In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative
tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results
far much less.
At the annual Fedsters,
and banksters plus cronies gathering in Jackson Hole Wyoming, Federal Reserve
Chairman Jerome Powell, predictably stated all was well in the US economy, and
that while the punchbowl would remain, the Fed would continue watering the
punch, but only in tiny previously signalled measured amounts. So far no tweets
from President Trump approving or disapproving of the Fed’s “independent”
interest rate policy.
Carry on bingeing as
normal, was the Fedster’s message.
Fed’s Powell plays down risk of overheating, still expects gradual pace of interest-rate hikes
By Greg Robb
Published: Aug 24, 2018 12:54 p.m. ET
Fed can stick with rate-hike trajectory pace with no sign inflation is moving above 2%, chairman says in Jackson Hole address
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Friday that the central bank’s gradual path of interest-rate hikes remains appropriate as there does not seem to be “an elevated risk of overheating.”In his closely watched speech opening the Jackson Hole summer retreat, Powell said inflation has recently moved up near 2% but “we have seen no clear sign of an acceleration” above that level.
“My colleagues and I believe that this gradual process of normalization remains appropriate,” he said.
Economists define a “gradual” pace as one quarter-point interest rate hike per quarter. The Fed has penciled in two more rate hikes this year. Investors see a 90% chance of a move in September and a 60% probability of a rate hike in December. At the same time, the Fed is gradually allowing its balance sheet to shrink.
Stocks SPX, +0.62% already firmer on the day, moved higher after Powell largely reaffirmed the gradual rate-hike path that the market has been banking on. Benchmark Treasury yields TMUBMUSD10Y, -0.45% pared their climb as Powell’s remarks hit, while the dollar index DXY, -0.50% deepened its loss.
“With solid household and business confidence, healthy levels of job creation, rising incomes and fiscal stimulus arriving, there is good reason to expect this strong performance will continue,” Powell said.
Anwiti
Bahuguna, senior portfolio manager, global asset allocation for Columbia Threadneedle
Investments, said the market might be mistaken in the view that this was a
dovish speech.
“I didn’t
view this as dovish,” she said. “His speech clearly said two more rate hikes
this year,” she added.
More
But elsewhere red lights continue flashing, bells are
ringing, klaxons sounding. To this old dinosaur market watcher, I think this
party’s about to end. If the regular business cycle and normalising interest
rates doesn’t do it in, next month’s round three of Trump’s trade war on China,
and China’s response certainly will, not to mention a looming soon to be hot
war with Iran and its customers, starting in November.
Below, more reason to head for the exits. With retailers
already deep in a hole, how much worse will it get when they must pass on Trump’s
tariff costs to US consumers, and right in the runup to Christmas sales.
These Sears and Kmart stores will start liquidation sales as early as next week
By Tomi
Kilgore
Published: Aug 24, 2018 11:16 a.m. ET
Shares fell toward a record low after tumbling nearly 40% so far this month
Sears Holdings Corp. has provided a list of 46 unprofitable stores, across 28 states, that it will close in November.The number includes 33 Sears stores and 13 Kmart stores. The struggling department store chain said liquidation sales at the closing stores will begin as early as Aug. 30.
Shares SHLD, -0.90% bounced 0.9% in morning trade Friday, after slumping 5.9% on Thursday to close at a record low of $1.11. They have tumbled 39% this month and 89% this year. In comparison, the SPDR S&P Retail exchange-traded fund XRT, -1.10% has run up 15% year to date and the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.62% has gained 7.4%.
Earlier this summer, Sears provided an updated list of 78 Sears and Kmart stores that it said would close in September.
The
company had originally said in May that it had identified 100 non-profitable
stores, and that it would begin closing 72 of those stores in the coming
months. At that time, Sears initially provided a list of 63 stores it would
begin closing in early September, then updated that list in early June to 68
stores, then added 10 more stores to the list in late June that it said would
begin closing in late September.
More
J.C. Penney may be courting the same fate as Sears
By Tonya Garcia
Published: Aug 24, 2018 2:35 p.m. ET
J.C. Penney Co. Inc. is out of step with the rest of the retail sector.
As rivals stage a steady rebound from the weakness of the last few years, the Plano, Texas–based department-store chain JCP, +2.81% has deteriorating financials, is struggling to identify its core customer and is still searching for a new chief executive, all issues that analysts say could push it into bankruptcy if it can’t turn things around quickly.
Penney’s second-quarter earnings report last week delivered the latest in a string of disappointing numbers, sending shares down almost 27% in their biggest one-day tumble in J.C. Penney’s 40-year history as a public company. The day ended with the stock at its lowest level on record. The stock, in fact, has fallen more than 51% in the past year, vastly underperforming the SPDR S&P Retail exchange-traded fund XRT, -1.10% , which has gained 34%, and the S&P 500 SPX, +0.62% , which has gained 17%.
The results and lowered guidance prompted S&P Global Ratings to downgrade the company’s credit rating to B- from B, sending it deeper into speculative-grade, or “junk,” territory. The downgrade reflects “continued weak operating results, compounded by persistently ineffective inventory management that has been a primary contributor to margin pressure and, in our view, indicates increasing execution risk,” said S&P.
