Baltic Dry Index. 2312 -19 Brent Crude 60.22
Spot Gold 1489
Never ending Brexit now October 31,
maybe. 47 days away.
Trump’s Nuclear China Tariffs
Now In Effect.
USA v EU trade war postponed to
November, maybe.
September 14, 1752,
Britain and the British Empire (including the American colonies) adopt the
Gregorian Calendar, losing 11 days, (no Sept 3-Sept 13th). People rioted
thinking the government just stole 11 days of their lives.
This historic weekend of the switch to
the Gregorian Calendar, and with tomorrow Battle of Britain Sunday, we cover
some of the less reported, but still important news.
All that Hong Kong unrest, and fears
that China might intervene after October 1, and the 70th anniversary of the founding
of Communist China, has many Hong Kongers looking for safety abroad. Why would
the London Stock Exchange choose now to sell itself to the
Hong Kong Stock
Exchange, no matter the price?
In stock markets, trouble is rising for
the “FAAGs” of the once only game in town “FAANGs.” Is this it, are they ringing
a bell at the top?
China offers US farmers and pork
producers a two week break. Longer if Trade War Team Trump come to their
senses.
The ECB pushes Europe deeper into the
insanity of negative interest rates. Something is going to blow soon and it’s
probably Germany.
The future of battery recycling looks to
be China’s.
When man tries to play God it has an all
too predictable result.
Enjoy.
Hong Kongers troubled by unrest look for new homes abroad
September 13, 2019 / 3:03 AM
HONG
KONG/MELBOURNE/VANCOUVER (Reuters) - As protests in Hong Kong stretch from
summer into autumn with little sign of resolution, a surge in migration
applications suggests more locals are making plans to leave the special administrative
region.
Their
sentiments, reflected in passport paperwork and in interviews with residents,
migration agents and real estate brokers across the globe, show the potential
for human and capital flight out of Hong Kong.
Since an
abortive push to allow extradition to mainland China sparked unrest in the
former British colony three months ago, emigration seminars have been
overflowing, organizers and attendees say.
Requests for
police-record printouts, which cost HK$225 ($29) and are only issued for visa
applications or child adoptions, jumped 54% to 3,649 in August compared with
last year. There have been more requests in 2019 so far than at the same point
in any of the previous five years.
In 2017, the
most recent year for which figures are available, there were 75 adoptions in
Hong Kong, a number comparable to previous years. The Hong Kong government
estimates that last year about 7,600 people left the city for good, roughly
one-third the number who sought police-record printouts.
Authorities
in Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan have reported spikes in migration enquiries,
and property agents from Melbourne to Vancouver say their phones are running
hot.
“There are
many uncertainties in Hong Kong,” one investor on a property agent’s
late-August tour of suburban Melbourne said before, laying out A$600,000
($410,000) for a house-and-land package.
---- China has denounced the protests, accusing the United States and Britain of fomenting unrest, and the Hong Kong government has sought to head off further trouble by accepting one of the protesters’ demands and withdrawing the extradition bill.
A mass march scheduled for Sunday will test how far that has allayed public anger.
As Hong Kong’s protests have expanded during the summer, swelling to million-strong marches and calls for democracy, so too have Hong Kongers’ searches for safe havens.
---- In June, lawyers and bankers told Reuters that wealthy tycoons were shifting their fortunes to places like Singapore.
Now,
migration agents say, middle-class families are checking out cheaper
alternatives.
More
Apple falls below $1 trillion as TV+ discounts said to weigh on earnings
By Tomi Kilgore
Published: Sept 13, 2019 3:11 p.m. ET
Shares of Apple Inc. dropped Friday to send the technology
behemoth’s market cap lower than $1 trillion, after Goldman Sachs slashed its
price target on concerns that Apple TV+ act as a drag on earnings.The stock AAPL, -1.94% slumped 1.% in afternoon trading to pace the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s DJIA, +0.14% decliners, but pared earlier losses of as much as 2.7%. Apple’s market capitalization regained its trillion-dollar status earlier this week for the first time since November 2018, after the company showed off new iPhones and detailed pricing for its subscription streaming offerings.
Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall checked in
on Apple in response to those announcements Friday morning, and cut his stock
price target to $165, 25% below current levels, from $187, while keeping his
rating at neutral, citing potential negative effects from some of the pricing
decisions Apple made.
More
Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google emails demanded in U.S. House panel probe
September 13, 2019 / 1:57 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. House of Representatives
panel on Friday demanded internal emails, detailed financial information and
other company records from top executives of Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc,
Apple Inc, and Alphabet Inc’s Google, widening the antitrust probe of Big Tech.
The letters seek by Oct. 14 internal
emails over the last decade from Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos,
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, among others, about
acquisitions.
