Baltic Dry Index. 3285 -53 Brent Crude 76.17
Spot Gold 1787
OPEC+ ends Friday’s meeting without a deal, to seek agreement Monday on oil output policy
LONDON — OPEC and non-OPEC ministers finished Friday’s
meeting without a resolution and they will meet again on Monday on oil output
policy, CNBC’s Brian Sullivan reported.
The energy alliance, often referred to as OPEC+, met via videoconference on
Friday afternoon to decide on whether to keep output policy unchanged or to
ramp up supply further.
OPEC+ except for the United Arab Emirates agreed to an easing of cuts and their extension to the end of next year, according to Reuters citing an OPEC+ source. The UAE said the extension is conditional to revising its baseline production, Reuters reported.
Oil prices moved on the news, rising slightly Thursday before losing momentum Friday as traders digested the implications. International Brent crude futures traded at $76.03 a barrel, up 0.2% for the session, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures settled 7 cents lower at $75.16 a barrel Friday.
The OPEC alliance had agreed in principle to increase supply by 400,000 barrels per day from August to December 2021 in order to meet rising demand, Reuters reported, citing unnamed OPEC+ sources.
OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia and non-OPEC leader Russia had also proposed extending the duration of cuts until the end of 2022, according to Reuters.
However, Reuters reported that the UAE opposed these plans on the grounds that OPEC+ should change the baseline for cuts, effectively raising its production quota.
Neil Atkinson, an independent oil analyst, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Friday that tensions between the UAE and other OPEC+ members had been “bubbling under for quite some time now.”
“The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company has been investing in new capacity, it’s been taking a more active role in trading,” he said, adding that it has perhaps started operating more like an international oil company than a national oil company. Unlike international oil companies, decisions taken by national oil companies tend to be influenced by the state.
“They look to the future, they see demand for oil continuing to grow in the medium term, they’ve installed more capacity and they want a greater share of that market as we move through the 2020s,” he added.
----“While a UAE withdrawal from OPEC+ should definitely not be dismissed, such a decision would be surprising. Such a move would compromise Abu Dhabi’s relationship with Riyadh, its broad positioning in the region, and its ability to build alliances over the long-term. Therefore, compromise appears to be the most likely outcome.”
----Analysts had expected the energy alliance to raise supply by around 500,000 barrels per day from next month, slightly higher than the reported proposal to increase by 400,000 barrels.
Oil prices have rallied more than 45% year-to-date in the first half of the year, supported by the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, a gradual easing of lockdown measures and massive production cuts from OPEC+.
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/02/opec-meeting-oil-output-policy-decision-in-focus-as-prices-rise.html
U.S. adds 850,000 jobs in June, better than expected
Job growth leaped higher in June as businesses looked to keep up with a rapidly recovering U.S. economy, the Labor Department reported Friday.
Nonfarm payrolls increased 850,000 for the month, compared with the Dow Jones estimate of 706,000 and better than the upwardly revised 583,000 in May. The unemployment rate, however, rose to 5.9% against the 5.6% expectation.
The jobless rate increase came even though the labor force participation rate was unchanged at 61.6%. A separate figure that accounts for discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons fell sharply to 9.8%, with the 0.4 percentage point decline putting the so-called real unemployment rate below 10% for the first time since March 2020.
Markets rose on the news, with futures on the major indexes indicating modest gains at the open before the holiday weekend.
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/02/jobs-report-june-2021.html
U.S. job growth picks up in June; unemployment rate rises to 5.9%
July 2, 2021 5:06 AM By Lucia Mutikani
Nonfarm payrolls increased by 850,000 jobs last month after rising 583,000 in May, the Labor Department said in its closely watched employment report on Friday. The unemployment rate rose to 5.9% from 5.8% in May.
The jobless rate has been understated by people misclassifying themselves as being “employed but absent from work.” There are a record 9.3 million job openings. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast payrolls advancing by 700,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate dipping to 5.7%.
Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% last month after increasing 0.4% in May. That raised the year-on-year increase in wages to 3.6% from 1.9% in May. Annual wage growth was in part flattered by so-called base effects following a big drop last June.
