Baltic Dry Index. 1219 +02 Brent Crude 70.42
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.More stock market mania again as we await President Trump’s big speech to America tomorrow night, the last Fed meeting under Chairwoman Janet Yellen, and a flood of earnings results from some of the bigwigs in the S&P 500.
Will President Trump
follow up his Davos success, by announcing another round in his trade
wars? Will the Fed get more hawkish in
2018? Is the US 10 year, and the dollar
signalling fear of the return of inflation. Is the mania over for the
cryptocurrency scam?
Just exactly how do you steal a non-existent “currency”
with a pretend value of zero to infinity? Isn’t it similar to rustling Unicorns?
Below, this morning’s
mania madness.
"In
economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension."
John Kenneth
Galbraith.
January 29, 2018 / 12:29 AM
Asia shares extend bull run, dollar huddles near lows
SYDNEY
(Reuters) - Asian shares extended their bull run on Monday amid upbeat
corporate earnings and strong global economic growth, while the dollar
struggled to bounce as the White House continued to complain of “unfair” trade
practices by competitors.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS added 0.26 percent, aiming for a 12th straight session of gains. It is up 8 percent for the year so far.
Japan's Nikkei .N225 rose 0.1 percent as the yen eased a little, while South Korea .KS11 notched a record.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng .HSI has been the best performer for the year so far with a rise of almost 11 percent, while Shanghai blue chips .CSI300 ran into profit-taking on Monday.
Spread betters tipped opening gains for the major European bourses, while E-Minis for the S&P 500 ESc1 were steady.
Wall Street has likewise been on a tear. Just last week, the Dow .DJI rose 2.08 percent, the S&P 500 .SPX 2.22 percent and the Nasdaq .IXIC 2.31 percent.
Quarterly earnings growth for the S&P 500 is estimated at 13.2 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data, up from 12 percent at the start of the year. Almost 80 percent of the 133 companies in the index that have reported beat forecasts.
Another 36 percent of the S&P 500 is due to report this week including heavy hitters Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.
----The rush to equities combined with the risk of faster global inflation, has been a major negative for sovereign bonds with yields rising across much of the developed world.
Yields on U.S. two-year Treasuries US2YT=RR have risen steadily to their
highest since 2008 and are fully priced for a rate hike by the Federal Reserve
in March.
Ten-year yields US10YT=RR broke above the range of the last week or so
to reach 2.69 percent on Monday, levels last visited in mid-2014.
The Fed holds its next meeting on Wednesday, the last for Chair Janet
Yellen, and analysts suspect the statement will only cement expectations for a
March move.
More
January 28, 2018 / 8:11 PM
Trump hints retaliation at 'very unfair' EU trade policies
LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump has
threatened to confront the European Union over what he calls “very unfair”
trade policy toward the United States.
Trump has demanded tougher enforcement of trade rules and
last week signed into law 30 percent tariffs on imported solar panels, among
the first unilateral trade restrictions made by the administration as part of a
broader protectionist agenda.
“I’ve had a lot of problems with European Union, and it may morph into
something very big from that standpoint, from a trade standpoint,” Trump said
in an interview with the British broadcaster ITV to be broadcast later on
Sunday.
”We cannot get our product in. It’s very, very tough. And yet they send
their product to us - no taxes, very little taxes. It’s very unfair.
“They’re not the only one, by the way. I could name many countries and
places that do. But the European Union has been very, very unfair to the United
States. And I think it will turn out to be very much to their detriment.”
Powell Era Arrives as Fed's Gradual Pace Looks Ripe for Rethink
By Craig Torres
Bankers at the forum in the Alps sounded more worried about asset bubbles,
and what happens when they pop, than an inflation rate that Fed officials have
regarded as too low and meriting a go-slow policy.
“Bubbles are building,” Axel Weber, UBS Group AG chairman and former
president of the German central bank, said in Davos. “The impact of this
current monetary policy on markets, rather than just on inflation, is something
central banks have to focus a bit more on at this point.”
Powell has an opportunity to refocus the message. Financial markets bet
that he continues Yellen’s “what-me-hurry?” approach to policy. There are good
reasons to be cautious. Central bankers don’t precisely know where the policy
rate begins to bite down on growth, and if they tighten too quickly they could
choke the upswing.
