Baltic Dry Index. 1899 +28 Brent Crude 83.33
Spot Gold 2031 US 2 Year Yield 4.70 +0.01
Rashness succeeds often, still more often fails.
Napoleon Bonaparte.
In the stock casinos, a pause or something more?
With month-end tomorrow, normally insiders and the money manager pros are busy dressing up stocks for their all important performance bonuses. Why not this week?
Could it be that they’ve noticed that the inverted US yield curve is flattening, often, usually, a sign of imminent US recession?
Just why are so many stock insiders massively
now dumping stocks for cash?
Morning Bid: Calm
prevails before inflation data, kiwi stirs
February 28, 20245
:41 AM GMT
A look at the day ahead in
European and global markets from Ankur Banerjee
An eerie calm is pervading global markets as traders await new
inflation tests later in the week, which will give the next clues on closely
watched rate outlooks in the U.S. and Europe.
There were pockets of excitement in the Asian day, however, as
New Zealand's central bank hinted at a
slightly less hawkish stance while South Korean shares kept up this month's relentless rally.
The U.S. inflation reading is due on Thursday while
the euro zone will weigh in on Friday, and both are expected to dominate market
action. Caution will be the driving force in the meantime, with futures
indicating a muted open today for European bourses.
Traders did get a shock early in the day when the
Reserve Bank of New Zealand trimmed its projected policy path for future rates.
That was enough to spark a rally in New Zealand
bonds, as markets sharply scaled back the risk of further hikes, as well as a
1% dip in the Kiwi to its lowest in nearly two weeks.
Asian shares outside Japan (.MIAPJ0000PUS) were a tad lower, while the
Nikkei (.N225) was taking a breather after
scaling record peaks and closing in on its next target at 40,000.
South Korean stocks (.KS11) are on a tear, up 1% on the
day and about 6% in February, lifted by the AI frenzy and authorities' moves
this week to boost shareholder returns and reduce the "Korea
discount".
Earnings at Reckitt Benckiser (RKT.L), maker of Dettol and Lysol
cleaning products, are the main event on the corporate diary, with a focus on
how consumer demand is faring in the face of rising prices.
Two of the world's top
consumer goods companies, Danone and Nestle, said last week
they would slow the pace of price increases this year, after two years of hikes
led many shoppers to seek cheaper alternatives.
The M&A chase for Britain's
Currys (CURY.L) heats up after the
electrical retailer rejected an improved 757 million pound ($959 million) bid
from U.S. investor Elliott Advisors. China-based online retailer JD.com (9618.HK) has said it is also
considering an offer.
Key developments that could
influence markets on Wednesday:
Economic events: Feb euro zone economic, industrial and services
sentiment as well as euro zone consumer confidence for Feb
Earnings: Reckitt Benckiser (RKT.L)
Morning
Bid: Calm prevails before inflation data, kiwi stirs | Reuters
Asia-Pacific markets mostly lower; Hong Kong
property stocks rally on budget announcement
UPDATED TUE, FEB 27 2024 11:13 PM EST
Asia-Pacific stock markets were mostly lower
Wednesday as New Zealand’s central bank kept its interest rate steady, while
Hong Kong’s property index rallied after the city’s budget announcement.
Hong Kong said
it would do away with property curbs in an effort to buoy its
real estate sector. Financial Secretary Paul Chan said he expected the
economy to grow in a range of 2.5% to 3.5% this year.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index dipped
0.2%, while the Hang Seng Property index jumped nearly 2%.
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand held its official cash rate at
5.50%, keeping it at a 15-year high, while warning that inflation
remained well above its target range.
China’s manufacturing purchasing
managers’ index reading and the U.S. personal consumption expenditures
price index — the Federal
Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge — are due Thursday.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 was
flat, while New Zealand’s benchmark S&P/NZX 50
index rose
0.5% after the RBNZ decision.
The CSI 300 index fell 0.3%.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 was
flat and the broader Topix inched 0.1% higher. The Nikkei 225 had hit a record
high earlier in the week.
South Korea’s Kospi rose
nearly 1%, rising after two straight days of declines. The smaller-cap Kosdaq
added 1.2%.
The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite ended
Tuesday with small gains as investors awaited key inflation data to be released
later this week.
The S&P 500 inched
up 0.17%, while the Nasdaq added
0.37%. The Dow Jones
Industrial Average fell
96.82 points, or 0.25%.
Asia markets fall,
New Zealand central bank holds rate steady (cnbc.com)
Stock futures inch lower Tuesday night as
investors await fresh inflation data: Live updates
UPDATED TUE, FEB 27 2024 7:50 PM EST
Stock futures ticked lower on Tuesday evening as
investors looked ahead to a key inflation report due later this week.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones
Industrial Average slipped
40 points, or 0.1%. S&P 500
futures pulled
back 0.04%, while Nasdaq 100 futures slid
0.09%.
In after-hours trading, online
marketplace eBay jumped
more than 3% after announcing that it was raising its quarterly dividend and would spend an
additional $2 billion on buybacks. Urban Outfitters lost
10% after missing estimates on the top and bottom lines in the fourth quarter.
In Tuesday’s regular session, the S&P 500 and
the Nasdaq Composite ended
the day with small gains, up 0.17% and 0.37%, respectively. The 30-stock Dow fell
for a second straight day, off by 0.25%.
The S&P 500 and the Dow are
off the highs they just notched late last week, but investors may want to think
twice before they aggressively ramp up on equities.
“I just don’t think you chase at
this point,” Drew Pettit, director of U.S. equity strategy at Citi, said on
CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime.”
“A lot of good news is getting priced in – we are actually trading up even
though the reporting season really hasn’t been great; we really haven’t had a
lot of broad beats and broad raises.”
More
Stock market today: Live updates (cnbc.com)
Finally, more on so you really, really, really want to own an EV. (Do/can EVs have turbos?)
Porsche Taycan Turbos Have
Lost Up To $100,000 Value In 4 Years
This
high-performance, German EV has taken a big drop in value
February
23, 2024
Depreciation is hitting EVs harder than most other
vehicles. A combination of
technology upgrades, price fluctuations on new cars, and lack of demand has
meant a rapid drop in value for many electric models. This phenomenon is
especially dramatic for Porsche’s Taycan EV, with high-spec Turbo models losing almost $100,000 in
value within four years.
The
Porsche Taycan, first launched in 2019, was to be the German automaker’s
attempt to take on the super popular Tesla Model S. While the Taycan offered
solid build quality and a driving experience that you would expect from the
maker of some legendary sports cars, the EV model was expensive. Porsche
decided to launch the model with the top-of-the-range Turbo and Turbo S
versions with starting prices of $151,000 and $185,000 respectively, and that
is before you start checking off all the option boxes. Porsche later expanded
the model range to include more “reasonably” priced models from the base Taycan
to the 4S, and GTS trims. Buyers could even opt for the SportTurismo wagon body
style.
There is an updated Taycan on its way for 2025 that will
provide even more power and faster charging, but this upgrade comes at a price with MSRPs starting
at $101,395 for a “base” spec all the way up to the Turbo S Sport Turismo with
a sticker price of $213,695. But even if you have that kind of cash, a savvy
shopper for a six-figure performance EV should look into the
pre-owned market because they could save serious money.
Here
is a sampling of three-to-four-year-old Taycaon Turbo and Turbo S models that
illustrate the massive depreciation.
----Here we have a Porsche Certified 2020
Turbo with just under 15,000 miles with a current asking price of $89,998 and
an original MSRP of $179,630. That’s a drop of $89,632
Porsche Taycan Turbos Have Lost Up To $100,000 Value
In 4 Years (jalopnik.com)
Apple
to Wind Down Electric Car Effort After Decadelong Odyssey
February
27, 2024
(Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. is
canceling a decadelong effort to build an electric car, according to people
with knowledge of the matter, abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in
the history of the company.
Apple made the disclosure internally
Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project, said the
people, who asked not to be identified because the announcement wasn’t public.
The decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin
Lynch, a vice president in charge of the effort, according to the people.
The two executives told staffers that the
project will begin winding down and that many employees on the car team — known
as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial
intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will
focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company.
More
Apple to Wind Down Electric Car Effort After Decadelong Odyssey (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.
Japan's inflation
beats forecasts, end of negative rates in sight
By Tetsushi
Kajimoto and Takahiko Wada February 27, 2024 1:46
AM GMT
TOKYO, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Japan's core consumer inflation slowed for a
third straight month in January but beat forecasts and held at the central
bank's 2% target, keeping alive expectations it will end negative interest
rates by April.
The 2.0% gain in the core consumer prices index (CPI) was slower than
the 2.3% increase in December, internal affairs and communications ministry
data showed on Tuesday, underscoring views waning cost-push inflation from
commodity imports could ease the pain of higher living costs.
However, the gain beat median market forecasts for a 1.8% rise,
reaffirming expectations hefty pay hikes will be offered by big firms at
labour-management wage talks on March 13 that would pave the way for the Bank
of Japan (BOJ) to end negative interest rates in March or April.
"The January CPI leaves open the possibility of the BOJ hiking its
policy rate at the March meeting if preliminary Shunto results due a few days
before the meeting are encouraging," said Marcel Thieliant at Capital
Economics, referring to Japanese name for the wage talks.
