Baltic Dry Index. 1404 +14 Brent Crude 76.57
"It's the nearest thing to a
meltdown that I ever want to see. We were fortunate this occurred when the
American economy is very strong. We are not operating in an environment of
weakness."
John J. Phelan, Chairman of the NYSE,
October 20, 1987
One central bank down,
the ECB to go later today. Will the ECB follow the US Fed and raise their
interest rate later today? Unlikely, but they might increase their guidance on
ending “whatever it takes.”
Now we have rising
interest rates to add to the headwinds of a growing acrimonious trade war,
rising energy inflation, a recovery that’s the weakest on record but already
108 months long, China’s economy starting to slow, and that’s in the official
figures, plus crop worries in South America, the USA, Russia and Ukraine.
According to the
stock pedlars it’s nothing to worry about, keep buying the dips. Well maybe,
but I think we face a summer of storms ahead. 1987 comes to my mind, but most
algo trades and stock pedlars now, weren’t around for “portfolio insurance.”
Below, stock markets waiting
for the Novichok effect to kick in. Will Deutsche Bank be the first to
detonate? BNP? Soc Gen? Old Three Card
Monte di Siena?
"What do you expect us to do?
Announce that all the Cabinet members will be buying IBM and General Motors tomorrow?
exasperated Administration official,
New York Times, October 20, 1987
Asian markets swing lower after Fed rate hike
Published: June 13, 2018 11:09 p.m.
ET
Asian stock markets were down in early trading Thursday, after the U.S.
Federal Reserve raised interest rates and indicated two more rate hikes were
coming later this year.Japanese stocks opened lower, with just the fishery/ag/forestry and marine transportation sectors up. The Nikkei NIK, -0.55% was down 0.4%, though few big caps were moving sharply. Nintendo 7974, -4.70% , however, was down 3.7% and tractor maker Kubota 6326, -2.22% eased 2.3% amid the dollar’s USDJPY, -0.15% pullback. Elsewhere, Toshiba 6502, +2.37% was up a further 2% to again be the best-performing large cap after Wednesday’s 6.6% jump on its stock-buyback plans.
South Korean stocks were notably lagging after Wednesday’s day off for elections, with the Kospi SEU, -1.58% down more than 1%. Construction names, which have surged since late April amid a Korean Peninsula thaw, continued the pullback seen during Tuesday’s Trump-Kim summit. Hyundai Engineering 000720, -7.90% was off 6% while construction-materials maker Busan Industrial 011390, -14.97% slid 11%.
Hong Kong stocks were little changed, with the Hang Seng Index HSI, -0.62% off 0.4%. Financial stocks slipped after the Fed’s latest rate hike, with China Construction Bank 0939, -0.88% down 1%. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority raised its base rate a quarter-point to 2.25%, matching the overnight interest rate hike by the Fed. A day after ZTE 0763, +1.07% shares sank 42% in their second day of resumed trading, they were up 3% Thursday.
The Shanghai Composite SHCOMP, -0.28% was down slightly, as was Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 XJO, -0.14% as well as stocks in Singapore STI, -0.37% and Taiwan Y9999, -0.91% .
June 13, 2018 / 7:04 PM
Fed lifts rates amid stronger inflation, drops crisis-era guidance
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on Wednesday, a move that
was widely expected but still marked a milestone in the U.S. central bank’s
shift from policies used to battle the 2007-2009 financial crisis and recession.
In raising its benchmark overnight lending rate a quarter of a
percentage point to a range of 1.75 percent to 2 percent, the Fed dropped its
pledge to keep rates low enough to stimulate the economy “for some time” and
signaled it would tolerate inflation above its 2 percent target at least
through 2020.
“The economy is doing very well,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in a
press conference after the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee released
its unanimous policy statement after the end of a two-day meeting.
“Most people who want to find jobs are finding them. Unemployment and
inflation are low ... The overall outlook for growth remains favorable.”
He added that continued steady rate increases would nurture the
expansion, as the Fed approaches a sort of sweet spot with its employment and
inflation goals largely met, the economy withstanding higher borrowing costs
and no sign of a spike in inflation.
More
Rising rates and deficit spell big trouble for the U.S., warns bond king Gundlach
By Barbara
Kollmeyer Published: June 13,
2018 7:59 a.m. ET
----So on to our call
of the day, which comes from DoubleLine founder Jeff Gundlach, who has
a dire warning on the U.S. fiscal situation.“Here we are doing something that almost seems like a suicide mission,” he said in a fresh webcast about his DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund. “We are increasing the the size of the deficit while we’re raising interest rates.”
“It’s pretty much unprecedented that we’re seeing this level debt expansion so late in an economic cycle,” Gundlach reportedly said, noting that both Fed fund-rates and the debt-to-GDP level are rising.
