Baltic Dry Index. 1395 -33 Brent Crude 71.99
“To
understand the history of [China] in the past 70 years, one has to go back to
the year 1840 when China was bullied and oppressed by imperialist powers”
Vice-President
Wang Qishan.
With many results
still to come in the US elections, US major media are predicting that the
Democrats will take the House while the Republicans will hold the Senate,
perhaps increasing their majority. If that is in fact the result, a technical
win for President Trump in that it practically guarantees no attempt at impeachment,
and no or very little change in President Trump’s foreign policy.
No greatly weakened President
Trump, when he gets to sit down with President Xi at the end of the month at
the G-20 meeting. Already twice this week, China has signalled it’s ready for serious
trade talks but only on the basis of equals. A relief rally looks likely today,
albeit tomorrow’s Fed meeting might limit stock market optimism.
With the elections
over and a technical win for President Trump, Trade War Team Trump can now drop
some of the bad rhetoric and get on with negotiating a trade deal with China,
while there is still time to avert a global recession next year.
Below, better news
from China.
China is ready to talk to resolve US trade war, says Vice-President Wang Qishan
·
The two countries ‘wish to expand cooperation’
and Beijing is prepared to ‘push for a proposal acceptable to both sides’
·
Tuesday’s speech strikes similar themes to those
in Xi Jinping’s address a day earlier
Sarah
Zheng Updated: Tuesday, 6 Nov, 2018 11:23pm
China is ready to engage with the US to resolve
their months-long trade war, Vice-President Wang Qishan said at a new economic
forum in Singapore hosted by US billionaire Michael Bloomberg.
Wang, widely reputed to be a “firefighter” and
one of President Xi Jinping’s most trusted allies, pushed back against
Washington’s “America first” trade policies in a nearly 20-minute keynote
address on Tuesday at the newly inaugurated Bloomberg New Economy Forum,
without making reference to US President Donald Trump by name.
At the same time, he promoted a vision of
globalisation that was an echo of Xi a day earlier in Shanghai at a
government-sponsored import fair, in another effort by Beijing to quell global
scepticism about its resolve to adopt economic reforms.
He said China and the US needed to cooperate closely
to resolve the problems facing the world, and that economic globalisation would
move forward despite twists and turns.
“Negativity and anger are not the way to
address the problems that have emerged from globalisation, nor will barriers
and disputes help solve one’s own problems; instead, they will only exacerbate
global market turbulence,” Wang said.
He added that China needed to stay “calm and
sober-minded”, invoking the country’s history of oppression by “imperialist
powers”.
“To understand the history of [China] in the
past 70 years, one has to go back to the year 1840 when China was bullied and
oppressed by imperialist powers,” he said.
“Since then, the unyielding Chinese people have
been fighting to once again stand on their feet and achieve prosperity and
strength.”
His
remarks at the inaugural forum – which brought together 400 business leaders to
rival the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – came ahead of a
proposed meeting between Trump and Xi at the G20 summit in Argentina later this
month.
Analysts said a meeting between the two heads
of state could mark a turning point in the months-long trade dispute between
the world’s two largest economies – relief that businesses and markets are
eager to see.
It also comes on the heels of Xi’s pledges on
Monday at this week’s China International Import Expo in Shanghai, where the
Chinese leader vowed to buy US$40 trillion in goods and services over the next
15 years.
Henry Kissinger: China, US must reveal red lines to avoid conflict
·
China’s continued growth means Washington and
Beijing will inevitably “step on each others’ toes”, says American former
secretary of state, 95
·
But he is “optimistic” about US-China ties, saying
problems can be worked through if each side is clear about the concessions they
are willing to make
Updated: Tuesday, 6 Nov, 2018 9:42pm
Speak openly to each other about your red lines and the concessions you
are willing to make to avoid conflict.
That was Henry Kissinger’s advice to feuding world powers on
Tuesday, as he warned Washington and Beijing an all-out conflict between them
would destroy the current world order.
Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore,
the American former secretary of state, 95, who is widely respected for his
prescient views on geopolitics, said it was inevitable that the world’s two
biggest economies would “step on each others’ toes” as the Asian power
continued to grow rapidly.
“The challenge is to maintain a fundamentally
cooperative relationship amid inherent differences of approach,” Kissinger
said.
He said: “It is essential for China and the
United States to [talk] to each other about what the objectives are that they
feel they must achieve and what the concessions are that they must not be asked
to make, and the concessions each is willing to make.”
