Baltic Dry Index. 2307 +68 Brent Crude 103.76
Spot Gold 1924
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 25/04/22 World 509,582,363
Deaths 6,243,259
“How did you get stagflation?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
With apologies to Ernest Hemingway,
Don’t look now but stagflation is suddenly arriving.
Between China continuing its foolish, counterproductive, ineffective lockdown measures against the growing omicron infections in China’s cities, the continuing new European war in the Ukraine, plus Indonesia suddenly last Friday banning the export of palm oil, see the inflation section, stagflation just switched gears from gradually to suddenly.
On Saturday, most UK supermarket chains started limiting the amount of vegetable oil customers can purchase to two, 2 litre bottles at a time.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index briefly falls 3%; oil slides nearly 3%
SINGAPORE — Asia-Pacific markets fell sharply on Monday following a sell-off on Wall Street on Friday.
The Hang Seng index briefly fell 3% as the Hang Seng Tech index dropped 2.96%. Shares of Chinese video company Bilibili plunged 3.77% in Hong Kong, and Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares slipped 3.58%.
Mainland Chinese markets slid. The Shanghai composite declined 2.38% while the Shenzhen component was down 2.86%.
“It’s no surprise and it makes all sorts of logical sense that the market should be concerned about the Covid situation because that clearly is impacting economic activity. It’s impacting earnings potential for many parts of the market,” said Timothy Moe, chief Asia-Pacific equity strategist at Goldman Sachs.
China has been struggling to contain its worst outbreak of the virus despite harsh lockdowns in its largest city, Shanghai. Over the weekend, capital Beijing, warned that the virus has been spreading undetected for about a week.
He said there is a lot of policy support on its way, especially in infrastructure spending, but that can’t take place when the economy is locked down.
“That’s why the market is very much focused on the near-term issues with respect to Covid,” he told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia.”
Japan’s Nikkei 225′s slipped nearly 2%, while the Topix declined 1.58%. Nissan’s shares fell 4% following a Bloomberg report that Renault may sell part of its stake in the Japanese company in order to focus more on electric vehicles.
In South Korea, the Kospi slid 1.57% and the Kosdaq was down 2.07%.
Australia and New Zealand markets are closed on Monday for a holiday.
U.S. stock futures were down slightly after a sell-off Friday, when the Dow Jones Industrial average plunged more than 900 points. The S&P 500 closed down 2.8% at 4,271.78, for its worst day since March. The Nasdaq Composite slipped 2.6% to 12,839.29.
slipped 2.6% to 12,839.29.
more
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/asia-markets-earnings-currencies-in-focus.html
Analysis: Bruised Wall Street faces gauntlet of worries after market tumble
April 24, 2022 2:11 PM GMT+1
NEW YORK, April 24 (Reuters) - Battered U.S. stocks are facing a potentially painful stretch in the weeks ahead, as hawkish Federal Reserve policy, rising bond yields, geopolitical uncertainty and the corporate earnings season fuel investor unease.
After last week’s sharp decline, the S&P is down 5.7% so far in April and is on track for its worst monthly drop since March 2020, when the spreading COVID-19 pandemic blasted stocks.
One measure of investor anxiety, the Cboe Volatility Index (.VIX), known as Wall Street’s fear gauge, on Friday notched its largest one-day gain in about five months to close at a five-week high of 28.21.
“More variables in any equation create greater uncertainty in terms of the outcome,” said Michael Farr, president of Farr, Miller & Washington. “We have more variables now than I can remember in my career.”
Chief among market participants' worries is a Fed that has repeatedly ratcheted up its hawkish rhetoric as it gears up to fight the worst U.S. inflation in nearly 40 years.
The hawkish stance was underlined on Thursday, when Fed Chair Jerome Powell said a half-point interest rate increase "will be on the table" at the central bank’s monetary policy meeting next month. read more
Traders in eurodollar futures, which reflect the U.S. interest rate outlook for the next few years, on Friday priced in the Federal Reserve's rate-hike cycle peaking at a higher level than previously expected, adding to worries that the scope of Fed tightening could hit U.S. growth.
