Baltic Dry Index. 1129 +04 Brent Crude 69.44
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for
merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the
public, or in some contrivance to raise prices…. But though the law cannot
hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to
do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary.
Adam Smith, The Wealth Of
Nations, 1776.
The Democrats in Washington having blinked, the
government shut down in America ended, well at least for another two and a half
weeks. Asia went back to business as
usual, excepting for heavy snowfall in Tokyo. President Trump got on with the business
of picking his golf outfit for Davos, where playing with the usual white golf ball
is considered unwise. He also took time out to impose U.S. tariffs on dishwashers
(electric,) and solar panels.
Below, how the world yawned at the US
closure.
Asian Stocks Reach Fresh Record High; Oil Climbs: Markets Wrap
By Adam Haigh and Brian Chappatta
22 January 2018, 22:17 GMT Updated
on 23 January 2018, 03:35 GMT
Asian stocks climbed to record highs Tuesday on optimism on corporate
earnings and after the U.S. government shutdown moved toward an end. The
yen strengthened as the Bank of Japan kept its monetary stimulus unchanged as
expected.
Equities in Japan, Australia, Hong Kong and South Korea advanced
following the S&P 500 Index’s rise to a record as Congress voted to
end the government shutdown after three days. The dollar traded near lows
for the year, while 10-year Treasury yields held near 2014 highs. The Taiwan
dollar jumped to its strongest since January 2013.
The Bank of Japan left its policy settings unchanged, as forecast by all
43 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Investors will scrutinize comments from
the BOJ’s governor at his news conference at 3:30 p.m. Tokyo time for any sign
that the central bank is closer to joining global peers in dialing back
ultra-loose monetary policy.
Meanwhile, traders have responded positively so far to the flurry of
results due this week from Japanese, European and U.S. companies. Netflix Inc.
soared having posted its biggest quarter ever. Wynn Macau Ltd. gained 5 percent
after reporting stronger-than-expected results. However, LG Electronics Inc.
was among those underperforming thanks to the Trump administration’s latest protectionist
moves, slapping tariffs on imports of dishwashers and solar products.
Elsewhere, West Texas Intermediate crude
climbed toward $64 a barrel after OPEC and Russia said output cuts will
continue until the end of the year. Bitcoin was drifting around $10,800.
more
Trump's Solar Tariffs Mark Biggest Blow to Renewables Yet
By Brian Eckhouse, Ari Natter, and Chris Martin
22 January 2018, 21:45 GMT Updated
on 23 January 2018, 00:19 GMT
President Donald Trump just dealt his biggest blow to the renewable energy
industry yet.On Monday, Trump approved duties of as much as 30 percent on solar equipment made abroad, a move that threatens to handicap a $28 billion industry that relies on parts made abroad for 80 percent of its supply. Just the mere threat of tariffs has shaken solar developers in recent months, with some hoarding panels and others stalling projects in anticipation of higher costs. The Solar Energy Industries Association has projected 23,000 job losses this year in a sector that employed 260,000.
The tariffs are just the latest action Trump has taken that undermine the
economics of renewable energy. The administration has already decided to pull
the U.S. out of the international Paris climate agreement, rolled back
Obama-era regulations on power plant-emissions and passed sweeping tax reforms
that constrained financing for solar and wind. The import taxes, however, will
prove to be the most targeted strike on the industry yet and may have larger
consequences for the energy world.
“We are inclined to view it as posing greater trade risk for all types
of energy, particularly if other nations establish new trade barriers against
U.S. products,” Washington-based research firm ClearView Energy Partners LLC
said in a report Monday.
U.S. panel maker First Solar Inc. jumped 9 percent to $75.20 in after-hours trading in New York. The Tempe, Arizona-based manufacturer stands to gain as costs for competing, foreign panels rise.
Trump approved four years of tariffs that start at 30 percent in the first year and gradually drop to 15 percent. The first 2.5 gigawatts of imported solar cells are exempt for each year, the president said in an emailed statement.
The duties are lower than the 35 percent rate the U.S. International Trade Commission recommended in October after finding that imported panels were harming American manufacturers. The idea behind the tariffs is to raise the costs of cheap imports, particularly from Asia, and level the playing field for those who manufacture the parts domestically.
----The duties won’t be entirely devastating for the U.S. solar industry, said Hugh Bromley, a New York-based analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. He estimated they’ll increase costs for large solar farms by less than 10 percent. The expense of a residential system, he said, will rise by about 3 percent.
