Baltic Dry Index. 1035
+42 Brent
Crude 62.13
Never ending Brexit
now October 31st, maybe.
Nuclear Trump
China Tariffs Now In Effect.
USA v EU trade war
postponed to November, maybe.
"When
a President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
President
Trump, with apologies to President Nixon.
Hopium’s back in
spades. All it took was for President
Trump to tweet about an “extended” meeting coming up with
President Xi at the G-20 meeting, and the EUSSR’s woes now being so bad, that the ECB is
promising to lower interest rates into the sub-basement again. More negative
interest rates shot across Europe.Pity the poor savers and pensioners.
Below, “it’s all
about goosing stocks, stupid,” with apologies.
Trump, Xi Stoke Trade Optimism With Plan to Resume Talks at G-20
By Justin Sink
Updated on 19 June 2019, 03:27 BST
·
·
Stocks rose on optimism of trade deal after
monthlong impasse
The U.S. and China said their presidents will meet in Japan next week to
relaunch trade talks after a month-long stalemate, triggering a rally in
financial markets.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he had a “very good” phone
conversation with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. The two leaders will hold an
“extended meeting” at the G-20 summit on June 28-29 in Osaka and “our
respective teams will begin talks prior to our meeting,” Trump said on Twitter.
The U.S. president had repeatedly threatened more tariffs if Xi spurned the
opportunity to talk.
More
Asian shares climb, wager all on dovish Fed, trade hopes revive
June 19, 2019 /
1:36 AM
SYDNEY (Reuters) -
Asian shares hit five-week highs on Wednesday as investors hoped the Federal
Reserve would follow the lead of the European Central Bank and open the door to
future rate cuts at its policy meeting later in the day.
Indeed, ECB President Mario Draghi’s shock about-face on easing fuelled
talk of a worldwide wave of central bank stimulus, firing up stocks, bonds and
commodities.
Adding to the cheer was news U.S. President Donald Trump would meet with
Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit later this month, and that trade
talks would restart after a recent lull. But most analysts do not expect a
decisive breakthrough.
“We expect no real change following the G20 sideline meeting. (But) the
fact that both sides are talking should at least postpone thoughts of a further
increase in tariffs, for a while at least...,” ING’s Greater China economist
Iris Pang said in a note.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan climbed 1.5%
to a five-week top. Shanghai blue chips firmed 1.7% to a six-week peak.
Japan’s Nikkei rose 1.6%, while Australia added 1% to its highest in 11
years. E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 were a fraction firmer after a upbeat
Wall Street session.
The Dow ended Tuesday with gains of 1.35%, while the S&P 500 rose
0.97% and the Nasdaq 1.39%. The S&P 500 has surged 6% so far this month to
be 1% from the all-time high hit in early May.
All eyes are now upon the Fed which is scheduled to release a statement
at 1800 GMT on Wednesday, followed by a press conference by Chairman Jerome
Powell shortly after.
More
The Dow is now on pace for its best June return in 80 years, but the Fed could change that in a heartbeat
By Mark
DeCambre Published: June 18, 2019 9:37 p.m. ET
U.S. stock benchmarks on Tuesday enjoyed a nearly
unfettered run-up toward records on the back of hope that central banks here
and abroad will ease monetary policy soon. Gains on the day have put the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.35% in position to ring up its best June gain of nearly 7% since 1938, when the blue-chip benchmark surged an eye-popping 24.3% on the month, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
---- The rally for equities has been partly supported by the belief that the Federal Reserve at the conclusion of its Wednesday rate-setting meeting will indicate its intent to cut interest rates to curb the effects of tariff clashes between the U.S. and international trade partners, notably China, that have roiled global economies and threaten to disrupt global supply chains.
Wall Street is pricing in as many as three rate reductions in 2019, even if bets aren’t that high for a rate cut on Wednesday, according to CME Group data, tracking federal-funds futures. The market added to gains Tuesday after President Donald Trump tweeted that he plans to hold an “extended meeting” with China President Xi Jinping at the meeting of Group of 20 leaders in Japan later this month.
However, some strategists worry that the market has gotten ahead of itself and could be poised to be disappointed by the Fed, if not by Sino-American trade negotiations, which may not deem the economy sufficiently weakened to merit a rate reduction in the coming year or as many as Wall Street investors are hoping.
