Baltic Dry Index. 1366 -64 Brent Crude 66.68
"In
economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension."
John Kenneth Galbraith
We open this morning
with Bloomberg reporting that the global economy is now back to “normal” again.
To this old dinosaur market watcher, things are far from normal in our central
bankster controlled and rigged global economy. For one thing, if things are
back to normal, why are central banksters still pursuing emergency measures of
interest rate suppression and buying up vast amounts of newly issued government
debts?
Below, poor old Bloomie
gets carried away, but still gets in an anti-Brexit dig.
Global Economy Back to ‘Normal’ After 2017's Upside Surprises
By Fergal O'BrienComparing 2017 predictions made a year ago versus the likely outturn -- based on the latest forecasts in Bloomberg’s monthly survey -- shows that the pessimists called this one wrong. One of the biggest surprises was the euro area, set for its strongest expansion in a decade. At 2.3 percent, the expected growth is far above the 1.4 percent pace predicted at the start of the year.
Even the U.K., which dropped to the bottom of the Group of Seven growth league, performed a little stronger than was expected. Tempering that small positive is the fact that it’s heading for its fourth straight slowdown in 2018, according to the latest projections.
“It took a decade but the crisis is now behind us,” said Samy Chaar,
chief economist at Lombard Odier in Geneva. “The global economy has found a
‘normal’ footing, inflation is starting to come back into the picture --
although far from posing a risk -- and central banks are able to gradually
remove exceptionally supportive policies.”
Some central banks have already started down the path of exiting from
stimulus, though very gradually. While the Federal Reserve is forecasting three
interest-rate increases in 2018 after three this year, the Bank of England only
lifted its benchmark rate for the first time in a decade in November. In the
euro area, the European Central Bank is slowing -- not stopping -- its pace of
monthly bond purchases.
So what does 2018 have to offer? According to Goldman Sachs, the
main risks to the outlook are political, including the struggling Nafta
negotiations, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and elections in Italy. But
continued loose monetary conditions will support the expansion.
More
In
other news, oil got an unexpected boost. If the global economy is now back to
normal, how long before inflation picks up?
Asia Stocks Mixed, Oil Touches $60, Bitcoin Flat: Markets Wrap
By Chris Anstey
Updated on 27 December 2017, 04:06 GMT
Asian stocks were mixed Wednesday in trading thinned by a holiday-shortened
week. Oil prices breached $60 a barrel for the first time since 2015 after a
pipeline blast in Libya.Japanese equity benchmarks posted slight gains, and Australian stocks were flat after a four-day weekend. South Korean equities dropped, weighed down by industrial companies after the world’s No. 2 shipbuilder announced a share sale that saw its price tumble as much as 29 percent. The dollar held within recent ranges against the euro and yen.
Taiwanese shares ticked higher, with technology shares advancing. The gains suggested easing concerns about analyst downgrades of Apple Inc. iPhone X sales estimates, which sent the Nasdaq Composite Index lower overnight.
China’s onshore stocks were little changed after a report showed a smaller gain for industrial-company profits last month. The other main release of the day comes from Vietnam, which has ridden an export boom to tiger-economy status. The country reports on fourth-quarter gross domestic product, estimated to show a near-7 percent growth rate.
Bitcoin appeared to be forming a bottom above $15,000 after the cryptocurrency endured a week-long tumble from its record above $19,000, which was hit Dec. 18.
More
Up
next, today’s update of cryptocurrency mania news.
Bitcoin's Rebound Eases as Cryptocurrency Watchers Debate Value
By Chris Anstey
Bitcoin’s rally took a pause Wednesday, suggesting it isn’t about to
make another run at its record reached last week.
The fervor that propelled the digital currency past $19,000, prompted in
part by regulated U.S. derivatives exchanges starting to trade contracts based
on the unit this month, has yet to return. Bitcoin traded around $15,947 as of
10:31 a.m. Tokyo time Wednesday, according to composite prices on Bloomberg, up
0.1 percent from late Tuesday though below that day’s high.
“Nobody knows the ultimate value of this underlying asset," Edward
Stringham, president of the American Institute for Economic Research, a
Massachusetts-based research group, said on Bloomberg Television. "We
cannot predict whether it’s going to be zero or one million dollars or anything
in between."
