Baltic Dry Index. 1215 -80 Brent Crude 76.00
Spot Gold 1949 US 2 Year Yield 4.50 +0.19
Coronavirus
Cases 01/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,103
Coronavirus Cases 26/05/23 World 689,274,736
Deaths 6,882,708
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 gambling stock casinos, a dot conm (AI) bubble is back. After all, no one anywhere really expects President
Biden not to cut a spending deal to reach agreement on raising the US debt ceiling. Time to dress up stocks for the coming month-end
bonuses.
Besides,
that dot conm bubble that blew up spectacularly, was more than 20 years
ago. Who remembers that, right. Time for
a new AI bubble.
As for that
debt ceiling deal, . Rep. Kevin Hern, of
Oklahoma, who chairs the 156-member Republican Study Committee, said Thursday
that he believed it was “likely” a deal would be reached by Friday afternoon.
We
will soon know. But what if he’s wrong? What
if President Biden sets Wall Street on fire?
He
wouldn’t do that, would he and everyone knows it. Buy more! Fill up your boots
with AI stocks.
Asia markets mostly rise after Wall Street sees
tech rally
UPDATED FRI, MAY 26 2023 12:37 AM
EDT
Asia-Pacific markets are mixed after Wall Street saw a
tech rally led by Nvidia, and U.S. negotiators moved
closer to a debt ceiling deal with just a week to go before the
government faces a potential default.
In Japan, the Nikkei 225 rose
0.92%, surpassing the 31,000 mark and leading gains in the region, while the
Topix also saw a gain of 0.15%.
Tokyo’s core-core inflation,
which excludes fresh food and fuel costs, rose by 3.9%, its fastest pace since
1982. The consumer price index for Japan’s capital, which is seen as a gauge
for the nationwide reading, rose at a slower pace of 3.2% in May from April’s
figure of 3.5%.
South Korea’s Kospi rose
0.17%, while the Kosdaq was up marginally. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 was
marginally higher after reversing earlier losses.
Mainland Chinese markets bucked
the trend and fell, with the Shanghai
Composite 0.32% lower and the Shenzhen Component down
0.51%.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index is
closed for a holiday, after hitting its lowest level this year on Thursday.
Overnight in the U.S., the three
major indexes ended mixed. While the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite surged
1.71% and the S&P
500 gained 0.88%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped
slighlty and lost 0.11%.
Asia markets mostly
rise after Wall Street sees tech rally (cnbc.com)
‘Price bubble’ in A.I. stocks will wreck rally,
economist David Rosenberg predicts
Investors piling into
stocks with artificial intelligence exposure may pay a hefty price.
Economist David
Rosenberg, a bear known for his contrarian views, believes enthusiasm
surrounding AI has become a major distraction from recession risks.
According to Rosenberg, the AI surge has striking
similarities to the late 1990s dot-com boom —particularly when it comes to the Nasdaq 100 breakout
over the past six months.
″[This] looks very weird,” said
Rosenberg, who served as Merrill Lynch’s chief North American economist from
2002 to 2009. “It’s way overextended.”
This
week, Nvidia’s blowout quarter helped drive AI excitement to
new levels. The chipmaker boosted its yearly forecast after delivering a strong
quarterly earnings beat after Wednesday’s market close. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
cited booming demand for its AI chips.
Nvidia stock
gained more than 24% after the report and is now up 133% over the last six
months. AI competitors Alphabet, Microsoft and Palantir are
also seeing
a stock surge.
In a recent note to clients,
Rosenberg warned the
rally is on borrowed time.
“There are breadth measures for the S&P 500 that
are the worst since 1999. Just seven mega-caps have accounted for 90% of this
year’s price performance,” Rosenberg wrote. “You look at the tech weighting in
the S&P 500 and it is up to 27%, where it was heading into 2000 as the
dotcom bubble was peaking out and soon to roll over in spectacular fashion.”
While mega cap tech outperforms,
Rosenberg sees ominous trading activity in banks,
consumer
discretionary stocks
and transports.
“They have the highest torque to
GDP. They’re down more than 30% from the cycle highs,” Rosenberg said. “They’re
actually behaving in the exact same pattern they have going into the past four
recessions.”
Price
bubble in AI stocks will wreck rally: economist David Rosenberg (cnbc.com)
Debt ceiling talks enter crunch time as
negotiators get closer to a deal
WASHINGTON — Urgent
talks to raise the U.S. debt ceiling appeared to move closer to a deal
Thursday, with only seven days to go before the United States faces an imminent
threat of debt default.
But negotiators
warned that the final phase of talks would likely be the most delicate and
difficult for both sides.
“We’re at a sensitive phase, with sensitive issues that remain.
Those sensitive issues are the thorniest issues that we’ve been discussing,”
Republican negotiator Rep. Patrick McHenry, of North Carolina, told reporters
at the Capitol on Thursday. “Everybody’s trying to do a fine job of figuring
out the finer details of this, but nothing’s done.”
McHenry said that no face-to-face meetings with
the White House negotiating team had been planned for Thursday but that he did
not view this as a sign that talks had stalled.
