Baltic Dry Index. 1612 +45 Brent Crude 77.16
The
most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by
accident. That’s where we come in, we’re
Trump professional advisors. We cause accidents.
With
apologies to computer programmers and Anon.
A journey of a
thousand miles, starts with a single step, said communist mass murderer Mao,
and with a single step this morning, America and China stepped up their trade
war, starting off on a journey of no one knows how many miles, nor of what
duration or destination.
President Trump
immediately threatened an escalation if China retaliated, which it has, though
there are a lot of procedural steps necessary before President Trump can impose
his full threatened tariffs on 500 billion of China’s goods. China, still
largely a command economy, can act far faster if President Xi opts to.
And so it starts. The
world’s largest debtor by far, just thumped the world’s largest creditor on the
nose. The world’s largest creditor, just poked the world’s largest debtor in
the eye. Biff, bash, thump, kapow!
For better or worse,
and my guess is it will be worse, the world is tearing up the rule book from
Pax Americana. The big unknown in this new and highly risky new order, how long
before the “next Lehman” shows up, and over priced and heavily indebted stocks
implode, and we repeat 2008-2009 but on steroids?
The only good news I
can offer is that it won’t take place on day one. But with each escalation and
each passing month, this American version of trade Russian roulette risks an
accident. Everyone now needs to own a little physical gold and silver, held
securely under their own physical control.
Success
is a lousy teacher – it seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
Bill
Gates.
U.S., China tariffs take effect as Trump threatens massive escalation
By Mike
Murphy Published: July 6, 2018 12:02 a.m. ET
Trump says U.S. may seek tariffs on more than $500 billion of Chinese goods
President Donald Trump said Thursday the U.S. could soon impose tariffs on more than $500 billion in Chinese imports, about the amount of total goods the U.S. imported from China last year.Trump made his comments hours before fresh tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese imports took effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time Friday.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on his way to a rally in Montana, Trump gave a running total of what he will seek, assuming China responds with retaliatory tariffs, starting with the $34 billion in levies that kicked in Friday.
“Then you have another 16 [billion] in two weeks and then as you know we have 200 billion in abeyance and then after the 200 billion we have 300 billion in abeyance. OK? So we have 50 plus 200 plus almost 300,” he said, according to reports by Reuters and CNBC, adding “It’s only on China.”
A massive escalation like that would likely rattle financial markets worldwide, and could have costly repercussions for U.S. manufacturers and consumers.
The $34 billion in tariffs are the first part of levies on a total of $50 billion of Chinese goods that Trump announced in June. The second part, with tariffs on $16 billion in Chinese imports, is scheduled to take effect in two weeks.
China has warned it will retaliate in kind. On Thursday, China’s customs bureau said it would impose tariffs on $34 billion in U.S. goods immediately after the Trump administration’s tariffs took effect Friday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
July 6, 2018 / 2:47 AM
As tariffs loom, China state media slams Trump's 'gang of hoodlums'
BEIJING/WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - China’s state media lashed out at U.S. President Donald Trump,
accusing the White House of behaving like a “gang of hoodlums” as the world’s
two biggest economies headed toward outright trade war on Friday.
The United States was set to impose tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese
imports from 0401 GMT, as Trump warned it may ultimately target over $500
billion worth of Chinese goods, or roughly the total amount that the United
States imported from China last year.
Beijing has vowed to respond immediately with an equal amount of tariffs
of its own against U.S. autos, agricultural and other products.
Chinese shares, which have been battered in the run-up to the tariff
deadline, slipped further from early deals and pulled Asian markets down, while
the yuan currency also weakened.
“In effect, the Trump administration is behaving like a gang of hoodlums
with its shakedown of other countries, particularly China,” the state-run China
Daily newspaper said in an English language editorial on Friday.
“Its unruliness looks set to have a profoundly damaging impact on the
global economic landscape in the coming decades, unless countries stand
together to oppose it.”
While the initial volley of tariffs was not expected to have major
immediate economic impact, the fear is that a prolonged battle would disrupt
makers and importers of affected goods in a blow to global trade, investment
and growth.
More
U.S., China trade battle could last into next year
The U.S. and China were poised to slap levies on $34 billion of each
other’s exports Friday, the first tangible shots in a trade battle both sides
are preparing to keep fighting for months if not years longer.
