Baltic Dry Index. 649 -08 Brent Crude 65.74
Car Crash Brexit 20 days away.
It is the maxim of
every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will
cost him more to make than to buy...What is prudence in the conduct of every
private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.
Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations, 1776.
It
is the 243rd anniversary of the Publication of Adam Smith’s “Wealth
of Nations,” today, and from London this morning we seem to have learned very
little from the great man’s book. Arguably we have traded in the invisible hand
of the market, for the very flawed rule of “we know best” pompous central
banksters, or even worse, “trade wars are easy to win,” TV politicians.
Below,
yesterday’s bad news Friday. From the still sinking Baltic Dry Index, to the US
employment numbers, to the never ending trade war talks, to the Dow
Transportation Average, the markets were spoiled for choice of bad news. Thank
Trump for pressuring Chairman Powell’s use of the Fed’s “plunge protection team”
or stocks might have suffered another “Black Friday.”
The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in
what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself
with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely
be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever,
and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly
and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.
Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations, 1776.
This 135-year-old stock index just logged its longest skid in about 50 years
By Mark
DeCambre Published: Mar 8, 2019 5:16
p.m. ET
The Dow Jones Transportation Average on Friday produced its
lengthiest series of losses since 1972, highlighting a recent slump that has
taken hold of the broader stock market. The Dow transports DJT, -0.45% created by Charles Dow in 1884 (the Dow Jones Industrial Average was formed in 1896), has fallen in 11 consecutive sessions. The 135-year-old index has only logged five periods in which it declined for 11 consecutive sessions, and five points where it has registered a 12-day drop, according to Dow Jones Market Data and S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Check out the complete table of declines of at least 10 sessions below:
----The recent skid for the closely watched gauge is significant because it is often used as a proxy for the health of the overall economy, and the stumble comes amid increased fretting over the health of the global economy.
Fears that a contraction abroad may spillover into the U.S. were heightened early Friday after American businesses in February created the fewest number of new jobs in 17 months, a comparatively paltry 20,000 payroll additions on the month after averaging some 200,000 jobs over the past year.
That employment data came a day after the European Central Bank unfurled a fresh batch of bank stimulus to address signs of weakness in the eurozone economy.
Concerns about a knock-on effect domestically and unresolved U.S.-China tariff dispute intensified on Friday, pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.09% to its fifth straight day of losses, and a decline in eight of the last nine sessions. On top of that, news out of China showing that the second-largest economy reported a 20% drop in February exports on the heels of a 9.1% gain in January, didn’t exactly incite a buying mood on Wall Street.
The benchmark reflects the performance of 20 large transportation companies, ranging from railroad operators to airlines. According to proponents of the century-old Dow Theory, the gauge, along with the Dow industrials, tends to be an accurate barometer of domestic economic health.
More
In
USA v China trade war news, who and what to believe. Mutual Assured Destruction
seems to be the only result so far, with a new global recession about to walk
onstage from the wings.
By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can
be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about
thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from
foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of
all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in
Scotland?
Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations, 1776.
Trump team has no plan to go to China for trade talks - official
March 8, 2019 / 9:01 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Trump
administration officials have not made any new plans to send a team to China
for face-to-face trade talks although there is much work left to be done to
reach a deal, White House trade adviser Clete Willems said on Friday.
“We’re
talking to them (Chinese officials) every day, but no one’s got any trip
plans,” Willems told reporters on the sidelines of a Georgetown Law School
event. When asked about the prospect for future face-to-face meetings, he said:
“Maybe. But there are no plans right now.”
The
governments of the world’s two largest economies have been locked in a
tit-for-tat tariff battle for months as Washington presses Beijing to address
long-standing concerns over Chinese practices and policies around industrial
subsidies, technology transfers, market access and intellectual property
rights.
Advances in
talks drove the White House to indefinitely delay hikes in tariffs on $200
billion (£153.6 billion) worth of Chinese imports that were set to kick in on
March 2.
Willems said
the two countries had made progress in talks but that there was still much more
to be done. He declined to say whether Trump would set a new tariff deadline
should the talks stall.
Members of
Congress and the business community have expressed concerns that Trump is so
eager for a deal ahead of presidential elections next year that he may accept
an agreement that falls short of addressing key structural issues.
More
China says working with U.S. day and night to get trade deal
March 9, 2019 / 3:15 AM
BEIJING (Reuters) - China and the United
States are still working day and night to achieve a trade deal that matches the
interests of both sides and the hopes of the world, including eliminating
tit-for-tat tariffs, a senior Chinese official said on Saturday.
Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen said he was optimistic about negotiations with Washington, but added any trade mechanism achieved must be equal and fair.
The governments of the world’s two largest economies have been locked in a tariff battle for months as Washington presses Beijing to address long-standing concerns over Chinese practices and policies around industrial subsidies, technology transfers, market access and intellectual property rights.
---- Wang, speaking at a news conference
on the sidelines of China’s ongoing annual meeting of parliament, said slapping
tariffs on each other was bad for workers, farmers, exporters and
manufacturers.
“It hurts investor confidence and delays corporate investment decisions,” said Wang, who has been deeply involved in the trade talks with the United States.
“Now, the economic and trade teams of the two sides are making full efforts to communicate and negotiate in order to reach an agreement in line with the principles and directions decided by the two heads of states,” he added.
“That is to remove all the tariffs imposed on each other, so that bilateral trade relations between China and the United States can return to normal.”
The two countries’ working teams are communicating “day and night”, Wang said.The trade talks have seen senior officials shuttling backwards and forwards between Beijing and Washington.
Giving rare details into the talks, Wang said the two countries had been making extra effort to find areas in common. During the talks Vice Premier Liu He and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer enjoyed take out food, he said.
More
U.S. February job growth weakest in nearly one and a half years
March 8, 2019 / 5:10 AM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. employment
growth almost stalled in February, with the economy creating only 20,000 jobs,
adding to signs of a sharp slowdown in economic activity in the first quarter.
The meager payroll gains reported by the Labor Department on Friday were the weakest since September 2017, with a big drop in the weather-sensitive construction industry.
They also reflected a decline in hiring by retailers and utility companies as well as the transportation and warehousing sector, which is experiencing a shortage of drivers.
The sharp step-down in payrolls was another blow to President Donald Trump who has suffered a series of setbacks in recent weeks, including failed nuclear talks with North Korea, a record goods trade deficit despite his administration’s “America First” policies and the economy missing the White House’s 3 percent annual growth target in 2018.
More
The World Economy Just Had a Rough Week
By Simon Kennedy
·
Up
next, an interesting weekend read. Who knew there was an unproven, Gaussian
correlation inequality conjecture? Or that to get noticed, you need to be
familiar with latex? That’s the document preparation system, not the kinky
rubber clothing favoured by certain types of Democrats. But what does it mean
for our future?
A Retiree Discovers an Elusive Math Proof—And Nobody Notices
As he was brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of geometry, probability theory, and statistics that had eluded top experts for decades.Known as the Gaussian correlation inequality (GCI), the conjecture originated in the 1950s, was posed in its most elegant form in 1972 and has held mathematicians in its thrall ever since. “I know of people who worked on it for 40 years,” said Donald Richards, a statistician at Pennsylvania State University. “I myself worked on it for 30 years.”
Royen hadn’t given the Gaussian
correlation inequality much thought before the “raw idea” for how to prove it
came to him over the bathroom sink. Formerly an employee of a pharmaceutical
company, he had moved on to a small technical university in Bingen, Germany, in
1985 in order to have more time to improve the statistical formulas that he and
other industry statisticians used to make sense of drug-trial data. In July
2014, still at work on his formulas as a 67-year-old retiree, Royen found that
the GCI could be extended into a statement about statistical distributions he
had long specialized in.
On the morning of the 17th, he saw how to calculate a
key derivative for this extended GCI that unlocked the proof. “The evening of
this day, my first draft of the proof was written,” he said.
Not knowing LaTeX, the word processer of
choice in mathematics, he typed up his calculations in Microsoft Word, and the
following month he posted his paper to the academic
preprint site arxiv.org.
More
LaTeX
Finally,
so you really think that nuclear power is safe and a good idea? When man plays
God, mankind usually loses. And just wait till we move on to fusion from
fission, and the tokamak starts to leak, vaporising everyone for miles around!
Experts say only 49 people died during the Chernobyl
explosion. Others closer to the disaster put the number at a devastating
150,000. In a new book, Kate Brown goes behind the scenes and discovers
widespread cover-ups
Update 10 March 2019
Chernobyl:
The secrets they tried to bury - how the Soviet machine covered up a
catastrophe
Kate Brown The Telegraph
At 01:23:48 on 26 April, 1986, 17 employees of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were on shift. To carry out a
routine experiment, they turned off Reactor No 4’s emergency system, which was,
in any case, too slow to prevent an accident. As the operators finished the
test, they planned to take the reactor offline for several weeks of routine
maintenance.
But on shutdown, the chain reaction in the reactor core went
‘critical’, meaning operators no longer controlled it. The reactor’s power
surged. The operators would remember how the thick concrete walls wobbled,
plaster rained down and the lights went out.
