Baltic Dry Index. 1668 Brent Crude 63.34
Proper Charlie Munger.
For more on Bernie Buymore, and to infinity and beyond, scroll
down to the final section. Does the last bitcoin trade at infinity?
We open today with a
wobble in Asia as JP Morgan joins in the Wall Street chorus singing stocks to
infinity and beyond.
December 15, 2017 / 1:04 AM
Asian shares slip, U.S. tax reform woes dent sentiment
TOKYO
(Reuters) - Asian shares erased earlier modest gains on Friday but were still
on track for a weekly rise, as sentiment was hurt by Wall Street’s weakness on
concerns about the progress of U.S. tax reform.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS was down 0.5 percent, but poised to gain 0.7 percent for the week.
Chinese shares slumped, with the Shanghai Composite index .SSEC off 0.9 percent and the blue-chip CSI300 index .CSI300 down 1 percent.
Japan's Nikkei stock index .N225 was down 0.1 percent, off its session lows, but still down 0.6 percent for the week, even amid fresh signs the economy is gathering momentum.
Big Japanese manufacturers’ business confidence improved for a fifth straight quarter in the three months to December to hit an 11-year high, the Bank of Japan’s quarterly tankan survey showed.
“The Nikkei came off its lows in the afternoon, largely on futures-led buying,” said Ayako Sera, senior market economist at Sumitomo Mitsui Trust. “But regional sentiment is still fragile, which will limit its upside.”
On
Thursday, U.S. retail sales increased more than expected in November and the
number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits dropped to near a
44-1/2-year low last week. That pointed to sustained strength in the economy
that could pave the way for further Federal Reserve interest rate hikes next
year.
----On Wall Street on Thursday, major U.S. stock indexes fell, with the S&P 500 .SPX down the most in a month, as investor worries over potential roadblocks to the Republicans' tax overhaul more than offset optimism over the strong data. [.N]
Republicans in the U.S. Congress reached a deal this week on a final version of their debt-financed legislation to cut taxes for businesses and wealthy Americans, with House and Senate votes expected early next week. But the bill has yet to get needed support of some key Senators, and investors worry about downward pressure on stocks if the bill were to fail.
More
JPMorgan Sees S&P 500 Hitting 3,000, Warns on Tech Stocks
By Lu Wang
Another
Wall Street firm says the bull market’s going to continue to run next year. But
it won’t be because of tech shares.
JPMorgan
Chase & Co. became the third major bank to predict the S&P 500 Index
will rise to 3,000 at the end of 2018, joining Oppenheimer and Evercore ISI. If
the benchmark for American equity hits that target, it will have rallied 13
percent from Thursday’s close.
“Expansionary phase of the business cycle, synchronized global earnings
momentum, U.S. tax reform should remain supportive of further rotation into
value, while continuing to pose risk for low vol and growth stocks,” Dubravko
Lakos-Bujas wrote in a note to clients Thursday.
The strategist sees large-cap tech, the group that’s done the heavy
lifting in a 2017 rally that’s added 18 percent to the S&P 500, turning
into a laggard next year. Tech stocks in the index have surged 37 percent so
far this year, pushing valuations to the highest level in eight years. They
account for almost one-quarter of the measure by weighting.
“Strong fundamentals but rich valuation, crowded positioning and tax
reform rotation are a significant potential headwind,” Lakos-Bujas wrote.
Financials will lead the way as the “key tax beneficiary,” he wrote.
Weaker regulations and the potential for higher interest rates will also help.
Lakos-Bujas recommends overweighting industrial, energy and materials shares.
John Stoltzfus at Oppenheimer and Dennis DeBusschere of Evercore ISI are
the other strategists who think the index will reach the 3,000 level next year,
making them the three most bullish tracked by Bloomberg. The average among all
prognosticators now stands at 2,838, with the majority holding a buy or neutral
view on tech stocks.