Kissinger, who played a key role in
Washington’s rapprochement with Beijing in 1971, said both sides could do
better in dealing with one another.
In the US, Kissinger said, officials needed to
learn that “not every crisis is caused by ill will” and that there was a “difference
between educating people and learning to cooperate with them”.
Washington also tended to believe that “if there
is a problem, there is a short-term solution,” he said.
The US, he said, needed “to understand that the
new world is not necessarily an adaptation of everything with which we are
familiar”.
Beijing, on the other hand, was bogged down by
its view that admitting to a problem would lead to more problems rather than
conflict resolution, he said.
More
First Opium War
The First Opium War (Chinese: 第一次鴉片戰爭), also known as the Opium War or the Anglo-Chinese War, was a series of military engagements fought between the United Kingdom and the Qing dynasty of China over their conflicting viewpoints on diplomatic relations, trade, and the administration of justice in China.[7]In the 17th and 18th centuries, the demand for Chinese goods (particularly silk, porcelain, and tea) in Europe created a trade imbalance between Qing Imperial China and Great Britain. European silver flowed into China through the Canton System, which confined incoming foreign trade to the southern port city of Canton. To counter this imbalance, the British East India Company began to auction opium grown in India to independent foreign traders in exchange for silver, and in doing so strengthened its trading influence in Asia. This opium was transported to the Chinese coast, where local middlemen made massive profits selling the drug inside China. The influx of narcotics reversed the Chinese trade surplus, drained the economy of silver, and increased the numbers of opium addicts inside the country, outcomes that worried Chinese officials.
More
In other news, will
President Trump’s sledgehammer finally force a largely idle continental Europe
into action? Will the EC or EU actually develop a new EU based, US proof,
international payments system? If they do, it wont be swift in coming, but it
will radically alter the rest of the century.
Iran sanctions take a sledgehammer to U.S.-Europe relations
Published: Nov 5, 2018 1:58 p.m. ET
Even pro-U.S. Europeans recoil at this new tyranny of the dollar
BERLIN (Project Syndicate) — Donald Trump may not want to launch wars in the Middle East, but that doesn’t mean he’s getting the United States out of the regime-change business. His administration has made it clear that it wants crippling sanctions on Iran to serve the same purpose as the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.Since withdrawing in May from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Trump has been looking for ways to turn up the pressure on the Iranian regime. On Nov. 4, U.S. sanctions on the country’s vital oil industry went into force. And the administration is ready to go even further, by imposing secondary sanctions on other countries with the goal of shutting Iran out of the dollar-based global economy entirely.
To that end, the U.S. wants to bar Iranian banks from the Society for World Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) and the global payments system that it oversees. This would effectively send Iran back to a pre-globalization dark age. The problem for Trump and his advisers, though, is that SWIFT is not a U.S. institution. It is registered and based in Belgium, which, along with the European Union’s 27 other member states, supports the JCPOA.
America’s exploration of increasingly sophisticated “smart” sanctions is
not new. At least since the start of the “war on terror,” the U.S. has been
pulling every financial lever that it can to destroy global networks like the
one Osama bin Laden used to launch the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
At first, the U.S. focused mainly on freezing the assets of extremist
groups and their affiliates. But then Stuart Levey, the under secretary for
terrorism and financial intelligence at the Department of the Treasury, had
another idea. While traveling in Bahrain, he read a local newspaper report
about a Swiss bank shutting down its business with Iran. It occurred to him
that the U.S. could use its own influence over the private sector to block
malign actors from the global economy.
Soon thereafter, the U.S. started pressuring banks around the world to
drop their business with Iran. Eventually, the authorities declared that any
bank doing business with Iran would be shut out of the U.S. market. With that
announcement, “secondary sanctions” were born.
Levey’s secondary sanctions were tremendously successful. No sane
business leader would ever choose the basket-case economy of a Middle Eastern
mullah state over that of the U.S. And when banks (namely, France’s BNP
Paribas) were accused of violating the sanctions, the fines were so large that
they sent shockwaves through global financial markets. It didn’t take long for
the U.S. to deploy similar methods of “connectivity warfare” against North
Korea, Sudan, and even Russia.
----Under President Barack Obama, targeted sanctions became America’s weapon of first resort. Together with the EU, the Obama administration sharpened and fine-tuned the punitive measures against Iran. This proved so effective that Iran eventually came to the negotiating table, where it agreed to limit its nuclear-enrichment activities under the JCPOA.
