Baltic Dry Index. 1689 +32 Brent Crude 72.97
“If
you're not gonna pull the trigger, don't point the gun.”
James
Baker. United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan,
and U.S. Secretary of State and White House Chief of Staff under President
George H. W. Bush.
For more on President
Trump threatening war on Iran, scroll down to Crooks Corner. Would a foreign escapade
trump Mueller’s Russian collusion investigation? Oil to 200 a barrel? How easy
is it to invade and occupy 80 million Iran? At what cost in fiat dollars and men?
We open with more of
the same. Trade wars, currency wars, and the start of round two’s escalation
set to kick off in August. No wonder the G-20 is nervous. Not so our complacent
stock markets, who still seem to think it’s all a storm in a teacup.
I think that it’s
anything but, even without President Trump threatening war with Iran. With a new war and 200 dollar oil, even if
Trump releases the US oil reserve, our way
too complacent world will come crashing down.
July 23, 2018 / 1:43 AM
Asian stocks ease, dollar near two-week lows on Trump comments
SYDNEY
(Reuters) - Asian shares dipped on Monday on fears of more protectionist
measures from the United States while the dollar declined against major
currencies after U.S. President Donald Trump criticised the Federal Reserve’s
tightening policy.
Trump, on Friday, lamented the recent strength of the U.S. dollar and accused
the European Union and China of manipulating their currencies.
The dollar index .DXY is so far up 2.4 percent this year led largely by
Fed rate rises, strong macro-economic data and nervousness about a full-blown
tariff war. It was last down 0.2 percent at 94.27, the lowest in more than two
weeks.
Trump’s remarks on Friday, coupled with new threats to slap duties on all U.S. imports from China, triggered sell-offs in Wall Street and European stocks on Friday, despite good corporate earnings.
Asian stocks took Wall Street's cue on Monday with MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS falling 0.2 percent. Japan's Nikkei .N225 stumbled 1.4 percent, Australian shares and South Korea's KOSPI index .KS11 fell 0.9 percent each.
Chinese shares also opened lower but quickly reversed their losses, with both the blue-chip index .CSI300 and Shanghai's SSE Composite .SSEC up a touch.
More
China’s Stealth Yuan Devaluation Catching Trump’s Attention
By Gregor Stuart Hunter and Enda Curran
Updated on 23 July 2018, 02:23 GMT+1
For more than a month, China seemed to be enjoying the advantage of
exchange-rate depreciation without the global backlash and panicky capital
outflows that accompanied the bout of yuan weakening in 2015. Then Donald Trump
took issue.The U.S. president’s charges that China is “manipulating” a currency that’s been “dropping like a rock” came at the end of a six-week slide in the yuan that took it to its lowest level in more than a year against the dollar. The remarks, in a tweet and an interview with CNBC, suggested to market participants that the U.S.-China trade war is now broadening to include currencies, putting fresh scrutiny on Chinese management of the yuan.
After overseeing a slide in the yuan of almost 5 percent since mid-June,
the question for Chinese officials now is whether to turn to other policy
measures to support growth in the face of headwinds to exports. Wang Tao at UBS
Group AG is among those predicting China will use other tools than the exchange
rate to “cushion the blow” from the trade war.
“The central bank will work to stabilize the currency,” Wang, UBS’s head
of China economic research in Hong Kong, said in a Bloomberg Television
interview. “So what can China do? At this moment I think they can ease some of
the tightening” in credit and fiscal policy, to support infrastructure
investment, she said.
China set the reference rate for the onshore yuan at 6.7593 Monday,
compared with a forecast 6.7554. The offshore yuan was little changed at 6.7764
as of 9:17 a.m. in Shanghai.
Trump’s criticism aside, China watchers have highlighted how the yuan’s
depreciation this time around is better understood by investors as a reflection
of economic fundamentals, rather than the 2015-style shock.
----As China’s officials determine whether to respond to Trump’s yuan manipulation charge, economists say there are clear arguments for a cheaper Chinese currency, justifying the current weakness.
“The currency should be depreciating from a broad macro perspective --
you have the Fed hiking and PBOC easing, so at some point it will be reflected
in the FX market,” Frederic Neumann, co-head of Asian economics research at
HSBC Holdings Plc in Hong Kong, told Bloomberg Television. “This is still in
line with the broader PBOC policy of introducing more volatility and letting
the market play itself out.”
