Baltic Dry Index. 1122 -14 Brent Crude 67.54
What goes up must come down.
Sir Isaac Newton
It’s Fed Day in Washington, District of
Crooks, and Fedster newbie Chairman Powell has been put on notice by Wall
Street’s Great Vampire Squids to toe the scripted Wall Street line, or else. “Roll
over, or we give Goldilocks a beating!” It’s a brutal way to start, but
Ebenezer Squid and his ilk, have to show who’s really in charge at the Fed.
Below, Wall Street lays down the law. Cross
us and Goldilocks gets it. Asian markets are cautiously betting Chairman Powell
will block Goldie from getting a thrashing. It’s ok to keep picking up pennies
in front of the steamroller, they think.
Powell will use press conference to counterbalance hawkish undertone of Fed’s forecasts
Published: Mar 20, 2018 3:43 p.m. ET
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell may use his first press conference to
counterbalance an obvious hawkish tilt among this year’s voting members of the
central bank’s policy panel.The Fed’s interest-rate committee is “a hell of a lot more hawkish” this year, said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust.
So it's easy to expect a hawkish tilt to the Fed’s policy statement and its dot-plot, which projects the course of interest rates and economic forecasts, when the central bank wraps up its latest two-day meeting on Wednesday.
Read: 5 things to watch from the Fed decision
Powell, therefore, will use his 60 minutes with reporters post-meeting to turn down the temperature and stress that rate hikes will be remain gradual.
“At the end of the day, the Fed will be more hawkish and he’ll temper that,” said Kevin Cummings, senior U.S. economist at NatWest Markets.
In essence, economists expect Powell will replay his two-day testimony to Congress from last month. On the first day, Powell sounded hawkish, pointing to the risks of the economy overheating, but on the second day he stressed any overheating was nowhere in sight.
See: Even as Powell softens tone, 4 rate hikes still on the table for 2018
Cummings said Powell has no reason to upset the apple cart now that the market DJIA, +0.47% has priced in the Fed's forecast of three hikes.
More
Energy Stocks Gain in Asia as Traders Await Fed: Markets Wrap
By Adam Haigh
Updated on 21 March 2018, 06:15 GMT
Energy companies underpinned stock gains in Asia after a rally in crude
oil, in an Asian session subdued by a Japanese holiday before the Federal
Reserve’s policy decision.
Stocks in Hong Kong outperformed ahead of earnings from Tencent Holdings
Ltd. An energy sub-index had the biggest gain in the MSCI Asia Pacific
excluding Japan index, as well as in Australia. Crude and U.S. energy shares
climbed overnight as the OPEC-led alliance of major oil producers accelerated
the timeline for curbing a worldwide supply glut. The dollar slid from a
two-week high, while Treasuries were un-traded thanks to the Japan holiday.
Markets are settling down after technology-led declines saw equities on the back foot at the start of the week. Though the broader market is recovering, the crisis engulfing Facebook Inc. continues to deepen, drawing the ire of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. Investor focus now turns to Jerome Powell’s first FOMC meeting as chairman; the jury is still out on whether the central bank will lift its projections for the pace of policy tightening this year.
Investors are also waiting to see any reaction from China in the face of U.S. tariffs expected to be imposed as soon as this week, as well as another U.S. government shutdown that is looming.
Elsewhere, the U.K. currency was little
changed after falling on data that showed the nation’s inflation rate fell more than expected in February.
Gold inched higher and iron ore climbed.
More
March 21, 2018 / 12:35 AM
Caution the watchword as Fed ponders rate pace
SYDNEY (Reuters) - A hush settled over financial markets
on Wednesday as investors counted down to a likely hike in U.S. interest rates
and guidance on how many more to expect this year, while trade war fears kept
export nations’ currencies on edge.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan
.MIAPJ0000PUS edged up 0.5 percent after a run of losses, tracking overnight
gains on Wall Street.
Chinese
shares were a bit more buoyant with Hong Kong's Hang Seng index .HSI
gaining 1.2 percent as real estate firms posted stellar profits.
E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 ESc1 inched up 0.1 percent, while
FTSE futures FFIc1 were off a fraction.
Markets are convinced the Federal Reserve will announce a quarter point
hike at 1800 GMT, but are less sure if it will signal three or four for the
year as a whole.
“A significant weighting towards four hikes this year may well cause
both equity and bond markets to sell off,” Jonathan Sheridan, analyst at FIIG
Securities in Sydney, said.
“The concerns here are that the Fed overshoots with raising rates into a
faltering economy,” Sheridan added.
“If this opinion takes hold then we may well see falling longer term
rates and a flatter yield curve, and it would also be negative for equities as
it increases the chances of a recession.”