In Trump’s hands, however, the scalpel has become a sledgehammer. As one
senior European policy maker put it to me, the Trump administration’s new
sanctions are like cluster bombs, falling on friend and foe alike.
Since Trump scrapped the JCPOA, European leaders have been looking for
ways to preserve some of the benefits for Iran, so that it will not restart its
nuclear program. But the U.S. has been making this difficult, by threatening
individuals on European corporate boards, including the directors of SWIFT,
with targeted sanctions.
Even more shocking, similar threats have reportedly been made against
key European public officials. European leaders’ request to the European
Investment Bank for its help in supporting the Iran nuclear deal doesn’t seem
to have borne fruit, most likely owing to U.S. threats against the EIB’s
corporate interests and directors.
Morehttps://www.marketwatch.com/story/iran-sanctions-take-a-sledgehammer-to-us-europe-relations-2018-11-05
EU officials hail Trump
setback in midterm elections
November 7, 2018 / 9:32 AM /
Updated 14 minutes ago
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union’s deputy chief executive hailed
Democratic victories in the U.S. midterm elections in comments that took a
clear swipe at what he called “rudeness” and “racism” under President Donald
Trump.
“Inspired by voters in the U.S. who chose hope over fear, civility over
rudeness, inclusion over racism, equality over discrimination,” tweeted Frans
Timmermans, a former Dutch foreign minister who is first vice president of the
European Commission led by Jean-Claude Juncker.
“They stood up for their values. And so will we,” he added.
Campaigning is getting under way in Europe for May elections to the
European Parliament, in which Timmermans is leading the campaign for the
centre-left.
A fellow Socialist commissioner, former French finance minister Pierre
Moscovici who oversees economic affairs, also tweeted an ironic comment about
Trump, who had earlier declared on Twitter that the election was a “tremendous
success”.
“The Democrats win the House of Representatives for the first time in
eight years despite powerful Republican gerrymandering,” Moscovici wrote.
“Donald Trump is right: ‘Tremendous success tonight’.”
There was no immediate official comment from Juncker or the Commission
as an institution.
Trump’s criticisms of the EU, including praise for Britain’s decision to
leave the bloc, his policies in the Middle East and threats of a trade war
against the Union, worry EU leaders.
Commission President Juncker secured a deal with Trump in July to stave
off new U.S. tariffs on EU goods, but relations remain tense. However, losing
control of the House may undermine Trump’s ability to push through some of his
trade policies.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-election-eu/eu-officials-hail-trump-setback-in-midterm-elections-idUKKCN1NC14Z?il=0
“Under
the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's
stability and balanced growth... The abandonment of the gold standard made it
possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an
unlimited expansion of credit... In the absence of the gold standard, there is
no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation”
Alan
Greenspan
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
Today, more on that Great
Trump Trade War on the Rest of the World. It’s not always easy.
Their Soybeans Piling Up, Farmers Hope Trade War Ends Before Beans Rot
North Dakota’s soybean crops are flourishing. But China has
stopped buying.
Nov. 5, 2018
ARTHUR, N.D. — This is harvest season in the rich farmlands of the
eastern Dakotas, the time of year Kevin Karel checks his computer first thing
in the morning to see how many of his soybeans Chinese companies have purchased
while he was sleeping.
Farmers here in Cass County have prospered over the last two decades by
growing more soybeans than any other county in the United States, and by
shipping most of those beans across the Pacific Ocean to feed Chinese pigs and
chickens.
But this year, the Chinese have all but stopped buying. The largest
market for one of America’s largest exports has shut its doors. The Chinese
government imposed a tariff on American soybeans in response to the Trump
administration’s tariffs on Chinese goods. The latest federal data, through
mid-October, shows American soybean sales to China have declined by 94 percent
from last year’s harvest.
Mr.
Karel, the general manager of the Arthur Companies, which operates six grain
elevators in eastern North Dakota, has started to pile one million bushels of
soybeans on a clear patch of ground behind some of his grain silos. The big
mound of yellowish-white beans, already one of the taller hills in this flat
part of the world, will then be covered with tarps.
The hope is that prices will rise before the beans rot.
“We’re sitting on the edge of our seat,” Mr. Karel said.
President Trump sees tariffs as
a tool to force changes in America’s economic relationships with
China and other major trading partners. His tough approach, he says, will
revive American industries like steel and auto manufacturing that have lost
ground to foreign rivals. But that is coming at a steep cost for some
industries, like farming, that have thrived in the era of globalization by
exporting goods to foreign markets.
