Baltic Dry Index. 635
-08 Brent
Crude 66.38
Trump 25 percent tariffs 8 days away. Brexit 38 days away.“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.
Asian stock markets
this morning, are again betting on a trade deal between the USA and China. US
and European markets yesterday turned more cautious. President Trump seemed to
back away once again from his March one deadline, getting cold feet as the
deadline is only just about one week away.
Any no deal result
will come as a great shock to global markets, but the pressure shifts daily onto
the US negotiators. Only President Trump will get the blame for a no deal
outcome. Chinese stocks have already largely corrected in 2018. It’s mainly US
and the west’s stocks that are flying in the stratosphere on a wing and a
prayer. It looks increasingly like President Trump’s bluff is about to be
trumped. Deal but a bad deal for the USA.
Below the latest spin
and developments. Asian central banksters seem to be preparing stimulus in the
face of the slowing global economy.
In sharp U-turn, monetary policy easing back in play across Asia
February 20, 2019
/ 5:38 AM
HONG KONG
(Reuters) - A slowing global economy and increasing strain on businesses from a
year-long Sino-U.S. trade war are tilting central banks from Japan to Australia
toward monetary easing in a remarkable 180 degree turn.
Late last year, the debate in Japan was focused on the demerits of
printing money and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) was adamant the next
likely move in rates will be up. An emerging market currency sell-off was seen
forcing externally vulnerable economies such as India, Indonesia and the
Philippines to keep tightening their policy rates.
But even they are now subject to rate cut bets.
A softer dollar and lower oil prices played an important role in the
turnaround. But crucially for Asia, regional growth engine China is having a
worse than expected start to the year and is exporting disinflation to the rest
of the region.
The Federal Reserve last month adopted a more cautious approach in a
shift that signaled its tightening cycle might be at an end.
“What’s obviously happening is that central banks are rethinking
monetary policy,” said Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS Group Holdings in Singapore.
With the exception of Philippines, which is also witnessing rapid
disinflation, all major Asian economies are now facing inflation rates at the
lower end or even below their central banks’ target. Price growth is sub-1
percent in Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.
“Underlying price pressures are remarkably soft ... and broadly
falling,” Frederic Neumann, co-head of Asian economics research at HSBC, said.
“The case for further monetary easing may thus become more pressing,
even if in itself this may not be enough to push up growth materially.”
On Tuesday, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said the central bank
was ready to boost stimulus if sharp yen rises hurt the economy and its price
goal.
More
Asia shares rally to four-and-a-half month peak on hopes of U.S.-China trade deal
February 20,
2019 / 1:03 AM
TOKYO (Reuters)
- Asian stocks advanced to 4-1/2-month highs on Wednesday as investors bet that
Chinese and U.S. trade negotiators would be able to secure a deal to
de-escalate their year-long tariff war.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose nearly
1.0 percent to reach its highest levels since Oct. 2.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gained 1.1 percent to six-month highs, while
Korea’s Kospi and Taiwan’s index recovered to levels last seen in early
October. Japan’s Nikkei gained 0.75 percent to two-month highs.
Chinese shares rose 0.4 percent, extending their run of gains to 18
percent from their Jan. 4 trough, thanks to inflows of foreign funds.
The gains in Asia topped those in Tuesday’s Wall Street session, where
the S&P 500 gained 0.15 percent, helped by upbeat results from Walmart. The
Nasdaq rose 0.19 percent, logging its seventh straight session of gains.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that trade talks with China
were going well and suggested he was open to pushing off the deadline to
complete negotiations, saying March 1 was not a “magical” date.
U.S. tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports are currently
scheduled to rise to 25 percent from 10 percent if no trade deal is reached by
March 1.
Investors now expect Trump to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping next
month, likely after China’s annual congress meeting starting from March 5, to
strike a deal, or secure a “memorandum of understanding.”
“They will likely agree on China importing a larger amount of natural
gas and agricultural products,” said Nobuhiko Kuramochi, chief strategist at Mizuho
Securities, adding that China will also “open up a part of its domestic
financial services and possibly some manufacturing sectors”.