Next in Brexit fake news, it was the best of times, it was
the worst of times, depending if you hack for Reuters or Bloomberg.
"When it becomes serious,
you have to lie"
Jean-Claude Juncker. Failed Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar. EC President.
Jean-Claude Juncker. Failed Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar. EC President.
December 15, 2017 / 12:43 AM
May wins applause from EU leaders for Brexit efforts
BRUSSELS
(Reuters) - European leaders applauded British Prime Minister Theresa May for
her work so far on Brexit, assuring her at a summit in Brussels that sufficient
progress has been made to allow Britain to move on to the next stage of leaving
the union.
A day after she suffered a defeat in parliament over her blueprint for
quitting the EU, May told her peers that she was on course to deliver Brexit
and urged them to speed up the talks to unravel more than 40 years of
membership.
After updating her peers on progress, and telling them that Britain’s
departure was “in the best interests of the UK and the European Union”, they
offered her a brief round of applause.
“She is our colleague. Britain is a member state. We are not only trying
to be, but we are polite and friendly people,” European Commission President
Jean-Claude Juncker said.
As she left to return to London -- she will not join the other 27
leaders for further discussions on Brexit and the euro zone -- May said she was
eager to move on, once her peers give the formal green light to trade talks on
Friday.
“We’ve had very good discussions,” she said. “I‘m looking forward to the
discussions coming out of tomorrow on the future trade relationship and
security relationship.”
More
Brexit Talks Are Set to Get Messy
By Ian Wishart
The first six months of Brexit negotiations were the easy part.
The European Union’s 27 remaining countries surprised themselves by
defying years of talking at cross purposes to hold a united front on their
approach to the U.K.’s withdrawal. As a result, the EU stood firm in denying
Britain the opportunity to discuss their future trading relationship until it
had persuaded Prime Minister Theresa May to make commitments first, including a
39 billion pound ($52 billion) payment plan.
That was then. With EU leaders in Brussels set to formally agree Friday
that May has complied with their conditions, there are already signs that EU
unity has hit its high watermark. Diplomats are warning that the next
stage could be less orderly as discussions start on what sort of relationship
Britain and the EU will have after Brexit.
“I have no doubt that the real test of our unity will be the second
phase of Brexit talks,” EU President Donald Tusk, who chairs summits, said on
Thursday, echoing an earlier warning from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who
said the next stage will be “incomparably more difficult.”
More
We close for the day with more on bitcoin mania. Have you sated your greed for today?
Japanese company to start paying employees in bitcoin
GMO Internet will pay portion of salaries in the cryptocurrency – whose prices have recently surged – from FebruaryFriday 15 December 2017 04.52 GMT
A Japanese company will start paying part of its employees’ salaries in Bitcoin, as it aims to gain better understanding of the virtual currency, a spokeswoman has said.
GMO Internet, which operates a range of web-related businesses including finance, online advertising and internet infrastructure, will start paying up to 100,000 yen (£660/$890) monthly by Bitcoin to its employees in Japan from February next year.
“Employees can receive salaries by Bitcoin if they want to,” company spokeswoman Harumi Ishii said. “We hope to improve our own literacy of virtual currency by actually using it.”
The offer will be open to around 4,000 employees of the GMO group in Japan, she said.
The company started a Bitcoin trading and exchange business in May. And next month, it will join the so-called “Bitcoin mining” business – gaining the right to receive new Bitcoins as a reward for helping keep the network secure by approving transactions.
World Bitcoin prices have surged globally this year, soaring from less than $1,000 in January to $17,000 this week.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/15/japanese-company-paying-employees-bitcoin
Litecoin founder Lee predicts future for bitcoin and his own runaway cryptocurrency
- Litecoin Founder Charlie Lee wants people to stop fussing over the rally in the cryptocurrency
- Litecoin prices have risen almost 8,000 percent this year
- Lee says runaway prices are prompting people to think of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and litecoin as speculative assets
CNBC.com
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/14/litecoin-founder-charlie-lee-talks-bitcoin-cryptocurrencies.html"If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars."
