Baltic
Dry Index. 1679
+09
Brent Crude 62.22
"It
was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it
was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the
season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of
despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we
were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other
way."
Charles
Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities.
For
once, little need for comment by me. We can all see at a glance what
has gone wrong, but there’s no will anywhere on planet Earth to
avert the coming tragedy.
Dollar Heads for Weekly Gain, Asia Stocks Advance: Markets Wrap
By Adam Haigh
7 December
2017, 22:26 GMT Updated on 8 December 2017, 06:13 GMT
The
dollar is poised for a solid weekly advance after U.S. tax-cut
legislation made progress in Congress, and ahead of employment data
expected to show continued robust hiring.
Asian
stocks rose following a broad-based rally in U.S. equities. Japan’s
benchmarks advanced, buoyed by a weaker yen, which extended a 0.7
percent slide. The Bloomberg dollar index at one point was heading
for its biggest weekly gain this year. The pound advanced on hopes
last-minute
talks will result in a deal on the Irish border that will allow
Brexit negotiations to move on. Gold was steady after extending this
week’s slide to a four-month low.
Equities across the Asia-Pacific
began rallying on Thursday after an eight-day losing streak saw
investors booking profits following 2017 gains. This year remains on
track to be the best since 2009 when stocks surged in the immediate
aftermath of the financial crisis.
“We’ve
had a terrific year in financial assets across the board,” Kenneth
Taubes, chief investment officer of U.S. investment management at
Amundi, which oversees about $1.6 trillion, told
Bloomberg TV. “As we get towards the end of the year and valuations
seem more extended than there were last year, it’s pretty natural
that people want to lock in some profits.”
Stocks
in the U.S. resumed their run-up tied to speculation that the U.S.
tax overhaul will boost corporate profits. The S&P 500 Index
ended a four-day losing streak, with industrial and consumer
discretionary shares among the best performers. That follows a few
days in which the markets drifted as investors awaited the details of
a final bill. Meanwhile, Congress passed
a two-week extension of federal funding that averts a government
shutdown this week.
And
the bitcoin
frenzy continues. The cryptocurrency that has sparked so much
debate went on a wild ride on Thursday. On Coinbase Inc.’s GDAX
exchange, prices zoomed up to almost $20,000 from $16,000 in only
about 90 minutes before crashing back down. The largest digital
currency is still up more than 16-fold this year. It traded around
$16,000 in Asia.
Japan’s
economy expanded in the third quarter more than initially
reported, as business investment
grew at a faster pace. In China,
exports
in November jumped on firm global demand, while imports were
underpinned by a sound domestic economy.
More
Bitcoin Exchanges Are Buckling While the Price Surges Past $16,000
By Camila Russo
7 December
2017, 03:16 GMT Updated on 8 December 2017, 00:31 GMT
Bitcoin
surged past $16,000 for the first time on Thursday, with frenzied
demand to trade the cryptocurrency buckling
one of the largest exchanges just days before the first U.S. futures
contracts begin trading.
Bitcoin’s rally of more than $3,000
in the past 24 hours continues to defy its legions of skeptics, as
mainstream demand for the world’s largest cryptocurrency explodes.
Investors flocking to open new accounts or place orders Thursday left
Coinbase, the largest U.S. exchange, warning of outages and slow
transactions.
Trezor, a wallet service, tweeted
that it’s having “minor issues” with its servers, while
Bitfinex,
the largest bitcoin exchange in the world, said on Twitter
that it has been under a denial of service attack for several days
and that it recently got worse.
Bitcoin
listed at $16,395 as of 1:15 p.m. in Bloomberg pricing that is a
composite of exchanges. That takes its rally this year past
1,500 percent and its market capitalization is now at $274 billion.
On Thursday it topped out at $16,777.08 after starting the day at
$13,363.25.
“This is irrational exuberance,”
Royal Bank of Scotland Chairman Howard John Davies said in an
interview on Bloomberg TV on Thursday. “This is a very, very
unusual market, that shows we’re not in a normal two-way trading
market.”
