Baltic Dry Index. 1460 -68 Brent
Crude 63.99 Spot Gold 1475
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 best argument against
democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Sir Winston Churchill.
Decision day in rainy,
cold, wet, snowy, blustery GB. The only certain result, whoever wins, big unfunded
spending is back. Brits better get hold of some gold and silver insurance and
fast.
Another day closer to new
China tariff Sunday in America, too. Will President Trump blink and do another
U-turn in his trade war with China? Stocks seem to think so, but how would that
play out in the coming presidential election year?
Yesterday the Fed predictably
did nothing, promising to do nothing all next 2020 election year. Well maybe,
but on Monday they have another potential repo price spike coming up, similar
to the disaster of September 16, that setoff the Fed’s panicky new monetisation.
Just don’t call it quantitative easing part four, even though it is. Americans
now need some gold and silver insurance too.
Below, hopium’s nervously
back again in stocks. Trump wouldn’t blow it would he? I mean would he?
Most Asian markets higher after Fed signals it will hold the line on interest rates
By Rachel
Koning Beals Published: Dec 11, 2019
11:30 p.m. ET
Gains in Japan and Hong Kong led an otherwise mixed early
Asian stock session Thursday after the Federal Reserve signaled it will likely
keep U.S. interest rates on hold throughout 2020 amid a solid economy. U.S. stocks gained slightly, the 10-year Treasury yield fell below 1.8% and the dollar DXY, -0.35% held losses in response to the Fed’s update.
“The Fed offered up a surprising holiday season dovish delight for the market,” said Stephen Innes, chief Asia market strategist with AXI Trader.
Japan’s Nikkei NIK, +0.18% rose 0.2%, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index HSI, +1.33% was up 1.1%. The Shanghai Composite SHCOMP, -0.20% slipped 0.2%, while the Shenzhen Composite 399106, +0.01% also eased slightly.
South Korea’s Kospi 180721, +1.37% rose 1.2%, while benchmark indexes in Taiwan Y9999, +1.16% and Singapore STI, +0.82% were little moved. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 XJO, -0.65% eased 0.7%.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.11% closed up 0.1%, while the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.29% closed 0.2% higher and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.44% rose 0.4%. All three U.S. benchmarks ended Tuesday within 1% or less of their record closes set nearly two weeks ago on Nov. 27, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
The Fed announced it was holding interest rates steady as was widely expected, but added that it expected to make no changes in either direction throughout 2020. It has said trade conflicts bear watching.
Bullish global stock investors are hoping for a delay to the Dec. 15 deadline for new tariffs on some $160 billion of consumer goods shipped from China to the U.S., which could be seen as a sign of progress for bigger-picture trade talks. U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to meet with top trade advisers on Thursday to discuss those planned tariffs, three sources familiar with the plans told Reuters.
So far, reports from the administration have been conflicting. White House advisers Larry Kudlow and Peter Navarro have both indicated that tariffs scheduled to hit Chinese goods on Dec. 15 are “still on the table,” following a report from the Wall Street Journal in which talk participants that said both parties were bracing for a delay of a tariff increases on China goods on Sunday.
“President Trump is impossible to predict. So, unless you have some idea of the content of the Trump Twitter feed in advance, I suspect most traders will likely err on the side of caution and remain sidelined,” said Innes. “But looking at the current price action in [the S&P 500] and [the Chinese yuan], you don’t get the impression that investors even remotely think the U.S. will impose December tariffs which could derail a trade deal.”
Also keeping the market’s attention, a meeting of the European Central Bank on Thursday is expected to produce no surprises. The U.K. holds a general election Thursday.
Federal Reserve leaves interest rates unchanged
Dec. 11, 2019 /
3:14 PM
Dec. 11 (UPI) -- The Federal Reserve left the benchmark interest rate
unchanged Wednesday, citing steady low inflation.The Federal Open Market Committee said it's leaving the federal funds rate at 1.5 percent to 1.75 percent, as was expected, at the conclusion of its two-day meeting.