More
But in less hopium news in the real world, Asia continues
to slow, the EUSSR is back on life support again, and professional fund
managers are now bearish on global stocks but bullish on bonds. They see
recession ahead.
Japan's exports fall for sixth consecutive month
By Mayumi
Negishi Published: June 18, 2019
10:46 p.m. ET
TOKYO--Japan's exports tumbled for the sixth straight month in May, hit
by a sharp drop in shipments of chip-making tools and automobile parts, amid
heightened trade tensions between the U.S. and China.
Japan's exports fell by 7.8% from the previous year in May--in line with
a FactSet poll of economists--due to decline in shipments of chip-making tools
and semiconductor parts to China, data released by the Ministry of Finance
showed Wednesday.
The weak exports, along with a surge in crude oil imports, translated to
a 967 billion yen ($8.9 billion) monthly trade deficit, its first in four
months.
Rising global economic uncertainty, and the broad slowdown in the global
economy is hurting exporters of precision equipment, like Japan, which is home
to the likes of Tokyo Electron Ltd., Dainippon Screen Manufacturing Co.,
Advantest Corp.and other major makers of machines.
Wednesday's trade data showed exports to China, Japan's biggest trading
partner, fell almost 10% year-over-year. Shipments of chip-making equipment
fell almost 28%, amid escalating pressure by the U.S. on its allies to restrict
use of China-made chips.
Exports to all of Asia fell 12%, as a global slump in chip demand hurt
appetites of chip makers like South Korea's Samsung Electronics to invest in
capacity expansion. Exports to Europe also fell by 7% on lower appetite for
Japanese goods.
However, exports to the U.S. rose 3% on strong demand for Japanese cars,
expanding Japan's trade surplus with the U.S. by almost 15% in May from the
previous year. The data comes amid continued pressure from Washington on Japan
for a bilateral trade deal.
Draghi puts further ECB easing firmly on the table
June 18, 2019 /
9:23 AM
SINTRA, Portugal
(Reuters) - The European Central Bank will ease policy again if inflation fails
to accelerate, ECB President Mario Draghi said on Tuesday, signalling one of
the biggest policy reversals of his eight-year tenure.
After four years of unprecedented stimulus to revive the euro zone
economy after its debt crisis, the ECB had been preparing markets for policy
tightening, dubbed “normalisation” — only to see a global trade war unravel its
plans within a matter of months.
The problem is that with rates at record lows and the ECB’s balance
sheet already swelled to 4.7 trillion euros (£4.2 trillion), its remaining
ammunition is limited, raising doubts about the likely effectiveness of any
further measures.
“In the absence of improvement, such that the sustained return of
inflation to our aim is threatened, additional stimulus will be required,”
Draghi told the ECB’s annual conference in Sintra, Portugal.
With just four months left of his term, the slowdown is also a threat to
Draghi’s legacy. The Italian’s promise in 2012 to do “whatever it takes” to
save the euro is widely credited with holding together the currency bloc during
the darkest days of its crisis.
“(We) will use all the flexibility within our mandate to fulfil our
mandate — and we will do so again to answer any challenges to price stability
in the future,” Draghi said on Tuesday. “Monetary policy remains committed to
its objective and does not resign itself to too-low inflation.”
But Draghi is not alone in having to backtrack.
The U.S. Federal
Reserve first abandoned interest rate hikes and may this week signal cuts in
borrowing costs as global turmoil erodes confidence, hitting stocks and global
trade.
More
German 10-yr yield hits -0.30% on Draghi's stimulus klaxon
June 18, 2019 /
9:45 AM
LONDON (Reuters) -
The euro dropped and German government bond yields hit -0.30% for the first
time on Tuesday after European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi said the bank
would provide more stimulus if inflation failed to pick up.
---- That exacerbated the dash for bonds, already in play as investors fret about the world economy, the impact of trade wars and the simmering Iran-U.S. tensions in the Gulf.
Germany’s 10-year government bond yield, the benchmark for the bloc,
dropped six basis points to a record low of minus 0.308% after the remarks,
while most other euro zone bond yields slipped 5-14 basis points on the day.
Austrian 10-year yields slipped into negative territory for the first
time ever, while the Draghi effect also sent U.S. 10-year Treasury yields to
their lowest since September 2017.
---- As if to underline this, a closely watched survey by the ZEW Institute showed the mood among German investors deteriorated sharply in June.
Money market investors are now fully pricing in an ECB rate cut for
December 2019 for the first time.
