Baltic Dry Index. 763 -38 Brent Crude 87.63
Spot Gold 1926 U S 2 Year Yield 4.14 +0.05
Whenever
destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s
protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave
to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards
and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values.
Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a
mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are
expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account
which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it
bounces, marked: "Account Overdrawn."
Ayn Rand.
Is the USA
about to bounce its cheque?
In the stock casinos, more hopium that the bottom is
in. Never mind that Uncle Scam has had his credit card temporarily withdrawn,
or that bitcoin outperformed stocks this week.
Never mind that collectively the once high flying
tech sector has just laid off or is laying off, 70,000 highly paid, mostly US
employees.
Never mind that more interest rate hikes are coming
from the Fed, the BOE and ECB, nor that the effect of taking interest rates
from zero to 4 percent in the USA has yet to fully take effect in the economy.
Buy more, scream the perma-bulls.
Look away from the rising crude oil price and collapsing
Baltic Dry Index now.
Stocks close higher Friday, Nasdaq notches third
straight week of wins
FRI, JAN 20 2023 5:15 PM EST
Stocks rallied
on Friday to finish the week strong after briefly losing the momentum of the
January rally.
The Nasdaq was also the outperformer for the week,
posting a 0.55% gain and its third positive week in a row. The Dow finished the
week lower by 2.70%, and the S&P posted a 0.66% loss, both breaking
two-week win streaks.
All of the major averages are still in positive
territory for the year.
---- Investors continued to monitor earnings reports and mega
cap tech shares led the market higher. Netflix gained about 8.5% after posting more subscribers than
expected even though its quarterly earnings missed analysts’
estimates. Alphabet rose more than 5% after the company announced it will lay
off 12,000 employees.
Stocks rally to
finish the week strong
All of the major
averages finished higher on Friday.
The Dow Jones
Industrial Average added 329.81 points, or 1%, the S&P 500 advanced 1.89%
and the Nasdaq Composite rose 2.66%.
For the week, the
Dow finished lower by 2.7% and the S&P posted a 0.66% loss. The Nasdaq
gained 0.55%.
Stocks
close higher Friday, Nasdaq notches third straight week of wins (cnbc.com)
Bitcoin has climbed more than 10% this week,
outperforming stocks
Cryptocurrencies
rose this week even as U.S. equities briefly retreated from their new year
rally and a major crypto lender submitted a long awaited bankruptcy filing.
Bitcoin was last higher by about 12% for the week, according to Coin Metrics, while ether has risen 14%.
---- Bitcoin and ether rose 2.73%
and 2.15%, respectively, in the same four-day period.
“Bitcoin seems to be trading along with the Nasdaq
and risk assets again, after the past months of decoupling,” said Sylvia
Jablonski, CEO and chief investment officer at Defiance ETFs. “This is good
news for crypto investors in that if inflation is falling, and the Fed is closer
to the end than the beginning of economic tightening, risk assets will catch a
breath of fresh air and perhaps lure investors back in.”
---- Jablonski said bitcoin has
benefited from performance bursts this week as short-term sentiment favored
Nasdaq stocks. Whether it holds up depends on the Fed’s continued tightening
path, and whether or not the economy is pushed into a recession, she added.
This week’s rise in crypto prices also comes amid
the latest blow to the industry: Genesis one of the biggest lenders in crypto
and one of FTX’s largest unsecured creditor filed for bankruptcy late Thursday
night.
More
Bitcoin
has climbed more than 10% this week, outperforming stocks (cnbc.com)
Wall St Week Ahead Tech stock
rebound faces doubters with earnings season ahead
January
21, 2023 12:03 AM GMT
NEW YORK, Jan 20
(Reuters) - A spate of earnings reports in coming weeks is set to test a recent
bounce in technology and other megacap stocks, a category whose leadership
position in U.S. markets has faltered after last year’s deep selloff.
The
tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index (.NDX) has gained nearly 6.2% in 2023,
compared to a 3.45% rise for the S&P 500 (.SPX).
Shares of some megacap companies - which include those grouped outside of tech
in sectors like communication services and consumer discretionary - have shot
higher, with Amazon (AMZN.O), Meta Platforms (META.O) and Nvidia (NVDA.O) posting double-digit percentage
increases.
Several factors are driving that outperformance,
including investors piling into stocks they believe were overly punished in
2022. A moderation in bond yields, whose jump last year particularly pressured
tech-stock valuations, is also likely helping the group, investors said.
