Russia's war against Ukraine was likely to make
everything from energy and metals to agricultural goods a lot more expensive,
Carnell added.
"Everybody's incomes are
going to get eroded. Global growth is going to get battered. What more do you
need?
Fund manager Luke
Sadrian has been trading metals for thirty years, at hedge fund titans Brevan
Howard and Moore Capital to now running his own shop. For the first time in his
career, he says the London Metal Exchange is too risky to trade.
Sadrian, like many market veterans, was shocked by the
LME’s decision to suspend nickel trading on Tuesday morning and cancel all the
transactions from earlier in the day. Now, in the middle of a scorching bull
market that’s lifted prices to record highs, some in the industry are simply
deciding to walk away.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-10/hedge-funds-walk-away-from-lme-after-3-9-billion-trades-torn-up
Column: Nickel, the devil's metal
with a history of bad behaviour: Andy Home March 11,
2022 1:00 AM GMT
LONDON, March 10 (Reuters) - The global nickel market is
in a pricing black-out.
The London Metal Exchange (LME)
three-month nickel price sits in suspended animation at $48,048 per tonne,
Monday's closing price and the last trade with even a semblance of legitimacy.
Tuesday's mayhem and the
resulting decision by the LME to suspend all trading has frozen what is the core reference
price for the global supply chain stretching from miners to stainless steel
mills and electric vehicle battery makers.
China is also in black-out. The Shanghai Futures
Exchange has suspended trading until Friday .
Today there is no global nickel
trading and no price formation.
It's a truly shocking outcome
but not without precedent.
When German miners first
discovered nickel in the fifteenth century, they called it Kupfernickel, or
"Old Nick's Copper", and it has had a history of devilish behaviour
ever since the LME launched the contract in 1979.
The
underlying cause of the repeated market disorder has never changed.
"The LME contract has been
criticised as illiquid, unrepresentative, open to manipulation and
volatile".
Hard to disagree given this week's
extraordinary events but those words were written in 1992 by a former
colleague, Simon Clow. ("The International Nickel Trade", Woodhead
Publishing)
The criticism came hot on the heels
of what at the time was known as the nickel crisis of 1988.
On
Friday Feb. 25 of that year the LME official ring descended into chaos as one
house bid up the cash price from $10,000 per tonne to $15,000 per tonne with
not a single offer. The cut and thrust of open outcry came perilously close to
physical fisticuffs.
By the standards of the time, the
liquidity vacuum and price acceleration were just as shocking as Tuesday's
explosion to $101,365 per tonne.
Ring-trading was suspended for the
first afternoon session, which at the time amounted to halting the market,
while the LME board held an emergency meeting.
More
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/nickel-devils-metal-with-history-bad-behaviour-2022-03-10/
Finally, in new European war news, the World Health
Organisation wants Ukraine to destroy the contents of its “health Labs,” aka
bio-warfare labs. More on those probably later today as the UN Security Council
debate them at Russia’s request.
Exclusive: WHO says it advised
Ukraine to destroy pathogens in health labs to prevent disease spread March 11,
2022 1:30 AM GMT
March 10 (Reuters) - The World
Health Organization advised Ukraine to destroy high-threat pathogens housed in
the country's public health laboratories to prevent "any potential
spills" that would spread disease among the population, the agency told
Reuters on Thursday.
Biosecurity experts say Russia's
movement of troops into Ukraine and bombardment of its cities have raised the
risk of an escape of disease-causing pathogens, should any of those facilities
be damaged.
Like many other countries, Ukraine
has public health laboratories researching how to mitigate the threats of
dangerous diseases affecting both animals and humans including, most recently,
COVID-19. Its labs have received support from the United States, the European
Union and the WHO.
In response to questions from
Reuters about its work with Ukraine ahead of and during Russia's invasion, the
WHO said in an email that it has collaborated with Ukrainian public health labs
for several years to promote security practices that help prevent
"accidental or deliberate release of pathogens."
"As part of this work, WHO has
strongly recommended to the Ministry of Health in Ukraine and other responsible
bodies to destroy high-threat pathogens to prevent any potential spills,"
the WHO, a United Nations agency, said.
The WHO would not say when it had
made the recommendation nor did it provide specifics about the kinds of
pathogens or toxins housed in Ukraine's laboratories. The agency also did not
answer questions about whether its recommendations were followed.
Ukrainian officials in Kyiv and at
their embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
Ukraine's laboratory capabilities
are at the center of a growing information war since Russia began moving troops
into Ukraine two weeks ago.
On Wednesday, Russian foreign
ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova repeated a longstanding claim that the
United States operates a biowarfare lab in Ukraine, an accusation that has been
repeatedly denied by Washington and Kyiv.
Zakharova said that documents
unearthed by Russian forces in Ukraine showed "an emergency attempt to
erase evidence of military biological programmes" by destroying lab
samples.