----As for the rest of
the “Bond King’s” views on that webcast: The dollar is going down, oil is
headed for $80 to $90 a barrel, and now’s a good time for emerging-market or high-yield
bonds.
More
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-on-a-suicide-mission-warns-bond-king-gundlach-2018-06-13
June 14, 2018 / 3:41 AM
China holds fire on rates, posts 'shockingly weak' activity growth
BEIJING
(Reuters) - China’s economy is finally starting to cool under the weight of a
multi-year crackdown on riskier lending that is pushing up borrowing costs for
companies and consumers, with data on Thursday pointing to a broad slowdown in
activity in May.
China’s central bank sparked concerns over the health of the economy
earlier in the day when it left
short-term interest rates unchanged, surprising
markets which had expected it to follow a hike by the U.S. Federal Reserve, as
it has tended to do.
Industrial output, investment and retail sales all grew less than
expected, offsetting upbeat trade data and suggesting further weakness ahead if
Beijing perseveres with its crackdowns on factory pollution, questionable local
government projects and shadow banking.
The data, which showed the slowest investment growth in over 22 years,
“was all shockingly weak by Chinese standards,” economists at Rabobank said,
adding that the readings may explain the central bank’s decision to keep rates
on hold.
“Get ready for headlines talking about Chinese deleveraging hitting the
economy – except it isn’t even deleveraging yet! China is walking more of a
tightrope than markets believe – and the data underline that issue clearly,”
they said.
----Much of their effort so far has focused on the banking sector - explaining why China’s headline GDP growth has been so consistently solid.
But there are growing signs in official data and unofficial gauges that
the regulatory crackdown is starting to filter through into the broader
economy, with companies complaining it is harder and costlier to secure
financing and a growing number of firms defaulting on bonds.
China’s fixed-asset investment growth cooled to 6.1 percent in
January-May from the same period a year earlier, the slowest pace since at
least February 1996.
More
Trump Has Created ‘Worldwide Vacuum,’ Says Germany’s Top Diplomat
By Birgit Jennen, Arne Delfs, and Patrick Donahue
Updated on 13 June 2018, 19:05 GMT+1
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called on the European Union to unite
and fill the void left by the U.S. drawback from global agreements that have
underpinned trans-Atlantic relations for decades.
Maas’s warning that the post-World War II order “no longer exists”
signals that Germany is starting to confront a president who seems to delight
in challenging allies on issues from security to exports. Chancellor Angela
Merkel earlier challenged Trump over U.S. services exports to the EU.
“The Atlantic has gotten wider under President Trump,” Maas said in a
speech in Berlin on Wednesday. “Trump’s isolationist policy has opened a huge
worldwide vacuum. Therefore our common response today to ‘America First’ must
be ‘Europe United.”’
Merkel rebuffed Trump’s sustained criticism of Germany’s export prowess in a speech on Tuesday, arguing that the U.S. runs a trade surplus with Europe when services are included.
The U.S. has a $14 billion dollar current-account surplus with the EU, Economy Ministry spokeswoman Tanya Alemany told reporters in Berlin when asked about Merkel’s remarks. In contrast, the U.S. Census Bureau says the EU had a $101 billion trade surplus in goods and services with the U.S. last year and a $30.3 billion surplus in the first quarter of 2018.
More
Finally, staying with
Germany and on the basis that there’s no smoke without fire, and with Deutsche
Bank belching smoke like a battleship turning away under fire, the ECB’s firemen
are busy visiting DB, BNP, and Soc Gen, looking for answers or fires. Someone
must have lent them a copy of Bagehot’s, Lombard Street.
“It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario
within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any
of those [Credit Default Swap] transactions.”
Joseph J. Cassano, former head
of A.I.G. Financial Products, London, August 2007. AIG was bailed out with 85
billion September 2008, after Cassano’s riskless CDS blew up.
ECB Looks at Deutsche Bank, BNP, SocGen's Trading Books
By Steven Arons and Nicholas Comfort
13 June 2018, 10:56 GMT+1
The European Central Bank has been taking a closer look at the trading books
of three of the euro-zone’s biggest lenders, according to people briefed on the
matter.The Frankfurt-based supervisor asked BNP Paribas SA, Deutsche Bank AG and Societe Generale SA several months ago to provide information on how they value bonds, stocks and derivatives on their trading books, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing confidential information. The review is now close to a conclusion, they said.
News of the probe was reported earlier by Sueddeutsche Zeitung. BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and SocGen declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg News.
The ECB has made no secret of its intention to take a close look at the trading operations of the euro area’s largest banks, particularly at how they use the leeway they’re given to price hard-to-value assets and liabilities themselves. Such Level 3 instruments represent less than 1 percent of euro-zone bank assets, ECB data show, but they’re considered important to keep an eye on because of the potential risks they pose to financial stability.
