Baltic Dry Index. 1351 +67 Brent
Crude 63.69 Spot Gold 1456
Never ending Brexit now January 31, or maybe sooner.
Trump’s Nuclear China Tariffs Now in effect.
The USA v EU trade war started October 18. Now in effect.
Although a "bubble" in home
prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely, there do appear to be,
at a minimum, signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to
have risen to unsustainable levels.
Alan Greenspan, 9th June 2005.
Christmas has come early for our complacent, global stock
market bubbles, and we haven’t even reached Thanksgiving Day in America yet.
Bubble on like there’s no tomorrow.
This old dinosaur market
follower thinks that he’s seen the likes of this before. Commodities in the mid
to late 70s.
Kuwait’s Souk
Al-Manakh stock market of the early 80s that led to the 1982 Kuwait stock
market crash.
The 1985 – 1987 stock
mania bubble, that burst spectacularly on October 19, 1987.
The Nasdaq, “stock
market for the next 100 years,” dot-con technology bubble of 1994 to 2000, that blew up
in March 2000.
And of course, the
infamous Greenspan stock and real estate bubbles of 2002 -2008 that ended with
the Great Recesssion that started in the collapse of Lehman Brothers 15, September
2008.
Couldn’t happen again,
could it? Well not according to “Sunny
Jay Powell.”
Below, bubble on.
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth
Galbraith
Asian markets mixed on new optimism for U.S.-China trade deal
By Associated
Press and Marketwatch
Published: Nov 25,
2019 11:56 p.m. ET
Asian shares were mixed after an upbeat start Tuesday on
optimism over U.S.-China trade talks, prompted by Beijing’s new guidelines for
the protection of patents and copyrights.Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 NIK, +0.42% advanced 0.6% in morning trading. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 XJO, +0.83% gained 0.7%. South Korea’s Kospi 180721, +0.55% added 0.4%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng HSI, -0.13% retreated slightly and the Shanghai Composite SHCOMP, +0.02% was about flat.
----Gains on Wall Street were led by technology companies after China’s announcement of new, stronger guidelines for protecting patents, copyrights and other intellectual property. Piracy is a sore point in U.S.-China trade tensions. Markets saw China’s latest move as an encouraging sign for negotiations on the first phase of a deal to end a punishing tariff war between the two biggest economies.
“There is renewed hope on some progress of U.S.-China trade talk after China’s state-backed news media Global Times said that both sides are ‘very close’ to phase one deal,” said Zhu Huani, at Mizuho Bank in Singapore.
An announcement by China’s Commerce Ministry early Tuesday that top trade negotiators from both sides spoke by phone and agreed to continue talks did not seem to spur significant gains. That might be because the vaguely worded notice did not mention specifics or indicated how much progress has been made.
The S&P 500 SPX, +0.75% rose 23.35 points, or 0.8%, to 3,133.64. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.68% climbed 190.85, or 0.7%, to 28,066.47, and the Nasdaq COMP, +1.32% umped 112.60, or 1.3%, to 8,632.49. All three indexes set records.
More
Fed’s Powell upbeat on economy, says low inflation allows for low rates
Published: Nov 25,
2019 11:45 p.m. ET
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Monday sketched an optimistic
view of the economy but signaled that continued low inflation means higher
interest rates won’t likely be necessary anytime soon.
Powell said that even with unemployment near a 50-year low of 3.6%,
there’s still “plenty of room” for wages to rise and for more Americans to join
the workforce. He noted that annual inflation remains below the Fed’s 2% target
level.
The Fed chairman made his remarks in a speech to the Greater Providence
(Rhode Island) Chamber of Commerce.
The central bank has cut its benchmark short-term rate three times this
year to a range of just 1.5% to 1.75%. Powell signaled last month that the Fed
will now likely remain on hold unless the economy noticeably worsens.
Powell said the three rate cuts have helped spur more home purchases,
which have contributed to the economy’s ongoing expansion, now in its 11th
year, the longest on record.
That long-running growth is benefiting many less-advantaged workers who
had mostly seen meager hiring and wage gains in the first half of the recovery,
Powell said. Continuing to spread such opportunities is a key reason to sustain
growth, he added.
More
Opinion: Investors, watch out: Optimism over U.S.-China trade deal could easily turn into pessimism
By Nigam
Arora
Published: Nov 25,
2019 4:43 p.m. ET
There are two pieces of news on the U.S.-China trade deal
for investors to know today. First, China is promising more protection for intellectual property. Second, despite contradictory media reports about a trade deal, there is some credibility to Gao Lingyun, an expert who is apparently close to the trade talks, saying that the “two sides have reached a broad consensus” for the first part of an agreement.
