Baltic
Dry Index. 1388 +83 Brent Crude 65.41
Spot
Gold 3204 U S 2
Year Yield 3.98 +02
US
Federal Debt. 36.859 trillion!!!
So,
when the public debt crosses the $37 trillion mark in the next few months, it
will be accurate to say that you haven’t seen anything yet. We will be well
north of the $40 trillion debt mark sometime in 2025 and, when you add the
GOP/Trump planned $10 trillion of new red ink to CBO’s latest optimistic
baseline forecast, the public debt will be pushing $70 trillion by the
mid-2030s.
David
Stockman. Davidstockmancontracorner.
In the US stock
casinos, more disconnect from the real economy as rating agency Moody’s
downgrades Uncle Scam’s credit rating and US consumer confidence collapse to
its second lowest reading ever.
Dinosaur Graeme expects
a summer stock catastrophe lies ahead in the stock casinos.
S&P
500 posts fifth winning day, notches 5% weekly gain as U.S.-China trade
tensions ease: Live updates
Updated
Fri, May 16 2025 4:17 PM EDT
The S&P
500 rose Friday for a fifth session and posted a sharp weekly gain, as
investors looked past the release of disappointing consumer sentiment data and
persistent inflation worry.
The broad market index climbed 0.70% to end at
5,958.38, while the Nasdaq
Composite gained 0.52% to close at 19,211.10. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained
331.99 points, or 0.78%, settling at 42,654.74. Friday’s advance put the
30-stock benchmark into positive territory for 2025.
For the week, the S&P 500 surged 5.3%, and the
Dow gained 3.4%. The Nasdaq Composite jumped 7.2% this week. Technology stocks
also had a strong week. Shares of Nvidia gained about 16%,
while Meta Platforms advanced
8%. Shares of Apple climbed
6%, while Microsoft popped
3%.
The major averages rose even after the University of
Michigan’s consumer sentiment index came in at its second-lowest level on
record. Consumers also see prices rising 7.3% over the next year, up from 6.5%
last month.
Stocks have made a strong comeback since U.S. and
Chinese officials earlier this week agreed on a 90-day truce in their tariff
measures, which eased investors’ fears of escalating global trade tensions and
rising risk to the economy.
“Markets are repricing the stagflation risk right
now — what was once the base case for folks who were sure that tariffs were
going to shoot inflation skyward immediately, really hasn’t been supported
in the data,” said Jamie Cox, managing partner at Harris Financial Group. “The
U.S. consumer may say he/she is worried, but they aren’t spending like they
are. Consumption trumps all once you filter out all the noise.”
Wall Street is also hoping that there will be more
clarity on the trade front in the weeks ahead.
President Donald Trump said Friday that his
administration will send letters to many countries detailing new tariff rates,
possibly over the next two to three weeks. Those letters would take the place
of trade negotiations with countries where the U.S. doesn’t have time to meet.
Stock
market today: Live updates
Moody’s
downgrades United States credit rating, citing growth in government debt
Published
Fri, May 16 2025 4:52 PM EDT
Moody’s Ratings cut the United
States’ sovereign credit rating down one notch to Aa1
from Aaa, the highest possible, citing the growing burden of financing the
federal government’s budget deficit and the rising cost of rolling over
existing debt amid high interest rates.
“This
one-notch downgrade on our 21-notch rating scale reflects the increase over
more than a decade in government debt and interest payment ratios to levels
that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns,” the rating
agency said in a statement.
The
decision to lower the United States credit profile would be expected, at the
margin, to lift the yield that investors demand in order to buy U.S. Treasury
debt to reflect more risk, and could dampen sentiment toward owning U.S.
assets, including stocks. That said, all the major credit rating agencies
continue to give the United States their second-highest available rating.
The
yield on the benchmark 10-year
Treasury note climbed 3 basis points in after-hours trading, trading
at 4.48%. The iShares 20+ Year
Treasury Bond ETF — a proxy for longer term debt prices — fell about
1% in after hours trading, while the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust that
tracks the benchmark index for U.S. stocks dropped 0.4%.
Moody’s
had been a holdout in keeping U.S. sovereign debt at the highest credit rating
possible, and brings the 116-year-old agency into line with its rivals.
Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. to AA+ from AAA in August 2011, and
Fitch Ratings also cut the U.S. rating to AA+ from AAA, in August 2023.
“Successive
U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse
the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” Moody’s
analysts said in a statement. “We do not believe that material multi-year
reductions in mandatory spending and deficits will result from current fiscal
proposals under consideration.”
