Baltic
Dry Index. 2044 +05 Brent Crude 65.89
Spot Gold 3354 US 2 Year Yield 3.75 +0.01
US Federal Debt. 37.245 trillion
US GDP 30.208 trillion.
It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy...What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.
Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations. 1776
Someone send a copy to President Trump.
Not much need for my input this morning, the articles below speak loudly for themselves.
Today’s political focus will be on the meeting between President Trump and Zelensky. A gaggle of Europe’s warmongers are in Washington to support more relentless NATO proxy war in Ukraine. How many more dead Ukrainians will satisfy them? For what?
The global stock casinos have been totally indifferent to the Ukraine war and will likely stay that way.
The US Treasury market will be focused on the Fed’s upcoming Jackson Hole Junket. Will Fed Chairman Powell use the junket to hit back at President Trump.
Asia-Pacific markets mostly rise as investors
await details of U.S.-Ukraine talks
Published Sun, Aug 17 2025 7:58 PM EDT
Asia-Pacific markets mostly rose
Monday , after the U.S.-Russia summit concluded without a ceasefire.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 benchmark
advanced 0.65%, while the broader Topix index added 0.53%.
In South Korea, the Kospi index fell 1.25%,
while the small-cap Kosdaq declined 1.52%.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index moved up
0.19% while mainland China’s CSI
300 increased by 0.34%.
Meanwhile, Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 briefly hit
an intra-day high of 8,960 and was last seen up 0.14%.
Over in Singapore, non-oil domestic
exports shrank 4.6% in July from the year before, worse than the 1.8%
contraction penciled by economists polled by Reuters.
July’s reading comes after a revised
growth rate of 12.9% in June, data from Enterprise
Singapore showed Monday.
U.S.
equity futures ticked up in early Asia hours on hopes for rate cuts by
the U.S. Federal Reserve, which fueled a winning week on Wall Street.
The S&P 500 slipped on Friday
after hitting a record high, as investors took some gains off the table after a
strong week.
The broad market index settled down 0.29%
at 6,449.80. The Nasdaq
Composite shed 0.40% to end the week at 21,622.98. while the Dow Jones Industrial Average outperformed,
rising 34.86 points, or 0.08%, to close at 44,946.12, thanks to a 12% jump
in UnitedHealth.
Asia
markets mixed as investors await details of U.S.-Ukraine talks
Stock futures tick higher following
back-to-back winning weeks: Live updates
Updated Mon, Aug 18 2025 12:19 AM EDT
Stock futures traded slightly higher early
Monday after hopes for lower interest rates fueled a winning week on Wall
Street.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures edged
up 57 points or 0.13%. S&P
500 futures and the Nasdaq
100 futures were up 0.14% and 0.21%, respectively.
Sunday night’s action comes after the
three major averages notched their second straight positive week. The Dow climbed 1.7%, while
the S&P 500 and
Nasdaq Composite rose 0.9% and 0.8%, respectively. It was also the fourth week
of gains out of the last five for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq.
Small-cap stocks outperformed last week,
jumping more than 3% as investors bet on forthcoming rate cuts from the Federal
Reserve.
Ross Mayfield, investment strategist at
Baird Private Wealth Management, also pointed to the S&P 500 Equal Weight
Consumer Discretionary index hitting an all-time high as a sign that
tariff-driven economic fears may be overblown.
“With the market’s message quite upbeat
... it raises the question of whether the conventional wisdom about a weakening
U.S. consumer and potential stagflation is missing the mark,” he wrote in a
Friday note.
The Fed will continue to be in focus this
week as central bank members travel to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for the annual
economic policy symposium. Investors will be monitoring the event for clues
about the future path of rates. Fed funds futures are pricing in a nearly 85%
likelihood that the central bank cuts rates at its next policy meeting in
September, according to CME’s FedWatch tool.
Beyond economic policy, traders will be
monitoring earnings reports due over the course of the week as the season winds
down. Big-box retailers, including Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart and Target, are among the major
companies slated to release results this week.
