Baltic Dry Index. 1172 -43 Brent Crude 76.63
Spot Gold 1935 US 2 Year Yield 4.54 +0.04
Coronavirus
Cases 01/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,103
Coronavirus Cases 30/05/23 World 689,478,678
Deaths 6,884,013
"There is no means of avoiding the final
collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only
whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of
further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the
currency system involved."
Ludwig
von Mises.
In the stock casinos,
cautious optimism that the US debt default crisis is over. But is it?
Can the US House and
Senate pass the necessary legislation unamended and get it to President Biden
for signing by June 5th?
I have my doubts
about that June 5th deadline date being real, but assuming it’s
real, it gives disappointed Republicans leverage to amend the legislation or to
delay it in the Senate.
This US debt default
crisis might not yet be over until it’s over.
Asia markets
trade mixed ahead of U.S. vote on debt ceiling deal; Hong Kong set for new lows
UPDATED MON, MAY 29 2023
10:48 PM EDT
Asia-Pacific
markets are mixed on Tuesday with a vote looming ahead on the tentative
U.S. debt ceiling deal reached between President Joe Biden and House
Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy over the weekend, avoiding a default for the
U.S. economy.
The U.S. Congress is set to vote
on the legislation as early as Wednesday. Lawmakers have not signaled that they
intended to return to Capitol Hill early to work on the deal. Both Republican
and Democratic support is needed for the bill agreement to pass.
In Japan, the Nikkei 225 was
0.31% lower and the Topix slid 0.58%, as the country saw its unemployment rate
come down slightly to 2.6% in April from 2.8% in March.
South Korea’s Kospi returned from
a public holiday and climbed 0.92%, while the Kosdaq saw a gain of 0.4%. In
Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 was
trading close to the flatline.
Hong Kong stocks snapped a four
day losing streak as the Hang Seng Index opened
0.48% up, while the Hang Seng Tech Index saw a stronger rebound and rose 1.06%.
Mainland Chinese markets were
also mixed on Tuesday, with Shanghai
Composite falling 0.21% and the Shenzhen Component up
by 0.1%.
U.S. markets were closed
on Monday for Memorial Day, but futures rose as investors
further digested the deal tentatively struck over the weekend — some
considering it a “market
opportunity.”
Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average added
72 points, or 0.2%, while S&P
500 futures gained 0.3%. Nasdaq-100 futures climbed
0.5%.
Stock futures
rise after GOP and White House reach tentative U.S. debt ceiling deal: Live
updates
UPDATED MON, MAY 29 2023 7:00 PM EDT
Stock
futures rose Monday night after the Biden administration and Republican
lawmakers reached a tentative deal on raising the U.S. debt ceiling.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones
Industrial Average added
72 points, or 0.2%, while S&P 500
futures gained
0.3%. Nasdaq-100 futures climbed
0.5%.
President Joe Biden and House
Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy reached
an agreement to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a default over the weekend,
with Congress set to vote on the legislation as early as Wednesday. Lawmakers
have not signaled that they intended to return to Capitol Hill early to work on
the deal. Both Republican and Democratic support is needed for the bill
agreement to pass.
The agreement comes just days
before the so-called “X date” on June 5, which is the earliest date the
Treasury Department has signaled the U.S. could default on debt obligations.
The initial compromise was first announced on Saturday evening.
The long negotiations between the
White House and congressional leaders raised concern among investors that a
default on U.S. debt could take place. Wall Street has already contended with
persistent inflation and a banking crisis this year.
Stocks closed higher on Friday.
The Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 finished last week with gains. The market
was closed Monday due to Memorial Day.
More
Stock
market today: Live updates (cnbc.com)
Republicans speak
out against U.S. debt-ceiling deal, in sign of rocky road ahead
A handful of
hard-right Republican lawmakers said on Monday they would oppose a deal to raise
the United States’ $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, in a sign that the bipartisan
agreement could face a rocky path through Congress before the U.S. runs out of
money next week.