In Beijing, President Xi Jinping has instructed various levels of
government to get ready for a full-bore trade war, according to Chinese
officials. “With his tariff threats, Trump is posing an unprecedented challenge
to the leadership,” said Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at
Nanjing University, referring to President Donald Trump.
Brookings Institution China scholar David Dollar, who was the U.S.
Treasury’s top official in Beijing during the Obama administration, figures the
fight will stretch into next year, at least, because a strong economy will make
it less likely that the U.S. will feel any immediate economic pressure from the
trade fight.
Trump’s threat to levy tariffs on another $200 billion also won’t be
ready to put into effect until the late fall because the U.S. has to clear a
number of procedural requirements. And as the U.S. closes in on midterm
congressional elections, the China fight might seem like “a political winner,”
Dollar said. The new levies were scheduled to take effect at midnight Eastern
in the U.S.
Brace for a lost decade for U.S. stocks, warn Morningstar strategists
By Victor
Reklaitis Published: July 5,
2018 8:46 a.m. ET
It’s time to put away the grill and fireworks and instead focus on the Fed
minutes that will hit during afternoon trading.If the smoke signals from Jay Powell & Co. aren’t stirring enough, we’ve also got Washington and Beijing’s dueling tariff packages that are getting closer to taking effect. And there’s Friday’s jobs report.
Beyond the near-term economic headlines, strategists at Morningstar say the longer-term outlook isn’t that great for U.S. stocks, providing our call of the day.
“Our
expectation at the moment is that you won’t have any real return from U.S.
equities over the next 10 years,” said Morningstar’s Dan Kemp at a company
event Wednesday in London. In the chart he shared below, the black line is
pretty close to zero for American stocks.
That
line represents implied returns for various stock markets after adjusting for
current valuations. The U.S. equity market “looks both extremely expensive and
very unattractive relative to other markets,” said Kemp, who is the research
and money management company’s chief investment officer for Europe, the Middle
East and Africa. But he also waved the Stars and Stripes a bit: U.S. Treasurys GOVT,
+0.16% “are actually the most
attractive government bond market,” he said.
More
How Trump’s European auto tariff proposal could backfire
By Jeffry
Bartash Published: July 2, 2018 5:46 a.m. ET
U.S. has huge tariffs on SUVs and pickup trucks, the most lucrative part of the auto market
President Donald Trump is continuing to threaten Europe with stiff tariffs on auto imports if they don’t drop unspecified trade barriers, but the risk might not be worth the reward.Relatively few European-made cars are actually sold in the United States, for one thing. And even if Trump were to get his way, Europe wants something in return: Easier access to the highly protected and lucrative market for SUVs and pickup trucks that generate the bulk of profits for American auto makers Ford F, +1.00% and General Motors GM, -1.34% .
----Auto makers such as BMW BMW, +5.52% , Porsche, Volkswagen VOW3, +4.64% and Daimler DAI, +2.94% unit Mercedes-Benz shipped about 1.2 million cars made in Europe to the United States in 2017, according The Wall Street Journal. That’s about $43 billion worth of autos.
Sounds like a lot, but it’s really just a small percentage of all the vehicles sold in the U.S. Americans bought 17.3 million cars and light trucks last year. Less than 7% came from Europe.
----Many U.S.-made cars exported to Europe, for instance, are exempt from the EU tariff because they include a requisite percentage of parts made on the Continent. American automakers also build cars in Europe.
Only 15% of U.S. autos shipped to the EU last year were subject to the
tariff, estimates Christine McDaniel, senior research fellow at George Mason
University’s Mercatus Center.
----What Trump also fails to mention is that the U.S. has a much higher 25% tariff on foreign-made SUVs and light trucks, the sweet spot in the American auto market. By contrast, the EU charges 10%.
Ford and General Motors have made a killing selling bigger
vehicles such as the Ford F-150 and Chevrolet Silverado.
More
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-trumps-european-auto-tariff-proposal-could-backfire-2018-06-22
Finally, in other
news, Japan is getting historic rains and might get hit early next week with a
Pacific typhoon. Is the Atlantic is about to get its first hurricane of the 2018
season?
