Baltic Dry Index. 1373 -46 Brent Crude 74.25
The only relevant test of the
validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
Milton Friedman
After U-turning on President Trump’s inhuman
policy of separating illegal migrant parents from their children, more below in
Crooks Corner, will President Trump now U-turn on his potentially disastrous global
trade war policy?
The stock promoters and pedlars seem to think,
yes, President Trump’s position is only a hard ball negotiating ploy, they
posit. I disagree, if President Trump U-turns on his trade war now, he’ll be
handing the mid term elections to the Democrats. Guaranteeing himself two years
of unrelenting Congressional warfare. The lamest of lame duck presidents.
Having
put himself in a corner of his own making, would President Trump really throw
the Republican Party under the bus ahead of the mid-terms?
From tomorrow the first of the EUSSR’s
retaliatory tariffs start to apply. More retaliation kicks in on July one. The
damage from all the tariffs is just starting. Stick around until the end of
summer, heading closer to the elections.
But the failed G-7 meeting, plus the
unilateral decision to break treaties and to impose tariffs on friend and foe
alike, has already undermined confidence and trust in the USA as a reliable
partner and ally. It will take years to rebuild that trust, if it’s ever
rebuilt. The damage from the ZTE sanctions, will linger on for decades.
Below, the global stock markets sleepwalking
into catastrophe. Unwilling to face up to the new reality. Though not for much
longer I suspect. As in August 1914, once the shooting started, the war turned
out nothing like what the experts and generals expected.
The most important single
central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both
parties benefit.
Milton Friedman
June 20, 2018 / 4:54 PM
Top central banks see growing gloom global trade war
SINTRA, Portugal (Reuters) - A developing
trade war between the world’s biggest economies is weighing on business
confidence and could force central banks to downgrade their outlook, the
world’s most powerful policymakers argued on Wednesday.
After imposing punitive tariffs on a number of its top trading partners,
the United States earlier this week threatened China with further duties on
$200 billion, escalating a conflict that has already drawn retaliatory steps
from nearly all corners of the world.
Sitting side by side in a Portuguese hill-top town, the heads of the
U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the
Reserve Bank of Australia all took a gloomy view on the escalating conflict,
arguing that the consequences are already evident.
“Changes in trade policy could cause us to have to question the
outlook,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in some of his strongest remarks yet on
the issue.
“For the first time we are hearing (from business leaders) about
decision to postpone investment, postpone hiring, postpone making decisions,”
he said.
The U.S. could be a victim of its own policies, Deutsche Bank’s analysts
argued, predicting a hit to growth and corporate earnings.
“Our analysis indicates that such a further escalation of the trade
dispute to include $200 billion of imports could reduce real GDP growth by
roughly -0.2 to -0.3 percentage points,” Deutsche said, adding that this could
reduce S&P 500 earnings growth by 1 to 1.5 percent.
Such a trade war would come at an especially sensitive time for central
banks, as they try to move past crisis-era unconventional measures and build
policy buffers for any potential downturn at the end of the current business
cycle.
---- Speaking alongside Powell, ECB chief Mario Draghi said he had little reason to be optimistic, arguing that the ECB would have to incorporate the newest wave of punitive measures into calculation.
“It’s not easy and it’s not yet time to see what the consequences on
monetary policy of all this can be, but there’s no ground to be optimistic on
that,” Draghi said.
He warned that the impact could come through reduced confidence, lower
investments and a drop in exports, all potentially exacerbated by retaliatory
moves.
The ECB last week downgraded its growth forecast for the year, and
Draghi said the economy’s soft patch could be longer than the bank’s staff
predicted.
Berenberg economist Holger Schmieding put the average direct economic
damage from a trade war between the United States, China and the European Union
at roughly 0.1 to 0.2 percent of GDP for those countries.