For skeptics doubting whether individuals and businesses will truly
start using bitcoin as a medium of exchange -- as opposed to some officially
backed digital currency -- the short-lived rebound from the past week’s selloff
portends further declines.
"It’s much more likely once you’ve made a big downward movement
like the one we made last week that you have a bigger and more complex
correction," Ric Spooner, a Sydney-based analyst at CMC Markets, told
Bloomberg Television. "Once a market like this one locks into those
patterns it becomes pretty good" to follow via chart-based analysis, he
said.
Spooner said it’s possible bitcoin could drop to $5,700 or $8,700 in
coming months.
Opinion: Heed Warren Buffett’s warning: bitcoin is pure FOMO
Published: Dec 26, 2017 7:26 p.m. ET
Cryptocurrency mania rests on greater fools
To the surprise of nobody, billionaire investor Warren Buffett isn’t interested in bitcoin, the electronic currency that has zoomed higher in value over the past few weeks.Bitcoin BTCUSD, +3.42% BTCF8, +3.58% is a complex idea. Simply put, it’s a virtual currency that is created, owned and traded entirely online in anonymous and unregulated settings. In theory, there is a limited number of these physically non-existent digital “coins,” though that limit hasn’t yet been reached. A few years ago, bitcoins were almost worthless; earlier in December, bitcoin’s valued briefly topped $19,000.
Buffett is having none of it. "You can't value bitcoin, because it's not a value-producing asset," he said recently. Earlier, in 2014, when bitcoin was worth much, much less, Buffett said, "Stay away from it. It's a mirage, basically,” adding, “The idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is just a joke, in my view."
So what drives the value of an essentially value-free asset? FOMO — fear of missing out.
More
We end for the day
with Bloomberg pointing out what voters everywhere have already noted and protested.
In the new “normal,” the central bankster rigged global economy, isn’t rigged
in their favour.
World's Wealthiest Became $1 Trillion Richer in 2017
By Tom Metcalf and Jack WitzigThe 23 percent increase on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world’s 500 richest people, compares with an almost 20 percent increase for both the MSCI World Index and Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.
----By the end of trading Tuesday, Dec. 26, the 500 billionaires controlled $5.3 trillion, up from $4.4 trillion on Dec. 27, 2016.
“It’s part of the second-most robust and second-longest bull market in
history,” said Mike Ryan, chief investment officer for the Americas at UBS
Wealth Management, on Dec. 18. “Of all the guidance we gave people over the
course of this year, the most important advice was staying invested.”
More
In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative
tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results
far much less.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
No crooks today, they’ll surely be back tomorrow.
Today good news, there’s probably lots of life out there in other worlds. But
is that really good news? It wasn’t good news for most of the native Americans
when the Spanish and other Europeans showed up? And it wasn’t very good news
for the most Europeans when the Mongol Horde showed up. As they say, this time
it’s different, right?
Still why would any advanced civilisation want to
come here? We’re busy borrowing from the future to consume and pollute the here
and now. All the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money has brought us so far, is
never ending war, and never ending, unrepayable debt. What could we possibly have that they would need?
Fossils suggest a universe filled with life
Evidence of life processes found in fossils in
3.5-billion-year-old rocks. Scientists say this work suggests life in our
universe is widespread.
This month, scientists from UCLA and the University of Wisconsin–Madison
announced the results of their analysis of rock samples found decades ago in
Western Australia. They say the rocks contain fossils of 3.465-billion-year-old
microorganisms, the oldest ones known. The study’s lead author – paleontologist
J. William Schopf of UCLA – collected the fossils in 1982
and interpreted them then as early life. Critics had argued they were just odd
minerals that only looked like biological specimens. The new study shows that
two of the species appear to have performed a primitive form of photosynthesis,
another apparently produced methane gas, and two others appear to have consumed
methane and used it to build their cell walls. Thus, according to these
scientists, the new findings show the microfossils are indeed biological. Plus,
they said, the fossils provide:… strong evidence to support an increasingly widespread understanding that life in the universe is common.
Their work was published December 18, 2017 in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
These scientists say their work strengthens the case for life existing elsewhere in the universe because, they say, it shows a diverse group of organisms had already evolved extremely early in the Earth’s history. That early earthly life — combined with our knowledge of the vast number of stars in the universe and the growing understanding that planets orbit so many of them — suggests life is common in the universe. Schopf commented in a statement:
… it would be extremely unlikely that life formed quickly on Earth, but did not arise anywhere else.
