Baltic Dry Index. 1191 +06 Brent Crude 67.47
John Kenneth Galbraith.
Today all eyes are on
Washington District of Crooks, and Fed Chairman Powell’s big day. Global markets are anticipating nothing but a
Powell Put. Goldilocks may have been savaged earlier in the month by the bears,
but Mr. Powell has to say that she survived and is doing well in recovery. Any
hint that she died and got eaten in early February, and that the three bears
are out on the loose and looking for desert, and February’s month end will turn
into a rout.
Of course Chairman Powell
is well aware of all this, and so everyone and their dog is out betting on
Goldilocks again. Chairman Powell and the rest of the Fedster’s are well and
truly over Wall Street’s barrel, which is exactly how Wall Streeters like it.
They wouldn’t have it any other way. But are they right?
February 27, 2018 / 1:14 AM
Asian shares rise to three-week high ahead of Powell's testimony
TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares extended their recovery on
Tuesday, hitting a three-week high as U.S. borrowing costs eased ahead of
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s highly-anticipated first congressional
testimony later in the day.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan
rose 0.5 percent, building on its bounce from a two-month low touched on Feb.
9.
It has now recouped more than 60 percent of its losses from a sharp
global rout in early February.
Japan’s Nikkei rose 1.0 percent to three-week highs.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 advanced 1.18 percent on Monday helped
by fall in U.S. bond yields.[.N]
The 10-year U.S. Treasuries yield eased to 2.864 percent, dropping
further from its four-year peak of 2.957 percent touched on Feb 21, driven by
month-end buying as well as position adjustments ahead of Powell’s testimony.
Powell’s debut appearance is seen as critical for financial markets at a
time when many investors are nervous about the Fed’s policy normalization
following years of stimulus after the financial crisis almost a decade ago.
It has now recouped more than 60 percent of its losses from a sharp
global rout in early February.
Japan’s Nikkei rose 1.0 percent to three-week highs.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 advanced 1.18 percent on Monday helped
by fall in U.S. bond yields.[.N]
The 10-year U.S. Treasuries yield eased to 2.864 percent, dropping
further from its four-year peak of 2.957 percent touched on Feb 21, driven by
month-end buying as well as position adjustments ahead of Powell’s testimony.
Powell’s debut appearance is seen as critical for financial markets at a
time when many investors are nervous about the Fed’s policy normalization
following years of stimulus after the financial crisis almost a decade ago.
More
Powell Faces Policy ‘Combativeness’ in Riskier Post-Yellen World
By Craig Torres
Updated on 27 February 2018, 05:01 GMT
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s embrace of his predecessor’s
gradual approach to tightening monetary policy is about to be tested.
Since Powell accepted President Donald Trump’s nomination almost four
months ago, the near-term outlook has changed significantly.
Financial volatility has awakened, and a booming stock market has shown
it can also go down. A $1.5 trillion tax package is adding stimulus to the U.S.
economy at a time of very low unemployment and solid growth, a trend that could
red-line demand and kick up a central banker’s worst enemy -- inflation. The
government wants to test the limits of the world’s appetite for its debt, a
boost in supply that’s putting upward pressure on market interest rates.
For Powell, who delivers his first congressional testimony as Fed chairman on Tuesday, there’s suddenly a lot more political and economic risks testing the new leader from the outset.
“In this environment, you will have more combativeness between fiscal and monetary policy,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton in Chicago. “Debt-financed fiscal stimulus is hitting the accelerator on growth at the very moment the Fed was attempting to tap on the brakes.”
Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen pursued a policy of ultra-patience, letting the economy work through headwinds of tight credit and weak confidence. She raised benchmark lending rate just five times over her four-year tenure. She also exploited a period of low inflation to test the limits of labor market slack.
Fed’s Quarles Raises Hope for Faster, Sustained U.S. Growth Pace
The margin Powell faces to continue to run the economy hot is slimmer. The unemployment rate was 4.1 percent last month and forecasters expect it to drop into the 3s this year. The debate inside the Fed will intensify over the pace of tightening. Policy makers penciled in three hikes in December, but just a few weeks later they boosted their outlook for growth, according to minutes from the January Federal Open Market Committee meeting.
More
Fed Gauges of Factories’ Pricing Power Add to Signs of Inflation
By Vince Golle
More
and more U.S. factories are getting some pricing power back.
Robust orders for business equipment, steady consumer spending and
improving economies around the world have stoked demand for raw materials. An
acceleration in prices of just about everything from chemicals and fuel to
lumber and metals has been in train for months. More recently, some producers
have shown a greater ability to pass those costs onto their customers, based on
the latest data from regional Federal Reserve banks.