The FOMC said a strong labor market, and rising economic activity and household spending factored into its decision. The committee expressed concern over weak exports.
"The committee judges that the current stance of monetary policy is appropriate to support sustained expansion of economic activity, strong labor market conditions, and inflation near the Committee's symmetric 2 percent objective," the FOMC statement read.
"The committee will continue to monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook, including global developments and muted inflation pressures, as it assesses the appropriate path of the target range for the federal funds rate."
The Federal Reserve was expected to maintain its current interest rate after three reductions earlier in the year. The committee last lowered the rate to its current level on Oct. 30 after President Donald Trump repeatedly criticized Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. The president said higher rates have stifled economic growth.
In UK news, the voters
finally have their say. But will UK MPs ignore their vote as with the
Brexit
referendum? Will today’s UK’s gales and storms be the big winner of the first winter
general election since 1923? Whatever the result, big unfunded spending is back
on the agenda. Every Brit now needs some insurance policy based on physical,
fully paid up, gold and silver, held securely under their own control.
Leaders scramble for final votes as UK’s ugly election ends
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s election has been like
the country’s late-autumn weather: chilly and dull, with blustery outbursts.
On the last day of the campaign, political
leaders dashed around the U.K. on Wednesday trying to win over millions of
undecided voters who will likely determine the outcome.
Opinion polls suggest Prime Minister Boris
Johnson’s Conservatives have a lead over the main opposition Labour Party
led by Jeremy
Corbyn ahead of Thursday’s election. But all the parties
are nervous about the verdict of a volatile electorate fed up after years of Brexit
wrangling.
Truck driver Clive Jordan expressed a weariness
that could be heard up and down the country during the five-week campaign.
“Basically I just want it over and done with
now,” he said. “Nobody’s doing what they said. Everybody’s lying.”
Britain’s first December vote since 1923 has
been dubbed the Brexit Election. It is being held more than two years early in
hopes of breaking Britain’s political deadlock over the country’s stalled
departure from the European Union.
Johnson has focused relentlessly on Brexit
throughout the campaign, endlessly repeating his slogan “Get Brexit done.” He
says that if he wins a majority of the 650 House of Commons
seats on Thursday, he will get Parliament to ratify his “oven-ready”
divorce deal with the EU and take Britain out of the bloc as scheduled on Jan.
31.
The
Conservatives have focused much of their energy on trying to win seats like
Bolsover — working-class towns in central and northern England that have
elected Labour lawmakers for decades, but also voted strongly in 2016 to leave
the EU.
Polls suggest that plan may be working, and the
Conservatives have also been helped by the Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage,
which decided at the last minute not to contest 317 Conservative-held seats to
avoid splitting the pro-Brexit vote.
Labour — which is largely but ambiguously pro-EU
— faces competition for anti-Brexit voters from the centrist Liberal Democrats,
Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties and the Greens.
“The only reason the Conservatives are so far
ahead in the polls now is that the ‘remain’ vote is divided,” said Rosie
Campbell, professor of politics at King’s College London. “For ‘remain’ voters
it has been a real failure of leadership.”
If the Tories fail to win a majority, it will be
a sign that voters think other issues are just as important as Brexit. Labour
has focused on domestic issues, especially the wear and tear to the country’s
state-funded health service after nine years of Conservative government
austerity. Labour also promises to boost public spending, nationalize Britain’s
railways and utilities and provide everyone in the country with free internet
access — all paid for by raising taxes on high earners.
Whoever Wins in Britain’s Election, Big Government Spending Is Back
Conservative Boris Johnson has plans costing billions; Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has even bigger ideas
By Jason Douglas
Dec. 11, 2019 11:10 am ET
BARNSLEY, England—The fiscal brakes are coming off.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is promising voters in Thursday’s U.K. election £100 billion ($128 billion) of investment in infrastructure and billions more for policing and health care.
His main rival, the Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn, is offering an even greater bounty, with hundreds of billions in spending and borrowing to remake Britain as a 21st-century state-run economy, complete with free broadband in every home.
