Baltic
Dry Index. 2094 22/12/23
Brent Crude
78.41
Spot
Gold 2064 US
2 Year Yield 4.23 -0.03
January 2, 1896. The Jameson Raid (Afrikaans: Jameson-inval, lit. ''Jameson's Invasion'' , 29 December 1895 – 2 January 1896) was a botched raid against the South African Republic (commonly known as the Transvaal) carried out by British colonial administrator Leander Starr Jameson, under the employment of Cecil Rhodes.
On the first trading day of 2024, a mixed message from Asia. Oh well, on to Europe’s stock casinos opening.
In commodities, crude oil frets over a war on shipping in the Red Sea. A wider war breaking out in the Middle East.
As the Jameson raid showed back in late 1895/96, rash actions can have massive unintended consequences. Arguably, the Jameson raid led up to World War One by stoking up tension between GB and Germany ending in Germany’s “blank cheque” to Austria. Today, Biden’s “blank cheque” to Israel’s far right government following the massive Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th.
Australia market nears all-time high, China
stocks lower as factory activity slumps further
UPDATED TUE, JAN 2 2024 12:38 AM
EST
Asia-Pacific
markets were mixed on the first trading day of the year, with China stocks
dipping and Australian markets nearing its all time high.
Official data showed China’s manufacturing PMI contracted
further in December 2023, in a sign that more policy support was likely needed
to revive its economy.
However, a Caixin survey showed
that manufacturing activity in China expanded in December. The manufacturing
PMI came in at 50.8 in December, up from 50.7 in November.
China’s CSI 300 index sunk 0.9%
Tuesday, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index shed
1.48%. Both markets were among the worst performers of 2023.
Australia’s S&P/ASX
200 rose 0.49% to close at 7,627.8, just about 1 point away
from its all-time high of 7,628.9 hit on Aug. 13, 2021.
Japan was assessing the damage from a powerful
earthquake that struck its central region on New Year’s Day, and markets in the
country are closed until Jan. 4.
Nearly
100,000 people were ordered to evacuate, and at least eight
people were reported dead from the quake, which had a preliminary magnitude of
7.6. Japan’s Nikkei 225 wrapped
up 2023 with gains of over 28%, making it Asia’s top-performing market.
South Korea’s Kospi rose
0.6% higher, while the small-cap Kosdaq rose 1.29%.
In the U.S., stock futures were flat in
overnight trading Monday as the market prepares to kick off the new year.
Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average were
little changed, while S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100
futures traded marginally above the flatline. Markets were closed Monday for
New Year’s Day.
Asia markets: Live
updates, Japan earthquake, China Caixin PMI (cnbc.com)
Asia's factories end
2023 on soft note amid fragile China recovery
January 2, 2024 3:28
AM GMT
SYDNEY, Jan 2 (Reuters) - Asia's
factory activity weakened in December, portending a shaky start for the
region's manufacturing powerhouses in 2024 as China's patchy economic recovery
impeded a broader revival in demand.
A range of purchasing managers'
indexes (PMIs) published by S&P Global on Tuesday showed factory activity
continuing to decline in most Asian economies at the end of last year and
confidence broadly sagging.
The struggles for
Asia's tech-heavy economies persisted with South
Korean factory activity dipping back into decline and Taiwan
extending its contraction for the 19th straight month, the PMIs showed.
China's Caixin PMI
showed an unexpected
acceleration in activity in December, although this contrasted
with Beijing's official
PMI released on Sunday that remained in contraction territory
for the third straight month.
The mixed economic prospects for China
continue to cloud the outlook for its major trading partners.
"Overall, the economic outlook
for (China's) manufacturing sector continued to improve in December, with
supply and demand expanding and price levels remaining stable," Wang Zhe,
Senior economist at Caixin Insight Group said.
"However, employment remained a
significant challenge, and businesses expressed concerns about the future,
remaining cautious in areas including hiring, raw material purchasing, and
inventory management."
Beijing has in recent months introduced
a series of policies to shore up a feeble post-pandemic recovery, but the
world's second-largest economy is struggling to gain momentum amid a severe
property slump, local government debt risks and soft global demand.
Elsewhere in Asia, PMIs showed
activity in Malaysia's and Vietnam's factory sectors remained in contractionary
mode, although it accelerated slightly in Indonesia.