Having more success in passing along higher input costs may be good news
for Americans’ paychecks. as it gives companies the wherewithal to boost pay
while ensuring profit margins don’t erode. At the same time, inflation also
eats into consumers’ purchasing power, and concerns about faster price gains
fueled big drops in stocks and Treasuries earlier this month.
An unidentified respondent in the most recent survey of manufacturers in the Kansas City Fed District, released on Feb. 22, said materials prices seem to be on the cusp of increasing significantly. And with qualified workers harder to find, inflation is on the way, according to the comment.
The largest recent increases in input costs are petroleum based, with diesel prices having surged more than 43 percent in the past 12 months. But the jump isn’t confined to energy. Lumber, chemicals, plastics, paints and scrap metal are among the biggest year-over-year price gainers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
----A firming up of the world economy is also
helping to propel materials prices higher. A recent JPMorgan Chase &
Co. survey of leaders of mid-size U.S. companies showed 69 percent were upbeat about global
prospects this year, more than double the 30 percent who said so in 2017. Such
optimism helps explain a surge in metals futures over the past year.
More
BlackRock Has It Wrong on U.S. Stocks, Russell Investments Says
By Cormac MullenThe strong earnings momentum in U.S. stocks championed by BlackRock is actually a cause for concern to Russell’s Wouter Sturkenboom, senior investment strategist at the $297 billion asset manager. It raises the hurdle for positive profit surprises and the earnings revisions ratio highlighted in the BlackRock note doesn’t have a great track record as a leading indicator of returns, he said.
“While we admire the strategists at BlackRock and other industry pundits who share this view” on U.S. stocks, he wrote in a blog post, “we respectfully disagree.”
For Sturkenboom, the U.S. government’s fiscal stimulus will increase inflation, grow the budget deficit and cause interest rates to move higher. This poses a risk to valuation multiples, he said, an expansion of which has been behind much of the strong returns in U.S. stocks in recent years.
“The chart clearly shows the majority of return has come from a change
in valuation, which the recent selloff did not really impact at all,” he wrote
in a blog post. “As a result, we take the risk of higher inflation, interest
rates and monetary policy uncertainty much more seriously.”
While BlackRock’s global chief investment strategist, Richard Turnill,
also noted the risk to multiples in his note, he argued earnings growth matters
more than valuations over shorter-time horizons at this stage of the economic
cycle.
The strategists also differ in their views on Europe. BlackRock
downgraded its view on European stocks to neutral, while for Russell
Investments they are the “clear” preference over their U.S. peers.
Europe has strong economic growth, expanding corporate margins and
“virtually nonexistent” inflation risk, according to Sturkenboom. Monetary
policy is expansionary and expected to stay that way for the foreseeable
future.
More
Economics is
extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
John
Kenneth Galbraith
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, another day, another cryptocurrency scandal.
This one ought to be good.
Cary Grant. To Catch A Thief.
Self-Proclaimed Bitcoin Inventor Accused of Swindling $5 Billion of Cryptocurrency
By Jef Feeley
Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed inventor of
bitcoin, is accused of swindling more than $5 billion worth of the
cryptocurrency and other assets from the estate of a computer-security expert.
Wright, who claimed in 2016 that he created the computer-based currency
under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, allegedly schemed to use phony contracts
and signatures to lay claim to bitcoins mined by colleague Dave Kleiman,
another cryptocurrency adherent, who died in 2013, according to a lawsuit filed
by Kleinman’s brother.
Kleiman’s family contends they own the rights to more than 1 million
Bitcoins and blockchain technologies Kleiman mined and developed during his
lifetime and that the assets’ value exceeds $5 billion, according to the Feb.
14 filing in federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida.
“Craig forged a series of contracts that purported to transfer Dave’s
assets to Craig and/or companies controlled by him,’’ lawyers for Kleiman’s
family said in the complaint. “Craig backdated these contracts and forged
Dave’s signature on them.’’
Wright, an Australian who lives in London, couldn’t immediately be
reached for comment on the suit, which also accuses the entrepreneur of
violating partnership duties to Kleiman and unjustly enriching himself at his
colleague’s expense. There is no attorney listed for Wright on the docket.
Wright and Kleiman formed a Florida-based company, W&K Info Defense
Research LLC, in 2011 to focus on cybersecurity, according to the court filing.
The pair also had earlier worked together on the development of Bitcoin and had
extensive mining operations, according to the family’ s lawsuit.
