Baltic Dry Index. 1020 +11 Brent Crude 67.13
'You just
never know. That unpredictability is the great thing about life. You change.
The world changes. You live in a country where we are still blessed with
enormous opportunity. Leave yourself open to the world of possibility. You have
the ambition, you have the smarts and you have the toughness. So, turn the page
on your biography - you have just started a new chapter in your lives.'
Lloyd Blankfein, “Mr. Goldman Sacks,” CEO of Goldman Sachs
unintentionally backs Brexit in a US speech to graduates, mid 2016.
The crypto currency
collapse, has collapsed bitcoin mining, which in turn seems to have collapsed US
chipmaker Nvidia. How far, if at all, will the contagion spread? We will likely
find out later today.
In California, the
land of fruits and nuts, as its called, will PG&E get bailed out by the
taxpayers of California? The speculators are betting heavily they will. Buy
why? The taxpayers didn’t start the CA wild fires, PG&E seems to be
admitting it started the biggest. Why should the stock and bond holders get a
free ride?
In Brexit yesterday,
UK Prime Minister May’s day crashed and burned. The longer she spoke in the
Commons, the longer her nose grew and grew. No one will sign up to a 585 page Brussels
contract, nor should they. For a second time in two years the EUSSR has brought
down a GB Prime Minister. The EUSSR just shot itself in the other foot. An
interesting weekend now lies ahead in London and Brussels. With the lower Pound, a tourist shopping boom is set for Dear Olde London Town.
Asia mood soured by Nvidia slide, sterling scarred by Brexit chaos
November 16, 2018 / 12:56 AM
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Asian shares shed early gains on Friday after
disappointing results from U.S. chipmaker Nvidia Corp hammered its stock and
sent selling rippling through the entire tech sector. The British pound also lay battered and bruised after a bout of political turmoil fanned fears the country could crash out of the European Union without a divorce deal.
Asian shares had started firm after hopes for a thaw in Sino-U.S. trade relations gave Wall Street a fillip, but a near 17 percent plunge in Nvidia’s (NVDA.O) stock soured the mood.
The chip designer on Thursday forecast disappointing sales for the holiday quarter, pinning the blame on unsold chips piling up with distributors and retailers after the evaporation of the cryptocurrency mining boom.
Also falling in after-hours trading were shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) and Intel (INTC.O).
Losses in semi-conductor shares dragged Japan's Nikkei .N225 down 0.2 percent, while Nasdaq futures NQc1 fell 0.6 percent.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS
erased early gains to go flat, then edged up 0.1 percent.
“It started with Apple, then Nvidia... Since performances of these
companies set the tone for the global tech and chip industries, related
Japanese stocks will likely be sluggish for a while,” said Takatoshi Itoshima,
a strategist at Pictet Asset Management.
More
‘Crypto hangover’ has Nvidia staggering into holidays with a big headache
By Jeremy C.
Owens Published: Nov 15, 2018 8:32 p.m. ET
Nvidia Corp. is suffering a “crypto hangover” that will be hard to cure,
thanks to a glut of new and used gaming cards on the market amid the launch of
the company’s newest technology that replaces them.In an earnings report released Thursday afternoon, Nvidia NVDA, +2.64% predicted a decline in revenue in the fourth quarter, both sequentially and year-over-year, thanks to an inventory backlog of its Pascal-based gaming cards. Executives explained that the end of a cryptocurrency mining boom that had created high demand for the company’s graphics chips caused demand to dry up, and prices did not come down quickly enough to draw customers who may have been waiting for cheaper and freely available gaming cards.
“The crypto hangover lasted longer than we expected and we were surprised by that, but it will pass,” Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in an interview with MarketWatch on Thursday afternoon.
Don’t miss: Nvidia has a Pascal problem, and its stock is plunging after earnings
The numbers are rather staggering. Nvidia’s forecast for the fiscal third quarter, which is under way and includes the holiday-shopping period, projects a 30%-plus sequential decline in gaming sales, Nvidia’s biggest business by far. Nvidia shares dropped 16.8% in extended trading Thursday, which would take shares to their lowest prices since September 2017 if it holds into Friday’s regular session, and took GPU competitor Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD, +3.27% down with it. Nvidia shares were already down 28% this quarter, as the S&P 500 index SPX, +1.06% has declined 6.3%.
More
Hedge-fund boss who predicted ‘87 crash says get ready for some ‘really scary moments’
By Mark
DeCambre Published: Nov 15, 2018
10:07 p.m. ET
Paul Tudor Jones, a hedge-fund luminary, said he’s stress-testing his
portfolio of corporate debt because he expects a tumultuous road ahead on the
back of the Federal Reserve’s apparent commitment to normalizing interest rates
and buttressed by corporate tax cuts from the Trump administration. Speaking at an economic forum in Greenwich, Conn., a hotbed for hedge funds, Jones said the Fed faces real challenges amid “the end of a 10-year run” of economic growth that many anticipate will soon come to a screeching, cyclical end.