China
and other trading partners hit with the tariffs, including the European Union,
have sought to maximize the political impact of their reprisals. The European
Union imposed tariffs on bourbon, produced in Kentucky, the home state of the
Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, from
Wisconsin, the home state of House Speaker Paul Ryan. China's decision to
impose tariffs on soybeans squeezes some of Mr. Trump's staunchest supporters
across the Midwestern farm belt.
----
Like most successful American exports, soybeans are produced at high efficiency
by a small number of workers using cutting-edge technologies, like tractors
connected to satellites so the optimal mix of fertilizers can be spread on each
square foot of farmland. The United States exported $26 billion in soybeans
last year, and more than half went to China.
Some farmers in North Dakota say they trust Mr. Trump to negotiate in
the nation’s interest. Mr. Karel said many of his customers wear red “Make
America Great Again” caps and insist that the pain of lost business and lower
profits is worthwhile. They say they’ll suffer now so their children benefit
later — echoing the argument Mr. Trump has made.
Others are less enthused. Greg Gebeke, who farms 5,000 acres outside
Arthur with two of his brothers, said he struggled to understand the
administration’s goals.
“I’m trying to follow and figure out who the winners are in this tariff
war,” Mr. Gebeke said. “I know who one of the losers are and that’s us. And
that’s painful.”
----
China
is by far the world’s largest importer of soybeans. The country
consumed 110 million tons of soybeans in 2017, and 87 percent of those beans
were imported — the vast majority from either Brazil or the United States.
While soybeans are grown throughout the Midwest, the soybean fields of North
Dakota are the part of soybean country that is closest to the Pacific Ocean,
and so its beans are mostly sent to China.
In
the mid-1990s, there were 450,000 acres of soybeans in the state. Last year,
there were 6.4 million. As the state’s production of soybeans increased,
companies spent millions of dollars on larger grain elevators, on the 110-car
trains that carry the soybeans west to the Pacific Coast, on bigger terminals
at the ports. A few years ago, Mr. Gebeke traded his grain drill, used to plant
wheat, for a second machine to plant soybeans.
More
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?
Physicists name and codify new field in nanotechnology: 'electron quantum metamaterials'
Date:
November 5, 2018
Source:
University of California - Riverside
Summary:
New materials are being synthesized by twisting and stacking atomically thin
layers. To bring it all under one roof, physicists propose this field of
research be called ''electron quantum metamaterials.'
When two atomically thin two-dimensional layers are stacked on top of
each other and one layer is made to rotate against the second layer, they begin
to produce patterns -- the familiar moiré patterns -- that neither layer can
generate on its own and that facilitate the passage of light and electrons, allowing
for materials that exhibit unusual phenomena. For example, when two graphene
layers are overlaid and the angle between them is 1.1 degrees, the material
becomes a superconductor.
"It's a bit like driving past a vineyard and looking out the window
at the vineyard rows. Every now and then, you see no rows because you're
looking directly along a row," said Nathaniel Gabor, an associate
professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of
California, Riverside. "This is akin to what happens when two atomic
layers are stacked on top of each other. At certain angles of twist, everything
is energetically allowed. It adds up just right to allow for interesting
possibilities of energy transfer."
This is the future of new materials being synthesized by twisting and
stacking atomically thin layers, and is still in the "alchemy" stage,
Gabor added. To bring it all under one roof, he and physicist Justin C. W. Song
of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, have proposed this field of research
be called "electron quantum metamaterials" and have just published a
perspective article in Nature Nanotechnology.
"We highlight the potential of engineering synthetic periodic
arrays with feature sizes below the wavelength of an electron. Such engineering
allows the electrons to be manipulated in unusual ways, resulting in a new
range of synthetic quantum metamaterials with unconventional responses,"
Gabor said.
Metamaterials are a class of material engineered to produce properties
that do not occur naturally. Examples include optical cloaking devices and
super-lenses akin to the Fresnel lens that lighthouses use. Nature, too, has
adopted such techniques -- for example, in the unique coloring of butterfly
wings -- to manipulate photons as they move through nanoscale structures.
More
“The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that
can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.”“Adam Smith” aka George Goodman.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished October.
DJIA: 25,116 +176 Down. NASDAQ:
7,306 +232 Down. SP500: 2,712 +146 Down. All three slow indexes went sharply down in
October, suggesting there’s more of the correction to come.
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