“Undermining the rules-based global trade order would sow serious
uncertainty and raise transaction costs over time. In the long run, this could
undo some of the gains from globalisation over the last decades,” Schmieding
said.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-ecb-policy-trade/top-central-banks-see-growing-gloom-global-trade-war-idUKKBN1JG2EX
June
21, 2018 / 1:39 AM
Asian shares edge ahead, oil subdued before OPEC meeting
SYDNEY (Reuters) -
Asian shares crept ahead on Thursday as a lull in the Sino-U.S. trade tussle
and talk of more Chinese stimulus helped calm nerves, while tensions in the oil
market grew ahead of an OPEC meeting that could expand the supply of crude.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS gained 0.4 percent, while Japan's Nikkei .N225 added 0.7 percent.
Australia’s main index had another strong day, rising 1 percent on fund manager demand before the end of the local financial year next week.
Futures for the S&P 500 ESc1 added 0.4 percent as investors waited for new developments on global trade. After a hesitant start, Chinese markets moved into positive territory as Shanghai blue chips rose 0.6 percent .CSI300.
The mere
absence of new threats from President Donald Trump on tariffs was enough to
stem recent selling, with investors clinging to the hope that all the bluster
was a ploy which would stop short of an outright trade war.
“Many
participants see the Trump Administration’s hard line as part of the
negotiating strategy,” said Richard Grace, chief currency strategist at CBA.
Markets had also been encouraged by the People’s Bank of China’s move to set firm fixings for its yuan, along with the addition of extra liquidity.
There was also much speculation the central bank would cut bank reserve requirements, thus boosting lending power in the economy.
On Wall Street, resilience in tech stocks helped the Nasdaq to an all-time high, though the moves were modest. While the Dow Jones .DJI fell 0.17 percent, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 0.17 percent and the Nasdaq .IXIC 0.72 percent.
Twenty-First Century Fox Inc (FOXA.O) climbed 7.5 percent after Walt Disney Co (DIS.N) sweetened its offer for some of the company’s assets to $71.3 billion, looking to topple Comcast Corp’s (CMCSA.O) bid.
More
Apple tops this watchlist of stocks at risk amid escalating trade tensions
Published: June 20, 2018 4:05 p.m. ET
From Shanghai SHCOMP, -0.24% to Germany DAX, +0.14% DAX, +0.14% escalating trade tensions are taking a toll on global markets. “One can understand if U.S. trading partners are getting frustrated,” says Michael O’Rourke of Jones Trading. “If the Trump administration’s decisions to actively continue to escalate trade tensions is not enough, injury is added to insult due to the fact that foreign financial markets are succumbing to the burden.”
Meanwhile, the S&P SPX, +0.17% has held up relatively well, slipping just slightly over the previous two days while managing to end each session at intraday highs. But O’Rourke warned that it might be just a matter of time before the S&P, and, more specially, shares of U.S. companies doing big business in China, feel the heat.
“The overnight trading in foreign equity markets and the S&P 500 was the result of active investors beginning to discount the risks of an escalating storm,” he wrote. “ One would expect in a discounting market, that increases uncertainty for corporations exposed. We have witnessed mild reactions in industrial and materials companies but overall this market is not discounting much.”
If that changes, the following stocks could be vulnerable, O’Rourke warned:
----That’s a table of Russell 3000 companies with over $1
billion in revenue derived from China, screened for those with at least 10% of
sales coming from the Chinese market. As you can see, there are some
heavyweights on that list, including Apple AAPL, +0.44% Intel INTC, +1.00% Qualcomm QCOM, +0.15% and Boeing BA, +0.46% to name just a
few
More
And so its starts, small at
first, but like that fateful, disastrous August 1914, start it does. Where it
all ends up, nobody knows, nor when.
EU to impose tariffs on $3.2 billion of U.S. goods starting Friday
Published: June
20, 2018 7:16 a.m. ET
The European Union
will begin implementing tariffs on €2.8 billion ($3.2 billion) worth of goods
imported from the U.S. on Friday, the European Commission said Wednesday. The
"rebalancing measures" are in response to the U.S. imposing
respective tariffs of 25% and 10% on aluminum and steel imports from the EU on
June 1, the commission said. Agricultural goods and other U.S. products will
also be hit with levies. "The rules of international trade, which we have
developed over the years hand in hand with our American partners, cannot be
violated without a reaction from our side.
