Friday 28 September 2018

Dress Up Friday. Aluminium Reality. President Pan.


Baltic Dry Index. 1524 +21   Brent Crude 81.73

The market, like the Lord, helps those who help themselves. But, unlike the Lord, the market does not forgive those who know not what they do.

Warren Buffett.

We have reached the end of the week, month and quarter, time to dress up the stock market closes to improve money manager bonuses. Never mind that the Fed and other central banks are tightening interest rates, never a positive for most stocks. Never mind that President Trump has unleashed the first trade war since the 1930s against friend and foe alike, with especial vitriol against poor Canada.  Never mind that the 1930s precedent ended badly for all, this time it’s different, right? Never mind that stocks are just about to enter the traditional, historical crash season. Never mind that we are also in the midst of an all against the US dollar currency war.

This time round our new world prosperity is entirely built on central bank, rigged low interest rate, unrepayable debt. What could possibly go wrong?

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

Asia Stocks Rise; Dollar Holds Post-Fed Advance: Markets Wrap

By Adam Haigh
Updated on 28 September 2018, 04:18 GMT+1
Asian stocks rounded out a volatile month with gains on Friday, with Japanese shares outperforming thanks to a slide in the yen to the weakest level this year. The yen’s drop was part of a broader advance in the dollar after the Federal Reserve’s meeting.





Equities in Hong Kong and Australia also gained, with Chinese shares, though Korean equities slipped. U.S. stocks rose overnight. The dollar hit a two-week high after the Fed raised its key interest rate and lifted its long-term estimate for the benchmark. That came even as Treasury yields retreated some after the meeting. Italian assets may be under pressure after the government set a wider budget-deficit target than some had expected.

While U.S. investors have a raft of economic data due Friday including consumer spending, Asian traders will turn their focus to Tokyo. Traders will be watching whether the Bank of Japan tapers purchases of super-long bonds in its plan for October, out Friday afternoon. Analysts say the bank may indicate it will buy less of the debt due in more than 10 years at each operation, while keeping the number of purchase days the same as September.

Elsewhere, oil rose a day after the U.S. Energy secretary ruled out tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, compounding concerns that sanctions on Iran will tighten markets.
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In other news, the sky just fell in on Elon Musk, Tesla, and his August short squeeze on Tesla stock. A countdown clock is now ticking away on Tesla. An outlier for the rest of the market perhaps?
The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.

Peter Pan.

U.S. regulator sues Musk for fraud, seek to remove him from Tesla

September 27, 2018 / 9:15 PM
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday accused Tesla Inc Chief Executive Elon Musk of fraud and sought to remove him from his role in charge of the electric car company, saying he made a series of “false and misleading” tweets about potentially taking Tesla private last month.

Musk, 47, is the public face of Tesla and losing him would be a big blow for the money-losing car maker which has a market value of more than $50 billion, chiefly because of investors’ belief in Musk’s leadership.

The Department of Justice, which has the authority to press criminal charges, has also questioned the company about Musk’s tweets, the company said this month.

Tesla shares tumbled 12 percent in after-hours trading.

“Elon is Tesla and Tesla is Elon and that’s great when Elon is scoring touchdowns and grand slams but not so great when there are negative things tied to him,” said Karl Brauer, executive publisher at car research firm Kelley Blue Book.

Musk said he had done nothing wrong. “This unjustified action by the SEC leaves me deeply saddened and disappointed,” he said in a statement. “Integrity is the most important value in my life and the facts will show I never compromised this in any way.”

Tesla’a board said they are “fully confident” in Musk.

The SEC’s lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court, caps a tumultuous two months set in motion on Aug. 7 when Musk told his more than 22 million Twitter followers that he might take Tesla private at $420 per share, with “funding secured.”

On Aug. 24, after news of the SEC probe had become known, Musk blogged here that Tesla would remain public, citing investor resistance.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the SEC filed the lawsuit after a proposed settlement with Musk fell apart. The SEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment late on Thursday.
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In inflation news, Trump’s war on Iran’s oil sales has a downside for oil consumers. But if inflation returns, what will that do for over priced stocks?