What has to change, some economists said, is the way that his Fed
signals responsiveness to economic conditions that could brighten more quickly
than expected.
“The issue is: Is the Fed nimble enough?” said Vincent Reinhart, chief
economist at Standish Mellon Asset Management in Boston and a former senior Fed
adviser. “They don’t give evidence of being data-dependent or making decisions
meeting by meeting.”
There are few successful examples of a central bank smoothly warning
markets it could shift to a more aggressive posture. The long shadow of the
Fed’s 2013 Taper Tantrum cautions against abrupt moves. Yields on U.S. 10-year
notes jumped by more than a percentage point over several weeks after then-Fed
chief Ben Bernanke said it would start trimming its monthly bond purchase program.
More
Massive Cryptocurrency Heist Spurs Call for More Regulation
By Yuji Nakamura and Andrea Tan
Updated on 29 January 2018, 05:45 GMT
At 2:57 a.m. on Friday morning in Tokyo, someone hacked into the digital
wallet of Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck Inc. and pulled off one of the biggest heists
in history.Three days later, the theft of nearly $500 million in digital tokens is still reverberating through cryptocurrency markets and policy circles around the world.
The episode, disclosed by Coincheck executives at a hastily arranged press conference on Friday night, has heightened calls for stricter oversight at a time when many governments are working out how to regulate the booming cryptocurrency exchange industry. Japanese policy makers began a new licensing system for the venues just a few months ago, and regulators in South Korea are debating whether to ban exchanges outright.
While Bitcoin and its ilk have recovered from their selloff on Friday -- thanks in part to Coincheck’s assurances over the weekend that customers would be partially reimbursed -- market observers say concerns over security lapses at cryptocurrency exchanges are likely to persist. They may even push some investors toward peer-to-peer methods of trading that don’t rely on centralized platforms.
“The latest theft will have two immediate effects: more regulation by authorities over exchanges and more recognition of the advantages offered by decentralized ways of trading,” said David Moskowitz, co-founder of Indorse Pte in Singapore, which runs a social network for blockchain enthusiasts.
On Monday, Japan’s Financial Services Agency ordered Coincheck to submit a report by Feb. 13 outlining the root causes of the debacle and its response to customers, and detailing how it intended to enhance risk management and internal controls.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-28/massive-cryptocurrency-heist-puts-spotlight-on-exchange-security
If all
else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
John Kenneth
Galbraith.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, the other side to bitcoin and blockchain
mania.
"a company for carrying
out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is". The South Sea Bubble 1720
“Blockchain” Stocks Collapse by 40% to 90%
by Wolf Richter • • 64
Comments
It’s not a pretty sight.
Short sellers are in Nirvana with these creatures that had surged by hundreds or even thousands of percent in days after they announced a switch to “blockchain” in their business model or added “Blockchain” to their name. Their shares are now crashing.I have written about a number of these outfits and their crazy share-price moves and their silly stock manipulation schemes on the way up. Now, not much later, here’s an update on how they’re doing on the way down.
UBI Blockchain International down 93% from the peak. UBIA had skyrocketed about 1,500% to $115 a share intraday by December 18, but has now – at $8.25 this morning – given up most of it.
This is a true gem. On January 9, the SEC halted trading in UBIA shares, citing two reasons: “accuracy” in UBI’s disclosures and very funny trading activity. This froze the share price at $22. The trading halt came 11 days after I’d lambasted the shenanigans by the company and its executives. On Tuesday (January 23), trading resumed – and the shares have since plunged to $8.25.
More
https://wolfstreet.com/2018/01/25/the-40-to-90-collapse-of-blockchain-stocks/
01.26.18
Perhaps you bought some illegal narcotics on the Silk Road half a decade ago, back when that digital black market for every contraband imaginable was still online and bustling. You might already regret that decision, for any number of reasons. After all, the four bitcoins you spent on that bag of hallucinogenic mushrooms would now be worth about as much as an Alfa Romeo. But one group of researchers wants to remind you of yet another reason to rue that transaction: If you weren't particularly careful in how you spent your cryptocurrency, the evidence of that drug deal may still be hanging around in plain view of law enforcement, even years after the Silk Road was torn off the dark web.