On Monday,
the Texas attorney general led a group of 50 attorneys general from U.S. states
and territories in a probe of whether Google abuses its market power in
advertising.
“There is
growing evidence that a handful of corporations have come to capture an
outsized share of online commerce and communications,” said House Judiciary
Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat, who signed the letters along
with Ranking Republican Representative Doug Collins and Representative David
Cicilline, who chairs the antitrust subcommittee and ranking Republican Jim Sensenbrenner.
“This
information is key in helping determine whether anticompetitive behavior is
occurring, whether our antitrust enforcement agencies should investigate
specific issues and whether or not our antitrust laws need improvement to
better promote competition in the digital markets,” Collins said in a
statement.
More
China to exempt U.S. pork, soybeans from additional tariffs: Xinhua
September 13, 2019 / 10:18 AM
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China will exempt
some agricultural products from additional tariffs on U.S. goods, China’s
official Xinhua News Agency said Friday, in the latest sign of easing Sino-U.S.
tensions before a new rounds of talks aimed at curbing a bruising trade war.
The United
States and China have both made conciliatory gestures, with China renewing
purchases of U.S. farm goods and U.S. President Donald Trump delaying a tariff
increase on certain Chinese goods.
China had
imposed additional tariffs of 25% on U.S. agricultural products including
soybeans and pork in July 2018. It raised tariffs on soybeans by a further 5%
and on pork by a further 10% on Sept. 1.
“China
supports relevant enterprises buying certain amounts of soybeans, pork and
other agricultural products from today in accordance with market principles and
WTO rules,” Xinhua said, adding that the Customs Tariff Commission of China’s
State Council would exclude additional tariffs on those items.
China has
“broad prospects” for importing high-quality U.S. agricultural goods, Xinhua
reported, citing unnamed authorities.
An outbreak
of deadly African swine fever, which has cut China’s pig herd by a third since
mid-2018, has propelled Chinese pork prices to record levels and left the
country in need of replacement supplies from overseas.
---- China is also expected to step up purchases of soybeans, historically the most valuable U.S. farm export which China has largely avoided buying since the trade war began last year.
Before the announcement of additional tariff exemptions, Chinese firms bought at least 10 boatloads of U.S. soybeans on Thursday, the country’s most significant purchases since at least June.
“It is hoped
that the U.S. will be true to its words and fulfill its promise to create
favorable conditions for cooperation in agricultural areas between the two
countries,” the report said.
Lower-level
U.S. and Chinese officials are expected to meet next week in Washington before
talks between senior trade negotiators in early October.
More
Farmers react cautiously to China excluding soy, pork from new tariffs
Sept. 13, 2019 / 3:16 PM
EVANSVILLE, Ind., Sept. 13 (UPI) -- Soy and pork prices jumped Friday after China announced it would exclude those commodities from its
latest round of tariff escalations, but farmers say it is too soon to
celebrate.High existing retaliatory tariffs remain on both soy and pork going into China. And this is not the first time China has extended an olive branch, raising hopes of a resolution to the trade dispute with the United States that began last summer.
"By
this point, we're 18 months in," said Blake Hurst, president of the
Missouri Farm Bureau, who grows corn and soybeans. "It's become impossible
for any farmer to know what is going on. I have no idea how this will impact
the market. There is just total confusion."
Still, the
futures market responded immediately to China's announcement. Soybean prices
rose by more than 5 cents per bushel Friday afternoon, and pork was up more
than 2.5 cents per pound, according to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
"This is a most welcome development," David Herring, of North Carolina, president of the National Pork Producers Council, said in a statement. "We are hopeful that this apparent gesture of goodwill by China leads not only to more sales of U.S. pork, but that it contributes to a resolution of U.S.-China trade restrictions."
But industry experts were quick to caution that this rebound might be short-lived. Everything rides on the outcome of upcoming trade talks scheduled for early October.
More
In
EUSSR news, Draghi’s further push into negative interest rates and additional
quantitative easing from next month, drew ire and fire from EU paymaster
Germany, all the more so after Brexit and the EUSSR’s second largest
contributor leaves.
'Count Draghila is sucking our accounts dry', says German daily Bild
September 13, 2019 / 8:36 AM
Next to a photomontage of Draghi with fangs and dressed as
a vampire, Bild’s headline read: “Count Draghila is sucking our accounts dry.” Hoping to kick-start economic activity nearly a decade after the euro zone’s debt crisis, the ECB on Thursday cut interest rates deeper into negative territory and promised bond purchases with no end-date to push borrowing costs even lower.
The bigger-than-expected stimulus immediately fuelled concerns among frugal Germans, who have complained for years that the ECB’s low interest rates are denying them a decent rate of return on their savings.