Oil prices edge up amid uncertainty over fallout from Iran sanctions

September 28, 2018 / 3:07 AM
BEIJING (Reuters) - Oil prices inched up on Friday, with investors trying to gauge the potential impact on supply from looming U.S. sanctions on Iran’s crude exports.

The most-active Brent crude futures contract, for DecemberLCOZ8, had risen 18 cents, or 0.22 percent, to $81.56 per barrel by 0126 GMT. That was close to a four-year high of $82.55 struck on Tuesday.

With the expiration of the Brent November futures contract LCOX8 later on Friday, the front-month LCOc1 contract will become the December contract.

U.S futures CLc1 were up 21 cents, or 0.29 percent, at $72.33 per barrel, on track for a weekly gain.
“The market has been focusing on trading headlines on the Iran sanctions for a whole week. But views on how much OPEC and Russia can make up for the losses vary,” said Chen Kai, head of commodity research at Shenda Futures.

The sanctions kick in on Nov. 4, with Washington asking buyers of Iranian oil to cut imports to zero to force Tehran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement and to curb its influence in the Middle East.

---- Two sources familiar with OPEC policy said Saudi Arabia and other producers discussed a possible production increase of about 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) among the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and non-OPEC allies.

However, ANZ said in a note on Friday that major suppliers were unlikely to offset losses due to the sanctions estimated at 1.5 million bpd.

At its 2018-peak in May, Iran exported 2.71 million bpd, nearly 3 percent of daily global crude consumption. The nation is OPEC’s third-largest producer.
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Finally, why President Trump & his not so merrie olde men, are so hopelessly wrong on Canadian Aluminium. In making aluminium, the USA is far too expensive to compete.

Oh, the cleverness of me. 

President Trump, with apologies to Peter Pan.

The Metal That Started Trump’s Trade War

The president’s aluminum tariff is bad for America—and great for Switzerland’s Glencore.

September 27, 2018, 4:00 AM EDT

----The Hawesville smelter makes some of the world’s highest-purity aluminum, and it’s the only one in the U.S. that mass-produces the military-grade kind needed for fighter jets and tanks. Yet the method it uses isn’t that different from how aluminum was made in 1886, when Charles Martin Hall, an Alcoa Corp. co-founder, first shot an electrical current through a mineral bath of aluminum oxide. The process has become more efficient over time, but no one’s figured out a better way to separate oxygen atoms from aluminum atoms. The business is stubbornly dirty, expensive, and dependent on human labor.

It’s also incredibly energy-intensive. At full capacity, the Hawesville plant uses as much electricity as the entire city of Louisville (population 620,000), about 70 miles away. Not that the plant is at full capacity these days. This smelter was built in 1969, on the banks of the Ohio River, in a region that used to be the aluminum industry’s equivalent of Silicon Valley. Cheap coal dug out of the Appalachians and barged down the river was used to power half a dozen smelters clustered around Kentucky, Ohio, and Western Pennsylvania.

As recently as 2000, the U.S. was home to 23 aluminum smelters. Today there are six. Aluminum companies decided a long time ago that it was cheaper to produce the raw metal in areas outside the U.S. that had easy access to cheap hydro, thermal, and petroleum power—Canada, Iceland, Russia, and the Middle East. As aluminum became less expensive to make elsewhere, American companies focused on more profitable products made with low-cost imported raw ingot.

That’s been great for companies that use the metal: carmakers, airplane builders, brewers (all those cans), and aluminum sheet manufacturers. But the smelting business in the U.S. has been crushed, shedding two-thirds of its jobs over the past five years. Of the remaining smelters, Century owns three, including Hawesville. As aluminum prices sank, so did Century’s profits, to the point that by the end of 2015 the entire U.S. smelting industry was on the brink of extinction. Century lobbied the government and laid off about a third of its workers as its U.S. plants inched toward oblivion. Then Donald Trump got elected, and everything changed.