More
Investors just pulled a massive $17.5 billion out of global equities. They’re just getting started, says Bank of America.
Last Updated: April 22, 2022 at 5:07 p.m. ET
Are the bears just getting started?
That’s a question posed by strategists at Bank of America, who noted Friday that investors pulled $17.5 billion out of global equities over the past week, making for the biggest weekly outflow so far this year.
They cautioned that those outflows could well deepen. Since Nov. 2021, Nasdaq peak inflows to stocks have occurred in 16 of 20 weeks, for a total of $229 billion, while private clients bought stocks 17 out of 20 weeks, pointed out Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett, who provided the below chart:
Investors also pulled $8.7 billion out of bonds and $55.4 billion from cash, pouring $900 million into gold. That was before Friday’s stock-market rout, which saw the S&P 500 SPX, -2.77% slump 2.8% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -2.82% plummet 981.36 points, or 2.8%. The S&P 500 is down 10.4% year to date, while the Dow is off 7%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite COMP, -2.55% is down 17.9% so far in 2022, after a 2.5% Friday drop.
Breaking down some of the equity outflows, Bank of America strategists noted data showing Europe saw the 10th straight weekly outflow — $2.9 billion, while $1.6 billion exited financials, as money flowed back into buying the technology sector dip. Materials, meanwhile, marked a record 8-weeks of inflows.
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Oil slides to near 2-week lows as Shanghai lockdowns stoke demand worries
April 25, 2022 5:26 AM GMT+1
TOKYO, April 25 (Reuters) - Oil prices slumped to near two-week lows on Monday, extending losses from last week, as concerns grew that prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns in Shanghai and potential U.S. rate hikes would hurt global economic growth and fuel demand.
Brent crude futures were down $3.15, or 3.0%, at $103.50 a barrel by 0326 GMT. They touched $103.41 earlier in the session, the lowest since April 12.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures fell $3.01, or 3.0%, to $99.06 a barrel, having skidded earlier to $98.93, the lowest since April 12.
The benchmarks lost nearly 5% last week on demand concerns.
"Oil is rerating lower due to the China consumption hit while the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to slow down the US economy," SPI Asset Management Managing Director Stephen Innes said in a note.
"Those are two gusty headwinds suggesting some oil bulls will give way to recession fears and demand devastation."
More
In other news, to no one’s surprise President Macron was re-elected President of France, but on the lowest voter turnout since 1969 according to the BBC. With every party from the communists to the greens voting to block Marine Le Pen and all of French media united behind Macron, the result was never in doubt according to the polls, but few in France seem to think yesterday’s election really settled anything.
Inflation is rising, Macron’s Ukraine diplomacy was squashed in Washington, Germany is blocking an EU embargo on Russian oil and gas, and French EU initiatives are largely blocked in Brussels.
Analysis: In troubled France, no honeymoon for re-elected Macron
By Michel Rose April 24, 2022 9:32 PM GMT+1
PARIS, April 24 (Reuters) - Now comes the hard part.
Emmanuel Macron may have seen off far-right leader Marine Le Pen, but his second term could be even rockier than the first with mounting political opposition and boiling social discontent.
As his supporters savoured a hard-earned re-election at a rally by the Eiffel Tower on Sunday, Macron acknowledged in his victory speech that many people who voted for him did so to block Le Pen and not because they support his ideas.
"No one will be left by the wayside," Macron said, flanked by his wife Brigitte.
"This next era will not be the same as the last mandate, we will invent a new way of doing things together, for a better five years."
The next hurdle is only a few weeks ahead. Parliamentary elections in June will define the make-up of the government Macron must rely on to see through reform plans that would be an unprecedented shake-up of France's welfare state.
Newly elected presidents can usually expect to get a majority in parliament whenever legislative elections directly follow the presidential vote because of the generally low turnout among supporters of all the defeated candidates.
However, in her concession speech, Le Pen sounded defiant, promising a strong opposition bloc in parliament. While hard-left Jean-Luc Melenchon has his mind set on becoming prime minister after securing the bulk of the left-wing vote in the first round.
