Baltic Dry Index. 657
-07 Brent
Crude 65.86
Brexit 21 days away.
“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high
plateau. I do not feel there will be soon, if ever, be a 50 or 60 point break
from present levels, such as (bears) have predicted. I expect to see the stock
market a good deal higher within a few months.”
Irving Fisher, Ph.D. in economics, Oct. 17, 1929
Did China’s massive
export collapse, just doom the world to a new global recession? Probably, although
the optimist in me hopes that it’s merely a reflection on how Trump’s
threatened punitive tariffs shifted demand for exports to front run the
proposed tariffs. Still that’s not the way to bet.
Equally alarming was
the 5 percent decline in China’s imports. Taken together with the decline in
the Baltic Dry index, down some 45 percent year on year, and a global collapse
in real estate pricing, and I think something much bigger is underway in the
global economy.
If it is, then this
is just the beginning. Bad times lie directly ahead, probably about to be
aggravated by a stupid EU bureaucracy hell bent on a no deal punitive Brexit
that cuts off Germany’s nose despite the EU’s face.
Below, bad news
Friday.
"We
will not have any more crashes in our time."
John
Maynard Keynes, leading British economist, in 1927
Asia stocks dealt body blow as China exports tank
March 7, 2019 /
11:50 PM
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Asian stocks shuddered lower on Friday after
shockingly weak export data from China heightened market fears about a global
economic slowdown, a day after European policymakers slashed growth forecasts
for the bloc.
Beijing reported exports in February tumbled 20.7 percent from a year
earlier, far beneath forecasts of a 4.8 percent drop and more than erasing
January’s surprise jump.
Analysts cautioned the timing of the Lunar New Year made it difficult to
draw a true signal from the data noise, but the scale of the miss was alarming.
Adding insult to injury, China’s leading brokerage Citic Securities
issued a rare “sell” rating on the Shanghai-listed shares of People’s Insurance
Group of China (PICC) sending them down almost 10 percent.
Shanghai blue chips quickly extended early losses to be down 2.9
percent, the sharpest daily fall since October, while the dollar climbed on the
yuan.
Japan’s Nikkei dropped 2.0 percent and Australia 0.9 percent. MSCI’s
broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan skidded 1.2 percent to a
two-week trough.
E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 eased 0.2 percent and spreadbetters
pointed to opening falls for European bourses.
The mood had already been brittle after the European Central Bank
slashed its growth forecasts and surprised everyone with a new round of policy
stimulus, leaving investors fearing the worst for the global economy.
ECB President Mario Draghi said the economy was in “a period of
continued weakness and pervasive uncertainty” as he pushed out a planned rate
hike and instead offered banks a new round of cheap loans.
The reversal came in the same week that Canada’s central bank took a
sudden dovish turn and dismal data from Australia to the UK instilled a sense
of foreboding in markets.
“When central
banks surprise like this some investors wonder whether that infers things are
much worse than they thought,” said Gavin Friend, a senior market strategist at
NAB.
More
Oil prices slide as economic outlook darkens, U.S. supply surges
March 8, 2019 /
1:30 AM
SINGAPORE (Reuters)
- Oil prices dropped on Friday as clouds gathered over the global economy after
the European Central Bank (ECB) warned overnight of continued weakness and
fresh data showed Chinese exports and imports slumped last month.
With surging U.S. supply also unsettling markets, international
benchmark Brent crude futures were at $65.78 per barrel at 0528 GMT, down 52
cents, or 0.8 percent from their last close.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were at $56.25 per
barrel, down 41 cents, or 0.7 percent.
Financial markets, including crude oil futures, took a hit after ECB
President Mario Draghi said on Thursday the economy was in “a period of
continued weakness and pervasive uncertainty”. Europe’s economic weakness comes
as growth in Asia is also slowing down.
So far oil demand has held up, especially in China where imports of
crude remain above 10 million barrels per day (bpd).
Yet a slowdown in economic growth will at some point likely dent fuel
demand, putting pressure prices.
China’s February dollar-denominated exports fell 21 percent from a year
earlier, coming in far worse than analysts’ expectations, while imports dropped
5.2 percent, official data showed on Friday.