Bloomberg
Economics estimates that the yuan is around 6.6 percent overvalued, based on
economic fundamentals. Fielding Chen and Tom Orlik wrote in their analysis
Friday that “there’s a sense that the decline is in line with Beijing’s wishes
and -- if they want -- under their control.”
More
July 21, 2018 / 4:18 PM
U.S. courts allies with free trade offers at G20, France resists
BUENOS
AIRES (Reuters) - The United States sought to woo Europe and Japan with free
trade deals on Saturday to gain leverage in an escalating tariff war with China
but its overtures faced stiff resistance from France at a G20 finance ministers
meeting dominated by trade tensions.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters at the gathering
of the financial leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies in Buenos Aires
that he was renewing President Donald Trump’s proposal that G7 allies drop
trade barriers between them.
“If Europe believes in free trade, we’re ready to sign a free trade
agreement,” Mnuchin said, adding that such a deal would require the elimination
of tariffs, non-tariff barriers and subsidies. “It has to be all three issues.”
Trump has angered European allies by imposing import tariffs of 25
percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum, causing the European Union to
retaliate with similar amounts of tariffs on Harley-Davidson motorcycles,
Kentucky bourbon and other products.
Trump, who frequently criticizes Europe’s 10 percent car tariffs, is
also studying adding a 25 percent levy on automotive imports, which would hit
both Europe and Japan hard.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said the European Union would not
consider launching trade talks with the United States unless Trump first
withdraws the steel and aluminum tariffs and stands down on a car tariff
threat.
“We refuse to negotiate with a gun to our head,” Le Maire told reporters
on the sidelines of the G20 meeting.
Mnuchin’s
offer to the European Union and Japan - along with a renewed effort to
jump-start stalled talks with Mexico and Canada to modernize the North American
Free Trade Agreement - come as the United States and China are at loggerheads
in an escalating trade dispute with no talks in sight.
----Mnuchin is not meeting formally with any Chinese officials at the G20 meeting, but said that was because his normal counterpart, top Chinese economic adviser Liu He, is not attending.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) also warned that the recent wave
of trade tariffs would significantly harm global growth.
More
July 21, 2018 / 1:01 PM
U.S. tariffs to cost Germans up to 20 billion euros this year: report
BERLIN
(Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs will lead to a drop in
prosperity in Germany this year and are likely to cost Germans up to 20 billion
euros ($23.44 billion), the head of German think-tank IMK said.
The United States imposed tariffs on EU steel and aluminum on June 1 and
Trump is threatening to extend them to EU cars and car parts.
“The policy of tariffs will cost Germans up to 20 billion euros in
additional income this year,” Gustav Horn, director of the IMK, which is close
to the trade unions, told weekly magazine Der Spiegel.
“Without Trump’s policies, the upturn would do better in terms of
exports,” he added.
If firms had better export prospects, they would have reason to invest
more, he said. But that is not happening now and is resulting in income and
number of jobs being lower than possible, he added.
If the trade conflict escalates further, exports and therefore
investment would tumble, Horn was cited as saying, adding: “That would be the
classic case of an economic downturn.”
On Friday the head of the DIHK Chambers of Commerce said tariffs on
imported cars that the United States is considering would slash around 6
billion euros ($7.03 billion) off German economic output.
July 23, 2018 / 2:10 AM
China probes stainless steel imports from Indonesia, EU, Japan and Korea
BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Monday launched an anti-dumping
probe into stainless steel imports worth $1.3 billion, including from a
privately owned Chinese mill with operations offshore, after complaints that a
flood of product has damaged the local industry.
The Commerce Ministry said on Monday the investigation will target imports of stainless steel billet and hot-rolled stainless steel sheet and plate from the European Union, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia, which nearly tripled last year.
The move follows a complaint by Shanxi Taigang Stainless Steel (000825.SZ), with backing from four other state-owned mills including Baosteel’s stainless steel division, which blamed cheap imports on falling prices, it said.
China makes and consumes around half of the world’s stainless steel, which is used to protect against corrosion in buildings, transportation and packaging.
While the complaint targets eight foreign producers, it also lists a
number Chinese companies, including the Indonesian unit of one of the world’s
top producers, Tsingshan Stainless Steel, and 19 traders who import product.
Some private Chinese companies have opened or started building plants in
Indonesia in recent years, drawing on its plentiful nickel resources and
lower-cost of production.
A significant portion of the new production has been sold in China,
analysts say.
The rapid increase in imports damaged the Chinese market, according to
the complaint filed by Shanxi Taigang and released with the commerce ministry
document.
