Baltic Dry Index. 2055 -06 Brent Crude 102.78
Spot Gold 1948
Benchmark Treasury yield hits 3-yr high; dollar posts weekly gain
April 8, 2022 11:55 PM GMT+1
· Dow ends up, S&P 500 and Nasdaq ended lower
· Dollar index hits 100
· 10-yr Treasury yield hits 3-yr high
NEW YORK, April 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury 10-year yield hit a three-year high above 2.7% on Friday while the U.S. dollar index posted its largest weekly percentage gain in a month, helped by the prospect of more aggressive Federal Reserve tightening.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq ended lower in choppy tradeas investors assessed the economic outlook with the Fed moving to fight inflation. read more
This week's release of minutes from the Fed's March meeting showed "many" officials were prepared to raise rates in 50-basis-point increments in coming months. read more
The dollar index advanced to 100 for the first time in nearly two years. It rose as high as 100.19, its highest since May 2020. It was last little changed on the day at 99.822, and up 1.3% on the week.
As the dollar has gained in recent weeks, the euro has been pressured by a tightening election race in France, the euro zone's second-biggest economy, between President Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Macron is still ahead in polls.
The euro dropped for the seventh straight session to a one-month low of $1.0837. It last changed hands at $1.0853, down 0.3% on the day . read more
"The dollar's latest pop is the culmination of bullish factors ranging from geopolitical risk, election uncertainty in France, and the Fed's increasingly hawkish outlook for interest rates," said Joe Manimbo, senior market analyst at Western Union Business Solutions in Washington. read more
In Treasuries, the 10-year yield hit 2.73%, its highest since March 2019, and the yield on 10-year inflation-protected securities went within 15 basis points of turning positive for the first time in over two years.
The yield on 10-year Treasury notes was up 5.2 basis points to 2.706% while the 2-year note yield was up 5.8 basis points at 2.520%, leaving the 2/10 spread at 18.41 basis points.
---- In the energy market, oil prices rose 2% on the day, but registered their second straight weekly decline.
Member nations of the International Energy Agency (IEA) will release 60 million barrels over the next six months, with the United States matching that amount as part of its 180 million barrel release announced in March.
Brent crude futures settled up $2.20, or 2.19%, at $102.78 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures rose $2.23 to $98.26. read more
https://www.reuters.com/business/global-markets-wrapup-1-2022-04-08/
French election: Far-right Le Pen closes in on Macron ahead of vote
By Lucy Williamson BBC Paris correspondent 8 April, 2022
The least a president might expect, when juggling a war in Europe with an election at home, is a bounce in the polls.
But Emmanuel Macron has discovered that all the energy he spent dealing with Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine has been of little help in France's unpredictable vote.
"Nothing is impossible," President Macron has warned, as polls suggest his far-right rival is closer than ever before to winning the presidency.
A month ago, Marine Le Pen was trailing President Macron by 10 points and fighting for a place in the second round against him.
Now she's seen as the clear favourite to challenge him for the presidency after Sunday's first round. If she does make it through to the 24 April run-off, opinion polls suggest for the first time that a Le Pen victory is within the margin of error.
More
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61029655
In commodities, big trouble lies right ahead.
LME Risks More Squeezes as Metal Stockpiles Hit Lowest in Decades
· Freely available inventories hit lowest since at least 1997
· Zinc inventories have plunged as Trafigura books large volumes
7 April 2022, 20:34 BST Updated on8 April 2022, 10:18 BST
London’s metal traders are still reeling from the historic squeeze in nickel a month ago, but they may not get much time to recover -- inventories across the exchange’s warehouses have dropped to perilously low levels, raising the threat of further spikes in everything from aluminum to zinc.
The available stockpiles across the six main contracts on the London Metal Exchange have plunged to the lowest on record in data going back to 1997. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. warned that copper is “sleepwalking towards a stockout,” while freely available zinc inventories shrank by more than 60% in less than three weeks as Trafigura Group booked out large volumes. Nickel itself remains at risk of further turmoil.
More
Column: U.S. gas storage emptied by exports to Europe and Asia: Kemp
April 8, 2022 7:02 PM GMT+1
LONDON, April 8 (Reuters) - U.S. gas prices have climbed to their highest level in more than a decade as strong demand from overseas has emptied storage and left inventories well below average for the time of year despite a mild winter.
Front-month futures for gas delivered at Henry Hub in Louisiana have risen to $6.40 per million British thermal units, the highest in real terms since 2010.
Wholesale prices in the United States are still far below those prevailing in Northeast Asia ($33 per million British thermal units) and Northwest Europe ($34).
Full price convergence is prevented by the limited liquefaction capacity for exports from the United States and regasification capacity for imports into Asia and Europe.
But shortages in other regions and fears of an interruption of supplies from Russia are pulling U.S. prices higher via increased demand and prices for LNG.
U.S. LNG exports rose 13% in the three months from November to January compared with the same period a year earlier, while gas production was up by less than 5%.
