Baltic Dry Index. 1701 -15 Brent Crude 95.31
Spot Gold 1849 U S 2 Year Yield 5.03 -0.01
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
Sir Winston Churchill.
In the stock casinos, it was a difficult week and month. Now comes a difficult few quarters. Without flogging a dead horse and repeating yesterday’s LIR update, just re-read yesterday’s LIR for most of the reasoning.
What happens next week is largely dependent on whether the US Federal government shuts down and if so, for how long.
Less so, but increasingly becoming more important with each passing week, what happens to the price of oil and how fast 90+ dollar oil inflation gets passed on into the wider G-7 economies.
In America, week three of the widening US auto workers strike will now be beginning to impact the US economy.
Slightly
longer term, whether north America, the UK and EU get another inflation break from
another mild winter, or whether we get a normal, or hopefully not, a hard
winter. With so many consumers living pay
check to pay check, maxing out credit cards, operating on buy now pay later schemes, a hard
winter will become a very hard winter for many.
Dow sheds more than 100 points Friday, S&P 500
and Nasdaq wrap worst month in 2023: Live updates
UPDATED FRI, SEP 29 2023 5:37 PM EDT
The Dow Jones Industrial Average retreated
on Friday as investors followed the latest news about a potential government
shutdown and ended what has been a tough month for stocks.
The blue-chip average lost 158.84
points, or 0.47% to finish at 33,507.50, led down by Travelers Companies.
The S&P 500 dropped
0.27% to 4,288.05. The Nasdaq Composite traded
up 0.14% to 13,219.32.
The Dow and S&P 500 were
higher earlier in the day, as traders cheered data showing inflation may be
easing. At session highs, the Dow had climbed about 227 points, or 0.7%, while
the S&P 500 added 0.8%. The Nasdaq Climbed had rallied 1.4% at its best
point in the session.
The latest reading of the personal
consumption expenditures price index, which is the Federal
Reserve’s preferred inflation metric, came Friday morning. So-called core PCE,
which strips out volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.1% in August and 3.9%
annually. Economists polled by Dow Jones expected that the core PCE would
advance 0.2% on a monthly basis and 3.9% year over year.
But investor concerns about the
potential for a government shutdown weighed on the market later in the session.
House GOP leaders failed
to pass a short-term spending bill on Friday, bolstering fears
that federal lawmakers wouldn’t reach an agreement on time.
“The market will also need to
deal with what appears to be a likely government shutdown,” said Chris
Fasciano, portfolio manager at Commonwealth Financial Network. “How long it
lasts and how it affects short-term economic data, consumer confidence and
interest rates will be amongst key topics for investors to pay attention to.”
The market saw sharp losses for
the trading month and quarter, both of which conclude with Friday’s close.
The S&P 500 finished the
month down 4.9% and the quarter lower by 3.7%. The Nasdaq Composite was off
5.8% in September, and down 4.1% for the quarter. Both posted their worst
months this year. The Dow notched a 3.5% decline this month and a 2.6% fall for
the quarter.
“Stocks have declined too much
and too fast during this seasonally volatile time of the year driven by a long
list of worries,” said Carol Schleif, CIO of the BMO Family Office. “The market
only a few months ago was worry free amid the belief that the Fed could
engineer a soft landing, and now the market’s worry closet door is wide open as
investors raise questions about the economic outlook.”
The Dow and S&P 500 ended the
week down about 1.3% and 0.7%, respectively. The Nasdaq Composite ended 0.06%
higher.
Stock
market today: Live updates (cnbc.com)
European stocks log worst quarter in a year with a
drop of 2.9%
UPDATED FRI, SEP 29 2023 12:02 PM EDT
European
stocks were higher Friday, but optimism in recent sessions rounded off a weak
month and the worst quarter for a year.
The pan-European Stoxx 600 provisionally
closed up 0.5% on the prior session, with most sectors finishing in positive
territory as tech and household goods led the pack.
The index ended
Wednesday at a six-month low and has declined 2.1% this month,
according to LSEG data, following a 2.8% fall in August. Despite making gains
in July, that still takes the benchmark Stoxx to a 2.9% loss for the quarter,
its worst performance for a year.
Investors on Friday analyzed euro
zone inflation, which fell to its lowest level since October 2021.
It tumbled to 4.3% for the month of September, according to flash data.
