Never ending Brexit now October 31, maybe. 13 days away.
Trump’s Nuclear China Tariffs Now In Effect.
The USA v EU trade war starts October 18. Today!!!
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.
Despite a Brexit deal yesterday, which may or may not get
through the UK House of Commons, global markets this morning are more focused
on the dismal GDP figure out of China. And these are the official massaged
figure that no one, least of all in Beijing, believe.
The global economy, thanks largely to all the trade wars,
stands on the edge of entering a new recession. Adding to the gloom, the USA’s
new trade war tariffs on Europe kick in today.
Last Friday it was all about a supposed “trade deal lite
Part One,” between the USA and China, with
some 50 billion of new Chinese purchases of US farm products to come. By this
Friday, that all seems to have been a mirage.
Today we are back to a harsh reality of a slowing China
and EU, a growing manufacturing recession already underway and now seeming to
be widening out into the consumer economy. Add in some sort of financial crisis
underway in the US financial system, requiring the Fed to launch QE4 in all but
name, and on the 32nd anniversary of the great stock market crash of
1987, are our markets poised for a repeat next week?
Below, reasons to sit out this weekend in cash and
precious metals.
Asian markets mixed after
decades-worst GDP growth by China
Asian markets were mixed in early trading Friday, as new
data showed worse-than-expected economic growth in China.
China’s economy expanded at a 6% rate year-over-year,
official data showed, less than the median 6.1% forecast by economists polled
by the Wall Street Journal, and the worst pace of growth since the first
quarter of 1992. It was the second straight month of weaker year-on-year data.
China expects annual GDP growth of 6% to 6.5% this year, down from last year’s
6.6% growth.
Still, investors appeared relieved the numbers weren’t
worse, considering the ongoing tariff war with the U.S. and signs of a global
slowdown.
China's GDP growth grinds to near
30-year low as tariffs hit production
October 18, 2019
/ 3:04 AM
BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s third-quarter
economic growth slowed more than expected and to its weakest pace in almost
three decades as the bruising U.S. trade war hit factory production, boosting
the case for Beijing to roll out fresh support.
Gross domestic product (GDP) rose just 6.0% year-on-year, marking a
further loss of momentum for the economy from the second quarter’s 6.2% growth.
China’s trading partners and investors are closely watching the health
of the world’s second-largest economy as the trade war with the United States
fuels fears about a global recession.
Asian stocks stumbled after the data, reversing gains made on the UK and
European Union striking a long-awaited Brexit deal.
Downbeat Chinese data in recent months has highlighted weaker demand at
home and abroad. Still, most analysts say the scope for aggressive stimulus is
limited in an economy already saddled with piles of debt following previous
easing cycles, which have sent housing prices sharply higher.
Nie Wen, a Shanghai-based economist at Hwabao Trust, pinned the
worse-than-expected GDP growth mainly to weakness in export-related industries,
especially the manufacturing sector.
“Given exports are unlikely to stage a comeback and a possible slowdown
in the property sector, the downward pressure on China’s economy is likely to
continue, with fourth-quarter economic growth expected to slip to 5.9%,” Nie
said.
“Authorities will loosen policies, but in a more restrained way.”
The third-quarter GDP growth was the slowest since the first quarter of
1992, the earliest quarterly data on record, and missed forecasts for 6.1%
growth in a Reuters poll of analysts. It was also at the bottom end of the
government’s full-year target range of 6.0%-6.5%.
In a briefing after the GDP data release, Mao Shengyong, a spokesman for
China’s statistics bureau, announced Beijing’s plans to bring forward some 2020
special local government bond issuance to this year, in a move to spur regional
infrastructure investment.
Even recent signs of breakthrough in the protracted trade war between
Beijing and Washington are unlikely to change the economic outlook any time
soon.
U.S. hardwood industry disintegrates
from trade war with China
Oct. 17, 2019 /
3:00 AM
Oct. 17 (UPI) -- A possible trade deal with China announced last week
might not be broad enough to save U.S. hardwood timber companies from layoffs,
cutbacks and closings, industry sources say.
Chinese tariffs slapped on exports of red oak, walnut and other
hardwoods have cut almost 50 percent of the revenue in the industry since 2017,
according to the American Hardwood Export Council. Lumber companies have
responded by closing sawmills and eliminating shifts.
"When China slapped a 25 percent tariff rate on red oak logs and
lumber, it cratered the price producers can get for red oak. That's a huge
chunk of demand that's disappeared," said Tripp Pryor, the council's
spokesman. "This drop is larger than if all of Europe and all of Southeast
Asia just quit buying U.S. hardwoods overnight."