More
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
A "recession shock" is coming, BofA warns
LONDON (Reuters) - The macro-economic picture is deteriorating fast and could push the U.S. economy into recession as the Federal Reserve tightens its monetary policy to tame surging inflation, BofA strategists warned in a weekly research note.
"'Inflation shock' worsening, 'rates shock' just beginning, 'recession shock' coming", BofA chief investment strategist Michael Hartnett wrote in a note to clients, adding that in this context, cash, volatility, commodities and crypto currencies could outperform bonds and stocks.
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday signalled it will likely start culling assets from its $9 trillion balance sheet at its meeting in early May and will do so at nearly twice the pace it did in its previous "quantitative tightening" exercise as it confronts inflation running at a four-decade high.
A large majority of investors also expect the central bank to hike its key interest rate by 50 basis point.
In terms of notable weekly flows, BofA said emerging market equity funds enjoyed the biggest inflow in ten weeks at $5.3 billion in the week to Wednesday while emerging market debt vehicles attracted $2.2 billion, their best week since September.
It was also an eight week of outflows for European equities at $1.6 billion while U.S. stocks enjoyed their second week of inflows, adding $1.5 billion in the week to Wednesday.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/recession-shock-coming-bofa-warns-101801015.html
Food Prices Jump Most on Record as War Sparks Supply Chaos
· UN gauge of world food costs climbed to fresh record in March
· Higher prices are contributing to inflation and hunger crisis
8 April 2022, 09:00 BST Updated on8 April 2022, 09:38 BST
Global food prices are surging at the fastest pace ever as the war in Ukraine chokes crop supplies, piling more inflationary pain on consumers and worsening a global hunger crisis.
The war has wreaked havoc on supply chains in the crucial Black Sea breadbasket region, upending global trade flows and fueling panic about shortages of key staples such as wheat and cooking oils. That’s sent food prices -- which were already surging before the conflict started -- to a record, with a United Nations’ index of world costs soaring another 13% last month.
Ukraine’s ports are closed and many vessels are avoiding the region, which accounts for about a quarter of all grains trade. Farmers in Ukraine, the top sunflower-oil exporter, are expected to drastically cut crop plantings and the nation is struggling to export supplies already harvested. Elsewhere in the world, high energy and fertilizer prices are raising food-production costs, which is feeding through to bigger grocery bills or threatening output.
The food price rally is felt most in poor countries where groceries make up a large share of consumer budgets -- and the fallout from Russia’s invasion has sent costs of basic foods like bread soaring. The United Nations’ World Food Programme recently said expensive staples in import-dependent Middle Eastern and North African nations are putting people’s resilience at a “breaking point.”
The surging costs are spurring some countries to hold off on imports, seek new suppliers or draw down local stockpiles, though that won’t be a long-term fix, said Erin Collier, an economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
“It’s basically kind of deterring demand,” she said in an interview. “That can only last for so long. Wheat is a staple food.”
The FAO’s gauge of global prices has jumped about 75% since mid-2020, eclipsing levels seen in 2008 and 2011 that contributed to global food crises. Last month’s surge helped prices round out a seventh straight quarterly gain, the longest such run since 2008.
That’s bad news for the world’s hunger problem. Cost increases stemming from the war and resulting sanctions on Russia will -- without action -- push more than 40 million additional people into extreme poverty, according to an analysis published last month by the Center for Global Development, a non-profit think tank whose funders include Bloomberg Philanthropies.
----The FAO raised its outlook for global grain stockpiles -- usually a good sign for supplies -- but said most of that is due to stranded grain in the Black Sea region. Ukraine’s exports will be particularly hard hit from the war, with wheat shipments falling 5 million tons and corn down 12.5 million tons from a previous estimate. Freight and financing challenges are also impairing Russian sales.
More
Below, why a “green energy” economy may not be possible, 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.
Memo Reveals State Department Assessed in Early 2020 That Lab Leak Was Most Likely Origin of COVID-19
By and April 6, 2022 Updated: April 7, 2022
A newly released memo from the U.S. State Department reveals that government officials knew early on that the COVID pandemic likely originated at a lab in Wuhan, China.
That memo, dated April 2020, states that out of five possible origins for COVID, a lab leak was by far the most likely. The memo also suggests that alternative theories had been introduced to prevent a lab leak from being investigated. The memo, which focuses almost entirely on the likelihood of a lab leak, contains a large amount of information that wasn’t known publicly at the time it was written.
Although a lab leak is now widely accepted as a likely origin for the virus, when the memo was written, a concerted effort was underway to discredit that possibility. It also raises the question of what senior State Department leadership—including then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—knew and why the information was withheld from the public.
According to the newly released memo, the State Department knew as of April 2020 that the central issue surrounded an obsession with collecting and testing a massive amount of virus-carrying bats on the part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and China’s Wuhan-located Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The State Department noted that lab testing of the earliest-known patient at the Wuhan Central Hospital in December 2019 determined that the virus was a “Bat SARS-like Coronavirus.” At the time this patient was tested, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hadn’t disclosed that there was any problem at all.
