Baltic Dry Index. 844 -63 Brent Crude 68.16
Spot Gold 1562
Never ending Brexit now January 31.
Trump’s Nuclear China Tariffs Now in effect.
The USA v EU trade war started October 18. Now in effect.
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith
According to global stock and commodity markets, the Middle
East action is all over. Iran won’t retaliate, because it can’t. Buy more
stocks, especially technology stocks, now that this year’s Consumer Electronics
Show is underway in Las Vegas, sell commodities. Ignore that unreliable sinking
Baltic Dry Index.
Well maybe, but that assumes that Iran is fully in
control of all of the players on its side. That Iran has perfect control and
command of its forces and proxy militias. That there are no rogue players or suicide
“martyrs” in Iraq just biding their time.
Iran might very well not want war, but we don’t always
get what we want, though we usually get what we deserve.
Below, complacency is back. CES 2020 notwithstanding, I’ll
continue to see stock rallies as exit rallies.
Asia stocks rally, oil skids as investors reassess Mideast risk
January 7, 2020 /
12:41 AM
SYDNEY
(Reuters) - Asian shares rebounded on Tuesday as investors’ reassessed the risk
of an all-out conflict between the United States and Iran, while Wall Street
battled back to the black as tech stocks climbed.
Oil surrendered hefty gains as some speculated Iran would be unlikely to
strike against the U.S. in a way that would disrupt supplies, and its own crude
exports. [O/R]
“Oil traders have been unwinding their hedges, thinking that Iran’s
economic hardships would deter an attack on any oil infrastructure in that it
would likely freeze out any existing Iranian exports and put the economy into
an even deeper hole,” said Stephen Innes, chief Asia market strategist at
AxiTrader.
Brent crude futures fell 86 cents to $68.05 a barrel, having been as
high as $70.74 on Monday, while U.S. crude dropped 77 cents to $62.50.
Gold also retreated to $1,558.67 an ounce, after scaling a near
seven-year peak of $1,582.59 overnight.
Equities went the other way as MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific
shares outside Japan added 0.7%, recouping almost all of Monday’s losses.
Japan’s Nikkei rallied 1.4% and Shanghai blue chips 0.5%. E-Minis for
the S&P 500 firmed 0.2%, while EUROSTOXX 50 futures rose 0.4% and FTSE
futures 0.6%.
Asian shares fell sharply on Monday as Iran and the United States traded
threats after an U.S. air strike on Jan. 3 killed a top Iranian commander.
The mood calmed a little as the session passed with no new aggression.
---- Wall Street chose to hope for the best and the Dow rose 0.24%, while the S&P 500 gained 0.35% and the Nasdaq 0.56%.
Surveys of service sectors out overnight showed an improvement in the
United States, UK and EU, stirring speculation the closely-watched ISM measure
of U.S. services due later Tuesday will also show strength.
More
Iran is too weak to start a world war
6
January 2020
Niall Ferguson is a Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford.
My response to the news that U.S. forces had assassinated General Qassem
Soleimani was: “Good riddance. Now what?” No tears should be shed for Gen. Soleimani.
As the mastermind of Iran’s numerous proxy wars beyond its borders, he had the
blood of countless people on his hands, including hundreds of American and
coalition soldiers killed by the Shia militias he helped to train and finance.
Second only to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in personal
power, Gen. Soleimani had come to personify the ruthless, bloodthirsty spirit
of the regime in Tehran.
But what will the consequences be of his assassination? Let us begin by
dismissing that perennial, “Oh no! Reckless Donald Trump has lit the fuse for
the Third World War.” At a time such as this, commentators in need of a facile
historical analogy inevitably reach for the murder of Austria’s Archduke Franz
Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June, 1914, generally regarded as the catalyst for the
First World War.
But Gen. Soleimani was no Ferdinand. First, it was Bosnian-Serb
terrorists who carried out the hit on the legitimate heir to the august
Austro-Hungarian imperial throne. Gen. Soleimani’s career as a sponsor of
terrorism puts him closer to the Sarajevo assassin, Gavrilo Princip, than to
his victim.
Second, the Middle East in January, 2020, is not Europe in June, 1914.
The great powers then were quite evenly matched; each made the mistake of
thinking that it might gain from a full-scale European war. Today, Iran’s
leaders are under no illusions. They cannot risk a war with the vastly superior
United States.
