Baltic
Dry Index. 976 -52 Brent Crude 72.68
Spot Gold 2604 US 2 Year Yield 4.32 -0.03
Buy low and sell high. It's pretty simple. The problem is knowing what's low and what's high.
Jim Rogers.
More Wobble or the everything bubble top? Is the deep state out to sink Trump or is it just the end of the Covid 19 “free” money bubble?
Asia markets mostly fall as investors assess China
rate decision; Australian stocks hit 3-month low
Updated Fri, Dec 20 2024 1:42 AM EST
Asia-Pacific markets mostly fell on Friday
as investors digest inflation data out of Japan, as well as an interest rate
decision out of China.
The People’s Bank of China held
its loan prime rates steady on Friday, leaving the one-year rate
unchanged at 3.1% and the five-year rate at 3.6%.
The one-year LPR influences corporate
loans and most household loans in China, while the five-year LPR serves as a
benchmark for mortgage rates.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index rose 0.16%
after the LPR decision, while mainland China’s CSI 300 dropped 0.41%.
Japan also released its November inflation
numbers, a day after the Bank of Japan held
rates at 0.25%.
The core inflation rate in the country —
which strips out prices of fresh food — came in at 2.7%, slightly higher than the 2.6% expected
from economists polled by Reuters
Headline inflation came in at 2.9%, higher
than the 2.3%
seen in October.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 0.29% after
the inflation reading and closed at 38,701.9, while the broad-based Topix
slipped 0.44% and finished at 2,701.99.
South Korea’s Kospi was down 1.3% to end
at 2,404.15, and the small cap Kosdaq lost 2.35% to 668.31, leading Asian
losses.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 fell 1.24%
to close at 8,067, its lowest closing level since September.
Overnight in the U.S., the Dow Jones Industrial Average narrowly
snapped its longest losing streak since 1974 on Thursday.
The 30-stock Dow added 0.04%, but other
major U.S. indexes fell, with the S&P 500 down 0.09% and
the Nasdaq Composite falling
0.10%.
The 10-year Treasury yield also rose for a
second day, topping 4.5% and pressuring stocks. The benchmark yield surged more
than 13 points in the previous session.
Asia markets live: China LPR, Japan CPI
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.
Bank
of England holds interest rates and downgrades growth forecasts
Thursday
19 December 2024 12:03 pm | Updated: Thursday
19 December 2024 12:31 pm
The
Bank of England held interest rates at 4.75 per cent today, while downgrading
economic forecasts for the UK towards stagnant growth.
Only
six members of the Bank’s
Monetary Policy Committee voted to keep interest rates steady, less than
had been expected, as three voted to cut rates by 0.25 per cent citing fears
over a weaker economy.
The
Bank slashed
UK growth forecasts for the last quarter of 2024 to zero, down from its
estimate last month of a 0.3 per cent rise. GDP fell by 0.1 per cent in both
September and October.
“The
prospective increase in labour costs from higher National Insurance
contributions from next April, announced in the Budget, is currently weighing
heavily on sentiment,” the Bank said.
Companies
are considering cutting their headcount, accelerating investment in automation,
and offshoring labour to deal with the National Insurance hike, it added.
Despite
sour prospects for growth, fears over inflation
continue to plague the
Bank, as it stated that early reactions to the Budget suggested a “risk of
greater upward pressure” on inflation than previously thought.
Provisions
introduced in the Budget are expected to “push prices up – notably for the food
and drink, hospitality, leisure and care sectors – and CPI inflation higher next
year”, it said.
Meanwhile,
forecasted increases in pay for next year were raised to three to four per
cent, up from two to four per cent in the previous estimates.
The
news came following higher-than-expected earnings data from the Office for
National Statistics earlier this week, which came in at 5.4 per cent, compared
to the 4.6 per cent forecast by markets.
Inflation data, also
released earlier this week, revealed that prices had increased by 2.6 per cent
throughout November, up from 2.3 per cent in October.
The
Bank expected inflation to continue to tick up in the near term, with the
Budget expected to up the rate of price increases by 0.5 per cent.
More
Bank of England
holds interest rates and downgrades growth forecasts
Germany
and France are in crisis – is the next global financial crash brewing?
19
December 2024
Things
are not quite going according to plan for Rachel Reeves. The economy has contracted for the past
two months and inflation is proving hard
to shift.
The first Labour budget in more than 14 years received a frosty reception. But
everything is relative; at least the chancellor had no trouble getting her
measures through parliament, which is more than can be
said for
Emmanuel Macron in France. And if opposition MPs at Westminster were to call a
vote of no confidence, Labour’s massive majority means it would be spared the defeat
suffered by Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, earlier this week.
In
Germany and France, support is growing for parties of the hard right and the
hard left, and it is not difficult to see why. A crisis that affected countries
on the periphery of the 20-nation eurozone 15 years ago – Greece, Portugal and
Ireland – has now worked its way to the core of the single currency zone. Let’s
be clear: France is not the new Greece. The European Central Bank would probably
step in to
buy French bonds in the event of a full-scale speculative attack, and is now
better equipped to do so than during the last crisis.
Even
so, there are signs of history repeating itself. The global financial crisis
that erupted in 2008 didn’t appear out of nowhere, and there were plenty of
warning signs in the 1990s – from Mexico to Thailand, and from South Korea to
Russia – of trouble ahead. In spite of these red flags, few imagined that the
crisis would spread to the world’s biggest economy the US, until it was too
late. There are red flags flying now too. It matters that Scholz faces
being ousted as
chancellor in February’s snap election, and it matters that Macron can only get
MPs to pass a stopgap budget. These are not minor squalls; they are signs of a
coming storm.