The announcement is in line with
recent country-specific data, with preliminary inflation figures from Germany
showing inflation slowed more than expected Thursday. Harmonized data for
Europe’s biggest economy showed a 4.3% increase in consumer prices since
September 2022 — the lowest level since Russia’s full-scale invasion of
Ukraine.
Asia-Pacific markets largely
climbed in the final trading day of the week, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index leading gains in the region and rising over 2%.
European
markets open to close: Stoxx 600 has worst quarter in a year (cnbc.com)
GM, Ford chiefs clash with UAW as union expands strikes
By David Shepardson and Joseph White
DETROIT, Sept 29 (Reuters) - The chief
executives of GM and Ford blasted United Auto Workers leaders on Friday, and
UAW chief Shawn Fain responded in kind, hours after the union escalated the
strike that is now in its third week.
Fain on Friday
expanded the first-ever simultaneous strike against
the Detroit Three, ordering workers to walk off the job at Ford's Chicago
assembly plant and GM's (GM.N) Lansing,
Michigan, assembly plant. He said Stellantis was spared after last-minute
concessions by the Chrysler parent.
"It’s clear that there
is no real intent to get to an agreement," GM CEO Mary Barra said late
Friday, while Ford CEO Jim Farley said the union was holding a deal
"hostage" over a dispute over future electric vehicle battery plants.
The UAW responded on social media that neither CEO had attended bargaining this
week.
“And yet, Barra and Farley
made a combined $50 million dollars last year,” the union added.
The harshly worded personal
statements showed increasing frustration with the pace of negotiations that are
entering their third week.
Farley said the UAW demands
"could have a devastating impact on our business." He said the
dispute centered around wages and benefits at new electric vehicle battery
plants that have yet to start production.
“I don’t know why Jim
Farley is lying about the state of negotiations," Fain said in response.
"It could be because he failed to show up for bargaining this week, as he
has for most of the past 10 weeks."
The union and the companies remain far apart on key
economic issues and the CEO statements suggested they are not close to
resolving many sticking points. Fain has stuck with a demand for 40% pay hikes
over a four-year contract, a position supported this week by President Joe Biden. The companies have offered pay hikes of about 20%.
More
GM,
Ford chiefs clash with UAW as union expands strikes | Reuters
In useless war news, welcome to the death of the tank and arrival of massed drones.
Tanks and
troops out in the open in Ukraine can't go 10 minutes without being spotted and
fired upon, Ukrainian official says
Updated Fri, 29 September 2023 at 9:38 am BST
The sheer number of drones operating in Ukraine, as well as battle-management systems that provide real-time imaging and locations, mean that troops and tanks out in the open have just minutes before they're targeted, a top Ukrainian military official says.
"Today, a column of tanks or
a column of advancing troops can be discovered in three to five minutes and hit
in another three minutes," Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy commander
of Ukraine's HUR military-intelligence service, told The Wall Street Journal.
"The survivability on the
move is no more than 10 minutes," he added.
Skibitsky also told the newspaper
that "surprises have become very difficult to achieve."
Russia and Ukraine are both
deploying thousands of drones on the battlefield and are using cheap drones to
target each other's forces.
This, in turn, is bringing into
question some fundamentals of American military doctrine.
"The days of massed armored
assaults, taking many kilometers of ground at a time, like we did in 2003 in
Iraq — that stuff is gone because the drones have become so effective
now," Bradley Crawford, a retired US Army sergeant who's an Iraq war
veteran, told the newspaper.
Ukraine has been increasingly
relying on cheap, first-person-view drones, or FPVs, to take out Russian
military hardware.
These drones tend to cost about $400 to $500, which is a lot less than a regular 155mm artillery
shell, which can cost up to $3,000, or a T-72 tank, which costs about $1,2 million.
Last week, Ukraine's Minister of
Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, said unmanned Ukrainian aerial
vehicles had struck a record 205 pieces of Russian military
hardware in Ukraine.
These included 64 cannons, 27
tanks, and 55 trucks, he said.
While the exact number of drones
deployed remains unclear, the Royal United Services Institute estimated earlier
this year that Ukraine was losing about 10,000 drones a month, a sign of their widespread use.
Russia is meanwhile working to
make a deadlier, more advanced version of Iran's Shahed-136 attack drone, The Washington Post reported based on leaked documents.
Finally,
our fast developing new El Nino wants close watching in the coming weeks and
months. Food price inflation is still
with us and could yet easily get much worse.