A better analogy might be with the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich,
“the man with the iron heart” (Hitler’s grim accolade), the founding head of
the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), the creator of the genocidal
Einsatzgruppen and the brutal tyrant of the dismembered Czechoslovakia, who was
fatally wounded by British-trained agents of the Czech government-in-exile in
May, 1942.
More
CES 2020 live from Las Vegas: The latest from Sony, Impossible Foods, Samsung and more
CNET's live coverage of CES 2020 press day is in full swing.
CES
2020 is where the technology year kicks off: It's a gigantic trade
show (more than 170,000 attendees are expected) where the biggest names in
consumer electronics converge on Las Vegas to show off the tech that will
dominate our lives in the next decade. This year, we'll see everything from 8K
TVs to digitally
rendered people to sex
tech -- and that's just for starters.
Yes, you wish you were here -- but CNET offers the
next best thing. We're delivering four full days of live video programming from
the show floor. Our coverage kicked off earlier today at 7:45 a.m. PT (10:45
a.m. ET, 3:45 p.m. UK), and will run for more than 10 hours, finishing up with
the Samsung keynote at 6:30 p.m. PT (9:30 p.m. ET, 2:30 a.m. UK).
There are three ways to watch:
- Watch right here, embedded above.
- Watch on YouTube.
- If you're at CES: Stop by the CNET Stage on the second level of the Sands Expo Center.
More
Finally, though it’s still very early in the new northern
hemisphere crop year, there’s already concerns over the US winter wheat crop. Something
we’ll keep following closely.
Droughts, floods hinder U.S. wheat production
Jan. 6, 2020 /
3:00 AM
EVANSVILLE, Ind., Jan. 6 (UPI) -- After record-breaking rains ruined
upper Midwest wheat harvests, drought now threatens the nation's grain growing
farther south.
Lack of rain during the fall left farmers in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma
and Texas -- where the majority of the nation's winter wheat is grown --
struggling to get their plants to grow.
"The rain shut off in July, and we haven't had any meaningful
moisture until Thanksgiving Day," said Kyler Millershaski, a wheat farmer
in Lakin, Kan. "It's been extremely dry."
During that same period, rain pummeled the upper Midwest. States like
North Dakota, which produces large quantities of spring wheat, experienced
massive flooding, and farmers battled mud and ice to harvest their crops.
"The farmers are saying it was the most challenging harvest in a
generation," said Jim Peterson, the policy and marketing director for the
North Dakota Wheat Commission. "We still have acres that have not been
harvested. And the rain impacted the quality of the crop we did harvest."
The two opposing -- and damaging -- weather patterns hit the two areas
of the country that grow the majority of U.S. wheat.
In the lower Midwestern states, farmers grow winter wheat, which they
sow around October. It develops its roots during the fall and then goes dormant
during the cold winter months. It begins growing again in the spring and is
ready for harvest around June.
Spring wheat, by contrast, is planted farther north in the upper Midwest
-- where winters are much too cold for winter wheat to survive. Like many
commodity crops, it is planted around April and harvested in the fall.
The 2019 growing year was disastrous for spring wheat, with heavy rains
and floods preventing farmers across the region from planting and harvesting.
---- Farther south, winter wheat growers are in the midst of their growing season.
"Right now, it is in dormancy," said Marsha Boswell, a
spokeswoman for the Kansas Wheat Commission. "We're just waiting. It's
hard to predict what will happen."
But the conditions are not ideal, she quickly added. The fall drought
meant much of this year's wheat did not develop the roots needed to overwinter
well.
"Some of [the plants] didn't even come up," Boswell said.
Farmers are watching their fields closely. They will need spring rains
for their surviving wheat to mature.
More
"We shouldn't pour cold water on everything. We, the eight or nine players in global investment banking, have a very good future."
Deutsche Bank, CEO Josef Ackermann. Davos, January 2007.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner.
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
Today, more on poor Europe, limping towards, or already in recession.
President Trump’s Iran tantrum aside, not a very pleasant start to the roaring
20s.
In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth Galbraith.
Drastic increase in free capacity for European road freight transport
More free capacity
is available in European road freight since industry has implemented further
production cutbacks in light of the weak demand for exports and the sluggish
economic climate.
