Baltic Dry Index. 1555 +28 Brent Crude 42.18
Spot Gold 1751
Coronavirus Cases 22/6/20
World 9,093,451
Deaths 471,616
----“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing,” he said in an interview with the FT in Japan.
Now the prospect of Chuck Prince dancing is in itself unsettling.
But his account amounts to quite an elegant explanation of why financial
bubbles persist.
Was President
Trump’s poorly attended rally in Tulsa Oklahoma, the Fed’s signal to jump off
President Trump’s re-election campaign?
With a bevy of
Fedsters due to mouth-off this week, stock gamblers in the latest Fed fueled
stock bubble will be paying close attention all week for any sign that the pace
of QE to infinity and beyond is about to
end.
Already outside of
stock bubbles QE seems to have lost its magic powers.
Each new trillion added to the Fedster’s balance sheet seems to have less and
less effect in the real economy.
With 40 million
filed for unemployment claims and continuing claimants close to 21 million, can
the Fed get off President Trump's re-election bandwagon without crashing what’s left of
the US economy?
But if President
Trump’s already a one termer, the latest stock bubble faces a very left wing,
tax and redistribute President Biden.
Gold seems to be already writing
off President Trump. In stock bubbles getting out early beats getting carried out
last. Will the Fedsters still come through for President Trump this week?
Below, a wobbly start
to the new week.
Asian markets mixed as traders seek direction
Published: June 21, 2020 at 11:42
p.m. ET
Asian markets were mixed in early trading Monday, after the
World Health Organization reported a record single-day total of new coronavirus
cases around the world.Japan’s Nikkei 225 NIK, 0.38% inched up 0.1% while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index HSI, -0.32% slipped 0.4%. The Shanghai Composite SHCOMP, 0.28% advanced 0.2% while the smaller-cap Shenzhen Composite 399106, +0.50% gained 0.4%. South Korea’s Kospi 180721, -0.05% dipped 0.1%, while benchmark indexes in Taiwan Y9999, 0.18% , Singapore STI, 0.23% and Indonesia JAKIDX, -0.01% were little changed. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 XJO, 0.49% rose 0.2%.
“It has been a relatively limp start to the Asia session as it seems like investors who have been trading mostly on momentum appear waiting for someone to take charge and shrug off Friday markets weakness,” Stephen Innes, chief global markets strategist at AxiCorp, wrote in a note. “The market is caught between fears of a second COVID wave and improving [economic] data.”
On Sunday, WHO reported more than 183,000 new cases in the latest 24 hours, with Brazil and the U.S. having the most new cases. Former U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb told CBS News on Sunday and more states need to mandate the use of face masks in public in an effort to slow the spread of the disease. “It’s a tool that we have [and] a tool has been demonstrated to have an impact if everyone does it, or most people do it,” he said.
U.S. stock futures rose after initially falling in electronic trade late Sunday. Last week, all three equity benchmarks made weekly gains, though the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended the week on a three-day losing streak.
More
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/asian-markets-mixed-as-traders-seek-direction-2020-06-21?mod=mw_latestnews
The risk-reward in the stock market isn’t looking good, warns fund manager overseeing $16 billion in assets
That’s Bryn Mawr Trust’s Jeffrey Mills, who oversees $16 billion in assets, talking to CNBC Friday about what’s next for a stock market struggling for direction to start the week. At last check, futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average YM00, 0.60% had bounced off a triple-digit drop to push higher.“The liquidity injection that the Fed is introducing to the market is actually being tapered off,” Mills went on to say. “Stocks are discounting an environment that is not necessarily reflective of not only economic fundamentals, but earnings fundamentals.”
Mills said that using trailing price-to-earnings as a measure, valuations haven’t been this high since the tech bubble. In this climate, Mills went to underweight in stocks mid-April.
“You have information that’s all over the map. Sentiment data isn’t really clear. One day you get a positive virus headline. The next day you get a negative one,” Mills said, explaining that investors need not get too bearish or too bullish. “Positioning needs to be somewhat nuanced.”
Last month, Mills spoke of the benefits of having cash on the sidelines in this climate.
“When people ask me, ‘How should I be invested? I need this money in one or even two years’ time.′ I tell them they probably shouldn’t even be in the stock market at all,” Mills told CNBC, adding that the advice applies now more than ever.
More
In other news,
what’s a mere missing couple of billion to the Bundesbank? Or Softbank Group
come to that. Surely Wirecard deserves a
bankster bailout, like everyone else. After all, it’s only fiat money, and as I
often write, there’s plenty more where that comes from.
