Baltic Dry Index. 1385 +14 Brent Crude 69.17
No one can forecast the
economy with certainty.
Jamie Dimon
Four percent growth
for US GDP, and bitcoin’s not a fraud, is the latest from the world of Hopium,
from the top banana running the J. P. Morgan bank these days. Well maybe, it’s
a funny old world these days, but in a giant old economy like the USA’s, four
percent is a tall order, even without a newbie Fed setting out to normalise interest
rates and reduce its balance sheet. Perhaps it’s time to test the water
machines at JP Morgan.
"In
economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension."
John Kenneth
Galbraith.
Asia Stock Rally Fades as Yen Gains for Second Day: Markets Wrap
By Adam Haigh
Updated on 10 January 2018, 03:52 GMT
Asia’s
stock rally to record highs looked to take a breather on Wednesday as investors
consider the impact of a jump in bond yields. The yen strengthened for a second
day, with traders fixating on prospects for scaled-back debt purchases from the
Bank of Japan.
Reduced asset purchases by the world’s top central banks, rising commodity prices and looming U.S. debt sales all support the case for higher bond yields, in a potential test to surging equity valuations. Yields on 10-year U.S. Treasuries held near the highest since March, around 2.55 percent, a level that spurred the fixed-income veteran Bill Gross to declare a bond bear market Tuesday. Oil is near its highest since 2014.
Asian equity benchmarks were mixed, with Japanese equities weighed down by another rise in the yen, after the Bank of Japan made a small cut to purchases of long-dated Japanese government bonds Tuesday. Futures on the S&P 500 Index were little changed after the gauge edged up to a fresh record in a sixth straight session of gains.
China’s central bank weakened its daily fixing on the yuan by the most since September, one day after a report showed it has adjusted its currency-fixing mechanism. Shares in Shanghai were little changed after a report showed factory price gains eased in China, potentially reducing the incentive for the People’s Bank of China to raise borrowing costs.
The start of 2018 has been greeted by a surge in risk assets, with
strategists at Morgan Stanley saying the bull market in equities has now
reached a stage of euphoria. The next leg of the rally will be tested by
earnings reports due this week at companies including JPMorgan Chase &
Co. and Wells Fargo & Co.
"Markets will be higher at the end of next year than they are right
now, in my opinion, but it’s going to be a little volatile getting there,"
Jonathan Slone, chief executive officer of CLSA Ltd., said on Bloomberg TV.
Greater fluctuations are in store "as this adjustment period comes in and
as the bond markets settle down into what could be a new trading range,"
he said.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-09/treasuries-slide-as-asia-stocks-face-mixed-start-markets-wrap
"My
daughter asked me when she came home from school, “What’s the financial
crisis?” and I said, it’s something that happens every five to seven years."
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase
Dimon thinks even his own economist at J.P. Morgan is dead wrong about GDP, predicts 4% U.S. growth
Published: Jan 9, 2018 5:37 p.m. ET
J.P. Morgan boss Jamie Dimon also regrets calling ‘bitcoin’ a fraud
Those were the thoughts of JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon, who offered a forecast for U.S. economic growth that outstrips even some of the more bullish economists.Speaking during an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday, Dimon said the recently signed tax legislation, which cuts the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%, is likely to support higher levels for the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.41% the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.13% and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.09% which have already rung up all-time highs in first several sessions of 2018, after a record-setting rally for the equity benchmarks last year.
Dimon said he expects the “competitive tax rate” to encourage deal-making on Wall Street, pointing to Europe which he said is on pace to grow at a 3% rate. A reading of gross domestic product is slated for Jan. 26.
In the U.S., the economy grew at a 3.1% annual pace in the second quarter and a 3.2% annual rate in the third, according to the Commerce Department, exceeding the post recession pace of near 2% A fresh estimate of gross domestic product is slated for Jan. 26.
However, few prominent economists are expecting GDP growth to hit a stellar 4% pace this year.