Researchers at Qatar University and the country's Hamad Bin Khalifa University earlier this week published findings that show just how easy it may be to dredge up evidence of years-old bitcoin transactions when spenders didn't carefully launder their payments. In well over 100 cases, they could connect someone's bitcoin payment on a dark web site to that person's public account. In more than 20 instances, they say, they could easily link those public accounts to transactions specifically on the Silk Road, finding even some purchasers' specific names and locations.
"The retroactive operational security of bitcoin is low," says Qatar University researcher Husam Al Jawaheri. "When things are recorded in the blockchain, you can go back in history and reveal this information, to break the anonymity of users."
Bitcoin's
privacy paradox has long been understood by its savvier users: Because the
cryptocurrency isn't controlled by any bank or government, it can be very
difficult to link anyone's real-world identity with their bitcoin stash. But
the public ledger of bitcoin transactions known as the blockchain also serves
as a record of every bitcoin transaction from one address to another. Find out
someone's address, and discovering who they're sending money to or receiving it
from becomes trivial, unless the spender takes pains to route those
transactions through intermediary addresses, or laundering services that
obscure the payment's origin and destination.
----To
do so, the Qatari researchers first collected dozens of bitcoin addresses used
for donations and dealmaking by websites protected by the anonymity software
Tor, run by everyone from WikiLeaks to the now-defunct Silk Road. Then they
scraped thousands of more widely visible bitcoin addresses from the public
accounts of users on Twitter and the popular bitcoin forum Bitcoin Talk.By merely searching for direct links between those two sets of addresses in the blockchain, they found more than 125 transactions made to those dark web sites' accounts—very likely with the intention of preserving the senders' anonymity—that they could easily link to public accounts.
Among those, 46 were donations to WikiLeaks. More disturbingly, 22 were payments to the Silk Road. Though they don't reveal many personal details of those 22 individuals, the researchers say that some had publicly revealed their locations, ages, genders, email addresses, or even full names. (One user who fully identified himself was only a teenager at the time of the transactions.) And the 18 people whose Silk Road transactions were linked to Bitcoin Talk may be particularly vulnerable, since that forum has previously responded to subpoeanas demanding that it unmask a user's registration details or private messages. "You have irrefutable evidence mapping this profile to this hidden service," says Yazan Boshmaf, another of the study's authors.
The researchers point out that they used only easily spotted addresses and simple matching techniques. They didn't exploit, for instance, methods that other researchers have proposed for making less obvious connections between bitcoin addresses that identify "clusters" of addresses associated with dark web black markets. Nor could they use the means available to law enforcement to compel online services like the popular bitcoin wallet company Coinbase to cough up secret bitcoin addresses. "Our analysis shows a lower bound of what can be found," Boshmaf says. More well-resourced and motivated hunters could potentially trace even more would-be anonymous bitcoin spenders, even years later.
More
01.25.17
Monero, the Drug Dealer's Cryptocurrency of Choice, Is on Fire
Opinion: Bitcoin and blockchain’s broken promises
Published: Jan 26, 2018 10:58 a.m. ET
Cryptocurrencies aren’t going to change the world, Nouriel Roubini says
NEW YORK (Project Syndicate) — The financial-services industry has been undergoing a revolution. But the driving force is not overhyped blockchain applications such as bitcoin. It is a revolution built on artificial intelligence, big data, and the internet of things.Already, thousands of real businesses are using these technologies to disrupt every aspect of financial intermediation. Dozens of online-payment services — PayPal, Alipay, WeChat Pay, Venmo, and so forth — have hundreds of millions of daily users.
And financial institutions are making precise lending decisions in seconds rather than weeks, thanks to a wealth of online data on individuals and firms. With time, such data-driven improvements in credit allocation could even eliminate cyclical credit-driven booms and busts.
Similarly, insurance underwriting, claims assessment and management, and fraud monitoring have all become faster and more precise. And actively managed portfolios are increasingly being replaced by passive robo-advisers, which can perform just as well or better than conflicted, high-fee financial advisers.
Now, compare this real and ongoing fintech revolution with the record of blockchain, which has existed for almost a decade, and still has only one application: cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain’s boosters would argue that its early days resemble the early days of the internet, before it had commercial applications. But that comparison is simply false. Whereas the internet quickly gave rise to email, the World Wide Web, and millions of viable commercial ventures used by billions of people, cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin do not even fulfill their own stated purpose.