“The horror for German savers goes on and on,” Bild wrote.
The newspaper has taken aim at Draghi before.
During the euro zone crisis, Bild gifted the Italian a spiked Prussian helmet from 1871 to show its confidence that he would adhere to German-style discipline. Draghi put the helmet on a shelf in his office.
Voicing Germans’ angst, Helmut Schleweis, president of Germany’s powerful savings banks association, said the ECB’s latest policy package “does more harm than good”.
German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz sought to calm savers worried ahead of Thursday’s ECB meeting.
“Most contracts that customers have with their banks do not currently allow such penalty rates, so the problem is not acute,” Scholz said. “Banks’ boards are wise enough to grasp what they would trigger with such penalty rates.
But Joachim Wuermeling, a board member of Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, struck a different tone: “Banks could soon pass on lower interest rates to even more customers,” Wuermeling told Focus magazine.
Nobody should be surprised if banks demanded higher fees and were mulling negative interest rates, Wuermeling said. “It may be necessary from a business and banking supervisory point of view,” he added.
More
ECB hawks slam Draghi's farewell stimulus
September 13, 2019 / 10:40 AM
Facing a protracted slowdown, the ECB cut rates deeper into
negative territory on Thursday and agreed to relaunch bond purchases with no
scheduled end-date, a move that divided the rate-setting Governing Council. Although no vote was taken, sources with direct knowledge of the discussion said that over a third of policymakers opposed the measures pushed by outgoing ECB chief Mario Draghi, an unusually high figure for a body that normally strives for consensus.
“This broad package of measures, in particular restarting the asset purchase programme, is disproportionate to the present economic conditions, and there are sound reasons to doubt its effectiveness,” Dutch central bank chief Klaas Knot, a frequent critic of the bank’s ultra-easy monetary policy, said.
While disagreements are frequent, ECB policymakers usually line up behind decisions and refrain from openly criticising its policy.
Knot said the euro zone economy is running at full capacity, wages are increasing and that financing conditions are so easy, they do not impede the flow of credit.
“There are increasing signs of scarcity of low-risk assets, distorted pricing in financial markets and excessive risk-seeking behaviour in the housing markets,” added Knot, a member of the ECB’s policy-setting Governing Council.
Austrian central bank chief Robert Holzmann meanwhile said he was worried the ECB had made a mistake and that such a broad package should not have come before the bank’s planned policy review, which could even see the inflation target lowered.
More
Next, battery recycling. Did China just
eat the rest of the world’s lunch?
How China is Cornering the Lithium-ion Cell Recycling Market
100,000 tons of batteries may be recycled this year — almost all of it in Asia.
Jason DeignSeptember 11, 2019
The commonly held view that lithium-ion batteries are not being recycled is not true. It’s just that China has pretty much cornered the market, experts say.
China recycled around 67,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries last year, or 69 percent of all the stock available for recycling worldwide, according to Hans Eric Melin, founder of U.K.-based Circular Energy Storage.
Another 18,000 tons was recycled in South Korea, mostly for the Chinese market, said Melin, a leading authority on battery recycling. These figures are approximate because recyclers often hoard batteries to take advantage of spikes in materials pricing, he said.
This year, up to 100,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries could be recycled globally, with China aiming to take an increasing share to build up materials supplies for its burgeoning battery business.
China has benefited from around a decade of mobile phone manufacturing, which has enabled it to perfect lithium-ion battery recycling as part of a growing handset refurbishing industry. Three out of four phones that are sent for refurbishing go to China, Melin said.
“When we talk about low recycling rates of phones, of tablets, that’s not really true, because we are exporting them for refurbishment and for remanufacturing,” said Melin. “But that is going on in China. They have had for a long time a large feedstock of batteries from consumer electronics.”
Even today, about 80 percent of lithium-ion batteries reaching end of life are from portable electronic devices, he said.
---- Elsewhere in China, erstwhile scrap company Hunan Brunp Recycling Technology, a subsidiary of lithium-ion battery leader CATL since 2015, last year recycled about 30,000 tons of batteries.
Meanwhile, Quzhou Huayou Cobalt New Material has roughly 60,000 tons of lithium-ion battery recycling capacity a year and recycled around 10,000 tons in 2018, Melin said.
Alongside these and two other major players, Ganzhou Highpower Technology and Guangdong Guanghua Sci-Tech, Melin said there was a “long tail” of hopefuls vying to grow in the market.
In North America and Europe, recycling is seen as a waste disposal activity that companies should be paid to carry out. But competition is so intense in China that recyclers there are willing to pay to get their hands on dead batteries.
This appetite means China’s grip on lithium-ion recycling seems likely to grow. American and European recycling companies have good processes but might struggle to find the volumes of used batteries needed for profitable operations, Melin said.