But he predicted China “will not back down on so-called structural
issues. The two countries may perhaps agree to set up a body to continue
discussing those issues. Markets are already in the middle of pricing in these
things.”
More
Amid trade talks, China urges U.S. to respect its right to develop, prosper
February 20, 2019
/ 2:12 AM
BEIJING (Reuters)
- The United States should respect China’s right to develop and become
prosperous, the Chinese government’s top diplomat told a visiting U.S.
delegation, reiterating that the country’s doors to the outside world would
open wider.
The world’s two largest economies began their latest round of trade
talks this week to resolve a bitter dispute in which each has levied tariffs on
imports from the other.
The United States has accused China of unfair trade practices, including
forced technology transfers, charges it has denied.
Respect and cooperation are the correct choice for both countries, something
the international community hopes to see, State Councillor Wang Yi told the
delegation of U.S. business leaders and former officials in Beijing on Tuesday.
“Just like the United States, China also has the right to development,
and the Chinese people also have the right to have a good life,” the foreign
ministry paraphrased Wang as saying, in a statement issued on Wednesday.
“The U.S. side should recognize that China’s development is in the
world’s interest, as well as the United States’. Only by seeing China’s
development as an opportunity for the United States can this help resolve
certain problems, including trade and economic ones,” Wang said.
China’s reform and steps to open up are in line with its development
needs, and its doors to the outside world will open ever wider, he added,
repeating previous government pledges.
“As long as China and the United States proactively meet each other
halfway, then trade and economic cooperation can still play a role as a ballast
stone in Sino-U.S. ties,” he said.
The U.S. delegation included former U.S. National Security Adviser
Stephen Hadley, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President Myron
Brilliant, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce China Center President Jeremie
Waterman.
---- Widely-read tabloid the Global Times, published by the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily, said in a Wednesday editorial that both sides must remain calm during the current talks, but that Washington must not force anything on Beijing.
“U.S. demand for China’s structural reform must stay in line with
China-U.S. trade cooperation and coordinate with China’s reform and opening-up.
The talks must not try to force Beijing to change its economic governance or
even its development path,” it said.
“China and the U.S. must sign an agreement that will inspire their
people, heralding accelerated economic development.”
Column: The United States' aluminium tariff wall is crumbling
February 19, 2019
/ 12:31 PM
LONDON (Reuters) -
It is almost a year since the United States imposed duties on imports of
aluminium and steel on national security grounds.
If the aim of the so-called “Section 232” tariffs was to lift domestic
production, President Donald Trump’s administration can claim a degree of
success.
U.S. output of primary aluminium has started rising sharply thanks to
restarts of idled capacity, although not all of them have been directly down to
the 10-percent import tariff.
If, however, the aim was also to tackle rising import penetration,
particularly by Chinese aluminium producers, tariffs may already have passed
peak effectiveness.
Ever more gaps are appearing in the aluminium trade wall as the number
of exclusions granted for specific products lengthens.
China has been a major beneficiary of the exclusions process with approved
import tonnages not far off actual volumes in 2017.
It has fared considerably better than Canada, long-standing U.S. ally
and a strategic supplier of aluminium to its neighbour.
Hardly any Canadian metal has been excluded from the tariffs, which is
why the country’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is lobbying hard for a
full exemption.
So runs the law of
unintended consequences but it also highlights the limited effectiveness of
tariffs if, like the United States, you are heavily import dependent.
More
Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1932.
GB Brexit 2019.
GB Brexit 2019.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
No crooks today for once,
they’ll show up again tomorrow like a bent politician. Today, could there be a
North Sea oil bonanza for GB after Brexit? Is God an Englishman after all?
Who
needs dangerous, crooked gambling banksters, when there’s a real economy still
around.
'Phantom volcanoes' may hide more oil and gas in the North Sea: study
February 19, 2019
/ 1:12 PM
OSLO (Reuters) -
An unexplored 7,000 square kilometre (2,700 square mile) swathe of the British
North Sea, previously thought to contain empty chambers left by three extinct
volcanoes, may hide oil and gas instead, the University of Aberdeen said on
Tuesday.