Daily price swings of that magnitude
and weakness at the exchanges underscored concerns raised Wednesday
by some of the world’s biggest
brokerages, which told regulators the contracts have been rushed
to market without enough due diligence. The new bitcoin derivatives
products are slated to begin trading this month and are expected to
boost mainstream demand. On a day such as Thursday, trading
would pause under proposed daily price-swing limitations.
The
slowdown on exchanges also highlighted the disparate pricing that can
occur. The surging demand on Coinbase sent prices as high as $19,697
at 11:23 a.m., higher by more than $3,000 than other exchanges.
Coinbase added at least 300,000 users since just before the
Thanksgiving holiday. The company had 13.3 million users as of Nov.
26, up from 13 million on Nov. 22 and 10.6 million two months ago.
More
Bitcoin Wildness Highlights Worries as Futures Trading Nears
By Nick Baker, Annie Massa, Brian Louis, and Camila Russo
7 December
2017, 19:16 GMT Updated on 8 December 2017, 03:55 GMT
Bitcoin’s
poised to go legit. Is it really ready?
Three days before Cboe Global Markets
Inc., one of the world’s biggest regulated exchanges, debuts
futures on the cryptocurrency, it had one of its wildest sessions
ever. On Coinbase Inc.’s GDAX exchange, prices zoomed up to almost
$20,000 from $16,000 in only about 90 minutes -- then crashed back
down. The largest digital currency is still up more than 16-fold this
year, trading at 16,126.32 as of 11:52 a.m. in Hong Kong, according
to Bloomberg composite pricing.
Coinbase,
one of the largest U.S. online exchanges used by investors,
temporarily crashed and continued to suffer from service delays.
Trezor, a wallet service, tweeted that it’s having “minor issues”
with its servers, while Bitfinex, the largest bitcoin exchange in the
world, said on Twitter that it has been under a denial of service
attack for several days and that it recently got worse.
Cboe
and CME Group Inc. last week got permission to offer bitcoin futures.
CME’s products launch Dec. 18.
The entrance of Cboe and CME is a
watershed for bitcoin because many professional investors have been
unwilling to do business on the unregulated platforms where bitcoin
currently trades. Cboe and CME are regulated, potentially assuaging
those concerns.
Some big traders had just warned
about the impending introduction. On Wednesday, the Futures Industry
Association -- a group of major banks, brokers and traders -- said
the contracts were rushed without enough consideration of the
risks.
The group outlined their concerns in
an open letter, questioning whether the exchanges would be able to
adequately police market manipulation for bitcoin futures. FIA added
that the exchanges didn’t get enough industry feedback on margin
levels, trading limits, stress tests, and clearing for the products
before bringing them to market.
----Other
trading experts have sounded alarm bells on the possibility of
manipulation. The thinking goes that because cryptocurrency markets
aren’t policed by a central regulator, cheaters could fly under the
radar if they try to move the price of bitcoin on exchanges with
scant volume.
The CFTC “has strong
anti-manipulation rules for futures, but those won’t necessarily
protect investors if the bitcoin cash markets are manipulated,”
said Ty Gellasch, executive director of the Healthy Markets
Association, an investor advocacy group.
More
Finally
today, great instability ahead. Yet another unintended consequence of
the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money, communist money, but what did
they think was going to happen? The rich get richer while the rest
get left behind. A recipe for unstable democracies, and Comrade
Corbyn and Comrade Sanders populist charlatans.
The richest 1 percent now owns more of the country’s wealth than at any time in the past 50 years
By
Christopher
Ingraham December 6
The
wealthiest 1 percent of American households own 40 percent of the
country's wealth, according to a
new paper by economist Edward N. Wolff. That share is higher than
it has been at any point since at least 1962, according to Wolff's
data, which comes from the federal Survey
of Consumer Finances.
From 2013, the share of wealth owned
by the 1 percent shot up by nearly three percentage points.
Wealth
owned by the bottom 90 percent, meanwhile, fell over the same period.
Today, the top 1 percent of households own more wealth than the
bottom 90 percent combined. That gap, between the ultrawealthy
and everyone else, has only become wider in the past several decades.
----In
the United States, the distribution of that wealth is even more
skewed toward the top than the distribution of income. For the
sake of illustration, let's say that America is a country of 100
people, and all of the wealth in the country — the homes and land
and financial assets — is represented by 100 slices of pie.