Our response is
measured, proportionate and fully in line with WTO rules," Cecilia
Malmström, the European Union's trade commissioner, said in a statement. The EU may impose tariffs on another €3.6 billion
worth of U.S. goods "at a later stage -- in three years' time or after a
positive finding in WTO dispute settlement if that should come sooner."
U.S. President Donald Trump has said the tariffs are aimed at protecting the
U.S. steel industry.
Hedge-fund boss who predicted ‘87 crash says next recession will be ‘really frightening’
Published: June 20,
2018 7:36 a.m. ET
‘We’ll have monetary policy, which will exhaust really quickly, but we don’t have any fiscal stabilizers’ says Jones
Paul Tudor Jones, a hedge-fund luminary, on Monday said the next economic downturn confronted by the U.S. could be an ugly one.“The next recession is really frightening because we don’t have any stabilizers,” he said, speaking at an event sponsored by Goldman Sachs GS, +0.52% and hosted by its CEO Lloyd Blankfein called “Talk at GS.”
“We’ll have monetary policy, which will exhaust really quickly, but we don’t have any fiscal stabilizers,” Jones said.
The billionaire investor said the dynamic created by the Federal Reserve, as it attempts to normalize interest-rate policy from the 2007-‘09 financial crisis, is unsustainable, referring to valuations for stocks that many on Wall Street view as pricey.
Jones’s comments come after he told CNBC last week that stock market and bond yields are set for a ‘crazy’ rise.
“I think you’ll see rates go up and stocks go up in tandem at the end of the year,” Jones said last Tuesday. He made the case that real rates remain historically low and that rising bond yields, which move inversely to bond prices, won’t deter investors from scooping up stocks.
That is conducive to equities being “jacked up and ready to go,” he said during his interview with Blankfein on Monday.
Jones is widely credited with predicting, and profiting, from the stock-market crash on Oct. 19, 1987, which saw the Dow lose nearly 23% of its value, marking the largest one-day percentage decline for the blue-chip benchmark in its history. Jones founded Tudor in 1980 and became known for trading everything from currencies to commodities. His record has featured middling returns and an exodus of billions from his hedge fund in more recent years. According to a Forbes list of billionaires, Jones boasts a net worth of $4.7 billion
Check out the complete GS interview below via YouTube:
Indeed,
a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it... gives
people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to
want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in
freedom itself.
Milton
Friedman
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Not the usual suspects today. Today, the US
government doubled over and bent like a pretzel. A Trumpian human tragedy in
the making. Worse, it has probably done irreparable damage to US – Latin American
relations; poisoned the atmosphere ahead of President Trump’s July EU and UK
visits. Why would President Putin want to lend his prestige and summit with
Trump during July?
The government solution to a
problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Milton Friedman
Will detained migrant children be reunited with parents? No one seems to know
Published: June 20, 2018 11:46 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump on Wednesday stopped his administration’s widely
condemned policy of separating children from their parents at the border, but
one big question lingers: What happens to the nearly 2,500 children already in
federal custody?No one seems to really know.
“There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,” a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services said of Trump’s executive order, according to the New York Times.
According to the HHS, there are no plans to reunite families in the near future, and children already being detained will remain there while their parents’ cases go through the legal system. The HHS said existing policies apply to those children, meaning that it’s up to the parents to find their children, which, if the parents are in custody as well, may be impossible.
Furthermore, a report by The New Yorker earlier this week found authorities had no system in place for tracking where detained children were, or for reuniting them with their parents.
“There is no system whatsoever to track these family separations, no efforts systematically to reunite these families,” Anthony Enriquez of Catholic Charities told the New York Times on Wednesday. “There is no supervisor, there is no database saying, ‘child here, parent there,’ so they can come back together.”
In a series of tweets Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont called for detained families to be reunited and said Trump’s executive order does not go far enough. “We must be clear that mass incarceration of families is not the answer — alternatives exist that have proven to be effective, less costly, and more humane,” he said.
