Baltic Dry Index. 1055 -25 Brent Crude 69.67
William F. Rickenbacker
Today the global economy stands at the edge
of an abyss. The world’s two largest economies have imposed trade sanctions
against each other. So far the amount of
trade likely to be affected remains small. If both stop now, no great damage is
likely to befall the global economy, but President Trump is threatening to
impose more tariffs on Chinese goods, and it’s hard to see China not
retaliating. President Trump is
proposing to jump into that abyss, and both Mexico and Canada have just about
one month left to negotiate a NAFTA climbdown, before both countries temporary
exemption from President Trump’s steel and aluminium tariffs end.
Below, the global economy on the edge of
madness. Though no one wins in a full scale trade war, not everyone loses at
the same time nor to the same degree.
April 2, 2018 / 12:20 AM /
Updated an hour ago
China imposes additional tariffs in response to U.S. duties on steel, aluminum
BEIJING
(Reuters) - China has slapped extra tariffs of up to 25 percent on 128 U.S.
products including frozen pork, as well as on wine and certain fruits and nuts,
in response to U.S. duties on imports of aluminum and steel, China’s finance
ministry said.
The
tariffs, to take effect on Monday, were announced late on Sunday and match a
list of potential tariffs on up to $3 billion in U.S. goods published by China
on March 23.
China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) said it was suspending its
obligations to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to reduce tariffs on 120 U.S.
goods, including fruit. The tariffs on those products will be raised by an
extra 15 percent.
Eight other products, including pork, will now be subject to additional
tariffs of 25 percent, it said, with the measures effective from April 2.
“China’s suspension of its tariff concessions is a legitimate action
adopted under WTO rules to safeguard China’s interests,” the Chinese finance
ministry said.
China has imposed the additional tariffs amid escalating trade tensions
between Beijing and Washington, sparking fears of a full-blown trade spat
between the world’s two biggest economies.
U.S. President Donald Trump is preparing to impose tariffs of more than
$50 billion on Chinese goods intended to punish Beijing over U.S. accusations
that China systematically misappropriated American intellectual property -
allegations Beijing denies.
China has repeatedly promised to open its economy further, but many
foreign companies continue to complain of unfair treatment. China warned the
United States on Thursday not to open a Pandora’s Box and spark a flurry of
protectionist practices across the globe.
In a statement published on Monday morning, MOFCOM said the United
States had “seriously violated” the principles of non-discrimination enshrined
in World Trade Organization rules, and had also damaged China’s interests.
“China’s suspension of some of its obligations to the United States is
its legitimate right as a member of the World Trade Organization,” it said,
adding that differences between the world’s two largest economies should be
resolved through dialogue and negotiation.
March 31, 2018 / 1:43
China says protectionist moves will mean shutting door on the country
BEIJING
(Reuters) - China wants to share its development opportunities with other
countries, but protectionism will mean closing the door into China, the
country’s top diplomat said, amid a festering trade dispute with the United
States.
---- Speaking at a regional forum in Vietnam’s capital Hanoi on Friday, Chinese State Councillor Wang Yi said the country’s reform and opening up policy will neither be changed nor be affected by any external factors, China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
“China’s reform and opening up is in line with the interests of the
Chinese people, and will also benefit other countries,” the statement cited
Wang as saying, adding China will provide an even better investment environment
for foreign companies.
“Opening up should work both ways. China opens itself to other countries
and hopes others will be open to China,” he said, without mentioning any
countries by name.
While friction and disputes over trade are normal, what is important is
to work for reasonable solutions through equal consultations in line with laws
and rules, Wang added.
“Any unilateral or protectionist measures are an approach against the
trend of the history, will go nowhere and will see their own interests
undermined,” he said.
More.
March 29, 2018
Exclusive: China taking first steps to pay for oil in yuan this year - sources
HONG KONG/BEIJING (Reuters) - China is taking its first steps
towards paying for imported crude oil in yuan instead of the U.S. dollar, three
people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters, a key development in
Beijing’s efforts to establish its currency internationally.
Shifting just part of global oil trade into the yuan is potentially
huge. Oil is the world’s most traded commodity, with an annual trade value of
around $14 trillion, roughly equivalent to China’s gross domestic product last
year.
A pilot program for yuan payment could be launched as early as the
second half of this year, two of the people said.
Regulators have informally asked a handful of financial institutions to
prepare for pricing China’s crude imports in the yuan, said the three sources
at some of the financial firms.
