Baltic
Dry Index. 1936 +13 Brent Crude 63.60
Spot Gold 4073 US 2 Year Yield 3.52 -0.08
US Federal Debt. 37.858 trillion
US GDP 30.326 trillion.
THE ECONOMY IS SO BAD...
How bad is it you ask?
Exxon-Mobil just laid off 25 Congressmen.
With President Trump’s trip to Israel and Egypt well covered in mainstream media, we will simply wish him well in his efforts to bring lasting peace to the Middle East.
In other President Trump news, is President Trump already fast rowing back on his latest China trade war attack?
“Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I,” Trump wrote. “The U.S.A. wants to help China, not hurt it.”
An interesting week in the stock casinos lies ahead.
Chinese stocks lead declines in Asia on renewed
China-U.S. trade tensions
Published Sun, Oct 12 2025 7:51 PM EDT
Asia-Pacific markets fell Monday after
China and the U.S. tightened trade restrictions and traded fresh accusations,
renewing tensions between the world’s two largest economies.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index declined
3.41%, while mainland China’s CSI 300 traded 1.76% lower.
The offshore Chinese yuan strengthened
0.1% to 7.1267 against the greenback. The 10-year China government bond yield
lost more than 5 basis points to 1.752%.
China on
Sunday said “we are not afraid of” a trade war with the United States after
President Donald Trump vowed
to impose punishing new retaliatory
tariffs on Chinese imports.
A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Commerce accused the U.S. of a “textbook
double standard” with Trump’s
promise on Friday to tack on additional 100% tariffs on those imports
after China imposed new export
controls on rare earths minerals.
The recent policy announcements may signal
that China intends to push for greater concessions from the U.S., Goldman Sachs
wrote in a note Sunday.
China’s exports climbed at the fastest
pace in six months in September, while imports logged their strongest gain in
more than a year, even as a trade deal with the U.S. remains elusive.
Exports grew 8.3% in September in U.S.
dollar terms from a year earlier, China’s customs data showed Monday, beating
Reuters-polled economists’ estimates for a 7.1% rise and rebounding from August’s
six-month low.
Australia’s ASX/S&P 200 lost 0.68%.
South Korea’s Kospi plunged 2.35%, and the small-cap Kosdaq declined 2.24%.
Singapore’s benchmark index fell as much
as 1.5%.
Japan markets are closed for the holidays.
In a Truth
Social post on Sunday, Trump suggested to investors the president may
not follow through on his threat to post a “massive increase of tariffs” on
China.
That comment on Friday brought the U.S.
trade war with China back to the fore, and sent
stocks tumbling in a rout that wiped
out $2 trillion in market value.
“Don’t worry about China, it will all be
fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want
Depression for his country, and neither do I,” Trump wrote. “The U.S.A. wants
to help China, not hurt it.”
On Friday stateside, the three U.S. major
averages declined.
Stocks accelerated selling into the close,
with the Dow Jones Industrial
Average closing down 878.82 points, or 1.9%, at 45,479.60. The S&P 500 lost 2.71% to
settle at 6,552.51, while the Nasdaq
Composite fell 3.56% to 22,204.43. The broad-based index’s decline was
the largest since April 10.
Asia
markets: Hang Seng Index, CSI 300, U.S.-China trade tensions
Stock futures rebound from Friday’s rout after
Trump says China situation ‘will all be fine’: Live updates
Updated Sun, Oct 12 2025 6:36 PM EDT
U.S. stock futures rose Sunday night,
rebounding from Friday’s sell-off after President Donald Trump said trade
relations with China “will all be fine.”
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures rose
by 358 points, or 0.8%. S&P
500 futures and Nasdaq-100
futures climbed 1% and 1.2%, respectively.
Those moves come after Trump’s Truth
Social post on Sunday suggested to investors the president may not
follow through on his threat to post a “massive increase of tariffs” on China.
That comment on Friday brought the U.S. trade war with China back to the fore,
and sent
stocks tumbling in a rout that wiped
out $2 trillion in market value.
“Don’t worry about China, it will all be
fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want
Depression for his country, and neither do I,” Trump wrote. “The U.S.A. wants
to help China, not hurt it.”
Vice President JD Vance echoed those
sentiments over the weekend. He told Fox Newsthat the U.S. will negotiate if
Beijing is “willing to be reasonable,” though he added that the U.S. has “far
more cards” if not.
Those comments could encourage investors
to return to the market after Friday’s sell-off, especially in technology names
that got hit with the worst of the selling. Many tech companies rely on rare
earths from China for the manufacture of semiconductors and electric vehicles,
among other goods.
