Tuesday 23 August 2022

Bruno The Bear’s Back. A UK Food Disaster.

 Baltic Dry Index. 1270 -09    Brent Crude 97.02

Spot Gold 1737         US 2 Year Yield 3.37 +0.03

Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000

Deaths 53,100

Coronavirus Cases 23/08/22 World 601,811,081

Deaths 6,474,253

"It's strange that men should take up crime when there are so many legal ways to be dishonest. “

Al Capone.

In the stock casinos, Bruno the Grizzly Bear returned from his summer holiday.

The Greater Fool rally over, the stock casinos got back to forward looking at higher interest rates, higher inflation, higher wages, a looming winter of fuel and food shortages, and a looming winter recession with social discontent.

Not to worry though, team Biden, Trudeau, Macron, Scholz, Van der Leyen, and a UK PM yet to be announced are on the case. What could possibly go wrong?


Asia-Pacific markets trade lower after Wall Street’s sharp declines

UPDATED TUE, AUG 23 2022 12:11 AM EDT

Asia-Pacific markets traded lower on Tuesday morning after major indexes on Wall Street finished their worst day since June amid mounting rate hike concerns.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was down 0.27%. The  was flat and the  fell 0.23%.

Japan’s Topix traded 1.08% lower,  fell 1.25%, while South Korea’s  was down 0.77%.  declined 0.49.

Oil prices edged up after Saudi Arabia said OPEC could cut output, with  trading 0.85% higher, while  rose 0.83%.

Investors will be watching markets for reaction to a sharp tumble on Wall Street overnight, as the  fell more than 600 points in its worst day since June, as the summer rally fizzled out and fears of aggressive interest rate hikes returned to Wall Street. The  also tumbled 2%.

“There was a big hit to risk appetite in what was a night devoid of any top tier data. Instead markets are apprehensive ahead of US Fed Chair Powell’s Jackson Hole speech,” Tapas Strickland of National Australia Bank said in a Tuesday note.

Australia’s Manufacturing Purchasing Managers (PMI) Index signaled the first contraction in the private sector’s output since January, while Singapore is set to release its core inflation data later in the afternoon.

More

Asia-Pacific markets: Wall Street, Singapore inflation, PMI (cnbc.com)

 

Dow slumps 600 points Monday to wrap worst day since June as summer rally fades

UPDATED MON, AUG 22 2022 9:53 PM EDT

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply Monday, in its worst day since June, as the summer rally fizzled out and fears of aggressive interest rate hikes returned to Wall Street.

The Dow fell 643.13 points, or 1.91%, to 33,063.61. The S&P 500 dropped 2.14% to 4,137.99, and the Nasdaq Composite tumbled 2.55% to 12,381.57, respectively. It was the worst day of trading since June 16 for the Dow and the S&P 500.

Those losses come on the back of a losing week, which snapped a four-week winning streak for the S&P 500. Still, the broader market index remains about 13% above its June lows.

Investors are anticipating what could be a volatile week of trading ahead of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s latest comments on inflation at the central bank’s annual Jackson Hole economic symposium.

---- Tech stocks declined on concerns over more aggressive rate hikes from the Fed. Amazon fell 3.6%. Semiconductor stocks dropped with Nvidia down about 4.6%. Shares of Netflix were roughly 6.1% lower following a downgrade to sell from CFRA.

Dow slumps 600 points Monday to wrap worst day since June as summer rally fades (cnbc.com)

In energy news, don’t blame us for your mistakes creating high energy prices, says OPEC.

Germany, and the rest of the EUSSR, faces industrial bankruptcy from the soaring price of natural gas. Taking down Russia appears more likely to take down the EUSSR.

 OPEC not to blame for soaring inflation, new chief says, citing underinvestment in oil and gas

6:13 AM EDT

New OPEC Secretary-General Haitham Al Ghais said Wednesday that the influential producer group is not to blame for soaring inflation, pointing the finger instead at chronic underinvestment in the oil and gas industry.

“OPEC is not behind this price increase,” Al Ghais told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble.