Of the more than 92% of S&P 500
companies that have already reported this quarter, almost 82% have surpassed
Wall Street’s expectations, according to FactSet.
Stock
market today: Live updates
Wall Street Week Ahead
Aug. 17, 2025 6:20 AM ET
Wall Street's focus this week will be on
the annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium to be held from August
21 to 23. Market participants will also gear up for a deluge of quarterly
results from retail companies. Meanwhile, Russia and Ukraine developments will
continue to grab eyeballs, with the latter nation's President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy set to meet U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday.
The Jackson Hole gathering will see some of the world's most well-known central
bankers, economists, and financial experts convene in Kansas City. The theme
this year is "Labor Markets in Transition: Demographics, Productivity, and
Macroeconomic Policy." With the Federal Reserve's dual mandate of
price stability and maximum employment coming under pressure after concerning
jobs and inflation data this month, market participants will be watching the
symposium keenly for any clues on the central bank's future actions.
Turning to the earnings calendar, retail giants Walmart (WMT) and Home Depot (HD) will headline
the week, along with smaller rivals Target (TGT) and Lowe's (LOW).
In terms of economic data, investors will be receiving the minutes of the Fed's
July monetary policy committee meeting on Wednesday, followed by S&P flash
PMIs on Thursday.
Wall Street Week
Ahead | Seeking Alpha
Not in the cards: Why some suspect stable trade
may not follow Trump’s tariff deals
Published Sun, Aug 17 2025 8:44 AM EDT
The White House has signed a number of
notable trade deals in the months since President Donald Trump slapped sharply
higher tariffs on imports in early April. But some on Wall Street are
cautioning that turmoil surrounding relations between the U.S. and its major
trading partners is far from over.
“Our views have been at odds with the
investor consensus all year – and they still are,” Andy Laperriere, head of
U.S. policy at Piper Sandler, wrote in a report this summer. “The emerging
narrative is that even though tariffs are high, we now have deals that will
provide stability in trade policy. Therefore, economic actors can adjust to the
new reality and move on,” he said. In his firm’s opinion, however, “trade
stability is not in the cards.”
Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs went into effect on Aug. 7.
The president had announced the
sweeping levies back
on April 2, and their initial size sent stocks reeling before a series of
walk-backs from the White House eased investors’ concerns. Stocks have since
recovered these losses and gone on to score record highs.
Lately, investors have been betting that
Trump won’t implement the most draconian of his trade plans, in what has come
to be known as the TACO trade, short for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” But the
duties that Trump announced in early April have in large part taken hold.
----
“One of the things that I think is interesting, that I think is
underappreciated is that ‘liberation day’ mostly arrived,” Laperriere said
during a webinar earlier this month. “When you look at our major trading
partners, most of what was put on the board on April 2 is on the board now.”
Catalysts for instability
Trump’s tariffs have faced significant
legal challenges, with a federal appeals
court judge seeming skeptical in late July of the president’s
claim that he has the authority to impose new tariffs under the International
Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), a law that grants the president
authority to regulate international commerce in response to a national
emergency. Trump later warned U.S. courts against
blocking his tariff policy.
With the ongoing litigation and unsettled
backdrop, uncertainty around the future of tariffs and trade persists.
More
Why some suspect
stable trade may not follow Trump's tariff deals
'Just baffled': Economist questions how Trump
claims his plan is 'a win for America'
August 16, 2025
Natasha Sarin, president and co-founder
of The Budget Lab at Yale,
says she bristles at the thought of President Donald Trump touting his recent
E.U. trade deal as a win.
“The idea that taking a tariff rate of 1.5
percent and turning it into a tariff rate of 15 percent plus is somehow a win
for Americans — I’m just baffled by the concept,” said the economist to New
York Times reporter Ezra Klein. “Because no one would say that if you
took the sales tax on certain goods and you increased it 15-fold that was a win
for Americans. But effectively, that’s what we’ve done.”