“Tech stocks were front and center in the
sell-off as investors fear this situation with US/China would put a major dent
in the AI Revolution thesis and bring us back to the dark days of April,” Dan
Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, wrote in a
Sunday note. “We believe the bark will be way worse than bite here and Trump
and Xi should be meeting in the next few weeks to discuss some of these topics
and likely the November 1 tariff threat overhang will ultimately be removed.”
All three major averages slid last week,
with the Dow losing 2.7%. The S&P 500 fell 2.4% for the period, while the
Nasdaq slid 2.5%. The S&P 500′s 2.7% drop on Friday alone was its largest
since April, when the stock market was still reeling from the shock of Trump’s
initial tariff announcement.
Yet other concerns are mounting for the
market. The government shutdown is stretching into a new week as a major
payrolls deadline looms. Oct. 15 is the next pay date for most federal workers,
and possibly the first that many
More
Stock
market today: Live updates
Global week ahead: Three-speed Europe heads to
Washington D.C.
Published Sat, Oct 11 2025 10:17 PM EDT
It’s that time of the year when the CNBC
International team gets to cross the Atlantic for a full week of coverage from
Washington, D.C.
While we may be on American soil, Europe
will take center stage as we speak to central bank governors and finance
ministers from across the continent who are attending the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank Annual Meetings.
Besides the many macro-economic demands,
there are some homegrown challenges to confront.
So far, the second half of the year has
been marked by political and economic divergence in Europe. At a time when the
bloc should be united, given a raft of external pressures, nations are
preoccupied with domestic issues.
France first
France remains a flashpoint. As CNBC’s Charlotte
Reed reports from Paris, the unprecedented political uncertainty has rattled
the French bond market.
In Washington, D.C., CNBC’s Karen Tso will
speak to Banque de France Governor and European Central Bank Board Member
Francois Villeroy de Galhau about how the turmoil in the Elysée Palace is
affecting monetary policy decisions.
Last week, he told RTL Radio, “we’re all
fed up with this political mess”, warning it’s eroding business and consumer
sentiment, and could shave up to 0.2% off economic growth.
Making the Merz of it
Germany, by contrast, is on firmer
footing. Goldman Sachs forecasts the economy will outperform in 2026 as
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government prioritizes fiscal “speed and
execution.”
Music to the ears of Bundesbank Chief
Joachim Nagel, who will be speaking to CNBC during the IMF/World Bank meeting.
However, he has urged caution, warning in
a New
York Times interview
that Europe cannot afford complacency over trade tariffs, Chinese competition
or central bank independence.
Spain’s bull run
Meanwhile, the sun continues to shine on
the Spanish economy, as the nation receives a double thumbs-up from the ratings
agencies, with both Moody’s and Fitch joining S&P Global in upgrading its
credit rating.
This week, CNBC will speak to Finance
Minister Carlos Cuerpo, who used strong economic momentum, relative to its
European neighbors, to push for reforms to the bloc’s financial markets.
Economic data and earnings this week:
Monday: China trade data
Tuesday: German inflation data, U.K.
unemployment data, Ericsson earnings
Wednesday: China and French inflation
data, ASML earnings
Thursday: U.K. GDP data, ABB earnings
Friday: EU inflation data, AB Volvo
earnings
Global week ahead:
Three-speed Europe heads to Washington D.C.
Market sell-off: Trump post lops off $2 trillion
from stocks in a single day
Published Sat, Oct 11 2025 9:32 AM EDT
On Friday morning, the S&P 500 was less
than a couple of points from another all-time high. Then, after a single social
media post from President Donald Trump, $2 trillion in
market value was wiped out.
The unraveling shows the sway the
president’s one-man trade policy still has over the fate of the global economy.
Trump at 10:57 a.m. ET wrote on his Truth
Social platform that China was “becoming very hostile” with the rest of the
world, especially when it comes to its control of rare earth metals. He accused
China of holding the world “captive” because of its “monopoly” on these crucial
resources.
The key part that the stock market reacted
to in the 500-word Trump post was this: “One of the policies that we are
calculating at this moment is a massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products
coming into the United States of America.”
That’s all it took.
Bespoke Investment Group calculates that about
$2 trillion in value from the U.S. stock market was erased by that single post.
The S&P 500 lost 2.7% as the closing bell rang out at the New York Stock
Exchange. It was its worst performance since early April, when the stock market
was in the throes of a cascading sell-off from Trump’s so-called liberation day rollout of
higher-than-expected duties for every country on the globe.
