Baltic Dry Index. 1558 -17 Brent
Crude 64.18 Spot Gold 1460
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.
“The
world is a place that’s gone from being flat to round to crooked.”
Mad
Magazine.
This week it’s all about China. Well, in GB its also
about Thursday’s general election, but outside of Europe, the election is
largely a side event.
Will President Trump go ahead with new tariffs on China’s
exports to the USA next Sunday? With the unpredictable president Trump its hard
to say. One day he’s talking up a storm for a new early trade deal lite, part
one, with China, the next talking about no trade deal at all until after next
November’s presidential US election.
Both sides trade-talk teams blow hot and cold over the
prospects for a trade deal, but realistically it’s hard to see a meaningful
trade deal coming in the current political climate.
China says no trade deal without a tariff rollback.
President Trump is talking about new tariffs starting on Sunday.
China accuses the USA of meddling in China over Hong Kong,
and threatens unspecified actions if President Trump signs into law the US Congress’s
latest Bill punishing China for human rights abuses.
The markets are still expecting a white rabbit to be
pulled out of a top hat this week. I think it’s far safer not to be gambling on
a 50:50 political event.
Below, hopium still rules for now. Dare President Trump not
give in on a trade deal and crash any Santa Claus rally?
Asian shares buoyed by Wall St rally, but China worry caps gains
December 9, 2019
/ 1:50 AM
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Asian stocks edged up on Monday, catching some of
Wall Street’s momentum after surprisingly strong U.S. jobs data although
regional gains were capped by concerns about China’s economic slowdown due to
the prolonged Sino-U.S. trade war.
Japan's benchmark Nikkei .N225 added 0.4% while MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS gained 0.3%, with Australian stocks and South Korea's KOSPI .KS11 up 0.4% and 0.3%, respectively.
China's Shanghai Composite .SSEC stood flat and Hong Kong's Hang Seng .HSI rose 0.2%.
Wall Street rose to near record highs on Friday on the strong jobs data and some signs of optimism about the U.S.-China trade talks, with the benchmark S&P 500 .SPX closing within 0.2% of its peak set in late November.
U.S. job growth increased by the most in 10 months in November as the healthcare industry boosted hiring and production workers at General Motors returned to work after a strike, in the strongest sign that the world’s largest economy is in no danger of stalling.
“This economy is still climbing and shattering the records for longevity,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank. “Right now, the clouds of recession still remain well offshore despite troubled economies elsewhere in the world and a trade war.”
Top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Friday that a Dec. 15 deadline is still in place to impose a new round of U.S. tariffs on Chinese consumer goods, but President Donald Trump likes where trade talks with China are going.
Still, investors think things could change if trade tensions escalate further, especially if Trump goes ahead with the planned tariffs on some $156 billion worth of products from China in mid-December.
More
China's potential growth below 6% over next five years - central bank adviser
December 8, 2019
/ 11:24 AM
BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s potential economic growth will be below 6%
over the next five years, an adviser to China’s central bank said on Saturday.
The economy could grow between 5% and 6% from 2020 to 2025, Liu Shijin,
a policy adviser to the People’s Bank of China, said at a conference in
Beijing, according to an article he posted on social media.
China’s monetary policy is already quite loose, and attempting to
stimulate the economy to grow faster than its potential could cause it to fall
off a cliff, said Liu.
China’s third-quarter economic growth slowed more than expected to 6%
year-on-year, marking its weakest pace in almost three decades, and at the
bottom end of the government’s full-year target range of 6.0%-6.5%.
Despite the growing strains on the economy caused by slowing domestic
demand and a trade war with the United States, Beijing remains reluctant to
implement major stimulus for fear of heightening financial risks given already
high levels of debt.
China central bank governor Yi Gang reiterated in an article published
last week that China will not resort to quantitative easing and is committed to
maintaining a prudent monetary policy.
China November exports fall, but import growth hints of recovering demand
December 8, 2019 /
3:43 AM
BEIJING (Reuters)
- China’s exports in November shrank for the fourth consecutive month,
underscoring persistent pressures on manufacturers from the Sino-U.S. war but
growth in imports may be a sign that Beijing’s stimulus steps are helping to
stoke demand.