Jones is widely credited with predicting, and profiting, from the stock-market crash on Oct. 19, 1987, which saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.83% lose nearly 23% of its value, marking the largest one-day percentage decline for the blue-chip benchmark in its history.
More
PG&E shares surge 40 pct on report regulator wants to avoid bankruptcy from wildfire
November 16, 2018 / 12:48 AM
SAN FRANCISCO/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -
PG&E Corp (PCG.N) shares soared 40 percent in after-hours
trade on Thursday following a report that a regulatory official told investors
the agency does not want the utility to go into bankruptcy should it be found
responsible for this month’s deadly wildfire in northern California.
Bloomberg reported the comment by a California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) official on a call hosted by Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), citing a person familiar with the matter.
A CPUC spokesman said he could not confirm the remarks and Bank of America declined to comment. CPUC issued a statement emphasizing that state law requires it to consider a utility’s financial health when weighing a request to cover costs associated with wildfires.
“A utility filing bankruptcy is not in the best interest of consumers,
but that decision is not the CPUC’s,” a CPUC spokeswoman told Reuters.
Late on Thursday, Moody’s cut parent PG&E’s credit rating to one
notch above junk, although many of the company’s bonds were already trading at
non-investment grade levels earlier in the day.
S&P Global Ratings, citing rising risks that the company may face
from the wildfire, also lowered its rating on PG&E by one notch to
BBB-minus.
It placed the company on CreditWatch with negative implications, saying
the risks increase the probability of another downgrade over the next few
months.
Investors are watching for clues about whether California’s government
will step in to save PG&E should it eventually be found responsible for the
Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise a week ago, and should any
potential liability exceeds the utility’s resources.
More
Finally, in Brexit news, Prime Minister May slips on a
585 page, Brussels banana skin. Who in their right mind would sign a 585 page
contract written in Brussels? Prime
Minister May apparently! My money is on her not getting the chance.
“No
democratic nation has ever signed up to be bound by such an extensive regime,
imposed externally without any democratic control over the laws to be applied.”
Dominic
Raab, ex Brexit Secretary.
Tory deal with DUP over unless May replaced - Daily Telegraph
November 15, 2018 / 11:03 PM
(Reuters) - The Conservative Party’s deal with Northern Ireland’s DUP on
Brexit is over unless Prime Minister Theresa May is replaced with a new leader,
the Daily Telegraph reported.
The DUP would vote down the withdrawal agreement in Parliament, adding
that its support now “depended on who the leader of the Conservative Party is,”
the newspaper reported, citing sources close to DUP leader Arlene Foster.
Who wants to be Britain's next prime minister?
November 15, 2018 / 6:23 PM
LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Theresa
May’s position as leader of the ruling Conservative Party is under assault by
eurosceptic MPs who reject her EU exit strategy and want a more pro-Brexit
leader.
May has vowed to fight on to the next election in 2022, but if enough MPs demand her resignation she will face a confidence vote.
Below is a summary of some of those who could be in the frame to replace May:
BORIS JOHNSON, 54
The former foreign minister is May’s most outspoken critic over Brexit. He resigned from the cabinet in July in protest at her handling of the exit negotiations.
More
Anon.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.
No banksters today, they’ll be back next week in droves. Today,
Wikileaks and the US Pentagon. To no one’s surprise, the Pentagon failed its
first audit.
Well fancy giving money to the government! Might as
well have put it down the drain.
Fancy giving money to the government! Nobody will
see the stuff again.
A. P. Herbert.
U.S. Is Optimistic It Will Prosecute Assange
Over the past year, U.S. prosecutors have discussed several types of charges they could potentially bring against the WikiLeaks founder
By Aruna Viswanatha and Ryan Dube
Nov. 15, 2018 6:05 p.m. ET
The Justice Department is preparing to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange and is increasingly optimistic it will be able to get him into a U.S.
courtroom, according to people in Washington familiar with the matter.Over the past year, U.S. prosecutors have discussed several types of charges they could potentially bring against Mr. Assange, the people said. Mr. Assange has lived in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since receiving political asylum from the South American country in 2012.
The people familiar with the case wouldn’t describe whether discussions were under way with the U.K. or Ecuador about Mr. Assange, but said they were encouraged by recent developments.
Ecuador’s relationship with Mr. Assange has deteriorated sharply since last year’s election of President Lenin Moreno, who has described him as a “stone in our shoe” and said his continued presence at the embassy is unsustainable.
An indictment from special counsel Robert Mueller that portrayed WikiLeaks as a tool of Russian intelligence for releasing thousands of hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign has made it more difficult for Mr. Assange to mount a defense as a journalist. Public opinion of Mr. Assange in the U.S. has dropped since the campaign.
Prosecutors have considered publicly indicting Mr. Assange to try to trigger his removal from the embassy, the people said, because a detailed explanation of the evidence against Mr. Assange could give Ecuadorean authorities a reason to turn him over.
The exact charges Justice Department might pursue remain unclear, but they may involve the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the disclosure of national defense-related information.
More
Pentagon fails its first-ever audit, official says
November 15, 2018 / 6:26 PM
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - The Pentagon has failed what is being called its first-ever
comprehensive audit, a senior official said on Thursday, finding U.S. Defense
Department accounting discrepancies that could take years to resolve.
