Baltic Dry Index. 3189 +94 Brent Crude 110.86
Spot Gold 1816
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 19/05/22 World 525,080,438
Deaths 6,294,856
The Fed “is going to have to make a very difficult choice,” El-Erian said. “A lot of people say it needs luck and skill. It needs a lot of luck at this point.”
Another day of harsh reality returning to the stock casinos. With global interest rates just starting out on many months, possibly years of interest rate hikes, very few stocks prosper in such conditions, no matter how many TV stock promoters/shills say the bottom’s in.
My guess and it’s only as good as anyone else’s, is that eventually the S&P 500 will bottom out around 2,500. Of course, it won’t drop continuously to 2,500. There will be bear market, short squeeze rallies along the way.
But, with stagflation arriving right now, in all likelihood followed by a deep global recession, most stocks are a sell in favour of most food commodities.
All the more so if the northern hemisphere weather doesn’t provide enough replacement grains to replace the unnecessary war in the breadbasket of much of the world.
What were they thinking back in January-February in Washington, London and NATO Brussels. Something like, Putin won’t invade a land as big as Ukraine with only 190,000 troops. Germany used 1.5 million. The USSR retaking Ukraine 2.2 million. We can call his bluff and destroy him?
Only President Macron of France foresaw the looming war disaster and tried seriously to stop it, only to be embarrassingly put down by Biden and Blinken.
Now both are desperately begging President Putin to release the grain stored in the Ukraine ports captured by Russia, even as both wage a proxy war against Russia to the last Ukrainian.
Asia markets sell off as Hong Kong's Hang Seng leads losses and Tencent shares plunge nearly 7%
Published Wed, May 18 20227:39 PM EDTUpdated 15 Min Ago
SINGAPORE — Most Asia-Pacific markets fell sharply in Thursday trade after heavy losses on Wall Street overnight.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng index led losses regionally, falling 2.25% by the afternoon. Shares of Chinese tech behemoth Tencent plunged 6.62% after reporting that its quarterly profit halved.
Other Chinese tech stocks in Hong Kong also saw heavy losses, with Alibaba falling 6.06% while Meituan shed 3.2%. The Hang Seng Tech index traded 3.4% lower.
Mainland Chinese stocks declined, with the Shanghai Composite fractionally lower while the Shenzhen Component declined 0.247%.
The Nikkei 225 in Japan fell 1.75% while the Topix index shed 1.31%. Japan's exports rose 12.5% year-on-year in April, data from the country's Ministry of Finance showed Thursday. That was lower than expectations for a 13.8% increase, according to Reuters.
South Korea's Kospi dropped 1.34%, while the S&P/ASX 200 in Australia slipped 1.61%.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan traded 1.91% lower.
----Major indexes on Wall Street tumbled, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing at its lowest since March 2021. The Dow dropped 1,164.52 points, or 3.57%, to 31,490.07.
The S&P 500 slipped 4.04% to 4,923.68, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 4.73% to 11,418.15.
----The U.S. dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of its peers, was at 103.599 — off levels below 103.5 seen earlier in the week.
The Japanese yen traded at 128.88 per dollar, still stronger than levels above 129 seen yesterday against the greenback. The Australian dollar was at $0.7017, against an earlier low of $0.695.
Oil prices were higher in the afternoon of Asia trading hours, with international benchmark Brent crude futures up 1.61% to $110.87 per barrel. U.S. crude futures climbed 1.09% to $110.78 per barrel.
Goldman CEO Sees Recession Risk, ‘Extremely Punitive’ Inflation
By Sonali Basak 18 May 2022, 13:34 BSTGoldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer David Solomon said clients are preparing for slowing growth and a decline in asset prices -- all as “extremely punitive” inflation creates a tax on the economy.
“There’s a chance of recession,” he said in a telephone interview. While he added that he’s not overly concerned about that risk, Solomon cited at least a 30% chance of such an event in the next 12 to 24 months as calculated by his firm’s economists, led by Jan Hatzius. He’s watching closely for whether credit spreads begin to widen out more materially.
Solomon’s comments come months after his top deputy, John Waldron, told a large investment client that the Federal Reserve hadn’t been acting swiftly enough to control inflation. This week, former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein expressed similar unease about soaring prices.
“We have to get rid of inflation,” Solomon said Tuesday on the phone call. “Inflation is extremely punitive, especially on those that are living week to week, paycheck to paycheck. It’s a big, big tax on that part of society. I think it’s very, very important that we get it under control.”
