Baltic Dry Index. 1125
-13 Brent
Crude 62.40
Never ending Brexit
now October 31st, maybe.
Nuclear Trump
China Tariffs Now In Effect.
USA v EU trade war
postponed to November, maybe.
Every
generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before
it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
George
Orwell.
To this old dinosaur
market follower, this looks like what may be the final exit rally in stocks. If
the Fed cuts their key interest rate next week, they will be cutting because of
economic weakness, and economic weakness is never good for holding stocks.
But to this old
dinosaur commodities trader, the commodity markets are telling a tale of a
rising global slowdown. A slowdown made very much worse by all of the Trump
trade wars, with even more threatened. Against China, according to Trump, right
after the coming G-20 meeting near month end. Against Mexico (again,) after a
review in about 45 days. Against German autos by November. And now against
French wine, in an unspecified time frame.
This is anything but
a time to be taking on extra risk.
Asia stocks gain amid Mexico reprieve, firmer Chinese shares
June 11, 2019 /
1:58 AM
TOKYO (Reuters) -
Asian stocks, led by Chinese shares, gained on Tuesday as markets basked in
relief following the U.S. decision to hold off from imposing import tariffs on
Mexico as the two governments agreed a deal to combat illegal migration from
Central America.
Hopes that U.S. interest rates will be cut as early as next week also
provided support.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan gained 0.65%.
The Shanghai Composite Index climbed 1.7% after China said on Monday
that it will allow local governments to use proceeds from special bonds as
capital for major investment projects in a bid to support the slowing economy.
Australian stocks rose 1.3%, South Korea’s KOSPI added 0.3% and Japan’s
Nikkei edged up 0.35%.
U.S. stocks extended their recent climb on Monday, with the Dow rising
for the sixth trading day.
Relief that the United States had stepped back from an immediate
imposition of tariffs on Mexico encouraged buyers, though U.S. Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo warned the United States could still slap tariffs on Mexico
if not enough progress was made on its commitment to stem illegal immigration.
While global markets have been given some reprieve, fresh U.S. trade
threats against China were seen limiting any major boost to investor sentiment.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he was ready to impose
another round of punitive tariffs on Chinese imports if he cannot make progress
in trade talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit.
The U.S. president has repeatedly said he
expected to meet Xi at the June 28-29 summit in Osaka, Japan, although China is
yet to confirm any such meeting.
“The lift from the U.S.-Mexico trade development is likely to be a
temporary one for the equity markets as the bigger issue between the United
States and China remains unresolved,” said Masahiro Ichikawa, senior strategist
at Sumitomo Mitsui DS Asset Management.
“Nervousness will prevail in the markets until the G20 summit. And there
is no guarantee that matters will improve even if the U.S. and Chinese leaders
meet at the summit.”
Economists at Societe Generale said in a note that “the probability of
the U.S.-China trade conflict drawing to an amicable conclusion has decreased
significantly over the past few weeks.”
More
Morgan Stanley bear warns his bleak scenario for 2019 is taking shape
By Shawn
Langlois Published: June 10, 2019
4:35 p.m. ET
----Mike Wilson — hailed across Finance Twitter as “Wall Street’s most bearish analyst” — says there’s one big risk out there for investors...
That he’s right.
“The macro and micro economic data continue to deteriorate,” Morgan Stanley’s chief investment officer wrote, pointing to weak durable goods orders, disappointing capital spending, soggy retail earnings, lackluster freight shipments, and a “very soft” jobs number as evidence of an economy running on fumes.
“This raises the risk of my core view playing out — that companies will do whatever it takes to protect margins,” Wilson wrote. “And while labor is the last lever they pull, they will use it if they need to.”
Don’t be so quick to blame U.S.-China trade tensions, either, he said. “The economy was already slowing and escalation potentially makes things worse.”
And if you’re waiting for a lower interest rates to ignite a rally... don’t.