----Moreover, J.P. Morgan’s chief U.S. economist Michael Feroli’s forecast for early GDP readings lands below his boss’s much loftier expectations, even factoring the tax cuts: “We boosted our 1Q18 real GDP forecast from 2.0% to 2.5%…following the recent passage of the tax package. The changes are set to take effect somewhat earlier than we had anticipated a few weeks ago, and also are more frontloaded than we had expected. As a whole, we look for the package to boost GDP growth by about 0.3%-pt in 2018 and 0.2%-pt in 2019, according to his recent research report.
More
Next up, it’s gadget
show time in America once again. All the stuff you never knew you needed,
until this week.
CES 2018: The Best Gadgets We've Seen So Far
The first wave of augmented reality glasses, an adapter to bring Alexa into your car, and a robot that folds your laundry for you.
01.09.18 07:00 am
Rokid Glass
In the near future, augmented reality wearables will slide into our
lives as seamlessly as iPhones and Fitbits. Rokid's AR glasses? Well, those
aren't quite there yet. The Chinese company's prototype is chunky, clunky, and
totally ugly—but even in its rudimentary form, we were impressed with what they
could do. The glasses show information in the corner of the lens, including
surprisingly reliable facial recognition tech that tells you who's around. It's
a compelling proof of concept of what AR wearables will be capable of before
2018 is over.
Raven H
The Raven H is a unique and versatile smart home device—it’s a speaker,
a voice-activated assistant, and a touch-sensitive home entertainment remote,
all in one. The sharp design comes courtesy of Swedish audio and electronics
firm Teenage Engineering. Even more fun, Raven is owned by Chinese web services
giant Baidu, so when you talk to the little LED-dotted square on top, you’re
interacting with DuerOS, Baidu’s rapidly growing AI platform. There’s just one
catch: You’ll need to talk to it in Chinese.
Garmin
Speak Plus
Someday, all cars will have Alexa and 5G and the infotainment system of
your dreams. Today is not that day. Garmin's Speak Plus helps bridge the gap:
It plugs into your car's cigarette adapter, connects to your phone over
Bluetooth, and sticks to your windshield. From its perch, this round gizmo
provides a dash cam, turn-by-turn navigation, and all of Alexa's many other
skills. If you connect it to your stereo (again over Bluetooth), you can even
use your voice to control your music. It's not quite as simple as an integrated
setup, but at $230 it won't require a bank loan just to get one.
MoreCES 2018: Kodak soars on KodakCoin and Bitcoin mining plans
8 hours ago
The US firm said it was teaming up with London-based Wenn Media Group to carry out the initial coin offering (ICO).
It is part of a blockchain-based initiative to help photographers control their image rights.
Kodak also detailed plans to install rows of Bitcoin mining rigs at its headquarters in Rochester, New York.
Details of this second scheme - which is being branded the Kodak KashMiner - were outlined at the CES tech show in Las Vegas.
Customers will pay up-front to rent mining capacity.
Kodak is the latest in a series of companies to see its value jump after revealing plans for blockchain-related activity.
"This is a phenomenon we saw back during the dot com days in the late 1990s where traditional companies would mention some kind of internet strategy and their stock price would jump up," commented Garrick Hileman from the University of Cambridge.
"When you see stock prices moving like this it does appear to be troubling - it's hard to say if there's a bubble but it certainly is indicative of a frothy investment market."
Kodak was famously slow to join the digital revolution, and
its hesitation to leave behind its film heritage cost the company its market.
Since its collapse in 2012, Kodak has licensed its brand to a variety of
manufacturers, with the mark appearing on batteries, printers, drones, tablet
computers and digital cameras.
The KashMiner operation will be run by Spotlite, a licensee that had
previously teamed up with Kodak to use its brand to market LED lights.
More
In rare showing, Google arrives at CES to battle Alexa and Siri
LAS VEGAS — More than 3,900 companies are on hand to show off their
latest technologies at CES this week, but there’s one giant name that stands
out from the pack: Google.