India's PMI for last month will be
released on Wednesday and Japan's is due on Thursday.
More
Asia's
factories end 2023 on soft note amid fragile China recovery | Reuters
Oil jumps 1.5% in New Year after U.S. forces repel Houthis in
Red Sea
By Florence Tan
January
2, 2024 4:59 AM GMT
SINGAPORE, Jan 2
(Reuters) - Oil prices jumped 1.5% in the first session of the New Year, due to
potential supply disruptions in the Middle East after a naval clash in the Red
Sea, and hopes of strong holiday demand and an economic stimulus in China, the
top crude importer.
Brent crude rose
$1.20, or 1.5%, to $78.24 a barrel by 0438 GMT while U.S. West Texas
Intermediate crude was at $72.66 a barrel, up $1, or 1.4%.
A
Reuters survey of economists and analysts predicted Brent crude would average $82.56 a barrel this year,
slightly higher than the average of $82.17 in 2023. Analysts forecast that weak
global growth would cap demand, but expected geopolitical tensions to provide
support.
U.S.
helicopters repelled an attack on Sunday
by Iran-backed Houthi militants on a Maersk container vessel in the Red Sea,
sinking three Houthi ships and killing 10 militants, escalating risks of the
Israel-Gaza war becoming a wider regional conflict.
"The oil
price may be affected by the escalation of the situation in the Red Sea over
the weekend and the peak demand season during China's Spring Festival,"
Leon Li, a Shanghai-based CMC Markets analyst said, referring to the Lunar New
Year holiday set for early February.
Li added that the
forecast Chinese holiday demand was also raising expectations for a price
rebound in January.
A
wider conflict could close crucial waterways for the transportation of oil
supplies such as the Red Sea and the Straits of Hormuz in the Gulf. After the
naval battle, an Iranian warship sailed into
the Red Sea, Iranian media reported on Monday.
At
least four tankers transporting
diesel and jet fuel from the Middle East and India to Europe are sailing around
Africa to avoid the Red Sea, ship tracking data show.
Oil jumps 1.5% in New Year after U.S. forces repel Houthis in Red Sea | Reuters
Next, the trouble with AI?
A Clue as to
Why AI Is so Dumb
12/28/2023 Updated: 12/28/2023
The
New York Times has dropped a major lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for
copyright infringement. The paper claims that these companies have been
scraping NY Times content to train ChatGPT and other features of artificial
intelligence software. They cite real injury here: People are using AI tools
for information rather than subscribing to The NY Times, and therefore The NY
Times is losing advertiser revenue.
My first
reaction is: That explains so much!
In particular, it
shows why on any topic regarding politics, news, public health, climate change,
or anything even mildly controversial, ChatGPT comes across so stupidly
conventional and ignorant of deeper literature. It is like reading The New York
Times precisely because the AI engine is using The New York Times as its
trainer! That truly does account for the core of the problem.
More
A Clue as to Why AI Is so Dumb | The Epoch Times
Finally,
sadly, The New York Times covered how, despite warnings, Israel got it all so
wrong on October 7, 2023. 1200 dead, 240 hostages, 22,000 Palestinians dead,
14,000 of them mostly women and children. The IDF only claim 8,000 terrorists
killed as of 31/12/23.
Where Was the Israeli Military?
Far beneath the Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv, in a bunker
known as The Pit, commanders were trying to make sense of reports of Hamas
rocket fire in southern Israel early on the morning of Oct. 7, when the call
came in.
It was a commander from the division that oversees military operations
along the border with Gaza. Their base was under attack. The commander could
not describe the scope of the attack or provide more details, according to a
military official with knowledge of the call. But he asked that all available
reinforcements be sent.
At 7:43 a.m., more than an hour after the rocket assault began and
thousands of Hamas fighters stormed into Israel, The Pit issued its first
deployment instructions of the day. It ordered all emergency forces to head
south, along with all available units that could do so quickly.
But the nation’s military leaders did not yet recognize that an invasion
of Israel was already well underway.
Hours later, desperate Israeli citizens were still fending for
themselves and calling for help. Roughly 1,200 people died as the Middle East’s
most advanced military failed in its essential mission: protecting Israeli
lives.
