Baltic Dry Index. 4257 -153 Brent Crude 86.21
Spot Gold 1802
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 26/10/21 World 244,837,898
Deaths 4,970,286
Why was the stock trader electrocuted?
Because he shorted Tesla.
In the Magic Money Tree central bankster fuelled stock casinos, it’s an Electric Vehicle one-way street to billionaire heaven.
To this old dinosaur market follower, there’s a very fishy smell around the stock casinos today.
Is anyone at the Fed long Tesla?
Asian shares mostly higher, tracking Wall Street rally
TOKYO (AP) — Asian shares were mostly higher Tuesday after another rally to a record high on Wall Street.
Stocks have been pushing broadly higher as companies turn in much stronger profit reports for the summer than analysts had expected. Historically low interest rates, along with strong corporate profit growth, have helped the S&P 500 more than double from the bottom it set in March 2020 in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
On Monday, the S&P 500 rose 0.5% to 4,566.48, surpassing a record set on Thursday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average also reached an all-time high, gaining 0.2% to 35,741.15. The Nasdaq composite picked up 0.9%, to 15,226.71.
In Tuesday trading, Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 added 1.8% to 29,100.57. The advance was helped by a 2% jump in electronics and entertainment Sony Corp., which is reporting earnings later this week. Sony, which has video game and movie divisions, has seen sales rise as people opted for stay-home entertainment during the pandemic.
“Sentiments in Asia may largely mirrored the stellar performance in Wall Street overnight, while the COVID-19 situation in China remains on watch with control measures being tightened,” said Yeap Jun Rong, market strategist at IG in Singapore.
China has reimposed travel restrictions in some areas to combat outbreaks of the virus that are adding to concerns over a slowing economy.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.4% to 26,021.39. The Shanghai Composite was flat at 3,610.56.
South Korea’s Kospi edged up 0.6% to 3,037.21 after the government reported the economy grew at an annual pace of 4%, according to government data. That was slightly weaker than expected. But analysts expect consumer spending to recover as virus cases ease with progress in the country’s vaccine rollout.
On Wall Street, Tesla jumped to the biggest gain in the S&P 500 after Hertz said it will buy 100,000 Model 3 vehicles for its fleet. The landmark deal for the electric-vehicle industry sent Tesla up 12.7%. Because it’s one of the biggest stocks in the market, its moves have an outsized effect on the S&P 500.
S&P 500 companies so far have reported profits for the third quarter that were nearly 46% higher than year-ago levels.
More
Tesla hits $1 trillion market cap for the first time after Hertz says it will buy 100,000 electric vehicles
Tesla hit a $1 trillion market cap on Monday following news that Hertz is ordering 100,000 vehicles to build out its electric vehicle rental fleet by the end of 2022.
The company joins trillion-dollar market cap companies like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.
News of the deal brought Tesla’s stock to more than $1,045 a share midday, a new record high one trading day after the shares broke $900. The stock closed up 12.66% at about $1,024 a share.
Strong EU sales and bullish analyst calls further boosted Tesla’s stock price. Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas raised his price target on Tesla to $1,200 a share from $900 on Sunday. Jato Dynamics said Monday that Tesla’s Model 3 electric sedan became the first fully electric vehicle to top new car sales overall in Europe in September.
The deal with Hertz, which will bring in a reported $4.2 billion for Tesla, is the largest ever purchase of electric vehicles, Bloomberg previously reported.
Tesla could not be reached for comment.
Bloomberg also reported the cars are slated for delivery within the next 14 months and will be available to customers in the U.S. and parts of Europe as early as November, according to the people.
The deal comes more than a year after Hertz filed for bankruptcy protection during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as demand for travel and rental vehicles waned. This year, investors from Knighthead Capital Management and Certares Management said they would take over the company.
But outside of the one-way EV stock casinos, storm clouds continue gathering. If stock casinos are supposed to be forward looking predictors of the future, for now they are driving into the future using the rear view mirror.
Business economists less optimistic about next year’s growth
WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation’s business economists are slightly less optimistic about growth prospects over the next year, noting a number of threats ranging from higher-than-expected inflation to lingering disruptions from COVID-19 and snarled supply chains.
