Baltic Dry Index. 680 +04 Brent Crude 84.85
Spot Gold 1913 US 2 Year Yield 4.25 +0.06
Coronavirus
Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,103
Coronavirus Cases 31/01/23 World 675,033,179
Deaths 6,760,922
January 31, 1943. German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrenders at Stalingrad.
With Soviet armies closing in as part of Operation Ring (begun January 10, 1943), the situation was hopeless. The Sixth Army was surrounded by seven Soviet armies. On January 31 Paulus disobeyed Hitler and agreed to give himself up. Twenty-two generals surrendered with him, and on February 2 the last of 91,000 frozen starving men (all that was left of the Sixth and Fourth armies) surrendered to the Soviets.
Battle of Stalingrad | History, Summary, Location, Deaths, & Facts | Britannica
It is the last trading day of the first month of 2023. Typically a day to dress up the stock casinos and boost money manager bonuses.
It is day one of the US central bank’s two day meeting. Tomorrow they will let us in on their new interest rate for the next few weeks and the economic future as seen by Chairman Powell and his team of entrail readers at the Temple of Mammon.
Coincidentally or not, the IMF chose yesterday to come out with a rosier forecast of the global economy. No pressure intended on the Fed, the BOE or ECB, all holding interest rate setting meetings this week.
All are expected to increase their key
interest rates by a quarter of one percent, although some at the ECB have
posited that a half of one percent is really needed. But with the German
economy flirting with recession if not actually entering recession, my guess is
that the ECB will follow the Fed’s lead and stick to a quarter of one percent
rate increase.
Asia-Pacific
shares trade mixed; China manufacturing activity shows growth
UPDATED TUE, JAN 31 2023 12:08 AM EST
Asia-Pacific shares traded mixed on Tuesday as
investors digested a range of economic data and a potential interest rate hike
from the Federal Reserve.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index fell
0.93%. Mainland China’s Shanghai
Composite dipped 0.39% and the Shenzhen Component was
down 0.64% as China’s official manufacturing PMI reported a reading of 50.1,
above the 50-point mark separating growth from contraction.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 was
up 0.33% as investors await retail sales data for December. Japan’s Nikkei 225 traded
slightly above the flatline and the Topix gained 0.28% as Japan reported an
unemployment rate of 2.5% for December, in line with expectations.
South Korean benchmark Kospi dipped 0.4%,
while the Kosdaq shed 0.72% after South Korea logged a 7.3% drop for December’s
year-on-year industrial output, steeper than Reuters’ expectations of a 5.1%
fall.
The International Monetary Fund
also revised upward its global growth projections for2023, but cautioned that
higher interest rates and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would likely still weigh
on activity.
Investors are also looking ahead towards trade
data from Thailand.
Overnight in the U.S., major
indexes fell, bracing for the busiest week of earnings season and the Federal
Open Market Committee’s meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, where the Fed
is expected to hike rates by one-quarter of a percentage point.
Asia-Pacific shares, Fed, earnings, economic data (cnbc.com)
IMF hikes global growth forecast as inflation
cools and household spending surprises
PUBLISHED MON,
JAN 30 2023 8:31 PM EST
The International
Monetary Fund on Monday revised upward its global growth projections for the
year, but warned that higher interest rates and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
would likely still weigh on activity.
In its latest
economic update, the IMF said the global economy will grow 2.9% this year —
which represents a 0.2 percentage point improvement from its previous forecast
in October. However, that number would still mean a fall from an expansion of
3.4% in 2022.
It also revised its
projection for 2024 down to 3.1%.
“Growth will remain
weak by historical standards, as the fight against inflation and Russia’s war
in Ukraine weigh on activity,” Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, director of the
research department at the IMF, said in a blog post.
The outlook turned more positive on the global
economy due to better-than-expected domestic factors in several countries, such
as the United States.