As a currency, bitcoin should be a serviceable unit of account, means of payments, and a stable store of value. It is none of those things. No one prices anything in bitcoin. Few retailers accept it. And it is a poor store of value, because its price BTCUSD, +4.57% can fluctuate by 20% to 30% in a single day.
Worse, cryptocurrencies in general are based on a false premise.
According to its promoters, bitcoin has a steady-state supply of 21 million units, so it cannot be debased like fiat currencies. But that claim is clearly fraudulent, considering that it has already forked off into three branches: bitcoin cash, litecoin, and bitcoin gold. Besides, hundreds of other cryptocurrencies are invented every day, alongside scams known as “initial coin offerings,” which are mostly designed to skirt securities laws. So “stable” cryptos are creating money supply and debasing it at a much faster pace than any major central bank ever has.
As is typical of a financial bubble, investors are buying cryptocurrencies not to use in transactions, but because they expect them to increase in value. Indeed, if someone actually wanted to use bitcoin, they would have a hard time doing so. It is so energy-intensive (and thus environmentally toxic) to produce, and carries such high transaction costs, that even bitcoin conferences do not accept it as a valid form of payment.
Until now, bitcoin’s only real use has been to facilitate illegal activities such as drug transactions, tax evasion, avoidance of capital controls, or money laundering. Not surprisingly, G-20 member states are now working together to regulate cryptocurrencies and eliminate the anonymity they supposedly afford, by requiring that all income- or capital-gains-generating transactions be reported.
After a crackdown by Asian regulators this month, cryptocurrency values fell by 50% from their December peak. They would have collapsed much more had a vast scheme to prop up their price via outright manipulation not been rapidly implemented. But, like in the case of the sub-prime bubble, most U.S. regulators are still asleep at the wheel.
Since the invention of money thousands of years ago, there has never been a monetary system with hundreds of different currencies operating alongside one another. The entire point of money is that it allows parties to transact without having to barter. But for money to have value, and to generate economies of scale, only so many currencies can operate at the same time.
In the U.S., the reason we do not use euros or yen in addition to dollars is obvious: doing so would be pointless, and it would make the economy far less efficient. The idea that hundreds of cryptocurrencies could viably operate together not only contradicts the very concept of money; it is utterly idiotic.
More
"As fewer and fewer people
have confidence in paper as a store of value, the price of gold will continue
to rise. The history of fiat money is little more than a register of monetary
follies and inflations. Our present age merely affords another entry in this
dismal register." Hans F. Sennholz
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?
Graphene oxide is ‘sensed’ by specialized cells of the immune system
Date:
January 26, 2018
Source:
Karolinska Institutet
Summary:
A new study shows that our immune system handles graphene oxide in a manner
similar to pathogens, paving the way for safer biomedical applications of this
two-dimensional material.
A study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet, the University of Manchester
and Chalmers University of Technology published in CHEM shows that our immune
system handles graphene oxide in a manner similar to pathogens, paving the way
for safer biomedical applications of this two-dimensional material.
Graphene is the thinnest material known to man, a million times thinner
than a human hair. Graphene oxide (GO), in turn, is an atomically thin material
consisting only of carbon and oxygen atoms. GO is currently being considered
for numerous uses including drug delivery and other medical applications.
However, it is of critical importance to understand how these materials
interact with the body.
In a new study led by Professor Bengt Fadeel at the Institute of
Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, it is shown that neutrophils,
the most common type of white blood cell that is specialised in combating
infections, release so-called neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) when
encountering GO. NETs are made up of a "spider-web" of DNA decorated
with proteins that help neutrophils to destroy microorganisms such as bacteria
and fungi. The researchers found that GO causes specific changes in the lipid
composition of the cell membrane of neutrophils leading to the release of NETs.
They could also show that antioxidant treatment reversed this process. In a
companion study published in Nanoscale, it was shown that GO is degraded in
NETs, much like bacteria and other pathogens.
"Taken together, these studies show that GO can be trapped and
degraded in NETs just like pathogens. Understanding how the immune system
senses and handles GO paves the way for safer biomedical applications of GO and
other graphene-based materials, for instance in the context of drug
delivery," says Professor Bengt Fadeel.
More
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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