More
History Could Doom U.S.-China Trade Deal
By pushing for something that looks like an unequal treaty, Washington is virtually guaranteeing it will break down.By Michael Schuman
Trade talks between the U.S. and China seem to be hurtling toward a
predictable conclusion -- the signing of a shallow deal that doesn’t solve the
real issues dividing the world’s two largest economies. The coup de grace will
likely come later this month in another high-profile summit between presidents
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
It’s time to admit the “comprehensive” pact Trump promised never really
had a chance to come to fruition, precisely because of the way he chose to
pursue it. What’s worse, in his eagerness to tout any deal as a bigger and more
transformative triumph than it’s likely to be, he may well ensure it fails.
From the
beginning, Trump’s tariff strategy not only displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the Chinese economy and its problems,
it was designed to entrench resistance in China. It’s all too easy for
outsiders to assume the People’s Republic has no politics, especially after
watching China’s rubberstamp National People’s Congress go through its annual motions
in Beijing this week.
Nevertheless, the Chinese Communist Party has its
internal factional struggles and ideological agenda, as well as an image to
uphold with the public, just like any other political party.
The fact that Xi now thoroughly dominates the government also puts pressure on him to score successes and maintain a strong economic performance, since there’s no longer anyone else to blame. That suggests he might be eager to end the trade war, especially as the Chinese economy slows down. While he does seem willing to give Trump enough to get a deal done, however, surrendering too much would be more dangerous for Xi politically than doing no deal at all.
The reason is rooted in history, or at least the CCP version of it. A core element of the messaging the party uses to justify its rule is that it will right the perceived wrongs of the past. Beginning in the mid-1800s, Great Britain, France, the U.S. and others used force or the threat of force against a temporarily weakened China to extract pieces of territory, economic concessions and other demeaning violations of Chinese sovereignty through a series of “unequal” treaties. That’s how the British got Hong Kong and the Japanese Taiwan.
Much of the purpose was to pry open a Chinese market that had been tightly restricted by the ruling Qing Dynasty. The CCP now argues that -- thanks to its skillful rule since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 -- China is strong again and will avenge these past humiliations, reassuming its proper place at the center of the world economy.
The state propaganda machine keeps the humiliation of China’s surrender to “gunboat diplomacy” fresh in the public mind. In response to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s speech late last year on China policy, for instance, a commentary in the party-owned Global Times was quick to remind readers that “the U.S. had been one of the perpetrators of the indignities and exploitation that China suffered during the ‘Century of Humiliation.’”
More
“There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in
the nature of a crash.”
Irving Fisher, leading
U.S. economist, New York Times, Sept. 5, 1929
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
Today, those cheating, lying,
spooks again from the NSA. Why would they do this springs to mind? What hidden
backdoors and trojans, does it contain?
Cui bono.
The NSA Makes Ghidra, a Powerful Cybersecurity Tool, Open Source
03.05.19
The National Security Agency develops advanced
hacking tools in-house for both offense and defense—which you could
probably guess even if some notable
examples hadn't leaked in recent years. But on Tuesday at the RSA
security conference in San Francisco, the agency demonstrated Ghidra, a refined
internal tool that it has chosen to open source. And while NSA cybersecurity
adviser Rob Joyce called the tool a "contribution to the nation’s
cybersecurity community" in announcing it at RSA, it will no doubt be used
far beyond the United States.You can't use Ghidra to hack devices; it's instead a reverse-engineering platform used to take "compiled," deployed software and "decompile" it. In other words, it transforms the ones and zeros that computers understand back into a human-readable structure, logic, and set of commands that reveal what the software you churn through it does. Reverse engineering is a crucial process for malware analysts and threat intelligence researchers, because it allows them to work backward from software they discover in the wild—like malware being used to carry out attacks—to understand how it works, what its capabilities are, and who wrote it or where it came from. Reverse engineering is also an important way for defenders to check their own code for weaknesses and confirm that it works as intended.
"If
you’ve done software reverse engineering, what you’ve found out is it’s both
art and science; there’s not a hard path from the beginning to the end,"
Joyce said. "Ghidra is a software reverse-engineering tool built for our
internal use at NSA. We're not claiming that this is the one that’s going to be
replacing everything out there—it's not. But it helped us address some things
in our workflow."