The decision will “destruct some demand for new projects in the next two
years,” Bromley said. “But they will likely prove insufficient
in magnitude and duration to attract many new factories.”
More
It is the maxim of every prudent master of a
family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make
than to buy...What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can
scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.
Adam Smith, The Wealth Of
Nations. 1776.
And so on to the Great Fix in Davos, where
President Trump is due on Friday to announce exactly how all attending will Make
America Great Again.
Davos Warns Not to Get Too Complacent While World Economy Picks Up
By Enda Curran and Alessandro Speciale
22 January 2018, 17:30 GMT Updated
on 23 January 2018, 05:50 GMT
Enjoy the party while it lasts: That was the opening day message for the
corporate and political leaders attending the World Economic Forum’s annual
meeting.
Booming stock markets and the best global economic growth in seven years
are fueling record levels of optimism among chief executives, according to a
survey released by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP late Monday in Davos,
Switzerland.
But just hours earlier, the International Monetary Fund used the gathering to argue that while the outlook for this year and the next was better than previously anticipated, a recession may be closer than many acknowledge and that investors and policy makers should guard against complacency.
The combination of optimism and caution will set the tone for a week of meetings a decade after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression wrong-footed Davos delegates. Among the current risks: potential irrational exuberance in financial markets, surging debt in China and elsewhere as well as political flash points from Brexit to North Korea.
“The bull market seems to be
steamrollering over everyone who has a bearish view,” said Tim Adams, president
of the Institute of
International Finance who will be in Davos. “But there’s a lot of
complacency. There are termites in the foundation and a number of those are
gnawing away at night.”
It’s a conflicted backdrop for world leaders and global executives
gathering for the meetings that this year will host U.S. President Donald
Trump, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel
Macron, along with many leading CEOs.
In some ways the Davos meeting should be a cause for celebration. After
years of sluggish growth, the world economy is finally taking off. The IMF
upgraded its outlook for this year and the next by 0.2 percentage point each,
pushing its forecast for worldwide expansion for both 2018 and 2019 to 3.9
percent, the highest level since 2011. Trump’s recent tax cut was cited as one
reason for the pickup.
The lender said the global recovery now under way is the broadest in
seven years, with gross domestic product rising last year in 120 countries
which together account for three-quarters of world output.
More
Finally, in cryptocurrency news, initial coin
offerings may already be obsolete. “We wuz robbed,” say some of the early
investors. Caveat emptor. South Korea takes away the veil.
January 22, 2018 / 2:13 PM
Top Swiss cryptocurrency lawyer questions 'stupid' ICO structure
ZURICH (Reuters) - One of the top lawyers
in the booming cryptocurrency industry says the legal structure he helped set
up to raise funds for new virtual currencies is “old, inflexible and stupid”
and may no longer be fit for purpose.
The Swiss lawyer’s comments come as regulators around the world increase
their scrutiny of initial coin offerings (ICOs), the digital fundraisers that
precede a currency’s launch.
There is also growing scrutiny from investors. The Zug-based Tezos
Foundation is facing U.S. class-action lawsuits from those who say they were
misled and defrauded in its ICO.
Luka Mueller’s MME law firm helped set up foundations in Switzerland for
Tezos and some of the world’s biggest ICOs, including those of Bancor and
Ethereum. Many foundations applied for non-profit tax status. The money raised
in the ICO is treated as a donation that may not be returned.
Regulators in the United States, the UK, and elsewhere are looking at
whether an ICO should have similar investor protection to an initial public
offering (IPO) for a company.
Mueller told Reuters cryptocurrency groups involving U.S. participants
or gaining backing from investors should set up companies instead of the Swiss
foundations he helped popularize.
“If you structure your token sale in a way that it would look like an
initial public offering, then even if you launch a (blockchain) protocol, the
foundation is maybe not suitable,” he said.
“If...the background is more an investor environment rather than a
technical environment, yes, do all the registrations. If you want to sell it,
if you want to be active and actively promoting it in the US, apply U.S. law.”
He said a foundation could still work for ICOs if a project is of
interest mainly to technical experts rather than investors.
----ICOs skyrocketed in 2017, reaching nearly $3 billion through September. Switzerland attracted around a quarter of the world’s ICOs with nearly $650 million raised there in the first nine months of 2017, according to data compiled by cryptocurrency research firm Smith + Crown.
Blockchain groups have set up foundations in the Swiss “Crypto Valley,”
but the model has also loosely been exported elsewhere including to the
Seychelles, Mauritius and Singapore.
