Baltic Dry Index. 1408 +152 Brent Crude 92.60
Spot Gold 1704 US 2 Year Yield 3.75 +0.17
Coronavirus
Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 14/09/22 World 614,890,960
Deaths 6,520,813
The [UK] trade in
fuels deficit – which includes oil, natural gas and other fuels – increased to
£5.6 billion in July, from £5.1 billion in June.
Gabriella Dickens,
at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said: “The trade deficit will reach enormous
proportions over the coming months.
“For starters,
futures prices suggest that the monthly trade deficit in natural gas, contained
within the fuels component, will increase to about £8 billion by the end of
this year, from £1.8 billion in July.
UK trade gap narrows but set to soar to ‘enormous proportions’, experts warn (msn.com)
In the stock casinos, yesterday’s US inflation numbers had stocks retreating faster than the Russian Army leaving Ukraine.
While
I expect the US casinos to stabilise later today, the US Treasury yield curve suggests
a lot more pain to come over the rest of the year.
Major
Asia-Pacific markets drop 2% following Wall Street plunge
UPDATED WED, SEP 14 2022 12:40 AM EDT
Shares in
the Asia-Pacific dropped sharply on Wednesday after indexes on Wall Street plunged following
a higher-than-expected U.S.
consumer price index report for August.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped
2.7%, and the Topix index fell 2%. The Japanese yen traded
at 143.75 per dollar after hovering around its weakest levels since September
1998.
The Hang Seng index in
Hong Kong dipped 2.55%, and the Hang Seng Tech index fell 2.96%. In Australia,
the S&P/ASX 200 shed
2.48%.
The Kospi in
South Korea lost 1.34% and the Kosdaq declined 1.67%. The South Korean won passed
the 1,390-mark against the greenback and was last trading at 1,391.98 against
the dollar, around the weakest levels since March 2009.
Mainland China’s Shanghai Composite lost
1.02% and the Shenzhen
Component fell
1.496%.
MSCI’s broadest
index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan fell 2.28%.
The U.S. 2-year Treasury yield also reached
3.79%, the
highest level since 2007. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost
1,276.37 points, or 3.94%, to close at 31,104.97. The S&P 500 shed 4.32% to
3,932.69, and the Nasdaq Composite lost 5.16% to end the session at 11,633.57.
“What is perhaps most
disconcerting in all this is that the strength in core inflation is very
much service sector-led categories,” said Ray Attrill, National Australia
Bank’s head of FX strategy, wrote in a note, adding the sector is primarily
wage inflation-driven.
Asia
markets: Stocks drop after Wall Street plunge on U.S. CPI (cnbc.com)
Dow tumbles 1,200
points for worst day since June 2020 after hot inflation report
UPDATED TUE, SEP 13 2022 5:40 PM
EDT
Stocks fell
sharply on Tuesday after a key August
inflation report came in hotter than expected, hurting investor
optimism for cooling prices and a less aggressive Federal Reserve.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average
slid 1,276.37 points, or 3.94%, to close at 31,104.97. The S&P 500 dropped
4.32% to 3,932.69, and the Nasdaq Composite sank 5.16% to end the day at
11,633.57.
Just five stocks in the S&P
500 finished in positive territory. Tech stocks were hit particularly
hard, with Facebook-parent Meta skidding 9.4% and chip giant Nvidia shedding
9.5%.
The drop erased nearly all of the
recent rally for stocks, pulling the S&P 500 back toward its Sept. 6 close
of 3,908 and causing some traders to glance back at mid-June, when the index
fell below 3,700.
“I think we may even go back and
retest the June lows,” UBS director of floor operations Art Cashin said Tuesday
on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”
“Certainly the 3900 is just so
tempting, and you’re pulling back below the 50-day moving average here. It’s
very much about the technicals. It’s not so much that the one number made the
economy go topsy-turvy. It meant a lot of guys who were making preliminary
favorable bets got caught off base,” he said.
The August consumer price index
report showed a higher-than-expected reading for inflation. Headline inflation
rose 0.1% month over month, even with falling gas prices. Core inflation rose
0.6% month over month. On a year-over-year basis, inflation was 8.3%.
Economists surveyed by Dow Jones
had been expecting a decline of 0.1% for overall inflation, with a rise of 0.3%
for core inflation.
The report is one of the last the
Fed will see ahead of their Sept. 20-21 meeting, where the central bank is
expected to deliver its third
consecutive 0.75 percentage point interest rate hike to tamp
down inflation. The unexpectedly high August report could lead the Fed to
continue its aggressive hikes longer than some investors anticipated.