In March 2018, Trump fired the first major shot of his international trade war when he announced a 25 percent tariff on foreign steel and 10 percent on aluminum. The result has been chaos on both fronts, but particularly with the latter. The U.S. still produces two-thirds of the steel it uses, but it imports 85 percent of its raw aluminum. Through Sept. 19, companies have had to pay $625.4 million in aluminum tariffs, as they can’t find enough domestic supply. Canada has retaliated with its own tariffs. Since a piece of aluminum can take as many as five round trips across the U.S.-Canada border on its journey from ingot to finished product, what used to be the free passage of goods between two friendly nations has become an expensive logjam.

MillerCoors LLC says the tariffs will cost it $40 million in profit this year. Coca-Cola Co. is raising prices. Ford, General Motors, and Boeing have all said this is bad for business. So does most of the U.S. aluminum industry: Alcoa lowered its profit forecasts; trade groups claim that by trying to save low-margin smelters, Trump will hurt the more profitable segments of the business, killing more jobs than he creates.
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Town that aluminum built hopes to join World Heritage list

SAGUENAY, QUE.
Published November 12, 2010 Updated May 2, 2018
To stand in the heart of Arvida, with its plume-spewing smokestacks looming nearby, it's tough to feel you're getting a glimpse into a modern-day Eden.

Yet this remote Quebec community was born as a model city and cutting-edge town, a Silicon Valley of its day. And now, local residents are dreaming big: They want Arvida, an industrial "utopia" carved out of the Saguenay plain, recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Boosters say history has forgotten Arvida. After the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal and Versailles, could it be Arvida's turn for UNESCO glory?

"The people want it," says local councillor Carl Dufour, who is spearheading the effort, "and history wants it. Arvida was one of the most ambitious projects of its time."

To boosters, Arvida deserves a place on the map, nearly a century after a hot-tempered, fist-pounding American industrialist literally put it there.

Arvida was the creation of Alcoa (later Alcan) and its president, Arthur Vining Davis, a Massachusetts-born financier who gave the town his imprint as well as his name, at least the first two letters of each part of it.

Mr. Davis had set his sights on a corner of Quebec's Saguenay where abundant hydroelectric power could be used to create the magical metal of its time, aluminum. This was to be no ordinary boom town. By the 1920s, Mr. Davis recruited a New York planner and shaped both a company town and a model metropolis, 240 kilometres north of Quebec City.

----The tidy "workmen's" homes built as part of Arvida's original scheme still rise on spacious lots on winding, tree-lined streets - no grid-like monotony here. Each house was built with a garden and distinctive architectural style. Arvida was planned down to compulsory dog licences. The town got schools, churches and a way of life that included free Saturday night dances for the workers.

It became known as the City Built in 135 Days, trumpeted later by the New York Times as "a model town for working families" on "a North Canada steppe."

----Arvida turned into the biggest aluminum production centre in the Western world, so critical to the Allied effort during the Second World War that the wartime city was guarded by anti-aircraft batteries.

"Bill Gates is cutting-edge technology in 2005. Arvida was cutting-edge technology in 1945," says John Hartwick, who grew up in Arvida and is now an economics professor at Queen's University. "People visited the place with their mouths open. There was pride in the community. It was the Microsoft of 1947," said Prof. Hartwick, author of the book, Out of Arvida.

----In its day, Arvida's industrial might lured graduates from McGill, Princeton and M.I.T. As some recall, their English-speaking world of curling clubs, balls and operettas didn't much mix with the French-speaking neighbours. In the years before the Quiet Revolution, Quebec company towns like Arvida stood as a symbol of Anglo dominance over a French-speaking work force.

Today the families from what was known as the Quartier des Anglais have scattered, and reunions these days happen over lunch in spots like Kingston, Ont. "They still have the Arvida glow," Prof. Hartwick says.