More https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-18/goldman-ceo-sees-recession-risk-extremely-punitive-inflation?srnd=premium-europeEl-Erian Says US Can’t Avoid Stagflation Even as Fed Tightens
· Stagflation is ‘worst thing’ for central banks, El-Erian says
· Markets still to price in ‘significant’ economic slowdown
18 May 2022, 13:18 BST
The US economy won’t be able to avoid a bout of stagflation and markets have yet to tune into the risk of a significant slowdown in growth, said Mohamed El-Erian, the chair of Gramercy Fund Management and former chief executive officer of Pimco.
While the US can perhaps avoid a recession, “what is unavoidable is stagflation,” El-Erian told Bloomberg Television’s Francine Lacqua. “We’ve seen growth coming down and we’re seeing inflation remaining high.”
He blamed the situation in part on the Federal Reserve’s view from 2021 that inflation would at some point fade. It’s since retired the “transitory” thesis and is now tightening monetary policy, with Chair Jerome Powell saying Tuesday that interest rates will be raised until there’s “clear and convincing” evidence that inflation is in retreat.
“The Fed is finally catching up to developments on the ground,” said El-Erian, who contributes to Bloomberg Opinion. “But it still has someway to go.”
Stagflation is the “worst thing for central banks, especially for the Fed because it puts its two objectives in conflict with each other,” he said. “This situation was avoidable, had the Fed not stuck to its transitory inflation characterization.”
The Fed “is going to have to make a very difficult choice,” El-Erian said. “A lot of people say it needs luck and skill. It needs a lot of luck at this point.”
As for how investors should respond, he said they have still to price in a “significant slowdown in growth,” which means there’s more of an adjustment to make.
Melvin Capital says it’s winding down funds and returning money to investors during market turmoil
Melvin Capital Management, the hedge fund burned by the GameStop mania, said it will unwind its funds and return cash to investors as losses accelerated during the market turmoil this year, CNBC confirmed.
“The past 17 months has been an incredibly trying time for the firm and you, our investors,” founder Gabe Plotkin wrote in a letter to investors. “I have given everything I could, but more recently that has not been enough to deliver the returns you should expect. I now recognize that I need to step away from managing external capital.”
News of the letter was first reported by Bloomberg.
Melvin was one of the biggest victims from the meme stock frenzy last year due to its large short position in GameStop. Citadel and Point72 had to infuse close to $3 billion into Plotkin’s hedge fund to shore up its finances.
Plotkin has failed to recoup the losses in a volatile 2022. The fund was down 21% at the end of the first quarter and the number might have gotten worse in the current quarter as the tech-driven rout intensified in the face of rising rates.
The embattled hedge fund increased its stake in Amazon and Microsoft significantly in the first quarter, according to a regulatory filing. Its largest positions as of the end of March included a number of reopening plays like Live Nation, Hilton Worldwide Holdings and Expedia.
Melvin said it will not be charging management fees as of June 1.
CNBC reported earlier this month Plotkin had discussed a novel plan with its investors under which the firm would return their capital, while giving them the right to reinvest that money in what would essentially be a new fund run by Plotkin.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/melvin-capital-says-it-plans-to-unwind-funds.html
Finally, another disastrous consequence of Europe’s unnecessary war. Probably no one in Washington, London, NATO Brussels or Moscow knew it existed or cared. When diplomacy deliberately failed.
The invaders destroyed the National Gene Bank of Plants of Ukraine
One of the world’s largest the National Gene Bank of named after V.Ya. Yuriev National Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine, located in Kharkiv, was destroyed during the war.
This was announced by the leading researcher of the institute Sergey Avramenko on his YouTube channel.
Preservation and effective use of plant genetic diversity to ensure food, economic, environmental, social security and development is one of the most pressing problems of mankind. In Ukraine, these activities were initiated in the early 1900th by such prominent scientists as A.Ye. Zaikevych, P.V. Budrin, V.Ya. Yuriev, B.K. Yenken, M.I. Vavilov, M.M. Kuleshov, L.M. Delone and others.
With the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence in 1992, on the initiative of the Ukrainian Academy of Agrarian Sciences, the scientific and technical program “Plant Genetic Resources” was launched. The program is aimed at creating the National Gene Bank of Plants of Ukraine. It is performed by 28 leading breeding and research institutions that form the System of Plant Genetic Resources of Ukraine. For coordination and scientific and methodological guidance of the System on the basis of the Plant Production Institute named after VYa Yuriev, the National Center for Genetic Resources of Plants of Ukraine (NCPGRU) was founded. A powerful base for working with plant genetic resources was created by including several research units of the Plant Production Institute named after VYa Yuriev as well as of Ustymivka Experimental Station of Plant Production (which was previously part of the system of the MI Vavilov All-Union Institute of Plant Production) in the NCPGRU.