Tezos aims to be a blockchain that’s more reliable than the ones behind
bitcoin and ether. Its foundation raised $232 million last July.
It is now facing at least half a dozen class-action lawsuits in the
United States. The plaintiffs are seeking a refund as well as damages.
They made non-refundable donations and expected to receive tokens called
Tezzies when the network launched. But a former board member said the project
is in a state of paralysis because of the lawsuits and a dispute between the
developers and the foundation’s president. The network has not yet launched.
More
January 23, 2018 / 2:08 AM
South Korea to ban cryptocurrency traders from using anonymous bank accounts
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea will ban the
use of anonymous bank accounts in cryptocurrency trading from Jan. 30,
regulators said on Tuesday in a widely telegraphed move designed to stop
virtual coins from being used for money laundering and other crimes.
The measure comes on top of stepped up efforts by Seoul to temper South Koreans’ obsession with cryptocurrencies. Everyone from housewives to college students and office workers have rushed to trade the market despite warnings from global policymakers about investing in an asset that lacks broad regulatory oversight.
The bitcoin price in South Korea extended loss following the latest regulatory announcement, down 3.34 percent at $12,699 as of 0409 GMT, according to Bithumb, the country’s second-largest virtual currency exchange.
Bitcoin BTC=BTSP slumped nearly 20 percent last week to a four-week low on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange, pressured by worries over a possible ban on trading the virtual asset in South Korean exchanges. In Tuesday afternoon trade, it was up 5.4 percent at $10,925.
----Starting Jan. 30, cryptocurrency
traders in South Korea will not be allowed to make deposits into their virtual
currency exchange wallets unless the names on their bank accounts matches the
account name in cryptocurrency exchanges, Kim Yong-beom, vice chairman of the
Financial Services Commission told a news conference in Seoul.
More
By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very
good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of
them at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be
brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the
importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and
burgundy in Scotland?
Adam Smith, The Wealth Of
Nations. 1776.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, haven’t we been here before?
Is the Fed already way to far behind the curve?
There is no art which one government sooner learns
of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.
Adam Smith. The Wealth Of
Nations, 1776.
This Rare Bear Who Called the Crash Warns Housing Is Too Hot Again
By Prashant Gopal
22 January 2018, 10:00 GMT
When real estate investors get this confident, money manager James Stack
gets nervous.U.S. home prices are surging to new records. Homebuilder stocks last year outperformed all other groups. And bears? They’re now an endangered species.
Stack, 66, who manages $1.3 billion for people with a high net worth, predicted the housing crash in 2005, just before prices reached their peak. Now, from his perch in Whitefish, Montana, he says his “Housing Bubble Bellwether Barometer” of homebuilder and mortgage company stocks, which jumped 80 percent in the past year, once again is flashing red.
“It is 2005 all over again in terms of the valuation extreme, the psychological excess and the denial,” said Stack, whose fireproof files of newspaper articles on bear markets date back to 1929. “People don’t believe housing is in a bubble and don’t want to hear talk about prices being a little bit bubblish.”
Bubble? What Bubble?
As the housing market approaches its key spring selling season, Stack is practically alone in his wariness. While price gains may slow, most analysts see no end in sight for the six-year-old recovery.There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. The housing needs of two massive generations -- millennials aging into homeownership and baby boomers getting ready for retirement -- are expected to fuel demand for years to come if employment remains strong. Sales in master-planned communities, many of which target buyers who are at least 55, reached a record last year, according to John Burns Real Estate Consulting. Last month, a gauge of confidence from the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo rose to the highest level in 18 years, and starts of single-family homes in November were the strongest in a decade.
“As soon as homes are finished, they’re flying off the shelf,” said Matthew Pointon, Capital Economics Ltd.’s U.S. property economist.
More
Fed Scared to Death of Causing Global Financial Crash – Nomi Prins
Two time, best-selling author Nomi Prins says central bankers
have no idea how to stop the easy money policies that they started after the
financial meltdown of 2008. Prins explains, “So, when the Fed says they are
going to remove assets from their $4.5 trillion book by not reinvesting the
interest payment . . . the reality is they haven’t really done that. They
have reduced their book by about $10 billion off of $4.5 trillion since they
mentioned they were going to start ‘tapering.” The media discusses this
as a major tightening move.