Just two weeks ago, they were pricing in a 60% chance of a rate cut by
the end of the year.
The euro weakened across the board, falling to a two-week low versus the
dollar and to a 1-1/2 week low versus the Swiss franc.
The main euro zone stocks index reversed early losses as the euro fell.
It was trading down up 1.1% by 1045 GMT as the fall in the single currency
translated into a boost for euro zone exporters.
More
Investors most bearish on global stocks since 2009 - BAML survey
June 18, 2019 /
10:37 AM
LONDON (Reuters) -
Investors haven’t been this bearish on stocks since early-2009 when the world
was in the throes of the financial crisis triggered by the Lehman Brothers
collapse, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s June fund manager survey showed.
Results of the
monthly survey, released on Tuesday, showed funds’ allocation to global
equities dropped by 32 percentage points from May to a net 21% underweight.
This is the lowest allocation to stocks since March 2009 and the second-biggest
one-month drop on record.
Bond allocations meanwhile jumped by 12 percentage points to the highest
since September 2011, as dovish signals from central banks and rock-bottom
inflation expectations triggered a U-turn in the market’s interest rate
outlook.
Investors said U.S. government bonds were the “most crowded” trade for
the first time in the survey’s history, while 56% of respondents named trade
war as the top risk to markets.
The percentage of investors expecting higher short-dated interest rates
fell to its lowest level since 2008, the survey found.
Finally, in other
news, China and Russia start playing hardball back to America over North Korea.
Russia, China, block US effort to halt N. Korea fuel deliveries
Date created :
Russia and China on Tuesday blocked an American initiative that aimed to
halt fuel deliveries to North Korea, which Washington accuses of exceeding its
annual ceiling for 2019, diplomatic sources said.
Moscow and Beijing said more time was needed to study the US request,
which was backed by 25 UN members including Japan, France and Germany,
according to the sources.
A week ago, the United States, in a report, accused North Korea of
breaching the United Nations-imposed ceiling on fuel imports by carrying out
dozens of ship-to-ship transfers this year.
The cap on fuel imports is among a series of tough sanctions adopted by
the UN Security Council in response to North Korea's ballistic missile and
nuclear tests.
The United States insists that "maximum pressure" from the
sanctions must remain on North Korea until it agrees to dismantle its weapons
program.
Washington had asked that a United Nations sanctions committee rule that
the annual cap of 500,000 barrels had been exceeded and order all countries to
halt fuel deliveries.
Countries on the sanctions committee, including Russia and China, had
until Tuesday to raise objections to the request to cut off fuel shipments to
North Korea.
----The US and Japan have documented at least eight illegal ship-to-ship transfers of fuel involving North Korea-flagged tankers, the report said.
An additional 70 instances of fuel deliveries on the high seas were
detected by the United States between January and April, although the volume of
fuel unloaded from the ships was not known.
According to diplomats, the North Koreans are masters at concealing
ships via false flags or false documents to hide their use for the benefit of
Pyongyang.
The United States last year accused North Korea of exceeding the quota
on fuel imports through illegal ship transfers, but Russia and China raised
questions about the data and no action was taken.
This year, Washington began raising its concerns about the
sanctions-busting with Beijing and Moscow weeks ago, arguing that without
enforcement, the cap on fuel imports will be "completely
meaningless," a council diplomat said earlier.
Over the past year US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim
Jong Un have held two summits, but the second meeting, held in Vietnam, ended
abruptly when the two failed to agree on what the North would be willing to
give up in exchange for sanctions relief.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in called last week for Trump and Kim to
meet again soon, saying a prolonged impasse could weaken their willingness to
pursue dialogue on the Korean peninsula.
"You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than
you can with a kind word alone."
President Trump, with apologies to Al Capone.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
Today, more of the unintended consequences of the Great Nixonian Error
of fiat money, August 15, 1971.
Why long periods of the U.S. going without recession may be bad for the economy
By Jeffry
Bartash Published: June 17, 2019 2:31 p.m. ET
The 10-year old economic expansion will set a record next
month by becoming the longest ever. Great news, right? Maybe not, say
economists at Deutsche Bank.Prolonged expansions have become the norm since the early 1970s, when the tight link between the dollar DXY, -0.12% and gold GC00, +0.49% was broken. The last four expansions are among the six longest in U.S. history .