The bank kept more than 160 thousand varieties of plant seeds, and hybrids of agricultural crops worldwide.
He also stressed that seed samples were ordered by specialists from different countries, including Russia, to carry out selection work on a particular crop that would be adapted to a specific area.
The specialist added that there are those that no longer exist in Europe and the world among the destroyed samples.
https://odessa-journal.com/the-invaders-destroyed-the-national-gene-bank-of-plants-of-ukraine/
If we don't end war, war will end us.
H. G. Wells.
Global Inflation/Stagflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
Europe Car Sales Slump 20% in April, Dashing Hopes for Recovery
· Industry is beset by stubborn shortages, China lockdown effect
· Record inflation increasingly poses a threat to strong demand
18 May 2022, 07:00 BST
Europe’s new-vehicle sales shrank for a 10th month in a row as the industry remains mired in supply-chain crises that are stoking record inflation and threatening to put off car buyers.
Registrations fell 20% to 830,447 vehicles in April, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association said Wednesday, the steepest decline this year. Stellantis NV, the carmaker formed from the merger of PSA Group and Fiat Chrysler, was the hardest-hit among major manufacturers with a 31% drop.
Issues constraining production -- chief among them being the global semiconductor shortage -- have led forecasters at LMC Automotive to cut their estimate for Western European passenger-car sales each of the last four months. They now expect annual deliveries to shrink 6% this year to less than 10 million units. Back in January, LMC was calling for almost 9% growth. Carmakers have managed to make up for lost volume by charging higher prices, though it’s unclear how much higher they can go.
“Global supply issues show no significant signs of easing, while underlying demand prospects are eroding, too,” LMC wrote in a report this month. “Households will experience a serious squeeze to real income this year. Supply issues do remain the key determinant for registrations for now.”
Across Europe’s biggest markets, Italy posted the sharpest decline, contracting by a third, while registrations in Germany and France dropped by more than a fifth.
More
Britain’s Inflation Rate Surges to a 40-Year High of 9%
By Andrew Atkinson 18 May 2022, 07:04 BSTUK inflation rose to its highest level since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister more than 40 years ago, adding to pressure for action from the government and central bank.
Consumer prices surged 9% in the year through April, the fastest rate since 1982, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday in a report that marked a bleak moment for living standards.
The increase is more than double the pace of basic wage growth, squeezing consumer spending power at the sharpest pace on record. The pain is set to intensify, with the Bank of England predicting double-digit inflation by October when energy bills are almost certain to jump again.The cost-of-living crisis already has amplified the political debate about how to handle a series of shocks hitting the UK. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives government has targeted relief at those with jobs, while the Labour opposition is calling for an emergency budget to help pensioners and people on benefits.
Both parties and some economists have faulted BOE Governor Andrew Bailey for describing inflation as “temporary” for too long. One of Bailey’s predecessors, Mervyn King, who led the central bank through the crisis in 2008, said last year’s dose of stimulus was a mistake.
More
Wheat Tour Participants Estimate 39.5 bushel crop in northern Kansas
2022 Winter wheat tour is occurring this week.
By Bill Spiegel 5/17/2022
Wheat Tour Participants Estimate 39.5 bushel crop in northern Kansas
Its arguable that Day 1 of the 2022 Wheat Tour, which spanned northern Kansas from Manhattan to Colby, is the best overall wheat crop in the state. If that’s the case, the tour’s 39.5 bushel per acre findings, based on 248 field stops, is nearly 20 bushels per acre lower than last year’s and the lowest yield since 2018. It’s well off the five-year average of 46.9 bushels per acre.
----While in Colby, participants received winter wheat yield updates from neighboring states:
- Nebraska: 0.93 million acres planted; estimated 41 bushel per acre yield. 2021 actual yield was 41.16 million bushels.
- Colorado: 2.15 million acres planted; estimated 28.6 bushel year acre yield. 2021 actual yield was 69.56 million bushels.
The 2022 wheat crop shows major damage from drought and heat stress. Northwest Kansas in particular was hard-hit by drought and heat; some areas were affected by frost, according to tour participants. A swath of wheat in Ellis, Trego, Rush and Lane counties had hail damage too.
The Hard Winter Wheat Tour, sponsored by the Wheat Quality Council, left Manhattan this morning and stopped in Colby for the night. Tour participants will leave Colby and zigzag south and east to Wichita.
This is considered the region most widely affected by severe drought, according to Kansas State University’s Mesonet.
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.
First at-home test for flu, COVID and RSV authorized by the FDA
Rich Haridy May 16, 2022
A new direct-to-consumer test designed to detect a number of different respiratory viruses, including COVID-19 and influenza, has been authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The test is the first of its kind to be approved by the FDA that gives consumers access to these kinds of diagnostics without going through a doctor or needing a prescription.
