Baltic Dry Index. 1176 -74 Brent Crude 79.00
Spot Gold 1855 US 2 Year Yield 4.36 -0.04
Coronavirus
Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,103
Coronavirus Cases 05/01/23 World 666,637,064
Deaths 6,703,844
Never fight the Fed.
Wall Street Maxim.
The
minutes of the US central bank’s last meeting showed a Fed committed to continuing
to raise interest rates for longer to finally beat US inflation.
Despite
that, initially the stock casino punters didn’t believe them. My guess is that the punters in the stock
casinos are betting wrong, or at least betting long far too early to be right
initially.
Back in
the real world, property prices and sales are still falling, used car prices
and sales are still falling, layoffs are starting to rise. More interest rate
hike are coming at least out to mid-year.
Offsetting
that, much of Europe is having a mild winter so far, mitigating high energy
prices. Northern California’s drought is ending in rains that would impress
Noah.
But it’s
too early to try guessing what impact, if any, this will eventually have on
food price inflation.
Past higher
interest rate hikes lag in impacting most of the G-7 economies.
In cryptoland, a new scandal appears to be underway.
Asia-Pacific
shares rise as investors digest private survey data on China services
UPDATED WED, JAN 4 2023 10:42 PM
EST
Asia-Pacific markets climbed as investors shrug
off the U.S. Federal Reserve’s commitment to higher interest rates in tackling
inflation.
Mainland China’s Shenzhen Component was
up 2.42%, while the Shanghai
Composite rose 1.03%
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index jumped
1.60%, paring earlier gains of more than 2% as investors digested an improved
reading in China’s Caixin services Purchasing Managers’ Index for December.
Hong Kong’s S&P Purchasing Managers’ Index indicated an ease in private
sector contraction.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose
0.669%. In Japan, the Nikkei
225 was up 0.68% in its first hour of trade, while the Topix
added 0.16%. The Kospi rose
0.49%, and the Kosdaq inched up fractionally.
Singapore’s retail sales for November is slated
for release later in the day.
Overnight on Wall Street, stocks
snapped a two-day losing streak as Fed minutes released
Wednesday from the December meeting showed higher interest
rates are to remain as long as inflation stays high.
Asia-Pacific
markets, Fed minutes, inflation, PMI, Singapore retail, Caixin services
(cnbc.com)
European markets
head for lower open as investors focus on data, Fed
UPDATED THU, JAN 5 2023 12:31 AM
EST
European markets are heading for a lower open Thursday as global markets
focus on economic data from the region, and the latest signals from the U.S.
Federal Reserve on inflation and interest rates.
On Wednesday, minutes from the Fed’s last meeting in December
were released, showing the central bank remained committed
to higher interest rates for “some time.” the minutes prompted
U.S. markets to give up earlier gains in the trading session and U.S. stock
futures were flat overnight.
European markets closed higher on Wednesday as inflation data
from France and Germany indicated that consumer price increases across the euro
zone are slowing.
European
markets live updates: Stocks, news, data and earnings (cnbc.com)
Fed minutes: Officials cited strong hiring to justify
hikes
January 4 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve officials suggested at
their most recent meeting that a continuing streak of robust hiring could keep
inflation elevated and was a key reason why they expected to raise
interest rates this year more than they had previously
forecast.
In the minutes of their
mid-December meeting released Wednesday, the officials also underscored that a
slowdown in their rate hikes — from four three-quarter point hikes in a row to
a half-point increase — “was not an indication of any weakening” in their
resolve to bring inflation back down to their 2% target.
Nor did the smaller increase
signal “a judgment that inflation was already on a persistent downward path,”
the minutes said. Instead, the risks remained that inflation could stay higher
than expected, officials said.
That message reflected concern
that Wall Street traders were too optimistic that the Fed would soon suspend
its rate hikes and even cut them later this year. Such a “misperception,” the
minutes indicated, would complicate the Fed’s drive to lower inflation. This
would occur if bullish traders sent stocks up and bond yields down, which would
counter the Fed’s efforts to cool the economy.