“There are other factors beyond OPEC that are really behind the spike we have seen in gas [and] in oil. And again, I think in a nutshell, for me, it is underinvestment — chronic underinvestment,” he added.

“This is the harsh reality that people have to wake up to and policymakers have to wake up to. Once that is realized I think then we can start to think of a solution here. And the solution is very clear. OPEC has a solution: invest, invest, invest,” Al Ghais said.

Earlier this year, Kuwait’s Al Ghais was appointed for a three-year term as OPEC’s secretary general. He succeeds Nigerian oil industry veteran Mohammad Barkindo, who died at the age of 63 last month just days before he was due to step down from the organization.

The International Energy Agency said in June that global energy investment was on track to increase by 8% this year to reach $2.4 trillion, with most of the projected rise coming mainly in clean energy.

It described the findings as “encouraging” but warned investment levels were still far from enough to tackle the multiple dimensions of the energy crisis.

For oil and gas, the IEA said investment jumped 10% from last year but remains “well below” 2019 levels. It said today’s high fossil fuel prices provided “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” for oil and gas-dependent economies to undergo a much-needed transformation.

The IEA has previously said investors should not fund new oil, gas and coal supply projects if the world is to reach net-zero emissions by the middle of the century.

To be sure, the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil, gas and coal, is the chief driver of the climate emergency.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned in April that it is “moral and economic madness” to fund new fossil fuel projects.

Al Ghais’ comments come shortly after the influential producer group of OPEC and non-OPEC partners, an energy alliance often referred to as OPEC+, surprised market participants at its Aug. 3 meeting by announcing plans to add only 100,000 barrels per day from next month.

The group said that “severely limited availability of excess capacity” meant it was necessary to proceed with “great caution.”

It was seen as a snub to U.S. President Joe Biden, who during a visit to OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia last month had called for the group to pump more crude to help the U.S. and global economy.

OPEC and non-OPEC producers are next scheduled to meet on Sept. 5.

More

Haitham Al Ghais: OPEC not to blame for soaring inflation (cnbc.com)

 

European gas prices surge as Russian pipeline maintenance fuels fears of a total shutdown

PUBLISHED MON, AUG 22 2022 7:40 AM EDT

European natural gas prices surged on Monday after Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom said it would shut down Europe’s single biggest piece of gas infrastructure for three days from the end of the month.

The unscheduled maintenance works on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which runs from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea, deepen a gas dispute between Russia and the European Union and exacerbate both the risk of a recession and a winter shortage.

The front-month gas price at the Dutch TTF hub, a European benchmark for natural gas trading, jumped 19% on Monday to reach 291.5 euros ($291.9) per megawatt hour.

The contract closed on Friday at a record high of 244.55 euros per megawatt hour, registering its fifth consecutive weekly gain.

Gazprom said Friday that the shutdown was because the pipeline’s only remaining compressor required servicing. Gas flows via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline will be suspended for the three-day period from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2.

Gazprom said gas transmission would resume at a rate of 33 million cubic meters per day when the maintenance work is completed “provided that no malfunctions are identified.”

The announcement of the temporary shutdown comes as European governments scramble to fill underground storage facilities with natural gas supplies in a bid to have enough fuel to keep homes warm during the coming months.

Russia has drastically reduced natural gas supplies to Europe in recent weeks, with flows via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline currently operating at just 20% of the agreed-upon volume.

Moscow has previously blamed faulty and delayed equipment for the sharp drop in gas supplies.

Germany, however, considers the supply cut to be a political maneuver designed to sow uncertainty across the bloc and boost energy prices amid the Kremlin’s onslaught against Ukraine.

Two grave risks

Until recently, Germany bought more than half of its gas from Russia. And the government of Europe’s largest economy is now battling to shore up winter gas supplies amid growing fears that Moscow could soon turn off the taps completely.

What’s more, Europe’s race to save enough gas comes at a time of skyrocketing prices. The surge in energy costs is driving up household bills, pushing inflation to its highest level in decades and squeezing people’s spending power.

Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank, said Gazprom’s latest announcement was an apparent attempt to exploit Europe’s dependence on Russian gas.