More
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-who-says-it-advised-ukraine-destroy-pathogens-health-labs-prevent-2022-03-11/
Greenwald Slays 'Fact Checkers'
After Nuland's Ukraine Biolab Bombshell Thursday, Mar 10, 2022 - 10:11 AM
---- Claims that Ukraine currently maintains dangerous
biological weapons labs came from Russia as well as China. The Chinese Foreign
Ministry this month claimed :
"The US has 336 labs in 30 countries under its control, including 26 in
Ukraine alone.” The Russian Foreign Ministry asserted
that “Russia obtained documents proving that Ukrainian biological laboratories
located near Russian borders worked on development of components of biological
weapons.” Such assertions deserve the same level of skepticism as U.S. denials:
namely, none of it should be believed to be true or false absent evidence. Yet
U.S. fact-checkers dutifully and reflexively sided with the U.S. Government to
declare such claims "disinformation” and to mock them as QAnon conspiracy
theories.
Unfortunately for this propaganda racket masquerading as
neutral and high-minded fact-checking, the neocon official long in charge of
U.S. policy in Ukraine testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true.
Yesterday afternoon, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland testified before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), hoping to
debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in Ukraine, smugly
asked Nuland: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?”
Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland, thus
providing further "proof” that such speculation is dastardly Fake News
emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon. Instead, Nuland did something
completely uncharacteristic for her, for neocons, and for senior U.S. foreign
policy officials: for some reason, she told a version of the truth. Her answer
visibly stunned Rubio, who — as soon as he realized the damage she was doing to
the U.S. messaging campaign by telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded
that she instead affirm that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone
should be “100% sure” that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life
raft, Nuland told Rubio he was right.
But Rubio's clean-up act came too late. When asked whether
Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons,” Nuland did not deny this:
at all. She instead — with palpable pen-twirling discomfort and in halting
speech, a glaring contrast to her normally cocky style of speaking in
obfuscatory State Department officialese — acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh,
biological research facilities.” Any hope to depict such "facilities” as
benign or banal was immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: “we
are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be
seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the
Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials
from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach”
More
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/greenwald-slays-fact-checkers-after-nulands-ukraine-biolab-bombshell
Global Inflation/Stagflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our
spendthrift politicians, inflation now
needs an entire section of its own.
Inflation rose 7.9% in February,
as food and energy costs push prices to highest in more than 40 years Published Thu, Mar 10 2022 8:31 AM EST
Inflation grew worse in February amid the escalating crisis
in Ukraine and price pressures that became more entrenched.
The consumer price index, which measures a wide-ranging
basket of goods and services, increased 7.9% over the past 12 months, a fresh
40-year high for the closely followed gauge, according
to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The February acceleration was the fastest pace since
January1982, back when the U.S. economy confronted the twin threat of higher
inflation and reduced economic growth.
On a month-over-month basis, the CPI gain was 0.8%.
Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected headline inflation to increase
7.8% for the year and 0.7% for the month.
Food prices rose 1% and food at home jumped 1.4%, both the
fastest monthly gains since April 2020, in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic .
Energy also was at the forefront of ballooning prices, up
3.5% for February and accounting for about one-third of the headline gain.
Shelter costs, which account for about one-third of the CPI weighting,
accelerated another 0.5%, for a 12-month rise of 4.7%, the fastest annual
increase since May 1991.
Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core
inflation rose 6.4%, in line with estimates and the highest since August 1982.
On a monthly basis, core CPI was up 0.5, also consistent with Wall Street expectations.
The rise in inflation meant worker paychecks fell further
behind despite what otherwise would be considered strong increases.
Real inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings for the
month fell 0.8% in February, contributing to a 2.6% decline over the past year,
according
to the BLS . That came even though headline earnings rose 5.1% from a year
ago, but were outweighed by the price surge.
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/10/cpi-inflation-february-2022-.html
Ukraine Bans Exports of Several
Grains, Sugar, Salt, Meat By Reuters March 9, 2022,
at 2:06 a.m.
LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) - Ukraine's
government has banned exports of rye, barley, buckwheat, millet, sugar, salt,
and meat until the end of this year, according to a cabinet resolution
published on Wednesday.