Although expected,
the opposition illustrates the hurdles that Democratic President Joe Biden and
top congressional Republican Kevin McCarthy will have to overcome to see the
Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Democratic-controlled Senate
pass the package.
Florida Governor Ron
DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination, said the
deal does not do enough to change the fiscal trajectory. “After this deal, our
country will still be careening toward bankruptcy,” he said on Fox News.
Still, backers
predicted it would clear Congress before the United States runs out of money to
pay its bills, which the Treasury Department says will happen on June 5.
“This thing will
absolutely pass. There’s no question about that,” said Republican Representative
Dusty Johnson, who said he had talked to dozens of fellow lawmakers.
Biden said he had
been working the phones, as well. “It feels good. We’ll see when the vote
starts,” he told reporters.
The 99-page bill would
suspend the debt limit through Jan. 1, 2025, allowing lawmakers to set aside
the politically risky issue until after the November 2024 presidential
election. It would also cap some government spending over the next two years.
A crucial first test
will come on Tuesday, when the House Rules Committee takes up the bill, in a
necessary first step before a vote in the full House. Though the panel is
normally closely aligned with House leadership, McCarthy was forced to include
some skeptical conservatives as a price for winning the speaker’s gavel.
One of those
conservatives, Representative Chip Roy, said on Tuesday he did not support the
bill.
“It’s not a good
deal. Some $4 trillion in debt for - at best - a two-year spending freeze and
no serious substantive policy reforms,” Roy wrote on Twitter.
Another panel member,
Ralph Norman, has already come out against the agreement.
McCarthy told
reporters on Monday he was not worried about the package’s prospects in the
committee.
In the Senate,
Republican Mike Lee also came out against the bill, which could point to a
difficult vote there, where any member has the power to delay action for days.
Democrats control the Senate by 51-49.
More
Republicans
speak out against U.S. debt-ceiling deal (cnbc.com)
Finally, is China
entering deflation and what does that mean for the rest of the global economy
if it is?
From my private
update yesterday.
As per today's LIR, China's industrial profits are falling, along with property prices and sales, imports and exports.
China's published CPI is about zero, while its PPI has gone negative.
While I'm sceptical about the accuracy of many figures from China, I suspect that China is entering deflation.
If that actually happens, how long before China's massive economy, about 15 to 20 percent of the global economy (GDP,) begins exporting deflation to the rest of the world. I don't know, but I suspect not very long.
While the markets are rightly relieved that a US debt crisis now seems to be under control, I think a new bigger problem has developed for H2 23.
If China has tipped into deflation, with a risk that this might soon spread out into the global economy, central banks need to stop raising interest rates and probably start cutting them from here.
But I doubt that this view is likely present in the Fed, BOE, ECB and other central banks.
Raising rates into a global economy facing deflation from China would be a policy mistake possibly rivalling the 1930s.
I've been around markets for along time but I wasn't around for the 1930s
Hopefully, I'm wrong and I'm not about to see their 21st century repeat.
China’s youth
unemployment hits a record high, deepening its economic scars
As youth unemployment in China rises to a record
high, college graduates are caught in a perfect storm — with some forced to
take on low-paying jobs or settle for jobs below their skill levels.
Official data shows urban
employment among the 16- to 24-year-olds in China hit a record 20.4% in April –
about four times the broader unemployment rate even as millions more
college students are expected to graduate this year.
“This college bubble is finally bursting,” said Yao Lu, a professor of
sociology at Columbia University in New York. “The expansion of college
education in the late 1990s created this huge influx of college graduates, but
there is a misalignment between demand and supply of high skilled workers. The
economy hasn’t caught up.”
The scourge of
underemployment is another issue that Chinese youths and policymakers have to
grapple with.
In a paper Lu
co-authored with Xiaogang Li, a professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University, the
professors estimated at least another quarter of college graduates in China are
underemployed, on top of the rising youth unemployment rate.
“Increasingly,
college graduates are taking up positions that are not commensurate with their
training and credentials to avoid unemployment,” Lu told CNBC.