Melenchon hopes to carry that momentum into the parliamentary elections and force Macron into an awkward and stalemate-prone "cohabitation" with him in charge of a left-wing majority.
Even if Macron allies do get a majority or a workable coalition pact, he will also have to deal with resistance in the streets to his reform plans, notably a pension reform that would gradually raise the minimum age to 65 from 62.
Pensions are always a hot issue in France and Macron's lower score against Le Pen compared to 2017 means he won't have the same authority to implement reforms he had five years ago, despite becoming the only French president to be re-elected in two decades.
More
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/troubled-france-no-honeymoon-re-elected-macron-2022-04-24/
Borrell says no EU agreement on Russian energy embargo
April 25, 2022 4:10 AM GMT+1
BERLIN, April 25 (Reuters) - There is insufficient support from European Union member states for a complete embargo or punitive tariff on Russian oil and gas imports, the EU's top diplomat Josep Borrell was quoted as saying by German newspaper Die Welt on Monday.
"At the moment, we in the EU do not have a unified position on this question," Borrell told the newspaper.
Oil exports are the Kremlin's main source of foreign currency and many within the EU have called for an end to oil payments because they effectively finance the war in Ukraine, which Russia calls a "special military operation".
Some EU countries are pushing for a sixth sanctions package on Russia and Brussels is preparing a full impact assessment of an oil ban as part of possible further measures.
Russia is Europe's biggest oil supplier, providing just over a quarter of EU oil imports in 2020, according to data from the bloc's statistics office Eurostat.
Borrell said the topic will be discussed at the next EU summit due at the end of next month and that he did not expect any decision on the matter before then.
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Inflation is not all bad. After all, it has allowed every American to live in a more expensive neighborhood without moving.
Senator Allan Cranston.
Global Inflation/Stagflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
In UK supermarkets at the weekend, purchase limitations on cooking oil supplies were introduced.
Soyoil Surges to Record High as Indonesia Bans Palm Oil Exports
By April 23, 2022 Updated: April 23, 2022
LONDON—Soybean oil prices soared to a record high on Friday as Indonesia’s decision to effectively ban exports of palm oil heightened concerns about already depleted global supplies of alternative vegetable oils.
The loss of shipments from Ukraine, the world’s top supplier of sunflower oil, and drought in the world’s top soybean oil exporter Argentina had already sparked a sharp rise in global vegetable oil prices.
The tightening vegetable oil supplies come as easing COVID-19 restrictions have sparked a surge in demand for food and biofuels.
Soybean oil prices on the Chicago Board of Trade rose to a peak of 83.21 cents per lb on Friday, up 4.5 percent on the day and a record high, before pulling back to 81.42—still a record for the most actively traded futures contract. Prices have now risen by almost 50 percent so far this year.
Indonesia, the world’s top producer and exporter of palm oil, blocked exports from April 28 to tackle rising domestic prices. The move looks set to fuel already surging food inflation elsewhere.
“This is bad news for vegetable oil consumers in many countries which currently strongly depend on palm oil in view of shortages in sunflower oil, rapeseed oil, and soy oil,” Siegfried Falk, an analyst at Hamburg-based Oil World, said.
Food inflation has become a major concern around the globe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a major exporter of wheat, corn, barley, sunflower oil, and rapeseed oil.
The United Nations food agency reported earlier this month that food prices had jumped nearly 13 percent in March to a new record high.
Argentina, the world’s top supplier of processed soy ahead of Brazil and the United States, briefly halted new overseas sales of soybean oil and meal in mid-March before hiking the export tax rate in a bid to tamp down domestic food inflation.