More
Dow
tumbles 1,200 points for worst day since June 2020 after hot inflation report
(cnbc.com)
Tech stocks
crushed in market selloff
The six largest U.S. tech companies lost more than $500 billion in
value Tuesday after an unexpectedly high August
inflation report sent tech stocks tumbling. The consumer
price index was up 0.1% for the month and was up 8.3% year over year, even as
gas prices fell.
---- Here are the companies that posted some of
the biggest losses:
- Apple lost
$154.11 billion in market cap and fell 5.87%, its steepest drop since
Sept. 2020
- Microsoft lost
$109.33 billion and fell 5.5%, its steepest drop since Sept. 2020
- Alphabet (which
owns Google) lost $85.32 billion and fell 5.9%, its steepest drop since
Mar. 2020
- Amazon lost
$98.11 billion and fell 7.06%, its steepest drop since May 2022
- Meta (formerly
Facebook) lost $42.55 billion and fell 9.37%, its steepest drop since
February 2022
- Nvidia lost
$34.21 billion and was down 9.47%, its steepest drop since March 2020.
More
Tech
stocks crushed in market selloff (cnbc.com)
In
other news, if it wasn’t for bad news there’d be no news at all, as the old
joke goes.
U.S.
railways to halt grain shipments ahead of potential shutdown -agriculture
sources
September 13, 2022 10:29 PM GMT+1
CHICAGO, Sept 13
(Reuters) - Some U.S. railroads will start halting crop shipments on Thursday,
a day ahead of a potential work stoppage, an agricultural association and
sources at two grain cooperatives said on Tuesday, threatening exports and feed
deliveries for livestock.
With farmers
starting to harvest autumn crops that are shipped to meat and biofuels
producers, the shipping disruptions could add to already high inflation.
Farmers also plan to add fertilizer to fields after the harvest, and shipments
of fertilizer are being delayed.
Most major U.S. railways have already stopped accepting new
shipments of ammonia fertilizer and other potentially hazardous materials, said
Justin Louchheim, senior government affairs director at The Fertilizer
Institute, an industry group.
Louchheim said
fertilizer producers are now evaluating how much storage they have for ammonia
that cannot move by rail, and whether some can move by truck.
The potential
rail shutdown looms just six weeks before most Midwest farmers would begin
applying fertilizer, said Josh Linville, fertilizer director at StoneX Group.
About 40% of the U.S. fertilizer supply is on a rail car at some point before
arriving on a farm, he said.
More
U.S.
railways to halt grain shipments ahead of potential shutdown -agriculture
sources | Reuters
Inflation isn’t
just about fuel costs anymore, as price increases broaden across the economy
For the better part of a year, the inflation
narrative among many economists and policymakers was that it was essentially a
food and fuel problem. Once supply chains eased and gas prices abated, the
thinking went, that would help lower food costs and in turn ease price
pressures across the economy.
August’s consumer
price index numbers, however, tested that narrative severely, with
broadening increases indicating now that inflation could be more persistent and
entrenched than previously thought.
CPI excluding food and energy prices — so-called core inflation — rose 0.6% for
the month, double the Dow Jones estimate, bringing year-over-year
cost-of-living increases up 6.3%. Including food and energy, the index rose
0.1% monthly and a robust 8.3% on a 12-month basis.
At least as important, the source of the increase
wasn’t gasoline, which tumbled 10.6% for the month. While the summertime
decline in energy prices has helped temper headline inflation numbers, it
hasn’t been able to squelch fears that inflation
will remain a problem for some time.
The broadening of inflation
Rather than fuel,
it was food, shelter and medical services that drove costs higher in August,
slapping a costly tax on those least able to afford it and raising important
questions about where inflation goes from here.
“The core inflation
numbers were hot across the board. The breadth of the strong price increases,
from new vehicles to medical care services to rent growth, everything was up
strongly,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “That was the
most disconcerting aspect of the report.”
Indeed, new vehicle
prices and medical care services both increased 0.8% for the month. Shelter
costs, which include rents and various other housing-related expenses, make up
nearly a third of the CPI weighting and climbed 0.7% for the month.
Food costs also have been nettlesome.
The food at home
index, a good proxy for grocery prices, has increased 13.5% over the past year,
the largest such rise since March 1979. Prices continued their meteoric climb
for items such as eggs and bread, further straining household budgets.
More
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.
Today,
yet more food price inflation arrives.
It’s Not Just
Inflation: Avian Flu Will Pump Up Prices Of Thanksgiving Turkeys
September
13, 2022
Sky-high
inflation and a persistent outbreak of the viral avian flu is driving up the
costs to produce turkey this year while threatening the supply.
In Meeker County, Minnesota,
at the end of August, 180,000 turkeys infected with avian flu had to be killed.
Farmers were raising the
birds for Hormel’s Jennie-O brand, the country’s second-biggest turkey
supplier. The outbreak in the rural community, 70 miles west of Minneapolis, is
still ravaging flocks.
“We’ve worked really hard,” Hormel
CEO Jim Snee said during the company’s Sept. 1 earnings call. “But, clearly,
this is still an issue.”
This year, the flu has killed 44
million birds, including 4.5 million turkeys, or 2.5% of U.S. turkey
production. Coupled with the highest inflation in 40 years, which has hit the
meat case at double the rate of other consumer products due to higher feed
prices and more expensive fuel, analysts predict Thanksgiving will cost more
this year because of the flu-diminished turkey supply.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s
most recent data show an “alarming” low level of turkeys in cold storage,
according to investment banker Walter Kunish, who tracks the market for HTS
Commodities. Most turkeys eaten at Thanksgiving are harvested throughout the
year and frozen, which is one reason why the virus’ eight-month-long spread has
had such an impact. With 2022 turkey production estimated to be off more than
4% compared with 2021, whole 8- to 16-pound wholesale prices are expected to rise
23% higher than last year.
“With the spike in turkey prices we
believe that a decline in consumption during the holidays can occur,” Kunish, a
former economist for the USDA who has worked at top meat processors Cargill and
Tyson Foods, told Forbes. “That disease has really wreaked havoc on
turkey supplies.”
The average price per pound for
turkey at supermarkets and other retailers is now about 60% higher compared
than last year, or just under $3 per pound, according to NielsenIQ data, which
scans prices and receipts across the majority of U.S. food retailers.
Meat has been one of the categories
“most severely impacted by inflation,” said Carman Allison, a vice president
and economist at NielsenIQ. In the last year, meat prices are up an average of
12%, while turkey prices have increased even more – 14%.
More
It’s Not Just
Inflation: Avian Flu Will Pump Up Prices Of Thanksgiving Turkeys (msn.com)
One of Britain's
biggest grocery chains is restricting how many discount-brand items shoppers
can buy as inflation bites
September
13, 2022
- Asda is restricting how many items shoppers can
buy from its discount range to three of each product.
- The grocer
says this is because of huge demand and is just for "a short
time."
- Inflation is
soaring in the UK. Food and beverage prices rose 12.7% in the year to July
2022.
Britain's third-biggest supermarket chain is restricting how many items
shoppers can buy from its discount range as inflation continues to soar.
Asda introduced a new Just
Essentials range in May that it rolled out more widely in August, featuring bright yellow packaging and low prices. This
replaces its Smart Price budget range.
Asda has since placed a limit on how
many items shoppers can buy, restricting them to three of each product for a
"short time."
"We love that you love Just
Essentials and we're working hard to keep up with demand," signs on Asda's
aisles underneath some of the Just Essentials products read. "To help make
sure customers can get what they need, we're limiting purchases to 3 of each
product per customer for a short time."
An Asda spokesperson told
Insider: "Just Essentials is proving really popular at the moment and
we're working hard to get the out-of-stock products back on the shelves as
quickly as we can."
They
added: "To make sure as many customers as possible can buy these products
we are temporarily limiting purchases to a maximum of three of each
product."
The
full product line, made up of almost 300 products, including meat, fish, bread,
cupboard staples, and household and toiletry products, is expected to be fully
rolled out by the end of the year. Asda has previously
said that Just Essentials is "set to become the largest budget-friendly
essentials range in the market."
----Data from the UK's Office for National Statistics shows
that food and non-alcoholic beverage prices rose by 12.7% in the year to July
2022, including an increase of 2.3% between June and July, the highest monthly
increase since May 2001.
Inflation-strapped
customers are trading down, switching to cheaper
brands or grocery store private labels.
Some are even changing the types of products they buy as
certain categories, like meat, get more expensive.
Asda,
which Walmart sold for $8.8 billion in
2020, has almost 600 stores across the UK, where it's the third-biggest grocery
store by market share.
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.
With Covid-19 starting to become only endemic,
this section is close to coming to its end.
The Mystery of Why Some People
Don’t Get Covid
A small number of people appear naturally immune to the coronavirus.
Scientists think they might hold the key to helping protect us all.
