Baltic Dry Index. 1528 -23 Brent
Crude 63.98 Spot Gold 1464
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.
“To build may have to be the slow and
laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single
day.”
Sir Winston Churchill.
Another day, more waiting. In trade war news, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, says a deal
is close but it’s all down to Trump’s decision. Who knew?
It’s all down to the Fed’s
decision, or non-decision later today, and how they spin their latest
continuing monetization. Just don’t call it a monetization. That brings
comparisons to Venezuela and Zimbabwe, among other success stories.
Elsewhere in global trade news,
it was a WTO loss v an USMCA “win.” To most
outside observers, the “win” looks more like a weak revision of NAFTA at best,
a loss if it turns out to be meaningless.
The WTO loss could be immense,
depending on what everyone now does next. With no appeals process left in
place, will countries just ignore WTO rulings? Accept them without appeal? Try
to arbitrate them? All three?
In the UK, an election tired voting
population “prepares,” for a stormy general election tomorrow. With roughly only
8 hours of daylight at this time of year, and bracing for gales, storm force
winds, rain, hail, and snow in some parts of wintry GB, it will be interesting
to see voter turnout, and where. With reportedly some 3 million newly
registered voters intending to vote, according to some of the media, the polls
are likely to be highly unreliable, if many if not most of the three million
turn out to vote.
Below, another day of waiting and
watching.
“Success is not final, failure is not
fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Sir Winston Churchill.
Asian shares drift as tariff deadline looms, pound eases on YouGov poll
December 11, 2019
/ 12:54 AM
SINGAPORE
(Reuters) - Asian stocks drifted on Wednesday as Sino-U.S. trade talks showed
little progress ahead of a weekend deadline for the imposition of additional
U.S. tariffs, and the pound wobbled as opinion polls pointed to a tight British
election on Thursday.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan drifted 0.1% higher, as markets in the region wavered either side of flat. Japan's Nikkei .N225 traded 0.2% lower, Australia's S&P/ASX 200 rose by the same margin.
Shanghai blue chips .CSI300 added 0.1%. U.S. stock futures ESc1 were 0.1% lower.
Faced with often conflicting reports, investors have begun to suspect that even if U.S. tariffs due to take effect on Sunday are delayed, it could take until 2020 before Washington and Beijing can agree a preliminary deal to wind back their trade war.
“Every day we get a little bit of a nudge one way or the other,” said Rob Carnell, Asia-Pacific chief economist at ING in Singapore. “You just don’t know who to believe, whether these comments have any basis in reality or whether they’re a negotiating tactic.”
In the absence of harder news on the trade front, investors’ focus was locked on the U.S. Federal Reserve’s policy meeting and its outlook for the economy due at 2000 GMT, as well as Britain’s election.
The Fed is widely expected to hold rates steady, with investors interested in whether the central bank changes its view of the economy and its 2% growth forecast for next year.
More
Trump will have final say on U.S.-China trade deal - White House trade adviser
December 11,
2019 / 1:10 AM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will be the one to
make the final decision on tariffs and the U.S.-China trade deal, White House
trade adviser Peter Navarro said on Tuesday.
“Either way we’re going to be in a great place ... The president loves
them (the tariffs),” Navarro said in an interview with Fox Business Network.
“If we get a great deal, we’ll be in a good place as well. But it will
be the president’s decision. It will come soon,” Navarro added.
U.S. trade offensive takes out WTO as global arbiter
December 10, 2019
/ 9:26 AM
BRUSSELS (Reuters)
- U.S. disruption of the global economic order reaches a major milestone on
Tuesday as the World Trade Organization (WTO) loses its ability to intervene in
trade wars, threatening the future of the Geneva-based body.
Two years after starting to block appointments, the United States will
finally paralyse the WTO’s Appellate Body, which acts as the supreme court for
international trade, as two of three members exit and leave it unable to issue
rulings.
Major trade disputes, including the U.S. conflict with China and metal
tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump, will not be resolved by the
global trade arbiter.
Stephen Vaughn, who served as general counsel to the U.S. Trade
Representative during Trump’s first two years, said many disputes would be
settled in future by negotiations.
Critics say this means a return to a post-war period of inconsistent
settlements, problems the WTO’s creation in 1995 was designed to fix.
The EU ambassador to the WTO told counterparts in Geneva on Monday the
Appellate Body’s paralysis risked creating a system of economic relations based
on power rather than rules.
The crippling of dispute settlement comes as the WTO also struggles in
its other major role of opening markets.
---- Two years after starting to block appointments, the United States will finally paralyse the WTO’s Appellate Body, which acts as the supreme court for international trade, as two of three members exit and leave it unable to issue rulings.
Major trade disputes, including the U.S. conflict with China and metal
tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump, will not be resolved by the
global trade arbiter.
Stephen Vaughn, who served as general counsel to the U.S. Trade
Representative during Trump’s first two years, said many disputes would be
settled in future by negotiations.
Critics say this means a return to a post-war period of inconsistent
settlements, problems the WTO’s creation in 1995 was designed to fix.
The EU ambassador to the WTO told counterparts in Geneva on Monday the
Appellate Body’s paralysis risked creating a system of economic relations based
on power rather than rules.
The crippling of dispute settlement comes as the WTO also struggles in
its other major role of opening markets.
More
In Apparent Victory for Trump, Pelosi Approves USMCA: Look Closer
Goodbye NAFTA, Hello USMCA
In what "seemingly" constitutes a major victory for Trump, Democratic Lawmakers Agree to Support North America Trade Pact.
House Democrats agreed to support the new U.S. trade deal with Mexico and Canada, marking a victory for President Trump who ran for office in 2016 on a pledge to remake or blow up the North American Free Trade Agreement.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the new version of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement a “victory for American workers” at a Tuesday morning news conference. The pact will replace Nafta when ratified and contains provisions aimed at creating more manufacturing jobs, for example, by increasing the proportion of vehicles that must originate in North America for the cars and trucks to receive duty-free treatment.