“A rate cut after a long hiking cycle tends to be negative for stocks, in contrast to a pause like in January, which is typically positive,” Wilson said. “I’ve been vocal about the likelihood of U.S. earnings and the economic cycle disappointing this year. Specifically, I’ve argued that the second half recovery many companies have promised and investors expect is unlikely to materialize.”
He’s not seeing enough evidence to change his mind. In fact, Wilson’s team is looking for GDP to hit the skids in the second half.
More
Trump ready to slap more tariffs on China after G20 meeting
June 10, 2019 /
6:05 PM
WASHINGTON/BEIJING
(Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday he was ready to impose
another round of punitive tariffs on Chinese imports if he cannot make progress
in trade talks with China’s President at a Group of 20 summit later this month.
Since two days of talks to resolve the U.S.-China trade dispute last
month in Washington ended in a stalemate, Trump has repeatedly said he expected
to meet President Xi Jinping at the June 28-29 summit in Osaka, Japan. China
has not confirmed any such meeting.
Trump said last week he would decide after the meeting of the leaders of
the world’s largest economies whether to carry out a threat to impose tariffs
on at least $300 billion (236 billion pounds) in Chinese goods.
In comments to reporters on Monday, Trump said he still thought the
meeting with Xi would happen.
“We are scheduled to talk and to meet. I think interesting things will
happen. Let’s see what happens,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
The United States has already imposed 25% tariffs on $250 billion worth
of goods.
China’s foreign ministry said on Monday that China is open to more trade
talks with Washington but has nothing to announce about a possible meeting.
Tensions between Washington and Beijing rose sharply in May after the
Trump administration accused China of having reneged on promises to make
structural economic changes during months of trade talks.
---- The U.S. government has also angered China by putting Huawei Technologies Co Ltd on a blacklist that effectively bans U.S. companies from doing business with the Chinese firm, the world’s biggest telecoms equipment maker.
Investors worry China will retaliate by putting U.S. companies on a
blacklist or banning exports to the United States of rare earth metals, which
are used in products such as memory chips, rechargeable batteries and cell
phones.
Fitch Ratings said on Monday any such move would be disruptive to the
U.S. technology sector and could hurt some Chinese sectors as well, though it
added that it was too early to assess potential credit implications.
In an interview with CNBC, Trump said the Huawei dispute could be addressed as part of a trade deal with China.
The escalating trade war between the world’s two largest economies has unnerved financial markets with worries that it could further disrupt global manufacturing and supply chains and push an already slowing global economy into recession.
On Sunday, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said resolving the current trade tensions should be the top priority for G20 economies.
More
Trump Says U.S. to ‘Do Something’ About French Wine Tariffs
By Terrence Dopp and Margaret Talev
Updated on 10 June 2019, 16:30 BST
·
·
In 2011, Trump purchased a Virginia winery, now
run by his son
“France charges us a lot for the wine. And yet we charge them very little for French wine,” Trump complained in an interview with CNBC anchors on Monday after visiting Normandy last week.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-10/trump-says-u-s-to-do-something-about-french-wine-tariffs?srnd=premium-europe
Next in Brexit
news, the EUSSR may have a big black hole. Of the 39 billion supposed separation
agreement, only 9 billion represents money due, the other 30 billion was supposed
to a GB continuing contribution for the next two years. Under a no deal withdrawal,
no two years of continuing payments. All in the rump-EU will have to pay in
more or cut back and make do with less. Such is the mess Juncker and Barnier
created.
Britain not paying £39 billion Brexit bill would not constitute default - S&P Global
June 10, 2019 /
12:25 PM
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain withholding the £39 billion it promised the
European Union as part of its original Brexit plan would not constitute a
sovereign default, rating agency S&P Global said on Monday.
Boris Johnson, the leading candidate to be Britain’s next prime minister
said at the weekend he would withhold the Brexit payment until the EU gave
Britain better exit terms, drawing immediate rebuke about a default from
France.
“Our (credit) ratings speak to commercial debt obligations,” S&P’s
primary analyst for the UK, Aarti Sakhuja, told Reuters. “The U.K. not paying
the 39 billion pound bill would therefore not constitute a sovereign default
under our methodology.”