For decades it was
assumed that the Rattray volcanic province off northwest Scotland contained old
magma chambers, ruling out the possibility of oil and gas discoveries.
However, the university’s geologists now say these “phantom volcanoes”
never existed at all.
The study’s findings raise the prospect of future discoveries in the
area, which has been left untouched over 50 years of exploration activity in
the North Sea, said the university.
“What we found has completely overturned decades of accepted knowledge,”
Aberdeen University’s Dr Nick Schofield said in a statement. “This gives us
back a huge amount of gross rock volume that we never knew existed, in one of
the world’s most prolific regions for oil and gas production.”
Schofield said the team of geologists, including two colleagues from
Heriot-Watt University and the University of Adelaide, had reassessed the area
by combining 3D seismic data from Norway’s Petroleum Geo-Services with well
data.
“There is a huge area under there that hasn’t been looked at in detail
for a long time, because of the previously incorrect geological model,”
Schofield said.
Exploration in the area may be challenging, said the geologists, but
technology is improving and there are still big discoveries being made in the
North Sea, such as the ones in the Central Graben and Viking Graben areas.
“As the old saying goes, often the best places to look for oil are in
places near to where you’ve already found it,” said Schofield. “The North Sea
is a prime example of that.”
More
Alan Schwartz, CEO Bear Stearns, March 12, 2008.
Bust March 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?
Chemical data mining boosts search for new organic semiconductors
Date:
February 14, 2019
Source:
Technical University of Munich (TUM)
Summary:
Organic semiconductors are lightweight, flexible and easy to manufacture. But
they often fail to meet expectations regarding efficiency and stability.
Researchers are now deploying data mining approaches to identify promising
organic compounds for the electronics of the future.
Producing traditional solar cells made of silicon is very energy
intensive. On top of that, they are rigid and brittle. Organic semiconductor
materials, on the other hand, are flexible and lightweight. They would be a
promising alternative, if only their efficiency and stability were on par with
traditional cells.
Together with his team, Karsten Reuter, Professor of Theoretical
Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich, is looking for novel
substances for photovoltaics applications, as well as for displays and
light-emitting diodes -- OLEDs. The researchers have set their sights on organic
compounds that build on frameworks of carbon atoms.
Contenders for the electronics of tomorrow
Depending on their structure and composition, these molecules, and the
materials formed from them, display a wide variety of physical properties,
providing a host of promising candidates for the electronics of the future.
"To date, a major problem has been tracking them down: It takes
weeks to months to synthesize, test and optimize new materials in the
laboratory," says Reuter. "Using computational screening, we can
accelerate this process immensely."
Computers instead of test tubes
The researcher needs neither test tubes nor Bunsen burners to search for
promising organic semiconductors. Using a powerful computer, he and his team
analyze existing databases. This virtual search for relationships and patterns
is known as data mining.
"Knowing what you are looking for is crucial in data mining,"
says PD Dr. Harald Oberhofer, who heads the project. "In our case, it is
electrical conductivity. High conductivity ensures, for example, that a lot of
current flows in photovoltaic cells when sunlight excites the molecules."
Algorithms identify key parameters
Using his algorithms, he can search for very specific physical
parameters: An important one is, for example, the "coupling
parameter." The larger it is, the faster electrons move from one molecule
to the next.
A further parameter is the "reorganization energy": It defines
how costly it is for a molecule to adapt its structure to the new charge
following a charge transfer -- the less energy required, the better the
conductivity.
More
Lloyd Blankfein, “Mr. Goldman Sacks,” CEO of Goldman Sachs
unintentionally backs Brexit in a US speech to graduates, mid 2016.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished January
DJIA: 24,999 +76 Down. NASDAQ: 7,282 +124 Down.
SP500:
2,704 +71 Down.
Normally this
would suggest more correction still to come, but with President Trump wanting
to be judged by the performance of the stock market and the Fed’s Plunge
Protection Team now officially part of President Trump’s re-election team,
probably the safest action here is fully paid up synthetic double options on
most of the major indexes.
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