Sarin said the U.S. economy before
President Trump took office was doing “quite well” relative to the rest of the
world recovering from pandemic, despite many polls. Inflation had been very
high, but it was coming back down toward the Fed’s 2 percent target, with just
the last mile to go. The labor market, she said, was strong.
And then President Trump took office.
“At the time, many commentators, including
myself, said the best-case scenario for the economy is literally if [Trump] did
nothing,” Sarin said. “… Instead, beginning on Liberation Day and continuing
since, the president and his administration initiated a trade war aimed at
remaking the global order. The consequences of the trade war have been some of
the most inflationary policies we’ve seen in our lifetimes.”
Now Trump’s trade war is beginning to
reverberate.
“The Budget Lab at Yale, which I run,
estimates that we’re going to see household prices increase by around $2,000 a
year. We’re going to see an inflation uptick, and we’re going to see a weaker
labor market as a result of all that has already been done.
Sarin told Klein the only reason most
other nations haven’t responded to Trump’s tariffs with retaliatory tariffs of
their own is because tariffs “are a bad tax” on their own people by forcing
folks at the middle or bottom of the tax code to pay proportionately more for
goods and necessities.
More
'Just baffled':
Economist questions how Trump claims his plan is 'a win for America'
In other news, the Great Stain on Israel. President Trump, end this Jewish starvation of Moslem women and children. Would you really allow Moslems to be starving Jewish women and children? If yes, eternal shame on you!!!
‘The children in Gaza are too weak to play or
sing: hunger has stolen their childhood’
Bryony Gooch Sat 16 August 2025 at 1:32 pm BST
At the SOS Children’s Village in southern
Gaza, a group of children are crowding around a bus
carrying energy biscuits and milk from Unicef.
“You cannot imagine the happiness in the
camp when they received those biscuits,” says Reem Alreqeb, who helps run the
camp for displaced children in Khan Younis. “It isn’t that delicious, but the
children felt good to taste them after three months without any sweets.”
Since Israel announced a
military takeover of
the Gaza
Strip,
life has felt even more uncertain and tense for Ms Alreqeb and the children at
the camp, many of whom have lost their families. If they are asked to move, all
that remains is a bus with a few tents. They don’t have enough food or basic
supplies to bring with them.
“I’m doing my best to stay focused and
grounded, especially for the sake of the children and families who rely on us,”
she tells The Independent.
This isn’t the first time that SOS
Children’s Villages has been forced to move the children from Gaza in its care
since the ongoing conflict began on October 7, 2023. In May last year, they
were forced to leave their permanent village in Rafah after a ground invasion
began which displaced an estimated one million Palestinians.
In just one day, charity workers had to
transport 170 people – including caregivers and their families – to a
humanitarian zone in Khan Younis. On the final day of a three-day trip to bring
bare essentials to the humanitarian zone, their car broke down as drones struck
people overhead.
“The plane was shooting directly at the
people who were around us,” Ms Alreqeb remembers. “I thought that we were going
to die at that moment.”
Within three days, they managed to install
tents and contract vendors to install bathrooms and water infrastructure, but
that memory still haunts Ms Alreqeb.
“It was a nightmare,” she says. “I still
dream about those days and hope that I never have to experience it again.”
In little over a year, the number of
children in the camp has increased to almost 50, and they receive between 10
and 15 new children every month.
Working with Unicef and social
workers on the strip, they work to look after children who are unaccompanied
and separated from their families before reunifying them with relatives. Until
the children are reunited with family, they stay with caregivers in a caravan
that they call home, where all their needs are supported.
Many of the children who arrive at the
camp are often “suffering from intensive hunger”, says Ms Alreqeb, with some
children suffering from such trauma that they become violent.
“We have a team who are very experienced
at dealing with those children,” she adds, referring to the social workers and
psychologist who form part of the staff. “When these children receive the care
they need, their behaviour improves.”
Every day they wake up to the sound of
bombardment, but Ms Alreqeb says the ultimate challenge for the past three
months has been finding food after Israel’s blockade in March.