July 6, 2018 / 2:41 AM
Hundreds of thousands evacuated in Japan as 'historic' rain falls; two dead
TOKYO
(Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of people across a wide swathe of western and
central Japan were evacuated from their homes on Friday as torrential rains
pounded the nation, flooding rivers, setting off landslides and leaving at
least two people dead.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said the rainfall was “historic” and
warned more rain was set to batter already saturated parts of the nation
through Sunday.
By Friday morning, one part of the main island of Honshu had been hit
with twice the total amount of rain for a normal July.
----Around 168,000
people were ordered from their homes due to the danger of further landslides
and flooding, and 1.2 million more were advised to leave as of Friday morning,
the Agency added. This included parts of the tourist city and ancient capital
of Kyoto, where authorities had closed off some bridges and waterside
promenades as rivers swelled.
----One part of the smallest main island of Shikoku was hit by 98 mm (4 inches) of rain in the hour to 8:00 a.m. on Friday, with a total of 908 mm (36 inches) in the 48 hours previously. Some parts of Japan were set to see up to 400 mm of rain in the coming 24 hours, with the rain set to continue until Sunday.
Japan’s weather woes are far from over. Typhoon Maria, forming deep in
the Pacific, is set to strengthen, possibly into an intense Category 4 storm,
and may directly target the southwestern islands of Okinawa early next week.
Tropical Storm Beryl could strengthen into hurricane by Saturday: NHC
(Reuters) - Tropical Storm Beryl is strengthening over the tropical
Atlantic and could become a hurricane by Friday or Saturday, the U.S. National
Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Thursday.
Beryl is about 1,295 miles (2,080 km) east-southeast of the Lesser
Antilles in the Caribbean Sea and contains maximum sustained winds of 50 miles
per hour (85 km/h), the NHC said in its latest advisory.
"The center of Beryl will remain east of the Lesser Antilles
through Sunday," the Miami-based weather forecaster added.
More
I don’t
want yes men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs
them their jobs.
Samuel
Goldwyn.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, only in the EUSSR, as they say. Will Italy’s
new government turn off the TAP? My guess, this being Italy, when enough EBRD
money is diverted to the protesting natives, those 1600 olive trees will have
passed their sell by date.
"On
the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the
time.”
George
Orwell.
The 1,600 Olive Trees Holding Up a $5.2 Billion Pipeline
What was once a lonely fight over local farms has become a populist protest against globalization.
By Chiara Albanese 5 July 2018, 05:01 GMT+1
On a recent visit to a construction site near an olive grove along the
coast of southern Italy, a reporter’s phone buzzed with an ominous text
message: “We know you’re there.”The text came from one of the people fighting to stop the final construction of a 4.5 billion-euro ($5.2 billion) natural gas pipeline that’s designed to run right beneath the olive trees, an area farmed for centuries and now surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. They have been working in shifts, monitoring progress of a project meant to carry gas from the Caspian Sea and provide the cornerstone of a European Union plan to wean itself off Russian gas.
Now their years long fight to block the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, known
as TAP, has been given a boost. The ministers in Italy’s new government
have threatened to put the project under review, aligning more with the
protesters than the companies working on the pipeline, including British oil
giant BP Plc and Italy’s state-owned gas company, Snam SpA. The threats
have thrown into question whether the final stretch will be
ready by the planned 2020 deadline—or completed at all.
The companies that invested in TAP and the larger pipeline it connects
with could face billions in losses if the project is delayed, said Elchin
Mammadov, a utilities analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “There is a 90%
probability that it will not be ready,” he said.
On Wednesday, the board of the London-based European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development gave the project a vote of confidence, approving
a loan of up to 500 million euros and saying the initial annual capacity of 10
billion cubic meters of natural gas would be enough for 7 million European
households.
What began as a squabble about olive groves has grown into a larger
protest against globalization, a theme that courses through populist rhetoric.
“Our fight started to protect our land,” said Gianluca Maggiore, a
member of the group that calls itself No TAP. “Now we are fighting against the
system, against energy markets distortion, against speculation by multinational
companies.”
The populist coalition now in power in Rome is made up of lawmakers from
the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and from the anti-immigrant League.
Since coming to power on June 1, they have roused worries throughout the
eurozone, on issues such as the common currency and migrant policy. Yet the new
government’s energy policies may turn out to have the greatest impact.
