Baltic Dry Index. 2121 -83 Brent Crude 60.12
Spot Gold 4365 US 2 Year Yield 3.49 +0.01
US Federal Debt. 38.423 trillion US GDP 31.647 trillion.
If the earth were flat from east to west, the stars would rise as soon for westerners as for orientals, which is false. Also, if the earth were flat from north to south and vice versa, the stars which were always visible to anyone would continue to be so wherever he went, which is false. But it seems flat to human sight because it is so extensive.
Ptolemy
While it’s too early to know that the AI bubble has burst, it’s increasingly looking that way in the stock casinos.
If the Great AI bubble has in fact burst, how bad will the year-end losses be and where will those losses show up?
Put another way, who will survive the great AI crash and who will fail?
Asia-Pacific markets track Wall Street declines as
rotation out of tech continues
Published Wed, Dec 17 2025 6:58 PM EST
Asia-Pacific markets tumbled Thursday as
investors on Wall Street continued to rotate out of tech.
Artificial intelligence-related stocks
dragged indexes after the Financial Times reported that Oracle’s primary investor,
Blue Owl Capital, pulled out from funding one of its data center projects.
Shares of the AI stock tumbled 5.4%.
Other stocks tied to the AI trade also
fell, including chipmaker Broadcom,
AI darling Nvidia,
and Advanced Micro Devices
Over in Asia, the Bank of Japan will kick
off its two-day meeting, with the central bank expected to raise rates to 0.75%
Friday, its highest level in 30 years.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 lost 1.53%,
leading losses in Asia, while the Topix fell 0.45%. Softbank Group Corp was
among the top losers in the benchmark Nikkei 225, falling as much as
7.25%. The group pared some losses and was last trading 3% lower.
Other Japanese tech stocks also fell.
Semiconductor equipment supplier Advantest, dropped as much as
5%. Counterparts Lasertec, Renesas Electronics and Tokyo Electron declined
between 3% and 4%.
South Korea’s Kospi was down 1.36%, and
the small-cap Kosdaq was 0.64% lower.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 slipped
0.3%.
Shares of Australian energy giant Woodside Energy declined
1.84% after the firm announced that CEO and managing director Meg O’Neill
had resigned and accepted the role of CEO at British oil and gas major BP.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index opened 0.76%
lower, while the mainland CSI 300 was flat. Shares of Chinese chipmaker MetaX
Integrated Circuits slid as much as 7% after
soaring nearly 700% in their market debut in Shanghai on Wednesday. The
company raised nearly $600 million in its initial public offering.
Overnight in the U.S., all three major
indexes fell, with the S&P
500 down 1.16%, and the Nasdaq Composite seeing the
largest loss of 1.81%. The Dow
Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.47%.
Traders are awaiting the release of the
U.S. consumer
price index reading for November, due Thursday morning. It will mark
the first consumer inflation report issued to the public since the government
shutdown ended last month. Economists polled by Dow Jones expect that headline
inflation grew at a 3.1% pace on a year-over-year basis.
Asia-Pacific
markets track Wall Street declines as rotation out of tech continues
SoftBank leads decline in Japanese tech stocks as
worries over AI spending spill over to Asia
Published Wed, Dec 17 2025 9:17 PM EST
Japanese tech stocks took a tumble on
Thursday as AI infrastructure spending worries on Wall Street crossed the ocean
into the Asian markets, with AI-related stocks declining.
Softbank Group Corp was
among the top losers in the benchmark Nikkei 225, falling as much as
7.25%, with the index leading losses in Asia, down 1.23%. The group pared some
losses and was last trading 3% lower.
This decline comes as the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 1.81%
overnight, dragged by losses in Oracle,
Broadcom, Nvidia and other AI plays.
The losses in Oracle came after the
Financial Times reported on Wednesday that Blue Owl Capital’s plans to finance
the cloud infrastructure company’s $10 billion Michigan data center had
stalled. The company last week had refuted
a report that said it had delayed some projects for AI major OpenAI to
2028.
Tech-focused SoftBank has seen sharp
volatility in its stock over the past month as fears over AI-related spending
have gripped the market.
At the start of the year, the group had
revealed plans to invest $500
billion in AI infrastructure in the U.S. along with OpenAI, Oracle and
other partners, and in September it announced five new U.S. AI data center
sites under Stargate, OpenAI’s overarching AI infrastructure platform.