More
Indonesia's palm oil export ban leaves global buyers with no plan B
April 25, 2022 5:51 AM GMT+1
MUMBAI, April 25 (Reuters) - Global edible oil consumers have no option but to pay top dollar for supplies after Indonesia's surprise palm oil export ban forced buyers to seek alternatives, already in short supply due to adverse weather and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The move by the world's biggest palm oil producer to ban exports from Thursday will lift prices of all major edible oils including palm oil, soyoil, sunflower oil and rapeseed oil, industry watchers predict. That will place extra strain on cost-sensitive consumers in Asia and Africa hit by higher fuel and food prices. read more
"Indonesia's decision affects not only palm oil availability, but vegetable oils worldwide," James Fry, chairman of commodities consultancy LMC International, told Reuters.
Palm oil - used in everything from cakes and frying fats to cosmetics and cleaning products - accounts for nearly 60% of global vegetable oil shipments, and top producer Indonesia accounts for around a third of all vegetable oil exports. It announced the export ban on April 22, until further notice, in a move to tackle rising domestic prices. read more
"This is happening when the export tonnages of all other major oils are under pressure: soybean oil due to droughts in South America; rapeseed oil due to disastrous canola crops in Canada; and sunflower oil because of Russia's war on Ukraine," Fry said.
Vegetable oil prices have already risen more than 50% in the past six months as factors from labour shortages in Malaysia to droughts in Argentina and Canada - the biggest exporters of soyoil and canola oil respectively - curtailed supplies. read more
----Importers such as India, Bangladesh and Pakistan will try to increase palm oil purchases from Malaysia, but the world's second-biggest palm oil producer cannot fill the gap created by Indonesia, Chaturvedi said.
Indonesia typically supplies nearly half of India's total palm oil imports, while Pakistan and Bangladesh import nearly 80% of their palm oil from Indonesia.
"Nobody can compensate for the loss of Indonesian palm oil. Every country is going to suffer," said Rasheed JanMohd, chairman of Pakistan Edible oil Refiners Association (PEORA).
----As Indonesia has allowed loading until April 28, consuming countries will have enough supply for the first half of May, but could face shortages from the second half, said a refiner based in Dhaka.
South Asian refiners will only slowly release oil into the market as they know supplies are limited, he said.
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.
China Covid death toll rises as Beijing warns of 'grim' situation
Sun, April 24, 2022, 3:42 AM
Shanghai reported 39 Covid deaths Sunday, official data showed, its highest daily toll since a weeks-long lockdown started, while China's capital Beijing warned of a "grim" situation with rising infections.
The world's second-largest economy has been struggling to stamp out its worst Covid-19 outbreak in two years with a playbook of harsh lockdowns and mass testing as it sticks to a strict zero-Covid policy, taking a heavy toll on businesses and public morale.
The cosmopolitan business hub of Shanghai has been almost entirely locked down since the start of the month, snarling supply chains, with many residents confined to their homes for even longer as it became the epicentre of the outbreak.
China's biggest city only announced its first fatalities on April 18, despite reporting thousands of cases each day in recent weeks.
It reported 39 more deaths on Sunday, National Health Commission data showed, bringing its total toll to 87, while the country logged nearly 22,000 new local virus cases.
Shanghai's previous highest daily toll since lockdown was 12, reported a day earlier.
The city of 25 million has struggled to provide fresh food to those confined at home, while patients have reported trouble accessing regular medical care as thousands of health staff were deployed for Covid testing and treatment.
Censors have battled to scrub the online backlash against the prolonged lockdown.
Meanwhile 22 new infections were reported in the capital Beijing, after warnings from an official on Saturday that the city must take urgent action.
Health official Pang Xinghuo said preliminary observations suggested Covid had been "spreading invisibly" within the capital for a week now, affecting "schools, tour groups and many families".
"The risk of continued and hidden transmission is high, and the situation is grim," Tian Wei of Beijing's Municipal Party Committee told a press briefing.
https://news.yahoo.com/china-covid-death-toll-rises-024240149.html
COVID-19 third leading cause of death again in 2021- study
The overall death rate was lowest among children aged 5 to 14 years old, and highest among people aged 85 and above.
By REUTERS Published: APRIL 22, 2022 22:34
COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States for the second year in a row in 2021, with death rates rising for most age groups, a government study showed on Friday.
COVID-19 was the underlying or contributing cause of 460,513 deaths in the United States last year, a nearly 20% jump compared to 2020, the study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed.
