Baltic Dry Index. 1436 +02 Brent Crude 68.30
Spot
Gold 3337 U S 2
Year Yield 3.88 Thurs.
US
Federal Debt. 37.062 trillion
US
GDP 30.114 trillion
“In the Land of Toys, every day, except Sunday, is a Saturday.
Vacation begins on the first of January and ends on the last day of December.
That is the place for me! All countries should be like it! How happy we should
all be!”
President Trump, with apologies to Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio.
Tariff day for steel
is July 8th, for everything else is July 9th, or is it
August 1st?
Who knows? Apparently not even King Donald the first.
With meaningless trade deals so far with only the UK and Vietnam, the coming week will be “interesting”.
May you live in
interesting times, is a supposed Chinese curse, allegedly dating back only to
the 1920s.
Like it or not, we
are all about to live in interesting times, next week through to August 1st.
1929-1932, 2.0 here we
come!
Trump
Amps Up Tariff Pressure, and EU Scrambles to Secure a Deal
5 July 2025
President Trump said he was preparing to set
unilateral tariff rates of up to 70% that would kick in Aug. 1, delaying the
levies while putting pressure on global trade negotiations.
The European Union will hold crunch talks with the
U.S. over the weekend in an effort to secure a tentative trade agreement that
avoids the higher levies.
Officials from the European Commission, the bloc’s
executive body, told the EU’s member states on Friday that they are nearing the
outline of a potential deal with the U.S. that would leave the current 10%
tariffs on most European imports in place, people familiar with the matter
said.
EU officials held talks in Washington this past
week. The bloc is racing to do a deal before July 9, when Trump had threatened
to raise tariffs for EU imports to 50%. The talks are fluid and the details of
a potential agreement could change. It is also not certain that a deal will be
reached.
Trump said the U.S. is poised to inform many trading
partners of import duties ranging “from maybe 60% to 70% tariffs to 10% and 20%
tariffs,” putting global investors on the defensive with U.S. markets closed
for July Fourth.
The notices will be sent to countries by July 9, the
president said. That is the White House’s self-imposed deadline for ending a 90-day pause on
“reciprocal” tariffs first unveiled in April. He said the tariffs would kick in
from the start of next month, telling reporters: “They’ll start to pay on Aug.
1.”
n subsequent comments to reporters late Friday,
Trump said he has signed about a dozen letters and they will be sent out on
Monday.
The indication that tariffs will take effect in
August suggests the U.S. wants more time to continue pushing for agreements
with key trading partners such as the EU, Japan and South Korea, said Inga
Fechner, an economist at ING.
“That’s the most interesting takeaway because it
would basically mean that he would leave more room for negotiations,” Fechner
said. Big trading partners would likely retaliate if the higher tariff rates
kick in next week, she said.
So far, the administration has struck
preliminary trade pacts with the U.K. and Vietnam, and an on-again, off-again truce with China.
More
Trump
Amps Up Tariff Pressure, and EU Scrambles to Secure a Deal
Trump’s
tariffs deadline is looming for Europe. Here’s where things stand
Published
Fri, Jul 4 2025 7:05 AM EDT Updated Fri, Jul 4 2025 7:53 AM EDT
All
eyes are on talks between the U.S. and the European Union, which have yet to
strike a trade deal with just days to go before Washington’s tariffs come into
full effect.
Should
the trading partners fail to reach an agreement by July 9 — when a 90-day
reprieve on U.S. President Donald Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs ends —
EU goods imported to the U.S. could be hit by duties
of up to 50%. Retaliatory measures from the EU targeting a wide
range of U.S. goods, which have also been temporarily put on hold, could
then follow shortly afterward.
The
U.S.-EU trade relationship is one of the most important in the world,
accounting for around 30% of global goods trading according to the European Council. Medicinal and pharma products, road
vehicles and petroleum products are some of the top traded goods.