More
Trump post costs
stocks $2 trillion in single day
Tech megacaps lose $770 billion in value as Nasdaq
suffers steepest drop since April
Published Fri, Oct 10 2025 5:11 PM EDT
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on
Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following
President Donald Trump’s
threats for
increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies
occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines sent
the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was
the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal”
duties on
U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump
declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and, on Nov.
1, it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about
2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are
disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on
hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
In late September, Nvidia, which makes
graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a
market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline
by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a
series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only
seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video
creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now
boasts over 800 million weekly
users. Microsoft, which spends heavily on infrastructure to operate its cloud
data centers, saw its market cap drop by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That
stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. Amazon competes with Microsoft to rent out
GPUs from its cloud data centers. The online retailer lost $121 billion in
value during the day.
“There continues to be a lot of noise
about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July.
“Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s
impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced
vehicles on
Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter
results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week.
Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%,
respectively.
Tech megacaps lose
$770 billion in value as Nasdaq plunges 3.6%
In other news.
China ‘not afraid of trade war,’ accuses U.S. of
‘double standard’ for rare earths retaliation
Published Sat, Oct 11 2025 10:53 PM EDT
China on
Sunday said “we are not afraid of” a trade war with the United States after
President Donald Trump vowed
to impose punishing new retaliatory
tariffs on Chinese imports.
A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Commerce accused the U.S. of a “textbook
double standard” with Trump’s
promise on Friday to tack on additional 100% tariffs on those imports
after China imposed new export
controls on rare earths minerals.
That promise in a social media post by the
president shook U.S.
stock markets on Friday, erasing $2 trillion in equity values in a
single day.
Willful threats of high tariffs are not
the right way to get along with China, the ministry spokesperson said.
“China’s position on the trade war is
consistent: we do not want it, but we are not afraid of it,” they added.
The spokesperson said that the United
States “for a long time … has been overstretching the concept of national
security, abusing export control, taking discriminatory actions against China,
and imposing unilateral long-arm jurisdiction measures on various products,
including semiconductor equipment and chips.”
The U.S. Commerce Control list covers more
than 3,000 items, more than three times the approximately 900 items on China’s
Export Control List of Dual-use Items, the spokesperson said.
China called its export controls on rare
earth exports a “legitimate” measure under international law, pushing back
against U.S. accusations of economic coercion.
The Commerce Ministry said the controls,
issued Thursday, were part of Beijing’s effort to strengthen its export control
system and “better safeguard world peace and regional stability” amid what it
described as a turbulent global security environment.
The measures, which now cover not only
rare earth materials but also related intellectual property and technologies,
were announced just weeks before a potential meeting between Trump and Chinese
leader Xi Jinping.
“These controls do not constitute export
bans. Applications that meet the requirements will be approved,” the Commerce
Ministry spokesperson said.
“China has fully assessed the potential
impact of these measures on the supply chain and is confident that the impact
will be very limited.”
Beijing’s new curbs also require foreign
entities to obtain a license to export products containing more than 0.1% of
domestically-sourced rare earths, or manufactured using China’s extraction,
refining, magnet-making or recycling technology. Applications for items that
could be used in weapons or other military purposes will be denied.
----China accounts for about 70% of the global supply of rare
earths and has repeatedly used the critically needed minerals as a bargaining
chip in trade discussions.
Tensions whipsaw
Hours after tightening export controls on
rare earths, Beijing also announced that it would start charging
U.S. ships docking at Chinese ports from Oct. 14, mirroring a new U.S.
fee on Chinese vessels arriving at U.S. ports, set to take effect the same day.
More
China:
Trump tariffs for rare earths move risk trade war
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.
The
Big Crash: Are we really heading for another 1929?
As central banks sound the alarm over an AI bubble, parallels with previous market manias cannot be ignored
11
October 2025 6:00am BST
It’s
October 2027, and the poly-crisis that financial markets have long feared is
unfolding at speed. Vladimir Putin has made strong gains in his war against
Ukraine and has begun massing troops at Europe’s borders in readiness for
invasion of one or more of the Baltic states.
In
the Far East, China’s Xi Jinping is openly preparing for his long-promised
assault on Taiwan, emboldened both by Putin’s success and Donald Trump’s
drubbing in the congressional midterms, which have significantly reduced the
US’s scope for effective retaliation.
In
the Middle East, the
fragile peace secured by Trump in 2025 has already fallen apart,
plunging the region into renewed conflict.