The National Association for Business Economics released a new report Monday that found 66% of NABE members responding to a survey expect the economy to grow by 3% to 5.9% over the next year while 28% were less optimistic, pegging growth over the next year at a far slower 0.1% to 2.9%.
That result represented a downgrade from the previous survey in July which had found an identical 66% who believed growth would be 3% to 5.9% but 20% of those surveyed expected growth to come in at an even stronger 6% to 8.9%. In the new survey, no NABE member saw growth higher than the 3% to 5.9% range over the next year.
The NABE forecast for GDP over the next year is generally in line with the expectations of many private forecasting firms.
The government on Thursday will release its first look at economic growth, as measured by the gross domestic product, for the July-September quarter. Economists are forecasting GDP grew at an annual rate of around 3% in the third quarter, a marked slowdown from growth rates of 6.1% in the first quarter and 6.7% in the second quarter.
---- The NABE survey found 33% of those responding saw increased cost pressures as the biggest risk to their company’s outlook followed closely by 28% of NABE survey respondents who saw the possibility of higher COVID-19 cases as the biggest threat. Twenty percent saw further problems with supply chains as the biggest threat.
---- The NABE survey found that 47% of the survey group indicated their companies were experiencing worker shortages, up from 39% in July. None of the NABE survey members felt these labor shortages would be resolved by the end of this year but 36% felt the labor situation will improve in 2022 while 14% said the labor shortages would still be around in 2023 or even later.
In terms of the supply chain problems, half of those surveyed said their companies were experiencing delays or shortages in receiving materials, up from 40% in the July survey.
More
South Korea's Q3 GDP grows at slower pace, misses forecast
October 26, 2021 2:38 AM BST
SEOUL, Oct 26 (Reuters) - South Korea's economy grew at a slower pace in the third quarter, as robust exports were offset by weak domestic demand and construction and facility investments, data from the Bank of Korea showed on Tuesday.
Gross domestic product (GDP) grew a seasonally adjusted 0.3% in the September quarter from three months earlier, slowing from 0.8% growth in the preceding quarter and missing a median 0.6% growth tipped in a Reuters survey. read more
From a year earlier, Asia's fourth-largest economy expanded 4.0% during the third quarter, down sharply from a 6.0% expansion in the second quarter, which was the fastest in a decade. That also compares to a 4.2% rise seen in the survey. read more
UPDATE 1-Japan's services prices rise for 7th straight month on freight cost gains
October 26, 2021
TOKYO, Oct 26 (Reuters) - The prices that Japanese companies charge each other for services rose 0.9% in September from a year earlier to mark a seventh straight month of gains, a sign inflationary pressure is building mostly on global supply constraints.
There is uncertainty, however, on whether firms will pass on higher costs to households as demand is yet to show signs of a pick up since emergency COVID-19 curbs were lifted here on Sept. 30.
The increase in the services producer price index was just below a 1.0% gain marked in August, Bank of Japan (BOJ) data showed on Tuesday.
The key driver behind the September rise was transportation fees, suggesting that surging global demand and supply bottlenecks are hurting corporate profits.
The cost of ocean freight transportation spiked 34.9% in September from a year earlier, the biggest rise since 2008.
Air freight fees were also up 28.5% in September, faster than a 19.6% gain in August.
“The impact of higher oil costs comes with a lag so if oil prices continue to rise, we might see further hikes in freight transportation fees,” Shigeru Shimizu, head of the BOJ’s price statistics division, told a briefing.
---- Japan has not been immune to global commodity inflation, with wholesale prices surging to a 13-year high of 6.3% in September, putting pressure on corporate profit margins and raising the risk of unwanted consumer price hikes.
But consumer inflation has been stuck around zero as firms remain reluctant to pass on costs to households, reinforcing expectations the BOJ’s 2% target will remain elusive.
Which is more expensive: Charging an electric vehicle or fueling a car with gas?
Last year, Patrick Anderson went electric: He got a Porsche Taycan EV in dark blue.
Anderson, who is CEO of East Lansing-based economic consulting firm Anderson Economic Group, loves the zippy acceleration and "exciting" features the car offers. He also gets satisfaction in knowing that driving an EV benefits the environment, he said.
But Anderson's joy comes with a dark side.
"They are a wonderful driving experience. But at the same time, they're an enormous burden in time and in energy in finding chargers and getting them charged," Anderson said. "And you’re not really saving much in terms of charging costs ... you may be paying more.”
---- Costs to drive an EV compared with a gasoline car are detailed in a report Anderson Economic released Thursday called "Comparison: Real World Cost of Fueling EVs and ICE Vehicles."
The study has four major findings:
- There are four additional costs to powering EVs beyond electricity: cost of a home charger, commercial charging, the EV tax and "deadhead" miles.
- For now, EVs cost more to power than gasoline costs to fuel an internal combustion car that gets reasonable gas mileage.
- Charging costs vary more widely than gasoline prices.
- There are significant time costs to finding reliable public chargers – even then a charger could take 30 minutes to go from 20% to an 80% charge.
It is the first of a series of reports Anderson Economic Group will release.
More
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2021/10/23/costs-charge-ev-fuel-car-gas-study/6154204001/
Global Inflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
Inflation genie out of the bottle: Five questions for the ECB
October 25, 2021 7:15 AM By Dhara Ranasinghe, Saikat Chatterjee
LONDON (Reuters) - The inflation genie is finally out of its bottle.
Now investors are waiting to see whether the European Central Bank on Thursday admits that price pressures are too significant to ignore. They will also want an explanation of what that means for its ultra-easy policy stance.
Big decisions on the future of the ECB’s pandemic emergency stimulus will wait until December. But with surging energy prices and supply bottlenecks, Thursday’s meeting should be anything but dull.
Here are five key questions on the radar for markets.
1/ What does high inflation mean for the policy outlook?
The ECB may acknowledge that a jump in price pressures is likely to last longer than anticipated, but the central bank is unlikely to abandon its dovish policy stance just yet.
Its 2023 inflation forecast is 1.5%, below the 2% target, and policymakers argue that tightening policy too early could hurt the economy.
ECB Chief Economist Philip Lane has argued that the current bout of inflation in the bloc is not a trigger for monetary policy action as growth in services prices and wages remains weak.
"They have to be very careful they don't scare the horses," said Craig Inches, head of rates at Royal London Asset Management. "If they come out a little bit on the hawkish side, certain peripheral markets could start to struggle."
More
ECB charts lonely course through inflation spike
Issued on: 25/10/2021 - 05:28
ECB policymakers will meet on Thursday, with markets hoping for hints on when the bank might start raising historically low interest rates or tweak the pace of bond buying under its massive pandemic-era stimulus programme.
Bottlenecks have pushed up prices and pinched industrial production in the eurozone, drawing a tightrope for policymakers to walk as withdrawing stimulus to quash inflation risks further crimping the economic recovery.
In September, prices in the euro area rose 3.4 percent year on year, a 13-year high pushed by the cost of energy, and well above the bank's two-percent target.
At the same time, material shortages linked to the pandemic have stalled the economic recovery in parts of the eurozone.
Eurozone business sentiment in October was at its lowest point since April, according to an IHS Markit survey published last week, with shortages being felt particularly in European powerhouse Germany and its vital automotive sector.
President Christine Lagarde has however said the ECB would not "overreact" to what the bank's economists see as "transitory" inflation driven by one-off pandemic effects.
'Getting closer'
At the end of September, the heads of the world's biggest central banks came together at the ECB's monetary policy summit to discuss the problems facing them.
The US Federal Reserve was "getting closer" to meeting its targets to start winding down its own stimulus programme, its chair Jerome Powell said in a panel discussion with Lagarde and colleagues from the UK and Japan.
Members of its policy-making committee also expect the Fed to start raising interest rates at the end of 2022 -- a prospect which has yet to officially materialise at the ECB as the bank's medium-term inflation forecasts continue to sit below its target.
The Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey said in mid-October that his institution "will have to act" on inflation, bringing forward expectations of a rise in interest rates.
Other central banks within the European Union have responded aggressively to rising prices.
The Polish central bank hiked interest rates at the beginning of October for the first time in almost a decade, while its Czech counterpart raised rates sharply in September to tame soaring inflation.
Despite some dissent among members of the governing council, the ECB seemed "pretty zen", said Bruno Cavalier, economist at Oddo.
In a letter last week announcing his resignation to colleagues, Jens Weidmann, the president of the German central bank and a prominent advocate of tight monetary policy, said it would be "decisive" for the ECB's strategy "not to lose sight of future inflation risks".
Upwards pressure on prices would however "largely fade out over the course of next year," Isabel Schnabel, who sits on the executive board of the ECB, said earlier this month.
More
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211025-ecb-charts-lonely-course-through-inflation-spike
Kazakhstan Hikes Rate to 9.75% as Inflation Continues to Rise
By Nariman Gizitdinov 25 October 2021, 10:10 BST· Increase of 25 basis points marked third consecutive hike
· Decision came as inflation accelerated to 8.9% in September
Kazakhstan’s central bank delivered its third consecutive interest-rate hike as inflation accelerated in Central Asia’s largest energy producer.
More
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
China postpones Beijing marathon due to Covid surge
25 October, 2021
China has postponed the Beijing marathon until further notice, amid a surge in coronavirus infections.
It comes as the country's top health official warned that a fresh outbreak of cases is expected to spread further.
China has reported more than 133 cases across 11 provinces so far. All of them have been linked to the highly transmissible Delta variant.
The latest surge is considered the largest outbreak in the country since Nanjing in August this year.
It has raised concerns over China's ability to maintain its zero-tolerance approach to the virus, especially leading up to the 2022 Winter Olympics.
Held annually since 1981, the Beijing marathon is one of China's biggest local sporting events.
The race traditionally begins at Tiananmen Square and ends in Celebration Square in Beijing's Olympic Park.
Around 30,000 people were expected to take part in the marathon, which was scheduled to happen on October 31.
Marathon organisers said it was cancelling the event "in order to prevent the risk of the epidemic spreading (and) effectively protect the health and safety of the majority of runners, staff and residents."
The latest surge is believed to have been spread by local tour groups visiting other provinces and cities.
China has enforced travel restrictions, ramped up testing and urged heightened vigilance in a bid to stamp out the latest outbreak.
Officials have banned travel agencies from arranging cross-provincial tours that involve affected regions.
Meanwhile, authorities in the capital Beijing have said they will not allow people with travel history to affected counties into the city.
Many countries such as Australia have switched from a zero-tolerance policy to living with the virus.
But China has stuck to a zero-Covid strategy by implementing harsh lockdowns, mass testing and pursuing mass vaccination drives - about 75.6% of China's population, or 1.068 billion people, had received complete vaccine doses as of Saturday.
However, it has recently suffered sporadic local outbreaks of Covid, mostly due to the Delta variant.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-59033165
China battles new Covid outbreak with eye on Winter Olympics
Issued on: 25/10/2021 - 06:52
Residents of the Chinese capital were also advised not to leave the city unless necessary, although regular transport services out of the city continued as normal.
China reported 39 new cases on Monday, bringing the tally from the latest Delta variant-linked outbreak to more than 100 cases over the past week.
The numbers are extremely low compared with most other places in the world, but China has pursued a zero-case strategy throughout the pandemic and authorities are determined to stamp out the latest outbreak with the Winter Olympics just over 100 days away.
Several housing compounds in the capital have been locked down, and organisers on Sunday indefinitely postponed a marathon at which 30,000 runners were expected.
And at a Sunday press briefing, Xu Hejian, vice minister of Beijing's publicity department, advised people against large gatherings and "unnecessary" travel out of the capital.
Those entering the city from areas with Covid cases must show a negative test, officials said.
Health officials have warned that more infections may emerge as testing is ramped up in the coming days to fight the outbreak, which has been linked to a group of domestic tourists that travelled across China.
Authorities on Sunday suspended inter-provincial tour groups in five areas where cases have been detected, including Beijing.
Northern China has accounted for the majority of cases, with mass testing under way in eleven provinces.
A stay-at-home lockdown started Monday for around 35,000 people -- including tourists -- in Inner Mongolia region's Ejin county.
Some cities, including Gansu's provincial capital Lanzhou, and parts of Inner Mongolia have suspended bus and taxi services and closed tourist sites.
In the central city of Wuhan -- where the coronavirus was first identified in late 2019 -- organisers abruptly cancelled another marathon Sunday that was expected to draw 26,000 participants.
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
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.
Argon fluoride laser could lead to practical fusion reactors
David Szondy October 24, 2021
The US Naval Research Laboratory (AFL) is developing an Argon Fluoride (ArF) laser that may one day make fusion power a practical commercial technology. The wide-bandwidth ultraviolet laser is designed to have the shortest laser wavelength that can scale up to power a self-sustaining fusion reaction.
To call fusion energy a game changing technology is like saying that fire might one day find a practical application. In fact, the ability to generate clean energy from hydrogen in any desired quantity over any foreseeable timescale would fundamentally alter civilization in ways we can't imagine.
The problem is fusion power is like the proverbial rabbit pie recipe that begins with, "First, catch your rabbit." Though we can recreate the conditions found inside the Sun to produce fusion reactions on Earth, these are relegated to hydrogen bombs and laboratory experiments where it takes more energy to create the fusion reaction than we can get out of it – though recent experiments are getting much closer to turning that around.
The goal for the past 75 years has been to produce temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees C (180 million degrees F) and the pressure needed to ignite the fusion reaction and generate enough surplus energy to sustain it. That in itself would be a major achievement, but the technology also has to be able to sustain the reaction indefinitely, while also being cheap enough and the reactor small enough for it to be practical.
The NRL's ArF laser is intended for a test facility based on the principle of Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). In this, a bead of deuterium or tritium, which are heavy isotopes of hydrogen, is fired upon by multiple lasers, heating and compressing it in a fraction of a second to such an extent that the hydrogen atoms implode, fuse together, and release enormous amounts of energy.
The new deep ultraviolet laser, also known as a laser driver, is claimed to transfer energy to the fuel bead with greater efficiency and produces much higher temperatures to generate the implosion. Using radiation hydrodynamics simulations the NRL scientists say that performance could be increased a hundredfold with an efficiency of 16 percent, compared to only 12 percent from the next most efficient krypton fluoride laser.
Because of these improvements, the ArF laser could lead to smaller and less expensive fusion power plants. However, the team stresses that there is still a long way to go before fusion is hooked up to the national grid. The laser will need to provide the required energy, repetition rate, precision, and billion-shot class reliability for a practical plant.
To move towards this, the laboratory is running a three-phase program with the first dedicated to the basic science and technology of the ArF laser. This will be followed by phase two, which will concentrate on building and testing a full-scale high-energy ArF laser, and then phase three where an implosion facility consisting of 20 to 30 lasers will be constructed.
“The advantages could facilitate the development of modest size, less expensive fusion power plant modules operating at laser energies less than one megajoule,” says Steve Obenschain, Ph.D., a research physicist at NRL. “That would drastically change the existing view on laser fusion energy being too expensive and power plants being too large.”
The research was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
The Stock Market.
Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to
the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $ 100 each.
The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the
forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands of monkeys for $ 100
and as supply started to diminish, the villagers
stopped their effort.
Now the man announced that he would buy
monkeys for $ 200. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started
catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even more and people
started going back to work on their farms.
Next the mysterious man increased his offer to $ 250
for each money, and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an
effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!
Now the man now announced that he was going to
negotiate a large order for monkeys and that we was willing to buy monkeys for
$ 500 each! However as he had to go to the city for the business, his assistant
would now buy monkeys on his behalf.
In the absence of the man, the assistant told the
villagers; "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has
collected. I will sell them all to you at $ 350 each and when the man returns from
the city, you can sell the same to him for $ 500 each.
"The villagers got all their savings, borrowed
money from friends and relatives and bought all the monkeys they could.
Thereafter, then they never saw the mysterious man or his assistant again, but now
there were monkeys everywhere!
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