Other Japanese tech stocks also fell.
Semiconductor equipment supplier Advantest, dropped as much as
5%. Counterparts Lasertec, Renesas Electronics and Tokyo Electron declined
between 3% and 4%.
Jesper Koll, expert director at
Tokyo-based financial services firm Monex Group, said much of what goes into
data centers, power centers, and AI hardware enablers is “Made in Japan, and
can only be made in Japan.” That makes Japanese tech, especially AI-related
stocks more vulnerable to any worries around U.S. tech spending.
More
SoftBank
leads decline in Japanese tech stocks as worries over AI spending spill over to
Asia
Stocks Take a Hit as AI Fears Settle In
December 17, 2025 at 11:07 PM GMT
Stocks took a turn for the worse Wednesday
as doubts in tech darlings and artificial intelligence outlays manifested
in declines across the board. The rout hits amid growing suspicion that
the mother of all bubbles may be ready to pop. Magnificent Seven pole
sitter Nvidia led declines among the megacaps as the S&P 500 fell
1.2% and the Nasdaq slid 1.8%.
Even the slightest hint of trouble around
data centers is enough to spook investors banking on the AI boom, and there was
more than a hint today. AI
canary Oracle coughed up some coal dust in the form of financing
issues around a data center in Michigan. It turns out that Blue Owl
Capital, a longtime partner in the company’s AI infrastructure build-out, is
not contributing equity. Oracle plunged about 5.4%.
As the year draws to a close, a clearer
narrative has emerged: the mega-cap technology stocks that have powered this
bull run may be losing their ability to carry the market on their own,
according to Fawad Razaqzada at Forex.com. Here’s today’s
market wrap. —Jordan
Parker Erb
As the year draws to a close, a clearer
narrative has emerged: the mega-cap technology stocks that have powered this
bull run may be losing their ability to carry the market on their own,
according to Fawad Razaqzada at Forex.com. Here’s today’s market wrap.
Stocks
Take Hit as AI Fears Settle In: Evening Briefing Americas - Bloomberg
In other news, will AI ever deliver a profit?
AI promised a revolution. Companies are still
waiting.
December 16, 2025 9:04 PM GMT
SAN FRANCISCO/STOCKHOLM, Dec 16 - Last
spring, CellarTracker, a wine-collection app, built an AI-powered sommelier to
make unvarnished wine recommendations based on a person’s palate. The problem
was the chatbot was too nice.
“It's just very polite, instead of just
saying, ‘It's really unlikely you'll like the wine,’” CellarTracker CEO Eric
LeVine said. It took six weeks of trial and error to coax the chatbot into
offering an honest appraisal before the feature was launched.
Since ChatGPT exploded three years ago,
companies big and small have leapt at the chance to adopt generative artificial
intelligence and stuff it into as many products as possible. But so far, the
vast majority of businesses are struggling to realize a meaningful return on
their AI investments, according to company executives, advisors and the results
of seven recent executive and worker surveys.
One survey of 1,576 executives conducted
during the second quarter by research and advisory firm Forrester Research
showed just 15% of respondents saw profit margins improve due to AI over the
last year. Consulting firm BCG found that only 5% of 1,250 executives surveyed
between May and mid-July saw widespread value from AI.
Executives say they still believe
generative AI will eventually transform their businesses, but they are
reconsidering how quickly that will happen within their organizations.
Forrester predicts that in 2026 companies will delay about 25% of their planned
AI spending by a year.
“The tech companies who have built this
technology have spun this tale that this is all going to change quickly,”
Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins said. “But we humans don’t change that fast.”
AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic
and Google are all doubling down on courting business customers in the next
year. During a recent lunch with media editors in New York, OpenAI CEO Sam
Altman said developing AI systems for companies could be a $100 billion market.
All this is happening against the backdrop
of unprecedented tech investment in everything from chips, to data centers, to
energy sources.
Whether these investments can be justified
will be determined by companies’ ability to figure out how to use AI to boost
revenue, fatten margins or speed innovation. Failing that, the infrastructure
build-out could trigger the kind of crash reminiscent of the dot-com bust in
the early 2000s, some experts say.
