Baltic Dry Index. 1558 +13 Fri. Brent Crude 76.69
Spot Gold 2027 US 2 Year Yield 4.00 +0.08
Coronavirus
Cases 01/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,103
Coronavirus Cases 09/05/23 World 687,943,162
Deaths 6,871,716
“We have 2 classes of forecasters: Those who don't know . . and those who don't know they don't know. “
John Kenneth Galbraith
In the Asian gambling stock casinos this morning, another wobble or the start of something more?
Overnight in the U.S., the Federal Reserve’s quarterly Senior Loan Officer Opinion survey showed requirements got tougher for commercial and industrial loans. The report showed trouble within mid-sized institutions caused banks to tighten lending standards to households and businesses, potentially posing a threat to U.S. economic growth.
With a multiple banking car crash underway in the US economy,
what happens next and fast, probably depends on the outcome of today’s deficit
talks between President Biden and the House Republican leaders.
Peace talks or war declarations, we should know by later in the
day.
As if the economic future wasn’t darkening fast enough for banks and borrowers, it’s not looking rosy for most workers either, more on that below.
In better news though for the bubble industries of fizzy drinks and producers of soap (politicians excepted,) the great bubble problem has finally been solved. We can all drink to that.
Asia markets
trade mixed as China’s trade surplus beats expectations
UPDATED TUE, MAY 9 2023 12:50 AM
EDT
Asia-Pacific
markets traded mixed as China’s trade surplus beat expectations with exports
rising 8.5%. Investors will also await U.S. inflation reports later this week.
China reported a trade
surplus of $90.2 billion, higher than expectations to see a surplus
of more than $70 billion.
In mainland China, the Shanghai Composite rose
0.3%, continuing its winning streak after marking the highest point in 10
months on Monday. The Shenzhen
Component also rose marginally.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index dropped
0.53%, while the Hang Seng Tech index slid by more than 1%.
In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 fell
0.23% ahead of the nation’s annual Federal Budget announcement, with watchers
widely expecting to see the first budget surplus since the 2008 financial
crisis. South Korea’s Kospi fell
0.32% and the Kosdaq slid 1.13%.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose
0.77% and the Topix gained 0.97% higher, buoyed by basic materials and energy
stocks. Japan saw a decline in household spending in April despite economists
surveyed by Reuters expecting to see growth.
Thailand’s Set Composite
index as
the nation prepares for a general
election this month with issues related to the economy sitting
at the top of the agenda.
Overnight in the U.S., the Federal
Reserve’s quarterly Senior Loan Officer Opinion survey showed
requirements got tougher for commercial and industrial loans. The report showed
trouble within mid-sized institutions caused banks to tighten lending standards
to households and businesses, potentially posing a threat to U.S. economic
growth.
Stocks ended the session mixed,
with the S&P 500 up
marginally and the Nasdaq
Composite climbing 0.18%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped
0.17%.
Asia
markets trade mixed as China's trade surplus beats expectations (cnbc.com)
S&P 500
futures are flat as investors await closely followed inflation data: Live
updates
UPDATED MON, MAY 8 2023 7:10 PM
EDT
S&P 500 futures are little changed Monday
night as investors readied for key inflation reports due later in the week.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones
Industrial Average lost 12 points, or 0.04%. S&P 500 futures inched down by
0.05%, while Nasdaq-100 futures shed 0.1%.
Palantir jumped more than 20%
after hours on a
strong earnings report and upbeat guidance. Lucid,
PayPal and Skyworks, on the other hand, were all down in extended trading after
their quarterly reports were released.
The moves follow a lukewarm
session that left the three major indexes modestly changed. The S&P 500 finished
0.05% higher, while the Nasdaq Composite ended
with a gain of nearly 0.2%. The Dow was
the underperformer of the session, closing almost 0.2% lower.
Investors followed the release of
the Federal Reserve’s quarterly Senior
Loan Officer Opinion survey, which found that banks had to tighten
lending standards to households and businesses as a result of industry turmoil,
which could in turn threaten economic growth.