It also includes updated labor rules and beefed-up enforcement provisions to hold firms in Mexico to account on labor, according to people familiar with the emerging deal.
USMCA
had long been supported by Republicans and leading business trade groups but
opposed by Democrats over concerns such as the legal language enforcing new
labor rules. The Democratic approval Monday comes as a rare bipartisan moment
of cooperation on economic policy at a time when Capitol Hill is divided over
the impeachment inquiry.
---- Point by Point Comments
1: Pelosi wanted more, and settled for less. Five days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported Democrats Want to Invade Mexico. Essentially, the unions demanded that the US be allowed to enforce labor laws in Mexico. However, Mexico would not agree. Canada would not have gone alone either.
2: The devil is in the details. I suspect Mexico will be able to circumvent these rules, if it wants.
3: Digital rules accomplish nothing.
4: Agriculture essentially remains the status quo. Wisconsin dairy farmers do get a minor victory.
5: This is a potential victory for US consumers, but one that Trump did not appear to want. In practice, however, I wonder if it does much.
More
“Success consists of going from failure to
failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
Sir Winston Churchill.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner.
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
Today, finally some BBC sanity. Time to defund the extreme left wing,
anti-British BBC.
UK says could decriminalise non-payment of BBC licence fee
December 10,
2019 / 7:32 AM
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain is looking at whether or not to decriminalise
the penalty for non-payment of the 154.50-pound annual BBC “licence fee” tax on
all television-watching households, Justice Secretary Robert Buckland said on
Tuesday.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday questioned why the BBC
should continue to be supported by the annual fee, one of the biggest hints to
date that the funding of Britain’s main news provider could be upended.
“What we are talking about as a first step is the decriminalisation of
failing to pay the TV licence,” Buckland told BBC radio.
He said people during election campaigning had said they worried about
the cost of the licence fee.
“Is it right to criminalise and target a vulnerable section of society
for what really is an issue of civil liability? We would consult on that to
work out whether criminalisation is the right way to approach this issue,” he
said.
It is a criminal offence to watch TV or use BBC iplayer in the United
Kingdom without a valid TV licence.
Time to dispose
of the extreme left wing, anti-America, anti-British, anti-Christian,
anti-Israel, anti-Trump, pro-moslem, pro-lgbt, pro-Comrade Corbyn, pro-Clinton,
degenerate, trougher’s paradise of the BBC
& World Service. End the
troughers tax. Make the troughers work for their living. End the parasitic,
Labour promoting BBC.
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 tech jewel: Converting graphene into diamond film
Synthesis of the thinnest possible diamond-like material starting from bilayer graphene and without high pressure
Date:
December 9, 2019
Source:
Institute for Basic Science
Summary:
Can two layers of the ''king of the wonder materials,'' i.e. graphene, be
linked and converted to the thinnest diamond-like material, the ''king of the
crystals''? Scientists have reported the first experimental observation of such
conversion.
Can two layers of the "king of the wonder materials," i.e.
graphene, be linked and converted to the thinnest diamond-like material, the
"king of the crystals"? Researchers of the Center for
Multidimensional Carbon Materials (CMCM) within the Institute for Basic Science
(IBS, South Korea) have reported in Nature Nanotechnology the first
experimental observation of a chemically induced conversion of large-area
bilayer graphene to the thinnest possible diamond-like material, under moderate
pressure and temperature conditions. This flexible, strong material is a
wide-band gap semiconductor, and thus has potential for industrial applications
in nano-optics, nanoelectronics, and can serve as a promising platform for
micro- and nano-electromechanical systems.
Diamond, pencil lead, and graphene are made by the same building blocks:
carbon atoms (C). Yet, it is the bonds' configuration between these atoms that
makes all the difference. In a diamond, the carbon atoms are strongly bonded in
all directions and create an extremely hard material with extraordinary
electrical, thermal, optical and chemical properties. In pencil lead, carbon
atoms are arranged as a pile of sheets and each sheet is graphene. Strong
carbon-carbon (C-C) bonds make up graphene, but weak bonds between the sheets
are easily broken and in part explain why the pencil lead is soft. Creating
interlayer bonding between graphene layers forms a 2D material, similar to thin
diamond films, known as diamane, with many superior characteristics.
Previous attempts to transform bilayer or multilayer graphene into
diamane relied on the addition of hydrogen atoms, or high pressure. In the
former, the chemical structure and bonds' configuration are difficult to
control and characterize. In the latter, the release of the pressure makes the
sample revert back to graphene. Natural diamonds are also forged at high
temperature and pressure, deep inside the Earth. However, IBS-CMCM scientists
tried a different winning approach.
The team devised a new strategy to promote the formation of diamane, by
exposing bilayer graphene to fluorine (F), instead of hydrogen. They used
vapors of xenon difluoride (XeF2) as the source of F, and no high pressure was
needed. The result is an ultra-thin diamond-like material, namely fluorinated
diamond monolayer: F-diamane, with interlayer bonds and F outside.
---- "This simple fluorination method works at near-room temperature and under low pressure without the use of plasma or any gas activation mechanisms, hence reduces the possibility of creating defects," points out Pavel V. Bakharev, the first author and co-corresponding author.
Moreover, the F-diamane film could be freely suspended. "We found
that we could obtain a free-standing monolayer diamond by transferring
F-diamane from the CuNi(111) substrate to a transmission electron microscope
grid, followed by another round of mild fluorination," says Ming Huang,
one of the first authors.
More
“If you have an important point to make,
don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then
come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time-a tremendous whack.”
Sir Winston Churchill.
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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