Baltic Dry Index. 4275 +60 Brent Crude 75.34
Spot Gold 1754
“Will you walk into my parlour?”
said the Spider to the Fly,
“‘Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;
The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
And I have many curious things to show when you are there.”
All in all, it was something of a bad week all round.
In Washington, the Carter era returned and it wasn’t just the inflation.
In China, fears that the Evergrande real estate empire will collapse next week. Fury that the new AUKUS alliance will provide nuclear hunter-killer subs to Australia. Those Aussie subs will be hunting China’s nuclear subs.
In France fury that the new AUKUS alliance blindsided them and blew up a French deal to sell submarines to Australia. France recalled its Washington Ambassador and cancelled a Gala Friday night DC party.
The Pentagon’s top General caught out in a lie, reversed itself via a lower ranking General making the Mea Culpa.
In the stock casinos, fear of the approaching month of October, the Fed starting to tapper its bond purchases, and clear signs of sentiment changing.
S&P 500 falls Friday, notches second straight week of losses in September slump
Stocks dipped on Friday as investors remain cautious due to a resurgent Covid virus, a Federal Reserve meeting next week and a historical tendency for September to be a weak month for equities.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 166.44 points or 0.5% to close at 34,584.88, dragged down by a nearly 2.9% drop in Dow Inc. The S&P 500 shed 0.9% to 4,432.99 and the Nasdaq Composite lost 0.9% to close at 15,043.97.
Mega-cap technology stocks were mostly in the red, with social media giant Facebook dropping 2.2% and Alphabet falling just shy of 2%. Apple lost 1.8%, and Microsoft slipped 1.7%.
The Food and Drug Administration advisory committee on Friday rejected a plan to administer booster shots of Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine to the general public. Pfizer fell 1.3% and BioNTech dropped 3.6%. Moderna lost 2.4%.
History is not on the market’s side with the S&P 500 averaging a 0.4% decline for September, the worst of any month, according to the Stock Trader’s Almanac. Friday in particular begins a historically weak period for stocks as those September losses typically come in the back half of the month.
Some of the volatility that comes during September is often surrounding so-called quadruple witching, which occurred at the close Friday. This is the expiration of stock index futures, stock index options, stock options, and single-stock futures.
“We expect volatility to increase over the next month driven by a seasonal pickup in investor uncertainty, continued virus uncertainty, and significant monetary and fiscal policy catalysts,” wrote John Marshall, head of derivatives research for Goldman Sachs, in a note Friday. Marshall cited data showing S&P 500 volatility typically increased by 27% from August to October.
Still, stocks closed on Friday with losses for the week. The Dow slipped less than 0.1% this week, for its third straight week of declines. The Dow has not had a 3-week losing streak since September 2020. The S&P 500 fell nearly 0.6% since Monday for its second straight week of losses. The Nasdaq Composite dropped close to 0.5% this week.
For the month, stocks are also trading in negative territory. The Dow is down about 2.2% in September. The S&P 500 is off by nearly 2% this month but still just 2.5% from its all-time high. The Nasdaq has lost 1.4% this month.
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/16/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html
The stock market is undergoing a slow motion deterioration with pockets of shares down 20% or more
Published Thu, Sep 16 2021 7:21 AM EDT Updated Thu, Sep 16 2021 4:42 PM EDT
The land mines for the market are growing. Seasonal weakness is combining with uncertainty over the Covid-19 delta variant’s impact on consumer behavior, rising labor and material costs pushing prices higher as well as poor economic data out of China.
While the S&P 500 is still about 1% from its record high, those land mines are taking their toll on large sectors of the market.
“For the last several months, most stocks have declined more frequently than they have advanced--evidence of a weakening market condition,” CFRA chief investment strategist Sam Stovall said in a recent note to clients.
Other strategists have noticed this divergence as well.
“As the equity market reaches new highs, the divergence in the advance-decline line suggests we may be approaching a top,” Guggenheim global chief investment officer Scott Minerd said in a recent tweet. “In the past, such divergence has indicated the market is vulnerable to a sell-off.”
The 20% decline club is getting larger
About 15% of S&P 500 stocks are more than 20% below 52-week highs, but much larger swaths of the midcap and small-cap universe are down 20% or more. The latter groups are less tech-focused and more susceptible to an economic slowdown:
Slow motion deterioration
(percentage of stocks that are 20% or more below their 52-week highs)
- S&P 500 15%
- S&P Midcap 30%
- S&P Small Cap 48%
The Covid-related weakness is affecting sectors associated with the reopening, such as industrials and retail.