One of the most intense El Niños
ever observed could be forming
September
27, 2023
A fast-forming and strengthening El Niño
climate pattern could peak this winter as one of the most intense ever
observed, according to an experimental forecast released Tuesday. The new
prediction system suggested it could reach top-tier “super” El Niño strength, a
level that in the past has unleashed deadly fires, drought, heat waves, floods
and mudslides around the world.
This time, El Niño is
developing alongside an unprecedented surge in global temperatures that scientists say has increased the likelihood
of brutal heat waves and deadly floods of
the kind seen in recent weeks.
Will that make El Niño’s
typical extremes even more dramatic in the winter?
“My answer would be — maybe,”
said David DeWitt, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.
Whether — and where — this El
Niño might produce new weather extremes is difficult to pin down months in
advance, scientists said. That’s because research has not clarified any link
between human-caused planetary warming and El Niño, or its counterpart, La
Niña. Variation among El Niño events also makes weather impacts difficult to
predict.
There are
signs that rising temperatures could increase El Niño’s capacity to trigger
heavy rainfall in some parts of the globe, though, said Yuko Okumura, a
research scientist at the University of Texas.
“It’s likely the impact might
be stronger,” Okumura said.
Climate models have for
months suggested the potential for an intense El Niño that could trigger
floods, heat waves and droughts.
The phenomenon is marked by a
surge of warmth in surface waters along the equator in the eastern and central
Pacific Ocean. The warmer those waters become, and the more they couple with
west-to-east flowing winds over the Pacific, the stronger the El Niño and its
influence on global weather.
NOAA scientists declared the pattern’s arrival in June, by which point there were already signs of unusual warming in the Pacific and other waters around the world.
As global ocean and surface
temperatures surged into record territory in the months that followed, official
predictions of El Niño’s intensity have solidified. NOAA’s climate forecasters
this month estimated the
chance of a strong El Niño pattern by winter in the Northern Hemisphere at 71
percent. Its current strength is moderate.
A forecast that the National
Center for Atmospheric Research issued Tuesday was even more bullish, using a
new prediction system to prognosticate that the coming winter could bring a
super El Niño, with strength rivaling the historic El Niño of 1997-1998. That
winter brought extreme rainfall to California and Kenya, and intense drought to
Indonesia.
“We might be facing a similar
winter coming up,” said Stephen Yeager, a project scientist at the center who
helped lead the forecasting. “This is one plausible future.”
The model predicts this El
Niño will be a little less intense than the last super El Niño, which occurred
in 2015-2016. That El Niño was tied to severe coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef, record cyclones in
the Pacific, drought and fires
in Australia, a historic snowstorm along
the Mid-Atlantic coast and disease outbreaks around the world.
Though confidence may be high
that Pacific waters will remain warm, allowing El Niño to persist for months,
that does not mean scientists are sure of what that augurs for weather around
the world.
A textbook El Niño includes tendencies toward dry conditions in such places as Indonesia,
northern Australia and southern Africa and wet conditions across parts of South
America, eastern Africa and along the southern tier of the United States. Signs
are already suggesting a hot and dry summer for Australia, for example, where
authorities are warning of heightened wildfire dangers.
But that does not mean the
same conditions develop with each El Niño.
More
One of the most intense El Niños ever observed could
be forming (msn.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.
The
“Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” sets out to close the barn door.
Bank of England seeks more ammunition to
deal with financial instability after LDI crisis
THURSDAY 28 SEPTEMBER 2023
2:17 PM
The Bank
of England is in the process of designing lending tools that allow it to give
directly to insurance firms and pension funds, after the near-death experience
of the Liability-Driven Investment (LDI) crisis in 2022.
In a speech in London, Andrew Hauser, executive director for markets, said the Bank was working on facilities that would enable it to better respond to financial problems in the market-based finance sector, also known as non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs).
He confirmed the Bank was developing
lending tools to “help underpin financial stability during periods of
exceptional liquidity stress, channelling liquidity directly to resilient NBFIs
when capacity constraints prevent banks from lending in sufficient size.”
Citing the examples of the dash for cash in 2020 and the LDI crisis a year
ago, Hauser said “it is impossible to argue that market-based finance cannot
threaten stability”.
On both occasions, financial institutions dumped
assets, many of which were safe, in search of cash that would enable them to
meet margin calls.