“They’ve got work in the White
House, we have work here in the Capitol. I don’t know about us physically being
together, but there’s alignment on the set of things that we need to work on,”
said McHenry.
At the White House, President Joe
Biden sounded a cautiously optimistic note. “The only way to move forward is
with a bipartisan agreement, and I believe we’ll come to an agreement that
allows us to move forward and protects the hardworking Americans of this
country,” he said Thursday.
---- One influential Republican said he was optimistic about
reaching a deal before the holiday weekend. Rep. Kevin Hern, of Oklahoma, who
chairs the 156-member Republican Study Committee, said Thursday that he
believed it was “likely” a deal would be reached by Friday afternoon.
“We are inching
closer to a deal. I think it’s some of the finer points they are working on
right now,” Hern told Reuters. “You are likely to see a deal by tomorrow
afternoon.”
More
Debt
ceiling negotiations intensify between Biden, Republicans (cnbc.com)
Biden, McCarthy appear near two-year deal on US debt ceiling
as default looms
May
26, 20232:14 AM GMT+1
WASHINGTON, May 25 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden and top
congressional Republican Kevin McCarthy are closing in on a deal that would
raise the government's $31.4 trillion debt ceiling for two years while capping
spending on most items, a U.S. official told Reuters.
The deal, which is not final, would increase funding for
discretionary spending on military and veterans while essentially holding
non-defense discretionary spending at current year levels, the official said,
who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about internal
discussions.
The White House is considering scaling back its plan to boost
funding at the Internal Revenue Service to hire more auditors and target
wealthy Americans, the official said.
A second U.S. official said IRS funding is an open issue, but
the main thrust is ensuring the agency executes the president's priorities,
even if there is a small haircut or funding is moved around.
The final deal would specify the total amount the government
could spend on discretionary programs like housing and
education, according to a person familiar with the talks, but not break that
down into individual categories. The two sides are just $70 billion apart on a
total figure that would be well over $1 trillion, according to another source.
More
Biden,
McCarthy appear near two-year deal on US debt ceiling as default looms |
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.
By
blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, the US blew up the German cheap energy
from Russia business model and has tipped Germany into recession. It’s a funny
old world as a NATO ally.
Germany
tips into recession and analysts warn economy won’t get much better
THURSDAY 25 MAY 2023 8:57 AM
Germany slipped
into an official recession over the winter, triggered by family finances being
crushed by sky high energy bills, official figures out today show.
Revised estimates
from the country’s statistics agency, Destatis, revealed gross domestic product
(GDP) contracted 0.3 per cent in the first three months of this year.
The organisation previously thought
output flatlined over the period.
Today’s downgrade
means Germany’s economy has shrunk for two straight quarters, meeting the rule
of thumb recession definition. GDP slumped 0.5 per cent in the final quarter of
last year.
Consumer spending
dropped 1.2 per cent at the beginning of the year, the main factor driving
production lower. That was a slight improvement from the 1.7 per cent drop in
the final months of 2022.
Germany has been
particularly exposed to the energy price shock caused by Russia’s full-scale
invasion of Ukraine.
A large chunk of
its economic output is generated by its industrial and manufacturing
industries, which have for years relied on cheap energy from Russia. Rising gas
prices have forced firms to trim activity and households to conserve their
cash.
Compounding the
energy price shock’s squeeze on the economy has been the European Central
Bank’s (ECB) aggressive interest rate rises to tame inflation across the
20-member eurozone.
ECB officials are
tipped to raise rates at least one more time this year. Eurozone inflation has
slimmed to seven per cent from a peak of nearly 11 per cent. In Germany, the
rate of price increases is running at 7.6 per cent.
Analysts warned
Europe’s economic powerhouse’s performance won’t get much better as the year
progresses.
“Looking ahead, we
doubt that GDP will continue to fall in coming quarters, but we see no strong
recovery either,” Claus Vistesen, chief eurozone economist at consultancy
Pantheon Macroeconomics, said.
“We think
consumers’ spending is now rebounding as inflation eases, and the 4.9 per cent
crash in government spending will mean-revert too. By contrast, we think
investment is now falling, as higher interest rates and tightening credit
standards bite, and the surge in net exports also is petering out,” he added.
Earlier this week
the International Monetary Fund hiked its forecasts for UK GDP growth this year
to 0.4 per cent from a 0.3 per cent contraction. That means Germany is now
tipped to be the worst performing economy in the G7 this year.
Germany tips into recession and analysts warn things won't get better (cityam.com)
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
New
York ending COVID-19 vaccine requirement for health care workers
May 25,
2023, 10:24am
Health care workers in New York may not be
mandated to get the COVID-19 vaccine anymore.
The New York state Department of Health says
it would no longer enforce the requirement, but employers could implement their
own policies on COVID-19 vaccinations.
As
for workers who refused to comply with the mandate, state officials say it’s up
to individual health systems to decide whether to rehire them.
However, the agency says the repeal must
allow 60 days for public comment and will most likely not go into effect until
the fall.