By Chanyaporn Chanjaroen
Updated on June 22, 2020, 4:56 AM GMT+1
Wirecard AG
said the missing 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) of cash on its balance sheet
probably doesn’t exist, the latest in a dramatic fall from grace for a company
once considered the future of German fintech.The payments firm withdrew its recent financial results and said that previous descriptions of business with third parties, which process transactions on Wirecard’s behalf, were “not correct.” Even before the early Monday statement, the deepening scandal had seen Wirecard’s shares and bonds collapse, its chief executive depart, and left the company renegotiating debt terms with its lenders in a struggle for survival.
The company said it was in “constructive discussions” with its lending banks, including the extension of lines coming due at the end of June. It is working with investment bank Houlihan Lokey on a sustainable financing strategy. Also under consideration are cost reductions, a restructuring, and disposal or termination of business units and product segments, according to the statement.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-22/wirecard-says-missing-cash-likely-doesn-t-exist-pulls-results?srnd=premium-europe
Finally,
one professional money manager, noticing the Great Disconnect between the stock
bubble and reality is suggesting shorting stocks, (and going long gold.)
I
would suggest that very few investors should ever, or could ever, short stocks.
To do that here is to take on open ended risk, fighting the Trump re-election
Fed that’s flooding liquidity into the bubble to drive stocks higher. A safer
fixed risk play is to buy stock index put options, if one wants to get involved
at all.
‘La la land?’ The stock market is ‘insanely disconnected’ and due for a ‘reckoning,’ Warren Buffett buff warns
Published: June 18, 2020 at 2:25 p.m. ET
Those betting against this “absurdly overvalued” stock
market are about to get paid, if Kevin Smith, Crescat Capital’s chief investment
officer, has it right in his gloomy assessment. “Speculation is rampant and being championed by a bold new breed of millennial day traders,” he said. “The mania is based on a widespread hope in Fed money printing. The catalysts for reckoning are numerous as a major cyclical economic downturn has only just begun.”
Smith, who recently talked about learning the ropes from a stack of Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A, -0.51% BRK.B, -0.55% shareholders letters his dad gave him long ago, said, in a very un–Warren Buffett fashion, that shorting stocks “is worthy of a significant allocation today.”
Smith
used this chart of plunging S&P 500 SPX,
-0.56% profit margins to show “how insanely disconnected
equity prices are from their underlying fundamentals.” He warned that
buy-the-dip investors are “not paying attention and have simply been too eager
to call the bottom.”
---- Smith reiterated his “macro trade of the century” call that there’s never been a better set-up for rotating out of overvalued stocks and into undervalued precious metals.
“Markets driven by euphoria never end well,” he explained in a note to clients this week. “The U.S. stock market today is in la-la land. It is discounting a new expansion phase of the economy at the same time as a major recession has only just begun.”
Smith took some lumps in his funds when the market was soaring early in the year, but his returns ballooned in March as the coronavirus pandemic arrived.
More
In
the Fed’s Great Stocks, Bonds, and ETF bailouts, the central bank is stoking up
wealth and racial inequality. The vast majority of the otherwise
underwater stocks, bonds and ETFs
getting bailed out are owned by the top one percent, who are overwhelmingly
white and elite.
The
other ninety nine percent do not benefit from the central bankster bailouts,
which includes most of the minorities and most of the middle class and poor white
community. On the Great Nixonian Error of Fiat Money the Fed is fuelling a
great societal divide. A great day of reckoning
lies ahead, but does it come before or after November 3rd?
“The enemy was repelled. But victory was not won. The war dragged on for a year and there was no decision. Gold grew scarce, and again the Government was in despair.
“I easily relieved them. ‘Write,’ I said, ‘promises on paper to be repaid in gold.’ They did as I advised—paying me (at my request) a trifle of half a million for the advice. I handled the affair—on a merely nominal profit. I punctually met for another year every note that was paid in. But too many were presented, for the war seemed unending and entered a third year.
“Then did I conceive yet another stupendous thing. ‘Bid them,’ said I to the Sultan, ‘take the notes as money. Cease to repay. Write, not “I will on delivery of this paper pay a piece of gold,” but, “this is a piece of gold.”’
“He did as I told him. The next day the Vizier came to me with the story of an insolent fellow to whom fifty such notes had been offered as payment for a camel for the war and who had sent back, not a camel, but another piece of paper on which was written ‘This is a camel.’
“‘Cut off his head!’ said I.
“It was done, and the warning sufficed. The paper was taken and the war proceeded.
Hilaire Belloc. The Mercy of Allah.
Though
hopefully, we are passing/have passed the peak of new cases, at least of the
first SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, this section will continue until it becomes
unneeded.
So
were all the lockdowns one gigantic mistake with massive economic consequences?
Who blew it?
After George Floyd’s killing, experts
warned that demonstrations could set off new waves of infections. But early
testing in Minneapolis tells another story.