It is a daily issue for caregivers
and aid
workers to
petition other international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and street
vendors to supply the camp with what little food remains in the war-torn strip.
While they are just about able to get the bare minimum of nappies, milk, food
and fuel, starvation is taking its toll on the children.
More
‘The children in Gaza are too weak to play or sing: hunger has stolen their childhood’
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.
Trump’s
controversial $250 visa fee could cost the US economy $11 billion as tourists
stay away, research finds
August
15, 2025
Research
suggests President Donald Trump’s new $250
“visa integrity fee” could cost the United States $11 billion — a much
larger figure than the Congressional
Budget Office previously
estimated, according to a report.
The
fee, packed in Trump’s so-called
“Big, Beautiful Bill” that he signed into law last month, applies to all
visitors traveling to the U.S. on a non-immigrant visa. The fee doesn’t apply
to countries on the Visa
Waiver Program,
which includes most Western
European nations and some Asian countries.
By
2034, the “visa integrity fee” would bring in more than $27 billion, the
Congressional Budget Office estimated. Said differently, the office is
predicting the U.S. will rake in $2.7 billion from 11 million foreign travelers paying the
fee each year.
While
the language of the law makes the fee sound like a win for the U.S. economy, it may actually
become a major loss, as the cost
could deter visitors.
That loss could be as high as roughly $3.6 billion per year, or $11 billion in
three years, according to a Tourism Economics analysis seen by Forbes.
A
decline in travelers could lead to a dip in visitor spending and job losses in
the tourism industry. In 2022, the travel and tourism industry contributed $2.3
trillion to the U.S. economy, according to the International
Trade Administration.
The
CBO appeared not to have taken these potential drops into account.
“By
longstanding tradition, the Congressional Budget Office does not incorporate
macroeconomic feedback effects into its traditional cost estimates,” a CBO
spokesperson told Forbes. “We didn't specifically do a dynamic
analysis of this provision.”
The
Independent has
reached out to the CBO for more information.
The
fee, which will take effect in October, was introduced before the U.S. is set
to host events which tend to draw large crowds from around the world, including
the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics.
Even
before Trump’s mega-bill was passed international tourism was down.
The
U.S. was the only country of the 184 economies analyzed by the World
Travel & Tourism Council forecast to see international
visitor spending decline in 2025, a May report found. At this rate, the U.S. is
on track to lose $12.5 billion in international visitor spending this year,
according to the report.
“This
is a wake-up call for the U.S. government,” the organization’s CEO Julia
Simpson warned in a statement. “The world’s biggest Travel & Tourism
economy is heading in the wrong direction, not because of a lack of demand, but
because of a failure to act. While other nations are rolling out the welcome
mat, the U.S. government is putting up the ‘closed’ sign.”
Outside
of Canada and Mexico, the United Kingdom, India, Brazil, Japan, and Germany
comprised the top
five countries with
citizens that visited the U.S. this year as of May 2025, according to the
International Trade Administration. Of these nations, the fee would only apply
to citizens of Brazil and India, which could pack a punch to the U.S. economy.
In
2022, for example, Indian tourists visiting the
U.S. generated around $13 billion, according to the International
Trade Administration.
More
U.S.
visitors to Canada outnumber Canadians in U.S. in rare reversal
Published: August
13, 2025 at 8:40AM EDT
As
Canadian travel to the United States continues to decline, new data shows a
notable tipping point: More Americans visited Canada this July than Canadians
did the United States, in a reversal not seen in years.
Statistics
Canada’s latest figures show that U.S. residents made 1.8 million trips into
Canada by automobile last month, with only 1.7 million Canadian return trips
from the United States.
Canadian
trips to the U.S. have outnumbered U.S.-Canada trips every July since before
the COVID-19 pandemic, until now.
July
travel has declined in both directions since last year, with U.S. visitor
totals down 7.4 per cent and Canadian return trips plunging 36.9 per cent, down
for six and seven months in a row, respectively.