More
In other news, Uber’s spin doctors start the
blame game by blaming the deceased. Unseemly, untimely, insensitive, come to
mind, a PR disaster awaiting a single misstep. America’s tort bar take the victim’s side.
Uber's Liability in Deadly Crash May Turn on Victim's Steps
By Margaret Cronin Fisk
Updated on 20 March 2018, 21:27 GMT
Uber Technologies Inc.’s potential liability for
the death of a woman hit and killed in Arizona by a self-driving car may be
limited after a video showed she suddenly walked
into traffic on a dark street.The woman’s family could sue, claiming Uber’s self-driving technology was to blame. While any jury would likely weigh her actions, under Arizona law, the company may still have to pay, according to David Logan, a law professor in Rhode Island.
The state required defendants -- even those found minimally at fault -- to pay a commensurate percentage of the damages, Logan said. The family’s lawyers could argue that the driverless car was still responsible because “a negligent design didn’t enable the car to do what a driver could have,’’ he said.
The fatal crash is likely to add pressure on state and federal lawmakers, who need to play catch-up on rules and regulations for the testing and any ultimate deployment of self-driving vehicles on the nation’s roadways. Lobbyists for the automakers and tech giants developing driverless cars and safety advocates will come head-to-head as the next generation of laws are created.
Federal oversight is unlikely, particularly given the stalemate in Congress over other initiatives, so a “patchwork’’ of state laws will be the most likely result, Logan said.
The Driverless Car is Already Here. What Comes Next?: QuickTake
In the death of the woman in Arizona, her actions would lower any possible damages Uber might have to pay, but the company could still lose, Logan said.
Under Arizona law, a defendant found even minimally at fault would have to pay that percentage of damages -- if it found Uber 1 percent responsible, the company would be on the hook for 1 percent of any jury award, he said. How high a percentage would depend on the facts of the case, following the complete investigation.
----In many other states, if the plaintiff is found more than 50 percent responsible, the defendant doesn’t have to pay anything, he said.
It’s unlikely that Uber would escape responsibility no matter what the
pedestrian did, said attorney Kevin Dean, who specializes in auto product
defect claims.
“In this situation, the car never stopped,’’ he said. “The car never
took evasive maneuvers.’’
More
Finally, in the
northern hemisphere, we have reached the vernal equinox as we head away from
winter and towards summer. Equinox means
equal night, meaning equal day and night. Well not exactly. God gives us a few
minutes more of day than night, but most probably won’t notice unless like me
they are logging it.
I can calculate the motion of
heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
Sir Isaac Newton
Are day and night equal at the equinox?
Equinox means “equal night.” And you might hear day and night are equal at the equinoxes. Yet Earth’s air and our sun conspire to give us more daylight at an equinox.
The March 2018 equinox – the Northern Hemisphere’s spring or vernal equinox and the Southern Hemisphere’s autumn equinox – falls on Tuesday, March 20 at 16:15 UTC (12:15 p.m. EDT; translate UTC to your time). Twice a year – at the March and September equinoxes – everyone worldwide supposedly receives 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night. Is it true? Not exactly. There’s actually more day than night on the day of an equinox. There are two reasons why:
The sun is a disk, not a point. Watch any sunset, and you
know the sun appears in Earth’s sky as a disk.
It’s not pointlike, as stars are, and yet – by definition – most
almanacs regard sunrise as when the leading edge of the sun first touches the
eastern horizon. They define sunset as when the sun’s trailing edge finally
touches the western horizon.
This in itself provides an extra 2.5 to 3 minutes of daylight at
mid-temperate latitudes.
Atmospheric refraction. The Earth’s atmosphere acts
like a lens or prism, uplifting the sun about 0.5 degrees from its true
geometrical position whenever the sun nears the horizon. Coincidentally, the
sun’s angular diameter spans about 0.5 degrees, as well.
In other words, when you see the sun on the horizon, it’s actually just
below the horizon.
What does atmospheric refraction mean for the length of daylight? It advances
the sunrise and delays the sunset, adding nearly another six minutes
of daylight at mid-temperate latitudes. Hence, more daylight than night at the
equinox.
Morehttp://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/are-day-and-night-exactly-equal-at-the-equinox
Atheism is so senseless. When
I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun
to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance.
Sir Isaac Newton
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, the travails of Facebook. What Edward
Snowden, former National Security Agency contractor turned whistle-blower, calls
a surveillance company. One with a likely backdoor for the NSA and other five
eyes to pry, bribe, (twist arms, and blackmail.) Mueller’s got it all wrong! It wasn’t those 13
genius Russians that stole the election for Trump, it was those dodgy, braggadocios,
British Cambridge, nerdish, ex-dons.
