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“China
is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will move the
world.”
Napoléon
Bonaparte
In China news, it’s
day one of the Chinese Communist Party Congress, addressed by President Xi in a
three hour speech. President Xi is widely expected to consolidate his power,
and introduce his new team.
Caution Prevails as China's Xi Delivers Key Speech: Markets Wrap
By Adam Haigh and Andreea Papuc
A sense of caution gripped markets as China’s President Xi Jinping spoke
at the opening of the Communist Party Congress, with investors assessing the
magnitude of recent gains in global equities.
Asian equities were mixed, despite fresh records for U.S. stocks, while
the dollar rally from the start of the week continued to peter out. Xi said
China was pushing through reforms in a systematic way as he warned of “severe”
challenges in a 3 1/2-hour long speech that kicked off the week-long event and
laid out a road map to turn the nation into a leading global power by 2050.
The Bloomberg dollar index fluctuated. Negotiations over the future
of the North American Free Trade Agreement were extended into the first
quarter of 2018 in a bid to resolve differences after Canada and Mexico
rejected what they see as hard-line U.S. proposals. That sent the Mexican peso
more than 1 percent higher on Tuesday and it was holding those gains in early
Asian trading.
Markets have been stable with a lack of volatility going into the start
of the Communist Party Congress. However, in the past the meetings coincided
with an average 3.3 percent drop on the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index and
a further 3.3 percent in the following five trading days.
The reaction on
Wednesday was muted: the yuan inched higher as did the Shanghai Composite
Index.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s choice for the next chair of the Federal
Reserve, which has been a focus for markets in recent weeks, will be unveiled
before he leaves Nov. 3 for an 11-day trip to Asia and Hawaii, a person
familiar with the process said Tuesday. John Taylor was said to have impressed
Trump in an interview, buoying gains in the greenback earlier this week given
the assumption by many that he would favor tighter policy. Trump also tried to
rally support for his tax plan in a speech on Tuesday.
The pound reversed losses that came after Governor Mark Carney said the
Bank of England is making contingency plans for a “hard” exit from the European
Union. The euro also recovered after falling when Spain cut its growth forecast
for 2018 to 2.3 percent from 2.6 percent, acknowledging the impact of an
escalating political crisis in Catalonia, a region that accounts for a fifth of
the country’s output. The Spanish state is turning up the pressure on
separatist leaders to drop their push for independence.
Markets in Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka are closed for holidays.
More
October 17, 2017 / 11:07 PM /
Updated 10 minutes ago
China's Xi pledges to build 'modern socialist country'
BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese
President Xi Jinping opened a critical Communist Party Congress on Wednesday
with a pledge to build a “modern socialist country” that will never copy the
political systems of others and will remain open to the world.
Xi’s wide-ranging speech kicked off the twice-a-decade congress, a
week-long, mostly closed-door conclave that will culminate with the selection
of a new Politburo Standing Committee that will rule China’s 1.4 billion people
for the next five years.
He set out his vision as he addressed more than 2,000 delegates in
Beijing’s cavernous Great Hall of the People, including 91-year-old former
president Jiang Zemin.
“Through a long period of hard work, socialism with Chinese
characteristics has entered a new era, this is a new historical direction in
our country’s development,” Xi said in a speech carried live across the nation
on state television.
China will relax market access for foreign investment and expand access
to its services sector, as well as deepen market-oriented reform of its
exchange rate and financial system, while at the same time strengthening state
firms, he said.
China’s political system is the broadest, most genuine, and most
effective way to safeguard the fundamental interests of the people, Xi said.
“We should not just mechanically copy the political systems of other
countries,” he said.
---- Xi has waged a relentless fight against deep-rooted graft since assuming power five years ago, with more than a million officials punished and dozens of former senior officials jailed.
He also said China had firmly opposed and prevented independence for
self-ruled Taiwan, claimed by Beijing as its own, over the past five years.
While the speech was high on aspiration and short on policy specifics,
its language will be parsed for signals or policy directives, including on the
direction of reforms for the world’s second-largest economy.
More
China's 19th Party Congress
The Communist Party's twice-a-decade reshuffle will shape China's political future.
Coverage.
We close for the day
with Bloomberg turning slightly less negative on Brexit. I have my doubts that
the EUSSR is a serious negotiating party, but in trade Europe export far more
to the UK than the other way round. It’s Europe that putting their UK exports
at risk after a no deal Brexit, not any blocking by Great Britain. French and
German trucks, vans, and cars, can easily be replaced by imports from China and
Japan. In Spain, the crisis grows and impacts the economy. Will the Army be
sent in to Catalonia tomorrow?
