Baltic Dry Index. 1130 -16 Brent Crude 79.68
Spot Gold 1879 US 2 Year Yield 4.24 -0.21
Coronavirus
Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,103
Coronavirus Cases 06/01/23 World 668,202,608
Deaths 6,713,617
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 Asian stock casinos, it’s all about hopium on a fast rebound in China’s
economy. But with the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday soon to start just as a
new great Covid-19 surge is sweeping across China that fast rebound might be
much slower than the gamblers expect.
More March rather than January.
Asia-Pacific
markets rise as China reopens borders with Hong Kong
UPDATED MON, JAN 9 2023 12:28 AM
EST
Asia-Pacific
markets traded higher as Hong Kong and mainland China resumed quarantine-free travel over
the weekend, signaling the end of zero-Covid policy which kept borders
effectively closed for nearly three years.
South Korea’s Kospi rose 2.51%,
leading gains in the region and the Kosdaq gained 1.48%.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index gained
1.46% on the first day of trade following the reopening. Technology stocks led
gains alongside travel and consumer names. In mainland, the Shanghai Composite rose
0.6% and the Shenzhen Component rose
0.62%
The S&P/ASX 200 gained
0.6% as investors digested the Australia’s buildings approvals print that came
in significantly lower than expected. Japan’s markets were closed to observe
Coming of Age Day, a public holiday.
In the U.S., major indexes ended
last week with their first
rally of the new trading year. Nonfarm
payrolls for December came in slightly higher than expected,
while wages rose at a slower pace than expected. ISM’s non-manufacturing purchasing
managers’ index showed a contraction
in the services sector — adding to hopes that the Federal
Reserve’s rate hikes are making progress in taming inflation.
Asia-Pacific
markets: Hong Kong and mainland China resumes, Australia building approvals
(cnbc.com)
European markets
set for positive open, buoyed by China reopening
UPDATED MON, JAN 9 2023 12:26 AM EST
European
markets are heading for a positive open at the start of the new trading week,
with market sentiment buoyed by a further reopening of the Chinese economy.
Asia-Pacific
markets traded higher overnight as Hong Kong and mainland China
resumed quarantine-free travel over
the weekend, signaling the end of zero-Covid policy which kept borders
effectively closed for nearly three years.
Meanwhile, U.S. stock futures
inched higher in overnight trading Sunday after the major
averages notched their first big rally of the new trading year.
European
markets live updates: stocks, data, news and earnings (cnbc.com)
China’s big
consumer market isn’t rebounding to pre-pandemic levels just yet
BEIJING — It’s going
to take time for Chinese consumers to really start spending again, despite
China’s abrupt shift toward reopening.
About a month after
Guangzhou city resumed in-store dining, local coffee shop owner Timothy Chong
said revenue was recovering — to 50% of normal levels.
“In late December,
customer flow gradually normalized, with a slight upward trend, but [a recovery
in] business volume still needs to wait,” he said in Chinese, translated by
CNBC.
He expects it will
take at least three or four months before revenue can return to normal. For the
past six months, revenue had dropped to 30% of typical levels, Chong said. He
said Bem Bom Coffee’s first store opened in late 2019, followed by a second
store and a coffee academy in August 2021.
China’s retail sales
were down slightly for 2022 as of November, official data showed. Consumption
has lagged overall economic growth since the pandemic began nearly three years
ago.
For the year ahead,
Bain partner Derek Deng kept a lid on expectations. “The hope is we at least
get back to the first quarter of 2022 level,” he said, noting that was just
before the Shanghai lockdown.
Retail sales for the first three months of 2022
were up by about 3.3% from a year ago, but had slowed to a decline of 0.7% for
the first half of the year, according to Wind Information.
A return to 2021 — when retail sales rebounded by 12.5%— would be an
optimistic scenario, Deng said. “I don’t think people are seeing that as sort
of the base case, mostly because the macro factors are actually less favorable
compared to 2021.”