The report suggested the economy closed the second quarter with strong growth momentum, following a reopening made possible by vaccinations against COVID-19. More than 150 million people are fully immunized, leading to pandemic-related restrictions on businesses and mask mandates being lifted.
Politicians, businesses and some economists have blamed enhanced unemployment benefits, including a $300 weekly check from the government, for the labor crunch. Lack of affordable child care and fears of contracting the coronavirus have also been blamed for keeping workers, mostly women, at home.
---- According to job search engine Indeed, 4.1% of jobs postings advertised hiring incentives through the seven days ending June 18, more than double the 1.8% share in the week ending July 1, 2020. The incentives, which included signing bonuses, retention bonuses or one-time cash payments on being hired, ranged from as low as $100 to as high as $30,000 in the month ended June 18.
Some restaurant jobs are paying as much as $27 per hour plus tips, according to postings on Poachedjobs.com, a national job board for the restaurant/hospitality industry. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, but is higher in some states.
More
In other news, a hurricane heads towards Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba. Depending on if it strengthens and its path, this might become a big story for next week.
Yet another US ransomware attack. We will learn more about this over the next few days.
Elsa strengthens into Category 1 hurricane on path to Caribbean, U.S.
July 1, 2021 / 9:19 AM / Updated July 2, 2021 at 8:21 PM
July 2 (UPI) -- Hurricane Elsa strengthened further Friday afternoon -- hours after becoming the first hurricane of the Atlantic season -- and was on track to reach parts of the Caribbean and the U.S. mainland.
In an 8 p.m. EDT update Friday, the NHC said Elsa was located about 475 miles east-southeast of Isla Beata, Dominican Republic, and 810 miles east-southeast of Kingston, Jamaica. It had maximum sustained winds of 85 mph and was moving west-northwest at 30 mph.
A tropical storm becomes a hurricane with sustained winds of 74 mph. Elsa would graduate to a Category 2 storm if it reaches winds of 96 mph.
"On the forecast track, Elsa will move across the eastern Caribbean Sea tonight, across the central Caribbean Sea on Saturday, and move near the southern coast of Hispaniola late Saturday or Saturday night. By Sunday, Elsa is forecast to move near Jamaica and portions of eastern Cuba, and move near portions of central and western Cuba Sunday night and Monday," the NHC said.
A hurricane warning was in effect for Jamaica, the southern portion of Haiti from Port Au Prince to the southern border with the Dominican Republic, and from Punta Palenque in the Dominican to the border with Haiti, the NHC said.
Several areas were under a tropical storm warning, including St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the coast of Haiti north of Port Au Prince and the Dominican coast from Punta Palenque to Cabo Engano.
More
Ransomware hits hundreds of US companies, security firm says
WASHINGTON (AP) — A ransomware attack paralyzed the networks of at least 200 U.S. companies on Friday, according to a cybersecurity researcher whose company was responding to the incident.
The REvil gang, a major Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate, appears to be behind the attack, said John Hammond of the security firm Huntress Labs. He said the criminals targeted a software supplier called Kaseya, using its network-management package as a conduit to spread the ransomware through cloud-service providers. Other researchers agreed with Hammond’s assessment.
“Kaseya handles large enterprise all the way to small businesses globally, so ultimately, (this) has the potential to spread to any size or scale business,” Hammond said in a direct message on Twitter. “This is a colossal and devastating supply chain attack.”
Such cyberattacks typically infiltrate widely used software and spread malware as it updates automatically.
It was not immediately clear how many Kaseya customers might be affected or who they might be. Kaseya urged customers in a statement on its website to immediately shut down servers running the affected software. It said the attack was limited to a “small number” of its customers.
Brett Callow, a ransomware expert at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft, said he was unaware of any previous ransomware supply-chain attack on this scale. There have been others, but they were fairly minor, he said.
“This is SolarWinds with ransomware,” he said. He was referring to a Russian cyberespionage hacking campaign discovered in December that spread by infecting network management software to infiltrate U.S. federal agencies and scores of corporations.