EU to Prepare for U.K. Trade Deal Even as Brexit Talks Stall
By Helene Fouquet, Nikos Chrysoloras, and Ian WishartThe Council of the EU, which represents member states, will start working with the European Commission as soon as this month on the key points, according to two EU officials familiar with the matter. The plan is to have a road map ready by December so that trade talks can begin as soon as the EU decides the U.K. has offered enough on the divorce settlement to deserve moving on to trade, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The preparation work, which will only be carried out within the European side, represents a gesture to the U.K. in response to the concessions May made in her Florence speech last month. The EU may still decide in December against starting trade negotiations, and continues to press May to make her intentions on paying the exit bill clear.
“This week’s European Council will be a stepping stone toward the next get-together,” the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said ahead of this week’s EU leaders meeting in Brussels. “I have said we are ready to accelerate the rhythm, but to accelerate you need two.”
----May’s team believes she has already moved as far as she can toward giving the EU what it wants. They believe she took a political risk in offering to pay into the EU budget and meet wider financial obligations and now needs the bloc to make a big gesture on trade talks in return.
“We are reaching the limits of what we can achieve without consideration
of the future relationship,” U.K. Brexit Secretary David Davis told lawmakers
in London on Tuesday. “We are ready to move these negotiations on.”
More
October 17, 2017 / 9:31 AM /
Updated 9 hours ago
Catalonia refuses to renounce independence, separatist protesters rally
BARCELONA
(Reuters) - Catalonia refused on Tuesday to bow to the Spanish government’s
demand that it renounce a symbolic declaration of independence, setting it on a
political collision course with Madrid later this week.
Madrid has threatened to put Catalonia, which accounts for a fifth of
Spain’s economy, under direct central rule if its regional government does not
abandon independence by Thursday.
But Catalonia’s government rejected Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s
deadline.
“Giving in forms no part of this government’s scenarios,” Catalan
government spokesman Jordi Turull said. “On Thursday, we won’t give anything
different than what we gave on Monday.”
Spain’s biggest political crisis in decades worsened on Monday night
when Madrid’s High Court jailed the heads of Catalonia’s two main separatist
groups pending an investigation for alleged sedition.
The Catalan government accused Madrid of taking “political prisoners”
and tens of thousands of protesters gathered along Barcelona’s Diagonal Avenue
to call for their release.
People held up lighted candles, whistled and shouted “freedom” and “out
with the occupying forces”.
“There should not be political prisoners in a democratic country in the
21st century. This country is not democratic. I‘m here to support democracy,”
said Alicia Cabreriza, a 26-year-old computer programmer from Barcelona.
Spain Jails Separatists as Growth Forecast Lowered on Catalonia
By Esteban Duarte and Charles Penty
Spain cut its economic forecast for 2018 as the costs of the Catalan
crisis begin to mount.
Output will grow by 2.3 percent next year instead of the 2.6 percent
previously projected, the economy ministry said in an emailed statement just
before midnight Monday, citing the impact of the political standoff in
Catalonia, which accounts for a fifth of Spain’s gross domestic product, and
the related struggle to approve a budget.
The Spanish economy is set to grow by 3 percent for a third straight year
in 2017 after Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s reforms helped the country shake
off the worst recession in its modern history, earning the endorsement of the
European Commission. The standoff in Catalonia is set to put a dent in that
run.
The
Spanish state is turning up the pressure on the separatists as Rajoy tries to
persuade Catalan President Carles Puigdemont to drop his claim to independence
following the illegal referendum on Oct. 1. Rajoy has threatened to take direct
control of the region unless Puigdemont backs down by 10 a.m. Thursday.
---- Escalation may be on the cards though. Judge Carmen Lamela jailed two leading separatists on Monday as a precautionary measure as she investigates potential sedition charges against them. Defense Minister Maria Dolores de Cospedal, who last week hinted that she’s ready to send the army into Catalonia to assert control, canceled a visit to troops stationed in Barcelona this afternoon after a Spanish air force pilot was killed when his F-18 fighter crashed near Madrid.
“We’re not going to budge,” Catalan Government Spokesman Jordi
Turull said at news conference in Barcelona. “From Thursday we’ll see which
scenario the Spanish government is opting for, whether it’ll continue with
repression or sit down to talk.”
Spain’s benchmark stock index has fallen by about 9 percent since May as
the separatist campaign gathered momentum. It rose for the first time in four
sessions on Tuesday, gaining 0.5 percent at 2:05 p.m. Jefferies equity
strategists downgraded their rating on Spanish stocks to modestly bearish,
citing the Catalan tensions, while the euro slid for a fourth day.
More
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Below, retribution Malta style. Will the EC/EU now
investigate Malta? We’ve covered Malta before, as the EUSSR’s very own version
of tax avoiding Panama. But will this murder finally force the EU
bureaucrats to investigate and act?
Malta car bomb kills Panama Papers journalist
Daphne Caruana Galizia, a blogger whose investigations focused on corruption, was described as a ‘one-woman WikiLeaks’
Monday 16 October 2017 18.33 BST
The journalist who led the Panama Papers
investigation into corruption in Malta was killed on Monday in a car bomb near
her home.Daphne Caruana Galizia died on Monday afternoon when her car, a Peugeot 108, was destroyed by a powerful explosive device which blew the vehicle into several pieces and threw the debris into a nearby field.