In
2024, trade between the two transatlantic partners was valued at around 1.68
trillion euros ($1.98 trillion) when taking into account both goods and
services, the European Council said.
The
EU recorded a surplus of 198 billion euros, when it comes to goods, but logged
a deficit of around 148 billion euro in the trading of services — meaning the
bloc overall had a trade surplus of around 50 billion euros in 2024.
Trump
has repeatedly taken
issue with the trade relationship between Washington and Brussels, suggesting
it is unfair and accusing the
EU of taking advantage of the U.S.
Slow
moving negotiations
U.S.-EU
negotiations have appeared to be difficult and slow to gain ground. Sources told
CNBC earlier this week that a bare-bones political deal that is light on
details may be the EU’s best hope.
European
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen seemed to echo the view on Thursday.
“What
we are aiming at is an agreement in principle,” she said, adding that a
detailed agreement was “impossible” to reach during the 90-day reprieve.
Von
der Leyen also reiterated that, if no agreement is reached, “all the
instruments are on the table.”
European
Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic meanwhile said in a social
media post on Friday said that he had had a “productive” week in
Washington D.C. meeting various U.S. officials.
“The
work continues. Our goal remains unchanged: a good and ambitious transatlantic
trade deal,” he said.
U.S.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent seemed more hesitant about the odds of a trade
agreement being struck before the deadline.
“We’ll
see what we can do with the European Union,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk on the
Street” on Thursday.
Is
a deal coming?
Experts
speaking to CNBC appeared skeptical about the short-term likelihood of a
fully-fledged deal.
----“The
detailed agreement is what it says: detailed. It can run into many pages,
[because] full trade agreements are thousands of pages, but what we could see
is heads of terms like the one that the U.S. signed with the U.K.,” he said.
More
Trump's
tariffs deadline is looming for Europe. Here's where things stand
Trump's
Vietnam pact takes aim at China — but it raises more questions than answers
Published
Fri, Jul 4 2025 6:53 AM EDT Updated Fri, Jul 4 2025 11:14 AM EDT
U.S.
President Donald Trump announced a trade pact with Vietnam on Wednesday, but
its scant details have left economists wondering about what it would mean for
the flow of Chinese goods rerouted through the country.
Trump said
Wednesday there would be a 20% tariff on goods from Vietnam and a 40%
“transshipping” tariff on goods originating in another country and transferred
to Vietnam for final shipment to the U.S.
Chinese
manufacturers have used transshipping to sidestep the hefty tariffs on its
direct shipments to the United States, using Vietnam as a major transshipment
hub.
White
House trade advisor Peter Navarro alleged that around one-third of Vietnam’s
exports are rerouted from China and described Vietnam as “essentially a colony
of communist China” in a interview with Fox News in April.
The
latest deal is an apparent strike against such rerouted shipments from China,
said Yao Jin, an associate professor of supply chain management at Miami
University.
But
enforcing targeted levies on transshipments will be a tough task for Hanoi, as
it will have to define the scope of what would qualify as “made in Vietnam” and
what constitutes transshipment.
“If
it only applies to pure transshipments — goods sent from China to the US via
Vietnamese ports, without any local assembly — then there should hardly be any
impact on Vietnam,” Frederic Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC Bank told
CNBC on Friday.
However,
if the 40% tariff applies to “all Vietnamese goods with even a minimal share of
Chinese components, the disruptions could be significant,” Neumann said.
Similarly,
Dan Wang, China director at Eurasia Group, said “it is unclear how this would
work — presumably the burden falls to Hanoi on the issuance of rules of origin
certificates — and what level of Chinese components, if that is the metric,
will be deemed too much.”