With these pledges, the U.K. joins the ranks of advanced economies where politicians are signaling an end to years of constrained fiscal policy. Public spending is back in vogue, even among some parties on the right with a traditional zeal for balanced budgets and a mistrust of big government.
In the U.S., President Trump’s tax cuts and military spending pushed the federal budget deficit to $1 trillion in the 12 months through October. France and Spain are relaxing budget goals to pay for tax cuts and extra social benefits to soothe disaffected voters.
Normally abstemious countries including the Netherlands, Finland and Germany are boosting outlays on welfare, defense and infrastructure. In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet has approved a $120 billion stimulus program to revive flagging growth and help regions hit by an October typhoon.
The move toward greater fiscal activism comes after years of heavy lifting by monetary authorities that have left central banks depleted, and even maligned for exacerbating inequality by turbocharging asset prices.
Populist movements of the left and right, meantime, have found fertile soil in regions left behind by patchy economic growth, leading mainstream parties to rewrite the economic playbook to keep voters sweet. Citizens grumble about creaking infrastructure and many fret that the private sector isn’t up to daunting challenges such as climate change.
The shift is coming at a time when economic clouds are darkening, with a U.S.-China confrontation over trade pinching growth and spooking investors.
More
Months before he died, Volcker ripped into Trump and ‘nihilistic forces’ undermining confidence in the US
In an afterword to a paperback release of his autobiography, the legendary former central bank chief called out the president for his attacks on the Fed and said there is a general movement to undermine confidence in essential U.S. institutions.
“Nihilistic forces are dismantling policies to protect our air, water, and climate,” Volcker wrote at the end of “Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government.” “And they seek to discredit the pillars of our democracy: voting rights and fair elections, the rule of law, the free press, the separation of powers, the belief in science, and the concept of truth itself.”
Volcker died Sunday at age 92. An excerpt of the afterword was published Wednesday in the Financial Times.
He guided the Fed from 1979-87 and led the way to vanquishing the runaway inflation of the period.
Later, he formulated the Volcker rule banking reform that restricted risk-taking on Wall Street.
In the essay he wrote in September, Volcker addressed Trump’s repeated criticism of the Fed. The president has demanded the central bank lower rates and has called officials there “boneheads” and said Chairman Jerome Powell was “clueless.”
“Not since just after the second world war have we seen a president so openly seek to dictate policy to the Fed,” Volcker wrote. “That is a matter of great concern, given that the central bank is one of our key governmental institutions, carefully designed to be free of purely partisan attacks.”
Volcker added that confidence in the U.S. is “under siege.”
“Seventy-five years ago, Americans rose to the challenge of vanquishing tyranny overseas. We joined with our allies, keenly recognizing the need to defend and sustain our hard-won democratic freedoms,” he said. “Today’s generation faces a different, but equally existential, test. How we respond will determine the future of our own democracy and, ultimately, of the planet itself.”
The concerns are similar to those he expressed a year ago in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times and CNBC, during which he said the U.S. was in “a hell of a mess” because “nobody believes in the leadership of the country.”
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck,
and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
Comrade Agent Corbyn, hits
the Communist trifecta.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner.
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
Today, finally, some common sense in the west over rare earths. But who
will monitor who gets what, and if it’s fair value?
Exclusive: U.S. Army will fund rare earths plant for weapons development
December 11, 2019
/ 6:09 AM
(Reuters) - The
U.S. Army plans to fund construction of rare earths processing facilities, part
of an urgent push by Washington to secure domestic supply of the minerals used
to make military weapons and electronics, according to a government document
seen by Reuters.
The move would mark the first financial investment by the U.S. military into commercial-scale rare earths production since World War Two’s Manhattan Project built the first atomic bomb.
It comes after President Donald Trump earlier this year ordered the military to update its supply chain for the niche materials, warning that reliance on other nations for the strategic minerals could hamper U.S. defenses.
China, which refines most of the world’s rare earths, has threatened to stop exporting the specialized minerals to the United States, using its monopoly as a cudgel in the ongoing trade spat between the world’s two largest economies.