“On its own, a brief closure of the pipeline would not make a major difference, especially as Russia has reduced its gas exports through NS1 to 20% of capacity since 27 July anyway,” Schmieding said in a research note.

“But it highlights two grave risks: (i) Russia may falsely claim that it cannot re-open the pipeline afterwards because of a ‘technical issue’ that could only be resolved if Western sanctions were lifted, and (ii) Russia may also shut down its other pipelines to Europe later on,” he added.

Schmieding said higher prices for even scarcer gas supplies would “worsen the serious recession into which Europe is falling already” and warned an immediate further cut in Russian flows would raise the likelihood that Germany may face a winter shortage.

European gas prices surge as Russia announces Nord Stream 1 shutdown (cnbc.com)

Finally, in truly disastrous news, the price of the UK’s staple food is set to rise. We’ll all have to down size to baked beans on toast, I suppose.

Cost of chips could rise within weeks after potato crops hit by heatwave, experts say

Evie Townend & Sonia Sharma 22 August, 2022

The cost of chips could increase within weeks and there are fears of shortages due to this summer's heatwave, experts say.

Record temperatures, which saw parts of the UK reach 40 degrees, have caused the main potato crop to wilt. Farmers say potatoes are particularly vulnerable to heatwaves because they are 80% water.

The soaring temperatures were also experienced during the crop’s most important growing period. Earlier in August, Tom Bradshaw, from the NFU union, told trade magazine The Grocer that the water shortage was "critical".

He said: "I can’t see how potato yields are going to be anything but well below average — onion yields the same." A spokesperson from the Isle of Ely Produce added: “Indications are that the heat has really wrecked crops and any rain now could hurt yields further."

ut another wholesaler told The Grocer magazine: "There is a lot of speculation at the moment. The chip guys have already put through significant increases in the last 12 months due to fuel and energy costs and this is the next opportunity for them to increase the price. However, we won’t get a true picture until they have lifted the crop in September or October."

In certain parts of the UK, there has not been any substantial rainfall since the Jubilee weekend and it has been dubbed the driest July since 1935. Eight out of 14 areas in England were affected by the drought alerts announced on August 12 with restrictions being put in place for their water usage, reports The Mirror.

This includes Devon and Cornwall, East Anglia, Thames, Kent and South London and East Midlands. The news piles yet more pressure on fish and chip shops, which have already felt the effects of rocketing costs.

Chippies on the brink of closure have faced startling price rises of more than 13% - but business owners warn the picture is even bleaker. Industry bosses fear the cost of living crisis could force 3,000 of the UK's estimated 10,500 chippies to close as people will no longer have the cash for the traditional treat.

Cost of chips could rise within weeks after potato crops hit by heatwave, experts say (msn.com)

Global Inflation/Stagflation/Recession Watch.  

Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians,  inflation now needs an entire section of its own.

Something a little different today, calculators. Every calculator you ever dreamed of, not just the one shown.

Million BTU to Megawatt-hours Conversion

Enter the energy in million BTU below to get the value converted to megawatt-hours.

Million BTU to Megawatt-hours Conversion (MMBTU to MWh) (inchcalculator.com)

Citi: UK to suffer 18.6 per cent inflation peak, near 50-year high

MONDAY 22 AUGUST 2022 11:42 AM

Inflation is set to surge above levels seen during the oil price shock of the late 1970s in a sign the UK economy is hurtling toward a deep slump, new forecasts published today show.

The cost of living will climb to 18.6 per cent in January, pushed higher by the energy watchdog hiking the cap on bills even further to pass on steep wholesale gas costs, according to Wall Street investment bank Citi.

 

That would be the highest rate in around half a century and above the just under 18 per cent inflation peak during the oil crisis five decades ago, caused by Opec cutting supplies.

There are signs inflation has peaked in countries comparable to the UK. The US’s rate dropped much quicker than expected last month to 8.6 per cent.

Britain already has the highest inflation in the G7.

Analysts at Citi said household finances are set to come under intense pressure from the price surge, forcing them to slash spending and tipping the UK economy into recession.

Elevated energy prices, caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupting the European gas market and global supply being outpaced by sudden burst in demand after the Covid-19 unlocking, have sent inflation on an upward spiral.