Massive
deficit
The
U.S. is running a massive budget deficit as interest costs for Treasury debt
continued to rise due to a combination of higher rates and more principal debt
to finance. The fiscal deficit in the year that began October 1 is already
running at $1.05 trillion, 13% higher than a year ago. Revenue from tariffs
helped shave some of the imbalance last month.
In
its statement accompanying the downgrade, Moody’s analysts wrote that, “If the
2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case, it will add
around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments)
deficit over the next decade.”
“As
a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by
2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on
debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation,”
Moody’s said. ″We anticipate that the federal debt burden will rise to about
134% of GDP by 2035, compared to 98% in 2024.″
The
Moody’s downgrade came as the GOP-led House Budget Committee on Friday rejected
a sweeping tax cut package as part of President Donald Trump’s economic agenda,
including extending tax cuts first enacted in 2017.
More
Moody's
lowers U.S. credit rating to 'Aa1'
In other news.
How
UK state pension compares to the rest of Europe
UK pays out up to £802.32 per month, ranking 16th on
a list of 30 European countries when comparing income against the cost of
living
Spanish pensioners enjoy the most comfortable
retirement in Europe, with their maximum monthly state pension almost three times
higher than in Britain despite the cost of living being higher in the UK.
The UK pays out a maximum £802.32 per month to
retirees, according to data by financial advisers Almond Financial, ranking
16th on a list of 30 European countries on the pension breakeven index, which
compares state pension income against the cost of living in each country.
The data released in September was calculated on the
basis that most pensioners in these countries are mortgage-free.
The estimated monthly cost of living, including food
shopping and energy bills but excluding rent, for a single person in the
UK was £688.04 at the time, according to Numbeo, a comparison website that
provides crowdsourced data of the cost of living in major cities.
More
How UK state pension compares to the rest of Europe
The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put
the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of
the politicians.
Henry Hazlitt
Global
Inflation/Stagflation/Recession Watch.
Given our Magic Money
Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation/recession now needs an entire
section of its own.
Consumer
sentiment slides to second-lowest on record as inflation expectations jump
after tariffs
Published Fri, May 16 2025 10:08 AM EDT Updated Fri,
May 16 2025 12:43 PM EDT
U.S. consumers are becoming increasingly worried
that tariffs will lead to higher inflation, according to a University of
Michigan survey released
Friday.
The index of consumer sentiment dropped to 50.8,
down from 52.2 in April, in the preliminary reading for May. That is the
second-lowest reading on record, behind June 2022.
The outlook for price changes also moved in the
wrong direction. Year-ahead inflation expectations rose to 7.3% from 6.5% last
month, while long-term inflation expectations ticked up to 4.6% from 4.4%.
However, the majority of the survey was completed
before the U.S. and China announced a 90-day
pause on most tariffs between the two countries. The trade situation
appears to be a key factor weighing on consumer sentiment.
“Tariffs were spontaneously mentioned by nearly
three-quarters of consumers, up from almost 60% in April; uncertainty over
trade policy continues to dominate consumers’ thinking about the economy,”
Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, said in the release.
Inflation expectations are closely watched by
investors and policymakers. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has said the
central bank wants to make sure long-term inflation expectations do not rise
because of tariffs before resuming rate cuts.
Even with the pauses on import levies against China
and other countries, the effective tariff rate for goods entering the United
States is still significantly higher today than it was before President Donald Trump’s inauguration in
January. Economists on both sides of the aisle mostly agree that tariffs could
lead to a short-term rise in prices, though the extent of that increase and
whether it would fuel long-term inflation remains unclear.
Recent inflation data has not shown a tariff bump,
as both the consumer
price index and producer price index for April came in below consensus
estimates.
A final consumer sentiment index for the month is
slated to be released on May 30, and will likely be closely watched to see if
the tariff pause led to an improvement in sentiment.
Consumer
sentiment slides to second-lowest on record as inflation expectations jump
after tariffs
Technology
Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
Breakthrough shrinks fusion power plant and expands practicality
By David Szondy May 10, 2025
Commercial fusion power plants may be cheaper and easier to build
thanks to a breakthrough by TAE Technologies that allows reactors to generate
their own containment fields without the need for massive magnetic coils and
other systems.
Practical fusion power has been touted as only 25 years in the
future ever since 1945, but there are some bright spots on the horizon that
suggest that it could come to pass as soon as the next decade.