“If we look across markets today,
the price action is relatively muted,” said Charlie Ripley, senior investment
strategist at Allianz Investment Management. “There’s somewhat of a sigh of
relief that the report wasn’t worse than expected.”
Traders are also looking ahead to
April’s consumer price index report slated for Wednesday and the producer price
index on Thursday for the newest data on the path of inflation.
Elsewhere, Treasury Secretary
Janet Yellen said on CNBC Monday afternoon that failing to raise the debt
ceiling would
be an “economic catastrophe” and that regulators are not close to any
policies that would limit short-selling regional bank stocks.
Investors will watch Tuesday for
morning data from the National Federation of Independent Business. Fed Governor
Philip Jefferson and New York Fed President John Williams are both slated to
speak at events over the course of the day.
Short-term Treasury
yields are jumping, but don’t overlook intermediate-term issues
Never mind the
scorching hot yields on short-term Treasurys, particularly as debt ceiling
chatter heats up. Investors may want to look at longer duration issues instead,
said Kathy Jones, chief fixed income strategist at the Schwab Center for
Financial Research.
“The guidance has
been for a while to extend duration,” she said, noting that she understands why
investors might be more inclined to chase 5% yields in Treasury bills or
certificates of deposit as opposed to holding a five-year bond.
“Historically, once
the Fed is past the peak in tightening, which we think is likely,
intermediate-term bonds – that 5-to-7-year maturity bucket – tend to outperform
on a total return basis after the peak is reached,” she said.
Jones added, “They
may face reinvestment risk if they are in something that isn’t at least locking
in some of this yield for the next three to five years.”
Even with rates as
attractive as they are now, investors should know that these Treasury yields
alone won’t keep pace with inflation over the long term. Be sure to keep your
portfolio diversified.
Stock market today: Live updates (cnbc.com)
In the labour market, a darkening present
looks to be turning black for many.
Tweaking Interest Rates Is A Fool’s Errand
DAVID STOCKMAN 8 MAY 2023
For once there was some useful information in today’s jobs report,
albeit not of the kind Wall Street slobbers over. We are referring to the
information in the chart below showing that fully 43% of the 4.3
million jobs allegedly created since March 2022 were made-up from
whole cloth by the green eyeshades at the BLS. Just plain finger in the air
stuff.
That’s right. The birth-death model has added 1.84
million jobs since last March, meaning that almost half of all
“job gains” in the past year were generated not by real world employers, but by
an excel spreadsheet.
More
Tweaking
Interest Rates Is A Fool’s Errand (substack.com)
AI could replace 80% of
jobs 'in next few years': expert
Mon, May 8, 2023 at 10:19 PM GMT+1
Artificial intelligence could replace
80 percent of human jobs in the coming years -- but that's a good thing, says
US-Brazilian researcher Ben Goertzel, a leading AI guru.
Mathematician, cognitive scientist
and famed robot-creator Goertzel, 56, is founder and chief executive of
SingularityNET, a research group he launched to create "Artificial General
Intelligence," or AGI -- artificial intelligence with human cognitive
abilities.
With his long hair and leopard-print
cowboy hat, Goertzel was in provocateur mode last week at Web Summit in Rio de
Janeiro, the world's biggest annual technology conference, where he told AFP in
an interview that AGI is just years away and spoke out against recent efforts
to curb artificial intelligence research.
- As smart as humans? -
Q: How far are we from artificial
intelligence with human cognitive abilities?
"If we want machines to really
be as smart as people and to be as agile in dealing with the unknown, then they
need to be able to take big leaps beyond their training and programming. And
we're not there yet. But I think there's reason to believe we're years rather
than decades from getting there."
----Threat to jobs -
Q: Isn't their potential to replace
people's jobs a threat?
"You could probably obsolete
maybe 80 percent of jobs that people do, without having an AGI, by my guess.
Not with ChatGPT exactly as a product. But with systems of that nature, which
are going to follow in the next few years.
"I don't think it's a threat. I
think it's a benefit. People can find better things to do with their life than
work for a living... Pretty much every job involving paperwork should be
automatable.