Now part of the amalgamated city of Saguenay, Arvida has about 12,000 residents, and the smelter and other related plants, now part of Rio Tinto Alcan, are still in operation. This month, Mr. Dufour and other organizers will present their case for recognition to Parks Canada, a critical first step before reaching UNESCO.

Arvida

Located in Saguenay, Quebec, the Arvida smelter began operations in 1954 and employs 1000 people. It has 6 lines of pre–bake reduction cells and produced 173,000 tonnes of primary aluminium in 2015. The aluminium produced at the Arvida smelter is cast as value-added billets for markets worldwide or sold in liquid form directly to customers.
Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You will have everything in life.

President Trump, with apologies to Peter Pan.

Crooks and Scoundrels Corner

The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.

In trade wars, as in China, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Sail on sailor, there’s no room in Hong Kong under President Trump.

China denies request for Hong Kong port call by American warship

The refusal follows exchange of trade tariffs and US sanctions on a Chinese defence ministry unit over purchase of Russian weapons
PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 25 September, 2018, 6:06pm UPDATED : Tuesday, 25 September, 2018, 11:42pm
China has rejected a request for a US warship to make a port call in Hong Kong, the US consulate in Hong Kong said on Tuesday, amid rising tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.

“The Chinese government did not approve a request for a port visit to Hong Kong by the USS Wasp. We have a long track record of successful port visits to Hong Kong, and we expect that to continue,” the consulate said.

The amphibious assault ship had been due to stop in Hong Kong next month, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed US military officials.

The Chinese foreign ministry declined to comment on the refusal, saying only that China approved port visits on a case-by-case basis. The vessel is part of a group based in Sasebo in Japan and operating in the Indo-Pacific region.

In 2016, China denied a request for a US carrier strike group led by the USS John C Stennis to visit Hong Kong during heightened tensions over the South China Sea.

This time the rejection comes as China and the United States are locked in a trade war, with the US and then China imposing tariffs on each other’s goods.

In New York, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told a gathering of US business representatives that Washington’s repeated attacks on Beijing threatened the “total destruction” of four decades of gains in China-US relations.

Washington also decided last week to impose sanctions on a unit of the Chinese defence ministry and its director for buying advanced weapons from Russia.

In response, China recalled a navy commander from a visit to the US and postponed a military dialogue between the two countries.

Beijing also summoned US ambassador to China Terry Branstad and acting US defence attaché David Menser to protest against the sanctions.

The ministry said the US had no right to interfere in defence cooperation between China and Russia, and the US sanctions had seriously damaged China-US military relations.

Beijing has also protested against a US proposal to sell US$330 million in arms to Taiwan.

Shen Dingli, an international relations professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the rejection was a way for China to express its dissatisfaction.

Shen said nationalistic voices would grow resentful if Beijing did not take tough action against the US.

Xi Jinping says trade war pushes China to rely on itself and ‘that’s not a bad thing’

Factory workers and farmers in China’s rust belt first to hear how the country will respond to rising protectionism
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 26 September, 2018, 7:45pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 26 September, 2018, 11:27pm

Chinese President Xi Jinping says rising “unilateralism and protectionism” is forcing China to rely more on itself for development and “it’s not a bad thing”, reflecting a determination to fight a protracted trade war with the US if necessary.

Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader in decades, said it was time for China to cut its dependence on foreign technologies and others in his first clear statement on how China would cope with the trade war.

Speaking from one of China’s biggest state-owned factories, Xi emphasised the value of self-reliance, according to People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party.

“Internationally, it’s becoming more and more difficult [for China] to obtain advanced technologies and key know-how. Unilateralism and trade protectionism are rising, forcing us to adopt a self-reliant approach. This is not a bad thing,” Xi said.

“Rising protectionism” is a euphemistic reference to the tariff conflict between Beijing and Washington.

“Ultimately, China depends on itself” for development, Xi said.