New York ending
COVID-19 vaccine requirement for health care workers (news12.com)
Human Body’s Self-Repair Mechanism Can Help Treat Spike
Protein-Induced Brain Injuries: Dr. Paul Marik
May 25, 2923
Spike proteins generated by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine are causing brain fog and other “profoundly disabling” neurological symptoms in some patients, according to Dr. Paul Marik, a longtime critical care doctor.
“The truth of the matter is that spike protein is probably one of the most toxic compounds that human beings can be exposed to, and its toxicity is through multiple different pathways that we’re just beginning to understand,” Marik said in a recent interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
Marik is a co-founder of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a non-profit medical group known for championing the use of ivermectin in treating COVID-19 infection. The group also focuses on developing treatment options for people suffering from “post-vaccine syndromes,” including ridding the spike proteins accumulated in their bodies followinh vaccination.
The mRNA vaccines work by using coded messenger RNA to instruct muscle cells to produce spike proteins to trigger an immune response. The problem is, according to Marik, lab-assembled mRNA lingers in the human body much longer than the ones a patient gets from natural infection.
“The virus that’s [an] actively replicating virus lasts for about five days. After five days, the messenger RNA, which the virus uses to make all this protein, is destroyed by the body,” Marik explained to host Jan Jekielek. “If you’re immune-competent, within five days, the messenger RNA is gone and you’re body does not continue to make new spike protein.”
“When you inject the synthetic, artificially-manufactured mRNA, it doesn’t stay in the arm. It actually circulates and goes to lymph nodes and organs,” he said, noting that one study showed injected mRNA in the body for as long as 60 days.
----Neurological Harm
The spike protein associated with COVID-19 affects so many organ systems that physicians usually don’t see a pattern of symptoms in patients who suffer from vaccine injuries, according to Marik.
These patients have such diverse symptoms that really don’t fit in with
a pattern that they’ve been taught,” Marik told Jekielek, referring to
physicians trying to diagnose vaccine-injured people. “Almost always, they say,
‘Well, this is stress. This is anxiety. This is a functional disorder. This is
in your head. This isn’t real.”
“But it is real,” Marik said from his observations. “It’s just because
of spike going to every organ system, and every organ system is involved.”
Among those organ systems, the brain appears to be a particularly vulnerable one, according to Marik. This could explain why so many vaccinated people have reported neurologic symptoms.
More
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.
Now engineers can make electricity
from thin air joining central banksters who make fiat money out of thin air,
too.
Tiny holes key to making lightning-like energy from
air, says study
Michael Franco May 24, 2023
As anyone
who's ever witnessed a bolt of lightning streaking through the sky knows, the
air around us can be filled with an astonishing amount of energy. A new study
shows that some of this energy can be harvested using a simple perforated
nanofilm that can be made from an astonishing variety of materials.
In 2020, Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and
computer engineering at UMass Amherst, and his colleagues grew nanowires from
bacteria known as Geobacter sulfurreducens. The scientists showed
how those wires could continuously pull electricity out of the air by harvesting even small
amounts of humidity. The system relied on the chemistry of the nanowires and
the pores in a film that encased them.
Building on that research, Yao and his team have now discovered that the
type of nanowire involved in the process is inconsequential. The real trick,
they say, has everything to do with the size of the pores in the film.
"What we realized after making the Geobacter discovery," says
Yao, "is that the ability to generate electricity from the air – what we
then called the 'Air-gen effect' – turns out to be generic: literally any kind
of material can harvest electricity from air, as long as it has a certain property."
The
property he is referring to has to do with what's known as the "mean free
path," the distance one molecule of any substance can move before bumping
into another molecule. For water, such as that which forms the humidity in the
air, the distance is 100 nanometers (nm), or less than a thousandth of the
width of a human hair.
As
with the previous research, the new study involves two layers of nanofilm. The
top has perforations smaller than 100 nm. This acts as a kind of sieve that
holds water molecules on the surface as they wait to squeeze through the pores.
As these molecules gather on the top film they generate a natural electrical
charge that is greater than the charge on the lower layer of the film. The
imbalance between the two layers effectively creates an electrical current,
similar to the way in which lightning forms in clouds.
"The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,"
says Yao, who is the new paper’s senior author. "Think of a cloud, which
is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains
a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt
– but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What
we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces
electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest
it."
Yao says that because the electricity-generating effect is based solely
on pore size, the system could be made out of a range of different materials.
"The idea is simple but it’s never been discovered before, and it
opens all kinds of possibilities," he said. "The harvester could be
designed from literally all kinds of material, offering broad choices for
cost-effective and environment-adaptable fabrications. You could imagine
harvesters made of one kind of material for rainforest environments, and
another for more arid regions."
More
Tiny holes key to
making lightning-like energy from air, says study (newatlas.com)
Another weekend and a party holiday weekend if a US debt
ceiling deal is reached later today. Shame about Germany leading the EUSSR into
recession. Ignore that scary coming US Commercial Real Estate bust. Look away
from that growing real estate bust in China.
We will all get rich trading AI stocks to each other for
the next few years, before the great unemployment from AI replacement actually
hits. Have a great weekend everyone.
There is nothing new under the sun and least of all in the stock
market.
Jesse Livermore.
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