That
works out to an average of one slice of pie per person, which is
exactly what everyone would get if we lived in a society where wealth
was equally distributed.
But that's not the society we live
in, and indeed that's not the society that most of us want to live in
either. People generally agree that if you work harder you're
entitled to more of the pie, and that if you don't work at all, well,
barring certain circumstances, no pie for you.
In 2010, Michael Norton and Dan
Ariely surveyed more
than 5,500 people to find out how they thought wealth should be
distributed in this country: How much of the pie should go to the top
20 percent of Americans, and to the next 20 percent, and so on, all
the way down to the bottom of the distribution?
On
average, respondents said that in an ideal world the top 20 percent
of Americans would get nearly one-third of the pie, the second and
middle quintiles would get about 20 percent each, and the bottom two
quintiles would get 13 and 11 slices, respectively.
In
an ideal world, in other words, the most productive quintile of
society would amass roughly three times the wealth of the least
productive.
Now, let's take a look at how the pie
is actually distributed. These figures come from
Wolff's working
paper, and he expands on them further in his new book, "A
Century of Wealth in America."
The
top 20 percent of households actually own a whopping 90 percent
of the stuff in America — 90 slices of pie! That's exactly 4½
slices per person, nearly triple their “ideal” share
according to Norton and Ariely's survey respondents. Their
average net worth? $3 million.
That leaves just 10 percent of the
pie for the remaining 80 percent of the populace.
More
“Lenin
is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist
System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of
inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an
important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they
not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the
process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of
this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security,
but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of
wealth.”
John
Maynard Keynes.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The
bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today,
does trouble in commodities signal global trouble dead ahead? Is Dr.
Copper an early warning of an arriving new slowdown?
Commodities Crumble Again as China Alarm Bells Sink Metals
By Grant Smith, Eddie Van Der Walt and Mark Burton
7 December
2017, 11:23 GMT Updated on 7 December 2017, 13:51 GMT
Stocks and bitcoin may be
having a stellar year, but one corner of global markets hasn’t
shared the good fortune.
The Bloomberg Commodities Index has
fallen 4.2 percent in the past month, putting it on course for its
sixth year of losses out of seven.
The big question is whether the
selloff is simply a snap back after a frenzied rally or the warning
of a weaker economy. One bad sign for commodities going forward are
expectations for a slower growth in China. The country’s pollution
cleanup and a cooling property market will damp investment into 2018,
according to a Bloomberg survey last week.
Here are a few takeaways from the
selloff:
Breadth
Energy, metals and agriculture are
showing losses. Nickel has been hit hardest recently as the fever
over electric car batteries wore off. Oil traders took profits after
the OPEC meeting and oversupply continued to be a headache for grain
traders.
China
China is still the big swing factor
in commodity markets and metals traders are starting to price the
possibility that slower growth will mean less demand.
The nation’s fixed-asset investment
in infrastructure will grow 12 percent next year, according to the
median estimate in a Bloomberg survey, down from almost 20 percent in
the first 10 months this year. Copper has born the brunt of the
nervousness and prices are near a two-month low.
more
Iron Ore From Paradise Wins No Takers as China Upends Market
By Swansy Afonso
8 December
2017, 03:02 GMT Updated on 8 December 2017, 07:01 GMT
A
China-led flight to quality in the global iron ore market is
punishing producers of the lower-grade material, with miners in India
facing an increasing battle to find buyers for their cargoes as
demand dwindles.
In Goa, exporters are struggling
to sell even a quarter of what they shipped last year, according to
Glenn Kalavampara, secretary at the Goa
Mineral Ore Exporters’ Association. “There’s absolutely no
market,” he said by phone from Panaji, capital of the western state
that’s better known for its sparkling beach resorts. “The
preference for higher-grade ore is a major concern.” he said.
While Indian exports account for just
a fraction of the global seaborne market of about 1.4 billion tons
that’s dominated by Vale SA, Rio
Tinto Group and BHP Billiton Ltd., the plight of the low-grade
shippers highlights the new dynamic. A concerted anti-pollution push
in China this winter has supercharged the premium commanded by
higher-grade material, which is more efficient. This week, Rio
pointed to “clear
evidence” of a structural change in the market, and earlier
this year, BHP highlighted the industry’s “new reality”.