“Economic growth proved
surprisingly resilient in the third quarter of last year, with strong labor
markets, robust household consumption and business investment, and
better-than-expected adaptation to the energy crisis in Europe,” Gourinchas
said, also noting that inflationary pressures have come down.
In addition, China announced the
reopening of its economy after strict Covid lockdowns, which is expected to
contribute to higher global growth. A weaker U.S. dollar has
also brightened the prospects for emerging market countries that hold debt in
foreign currency.
---- The IMF on Monday warned of several factors
that could deteriorate the outlook in the coming months. These included the
fact that China’s Covid reopening could stall; inflation could remain high;
Russia’s protracted invasion of Ukraine could shake energy and food costs even
further; and markets could turn sour on worse-than-expected inflation prints.
More
IMF
hikes global growth forecast as inflation cools (cnbc.com)
Stock futures
inch higher as S&P 500 heads for best January since 2019
UPDATED MON, JAN 30 2023 7:00 PM
EST
Stock futures rose slightly in overnight trading
as the S&P 500 looks to cap off its best January since 2019.
Futures tied to the S&P 500
added 0.26%, while futures connected to the Dow Jones Industrial Average inched
0.15%, or 49 points, higher. Nasdaq-100 futures gained 0.28%.
The overnight moves followed a
pause in what’s
been a stellar January for stocks. During regular trading the Dow
declined 260.99 points, or 0.77%, while the S&P and Nasdaq Composite fell
1.30% and 1.96%, respectively.
Stocks have rallied to start the
year after a brutal 2022 — and the
worst year for stocks since 2008. As of Monday’s close, the S&P
and Dow are up 4.64% and 1.72% in January, respectively, and headed for their
third positive month in four. The Nasdaq Composite has risen 8.86% this month,
putting it on pace for its best monthly performance since July.
---- A solid January could be a good sign for the market, and potentially
foreshadow a continued uptick in the months that follow. Of the five
instances in which the S&P gained more than 5% in January after a negative
year, the benchmark index rose 30% for the year on average, said Carson Group’s
Ryan Detrick in a tweet.
However, a busy week of earnings,
with reports from the likes of McDonald’s, Meta Platforms and Amazon, could put
this recent rally in jeopardy. Investors are watching closely for comments on
how some of the largest companies are faring amid high inflation and fears of
slowing consumer spending.
Attention also turns to the
latest interest rate decision due out of the Federal Reserve’s latest policy
meeting kicking off Tuesday. Traders widely expect a 25 basis point increase,
but will monitor commentary for clues into how much further the Fed intends to
hike, or when it plans to cut rates.
Companies reporting earnings
Tuesday include McDonald’s, Caterpillar, General Motors, Pfizer and Advanced
Micro Devices.
Stock
futures inch higher as S&P 500 heads for best January since 2019 (cnbc.com)
Bubbles R-Us
January 30, 2023 david
stockman
The Wall Street Journal today brings word that a
professor Efraim Benmelech of the finance department at Northwestern University
thinks the Fed is hurting housing and the consumer too much. Opined he,
…….those
higher interest rates are making mortgages more expensive and leading to fewer
home sales. That leads to less spending on appliances, paint and
other home goods, because people commonly buy those items ahead of a sale and
after moving.
“The
actions of the Fed are leading to lower consumption,” he said.
You
don’t say!
Then
again, has it occurred to the good professor that the years and years of ultra
low mortgage rates engineered by the Fed were totally unnatural, uneconomic and
not sustainable?
The
evidence for that is in the chart below. It shows that for most of the last
three decades, the Fed drove the after-inflation or “real” interest rate on
30-year mortgages steadily lower until it actually turned negative.
That’s
right. There was a whole lot of appliances, paint and other building supplies
being sold because mortgage investors were getting fleeced by the Fed’s
negative real rate regime. But now it’s time to pay the piper.
Stated
differently, the unfolding recession is a long overdue and necessary purge of
artificial economic activity stimulated and subsidized by the central bank’s
own financial repression policies.
