Baltic Dry Index. 1076 -18 Brent Crude 75.50
Spot Gold 1957 US 2 Year Yield 4.70 +0.08
If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
John Maynard Keynes.
It is mid-June nearing the northern hemisphere summer solstice, stocks are entering the usual summer doldrums, with an underperforming Chinese economy dragging on the global economy.
Later this week, the BoE is expected to raise its key interest rate by another quarter of one percent. Probably follow the Fed and talk about more interest rate hikes to come in the belated fight against inflation that wasn’t transitory.
I hope no one is paying central banksters for their advice and misreading of inflation.
Despite their inept advice, I think there’s a good chance that the Fed’s pause last week and the BOE’s rate hike this week will be the top in this round of global interest rate hikes.
Rate hike effects lag in the national economies and are now just really starting to bite.
In the commercial and residential property markets of the USA, Canada, UK and EU, the boom is fast turning into bust. In China, the property bust far from ending seems to be deepening.
Property health or decline, drives much of the wealth effect in the wider economy. Its decline is about to show up on steroids in H2 23, I think.
Add in a US inverted yield curve signalling a recession ahead in the US economy, plus millions of student loan holders there having to start servicing the loans again with the first payments due this October, and I think the Fed’s pause will be extended until an arriving recession starts the Fed leading the way into interest rate cuts. Conveniently just in time for the 2024 presidential election year.
But up first, the summer doldrums and the
mainstream media silly season.
Asia markets largely fall as Japan hovers near
33-year highs
UPDATED MON, JUN 19 2023 12:34 AM
EDT
Asia-Pacific
markets largely fell on Monday, with Japan’s markets still hovering near
33-year highs.
The Nikkei 225 has
posted weekly gains for the last 10 weeks, but slipped 0.3% on Monday along
with the Topix, which was trading close to the flatline.
South Korea’s Kospi dropped
0.77%, while the Kosdaq was down 0.21%.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index opened
0.48% lower, along with mainland Chinese stocks. The Shanghai Composite was
down marginally and the Shenzhen
Component dropped 0.18%.
Australia bucked the wider sell
off in the region, with the S&P/ASX 200 higher
by 0.31% and powered by utilities and consumer services stocks.
Asian investors will be looking
ahead to China’s loan prime rate decision on Tuesday, after the world’s second
largest economy cut
some of its key lending rates last week.
On the diplomatic front, U.S.
Secretary of State Antony
Blinken is in Beijing on a diplomatic mission to repair
strained ties between the U.S. and China.
U.S. markets will be closed Monday for the Juneteenth
holiday. On Friday, all three major indexes ended the day lower
after a strong showing earlier in the week. The U.S. Federal Reserve notably
held rates after last week’s FOMC meeting, breaking a streak of
10 straight increases.
The S&P 500 ticked
down 0.37% and the Nasdaq
Composite lost 0.68%, but both indexes still recorded their
best week since March. The Dow
Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.32%, but notched its third
positive week in a row.
Asia
markets largely fall as Japan hovers near 33-year highs (cnbc.com)
European stocks head for lower open as market
jitters continue
UPDATED MON, JUN 19 2023 12:50 AM
EDT
European
markets are heading for a negative open at the start of the new trading week as
investors remain jittery over the economic outlook.
Overnight, Asia-Pacific
markets largely fell, although Japan’s markets were still
hovering near 33-year highs.
Asia investors will be looking
ahead to China’s loan prime rate decision on Tuesday, after the world’s
second-largest economy cut
some of its key lending rates last week.
On the diplomatic front, U.S.
Secretary of State Antony
Blinken is in Beijing on a diplomatic mission to repair
strained ties between the U.S. and China.
European
markets live updates: stocks, news, earnings, data (cnbc.com)
In other news, France hosts a global summit this week but little meaningful is expected. Well it is the summer silly season after all.
China’s rebound from Covid lockdowns falters.
Paris summit to push for
global debt and climate reform
Issued
on:
French
President Emmanuel Macron has
said the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact is aimed at building a
"new consensus" to meet the interlinked global targets of tackling
poverty, curbing planet-heating emissions and protecting nature.
Ideas on the table range from
taxation on shipping, fossil fuels or financial transactions, to innovations in
lending and a structural rethink of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
World Bank.
France says the two-day summit,
which begins on Thursday and will bring together some 50 heads of state and
government, was more of a platform for ideas sharing ahead of a cluster of
major economic and climate meetings in the coming months.
In particular, the French
Presidency said on Friday it wanted to give "political impetus" to
the idea of an international tax on carbon emissions from shipping, with hopes
of a breakthrough at a meeting of the International Maritime Organization later
in June.