As
more Chinese manufacturers moved their production to Vietnam since Trump’s
first term, Vietnam’s trade surplus with the U.S. more than tripled to a record
high of $123.5 billion last year from less than $40 billion in
2018, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
More
Trump’s
Vietnam pact targets China, raises more questions than answers
Indian
regulator locks U.S. trading firm out of its stock market, accusing it of
‘index manipulation’ and ‘unlawful gains’
Ruling comes as
India and the U.S. struggle to grind out a trade deal
Last Updated: July 4, 2025 at 9:27 a.m. ET
U.S. proprietary trading outfit Jane Street has
been accused by the Indian Securities and Exchange Board of index
manipulation on its exchanges and walloped with a financial penalty of
around $570 million, based on its “illegal gains” as the board judged them.
Furthermore, the regulator ruled on Thursday that
“Jane Street entities are restrained from accessing the securities market and
are further prohibited from buying, selling, or otherwise dealing in
securities.”
For Jane Street, this represents a major
disappointment, considering it reaped $2.3 billion from trading in India alone
in 2024. India is an appealing market for derivative players given its high
daily turnover — volume averages $11 to 12 billion per day, according to
Mumbai-based Macquarie stockbroker Sam Rigby. The market sees heavy participation of relatively unsophisticated retail
investors in derivatives, primarily equity options trading.
For the last five years, India has been the leading
exchange for the number of contracts traded although the U.S is larger by
dollar value.
Having pursued a fairly relentless upward trajectory
and trebled in the last decade, the Indian stock market has become hugely
speculative. Owing to impressive growth rates, the world’s largest population,
huge investments in infrastructure and digitisation, a booming middle class and
the likelihood of becoming the fourth-largest economy by 2027, India has become the world’s most expensive market in
terms of the most popular valuation metric, the price-earnings ratio. It now
ranks alongside the U.S. market at 25 times.
Having outperformed other markets so comprehensively
and been a consensus overweight for emerging market fund managers for so long,
this year the benchmark Indian index, the Nifty 50 has struggled. By the
end of the first half of 2025 the index returned 7.45%, roughly half that
delivered by the MSCI Asia Pacific index.
The extent of the involvement of U.S. proprietary
trading firms and hedge funds only really became apparent during a courtroom battle last year between Millennium and Jane Street when
the latter’s profits became public.
After this disclosure, SEBI suddenly took an
interest in protecting retail investors from what they consider exploitative
strategies and warned Jane Street in February to desist from such practices.
SEBI alleged in its report that retail investors had lost $21 billion
cumulatively in three years up to 2024.
The landmark case against Jane Street comes at a
very delicate stage in tariff negotiations between Washington and Delhi. Before
the tariff pause was announced, India was hit with a 26% rate, reflecting its
large surplus with the U.S. Diplomats
and trade missions met in Washington over the last week, but talks are
going down to the wire.
For President Trump, a trade deal with India would
represent a huge coup and perhaps the Jane Street ruling is one way of India
trying to exert political leverage at this key juncture.
In shipping news. Approx.
18 minutes.
US
Container Volumes Dropped 6.9% in May | Are Bigger Drops Coming?
US Container Volumes Dropped 6.9% in May | Are Bigger Drops Coming?
In other news.
British
banking chiefs take a leaf from Elon Musk’s DOGE
Friday 04 July 2025 6:00 am
The chiefs of the UK’s Big Four banks are taking a
leaf out of the Elon Musk playbook
in their strident bid to slash costs.
Natwest’s Paul Thwaite, Lloyds’ Charlie Nunn, HSBC’s
Georges Elhedery and Barclays’ CS Venkatkrishnan are in the midst of major
cost-cutting endeavours that bear similarities to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) mission.
Musk initially pledged to save $2tn across the US
government – later halved – through aggressive measures including mass firings,
consolidating agencies and stripping back departmental budgets.
The Tesla chief centered his plans around drastic
simplification – a move echoed in the playbook of British bankers as they seek
to charm investors and boards.
William Howlett, financials analyst at Quilter
Cheviot, told City AM simplification has become a
“consistent buzzword” for lenders as they sought to streamline legacy systems.