The
Fed’s belated attempt to “normalize” interest rates, therefore, is not a
mean-spirited policy to deliberately cause labor, manufacturing capacity and
other economic resources to be idled. To the contrary, it’s a belated attempt
to unshackle markets from the excesses, bubbles, malinvestments, inefficiencies
and unsustainabilities that were the inherent results of decades of reckless
money-printing.
More, subscription required.
Bubbles R-Us - David Stockmans Contracorner (substack.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.
German
economy unexpectedly shrinks in Q4, reviving spectre of recession
January
30, 2023 10:35 AM GMT
BERLIN, Jan 30
(Reuters) - The German economy unexpectedly shrank in the fourth quarter, data
showed on Monday, a sign that Europe's largest economy may be entering a
much-predicted recession, though likely a shallower one than originally feared.
Gross domestic
product decreased 0.2% quarter on quarter in adjusted terms, the federal
statistics office said. A Reuters poll of analysts had forecast the economy
would stagnate.
In the previous
quarter, the German economy grew by an upwardly revised 0.5% versus the
previous three months.
A recession -
commonly defined as two successive quarters of contraction - has become more
likely, as many experts predict the economy will shrink in the first quarter of
2023 as well.
"The winter
months are turning out to be difficult - although not quite as difficult as
originally expected," said VP Bank chief economist Thomas Gitzel.
"The severe
crash of the German economy remains absent, but a slight recession is still on
the cards."
German Economy
Minister Robert Habeck said last week in the government's annual economic report that
the economic crisis triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine was now manageable,
though high energy prices and interest rate rises mean the government remains
cautious.
The government
has said the
economic situation should improve from spring onwards, and last week revised
up its GDP forecast for 2023 -- predicting growth of 0.2%, up from an autumn
forecast of a 0.4% decline.
As far as the
European Central Bank goes, interest rate expectations are unlikely to be
affected by Monday's GDP figures as inflationary pressures remain high, said
Helaba bank economist Ralf Umlauf.
The ECB has all but committed to
raising its key rate by half a percentage point this week to 2.5% to curb
inflation.
Monday's figures
showed falling private consumption was the primary reason for the decrease in
fourth-quarter GDP.
More
German economy
unexpectedly shrinks in Q4, reviving spectre of recession | Reuters
Philips
to cut 13% of jobs in safety and profitability drive
January
30, 2023 9:16 AM GMT
AMSTERDAM, Jan 30 (Reuters) - Dutch health
technology company Philips (PHG.AS) will
scrap another 6,000 jobs worldwide as it tries to restore its profitability and
improve the safety of its products following a recall of respiratory devices
that knocked off 70% of its market value.
Half of the job cuts will be made this
year, the company said on Monday, adding that the other half will be realised
by 2025.
The new reorganisation brings the total
amount of job cuts announced by new Chief Executive Roy Jakobs in recent months
to 10,000, or around 13% of Philips' current workforce.
It also adds to the string of
technology-based firms to make layoffs, after companies including Alphabet's
Google (GOOGL.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O), Amazon (AMZN.O) and German software
maker SAP (SAPG.DE) announced
thousands of layoffs to cut costs as they brace for tougher economic
conditions.
---- "There is a significant beat
on Q4 and the operational improvement measures are very large," ING
analyst Marc Hesselink said in a note.
Jakobs took over the reins of the
company last October, as Philips continued to grapple with the fallout
from the
recall of millions of ventilators used to treat sleep apnoea over
worries that foam used in the machines could become toxic.
"What we present today I think is
a very strong plan to secure the future of Philips. The challenges we have are
serious and we are adressing them head on," Jakobs told reporters.
More
Philips to cut 13%
of jobs in safety and profitability drive | Reuters
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.
FDA Sued for Withholding
COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Analyses
January 28,
2023Updated:
January 29, 2023
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been sued for
withholding the results of key COVID-19 vaccine safety analyses.
