Baltic Dry Index. 637
+03 Brent
Crude 64.77
Trump 25 percent tariffs. Postponed. Brexit 32 days away.
If there’s a new USA v China trade deal what is it? Other
than a promise to buy some more US soybeans, no one seems to know. As always
with President Trump, things are always “the biggest,” “the best ever,” “the
greatest,” whether true or more often not. So what’s the big deal with this
China deal?
Anyway, it’s far easier, quicker and cheaper to ship soybeans to China from US west coast ports than it is from any port in Brazil.
Anyway, it’s far easier, quicker and cheaper to ship soybeans to China from US west coast ports than it is from any port in Brazil.
Below, after all the Washington hype, “where’s the beef?”
Asian markets fall as trade-deal enthusiasm cools ahead of Trump-Kim summit
By Marketwatch
Published: Feb 25, 2019 11:52 p.m. ET
Asian markets largely declined in early trading Tuesday, as
President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traveled to Vietnam
for their second summit.No new reports of major progress in ongoing U.S.-China trade talks sapped enthusiasm that sent stocks in mainland China soaring Monday. The Shanghai Composite SHCOMP, +0.66% rose 0.4% and the smaller-cap Shenzhen Composite 399106, +1.09% gained 0.2%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index HSI, -0.62% fell 0.5%, while Japan’s Nikkei NIK, -0.35% declined about the same. South Korea’s Kospi SEU, -0.35% slipped 0.4% and Australia’s ASX 200 XJO, -0.94% dropped 1.1%. Benchmark indexes in Taiwan Y9999, +0.01% , Singapore STI, -0.37% and Indonesia JAKIDX, +0.37% fell as well.
U.S. 'will not be bought off' by China soy deal in trade talks - Perdue
February 25,
2019 / 9:19 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States will keep pressing China for
intellectual property safeguards in trade talks, regardless of Beijing’s pledge
to purchase 10 million tonnes of U.S. soybeans in the near term, U.S.
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said on Monday.
“Still, the structural core issues of intellectual property transfer
have to be dealt with,” Perdue told reporters after a speech in Washington. “We
will not be bought off as a country over purchases without eliminating some of
these non-trade barriers in China.”
President Donald Trump said on Sunday he would delay an increase in U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods thanks to “productive” trade talks and that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping would meet to seal a deal if progress continued.
----- Asked about the time frame of the 10 million-tonne purchase, Perdue said: “That is near term. The impression I had, it is imminent.”
China resumed buying some U.S. soy in December, after Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, struck a trade war truce, but sales are still way short of the pre-tariff levels.
Next more red flags from China. Does China ever have any other flags than red?
The Time Bomb in China’s Bond Market
Off-budget local government debt may look attractive to investors, with juicy corporate bond yields and quasi-sovereign credit status. Be careful.By Shuli Ren
Corrected 25 February 2019, 11:53 GMT
Last August, when a paramilitary group almost became the first default among local government financing vehicles, few would have thought that another asset frenzy was afoot in China.
Yet off-budget local government debt is having a fun ride. After that scare, yields for AA rated, three-year bonds issued by local government financing vehicles compressed to 3.9 percent from about 5 percent.
For yield-thirsty investors, off-balance sheet local government debt can be very attractive: Such bonds offer corporate bond yields while seemingly having quasi-sovereign credit status.
Don’t get too comfortable – after all, China has accumulated nearly 30 trillion yuan ($4.49 trillion) of LGFV debt, according to HSBC Holdings Plc.
The latest warning comes from Qinghai Provincial Investment Group Co. The aluminum producer failed to wire funds for a coupon payment for its $300 million dollar bond due 2020, Christopher Anstey and Carrie Hong of Bloomberg News reported. On Monday morning, the bond tumbled 20 cents to trade at 75 cents on the dollar.
There are more red flags in this sector. As early as 2015, the State Council clarified that new issues by local government financing vehicles qualify as corporate debt, meaning there’s no government backstop. In addition, cash flow-based credit analysis on LGFV debt is almost pointless: After years of big speeches, fiscal reform in China has gone nowhere. Local governments still don’t have reliable sources of income to service their borrowings – handouts from Beijing comprise about a third of their revenue, estimates Moody’s Investors Service.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-25/risks-pile-up-for-china-s-local-government-financing-vehicles
Finally, gold mining is back in play. Who knows something that the rest of us don’t? How close is a fiat currency collapse in the next recession? How close is a China major bond market collapse?
Barrick makes $18 billion hostile bid for Newmont in gold mega-merger
February 25, 2019
/ 11:15 AM
(Reuters) -
Canada’s Barrick Gold Corp offered to buy U.S. rival Newmont Mining Corp for
nearly $18 billion in stock on Monday in a hostile takeover that seeks to
combine the world’s two largest gold producers.
Newmont responded by saying it had already reviewed and rejected
possible deals with Barrick and said its own $10 billion pending purchase of
Goldcorp Inc made more business sense.
Barrick said its acquisition of Newmont was contingent on the company scrapping the deal to buy Toronto-listed Goldcorp, adding that its offer was a “significantly superior” option for Newmont shareholders.
“The combination of Barrick and Newmont will create what is clearly the world’s best gold company, with the largest portfolio of Tier One gold assets,” Barrick Chief Executive Officer Mark Bristow said in a statement.
“Most important, it will enable us to consider our Nevada assets as one complex,” he added.
In Newmont’s statement and a pair of media interviews, Chief Executive Gary Goldberg pointed to a joint venture as a better way of extracting value from the two companies’ mines in Nevada, the United States’ largest producer of gold and silver.
Newmont has 19 mines in the state, adjacent to Barrick’s own operations and Reuters had reported in November that the miners were in talks to combine their operations in the state.