----Xi made the comments during a visit to China First Heavy Industries, a state-owned machinery maker in Qiqihar of the northeastern province of Heilongjiang – a factory which can trace its roots to the early 1950s, when it weathered China’s worst economic days of isolation from the rest of the world.

Ding Yifan, a senior researcher with Tsinghua University’s National Strategy Institute, said Xi’s emphasis on “self-reliance” showed that Beijing was ready to dig in its heels.

“The spirit of self-reliance is the same as the old days,” said Ding. “But the implications can be very different – if China can weather the trade war to secure a leading edge in technology and manufacturing, China will become number one and invincible.”

Xi said China was a big country which must “depend on itself for food supply, depend on itself for economic development, and depend on itself for manufacturing”.
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"The world urgently needs to create a diversified currency and financial system and fair and just financial order that is not dependent on the United States."
Shi Jianxun. China People’s Daily. September 16, 2008

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?

Shedding light on -- and through -- 2D materials

High-performance computing helps to survey optical qualities of atom-thick materials for optoelectronics

Date: September 24, 2018

Source: Rice University

Summary: Scientists use a computational method to calculate the optical properties of two-dimensional materials. Their work promises to simplify the process of identifying the right materials for next-generation optoelectronic devices. 

The ability of metallic or semiconducting materials to absorb, reflect and act upon light is of primary importance to scientists developing optoelectronics -- electronic devices that interact with light to perform tasks. Rice University scientists have now produced a method to determine the properties of atom-thin materials that promise to refine the modulation and manipulation of light.

Two-dimensional materials have been a hot research topic since graphene, a flat lattice of carbon atoms, was identified in 2001. Since then, scientists have raced to develop, either in theory or in the lab, novel 2D materials with a range of optical, electronic and physical properties.

Until now, they have lacked a comprehensive guide to the optical properties those materials offer as ultrathin reflectors, transmitters or absorbers.

The Rice lab of materials theorist Boris Yakobson took up the challenge. Yakobson and his co-authors, graduate student and lead author Sunny Gupta, postdoctoral researcher Sharmila Shirodkar and research scientist Alex Kutana, used state-of-the-art theoretical methods to compute the maximum optical properties of 55 2D materials.

"The important thing now that we understand the protocol is that we can use it to analyze any 2D material," Gupta said. "This is a big computational effort, but now it's possible to evaluate any material at a deeper quantitative level."

Their work, which appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano, details the monolayers' transmittance, absorbance and reflectance, properties they collectively dubbed TAR. At the nanoscale, light can interact with materials in unique ways, prompting electron-photon interactions or triggering plasmons that absorb light at one frequency and emit it in another.

Manipulating 2D materials lets researchers design ever smaller devices like sensors or light-driven circuits. But first it helps to know how sensitive a material is to a particular wavelength of light, from infrared to visible colors to ultraviolet.

"Generally, the common wisdom is that 2D materials are so thin that they should appear to be essentially transparent, with negligible reflection and absorption," Yakobson said. "Surprisingly, we found that each material has an expressive optical signature, with a large portion of light of a particular color (wavelength) being absorbed or reflected."

The co-authors anticipate photodetecting and modulating devices and polarizing filters are possible applications for 2D materials that have directionally dependent optical properties. "Multilayer coatings could provide good protection from radiation or light, like from lasers," Shirodkar said. "In the latter case, heterostructured (multilayered) films -- coatings of complementary materials -- may be needed. Greater intensities of light could produce nonlinear effects, and accounting for those will certainly require further research."
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Another weekend, and an American tongue twister to amuse the children and grandchildren. Have a great weekend everyone. The traditional stock market crash season resumes on Monday.

"How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
He would chuck, he would, as much as he could,
and chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would
if a woodchuck could chuck wood."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog

The monthly Coppock Indicators finished August.

DJIA: 25,965 +207 Down. NASDAQ: 8,110 +265 Up. SP500: 2,902 +168 Up.
All three slow indicators moved down in March, but the S&P and  NASDAQ have now turned up.  September will be critical for confirmation of this change.

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