Baltic Dry Index. 2025 +08 Brent Crude 67.18
Spot Gold 3476 US 2 Year Yield 3.59 -03
US Federal Debt. 37.304 trillion
US GDP 30.237 trillion.
Work spares us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.
Voltaire
As the USA celebrates the Labor Day holiday the rest of the world trades on without the USA.
China and much of the rest of the world’s focus today will be on the outcome of the two day Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in China, where China is acting as global moderate to Trump’s USA tariffs chaos.
Will it work? Who knows, but the ROW is heavily incentivised to de-dollarise and reduce economic dependence on an increasingly over stretched USA.
Asia markets trade mixed as investors assess
China’s RatingDog manufacturing data
Published Sun, Aug 31 2025 7:57 PM EDT
Asia-Pacific markets traded mixed Monday
as investors assess China’s RatingDog manufacturing data for August. The metric
— which was previously known as the Caixin Purchasing Managers’ Index — came in
at 50.5, compared to a contraction of 49.5 the month before.
Data released Sunday showed that the
country’s manufacturing PMI data came in at 49.4 in August, compared to 49.3
the month before.
Investors are also assessing the
developments in India and China relations, after leaders from both countries
agreed that they are development
partners, not rivals during a two-day meeting of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization regional security bloc. Chinese President Xi Jinping
is expected to deliver a speech at the summit.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index rose 2.16%,
with gains led by by Alibaba
Group which jumped 17.63%, BOC Hong Kong Holdings which
surged 8.01% and WuXi AppTec which
gained 6.86%.
Meanwhile, mainland China’s CSI 300 ticked up 0.33%.
In Japan, the Nikkei 225 declined by
2.03%. Losses were led by Advantest which
plunged 9.04%, Disco Corp which declined 8.39% and Socionext which dropped
7.09%.
Meanwhile, Japan’s broader Topix index
lost 0.78%.
Over in South Korea, the Kospi index fell
0.81%, while the small-cap Kosdaq lost 0.8%.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 benchmark
retreated 0.62%.
Investors were also assessing a U.S. federal
appeals court ruling that most of U.S. President Donald Trump’s
“reciprocal tariffs are illegal.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Federal Circuit held Friday ruled
that Trump had overstepped his presidential authority by imposing levies on
virtually every country in the world as part of his April 2 “liberation day”
announcement.
Over
in Wall Street, stocks fell Friday as new inflation data showed rising
prices was still a risk heading into the new month.
The broad-based S&P 500 ended the day
0.64% lower at 6,460.26, but still scored its fourth winning month in a row.
The Nasdaq Composite shed
1.15% to finish at 21,455.55, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost
92.02 points, or 0.20%, to settle at 45,544.88.
U.S. markets are closed Monday for the
Labor Day public holiday.
Asia
markets trade mixed after China's RatingDog manufacturing data
Wall Street Week Ahead
Aug. 31, 2025 6:09 AM ET
Wall Street will see a holiday-shortened
week on account of the Labor Day weekend. Still, investors will have plenty to
digest, with the highlight being Friday's August nonfarm payrolls report.
The labor market will be squarely in focus, with updates on job openings and
private sector employment scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday. The big event
will be on Friday, especially after July's nonfarm payrolls came in
significantly weaker than expected and May and June saw one of the biggest
two-month revisions to job growth in decades. Any further signs of weakening in
the U.S. labor situation will all but guarantee a Federal Reserve rate cut in
September for traders.
Some quarterly earnings reports from major tech names will also grab the
spotlight this week, namely Dow 30 component Salesforce (CRM) and chipmaker
Broadcom (AVGO).
Wall Street Week
Ahead | Seeking Alpha
China’s Xi says SCO bears 'greater responsibility'
for maintaining peace and stability
Xi Jinping is hosting 2-day summit of
Shanghai Cooperation Organization in northern port city of Tianjin
01.09.2025 - Update : 01.09.2025
Chinese President Xi Jinping said the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has a “greater responsibility” for
maintaining peace and stability.
“At present, the century-defining
transformation is accelerating across the world, with a marked increase in
factors of instability, uncertainty, and unpredictability. The SCO thus bears
an even greater responsibility for maintaining regional peace and stability and
promoting development and prosperity of all countries,” Xi, alongside his wife
Peng Liyuan, told a welcoming banquet at the Tianjin Meijiang Convention Center
for foreign guests in northern China Sunday night.
Xi is hosting a two-day summit of SCO
leaders as well as “SCO plus,” bringing together some 20 heads of state and
government as well as leaders of international organizations.
This transformation “is accelerating
across the world, with a marked increase in factors of instability,
uncertainty, and unpredictability,” said the president of the world’s second
largest economy, according to Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning.
He said the SCO has "stayed committed
to the Shanghai Spirit, strengthening solidarity and mutual trust, deepening
practical cooperation, and taking an active part in international and regional
affairs."
"The SCO has grown into a significant
force in promoting a new type of international relations and building a
community with a shared future for humanity," said Xi.
Xi stressed that the SCO Summit being held
in Tianjin “is tasked with an important mission: to build consensus among all
parties, ignite momentum for cooperation, and draw up a blueprint for
development.”
Amid the turbulence, he said “the SCO thus
bears an even greater responsibility for maintaining regional peace and
stability and promoting development and prosperity of all countries.”
“It is believed that with the collective
efforts of all parties, this Summit will be a complete success and the SCO will
play an even greater role and achieve greater development,” he added.
The main part of the summit is set to be
held Monday, when the participating leaders are expected to sign the Tianjin
Declaration and approve a 10-year strategy alongside outcome documents on
security, trade, energy and cultural cooperation.
The summit will also issue statements on
the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the founding of the UN.
The SCO evolved from the "Shanghai
Five" mechanism comprising China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan before Uzbekistan joined as the sixth member. Today, it includes 10
member states, two observers and 14 dialogue partners across Asia, Europe and
Africa.
The organization covers approximately 24%
of global land area and 42% of the world’s population, with member states
accounting for roughly one-quarter of global GDP and trade increasing nearly
100-fold in two decades.
China’s trade with SCO members, observers
and dialogue partners reached a record $890 billion in 2024, or 14.4% of its
total foreign trade.
The previous SCO leaders’ summit was held
in Kazakhstan in July 2024, where 25 strategic documents were adopted covering
energy, security, finance and information security.
China’s
Xi says SCO bears 'greater responsibility' for maintaining peace and stability
In other news, more UK taxes, rather than
cutting spending and joining Trump in ending NATO’s proxy war on Russia.
Treasury should tax big banks on quantitative
easing windfalls, argues thinktank
Fri 29 August 2025 at 12:00 am BST
Rachel Reeves should levy a new bank tax
and urge the Bank of England to halt bond sales to reduce the government’s
£22bn-a-year losses from quantitative easing, the IPPR thinktank has argued.
In a report called Fixing the Leak, the
IPPR’s associate director for economic policy, Carsten Jung, says the Treasury
should rein in the costs of QE as public finances are tight.
“What started as a programme to boost the
economy is now a massive drain on taxpayer money,” he said. “Public money is
flowing straight into commercial banks’ coffers because of a flawed policy
design. While families struggle with rising costs, the government is … [in
effect] writing multibillion-pound cheques to bank shareholders.”
The emergency
policy, first enacted in 2009 during the global financial crisis,
involved buying up £895bn of bonds from the UK’s banks and, in exchange,
crediting them with reserves at the Bank of England.
The Bank is now winding down QE – a
process known as “quantitative tightening” (QT) – by selling the bonds at a
rate of £100bn a year, but these sales are taking place at a loss.
In accordance with a promise from Alistair
Darling, then chancellor, the Treasury bears the financial risks of QE, so
these losses hit the government’s finances.
In addition, the higher Bank of England
base rate, now set at 4% to combat
above-target inflation, means the Bank is paying out higher interest rates on
banks’ reserves than it is receiving on the bonds it holds. In total, these
losses amount to a £22bn-a-year hit to the public finances, according to the
IPPR.
Jung calls for the Treasury to tax the big
banks on their QE-related reserves, saying the profits of the big four have
more than doubled since before the Covid pandemic.
He says such a policy could bring in £8bn
a year and sidestep the Bank’s objections to a widely mooted alternative known
as “tiered reserves”, which the Bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, has argued
could interfere with its job of combating inflation.
The IPPR compares the new bank levy it
recommends with a tax on deposits implemented by the Conservative prime
minister Margaret Thatcher in 1981, as rising interest rates led to higher bank
profits.
Jung said: “A targeted levy, inspired by
Margaret Thatcher’s own approach in the 1980s, would recoup some of these
windfalls and put the money to far better use, helping people and the economy,
not just bank balance sheets.”
With gilt markets consistently jittery in
recent months, the report also suggests the chancellor recommends to the Bank
that it halt the process of selling off its stockpile of bonds.
The Bank’s nine-member monetary policy
committee will decide the pace of QT for the year ahead at a meeting on 18
September.
Bailey appeared to hint at the Bank’s
quarterly monetary policy press conference this month that it would consider
slowing the sell-off in the face of volatile long-term bond yields that move in
the opposite direction to prices.
“There has been a change in the liquidity
of the curve at the long end and that has affected yields,” he said, adding
that all options were on the table for the meeting. Yields on 30-year
government bonds, known as gilts, were close to a
27-year high this
week.
More
Treasury should
tax big banks on quantitative easing windfalls, argues thinktank
I do not like work even when someone else does it.
Mark Twain
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.
Rural
America is suffering an economic crisis as crop prices plunge — ‘U.S. soybean
farmers cannot survive a prolonged trade dispute’
August
31, 2025
- Agricultural
trade groups have sounded the alarm recently on the state of
farmers, who are grappling with a continued slump in prices for their
crops and worsening credit conditions. They have asked lawmakers to help
increase access to export markets, including China, which is still locked
in a trade war with the U.S.
U.S.
producers of corn and soybeans have sent dire warnings as prices for their
crops have crashed in recent years while President Donald Trump’s trade war
whipsaws farmers.
On
Thursday, the National Corn Growers Association raised alarms about
“the economic crisis hitting rural America, as commodity prices drop at a time
when input costs remain at near-record highs.”
Corn
prices have plunged more than 50% from their 2022 peak, while production costs
are down just 3% in that span, translating to a loss of 85 cents per bushel,
the NCGA said, adding that the outlook for next year is worse with even lower
prices and higher costs.
The
NCGA called on Congress and the Trump administration to boost demand, including
via higher blends of ethanol and increased foreign market access.
A
week before that, the American Soybean Association sent a letter to
Trump, warning that “U.S. soybean farmers are standing at a trade and financial
precipice.”
The
group asked that Trump prioritize soybeans in trade talks with China, seeking
major purchase commitments as well as the removal of Beijing’s duties on the
U.S.
“Historically,
the U.S. was the provider of choice for Chinese customers,” the letter said.
“However, due to ongoing tariff retaliation, our longstanding customers in
China have and will continue to turn to our competitors in South America to
meet their demand, a demand Brazil can meet due to significantly increased
production since the previous trade war with China.”
With
harvest season fast approaching, the association added that China hasn’t
purchased any U.S. soybeans for the months ahead.
The
longer negotiations with China drag on without a trade deal—and the deeper
farmers go into the fall— the more pain they will feel, it said.
Like
the corn growers, the soybean growers also cited sharply lower prices and high
costs. Since peaking in 2022, soybean
prices have fallen about 40%.
“Soybean
farmers are under extreme financial stress,” the group said. “Prices continue
to drop and at the same time our farmers are paying significantly more for
inputs and equipment. U.S. soybean farmers cannot survive a prolonged trade
dispute with our largest customer.”
More
Here’s
what it really means for Trump to get control of the Federal Reserve board
Published
Sat, Aug 30 2025 8:54 AM EDT
President
Donald Trump’s effort to sack Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is about more
than firing someone: It’s a maneuver that, if successful, would mark a seismic
shift for an institution that for ages had been considered above politics.
Since
taking office in January, Trump has placed the Fed directly in the crosshairs
of executive power. He has berated central bankers for not lowering rates,
threatened to remove Chair Jerome Powell, and now has
taken the unprecedented step of actually attempting to unseat Cook.
From
the president’s perspective, he’s looking to reform what has been an unpopular
institution, often blamed for the runaway inflation that hit the
U.S. following the Covid pandemic. Trump sees lower interest rates as a pathway
to manage the swelling federal debt while boosting a housing market that has
been a counterweight to an otherwise growing economy.
However,
legal scholars as well as financial market experts and present and former Fed
officials say Trump’s moves not only threaten to make the Fed more political
but also would undermine key pillars of the American financial system.
“We
are on a road that is going to lead to the erosion of central bank
independence,” said Kathryn Judge, a professor at Columbia Law School. “It
would be incredibly costly for the long-term health of the economy for the Fed
to lose the credibility that it has spent decades trying to build.”
Independence
in the Fed’s case is a term used to describe its freedom from outside political
influence to determine monetary policy that is best for the U.S. economy. This
is particularly the case if those decisions are unpopular, such as when the
Federal Open Market Committee raises interest rates to bring down inflation.
But
there’s more at stake than simply the level of the three rates the Fed
controls.
What
the board controls, and what it doesn’t
Should
Trump get a majority of members on the board of governors to vote the way he
wants — and the evidence right now, to be sure, is scant that he can ever
achieve such a goal — it would give him access to key levers that control the
economy as well as the nation’s financial infrastructure.
The
seven-member Board of Governors, for instance, has regulatory and enforcement
power over banks.
Moreover,
while the 12-member FOMC sets the key overnight funds interest rate, the
governors alone establish the discount rate, used to find the present value of
money, and the interest on reserve balances, which pays banks for storing their
money at the Fed and also serves as a kind of guardrail for the funds rate.
Finally,
the board has control over the reappointments of the 12 regional bank
presidents, with a slew of names coming up in 2026.
Embedded
within those responsibilities is the Fed’s role in ensuring the integrity of
the Treasury system and preserving a stable dollar.
In
other words, this is about more than just getting a rate cut in September.
“The
most serious danger, I think, to people’s being able to have confidence in the
Fed board is what Trump is himself doing,” said Robert Hockett, a professor at
Cornell Law School. “Because if Trump succeeds with this, then it suggests the
Fed board is nothing but a rubber stamp. It just basically tells us that any
nutjob who happens to get into the White House will be setting monetary policy
henceforth.”
The
effect, Hockett added, is that “we can have the same kind of hyperinflations in
the future that banana republics in Latin America have classically had when
their dictators have set monetary policy, or that Turkey has experienced in
recent years because its dictator has set monetary policy.”
More
Here's what it
really means for Trump to get control of the Federal Reserve board
Covid-19
Corner
This section will continue only occasionally when something of interest occurs.
Off topic but interesting.
AstraZeneca to seek approval for blood pressure drug by year-end
30 August 2025
(Reuters) -AstraZeneca
plans to file for regulatory approval of its experimental blood pressure
treatment before the end of the year, a senior company executive said, about a
product seen as key to the drugmaker's long-term sales strategy.
The company is aiming for
potential approvals in 2026 for the drug, baxdrostat, starting with the U.S.
and the EU, said Ruud Dobber, president of AstraZeneca's biopharmaceuticals
unit, ahead of a presentation of advanced trial data at a medical conference on
Saturday.