The pair controlled as many as 1.1 million Bitcoins at the time of
Kleiman’s death, according to the suit. They were held trusts set up in
Singapore, the Seychelles Islands and the U.K., the suit says.
Wright said in a 2016 blog post and interviews that he was the main
participant in a team that developed the original Bitcoin software under the
pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. After skeptics questioned the claims, Wright said
that he decided not to present any further evidence to prove that he is the
creator of Bitcoin.
In the filing, Kleiman’s brother includes what he says is email traffic
between himself and Wright in which the entrepreneur indicates he may have been
holding 300,000 of Kleiman’s Bitcoins.
Dave “mentioned that you had 1 million Bitcoins in the trust and since
you said he has 300,000 as his part,’’ the computer expert’s brother wrote. “I
was figuring the other 700,000 is yours,” he added in the email. “Is that correct?”
“Around that,” Wright wrote back. “Minus what was needed for the
company’s use.”
The case is Ira Kleiman v. Craig Wright, No. 18-cv-80176, U.S. District
Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Henry Hazlitt
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?
Reinventing the inductor
Materials-based approach yields a smaller, higher-performing alternative to the classic design
Date:
February 21, 2018
Source:
University of California - Santa Barbara
Summary:
A basic building block of modern technology, inductors are everywhere:
cellphones, laptops, radios, televisions, cars. And surprisingly, they are
essentially the same today as in 1831, when they were first created by English
scientist Michael Faraday. Now, a team has taken a materials-based approach to
reinventing this fundamental component of modern electronics.
The particularly large size of inductors made according to Faraday's
design are a limiting factor in delivering the miniaturized devices that will
help realize the potential of the Internet of Things, which promises to connect
people to some 50 billion objects by 2020. That lofty goal is expected to have
an estimated economic impact between $2.7 and $6.2 trillion annually by 2025.
Now, a team at UC Santa Barbara, led by Kaustav Banerjee, a professor in
the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has taken a
materials-based approach to reinventing this fundamental component of modern
electronics. The findings appear in the journal Nature Electronics.
Banerjee and his UCSB team -- lead author Jiahao Kang, Junkai Jiang,
Xuejun Xie, Jae Hwan Chu and Wei Liu, all members of his Nanoelectronics
Research Lab -- worked with colleagues from Shibaura Institute of Technology in
Japan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China to exploit the phenomenon of
kinetic inductance to demonstrate a fundamentally different kind of inductor.
All inductors generate both magnetic and kinetic inductance, but in
typical metal conductors, the kinetic inductance is so small as to be
unnoticeable. "The theory of kinetic inductance has long been known in
condensed-matter physics, but nobody ever used it for inductors, because in
conventional metallic conductors, kinetic inductance is negligible,"
Banerjee explained.
Unlike magnetic inductance, kinetic inductance does not depend on the
surface area of the inductor. Rather, kinetic inductance resists current
fluctuations that alter the velocity of the electrons, and the electrons resist
such change according to Newton's law of inertia.
----The UCSB team designed a new kind of spiral inductor made up of multiple layers of graphene. Single-layer graphene exhibits a linear electronic band structure and a correspondingly large momentum relaxation time (MRT) -- a few picoseconds or higher compared to that of conventional metallic conductors (like copper used in traditional on-chip inductors), which ranges from 1/1000 to 1/100 of a picosecond. But single-layer graphene has too much resistance for application on an inductor.
However, multilayer graphene offers a partial solution by providing
lower resistance, but interlayer couplings cause its MRT to be insufficiently
small. The researchers overcame that dilemma with a unique solution: They
chemically inserted bromine atoms between the graphene layers -- a process
called intercalation -- that not only further reduced resistance but also
separated the graphene layers just enough to essentially decouple them,
extending the MRT and thereby increasing kinetic inductance.
The revolutionary inductor, which works in the 10-50 GHz range, offers
one-and-a-half times the inductance density of a traditional inductor, leading
to a one-third reduction in area while also providing extremely high
efficiency. Previously, high inductance and reduced size had been an elusive
combination.
"There is plenty of room to increase the inductance density further
by increasing the efficiency of the intercalation process, which we are now
exploring," said co-author Jiang.
"We essentially engineered a new nanomaterial to bring forward the
previously 'hidden physics' of kinetic inductance at room temperature and in a
range of operating frequencies targeted for next-generation wireless
communications," Banerjee added.
Remember
that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in
prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
Socrates
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished January
DJIA: 26,149 +282 Up. NASDAQ: 7,411 +310 Up. SP500: 2,824 +212 Up.
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