The 17-month long trade dispute has heightened the risks of a global
recession and fueled speculation that China’s policymakers could unleash more
stimulus as growth in the world’s second-largest economy cooled to nearly
30-year lows.
Overseas shipments fell 1.1% from a year earlier last month, customs
data showed on Sunday, compared with a 1.0% expansion tipped by a Reuters poll
of analysts and a 0.9% drop in October.
Imports unexpectedly rose 0.3% from a year earlier, marking the first
year-on-year growth since April and compared with a 1.8% decline forecast by
economists.
The better-than-expected import data may point to firming domestic
demand after factory activity showed surprising signs of improvement recently,
although analysts have noted the recovery could be difficult to sustain amid
trade risks.
China’s trade
surplus for November stood at $38.73 billion, compared with an expected $46.30
billion surplus in the poll and a $42.81 billion surplus recorded in October.
More
China November iron ore imports down for second month as top miners ship less
December 8, 2019 /
6:04 AM
BEIJING (Reuters)
- China’s iron ore imports fell for a second straight month in November,
customs data showed on Sunday, as lower shipments from top miners in Australia
and Brazil overshadowed firm demand for the steelmaking ingredient at mills.
The world’s top steel producer brought in 90.65 million tonnes of iron ore last month, down 2.4% from 92.86 million tonnes in October and compared with 86.25 million tonnes a year earlier, data from the General Administration of Customs showed.
For the first 11 months of 2019, iron ore arrivals reached 970.69 million tonnes, down 0.7% on an annual basis.
Data from Australia’s Port Hedland showed it shipped less iron ore to China in October, down 0.7% from a month earlier.
Brazilian miner Vale (VALE3.SA), meanwhile, has halted production at various mines after a deadly dam collapse in early January and has forecast a near 15% sales drop in 2019.
“Miners (in Australia) are undergoing maintenance after a strong
financial year,” Darren Toh, an analyst with Tivlon Technologies, said before
the data was released.
The softening of Australian shipments coincided with wet weather
conditions kicking in in Brazil, he added.
Inventories of imported iron ore at Chinese ports fell to 129.4 million
tonnes by the end of November, logging the first monthly drop in five.
Despite seasonal factors, analysts remained optimistic about iron ore
demand in coming months as profits recovered at Chinese mills after a pick up
in construction in November.
More
China's November soybean imports surge as U.S. cargoes booked during truce arrive
December 8, 2019 /
5:45 AM
BEIJING (Reuters)
- China’s November soybean imports jumped from a year ago as shipments from the
United States booked during a truce in the Sino-U.S. trade war cleared customs,
customs data showed.
China imported 8.28 million tonnes of soybeans in November, up 54% from
5.38 million tonnes a year ago, as U.S. soybean cargoes arrived, data from the
General Administration of Customs showed on Sunday.
The November figure was also up about 34% from October’s 6.18 million
tonnes, according to the data.
The world’s top soybean buyer usually gets most of its oilseed imports
from the United States in the final months of the year when the U.S. harvest
dominates the market. American cargoes, however, plunged after Beijing slapped
a 25% tariff on a list of U.S. products including soybeans in July last year.
Chinese buyers had steered clear of U.S. produce amid the trade war but
have been buying more U.S. beans in recent months after the government offered
some of them waivers to buy American cargoes exempt from extra tariffs, in a
goodwill gesture to Washington.
China said on Friday it will offer more waivers on some soybeans
shipments as the two sides try to thrash out an agreement to defuse their
protracted trade war.
Still, China’s demand for soybeans, crushed to produce soymeal for
animal feed, has been curbed by a devastating outbreak of African swine fever
that has slashed its pig herd by 41%, official data shows.
For the first 11 months of the year, China bought in 78.97 million
tonnes of soybeans, down 4% from the same period last year, customs data
showed. CNC-SOY-IMP
More
In other news, the Swiss based BIS thinks it knows why the Fed is busy
monetising like a drunken sailor. The big four US banks stopped lending to each
other.