Ofgem, the market regulator, is on Friday expected to announce bills will climb around 75 per cent in October. Citi said bills may jump above £4,500 in January based on current gas future prices.

The new forecasts are gloomier than the Bank of England’s projection earlier this month, which were branded by fellow investment bank Goldman Sachs as the most downbeat ever published by a central bank.

Governor Andrew Bailey and the rest of the monetary policy committee think the UK will suffer a more than 13 per cent inflation peak and that households’ living standards will fall by the biggest cumulative 2-year amount on record.

Those dynamics are set to plunge Britain into a 15-month long recession, the longest since the financial crisis, starting in the final months of this year.

Inflation is already running at 10.1 per cent, more than five times the Bank’s two per cent target.

Citi: UK to suffer 18.6 per cent inflation peak, near 50-year high (cityam.com)

The other reason why food prices are rising

The United Nations’ worst-case scenario calculation is that global food prices will rise by an additional 8.5% by 2027.

More expensive fertilizers are contributed to those higher costs, with some fertilizers spiking 300% since September 2020, according to the American Farm Bureau.

“Last year [fertilizer] was around $270 per ton and now it’s over $1,400 per ton,” Meagan Kaiser, of Kaiser Family Farms and farmer-director of the United Soybean Board, told NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt.”

----Farmers are finding themselves forced to pass some of those costs along to customers, resulting in higher grocery prices.

Fertilizer is essential for crops. Without fertilizer, plants may not get the nourishment they need to result in the yields necessary to meet global demand.

According to the International Fertilizer Association, we would only be able to feed about half of the global population without fertilizer.

Farmers are trying to adjust to this new normal. When surveyed in spring 2022 about what they intended to plant, farmers said they were turning to more soybean, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, or a record 91 million acres of the legume. That may be because legumes don’t require as much fertilizer as corn to grow.

Spikes in fertilizer prices started when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

“It’s amazing how dependent the world is on fertilizers from the region that we’re talking about Russia and Ukraine,” Johanna Mendelson Forman, adjunct professor at American University’s School of International Service, told CNBC.

The region is responsible for at least 28% of the world’s fertilizer exports, including nitrogen-, potassium- and phosphorus-based fertilizers, according to Morgan Stanley.

Also factoring into price spikes are rising natural gas costs.

“There’s a direct relationship with what we’re seeing in fuel prices and fertilizer prices,” Jo Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told CNBC.

That’s because fossil fuels are used in the manufacturing process of fertilizers — and is one of the reasons that they can contribute to climate change.

More

The other reason why food prices are rising (cnbc.com)

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

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/environmental-disaster-ev-battery-metals-crunch-horizon-industry-races-recycle

Covid-19 Corner

This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.

With Covid-19 starting to become only endemic, this section is close to coming to its end.

Antibody “master key” discovery could neutralize all COVID variants

Rich Haridy  August 21, 2022

A new study published in Nature Communications has homed in on a part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that seems to be shared across all known variants. The research also reveals an antibody fragment that can hypothetically block the virus from entering human cells, paving the way for future therapies to neutralize all COVID-19 variants.

The new research offers one of the most thorough investigations to date into the spike protein differences between a number of SARS-CoV-2 variants. Using cryo-electron microscopy the study zoomed in on spike proteins from Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Kappa, Epsilon, and Omicron (BA.1 and BA.2) variants.

The researchers discovered a certain part of the spike protein is conserved across all these variants. This spot, known as an epitope, is vulnerable to novel antibodies that could block the virus' ability to infect human cells.

“The epitope we describe in this paper is mostly removed from the hot spots for mutations, which is why its capabilities are preserved across variants,” explained Sriram Subramaniam. “Now that we’ve described the structure of this site in detail, it unlocks a whole new realm of treatment possibilities.”

Antibodies work to block infection by fitting into those epitopes on the viral spike protein and interrupting the way the virus would lock onto human cells. The new research describes the development of an antibody fragment, dubbed VH Ab6, which can attach to that epitope found in all current SARS-CoV-2 variants.