More
Record
youth unemployment stokes economic worries in China (cnbc.com)
China’s
industrial profits tumble 18% in April as demand sputters
Profits at China’s industrial
firms slumped in the first four months of 2023, official data showed on
Saturday, as companies continued to struggle with margin pressures and soft
demand amid a faltering economic recovery.
Profits fell 20.6% in
January-April from a year earlier, compared with a 21.4% decline in the first
three months, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
In
April alone, industrial firms posted a 18.2% drop in profit year-on-year,
according to the NBS, which only occasionally gives monthly figures. Profits
shrank 19.2% in March.
“Overall, today’s
data shows that industrial enterprises, especially private and equity-owned
enterprises, continue to be affected by a combination of unfavourable factors
such as the base effect, short-term pressure on the economic recovery and the
downward trend of PPI (producer prices),” said Bruce Pang, chief economist at
Jones Lang Lasalle.
Chinese companies are
struggling with both weak demand at home and softening demand in the country’s
major export markets. Producer deflation deepened in April, with the producer
price index (PPI) falling at the fastest clip since May 2020.
Lenovo, the world’s
largest PC maker, said this week that quarterly revenue and profit tanked in
January-March and it had cut 8% to 9% of its workforce to reduce costs, as
global demand for personal computers (PCs) continued to slump.
Producers of steel
and other industrial metals are also hurting. Prices for steel reinforcing bars
used in construction hit the lowest level in three years this week, and only a
third of the country’s mills are currently operating at a profit, according to
consultancy Mysteel.
“There is still some
pressure felt in May due to the difference between the purchase and sales
prices, with steel prices falling in the month because of the
slower-than-expected demand recovery,” Baosteel, a subsidiary of the world’s
largest steelmaker-China Baowu Steel Group, said in an investor interactive
platform on May 22.
Foreign firms saw
their profits slide 16.2% in January-April from a year earlier, while
private-sector firms recorded a 22.5% plunge, according to a breakdown of the
data.
Profits sagged for 27
of 41 major industrial sectors during the period, with the ferrous metal
smelting and rolling processing industry reporting the biggest slump at 99.4%.
More
China's
industrial profits tumble 18% in April as demand sputters (cnbc.com)
Hawkers
back on China's streets as economic recovery teeters
May
30, 20233:05 AM GMT+1
SHANGHAI/BEIJING, May 30 (Reuters) -
Wang Chunxiang pushes a cart around busy areas of Shanghai, playing cat and
mouse with the authorities as she tries to sell pastries. The jobs she could
get do not pay enough for her to make ends meet.
"Salaries are too low," said
the 43-year-old, after serving a customer steamed sweet rice cakes from a wok.
"At my age, without much
knowledge, I could only earn 5,000 to 6,000 yuan ($868) per month as a cleaning
lady. Shanghai rent is so expensive. Even low quality homes are 2,000-3,000
yuan," said Wang, who recently resumed hawking after a six-year break.
She can earn about 10,000 yuan in a
good month selling pastries for 15 yuan a box.
As life in China returns to normal
after the pandemic, hawkers are hitting the streets. They look to at least
supplement their income amid an uneven economic recovery in which jobs
and wage growth has been sluggish.
For decades, street stalls and hawkers
- common elsewhere in Asia - have been banned or tightly regulated in many
Chinese cities, with authorities seeing them as unsightly.
There are signs, however, that local
governments are giving hawkers more leeway, a trend expected to continue.
Zibo in eastern China became a media
sensation this month after a rush of tourists visiting street food stalls
forced authorities to issue warnings about overcrowding.
The tech hub of Shenzhen, which banned
hawking in 1999, will ease restrictions on street stalls from September.
Shanghai is seeking public opinion on revising hawker regulations and in April
said it had set up 74 spots for vendors.