Well yes, but why? What drama do
they all see directly ahead, and why should the rest of the world carry on
trading in a fiat currency that now embarking on Latin America style
monetisation?
Big U.S. banks' reluctance to lend may have caused repo-market shock: BIS
Published: Dec 8, 2019 8:42 p.m. ET
An
unwillingness among the four leading U.S. banks to lend cash, combined with a
surge in demand from hedge funds for secured funding, could explain the spike
in U.S. money market rates and the sudden stress in the repo market beginning
in September, the Bank for International Settlements said in a report dated
Monday. Cash available to banks for short-term needs, also known as the
repo market, all but disappeared in September, and some rates shot as high as
10% on certain overnight loans, which forced the Federal Reserve to make an
emergency injection of billions of dollars for the first time since the global
financial crisis roughly a decade ago. The major banks were not named in the
report.
The
researchers conceded that the exact cause of the sudden stress is unknown but
they reasoned that the factors could have ranged from large withdrawals for
quarterly tax payments to the knock-on effects of sizeable trades in U.S.
Treasuries. The BIS analysts emphasized that a growing over-reliance on the
biggest U.S. banks to keep the repo market functioning may have been the
leading factor. The Fed's ongoing efforts to shore up the short-term repo
lending markets have
begun to rattle some market experts, as interventions have stretched to a
third month.
"From a strictly economic point of view, buying gold in a major inflation and holding it probably presents the least risk of capital loss of any investment or speculation."
Henry Hazlitt
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner.
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
Not your usual crooks today. Today, the crooks and gangsters, that
anti-Trump Rolling Stone said knew President Trump and Senator, later Vice
President Biden. Interesting reading, to say the least. Come back Diogenes, that
ancient Greek man and his lamp. Washington needs you ASAP.
Cary Grant. To Catch A Thief.
The Real-Life Mob Families of ‘The Irishman’? Donald Trump Knew Them
The president and his associates have long histories with the Mafia figures who populate Scorsese’s film
December 6, 2019 12:25PM ET
Martin
Scorsese’s new film, The Irishman, conjures up a lost world. It
depicts an era when the Mafia
was so powerful that it set off alarms in the Kennedy White House, and Scorsese
even hints that organized crime was behind JFK’s assassination.But by the end of the three-hour-plus movie, the nostalgia fades and so does the pinkie-ring finery. Every made man Scorsese introduces to the viewer is snuffed out until all that’s left is Frank Sheeran (played by Robert DeNiro), a disheveled, wheelchair-bound ex-hit man who’s haunted by his memories. At the film’s end, a pair of FBI agents plead with Sheeran to talk about his victims, telling him there’s no reason to keep silent anymore because there’s no one left to protect. “Everybody’s dead, Mr. Sheeran,” one agent says. “They’re all gone.”
Well, many still remember. One person who knew the real-life mob families that show up in The Irishman is President Donald Trump.
Back
in the 1980s and 1990s, Trump’s buildings and his casinos attracted underworld
figures like “Fat Tony” Salerno, the Fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping boss of the
Genovese crime family. Salerno, who’s portrayed in the film by Domenick
Lombardozzi, supplied the fast-drying concrete that built Trump Tower and other
Trump properties. Salerno also controlled the local concrete workers union, and
when a strike shut down construction in Manhattan in 1982, the one of the few
buildings that wasn’t affected was Trump Tower.
----Trump wasn’t the only one who knew the people in the world of The Irishman. In addition to being a hit man, Sheeran was president of a local Teamsters union in Delaware. In 1972, shortly before Election Day, a prominent lawyer who was very big in the Democratic Party came to see him. There were some political ads that would run in the local newspaper every day in the last week before election, and the lawyer didn’t want them to run. So Sheeran set up a picket line outside the newspaper, and he knew the Teamsters union drivers who delivered the paper wouldn’t cross it. So the ads were never delivered, and on Election Day, Delaware had a new senator: a young man named Joe Biden. After that, Sheeran said Biden’s door was always open. “You could reach out for him, and he would listen,” he wrote.