“This phase of the pandemic poses downside risks to the economic recovery, including to inflation components that are more sensitive to the disruption in services demand,” Barclays economist Blerina Uruci wrote in a recent note to clients.
More
One stunning afternoon: Setbacks imperil Biden’s reset
WASHINGTON (AP) — It was an hour President Joe Biden would no doubt like to forget.
On Friday, the Pentagon acknowledged that a drone strike in Afghanistan killed 10 civilians, including seven children, not terrorists. A panel advising the Food and Drug Administration voted to not recommend COVID booster shots for all Americans over 16, dashing an administration hope. And France announced it was recalling its ambassador to the U.S. out of anger for being cut out of a secret nuclear submarine deal Biden had struck with the United Kingdom and Australia.
The punishing headlines, all within an hour, underscored the perils for any president from the uncontrollable events that can define a term in office.
They came as Biden has seen public approval numbers trend downward as the COVID-19 crisis has deepened and Americans cast blame for the flawed U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The administration had hoped to roll out tougher vaccine guidelines, a new international alliance to thwart China and a recommitment to what Biden has done best: drawing on his years on Capitol Hill and knowledge of the legislative process to cajole fellow Democrats to pass the two far-reaching spending bills that make up the heart of his agenda.
More
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-europe-business-health-france-516d7c24943c830823ff1602e4ab604e
France, still mad about that submarine deal, just recalled its ambassadors to the United States and Australia
WASHINGTON — France, still mad about the submarine deal Australia struck with the United States and the United Kingdom, has recalled its ambassadors from the U.S. and Australia.
France’s foreign minister said Friday that the country immediately recalled the ambassadors in protest of a trilateral security deal that included nuclear-powered submarines for Australia.
“At the request of the President of the Republic, I have decided to immediately recall our two ambassadors to the United States and Australia to Paris for consultations,” French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in a statement.
“This exceptional decision is justified by the exceptional gravity of the announcements made on 15 September by Australia and the United States.”
More
Pentagon reverses itself, calls deadly Kabul strike an error
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon retreated from its defense of a drone strike that killed multiple civilians in Afghanistan last month, announcing Friday that a review revealed that only civilians were killed in the attack, not an Islamic State extremist as first believed.
“The strike was a tragic mistake,” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told a Pentagon news conference.
McKenzie apologized for the error and said the United States is considering making reparation payments to the family of the victims. He said the decision to strike a white Toyota Corolla sedan, after having tracked it for about eight hours, was made in an “earnest belief” — based on a standard of “reasonable certainty” — that it posed an imminent threat to American forces at Kabul airport. The car was believed to have been carrying explosives in its trunk, he said.
----The airstrike was the last of a U.S. war that ended as it had begun in 2001 — with the Taliban in power in Kabul.
----Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters two days after the attack that it appeared to have been a “righteous” strike and that at least one of the people killed was a “facilitator” for the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate, which had killed 169 Afghan civilians and 13 American service members in a suicide bombing on Aug. 26 at the Kabul airport.
After McKenzie’s remarks on Friday, Milley expressed regret.
More.
Finally, the new rising trade superpower applies to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, (CPTPP,) that was formed after the fading trade superpower pulled out in 2017, of the then forming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP.)
But will the minnows let in an aggressive Orca whale? More aptly, why would the flies let a spider into their club?
China applies to join Pacific trade pact to boost economic clout
September 16, 2021 3:36 PM
BEIJING (Reuters) -China has filed an application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the commerce ministry said, as the world’s second-biggest economy looks to bolster its clout in trade.
Commerce Minister Wang Wentao submitted China’s application to join the free trade agreement in a letter to New Zealand’s trade minister, Damien O’Connor, the Chinese ministry said in a statement late on Thursday.
The CPTPP was signed by 11 countries including Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan and New Zealand in 2018.
Before that, it was known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and seen as an important economic counterweight to China’s regional influence.
Japan, the CPTPP’s chair this year, said it will consult with member countries to respond to China’s request, but stopped short of signalling a timeline for doing so.
“Japan believes that it’s necessary to determine whether China, which submitted a request to join the TPP-11, is ready to meet its extremely high standards,” Japanese Economy Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura told reporters on Friday.
The TPP was central to former U.S. President Barack Obama’s strategic pivot to Asia but his successor, Donald Trump, withdrew the United States from the pact in 2017.