06.18.2020 05:16 PM
----The
testing program in the Twin Cities has been particularly well-embraced, making
it a sort of testbed for the rest of the nation, where protests began later.
Now, early data from Minnesota’s efforts suggests such fears may have been
overblown. In the vast, unplanned experiment of unleashing tens of thousands of
previously isolated people into a few city blocks, that’s good news. But
perhaps even more significant is how this preliminary testing data is starting
to reshape scientists’ understanding of how the novel pathogen behaves, with
important implications for states’ plans to reopen.
----Now,
results from the first week of testing are in. And at least among the people
who volunteered for the earliest rounds of tests, the data suggests that the
mass gatherings may not result in a spike of Covid-19 infections after all.
----Of the 3,200 people tested so far at the four popup sites across the metro, 1.8 percent have tested positive for Covid-19, says Ehresmann. HealthPartners, one of the largest health care providers in Minnesota, also reported to the state that it had tested about 8,500 people who indicated that attendance at a mass gathering was the reason they wanted a test. Among them, 0.99 percent tested positive. These numbers have been one of the few pleasant surprises since the outbreak began, says Ehresmann. “Right now, with the data available to us, it appears there was very little transmission at protest events,” she says. “We’re just absolutely relieved.”
In a handful of other US cities that have rolled out free testing for protest-goers, the first round of results look similarly encouraging. In Seattle, fewer than 1 percent of the 3,000 people tested after attending protests were positive for coronavirus, according to a statement put out by the city’s mayor last Friday. This week, Boston officials announced that 14 out of 1,288 people tested so far were positive for coronavirus, or 1.1 percent. Of course, these are only three cities out of hundreds that have been enveloped in large-scale protests against police brutality and institutionalized racism. Many are not conducting widespread public testing, and so signals of protest-related spikes may take longer to emerge.
More
WHO: COVID-19 pandemic is 'accelerating,' in 'new and dangerous phase'
Published:
June 19, 2020 at 1:48 p.m. ET
The
COVID-19 pandemic is "accelerating" and a record number of new cases
in a single day were reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) on
Thursday, WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu said during a news
conference on Friday. The WHO said there were more than 150,000 new cases of
the coronavirus on Thursday, and about half of those cases came from the
Americas.
There
have been more than 8.5 million cases in total, with nearly half a million
deaths, since the virus first gained international attention in January. The
U.S. has the most number of cases worldwide, with about 2.2 million cases and
at least 118,000 deaths. Elsewhere in the Americas, Chile and Peru have both
reported more than 230,000 cases at this time. "The world is in a new and
dangerous phase," Tedros said. "We call on all countries and all
people to exercise extreme vigilance."
A Global Scramble for the Coming Coronavirus Vaccine
A vast rivalry is developing between the
U.S. and China in the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine. The health of
billions of people depends on the outcome. How can the vaccine be fairly
distributed? By DER SPIEGEL Staff
19.06.2020, 21.46 Uhr
----Germany’s 300-Million-Euro Gambit
The German government is hoping that the vaccine being developed here can be deployed around the world to halt the coronavirus. Berlin announced this week that it would invest 300 million euros in Curevac, putting 23 percent of the company under state ownership, with the government saying it is taking the step to prevent the company from moving abroad if it goes through with a planned IPO on the stock exchange in New York in July.The German government wants Curevac to stay in Germany because of the ongoing presence of the virus. The number of new infections may be low at the moment, but just as China is currently experiencing a new outbreak, there’s a risk that the disease will flare up again in Germany. Many fear there will be a second wave of infections and no one knows right now what effect the loosening of the lockdowns in Europe will have. The only thing that can really make a decisive difference is a vaccine.
Production manager von der Mülbe spends 10 to 12 hours a day on the phone arranging meetings with supervisory authorities and negotiating with suppliers. The candidate isn’t his only problem. As with all of the company’s competitors, Curevac is already facing the threat of bottlenecks.
The mini vials made of special medical glass that vaccines are transported in are in short supply around the world. Demand is enormous, but the number of suppliers is limited. It’s almost reminiscent of the recent run on toilet paper around the world. In the case of the mini vials, though, this is just the beginning. Hypodermic needles are also becoming scarce around the world and existing manufacturing can’t easily be scaled up.
Unprecedented Demand
Indeed, developing the actual vaccine is only one of the steps necessary toward making it widely available. It will also have to be produced, distributed and administered in quantities that are difficult to fathom - and all of that will have to happen very quickly. But how?Once a functioning vaccine, or several different vaccines, for the COVID-19 virus is approved worldwide, around 6 billion doses will be necessary. Or twice that if boosters are required to achieve immunity.