"The problem I see is in the
interim period, when AIs are obsoleting one human job after another... I don't
know how (to) solve all the social issues."
More
AI could
replace 80% of jobs 'in next few years': expert (yahoo.com)
Finally, yet more trouble rising in cryptoland?
Binance closes BTC withdrawals amid congestion on the
Bitcoin network
The
Bitcoin mempool was clogged with over 400,000 transactions waiting to be
processed on May 7.
Crypto exchange Binance closed Bitcoin withdrawals on May 7 due to an alleged overflow of transactions
on the Bitcoin network.
The Bitcoin
mempool was clogged with over 400,000 transactions waiting to be processed at the time of writing. The
mempool is known as the “waiting area” for incoming transactions before they
are verified independently by each node on the network.
Binance tweeted that BTC withdrawals had resumed after nearly an hour of halting.
Outflows on the crypto exchange peaked on May 7, rising to $187 million, according to data from
CryptoQuant.
Behind the
congestion is believed to be a surge in BRC-20 transactions in the last few
days due to memecoins like Pepe (PEPE). The memecoin trading hype drove Bitcoin transaction fees to their
highest point in two years. On
May 3, the total amount of fees paid on the Bitcoin blockchain reached $3.5
million, jumping nearly 400% from late April, Cointelegraph reported.
Developed after Ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard, BRC-20 is an
experimental token standard recently introduced that allows users to create and
transfer fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. It is currently becoming a
hot spot for meme tokens.
CoinMarketCap’s data shows that PEPE’s price has climbed over 263%
in the last week. As of writing, however, the memecoin is down over 7%
following a 30% drop on May 6 as whales profited from Binance's recent listing. Crypto
exchanges MEXC Global, Bitget, Gate.ioand Huobi listed PEPE trading pairs two weeks ago,
kicking off the token hype.
Since
the introduction of Dogecoin in 2013, memecoins have become a major part of the
cryptocurrency world, making and ruining fortunes alike. Investopedia defines a memecoin as a cryptocurrency represented “with comical or
animated memes, that [is] supported by enthusiastic online traders and
followers.”
Binance closes BTC withdrawals amid congestion on the Bitcoin network (cointelegraph.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.
How Does Gold Perform With
Inflation, Stagflation, and Recession?
May 08, 2023
AT A GLANCE
- Gold
prices soared in the 1970s era of inflation, but the root causes of
inflation are different today
- In
six of the last eight recessions, gold outperformed the S&P 500 by 37%
on average
From
March 8 through April 24, gold rallied over 9%, outpacing the S&P 500 which
was up just over 3% in the same period. The rally seemed to correspond with
headlines of banking stress that could have the potential to alter the Fed’s
hiking path. For almost a year the U.S. treasury yield curve has been inverted
leading many analysts to believe that the U.S. economy is headed toward a
recession.
These and other
factors have drawn increased attention to the gold market, where options on
gold futures have reached record trading volume in 2023. Gold is believed to
perform well in times of economic stress. But does it? Let’s look at history to
tell us how gold performs under three scenarios – inflation, recession, and
stagflation.
Is Gold an Inflation Hedge?
It
would be nice if the answer to that question was a simple yes or no, but,
unfortunately, it’s more complicated. The last major bout of inflation in the
U.S. was the period between 1973 and 1979. During this time inflation averaged
approximately 8.8% per year and gold gained an astonishing 35% annual return.
This
would seem reasonable as inflation is associated with a weaker dollar and, in
this environment, market participants are usually drawn to
commodities to preserve purchasing power. But if we look a
little deeper we see another element. Elevated oil prices were the primary
driver of the 70’s inflation/stagflation. This is significant because it alters
the way the Federal Reserve and the government feels it can fight inflation.
Aggressive rate hikes are an effective tool if the cause is simply excessive
demand in the system, but when the cause of inflation is an elevated input
price like oil, the Fed can’t fix it as easily with rate hikes alone.