Accession to the CPTPP would be a major boost for China following the signing of the 15-nation Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) free trade agreement last year.
Beijing has lobbied here for its inclusion in the pact, including by highlighting that the Chinese and Australian economies have enormous potential for cooperation. However, relations between the two countries have soured.
Britain in June began negotiations to enter the trade pact, while Thailand has also signalled interest in joining it.
Wang and O’Connor held a telephone conference to discuss the next steps following China’s application, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said.
Said the cunning Spider to
the Fly, “Dear friend what can I do,
To prove the warm affection I’ve always felt for you?
I have within my pantry, good store of all that’s nice;
I’m sure you’re very welcome–will you please to take a slice?”
Global Inflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
Just Get Me a Box’: Inside the Brutal Realities of Supply Chain Hell
Logistics managers are battling the pandemic, a labor shortage, and huge demand to get goods to your front door.
16 September 2021, 05:01 BST
It’s mid-August, and logistics manager RoxAnne Thomas’s phone won’t stop pinging. Her faucets, sinks, and toilets are waylaid near Shanghai, snagged in Vancouver, and buried under a pile of shipping containers in a rail yard outside Chicago. As U.S. transportation manager for Gerber Plumbing Fixtures LLC, a unit of Taiwan’s Globe Union Industrial Corp. that’s based in Woodridge, Ill., Thomas is trying to overcome the biggest shock wave to unsettle global trade since the dawn of container shipping almost seven decades ago.
The pandemic has thrown the vital but usually humdrum world of logistics into a tailspin, spurring shortages of everything: masks and vaccine vials, semiconductors, plastic polymers, bicycles, and even baseball bobbleheads. For Thomas it’s complicated the shipment of about 10,000 20-foot containers of bathroom equipment she brings into the U.S. each year from China and Mexico, but it has also revealed a bigger, structural challenge.
---- “Every step of the process, there’s still backlog,” said Thomas, 41, in one of several interviews from late July through August. “The beginning of the supply chain in China—I don’t think that’s going to get better for a year.” And the outlook more broadly? “A year and a half before things are truly back to normal.”
Although the pandemic has shuttered factories and shaken supplies of raw materials, Thomas’s chief challenge is freight, and it starts with what used to be cheap, plentiful commodities: shipping containers.
Two years ago, a 40-foot container cost less than $2,000 to transport goods from Asia to the U.S. Today the service fetches as much as $25,000 if an importer pays a premium for on-time delivery, which is a luxury.
More.
Fire At UK-France Subsea Power Cable Could Trigger Winter Blackouts
Friday, Sep 17, 2021 - 02:45 AM
A fire in a subsea cable has dramatically reduced power imports from France until March, U.K.'s National Grid Plc said, deepening the energy crisis that threatens winter blackouts for millions.
The timing couldn't be worse. Before the fire, the U.K. was already experiencing a five-year low in spare winter capacity. Compound this with gas shortages and the lack of renewable energy sources, sending power prices on a record-breaking run. The country may experience grid chaos in the coming months.
"If we don't start to remedy the situation, we are going to be facing blackouts this winter," Catherine Newman, chief executive officer of Limejump Ltd., a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, told Bloomberg on Thursday. "If things don't start to reverse soon, we will see the industry getting turned off across the board."
"If anything goes wrong, we might not have anything left in the back pocket," said Tom Edwards, a consultant at Cornwall Insight Ltd., an adviser to the government and utilities. "If a nuke trips offline or something else big, that could cause issues because we might not have anything to replace it."
Britain receives power via six subsea cables, and two of them are connected to France's power grids of more than 56 nuclear power plants.
The cable's total capacity will be shut off until March 2022. The shortage is expected to exacerbate power price volatility when peak demand is seen in the winter months.
"The outage is going to lift the potential for price volatility as long as its offline," said Glenn Rickson, head of power analysis at S&P Global Platts.
The compounding energy crunch is fueling concerns about inflation when the economy is still recovering from the pandemic.
The subsea cable interruption doesn't mean blackouts will be seen in the immediate future. Still, as power demand increases as temperatures turn cooler, demand will spike and strain the grid.
More
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
"An Environmental Disaster": An EV Battery Metals Crunch Is On The Horizon As The Industry Races To Recycle
by Tyler Durden Monday, Aug 02, 2021 - 08:40 PM
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Can you grow COVID-19 vaccine-lettuce? UC Riverside scientists think so
Prof. Giraldo “We are testing this approach with spinach and lettuce and have long-term goals of people growing it in their own gardens. Farmers could grow entire fields.”
