Baltic Dry Index. 3300 unch. Brent Crude 75.35
Spot Gold 1810
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 13/07/21 World 188,080,023
Deaths 4,055,871
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.
Alan
Greenspan.
In the stock casinos, business as usual as the central banksters fuel the stock manias and with them inflation. With each passing month inflation looks to me to be anything but transitory.
Hope for the best but prepare for the return of central bankster approved inflation.
The trouble with inflation is, that once started it grows like Topsy, and very drastic measures are required to bring it back under control.
But given that central banks are now flooding planet Earth in the trillions of newly created fiat money, created at the push of a computer button out of nothing, I’m not sure it can be brought under control even if there was any desire in the central banks to do so.
When Fed Chairman Volker did it in 1980, he was merely dealing in the billions and in doing so he nearly blew up the then very much smaller financial system.
Trying that now risks blowing up the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money and with it ending the world’s dollar reserve standard. I don’t think the central banksters will even try.
Hong Kong shares jump nearly 2% as China’s June exports beat forecasts
SINGAPORE — Shares in Asia-Pacific were mostly higher in Tuesday trade as investors reacted to the release of China’s trade data for June.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index led gains regionally as it jumped 1.85%. In mainland China, the Shanghai composite rose 0.22% while the Shenzhen component shed 0.206%.
China’s exports in June jumped 32.2% as compared with a year earlier, customs data showed Tuesday. That was much higher than a forecast by analysts in a Reuters poll for a 23.1% growth in exports for June.
The data also showed Chinese imports in June surging 36.7%. That compared against an estimate for imports to have increased 30%, according to Reuters.
The Nikkei 225 in Japan gained 0.78% while the Topix index advanced 0.77%. South Korea’s Kospi climbed 0.74%.
Shares in Australia advanced as the S&P/ASX 200 edged 0.23% higher.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan traded 1.11% higher.
Overnight stateside, the major indexes on Wall Street rose to record closing highs.
More
Dow Jones rises to near 35,000; S&P and Nasdaq hit intraday highs
July 12, 2021 / 5:01 PM
July 12 (UPI) -- The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed near 35,000 as some big-name stocks turned in strong performances ahead of second quarter earnings reports.
The blue-chip index gained 126.02 points, or 0.36%, to 34,996.18 at the end of trading, while the S&P 500 gained 0.35% and the Nasdaq Composite closed up 0.21% as both indexes hit intraday highs.
Disney stock helped lead the way for the Dow, gaining 4.16% after its film Black Widow topped the U.S. box office, earning $80 million.
The figure was the highest domestic box office debut since the COVID-19 pandemic, while the company added an additional $60 million from sales on its streaming service Disney+.
Goldman Sachs stock gained 2.36% and JPMorgan Chase stock increased 1.42% as they prepared to be among the first companies to report their earnings on Tuesday.
"Most investors are expecting blockbuster earnings results and these will likely be peak earnings results," Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Wealth Advisors, said. "The most important element of these reports this week will be the outlook discussion from management and not necessarily the numbers of the last three months."
Financials was also the strongest performing sector on the S&P 500, and Tesla stock gained 4.38% to help lead the Nasdaq higher.
More
Next, China. Is China’s economy slowing or growing, or growing but slowing? My guess is the latter, but how much slowing will Beijing allow?
China’s June exports surge 32%, import growth slows
July 13, 2021
BEIJING (AP) — China’s exports surged in June while import growth slowed to a still-robust level as its economic rebound from the coronavirus leveled off.
Exports rose 32.2% from a year earlier to $281.4 billion, up from May’s 28% growth, customs data showed Tuesday. Imports grew 36.7% to $229.9 billion, but that was down from the previous month’s explosive 51% rise.
China led the global recovery from the pandemic but domestic consumer and other economic activity is leveling off. Chinese exporters benefited from the relatively early reopening of the economy while foreign competitors still faced anti-virus shutdowns.
Growth is expected to slow as global activity returns to normal. Exports to the United States rose 17.8% over a year ago to $46.9 billion while imports of American goods grew 37.6% to $14.3 billion despite tariff hikes still in place in a lingering trade war.
China’s global trade surplus swelled 11% over a year earlier to $51.5 billion. The politically sensitive surplus with the United States expanded 10.9% to $32.6 billion.