Perhaps
the gold market in the 70s was signaling a lack of confidence in the overall
economic outlook and the Fed’s ability to achieve success in its task. It
wasn’t until the 1980s that Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volker decided that
rates needed to be massively hiked to end inflation, even if it added to the
economic stress. The current inflation is dissimilar in a couple of ways.
----Does
Gold Perform Well During a Recession?
There have been eight
recessions between 1973 and the most recent in 2020.
In all but two of these, gold has outperformed the S&P 500. The exceptions
were in 1981 and 1990. 1981 was unique in that the Federal Reserve chairman
Paul Volker aggressively raised interest rates to combat the massive inflation
of the 1970s. 1990 was a mild recession and it came at a time when the world’s
central banks were net sellers of gold due to good macroeconomic conditions
globally.
More
How Does Gold Perform With Inflation, Stagflation, and Recession? | Institutional Investor
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
FDA Overhaul Needed for New
Vaccines and mRNA Therapies
Promise
or Peril: COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Issues Series (Part 1)
May
6, 2023
The pandemic has ended, but the
introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines which use mRNA technology, signifies the
start of a new era in modern medicine. The lagging regulatory framework which
the FDA cobbled together specifically for mRNA vaccine approval has set the
stage for adverse events related to genetic therapies using this new
technology. In this series, we will reveal emerging concerns about mRNA
injections related to the lipid nanoparticles, spike protein, and vaccine
contamination as public documents are released.
Summary of Series Key Facts
·
According
to a Moderna Securities and Exchange Commission filing in June 2020,
“Currently, mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA).”
·
The
FDA created new guidance, released in June 2020, for gene therapy
products to be marketed as vaccines against COVID-19. They were not put through
the same testing requirements as other RNA therapeutics. The new vaccines were
also not required to go through human biodistribution studies.
·
Had mRNA
vaccines been held to the same regulatory standards required for novel
therapeutics, the following three issues would likely have been
identified prior to authorization for human use:
1.
The
lipid nanoparticle (LNP) shell used to deliver the mRNA has inflammatory
potential and can cluster with other LNPs or fall apart, allowing the mRNA
inside to fall out and circulate freely in the bloodstream.
2.
The
spike protein coded by the mRNA and its S1 subunit has been found in the blood
following vaccination. Both the spike protein and the S1 subunit are associated
with inflammation and clotting
3.
Contamination
during the manufacturing process can cause impurities in the vaccine, such as
mRNA fragments and bacterial plasmids. Testing by pharma before authorization
found impurities—have these issues been fixed?
·
Despite
the promising potential of mRNA therapeutics, did the pandemic emergency
provide reasonable justification for the suspension of typical
regulatory requirements?
·
Should
these vaccines have been recommended only for the highest-risk individuals
pending further human testing? Should vaccine information sheets have included
all known risks to allow for full and complete informed consent?
·
Were
mandates unethical given the lack of standard pre-authorization
safety testing?
·
All
of these questions are relevant given the development of new mRNA vaccines
against influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). What regulatory
framework will apply going forward? Will these newer mRNA vaccines be subject
to stricter oversight aligned with, to borrow Moderna’s wording, “genetic
therapy” or the lagging framework used for COVID-19 mRNA vaccines?
More.
Much, much, more.
FDA Overhaul
Needed for New Vaccines and mRNA Therapies (theepochtimes.com)
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 many other things, I’ve added
this section. Updates as they get reported.
Today, something a little different
and highbrow. A solution to the triple bubble problem, a critical problem
solved for the makers of Champagne, Beer, Cider and soap.
Coming next, the definitive Vatican
solution to how many Angels can dance on the head of a pin.
A ‘Monumental’ Math Proof Solves the Triple
Bubble Problem
A
decades-old conjecture about the best way to minimize the surface area of a
three-bubble cluster seemed unprovable—until a breakthrough result.
MAY
7, 2023 8:00 AM
WHEN IT COMES to understanding the shape of
bubble clusters, mathematicians have been playing catch-up to our physical
intuitions for millennia. Soap bubble clusters in nature often seem to
immediately snap into the lowest-energy state, the one that minimizes the total
surface area of their walls (including the walls between bubbles). But checking
whether soap bubbles are getting this task right—or just predicting what large
bubble clusters should look like—is one of the hardest problems in geometry. It
took mathematicians until the late 19th century to prove that the sphere is the
best single bubble, even though the Greek mathematician Zenodorus had asserted
this more than 2,000 years earlier.