SEP 12, 2022
7:00 AM
---- In the early days of the pandemic, a
small, tight-knit community of scientists from around the world set up an
international consortium, called the COVID Human Genetic Effort, whose goal was to search for a genetic explanation as to
why some people were becoming severely sick with Covid while others got off
with a mild case of the sniffles.
After a while, the group noticed that some
people weren’t getting infected at all—despite repeated and intense exposures.
The most intriguing cases were the partners of people who became really ill and
ended up in intensive care. “We learned about a few spouses of those people
that—despite taking care of their husband or wife, without having access to
face masks—apparently did not contract infection,” says András Spaan, a
clinical microbiologist at Rockefeller University in New York.
Spaan
was tasked with setting up an arm of the project to investigate these seemingly
immune individuals. But they had to find a good number of them first. So the
team put out a paper in Nature
Immunology in which they outlined their endeavor, with a
discreet final line mentioning that “subjects from all over the world are
welcome.”
The
response, Spaan says, was overwhelming. “We literally received thousands of
emails,” he says. The sheer volume rushing to sign up forced them to set up a
multilingual online screening survey. So far, they’ve had about 15,000
applications from all over the world.
The theory that these
people might have preexisting immunity is supported by historical examples.
There are genetic mutations that confer natural immunity to HIV, norovirus, and a parasite that causes recurring malaria. Why would Covid be any different, the
team rationalized? Yet in the long history of immunology, the concept of inborn
resistance against infection is a fairly new and esoteric one. Only a few
scientists even take an interest. “It’s such a niche field, that even within
the medical and research fields, it’s a bit pooh-poohed on,” says Donald Vinh,
an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at McGill University in
Canada. Geneticists don’t recognize it as proper genetics, nor immunologists as
proper immunology, he says. This is despite there being a clear therapeutic
goal. “If you can figure out why somebody cannot get infected, well, then you
can figure out how to prevent people from getting infected,” says Vinh.
More
The
Mystery of Why Some People Don’t Get Covid | WIRED
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.
The competition for competing offshore
wind turbine designs heats up.
1-MW floating vertical axis
wind turbine to be deployed off Norway
Loz Blain September 12, 2022
We've been banging on a bit
about floating offshore wind turbines lately, but with good reason. Take a look
at the US Energy Information Administration's projected Levelized Cost of
Energy (LCoE) figures for 2027, on page 9 of this report.
Deep offshore wind is a huge renewable energy opportunity in the race towards decarbonization,
but as it stands, it's so expensive that it's going to be tough to make a
business out of it. The almighty dollar will speak; if offshore wind isn't profitable, humanity won't get access to
this resource.
But as has
been aptly explained in our recent interviews with the hugely
innovative World Wide Wind and
the super-practical
T-Omega Wind, part of the problem is the technology itself.
Today's fan-on-a-stick offshore wind turbines, according to these innovators,
are built around on-shore designs and land-based thinking that will simply
never work cost-effectively out in the deep ocean. There's a massive
opportunity here for fundamentally different designs to disrupt a rather
sick-looking industry, deliver vastly cheaper energy from offshore wind farms,
and by doing so, make a huge contribution to the clean energy revolution.
Swedish
company SeaTwirl has been around for a while; we
first covered it way back in 2011.
Officially founded in 2012, on the back of an idea first prototyped and tested
all the way back in 2007, the company has had a small, 30-kW test version of
its floating turbine technology called the S1 installed off the coast of
Lysekil, Sweden since 2015. Rising 13 m (43 ft) above the waterline and
reaching down 18 m (59 ft) below, it's been connected to the grid and making
power for seven years and counting, and has proven its ability to withstand
hurricane-level wind and wave conditions.
SeaTwirl describes
its design as simple and robust. It's a vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT), a
spinning cylinder as opposed to the windmill-like horizontal axis wind turbines
(HAWTs) conventionally used today. VAWTs are a promising technology for
floating offshore wind for a few reasons.
Firstly, they can
accept and use wind from all directions, so they don't need heavy, expensive
systems to point them into the breeze like HAWTs do. Secondly, they can run
their generators at or below the waterline. HAWTs need to mount this heavy gear
right up the top of their support towers where the main axle is, creating a
top-heavy design that requires extreme tower strength and huge counterweights
below the surface to keep them upright. More strength equals more materials, and
more cost.
Thirdly, they can
be deployed much closer together than HAWTs, since they create a minimal wake
effect downwind. HAWTs need to be spaced further apart, reducing the yield from
a given project area.
More
1-MW floating
vertical axis wind turbine to be deployed off Norway (newatlas.com)
J. K. Galbraith. The Great
Crash: 1929.
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