The researchers analyzed death certificate data for deaths occurring among residents in the United States during January to December last year. They found that 2021 saw the highest overall death rate since 2003, with heart disease and cancer being the first and the second leading cause of death, respectively.
The overall death rate was lowest among children aged 5 to 14 years old, and highest among people aged 85 and above, a trend similar to 2020, the report found. Deaths peaked in the months of January and September.
COVID-19 was associated with 111.4 per 100,000 deaths in the United States in 2021, compared to 93.2 per 100,000 deaths in 2020, CDC data showed. COVID death rates were lowest among those aged 1 to 4 years and 5 to 14 years.
While COVID death rates were the highest for those 85 years and older in 2021, those rates fell from 2020. There were 94,884 COVID-19 related deaths last year among those aged 85 and above compared with 122,707 in 2020, data showed.
Age groups under 75 saw significant increases in deaths, the researchers found.
The report also found that the overall age-adjusted US death rate rose nearly 1% from 2020 to 2021.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/article-704856
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
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, among other things, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported.
Breakthrough TPV cell makes more power from heat than a steam turbine
Loz Blain April 20, 2022
MIT says its new solid-state thermophotovoltaic heat engine can harvest more energy from heat than the average steam turbine, at a fraction of the cost and using no moving parts. Huge implications for future power stations, as well as grid-level energy storage.
The majority of humanity's electricity comes from heat – burning coal or natural gas, nuclear fission, concentrating solar – that's used to boil water and spin steam turbines. This method of power generation has been around since Charles Parsons first hooked a steam turbine up to a dynamo in 1884, and licensed the patent to George Westinghouse. Over the last century and a half, it's become ubiquitous all over the world as a mature and well-optimized technology with known strengths and limitations.
One of those limitations is efficiency. While some turbines have managed to convert up to 60 percent of a heat source's energy into electricity, the average turbine operates at closer to 35 percent efficiency. Another limitation is heat – the moving parts in turbines prevent them from operating, for example, at temperatures over 2,000 °C (3,600 °F).
These figures come from an MIT research team that's been working on an alternative: a heat engine with no moving parts, a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) device that the team has now demonstrated in a small 1 x 1-cm (0.4 x 0.4-in) prototype, maintaining an efficiency over 40 percent across a temperature range between 1,900 - 2,400 °C (3,450 - 4,300 °F).
That's a significant advance, says the team, from typical TPV heat engines, most of which operate at about 20-percent efficiency, with the previous record being 32 percent, and offers a more effective way of harvesting energy than turbines under the right circumstances.
Thermophotovoltaic heat engines boil down to something like this: heat arrives and is collected by an absorber/emitter material, which takes in the heat and kicks out photons on the other side. These photons are harvested by a regular photovoltaic cell in close proximity, which converts them into usable electricity.
The MIT team made its impressive efficiency advance by tweaking a few variables. Firstly, the input heat temperature – this device is designed specifically to work at hot temperatures above the range where turbines can no longer function. This allows the team to use higher-bandgap absorber/emitter materials, which take in more energy and release higher-energy infrared photons on the emitter side – as well as photovoltaic cells designed to take maximum advantage of those high-energy photons.
Then, the team layered the photovoltaic cells – the first layer being designed to harvest the highest-energy photons at transmission-efficient higher voltages, and the second layer being there to mop up lower-energy photons. Photons that make it through both layers are reflected back onto the absorber/emitter with a mirror, so that any photons outside the optimal ranges can feed back into the start of the process and help to keep the emitter temperature up.
In a paper published in Nature, the research team discussed its record-breaking experimental results, noting that "reaching 40 percent efficiency with TPVs is notable from the standpoint that it now renders TPV as a heat engine technology that can compete with turbines. An efficiency of 40 percent is already greater than the average turbine-based heat engine efficiency in the United States, but what could make TPVs even more attractive than a turbine is the potential for lower cost, faster response times, lower maintenance, ease of integration with external heat sources and fuel flexibility."
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The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
P. J. O'Rourke.
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