In the
LDI case, this turned into a fire sale of gilts, where the plunging value of
gilts forced firms to sell more gilts to meet margin calls, sending gilt prices
ever lower.
“Urgent
policy intervention was required to prevent a self-reinforcing downward price
spiral in government bond prices causing unwarranted tightening of financing
conditions and credit supply to households and businesses,” Hauser said.
But
Hauser pointed out the interventions were indirect. The Bank of England could
only provide liquidity to traditional banks, who could then lend it on, or
hoover up distressed assets in an attempt to calm the market.
There is no facility which allows the central bank
to funnel liquidity directly into firms like pension funds and insurance firms.
“It is unrealistic for the private sector to
self-insure against the most severe system-wide liquidity shocks: in such
cases, safeguarding financial stability requires an effective public backstop,”
he said.
NBFIs, sometimes known as shadow banks, have
played an increasingly important part in the financial sector since the
financial crisis.
Globally, assets in NBFIs have increased to $68tn from about $30trn in the immediate
aftermath of the financial crisis, representing 14 per cent of global
assets.
Euro zone inflation fell to 4.3% in September,
lowest level since October 2021
PUBLISHED FRI, SEP 29 2023 5:09
AM EDT
Annual inflation in the euro zone cooled to its
lowest level since October 2021, falling to 4.3% in September, flash figures
showed Friday.
That was down from a 5.2% annual reading in August,
while month-on-month inflation dipped from 0.5% to 0.3%.
Core inflation — which excludes energy, food,
alcohol and tobacco, and is closely watched by monetary policymakers — dropped
to 4.5% year on year in September from 5.3% in August.
The fresh print comes after the European Central
Bank decided to hike interest rates to
a record level in September, pegging its key rate at 4%.
The move was described as a “dovish hike” after
the ECB also gave its strongest suggestion yet that its governing council feels
rates may be at sufficiently high levels to bring inflation to target in the
medium term.
The bank’s most recent macroeconomic projections
for the euro area anticipate inflation will average 5.6% this year, falling to
3.2% in 2024 and 2.1% in 2025.
Officials have tried to dampen expectations for
rate cuts on the horizon, with French central bank Governor Francois Villeroy
de Galhau telling CNBC this
week that it would be “premature” to bet on when the first cut will come.
More
Euro zone inflation fell to 4.3% in September, lowest
level since October 2021 (cnbc.com)
This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Covid-19 hospital admissions in
England stabilise after recent rise
September 28, 2023
Covid-19 hospital admissions
in England have stabilised after rising for several weeks,
although the rate remains at its highest level for four months, figures show.
It comes as the NHS steps up the rollout of the latest Covid booster
vaccine, with millions of people due to be invited for the jab this week.
The rollout was brought forward as a precaution against the latest
Omicron subvariant of Covid-19, BA.2.86, although experts say there is
currently no evidence the new strain is more likely to make people seriously
ill than other variants in circulation, while vaccination is likely to provide
ongoing protection.
Hospital admissions in England of patients who tested positive for
Covid-19 stood at 4.4 per 100,000 people in the week to September 24, up
slightly from 4.1 in the previous week but down from 4.6 a fortnight earlier,
according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).
The admission rate was last above four per 100,000 people in May.
This is still some way below the level reached at Christmas 2022, when
the rate stood at 11.8 per 100,000, and is also well below the figures seen
during the first year of the pandemic.
Rates are highest among people aged 85 and over, at 44.9 per 100,000,
though this figure is down from 50.2 two weeks ago.
The rate for 75 to 84-year-olds has dropped over the same period, from
21.1 per 100,000 to 20.2.
There are no longer any official estimates of the prevalence of Covid-19
among the UK population, meaning hospital admissions are the only regular guide
to possible changes in how the virus is circulating.
More
Covid-19 hospital admissions in England stabilise
after recent rise (msn.com)
Study Finds Signs of Heart Injury in Vaccinated
People Without Chest Pain
The
study results 'suggest that mild asymptomatic myocardial inflammation could be
more common than we ever expected,' one doctor said.
9/27/2023 Updated: 9/28/2023
People who received a COVID-19 vaccine had higher levels of a glucose
analogue than unvaccinated people, suggesting heart inflammation, according to
a new study.
Researchers in Japan compared 700 vaccinated people with 303
unvaccinated people. None experienced cardiac symptoms.