Chinese economic growth soared to 18.3% over a year earlier in the first three months of 2021 as consumer and business activity revived following last year’s shutdown to fight the virus. That is expected to decline to a still-strong 7% in the three months ending in June and to cool further through next year.
China is injecting $150 billion into the economy — that may fuel a short-term rally, UBS says
Published Mon, Jul 12 2021 3:29 AM
China’s move to cut the amount of funds banks need to hold in reserve could boost market sentiment — and that could be good news for stocks in certain sectors, according to investment bank UBS.
The People’s Bank of China said Friday it would cut the reserve requirement ratio (RRR) by 50 basis points for all banks, effective from July 15. The move is expected to release around 1 trillion yuan (or $154 billion) in long-term liquidity into the economy.
The reserve requirement represents the amount of money that banks must hold in their coffers as a proportion of their total deposits. A lowering of that required amount will increase the supply of money that banks can lend to businesses and individuals.
“We think this broad-based RRR cut could boost market sentiment in the short term and improve stock market liquidity,” UBS analysts Lei Meng and Eric Lin said in a note on Monday.
Winners and losers
In the short term, the move could boost liquidity-sensitive sectors, such as aerospace and defense, electronics, IT and media, according to UBS.
Companies with strong earnings expectations could also outperform, UBS said, citing sectors such as electric vehicles and batteries, and the new energy sector.
However, the market rally may be short-lived given concerns over China’s slowing economic growth, the bank indicated.
“The RRR cut has, to some extent, added to equity investors’ concerns that the economic recovery in Q2-Q3 (this year) may not be as good as the market expected,” the UBS analysts wrote. “In our view, in the absence of a directional shift to monetary policy loosening, the additional liquidity will not drive a sustained market rally.”
UBS analysts pointed out that investors’ are worried about the weakening pace of China’s economic recovery in the second and third quarter this year — and that may weigh on the banking, insurance and consumer sectors.
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Global Inflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
Reversal of Long-Term Forces May Add to Inflation Threat
Economists see shifts in globalization, demographics and e-commerce putting upward pressure on prices
July 12, 2021 5:30 am ET
For the past few decades, the Federal Reserve has succeeded in keeping inflation low—perhaps too low. It had an assist: Shifts in the global economy, including globalization, demographics and the rise of e-commerce, helped keep prices in check.
Some economists say these so-called secular forces have begun to reverse in ways that the pandemic has intensified.
“The factors that were…playing a significant role in that low-inflation environment last cycle are beginning to fade,” said Sarah House, director and senior economist at Wells Fargo.
That could have important implications for the Fed as it grapples with how much of the current inflation pickup is temporary, and for the U.S. economy as a whole. Ms. House said it means that either inflation will run higher in the years ahead or the Fed will have to keep monetary policy tighter than it otherwise would to meet its 2% inflation target.
Economists point to several secular shifts that could give rise to new inflationary pressures.
Globalization goes into reverse
Global trade more than doubled from 27% of world gross domestic product in 1970 to 60% in 2008, buoyed by falling barriers to trade and investment. In the U.S., it soared from 11% of GDP in 1970 to 31% in 2011. Global competition compelled companies to build elaborate international supply chains, sourcing materials and products in the cheapest possible place. They were aided by access to cheap labor, as the fall of the Berlin Wall and China’s shift toward a market economy in the 1980s and 1990s more than doubled the workforce integrated with the global economy.
Consumers in wealthy nations benefited. U.S. “core” goods prices, which strip out volatile energy and food prices, rose just 18% between 1990 and 2019. Prices for core services, most of which are produced domestically, surged 147%. Increased import content explains some of that gap, said Blerina Uruci, senior U.S. economist at Barclays. “In some ways, countries like the U.S. were importing disinflation or even deflation from their trade partners,” she said.
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Average US price of gas rises 5 cents per gallon to $3.21
July 11, 2021
CAMARILLO, Calif. (AP) — The average U.S. price of regular-grade gasoline rose a nickel over the past two weeks, to $3.21 per gallon.
Industry analyst Trilby Lundberg of the Lundberg Survey said Sunday that gas prices will likely hold steady now that crude oil costs have stopped rising.
The price at the pump is 97 cents higher than it was a year ago.
Nationwide, the highest average price for regular-grade gas is in the San Francisco Bay Area, at $4.39 per gallon. The lowest average is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at $2.65 per gallon.