“Being the biggest buyer of oil, it’s only natural for China to push for
the usage of yuan for payment settlement. This will also improve the yuan
liquidity in the global market,” said one of the people briefed on the matter
by Chinese authorities.
China is the world’s second-largest oil consumer and in 2017 overtook
the United States as the biggest importer of crude oil. Its demand is a key
determinant of global oil prices.
More
Trump Warns He'll Dump Nafta If Mexico Doesn't Stop Drug Flows
By Justin Sink
1 April 2018, 16:58 GMT+1
President Donald Trump threatened to pull out of the North American Free
Trade Agreement if Mexico doesn’t stop people and drugs from flowing into the
U.S. from Central America.
“They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash
cow, NAFTA. Need Wall!” Trump said Sunday on Twitter, minutes before arriving
at church for an Easter Sunday service with his wife, Melania.
In a series of tweets, the president also suggested he was no longer
willing to strike a deal to assist immigrants brought to the country illegally
as minors, and repeated a call for Senate Republicans to go to a simple 51-vote
majority as a way to pass legislation more easily.
“Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the
Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release,”
Trump wrote. “Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming. Republicans must go to
Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!”
The president’s tweet was posted shortly after a segment on Fox News
Channel’s “Fox and Friends,” in which Brandon Judd, the president of the
National Border Patrol Council, a labor union representing border patrol
agents, talked about reports that a caravan of hundreds of Central Americans
was headed toward the U.S. in a bid to secure asylum.
More
March 29, 2018 / 5:35 PM
Global funds cut stock exposure to four-month low amid trade war fears
LONDON
(Reuters) - Spooked by brewing trade tensions and a broad reversal in
technology shares, global investors have cut their equity exposure to a
four-month low this month while reducing their holdings of U.S. stocks to the
lowest in nearly two years.
Reuters’ monthly asset allocation poll of 53 wealth managers and chief
investment officers in Europe, the United States, Britain and Japan was carried
out from March 12 to 27.
During this period, U.S. moves to slap tariffs on steel and aluminium
imports, and on up to $60 billion of Chinese goods, sent world stocks
.MIWO00000PUS to six-week lows.
Investors have been worried that tit-for-tat retaliatory measures from
China and a deterioration in world trade could hinder economic global,
prompting a sharp risk-off move in markets.
“Trade tariffs ... while they should not end up in a full-blown trade
war, risk weighing on market sentiment just when liquidity is diminishing and
financial conditions are expected to tighten,” said Pascal Blanque, chief
investment officer at Amundi.
In the poll, investors cut their equity holdings by almost 1 percentage
point to 48.1 percent of global balanced portfolios — the lowest level since
November — while raising bond holdings by 2.3 percentage points to 39.3
percent.
Within equity portfolios, managers cut their U.S. exposure to 38
percent, the lowest since April 2016.
More
March 30, 2018
Trade conflict fears to keep markets on edge for weeks
BRUSSELS
(Reuters) - A full-scale global trade war has not broken out yet - but that
hasn’t stopped the market from fretting about one or analysts from warning
about the potential cost.
Whether such concerns remain a driving force for asset prices in the
coming days depends largely on decisions, tweets and formal announcements from
Washington and Beijing, but it seems certain that the uncertainty has at least
another month to run.
South Korea has cut a deal with the United States, agreeing to reduce
its steel exports to avoid tariffs. The European Union, Canada, Mexico, Brazil,
Australia and Argentina face a May 1 deadline to reach equivalent deals.
U.S. President Donald Trump has tied the suspension of tariffs for
Canada and Mexico to a renegotiation of NAFTA. Officials have said the next
round of talks was due to start on April 8, but that date is not certain and
there are mixed messages on the chances of a quick breakthrough.
China has meanwhile warned that it could target a broad range of U.S.
businesses if Trump slapped tariffs on $50 billion-$60 billion of largely high
tech Chinese goods, although the latter may not happen until early June.
Economists at ING split such a conflict into four stages from a lone
Trump attack to a tit-for-tat battle to U.S. escalation, such as including EU
cars, and finally an all-out trade war.
The last, ING estimates, would harm all economies, with the United
States facing the heaviest hit, of some 2 percent of gross domestic product
(GDP) over two years, with U.S exporters facing high tariffs at all borders
while the rest of the world keeps its prevailing arrangements in place.