(Reporting by Natalia Zinets;
Editing by Shri Navaratnam)
https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2022-03-09/ukraine-bans-exports-of-several-grains-sugar-salt-meat
YARA CURTAILS PRODUCTION OF AMMONIA DUE TO INCREASED
NATURAL GAS PRICES Mar. 9, 2022 Source: Yara Int'l news
release Oslo--As a consequence of record high natural gas
prices in Europe, Yara is temporarily curtailing production at its Ferrara
(Italy) and Le Havre (France) plants. The two plants have a combined annual
capacity of 1 million tonnes ammonia and 0.9 million tonnes urea. Including optimization and maintenance at other
production facilities, Yara's European ammonia and urea production is expected
to be operating at approximately 45% of capacity by the end of this week. Yara will continue to monitor the situation and to
the extent possible use its global production system to keep supplying
customers and secure continuity in food supply chains, but curtailing
production where necessary due to challenging market conditions.
https://www.agrimarketing.com/s/140104
CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY WORKERS VOTE TO STRIKE,
THREATENS FERTILIZER SHIPMENTS Mar. 9, 2022 by Jenna Hoffman, AgWeb.com Last week, roughly 3,000 Canadian Pacific Railway
Ltd. (CP Rail) workers voted 96.7% in favor of going on strike starting March
16 if a collective bargaining agreement is not penned, according to CP
Teamsters. CP Rail halts would mean trouble for agricultural
stakeholders like Nutrien, who has spoken out against the planned strike. "Nutrien relies on rail and a CP Teamsters
strike could impact our ability to move potash, nitrogen, and crop inputs to
our retail locations across Canada ahead of the upcoming spring application
season, potentially reducing crop yields later in the year," the company
says. "The global food supply is already stretched and cannot afford
further negative impacts at this time." The company has since urged the Canadian government
to intervene before another "transportation crisis" arises. To read the entire article click here .
https://www.agrimarketing.com/s/140105
How Russian-Ukrainian conflict
may impact crop insurance decisions before the March 15 deadline By Shawn Williamson 3/9/2022
The point of the webinar was to give producers an update on
how the Russian-Ukrainian conflict may impact commodity prices and crop
insurance decisions before the March 15 crop insurance deadline.
Farmers who were participating in the webinar were
concerned about many things including rapid inflation, supply chain
disruptions, recession in the United States, and the Russian invasion turning
into a wider conflict. In fact, over 90% of the webinar participants polled
felt that inflation was a major concern.
The presenters believe that the worldwide wheat supply will
be impacted far more than other crops. Russian Federation and Ukrainian wheat
accounted for nearly 30% of worldwide wheat exports during the last five years
on average. Russia is the No. 1 wheat exporter in the world, and Ukraine is
fifth. They account for a smaller but still significant portion or corn
exports, at around 17%. (Soybean exports from those two countries were only 2%
of worldwide exports.)
If the breakdown of relations continues between Russia and
the West, Russian and Ukrainian wheat supplies may be sold only to countries
friendly toward Russia. This will obviously change who is buying wheat from
whom in many ways, and Russian tanks driving around on the Ukrainian winter
wheat crop is not going to help global supply for 2022.
Fertilizer prices rising around the world The presenters said that fertilizer prices were rising
around the world, and supply shortages of fertilizer could spell trouble for
certain countries. Surprisingly, Brazil gets over 90% of its nitrogen and
potash from imports and about 75% of its phosphate. And, a large portion of
those fertilizers comes from Russia and China.
The U.S. is only importing 9% to 12% of its nitrogen and
phosphate, but we’re importing 93% of our potash. Thankfully, 83% of that is
coming from Canada and only about 12% is coming from the combination of Russia
and Belarus, which is basically controlled by Russia.
The Farmdoc folks stated,
“fertilizer shortages are real,” and they expect high fertilizer costs at least
through 2023. Some producers have locked in lower fertilizer prices in advance
of this planting season, but I have to wonder if all supplies will be where
they are supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there (regardless of legal
contracts).
Anhydrous ammonia, which requires
natural gas, has roughly doubled in price per ton during the last year. This
obviously raises current year corn production costs. However, the presenters
said that corn prices and expected yields mean that corn is the favored crop in
all areas of Illinois, in spite of nitrogen supply concerns.
During the webinar, producer
participants were polled, and 58% of them expected no change in their planting
strategies for 2022. This makes sense because it’s getting late in the season
to change plans.
More
https://www.agriculture.com/news/crops/how-russian-ukrainian-conflict-may-impact-crop-insurance-decisions-before-the-march-15
Covid-19 Corner
This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Hong Kong puts mass testing on
hold as COVID-19 deaths rise Wed, March 9, 2022, 8:08 AM
HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said Wednesday
that reducing the skyrocketing number of deaths in the latest coronavirus surge
is the city's priority, putting a plan to test the entire population on hold in
the latest flip-flop in the government’s pandemic response.
Lam said there is “no specific time frame” for a citywide
testing, two weeks after she announced it would happen this month. Her earlier
announcement, coupled with rumors of an accompanying lockdown of the city, left store shelves bare as residents stockpiled daily
necessities.
“Now the situation is that planning and preparation are
still underway, but it is not a priority to do (mass testing). When to do it
will be a collective decision, and will take into account the opinions of
experts," said Lam.