Almost two-thirds of China’s stainless imports came from Indonesia last
year, up from 5 percent in 2016 and zero in 2015, the complaint said. That rose
to as high as 86 percent in the first quarter, it said.
More
If the financial
system goes down, our business is going down and, trust me, yours and everyone else's is going down, too.
Lloyd
Blankfein’s CEO Goldman Sachs, threat 2008. “Mr. Goldman Sacks.”
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, is the American War
Party and deep state manipulating Trump into a war with Iran?
Trump Warns Iran's Rouhani to ‘Never, Ever Threaten’ the U.S.
By Nick Wadhams
Updated on 23 July 2018, 05:15 GMT+1
U.S. President Donald Trump launched a new broadside against Iran,
warning of unspecified “consequences” if counterpart Hassan Rouhani again
threatened America.
In a Twitter post late Sunday, Trump said, “To Iranian President
Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES
THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO
LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE &
DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”
The
comment -- similar in tone and wording he used last year in warning North Korea
about its rapidly improving nuclear weapons program -- came hours after Rouhani
said the U.S. risked the “mother of all wars” in a conflict with Iran. In a
speech, Rouhani warned his U.S. counterpart against threatening the nation’s
oil exports and called for improved relations with its neighbors, including
arch-rival Saudi Arabia.
Trump is reimposing sanctions on Iran, which ships most of its oil
through the Strait of Hormuz, in an effort to squelch the country’s oil sales.
Hormuz, a shipping chokepoint at the mouth of the Gulf, is a conduit for
tankers carrying about 30 percent of all seaborne-traded crude oil and other
liquids.
Also Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo delivered a speech
on Iran policy in southern California accusing the country’s leaders of
corruption and urging European allies to join the U.S. in a pressure campaign
against the Islamic Republic. Pompeo said Iran’s leadership is made up of
“hypocritical holy men” responsible for “crooked schemes” that have hurt the country’s
economy and citizens.
Pompeo said America stands in solidarity with Iranians and reiterated
that the U.S. expects countries to “significantly” reduce their dependence on
Iranian oil or face tough new sanctions after Nov. 4.
“While it is ultimately up to the Iranian people to determine the
direction of their country, the United States, in the spirit of our own
freedoms, will support the long-ignored voice of the Iranian people,” Pompeo
said in the speech in Simi Valley, California. The audience included
Iranian-Americans, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton -- a leading Iran critic in
Congress -- and former California Governor Pete Wilson.
The
speech was the latest in a wave of U.S. criticism as the Trump administration
seeks to marshal support for its plan to reimpose sanctions against Iran -- and
punish anyone who does business with it -- in the weeks since the U.S. pulled
out of the 2015 accord to limit Iran’s nuclear program in May.
Iran Warns Trump Not to Threaten Country's Oil Exports
By Golnar Motevalli
Updated on 22 July 2018, 12:36 GMT+1
Iran’s president warned his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump not to
threaten the Persian Gulf nation’s oil exports and called for improved
relations with its neighbors, including arch-rival Saudi Arabia.
Trump is reimposing sanctions on Iran, which ships most of its oil
through the Strait of Hormuz, in an effort to squelch the country’s oil sales.
Hormuz, a shipping chokepoint at the mouth of the Gulf, is a conduit for
tankers carrying about 30 percent of all seaborne-traded crude oil and other
liquids. Other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq also export much of their crude through the
Strait.
Iran will seek improved relations with its Arab neighbors in the Persian
Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Rouhani
said in a speech in Tehran on Sunday, the semi-official Iranian Students’ News
agency reported. But he also said Saudi Arabia still needs to “change its
actions, let go of obstinacy and be willing to have relations.” He cautioned
the U.S. against pursuing hostile policies against Tehran, saying that war with
Iran would be the “mother of all wars.”
Iran and the European Union are working to salvage the 2015 accord that
lifted sanctions on the country in exchange for concessions on its nuclear
work. Trump withdrew from the international agreement and is restoring U.S.
sanctions. Rouhani made his comments a day after Iran’s Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that negotiating with the U.S. would be useless.
Rouhani suggested that Iran has alternatives to shipping crude through
Hormuz.
“No one who really understands politics would say they will block Iran’s
oil exports, and we have many straits, the Strait of Hormuz is just one of
those,” Rouhani said. He didn’t elaborate on the other “straits” Iran might have
available for its exports.