J. Paul Getty.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, the Orwellian world
to come.
If you want a vision of the
future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
George Orwell.
“Imagine Amazon expanded to encompass the
services and data-mining capabilities of Apple News, eBay, Uber, Groupon,
American Express, Citibank, and YouTube. Now imagine that this entity used that
information—everything from what you buy and where you go to how you pay your
bills and who your friends are—to give you a score between 350 and 950. And
that that number effectively quantified your place in society. This isn’t a
dystopian thought experiment: It is reality in China, where Ali Baba’s mobile
payment system includes Zhima Credit, a government-sanctioned system for determining
citizens’ so-called social credit scores.
It’s a tech-powered
attempt at social engineering. “For the Chinese Communist Party, social credit
is an attempt at a softer, more invisible authoritarianism,” Mara Hvistendahl
writes. “As Lucy Peng, the company’s chief executive, was quoted as saying in Ant
Financial, Zhima Credit ‘will ensure that the bad people in society don’t
have a place to go, while good people can move freely and without
obstruction.’” Indeed, Zhima Credit has blacklisted more than 6 million people
for defaulting on court fines. Being on that list means being banned from most
forms of travel, luxury hotels, and large bank loans. You could also lose your
credit-conscious friends.”
Wired
December 14 2017
Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking
12/14/17
All animals are equal, but
some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell.
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?
Russian scientists amp up battery power by finding out how to double capacity
December 13, 12:49 UTC+3
MOSCOW, December 13. /TASS/. Researchers from the Siberian Federal
University (SFU), the Krasnoyarsk Research Center at the Siberian Division of
the RAS, and the National University of Science and Technology MISIS have
discovered a way to make lithium-ion batteries double its capacity. To do
so, they came up with the idea to use graphene and vanadium disulfide as an
anode.The discovery is described in an article published recently in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C.
"The results of our study show that the structures comprised of graphene and vanadium disulfide can be applied as a perspective anode material for lithium-ion batteries with a high unit capacity and charge rate," the authors wrote in the research article.
The lithium-ion batteries are rechargeable batteries, used today in most
electronic devices, including all modern smartphones. This type of battery has
two electrodes: the positively charged anode and negatively charged cathode,
separated with a polymer material. When connected to a power outlet, the ions
of lithium move from cathode to anode, while the reverse process takes place in
the course of giving up the energy.
The researchers suggested using a combination of graphene and vanadium
disulfide. The unit capacity of such material is provided by the fact that
lithium ions are bound not only at the surface (as in conventional batteries)
but also between the layers of material. One of these layers is graphene, a 2D
modification of carbon, while the second layer is vanadium disulfide (VS2). The
overall thickness of the two-layer plate is about one nanometer. The
calculations indicate that the unit capacity of anode material in such case
reaches 569 mAh per gram, which is almost double that of pure graphite often
applied in modern batteries.
The mobility of lithium ions inside the anode materials also ensures a
high charge rate. These lithium-ion batteries can charge substantially faster,
also at low temperatures within a surrounding area.
Another weekend and just ten days left until Christmas. Will bitcoin trade at $25,000 by Christmas? Will rising interest rates cause a Christmas profit taking sell-off? Will President Trump tweet or not tweet over Christmas? Will North Korea’s “rocket man” send up a rocket for Christmas? I don’t know either. As we head closer towards the northern hemisphere winter solstice and pantomime season, have a great weekend everyone.
Richard Wittington, an honest dreamer, travels to London “where the streets are paved with gold”. Fairy Bow Bells realises his destiny, and supplies him with an introduction to the leading London bitcoin gambler, Bernie Buymore, a 22 year old dropout from the London School of Economics, who’s fighting extradition to America over an unintended flash crash in shady Chicago.
With apologies to Richard Gauntlett author of pantomime scripts.
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?
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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