Perhaps the most ambitious tightening of pockets comes from HSBC, where Elhedery has eyed savings of $1.5bn by the end of 2026.
Elhedery has spent his near-12 months since taking
the helm at the lender deploying strategies to reduce expenses, namely a significant scaling down of European
operations.
The lender put ten per cent staff in France on the
chopping block, sold its Canadian unit to the Royal Bank of Canada for $9.96bn
and most recently offloaded its life insurance division
for £260m.
As part of Elhedery’s plans, he split the business
into “eastern markets” covering the Asia-pacific and the Middle East and
“western” with the Americas and Europe.
Howlett said: “Banks continue to optimise where
capital is allocated in their operations to protect profitability targets by
focusing on areas where they have scale.”
International divisions at HSBC’s peers have been
ripe for the chop, with Natwest exiting from Ireland and Barclays selling its
consumer finance business in Germany.
Barclays’ move, completed in February 2025, released
around €4bn (£3.4bn) in risk weighted assets and increased the bank’s CET1
ratio – a key measure of a lender’s financial health – by ten basis points.
CS Venkatkrishnan, known as Venkat, is in the middle
of a three-year plan that targets a reduced reliance on the lender’s investment
bank, which made up over 50 per cent of its first-quarter income.
The bank tapped global consultancy giant Mckinsey in a bid to
identify cost-saving areas across its investment
arm in hopes the unit will produce a 12 per cent return on tangible equity by
2026.
More
British banking chiefs take a leaf from Elon Musk's DOGE
CEOs
Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs
July 3, 2025
CEOs are no longer dodging the question of
whether AI takes jobs. Now they are
giving predictions of how deep those cuts could go.
“Artificial intelligence is going to replace
literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,” Ford Motor Chief
Executive Jim Farley said in an interview last week with author Walter Isaacson
at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “AI will leave a lot of white-collar people
behind.”
At JPMorgan Chase, Marianne Lake, CEO of the bank’s
massive consumer and community business, told investors in May that she could
see its operations head count falling by 10% in the coming years as the company
uses new AI tools.
The comments echo recent job warnings from
executives at Amazon, Anthropic and other companies.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a note to employees
in June that he expected the company’s overall corporate workforce to be smaller in the
coming years because of the “once-in-a-lifetime” AI technology.
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs
that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy
said.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that half of
all entry-level jobs could disappear in one to five years, resulting in U.S.
unemployment of 10% to 20%, according to an interview with Axios. He urged
company executives and government officials to stop “sugarcoating” the
situation.
The Ford CEO’s comments are among the most pointed
to date from a large-company U.S. executive outside of Silicon Valley. His
remarks reflect an emerging shift in how many executives explain the potential
human cost from the technology. Until now, few corporate leaders have wanted to
publicly acknowledge the extent to which white-collar jobs could vanish.
In interviews, CEOs often hedge when asked about job
losses, noting that innovation historically creates a range of new roles.
In private, though, CEOs have spent months
whispering about how their businesses could likely be run with a fraction of
the current staff. Technologies including automation software, AI and robots
are being rolled out to make operations as lean and efficient as
possible.
Professionals will need to accept the reality that
few roles will be unchanged by AI, Micha Kaufman, CEO of the freelance
marketplace Fiverr, wrote in a memo to his staff this spring.
“This is a wake-up call,” he wrote. “It does not
matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist,
lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person—AI is coming for
you.”
Shopify Chief Executive Tobi Lütke recently told
workers that the company wouldn’t make any new hires unless managers could
prove artificial intelligence isn’t capable of doing the job.
----“I
think it’s going to destroy way more jobs than the average person thinks,”
James Reinhart, CEO of the online resale site ThredUp, said at an investor
conference in June.
Corporate advisers say executives’ views on AI are
changing almost weekly as leaders gain a better sense of what the technology
can do—and as they watch their peers more aggressively change hiring plans or
flatten corporate structures.
More
CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs
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.