Tacoma, Wash.-based Northwest Hardwoods will close their Mount Vernon,
Wash., and Maury River, Va., mills in November, laying off 100 employees, the
largest U.S. hardwood supplier said.
The decision was made "as prospects dimmed for a quick resolution
to the U.S. and China trade dispute," the company said in a statement.
The hardwood industry employs about 2 million people in the United
States, according to the Hardwood Federation. Hardwood sawmills usually are
family-owned and situated near timber forests in the Northeast, South and
Pacific Northwest.
Hardwoods exported from the United States include ash, beech, birch,
cherry, hickory, maple, red oak and walnut. Hardwoods are used for flooring,
furniture, cabinets, doors and decorative trim.
Tariffs have been like a "buzz saw" through Appalachian
hardwood businesses and the families that own and operate them, Frank Stewart,
executive director of the West Virginia Forestry Association in an opinion
piece sent to various publications.
"There is no other market to absorb 32,025 shipping containers of
American Red Oak that sold to China in 2017. The tariffs have taken all profits
from U.S. hardwood exports to China," he wrote. "It will drive mills
out of business this year, losing jobs and outlets for landowners to sell their
timber."
Since the United States' trade war with China, the value of exports of
U.S. hardwood lumber dropped by almost 57 percent to $54 million in August 2019
from $124.8 million in August 2017, according to the export council. All lumber
exports to China fell by $615 million compared to the previous year.
Even if the trade dispute is close to resolution, as the White House announced
Friday, the damage already might be done, the council's Pryor said.
Buyers in China are turning to Russian birch and aspen providers, as
well as West African illegal exports of endangered kevazingo wood from Gabon,
which leads to extreme harvesting deforestation, Pryor said.
"Once [buyers] have those sources of hardwoods, they will be
awfully hard to get back," he said. The U.S. hardwood industry buys timber
from private landowners and practices "sustainable forestry" Pryor
said.
In 2018, after soybeans, hardwood lumber was the largest export product
to China by value.
But when the U.S. Department of Agriculture passed an emergency $1.6
billion trade aid package, hardwood producers had to share a meager $5 million
with producers of softwoods and plywood.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government cut its 2020 growth forecast as
Europe’s biggest economy expects the pinch from waning global demand, Brexit
and lingering trade disputes to carry over into next year.
Gross domestic product will expand by 1% next year, compared with an
earlier expectation of a 1.5% increase, the Economy Ministry said Thursday in a
statement. While the outlook is an improvement from this year’s 0.5% projection
-- which the government kept steady -- the pace is a notable slowdown from
previous years.
The outlook may currently be dampened, but there’s no
threat of an economic crisis,” Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said in Berlin.
“Economic stimulus packages, in the traditional sense of triggering a flash in
the pan, are not the right instruments” to spur further growth, he added,
ticking off a list of efforts already underway by the government.
German
Malaise
Economic growth will probably be the weakest in six
years in 2019
Source: Federal Statistical Office, German Economy Ministry
Germany’s critical manufacturing sector has been
hard hit as trade disputes knock demand for exports, and the prolonged slowdown
is softening political resistance toward abandoning the country’s rigid
balanced-budget policy. The domestic economy remains resilient, however, and
there may be signs that the negative developments affecting international trade
may soon bottom out, the government said.
Finally, yet another US indicator
signals recession ahead.
Opinion: This little-known recession indicator is
now sending investors and consumers a warning
By Mark HulbertPublished: Oct 17, 2019 9:33 a.m. ET
One leading indicator of a coming U.S. economic recession
isn’t well-known — but it should be. Its record over the last four decades
suggests we pay attention to it.
But James Stack, editor of the InvesTech Research
newsletter, says that there are times when the two measures diverge and that
these divergences are significant.
Like now.
----What significance does all this have for the economy’s
prospects? Stack believes that wide divergences are typical of what happens
prior to a recession, and his belief has support from the historical data —, as
you can see from the accompanying chart, which plots a composite indicator
calculated by subtracting the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index from
the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment reading.
Notice that this composite indicator typically reaches a low prior to
recessions, and that it currently is lower than at any other time since 1979
(which is when the Conference Board began updating its index on a monthly
basis).
To be sure, with just five recessions since 1979, there are too few data
points to support a statistically robust conclusion. But, as Stack puts it, the
current record low reading of the composite indicator definitely has he and his
analysts “scratching our analytical heads.” He adds that the reading “carries a
pre-recession warning risk.”
