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To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students, I say, you too can be president of the United States.
George W. Bush
In the stock casinos, a mild attempt at a summer rally.
In US politics, the US Vice President’s coronation as the Democrat to take on Donald Trump in November.
Asia-Pacific markets trade mixed after Wall Street
gains; India budget on deck
PUBLISHED
MON, JUL 22 2024 7:42 PM EDT
Asia-Pacific markets traded mixed on Tuesday after Wall Street looked past political uncertainty to log gains overnight.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 inched up 0.61%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was 0.09% lower and the broad-based Topix advanced 0.08%.
South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.46%, while the small-cap Kosdaq climbed 0.48%. South Korea’s producer price index in June rose 2.5% year on year, compared to a 2.3% rise in May. Stocks of popular messaging app Kakao dropped 4.63% after an arrest warrant was reportedly issued for founder Brian Kim by South Korean court over allegations of market manipulation.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index slipped 0.09%, while Mainland China’s CSI 300 fell 1%.
India’s Nifty 50 and the BSE Sensex were little changed in the first hour of trading. India is slated to unveil its first budget under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third five-year term. Analysts at Barclays expect the coalition government to signal policy consistency in the budget, “showcasing continued fiscal consolidation with a marginal shift in the spending mix.”
“While maintaining focus on capex, we think the government will use increased receipts to fund higher revenue spending, balancing economic and political needs,” Barclays wrote in a recent note.
Traders in Asia will also monitor Singapore’s inflation data for June. According to economists polled by Reuters, the country’s consumer price index is expected to climb 2.7% year on year. This compares to a 3.1% rise in May.
Overnight in the U.S., the S&P 500 notched its best day since June 5 as tech shares bounced following the worst weekly loss for the index since April.
The benchmark climbed 1.08% to settle at 5,564.41 and clinch its best day since June 5, while the Nasdaq Composite advanced 1.58% to close at 18,007.57.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose
127.91 points, or 0.32%, to finish at 40,415.44.
Asia markets live updates: India budget, South Korea PPI (cnbc.com)
European markets set for mixed open ahead of batch
of earnings reports
PUBLISHED
TUE, JUL 23 2024 12:34 AM EDT
LONDON — European stocks are expected to open in mixed territory on Tuesday as investors await the latest earnings reports from regional companies.
The U.K.’s FTSE index is expected to open 12 points lower at 8,192, Germany’s DAX up 76 points at 18,490, France’s CAC 40 up 18 points at 7,639 and Italy’s FTSE MIB up 122 points at 34,984, according to data from IG.
European markets will be assessing the latest earnings from Givaudan, Thales, Alstom, Norsk Hydro, AkzoNobel, Banco de Sabadell, Randstad, Enagas and LVMH on Tuesday.
Hungary will announce its latest interest rate decision and data releases include Dutch and Irish consumer confidence figures.
Attention remains focused on the U.S. after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race on Sunday and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.
Democrats united behind Harris as the party’s front-runner for the presidential nomination Monday, a day of major fundraising for the party and for Harris’ campaign.
Asia-Pacific markets traded mixed overnight after Wall Street looked past political uncertainty to log gains on Monday. S&P 500 futures were near flat Monday night, with traders readying for earnings reports from major companies after the benchmark posted its best day in more than a month.
European markets: stocks, news, data and earnings (cnbc.com)
Majority of pledged Democratic delegates endorse
Harris after massive fundraising day
UPDATED TUE, JUL 23 2024 11:41 PM EDT
Democrats united behind Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s front-runner for the presidential nomination Monday, and their excitement translated into a juggernaut day of fundraising for the party and for Harris’ campaign.
Late Monday night, NBC News projected that Harris had won endorsements from a majority of the Democratic party’s pledged convention delegates. The threshold is 1,976 delegates, and NBC estimates that Harris has the spoken or written backing of 1,992 delegates.