Cybersecurity researcher Jake Williams, president of Rendition Infosec, said he was already working with six companies hit by the ransomware. It’s no accident that this happened before the Fourth of July weekend, when IT staffing is generally thin, he added.
“There’s zero doubt in my mind that the timing here was intentional,” he said.
More
https://apnews.com/article/business-technology-3011c6037bda9ac11b1249a4beb13b06
Global Inflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
"Considerable uncertainty is attached to all economic estimates."
Alan Greenspan, Chairman Federal Reserve Board, testimony 1994.
$100 oil? Analysts share their price forecasts after a strong rally in the first half of 2021
Published Fri, Jul 2 2021 1:43 AM EDT
Oil prices surged more than 45% in the first six months of 2021, rallying toward $80 a barrel for the first time in more than two and a half years.
Analysts on Wall Street believe there is potential for crude markets to climb even higher in the coming months, although not everyone is convinced that’s the case.
International benchmark Brent crude futures traded at $75.76 a barrel on Friday, down around 0.11%. The oil contract recorded gains of more than 45% through to the end of June, having stood at $51.80 on Jan. 1.
----Looking ahead, Goldman Sachs sees Brent prices averaging above $80 in the third quarter, with potential spikes “well above” that level as demand comes roaring back. JPMorgan, meanwhile, expects crude oil prices to “decisively” break into the $80s during the final three months of the year.
Analysts at Bank of America are even more bullish. They argue Brent prices could see $100 in the summer of next year. That would mark a return to triple digits for the first time since 2014.
It comes as all three of the world’s main forecasting agencies — OPEC, the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration — expect a demand-led recovery to pick up speed in the second half of 2021.
Tamas Varga, oil analyst at PVM Oil Associates, said global and regional oil inventories have been falling so far this year, supporting oil prices. “This trend is set to continue for the rest of the year,” he added.
More
Tight Capacity on Shipping Lines Brings Record Rates, Delays
U.S. retailers are facing high prices and are scrambling for scarce space on vessels ahead of the holiday shopping season
June 30, 2021 9:00 am ET
Hopes among cargo owners for relief from record ocean-freight rates are fading fast as growing demand for China-made goods ahead of the holiday shopping season threatens to overwhelm container-shipping operations.
Shipowners, used to years of overcapacity, had largely held back on ordering new vessels over the past year as the pandemic upended supply chains. Lockdowns to control the spread of the coronavirus caused trade to tumble early in 2020, but a sharp rebound in consumer demand began last summer and picked up steam in 2021.
“Before Covid and based on the capacity available and the limited new orders, demand and supply would have reached a balance this year and freight rates across the main trade routes were expected to gradually increase,” said a senior executive at a big Korean shipyard. ”But Covid shook supply chains, freight rates shot up and now everyone is looking at adding more ships.”
Daily rates from China to the U.S. West Coast are up 66% since January and more than 400% since the beginning of 2020, according to the Freightos Baltic Index. Spot rates from Asia to Northern Europe are up 92% and 480%, respectively, over the same periods.
“Covid has been the biggest boost ever for container ships, with a supercycle which is set to continue,” said Jonathan Roach, a container analyst at London-based Braemar ACM Shipbroking. “The rates have gone ballistic and it doesn’t look like it will change until next year.”
Demand for space on container ships is mainly driven by retailers such as Walmart Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. that have been rushing to restock after a year of supply-chain disruptions related to the pandemic. The high demand is leading to bottlenecks at ports around the world and pushing up prices for commodities and manufactured goods.
“We are short of summer sandals and bikinis and we’ll probably be short of boots and coats when the winter sets in,” said Anna Moore, a manager at a clothing and accessories boutique at The Westchester, a mall in White Plains, N.Y. “Shipping costs have tripled since last year, but merchandise comes in up to 45 days late.”
More
“Very few people can afford to be poor."
George Bernard Shaw. Socialist.
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
This weekend, what did Dr. Fauci know about gain of function research in Wuhan and when did he know it. Was Dr. Fauci covering up?