Talks of a joint venture fell through over Newmont’s demand for management control, Barrick’s Bristow said on a conference call with analysts. The deal marks Bristow’s first major strategic move at Barrick since taking the top position in January.
Newmont’s board of directors would “fully evaluate the Barrick proposal and respond in due course,” the company said.
Dealmaking in the gold sector, dormant for years as companies focused on cutting costs, took off last month when Barrick paid $6.1 billion to buy another rival Randgold Resources.
That set off a fresh wave of deals, including Newmont’s offer for smaller miner Goldcorp, which would make the Colorado-based firm the world’s top gold miner if it closes as planned next quarter.
With Barrick’s latest offer, the combined value of hostile or unsolicited M&A deals has reached $48.2 billion so far this year globally, the highest since 2006, according to data from Refinitiv.
More
"The great merit of gold is precisely that it is scarce; that its quantity is limited by nature; that it is costly to discover, to mine, and to process; and that it cannot be created by political fiat or caprice."
Henry Hazlitt
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
Today, posted without
need for comment.
Musk Faces U.S. Contempt Claim for Violating Accord With SEC
By Bob Van Voris, Matt Robinson, Benjamin Bain, and Dana Hull
25 February 2019, 23:17 GMT Updated on 26 February 2019, 03:45 GMT
Elon Musk is facing a new round of regulatory trouble for
tweets about Tesla Inc., raising fresh concerns
about the billionaire CEO’s ability to keep his impulses in check and
responsibly run a public company.The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday asked a judge to hold Musk in contempt for violating a settlement that required him to get Tesla approval for social media posts and other writings that could be material to investors. He breached that deal with a Feb. 19 tweet that said Tesla would make about half a million cars in 2019, the agency claims. The CEO posted a few hours later that deliveries would only reach about 400,000.
The
SEC’s move puts Musk in fresh legal peril less than five months after he
settled claims that he misled the public with tweets about taking the
electric-car maker private. He could face a variety of penalties, with the
stiffest being that he’ll be barred from running Tesla or any other public
company for a period of time, said Charles Elson, director of the John L.
Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.
"Having your CEO in contempt of an SEC action is a pretty bad
thing," Elson said in a phone interview. "They settled with him and
within a few months he’s back to doing similar things. It’s unbelievable."
Calls to Tesla and emails to Musk and his representative weren’t immediately returned. In a tweet after the filing, Musk said the SEC overlooked a comment he made on the company’s Jan. 30 earnings call that Tesla may make as many as 500,000 of its Model 3 sedans this year.
U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan, who is handling the case, hasn’t scheduled a hearing to weigh the contempt request or set a date for Musk or Tesla to respond to the filing. The news sent Tesla shares plunging as much as 5.4 percent after hours. The stock was already down 10 percent this year through the close of regular trading.
‘Needless Distraction’
Losing Musk, the principal architect of Tesla’s vision of a future where electric vehicles and solar power reduce humanity’s dependence on greenhouse gases, would be gutting for the company. The automaker has relied on its CEO not just for technology leadership but for its bold, anti-establishment image. But the cult of personality has also had a downside for Tesla, with Musk sending the stock into a tailspin with antics such as smoking pot on a web video or insulting an analyst on a conference call.More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-25/elon-musk-faces-u-s-contempt-claim-for-violating-sec-accord?srnd=premium-europe
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?
A quantum magnet with a topological twist
Materials with a kagome lattice pattern exhibit 'negative magnetism' and long-sought 'flat-band' electrons
Date:
February 22, 2019
Source:
Princeton University
Summary: Researchers probed a special kind of magnet containing atoms arranged in a pattern called a kagome lattice, which takes its name from a Japanese basket. They found that electrons in this material exhibit exotic behaviors that could be exploited for futuristic applications -- and that under a high magnetic field some electrons in this material act like an upside-down magnet.
Taking their name from an intricate Japanese basket pattern, kagome magnets are thought to have electronic properties that could be valuable for future quantum devices and applications. Theories predict that some electrons in these materials have exotic, so-called topological behaviors and others behave somewhat like graphene, another material prized for its potential for new types of electronics.
Now, an international team led by researchers at Princeton University has observed that some of the electrons in these magnets behave collectively, like an almost infinitely massive electron that is strangely magnetic, rather than like individual particles. The study was published in the journal Nature Physics this week.
The team also showed that placing the kagome magnet in a high magnetic field causes the direction of magnetism to reverse. This "negative magnetism" is akin to having a compass that points south instead of north, or a refrigerator magnet that suddenly refuses to stick.
"We have been searching for super-massive 'flat-band' electrons that can still conduct electricity for a long time, and finally we have found them," said M. Zahid Hasan, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University, who led the team. "In this system, we also found that due to an internal quantum phase effect, some electrons line up opposite to the magnetic field, producing negative magnetism."
The team explored how atoms arranged in a kagome pattern in a crystal give rise to strange electronic properties that can have real-world benefits, such as superconductivity, which allows electricity to flow without loss as heat, or magnetism that can be controlled at the quantum level for use in future electronics.
----A flat band structure indicates that the electrons have an effective mass that is so large as to be almost infinite. In such a state, the particles act collectively rather than as individual particles.
Theories have long predicted that the kagome pattern would create a flat band structure, but this study is the first experimental detection of a flat band electron in such a system.
One of the general predictions that follows is that a material with a flat band may exhibit negative magnetism.
Indeed, in the current study, when the researchers applied a strong magnetic field, some of the kagome magnet's electrons pointed in the opposite direction.
More
"From a strictly economic point of view, buying gold in a major inflation and holding it probably presents the least risk of capital loss of any investment or speculation."
Henry Hazlitt
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment