Baltic Dry Index. 1875 +32 Brent Crude 90.49
Spot Gold 1648 US 2 Year Yield 4.43 -0.02
Coronavirus
Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 19/10/22 World 630,871,552
Deaths 6,574,225
There can be few fields of human endeavour in which history
counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent
that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those
who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the
present.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In the stock casinos and bond markets, stability is returning but for how long?
Each day brings more sign of the global economy rolling over into recession.
High food and fuel inflation has triggered major industrial unrest across Europe and we haven’t even got to the start of Europe’s winter yet.
In America, the mid-term elections are about three weeks away, with anyone’s guess as to the outcome and which party will control the agenda for the next two years.
In China, the latest economic figures have been delayed, ostensibly due to the Chinese Communist Party Congress underway. Well if they say so it must be true, they wouldn’t be rewriting bad figures would they?
Today, on the 35th anniversary of
the Black Monday Great Stock Market crash of 1987, our late 2022 and early 2023
economic future looks anything but settled and promising.
Asia-Pacific
markets mixed, Hong Kong’s property stocks lose earlier gains after John Lee’s
speech
UPDATED WED, OCT 19 2022 12:16 AM EDT
Shares in
the Asia-Pacific were mixed on Wednesday following
a second day of gains in major U.S. indexes.
The Hang Seng index in
Hong Kong fell 1.18%, with the Hang Seng Tech index slipping 2.59% following
leader John Lee’s policy address. Mainland China’s Shanghai Composite shed
0.51% while the Shenzhen Component lost
0.61%.
The Nikkei 225 in
Japan added 0.52% and the Topix gained 0.3%. The Japanese yen remained
above 149 against the U.S. dollar. South Korea’s Kospi ticked
0.28% lower.
In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 gained
0.32%. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was 0.35%
lower.
China was due to release home
prices data Wednesday, but the release has been delayed. Indonesia’s central
bank starts a two-day board of governors meeting Wednesday.
Overnight in the U.S., strong
earnings reports fueled stock gains for a second session. The Dow Jones
Industrial Average added 337.98 points, or 1.12%, to close at 30,523.80. The
S&P 500 advanced 1.14% to 3,719.98. The Nasdaq Composite gained 0.90%,
finishing at 10,772.40.
“Equities rallied for a second
day in a somewhat choppy session as investors weigh up the earnings outlook
against rising interest rates,” ANZ Research analysts wrote in a note.
European markets
head for higher open, looking to build on gains
UPDATED WED, OCT 19 2022 12:28 AM
EDT
European markets are heading for a higher open
on Wednesday, looking to build on gains in the previous session.
The region’s markets ended Tuesday
higher, with the Stoxx
600 index rising 0.44% and all major bourses making gains.
The only sectors weighing down
markets were basic resources, which fell 1.48%, and oil and gas, which fell
1.26%. Tuesday afternoon saw the European Commission propose
setting temporary limits on daily gas trading levels to avoid
price spikes.
Shares of Apple
suppliers fall on report of iPhone 14 Plus production cut
Shares of Apple
suppliers in Asia slipped after the tech firm reportedly
asked a manufacturer in China to halt the production of an
iPhone 14 Plus component as Apple re-evaluates demand for the product.
The Information reported that two other suppliers that
assemble modules from that component have also cut production dramatically.
LG Innotek and SK
Hynix in South Korea lost around 2%, while Japan’s TDK
Corporation and Murata
Manufacturing shed
more than 1% each.
Apple’s stock
briefly lost $4 per share overnight, but closed the regular session 0.94%
higher as major indexes gained.
European
markets head for higher open, looking to build on gains (cnbc.com)
Factbox:
Strikes, protests in Europe over cost of living and pay
October 18, 2022 3:03 PM GMT+1
Oct 18 (Reuters)
- European countries are facing more strikes and protests due to high energy
prices and mounting costs of living. Here are details of some industrial
actions and demonstrations.
FRANCE
Regional
train traffic in France was cut by about half on Tuesday as several unions
called a nationwide strike. They are seeking to
capitalise on anger with decades-high inflation to expand weeks of industrial action at oil refineries to
other sectors. There was also some disruption to schools as the strike
primarily affected the public sector.
Thousands of
people took to the streets of Paris on Sunday to protest against soaring prices.
BRITAIN
About
1,000 GXO (GXO.N) drivers in Britain will take
strike action over five days from the end of the month in a dispute over pay,
the Unite union said on Tuesday, warning of disruption to beer deliveries.
Hundreds
of workers at the port of Liverpool, one of Britain's largest container ports,
are due to take two more weeks of strike action over pay and jobs from Oct. 24.
The Communication and Workers Union, representing 115,000 Royal Mail postal
workers, held strikes in September and early October, and have threatened more strikes after months of
failed negotiations over pay and operational changes.
More than 300,000
members of Britain's largest nursing union have begun voting over a strike to demand a pay rise. Junior doctors and
ambulance workers also plan to ballot over pay disputes. Rail workers have also walked out over
disputes over pay and job security.
GERMANY
Pilots
at Lufthansa's (LHAG.DE) Eurowings began a three-day strike over working hours on
Monday, their union said, affecting tens of thousands of the budget airline's
passengers. The walkout is due to end at 2159 GMT on Oct. 19.
HUNGARY
Thousands
of Hungarian students and parents protested on Oct. 14
in the second major rally in two weeks to support teachers who have been fired
for joining strike action for higher wages, and more teachers being warned of
dismissal.
CZECH REPUBLIC
Tens
of thousands of Czechs protested in Prague on Sept. 28
against the government's handling of soaring energy prices and the country's
membership of NATO and the European Union. The demonstration was organised by
far-right and fringe groups and parties including the Communists.
BELGIUM
Thousands
took to the streets in Brussels on Sept. 21 to protest at soaring energy prices
and the cost of living. A similar protest in June drew around 70,000 Belgian workers.
Factbox:
Strikes, protests in Europe over cost of living and pay | Reuters
Fed
may need to push policy rate above 4.75% -Kashkari
October
18, 2022 11:59 PM GMT+1
Oct 18 (Reuters)
- The Federal Reserve may need to push its benchmark policy rate above 4.75% if
underlying inflation does not stop rising, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President
Neel Kashkari said on Tuesday.
"I've
said publicly that I could easily see us getting into the mid-4%s early next
year," Kashkari said at a panel at the Women Corporate Directors,
Minnesota Chapter, in Minneapolis.
"But
if we don't see progress in underlying inflation or core inflation, I don't see
why I would advocate stopping at 4.5%, or 4.75% or something like that. We need
to see actual progress in core inflation and services inflation and we are not
seeing it yet."
Most Fed
policymakers expect to need to raise the policy rate, now at 3%-3.25%, to
4.5%-5% by early next year, based on projections published last month and
comments made publicly since then.
Kashkari's
remarks signal a readiness to go even further.
"That
number that I offered is predicated on a flattening out of that underlying
inflation," Kashkari said. "If that doesn't happen, then I don't see
how we can stop."
So far, data
suggests underlying inflation is rising, not falling, despite the Fed's
aggressive rate hikes this year.
Based
on recent readings of the consumer price index and other data, economists estimate the core personal
consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, which the Fed watches closely, rose
5.1% last month from a year earlier, compared with 4.9% in August.
The
data will be published just a few days before the Fed's next policy meeting on
Nov. 1-2.
More
Fed
may need to push policy rate above 4.75% -Kashkari | Reuters
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.
Inflation drives global
firms eastward in Europe in search of cost savings
Tue,
October 18, 2022 at 7:10 AM
PRAGUE/WARSAW (Reuters) - Central
European companies that provide remote, lower-cost business services for
multinationals are ramping up their expansion plans as high inflation drives
global firms to push more work to the region to cut costs and bolster margins.
From Prague and Warsaw to Budapest,
western companies have long looked to tap a deep pool of educated,
multinational workers for outsourced or offshored business services such as
software development, administration, payroll handling and research for big
European and U.S. customers.
Now, despite a narrowing wage gap and
costs rising faster than in western Europe, central Europe's business service
centres that flourished during the pandemic are taking on more staff as other
sectors such as manufacturers pull back due to the war in Ukraine and soaring
energy costs.
Take Silicon Valley-based Pure
Storage. The flash-data hardware and software developer said in September it
was doubling the number of engineers at its Prague centre and plans to double
them again in 2023 and again in 2024, Paul Melmon, the head of the Czech
centre, told Reuters.
"It is more cost effective to
hire an engineer in Prague than Mountain View even with inflation," said
Melmon, who said a diversified workforce represented one of the attractions of
Prague where Pure Storage employs a few hundred workers.
"If we started out here as an
experiment, the experiment is working."
INFLATION ATTRACTS
NEW INVESTORS
The business services sector has
grown from almost nothing 25 years ago to an industry employing nearly 800,000
workers across Central and Eastern Europe, an increasingly important engine for
local economies.
A survey from the Czech Association
of Business Service Leaders, the industry group representing the sector, pegs
employment growth at 11% in 2022 and 13% in 2023.
"With rising inflation in the
West this region is seeing more investors coming in to set up centres and new
types of services," said Jonathan Appleton, managing director of ABSL Czech
Republic.
The
wage gap has narrowed in recent years as economic growth in countries like
Poland and the Czech Republic outpace that of Western nations. But employment
costs in the region still range from around 30% to as much as 50% lower
depending on the role, companies and experts say.
More
Inflation drives global firms eastward in Europe in search of cost savings (yahoo.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
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 Fast-Spreading New COVID-19 Subvariant XBB Is Part
of a ‘New Class’ of Omicron
Mon, October 17, 2022 at
6:27 PM
For the past several
months, Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 have dominated COVID-19 cases
in the U.S. But now, there’s a class of new COVID subvariants on the rise and
one in particular is getting plenty of attention. It’s called XBB—or
Gryphon—and there’s a chance it could overtake everything else out there.
XBB is getting a lot of buzz
because it spreads fast—and seems to be able to evade immunity that people have
built up from having a previous COVID-19 infection or getting the vaccine, says
William Schaffner, M.D., an infectious disease specialist and professor at the
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Still, Dr. Schaffner says, “it’s
early days and we have a lot to learn.”
Here’s what we know about XBB so
far, and why doctors are keeping a close eye on it.
XBB is one of the “new class” of
Omicron variants that are spreading fast right now, says Thomas Russo, M.D.,
professor and chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo in New
York. That includes BQ.1.1, BQ.1, BQ.1.3, BA.2.3.20, and XBB, he says.
“XBB is a hybrid version of two
strains of the BA.2 form of Omicron,” explains Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., a senior
scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. It’s currently
“spreading efficiently in Singapore,” he adds.
The variant was first detected in
August 2022 in India, and has been detected in more than 17 countries since
then, including Australia, Bangladesh, Denmark, India, Japan and the U.S., per
Singapore’s Ministry of Health.
XBB is thought to have the best
ability to evade antibody protections of these newly emerged COVID variants,
according to a pre-print study from researchers in China. That study said that the
new strains of Omicron, and XBB in particular, “are the most antibody-evasive
strain tested, far exceeding BA.5 and approaching SARS-CoV-1 level.”
(SARS-CoV-1, in case you’re not familiar with it, is the strain of coronavirus
that causes SARS, a respiratory virus that can cause severe illness.)
Meaning,
the vaccine and having previously had COVID-19 are not thought to offer the
same level of protection against XBB as they have with previous strains of
COVID-19. Antibody drugs like Evusheld and bebtelovimab may also not be very
effective against XBB, the pre-print study says.
More
The Fast-Spreading New COVID-19 Subvariant XBB Is Part of a ‘New Class’ of Omicron (yahoo.com)
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.
No technology update today, just the
opposite. Today, Carters Steam Fair, up
for sale and holding its final outing in one of my local parks.
My late Border Collie Rosie and I,
often spent several walks around their fair ground in years gone by. She just loved
all the extra attention she got.
‘Largest vintage
funfair in the world’ for sale after 45 years of touring nation
17 October, 2022
A traditional English travelling
funfair, which has been running for the last 45 years, finishes its final tour
at the end of October.
Carters Steam Fair, which runs at
Reading’s Prospect Park until October 30, is up for sale with the hope of
finding a permanent site and a new owner.
The fair, which featured in the films
Rocketman and Paddington 2, has various vintage rides and games including a
chair-o-plane, dodgems and a coconut shy. All of the rides, which date from the
1890s to the 1960s, have been restored to their original style.
Joby Carter, 47, who manages the fair
and has worked on it since he was a child, said that the decision to sell up
had been “a long time coming”.
Mr Carter said: “We’re not taking it
lightly because I live and breathe the fair. I love it. But the pandemic came
along and I was introduced to these things called weekends. I got to see my family
more and I did reasonable hours in the day.
“It showed me a different way of
life. I wrote a signwriting book; I taught signwriting online.”
The funfair began in 1977 when Mr
Carter’s parents, John and Anna Carter, bought an 1895 Jubilee Steam Gallopers
ride. They then added more rides to their collection and became known as a
specialist in vintage fairground rides. The newest of the rides was built in
1965. Mr Carter said it is the largest vintage travelling funfair in the world.
The
most recent tour started in April and has visited Berkshire, Surrey, Essex,
Hertfordshire, London, Buckinghamshire, Staffordshire, Somerset and Hampshire.
Mr Carter said that the family are
selling the fair because it is difficult to find staff and that the rides get damaged
while touring because of being exposed to the elements. This then results in
lots of restoration work being necessary. For this reason, he said, the rides
would be best located on a permanent site under cover.
Having received no “sensible offer”,
Mr Carter said: “We would happily run it ourselves if we thought that someone
could help us find a location. We haven’t got the land and haven’t got the big
shed. Is there someone out there who has an existing visitor attraction, who
could add it to that place and give it a new lease of life?
“We’re hoping that someone will come
along, be it a government body, a council, or a trust who believes its
important and wants to carry it on.”
Pictures
‘Largest vintage
funfair in the world’ for sale after 45 years of touring nation (msn.com)
In any
great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to
be right alone.
John Kenneth
Galbraith.
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