More
Hawkers
back on China's streets as economic recovery teeters | Reuters
Niche
Commodities Sound Alarm in Every Corner of China’s Economy
·
Glass
futures have plunged when demand should be picking up
·
Corn starch
is an important ingredient in baby formula
Updated on
More, subscription required.
China
Economic Recovery Stuttering, Commodities Beyond Copper, Iron Suggest -
Bloomberg
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.
Dollar elevated as
sticky inflation cements Fed hike bets, debt ceiling deal lifts optimism
May 29, 2023
SINGAPORE
(Reuters) - The dollar was firm on Monday as economic resilience in the United
States raised market expectations for further rate hikes by the Federal
Reserve, while news that a debt ceiling deal had been finalised sparked some
risk-on sentiment.
The greenback
notched a fresh six-month high of 140.91 yen in early Asia trade and was headed
for a monthly gain of more than 3% against the Japanese currency.
The yen's
renewed decline has come on the back of rising U.S. Treasury yields, as bets
grow that interest rates in the United States would stay higher for longer.
Data released
on Friday showed that U.S. consumer spending increased more than expected in
April and inflation picked up, adding to signs of a still-resilient economy.
Yields on U.S.
Treasuries jumped on the back of the data, with the two-year yield, which
typically reflects near-term interest rate expectations, rising more than 10
basis points to an over two-month high of 4.639% on Friday. [US/]
Cash U.S.
Treasuries were untraded in Asia on Monday, owing to the Memorial Day holiday
in the United States, while futures were broadly steady. Ten-year futures'
implied yield was 3.84%.
The UK market
is similarly closed on Monday for a holiday.
Against the
dollar, the euro fell 0.13% to $1.0719, while sterling slipped 0.07% to
$1.2342.
"Whether the dollar
sustains the rally that we're seeing, I think it'll depend on particularly the
wages data, or average earnings within Friday's payrolls report, and obviously
we've got CPI before the Fed as well," said Ray Attrill, head of FX
strategy at National Australia Bank (NAB).
"There's still
quite a lot of data to flow under the bridge before we get to the June
meeting."
Money markets are now
pricing in a nearly 68% chance that the Fed will raise rates by 25 bps in June,
as compared to a roughly 17% chance a week ago, according to the CME FedWatch
tool
More
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
The W.H.O. finds that mRNA vaccine can trigger MS. Was that why big pharma demanded and got, immunity from vaccine lawsuits? Approx. 16 minutes.
Multiple
sclerosis
Majority of COVID Hospital
Deaths Were Due to Untreated Bacterial Pneumonia
May
28, 2023
Hospital protocolists sticking to
the strict hand-me-down highly profitable “COVID protocol” may have doomed a
majority of admitted COVID-19 patients to death due to a perfect storm of
institutional failure.
I first warned the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration in early 2020 that because the commercial kits did not use
internal negative controls there would be arbitrarily high COVID-19 false
positive rates due to the abuse of non-quantitative PCR.
The majority of “cases,” I pointed
out, would be false because the test was to be used as a screening device—and
when you screen with an imperfect test when prevalence is low, you end up with
more false positives than negatives in the set of positives.
Knowing that people who were
symptomatic for respiratory infections would be among the most tested
population and that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s medical approach to COVID-19 was to
tell people to go home and get as sick as possible, it was readily clear that
people would be dying due to lack of treatment for treatable conditions, like
bacterial pneumonia and fungal infections in the lung.
Now a study from the National
Institutes of Health-funded researchers in Chicago has found that unresolved
respiratory infections—not necessarily those involved in SARS-CoV-2—were
present in people who failed to “respond” to mechanical ventilation.
The authors wrote:
“Recent data suggest that
secondary pneumonia is present in up to 40% and pneumonia or diffuse alveolar
damage is present in over 90% of autopsy specimens obtained from patients with
acute SARS-CoV-2 infection (18).
“Consistent with these
observations, we and others found high rates of ventilator-associated pneumonia
(VAP) in patients with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia requiring mechanical ventilation,
suggesting that bacterial superinfections such as VAP may contribute to
mortality in patients with COVID-19 (7, 19–22).