Part of the problem has been that the tokamak reactor,
the front-runner design for a fusion power plant, has become a bit like that
home extension that got out of hand and sucked up a lot more time and money
than originally budgeted for until you wish you'd never started it in the first
place.
First conceived of by Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov in the 1950s,
tokamaks use a toroidal magnetic field to contain the hydrogen plasma to help
keep it at the sun-like pressure and temperature needed to ignite fusion. The
problem is that over decades of development tokamak designs have become
gigantic, with huge, complicated superconducting magnetic coils to generate the
containment fields along with equally complex and huge electromagnetic heating
systems.
The result is that the largest tokamak weighs
in at 23,000 tonnes and is still a long way from being practical.
Using a different type of fusion reaction combined with a new
reactor design, TAE says that it's come up with a simpler, more efficient way
to build a commercial reactor compared to a tokamak. It does this by dumping
the toroidal field in favor of a linear one that is based on what is called the
Field-Reversed Configuration (FRC) principle.
Essentially, FRC does away with the massive magnetic coils by
making the plasma produce its own magnetic containment field. After
accelerating high-energy ions of hydrogen and then giving them an electrically
neutral charge, these are injected as a beam into the plasma. On colliding with
the plasma, the beam particles are re-ionized, while the collision energy heats
the plasma.
The clever bit is that this sets up toroidal currents in the
plasma. As these intensify, the magnetic field used initially to contain the
plasma inverts and the plasma starts generating its own containment field. This
field can be configured in real-time for stability and adjusting the pressure
as required.
According to TAE, an FRC reactor can produce up to 100 times more
fusion power output than a tokamak based on the same magnetic field strength
and plasma volume. This allows for a surprisingly simple linear reactor design
that is cheaper to build and operate. Using a new neutral beam injection
system, the company says that it has been able to improve on a previous
experimental reactor, reducing the machine’s size and complexity while slashing
the costs by 50%.
In addition, FRC allows a reactor to run on proton-boron
aneutronic fusion. That is, a fusion reaction that fuses a hydrogen nucleus and
a boron-11 atom instead of two atoms of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and
tritium. It's called aneutronic because
instead of producing a neutron, the reaction p+¹¹B→3α+8.7MeV produces three
alpha particles (helium-4 nuclei) plus a lot of energy.
This is attractive because the fewer neutrons the less damage is
done to the reactor, the energy being released as charged particles is easier
to harness, less shielding is required, and boron-11 is relatively abundant and
is not radioactive.
The new reactor is called Norm because it's significantly shorter
than Norman, its predecessor. This is because the new FRC system allowed the
engineers to dump the long quartz tubes at either end of the chamber that were
used for plasma creation through supersonic collisions during plasma injection.
The data from Norm will be used to inform construction of the next
reactor, Copernicus, which will lead to Da Vinci (never mind that Vinci was
where Leonardo was from, not his name, but there you are), TAE's commercial
prototype that is expected to enter service in the next decade.
"With Norm, we have mastered the remaining complexities of
the FRC, and through its successful operation, TAE has materially de-risked
Copernicus," said TAE CEO Michl Binderbauer. "The NBI-only
achievement is an inflection point for TAE’s fusion R&D, charting a path
for streamlined devices that directly addresses the commercially critical
metrics of cost, efficiency and reliability. This milestone significantly
accelerates TAE’s path to commercial hydrogen-boron fusion that will deliver a
safe, clean and virtually limitless energy source for generations to
come."
The research was published in Nature
Communications.
Source: TAE
Technologies
Fusion power
breakthrough promises cheaper and simpler reactors
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt Clocks (usdebtclock.org)
This
weekend’s music diversion. Approx. 9 minutes.
Johann
Christoph Förster (1693-1745) - Concerto ex Dis dur
Johann Christoph
Förster (1693-1745) - Concerto ex Dis dur
This
weekend’s tariff and shipping diversion. US shipping fraud on China. Approx. 13
minutes.
China
REJECTS 300,000 Tons Of U.S Soybeans Disguised As Argentine! $200 MILLION Trade
Fraud EXPOSED
Next,
what happened to those Trijets? Approx.
14 minutes.
Trijets
Changed Everything - Until They Didn’t
Trijets Changed
Everything - Until They Didn’t - YouTube
Finally,
that India v Pakistan May 7th “dogfight” explained. Approx.8
minutes.
How
Pakistan's ABC System Downed Rafale?
How Pakistan's ABC
System Downed Rafale? - YouTube
It is extraordinary how many emotional storms one may weather in
safety if one is ballasted with ever so little gold.
William McFee
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