The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how we access diagnostic tests. Rapid antigen tests for COVID-19 allowed people to test for a SARS-CoV-2 infection without going to a doctor. And now the FDA has authorized the first at-home test that can differentiate several respiratory viruses.
The test is from life sciences company Labcorp and looks for traces of influenza A and B, SARS-CoV-2 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Unlike common rapid antigen tests, this new test uses more traditional PCR (polymerase chain reaction) technology. This means it involves sending a nasal swab out to a lab for analysis.
The kit is called the Labcorp Seasonal Respiratory Virus RT-PCR DTC Test and it will be available in stores or online without the need for a prescription. Users will complete a nasal swab at home, send the sample off to the closest Labcorp lab, and access results through an online platform within one to three days of the sample being received at a lab.
“While the FDA has now authorized many COVID-19 tests without a prescription, this is the first test authorized for flu and RSV, along with COVID-19, where an individual can self-identify their need for a test, order it, collect their sample and send it to the lab for testing, without consulting a health care professional,” said director of FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, Jeff Shuren.
The test obviously won’t be able to return tests fast enough to guide immediate treatment or isolation decisions but knowing whether an infection is either COVID, the flu or even RSV, will be valuable in the long-term.
Shuren said the FDA is looking to expand direct-to-consumer diagnostics such as this one, and in the future it is hoped rapid versions of the tests will be available for people to self-diagnose immediately at home.
“The rapid advances being made in consumer access to diagnostic tests, including the ability to collect your sample at home for flu and RSV without a prescription, brings us one step closer to tests for these viruses that could be performed entirely at home,” said Shuren.
It is unclear how much the test will cost but similar tests from Labcorp cost US$169.
Source: FDA
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
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.
Widely Available AI Could Have Deadly Consequences
US researchers’ “Dr. Evil project” proves drug discovery AI could be used to create biochemical weapons.
May 17, 2022 7:00 AM
In September 2021, scientists Sean Ekins and Fabio Urbina were working on an experiment they had named the “Dr. Evil project.” The Swiss government’s Spiez laboratory had asked them to find out what would happen if their AI drug discovery platform, MegaSyn, fell into the wrong hands.
In much the way undergraduate chemistry students play with ball-and-stick model sets to learn how different chemical elements interact to form molecular compounds, Ekins and his team at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals used publicly available databases containing the molecular structures and bioactivity data of millions of molecules to teach MegaSyn how to generate new compounds with pharmaceutical potential. The plan was to use it to accelerate the drug discovery process for rare and neglected diseases. The best drugs are ones with high specificity—acting only on desired or targeted cells or neuroreceptors, for instance—and low toxicity to reduce ill effects.
Normally, MegaSyn would be programmed to generate the most specific and least toxic molecules. Instead, Ekins and Urbina programmed it to generate VX, an odorless and tasteless nerve agent and one of the most toxic and fast-acting human-made chemical warfare agents known today.
Ekins planned to outline the findings at the Spiez Convergence conference—a biennial meeting that brings experts together to discuss the potential security risks of the latest advances in chemistry and biology—in a presentation on how AI for drug discovery could be misused to create biochemical weapons. “For me, it was trying to see if the technology could do it,” Ekins says. “That was the curiosity factor.”
In their office in Raleigh, North Carolina, Ekins stood behind Urbina, who pulled up the MegaSyn platform on his 2015 MacBook. In the line of code that normally instructed the platform to generate the least toxic molecules, Urbina simply changed a 0 to a 1, reversing the platform’s end goal on toxicity. Then they set a threshold for toxicity, asking MegaSyn to only generate molecules as lethal as VX, which requires only a few salt-sized grains to kill a person.
Ekins and Urbina left the program to run overnight. The next morning, they were shocked to learn that MegaSyn had generated some 40,000 different molecules as lethal as VX.
“That was when the penny dropped,” Ekins says.
MegaSyn had generated VX, in addition to thousands of known biochemical agents, but it had also generated thousands of toxic molecules that were not listed in any public database. MegaSyn had made the computational leap to generate completely new molecules.
At the conference and then later in a three-page paper, Ekins and his colleagues issued a stark warning. “Without being overly alarmist, this should serve as a wake-up call for our colleagues in the ‘AI in drug discovery’ community,” Ekins and his colleagues wrote. “Although some domain expertise in chemistry or toxicology is still required to generate toxic substances or biological agents that can cause significant harm, when these fields intersect with machine learning models, where all you need is the ability to code and to understand the output of the models themselves, they dramatically lower technical thresholds.”
More
Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.
John F. Kennedy.
No comments:
Post a Comment