Only in the first scenario, in which Trump imposes tariffs and no one
retaliates, would the United States make any noticeable economic gain - of some
0.3 percent of GDP.
ING’s head of international trade analysis Raoul Leering said that the
conflict was currently somewhere between the first scenario and the second
‘tit-for-tat’ stage.
“If other countries give in and give Trump something in return, then
we’re looking at scenario one,” he said. “It’s a conflict in which Trump could
turn out to be the winner.”
Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist at UniCredit, believes that the
trade conflict is likely to be the main driver of market sentiment for weeks to
come, although for the time being it is “barely more than tough talk”, with
strong announcements then watered down, such as with the metal tariff
exemptions.
“If
it stays like this it’s not really altering anything in the macro outlook. The
risk is, once you’ve started, you’re on a slippery slope and you don’t know if
you can stop. That’s the risk markets are worried about,” he said.
More
"If you don't trust gold, do you trust the logic of taking a beautiful pine tree, worth about $4,000 - $5,000, cutting it up, turning it into pulp and then paper, putting some ink on it and then calling it one billion dollars?"
Kenneth J. Gerbino
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, Tesla again. A perfect storm seems to be headed Tesla’s way.
Amazon gets Trumped.
Elon Musk Sends April Fools' Tweets Joking of Tesla Bankruptcy
By Craig Trudell
1 April 2018, 23:25 GMT+1
After
the worst month for Tesla Inc. shares in more than seven years,
punctuated by company blog posts about the
death of a Model X driver, Elon Musk is joking about his electric-car maker
going bankrupt.
“Despite
intense efforts to raise money, including a last-ditch mass sale of Easter
Eggs, we are sad to report that Tesla has gone completely and totally bankrupt,”
the chief executive officer wrote in an April Fools’ Day tweet on Sunday. Another post included a photo of Musk and a message that he
“was found passed out against a Tesla Model 3, surrounded by ‘Teslaquilla’
bottles, the tracks of dried tears still visible on his cheeks.”
Tesla’s
stock fell by 22 percent in March, the steepest monthly drop since December
2010, the year the company went public. Moody’s Investors Service last week to cut
Tesla’s credit rating further into junk status and said the company may soon
have to raise more than $2 billion, sending its bonds to all-time lows.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-01/elon-musk-sends-april-fools-tweets-joking-of-tesla-bankruptcy
March 28, 2018 / 10:42 PM
Tesla shareholder lawsuit against SolarCity deal set to proceed
(Reuters)
- A class action lawsuit by Tesla Inc shareholders against the electric car
maker’s chief executive, Elon Musk, and the company’s board over the SolarCity
deal was set to proceed after a Delaware judge refused to dismiss it.
The
lawsuit alleged the board of Tesla breached its duties to shareholders by
approving the SolarCity deal.
Tesla bought solar panel installer SolarCity for $2.6 billion in an
all-stock deal in 2016. Musk was then biggest shareholder in both Tesla and
SolarCity, and his SolarCity shares were converted to $500 million of Tesla
shares.
It is “conceivable that Musk, as a controlling stockholder, controlled
the Tesla board” during the SolarCity deal, the judge said.
“We do not agree with the decision and will be taking appropriate next
steps,” a Tesla spokesperson told Reuters.
“It’s important to emphasize that this was a motion to dismiss in which
the court was required to assume as true all of the allegations that are made
in the complaint.”
Trump Renews Amazon Attack, Says ‘Post Office Scam’ Must Stop
By Ros Krasny and Justin Sink
31 March 2018, 14:26 GMT+1 Updated
on 31 March 2018, 16:45 GMT+1
President Donald Trump lit into Amazon.com Inc. for the second time in three days
with a pair of Twitter messages that said the online retailer “must pay real
costs (and taxes) now!”The president on Saturday claimed, citing reports he didn’t specify, that the U.S. Postal Service “will lose $1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon” and added that the “Post Office scam must stop.” Amazon has said the postal service, which has financial problems stretching back for years, makes money on its deliveries.
Amazon shed $53 billion in market value on Wednesday after Axios reported that the president is “obsessed” with regulating the e-commerce giant, whose founder and chief executive officer, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post newspaper. Those losses were pared on Thursday, the final day of a shortened trading week, even as Trump tweeted that Amazon was using the postal service as its “Delivery Boy.”
White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said on Thursday that while the president was displeased with the e-commerce giant, and particularly instances where third-party sellers on the site didn’t collect sales tax, there were no administrative actions planned against Amazon “at this time.”