“Mr Trump! We are the honest men who have throughout history guaranteed
the safety of this region’s waterways,” Rouhani said. “Do not play with the
lion’s tail, it will bring regret.”
Iran would halt oil shipments through the strait if the U.S. stopped it
from exporting, Esmail Kowsari, deputy commander of the Sarollah Revolutionary
Guards base in Tehran, said earlier this month, according to the Young
Journalists Club, which is affiliated with Iran’s national broadcaster.
“Sometimes
you move publicly, sometimes privately. Sometimes quietly, sometimes at the top
of your voice.”
James
Baker. United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald
Reagan, and U.S. Secretary of State and White House Chief of Staff under
President George H. W. Bush.
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?
Physics treasure hidden in a wallpaper pattern
Date:
July 19, 2018
Source:
Princeton University
Summary:
An international team of scientists has discovered a new, exotic form of
insulating material with a metallic surface that could enable more efficient
electronics or even quantum computing. The researchers developed a new method
for analyzing existing chemical compounds that relies on the mathematical
properties like symmetry that govern the repeating patterns seen in everyday
wallpaper.
"The beauty of topology is that one can apply symmetry principles
to find and categorize materials," said B. Andrei Bernevig, a professor of
physics at Princeton.
The research, appearing July 20 in the journal Science, involved
a collaboration among groups from Princeton University, the University of
Pennsylvania (Penn), Sungkyunkwan University, Freie Universität Berlin and the
Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics.
The discovery of this form of lead-strontium (Sr2Pb3) completes a
decade-long search for an elusive three-dimensional material that combines the
unique electronic properties of two-dimensional graphene and three-dimensional
topological insulators, a phase of matter discovered in 2005 in independent
works by Charles Kane at Penn and Bernevig at Princeton.
Some scientists have theorized that topological insulators, which
insulate on their interior but conduct electricity on their surface, could
serve as a foundation for super-fast quantum computing.
"You can think about a topological insulator like a Hershey's
kiss," said Kane, a corresponding author on the paper. "The chocolate
is the insulator and the foil is a conductor. We've been trying to identify new
classes of materials in which crystal symmetries protect the conducting
surface. What we've done here is to identify the simplest kind of topological
crystalline insulator."
The new work demonstrates how the symmetries of certain two-dimensional
surfaces, known as the 17 wallpaper groups for their wallpaper-like patterning,
constrain the spatial arrangement (topology) of three-dimensional insulators.
In a conventional three-dimensional topological insulator, each
two-dimensional surface exhibits a single characteristic group of states with
cone-like dispersion. These cones resemble the elements on graphene called
Dirac cones, features that imbue the material and other two-dimensional Dirac
semimetals with their unusual electronic transport qualities, but they are
distinct because graphene possesses a total of four Dirac cones in two pairs
that are "glued" together.
Kane had suspected that with crystal symmetries, a second kind of topological
insulator could exist with a single pair of glued Dirac cones. "What I
realized was that a single pair of Dirac cones is impossible in a purely
two-dimensional material, but it might be possible at the surface of a new kind
of topological insulator. But when I tried to construct such a state, the two
cones always came unglued."
A solution emerged when Benjamin Wieder, then a graduate student in
Kane's group and now a Princeton postdoctoral associate, visited Princeton. At
Princeton, Bernevig and colleague Zhi Jun Wang had just discovered
"hourglass insulators" -- topological insulators with strange
patterns of interlocking hourglass-like states -- which Wieder recognized as
acting as if you had wrapped a three-dimensional crystal with a special kind of
patterned wallpaper.
"We realized that you could get not just the hourglass insulator,
but also this special Dirac insulator, by finding a crystal that looked like it
was covered in the right wallpaper," said Wieder.
----As even more exotic topological insulators are discovered, the role of wallpaper group symmetry, and of the special, graphene-like cones in the Dirac insulator, have been further solidified.
"When you can split a true surface Dirac cone while keeping
time-reversal symmetry, something truly special happens," said Bernevig.
"You get three-dimensional insulators whose two-dimensional surfaces are
also a kind of topological insulator." Such phases have been predicted
recently in bismuth crystals and molybdenum ditelluride (MoTe2) by several members
of the collaboration.
Furthermore, with the use of a new theory, topological quantum
chemistry, the researchers hope to find many more of these exotic phases.
"If we could paint these materials with the right wallpaper, we'd
see more Dirac insulators," said Wieder, "but sometimes, the wrong
wallpaper is interesting too."
MoreThe 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment