London Irvine Report: Special Update 20/09/2025 General Assembly High-level Week. 1929.

Baltic Dry Index. 2203 -02 Brent Crude 66.68

Spot Gold 3685 U S 2 Year Yield 3.57 unch.

US Federal Debt. 37.503 trillion

US GDP 30.277 trillion

"We held interest rates at 4% today. Although we expect inflation to return to our 2% target, we're not out of the woods yet so any future cuts will need to be made gradually and carefully."

BoE Governor Bailey, 18 September 2025.

The stock casinos mostly bubble up to new highs.

President Trump’s latest pick for the Fed sees no Trump tariff inflation effect. “Well he would say that wouldn’t he”, to quote a certain lady quite famous in 1963.

Below, onward and upward. To infinity and beyond.

Dow, S&P 500 close at fresh records, log big gains for the week after Fed rate cut: Live updates

Updated Fri, Sep 19 2025 4:14 PM EDT

Stocks rose on Friday, with major U.S. indexes notching weekly gains, as the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates set in investors’ minds.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 172.85 points, or 0.37%, to close at 46,315.27, reaching a fresh record high. The S&P 500 settled up 0.49% at 6,664.36, while the Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.72% to finish at 22,631.48.

The small-cap Russell 2000 dipped 0.7%, taking back some gains this week after the index touched a fresh record high earlier in the session.

Apple led the way higher, rising 3.2%, as the company’s latest iPhone went on sale around the world. Tesla shares were also up more than 2.2%.

Wall Street is on pace to post strong weekly gains. The S&P 500 and Dow are up 1.2% and 1%, respectively, while the Nasdaq is up 2.2%. The Russell 2000 gained 2.2%, notched its seventh weekly advance.

Stocks got a boost this week after the Fed lowered its benchmark overnight lending rate by a quarter percentage point, its first rate reduction since December. The move was widely expected by markets, but stocks had a volatile session on the back of the decision after Fed Chair Jerome Powell in his press conference characterized the decision as a “risk management cut.”

″While September has historically delivered pullbacks, this year’s market has defied that pattern — climbing 35% since March with strong technical and fundamental tailwinds,” said Mark Hackett, chief market strategist at Nationwide. “Still, with the S&P 500 trading at 22x forward earnings and volatility suppressed, a period of consolidation or choppiness would be a normal and healthy development.”

Stock market today: Live updates

What Reliving the 1929 Crash Tells Us About Today’s Stock Market

In 1929, Andrew Ross Sorkin re-creates the euphoria and mania that led to the most famous stock market slump in history.

September 19, 2025 at 11:00 AM UTC

There are two ways to read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929, a new book on the stock market crash of that year. You can pop the popcorn and watch rich men twisting in the lies they tell themselves and others. Or you can read 1929 to match the stories Wall Street told itself then to those of today, a perversely fun project that Sorkin subtly leaves us to complete for ourselves. Both approaches are worthwhile. Neither will task your brain.

That’s because Sorkin, one of America’s highest-profile financial journalists — with twin seats at CNBC and the New York Times — does not seek to explain why the stock market fever rose and broke. It was FOMO plus debt. It’s almost always FOMO plus debt. Nor does he offer a counternarrative about how the mania could have been avoided. (“No matter how many warnings are issued or how many laws are written,” he writes, “people will find new ways to believe that the good times can last forever.”) He isn’t trying to explain the Great Depression, or whether the crash caused it.

But in the current moment, when so much feels (and is!) unprecedented, Sorkin’s greatest accomplishment is allowing us to relive precedent by re-creating how the market felt in 1929, week by week, sometimes day by day, to those experiencing it as its own thing before they knew how it would live on in history.

What Andrew Ross Sorkin’s ‘1929’ Tells Us About Today’s Stock Market - Bloomberg

In other news, why more and more of the world is turning anti-west.

The Lies America Tells Itself About the Middle East

As Its Influence Faded, Washington Dissembled and Denied Reality

September 16, 2025

On any given day during the long war in Gaza, a Biden administration official could be expected to assert any of the following: a cease-fire was around the corner, the United States was working tirelessly to achieve one, it cared equally about the Israelis and the Palestinians, a historic Saudi-Israeli normalization deal was at hand, and all this was bound up with an irreversible path to Palestinian statehood.

Not one of those pronouncements bore even a loose resemblance to the truth. Talks about a cease-fire dragged on, and when they fitfully bore fruit, the resulting understandings quickly fell apart. The United States refrained from doing the one thing—conditioning or halting the military aid to Israel that kept the fire from ceasing—that might have made it happen. Taking that step was also the one thing that might have demonstrated, beyond platitudes, a U.S. commitment to protecting both Israeli and Palestinian lives. Saudi Arabia kept repeating that normalization with Israel depended on progress toward a Palestinian state, and the Israeli government consistently ruled such progress out. The more time went on, the more U.S. statements were exposed as empty words, met with disbelief or indifference. That did not stop them from being made. Did U.S. policymakers believe what they said? If not, why did they keep saying it? And if they did, how could they ignore so much contrary evidence staring them in the face?

The falsehoods served as cover for a policy that enabled Israel’s ferocious attacks on Gaza and hailed the most modest, fleeting improvement in the situation in the Palestinian enclave as the product of American humanitarianism and resolve. Israel’s brutality worsened under the Trump administration, but those earlier falsehoods had paved the way. They helped normalize Israel’s indiscriminate killings; its targeting of hospitals, schools, and mosques; its use of access to food as a weapon of war; and its continued reliance on American weapons. They laid the ground and there was no turning back.

The Lies America Tells Itself About the Middle East: As Its Influence Faded, Washington Dissembled and Denied Reality

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.

Miran says he doesn’t see tariffs causing inflation, putting him in minority on Fed committee

Published Fri, Sep 19 2025 12:11 PM EDT Updated Fri, Sep 19 2025 1:39 PM EDT

Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran said Friday that he doesn’t anticipate President Donald Trump’s tariffs will have an inflationary effect on the U.S. economy.

“I’m clearly in the minority in not being concerned about inflation from tariffs,” he said on CNBC’s “Money Movers.” “But that was also true in 2018-2019, and I think I probably could take a little victory lap about that.”

“There will always be relative price changes, but whether or not it’s inflation that’s macroeconomically significant of the type that monetary policy should respond to is a different question,” he added.

His comments come after the Fed governor was the lone dissenter among 12 Federal Open Market Committee voters from the central bank’s decision Wednesday to slash its benchmark overnight lending rate by a quarter-percentage point, instead calling for a half-point reduction.

When explaining the reason for his decision, Miran said he doesn’t “see any material inflation from tariffs.”

“I see no evidence that it’s occurred,” the policymaker said, pointing to the lack of difference in inflation rates between import-intensive core goods and overall core goods. “If you thought tariffs are driving inflation higher, you’d think imports would be differentially inflating at a higher pace.”

Miran additionally cited “no discernible trend difference” between U.S. core goods inflation and that in other countries. “If I thought that tariffs were driving any material inflation in the United States, I’d look for evidence,” he continued.

However, most measures show inflation running above the Fed’s 2% target this year, and the full committee’s forecast indicated it won’t come back to that level until 2028.

In the second half of the year, Miran expects growth to come in stronger, as he said economic headwinds such as uncertainty around Trump’s trade and tax policies caused growth in the first half to be weaker than he had hoped. He also believes Trump’s immigration policies will bring about disinflation in the economy.

“If you add millions of new immigrants into a country in a short period of time, it’s going to drive shelter prices up,” he said. “If you close that border, and then you have negative debt migration … that’s going to have a very disinflationary effect.”

The Senate confirmed Miran to the Fed Board of Governors on Monday, a day before this week’s policy meeting began. He had been picked by President Donald Trump in August to fill former Governor Adriana Kugler’s seat following her abrupt resignation.

Miran is set to serve on the board for the remainder of Kugler’s term, which expires on Jan. 31, 2026. He said during a confirmation hearing earlier this month that he will take an unpaid leave of absence from his position as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors while serving out the term rather than resign entirely.

Miran says he doesn't see tariffs causing inflation, putting him in minority on Fed committee

'Foothills of stagflation': Economists detail key dangers of Trump policies

September 18, 2025

On September 5, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that in August, the United States had 4.3 percent unemployment. The U.S. is not in a recession, yet there are warning signs for the American economy.

Job creation, according to the BLS, is weak. And major economists like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich fear that President Donald Trump's steep new tariffs will lead to "stagflation" — a painful combination of inflation, high unemployment and weak economic growth that the U.S. suffered in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Stagflation fears are addressed in a conversation between four economists — Larry H. Summers, Rebecca Patterson, Oren Cass and Jason Furman — published in Q&A form in the New York Times' opinion section on September 18.

Summers, who served as U.S. Treasury secretary under former President Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic Council (NEC) under former President Barack Obama, told the others, "I think we may be at the foothills of stagflation. I don't think tariff impacts have been fully felt or will be for some time, and confidence has more room to decline than to rise. I think inflation will surprise a bit on the high side. I suspect we are seeing unemployment and inflation forecasts both being revised up."

Furman noted that he shared "Larry's inflation concerns," adding, "Core inflation, excluding items like food and energy, has been running at a 3 percent rate. Some of that is tariffs, and they might be transitory. But even without tariffs, inflation is still running about 2.5 percent."

Patterson stressed that while some Americans are doing well economically, others are "struggling" to find work.

Patterson told Summers, Furman and Cass, "While overall economic growth has been fine, it is masking very different experiences for different parts of the population. High-income earners with homes and equities have rising levels of wealth and continue to spend. But young people just out of college, lower-income earners and retirees on fixed incomes are increasingly struggling, given high and still-rising prices, a stagnant job market and a lack of housing supply."

Cass, meanwhile, described himself as "the biggest optimist in the group."

Cass recalled, "When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, the Fed induced a sharp recession to tame stagflation. Even at the time, certainly in hindsight, people recognized that the short-term numbers were not the right measure."

Read the full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).

'Foothills of stagflation': Economists detail key dangers of Trump policies

In the beginning of a stock market boom it is ever the “dear public,” the fleecy lambs, the most guileless victims, who make the most money. They really do not know when to stop winning, and so in the end they lose profit and principal.

Edwin Lefevre

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is a 1923 roman à clef by American author Edwin Lefèvre. It is told in the first person by a character, in the book called Larry Livingston, inspired by the life of stock trader Jesse Livermore up to the time of writing.^[

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator - Wikipedia

Technology Update.

With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.

Electricity through osmosis: Japan opens landmark osmotic power plant

September 16, 2025

Imagine generating power not from sunlight or wind, but from the simple mixing of fresh and salt water. This is the quiet promise of osmotic energy, a renewable energy source generated where river meets ocean. The idea has been around for decades, but only now is it flowing into real-world use.

The principle behind osmotic potential is deceptively simple. When fresh and salt water are separated by a semi-permeable membrane, water molecules naturally move across the barrier to balance the difference. That flow builds up pressure strong enough to spin a turbine. No combustion, no emissions. And unlike wind or solar, there is no dependence on weather or daylight, making it capable of running continuously.

The first real push came in 2009, when the Norwegian company Statkraft built one of the world’s first prototype osmotic power plants. The four-kilowatt demonstration model proved the concept could generate electricity, but due to costs the technology mostly lingered in labs and small pilots.

Now, for only the second time since development of those prototypes, a full-scale facility has opened in Fukuoka, Japan. Built by a consortium including the National Institute for Materials Science and local partners, it’s the world’s second osmotic power facility designed for continuous output following the launch of another plant in Denmark in 2023. While considered modest in scale, it will generate around 880,000 kilowatt-hours per year – enough to power 220 households or offset the energy needs of a desalination plant.

What sets the Fukuoka facility apart from any prior iterations of the technology is not the amount of energy it generates, but how it applies physics to infrastructure. By pairing with a desalination plant, it taps into concentrated brine waste that would otherwise be discarded, creating a sharper salinity contrast than rivers naturally provide. Those stronger gradients boost efficiency and grounds osmotic generation in existing systems rather than the lab.

Still, hurdles remain. Pumping losses and membrane fouling can erode efficiency, and advanced membranes are expensive.

“While energy is released when the salt water is mixed with fresh water, a lot of energy is lost in pumping the two streams into the power plant and from the frictional loss across the membranes," said Professor Sandra Kentish of the University of Melbourne in a recent interview with The Guardian. "This means that the net energy that can be gained is small.”

Precisely the sort of challenges that pushed companies such as Statkraft to shutter its prototype after a few years.

While the Fukuoka facility doesn’t claim to have solved all of the issues, it shows that osmotic power can be folded into real-world infrastructure. Advances in membrane and pump technology are reducing the losses, Kentish noted, and Japan’s use of concentrated brine from desalination increases the energy available. That integration marks an engineering milestone – and underscores the core attraction of osmotic power: its reliability.

Osmotic energy: harnessing power from salt and fresh water

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.

Exponent Calculator

This weekend’s music diversion. Reichenauer, the Czech Vivaldi. Approx. 4 minutes.

Concerto for Oboe, Bassoon, Strings and Basso continuo in B flat major – Allegro

Concerto for Oboe, Bassoon, Strings and Basso continuo in B flat major - Allegro

Next, where “the Donald” stayed in Windsor. Approx. 4 minutes.

Windsor Castle | A British Royal Palace

Windsor Castle | A British Royal Palace - YouTube