Overall, the minutes
showed that Fed officials remained determined to keep rates high to quell
inflation and have taken little comfort from inflation’s decline from a peak of
9.1% in June to 7.1% in November. The hard-line message caused the stock market
to tumble after the Fed announced its latest rate hike and projected that there
would be more hikes this year than had been expected.
“The minutes stress that the Fed is going to reduce
inflation at the risk of hurting the labor market and the broader economy,”
said Ryan Sweet, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.
At a news conference after last
month’s meeting, Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged that inflation had been
subdued in October and November. But he stressed that “substantially more
evidence” of declining inflation would be needed for the Fed to pause its rate
hikes.
“We have a long way to go,”
Powell said, “to get to price stability.”
The Fed’s higher rates have
increased the costs of mortgages, auto loans and other consumer and business
borrowing.
More
Fed
minutes: Officials cited strong hiring to justify hikes | AP News
Amazon says it
will cut over 18,000 jobs, more than initially planned
Amazon said
Wednesday it will cut over 18,000 jobs, a bigger number than the e-retailer
initially said it would be eliminating last year.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the cuts
earlier, which Amazon said preempted its planned announcement.
“We typically wait to communicate about these outcomes until we
can speak with the people who are directly impacted,” CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a
memo to employees that the company published on its blog. “However, because one of our
teammates leaked this information externally, we decided it was better to share
this news earlier so you can hear the details directly from me.”
Tech companies are picking up in 2023 where they
left off last year, preparing for an extended economic downturn. Salesforce said
on Wednesday it would reduce
headcount by 10%, impacting over 7,000 employees. Both Amazon
and Salesforce admitted that they hired too rapidly during the pandemic.
Amazon specifically acknowledged that it had added workers
too quickly in warehouses as consumers shifted to online ordering. The company
employed 1.54 million people at the end of the third quarter.
In November, Jassy said Amazon
would eliminate roles, including at its physical stores and in its devices and
books divisions. CNBC reported at the time that Amazon was looking to lay off
around 10,000 of its employees. Now the number is higher.
More
Amazon
says it will cut over 18,000 jobs, more than initially planned (cnbc.com)
Finally in cryptoland there’s
apparently no honour among thieves as everyone scrambles aboard the roll-over
train.
Exclusive:
FTX's former top lawyer aided U.S. authorities in Bankman-Fried case
January 5, 2023 5:59 AM GMT
Jan 5 (Reuters) -
FTX's former top lawyer Daniel Friedberg has cooperated with U.S. prosecutors
as they investigate the crypto firm's collapse, a source familiar with the
matter said, adding pressure on founder Sam Bankman-Fried who was arrested on
criminal fraud charges last month.
Friedberg
gave details about FTX in a Nov. 22 meeting with two dozen investigators, the
person said. The meeting, held at the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District
of New York's office included officials from the Justice Department, Federal
Bureau of Investigation, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the
source said. Emails between attendees scheduling the meeting with those
agencies were seen by Reuters.
At the meeting,
he told prosecutors what he knew of Bankman-Fried's use of customer funds to
finance his business empire, the source said. Friedberg recounted conversations
he had with other top executives on the subject and provided details of how
Bankman-Fried's hedge fund Alameda Research functioned, the source said.
Friedberg's
cooperation has not been previously reported. He has not been charged and has
not been told he is under criminal investigation, the source said. Instead, he
expects to be called as a government witness in Bankman-Fried's October trial,
the person said.
Friedberg's lawyer,
Telemachus Kasulis, the FBI and FTX did not respond to requests for comment on
his cooperation. The SEC, the Department of Justice and Bankman-Fried's
spokesman declined to comment.
More
Exclusive:
FTX's former top lawyer aided U.S. authorities in Bankman-Fried case | 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.
Food
prices continue to skyrocket despite easing UK shop inflation
WEDNESDAY 04 JANUARY 2023
6:00 AM
UK inflation is beginning to ease, but food prices
are still accelerating at one of the fastest paces on record, new research out
today shows.
Annual shop price inflation, calculated by the
British Retail Consortium (BRC) and NielsenIQ, dropped slightly to 7.3 per cent
last month from 7.4 per cent in November.