Researchers analyzed results from positron emission tomography and
computerized tomography (PET/CT) scans that analyzed the uptake of
fluorodeoxyglucose F18 (FDG), a glucose analogue and marker of inflammation, in
the body.
Researchers found that
people vaccinated with a Moderna or Pfizer vaccine had higher levels of FDG in
the heart, liver, and spleen than unvaccinated people.
The higher levels of heart
FDG remained when stratifying the patients by various factors, such as age,
except for people who were tested more than 180 days after vaccination.
The higher FDG levels represent heart inflammation, Dr.
Takehiro Nakahara of the Keio University School of Medicine's Department of
Radiology and co-authors wrote. The levels could just indicate minor
inflammation, they said, pointing to a cardiac MRI study that found that post-vaccination heart problems were less
severe than those experienced after COVID-19.
"Even though vaccinated
patients in this study showed elevated myocardial FDG uptake on PET/CT up to
180 days after vaccination, this could result from relatively minor
inflammation and may not represent severe myocardial abnormalities," they
said.
The study was published by the Radiological Society of North America. Some authors
disclosed grants from pharmaceutical companies, including Nihon Medi-Physics. The
authors said they received no funding for the retrospective study.
Moderna and Pfizer didn't
respond to requests for comment.
More
Study Finds Signs of Heart Injury in Vaccinated People Without Chest Pain | The Epoch Times
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the
development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
Antigravity
disproved: Antimatter responds to gravity just like matter
Paul McClure September 27, 2023
Antimatter has intrigued and confounded physicists for almost
a century, and the effect of gravity on antimatter has been a point of
disagreement. New research may have settled the debate by finding that
antihydrogen atoms, the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen, are affected by
gravity in the same way as their matter equivalents, ruling out the existence
of repulsive 'antigravity.'
In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton proposed his gravitation
theory after watching an apple fall from a tree and questioning why it fell
straight down rather than sideways or upwards. Centuries later, Albert Einstein
came up with his general theory of relativity, which remains the most
successful, and tested, description of gravity. However, antimatter was unknown
to Einstein.
In 1928, British physicist
Paul Dirac theorized that for every particle, there exists a corresponding
antiparticle, predicting the existence of the positron – or antielectron –
which was first observed in 1932. Since then, there’s been a lot of speculation
about the interaction between gravity and antimatter, with some arguing that
antimatter is repelled by gravity and others that it’s attracted.
A new study by the
Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration at The European
Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) may have settled the argument, finding
that atoms of antihydrogen, the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen, fall to
Earth in the same way as their matter equivalents.
“In
physics, you don’t really know something until you observe it,” said Jeffrey
Hangst, a corresponding author of the study. “This is the first direct
experiment to actually observe a gravitational effect on the motion of
antimatter. It’s a milestone in the study of antimatter, which still mystifies
us due to its apparent absence in the Universe.”
The ALPHA
experiment is concerned with making, capturing and studying atoms of
antihydrogen in a trapping device. Antihydrogen atoms are electrically neutral
and stable particles of antimatter, making them ideal for studying the
gravitational behavior of antimatter. Antihydrogen is created by combining the
two component antiparticles, antiprotons and positrons. An antiproton is a
subatomic particle with the same mass as a proton but with a negative electric
charge.
More
Antigravity disproved: Antimatter responds to gravity
just like matter (newatlas.com)
This weekend’s music
diversion. No Great European Schwindlers
this weekend. This weekend back to normal and the Great Vivaldi again, this
time fooling around with a guitar. Well, he actually wrote it for the Lute or
mandolin, but everyone plays it now on the much easier guitar. Approx. 11 minutes. Approx. 10 minutes.
Vivaldi
- Concerto For Guitar And Strings in D Major
Vivaldi - Concerto For Guitar And Strings in D Major -
YouTube
Vivaldi: Lute Concerto in D
major, RV 93 - Darko Karajić (archlute) and New Trinity Baroque
This weekend’s chess
update. Approx. 12 minutes.
Queen
Sacrifice Too Scary to Keep
Queen Sacrifice Too Scary to Keep - YouTube
This
weekend the maths update. Approx. 14 minutes.
The
15 puzzle - solving the unsolvable 19th century Rubik's square
The 15 puzzle - solving the unsolvable 19th century
Rubik's square - YouTube
“Never in the field
of credit card debt was so much owed by so many to so few.”
With apologies to
Sir Winston Churchill.
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