His comments were echoed by Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler of New York and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi. “We are troubled that amid all the fanfare of Donald Trump’s televised signing ceremony there was not a single mention of how the more than 2,000 children will be reunited with their families,” they said in a joint statement Wednesday. “Children are currently being held in facilities that are often at opposite ends of the country from their parents, and there appears to be no system for reuniting these families.”
June 19, 2018 / 6:01 PM
Mexico calls migrant children separation 'inhumane,' 'racist'
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico’s foreign minister on Tuesday
called the separation of children from immigrant parents at the U.S.-Mexico
border “cruel and inhumane” while the leftist front-runner ahead of next month’s
presidential vote called it “racist.”
Images published this week of children and youths sitting in
concrete-floored cages in U.S. shelter facilities have generated outrage. U.S.
officials have defended the measures as a way to secure the border and deter
illegal entry.
“This is a clear violation of human rights and puts children, including
those with disabilities, in a vulnerable situation,” Foreign Minister Luis
Videgaray told a news conference in Mexico City, where he urged the United
States to reconsider the practice.
Videgaray said the Mexican government had made its position clear to
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration and raised the issue with senior
United Nations officials, including U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who leads polls ahead of the country’s July
1 election, asked Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to “act urgently” to
stop “that arrogant, racist, inhuman attitude of deporting children, putting
them in cages and separating them from their parents.”
“Soon, very soon, when our movement triumphs, we will defend the
migrants from Mexico, Central America, all the American continent, and all the
migrants of the world,” he said at a rally in Culiacan, the capital of the
north-western state of Sinaloa.
Of some 1,995 cases registered by U.S. authorities, only around one
percent of the children affected were Mexican, and most had already been
repatriated, Videgaray said.
Among the 21 identified cases of Mexicans separated from their parents was
a 10 year-old girl with Down Syndrome who was being held in McAllen, Texas,
Videgaray said, adding that the girl’s mother was sent to another place.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance” policy
in April that all immigrants apprehended while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border
illegally should be criminally prosecuted under the country’s criminal entry
statute.
The policy has led to family separations because when border agents
refer apprehended migrants to court for prosecution, parents are held in
federal jail to await trial by a judge while the children either remain in
border patrol custody or are moved to facilities.
---- Most of the children are from Central America, especially Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Honduras on Monday called for the United States to end the separations,
and El Salvador said the policy puts children’s health at risk and could cause
psychological scars.
Videgaray said Mexico would be working closely with the Central American
governments
More
Trump May Meet Putin During July Trip to Europe – Reports
03:08 21.06.201US officials are looking at a July timeframe for US President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, British media reported Thursday.
Trump is expected to travel to Brussels
for a NATO summit on July 11 and from there on to London. A
meeting with Putin may be arranged either before that time or
after he wraps up the UK trip, The Times newspaper said, citing
senior sources in the British government.
The Austrian capital of Vienna has been discussed as a possible venue, being the headquarters of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Russia and the United States are both members.
There are two possibilities at the moment
for the meeting and both are either before the NATO summit
in Brussels on July 11 or after Trump's visit to Britain on July
13, Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. However, there
are no comments from the White House or Kremlin so far confirming or
denying the reports.
More
If you put the federal
government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of
sand.
Milton Friedman
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?
Double-Sided Solar Panels Are Taking Off in China
June 20, 2018
By
Here’s one way to get more power from solar panels: use both sides of the cells. But don’t expect that to double the output.
China is expected to jump-start the market for panels that can absorb light on both sides with plans to install 2.7 GW this year, according to research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Other regions may add as much as 200 MW in 2018, and the global market may reach 15 GW by 2020. A typical nuclear reactor has about 1 GW of capacity.
Standard solar panels have a mostly aluminum backing. The so-called bi-facial panels remove most of the aluminum from the bottom, exposing the semiconducting material so it can produce electricity from light that hits it on either side.
This costs more to make, and until recently, the higher output hasn’t been enough to attract developers. Better manufacturing techniques are making them cheaper, and early installations show about a 10 percent boost in output as light bounces off the ground to hit the underside of the panels. Pro tip: It helps to paint the ground white.
The Great Depression, like
most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government
mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
Milton Friedman
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.
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