Now, however, the focus is shifting to whether
these companies can withstand a widely expected economic downturn while
supporting valuations that some investors believe are too high.
"To
keep this rebound going, the guidance for ’23 has to be less worse than what
people are anticipating," said Peter Tuz, president of Chase Investment
Counsel, whose firm recently pared its holdings in Apple (AAPL.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O).
Tech
and growth stocks led U.S. equity markets for years following the 2008
financial crisis, aided by near-zero interest rates. They struggled along with
broader markets last year as the Federal Reserve raised rates to fight surging
inflation, and some investors doubt they will regain the market's pole position
any time soon. The Nasdaq 100 fell 33% in 2022, while the S&P 500 lost
19.4%.
The
top six stocks by market value in late 2021 - Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (GOOGL.O), Amazon, Meta and Tesla (TSLA.O) - have seen their collective
weight in the S&P 500 fall from 25% to 18%, according to Strategas Research
Partners.
That
dynamic echoes a pattern seen after the market’s dot-com bubble burst after the
turn of the century. The six biggest stocks at that time saw their collective
weight in the S&P 500 decline to 5% from a peak of 17% over a number of
years, according to Strategas.
"This
leadership unwind ... is going to be one that is measured in years, not in
months or quarters," said Chris Verrone, head of technical and macro
research at Strategas.
Companies
comprising over half the S&P 500's market value are due to report results
in the next two weeks, including Microsoft, the second-largest U.S. company by
market value, on Tuesday, Elon Musk's Tesla and IBM (IBM.N) on Wednesday and Intel (INTC.O) on Thursday. Apple, the largest
U.S. company by market value, and Google-parent Alphabet report the following
week.
Fourth-quarter
earnings in the tech sector are expected to have declined 9.1% from a year ago,
compared to a 2.8% decline for S&P 500 earnings overall, according to
Refinitiv IBES.
More
Wall
St Week Ahead Tech stock rebound faces doubters with earnings season ahead |
Reuters
Finally, cryptoland’s failures and frauds (so far.)
Factbox: Crypto's string of
bankruptcies
January 20, 2023
11:40 AM GMT
LONDON,
Jan 20 (Reuters) - The lending unit of U.S. crypto firm Genesis filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection on Thursday, the latest company toppled by a market
rout last year that wiped about $1.3 trillion off the value of crypto tokens.
While bitcoin has
rallied this year, the impact of the market collapse has continued to hit
companies in the highly interconnected sector.
Here are the
major crypto firms to file for bankruptcy over the last year (listed in reverse
chronological order).
GENESIS GLOBAL CAPITAL
One
of the largest crypto lenders, Genesis froze customer redemptions in November
after major exchange FTX stunned the financial world with its bankruptcy. The
company is owned by U.S. venture capital firm Digital Currency Group.
In a filing with
the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday,
the firm said it had both assets and liabilities in the range of $1 billion to
$10 billion, and estimated it had more than 100,000 creditors.
Genesis Global
Holdco, the parent group of Genesis Global Capital, also filed for bankruptcy
protection, along with another lending unit, Genesis Asia Pacific.
CORE SCIENTIFIC
One
of the biggest publicly traded crypto mining companies in the United States,
Core Scientific Inc cited slumping bitcoin prices, rising energy costs and a $7
million unpaid debt from bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network as it filed for Chapter 11 in
December.
BLOCKFI
Crypto
lender BlockFi filed for Chapter 11 in
late November, some two weeks after FTX's collapse.
BlockFi said its
substantial exposure to FTX had created a liquidity crisis. The New
Jersey-based lender had relied on a $400 million FTX credit facility to stay
afloat after competing crypto lenders Voyager Digital Ltd and Celsius Network
went bankrupt earlier in 2022.
FTX
The
Bahamas-based exchange shocked the crypto world by going bankrupt in
November after suffering withdrawals of about $6 billion in just 72 hours and
rival crypto exchange Binance ditched a possible rescue.
FTX's affiliated
hedge fund Alameda Research also filed for bankruptcy. The collapse of the
companies, founded by former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, became one of the
most high-profile failures in the crypto sector. Investors in FTX had included
BlackRock and Canada's biggest pension plan.
Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty this
month to criminal charges that he cheated investors in FTX and caused billions
of dollars in losses.
CELSIUS NETWORK
A
crypto lender brought down by the collapse of terraUSD and luna, Celsius began its U.S. bankruptcy case on July 14.