Despite the drop, the rate of price increases is
still running at among the quickest since the BRC started tracking the data.
Worryingly, food price inflation, which jumped to
13.3 per cent from 12.4 per cent, drove overall shop prices higher. Non-food
inflation decelerated to 4.4 per cent in December from 4.8 per cent in
November, while fresh food prices climbed 15 per cent over the last year.
Rising food prices erode purchasing power sharply
due to households struggling to curb spending on filling their fridges and
kitchen cabinets.
Food retailers are being incentivised to lift
prices to offset rising costs caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sending
international energy prices flying and gumming up European supply chains.
The war has resulted in Ukrainian grain exports
remaining moored in the country, engineering global shortages of inputs used to
produce basic foods and lifting costs in the process.
The BRC’s figures indicated retailers were passing
on the “reverberations from the war in Ukraine continu[ing] to keep high the
cost of animal feed, fertiliser and energy” to consumers, BRC chief executive
Helen Dickinson said.
The squeeze on retailers from higher energy costs
is being partly absorbed by the government covering a portion of their bills.
However, the scheme is expected to be watered down
from the end of March due to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt pushing to shield taxpayers
from the risk of a resurgence in gas and oil prices – which are now trading at
pre-Russia-Ukraine war levels – in 2023.
Dickinson warned retailers may raise prices after
the government scales back help.
More
Food prices
continue to skyrocket despite easing UK shop inflation (cityam.com)
Mortgage
approvals collapse to early Covid-19 crisis levels after mini-budget chaos
WEDNESDAY 04 JANUARY 2023 11:16 AM
Mortgage approvals in the UK have
skidded to their lowest level since the early days of the Covid-19 crisis,
pushed down by prospective buyers retreating after Liz Truss’s botched
mini-budget sent interest rates flying, official figures out today show.
The number of mortgage approvals
tumbled a fifth over the month to November to their lowest level since June
2020, down to 46,075 from 57,875, according to figures from the Bank of
England.
That drop came before the Bank hiked borrowing costs 50 basis
points in December, the ninth rise in a row. The central bank also lifted rates
75 basis points in November, the largest increase since the 1980s.
However, mortgage
providers have been charging much higher rates than the benchmark after former
Prime Minister Liz Truss’s botched mini-budget roiled financial markets.
Truss tried to push
through £45bn of unfunded tax cuts despite inflation running at multi-decade
highs, raising Britain’s borrowing trajectory. Investors responded by ditching
UK bonds, sending yields sharply higher. Yields and prices move inversely.
That debt sell-off
pushed the rate at which mortgage suppliers finance loans higher as well,
prompting them to charge home borrowers more.
Now Chancellor Jeremy
Hunt has since scrapped pretty much all of Truss’s tax cuts and launched
£55bn of fiscal tightening in November, reassuring investors.
However, rates on
typical mortgages have stayed above five per cent since Truss’s mini-budget,
pricing prospective buyers out of the market.
More
Mortgage approvals collapse to early Covid-19 crisis levels (cityam.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.
XBB.1.5 omicron
subvariant is the most transmissible version of Covid yet, WHO says
The XBB.1.5 omicron subvariant that’s currently
dominating the U.S. is the most contagious version of Covid-19 yet, but it
doesn’t appear to make people sicker, according to the World Health Organization.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s
Covid-19 technical lead, said global health officials are worried about how
quickly the subvariant is spreading in the northeastern U.S. The number of
people infected with XBB.1.5 has been doubling in the U.S. about every two
weeks, making it the most common variant circulating in the country.
“It is the most transmissible
subvariant that has been detected yet,” Van Kerkhove told reporters during a
press conference in Geneva on Wednesday. “The reason for this are the mutations
that are within this subvariant of omicron allowing this virus to adhere to the
cell and replicate easily.”
It has been detected in 29
countries so far but it could be even more widespread, Van Kerkhove said.
Tracking Covid variants has become difficult as genomic sequencing declines
across the world, she said.
The WHO doesn’t have any data yet
on the severity of XBB.1.5, but there’s no indication at the moment that it
makes people sicker than previous versions of omicron, Van Kerkhove said. The
WHO’s advisory group that tracks Covid variants is conducting a risk assessment
on XBB.1.5 that it will publish in the coming days, she said.