The bulk of Chinese household
wealth is tied up in real estate, a one-time hot market that’s slumped
in the last year. Mainland Chinese stock markets dropped in
2022 for the first time in four years. Exports, a driver of China’s growth,
have started to decline in the last few months as global demand wanes.
Deng also noted fears of a second
Covid wave, the highly contagious XBB
omicron subvariant coming in from overseas and geopolitical
uncertainties.
More
China's
big consumer market isn't rebounding to pre-pandemic levels just yet (cnbc.com)
'Life
is moving forward': China declares new COVID phase
January 9, 2023 5:09
AM GMT
BEIJING, Jan 9 (Reuters) - China braced
for a "new phase" in its battle against COVID-19 on Monday and
financial markets strengthened after Beijing dropped pandemic border controls
in the latest easing of curbs that has let the virus loose on its 1.4 billion
population.
Sunday's reopening is one of the last
steps in China's dismantling of its "zero-COVID" regime, which began
last month after historic protests against curbs that kept the virus at bay for
three years but caused widespread frustration among its people and severe
damage to the world's second-largest economy.
While Beijing's move to drop quarantine
is expected also to boost outbound travel, several nations are demanding
negative tests from visitors from China, seeking to contain an outbreak that is
overwhelming many of China's hospitals and crematoriums.
"Life is moving
forward again!," the official newspaper of the Communist Party, the
People's Daily, wrote in an editorial praising the government's virus policies
late on Sunday which it said had moved from "preventing infection" to
"preventing severe disease".
"Today, the virus is weak, we are
stronger."
China's state Xinhua
news agency said the country had entered a "new phase" of its COVID
response, citing its virus prevention experience, the development of the
epidemic and increased vaccination levels.
China's top health
officials and state media have repeatedly said COVID infections are peaking
across the country and they are playing down the threat now posed by the
disease.
---- Officially, China has reported
just 5,272 COVID-related deaths as of Jan.8, one of the lowest rates of death
from the infection in the world.
But the World Health
Organization has said China is under-reporting the scale of the outbreak and
international health experts estimate more than one million people in the
country could die from the disease this year.
Shrugging off those
gloomy forecasts, investors are betting that China's reopening will help revive
the $17 trillion economy and bolster the outlook for global growth.
More
'Life
is moving forward': China declares new COVID phase | Reuters
Back in Ponziland cryptoland, the Bahamas is
struggling after the fraud of FTX.
‘The money is gone’: Bahamas tries to turn page after
FTX
January 9 2023
----The cryptocurrency exchange FTX was supposed to be the crown jewel of
the Bahamian government’s push to be the global destination for all things
crypto, after years of having an economy overly reliant on tourism and banking.
Instead, FTX is bankrupt and Bahamians are trying to figure out what’s next for
their country and whether their national crypto experiment has failed.
Regulators are trying to locate FTX’s customers’ missing money.
Meanwhile, charities like Rolle’s
and dozens of contractors now out of work hope that another company will come
along and bring new opportunities to the island nation, without the
complications and embarrassment of an alleged billion-dollar fraud.
Rolle,
a Pentecostal preacher known as the “singing bishop,” is a prominent figure in
the Bahamas. For decades, he’s cooked and donated food to the poor and provided
school lunches from his neighborhood kitchen at International Deliverance
Praying Ministry in Over-The-Hill, one of the most impoverished parts of the
capital of Nassau. Rolle and his staff feed roughly 2,500 people a week.
----Rolle’s
ministry received $50,000 from FTX in early 2022, one of several donations FTX
made to the Bahamian people when it relocated to the Caribbean island nation in
2021. It was money, he said, that was used to restore a food storage trailer
and make additional food donations. Rolle said it cost upward of $10,000 a week
to run his food donation program.
Asked about the failure of FTX,
Rolle described it as a sad distraction from the many issues facing the
country. Others are angry, particularly with Sam Bankman-Fried,
the young founder of FTX. The Bahamas had a reputation, like some other
Caribbean isles, as a destination for illicit and offshore finance. There was a
belief that crypto would allow the island to diversify its economy, give
Bahamians more financial opportunities and overall help provide the country a
more prosperous future.