Results of the inspection - conducted by some 1,200 auditors and
examining financial accounting on a wide range of spending including on weapons
systems, military personnel and property - were expected to be completed later
in the day.
“We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it,” Deputy
Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters, adding that the findings
showed the need for greater discipline in financial matters within the
Pentagon.
“It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion dollar organization, so the fact that
we did the audit is substantial,” Shanahan added.
The U.S. defense budget for the 2018 fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30
was about $700 billion. The Pentagon is a huge agency with multiple branches of
the military, costly weapons systems, large personnel needs, numerous military
bases of various sizes at home and abroad and troops deployed in far-flung
locales.
Shanahan said areas the Pentagon must improve upon based on the audit
results include compliance with cybersecurity policies and improving inventory
accuracy. In a briefing with reporters, he did not provide a figure detailing
how much money was unaccounted for in the audit.
---- A 1990 federal
law mandated that U.S. government agencies be audited, but the Pentagon had not
faced a comprehensive audit until this one was launched in December.
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?
Fusion breakthrough as China's "artificial sun" reaches 100 million degrees
David Szondy 15 November 2018The day of clean, limitless energy from nuclear fusion has taken another step closer thanks to China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). During a four-month experiment, the "Chinese artificial sun" reached a core plasma temperature of over 100 million degrees Celsius – that's more than six times hotter than the interior of the Sun – and a heating power of 10 MW, enabling the study of various aspects of practical nuclear fusion in the process.
Beginning operations in 2006, the Chinese designed and developed EAST is located at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASHIPS) and is billed as an open test facility for conducting steady-state operations and ITER-related physics research by both Chinese and international scientists. And, like many other fusion experiments, the ultimate goal is to produce a practical nuclear fusion power reactor.
EAST is a tokamak reactor, which consists of a metal torus or doughnut that is exhausted to a hard vacuum and then injected with hydrogen atoms. These atoms are then heated by a number of different methods to create a plasma that is then compressed using a series of powerful superconducting magnets.
Eventually, the plasma becomes so hot and so compressed that the
conditions inside the reactor mimic those found inside the Sun, causing the
hydrogen atoms to fuse, releasing tremendous amounts of energy. The hope is
that eventually a reactor can be built where the fusion reaction is
self-sustaining, and the reactor generates more energy than it consumes.
EAST produced its breakthrough temperatures and densities for around 10
seconds by combining four different heating methods to create the plasma and
spark the fusion process. In this case, the methods were lower hybrid wave
heating (oscillating the ions and electrons in the plasma), electron cyclotron
wave heating (using a static magnetic field and a high-frequency
electromagnetic field), ion cyclotron resonance heating (accelerating ions in a
cyclotron), and neutral beam ion heating (injecting a beam of accelerated
neutral particles into the plasma).
However,
the purpose wasn't just to peg the meter, but to also study how to maintain
plasma stability and equilibrium, how to confine and transport it, and how the
plasma wall interacts with energetic particles. In addition, EAST is used as a
demonstrator of how to use radio frequency wave-dominant heating, maintain a
high level of plasma confinement with a high degree of purity, maintain
magnetohydrodynamic stability, and how to exhaust heat using an water-cooled
tungsten divertor.
CASHIPS
says EAST is being used to explore how to maintain electron temperatures of
over 100 million degrees over long periods to further knowledge and aid the
development of advanced reactors like the International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reactor (ITER) being built in France, the Chinese Fusion
Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), and the proposed DEMO (DEMOnstration Power
Station). Achieving temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees Celsius –
even if only for around 10 seconds – proves that it is possible to reach the
temperatures required for nuclear fusion.
Another weekend and who will be GB Prime Minister
on Monday? Mrs May, in office but not in power? Ex Foreign Secretary, arch-brexiteer
Johnson? Any of the seven Tory dwarfs? Comrade
Agent Corbyn?
There hasn’t been this much fun in London since Prime
Minister Major and Chancellor Lamont caused the Pound to crash out of the
Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, vastly enriching George Soros along the way. I
wonder which way George has bet this time. Have a great weekend everyone.
Brexit Joke of the
Century.
Pythagoras's
theorem - 24 words.
The Lord's Prayer - 66 words.
Archimedes's Principle - 67 words.
The 10 Commandments - 179 words.
The Gettysburg address - 286 words.
U.S. Declaration of Independence - 1,300 words.
U.S. Constitution with all 27 Amendments - 7,818 words.
EU regulations on the sale of cabbage - 26,911 words.
The Lord's Prayer - 66 words.
Archimedes's Principle - 67 words.
The 10 Commandments - 179 words.
The Gettysburg address - 286 words.
U.S. Declaration of Independence - 1,300 words.
U.S. Constitution with all 27 Amendments - 7,818 words.
EU regulations on the sale of cabbage - 26,911 words.
Brexit leaving
contract, 585 pages of enslaving Brussels legalese.
Time to leave the EUSSR on WTO
rules.
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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