March 20, 2018 / 1:42 PM
Cambridge Analytica CEO claims influence on U.S. election, Facebook questioned
LONDON/SAN
FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The suspended chief executive of Cambridge Analytica said
in a secretly recorded video broadcast on Tuesday that his UK-based political
consultancy’s online campaign played a decisive role in U.S. President Donald
Trump’s 2016 election victory.
CEO Alexander Nix’s comments, which could not be verified, are
potentially a further problem for Facebook Inc as it faces lawmakers’ scrutiny
in the United States and Europe over Cambridge Analytica’s improper use of 50
million Facebook users’ personal data to target voters.
The social media network’s shares fell for a second day, closing down
2.5 percent, as investors worried that its dealings with Cambridge Analytica
might damage its reputation, deter advertisers and invite restrictive
regulation. The company has lost $60 billion (£43 billion) of its stock market
value over the last two days.
----If the FTC finds Facebook violated terms of the consent decree, it
has the power to fine the company thousands of dollars a day per violation,
which could add up to billions of dollars.
Facebook was also hit on Tuesday in a San Francisco court by the first
of what could be many lawsuits by shareholders claiming to suffer losses
because the company misled them about its ability to protect user
data. The company could also soon face lawsuits on behalf of users whose
personal information was exposed.
More
Facebook Besieged by Wall Street, Washington and Europe
By Brandon Kochkodin
Updated on 21 March 2018, 02:14 GMT
Facebook
Inc.’s grim week is getting grimmer.The company on Tuesday was beset on two continents by governments suddenly focused on data security and investors unliked its stock to the point that it lost $60 billion in value.
The Menlo Park, California, company, whose social network is a ubiquitous venue for social and political life, is drawing the unaccustomed unwelcome attention after the disclosure that it released the personal data of 50 million users to an analytics firm that helped elect President Donald Trump. The company, Cambridge Analytica, has been implicated in dirty tricks in elections around the globe.
Facebook has struggled to respond to the fast-moving imbroglio, and even Facebook workers have been in the dark. The company held a staff meeting today to answer their questions and address staff questions about what Facebook knew and when. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg plans to address employees on Friday at a previously scheduled all-hands meeting. For those not privy to the internal meetings, here are the latest developments:
CEO Zuckerberg may have to do a tour of European parliaments to appease lawmakers. Damian Collins, head of a U.K. parliament committee investigating the impact of social media on recent elections, invited Zuckerberg to answer for a “catastrophic failure of process.” Shortly thereafter an invitation followed from European Parliament President Antonio Tajani.
Separately, EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said she also plans to discuss the matter with Facebook during a visit in the U.S. this week while Italian telecommunications regulator AGCOM requested Facebook to provide information on data use.
Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg haven’t yet spoken publicly about the data leak, despite the global firestorm. When Zuckerberg addresses staff on Friday, he’s certain to face questions about the controversy.
U.S. Regulators Would Like a Word
More
The Problem Is Facebook, Not Cambridge Analytica
Outrage over a U.K.
firm's use of Facebook data for the Trump campaign should lead to a much bigger
question.
by Leonid Bershidsky
20 March 2018, 06:00 GMT
Facebook is being hammered for allowing the data firm Cambridge
Analytica to acquire 50 million user profiles in the U.S., which it may or may
not have used 1
to help the Trump campaign. But the outrage misses the target:
There's nothing Cambridge Analytica could have done that Facebook itself
doesn't offer political clients.Here, in a nutshell, is the CA scandal. In 2014, Aleksandr Kogan, an academic of Russian origin at Cambridge University in the U.K., built a Facebook app that paid hundreds of thousands of users to take a psychological test. Apart from their test results, the users also shared the data of their Facebook friends with the app. Kogan sold the resulting database to CA, which Facebook considers a violation of its policies: The app was not allowed to use the data for commercial purposes. Carol Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison, writing for the U.K. publication Observer, quoted former CA employee Christopher Wylie as saying the firm "broke Facebook" on behalf of Stephen Bannon, the ideologue and manager behind the Trump campaign.
It didn't escape keen observers that if the Trump campaign used Facebook user data harvested through an app, it did no more than Barack Obama's 2012 data-heavy re-election campaign. It's not documented exactly how Obama's team gathered oodles of data on potential supporters, but a deep dive into the tech side of that campaign by Sasha Issenberg mentioned how "'targeted sharing' protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade." To do this, the protocols would need to use the same feature of the Facebook platform for developers, discontinued in 2015, that allowed apps access to a user's friends' profiles -- with the user's consent, as Facebook invariably points out.
Let's face it: Users are routinely tricked to obtain such consent. Tech
companies make giving it, or agreeing to complex terms of service, look like a
low-engagement decision.