Finally, when is a deal not a deal?
Try Mexico for starters.
Trump holds tariff threat over Mexico if border cooperation fails
Published: June 9, 2019 4:35 p.m. ET
STERLING, Va. — President Donald Trump on Sunday dangled the prospect of
renewing his tariff threat against Mexico if the U.S. ally doesn’t cooperate on
border issues, while some of his Democratic challengers for the White House
said the last-minute deal to avert trade penalties was overblown.
In a series of tweets, Trump defended the agreement heading off the 5%
tax on all Mexican goods that he had threatened to impose Monday, but he warned
Mexico that, “if for some unknown reason” cooperation fails, “we can always go
back to our previous, very profitable, position of Tariffs.”
Still, he said he didn’t believe that would be necessary.
The tweets came amid questions about just how much of the deal —
announced with great fanfare Friday — was really new. It included a commitment
from Mexico, for instance, to deploy its new National Guard to the country’s
southern border with Guatemala. Mexico, however, had already intended to do
that before Trump’s latest threat and had made that clear to U.S. officials.
“We want to continue to work with the U.S. very closely on the different
challenges that we have together. And one urgent one at this moment is
immigration,” said Mexico’s ambassador in Washington, Martha Barcena. She told
CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the countries’ “joint declaration of principles ...
gives us the base for the road map that we have to follow in the incoming
months on immigration and cooperation on asylum issues and development in
Central America.”
The U.S. also hailed Mexico’s agreement to embrace the expansion of a
program implemented earlier this year under which some asylum-seekers are
returned to Mexico as they wait out their cases. But U.S. officials had already
been working to expand the program, which has already led to the return of about
10,000 to Mexico, without Mexico’s public embrace.
More
Mexico Doesn't Back Up Trump's Twitter Claims of Big Farm Deal
By Nacha Cattan and Eric Martin
8 June 2019, 21:54 BST Updated on 9 June 2019,
16:46 BST
·
Envoy says USMCA passage would create more
agricultural trade
·
Mexico already a major importer of U.S. grains,
meat, dairy
President Donald Trump hinted at additional measures between the U.S.
and Mexico, a day after he vowed that Mexico would soon make “large”
agricultural purchases from the U.S. as part of a deal on border security and
illegal immigration that allowed Mexico to avoid U.S. tariffs.
“Some things not mentioned in yesterday’s press release, one in
particular, were agreed on. That will be announced at the appropriate time,”
Trump said Sunday in a series of four tweets about Mexico, the media and other
matters.
More
"On
the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the
time.”
George
Orwell.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
Today, murky deals in Moscow, New
York and Washington, under Presidents Bush and Obama. How come no “Mueller”
investigation? More “follow the money,”
I suppose.
Exclusive: American banker and Putin ally dealt in access and assets, emails reveal
June 10, 2019 /
7:25 AM
LONDON
(Reuters) - A senior American banker once secretly awarded a shareholding in
powerful Moscow investment bank Renaissance Capital to one of Vladimir Putin’s
closest friends and brokered meetings for the friend with top U.S. foreign
policy officials a decade ago, emails show.
The American banker, Robert Foresman, currently vice chairman at UBS
investment bank in New York, held a series of prominent roles in Moscow’s
financial world. He headed Dresdner Bank’s investment banking operations in
Russia in the early 2000s, served as Renaissance Capital’s vice chairman from
2006 to 2009, and then led Barclays Capital’s Russia operation until 2016.
Putin’s friend, Matthias Warnig, sits on the boards of several Russian
state-controlled firms.
A deeply religious conservative, the blue-eyed, curly-haired U.S.
banker, has said it has always been his calling to be a peacemaker between the
two nuclear superpowers.
Now, a cache of Renaissance Capital emails from 2007 to 2011 reveal new
details about the close relationship Foresman cultivated within Putin’s circle
over the years and how he leveraged these ties to win deals. The emails, which
were reviewed by Reuters, also shine a light on the part played by Western
bankers in the heady days of Moscow’s 2007 economic boom, when the Kremlin was
moving to take over ever greater swathes of the Russian economy.