Why so? Freed from the constraints of gold-backed currency, governments and central banks have grown far more aggressive in combating downturns. They’ve boosted spending, slashed interest rates or taken other unorthodox steps to stimulate the economy.
“However, there has been a cost,” contended Deutsche Bank economists Jim Reid and Craig Nicol in a lengthy report.
“This policy flexibility and longer business cycle era has led to higher structural budget deficits, higher private sector and government debt, lower and lower interest rates, negative real yields, inflated financial asset valuations, much lower defaults (ultra cheap funding), less creative destruction, and a financial system that is prone to crises.
“In fact we’ve created an environment where recessions are a global systemic risk. As such, the authorities have become even more encouraged to prevent them, which could lead to skewed preferences in policymaking,” they wrote. “So we think cycles continue to be extended at a cost of increasing debt, more money printing, and increasing financial market instability.”
Even the current economy recovery is not all that it seems. Reid and Nicol said. It’s been the weakest of the 11 expansions that have taken place since 1949.
Yet despite the weak growth, stocks DJIA, +0.09% SPX, +0.09% and other assets have had one of their strongest runs ever.
“This could hint at the extraordinary lengths global authorities have gone to ensure this recovery continued,” they wrote. “Liquidity and intervention has been enormous and this has flowed into assets.”
The silver lining, sort of? Reid and Nicol don’t see danger right over
the horizon.
They say the situation can go on until the current era of low inflation
gives way to rising prices or leading countries like the U.S. run into a
debt-funding crisis. It could be several years or even much longer before that
happens.
“One could make a compelling argument that regular recessions
strengthened the economic success story as they acted as a natural cleansing
mechanism ensuring an efficient allocation of resources and preventing the
cumulative build-up of inefficiencies that could have arisen without regular
downturns,” Reid and Nicol wrote.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-long-periods-of-seemingly-economic-good-times-may-actually-be-bad-for-america-2019-06-17?mod=mw_theo_homepage“The US dollar is our currency but your problem.”
John Connolly
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?
A new 2D magnet draws future devices closer
Date:
June 17, 2019
Source:
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Summary:
Scientists have discovered a new type of 2D magnetic material that can be
integrated into spintronic devices.
We are all familiar with the image of electrons zipping around an atom's
nucleus and forming chemical bonds in molecules and materials. But what is less
known is that electrons have an additional unique property: spin. It is
difficult to make an analogy, but one could crudely describe electron spin as a
spinning-top rotating around its axis. But what is even more interesting is
that, when spins of electrons align together in a material, this leads to the
well-known phenomenon of magnetism.
One of the most cutting-edge fields in technology is spintronics, a
still-experimental effort to design and build devices -- such as computers and
memories -- that run on electron spin rather than just the movement of charges
(which we know as electrical current). But such applications demand new
magnetic materials with new properties. For example, it would be a huge
advantage if magnetism occurs in an extremely thin layer of the material -- the
so-called two-dimensional (2D) materials that include graphene, which is
basically an atom-thick layer of graphite.
However, finding 2D magnetic materials is challenging. Chromium iodide
(CrI3) recently revealed many interesting properties, but it degrades rapidly
in ambient conditions and its insulating nature doesn't promise much in the way
of spintronics applications, most of which require metallic and air-stable
magnetic materials.
Now, the groups of Andras Kis and Oleg Yazyev at EPFL have found a new
metallic and air-stable 2D magnet: platinum diselenide (PtSe2). The discovery
was made by Ahmet Avsar, a postdoc in Kis's lab, who was actually looking into
something else entirely.
To
explain the discovery of magnetism in PtSe2, the researchers first used
calculations based on density functional theory, a method that models and
studies the structure of complex systems with many electrons, such as materials
and nanostructures. The theoretical analysis showed that the magnetism of PtSe2
is caused by the so-called "defects" on its surface, which are
irregularities in the arrangement of atoms. "More than a decade ago, we
found a somewhat similar scenario for defects in graphene, but PtSe2 was a
total surprise for us," says Oleg Yazyev.
----"Such
ultra-thin metallic magnets could be integrated into the next generation
spin-transfer torque magnetic random-access memory [STT MRAM] devices,"
says Ahmet Avsar. "2D magnets could reduce the critical current required
to change magnetic polarity, and help us with further miniaturization. These
are the major challenges that companies are hoping to solve."
If
economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent
people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
John Maynard Keynes
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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