Half-baked
Europe-U.S. trade deal seems likely next week, but could be changed by Trump
July 2, 2025
The art of the deal seems
to be evolving into the art of the half-deal.
When President Donald Trump three months ago announced a July 9 deadline
for countries to negotiate trade deals with the United States or face tariffs
of as much as 50 per cent, the European Union faced an industry-busting crisis.
Tariffs that high would shatter key export sectors, including cars,
pharmaceuticals and machinery, inevitably pushing the 27-country bloc into
recession.
Certainly, the EU would
take more of a battering than the U.S. if the transatlantic trade war were to
go nuclear. In 2024, the EU’s goods trade surplus with the U.S. reached US$236-billion, up 13 per cent over
the previous year, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative
(though the U.S. has a fairly hefty services surplus with the EU). Were the EU
to see the goods surplus vanish, tens of thousands of skilled jobs would also
vanish, possibly triggering social unrest; the tax base would erode.
On Wednesday, with the
deadline hanging over the EU like the Sword of Damocles, EU Trade Commissioner
Maros Sefcovic was in Washington to try to bash out a deal that would shield
the bloc from punishing, double-digit tariffs – his greatest career challenge.
He is set to return to Brussels on Friday to deliver the good or bad news.
For some time, European
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been pushing a “zero-for-zero” tariff regime, meaning that Brussels and Washington would,
in time, eliminate tariffs on industrial goods. The Trump White House has
rejected the idea for fear that a true free-trade agreement would only widen
the U.S.’s trade deficit with the EU.
What seems likely is a
quasi-deal designed to buy time and kick the sensitive issues, like trade in
pharmaceuticals, down the road. Already, the EU has signalled it will back
down, but only somewhat, by accepting a 10-per-cent baseline tariff as long as there
are reduced rates on key industrial sectors, such as aviation (Europe’s Airbus
sells a lot of passenger jets in the U.S.) and semiconductors.
The ploy may or may not
work; it would have a better chance of success if the EU were to toss Mr. Trump
a few non-tariff-barrier bones, such as scrapping the idea of taxes on U.S.
digital tech’s advertising revenue or diluting the EU biosecurity standards so
Europeans can fill their dinner tables with American chlorinated chicken.
Canada dropped the digital services tax a few days ago to restart trade
negotiations with the U.S., which had been cancelled by Mr. Trump.
Already, there are signs
that the July 9 deadline, at least with the EU and a few other countries, will
in effect slip. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the White House
would “highly likely” delay imposing punishing tariffs on any countries
negotiating trade deals “in good faith.” Mr. Trump himself has sent out mixed
signals. Last Friday, he said “we can extend” the deadline. A few days later,
he said the opposite.
A lot can happen between
now and July 9. In a note published Wednesday, ING Economics said that U.S.
protectionism “is still the name of the game” but that, in some cases, deadline
extensions will be granted. That appears to be the case with the EU, with some
sort of trade outline, but not a final deal, likely to be unveiled next week.
More
Technology
Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
With Space
Junk on the Rise, Is a Catastrophic Event Inevitable?
Debris
from rockets and satellites can fall back to Earth or collide with other
objects, and wreckage that burns up can harm the ozone layer
July 3, 2025 8:00 a.m.
When astronomer Samantha Lawler got an email from a journalist in May 2024
saying that space junk may have landed in a farmer’s field an hour’s drive from
her home in Regina, Saskatchewan, she was skeptical. “I thought, ‘Yeah, right.’
A farmer right near me found space junk—what are the odds?”
But it was true: Several pieces of a
SpaceX Dragon trunk
(the portion of the rocket just below the capsule) had landed on
the property and on nearby farms. “The longest piece was probably eight feet
long, and it weighed 80 pounds,” says Lawler, who teaches at the University of
Regina. “If that hit your house, it would go right through; it wouldn’t even
slow down.”