While not yet formally the party’s presumptive nominee, Harris’ position as frontrunner is rock solid, and no potential challengers have signaled they intend to vie for the nomination.
In the hours since President Joe Biden announced that he would end his teetering reelection
campaign, Harris and the Democratic party have pulled in roughly $250
million in online donations and major donor commitments.
The Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue has processed $106 million in contributions to Democratic candidates since Biden dropped out, according to an automated tracker.
It is not clear yet how much of this money was given to House and Senate campaigns and how much went to the former Biden campaign, rebranded overnight as the Harris for President campaign.
In addition to the online donations, a super political action committee that supports the Biden-Harris ticket announced that over the past 24 hours, major donors have made contribution commitments totaling $150 million to the Harris election effort.
The pledges to Future Forward were described to NBC News as coming from donors who had been sitting on the sidelines for the past month, amid concerns about Biden as the nominee.
More
Majority of pledged Democratic delegates endorse Harris after massive fundraising day (cnbc.com)
In EV news, more bad news.
Hacking EVs and level 3 chargers through 1920's
technology
By Joe Salas July 20, 2024
Engineers at Southwest Research Institute have discovered a vulnerability in DC fast-charging stations that allows hackers to gain access to your electric vehicle while you're sipping a coffee.
Power line communication (PLC) is a way of sending data through existing power cables, like the electrical plugs in your home. It works by tossing a harmonic signal into the power line, then having a receiver on the other end interpret and extrapolate the data in that harmonic. IN this way, it's possible to send and receive transmissions like voice, video, and even your day-to-day internet traffic straight through your electrical wiring. This type of technology has been around since 1922.
----Level 3 DC chargers – which are the fastest means of topping up your Tesla while road tripping – use an IPv6-based protocol PLC to communicate with the car to monitor faults and collect data for everything from charge status, state of charge, to the vehicle identification number (VIN) and everything in between.
SwRI exploited vulnerabilities in the PLC
layer which granted them access to the network key and the digital addresses of
both the chargers and the vehicle using an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM)
attack that could emulate both the EV and the charging equipment.
"Through our penetration testing, we found that the PLC layer was poorly secured and lacked encryption between the vehicle and the chargers," said Katherine Kozan, the lead engineer at SwRI’s High Reliability Systems Department.
In 2020, SwRI was able to reverse engineer and hack the J1772 charger system – the most common charger type in the US – to disrupt the charging process, simulating a malicious attack. They were able to send signals to the car to mimic overcharging, adjust charging rates, or simply block charging altogether.
Level 3 hacks take everything to another
level, giving would-be hackers the potential ability to inject code into the
vehicle's firmware – the very base code that tells the vehicle how to operate –
altering its functions or disabling them altogether. Perhaps even allowing
remote access and control to black hats via the vehicle's cell-based
connectivity to the internet.
Some readers may remember the 2015 Jeep hack, where a pair of hackers from Missouri took control of an unmodified Jeep Cherokee while a Wired reporter drove down the freeway. The hackers went so far as to shut down the engine, taking control of the steering and coasting him off the freeway, before disabling the brakes. All while monitoring the car's position via GPS.
How did they get control like that?
Remotely, from just the infotainment system alone.
More
Hacking EVs and level 3 chargers through 1920's technology (newatlas.com)
Owners report more problems with EVs than gas
vehicles: JD Power
New technology in cars is driving an
increase in owner complaints, a June study found.
Published July 17, 2024
According to the study, battery electric vehicles averaged 266 problems per 100 vehicles, about 48% more than gas- and diesel-powered vehicles, which averaged 180 problems per 100 vehicles.
Tesla usually outperforms mass-market brand EVs in the survey, but this year they tied, each with an average of 266 problems per 100 vehicles. Mass-market EV brands did not substantially improve — rather, Tesla fell in its quality rating, likely influenced by the brand’s recent removal of common features, such as its recent switch to steering wheel-mounted buttons for horn and turn signal functions, J.D. Power said.