“There are hardly any exports,”
R.K. Sharma, secretary-general of the Federation of Indian Mineral
Industries, said by phone from New Delhi. Sharma has been working in
the sector for almost five decades, and at one time saw Indian
exports top 100 million tons. “Even the Goans who are near the
ports and have the least costs in the country are not able to sell,”
he said.
China’s push to clean the air has
exploded the price differential between high and low grades. On
Thursday, spot ore with 65 percent iron content from Brazil was
at $85.20 a dry ton, while benchmark material of 62 percent was
$65.70, and 58 percent was less than $40, according to Metal Bulletin
Ltd.
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? DC? A quantum computer next?
Wheat gets boost from purified nanotubes
Toxicity study shows plant growth enhanced by -- but only by -- purified nanotubes
- Date: December 6, 2017
- Source: Rice University
- Summary: Researchers test the effects of carbon nanotubes on the growth of wheatgrass. While some showed no effect, purified single-walled nanotubes dispersed in water enhanced the plants' growth, while the same nanotubes in an organic solvent retarded their development.
The
introduction of purified carbon nanotubes appears to have a
beneficial effect on the early growth of wheatgrass, according to
Rice University scientists. But in the presence of contaminants,
those same nanotubes could do great harm.
The Rice lab of chemist Andrew
Barron grew wheatgrass in a hydroponic garden to test the potential
toxicity of nanoparticles on the plant. To their surprise, they
found one type of particle dispersed in water helped the plant grow
bigger and faster.
They suspect the results spring from
nanotubes' natural hydrophobic (water-avoiding) nature that in one
experiment apparently facilitated the plants' enhanced uptake of
water.
The research appears in the Royal
Society of Chemistry journal Environmental Science: Nano.
The lab mounted the small-scale
study with the knowledge that the industrial production of nanotubes
will inevitably lead to their wider dispersal in the environment.
The study cited rapid growth in the market for nanoparticles in
drugs, cosmetic, fabrics, water filters and military weapons, with
thousands of tons produced annually.
Despite their widespread use, Barron
said few researchers have looked at the impact of environmental
nanoparticles -- whether natural or human-made -- on plant growth.
The researchers planted wheatgrass
seeds in multiple replicates in cotton wool and fed them with
dispersions that contained raw single-walled or multi-walled
nanotubes, purified single-walled nanotubes or iron oxide
nanoparticles that mimicked leftover catalyst often attached to
nanotubes. The solutions were either water or tetrahydrofuran (THF),
an industrial solvent. Some of the seeds were fed pure water or THF
as a control.
After eight days, the plantings
showed that purified single-walled nanotubes in water enhanced the
germination rate and shoot growth of wheatgrass, which grew an
average of 13 percent larger than plants in plain water. Raw single-
and multi-walled nanotubes and particles in either solution had
little effect on the plants' growth, they found.
However, purified single-walled
nanotubes in THF retarded plant development by 45 percent compared
to single-walled nanotubes in water, suggesting the nanotubes act as
a carrier for the toxic substance.
The concern, Barron said, is that if
single-walled nanotubes combine with organic pollutants like
pesticides, industrial chemicals or solvents in the environment,
they may concentrate and immobilize the toxins and enhance their
uptake by plants.
Nothing seen in the limited study
indicated whether carbon nanotubes in the environment, and
potentially in plants, will rise up the food chain and be harmful to
humans, he said.
More
Once
again another year draws to a close. If you are one of the regular
reader of this six days a week update that helps support my efforts
with the occasional donation via the Paypal button, once again I
sincerely thank you. If you are a regular reader who finds the LIR
informative, interesting, occasionally amusing or entertaining,
please consider making a small donation via the Paypal button on the
LIR website. For obvious reasons in our new age of almost rampant
fake news, I want to keep the LIR advertising free. But in any event
thank you for reading and sending in helpful suggestions.
21st
century adage: Is that true or did you hear it on the BBC?
Have a great weekend everyone.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished November
DJIA:
24,272
+243
Up.
NASDAQ:
6,874
+289
Up.
SP500:
2,648
+189
Up.
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