With trust in short supply over
broken climate financing promises from richer countries, developing nations are
looking for tangible progress.
The V20 group of countries on the
climate frontlines, which now includes 58 member nations, has said
restructuring the global financial system to align with climate targets must be
completed by 2030.
"It's great we are talking
about the international financial architecture, but we have to see timelines
and we have not seen those timelines," Sarah Jane Ahmed, V20 global lead
and finance adviser, told AFP.
"If we're starting to do this
stuff in the 2030s, it's going to be so much more expensive and the trade-offs
are going to be far steeper."
Leaders arriving in Paris to
champion that message include Kenyan President William Ruto and Ghana's President
Nana Akufo-Addo, as well as Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who has become
a powerful advocate for reform and will speak at the summit opening on
Thursday.
Other attendees include Chinese
Premier Li Qiang, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and European Commission head
Ursula von der Leyen.
Ajay Banga is also expected in
Paris, in his first international meeting since taking the helm of the World Bank, promising to embrace change.
With fewer leaders from wealthier
countries attending, Friederike Roder of Global Citizen said the conference
could fall short of hopes for a show of unity.
"We need everyone coming
together," she told AFP, stressing that major economies are needed to
agree reforms.
'Failed'
Economies have been battered by
successive shocks in recent years, including Covid-19, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, spiking inflation and the increasingly
expensive impacts of weather disasters intensified by global warming.
United Nations chief Antonio
Guterres has said the pandemic and its aftermath amounted to a "stress
test" for a financial system that was set up nearly eight decades ago.
"It largely failed," he
said earlier this month, adding that 52 developing countries are in, or near,
debt distress.
The World Bank plans to increase
its lending capacity by $50 billion over 10 years.
More
Paris
summit to push for global debt and climate reform (france24.com)
Consumption soft even amid deep discounts during
major China shopping festival, analysts say
Chinese consumers snapped up billions worth of
items in China’s first major online shopping festival after emerging from the
pandemic as merchants slashed prices, but analysts say that consumer confidence
still remains weak.
Chinese merchants offered customers
steep discounts during the 618 shopping festival, which ran on China’s major
shopping platforms from the end of May until June 18, in the hopes of shoring
up sales amid a weaker-than-expected recovery in consumption.
Major shopping festivals, like e-commerce retailer JD.com’s 618
and Alibaba’s Singles’ Day, are typically barometers of
consumption in China, and Chinese e-commerce platforms often participate by
offering discounts and incentives to consumers.
Analysts say that
consumption remains soft this year as China emerges from the pandemic, even as
platforms including JD.com, Tmall, Taobao and Pinduoduo offered billions in
subsidies.
“Chinese consumer
confidence remains weak due to a mix of geopolitics, continued weakness from
Covid-19 and domestic Chinese politics,” said Shaun Rein, founder and managing
director of the China Market Research Group in Shanghai.
Rein said that
consumers were less likely to spend more during 618 as merchants had already
been discounting heavily for years because of the pandemic, and deals were not
that much better compared to previous months.
In March, JD.com
launched a “10 billion yuan subsidies” program to compete with rival Pinduoduo,
which is known for its low-priced goods. The CEO of Alibaba’s e-commerce
business unit, Trudy Dai, also previously pledged to make “huge, historic”
investments to attract users to its platforms.
“For months, Chinese
consumers have been price-conscious, looking for deals and trading down across
most product categories,” Rein said.
This year, for the
first time, JD.com did not reveal its total sales numbers for the 618 event,
despite saying in a blog post that the 2023 shopping extravaganza had “exceeded
expectations, setting a new record.”
More
Oil
slides more than $1 on China growth uncertainties
June 19, 20235:05 AM GMT+1
TOKYO, June 19 (Reuters) - Global oil
prices fell more than $1 on Monday, backing off last week's gains, as questions
over China's economy outweighed OPEC+ output cuts and the seventh straight drop
in the number of oil and gas rigs operating in the United States.
Brent crude lost
$1.15, or 1.5%, to trade at $75.46 a barrel by 0350 GMT, while U.S. West Texas
Intermediate (WTI) crude was down $1.09, or 1.5%, to $70.69.
Last week, Brent
posted a gain of 2.4% and WTI rose 2.3%.
"China's economic uncertainties
may have caused the selloff after a two-day rebound in oil markets ahead of The
People's Bank of China's (PBOC) decision on its loan prime rates (LPR) this
week," said Tina Teng, an analyst at CMC Markets.
A number of major
banks have cut their 2023 gross domestic product growth forecasts for China after May data last week showed
the post-COVID recovery in the world's second-largest economy was faltering.