Baxdrostat targets blood
pressure-regulating hormone aldosterone, a novel approach compared with older
treatments like diuretics and ACE inhibitors, which do not address hormonal
drivers.
AstraZeneca expects peak
annual sales for the drug to exceed $5 billion.
Keenly watched data
showed that 2mg of baxdrostat, added to standard treatment, reduced systolic
blood pressure by 9.8 millimetres of mercury (mmHg) from the baseline at 12
weeks, when adjusted for placebo, in patients with hard-to-control
hypertension.
At the 1mg dose, that
pressure exerted on the arteries by the heart's pumping action was lowered by
8.7 mmHg.
Physicians polled by TD
Cowen wished to see a 10-12 mmHg fall in placebo-adjusted blood pressure, the
brokerage said on Friday.
Mineralys Therapeutics'
rival drug, lorundrostat, in March showed a placebo-adjusted reduction in
systolic blood pressure by 9.1 mmHg at six weeks with a 50mg dose. The U.S.
company also expects to submit data to the FDA by year-end.
"There's a huge
acknowledgement that hypertension needs to be treated in a much more aggressive
way," Dobber said.
High blood pressure
affects over 1 billion people, according to the World Health Organization, and
aggravates risk of heart attacks or strokes.
A small percentage of
patients - 1.1% - taking baxdrostat developed hyperkalaemia, marked by high
potassium levels in the blood. Hyperkalaemia was also observed with Mineralys'
lorundrostat.
(Reporting by Pushkala
Aripaka in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)
AstraZeneca to seek approval for blood pressure drug by year-end
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.
EV bus madness? How long before the
first fire?
First Bus is launching largest battery storage facility
29 August 2025
First Bus is launching its largest battery storage facility to
date.
The new site, located at Hoeford depot in Fareham, will
begin operating in September and marks a major step forward in the company’s
decarbonisation and energy management plans.
The facility will store surplus electricity and feed it back into
the UK grid during peak demand times, while also supporting the charging of
First Bus’ growing fleet of more than 1,200 electric buses.
Faizan Muhammad, investment director – energy at FirstGroup, said:
"Our investment in Palmer Energy Technology, alongside Barclays Bank and
Oxford University, brings together great private sector expertise to find
creative solutions to challenges facing the UK.
"This investment continues our strategy of backing new and
innovative companies aimed at supporting our long-term public commitment of
achieving a zero-emission commercial bus fleet by 2035.
"We’re really excited about this new chapter in our
decarbonisation journey and look forward to working closely with PETL to
continue developing this technology."
The Hoeford depot will house nearly three bus batteries, with the
capacity to store one megawatt of power—enough to supply around 125 homes for a
full day.
First Bus plans to repurpose batteries that have reached the end
of their service life on buses for use in stationary power storage.
Work will also begin later this year on an even larger battery
storage facility in Aberdeen, with additional sites under consideration across
the UK.
The project is supported by an investment in Palmer Energy
Technology (PETL), which designs and manufactures battery energy storage
systems.
Dr Andy Palmer, founder of PETL and former chief executive of
Aston Martin, said: "With buses at the forefront of the transition to
electric vehicles and net-zero transportation, I’m delighted to welcome
investment from FirstGroup Energy Ltd, as well as Barclays and Oxford
University, to advance development of next-generation control systems.
"This will allow us to accelerate our business and give the
UK a leading position in battery energy storage system technology."
First Bus aims to achieve a fully zero-emission commercial bus
fleet by 2035, having already electrified more than a dozen depots and replaced
over 1,200 diesel buses
with electric models.
First Bus is
launching largest battery storage facility | Daily Echo
Approx.
6 minutes.
Electric Narrowboat Battery BLAST - NEW FOOTAGE!
Electric
Narrowboat Battery BLAST - NEW FOOTAGE!
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt
Clocks (usdebtclock.org)
Some
people make things happen, some people watch while things happen, and some
people wonder what happened?
Anon. Attributed
to many.
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