Japan's core consumer price index includes oil products but excludes
fresh food prices.
The slowdown was due in part to a big drop in energy costs, reflecting
the base effect of last year's sharp rise and government subsidies to curb
gasoline and utility bills, in a sign of waning cost-push pressure that had
kept core inflation at or above the BOJ's 2% target since April 2022.
More
Japan's inflation beats forecasts, end of negative rates in sight | Reuters
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Mandating COVID-19 vaccines for some Queensland frontline workers
found to be unlawful, judge rules
February 27, 2024
A judge has ruled that mandating COVID-19
vaccines for some Queensland frontline workers was unlawful based on human
rights grounds.
Dozens of Queensland Police Service (QPS) and
Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS) staff challenged their workplace mandates in
the Supreme Court in 2022, after they refused to comply with the directives.
The two groups were testing the legality of the
directions on several grounds of the Judicial Review Act (JRA) and the Human
Rights Act (HRA).
On Tuesday, Justice Glenn Martin found the
applicants "had not established any ground under the JRA of
unreasonableness".
However, he did find the directives breached
section 58 of the HRA, which states that all public service employees must give
proper consideration to human rights before making a decision, and that they
must act and make decisions that are compatible with human rights.
In a written decision, Justice Martin
determined the commissioner of police failed to comply with this section of the
act — despite being provided human rights compatibility assessments — and based
on this, declared that the QPS directions were unlawful.
Justice Martin also found the director-general
of the Department of Health was not able to prove he had the power to make the
direction under an implied term of the QAS employment agreement. Due to this,
the direction was found to be of no effect and had "no force".
Arguments were also made by the applicants
about breaches of section 17 of the HRA, which says people should not be
subjected to medical treatment without full, free and informed consent.
However, Justice Martin ruled that this human
rights limit was reasonable when weighing all the circumstances.
QAS workers were required to have received two
doses of the vaccine by December 2021.
The QPS staff deadline to be fully vaccinated
was in January 2022 — unless an approved exemption was granted for medical and
religious reasons, or exceptional circumstances.
The QAS mandate was ordered to ensure staff
would not pose a significant risk to patients and the broader community, after
it was determined COVID-19 had been shown to "disproportionately affect
healthcare workers".
The QPS said it introduced its mandate for
similar public health reasons, as the nature of police work meant officers
interacted with large numbers of people across the state.
Mandates for both have since been lifted.
More
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.
Ultra-high density hydrogen storage holds twice as
much as liquid H2
Paul McClure February 20, 2024
A
nanoporous material that holds hydrogen at twice the density of cryogenic
liquid H2 could address the challenges of large-scale liquid and gas storage
that have held this clean fuel back.
Hydrogen is
finding plenty of applications as a clean fuel – in trucking and commercial
vehicles, short range aviation and shipping, for example, where it carries
considerably more energy per weight and volume than lithium batteries and can
deliver superior range figures and quick refueling. You can burn it more or
less like gasoline, or run it through a fuel cell to generate electric power.
It has the highest
energy per mass of any fuel, but it's a
pain to store. Keep it in gas tanks and you'll need some 700 atmospheres' worth
of compression. Keep it as a liquid, and you'll need to maintain cryogenic
temperatures just 20 degrees above absolute zero. And even when squashed into a
supercooled liquid, it might be lightweight, but it takes up a surprising and
inconvenient amount of volume, making it both energy-hungry and tough to
package where space is an issue.
Now, Korean researchers say
they've created a material that stores hydrogen at double the density of its
cryogenic liquid form. “Our innovative material represents a paradigm shift in
the realm of hydrogen storage, offering a compelling alternative to traditional
approaches,” said Hyunchul Oh, from the Ulsan National Institute of Science and
Technology (UNIST), lead author on this new research.
As a
molecule, hydrogen can physically adsorb into a porous material in a process
called physisorption. Highly porous materials have previously demonstrated the
ability to store a large amount of hydrogen per unit mass, but they've
struggled to store a lot of energy within a small volume.
Until now.
The team synthesized nanoporous magnesium borohydride (Mg(BH4)2),
a framework with partially negatively-charged hydrogen atoms forming the
nanopore’s inner surface, enabling the uptake of hydrogen and nitrogen.
Although both nitrogen and hydrogen can enter the pores, the researchers found
that the gas uptake for hydrogen was larger by a factor of three as both occupy
different adsorption sites in the pores.
More
Ultra-high density hydrogen storage holds twice as
much as liquid H2 (newatlas.com)
Take calculated risks. That
is quite different from being rash.
General George Patton.
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