Wall Street is optimistic. Stocks are up — at a new record, in fact. How should investors think about these positive reports on trade? Let’s explore the issue with the help of two charts.
Please click here for an annotated chart of S&P 500 ETF SPY, +0.78%.
Please click here for an annotated chart of Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF DIA, +0.70%.
For the sake of transparency, both were previously published and no changes have been made.
Note the following:
• For a longer-term perspective, the first chart is a monthly chart.
• For a shorter-term perspective, the second chart is a weekly chart.
• The monthly chart shows that the stock market is extended way above the trend line. This is a negative.
• The monthly chart shows relative strength index (RSI) divergence. In plain English, this means that as the stock market has made new highs, RSI is significantly below the prior high. This is a negative.
• The weekly chart shows that there is a good setup for the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.68% to reach the first target of 30,000 points.
• The (RSI) on the weekly chart shows that the market is overbought but there is room to run. Often this means a very short-term pullback and then a higher high.
China summons U.S. ambassador in protest over Hong Kong rights bill
November 26,
2019 / 12:46 AM
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China’s foreign
ministry summoned U.S. Ambassador Terry Branstad on Monday to protest against
the passing in the U.S. Congress of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy
Act, saying it amounted to interference in an internal Chinese matter.
The ministry said in a notice posted on its website Vice Foreign
Minister Zheng Zeguang pressed the United States “to correct its errors and
stop meddling in Hong Kong affairs and interfering in China’s internal
matters”.
Anti-government demonstrators have protested in the streets of Hong Kong
for six months amid increasing violence and fears that China will ratchet up
its response to stop the civil disobedience.
The protesters are angry at what they see as Chinese meddling in the
freedoms promised to Hong Kong when Britain handed it back to China in 1997.
The U.S. House of Representatives sent two Hong Kong-related bills to
the White House on Wednesday after voting almost unanimously in favour of them.
The Senate had unanimously passed the day before.
U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sign the bills into law,
despite delicate trade talks with Beijing.
Zheng said the passage of the Human Rights and Democracy Act was a form
of encouragement of the violence and constituted a serious violation of
international law and basic norms of international relations.
“China expresses its strong resentment and resolute opposition,” he was
quoted as saying.
---- A U.S. State Department spokeswoman said earlier Hong Kong’s autonomy, its adherence to the rule of law and its commitment to protecting civil liberties were “key to preserving its special status under U.S. law”.
“As the United States Government has said repeatedly, the Chinese
Communist Party must honour its promises to the Hong Kong people, who only want
the freedoms and liberties that they have been promised in the Sino-British
Joint Declaration, a U.N.-filed treaty,” the spokeswoman said.
The Joint Declaration is the 1984 agreement of the terms under which
Britain would return Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997, and included the
promise of a “high degree of autonomy” for Hong Kong for 50 years from that
date.
In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative
tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results
far much less.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner.
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
Today, metal bashing for a living, USA style. Or maybe that should be Italy
style?
GM goes to war against FCA
November 25, 2019 12:00 AM
DETROIT — When Sergio Marchionne and UAW President Dennis Williams
opened contract talks in 2015 with a bear hug instead of a handshake, assembly
workers recoiled at the idea that their union and employer were getting too
cozy.
The truth was more sinister, General Motors now claims.
Marchionne, stymied by GM's refusal to entertain his merger proposal,
had been bribing Williams and other UAW officials for years, GM says in a
stunning federal lawsuit filed last week. The suit contends that the Fiat
Chrysler Automobiles CEO was "using the UAW as the hammer" to make GM
reconsider.
Hours after the hug, GM says, Williams and some of his underlings —
including the union's chief FCA negotiator, later sentenced to prison after
admitting to taking FCA's bribes — celebrated at Detroit's London Chop House
with an $8,000 meal on FCA's dime.
FCA vehemently denied GM's allegations, accusing its domestic rival of
trying to thwart this year's UAW negotiations and undermine its planned merger
with PSA Group of France.
The suit, arguing that FCA corrupted the bargaining process over the
course of a decade to put GM at a labor-cost disadvantage while suppressing
wages for thousands of its hourly workers, seeks potentially billions of
dollars in damages. FCA went from having the highest labor costs of the Detroit
3 in 2006 to the lowest in 2015 by paying union officials to give it better
deals, GM says.
Suing FCA and three of its former executives wasn't "a decision
that we made lightly," GM CEO Mary Barra said at an investor conference
last week. But without a "level playing field," she said, "we
had to take action."
Marchionne, who died in 2018, "was a central figure in the conspiracy,"
said GM's general counsel, Craig Glidden. The three executives GM is suing —
Alphons Iacobelli, Jerome Durden and Michael Brown — have pleaded guilty in a
federal corruption probe. GM specifically excluded the UAW as a defendant,
though six former union officials also have pleaded guilty, with former Vice
President Joe Ashton expected to do so next week.