Only
the last five miles of the 500-mile-long pipeline—those under the olive
trees—are in question. The project will bring gas from Azerbaijan, winding
through Greece and Albania, under the Adriatic Sea and finally up into Italy,
which imports more than 90 percent of its oil and gas. Gas is already flowing
through some of the early portions, and TAP has been credited with helping the Greek economy last
year.
Those trees initially proved to be the most difficult obstacle of all.
Local associations and government officials are fighting TAP’s plans to
uproot more than 1,600 of them, despite pledges to take painstaking care.
And several cabinet ministers in the new populist government have
threatened to put the whole project under review, which environment minister
Sergio Costa said will be a priority. Barbara Lezzi, the new minister for the
southern regions and an outspoken TAP critic, said she hopes a special
committee will review whether it’s possible to halt the project or change its
route.
More
Jean-Claude
Juncker. Failed Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of
Finance Ministers. Confessed liar. European Commission President. Scotch
connoisseur.
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?
India’s Largest Solar Tender Yields Lowest Tariff Ever
July 3rd, 2018 by Saurabh
Two of
India’s leading solar power developers have managed to win possibly the largest
capacities ever awarded in a single tender in the country.
Acme Solar
and Azure Power managed to secure the rights to develop 600 megawatts of
capacity each in the largest solar power tender issued by the Solar Energy
Corporation of India to date. The tender is jointly the largest tender issued
in the country ever. Tenders with 2 gigawatts of capacity each were issued by
the states of Jharkhand and Telangana.
The tender was issued in January this year, and
attracted bids worth 2.95 gigawatts in the final round of auction from eight
developers. Acme Solar and Azure Power each placed successful bids to develop
600 megawatt capacity. While Acme Solar placed the lowest-bid of Rs 2.44/kWh
(3.55¢/kWh), Azure Power secured the capacity at Rs 2.53/kWh (3.69¢/kWh).
The bid of
Rs 2.44/kWh (3.55¢/kWh) is jointly the lowest-ever in Indian solar power
market. Acme Solar had placed a bid of Rs 2.44/kWh (3.55¢/kWh) for a
200 megawatt solar power project in the state of Rajasthan. The project is
being developed in the Bhadla solar power park.
Other
successful bidders include Shapoorji Pallonji (250 megawatts), Hero Future
Energies (250 megawatts), and Mahindra Susten (250 megawatts). Adani Green
Energy also placed a bid for 500 megawatts, but managed to secure only 50
megawatts due to over-subscription of the tender. ReNew Power Ventures and
Fortum India, which bid for 250 megawatts each, failed to win any capacity due
to higher tariff bid.
SB Energy
and EDEN Renewable had also submitted technical bids to set up 600 megawatts and 250
megawatts, respectively, but did not participate in the financial bidding
round.
This tender
was the first in a long list of similar tenders that have already been launched
and will be launched in the future by SECI. Under the conditions of these
tenders, project developers will be free to choose the site for the project
with no direct help from the government machinery. The developers will also
have to apply for connectivity to the inter-state transmission network.
More
Another weekend and a
spectacular weekend too. The British Grand Prix. England v Sweden. Henley
Regatta. Wimbledon. Warm pleasant summer weather. God must be an Englishman after all!
And then next week,
President Trump is set to go on the warpath against NATO in Brussels Europe, visit
GB on Friday the thirteenth, and meet up with his boss President Putin in
Finland. Where’s best for a Trump-phobic, violent professional anarchist-communist
rioter to go? Europe’s Trump haters are spoiled for choice. Have a great
weekend everyone.
"We
finished the year, and we reported that we had $17 billion of cash sitting at
the bank's parent company as a liquidity cushion. As the year has gone on, that
liquidity cushion has been virtually unchanged."
Alan Schwartz, CEO Bear Stearns, March 12, 2008.
Bust March 16, 2008.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished June.
DJIA: 24,271 +221 Down. NASDAQ:
7,510 +267 Down. SP500: 2,718 +169 Down.
All
three slow indicators moved down in March and have continued down in April. May
and June. For some a new bear signal, for others a take profits and get back to
cash signal.
The goal isn't more money.The goal is financial freedom.mcx tips
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