Since then,
Celsius has been embroiled in disputes over fraud investigations, disparate
treatment of customer accounts, customer privacy, and its spending on a new
bitcoin mining facility.
VOYAGER DIGITAL
New Jersey-based
crypto lender Voyager Digital filed for bankruptcy in the United States on July
6 after Three Arrows Capital (3AC) defaulted on a crypto loan worth more than
$650 million.
The
U.S. affiliate of major crypto exchange Binance said in December it intends to buy Voyager's crypto lending platform in a deal valued at about $1 billion.
The
deal, however, could be delayed or blocked in a review by a U.S. body that vets foreign
investments into U.S. companies for national security risks.
THREE ARROWS CAPITAL
The
crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital filed for bankruptcy on July 1, brought down by the collapse of the so-called
stablecoin terraUSD and its sister token luna in May.
Those meltdowns
wiped out $42 billion in investor value, and led to an arrest warrant in South
Korea for terraUSD's developers.
Factbox: Crypto's
string of bankruptcies | Reuters
Feds seize almost $700 million of FTX assets in Sam
Bankman-Fried criminal case
Federal prosecutors seized nearly $700 million in
cash and assets connected to Sam Bankman-Fried, primarily in the form of
Robinhood shares that were owned by the FTX founder, a court filing revealed
Friday.
John Ray, who replaced
Bankman-Fried as CEO to guide
FTX’s restructuring, is trying to rescue funds that were lost by the
crypto company’s depositors when the firm spiraled into bankruptcy in November.
Bankman-Fried was arrested on criminal fraud charges in December and is
released on a $250 million bond as he awaits trial.
The 55 million-plus Robinhood
shares are at the heart of a contentious multi-party battle between Caribbean
litigants, representatives of bankrupt crypto lender BlockFi, Bankman-Fried
himself, and FTX’s bankruptcy leadership.
Federal prosecutors have alleged that the
Robinhood shares were purchased using allegedly stolen customer funds. In May,
Bankman-Fried revealed that
he’d purchased a 7.6% stake in Robinhood and said at the time “we think it is
an attractive investment.” The stock closed Friday at $9.52, valuing the
recovered shares at over $526 million.
Bankman-Fried has denied
misappropriating customer assets.
More
Feds seize almost $700 million of FTX assets in Sam Bankman-Fried case (cnbc.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.
Fed to deliver two 25-basis-point
hikes in Q1, followed by long pause
January 20, 2023
12:10 AM GMT
BENGALURU, Jan 20 (Reuters) - The U.S.
Federal Reserve will end its tightening cycle after a 25-basis-point hike at
each of its next two policy meetings and then likely hold interest rates steady
for at least the rest of the year, according to most economists in a Reuters
poll.
Fed officials
broadly agree the U.S. central bank should slow the pace of tightening to assess
the impact of the rate hikes. The Fed raised its benchmark overnight interest
rate by 425 basis points last year, with the bulk of the tightening coming in
75- and 50-basis-point moves.
As inflation continues to decline, more than
80% of forecasters in the latest Reuters poll, 68 of 83, predicted the Fed
would downshift to a 25-basis-point hike at its Jan. 31-Feb 1 meeting. If
realized, that would take the policy rate - the federal funds rate - to the
4.50%-4.75% range.
The remaining 15 see a 50-basis-point
hike coming in two weeks, but only one of those was from a U.S. primary dealer
bank that deals directly with the Fed.
The fed funds rate was expected to peak
at 4.75%-5.00% in March, according to 61 of 90 economists. That matched
interest rate futures pricing, but was 25 basis points lower than the median
point for 2023 in the "dot plot" projections issued by Fed
policymakers at the end of the Dec. 13-14 meeting.
More
Fed to deliver two 25-basis-point hikes in Q1,
followed by long pause | Reuters
Exclusive: Google parent to lay
off 12,000 workers in latest blow to tech sector
January 20, 2023
11:11 AM GMT
Jan 20 (Reuters) -
Google's parent Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) is
eliminating about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, the company said Friday,
in the latest cuts to shake the technology sector.
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's CEO, said in
a staff memo shared with Reuters that the company had rapidly expanded
headcount in recent years "for a different economic reality than the one
we face today."
"I take full responsibility for
the decisions that led us here," he said.
The cuts come days
after rival Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) said
it would lay off 10,000 workers.
Alphabet's job losses affect teams
across the company including recruiting and some corporate functions, as well
as some engineering and products teams.
The layoffs are global and impact U.S.
staff immediately.