And
on the stock markets, it’s mayhem. Trillions of dollars of losses are being
inflicted on the one-time
boom sector of artificial intelligence (AI). With the global economy on the
brink of recession and unemployment climbing sharply, it is clear that the
market for AI’s services has been grossly overestimated.
Despite
promises made by AI evangelists, productivity is flatlining. Far from improving
output, reports suggest that AI is damaging many businesses where it has been
most fervently applied. Some claims on which AI has been sold to investors and
lenders even turn out to be overtly fraudulent.
Many
of the mega-deals that characterised the latter stages of the great AI gold
rush, with customers and suppliers incestuously taking cross holdings in one
another, are fast unravelling in an orgy of litigation, broken promises and
shattered expectations.
But
that is not all. Overlaying the stock market crash is a debt
crisis of monstrous proportions. Almost everywhere, bond market investors
are on strike and interest rates are rocketing. Global governments are
struggling both to refinance mountainous debts and to fund ballooning
expenditures.
Private
credit, a form of finance that has flourished outside the conventional, more
tightly regulated banking system, is in meltdown, with the folly of lending to
higher-risk enterprises unable to access credit elsewhere now cruelly exposed
for all to see. Again, the losses are monumental.
So
bad is the shock that the whole construct of competing fiat currencies, on
which the world’s financial architecture is built, seems to be crumbling.
Instead, states are hurriedly erecting financial border controls in a futile
attempt to stop those investors who haven’t lost everything fleeing for safer
shores.
But
those investors are realising a dreadful truth: even if you can get your money
out, there appears to be no safe place left to put it.
1929
redux
This
is of course a wholly imagined, doomsday future. Yet finance is built entirely
on trust and confidence and rarely has it looked quite so fragile as it does
today.
Even
the usually sleepy Bank of England and International Monetary Fund have now
taken to warning
about the possibility of a sharp, destabilising correction in equity markets,
all puffed up as they are by fevered speculation over the potentially
transformative powers of AI.
Valuations
are stretched to breaking point, with the so-called “Shiller Cyclically
Adjusted Price Earnings Ratio” – generally regarded as the most reliable
indicator of where the market is relative to past peaks – close to the all-time
high it recorded during the dot.com bubble and slightly higher than it was
before the great crash of 1929.
The
parallels with previous market manias are striking.
More
The
Big Crash: Are we really heading for another 1929?
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.
Another day, another battery fire,
although only a few get reported.
Battery believed to have caused fire at Lethbridge’s Waste and
Recycling Centre
Oct 10, 2025 | 11:55 AM
Lethbridge Fire and Emergency Services
(LFES) is continuing to investigate a fire at the Waste and Recycling Centre’s
Material Recovery Facility.
Firefighters were called to the building
around 5:15 p.m. on Thursday, October 9.
The facility’s sprinkler system quickly
activated, helping to contain the blaze before fire crews arrived.
LFES says they encountered a
“smoke-filled environment” and fully extinguished the fire.
It is believed that the fire was caused
by an improperly disposed of battery.
The City of Lethbridge says the incident
highlights the importance of proper waste disposal.
“Batteries can ignite and explode if
they are discarded in curbside waste carts. They pose a significant risk to
Waste and Environment employees and other residents,” reads a news release from
the City of Lethbridge.
The City is launching a new curbside
battery recycling pilot program, running from November 18-28, 2025.
You can also learn how to properly
dispose of batteries and other hazardous materials by downloading the
free Lethbridge Loop
app or using the Waste Wizard tool online to look up proper disposal methods for
all types of batteries and tricky waste items
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt Clocks (usdebtclock.org)
How the modern Ponzi Economy works.
It is a slow day in a damp little Irish town. The rain is
beating down and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in
debt, and everybody lives on credit.
On this particular day a rich German tourist is driving through the town and he
stops at the local hotel and lays a 100 euro note on the desk. He tells the
hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to
spend the night.
The owner gives him some keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs,
the hotelier grabs the 100 euro note and runs next door to pay his debt to the
butcher.
The butcher takes the 100 euro note and runs down the street to repay his debt
to the pig farmer.
The pig farmer takes the 100 euro note and heads off to pay his bill at the
supplier of feed and fuel.
The guy at the Farmers’ Co-op takes the 100 euro note and runs to pay his
drinks bill at the pub/hotel.
The hotel proprietor then places the 100 euro note back on the counter so the
traveller will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveller comes down
the stairs, picks up the 100 euro note, states that the rooms are not
satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town.
No one produced anything. No one earned anything, but the whole town is now out
of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism.
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