Available transport capacity rose 15.5% in November 2019,
from 111 to 128 index points, according to the “Transport Market Monitor”
published by logistics specialist Transporeon (Ulm / Germany; www.transporeon.com) and
its subsidiary Tim Consult. Since October, available freight transport
space increased by more than a third in overall terms.
Transport prices are only falling slightly, by contrast, with the transport price index dropping from 102.9 to 100.1 index points. This corresponds to a decline of 2.7%. Transport prices were thus 4.2% lower than in November 2018.
“It is worrying that the amount of available transport capacity has risen again for a number of key industries. This would suggest further cutbacks in production and, at all events, reduced capacity utilisation for industrial plants,” said Oliver Kahrs, managing director of Tim Consult. In the automotive industry, for example, available transport capacity underwent two-digit growth in November.
Transport prices are only falling slightly, by contrast, with the transport price index dropping from 102.9 to 100.1 index points. This corresponds to a decline of 2.7%. Transport prices were thus 4.2% lower than in November 2018.
“It is worrying that the amount of available transport capacity has risen again for a number of key industries. This would suggest further cutbacks in production and, at all events, reduced capacity utilisation for industrial plants,” said Oliver Kahrs, managing director of Tim Consult. In the automotive industry, for example, available transport capacity underwent two-digit growth in November.
Published
on 06.01.2020
If
economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent
people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
John
Maynard Keynes
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?
“Zombie” Solar Energy Storage System From 1980s Revived By Science
It’s
been a long time coming, but vintage solar energy storage research dating back
to the 1980s (and beyond) is finally bearing fruit. In the latest development,
scientists at the University of Houston in Texas have demonstrated proof of
life for a hybrid device that collects and stores sunlight in the form of heat
for 24/7 use. Nope, it’s not a concentrating solar system and it doesn’t rely
on molten salt or specialized oils. It involves norbornadiene-quadricyclane,
something fairly new on the CleanTechnica radar.
Norbornadiene-quadricyclane has been studied for solar
energy storage since at least 1983, when the American Chemical Society
published a paper aptly titled, “Norbornadiene-quadricyclane system in the
photochemical conversion and storage of solar energy”
in the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Process Design and
Development.The research toddled along slowly until a veritable volcano of new papers erupted in recent years. A 2016 study by a team of researchers in Sweden nails down the reason for the fresh burst of activity (emphasis added):
“Molecular photoswitches that are capable of storing solar energy, so-called molecular solar thermal storage systems, are interesting candidates for future renewable energy applications. In this context, substituted norbornadiene-quadricyclane systems have received renewed interest due to recent advances in their synthesis.“
---- The potential for high energy density in a norbornadiene-quadricyclane storage system is coming to light, which explains all the interest from renewable energy researchers.
That finally brings us to the University of Houston in Texas. Last fall a team of scientists at the school cooked up a new norbornadiene-quadricyclane solar energy storage device that solves a number of problems that have been blocking the way to commercial development.
By combining solar energy harvesting with energy storage in a single hybrid system, the new device avoids losses that occurs when energy is transferred from a collection device to a storage platform.
The result is a high-density system that can can convert solar energy for immediate use and store the excess, as the researchers describe in the journal Joule:
“Here, we combine the physics of molecular energy and latent heat storage to introduce an integrated, simultaneous harvesting and storage hybrid paradigm for potential 24/7 energy delivery. The hybrid paradigm utilizes heat localization during the day to provide a harvesting efficiency of 73% at small scale and ∼90% at large scale.”
That’s just for starters. The team also writes that “remarkably, at night, the stored energy by the hybrid system is recovered with an efficiency of 80% and at a higher temperature than that of the day, in contrast to all of the state-of-the-art systems.”
If that sounds a little on the high side, consider that conventional solar cells only capture part of the light spectrum. In contrast, the new system can collect the entire spectrum.
So, what are the next steps? It might involve applying the hybrid setup to different compounds, with an eye toward optimizing performance and scaling up. CleanTechnica is reaching out to the researchers for an update, so stay tuned for more on that.
More
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
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished December
DJIA: 28,538 +91 Up. NASDAQ: 8,973 +125 Up.
SP500: 3,231 +114 Up.
All higher again, but it’s
not a buy signal I would take. The rally is all down to the Fed monetizing at a
rate of about 100 billion a month. I continue to look on the Fed’s latest stock
bubble as an exit rally.
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