The average price of diesel in the survey taken Friday was $3.30 a gallon, up 3 cents from two weeks earlier.
https://apnews.com/article/business-7f9fa4625271dfb9ead6dd5e93836b20
Below, why a “green energy” economy may not be possible anyway, and if it is, it won’t be quick and it will be very inflationary, setting off a new long-term commodity Supercycle. Probably the largest seen so far.
The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking
https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R-0319-MM.pdf
Mines, Minerals, and "Green" Energy: A Reality Check
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/mines-minerals-and-green-energy-reality-check
There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.
Herbert
Hoover.
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Johnson & Johnson vaccine increases risk of rare nerve disorder, US FDA warns
Issued on:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday added a warning to the fact sheet for Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine saying that data suggests there is an increased risk of a rare neurological disorder in the six weeks after inoculation.
In a letter to the company, the FDA classified the chances of getting Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) after vaccination as being “very low.” Still, it said J&J vaccine recipients should seek medical attention if they have symptoms including weakness or tingling sensations, difficulty walking or difficulty with facial movements.
Around 12.8 million people have received J&J’s one-dose vaccine in the United States. The FDA said 100 preliminary reports of GBS in the vaccine recipients include 95 serious cases that required hospitalization and one reported death.
J&J said in a statement that it was in discussion with regulators about the cases of GBS. It said the rate of reported cases of GBS in J&J vaccine recipients exceeds the background rate only by a small degree.
GBS is a rare neurological condition in which the body’s immune system attacks the protective coating on nerve fibers. Most cases follow a bacterial or viral infection. Most people fully recover from GBS.
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‘Surprising Amount Of Deaths’ Will Soon Occur In These US Regions From Increased Covid-19 Cases, Expert Says
(CNN) — As the Delta variant rapidly spreads, US hotspots have seen climbing cases — and an expert warns a “surprising amount” of Covid-19 deaths could soon follow.
The US is averaging about 19,455 new cases over the last seven days, a 47% increase from the week prior, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. And a third of those, CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner said, come from five hotspots: Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and Nevada.
“In places like Missouri where ICUs are packed, you’re going to see a surprising amount of death,” Reiner said on Sunday.
At Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, 91% of ICU patients are on ventilators and many are in their 20s, 30s and 40s, Chief Administrative Officer Erik Frederick told CNN Saturday. That is especially concerning, he said, because at the peak last year there were only 40 to 50% of ICU patients on ventilators.
Typically, increases in Covid-19 death rates follow three to four weeks behind spikes in cases, Reiner said. It takes a week for patients to get sick enough to need hospitalization and then often another couple of weeks for the infection to become fatal.
“We will start to see an increase in mortality in this country,” Reiner said.
What is particularly frustrating for many experts, Reiner said, is that the deaths are “completely avoidable” now that vaccines are available.
But about one third of those 12 and older in the US haven’t received the vaccine yet, CDC data shows.
----Much of the rising cases have been attributed to the now dominant Delta variant, which is believed to be more transmissible. And the variant has sparked discussions over local vaccination mandates.
Across the US, 48% of the population is fully vaccinated, but in some states that number is much lower, according to CDC data. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Wyoming and Mississippi all have around 35% or less of their populations fully vaccinated.
More
Several inhalable COVID-19 vaccines move to human trials
Rich Haridy July 11, 2021
A new study in the journal Science Advances presents the latest research demonstrating the potential effectiveness of an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine is one of several in development designed to be administered through a nasal spray.
"The currently available vaccines against COVID-19 are very successful, but the majority of the world's population is still unvaccinated and there is a critical need for more vaccines that are easy to use and effective at stopping disease and transmission," explains Paul McCray, a researcher from the University of Iowa working on an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine.
McCray is working alongside colleagues from the University of Georgia on a single-dose COVID-19 vaccine delivered via a nasal spray. Their particular vaccine utilizes a virus called parainfluenza virus 5 (PIV5), optimized to express the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2.
PIV5 is harmless in humans and previous experiments with the virus as a vaccine delivery system have been effective in animal studies against MERS, another coronavirus. The new data demonstrates the experimental COVID-19 vaccine is effective in mice and ferrets.
"We have been developing this vaccine platform for more than 20 years, and we began working on new vaccine formulations to combat COVID-19 during the early days of the pandemic," says co-lead on the study, Biao He, from the University of Georgia. "Our preclinical data show that this vaccine not only protects against infection, but also significantly reduces the chances of transmission."