When they finally acknowledged an outbreak, they initially blamed it on pneumonia. It was only at the end of January that the CCP finally started admitting that COVID-19 was caused by a new virus that was transmitted between humans.
By that time, the virus had already been seeded across the globe and any chance at suppression had been lost. It was during this same period that the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was made aware of the virus’s likely origin, having been told by a group of scientists whom he was funding that there was a high probability that the virus was engineered.
More
Second COVID booster shot extends protection for just a few weeks, study shows
Thu, April 7, 2022, 2:23 AM
A fourth shot of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine increased protection against viral infection for only four to seven weeks, according to a massive study published Tuesday.
The study included 1.25 million people age 60 and over in Israel who received their fourth dose between January and March. Israel uses only the Pfizer vaccine.
People who got the fourth dose were half as likely to test positive for COVID-19 four weeks later when compared to people who only had three doses, according to the study.
But by the eighth week, the groups were almost equally likely to catch COVID-19, researchers found.
The fourth shot was the subject of much debate before U.S. regulators approved it last week for people age 50 and older.
The second booster had already been approved for immunocompromised people. President Joe Biden, 79, got his on March 30.
While increased protection against infection was short-lived, the fourth booster continued to protect against severe illness for at least six weeks, the study found. The research period actually ended before the protection did, leading researchers to suggest future studies.
The study compared only people with the fourth dose to people with a third dose. Previous research had suggested that the third dose provided a significant bump in infection protection over zero, one or two doses.
Only about 30% of the U.S. population, 98 million people, has received a third dose, according to Centers for Disease Control data.
More
https://news.yahoo.com/second-covid-booster-shot-extends-012300452.html
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.
Startling discovery threatens to upend Standard Model of particle physics
Michael Irving April 07, 2022
After a decade-long analysis, a collaboration of physicists has made the most precise measurement of the mass of a key particle – and it may unravel physics as we know it. The new measurement differs drastically from predictions based on the Standard Model, hinting at new physics.
Since it was developed in the 1970s, the Standard Model of particle physics has been extremely successful at explaining the interactions of particles and most fundamental forces. It doesn’t cover everything – major missing pieces include dark matter and even gravity – but what it does cover, it covers very well, consistently standing up to experiments that test its predictions.
But now, a well-studied particle may be threatening to poke a hole in that neat model. The mass of particles can be calculated through their relationships with other particles in the Standard Model, and this predicted mass can then be compared to actual measurements made in particle colliders, to test the internal consistency of the Standard Model. This process has now led to a major discrepancy, thanks to an unassuming particle called a W boson.
W bosons are elementary particles that carry the weak force, mediating nuclear processes like those at work in the Sun. According to the Standard Model, their mass is linked to the masses of the Higgs boson and a subatomic particle called the top quark. In a new study, almost 400 scientists on the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration spent a decade examining 4.2 million W boson candidates collected from 26 years of data at the Tevatron collider. From this treasure trove, the team was able to calculate the mass of the W boson to within 0.01 percent, making it twice as precise as the previous best measurement.
By their calculations, the W boson has a mass of 80,433.5 Mega-electronvolts (MeV), with an uncertainty of just 9.4 MeV either side. That’s within the range of some previous measurements, but well outside that predicted by the Standard Model, which puts it at 80,357 MeV, give or take 6 MeV. That means the new value is off by a whopping seven standard deviations.
Further cementing the anomaly, the W boson mass was also recently measured using data from the Large Hadron Collider, in a paper published in January. That team came to a value of 80,354 MeV (+/- 32 MeV), which is comfortably close to that given by the Standard Model.
So what’s going on? Some physicists not involved in the study are more comfortable siding with the Standard Model, which is understandable.
----If the new figure is verified, it could hint at unknown particles or new physics beyond the Standard Model, which are interfering with the expected interactions. After all, we already know that this framework is incomplete, and further investigations could help unravel the mystery.
“It’s now up to the theoretical physics community and other experiments to follow up on this and shed light on this mystery,” said David Toback, CDF co-spokesperson. “If the difference between the experimental and expected value is due to some kind of new particle or subatomic interaction, which is one of the possibilities, there’s a good chance it’s something that could be discovered in future experiments.”
The research was published in the journal Science.
This weekend’s musical diversion. Approx. 4 ½ minutes long.
Kyrie - Missa Papae Marcelli - Palestrina
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n8XdKkrqgo
This weekend’s chess update. Approx. 12 minutes.
The Carlsen Mate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNGWTTSy1k8
This week’s maths update. Approx. 19 minutes.
Reinventing the magic log wheel: How was this missed for 400 years?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIQQvxSXLhI
Finally, slavery in history. Approx. 18 minutes.
Enslaved Icelander Describes Horror of Ottoman Slave Market (1627) // Diary of Ólafur Egilsson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2EJChRdxL0
Helping the case for an International Bank for Slavery Reparations. Best to do it now while we are still on fiat money. GB should take the initiative.
April 9, 1914 Tampico incident - US ship crew arrested in Mexico.
https://www.firstworldwar.com/atoz/tampico.htm
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