Similar
reverse-engineering products exist on the market, including a popular
disassembler and debugger called IDA. But Joyce emphasized that the NSA has
been developing Ghidra for years, with its own real-world priorities and needs
in mind, which makes it a powerful and particularly usable tool. Products like
IDA also cost money, whereas making Ghidra open source marks the first time
that a tool of its caliber will be available for free—a major contribution in
training the next generation of cybersecurity defenders. (Like other open
source code, though, expect it to have some bugs.) Joyce also noted that the
NSA views the release of Ghidra as a sort of recruiting strategy, making it
easier for new hires to enter the NSA at a higher level or for cleared
contractors to lend their expertise without needing to first come up to speed
on the tool.
The
NSA announced Joyce’s RSA talk, and Ghidra’s imminent release, in early
January. But knowledge of the tool was already public thanks to WikiLeaks’
March 2017 “Vault
7” disclosure, which discussed a number of hacking tools used by the
CIA and repeatedly referenced Ghidra as a reverse-engineering tool created by
the NSA. The actual code hadn’t seen the light of day, though, until
Tuesday—all 1.2 million lines of it. Ghidra runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux
and has all the components security researchers would expect. But Joyce
emphasized the tool's customizability. It is also designed to facilitate
collaborative work among multiple people on the same reversing project—a
concept that isn't as much of a priority in other platforms.
----No
matter what comes next for the NSA's powerful reversing tool, Joyce emphasized
on Tuesday that it is an earnest contribution to the community of cybersecurity
defenders—and that conspiracy theorists can rest easy. "There’s no
backdoor in Ghidra," he said. "Come on, no backdoor. On the record.
Scout's honor."
More
"There
will be no interruption of our permanent prosperity."
Myron
E. Forbes, President, Pierce Arrow Motor Car Co., January 12, 1928
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?
Britain targets a third of electricity from offshore wind by 2030
March 7, 2019 /
12:06 AM
LONDON (Reuters) -
Britain plans to generate a third of its electricity from offshore wind farms
by 2030 and boost the value of exports of offshore wind services and equipment
to 2.6 billion pounds a year, the government said on Thursday.
Britain, which aims to lift industrial productivity as it leaves the
European Union, is the world’s biggest offshore wind market with almost 40
percent of global capacity. On and offshore wind turbines met 17 percent of UK
power needs in 2018.
Under the initiative, the government said it would encourage companies
to invest 250 million pounds in expanding production of windpower equipment so
60 percent of content for British offshore windpower projects were domestically
produced by 2030.
Claire Perry, Britain’s clean growth and energy minister, said in a
statement the plan would help coastal communities and would ensure the country
remained a global leader in the sector.
The government aims to treble the number of skilled jobs in the offshore
wind industry to 27,000 by 2030.
Siemens Gamesa and MHI Vestas, a venture between Denmark’s Vestas Wind
Systems A/S and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, already make turbines in
Britain.
Britain now has total installed windpower capacity of 20 gigawatts (GW),
with offshore wind farms accounting for 8 GW. Offshore capacity will reach 30
GW by 2030 under the plan.
The country also hosts the world’s largest wind farm, Orsted’s 659
megawatt (MW) Walney Extension project, with 87 turbines, some of which can
generate 8.25 MW each.
Britain aims to close coal-fired power stations by 2025, as it seeks to
cut greenhouse gas emissions. The failure of some nuclear power plans has also
encouraged the focus on offshore wind to fill the potential power gap.
More
Another weekend and a doom and gloom one
shaping up at that. What more could possibly go wrong? Well suicidal partisan politics
in America, an EU botched Brexit, and an ugly political hostage fight between
America, Canada and China. Better start the invasion of Venezuela ASAP.
"This crash is not going to have much effect on
business."
Arthur Reynolds, Chairman of Continental Illinois Bank of
Chicago, October 24, 1929
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished February
DJIA: 25,916 +68 Down. NASDAQ: 7,533 +109 Down.
SP500:
2,784 +62 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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