By AARON REICH SEPTEMBER 17, 2021 10:29
Injectable vaccines could be a thing of the past, with University of California Riverside (UCR) researchers investigating turning edible plants like lettuce into mRNA vaccine factories and make edible vaccines, which could have significant implications in combating COVID-19.
Backed by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the project works by showing how DNA with mRNA vaccines can be delivered into plant cells in a way that lets them replicate. IF this works, it could mean that plants could produce as much mRNA as a traditional vaccine injection.
“Ideally, a single plant would produce enough mRNA to vaccinate a single person,” UNCR's Department of Botany and Plant Science's Prof. Juan Pablo Giraldo said in a statement.
“We are testing this approach with spinach and lettuce and have long-term goals of people growing it in their own gardens,” added Giraldo, who is leading the research and working in collaboration with researchers from UC San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University. “Farmers could also eventually grow entire fields of it.”
But how do mRNA vaccines replicate inside plants?
The key, it turns out, are chloroplasts. These small organelles exist exclusively in plant cells, and cannot be found in non-plant life forms, save for the amoeboid known as Paulinella chromatophora.
The amount of chloroplasts per cell varies heavily depending on the plant. Inside the cell, they behave dynamically and serve a wide variety of functions such as synthesizing fatty acids, amino acids and helping the plant's immune response.
But its most famous and crucial function is to conduct photosynthesis, where chlorophyll captures energy from the light of the Sun and turning it into energy stored in ATP and NADPH molecules. This process allows it to free oxygen from water in the cells. It also then conducts what is known as the Calvin cycle, using ATP and NADPH to convert carbon dioxide into glucose.
---- But the ability of chloroplasts to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into glucose and other molecules has other implications, with Giraldo saying that they are an "untapped source for making desirable molecules."
And he has evidence to back this up. His prior research has shown that chloroplasts can express genes not naturally part of the plant if foreign genetic material is properly sent into the plant cell. Of course, this could only be done if the material was encased in the proper protective material, and figuring out which material would be used can be especially tricky. However, it is exactly this that Giraldo's laboratory specializes in.
But to get it in, one needs nanotechnology. That is why Giraldo has partnered with UC San Diego nanoengineering specialist Prof. Nicole Steinmetz to deliver the mRNA material into the chloroplasts.
"Our idea is to repurpose naturally occurring nanoparticles, namely plant viruses, for gene delivery to plants," Steinmetz said. "Some engineering goes into this to make the nanoparticles go to the chloroplasts and also to render them non-infectious toward the plants."
If successful, these findings could revolutionize how vaccines are administered into the human body. This is especially relevant, as vaccine hesitancy is strong in many places throughout the world, something that in the COVID-19 pandemic, the most widely-used vaccines for which are mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, can contribute to rising cases.
But this method could see vaccine hesitancy take a significant cut. This is because a significant amount of all vaccine hesitancy isn't simply rooted in doubts over the vaccine's effectiveness or misunderstandings about the virus and the vaccine's properties, but due to a simple fear of needles.
More
Dr. Fareed addresses Italian Senate at COVID summit
Sep 16, 2021
The following is Dr. Fareed's speech to the Italian Senate, Rome, and Italy at the International COVID Summit Monday, Sept. 13.
You can watch part of the speech here. Closing remarks can be viewed here.
Thank you for that kind introduction.
Distinguished Senators and Dear colleagues, friends, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great honor for me to address you today.
My name is Dr. George Fareed. I practice medicine in a rural town called Brawley California that sits on the Mexican border. This small community became the epicenter of COVID 19 in California, and I, who continue to treat patients in both the outpatient and hospital setting, found myself in the “eye of the storm,” treating very sick and contagious patients----not a place I thought I would be at age 76.
However, my training in biochemistry and virology, along with my degree from Harvard Medical School, prepared me well for the battle ahead, a battle that I have been fighting now for the past 18 months.
I, along with my colleague Dr. Brian Tyson, are winning the battle against COVID-19 for one simple reason: we follow the science!
COVID-19 is a disease that can be easily treated in its early stage, but comes very difficult to treat as the disease progresses.
As scientists such as Drs. Didier Raoult, Vladimir Zelenko, and Peter McCullough have taught us, the first stage of COVID involves viral replication resulting in symptoms such as flu-like symptoms of cough, fever, malaise, headache, and perhaps loss of taste and smell---if a patient is left untreated, this may progress into “cytokine storm” where oxygen saturation drops, and then into the thromboembolic stage where blood clots occur that can be fatal.