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.
Crooks
and Scoundrels Corner.
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
Today, that Brexit exit deal, if it can get past
the UK’s dysfunctional House of Commons.What an idiotic idea it was back in 2010 to go for fixed term
Parliaments under a Parliamentary system. A wounded minority government can’t
govern nor call an election to replace itself. Another giant mistake of Prime
Minister Dodgy Dave Cameron, the Justin Trudeau of GB, but without all the jovial
dressing up charm.
Johnson agrees Brexit deal, but
must now win over parliament
October 17, 2019 /
9:59 AM
BRUSSELS
(Reuters) - European Union leaders unanimously backed a new Brexit deal with
Britain on Thursday, leaving Prime Minister Boris Johnson facing a battle to
secure the UK parliament’s backing for the agreement if he is to take Britain
out of Europe on Oct. 31.
Speaking after the EU’s 27 other leaders had endorsed the deal without
Johnson in the room, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker declared
himself pleased that an agreement had been reached but unhappy to see Britain
go.
“All in all, I am happy, relieved that we reached a deal,” he said. “But
I am sad because Brexit is happening.”
Those sentiments were echoed by the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel
Barnier, and by Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, who has been a
vocal opponent of Brexit.
“On a more personal note, what I feel today is sadness,” Tusk told
reporters. “Because in my heart, I will always be a remainer. And I hope that
if our British friends decide to return one day, our door will always be open.”
British and EU negotiators reached the agreement after successive days of
late-night talks and nearly three years of heated discussions that have
strained EU-UK ties at a time the bloc is facing a wave of euroscepticism,
struggling to restart economic growth and take a stand against resurgent global
powers China and Russia.
Johnson said he was confident that parliament, which will sit for an
extraordinary session on Saturday to vote on the Brexit agreement, would
approve the deal.
----But the arithmetic in the vote is not simple.
The Northern Irish party that Johnson needs to help ratify any
agreement, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), has refused to support it,
saying it is not in Northern Ireland’s interests.
The head of the main opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, said he was
“unhappy” with the agreement and would vote against it. Labour has said it
wants any deal to be subject to a public vote, but as yet has not indicated
whether it will back any move for a second referendum on Saturday.
Johnson does not have a majority in the 650-seat parliament, and in
practice needs at least 318 votes to get a deal ratified. The DUP have 10
votes. Parliament defeated a previous deal struck by Johnson’s predecessor,
Theresa May, three times.
Deutsche Bank estimated there was a 55% chance parliament would reject
Johnson’s deal, and other analysts thought similar.
Brexit deal 'constructive' for UK
credit rating if passed: S&P Global
October 17, 2019
/ 1:18 PM
LONDON (Reuters) - A new Brexit deal will be “constructive” for
Britain’s downgrade-threatened credit rating if it gets the backing of the UK’s
parliament, S&P Global said on Thursday.
Britain clinched a last-minute Brexit deal with the European Union in
Brussels on Thursday, but still faces a challenge in getting it approved by
parliament before a planned October 31 Brexit deadline.
“This is constructive news, also for the rating,” one of S&P’s top
European sovereign analysts, Frank Gill, told Reuters.
On whether it would stabilize the UK’s AA rating’s ‘negative’ outlook if
approved, he added: “Ultimately it is going to come down to how the economy
performs.”
“Even with a deal you still have enormous questions about, for example,
UK financial services firms’ access to the (EU) single market.”
The new Brexit pact reached between the European Union and Britain on
Thursday will struggle to get through the U.K. Parliament. And for Boris
Johnson, the U.K. prime minister, that might not be a terrible outcome.
Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, which is part of Johnson’s
ruling coalition, has said they won’t back the latest deal. The Labour Party
also is opposed. On Johnson’s right, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has urged
the U.K. Parliament to reject the new tentative deal reached between the
British government and the European Union.
Johnson will need 320 votes in the U.K. Parliament for the Brexit deal
to be approved.
Even if all Conservative Party MPs back the deal, Johnson will need
help. “Johnson’s math has him needing 61 votes from a possible 85 and that will
be a tall task as he is still seeing resistance from Northern Ireland’s DUP,
the party that holds what many consider 10 critical votes,” said Edward Moya,
senior market analyst at OANDA, a foreign currency trading platform.
Kallum Pickering, senior economist at Berenberg, said even winning over
MPs Johnson kicked out of the party as well as Labour and independent MPs who
previously voted for Theresa May’s deal, Johnson will still be short by 6
votes.