More
Unsurprisingly, when scientific man plays
God, it has an all too predictable result. We’re not half as clever as we think
we are. A great mosquito experiment gone wrong.
Failed GM mosquito control experiment may have strengthened wild bugs
Michael
Irving September 12, 2019
Mosquitoes are more than just a pest –
they can be downright dangerous carriers of disease. One of the most innovative
ideas to control populations of the bugs has been to release genetically
modified male mosquitoes that produce unviable offspring. But unfortunately a
test of this in Brazil appears to have failed, with genes from the mutant
mosquitoes now mixing with the native population.
The idea sounded solid. Male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were genetically engineered to have a dominant lethal gene. When they mated with wild female mozzies, this gene would drastically cut down the number of offspring they produced, and the few that were born should be too weak to survive long.
Ultimately, this program should cut down the population of mosquitoes in an area – up to 85 percent, in some early tests. This of course means fewer bug-borne diseases, such as dengue, yellow fever, zika, and malaria, in humans. And since the offspring don’t live long enough to breed themselves, genes from the engineered bugs should stay neatly out of the gene pool of the wild population. The only visible effect should be the reduction of mosquito populations.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case. Researchers from Yale University have now examined mosquitoes around the city of Jacobina, Brazil, where the largest test of this technique has taken place over the last few years. Not only did numbers bounce back up in the months after the test, but some of the native bugs, they found, had retained genes from the engineered mosquitoes.
---- The GM mosquito strain was developed by a company called Oxitec, and it had previously been given FDA approval for these kinds of tests. In the Brazilian case, around 450,000 modified males were released in Jacobina every week for 27 months, totaling tens of millions of bugs. To keep tabs on them, the Yale team studied the genomes of both the GM strain and the wild species before the release, then again six, 12 and 27 to 30 months after the release began.
Sure enough, by the end of the test there was clear evidence that genes from the transgenic insects had been incorporated into the wild population. Although the GM mosquitoes only produce offspring about three to four percent of the time, it seems that those that are born aren’t as weak as expected. Some appear to make it to adulthood and breed themselves.
---- Worse still, the genetic experiment may have had the opposite effect and made mosquitoes even more resilient. The bugs in the area are now made up of three strains mixed together: the original Brazilian locals, plus strains from Cuba and Mexico – the two strains crossed to make the GM insects. This wider gene pool could make the mozzies more robust as a whole.
The scientists assure the public that the mixed mosquitoes pose no extra health risk, but there is still cause for concern. It’s unclear exactly what effect this will have on disease transmission or other control methods.
“It is the unanticipated outcome that is concerning,” says Powell. “Based largely on laboratory studies, one can predict what the likely outcome of the release of transgenic mosquitoes will be, but genetic studies of the sort we did should be done during and after such releases to determine if something different from the predicted occurred.”
The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Finally, more on the decline and fall of
Europe. Brexit now.
Vandals spray swastika at British World War Two cemetery in the Netherlands
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission says it was "appalled" by the vandalism at the site in Mierlo near Eindhoven.
Saturday
14 September 2019 02:56, UK
Vandals have
sprayed graffiti at a British and Commonwealth World War Two cemetery in the
Netherlands, with a large swastika seen daubed inside a chapel.
Letters have
also been sprayed on headstones in the cemetery in Mierlo near Eindhoven in the
south of the country.
The
Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) said it was "appalled" by
the vandalism that had taken place at the site.
The CWGC
said in a statement: "It is distressing to see the damage on the
headstones themselves, behind every one of those war graves is a human story of
someone who gave their life while in service.
Dutch police have tweeted an appeal urging
anyone who might be able to help identify the vandals to come forward.
The Mierlo War Cemetery is the final resting
place of 664 Commonwealth soldiers and one Dutch soldier from World War Two.
Graffiti has emerged on the site in the lead
up to the 75th anniversary of the allied forces landing in The Netherlands.
More
The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to
be certain, and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner of payment, the
quantity to be paid, ought all to be clear and plain to the contributor, and to
every other person...
Adam Smith, The Wealth Of Nations, 1776.
This weekend’s musical diversion. This weekend, the very underrated Herr J. F.
Fasch of Zerbst, Germany, which, despite Mr. Fash, is almost as unheard of as
Mr. Fasch himself.
Johann Friedrich Fasch - Trumpet Concerto in D-major (Ca.1750)
Johann Friedrich Fasch
“We look to Scotland for
all our ideas of civilisation.”
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished August
DJIA: 26,403
+52 Down. NASDAQ: 7,963 +59 Down. SP500: 2,926 +53 unchanged.
An inconclusive month, but all three shows signs of weakening.
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