A blogger whose posts often attracted more readers than the combined circulation of the country’s newspapers, Caruana Galizia was recently described by the Politico website as a “one-woman WikiLeaks”. Her blogs were a thorn in the side of both the establishment and underworld figures that hold sway in Europe’s smallest member state.
Her most recent revelations pointed the finger at Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan.
No group or individual has come forward to claim responsibility for the attack.
Malta’s president, Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, called for calm. “In these moments, when the country is shocked by such a vicious attack, I call on everyone to measure their words, to not pass judgment and to show solidarity,” she said.
After a fraught general election this summer, commentators had been fearing a return to the political violence that scarred Malta during the 1980s.
In a statement, Muscat condemned the “barbaric attack”, saying he had asked police to reach out to other countries’ security services for help identifying the perpetrators.
“Everyone knows Ms Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine,” said Muscat at a hastily convened press conference, “both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way”.
Muscat announced later in parliament that FBI officers were on their way to Malta to assist with the investigation, following his request for outside help from the US government.
The Nationalist party leader, Adrian Delia – himself the subject of negative stories by Caruana Galizia – claimed the killing was linked to her reporting. “A political murder took place today,” Delia said in a statement. “What happened today is not an ordinary killing. It is a consequence of the total collapse of the rule of law which has been going on for the past four years.”
According to local media reports, Caruana Galizia filed a police report 15 days ago to say that she had been receiving death threats.
The journalist posted her final blog on her Running Commentary website at 2.35pm on Monday, and the explosion, which occurred near her home, was reported to police just after 3pm. Officers said her body had not yet been identified. According to sources, one of her sons heard the blast from their home and rushed out to the scene.
Caruana Galizia, who claimed to have no political affiliations, set her sights on a wide range of targets, from banks facilitating money laundering to links between Malta’s online gaming industry and the Mafia.
Over the last two years, her reporting had largely focused on revelations from the Panama Papers, a cache of 11.5m documents leaked from the internal database of the world’s fourth largest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca.
The data was obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with media partners around the world, including the Guardian, by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington.
---- Earlier this year, during Malta’s presidency of the European Union, her revelations caused major concern in Brussels.
MEPs openly called for Muscat’s departure amid a growing scandal involving his wife, a Panamanian shell company and alleged payments from the president of Azerbaijan’s daughter.
Muscat, who has been premier since 2013, went to the polls a year early after his wife was implicated in the scandal. He has always denied any wrongdoing and promised to quit if any evidence emerges of his family having secret offshore bank accounts used to stash kickbacks – as Caruana Galizia had alleged.
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?
World's first "negative emission" power plant turns CO2 into stone
Rich Haridy October 16th, 2017
After
opening the
world's first commercial Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant designed to pull
CO2 out of the air, Swiss company Climeworks is now joining forces with a
geothermal power plant in Iceland to create the world's first "negative
emission" power plant.
For several years an international team of scientists has been working on a novel way to turn captured CO2 into solid minerals. The project is dubbed CarbFix and involves bounding the CO2 to water and then pumping it 700 meters (2,300 ft) underground. This CO2 solution, on contact with the deep basalt rock, was found to quickly form into a carbonate mineral.
Before this discovery it was thought that this mineralization process could take anywhere from hundreds to thousands of years, but the CarbFix team were surprised to discover the CO2 formed into a solid mineral in under two years.
"Our results show that between 95 and 98 per cent of the injected CO2 was mineralized over the period of less than two years, which is amazingly fast," says lead author on the CarbFix project, Dr Juerg Matter.
Climeworks has been pioneering a novel DAC system over the past few years. The technology can collect CO2 from ambient air onto a patented filter before it is purified and then sold on to businesses needing the gas in a commercial context. The first commercial plant in Zurich is delivering the collected CO2 to a nearby greenhouse.
Carbon sequestration, where CO2 is captured and stored in underground reservoirs, has been the source of much controversy in recent years. An MIT study from 2015 suggested that prior sequestration processes have not been especially effective. So while we can capture the CO2 we still don't have a large-scale method to safely dispose of it, and there is a very real concern that sequestered CO2 could leak back into the atmosphere.
Combining the Climeworks DAC technology with the CarbFix mineralization
process offers a proof-of-concept for a system that is not only carbon neutral
but actually carbon negative.
"The potential of scaling-up our technology in combination with CO2
storage, is enormous," says Climeworks CEO Christoph Gebald. "Not
only here in Iceland but also in numerous other regions which have similar rock
formations."
Of course the economic cost of deploying this kind of carbon capture
technology on a large scale is not particularly pragmatic right now, but for
the first time we are seeing realistic and effective carbon capture and storage
systems.
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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