Forbes covers the increasingly suspicious actions of Dr. Fauci and others at the end of January 2020 and start of February 2020. Approx. 8 minutes.
JUST IN: Jim Jordan Attacks Fauci's Actions At Start Of COVID-19 Pandemic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz5UN_VuA_A
Six Fully Vaccinated People Died of Covid-19 in Most-Vaccinated Nation
Vidya Gappy and Antony Sguazzin1 July 2021, 12:14 BST Updated on 2 July 2021, 06:38 BST
· Of those five had taken Covishield and one Sinopharm
· Island nation is the world’s most heavily vaccinated
The coronavirus has killed six fully vaccinated people in the Seychelles, which is suffering heightened Covid-19 infections despite inoculating a greater proportion of its people than any other nation.
Of those, five had taken Covishield, a version of the AstraZeneca Plc vaccine made in India, and one had been given Sinopharm, Jude Gedeon, the island nation’s public health commissioner said at a press conference on Thursday. Covishield has mainly been reserved for people over 60 in the Seychelles. All of those who died had serious underlying conditions, he said.
The rise in infections, which surged at the beginning of May and has remained at elevated levels ever since, is likely due to the arrival of the highly-transmissible delta variant, which was first identified in India, Gedeon said.
“It looks like delta came in Seychelles in May which explain the surge at the beginning of May,” Gedeon said. “We presume that the majority of cases we got in May was from that variant.”
The palm-fringed archipelago had rushed to inoculate its 98,000 people so that it could reopen to tourism, the lifeblood of its economy. It had to impose restrictions on gatherings and opening times for bars and restaurants after the initial surge and has maintained those.
“For the last three weeks a team of experts from World Health Organization and Africa Centers for Disease Control have been working with us to evaluate our vaccination rate, data and response,” Gedeon said. “They will produce a report which will help us decide on the strategy to be used moving forward in terms of vaccination, measures etc.”
Frequent genomic studies have been recommended, he said.
Once-promising mRNA COVID-19 vaccine disappoints with final trial data
Rich Haridy July 01, 2021
Behind Pfizer and Moderna, CureVac’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was long-anticipated, with hundreds of millions of doses already pre-ordered. But its final large trial data has disappointed with only 48 percent efficacy at preventing symptomatic disease.
Late in 2020, two experimental mRNA COVID-19 vaccines delivered stunningly positive final phase human trial results. With efficacy higher than 90 percent, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines introduced the world to an entirely new kind of biotechnology, and offered a way out of this devastating global pandemic.
Trailing behind those two vaccines was a third mRNA COVID-19 candidate from a German company called CureVac. Founded in 2000 by Ingmar Hoerr, CureVac was one of the first biopharmaceutical companies to really focus on mRNA therapies.
Following the success of other mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in late 2020, a great deal of attention shifted to CureVac’s promising candidate. The company was a little slower to get development going early in the pandemic, partially due to a notorious refusal of a billion-dollar buyout offer from US president Donald Trump. Eventually the German government invested hundreds of millions of euros to get CureVac’s research moving but large-scale clinical trials still didn’t get started until the end of the year.
CureVac’s vaccine promised significant benefits over Pfizer and Moderna’s candidates. It was cheaper and crucially didn’t require the extreme cold storage needed to preserve other mRNA vaccines.
Members of the European Union pre-ordered nearly half a billion doses of CureVac’s vaccine and it was set to play a major role in global vaccination efforts.
Over the last couple of weeks the first data from CureVac’s massive global Phase 3 trial has been revealed. The trial enrolled around 40,000 people, spanned 10 countries and covered 15 different SARS-CoV-2 variants.
According to the company, its vaccine, dubbed CVnCoV, showed an efficacy of just 48 percent against symptomatic disease of any severity. A more detailed breakdown of the data reveals a slightly rosier picture with efficacy rising to 77 percent when focusing on preventing moderate to severe disease in subjects aged 18 to 60. And, perhaps most importantly, there were zero hospitalizations or deaths in the vaccine cohort.