More
Trump's China Hawks Prepare to Swoop as Trade Talks Go Nowhere
By Shawn Donnan
Updated on 25 August 2018, 05:00 GMT+1
The trade
war between the U.S. and China is about to get uglier. After a long, hot summer
spent weighing risks and firing warning shots, the hawks in President Donald
Trump’s administration have gained the upper hand -- and they’re set to unleash
a fall offensive.
Talks in
Washington this week yielded little visible progress toward a cease-fire
between the world’s two largest economies. Looming instead are new tariffs that
Trump has threatened to impose on some $200 billion in annual imports from
China, and Beijing’s already-promised retaliation.
“We’re
facing an escalating trade war over the next few months,” says David Dollar of
the Brookings Institution, who served as the U.S. Treasury’s top man in China
under the Obama administration.
Even before
the latest talks broke up, the signals weren’t hard to read. Earlier this year,
the president publicly overruled Steven Mnuchin and ripped up a deal the
Treasury secretary had struck with Liu He, his Chinese counterpart.
In the past
week, while the two sides were talking, the U.S. slapped tariffs on a further
$16 billion in Chinese imports. Retaliation by Beijing will bring the amount of
trade affected by the dispute to $100 billion, with more to come.
Trump also
celebrated new restrictions on investment from China this week.
“Not enough
focus has been put on China. And that’s been for a long time,” the president
told legislators gathered at the White House on Thursday to mark the passage of
a law giving yet more powers to the already powerful Committee on Foreign
Investment in the U.S., which can block acquisitions on national security
grounds.
And on Friday, Trump’s officials were huddled in Washington with counterparts from Europe and Japan, discussing how to push China into changing course.
It all adds up to what many analysts see as a win for the president’s China hawks, in the debate over how to tackle the first major strategic rival the U.S. has faced since the end of the Cold War.
Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, says the hawks’ victory is reflected in the way U.S. demands have evolved in recent weeks.
When Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross led missions to Beijing earlier this year, one key priority was securing increased purchases of American soybeans, LNG and other commodities, to reduce a bilateral trade deficit that’s been a persistent obsession for Trump.
A few months on, the administration’s goals are more maximal. It’s demanding the kind of long-term structural changes to Chinese policy -- such as ending industrial subsidies and intellectual-property theft -- that hawks including Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro have been pushing for. “A spectrum shift,” Kennedy calls it.
---- At home, there’s growing unrest in the business community and among consumers. In hearings this week, a procession of small and medium-sized companies complained about the forthcoming tranche of tariffs, which will hit some 6,000 products ranging from seafood to bicycles.
More
August 24, 2018 / 7:08 AM
Exclusive - China to keep hitting back at U.S. over trade, to boost government spending: finance minister
BEIJING, (Reuters) - China will keep hitting back at
Washington as more U.S. trade tariffs are imposed, but its counter-strikes will
remain as targeted as possible to avoid harming businesses in China - whether
Chinese or foreign, Finance Minister Liu Kun said.
For now the
impact of the China-U.S. “trade frictions” on the Chinese economy has been
small, but he is concerned about potential job losses and lost livelihoods,
Liu, 61, told Reuters on Thursday in an interview at the finance ministry, his
first with the media since taking up the position in March.
He said that
the Chinese government will increase its spending to support workers and the
unemployed who are hurt by the trade conflict, and also predicted bond issuance
by local governments to support infrastructure investment this year will pickup
and blow past 1 trillion yuan (113.43 billion pounds) by the end of the current
quarter.
---- “China doesn’t wish to engage in a trade war, but we will resolutely respond to the unreasonable measures taken by the United States,” Liu said. “If the United States persists with these measures, we will correspondingly take action to protect our interests.”
So far,
China has either imposed or proposed tariffs on $110 billion (85.76 billion
pounds) of U.S. goods, representing most of its imports of American products.
Crude oil and large aircraft are key U.S. goods that are still not targeted for
penalties.
More
‘Thanks Mr Trump’: state media mocks US president for helping make China great again
Broadcaster’s English-language video listed all the ways Donald Trump’s trade war has helped China improve itself
PUBLISHED
: Wednesday, 22 August, 2018, 2:34pm
UPDATED
: Thursday, 23 August, 2018, 11:58am
China’s
biggest state broadcaster has produced a short, satirical video mocking the US
president that opens with the line: “Thanks Mr Trump, you are GREAT!”
The
English-language footage, which was uploaded on YouTube on Monday night, takes
the form of a letter to Donald Trump that thanks him for all the things he has
done for China, and highlights many of the country’s concerns in the ongoing
trade dispute.
The film by China Global Television Network (CGTN)
sarcastically thanks Trump for helping the rest of the world to “bond” and
galvanising China into making economic reforms that helped it lure major
foreign investors such as Tesla.
It is one of the few occasions that state media has
personally targeted the US president since the start of the trade war, with
most reports taking a less confrontational tone.
More
There can be few fields of human endeavour in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.
John Kenneth Galbraith.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished July.
DJIA: 25,415 +213 Down. NASDAQ:
7,672 +259 Down. SP500: 2,816 +166 Down.
All
three slow indicators moved down in March and have continued down ever since.
For some a new bear signal, for others a take profits and get back to cash
signal.
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