world.
When Shreya Dave was an MIT doctoral student working on a new kind of
filter for desalination plants, she paid a visit to a working reverse-osmosis
desalination plant in Spain. She quickly learned an important lesson that she
now says she would likely have missed if she'd stayed in the lab.
While much of her research, and that of many other labs, had focused on
how to make filter materials that could have a high flow rate at the pressures
they would encounter when put into use, her visit to the plant revealed that
this permeability was hardly ever a source of operational problems. Instead,
problems such as the handling of the filters during removal for cleaning or
replacement were what caused delays and added expense, because some of the
filters would break if accidentally dropped or mishandled.
The researchers had been trying to solve the wrong problem, she says.
Dave, now a research affiliate at MIT and CEO of a startup company working on
new filter systems, was able to readjust her research focus and develop a
potentially more useful set of applications for her work. But she and her
thesis advisor, MIT professor of materials science and engineering Jeffrey
Grossman, thought the process they went through might hold important lessons
for other researchers about the importance of doing detailed economic analysis
and having in-depth conversations with people using the technology that the
research is focused on.
Dave, Grossman, and their co-researchers Brent Keller PhD '16 and Karen
Golmer, innovator in residence at MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological
Innovation, have published an account of their experience in this process,
using their work on membranes as a case study, in the journal Joule.
That paper, Grossman says, is "not about our membrane per se," though
they do discuss the details of its development, but rather it is "our
story of bridging the gap between the research and how to commercialize
it." Grossman is the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in
Environmental Systems.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished September
DJIA: 22,405 +223 Up. NASDAQ: 6,496 +274 Up. SP500: 2,519 +179 Up.
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