Lawler returned to the farm several
weeks later, when two SpaceX employees arrived in a small truck to cart away the debris. “They silently picked up the pieces and loaded
them into the U-Haul,” she says. For Lawler, the incident drove home the
growing problem of space junk—and left her with a sense of dread that’s never
quite gone away. “Actually standing next to the pieces and thinking about them
falling at terminal velocity [about 165 feet per second]—that is terrifying.”
The increasing frequency of rocket
launches is crowding the region of space closest to Earth, known as low-Earth
orbit—a zone that’s already peppered with tens of thousands of bits of
decades-old hardware, some of it dating back to the Cold War. Experts caution that the danger posed by all this
space junk is rising sharply. Incidents like the one in Saskatchewan “are going
to become much more common,” says Lawler. Eventually, she says, “someone will
die from this.”
In recent years, debris has fallen
on Australia, Indonesia, India, Ivory Coast, Uganda, Kenya, Poland and several U.S. states.
Aside from falling to Earth, objects may also smash into each other in orbit—as
happened in 2009 when two communications satellites, one of them defunct, collided some 500 miles above Siberia; such collisions create even more debris. The
International Space Station, meanwhile, was forced to dodge space junk twice in one week in 2023, and again last November.
Scientists also point to the potential
danger to commercial aviation, as well as the pollution caused by debris
burning up in the atmosphere. A report released
by the European Space Agency in April noted that about 1,200 objects re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in
2024. Experts estimate that at least 120 of these re-entries were
uncontrolled, meaning they struck the Earth at some random spot beneath their
orbital path. The agency said that more than 50,000 objects larger than ten
centimeters (about four inches) across are currently in orbit, along with about
9,300 still-active satellites.
“We’re seeing a step-change in the
amount of human activity in space,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist
at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, who has been tracking objects in space for the past four
decades.
Much of this activity comes in the form
of satellites designed to carry broadband internet to users around the world.
SpaceX has been a leading player in this effort through its “constellations”
of Starlink satellites.
“Since 2019, with the first Starlink launch, we’ve gone from 1,000 working
satellites to over 11,000 working satellites,” says McDowell. Amazon,
meanwhile, is poised to compete with Starlink with its Kuiper satellite
system; the first of these was launched in April. And China had the first
launch of its planned 13,000-satellite Guowang system last December.
More
With Space Junk on the Rise, Is a Catastrophic Event Inevitable?
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt Clocks (usdebtclock.org)
Exponent
Calculator
Enter
values into any two of the input fields to solve for the third.
This
weekend’s music diversion something different. J. P. Sousa, in honour of US
Independence Day weekend. Approx. 3 minutes.
"The
Thunderer" by John Philip Sousa | The Concert Band of The U.S. Army Field
Band
"The
Thunderer" by John Philip Sousa | The Concert Band of The U.S. Army Field
Band - YouTube
Next,
Silchester, a lost Roman town. Living about 10 miles away, I have visited
Silchester many times, although apart from the outer wall there’s not much to
see, except sheep or barley. Most of the
archaeology was reburied or moved to Reading museum. Approx.
4 minutes.
A
Walk around the Roman Town of Calleva Atrebatum
A Walk around the
Roman Town of Calleva Atrebatum
Finally, more on the AI 171 crash. Approx. 7 minutes. For those with more time
Approx. 37 minutes
Ahmedabad
Plane Crash | Pilots Recreated AI-171's Final Moments On Simulator | What They
Found
Ahmedabad Plane
Crash | Pilots Recreated AI-171's Final Moments On Simulator | What They Found
AIR
INDIA CRASH - FACTS & THEORIES
AIR INDIA CRASH -
FACTS & THEORIES #airindiacrash
“Where are the gold pieces now?' the Fairy asked.
'I lost them,' answered the Central Bankster, but he told a lie, for he had
them in his pocket.
As he spoke, his nose, long though it was, became at least two inches longer.”
With apologies to Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio.
No comments:
Post a Comment