“The U.S. rare earths industry needs big help to compete against the Chinese,” said Jim McKenzie, chief executive officer of UCore Rare Metals Inc (UCU.V), which is developing a rare earths project in Alaska. “It’s not just about the money, but also the optics of broad support from Washington.”
The Army division overseeing munitions last month asked miners for proposals on the cost of a pilot plant to produce so-called heavy rare earths, a less-common type of the specialized minerals that are highly sought after for use in weaponry, according to the document.
Responses are due by Dec. 16. UCore, Texas Mineral Resources Corp (TMRC.PK) and a joint venture between Lynas Corp (LYC.AX) and privately-held Blue Line Corp are among the expected respondents, according to company officials and sources familiar with the matter.
The Army said it will fund up to two-thirds of a refiner’s cost and that it would fund at least one project and potentially more. Applicants must provide a detailed business plan and specify where they will source their ore, among other factors.
This latest move by the Army, a division of the Pentagon, comes after a military study earlier this year on the state of the U.S. rare earths supply chain.
The rare earths tension between the U.S. and China goes back to at least 2010, when China limited exports to Japan after a diplomatic dispute, sending prices for the niche metals spiking and fueling concerns across the U.S. military that China could do the same to the United States.
More
“Socialism
only works in two places: Heaven where they don’t need it and hell where they
already have it.”
Ronald
Reagan.
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?
The biggest battery breakthroughs of 2019
December
08, 2019
Many
corners of society stand to gain from advances in battery technology, from
automakers, to manufacturers of consumer electronics to all that care about the
environment. This year offered a little something for everybody with an interest
in this area of science, bringing us tech that could charge electric vehicles
in 10 minutes, batteries that suck carbon dioxide out of the air and news that
the world’s biggest battery is set to get even bigger. Here are the most
significant battery breakthroughs of 2019.
---- Ideally, the lithium-ion batteries that power our mobile devices and today’s electric vehicles stay within a certain temperature range when charging, otherwise they run the risk of degrading and suffering a far shorter lifespan. But there is plenty to be gained by charging them at higher temperatures if we can do so safely, namely a greater efficiency and therefore potentially far shorter plug-in times.
In October, a team of Penn State University researchers demonstrated a new kind of battery built to take the heat. Charging a battery at around 60° C (140° F) would normally be considered “forbidden,” by scientists, but the researchers’ device hits these temperatures in just 10 minutes and then rapidly cools before the deleterious effects can take hold.
The
breakthrough centered on a thin nickel foil, which the scientists attached to
the battery’s negative terminal to enable it to quickly warm as the electrons
flowed through it, before rapidly cooling again. This approach saw the team
safely charge the battery at these temperatures across 1,700 cycles. It did so
with such great efficiency, the scientists say it was equal to charging an
electric vehicle for a 200- to 300-mile range (320 to 480 km) in just 10
minutes.
---- Grid-level energy storage with a heart of molten silicon
Renewable sources like wind and solar can generate plenty of power, but it is storing that power for later use during peak load times that can be tricky. Back in April, Australian startup Climate Change Technologies (CCT) introduced what it sees as a solution, and a more effective one than standard lithium-ion-powered grid storage options.Its Thermal Energy Device (TED) is billed as the world's first working thermal battery. It is a modular battery that can be fed electricity from any source and use it to melt silicon inside an insulated chamber. A heat engine can then withdraw this energy for use as required, with each TED box able to store 1.2 MWh, while the individual units can be hooked up to create a battery of potentially unlimited size.
One of the big advantages of the system, according to CCT, is that molten silicon doesn't degrade like lithium does. In testing, the company says its battery showed no signs of degradation over 3,000 test cycles and it expects them to last for 20 years or more. That long life aside, the TED batteries are claimed to be capable of storing six times more energy than lithium-ion batteries per volume, for around 60 to 80 percent of the price.
More
I've done some brave things in my time. I
played Nottingham Labour Club. I was the one who shouted 'Three cheers for Mrs
Thatcher'. And it was during the bingo.
Ken Dodd.
Ken Dodd.
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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