Notes Today: 

• Amazon appears to do quite well, even if Jeffrey’s tiny boat is a bit of an embarrassment.  (1 hr chart below)

• 
  
  Putin's Russia becoming more and more warlike.

• More than 4 million Texans have lost power (again) after a weekend storm crippled the state’s energy infrastructure (again).  Abbott in action – again... Don’t think I’ll be moving to Texas.

• (Bloomberg) -- Soybean buyers stung by a smaller and slower harvest than expected in Brazil are turning to the U.S. for supply, driving up prices and threatening to worsen food inflation.What was expected to be a record crop in Brazil is now looking far smaller, with lower yields and harvest delays due to adverse weather catching traders and end-users shorthanded. The uncertainty has driven buyers into the U.S. market. More than 110 ships have been chartered on a preliminary basis to load crops at ports in the Pacific Northwest, according to Bill Tierney, chief economist for AgResource Co. in Chicago.
  
  
  

 

Notes Today:

• Investors wipe about $200 billion from Facebook's / Meta’s value (aka the plague on humanity)

• Reno, Nevada, hasn’t recorded a single drop of rain during the entire month of January, a record that goes back nearly 130 years. (Guardian)

• $324 million stolen from blockchain platform Wormhole  

• If you created an online account to manage your tax records with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), those login credentials will cease to work later this year. The agency says that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me, an online identity verification service that requires applicants to submit copies of bills and identity documents, as well as a live video feed of their faces via a mobile device.

Facebook (FB) performing as advertised. New members becoming scarcer (15 minute chart below)

More than half of the sea now logs temperatures once considered extreme, threatening countless species, livelihoods, and the air we breathe.

Facebook's sensation-seeking, hate-speech nurturing algorithms are ripping apart the fabric of many developing countries, especially India. (FB)

 

Quick Overview is up to date

Rise, Fall and Curious Revival of Vaseline The gelatinous oil-sludge byproduct emerged in the 19th century as a strangely popular women’s beauty treatment. And yup, it’s emerged again.

Made by Unilever (UN)

Notes Today:

 

• Officials at the Pentagon warned that Russia has enough troops near Ukraine to invade the entire country. And is adding more!!
• Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum  - Russia has an abortion rate nearly double that of the United States. Any form of Christianity outside of the state-controlled Orthodox Church is liable to be considered a cult. Only 15 percent of Russians are even interested in religion; only 5 percent have read the Bible.

• Hedge funds bought +104k contracts of ag futures last week - on Brazil damage and Crude Oil strength.   

• Two Long Island nurses made more than $1.5 million in a fake vaccine card scheme, prosecutors say.

• Plam Oil at all time high at 5628 

• The Tennessee school district bans Holocaust novel ‘Maus’ over violence and profanity – now sold out on Amazon. 

• Jake Tapper @jaketapper Another school board removing another heralded book from its curriculum: "To Kill a Mockingbird" will be removed from the Mukilteo WA School District's ninth-grade English/Language Arts required reading list. Selling out on amazon??

Imagine taking a long, hot shower without wasting water and energy.

If Apple Inc. made a shower, it might look something like the Orbital. 

“I sincerely hope that other artists and record companies will move off the SPOTIFY platform and
stop supporting SPOTIFY’s deadly misinformation about COVID,” Young wrote on his blog on Wednesday.

Joni Mitchell stands with Neil Young. 👍👍

After losing billions and thousands of subscribers in one week, Spotify CEO: "Based on the feedback over the last several weeks, it's become clear to me (slow learner) that we have an obligation to do more to provide balance and access to widely-accepted information from the medical and scientific communities guiding us through this unprecedented time." ( balance ?? 👎👎)

 

Quick Overview is up to date

Notes Today:

 

• Domestic US growth outpaced China's economic growth in 2021 for the first time in decades. 

• Apple posted its highest revenue in its history. Sales rose 11% to $123.9 billion in Q1.

• Tesla on the other hand lost some $100 billion on the day.

• Warren Buffett is once again richer than  Zuckerberg (CEO of the AKA plague on humanity)   a reminder that value-investingworks.

• The markets sold off when Fed head Jerome Powell said interest rates could rise further.

• Well, something that’s quite positive about higher interest rates is that we will, at long last, have safe and meaningful outlets for savings again. Your CD’s may just start to earn more than pennies.. 

• Global investment demand for gold suffered a more than 40% drop in 2021, even as bar and coin demand climbed to an eight-year high and investment demand for the fourth quarter more than doubled, according to a report from the World Gold Council released Thursday evening.

 

U.S. Stocks Historically Deliver Strong Gains in Fed Hike Cycles

In fact, stocks have risen at an average annualized rate of 9% during the 12 Fed rate hike cycles since the 1950s and delivered positive returns in 11 of those instances, according to Keith Lerner, Truist’s co-chief investment officer. The one exception was during the 1972-1974 period, which coincided with the 1973-1975 recession.

S&P

Russian ships, tanks and troops on the move to Ukraine as peace talks stall

 And a large military force, including Iskander short-range ballistic missiles, elite spetsnaz troops and anti-aircraft batteries, has arrived in Belarus from Russia’s eastern military district, an extraordinary deployment that western officials and analysts say could enable Moscow to threaten Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.

• Russia and Ukraine akkount for some 29% of global wheat exports.

 

How Did ID.me Get Between You and Your Identity? 

Should we be entrusting private companies with a responsibility that would naturally fall on governments—such as verifying the identities of their own citizens? Just as we probably don’t want Amazon or Facebook controlling access to our tax records or a government lifeline when things go wrong, it isn’t clear we should want ID.me to be everywhere we want to be.

Economist: The price of orange-juice futures surged, after this year’s orange crop in Florida was forecast to be the smallest since 1945. The Sunshine State’s orange groves are plagued with tree lice. Orange prices are also sensitive to a drought in Brazil, which has hurt citrus production there. The overall demand for orange has lost some zest in recent years, as consumers switch to low-sugar drinks.

The Video game industry is now far larger than the movie business. FT

It’s Not Complicated. Microsoft Wants Activision for Its Games. NYT

 

Notes Today:

 

• Tensions between Ukraine and Russia have led to the U.S. delivering 90 tons of military aid that arrived in Ukraine.

• State Department orders families of U.S. embassy personnel in Ukraine to begin evacuating the country as soon as Monday.

• The FOMC meets this week, and they are projected to hasten the taper of asset purchases. 

• Reports upcoming are the estimate of Q4 GDP and December New Home sales, December Personal Income and Outlays and November Case-Shiller house prices. 

• If you think your stock portfolio had a rough week, