Baltic Dry Index. 2759 -48 Brent Crude 82.73
Spot Gold 1867
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 16/11/21 World 254,589,524
Deaths 5,121,004
“All the fiat money world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.”
Fed Chairman Powell, with apologies to Peter Pan.
Low interest rates are forecast forever! No really, and we thought that they were mad and deluded in Glasgow.
In Asian stock casinos this morning, caution. As Presidents Biden and Xi hold their virtual summit meeting, which seems to be off to an amicable start, the punters in the casinos are wary of wrong guessing the outcome.
Still, talk, talk, talk, is better than war, war, war, as the old saying goes.
Mainstream media will have more spin on this all day.
Asia-Pacific shares mixed as investors monitor Biden-Xi talks
SINGAPORE — Shares in Asia-Pacific were mixed in Tuesday trade as investors watched a virtual meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Mainland Chinese stocks were higher, with the Shanghai composite up about 0.3% while the Shenzhen component gained 0.509%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index advanced 1.05%.
Japanese stocks were muted, with the Nikkei 225 in Japan slightly higher while the Topix index dipped fractionally. In South Korea, the Kospi fell about 0.1%.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan traded 0.29% higher.
The virtual meeting between Biden and Xi, which marked the closest communication between the two leaders since Biden took office in January, kicked off on a positive note with cordial remarks.
Both leaders called for increased communication and said it would be better to meet in person.
The S&P/ASX 200 in Australia lagged the broader region as it fell about 0.8% after the Reserve Bank of Australia’s governor pushed back against calls for a rate hike next year.
----Overnight on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 12.86 points to 36,087.45 while the S&P 500 was near flat at 4,682.80. The Nasdaq Composite dipped fractionally to 15,853.85.
The U.S. dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of its peers, was at 95.422 after recently rising from below 95.2.
The Japanese yen traded at 114.14 per dollar, weaker than levels below 113.9 seen against the greenback yesterday. The Australian dollar changed hands at $0.7353 following its bounce from below $0.73 seen late last week.
Oil prices were higher in the afternoon of Asia trading hours, with international benchmark Brent crude futures up 0.74% to $82.66 per barrel. U.S. crude futures gained 0.59% to $81.36 per barrel.
In US domestic news, President Biden signed the new infrastructure bill into law. All too soon another one trillion dollars will be adding to US domestic inflation on top of the long-term inflationary pressure released at the UN COP26 jamboree last week.
Biden signs $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law
November 16, 2021 3:39 AM GMT
WASHINGTON, Nov 15 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden signed into law a $1 trillion infrastructure bill at a White House ceremony on Monday that drew Democrats and Republicans who pushed the legislation through a deeply divided U.S. Congress.
The measure is designed to create jobs across the country by dispersing billions of dollars to state and local governments to fix crumbling bridges and roads and by expanding broadband internet access to millions of Americans.
The bill-signing ceremony, held in chilly weather on the White House South Lawn to accommodate a big crowd, was an increasingly rare moment when members of both parties were willing to stand together and celebrate a bipartisan achievement.
Biden, whose job approval ratings have dropped because of his handling of the economy and other issues, heard supportive chants of "Joe, Joe, Joe" from some in the crowd and got a standing ovation as he stepped to the microphone.
Biden said the bill's passage showed that "despite the cynics, Democrats and Republicans can come together and deliver results." He called the bill a "blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America."
----Biden signed an executive order before the ceremony directing that materials made in the United States be given priority in infrastructure projects, the White House said.
It also established a task force made up of top Cabinet officials to guide implementation of the legislation, co-chaired by former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. read more
----How long the bipartisan spirit will last is unclear as both sides expect a big battle over the social safety net plan.
Biden's Build Back Better package includes provisions on childcare and preschool, eldercare, healthcare, prescription drug pricing and immigration.
The White House is hoping House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will bring the bill to a vote this week. That will only be a first step, however, as the Senate has not yet taken up the legislation, and Democratic divisions could threaten its chances in that chamber.
More
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-needing-boost-sign-1-trillion-infrastructure-bill-2021-11-15/
Biden’s Spending Gives Milton Friedman the Last Laugh
The monetarist ‘isn’t running the show anymore,’ the 46th president said in 2020. Would that he were.
“ Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”
So declared Joe Biden in an interview with Politico in April 2020, not long before he locked up the Democratic presidential nomination. The context was Mr. Biden’s ambitions for a stimulus that would be “a hell of a lot bigger” than the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill Donald Trump had signed. It was a curious way to invoke an economist who died 15 years ago Tuesday, but it appears to be Biden shorthand for his preference for big government action over market modesty.
Outside this editorial page and some Friedman fans such as our friends at Reason magazine, it didn’t get much attention. But Mr. Biden’s swipe at the University of Chicago monetarist may be coming back to haunt him. After only 10 months of President Biden, Americans are today facing the worst inflation in 31 years.
No doubt most people couldn’t explain M2 or quantitative easing. But they know inflation when they see it, because it hits them in their everyday lives.
It hits them when the price of heating jumps from $574 to $746, which is what the U.S. Energy Information Administration reckons it will cost to heat the average American house this winter because of the 30% hike in natural-gas prices. It hits them in the extra $20 it takes to fill up a Chevy Malibu. It will hit them at their Thanksgiving tables, with frozen turkeys going for an average 22% more than last year, according to the Agriculture Department.
All this is hard for politicians to spin. It’s also why Americans aren’t likely to have their inflation concerns alleviated by reassurances that it’ll all go away next year—often from the same people who didn’t see it coming in the first place.
----Though today’s inflation is nowhere near the levels of the late 1970s, the Biden-Carter analogies grow stronger. What a comedown for a man who a few months ago was hailed as a transformational president in the mold of FDR. With each day Mr. Biden, like the hapless Mr. Carter before him, seems to persuade more Americans he simply isn’t up to the job.
----There are other areas where Friedman’s ghost haunts the president. Probably Friedman’s most popular saying was that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” But Mr. Biden is now trying to sell Americans the biggest “free lunch” in history: his Build Back Better bill, which will certainly spend more than the $1.75 trillion Democrats claim.
“The fact of the matter is, my Build Back Better Agenda costs $0—and it won’t raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year,” Mr. Biden claims. Friedman might have pointed out that if inflation is the problem Mr. Biden now admits it is, it’s already taxing plenty of Americans earning less than $400,000.
More
Finally, a last chance warning that will fall on willingly deaf ears.
Low interest rates forecast forever! What could possibly go wrong?
Fiat Dollars anyone? Fiat Euros or Pounds? Yen? Yuan? Bolivars? Cigarettes?
Fed should hike interest rates immediately to cut stagflation risks, economist Stephen Roach suggests
Former Federal Reserve economist Stephen Roach sees only one way to contain inflation: immediate rate hikes.
If the Fed doesn’t act, he warns rising prices could send shockwaves through the economy.
“They’re in denial. They continue to harbor the view that these are transitory Covid-related rebound effects,” the Yale University senior fellow told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Monday. “I would just put the burden of responsibility on the Fed. The longer they defer a more meaningful monetary tightening, the great the risks of stagflation.”
Roach has been warning stagflation was one supply chain accident away. Now, he contends the U.S. is in the throes of a broken supply chain while consumer demand is at a fever pitch.
“The level of aggregate demand is much, much stronger than the Fed had thought when assessing inflation prospects in recent policy meetings,” he said. “So that supply-demand imbalance is going to be persistent. Enduring.”
According to Roach, the Fed has its priorities wrong. He questions the central bank’s intention to taper its balance sheet before lifting rates.
“They need to raise rates first and worry about the balance sheet later,” said Roach, who also served as Morgan Stanley Asia’s chairman during the 2003 SARS outbreak. “They need to use the most impactful tool they have, not the least impactful tool, which is the balance sheet.”
Roach worries the Fed is too cowardly to stand up to inflation, and he believes there’s nothing lawmakers can do to materially ease its effects. So, the onus is on the central bank.
“I learned the painful lessons focusing on transitory special factors when I worked at the Fed in the early ’70s, and that was a recipe for disaster,” he said. “The Fed today has really no institutional memory. No policymakers in the control room have any firsthand experience with the types of shocks that we’re seeing right now.”
Entirely possible that we’ll see low interest rates forever, asset manager says
Published Mon, Nov 15 2021 1:23 AM EST
Interest rates could remain at their record lows “forever,” according to one asset manager, despite a recent rush to normalize policy by many of the world’s central banks.
GAM Investments’ Julian Howard told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” last week that he believed it was “entirely consistent historically to talk about low rates forever.”
Howard is the lead investment director of multi-asset solutions at GAM, which has 103 billion Swiss francs ($112 billion) in assets under management.
He cited research by economic historian Paul Schmelzing, who was a visiting scholar at the Bank of England when the paper was published in 2020.
The research looked at interest rates globally dating back to the 14th century, identifying a downward trend, with Schmelzing predicting that “real rates could soon enter permanently negative territory.”
Howard said the lower rates that we had seen in recent years were, therefore, “actually a return to a very, very long-term trend of yields falling over an extended period of time.”
He pointed to the economic damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, which is set to have a “very, very negative effect on interest rates,” he added.
“There’s no context in which a central bank will be able to normalize, sort of 1990s style normalize, interest rates when there’s going to be absolutely no growth,” Howard explained.
Howard expected that the Federal Reserve would probably only start raising interest rates in the second half of 2022.
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/15/gam-entirely-possible-that-well-see-low-interest-rates-forever.html
“Of course, the Neverlands vary a good deal”
and Peter Pan.
Global Inflation/Stagflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
Below, central bankster’s “we bet on black but red turned up. But we were right, it’s the markets that got it wrong!”
Bottlenecks limiting euro zone growth, inflation: ECB's Lagarde
November 15, 2021 10:23 AM
FRANKFURT (Reuters) -Persistent supply chain bottlenecks and soaring energy costs are slowing euro zone growth and will keep inflation high for even longer than had been thought, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said on Monday.
The ECB has banked on a rapid decline in inflation next year but policymakers are now openly admitting that their forecasts, already revised up several times, are still too low, as stress in the global economy takes a toll.
But Lagarde continued to push back on calls and market bets for tighter policy, repeating the ECB’s message that conditions for higher interest rates are unlikely to be met next year as inflation is still seen back below the bank’s 2% target farther out.
“Shortages of materials, equipment and labour are weighing on manufacturing production, weakening the near-term outlook,” she told a hearing of the European Parliament’s committee on economic affairs.
Inflation hit 4.1% last month and could approach levels near 4.5% by the end of the year, before a slow decline that will put it back under the ECB’s target only towards the end of 2022, economists predict.
Lagarde added that the bottlenecks were likely to ease next year and energy futures also point to a noticeable fall next year, suggesting that inflation will fall, even if a normalisation in prices takes longer.
“We still see inflation moderating in the next year, but it will take longer to decline than originally expected,” Lagarde added.
More
Fed's Kashkari expects higher inflation continuing over next few months
November 14, 2021 10:39 PM
(Reuters) -Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari said on Sunday he expects higher inflation continuing over the next few months but warned that the U.S. central bank should not overreact to elevated inflation as it is likely to be temporary.
"The math suggests we're probably going to see somewhat higher readings over the next few months before they likely start to taper off," Kashkari told CBS News' "Face the Nation" in an interview on Sunday cbsn.ws/3wN0aj6.
“But my view is we also need to not overreact to some of these temporary factors, even though the pain is real,” Kashkari said in the interview.
Kashkari on Tuesday said he expects more clarity on the economic outlook by the time the Fed ends its bond-buying program in mid-2022, and is keeping an “open mind” on the timing of any rate hikes to follow.
President Joe Biden’s economic advisers defended his policies on Sunday amid rising inflation that they said was a global issue related to the COVID-19 pandemic, not a result of the administration’s programs.
U.S. consumer prices rose 6.2% in October compared to a year earlier, the fastest annual rate in 31 years, driven by surges in the cost of gasoline and other goods.
More
U.S. Coal Hits 12-Year High, Threatening More Energy Inflation
By Will WadeUpdated on 15 November 2021, 16:15 GMT
U.S. coal prices surged to the highest in more than 12 years, threatening to bloat America’s already soaring electricity bills and signaling the dirty fuel isn’t get phased out anytime soon.
Prices for coal from Central Appalachia climbed more than $10 last week to $89.75 a ton on the spot market, according to figures released Monday from S&P Global Market Intelligence. That’s the highest since 2009, when a spike in exports boosted domestic prices for the power-plant fuel. Prices in other U.S. regions are lower but have also climbed in recent months.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-15/u-s-coal-prices-surge-to-highest-point-since-2009
California gas prices soar to record highs
Mon, November 15, 2021, 6:16 PM
Gas prices in California reached an all-time high Monday as the average price of a regular gallon soared to $4.682, according to the American Automobile Assn.
It was the state's second record-breaking day in a row. Monday's price for regular unleaded was six-tenths of a cent higher than the Sunday average reported by AAA, which broke the previous state record of $4.671 set in October 2012.
AAA Southern California spokesman Doug Shupe said the prices are being driven primarily by higher crude oil costs and an increased demand for fuel. A barrel of West Texas intermediate crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange closed at $80.79 Friday — more than double its 52-week low.
"We had really, really low demand during the pandemic, and then it just ramped up rapidly as more and more people became vaccinated," Shupe said. "The desire to get out there and travel really picked up quickly."
Prices also spiked in several counties, including Los Angeles, which climbed to $4.672 Monday — nearing the record of $4.705 set nine years ago.
That number is about 7.9 cents more than it was one week ago, 20.8 cents more than one month ago and $1.52 more than one year ago.
More
https://www.yahoo.com/news/california-gas-prices-soar-record-181627595.html
Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.
Alan Greenspan.
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Experimental RNA therapy harnesses immune system to fight COVID-19
Rich Haridy November 14, 2021
Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine have developed a new kind of COVID-19 treatment designed to stimulate the body’s immune defenses and fight off a coronavirus infection at its earliest stages. In preclinical animal tests an experimental RNA molecule helped immunocompromised mice completely clear the virus from their system.
When a cell is infiltrated by a virus it releases proteins called interferons. These proteins signal to other cells that a pathogen is in the vicinity, triggering a number of antiviral defenses and "interfering" with the virus's ability to replicate.
Some viruses have cleverly evolved methods to stifle an interferon response, allowing the virus more time to replicate before other immune system defenses catch up.
Several early studies on SARS-CoV-2 revealed those who ultimately suffered severe COVID-19 demonstrated low levels of type 1 interferon production at the earliest stages of infection. So stimulating the body’s initial interferon response as the virus is beginning to take hold could be an effective early treatment for COVID-19.
To do this researchers have developed a synthetic RNA molecule called SLR14. The molecule is designed to mimic genetic material from SARS-CoV-2 and subsequently activate specific receptors tuned to produce type 1 interferons.
Across a series of animal tests the researchers demonstrated a single dose of SLR14 protects from severe disease and death if administered either just before exposure to the virus, or soon after initial infection. The RNA molecule was found to be effective against all current circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2, including Delta.
The researchers also tested the treatment in an immunocompromised mouse model. Here the animals were suffering from chronic long-standing SARS-CoV-2 infections and treatment with SLR14 was enough to stimulate an immune response that completely eradicated the virus.
“These results demonstrated that SLR14’s utility extends beyond prophylactic antivirals,” the researchers write in the newly published study, “but also therapeutics that can be given to patients with immunocompromised conditions, providing an immediate solution to simultaneously cure chronic infection and suppress future emergence of immune-evasive variants.”
Akiko Iwasaki, corresponding author on the new study, say this particular finding was “surprising and spectacular." It indicates this kind of RNA therapeutic could be very useful in protecting immunocompromised patients who are unable to produce effective levels of antibodies or killer T cells.
More
India’s Covaxin COVID-19 vaccine 77.8% effective, Lancet study finds
Rich Haridy November 14, 2021
A new study in The Lancet is offering the first peer-reviewed and published data on the efficacy of Covaxin, a COVID-19 vaccine developed in India. The vaccine was found to be 77.8 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in a large Phase 3 clinical trial.
At the very beginning of 2021 India’s drug regulator, the Central Drugs and Standards Committee (CDSCO), unexpectedly issued an emergency use approval for COVID-19 vaccine Covaxin. At the time, the authorization was incredibly controversial as the vaccine was still deep in Phase 3 trials, with Phase 2 trial data yet to be formally published. One researcher went so far as calling the premature approval of Covaxin “unconscionable.”
Now, almost a year after its Phase 3 human trials kicked off, the first peer-reviewed data from that trial has been published in The Lancet. The top-line finding is the vaccine is 77.8 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19.
The Phase 3 trial enrolled more than 25,000 subjects, randomly allocated either two doses of the vaccine (administered four weeks apart) or two doses of placebo. Against asymptomatic COVID-19 the study reports an efficacy of 63.6 percent, and perhaps most importantly, the vaccine was 93.4 percent effective at preventing severe COVID-19.
No serious adverse events were detected in the trial. The vaccine was found to have a very good safety profile with only occasional mild side effects reported, such as headache or pain at injection site.
The trial spanned the period of time that saw the emergence of the Delta variant in India but the study notes it wasn't sufficiently powered to comprehensively evaluate effectiveness against that variant. A preliminary analysis of the data, however, indicates Covaxin is 65 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infection from the Delta variant.
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
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.
Weak bonds a strength in making borophene
Theory shows potential to synthesize material on an insulator
Date: November 12, 2021
Source: Rice University
Summary: Researchers show how borophene, the 2D form of boron, can be grown to simplify its use for applications.
Borophene may be done tantalizing materials scientists and start serving their ambitions, if a new approach by Rice University researchers can be turned into practice.
Materials theorist Boris Yakobson of Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering and his group suggest a method to synthesize borophene, the 2D version of boron, in a way that could make it easier to free up or manipulate.
According to the group's paper in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano, that would involve growing the exotic material on hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), an insulator, rather than the more traditional metallic surfaces typically used in molecular beam epitaxy (MBE).
The weaker van der Waals forces between the growing borophene and relatively chemically inert hBN would make it easier to remove the material from the substrate to use in applications. It would also allow for simpler direct evaluation of borophene (without lifting it from the substrate) for its plasmonic and photonic -- that is, light-handling -- properties because there would be no metallic substrate to interfere. That would also aid experimentation on its electronic properties, which could be of interest to those who study superconductivity.
The Yakobson team, including lead author and graduate student Qiyuan Ruan and co-authors Luqing Wang, a Rice alumnus, and research scientist Ksenia Bets, calculated the atom-level energies of borophene and hBN. They found the step-and-plateau hBN substrate encouraged boron atoms floating in the MBE chamber to alight, nucleating growth.
Because hBN, like graphene, has a chicken wire-like hexagonal lattice, its atomic arrangement also allowed for edge-epitaxial growth of the new crystal forming on its surface. In epitaxy, growth of the new material is dictated to a degree by the lattice below. In this case, that growth happens instead on the plateau's raised side.
In particular, the precise ab initio calculations showed that boron atoms have a "high affinity" to the hBN steps and their zigzag edges, bypassing the barrier to nucleation presented by any other locations on the substrate. That allows growth of the crystal to begin on a solid footing.
----Yakobson has a solid history of predicting what boron atoms could do, and then watching labs successfully take up the challenge. He hopes for no less with the latest theory.
"The process looks very logical and this way seems convincing, and we do hope that experimentalists worldwide will give it a try, as indeed happened with our earlier proposition of synthesis on metals," he said. "We are optimistic but keeping our fingers crossed. Serendipity in the lab usually implies a happy outcome, but also a surprise, possibly an obstacle not expected or desired."
Yakobson is the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering and a professor of chemistry at Rice. The U.S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences (DE-SC0012547) and the Robert Welch Foundation (C-1590) supported the research.
“The moment where you doubt you can fly, you cease forever being able to do it.”
Fed Chairman Powell, with apologies to
No comments:
Post a Comment