“These findings prompt an
alternative hypothesis that a relatively low mortality rate directly
attributable to primary SARS-CoV-2 infection is offset by a greater risk of
death attributable to unresolving VAP (23).”
They concluded:
“These data suggest mortality
associated with severe SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia is more often associated with
respiratory failure that increases the risk of unresolving VAP and is less
frequently associated with multiple-organ dysfunction.”
Unsurprisingly, the study found
that people with bacterial pneumonia who were on ventilators had the highest mortality.
Although their analysis restricted
consideration to bacterial pneumonia cases detected 48 hours after ventilation,
they did not distinguish between undiagnosed cases of bacterial pneumonia upon
admission and those acquired in-hospital (nosocomial infection).
The rate of co-infection is not
clear either, due to insufficient testing for bacterial pneumonia in patients
once diagnosed with COVID-19.
The study leads to the stunning
potential that perhaps 58 percent of “COVID” cases were respiratory issues
other than COVID-19 (43 percent bacterial pneumonia, 16 percent
non-pathogen causes of respiratory failure). Treated as “COVID,” these patients
were doomed to a fate of non-treatment due to mis- or under-diagnosis.
It is unclear what percentage of
deaths attributed to COVID-19 could have been prevented via a standard therapy
for bacterial pneumonia, but it is potentially very high.
Fauci’s prescription—sending
patients home to do nothing—no corticosteroids, no antibiotics just in case it
was bacterial—drove the COVID-19 death rate up far higher than it had to be.
Majority of COVID Hospital Deaths Were Due to
Untreated Bacterial Pneumonia (theepochtimes.com)
The World Health Organisation’s
power grab via the new International Health Regulations. Approx. 6 minutes.
European
concern
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.
Team successfully demonstrates
laser-induced monolayer graphene nanoprocessing
MAY 26,
2023
Discovered in 2004,
graphene has revolutionized various scientific fields. It possesses remarkable
properties like high electron mobility, mechanical strength, and thermal
conductivity. Extensive time and effort has been invested in exploring its
potential as a next-generation semiconductor material, leading to the
development of graphene-based transistors, transparent electrodes, and sensors.
But to render these devices into practical application, it's
crucial to have efficient processing techniques that can structure graphene films at micrometer
and nanometer scale. Typically, micro/nanoscale material processing and device
manufacturing employ nanolithography and focused ion beam methods. However,
these have posed longstanding challenges for laboratory researchers due to
their need for large-scale equipment, lengthy manufacturing times, and complex
operations.
In January
2023, Tohoku University researchers created a technique that could
micro/nanofabricate silicon nitride devices with thicknesses ranging from five
to 50 nanometers. The method employed a femtosecond laser, which emitted extremely
short, rapid pulses of light. It turned out to be capable of quickly and
conveniently processing thin materials without a vacuum environment.
By applying this method to an ultra-thin atomic layer of graphene,
the same group has now succeeded in performing multi-point hole drilling
without damaging the graphene film. Details of their breakthrough were reported
in the journal Nano Letters on May 16, 2023.
"With proper control of the input energy and number of laser
shots, we were able to execute precise machining and create holes with
diameters ranging from 70 nanometers (much smaller than the laser wavelength of 520
nanometers) to over one millimeter," says Yuuki Uesugi, assistant
professor at Tohoku University's Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for
Advanced Materials, and co-author of the paper.
Upon closer examination of the areas irradiated with low-energy
laser pulses, which did not make holes, via a high-performance electron
microscope, Uesugi and his colleagues found that contaminants on the graphene
had also been removed. Further magnified observation revealed nanopores less
than 10 nanometers in diameter and atomic-level defects, where several carbon atoms were missing
in the crystal structures of the graphene.
More
Team successfully
demonstrates laser-induced monolayer graphene nanoprocessing (phys.org)
“Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the
government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious
objections can be advanced against further encroachments.”
Ludwig
von Mises.
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