The full reasons behind the military’s slow response may take months to
understand. The government has promised an inquiry. But a New York Times
investigation found that Israel’s military was undermanned, out of position and
so poorly organized that soldiers communicated in impromptu WhatsApp groups and
relied on social media posts for targeting information. Commandos rushed into
battle armed only for brief combat. Helicopter pilots were ordered to look to
news reports and Telegram channels to choose targets.
And perhaps most damning: The Israel Defense Forces did not
even have a plan to respond to a large-scale Hamas attack on Israeli soil,
according to current and former soldiers and officers. If such a plan existed
on a shelf somewhere, the soldiers said, no one had trained on it and nobody
followed it. The soldiers that day made it up as they went along.
----The
documents and interviews revealed new details about the attack, including
military assessments and orders like the one given by The Pit early that
morning. Taken together, they show that much of the military failure was due to
the lack of a plan, coupled with a series of intelligence missteps in the
months and years before the attack.
Israeli security and military agencies produced repeated assessments that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of launching a massive invasion. The authorities clung to that optimistic view even when Israel obtained Hamas battle plans that revealed an invasion was precisely what Hamas was planning.
More. Much, much more.
Where Was the Israeli Military? – DNyuz
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 worst of inflation could be behind us. A
recession may not be
December 31, 2023
The writing was on the wall
for a recession in 2023.
At this time last year,
sky-high inflation was barely budging, leaving the Federal Reserve with no
choice but to continue hiking interest rates. The S&P 500 was well
into a bear market. Layoffs,
especially in tech, were piling up as
companies cut costs.
And to top it all off, the
Philadelphia Phillies made it to the World Series — a historically terrible sign for the economy since a recession kicks off each time the team
wins.
But the Phillies’ eventual
loss to the Houston Astros last year was apparently the economy’s gain because
a recession never happened.
Truth be
told, the reasons why it didn’t come to be in 2023 have little to do with
baseball and more to do with good policies and a bit of luck.
Still, as the standard
investment disclaimer goes, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
The case for a recession in 2024
The
risk of a recession has been elevated since the Fed began its tightening cycle
in March 2022, Fed Chair Jerome Powell told reporters in December. However, he
said that “there’s little basis for thinking that the economy is in a recession
now.”
But even when the economy
seems as though it has never been in better shape, there’s always the
possibility of a recession in the next year, Powell added.
That’s because unforeseen
economic shocks — like, say, a global pandemic — can arise at any point.
Barring future unexpected
events, some economists think present conditions still have the potential to
usher in a recession in the coming year.
“The recession is just
delayed, but not completely removed,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at
Nationwide Mutual.
One metric Bostjancic has
been keeping close tabs on is employment in the private services sector,
excluding health and education. The remaining sectors within private services —
such as transportation and leisure and hospitality — are more cyclical, meaning
they are more vulnerable to economic downturns. So studying movements in that
sector gives her a better sense of the state of the economy, she said.
In November 2022, monthly
hiring in the private services sector excluding health and education equaled
92,000, according to Labor Department data. However, the November 2023 jobs report shows a steep drop, with 22,000 new hires in the sector.
Overall, job growth has been
solid over the past year, which has helped keep the unemployment rate below 4%.
Bostjancic isn’t convinced
that will carry over into the new year, though. She thinks there’s a 65% chance
of a mild recession in 2024 and predicts the unemployment rate will rise to 5%
by the third quarter. That’s almost a percentage point higher than Fed
officials’ median projection for the unemployment rate in 2024, according to
the latest Summary of Economic Projections.
The income drop from the
unemployment Bostjancic is predicting would likely cause consumers to pull back
on spending and give rise to a recession, she told CNN. And unlike the past few
years, consumers don’t have “any extra fuel” to tap in to because they’ve
depleted savings they accumulated during the pandemic, she added.
There’s also a recession risk
stemming from the Fed itself. That’s because the central bank’s current high
level of interest rates is intended to slow the economy to help bring inflation
closer to its 2% target.
But if inflation continues to
recede and the Fed waits too long to cut interest rates, it could prevent the
economy from growing, said Louise Sheiner, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution and the policy director for the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and
Monetary Policy.
That means it’s going to be
challenging for the Fed to determine when it makes sense to cut interest rates, if at all.