PBOC is widely
expected to cut its benchmark loan prime interest rates on Tuesday, following a
similar reduction in medium-term policy loans
last week to shore up a shaky economic recovery.
Sources have told Reuters that China
will roll out more stimulus support for its
slowing economy this year, but concerns over debt and capital flight will keep
the measures targeted at shoring up weak demand in the consumer and private
sectors.
Still, China's
refinery throughput rose in May to its second-highest total on record, helping
to boost last week's gains, and U.S. energy firms cut the number of working oil and
natural gas rigs for a seventh week in a row for the first time since July
2020.
The oil and gas rig
count, an early indicator of future output, fell by 8 to 687 in the week to
June 16, lowest since April 2022. , , .
Oil prices on Monday
are also lower on expectations that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC) and its allies including Russia, or OPEC+, will struggle to
get compliance with production quotas, said Edward Moya, senior analyst at
OANDA.
More
Oil
slides more than $1 on China growth uncertainties | Reuters
Finally, yet more bad news from cryptoland.
Wyre
winding down as crypto winter bites
June
16, 2023 10:44 PM GMT+1 Updated a day ago
June 16 (Reuters) - Cryptocurrency
infrastructure provider Wyre is winding down, feeling the pinch of dwindling
interest in a market that was once hailed as the next frontier of finance.
The decision, announced in a tweet on
Friday, comes months after online checkout company Bolt Financial scrapped its
planned $1.5 billion purchase of Wyre.
Since then, the digital asset market
has seen a high-profile bankruptcy of crypto exchange FTX and lawsuits from the
U.S. securities regulator against Binance and Coinbase Global (COIN.O).
Wyre's decision was not because of any
regulatory action and investors who have assets on the company's platform could
withdraw them via its dashboard through July 14, it said.
Wyre winding down as crypto winter bites | 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.
Consumers Bracing For A Deep Recession, According To
New Survey
June
16, 2023
As high inflation
persists and interest rates are rising, Americans are concerned about the
current economy and a future recession. According to Nationwide’s 2023 Economic Impact survey, more than two-thirds of Americans (68%) expect a
recession within the next six months and nearly 80% of those who do, expect it
to be severe.
I met with Nationwide
Chief Economist Kathy Bostjancic to
discuss these findings, as well as her economic outlook for the remainder of the
year and what tradeoffs consumers are making to afford heightened expenses.
Gary
Drenik: The majority of
consumers are predicting a deep recession within the next 6 months – with many
expecting it to be as bad or even worse than the Great Recession of 2007-09. As
an economist, what is your outlook on a recession and what would you say to
people to help quell their fears?
Kathy Bostjancic: It’s
understandable that consumers are fearing a recession. So far this year, we
have experienced elevated inflation, trouble in the banking sector and multiple
consecutive interest rate hikes. What is currently keeping us out of a
recession is the strong labor market. If it continues to hold up and earnings
don’t tank, we may be able to avoid a hard landing. But we’re already starting
to see cracks in the labor market with a slight increase in jobless claims.
Combined with the
banking sector stress caused by the recent bank failures, we are continuing to
predict further tightening in credit conditions that leads to a moderate
recession in the second half of this year. Consumers should know that we do not
expect it to be as severe as the Great Recession though. Unlike the Great
Recession, we don’t foresee a housing market collapse or a financial crisis
this time around.
Drenik: The Federal Reserve just announced that it was pausing
interest rate hikes. What’s your outlook for the 2nd half of
the year?
Bostjancic: Following May’s Consumer Price Index report that
revealed cooling inflation, it is not surprising that the Fed paused interest
rate hikes this month. However, we could see them resume tightening in July in
an effort to combat stubborn inflation.
We know from a recent
Nationwide survey that
consumers are worried about the Fed’s policies. Almost three-quarters (70%) say
they are concerned about rising interest rates, up from 61% in September 2022.
About the same amount, 72%, expect to see rates increase over the next year. We
will continue to watch how consumers are reacting to the Fed’s moves knowing
that emotional responses can have great impact on the broader economy.
As our team looks ahead to the remainder of
this year and into 2024, we are expecting two or three quarters of negative
real GDP growth with a rise in the unemployment rate, which currently sits at a
low 3.7%. As we begin to see businesses experience reduced sales and
recessionary impacts, we also expect them to cut costs. These costs, such as
job losses and layoffs, will likely push unemployment up to around 5.5% by
mid-2024.
More
Consumers Bracing For A Deep Recession, According To New Survey (forbes.com)
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
COVID-Vaccinated
More Likely to Be Hospitalized: CDC Data
Jun 15 2023
COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization turned negative over time, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data presented on June 15.