THE 'EASY' BUTTON
Soon after ChatGPT’s launch, companies
worldwide created task forces dedicated to finding ways to embrace generative
AI, a type of AI that can create original content like essays, software code
and images through text prompts.
One well-known issue with AI models is
their tendency to please the user. This bias – what’s called “sycophancy” –
encourages users to chat more, but can impair the model’s ability to give
better advice.
CellarTracker ran into this problem with
its wine-recommendation feature, built on top of OpenAI’s technology, CEO
LeVine said. The chatbot performed well enough when asked for general
recommendations. But when asked about specific vintages, the chatbot remained
positive – even if all signals showed a person was highly unlikely to enjoy
them.
“We had to bend over backwards to get the
models (any model) to be critical and suggest there are wines I might not
like,” LeVine said.
Part of the solution was designing prompts
that gave the model permission to say no.
Companies have also struggled with AI’s
lack of consistency.
Jeremy Nielsen, general manager at North
American railroad service provider Cando Rail and Terminals, said the company
recently tested an AI chatbot for employees to study internal safety reports
and training materials.
But Cando ran into a surprising stumbling
block: the models couldn’t consistently and correctly summarize the Canadian
Rail Operating Rules, a roughly 100-page document that lays out the safety
standards for the industry.
Sometimes the models forgot or
misinterpreted the rules; other times they invented them from whole cloth. AI
researchers say models often struggle to recall what appears in the middle of a
long document.
Cando has dropped the project for now, but
is testing other ideas. So far the company has spent $300,000 on developing AI
products.
“We all thought it’d be the easy button,”
Nielsen said. “And that’s just not what happened.”
More
AI promised a
revolution. Companies are still waiting. | Reuters
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.
President
Trump tells the world to de-dollarise fast. Get gold and silver.
Trump
says next Fed chair will believe in lower interest rates 'by a lot'
December
18, 2025 4:37 AM GMT
WASHINGTON,
Dec 17 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said
on Wednesday the next chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve will be someone who
believes in lower interest rates "by a lot."
"I'll
soon announce our next chairman of the Federal Reserve, someone who believes in
lower interest rates, by a lot, and mortgage payments will be coming down even
further," Trump said.
Trump
made the comments during a national address touting his economic and national
security accomplishments in the first year of his second term in office.
He
has previously indicated that he will announce his chosen successor to current
Fed Chair Jerome Powell early
next year.
All
of the known finalists - White House economic adviser Kevin
Hassett, former Fed Governor Kevin
Warsh and current Fed Governor Chris
Waller - advocate for interest rates to be lower than they are now.
None,
however, has expressly indicated they would push the U.S. central bank to slash
rates as low as Trump has demanded, in some cases to as low as a crisis-level
1%. The current Fed rate ranges from 3.5%
to 3.75%, and not even his latest appointee - Governor Stephen Miran -
advocates for a rate anywhere near that low.
Trump
has repeatedly expressed a desire for lower mortgage rates, but the interest
rate the Fed controls has only limited effect on longer-term borrowing costs.
Those are more typically influenced by longer-term rates the Fed has less sway
over, such as the 10-year Treasury note yield .
That
rate is moved by investors' expectations for U.S. economic growth and inflation
and on balance has changed little in the last year. Mortgage rates have been
stuck in the 6.3%-6.4% range since Labor Day and show little indication of
moving lower.
Trump
told the Wall Street Journal last week that he was leaning toward either Warsh
or Hassett as the next head of the U.S. central bank. All the same, interviews
continued on Wednesday with a meeting with Waller, one of the early advocates
among current Fed policymakers for lower rates but a stalwart defender of Fed
independence.
Trump
told the newspaper that he thought the next Fed chair should consult with him
on where to set interest rates. Presidents typically leave rate decision-making
up to the Fed.
More
Trump
says next Fed chair will believe in lower interest rates 'by a lot' | Reuters
UK
inflation slides to 3.2% before Bank of England rate decision
December
17, 2025 7:30 AM GMT
LONDON,
Dec 17 (Reuters) - British consumer price inflation fell unexpectedly sharply
to 3.2% in November, its lowest since March, from 3.6% in October, official
figures showed on Wednesday, a day before the Bank of England is widely
expected to cut interest rates.