“Antibodies attach to a virus in a very specific manner, like a key going into a lock. But when the virus mutates, the key no longer fits,” said Subramaniam. “We’ve been looking for master keys – antibodies that continue to neutralize the virus even after extensive mutations.”

At this stage the research is still speculative. The antibody fragment demonstrated in the study is more there to demonstrate how broadly effective targeting this particular part of the spike protein could be in neutralizing all known variants.

So far there has been little mutational movement in the part of spike protein highlighted in this study. The researchers suggest future therapeutics for COVID-19 should target this specific epitope in the hopes of developing antibody treatments that can neutralize all variants of the virus.

Validating these new findings is another recent study demonstrating an antibody candidate that, so far, in animal studies, can neutralize all current SARS-CoV-2 variants. That study, published in Science Immunology, comes from a team of researchers at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.

More

Antibody “master key” discovery could neutralize all COVID variants (newatlas.com)

Next, some vaccine links kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada.

NY Times Coronavirus Vaccine Trackerhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html

Regulatory Focus COVID-19 vaccine trackerhttps://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.

Scientists blast atoms with Fibonacci laser to make an 'extra' dimension of time

21 August 2022

By firing a Fibonacci laser pulse at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a completely new, strange phase of matter that behaves as if it has two dimensions of time. 

The new phase of matter, created by using lasers to rhythmically jiggle a strand of 10 ytterbium ions, enables scientists to store information in a far more error-protected way, thereby opening the path to quantum computers that can hold on to data for a long time without becoming garbled. The researchers outlined their findings in a paper published July 20 in the journal Nature

The inclusion of a theoretical "extra" time dimension "is a completely different way of thinking about phases of matter," lead author Philipp Dumitrescu, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Quantum Physics in New York City, said in a statement. "I've been working on these theory ideas for over five years, and seeing them come actually to be realized in experiments is exciting."

The physicists didn't set out to create a phase with a theoretical extra time dimension, nor were they looking for a method to enable better quantum data storage. Instead, they were interested in creating a new phase of matter — a new form in which matter can exist, beyond the standard solid, liquid, gas, plasma. 

They set about building the new phase in the quantum computer company Quantinuum's H1 quantum processor, which consists of 10 ytterbium ions in a vacuum chamber that are precisely controlled by lasers in a device known as an ion trap. 

Ordinary computers use bits, or 0s and 1s, to form the basis of all calculations. Quantum computers are designed to use qubits, which can also exist in a state of 0 or 1. But that's just about where the similarities end. Thanks to the bizarre laws of the quantum world, qubits can exist in a combination, or superposition, of both the 0 and 1 states until the moment they are measured, upon which they randomly collapse into either a 0 or a 1. 

This strange behavior is the key to the power of quantum computing, as it allows qubits to link together through quantum entanglement, a process that Albert Einstein dubbed "spooky action at a distance." Entanglement couples two or more qubits to each other, connecting their properties so that any change in one particle will cause a change in the other, even if they are separated by vast distances. This gives quantum computers the ability to perform multiple calculations simultaneously, exponentially boosting their processing power over that of classical devices.

But the development of quantum computers is held back by a big flaw: Qubits don't just interact and get entangled with each other; because they cannot be perfectly isolated from the environment outside the quantum computer, they also interact with the outside environment, thus causing them to lose their quantum properties, and the information they carry, in a process called decoherence.

"Even if you keep all the atoms under tight control, they can lose their 'quantumness' by talking to their environment, heating up or interacting with things in ways you didn't plan," Dumitrescu said.

To get around these pesky decoherence effects and create a new, stable phase, the physicists looked to a special set of phases called topological phases. Quantum entanglement doesn't just enable quantum devices to encode information across the singular, static positions of qubits, but also to weave them into the dynamic motions and interactions of the entire material — in the very shape, or topology, of the material's entangled states. This creates a "topological" qubit that encodes information in the shape formed by multiple parts rather than one part alone, making the phase much less likely to lose its information.

More

Scientists blast atoms with Fibonacci laser to make an 'extra' dimension of time (msn.com)

The market, like the Lord, helps those who help themselves. But, unlike the Lord, the market does not forgive those who know not what they do.

Warren Buffett.

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