The effectiveness against hospitalization plummeted to negative 8 percent for people who received one of the old COVID-19 vaccines, according to data from a CDC-run hospital network.
A dose of one of the updated bivalent vaccines moved the protection above zero, to 29 percent, but the protection fell back to negative 8 percent beyond 89 days, the data show.
The protection estimates were for adults without a compromised immune system from Jan. 23 to May 24, when the XBB strain was dominant in the United States. The data came from people hospitalized at one of 25 hospitals across 20 states that are part of the Investigating Respiratory Viruses in the Acutely Ill network. Both cases and controls were hospitalized with COVID-like illness but the cases tested positive for COVID-19 and the controls tested negative for COVID-19.
“We see a pattern of waning against hospitalization,” Dr. Ruth Link-Gelles of the CDC said while presenting the data to a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel as they consider updating the composition of the vaccines.
Link-Gelles didn’t specifically comment on how the effectiveness turned
negative but noted the wide confidence intervals for some of the effectiveness
estimates.
The bivalent vaccines, made by Moderna and Pfizer, were introduced
in the fall of 2022 with the hopes of improving protection against
hospitalization and death after the old vaccines proved increasingly incapable
of providing sustained shielding.
Dr. Robert Malone, who helped
invent the messenger RNA technology utilized by the vaccine companies in their
vaccines, said that the negative effectiveness is consistent with prior data
such as a study from the Cleveland Clinic that found each successive
vaccine dose increased the risk of infection.
Other papers have also estimated that protection against infection turns
negative over time. Some datasets have indicated that vaccinated people were at higher risk
of hospitalization, long seen as a surrogate for severe disease.
Researchers in one recent
paper said that repeated vaccination—some Americans have
received a half-dozen COVID-19 shots in under three years—weakens immune
systems, potentially making people susceptible to life-threatening conditions
such as cancer.
More
COVID-Vaccinated More Likely to Be Hospitalized: CDC
Data (theepochtimes.com)
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.
China's record-breaking Mach 30 wind tunnel harnesses
timed explosions
Loz Blain June 15, 2023
The Chinese
Academy of Sciences (CAS) has announced that the world's fastest hypersonic
wind tunnel is up and running, a detonation-driven shock tunnel that'll allow
aerodynamic testing for aircraft, spacecraft and missiles at air speeds up to
Mach 30.
The idea of
a wind tunnel is simple enough: if you want to know how a shape will perform at
a given air speed, you build the shape, then hold it still in a test chamber
and observe as air is blown past it at the desired speed.
If all you're testing is a
car, you can get away with simply using big fans, and perhaps a looping chamber
that keeps the air circulating to reduce the power draw. If you want to get
your air up to the speed of sound, you can start choking the flow by reducing
the diameter of your tunnel, but as Scott Manley explains
in his charming Scottish brogue, that won't take you any faster, since the air
just compresses and becomes more dense.
To go well into supersonic
speeds, you actually have to widen the tunnel out again after the choke point,
allowing the re-expansion of the compressed air to drive an even faster flow,
just like in the exhaust nozzle of a rocket. Indeed, back in the 1960s, that's
what a nascent
NASA did at its Langley research center,
effectively building a million-horsepower, high-pressure methane-burning rocket
and sitting the test pieces, like heat-shield tiles from the space shuttle, in
the nozzle at speeds up to Mach 7, letting bits that burned or broke off simply
blow out the back into the swamp behind the tunnel.
But the JF-22 tunnel in
China, completed in 2021 and now verified by 16 "independent experts" from China's National Natural Science Foundation
(NNSF), takes things considerably further, claiming a world-leading Mach 30, or
airspeeds of 6.4 miles per second (10.3 km/sec) through a huge experimental
chamber with a diameter around 13 ft (4 m).
Located in northern Beijing,
this is the latest in a JF-series of wind tunnels built at the CAS's Institute
of Mechanics dating back into the 1950s, when, according to interviews
translated by Hidden China, early attempts using hydrogen combustion-powered
airflows would occasionally blow the roof off the building.
But it was this kind of
detonation, not the relatively calm and controllable process of combustion,
that would eventually lead to hypersonic test chamber speeds. A Mach 30 wind
tunnel, according to the South China Morning Post,
requires about as much energy as the entire Three Gorges Dam hydro power plant
produces. Detonation releases extreme amounts of energy if you can keep it
under control.
Thus, the
JF-22 uses "a series of precisely timed explosions to generate a series of
shock waves that reflect off each other and converge at a single point."
Lead scientist on the JF-22 project, Professor Jiang Zonglin, dubbed this a
"reflected direct shock wave driver."
More
China's
record-breaking Mach 30 wind tunnel harnesses timed explosions (newatlas.com)
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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