The
country enacted the Digital Assets and Registered Exchanges Act in 2020, making
the Bahamas one of the first countries to put together a regulatory framework
for cryptocurrencies and other digital assets. The prime minister, Philip
Davis, participated in the groundbreaking ceremony for FTX’s new $60 million
headquarters in Nassau in April, along with Bankman-Fried.
----“It’s
frustrating. Now when people think about crypto they are going to think of
FTX,” Deleveaux said. “That’s going to make my own job much harder.”
In some ways, FTX was both
ubiquitous and removed from the local community, Bahamians said. Its ads were
everywhere, most notably at the Nassau Airport in the hall for tourist
arrivals. But at the same time, FTX ran most of its operations from the secure
luxury compound known as Albany, where residents like Tiger Woods and Justin
Timberlake can be regularly spotted. Albany is located on the opposite side of
New Providence, the most populated island in the Bahamas and the location of
Nassau.
----One bartender at the Margaritaville Resort, where FTX
ran up an unpaid $55,000 tab, described a group of 10 to 15 mostly white FTX
employees who would eat in the restaurant, faces buried in their laptops the
entire time. While FTX did hire Bahamians or contracted with Bahamian
businesses, it was almost entirely for logistics jobs like construction,
janitor services or food catering.
Just as quickly as FTX became
engrained in elite Bahamian circles did the whole thing unravel. FTX failed in
spectacular fashion in early November, going from solvent to
bankrupt in less than a week. One food catering servicer said he had to let go
most of his workers after FTX, his biggest contract, went bankrupt.
More
'The
money is gone': Bahamas tries to turn page after FTX | AP News
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.
Big fall in euro zone inflation offers little help for ECB
January 7 2023
FRANKFURT/BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Euro zone inflation tumbled last month but underlying price pressures are still rising and economic growth indicators are surprisingly benign, suggesting that the European Central Bank will keep raising interest rates for months to come.
Fighting a historic surge in prices, the ECB has since July increased borrowing costs at its fastest pace on record. It has promised a string of further moves this year to curb inflation that its own economists see staying above its 2% target well into 2025.
Consumer price
growth across the 19 countries using the euro slowed to 9.2% in December from
10.1% a month earlier, Eurostat data showed on Friday - well below a Reuters
poll forecast of 9.7%, with the decline driven by lower energy prices.
The euro zone
has since expanded to 20 nations, with Croatia joining on Jan. 1.
But the
headline number masked a more malignant trend, with all key components of core
inflation accelerating.
Excluding
volatile food and energy prices, inflation picked up to 6.9% from 6.6%, while
an even narrower measure that also excludes alcohol and tobacco rose to 5.2%
from 5%.
Services and
non-energy industrial goods inflation, both watched closely by the ECB to gauge
the durability of price growth, accelerated, adding to concerns that inflation
is proving more stubborn than expected.
“Rising core inflation means that not much will sway the European Central Bank from the hawkish path it set out late last year," ING economist Bert Colijn said.
A string of other
indicators also suggest that the bloc's winter recession will be milder than
anticipated, leaving the ECB with more work to do to tame prices.
A key economic
sentiment indicator improved more than expected while retail sales data also
showed surprising resilience.
Exceptionally
mild weather, implying lower consumption of costly energy, will help too, by
propping up household spending power and preserving corporate margins.
But that may
complicate life for the ECB.
The recession
was expected to push up unemployment, naturally dampening price pressures. But
employment, already at a record high, is actually going up, not down.
Fiscal support
for households is also proving more generous than hoped and this excessive
spending is adding to purchasing power, weighing against the ECB's restrictive
policies.
More
Big fall in euro zone inflation offers little help for ECB (msn.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.