“Recent
data on foreign travel suggest that Canadians’ travel sentiment toward their
southern neighbour has been shifting in early 2025,” a StatCan report
from earlier this summer reads. “It is currently unclear whether the
change is temporary or part of a more permanent shift.”
Girl
Guides of Canada recently announced it would suspend excursions
to the United States for
an unspecified period of time, in a decision the organization said was linked
to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tightening border control policies.
“This
decision is rooted in our commitment to inclusivity and the safety of all our
members,” Girl Guides of Canada wrote in an email to CTV News.
“It
was prompted by the recent restrictions put on equal entry into the United
States, as some members may hold citizenship from non-Canadian countries and
could be impacted by the restrictions.”
As
for air travel, Canada has seen an increase in visitors, with 1.4 million
non-residents arriving this July, up just over three per cent from the same
time in 2024. While most of this growth came from overseas travellers, U.S.
visitors by air also increased 0.7 per cent.
Overall,
international arrivals to Canada are down 15.6 per cent from the same time last
year, according to StatCan.
Canada travel:
American visitors outnumber Canadians in U.S.
Covid-19
Corner
This
section will continue only occasionally when something of interest occurs.
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.
Strange atomic
vibration discovered in graphene could solve one of the greatest mysteries in
physics
08-15-2025
A cryogenic microscope that fits on a laboratory bench has now let
scientists watch electrons shake graphene’s atoms in real time, revealing
something called “phasons.”
The work ties those shivers to the zero-resistance current and odd
“strange metal” signals that appear when two graphene sheets are rotated by
about 1.1° or what’s referred to as the “magic angle.”
Dr.
John Birkbeck of the Weizmann
Institute of Science is to be credited for leading the new experiments.
Phasons and twisted graphene
Twisted bilayer graphene is celebrated for hosting
superconductivity, but its electrons also display the linear-in-temperature
resistivity that defines a strange metal.
Those two features usually live in very different materials, so
seeing them together puzzles theorists.
In graphene’s flat bands, electrons move
sluggishly, which magnifies every subtle interaction. One crucial interaction
couples electrons to phonons, quantized vibrations that carry lattice energy.
----What makes a phason special
A phason slides the two graphene layers against each other in
opposite directions. Unlike ordinary acoustic modes whose coupling fades as
wavelength grows, the phason’s grip on electrons strengthens at longer
wavelengths.
That upside-down behavior means the phason can scatter slow
carriers even when its own energy is
just a few millielectronvolts.
In the microscope, the phason announced itself as an inelastic
step in conductance that grew taller as the twist angle approached the magic
value.
“Our technique not only measures the phonon spectrum but also
quantifies how strongly electrons couple to each phonon mode,” said Dr.
Birkbeck.
The team also saw the phason’s energy collapse toward zero near
6°, while the coupling soared, a sign that this mode could seed both
resistivity and pairing.
Building a quantum twisting microscope
Two years earlier the group debuted a room-temperature version of
the quantum twisting microscope. Now they cool the device to 4 Kelvin and add
nanometer-precise rotation so that electrons can tunnel between aligned patches
of graphene.
During tunneling an electron may give up energy to emit a
vibration. By sweeping bias voltage, the researchers dictate that emission
energy, while the twist angle selects momentum, letting them scan the entire
vibration map.
The tip itself is another atom-thin conductor held against a
sample only a few hundred nanometers wide. Self-cleaning by van der Waals
forces removes contaminants, ensuring that every change in current stems from
the quantum states, not dirt.
“It can detect any excitation coupled to tunneling electrons,”
noted Jiewen
Xiao, also at the Weizmann Institute, stressing the method’s reach
beyond phonons.
Unusual clues to superconductivity
Classical theories predict that phonon coupling weakens for
low-energy acoustic modes, making them unlikely glue for electron pairs.
More
Strange atomic
vibration discovered may solve physics mystery - Earth.com
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt
Clocks (usdebtclock.org)
By
means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in
Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the
expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries.
Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines,
merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland?
Adam Smith. The Wealth of
Nations. 1776
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