The Biden story isn’t in the movie. There wasn’t room enough for
everyone to make it into Scorsese’s epic Mafia biopic, but Salerno does — and
with good reason. Salerno ran the most powerful of New York’s five Mafia
families. “I’m the fucking boss, that’s who I am,” Salerno once boasted in a
secretly recorded conversation. “Connecticut is mine; New Jersey is mine.”
Nothing got built in New York without Salerno dipping his meaty hand into the
till
More
"It's strange that men should take up crime when there are
so many legal ways to be dishonest. “
Al
Capone
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?
Gamma-ray laser moves a step closer to reality
Calculations by UC Riverside's Allen Mills predict metastable positronium bubbles in liquid helium
Date:
December 6, 2019
Source:
University of California - Riverside
Summary:
A physicist has performed calculations showing hollow spherical bubbles filled
with a gas of positronium atoms are stable in liquid helium. The calculations
take scientists a step closer to realizing a gamma-ray laser.
The calculations take scientists a step closer to realizing a gamma-ray
laser, which may have applications in medical imaging, spacecraft propulsion,
and cancer treatment.
Extremely short-lived and only briefly stable, positronium is a
hydrogen-like atom and a mixture of matter and antimatter -- specifically,
bound states of electrons and their antiparticles called positrons.
To create a
gamma-ray laser beam, positronium needs to be in a state called a Bose-Einstein
condensate -- a collection of positronium atoms in the same quantum state, allowing
for more interactions and gamma radiation. Such a condensate is the key
ingredient of a gamma-ray laser.
"My calculations show that a bubble in liquid helium containing a
million atoms of positronium would have a number density six times that of
ordinary air and would exist as a matter-antimatter Bose-Einstein
condensate," said Allen Mills, a professor in the Department of Physics
and Astronomy and sole author of the study that appears today in Physical
Review A.
Helium, the second-most abundant element in the universe, exists in
liquid form only at extremely low temperatures. Mills explained helium has a
negative affinity for positronium; bubbles form in liquid helium because helium
repels positronium. Positronium's long lifetime in liquid helium was first
reported in 1957.
When an electron meets a positron, their mutual annihilation could be
one outcome, accompanied by the production of a powerful and energetic type of
electromagnetic radiation called gamma radiation. A second outcome is the
formation of positronium.
Mills, who directs the Positron Laboratory at UC Riverside, said the lab
is configuring an antimatter beam in a quest to produce the exotic bubbles in
liquid helium that Mills' calculations predict. Such bubbles could serve as a
source of positronium Bose-Einstein condensates.
More
On 9 December 1868,[7] the first non-electric gas-lit traffic lights were installed outside the Houses of Parliament in London to control the traffic in Bridge Street, Great George Street, and Parliament Street.[8] They were proposed by the railway engineer J. P. Knight of Nottingham who had adapted this idea from his design of railway signalling systems[9] and constructed by the railway signal engineers of Saxby & Farmer. The main reason for the traffic light was that there was an overflow of horse-drawn traffic over Westminster Bridge which forced thousands of pedestrians to walk next to the Houses of Parliament.[10]
The design combined three semaphore arms with red and green gas lamps for night-time use, on a pillar, operated by a police constable. The gas lantern was manually turned by a traffic police officer with a lever at its base so that the appropriate light faced traffic.[11]
The signal was 22 feet (6.7 m) high. The light was called the semaphore and had arms that would extend horizontally that commanded drivers to "Stop" and then the arms would lower to a 45 degrees angle to tell drivers to proceed with "Caution". At night a red light would command "Stop" and a green light would mean use "Caution".[6]
Although it was said to be successful at controlling traffic, its operational life was brief. It exploded on 2 January 1869 as a result of a leak in one of the gas lines underneath the pavement[12] and injured the policeman who was operating it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished November
DJIA: 28,051 +76 Up. NASDAQ: 8,665 +94 Up. SP500: 3,141 +90 Up. All higher again, but it’s
not a buy signal I would follow. I would wait for the next sell signal.
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