Constantine Fraser, political analyst at TS Lombard, points out that
Johnson will now have this deal rather than a hard Brexit to run on if the U.K.
were to hold a general election.
“The main takeaway is that the Conservative party is now committed to
this deal, not no-deal, and will campaign for a majority for it if the coming
general election takes place before the U.K. has left the E.U.,” Fraser said.
Sky News reported that Johnson has told European Union leaders he will
not ask for an extension of the planned Oct. 31 exit date if Parliament doesn’t
approve the deal. That’s despite Parliament passing a law saying he would have
to do so in that situation
It is the highest impertinence and
presumption… in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of
private people, and to restrain their expense... They are themselves always,
and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them
look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people
with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their
subjects never will.
Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations, 1776.
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?
Alignment of single-wall carbon
nanotubes along common axis
Date:
October 16, 2019
Source:
University of Wyoming
Summary:
The researchers used machine-vision automation and parallelization to
simultaneously produce globally aligned, single-wall carbon nanotubes using
pressure-driven filtration.
A University of Wyoming researcher and his team have shown, for the
first time, the ability to globally align single-wall carbon nanotubes along a
common axis. This discovery can be valuable in many areas of technology, such
as electronics, optics, composite materials, nanotechnology and other
applications of materials science.
"Unlike previous efforts to align nanotubes using nanotube solution
filtration, we created an automated system that could create multiple aligned
films at one time," says William Rice, an assistant professor in UW's
Department of Physics and Astronomy. "Automating the filtration system
also had the effect that we could precisely control the filtration flow rate,
which produced higher alignment."
Rice was corresponding author of a paper, titled "Global Alignment
of Solution-Based, Single-Wall Carbon Nanotube Films via Machine-Vision
Controlled Filtration," which was published Oct. 9 in the print version of
Nano Letters, an international journal that reports on fundamental and
applied research in all branches of nanoscience and nanotechnology. An online
version of the paper appeared last month.
Joshua Walker, a third-year physics Ph.D. student from Cheyenne, was the
paper's lead author. Valerie Kuehl, a third-year Ph.D. chemistry student from
Beulah, Colo., was a contributing author of the paper.
----"Aligned carbon nanotubes have the potential to act as
excellent optical polarizers, which are important for optically determining
strain in materials. For example, if you look at your windshield with polarized
glasses, you can see areas of different strain in the glass," Rice says.
"Recent work by other groups also suggests that aligned nanotubes can be
used as transistors, polarized light emitters and directional heat sinks. The
hope is that a new generation of all-carbon electronics can be ushered in with
the use of carbon nanotubes, graphene and vacancies in diamonds."
----Additionally, Rice says his research team
flattened the meniscus of the nanotube solution in the glass funnel using a
treatment process called silanization. This prevented the nanotubes from
becoming scrambled by an uneven solution front as the nanotubes were filtered.
These two advances produce nanotube films that exhibit excellent alignment
across the entire structure, which was measured using a variety of polarized
optical techniques.
"Carbon nanotubes are significant material system because of their
impressive physical properties, such as extremely high thermal conductivity; a
Young's modulus much greater than steel; current-carrying capacity a thousand
times that of copper; and excellent light-matter coupling," he says.
A Young's modulus is ratio of the stress (force per unit area) to the
strain (percentage change in the physical dimensions) in a material, Rice says.
Plastics, rubber and wood have low Young's moduli, while steel, diamond and
nanotubes have high Young's moduli.
Another weekend,
and interesting one ahead for UK parliamentarians. If they vote down the EU’s
last chance Brexit deal, will they set off a rout in global stocks? With GB’s
new politicised Supreme Court now willing to interfere in politics, hopefully “Brenda
and the Supremes” have left time open next week for more of the never-ending melodrama,
Brexit. Have a great weekend everyone.
After a foreshock
between 19:00 and 20:00 local time, the main earthquake struck in the evening
at around 22:00, and numerous aftershocks followed through that night.[3]
Basel experienced a second, very violent shock in the middle of the night. The
town within the ramparts was destroyed by a fire when torches and candles
falling to the floor set the wooden houses ablaze. The number of deaths within
the town of Basel alone is estimated at 300. All major churches and castles
within a 30 km (19 mi) radius of Basel were destroyed.
Following the markets on both sides of the Atlantic since 1968. A dinosaur, who evolved with the financial system as it was perverted from capitalism to banksterism after the great Nixonian error of abandoning the dollar's link to gold instead of simply revaluing gold. Our money is too important to be left to probity challenged central banksters and crooked politicians.
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