Alphabet has already emailed affected
employees, the memo said, while the process will take longer in other countries
due to local employment laws and practices.
More
Exclusive: Google
parent to lay off 12,000 workers in latest blow to tech sector | Reuters
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.
2nd COVID-19 Booster Provides Worse Protection Than 1st: Study
Jan 19 2023
The protection provided by a
second COVID-19 vaccine booster was worse than that bestowed by an initial
booster, with the shielding trending negative after a period of time, according
to a new study.
Protection against symptomatic
infection was boosted to 64 percent for seven to 30 days after an initial
Pfizer or Moderna booster when compared with the protection the person had from
a primary series, researchers in France estimated. The measure is known as
relative effectiveness.
The relative booster effectiveness
against symptomatic infection, however, quickly dropped—reaching 33 percent 90
to 120 days after injection and 8.8 percent 150 to 180 days after infection,
the French researchers found.
A second booster increased the
shielding to 39 percent but the difference from the first booster turned
negative after 120 days, hitting negative 32.6 percent by 210 days.
“Although additional protection
with the second booster dose was achieved, it decreased over time reaching
levels below 10% at >90 days post vaccine administration,” Cynthia
Tamandjou and the other researchers, all with France’s national public health
agency, said in their study, which was published as a preprint by medRxiv.
The lower protection from a second
dose may stem from immune imprinting, or repeatedly stimulating people’s immune
systems with vaccines aimed at the Wuhan virus variant.
While that
approach helped protect against that variant, it hasn’t been in circulation
since 2020. Omicron and its subvariants gained dominance starting in late 2021,
but vaccines, apart from boosters cleared in the fall of 2022, have remained
the same.
“Frequent
exposure to the same antigen is to the detriment of new neutralizing responses
against variant antigens,” the researchers said. They called for human clinical
studies to examine the impact of immune imprinting.
More
2nd COVID-19 Booster Provides Worse Protection Than 1st: Study (theepochtimes.com)
World
Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines. https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
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 more useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus
resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.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, I’ve added this section.
Belarusian scientists developed
unique sodium-graphene energy storage device for electric vehicles
Posted: 20
January, 11:19
Belarusian scientists
have developed a unique sodium-graphene energy storage device for electric
vehicles – Valery Fedosyuk, Director General of the Scientific and Practical
Centre for Materials Science at the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus,
told journalists today on the sidelines of the Intellectual Belarus
exhibition, BelTA reports
“We promised the President to create our domestic
lithium-free battery, and we did it. We have the first prototype of the
Belarusian sodium battery. This is a very important and necessary innovation
for the country. We have achieved approximately the same parameters as lithium
batteries. Our developers have estimated that theoretically, sodium can provide
power, capacity and other necessary parameters 2.5-3 times higher compared to
lithium. I think when we fine-tune the technology, we will succeed. We will showcase
a more advanced battery at the next exhibition,” Valery Fedosyuk said.
The price of a new drive is much lower than that of
lithium batteries. “Lithium is expensive, there are few deposits, there won’t
be enough for everyone while Belarus has sodium. It is important for us to use
domestic raw materials. Alongside sodium, the battery contains ammonia, which
we also produce, as well as graphene, a modification that we get from cheap
graphite purchased in Russia,” the Director General of the Scientific and
Practical Centre noted.
So far, the new energy storage device has been
tested on small electric vehicles. “The next task is a bigger battery for
electric vehicles,” the scientist added.
He drew attention to the fact that no one in the
world has yet made a working prototype of sodium batteries, but Belarusian
scientists succeeded. “Our task is to repeatedly test the technology on
batteries of different capacities, on different equipment, and after that we
will look for investors with the Industry Ministry and think about how to
organise first small-scale, and then more serious production,” Valery Fedosyuk
shared his plans.
This weekend’s music diversion. Heinichen
again. Approx. 3 minutes.
Johann
David Heinichen: Concerto in G major, S.217, I. Allegro – Bremer
Barockorchester
Johann David
Heinichen: Concerto in G major, S.217, I. Allegro – Bremer Barockorchester -
YouTube
This
weekend’s chess update. Approx. 12 minutes.
This
Game Will Make Your Head Spin!
This Game Will
Make Your Head Spin! - YouTube
This
weekend’s maths update. Approx. 12 minutes.
Riemann's
paradox: pi = infinity minus infinity
Riemann's paradox:
pi = infinity minus infinity - YouTube
You have to
choose (as a voter) between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the
natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the
Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as
the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.
George Bernard
Shaw.
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