Daniele Nouy, chair of the ECB’s supervisory board, said last month the institution had subjected major trading banks to “a combination of enhanced monitoring, ‘deep dives’ and on-site inspections” on Level 3 assets, though she wasn’t specific about which firms were targeted. ECB executive board member Sabine Lautenschlaeger has also talked about collecting information on lenders.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-13/ecb-said-to-look-at-deutsche-bank-bnp-socgen-s-trading-books
A large Bank is exactly the place where a vain and shallow person
in authority, if he be a man of gravity and method, as such men often are, may
do infinite evil in no long time, and before he is detected. If he is lucky
enough to begin at a time of expansion in trade, he is nearly sure not to be
found out till the time of contraction has arrived, and then very large figures
will be required to reckon the evil he has done.
Walter Bagehot. Lombard Street. 1873
Walter Bagehot. Lombard Street. 1873
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Not the usual criminals today. Today, modern
“multi-cultural” socialist, PC Sweden, sent in by a regular LIR reader. I have
never been to Sweden and if this is modern Sweden they are welcome to it. Sadly
I have no reason to disbelieve the writer.
Brexit now, if only to control our borders from Mad
Merkel’s Migrants. But is Mayor Khan’s murder capital London, very far behind?
Sweden: The Chaos Spreads
by Svenne Tvaerskaegg
After decades of quietly growing like undiagnosed and untreated cancer
tumors, Sweden’s immigrant ghettos have reached the bursting point, and crime
is beginning to spill out into the ethnic Swedish areas of the country. Life is
becoming dangerous in those once peaceful and culturally homogeneous areas.
Ever-increasing numbers of ordinary Swedes are experiencing a grim awakening to
the frightening reality of what has happened to their country.
The Stockholm subway was once a safe and efficient means of getting
around Sweden’s capital, but it has now become a dangerous place and a conduit
for the spread of crime and antisocial behavior around the city. Criminal gangs
are taking over the subway and using it to commute between the ghettos and the
inner city, where they fuel the ever-rising tide of muggings, assaults and
rapes. Many subway stations have become open drug markets where dealers peddle
their wares untroubled by the undermanned and overstretched police. According
to police, 62% of all crime in Stockholm is now committed within a 500 meter
radius of a subway station.[1] The situation is becoming desperate,
and the Stockholm Transport Authority recently upgraded the security rating of
four subway stations to red, meaning they are now considered no-go zones and
unsafe for staff to work without a police escort.[2] A report last
year showed that up to 30% of the capital’s inhabitants now avoid using the
subway through fear of the escalating criminality.[3]
The degradation of daily life for ethnic Swedes is infecting all areas
of the social space. A family outing to a public swimming pool, once a pleasant
weekend activity, has now become a high-risk undertaking as gangs of immigrant
men use public swimming pools as an opportunity to stare at exposed infidel
flesh and sexually assault Swedish women and girls. According to a police
report, 80% of all incidents of sexual assault in public swimming pools are
committed by immigrant men, and often take the form of a gang’s surrounding a
girl so that she cannot escape while being assaulted.
The report says the
escalating number of assaults “have created a sense of helplessness. The affected
girls feel deeply humiliated and become frightened to go out.”[4]
Public libraries are being taken over by immigrant youths from the
ghettos who do not see libraries as places of tranquility and learning. They
regard them as their club rooms, where they can hang out, fight, cause trouble
and deal drugs. They often don’t bother using the toilets but do what they must
do on the floor between the bookshelves. Their behavior is driving away ethnic
Swedes, who can no longer browse the shelves and read in safety. The
librarians’ union reports that the peace and quiet of libraries is increasingly
being shattered by gang fights, sometimes involving bookcases being toppled and
books used as missiles. Librarians are routinely threatened, and dare not
intervene. According to the union chairman, “We can see that the problems that
exist in the rest of society are moving into public libraries.”[5]
Alarms directly connected to police stations are now being installed in public
libraries, but how effective they will be in calling for help from a thinly
spread and beleaguered police force is uncertain.
Even hospitals in Sweden are becoming danger zones. Gang fights in and
around the ghettos often end with multiple victims being taken to hospital with
knife and gunshot wounds. The wounded are followed in convoys of cars by their
gangs and clans, who carry on the fight in and around the hospital. Doctors and
nurses are threatened with violence if they do not treat the ‘right’ victim
first, and this has led to their covering the surname on their identification
badges with tape so they cannot be traced and attacked at in their homes.