The
problem for the eurozone’s big two is that they have near-stagnant economies
alongside generous social welfare systems that date back to the postwar
decades, when growth was still strong. Low levels of unemployment ensured there
were the tax revenues needed to pay for pensions and other benefits. The
arrival of the baby-boomer generation meant there were plenty of workers for
each retiree. The US picked up most of the tab for Europe’s defence during the
cold war, allowing European governments to prioritise welfare spending. But
those favourable conditions no longer apply. Birthrates have fallen, and the
baby boomers are getting older. Europe is being forced to dig deeper to pay for
its own defence in the face of the threat posed by Russia.
Most
important of all, growth rates have slumped. Germany’s economy is no
bigger now
than it was before the start of the Covid pandemic, five years ago; over the
same period France has grown by less
than 1% a year on
average. Stagnant living standards mean unhappy voters, as Scholz has found to
his cost. Weak growth also means governments have difficulty balancing the
books, leading to pressure to cut benefits and raise taxes. As Macron is
finding, this approach doesn’t go down well either.
The
eurozone wasn’t supposed to pan out like this. The rationale for the single
currency when it was launched a quarter of a century ago was that it would lead
to faster growth and close the gap in living standards with the US. In fact,
the opposite
has happened:
growth rates have been weak and the gap with the US has widened.
Design
flaws in the euro were obvious from the outset: it was a one-size-fits-all
approach for countries that had different needs, and it was based on the
neoliberal principles that low inflation and balanced budgets would deliver
stronger growth. The lack of a common fiscal policy to redistribute resources
from richer to poorer eurozone countries hasn’t helped either.
The
euro’s failure to deliver has had significant consequences. First, slow growth
has made member states more conservative and more resistant to change. Europe
has lacked the dynamism of the US and has stuck with old industries for far too
long. That is especially true of Germany, which has been painfully slow to
enter the digital age and to recognise the threat to its fossil-fuel-dominated
auto companies. Second, while there has been some recognition of the need for
change, it is not obvious that it will actually materialise.
More
Germany and France are in crisis – is the next global financial crash brewing?
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
How Many Lives Were Lost to COVID-19? A Look Back Nearly 5 Years Later
December 19, 2024
What's
New
Deaths from COVID-19 have
slowed significantly but continue adding to a tally of more than 7 million
deaths from the virus in the nearly five years since the World Health
Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic.
Why
It Matters
The world was transformed
by the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Business
as usual ground to a halt when the WHO declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020,
about four months after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China.
Since the pandemic was
affirmed, the WHO reports that around 777
million people have been infected by the virus worldwide, giving the illness an
overall worldwide mortality rate of a little less than 1 percent—much higher than common ailments like the flu.
What
To Know
In the United States, at
least 103 million COVID-19 cases have been reported since the pandemic began.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that at least 1.21
million people have officially died of the illness in the U.S., although the
actual number of deaths could be higher.
While the WHO's worldwide
confirmed death toll is 7,077,725 through December 1, the organization estimates that there were a massive 14.9 million "excess deaths"
associated with the virus in 2020 and 2021 alone. The figure includes both
confirmed COVID-19 deaths and indirect ones caused by "the pandemic's
impact on health systems and society."
A meta-analysis of seven
COVID-19 studies, published by medical
journal Cureus in August 2023, found that people who are
unvaccinated are 2.46 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than those who are
vaccinated.
In addition to deaths,
COVID-19 has seriously harmed the long-term health of many of those infected,
due to complications like "long COVID" and the COVID-associated
children's inflammatory syndrome MIS-C.
More
How Many Lives Were Lost to COVID-19? A Look Back Nearly 5 Years Later
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.
Fluorination
strategy unlocks graphene's potential for optoelectronic and energy
applications
18
December 2024
Researchers
from Tohoku University and collaborators have developed a weak fluorination
strategy to address the zero-bandgap limitation of graphene. Details of the
research were published in the journal Applied Physics
Letters.
In
most electronic materials, a "gate," i.e., a bandgap, exists that can
either stop or allow electricity to pass. This is how we control electricity in
things like computers or phones. But graphene has no such gate, meaning it
conducts electricity continuously and cannot be turned off.
To
counteract this, scientists have often added a small amount of fluorine atoms
to graphene, slightly changing its structure and introducing a bandgap, without
damaging its core advantages. Fluorination, however, relies on the use of
hazardous chemicals, rendering it dangerous and impractical to apply on a large
scale.
"We
developed an environmentally-friendly approach, one where we utilized
fluoropolymers under controlled conditions to achieve selective
fluorination," said Dr. Yaping Qi, assistant professor at Tohoku
University. "This advancement also enables enhanced photoluminescence and
tunable transport properties while maintaining high carrier mobility, making
graphene more applicable for use in optoelectronic and energy devices."
Qi and
her colleagues used advanced techniques, including photoluminescence (PL)
mapping and Raman spectroscopy, to analyze how fluorination changes graphene's
structure and optical properties. Their tests showed that fluorinated graphene
has improved light-emitting abilities, making it promising for use in LEDs,
sensors, and other energy technologies.
More
More
information: Yue Xue et al, Photoluminescence and transport properties of
fluorinated graphene via a weak fluorination strategy, Applied Physics
Letters (2024). DOI:
10.1063/5.0197942
Provided
by Tohoku University
Fluorination
strategy unlocks graphene's potential for optoelectronic and energy
applications
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt
Clocks (usdebtclock.org)
Another
weekend and it’s almost time to celebrate Christmas 2025. Have a great weekend
everyone.
The
last leg of a bull market always ends in hysteria; the last leg of a bear
market always ends in panic.
Jim
Rogers.
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