Read More: Here’s What the President Could Do About Amazon
Still, Brad Parscale, who’s managing Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, hinted in a tweet late Thursday that the administration may act to raise Amazon’s postal costs. “Once the market figures out that a single @usps rule change will crush @amazon’s bottom line we will see,” Parscale wrote.
More
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?
Next-gen lithium-metal batteries for electric vehicles, smart grids
Date:
March 28, 2018
Source:
University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center
Summary:
Electric vehicles, wind turbines or smart grids require batteries with far
greater energy capacity than currently available. A leading contender is the
lithium-metal battery. However, dendrite, or sharp needles, made of clumps of
lithium atoms can cause the batteries to heat up, lose efficiency and
occasionally short-circuit. Using supercomputers, researchers have simulated
the behavior of graphene oxide nanosheets that can limit the formation of
dendrites.
As renewable energy grows as a power source around the world, one key
component still eludes the industry: large-scale, stable, efficient and
affordable batteries.
Lithium-ion batteries have proven successful for consumer electronics,
but electric vehicles, wind turbines or smart grids require batteries with far
greater energy capacity. A leading contender is the lithium-metal battery,
which differs from lithium ion technology in that it contains lithium metal
electrodes.
First conceived in 1912, lithium-metal batteries have the potential for
huge amounts of energy storage at a low cost, but they suffer from a fatal
flaw: dendrites -- sharp needles made of clumps of lithium atoms that can cause
batteries to heat up and occasionally short-circuit and catch fire.
However, the promise of the technology has kept researchers and
companies working on ways to overcome this problem.
"Lithium-metal batteries are basically the dream batteries since
they provide an extremely high energy density," said Reza
Shahbazian-Yassar, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering
at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). "However, we have not been
able to build commercially viable lithium-metal batteries with organic liquid
electrolytes due to heterogeneous lithium metal plating that leads to dendrites
under extended battery cycling."
Recently, teams of researchers, including Shahbazian-Yassar at UIC and
Perla Balbuena at Texas A&M University, have been inching closer to finding
a solution, in part by applying the power of supercomputers to understand the
core chemistry and physics at work in dendrite formation and to engineer new
materials that can mitigate dendrite growth.
Writing in Advanced Functional Materials in February 2018, the
researchers presented the results of studies into a new material that may solve
the long-standing dendrite problem.
"The idea was to develop a coating material that can protect the
lithium metal and make the ion deposition much smoother," said Balbuena,
professor of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M and co-author on the paper.
The investigations relied on the Stampede and Lonestar supercomputers at
the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) -- among the most powerful in the
world.
ION PACHINKO
In the paper, the researchers described a graphene oxide nanosheet that
can be sprayed onto a glass fiber separator which is then inserted into the
battery. The material allows lithium ions to pass through it, but slows down
and controls how the ions combine with electrons from the surface to become
neutral atoms. Instead of forming needles, the deposited atoms form smooth,
flat surfaces at the bottom of the sheet.
The researchers used computer models and simulations in tandem with
physical experiments and microscopic imaging to reveal how and why the material
effectively controls lithium deposition.
They showed that the lithium ions form
a thin film on the surface of the graphene oxide and then diffuse through
defect sites -- essentially gaps in the layers of the material -- before
settling below the bottom layer of the graphene oxide. The material acts like
the pegs in a pachinko game, slowing and directing the metal balls as they
fall.
More
“If we went back on the gold standard and we adhered to the actual structure of the gold standard as it existed prior to 1913, we’d be fine. Remember that the period 1870 to 1913 was one of the most aggressive periods economically that we’ve had in the United States, and that was a golden period of the gold standard. I’m known as a gold bug and everyone laughs at me, but why do central banks own gold now?”
Alan Greenspan. June 28, 2016.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished March.
DJIA: 24,103 +272 Down
10. NASDAQ: 7,063 +300 Down 13. SP500: 2,641 +202 Down 10.
All
three slow indicators moved down. For some a new bear signal, for others a take
profits and get back to cash signal.
DJIA. Buy:
29/7/16 - 18,432. Sell: 29/3/18 –
24,103.
SP500. Buy: 29/7/16 –
2,174. Sell: 29/3/18 – 2,641.
NASDAQ. Buy: 29/7/16 –
5,762. Sell: 29/3/18 – 7,063.
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