They heard a human-sounding moan as the reactor bolted and then
popped. The blast tossed up a concrete lid, the size of a cruise ship, flipping
it over to expose the molten-hot core inside. A few seconds later, a more
powerful second explosion sent a geyser of radioactive gases into the Ukrainian
night. Plant worker Sasha Yuvchenko felt the thudding concussions and looked up
from the machine hall to see nothing but sky. He watched a blue stream of
ionising radiation careening toward the heavens. ‘I remember,’ he later reflected,
‘thinking how beautiful it was.’
More
Eight years on, water woes threaten Fukushima cleanup
March 8, 2019 / 7:15 AM
OKUMA, Japan (Reuters) - Eight years after
the Fukushima nuclear crisis, a fresh obstacle threatens to undermine the
massive clean-up: 1 million tons of contaminated water must be stored, possibly
for years, at the power plant.
Last year,
Tokyo Electric Power Co said a system meant to purify contaminated water had
failed to remove dangerous radioactive contaminants.
That means
most of that water - stored in 1,000 tanks around the plant - will need to be
reprocessed before it is released into the ocean, the most likely scenario for
disposal.
Reprocessing
could take nearly two years and divert personnel and energy from dismantling
the tsunami-wrecked reactors, a project that will take up to 40 years.
It is unclear
how much that would delay decommissioning. But any delay could be pricey; the
government estimated in 2016 that the total cost of plant dismantling,
decontamination of affected areas, and compensation, would amount to 21.5
trillion yen ($192.5 billion), roughly 20 percent of the country’s annual
budget.
Tepco is
already running out of space to store treated water. And should another big
quake strike, experts say tanks could crack, unleashing tainted liquid and
washing highly radioactive debris into the ocean.
Fishermen struggling
to win back the confidence of consumers are vehemently opposed to releasing
reprocessed water - deemed largely harmless by Japan’s nuclear watchdog, the
Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) - into the ocean.
“That would
destroy what we’ve been building over the past eight years,” said Tetsu Nozaki,
head of the Fukushima Prefectural Federation of Fisheries Co-operative
Associations. Last year’s catch was just 15 percent of pre-crisis levels,
partly because of consumer reluctance to eat fish caught off Fukushima.
On a visit
to the wrecked Fukushima Dai-ichi plant last month, huge cranes hovered over
the four reactor buildings that hug the coast. Workers could be seen atop the
No. 3 building getting equipment ready to lift spent fuel rods out of a storage
pool, a process that could start next month.
In most
areas around the plant, workers no longer need to wear face masks and full body
suits to protect against radiation. Only the reactor buildings or other
restricted areas require special equipment.
Fanning out
across the plant’s property are enough tanks to fill 400 Olympic-sized swimming
pools. Machines called Advanced Liquid Processing Systems, or ALPS, had treated
the water inside them.
Tepco said
the equipment could remove all radionuclides except tritium, a relatively
harmless hydrogen isotope that is hard to separate from water. Tritium-laced
water is released into the environment at nuclear sites around the world.
But after
newspaper reports last year questioned the effectiveness of ALPS-processed
water, Tepco acknowledged that strontium-90 and other radioactive elements
remained in many of the tanks.
Tepco said
the problems occurred because absorbent materials in the equipment had not been
changed frequently enough.
The utility
has promised to re-purify the water if the government decides that releasing it
into the ocean is the best solution. It is the cheapest of five options a
government task force considered in 2016; others included evaporation and
burial.
More
Hunterston B: Pictures show cracks in Ayrshire nuclear reactor
8 March 2019
Reactor three has not produced electricity since cracks were found to be forming quicker than expected.
About 370 hairline fractures have been discovered which equates to about one in every 10 bricks in the reactor core.
Owner EDF Energy says it does intend to seek permission from the Office of Nuclear Regulation (ONR) to restart.
It first has to prove it can still shut down the North Ayrshire reactor, which has not produced electricity for a year, in all circumstances.
The graphite bricks form the vertical channels within the reactor where the nuclear fuel is housed.
They sit alongside narrower channels where control rods can be dropped into place to counteract the nuclear reaction.
Tests and modelling have been undertaken to ensure that an earthquake would not distort the control channels and prevent the power station being shut down.
---- The operational limit for the latest period of operation was 350 cracks but an inspection found that allowance had been exceeded.
EDF plans to
ask the regulator for permission to restart with a new operational limit of up
to 700 cracks.
More
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for
merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the
public, or in some contrivance to raise prices…. But though the law cannot
hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to
do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary.
Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations, 1776.
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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