J.D. Power surveyed 99,144 purchasers and
lessees of new 2024 model-year vehicles between July 2023 and May 2024 and
after 90 days of ownership. The study also included repair visit data from
franchised new-vehicle dealerships.
The purpose of the study is to assist automakers in identifying problem areas in vehicles recently released on the market, with categories including infotainment; features, controls and displays; exterior; driving assistance; interior; powertrain; seats; driving experience; climate; and unspecified, unique issues.
Customers often identified problems with new technology, such as issues with infotaiment systems, which was the most problematic area in the study. They also called out issues with in-vehicle features and controls like windshield wiper or turn signal display buttons, false warnings from advanced driver assistance systems, difficulty connecting to the vehicle with popular apps like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and even poor smells emanating from the vehicle.
A total of 35 brands were ranked as part of the 2024 study. Ram rated highest in initial quality, followed by Chevrolet and Hyundai. Porsche ranked the highest among premium brands, followed by Lexus and Genesis.
EV makers Rivian, Tesla and Polestar round
out the bottom three overall.
Owners report more problems with EVs than gas vehicles: JD Power | Automotive Dive
The Noah rule: Predicting rain doesn't count; building arks does.
Warren Buffett.
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.
Corporate
bankruptcies at highest level since great recession
July 19, 2024
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and other Fed officials have started signaling interest rate cuts are coming, but it’s almost certainly too late to rescue a debt-ridden bubble economy addicted to easy money.
We’re already seeing the impacts of tighter monetary policy rippling through the economy with corporate bankruptcies through the first half of 2024 at the highest level in over a decade. That includes during the pandemic era in 2020 and 2021.
S&P Global called the surge of bankruptcies in June “historic” noting that it was the highest number recorded in a single month since at least the beginning of 2020.
According to S&P Global data, 75 corporations filed for bankruptcy in June alone. That drove the number of filings through the first six months of 2024 to 346, “higher than any comparable figure in the prior 13 years.”
The last time we saw bankruptcy filings at this level through the first half of a year was in 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession.
In 2023, there were 642 bankruptcy filings, also the highest number since 2010.
What is causing corporations to go bankrupt?
The first factor S&P Global mentioned was “higher interest rates,” along with supply chain issues and slowing consumer spending.
It is likely the slowdown in consumer spending is also due to higher interest rates.
As price inflation gripped the economy after the pandemic stimulus spree, Americans blew through their savings to make ends meet. Aggregate savings peaked at $2.1 trillion in August 2021. As of June 2023, the San Francisco Fed estimated that aggregate savings had dropped to $190 billion.
In other words, Americans ran through $1.9 trillion in savings in just two years.
Then they turned to credit cards. Now Americans are hitting their credit limits. Consumer debt has surged to a record $5.06 trillion with over $1 trillion in credit card bills.
Air is leaking out of the credit bubble, spending has slowed, and companies are feeling the squeeze.
Parsing the corporate bankruptcy filing data, it appears we are in the early stages of an economic meltdown. Most of the filings were in the consumer discretionary sector made up of companies manufacturing goods or providing services that people want but don’t need.
The consumer discretionary category includes hotels, restaurants, clothing retailers, sporting goods sellers, media companies, etc.
The data seems to indicate that consumers are cutting back on discretionary spending as they continue to try to make ends meet in this inflationary world.
This
is what the beginning of a recession looks like.
More
Corporate bankruptcies at highest level since great recession (fxstreet.com)
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Why Covid-19 is
spreading this summer
21st July 2024
Every July for the past four years,
epidemiologists at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have
noted a sudden spike in Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations, an annual trend
which has been dubbed "the summertime surge".
This summer in the United States, Covid-19
rates are reportedly particularly high in Arizona, California, Hawaii and
Nevada. In these western states, the number of positive tests reached 15.6% on the week ending July 6th, 1% up on the previous week. The CDC’s
investigations show that viral rates in wastewater are also on the rise once again.