The emails were exchanged among Renaissance Capital’s top executives and
between the bank and its clients and business associates before ownership of
the bank changed hands in 2012. They have figured in a long-running legal
battle over the controversial takeover by the Russian state of Mikhail
Khodorkovsky’s Yukos oil firm in the mid 2000s, and are reported here for the
first time.
Foresman’s relationship with the Kremlin was more complicated – and more
mercantile - than that of peacemaker, these emails show. They offer insight
into how Foresman and his colleagues sought to help the Kremlin pull off, and
profit from, its dismantlement of Yukos at a time when analysts say Moscow was
seeking international legitimacy for the politically-charged process. They also
show how the American banker guided Warnig around Washington foreign policy
circles during the Bush and Obama administrations.
In a statement to Reuters, Foresman said he considered it inappropriate
to comment on matters that may relate to proceedings before the English court -
a reference to a civil lawsuit in the UK - but he refuted any suggestion of
wrongdoing. Renaissance Capital’s new management declined to comment.
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?
Nothing new today,
but how they did the moon landings with early “computers.”
Apollo’s brain: The computer that guided man to the Moon
David Szondy June 9 2019When Apollo 11 touched down in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969, it was more than a triumph of the human spirit, it was also the story of a cybernetic wonder called the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), which helped the Apollo astronauts safely navigate to the Moon and back. It was a computer so advanced for its time that the engineers who created it said they probably wouldn't have tried to do so if they'd known what they were getting themselves into.
The Apollo Guidance Computer is one of the unsung successes of the Space
Race. This is probably because it was so phenomenally successful, having had
very few in-flight problems – and most of those were due to human error.
Carried aboard both the Command Service Module (CSM) and the Lunar Module (LM),
it flew on 15 manned missions, including nine Moon flights, six lunar landings,
three Skylab missions, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Mission in 1975.
At the time it was the latest and most advanced fly-by-wire and inertial
guidance system, the first digital flight computer, the most advanced miniature
computer to date, the first computer to use silicon chips, and the first
onboard computer where the lives of crew depended on it functioning as
advertised.
Not that the Apollo Guidance Computer was much to look at. At first
glance, it appeared like a brass suitcase in two parts, measuring a total of 24
× 12.5 × 6.5 in (61 × 32 × 17 cm) and weighing in at 70 lb (14 kg). Inside, it
isn't even very impressive by modern computer standards, having about as much
oomph as a smart bulb with a total of about 72 K of memory and a 12-microsecond
clock speed.
It's also hard to make an accurate comparison with modern devices
because the AGC wasn't a general purpose computer, but one that was literally
hardwired for a particular task, which allowed it to perform at the level of
the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum of the early 1980s – try to imagine getting to
the Moon using a Commodore 64 to handle the navigation and not break into a cold
sweat.
----Given the enormous number of variables, the above analogy only gives a small taste of the complexity of the equations that need to be solved for such a journey – and even then, the result will be a series of increasingly accurate estimates rather than a certain path. But what was certain from very early in the Apollo program was that space navigation is too complex and too counterintuitive for the astronauts to handle. In private, the engineers preferred that they not be allowed to have anything to do with it at all.
On top of that, designing and building a computer for the Apollo missions began as little more than a lot of hand waving. Though the first of all the Apollo contracts to be awarded, the AGC was one of thousands of sub-projects that were all chasing after a program where the basics were still in flux and where no one even knew if it was a mission where one, two, or more spacecraft would be used for the Moon landing.
A new technology
Things were already bad enough, but the AGS was being developed at a time when not only computers, but the entire field of electronics was undergoing an astonishing evolution that no one could predict.More, much, much, more.
https://newatlas.com/apollo-11-guidance-computer/59766/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=bd1ec59289-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-bd1ec59289-90625829
George Orwell.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: 24,815 +49 Down. NASDAQ: 7,453 +71 Down.
SP500: 2,752 +46 Down.
The S&P has reversed again to down after only one month. Time for
the Fed to step in again to buy stocks.
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