Traditional vaccines are usually administered by an intramuscular injection. But injections come with a whole load of hurdles making widespread vaccination campaigns complicated and costly. Injected vaccines often need cold storage and must be administered by medical professionals. Syringes are also a finite resource and supply problems have caused major issues with the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out.
One nasal spray vaccine is currently in the market. Called FluMist the vaccine targets influenza and, despite being approved for around a decade, its effectiveness has varied from year to year. For several years both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention recommended the injectable flu vaccine over this inhalable version, but recently changed that advice after a new formulation showed improved efficacy in the 2019-20 flu season.
Alongside the ease of administration of a nasal spray vaccine there is a strong hypothesis suggesting delivering vaccines directly to mucosal tissue in the upper respiratory tract could offer better localized protection from infection. Darrell Irvine, a bioengineer from MIT, has been working on developing inhalable vaccines for several years.
“In some cases, vaccines given in muscle can elicit immunity at mucosal surfaces, but there is a general principle that if you vaccinate through the mucosal surface, you tend to elicit a stronger protection at that site,” says Irvine. “Unfortunately, we don’t have great technologies yet for mounting immune responses that specifically protect those mucosal surfaces.”
A study from Irvine’s MIT team published earlier this year demonstrated great efficacy with a novel method attaching peptide vaccines to albumin proteins. Mouse studies showed the inhalable vaccine generated a 25-fold increase in immune T cells compared to the same vaccine injected into muscle.
A small number of inhalable COVID-19 vaccines are now in early-stage human trials. Early in 2021 researchers from Oxford University commenced Phase 1 human trials for a nasal spray version of its ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine (now more familiar as the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine).
More
Next, some vaccine links kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.
World Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines. https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
NY Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Stanford Website. https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
Regulatory Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker. https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some other useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
Centers for Disease Control Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
The Spectator Covid-19 data tracker (UK)
https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported.
Low-energy e-paper goes inverted for a full array of brilliant colors
Nick Lavars July 12, 2021
From building facades in San Diego to road signs in Australia, we are starting to see electronic paper make its way beyond the pages of Kindles and into the world in some very interesting ways. Working to widen the applications for this promising technology are scientists at Sweden's University of Technology, whose latest electronic paper display takes on an inverted design to offer a full array of accurate and brilliant colors.
Electronic paper like that used in Kindles and other e-readers uses just a fraction of the energy of tablets and smartphones, as they require no backlight to illuminate text and images. This is because they feature reflective screens with electrically conductive polymers that reflect and absorb ambient light, mimicking the way our eyes process information on regular paper.
This allows for displays that use minimal energy, are easier on the eyes, and can be worked into thin and even flexible forms. One aspect of this technology that has proven challenging, however, is in producing electronic paper with full-color displays, or at least of the same quality as we're used to on our tablets and phones. Advances are being made with various full color screens and tablets, and right at the cutting edge of this process are the chemical engineers behind this latest study.
In 2016, the team introduced a flexible, full color e-paper that uses 10 times less energy than a Kindle, with a thickness of less than 1 micron. This display featured electrically conductive components laid over the top of a pixelated surface, and used a combination of red, green and blue pixels to produce different colors, though at sub-optimal quality.
To address this, the scientists leveraged a new porous material made of trioxide, gold and platinum and used that as their electrically conductive component. This was laid beneath the pixelated surface rather than over the top of it as before, which means the user looks directly at the pixels and obtains a much clearer view of the colors on show. So much so, the team says this new display clearly outperforms the latest commercially available e-readers in terms of color and brightness.
“For reflective screens to compete with the energy-intensive digital screens that we use today, images and colors must be reproduced with the same high quality," says Marika Gugole, Doctoral Student at Chalmers University of Technology. "That will be the real breakthrough. Our research now shows how the technology can be optimized, making it attractive for commercial use."
One area the team would like to improve on is the use of rare metals, in this case gold and platinum. Because the display is so thin, it only requires small amounts of these materials, but the scientists hope to continue refining the design so that less and less of them are needed. They say the technology could one day be used in phones, tablets, and outdoor billboard-type displays, and imagine that in the right hands, may be commercialized sooner rather than later.
“A large industrial player with the right technical competence could, in principle, start developing a product with the new technology within a couple of months,” says study author Andreas Dahlin.
The research was published in the journal Nano Letters.
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
Vladimir
Lenin.
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