A similar trend has played out on the other
side of the Atlantic, where according to the UK's Health Security Agency, positive Covid-19 tests rose from 4%
at the end of March to 14% by the end of June.
The recent rise has been attributed to the FLiRT subvariants, the latest evolution of the Omicron strain of Covid-19 which emerged
towards the end of 2021. This new raft of subvariants is the inevitable consequence of the virus
trying out new mutations in its spike protein – a structure which is essential
for Covid-19's ability to enter human cells, but can also alert the human immune system to the virus' presence in the body. As a result, Covid-19 has found
more effective ways of evading the neutralising
antibodies within most of our immune systems, while
still being capable of locking onto the ACE2 receptor, a protein on human cells
in the respiratory tract which allows it to enter the body. (Find out more
about how Covid-19's symptoms have
changed as new varients have emerged.)
According to Shan-Lu Liu, who directs the
Viruses and Emerging Pathogens Program at The Ohio State University and has
studied the FLiRT subvariants, these latest Covid-19 viruses have managed to strike a balance between
escaping the immune system and still being able to bind to cells, which is
driving many of the new cases.
“The elderly and immunosuppressed are
particularly vulnerable to new subvariants due to their weakened immune
responses to vaccination and natural infection," says Liu. He explains
that experts recommend that these groups receive booster shots including the
XBB.1.5 monovalent vaccine. This was designed to target the Omicron XBB 1.5
subvariant of Covid-19, which emerged in 2022.
Given the need to protect society’s most
vulnerable, studying these continually emerging variants remains crucial for
updating the world’s Covid-19 vaccines. Based on work done by Liu and
others, US regulators and the World Health Organization have been able to make specific recommendations regarding new
vaccine targets based on the latest spike protein mutations, in time for the
latest Covid vaccine rollout in the autumn.
Yet for the scientists who monitor how
SARS-CoV-2 is evolving and changing, it is still almost impossible to predict when the next strains of note will emerge. While most common
respiratory infections like influenza or Respiratory Syncytial
Virus (RSV) follow seasonal patterns, surging during the autumn or winter months before abating in the spring
and summer, Covid-19 is yet to settle into such a distinctive cycle.
More
Why Covid-19 is spreading
this summer - BBC Future
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.
Graphene-based
brain chip offers 200x more power for Parkinson’s patients
July 22, 2024
A novel brain implant has been designed that can
both read signals and stimulate brain impulses. This is the promise of a new
technology from Inbrain Neuroelectronics, a startup based in Barcelona. Their
brain-computer interface (BCI) uses a special material called graphene to
create a high-resolution interface with the brain.
Graphene forms a two-dimensional material that is
just one atom thick, but tougher than steel. The material is composed of carbon
atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice. These remarkable properties make it a
game-changer for advancements in next-generation brain interfaces.
The company says that this brain implant could
significantly benefit Parkinson’s patients. According to IEEE Spectrum, the
health-tech company is all set to conduct its first-in-human test shortly.
BCI technology acts as a bridge between the brain
and external devices, like computers. By recording and interpreting brain
signals, BCIs have opened doors in medical diagnostics, communication for those
with speech limitations, and even controlling external equipment like robotic
limbs.
The Inbrain website mentions that roughly 30% of the world’s
population is affected by neural disorders. This innovative BCI tool aims to
offer therapeutic benefits for patients with Parkinson’s disease and
potentially other neurological disorders.
Inbrain’s CEO, Carolina Aguilar, notes a problem
with traditional BCIs made of metal. These metals experience a phenomenon
called “Faraday reactions” which causes the electrical signals to get
scrambled, making it difficult to send information back to the brain. Their new
graphene technology avoids this issue.
More
Graphene-based brain chip offers 200x more power for Parkinson’s patients
(msn.com)
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt
Clocks (usdebtclock.org)
Do not
save what is left after spending, but spend what is left after saving.
Warren
Buffett.
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