The bubble problem is simple enough to state: You start
with a list of numbers for the volumes, and then ask how to separately enclose
those volumes of air using the least surface area. But to solve this problem,
mathematicians must consider a wide range of different possible shapes for the
bubble walls. And if the assignment is to enclose, say, five volumes, we don’t
even have the luxury of limiting our attention to clusters of five
bubbles—perhaps the best way to minimize surface area involves splitting one of
the volumes across multiple bubbles.
Even in the simpler setting of the two-dimensional plane
(where you’re trying to enclose a collection of areas while minimizing the
perimeter), no one knows the best way to enclose, say, nine or 10 areas. As the
number of bubbles grows, “quickly, you can’t really even get any plausible conjecture,”
said Emanuel Milman of the Technion in
Haifa, Israel.
But more than a quarter century ago, John Sullivan, now of the Technical
University of Berlin, realized that in certain cases, there is a guiding
conjecture to be had. Bubble problems make sense in any dimension, and
Sullivan found that as long as the number of volumes you’re trying to enclose
is at most one greater than the dimension, there’s a particular way to enclose
the volumes that is, in a certain sense, more beautiful than any other—a sort
of shadow of a perfectly symmetric bubble cluster on a sphere. This shadow
cluster, he conjectured, should be the one that minimizes surface area.
Over the decade that followed, mathematicians wrote a series
of groundbreaking papers proving Sullivan’s conjecture when you’re trying to
enclose only two volumes. Here, the solution is the familiar double bubble you
may have blown in the park on a sunny day, made of two spherical pieces with a
flat or spherical wall between them (depending on whether the two bubbles have
the same or different volumes).
But proving Sullivan’s conjecture for three volumes, the
mathematician Frank Morgan of Williams
College speculated in 2007, “could well
take another hundred years.”
Now, mathematicians have
been spared that long wait—and have gotten far more than just a solution to the
triple bubble problem. In a paper posted
online in May 2022, Milman and Joe Neeman, of the University of Texas, Austin,
have proved Sullivan’s conjecture for triple bubbles in dimensions three and up
and quadruple bubbles in dimensions four and up, with a follow-up paper on
quintuple bubbles in dimensions five and up in the works.
More
A ‘Monumental’
Math Proof Solves the Triple Bubble Problem | WIRED
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
---- Origin[edit]
Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, written c. 1270, includes discussion of several
questions regarding angels such as, "Can several angels be in the same
place?"[3] However, the idea that such questions had a
prominent place in medieval scholarship has been debated, and it has not been
proven whether or not this particular question has been debated.[6] One theory is that it is an early modern fabrication,[a] used to discredit scholastic philosophy at a time
when it still played a significant role in university education. James Franklin has raised the scholarly issue, and mentions that
there is a 17th-century reference in William Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants (1637),[7] where he accuses unnamed scholastics of debating
"whether a Million of Angels may not fit upon a Needle's point?" This
is earlier than a reference in the 1678 The True Intellectual System Of
The Universe by Ralph Cudworth. Helen S. Lang, author of Aristotle's Physics and its Medieval
Varieties (1992), says (p. 284):
The question
of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle, or the head of a pin, is often attributed to 'late
medieval writers'.... In point of fact, the question has never been found in
this form….
More
How many angels
can dance on the head of a pin? - Wikipedia
An economist, a
philosopher, a biologist, and an architect were arguing about what was God's
real profession.
The philosopher
said, "Well, first and foremost, God is a philosopher because he created
the principles by which man is to live."
"Ridiculous!"
said the biologist "Before that, God created man and woman and all living
things so clearly he was a biologist."
"Wrong,"
said the architect. "Before that, he created the heavens and the earth.
Before the earth, there was only complete confusion and chaos!"
"Well,"
said the economist. "Where do you think the chaos came from?"
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