"Is it okay if we look at your friends' info?" they ask.
"Is it okay if we look at your friends' info?" they ask.
"Sure, why not? I want to take this nifty psychological test,"
we answer.
Afterward, only Facebook itself is interested in the legal minutiae of what permissions it gave to which developers. As far as everyone else is concerned, it doesn't matter whether an app gets the data for research purposes or for straight-up political ones. Average users worry more about convenience than privacy.
Afterward, only Facebook itself is interested in the legal minutiae of what permissions it gave to which developers. As far as everyone else is concerned, it doesn't matter whether an app gets the data for research purposes or for straight-up political ones. Average users worry more about convenience than privacy.
The relevant question, however, is what a campaign can actually do with
the data. CA's supposedly sinister skill is that it can use the Facebook
profile information to build psychological profiles that reveal a
person's propensity to vote for a certain party or candidate. When matched
against electoral registers, targeted appeals are possible.
More
Facebook is a ‘surveillance company’ rebranded as 'social media'
By News
Desk Published: March 19, 2018
Edward Snowden, former National Security Agency contractor, slammed Facebook
in a tweet after the social media giant suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data
analytics firm that worked for US President Donald Trump’s campaign.Facebook accused Cambridge Analytica for not removing data which they collected from tens of million Facebook users, but the former contractor blamed Facebook and other social media firms for being irresponsible, Washington Examiner reported.
“Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as ‘surveillance companies,'” Snowden said, adding, “Their rebranding as ‘social media’ is the most successful deception since the Department of War became the Department of Defense.”
“Facebook makes their money by exploiting and selling intimate details
about the private lives of millions, far beyond the scant details you
voluntarily post,” Snowden said earlier in the day. “They are not victims. They
are accomplices.”
Cambridge Analytica refused to do any wrongdoing on Saturday, stating
that they “fully complies” with Facebook’s terms and conditions.
Morehttps://tribune.com.pk/story/1664224/9-facebook-surveillance-company-rebranded-social-media/
Fidelity and allegiance sworn
to the King is only such a fidelity and obedience as is due to him by the law
of the land; for were that faith and allegiance more than what the law
requires, we would swear ourselves slaves and the King absolute; whereas, by
the law, we are free men, notwithstanding those oaths.
Sir Isaac Newton
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?
A future colorfully lit by mystifying physics of paint-on semiconductors
Date:
March 19, 2018
Source:
Georgia Institute of Technology
Summary:
It defies conventional wisdom about semiconductors. It's baffling that it even
works. It eludes physics models that try to explain it. This newly tested class
of light-emitting semiconductors is so easy to produce from solution that it
could be painted onto surfaces to light up our future in myriad colors shining
from affordable lasers, LEDs, and even window glass.
Some novel materials that sound too good to be true turn out to be true and
good. An emergent class of semiconductors, which could affordably light up our
future with nuanced colors emanating from lasers, lamps, and even window glass,
could be the latest example.
These materials are very radiant, easy to process from solution, and
energy-efficient. The nagging question of whether hybrid organic-inorganic
perovskites (HOIPs) could really work just received a very affirmative answer
in a new international study led by physical chemists at the Georgia Institute
of Technology.
The researchers observed in an HOIP a "richness" of
semiconducting physics created by what could be described as electrons dancing
on chemical underpinnings that wobble like a funhouse floor in an earthquake.
That bucks conventional wisdom because established semiconductors rely upon
rigidly stable chemical foundations, that is to say, quieter molecular
frameworks, to produce the desired quantum properties.
"We don't know yet how it works to have these stable quantum
properties in this intense molecular motion," said first author Felix
Thouin, a graduate research assistant at Georgia Tech. "It defies physics
models we have to try to explain it. It's like we need some new physics."
Quantum properties surprise
Their gyrating jumbles have made HOIPs challenging to examine, but the
team of researchers from a total of five research institutes in four countries
succeeded in measuring a prototypical HOIP and found its quantum properties on
par with those of established, molecularly rigid semiconductors, many of which are
graphene-based.
"The properties were at least as good as in those materials and may
be even better," said Carlos Silva, a professor in Georgia Tech's School
of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Not all semiconductors also absorb and emit
light well, but HOIPs do, making them optoelectronic and thus potentially
useful in lasers, LEDs, other lighting applications, and also in photovoltaics.
The lack of molecular-level rigidity in HOIPs also plays into them being
more flexibly produced and applied.
More
To explain all nature is too
difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to
do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.
Sir Isaac Newton
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished February
DJIA: 25,029 +283 Up 01. NASDAQ: 7,273 +313 Up 03. SP500: 2,714 +212 Flat.
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