Somehow all of our economies
have finally worked because of central bank activity. Growth is
real. It’s all positive. The markets are evidence of that because
of the levels they are at; and, therefore, these central banks, starting with
the Fed, are going to reverse course of these last 10 years. The reality
is if you look at the actual activity of the central banks, beyond the Fed
raising rates by a little bit, there hasn’t been and there isn’t being a
reversal of course because they are scared to death that too much of a reversal is
going to cause a major crash throughout the financial system.
Everything is connected. All the banks are
connected. Money flows around the world in less than nanoseconds, and all
of it has the propensity to collapse if that carpet the central banks have
created is dragged from beneath the floor of all this activity.”Prins, who just
finished traveling the globe to research her upcoming book, thinks there is one
big thing that can take the entire system down. Prins, a former top Wall Street
banker, contends, “There hasn’t been any real growth in the real economy.
That is an indication of the misfire of this entire plan.
There has been tremendous growth in stock markets and bond
markets. If you look at localities or states or governments whose debt to
GDP levels are well over 100%, in Japan it’s over 200%, in the United States it
over 100%, and this is the same throughout the world. These are levels
that they have never been, and they are all at their historic highs.
That’s why debt will ultimately be the destructor of the system. In order
for that to happen, the cheapness of money that allow states, municipalities
and corporations to continue to borrow at these cheap levels has to go away. .
. .
At some point, there will be a mistake. There might be a
tiny smidge of an interest rate hike at some central bank, probably the Fed,
which ripples throughout the system as a mistake, not because real growth has
happened, and that’s why interest rates have been raised. That will incur
defaults throughout the system. People will incur personal defaults, and
that will cause problems in the mortgage market . . . then it becomes a
knock-on credit crisis, and then banks start not to lend . . . . Then we have
the makings of a broad crisis.”
Prins doesn’t think we get a crash in 2018, but warns when the markets
crash, “they will come down fast.”
So, how is Prins protecting herself? Prins says, “I’m buying gold. . . .
I would also be a buyer of silver because silver is a used hard asset, and it’s
at really cheap levels right now. I would be a buyer as a percentage of
my portfolio. I have done exactly what I am telling you is a good idea to
do, which is to take money from the stock market and put it into hard assets.”
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?
2d tin (stanene) without buckling: A possible topological insulator
Date:
January 19, 2018
Source:
Nagoya University
Summary:
Researchers produce 2D sheets of tin atoms predicted to have exotic uses in
electronics.
Nagoya University-led researchers produce 2D sheets of tin atoms
predicted to have exotic uses in electronics.
Sometimes it pays to be two-dimensional. The merits of graphene, a 2D
sheet of carbon atoms, are well established. In its wake have followed a host
of "post-graphene materials" -- structural analogues of graphene made
of other elements like silicon or germanium.
Now, an international research team led by Nagoya University (Japan)
involving Aix-Marseille University (France), the Max Planck Institute in
Hamburg (Germany) and the University of the Basque country (Spain) has unveiled
the first truly planar sample of stanene: single sheets of tin (Sn) atoms.
Planar stanene is hotly tipped as an extraordinary electrical conductor for
high technology.
Just as graphene differs from ordinary graphite, so does stanene behave
very differently to humble tin in bulk form. Because of relatively strong
spin-orbit interactions for electrons in heavy elements, single-layer tin is
predicted to be a "topological insulator," also known as a quantum
spin Hall (QSH) insulator. Materials in this remarkable class are electrically
insulating in their interiors, but have highly conductive surfaces/edges. This,
in theory, makes a single-layered topological insulator an ideal wiring
material for nanoelectronics. Moreover, the highly conductive channels at the
edge of these materials can carry special chiral currents with spins locked
with transport directions, which makes them also very appealing for spintronics
applications.
In previous studies, where stanene was grown on substrates of bismuth
telluride or antimony, the tin layers turned out to be highly buckled and
relatively inhomogeneous. The Nagoya team instead chose silver (Ag) as their
host -- specifically, the Ag(111) crystal facet, whose lattice constant is
slightly larger than that of the freestanding stanene, leading to the formation
of flattened tin monolayer in a large area, one step closer to the scalable
industrial applications.
----Planar
stanene has exciting prospects in electronics and computing. "The QSH
effect is rather delicate, and most topological insulators only show it at low
temperatures," according to project team leader Guy Le Lay at
Aix-Marseille University. "However, stanene is predicted to adopt a QSH
state even at room temperature and above, especially when functionalized with
other elements. In the future, we hope to see stanene partnered up with
silicene in computer circuitry. That combination could drastically speed up
computational efficiency, even compared with the current cutting-edge
technology."
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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