Sudden Death: The No. 1 Cause of Death for Under 65s in 2021
Jan 6 2023
Believe it or not, it’s now the
No. 1 cause of death for this age group. Is there a silent epidemic that’s
impairing and destroying your immune system (and literally obliterating 90% of
your DNA repair mechanism)? And, what extreme remedies can reverse the attack?
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
·
Mounting
evidence shows the COVID shots are destroying people’s immune systems and are
triggering turbo-charged cancers
·
A
survey by Steve Kirsch found sudden death is the No. 1 cause of death among
those under the age of 65 who got the COVID jab
·
Myocarditis
as a cause of death is now registering across all age ranges but only for the
vaccinated. Cardiac-related deaths are also significantly elevated among
younger people (under 65) who got the jab compared to their unjabbed peers
·
Recent
research shows repeated jabs trigger a switch in the types of antibodies your
body produces and lower your ability to clear viruses. By switching from
spike-specific neutralizing IgG antibodies to IgG4 antibodies, your body
switches from tumor suppression mode into tumor progression mode
·
In
addition to the potential for cancer cells to run amok, IgG4 dominance may also
have severe autoimmune implications, as the COVID jab spike protein share
similarities with human proteins
Evidence showing the COVID shots
are a public health disaster keeps mounting. In late December 2022, Steve
Kirsch1 and Jessica Rose,2 Ph.D., both
published Substack articles detailing some of the latest evidence showing the
shots are destroying people’s immune systems and have triggered an avalanche of
turbo-charged cancers.
Kirsch’s article3 features results from a recent survey he conducted.
It included four questions: age, whether the deceased was jabbed or not, year
of death and cause of death. While the number of responses is low, major
insights can still be gleaned by looking at the trends.
More
Sudden Death: The No. 1 Cause of Death for Under 65s in
2021 (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.
Space-Based Solar Power Hardware Was Just Launched Into Orbit
for Testing
January 6, 2023
Space-based
solar power could provide round-the-clock access to renewable energy,
sidestepping one of the technology’s biggest limitations. Now the idea is going
to get its first true test after a Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched
experimental hardware designed to assess its feasibility.
The idea of
stationing gigantic solar panels in orbit around Earth and beaming the
power back has been around for decades. The possibility is
attractive, because in space you’re no longer at the mercy of the weather or
the planet’s cycles of day and night, and solar radiation levels are higher as
sunlight has not had to pass through the atmosphere.
So far
though, space-based solar power has remained in the realm of sci-fi
due to the technical complexity and unforgiving economics of space
technologies. But thanks to a $100 million donation in 2013, a
multidisciplinary team from Caltech has been quietly working
on it over the past decade, developing the various technologies
required to make it a reality. And this past Tuesday, prototypes of some of the
key subsystems required for a full-scale space-based solar power plant were
delivered into orbit by SpaceX for testing.
Over the
next few months, the team behind the Caltech Space Solar Power Project will test out
the systems that will allow their flexible solar panels to unfurl in space
and the technology designed to transmit power back to Earth.
They will also assess how well different kinds of solar panel technologies hold
up in the harsh environment of space.
“No matter
what happens, this prototype is a major step forward,” Ali Hajimiri, one of the
three Caltech professors leading the project, said in a statement. “It works here on
Earth, and has passed the rigorous steps required of anything launched into
space. There are still many risks, but having gone through the whole process
has taught us valuable lessons.”
Building
solar panels in space is a much more complicated business than doing so on
Earth. The biggest challenge is getting them there in the first place, which is
limited by the incredible cost of launching material into orbit. As a result,
the team has had to focus on reducing the weight of their solar panels as much
as possible without sacrificing their generating capacity.
Their
solution combines ultra-thin flexible solar panels, an ingenious design that
integrates power generation and transmission, and a novel modular architecture
that makes it possible to combine many smaller, self-contained panels to create
large arrays.
More
Space-Based Solar
Power Hardware Was Just Launched Into Orbit for Testing (singularityhub.com)
"In
economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension."
John Kenneth
Galbraith.
No comments:
Post a Comment