“The more this virus circulates the
more opportunities it will have to change,” Van Kerkhove said. “We do expect
further waves of infection around the world but that doesn’t have to translate
into further waves of death because our countermeasures continue to work.”
Scientists say XBB.1.5 is about as
good at dodging antibodies from vaccines and infection as its XBB and XBB.1
relatives, which were two of the most immune evasive subvariants yet. But
XBB.1.5 has a mutation that makes
it bind more tightly to cells, which gives it a growth advantage.
More
Covid
news: Omicron XBB.1.5 is most transmissible subvariant, WHO says (cnbc.com)
EXCLUSIVE: CDC Finds Hundreds of
Safety Signals for Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 Vaccines
Jan 3 2023
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has
identified hundreds of safety signals for the two most widely administered
COVID-19 vaccines, according to monitoring results obtained by The Epoch Times.
Bell’s palsy, blood clotting, and death were among the signals flagged through analysis of adverse event reports submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The CDC, which runs VAERS with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), describes it as “the nation’s early warning system” for vaccine issues.
The CDC’s primary analysis compared the reports made for specific events suffered after receipt of a Moderna or Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to the reports lodged following vaccination with any other vaccine, or all non-COVID-19 vaccines. The type of analysis is known as Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR).
Safety signals mean a condition may be linked to a vaccine. Signals require further analysis to confirm a possible link.
The CDC analysis was conducted on adverse events reported from Dec. 14, 2020, to July 29, 2022.
The Epoch Times obtained the results through a Freedom of Information Act request after the CDC refused to make the results public.
VAERS is a passive
reporting system that accepts reports from anybody, but most are lodged
by health care professionals, who were told during the COVID-19 pandemic
that they were required to lodge reports if post-vaccination issues cropped up.
People who lodge false reports face penalties.
Reports don’t prove causality
or a link between an event and a vaccine. At the same time, studies show that
the number of reports is often an undercount of the actual occurrence of
post-vaccination events.
‘Onus Is on the Regulators’
The CDC and FDA stated in operating procedure documents that officials would monitor VAERS
to identify “potential new safety concerns for COVID-19 vaccines,” with the CDC
performing PRR analysis. The CDC has issued multiple false statements on the data mining but
ultimately acknowledged that it didn’t start performing the monitoring
technique until 2022—more than one year after the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines
were authorized.
PRR involves comparing the
incidence of a specific adverse event after a specific vaccine to the incidence
after all other vaccines. A signal is triggered when three thresholds are met,
according to the CDC: a PRR of at least two, a chi-squared statistic of at
least four, and three or more cases of the event following receipt of the
vaccine being analyzed. Chi-squared tests are a form of statistical analysis
used to examine data.
The results obtained by The Epoch
Times show that there are hundreds of adverse events (AEs) that meet the
definition, including serious conditions such as blood clotting in the lungs,
intermenstrual bleeding, a lack of oxygen to the heart, and even death. The
high numbers, particularly the chi-squared figures, concerned experts.
More
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.
Here’s What You Can Expect at CES
2023
Technology's biggest trade show
must go on, in spite of rough economic headwinds. These are the trends and
innovations to keep an eye out for.
JAN
3, 2023 7:00 AM
AFTER
GOING REMOTE at
the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, CES returned to Las Vegas in 2022
for a hybrid experience. Many companies opted to continue virtually attending
the annual consumer trade show. Even though CES 2023 is not expected to
recapture the entire grandeur of years past, the Consumer
Technology Association (CTA) that hosts the event anticipates around 100,000
attendees.
CES 2023 runs from January 5 to 8, and it still offers an
option for remote attendance. In spite of an economy that’s worrisome for
most CEOs and last year’s major flops (remember NFTs?), innovative hardware
announcements will continue to make a splash on the showroom floor. From
cohesive developments in the smart home category to peculiar designs for
electric vehicles, here’s what you can expect at CES 2023.
More
Here’s What You Can Expect at CES 2023 | WIRED
In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative
tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results
far much less.
John Kenneth Galbraith.
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