Patrols by security guards are now standard in many hospitals, and personal
alarms are being issued to hospital staff so they can quickly summon help when
they are attacked. The chief of security at Scania University Hospital echoes
the words of the librarians’ union spokesman when she says: “Medical services
reflect society. It is dangerous when these kinds of violations against us
become the norm.”[6]
More
Surgeon says he is regularly treating children in school uniform for gun and knife wounds in London hospital which is 'like Afghan war zone'
Published: 12:22, 5 April 2018 | Updated: 01:17, 6 May 2018
----Speaking to Radio 4's Today, the leading surgeon said: 'We used to
look after people in their 20s now we look after people in their mid to late
teens and children, children in school uniforms are being admitted under our
care with knife and gun wounds.
'We routinely have children under our care - 13, 14 15-year-olds are
daily occurrences.
'About a quarter of what we see in our practice is knife and gun injury
and now we are doing major life-saving cases on a daily basis.
'Some of my military colleagues have described the practice here as
similar to being at Bastion, which is a very worrying comment to hear.'
Griffiths works as a lead trauma surgeon at the Royal London Hospital,
where there was a record 702 stabbing victims in 2017.
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?
Turbocharge for lithium batteries
Date:
June 11, 2018
Source:
Forschungszentrum Juelich
Summary:
A team of material researchers has succeeded in producing a composite material
that is particularly suited for electrodes in lithium batteries. The
nanocomposite material might help to significantly increase the storage
capacity and lifetime of batteries as well as their charging speed.
Lithium-ion batteries are the ultimate benchmark when it comes to mobile
phones, tablet devices, and electric cars. Their storage capacity and power
density are far superior to other rechargeable battery systems. Despite all the
progress that has been made, however, smartphone batteries only last a day and
electric cars need hours to be recharged. Scientists are therefore working on
ways to improve the power densities and charging rates of all-round batteries.
"An important factor is the anode material," explains Dina
Fattakhova-Rohlfing from the Institute of Energy and Climate Research (IEK-1).
"In principle, anodes based on tin dioxide can achieve much higher
specific capacities, and therefore store more energy, than the carbon anodes
currently being used. They have the ability to absorb more lithium ions,"
says Fattakhova-Rohlfing. "Pure tin oxide, however, exhibits very weak
cycle stability -- the storage capability of the batteries steadily decreases
and they can only be recharged a few times. The volume of the anode changes
with each charging and discharging cycle, which leads to it crumbling."
One way of addressing this problem is hybrid materials or nanocomposites
-- composite materials that contain nanoparticles. The scientists developed a
material comprising tin oxide nanoparticles enriched with antimony, on a base
layer of graphene. The graphene basis aids the structural stability and
conductivity of the material. The tin oxide particles are less than three
nanometres in size -- in other words less than three millionths of a millimetre
-- and are directly "grown" on the graphene. The small size of the
particle and its good contact with the graphene layer also improves its
tolerance to volume changes -- the lithium cell becomes more stable and lasts
longer.
Three times more energy in one hour
"Enriching the nanoparticles with antimony ensures the material is
extremely conductive," explains Fattakhova-Rohlfing. "This makes the
anode much quicker, meaning that it can store one-and-a-half times more energy
in just one minute than would be possible with conventional graphite anodes. It
can even store three times more energy for the usual charging time of one
hour."
"Such high energy densities were only previously achieved with low
charging rates," says Fattakhova-Rohlfing. "Faster charging cycles
always led to a quick reduction in capacity." The antimony-doped anodes
developed by the scientists, however, retain 77 % of their original capacity
even after 1,000 cycles.
"The
nanocomposite anodes can be produced in an easy and cost-effective way. And the
applied concepts can also be used for the design of other anode materials for
lithium-ion batteries," explains Fattakhova-Rohlfing. "We hope that
our development will pave the way for lithium-ion batteries with a
significantly increased energy density and very short charging time."
With the summer
solstice approaching in the norther hemisphere, check here to see how early you
can rise to see sunrise in your local or nearest city. For London the earliest sunrise starts a few
days before June 21.
Sunrise Sunset Calendar
Selected Major World Cities & Places of Interest
Set your calendar options then "Make Calendar".
All you need to know: June solstice 2018
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May.
DJIA: 24,416 +201 Down. NASDAQ:
7,442 +276 Down. SP500: 2,705 +180 Down.
All
three slow indicators moved down in March and have continued down in April and
May. For some a new bear signal, for others a take profits and get back to cash
signal.
"An employee on the exchange
floor said he was only granting interviews to people with television cameras.
"It’s busy," he said. " People are on the edge. You don't have
the friendliness that you usually have. Everybody is a mad man." A
passer-by stopped to ask him how the market was doing, and he quipped:
"You can't butt in. I'm going to be a star.""
New York Times article, October 20,
1987
Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. before you spend, earn. before you invest, investigate. Trusted Free Commodity Tips
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