This is the first time in several years that the Mountain View, Calif.
titan has had a big, stand-alone
booth at the show and its presence not only
reflects the changing dynamic of the show, but also serves as a declaration of
war on the battlefield of digital assistants.
CES is changing from a show where you show up with the flashiest gadget. Now
there's a greater focus on creating partnerships between small and large
companies to make each product work within constellation of others to
help people get through the day more efficiently, said Gary Shapiro, chief
executive of the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts CES. Tech
giants want their assistants to be the glue of that life operating system — the
voice that helps you turn on your lights, power your car’s dashboard and
control everything from your shower head to your bed.
Having an official booth at CES, especially when its chief rival Amazon
doesn't, lets Google show off to potential buyers and signal that it's
ready to work with the world's top brands and interesting start-ups, analysts
said.
“Google’s presence at CES is equally designed to reach not only
consumers but also developer ecosystems as well,” said Werner Goertz, analyst
at Forrester Research.
More
Finally,
in non new gadget news, the chipmakers just can’t get a break from bad news.
January 9, 2018 / 4:46 PM
Microsoft says security patches slowing down PCs, servers
(Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) said on Tuesday that software patches
released to guard against microchip security threats slowed down some personal
computers and servers, with systems running on older Intel Corp (INTC.O) processors seeing a noticeable
decrease in performance.
The comments in a blog post were the clearest signal from Microsoft that fixes for flaws in microchips from Intel and rivals described last week could meaningfully degrade performance. The topic is of keen interest to large data centre operators, which could incur significant cost increases if computers slow down.
Microsoft also said that security updates froze some computers using chipsets from Intel rival AMD (AMD.O), dragging AMD’s shares down nearly 4 percent.
Shares in Intel, which reiterated on Tuesday that it saw no sign of significant slowdown in computers, fell 2.5 percent taking the loss since the issue surfaced last week to about 7 percent or around $15 billion in market value.
AMD shares have gained nearly 20 percent in the last week as investors speculated that the chipmaker could wrest market share from Intel, whose chips were most exposed to the security flaws.
----Internet and
networking equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) said in a security advisory updated
on Tuesday that it has identified 18 vulnerable products, including some of its
blade servers, rack servers and routers, and expects to have patches for
servers in about five weeks, on February 18. Cisco said it is also looking for
problems in nearly 30 other products, including switches and routers. The
majority of Cisco’s products were not vulnerable because they are “closed
systems that do not allow customers to run custom code on the device,” it said.
The memory corruption flaws, named Meltdown and Spectre, could allow hackers to
bypass operating systems and other security software to steal passwords or
encryption keys on most types of computers, phones and cloud-based servers.
More
Remember
that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in
prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
Socrates
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
No crooks or scoundrels today, just another warning
that the US economy is flying on fumes. It may not be the 1960s “as goes
America, so goes the world,” anymore, but it’s still close.
Economist James K. Galbraith isn’t celebrating Dow 25,000
Published: Jan 8, 2018 4:58 p.m. ET
Household sector can only drive economic growth for so long
Pardon James Galbraith if he sits out the celebration of Dow 25,000.University of Texas economist Galbraith, the son of the famous Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, believes mainstream economists and the Federal Reserve are too wedded to old ideas to see what is really going on in the economy. Specifically, Galbraith is worried that the consumer is the only game in town — and that can’t last.
Galbraith used his latest book “The End of Normal” to lay out his case that the 2007-08 financial crisis wasn’t just a brief interruption in the life of an otherwise healthy economy but instead the latest crisis for an economy that lost its footing back in the 1980s.
At the American Economic Association meeting in Philadelphia, MarketWatch asked Galbraith to share his views on the economic landscape.
MarketWatch: You are not so impressed by the economy. Are people just overlooking our problems because the Dow Jones Industrial Average keeps going higher and higher?