----Exactly why CureVac’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine does not seem to be as effective as Pfizer or Moderna’s is a massive mystery. CureVac contends the primary reason is due to the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 variants circulating during its clinical trial. Only three percent of COVID-19 cases detected in the CVnCoV trial came from the original SARS-CoV-2 strain.
More
Next, some very useful 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
FDA information. https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download
Regulatory Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker. https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some more useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
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. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards.
A template for fast synthesis of nanographenes
New combined synthesis method an exciting breakthrough in the construction of nanographene libraries
Date: June 28, 2021
Source: Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (ITbM), Nagoya University
Summary: Development of a new APEX reaction means that large numbers of nanographenes can be easily synthesized using a commercially available hydrocarbon as a template.
A group of researchers at Nagoya University, Japan, have developed a new method for quickly and efficiently synthesizing nanographenes, a type of nanocarbon with great potential as a next generation material.
Nanographenes are the part structures of graphene, which is a sheet of carbon atoms around 3 nanometers thick with particular potential for use in semiconductor development, having electron mobility several hundred times better than current generation materials. Graphene was first isolated in 2004, a discovery which received the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics, making it a very new material which is currently the subject of a great deal of research.
With magnetic and electric characteristics beyond those of graphene, nanographenes are equally of interest to scientists in the nanocarbon research field. The biggest obstacle, albeit an exciting one, faced by researchers is the sheer number of potential nanographenes. The number of potentially possible nanographene structures increases with the number of benzene rings (6 atoms of carbon in a hexagonal formation) to make them. For example, even a relatively small 10 benzene ring nanographene may have up to 16,000 variants. As each nanographene has different physical characteristics, the key to applied nanographene research is to identify the relationship between the structure and characteristics of as many nanographenes as possible.
Thus, scientists' task is to create a nanographene library, containing data on the properties of as many nanographenes as possible. However, the current method of nanographene synthesis, known as a coupling reaction, is a multi-step process which produces one single nanographene. Thus, to create a 100-nanographene library, 100 separate coupling reactions would have to be carried out. Even this would be a significant undertaking, rendering the construction of a truly comprehensive nanographene library practically impossible.
To solve this problem, the Nagoya University research group, led by Professor Kenichiro Itami, have been working on the APEX reaction, a reaction which uses polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons as templates to synthesize nanographenes. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons have three areas of their structure -- known as the K region, M region and bay region -- which can be elongated in an APEX reaction, producing three nanographenes. These nanographenes can then be further elongated in a second reaction, meaning that a large number of nanographenes can be synthesized from a single polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon template molecule.
With Professor Itami's group having already developed the K region APEX reaction, and another group of scientists having done so for the bay region, they turned their attention to the M region. They activated the M region using the 1950 Nobel Prize winning Diels-Alder reaction, and succeeded in carrying out an elongation reaction on the activated M region, thus rendering all three possible sites on the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons capable of synthesizing nanographenes.
The researchers were able to produce 13 nanographenes with three APEX reactions, with most of these being previously unseen structures, thus proving both the efficiency and usefulness of this new method.
This exciting new piece of research and its potential to accelerate the creation of nanographene libraries is a step towards the development of the next generation of materials, which have the potential to revolutionize semiconductors and solar energy and improve lives all around the world.
This weekend’s musical diversion. Alessandro Marcello (1684~1750)
Approx. 10 minutes.
A. Marcello - Oboe Concerto in d minor (Marcel Ponseele, baroque oboe / Il Gardellino)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE2O_yfgtBU
This weekend’s chess masterclass. Approx. 15 minutes.
Whoops?! I Guess it Wasn't Pinned :) || Carlsen vs Giri || || GAR (2021)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUxo53Um_is
This weekend’s science update. Approx. 7 minutes.
Finland Might Have Solved Nuclear Power’s Biggest Problem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYpiK3W-g_0
"The leaders of the French Revolution excited the poor against the rich; this made the rich poor, but it never made the poor rich."
Fisher Ames, 1758-1808.
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