The scientists say their study is the most detailed ever conducted on microorganisms preserved in such ancient fossils. They said their study is:
… the first to establish what kind of biological microbial organisms they are, and how advanced or primitive they are.
The study describes 11 microbial specimens from five separate taxa. According to these scientists, some represent now-extinct bacteria and microbes from a domain of life called Archaea, while others are similar to microbial species still found today.
The scientists analyzed the microorganisms at the Wisconsin Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer Lab (WiscSIMS) in Madison. It is one of just a few places in the world where this type of work can be done. Secondary ion mass spectroscopy revealed the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 isotopes in the fossils.
The scientists then were able to use this information to determine how the microorganisms lived. The study’s co-author, geoscientist John Valley of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said:
The differences in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes. Their C-13-to-C-12 ratios are characteristic of biology and metabolic function.
When these fossils were formed, these scientists said, there was very little oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. In fact, oxygen would have been poisonous to these microorganisms, and would have killed them, they said. Oxygen first appeared on Earth approximately half a billion years later, before its concentration in our atmosphere increased rapidly starting about 2 billion years ago. Thus, at the time these ancient microorganisms were alive, advanced photosynthesis didn’t exist yet.
The scientists also said the very existence of the rocks they analyzed is remarkable. That’s because the average lifetime of a rock exposed on Earth’s surface is about 200 million years. William Schopf commented that, when he began his career, there was no fossil evidence of life dating back farther than 500 million years ago. He added:
The rocks we studied are about as far back as rocks go.
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?
New insights on graphene
Date:
December 21, 2017
Source:
Leiden, Universiteit
Summary:
Graphene floating on water does not repel water, as many researchers believe,
but rather attracts it, explain researchers in a new report.
Graphene floating on water does not repel water, as many researchers
believe, but rather attracts it. This has been demonstrated by chemists Liubov
Belyaeva and Pauline van Deursen and their supervisor Grégory F. Schneider.
Publication in Advanced Materials.
Graphene is made up of the same material as graphite -- found in pencils
for example -- which is why it was assumed for a long time that, like graphite,
graphene is water repellant. A key difference from graphite is that graphene is
no more than a single atom thick.
Important for biosensors
The studies on graphene gave rise to differing ideas about its wetting
properties. The Leiden researchers have now discovered that the surface of
graphene on water, provided it is clean and smooth, is hydrophilic. In other
words, graphene in water attracts water.
Graphene applications
This insight is very significant for the future applications of
graphene. Its thin atomic layer of carbon atoms, arranged in a honeycomb
structure, make the material suitable for use in biosensors to decode DNA. This
ultra-thin material can also be used in sensors, water filtration and membranes
of fuel cells. In all these cases, a graphene layer is exposed to water on both
sides.
On a layer of water
For a long time, graphene was believed to be hydrophobic, or water
repellant. The researchers assume that this is because graphene is generally produced
on a metal surface and is later transferred to a solid support such as a
silicon wafer. During this transfer process, however, the graphene can become
damaged or contaminated, which can influence the wetting behaviour.
Curvature of a droplet
To determine whether or not the surface of an intact layer of graphene
is hydrophilic, a droplet of water has to be introduced onto the layer. It is
then possible to determine from the curvature of the droplet whether the
surface is water repellent, just like a raincoat, or whether it attracts water.
So much for the theory, because in practice such a droplet will immediately
tear the thin graphene layer, resulting in cracks, after which there is not
much left to measure.
Imitating water
The researchers resolved this problem by using ice or hydrogel instead
of water as the support layer. Ice and hydrogel are much stronger and are good
imitators of water. The researchers were then able to introduce minuscule
droplets of water onto the graphene and measure the contact angle between the
graphene surface and the outside of the droplet. They also repeated the
measurements using other liquids with a different polarity. They were then able
to determine that all molecular interactions of the underlying water are felt
by the water molecules in the droplet above. This complete transparency is the
consequence of graphene's extreme thinness, and it explains why graphene is
hydrophilic on water.
A complete change in view
This discovery has a great impact on applications of graphene in
sensors, water filtration, and membrane-based fuel cells, all of which feature
graphene exposed to water. Developers will have to consider a completely
different starting point, namely that the graphene they work with is not
hydrophobic, but hydrophilic.
"On
the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the
time.”
George
Orwell.
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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