James Galbraith: The Dow DJIA, -0.05% is not a serious indicator of the condition of the economy. What we’ve had is a long but fairly slow expansion and a lot of reduction in the effective size of the labor force. Employment ratios have risen a little, but they are still way below where they were 10 or, for that matter, 20 years ago.
I think there are really major changes in the structure of the economy going forward. The share of business investment has been quite low, share of construction has been very low, and that means the economy is being driven increasingly by the consumer. The consumer is dependent upon the access to debt, auto loans, consumer loans and student loans. Those things will build up over time until such time as there is a crack and households decide that they no longer wish to access the credit — at which point this phase of the expansion will end.
It is a party that has to end?
I wouldn’t call it a party, because it is really not something that is
going on at any enormously rapid rate. But anything that is dependent on
household debt is going to end up running into problems sooner or later, and
that is the situation we’re in.
The Fed seems to be stumped by the lack of inflation.
There hasn’t been inflation in the economy since the early 1980s. It
collapsed with the end of the Soviet Union and with the rise of China as a
supplier for consumer goods. So the Fed has been patting itself on its back for
decades [of] holding back a phenomenon that doesn’t exist. [The Fed is like]
the little Dutch boy with the finger in the dike who never troubles himself to
look over the levy to see that the lake is dry. Economists have fed into that
with this completely made-up view that it is the central bank that drives the
inflation process — it is not.
More
Some things never change -
there will be another crisis, and its impact will be felt by the financial
markets.
Jamie Dimon
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?
Mexico’s Record Solar Prices Fall Below the Average Cost of Energy From Gas and Coal
Low costs will keep the market at the forefront of solar development in Latin America.
Jason
DeignJanuary
08, 2018
Low costs will keep Mexico at the vanguard of the Latin American solar
market, a region that will account for 11 percent of global PV demand by 2022.Latin America made up just 3 percent of global demand last year, but the region’s importance is set to soar, according to GTM Research's Global Solar Demand Monitor.
In the final quarter of 2017 alone, Latin America added a total of 3.4 gigawatts of capacity to country pipelines thanks to five auctions across Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico.
The auction system has seen average power-purchase agreement prices tumbling across the region. In Mexico, prices have dropped 76 percent, from $89 to $20.84 per megawatt-hour.
The average price achieved in Mexico’s latest auction is beneath the global blended levelized cost of energy for gas and coal, which ranges from around $40 to $80 per megawatt-hour. This is not the case with all Latin American markets, though.
Latin America sees some of the highest system-cost variations across
markets of any region in the world, according to GTM Research solar analyst
Manan Parikh. System costs can vary by as much as $0.35 per watt from one
country to another, he said.
These costs will continue dropping. However, because Latin American
module prices are dependent on demand dynamics in major markets, such as the
U.S. and China, decreases could be uneven.
In the first half of this year, for example, Brazilian and Mexican projects
could experience an uptick in system costs with a tightening of module supply.
From the second half of the year, in contrast, an oversupply of panels
is likely to lead to further decreases in system costs. Brazil may see system
costs breaking through the $1 per watt barrier by 2020.
Mexico is expected to have the lowest forecast system costs out to 2022,
said Parikh. In the coming years, Mexico will be “saving up to 50 percent on
soft costs relative to other major markets,” he said.
In addition to plummeting costs, Mexican project developers can take
advantage of a range of income opportunities to boost the profitability of
plants. They can sell any generation in excess of what is required by their
power-purchase agreement at nodal prices, for instance.
Alternatively, they can play in Mexico’s capacity market, or sell clean
energy certificates (certificados de energía limpia, or CELs) on the secondary
market.
More
Until Donald Trump got to
where he was, they said you'll never see a rich businessman who's never been in
politics be president. I clearly was wrong about that.
Jamie Dimon
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished December
DJIA: 24,719 +265 Up. NASDAQ: 6,903 +297 Up. SP500: 2,674 +199 Up.
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