A
Reuters poll of economists had shown a median forecast of a fall to 3.5% in
November's annual inflation rate, though the BoE had pencilled in a slightly
bigger drop to 3.4%.
Sterling
dropped by around half a cent against the U.S. dollar after the data came out,
which reinforced expectations for looser monetary policy.
Financial
markets have been pricing in a more than 90% chance of the BoE cutting rates by
a quarter point to 3.75% on Thursday, though many economists have said they see
the decision as more finely balanced.
Wednesday's
data showed services price inflation, which the BoE sees as reflecting as a
guide to longer-term inflation pressures, fell to 4.4% rather than holding at
4.5% as economists and the BoE had expected.
Food
and non-alcoholic beverage inflation dropped to 4.2% from 4.9% in October. The
BoE has said it expects this to rise 5.3% in December, the highest in nearly
two years.
Core
CPI - which excludes more volatile food, alcohol, energy and tobacco prices -
also slowed to 3.2% rather than holding at 3.4% as economists had forecast in
the Reuters poll.
Last
month the BoE's Monetary Policy Committee voted 5-4 to keep
interest rates on hold, breaking the quarterly cadence of rate cuts in place
since 2024 and economists expect a December rate cut by only a narrow 5-4
margin.
Of
those members who opposed a cut in November, Governor Andrew Bailey looks most
likely to switch votes as he said in minutes of the
decision that
he wanted to see further falls in price pressures "this year" before
backing a cut.
British
inflation has been higher than in other major advanced economies and in
November the central bank forecast it would remain above its 2% target until
the second quarter of 2027.
Since
then, finance minister Rachel Reeves announced measures in her November 26
budget that will shift climate change costs away from levies on energy bills
towards general taxation.
UK inflation slides to 3.2% before Bank of England rate decision | Reuters
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.
Incat powers up world’s largest battery-electric ship
Australian
shipbuilder Incat Tasmania has powered up the world’s largest battery-electric
ship – and the largest electric vehicle of any type on the planet – and
successfully completed its first e-motor trial in Hobart.
December 17, 2025
Australia-headquartered shipbuilder
Incat Tasmania has achieved a world first with the largest battery-electric
ferry yet built, completing its first e-motor propulsion trial on the River
Derwent.
The 130-meter vessel, identified as Hull
096, operated 100% on battery power on 14 December after Incat activated what
is described as the largest battery-electric propulsion system yet installed on
a ship.
The vessel’s energy storage system comprises more than 250 tonnes of batteries
capable of delivering more than 40 MWh of installed capacity – four times
larger than any previous maritime battery installation in the world.
Incat Chairman Robert Clifford said the
powering up of Hull 096 represents a world first in battery-electric shipping.
“This is the first time a ship of this
size, anywhere in the world, has been trialled under 100% battery-electric
propulsion,” he said, adding that the milestone marks a breakthrough for the
global maritime industry.
“This ship will stand as a flagship for
what’s possible when industry, design, and clean-energy technology come
together,” he said.
Hull 096, which has been constructed for
South American ferry operator Buquebus, was officially launched in
May at Incat’s shipyards and will now complete a series of trials before
it departs for South America in the coming months.
When it enters service between Argentina
and Uruguay, it will operate entirely on battery-electric power, carrying up to
2,100 passengers and 225 vehicles across the River Plate. The batteries on Hull
096 are expected to keep the vessel operating for 90 minutes and chargers will
be installed at the ship’s berths in Argentina and Uruguay, with a full charge
expected to take 40 minutes.
The Hull 096 milestone comes just days
after Incat signed a contract to build a third 100% battery-electric high-speed
ferry for Danish operator Molslinjen.
Incat penned a contract earlier this year to design and build two battery-electric ferries
for Molslinjen and, earlier this month, announced it would build a third
electric ferry for the company.
Each of the three 129-metre vessels will
be 100% battery powered, featuring a 45 MWh battery system and carrying
capacity for up to 1,483 passengers and 500 cars while operating at speeds of
more than 40 knots.
Incat powers up world’s largest battery-electric ship – pv magazine
International
Next, the
world global debt clock. Nations debts to GDP compared.
World Debt Clocks
(usdebtclock.org)
Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will
move the world.
Archimedes
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