You don’t have to be a pessimist to see that it won’t be possible to meet that demand immediately. Even in the best-case scenario, it may take years before enough vaccines can be produced and delivered.
And that means that the question as to when a vaccine will be ready must be followed up with an even more challenging query: Who gets supplies of the life-saving substance first? And who gets to decide? The answers will determine life and death. And the prosperity or poverty of entire nations will also be at stake.
The mysterious rise of the American biotech pioneer Moderna illustrates
the problem at hand. The small Boston-based vaccine company hasn’t launched a
single product in its close to 10-year history, but the company is currently
worth more than $23 billion on the stock exchange.
When the company recently reported initial success with its experimental
mRNA-1273 vaccine in only eight volunteers, it caused not only the company’s
share price to spike, but it also boosted the Down Jones index by almost 4
percent and Germany’s DAX index by more than 5 percent. It’s no less than
the future of the global economy that is currently being decided in the
laboratories of the vaccine manufacturers – and also who will have a share of
the wealth and who will not.
----Trump is also well aware of the powerful battalions he has at his disposal to send into the battle for the vaccine. America is home to the best laboratories and the most powerful pharmaceutical industry in the world. With Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co., all of which had revenues of more than 40 billion dollars in 2019, three of the six top-selling companies in the industry are American. Four of the world’s top five biotech companies are American, including Amgen (market value: 119 billion euros) and Gilead Sciences (83 billion euros).
But it’s also clear that the powerful U.S. will not be able to defeat
the coronavirus on its own. It can only do so with China’s help, because no
matter what "Big Pharma” wants to produce, the active pharmaceutical
ingredients, the basic ingredients of almost every drug, have been mostly
manufactured in China and India for the past decade.
More
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.
Researchers make next-generation, high-toughness battery component
Date:
June 18, 2020
Source:
Brown University
Summary:
By combining a ceramic material with graphene, engineers have made what they
say is the toughest solid electrolyte built to date.
A team of Brown University researchers has found a way to double the
toughness of a ceramic material used to make solid-state lithium ion batteries.
The strategy, described in the journal Matter, could be useful in
bringing solid-state batteries to the mass market.
"There's huge interest in replacing the liquid electrolytes in
current batteries with ceramic materials because they're safer and can provide
higher energy density," said Christos Athanasiou, a postdoctoral
researcher in Brown's School of Engineering and lead author of the research.
"So far, research on solid electrolytes has focused on optimizing their
chemical properties. With this work, we're focusing on the mechanical
properties, in the hope of making them safer and more practical for widespread
use."
The electrolyte is the barrier between a battery's cathode and anode
through which lithium ions flow during charging or discharging. Liquid
electrolytes work pretty well -- they're found in most batteries in use today
-- but they have some problems. At high currents, tiny filaments of lithium
metal can form inside the electrolytes, which cause batteries to short circuit.
And since liquid electrolytes are also highly flammable, those shorts can lead
to fires.
Solid ceramic electrolytes aren't flammable, and there's evidence that
they can prevent the formation of lithium filaments, which could enable batteries
to operate at higher currents. However, ceramics are highly brittle materials
that can fracture during the manufacturing process and during use.
For this new study, the researchers wanted to see if infusing a ceramic
with graphene -- a super-strong carbon-based nanomaterial -- could increase the
material's fracture toughness (a material's ability to withstand cracking
without falling apart) while maintaining the electronic properties needed for
electrolyte function.
"To our knowledge, this is the toughest solid electrolyte that
anyone has made to date," Sheldon said. "I think what we've shown is
that there's a lot of promise in using these composites in battery applications."
Other co-authors on the paper were Mok Yun Jin and Cristina Ramirez. The
work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-SC0018113).
Interest
rates are the most important prices in the economy, according to Nobel laureate
F.A. Hayek, because they reflect the collective time preference of individuals
to consume either now or later. Accordingly, interest rates co-ordinate
allocation of capital across the economy by signalling to businesses whether
they should invest. Distortions in interest rates can cause “clusters of
errors” in which large swathes of businesses unwittingly miscalculate at the
same time.
Hayek
observed that interest rate stimulus interfered with economic calculations,
causing managers to invest in projects that would not otherwise have appeared
profitable. Losses can subsequently materialise as customer demand fails to
meet forecasts that were, in retrospect, optimistic. Long-term projects are
highly sensitive to interest rates and are therefore more susceptible to such
distortions. Pension obligations and long-term, capital-intensive projects are
at high risk of miscalculation based on artificially low rates.
The Monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: 25,383 +12 Down. NASDAQ: 9,490 +178 Up.
SP500: 3,044 +83 Down.
The NASDAQ has remained up.
The S&P and the DJIA still remain down despite the best efforts of the Fed
to get them to go higher.
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