The FDA’s actions violate federal
law, the new lawsuit, filed on Jan. 26 in federal court in Washington by
the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense (CHD), alleges.
The suit is seeking the raw results
from the FDA’s analyses of reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting
System (VAERS).
The system, which the FDA runs with
the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), accepts reports
of post-vaccination adverse events.
As part of its vaccine safety
monitoring, the FDA pledged to run an analysis called Empirical Bayesian (EB)
data mining on the reports to see if any safety signals were triggered. These
signals give agencies an idea of which problems may be caused by vaccines.
Agencies are supposed to research signals to verify them or rule them unrelated
to vaccination.
“A report to VAERS does not mean that a vaccine
caused an adverse event. But VAERS can give CDC and FDA important information.
If it looks as though a vaccine might be causing a problem, FDA and CDC will
investigate further and take action if needed,” the CDC states on its website.
The FDA denied CHD’s request for the results of the
data mining, claiming that the records are “intra-agency memoranda consisting
of opinions, recommendations, and policy discussions within the deliberative
process of FDA, from which factual information is not reasonably segregable.”
The FDA also claimed that the sought-after
information “contains a discussion of legal and policy matters and fall within
the attorney work product and attorney-client privileges as enunciated by the Supreme
Court.”
The FDA also refused to provide the results of the EB data mining to The Epoch
Times, using the same rationale.
In a set of operating procedures, the
federal government said that the FDA would carry out EB data mining and that
the CDC would conduct a separate type of analysis using a method called
Proportional reporting ratio, or another way to analyze the VAERS data.
More
FDA Sued for
Withholding COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Analyses (theepochtimes.com)
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.
Profitable
retrofit system could slash steelmaking emissions by 94%
Loz Blain January 29, 2023
Iron and steel form the
structural backbone of modern life, but they're responsible for somewhere
around 8% of global carbon emissions, making them the single biggest source of
industrial greenhouse gases.
The path to
a 100% clean future is clear enough; ditch the blast furnaces and baked-coal
coke reductants, and replace them with electric arc furnaces running on clean
energy, and green hydrogen reductants. Boom: green
steel with water as the only by-product.
Here's the
problem: humanity is now producing somewhere around two billion tons of steel a year globally, and such a vanishingly tiny percentage of
that is clean that it was big news in 2021 when a
block of green steel actually got delivered to a customer. This is a colossal industry with an enormous amount of
assets, facilities and machinery already fully functional, and built to last.
Switching
to an electric arc furnace is no trivial exercise; it costs between US$1.1 to
1.7 billion according to the world's second-largest steelmaker, not including costs related to your stranded blast furnace
assets. Green hydrogen isn't available yet at the necessary scale, and thus the
production cost of green steel is a brutal 60% higher than the dirty stuff.
So
blast-furnace/basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) steel is going to be around for
decades to come, and that's why this new retrofit system from the University of
Birmingham may be one of the most important green-tech advances of the year,
despite not being fully green.
In a nutshell, it
replaces about 90% of the coke used in the blast furnace with direct carbon
monoxide injection. The carbon monoxide comes from a system that captures and
recycles the furnace's own exhaust "top gas," separating out carbon
monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and nitrogen gases at high temperatures. These
gases are then sent through a twin-reactor redox system that keeps the carbon
inside a closed loop.
The carbon
dioxide is cycled through a thermochemical oxidation process in one reactor
chamber, using a double perovskite material (Ba2Ca0.66Nb0.34FeO6,
or BCNF1 for brevity), which converts it into carbon monoxide at around 800 °C
(1,472 °F) at a rate around 10.1% each pass, grabbing oxygen atoms out of
carbon dioxide molecules and using them to fill up the cubic crystal structure
of the BCNF1.
More
Profitable
retrofit system could slash steelmaking emissions by 94% (newatlas.com)
We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness outside of the EUSSR.”
With grateful thanks to the writers
of the US Declaration of Independence.