More
The worst of inflation could be behind us. A recession may not be (msn.com)
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Avoiding COVID-19 was about more than just keeping 2
metres apart, study finds
December 30, 2023
How likely is it to get COVID-19 after being
exposed to someone infected? It’s been a question on many people’s minds during
the pandemic, and one that a group of researchers in the UK has finally found
an answer to.
Researchers from the Nuffield
Department for Medicine at the University of Oxford analysed data from 7
million people in England and Wales who, during the health emergency, were
notified by the country’s NHS COVID-19 app that they had been in contact with
someone who was infected. The goal was to find out how many of those alerted
actually contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The NHS COVID-19 app, which was
closed down in April 2023, allowed people who had downloaded it to let others
know that they had been infected. At the same time, the app would send users an
alert if they had come in the proximity of someone who was infected, (based on
non-mandatory reporting to the app). People would then have to either
self-isolate or get tested.
The job of Luca Ferretti, the lead
researcher of the University of Oxford study that was published in the journal
Nature this month, and his colleagues was to understand if the app had worked
correctly. Did it notify people when there was a reasonable risk? The short
answer is yes. But the researchers found out much more than that.
“The app was sending back to our
servers anonymous information about which people were getting notified of the
risk, which people were getting tested, who was getting a positive result, and
information about the specific contact: the duration, the proximity,” Ferretti
tells Euronews Next.
“We looked at what the app
computed as a risk to the individual, in terms of distance and duration, and
the two things came up to be really closely correlated,” he says.
Duration vs distance
The researchers took
advantage of this “treasure trove” of information to study the relation between
distance and duration of an encounter with an infected person to see how this
would influence the risk of someone being infected. And it turns out that
duration is as important as distance, if not more.
“Everybody was focussed on
the distance. There was this 1-metre or 2-metre distance rule in shops, at
stations. But distance should have never been the focus of it because as we
know now, the truth is more nuanced than that,” Ferretti says.
“Once you’re a short distance
from someone, it's the duration that matters. If you’re exposed for 10 seconds,
you must be very unlucky for the particles from the mouth of the infected
person to get to your mouth or your nose. But if you stay there one hour, of
course you will try your luck 60 times with respect to one minute.”
The researchers found that
longer exposures at greater distances had a similar risk to shorter exposures
at closer distances.
More
Avoiding COVID-19 was about more than just keeping 2 metres apart, study finds (msn.com)
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.
Collaborative review unveils the potential of
graphene in advancing nitride semiconductor technology
December 30, 2023
In a comprehensive review, researchers from
Soochow University, Beijing Graphene Institute and Xiamen Silan Advanced
Compound Semiconductor Co., Ltd. have collaborated to provide a systematic
overview of the progress and potential applications of graphene as a buffer
layer for nitride epitaxial growth.
The paper brings together
perspectives from academia, research institutions, and semiconductor industry
professionals to propose solutions for critical issues in semiconductor
technology.
Graphene, a two-dimensional material
known for its exceptional electrical and mechanical properties, has garnered
significant interest for its prospective use in the growth of nitride
semiconductors. Despite notable advancements in the chemical vapor deposition
(CVD) growth of graphene on various insulating substrates, producing high-quality
graphene and achieving optimal interface compatibility with Group III-nitride
materials remain major challenges in the field.
The review provides an in-depth look at the
bottlenecks in transferred graphene manufacturing techniques and the latest
advancements in transfer-free graphene growth. It also discusses the current
progress in growing transfer-free graphene on different insulating substrates
and its potential applications in nitride epitaxy.
The paper further outlines
the promising future of transfer-free graphene growth technology in the nitride
epitaxy sector and identifies the challenges that must be overcome to harness
its full potential. With a thorough analysis of existing literature, the review
serves as a technical and application guide for using graphene in nitride
epitaxial growth, encouraging further research in the area.
This review not only offers
valuable information to researchers and practitioners but also charts a course
for future research directions and technological innovations in the field of
nitride epitaxial growth.
More information: Xiang Gao et al, Transfer-free chemical vapor
deposition graphene for nitride epitaxy: challenges, current status and future
outlook, Science China Chemistry (2023). DOI:
10.1007/s11426-023-1769-y
The Jameson Raid, South Africa 1895
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