---- FCA funneled "millions of dollars" to certain UAW leaders, starting in July 2009, GM says in its lawsuit. The payments were designed to give FCA an unfair advantage in bargaining, it says, citing Iacobelli's admission of that, and "GM did not and could not have reasonably discovered this information earlier despite due diligence."
Marchionne had long sought a merger partner. After GM rejected his
overtures, FCA conspired with the UAW to weaken GM to make the merger
proposition more appealing, GM alleges. GM says Marchionne called it Operation
Cylinder, which is presumably a reference to the circular towers that house the
company's headquarters in downtown Detroit.
Marchionne and General Holiefield, the UAW vice president who negotiated
the union's contract with FCA in 2011, were close friends, documented by a
photo of a lively embrace between the two in 2009. Secretly, GM says,
Marchionne treated Holiefield to lavish dinners, paid for his 2012 wedding in
Venice, Italy, and got the couple's mortgage paid. Holiefield, who died in
2015, used his personal charity to conceal many of the bribes, the lawsuit
says. His wife, Monica Morgan, pleaded guilty to taking bribes through her
photography business and was sentenced last year to 18 months in prison.
More
“It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity. If there must be madness something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."
John Kenneth Galbraith. The Great Crash: 1929.
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?
Kick-starting Moore's Law? New 'synthetic' method for making microchips could help
Breakthrough method for processing nanomaterials heralds advances in quantum computing, nanotechnology
Date:
November 18, 2019
Source:
Johns Hopkins University
Summary:
Researchers have developed a new method for producing atomically-thin
semiconducting crystals that could one day enable more powerful and compact
electronic devices.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a new method for
producing atomically-thin semiconducting crystals that could one day enable
more powerful and compact electronic devices.
By using specially-treated silicon surfaces to tailor the crystals' size
and shape, the researchers have found a potentially faster and less expensive
way to produce next-generation semiconductor crystals for microchips. The
crystalline materials produced this way could in turn enable new scientific
discoveries and accelerate technological developments in quantum computing,
consumer electronics, and higher efficiency solar cells and batteries.
The findings are described in a paper published today in Nature
Nanotechnology.
"Having a method to sculpt crystals at the nanoscale precisely,
quickly, and without the need for traditional top-down processes, presents
major advantages for widespread utilization of nanomaterials in technology
applications," said Thomas J. Kempa, a chemistry professor at Johns
Hopkins University who directed the research.
Kempa's team first doused silicon substrates -- the supports used widely
in industrial settings to process semiconductors into devices -- with phosphine
gas. When crystals were coaxed to grow on the phosphine-treated silicon
supports, the authors discovered that they grew into structures that were far
smaller and of higher quality than crystals prepared through traditional means.
The researchers discovered that the reaction of phosphine with the
silicon support caused the formation of a new "designer surface."
This surface spurred the crystals to grow as horizontal "ribbons" as
opposed to the planar and triangularly-shaped sheets that are typically
produced. Moreover, the uniform complexion and clean-edged structure of these
ribbons rivaled the quality of nanocrystals prepared through industry-standard
patterning and etching processes, which are often laborious, lengthy, and
expensive, Kempa said.
----Materials processing limitations are one reason why Moore's Law has been slowing in recent years. The rule, posed in 1965 by IBM co-founder Gordon E. Moore, states that the number of transistors, and their performance, in a dense integrated circuit will double approximately every two years. Packing so many micron-sized transistors into microchips, or integrated circuits, is the reason that consumer electronics have gotten steadily smaller, faster, and smarter over the past few decades.
However, the semiconductor industry is now struggling to maintain that
pace.
----"We are contributing a fundamental advance in rational control of the shape and dimension of nanoscale materials," Kempa said.
This method can "sculpt nanoscale crystals in ways that were not
readily possible before," he added. "Such precise synthetic control
of crystal size at these length scales is unprecedented."
"Our method could save substantial processing time and money,"
he said. "Our ability to control these crystals at will could be enabling
of applications in energy storage, quantum computing and quantum
cryptography."
More
Note: Gordon E. Moore co-founded
Intel Corporation, not IBM as stated in the article. IBM was founded by Charles
Ranlett Flint who was the founder of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company
which later became IBM. For his financial dealings he earned the moniker
"Father of Trusts."
"In
economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension."
John Kenneth
Galbraith.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished October
DJIA: 27,046 +59 Up. NASDAQ: 8,292 +67 Up. SP500: 3,038 +67 Up.
Another inconclusive month,
but all three continued to move up weakly. A buy signal. But, like the Fed, I
would await more data.
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