"If we are going to do it properly, we have to tell
people that until you’ve got a negative result, you can’t go out and about.”
The city of 7.4 million people is in the grip of a
spiraling omicron outbreak that has swamped hospitals and morgues and reduced hours or shut
restaurants and other shops in the normally bustling financial hub.
More than 500,000 infections and over 2,600 deaths have
been recorded since the fifth wave began at the end of December, with many of
the victims among the unvaccinated elderly.
---- To reduce the number of deaths, infected patients will be treated
centrally, with the city’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital becoming a dedicated
hospital for COVID-19, she said. Some 1,500 beds will be set aside.
Some general wards in other hospitals will also be
converted into COVID-19 beds, and an emergency hospital will be built by
mainland authorities for the city that will be supported by medical staff from
elsewhere in China.
The city on Wednesday reported a total of 58,750 new
infections, more than 32,000 of which were detected via rapid antigen tests.
Hong Kong also reported 195 deaths, taking the total number since the pandemic
began to 2,869.
Mainland China is also grappling with a surge in new cases , though much smaller than in Hong
Kong. Another 233 cases of domestic transmission were reported Wednesday,
bringing the total to 899 since the daily count leaped back into the triple
digits last Friday — the highest figures since 2020, soon after the original
outbreak in the central city of Wuhan was detected.
The bulk of the most recent cases have been found in the
northeastern province of Jilin, more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) north
of Hong Kong, along with the east coast province of Shandong. Beijing itself
recorded six new cases.
More
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hong-kong-leader-says-no-080826492.html
Next, some vaccine links
kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada.
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
https://rt.live/
Centers for Disease Control
Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
The Spectator
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.
What is the Joint European Torus
(JET) laboratory and what key research is carried out in it? Mar 9 2022
JET is the largest and most powerful
operational tokamak machine in the world and is operated by the UK Atomic
Energy Authority (UKAEA) in Oxford. It is the focal point of the European
fusion research program, EUROfusion, and is currently the only tokamak capable
of using deuterium and tritium – the fuels that will be used in the first
commercial fusion powerplants.
JET is one of the most important
machines in the history of fusion energy research. We are extremely proud to
have been operating it here in Oxford on behalf of the EUROfusion consortium
over the past four decades. Its longevity and successes have allowed us to
break down many barriers on our mission to turn this ultimate science
experiment into sustainable commercial power.
JET
is a testament to the ingenuity of the original design team and the scientific
and operational teams who have upgraded and enhanced the machine so many times
to ensure it continues to be the world’s foremost device – even after four
decades of operation.
What technology
is currently being used at the facility? Fusion fuels – deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of
hydrogen – are injected into a vacuum vessel. The fuel is heated to around 150 million
degrees Celsius and changes from a gas into a plasma.
A ring-shaped vacuum vessel is used to control the plasma,
keeping it away from the chamber walls using powerful magnets. The plasma
exhaust systems remove the fusion-produced helium from the chamber and over 100
diagnostic systems monitor key properties, including plasma density,
temperature, impurities, and many others.
Heating systems include the use of a central solenoid coil
to drive electrical currents in the plasma of up to 4 million amps, as well as
high-energy particle beams and radio waves to provide auxiliary heating to the
plasma. To achieve all this requires state-of-the-art technologies in vacuum
systems, heat transfer, cryogenics, robotics, lasers, control, high power
computing, and many others.
These milestone results are evidence that the
ground-breaking research and innovation being done here in the UK, with our
partners across Europe, is making fusion power a reality.
Can you explain what fusion is and how you began your research? Fusion energy is crucial in addressing climate change
through a safe, sustainable, efficient and low-carbon energy supply. It has the
potential to deliver green energy for generations to come.
More
https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1465
Culham has been a major
international fusion research centre since the 1960s. Fusion research in the UK started in earnest in the UK in
the later 1940s / 1950s – with work being undertaken at Aldermaston, various
universities including Imperial College London and Oxford and the newly formed
Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. Zero Energy
Thermonuclear Assembly (or ZETA) at Harwell was the most prominent experiment
in this period.
More
https://ccfe.ukaea.uk/about-ccfe/history/
Another weekend and
sadly, another European war weekend. For
the want of diplomatically finding some way of allaying Russia’s fear of
encirclement by moving NATO into the Ukraine, Ukraine and Ukrainians are
getting smashed up mercilessly.
Did the Washington
War party blunder? Did they over promise help to poor Ukraine, then fail to
deliver? Did they gamble that with only
190,000 troops on the borders of Ukraine, Russia wouldn’t dare try to invade a
country the size of Ukraine? After all,
when Germany invaded Ukraine in WW2 they did it with about one and a half million men.
When Russia retook Ukraine they did it with about two and a quarter million men.
So how do we bring an
end to the stupidity of this very unnecessary war?
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