I’ve treated patients in all three stages--- delaying treatment in an elderly or high-risk patient, those with co-morbidities such as asthma or diabetes, is nothing short of cruel as the disease predictably progresses—many then die. The standard “wait and see” approach to COVID-19 has been the greatest medical failure I have seen in my long career because deaths are preventable- but you must treat early!
NO ONE NEEDS TO DIE FROM COVID-19
Eighteen months ago, in March 2020, I, along with my colleague Dr. Brian Tyson, began treating COVID-19 patients early in the course of the disease with a combination of medications, initially primarily hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin or doxycylcine, and nutraceuticals including zinc, vitamin D and C.
As Dr. McCullough explains, medications such as hydroxychloroquine act as ionophores to allow zinc into the cell to interfere with viral replication.
As time progressed, so did our treatment, and we added drugs such as ivermectin, fluvoxamine, and monoclonal antibodies, as well as aspirin and budesonide (steroid) to treat the other aspects of the disease.
We became part of an international network of physicians, including groups such as the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons led by Dr. McCullough and leaders such as Dr. Jean-Pierre Kiekens from Covexit.com---all engaged in one singular goal- saving lives through early treatment.
I developed my own protocols which vary slightly from patient to patient- depending on their clinical situation.
So- what do our results look like?
We have now treated over 7,000 patients, and there has not been a single death in patients treated within the first 5 to 7 days of the onset of symptoms. NOT A SINGLE DEATH. This includes patients with multiple co-morbidities as well as patients in their 90s!
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
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.
Rolls-Royce's all-electric Spirit of Innovation flies for the first time
David Szondy September 16, 2021
Rolls-Royce's high-speed, all-electric Spirit of Innovation aircraft has flown for the first time. On September 15, 2021 at 2:56 pm BST, the speedster prop plane took off from the UK Ministry of Defence’s Boscombe Down site outside Amesbury, Wiltshire, England for a 15-minute flight.
The first flight comes over six months after its first taxi trials and over a year later than its originally scheduled takeoff. The program will now move into a more intense flight-testing phase to collect data about the aircraft's electric power and propulsion system performance, and will culminate in an attempt to fly at over 300 mph (480 km/h).
Part of the Accelerating the Electrification of Flight (ACEL) program, the Spirit of Innovation is being developed by Rolls-Royce to not only set a new electric-propelled air-speed record, but also to push the development of eVTOL air taxis.
Inside the sleek streamlined hull that harks back to the classic racing planes of the 1930s is what Rolls-Royce claims is the most power-dense battery pack ever assembled for an aircraft. This consists of a battery pack of 6,000 cells that punch 400 kW (536 bhp) at 750 V through the electric powertrain and could reach a maximum output of 750 kW (1,000 bhp) with an Active Thermal Management System Cooling radiator to keep the system from overheating.
The batteries run three YASA 750R lightweight e-motors to turn the trio of electrically-actuated blades of the single propeller spinning at 2,400 RPM for a more stable ride and an energy efficiency of up to 90 percent. In addition, sensors monitor performance from 20,000 points in the powertrain.
"The first flight of the Spirit of Innovation is a great achievement for the ACCEL team and Rolls-Royce," Warren East, CEO, Rolls-Royce. "We are focused on producing the technology breakthroughs society needs to decarbonize transport across air, land and sea, and capture the economic opportunity of the transition to net zero. This is not only about breaking a world record; the advanced battery and propulsion technology developed for this program has exciting applications for the Urban Air Mobility market and can help make 'jet zero' a reality."
The video below shows the Spirit of Innovation taking off.
Source: Rolls-Royce
This weekend’s musical diversion. Another almost unheard Italian composer. Approx. 6 minutes.
Niccolò Jommelli (1714-1774) - Periodical Ouverture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVsCJMgEiC0
This weekend’s chess update. Approx. 17 minutes.
All Hail King Richárd!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXN6lUUA7Fg
This weekend’s maths update. Approx. 7 minutes.
The Strange Orbit of Earth's Second Moon (plus The Planets)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU-g6mC1F0g
The Spider turned him
round about, and went into his den,
For well he knew the silly Fly would soon come back again:
So he wove a subtle web, in a little corner sly,
And set his table ready, to dine upon the Fly.
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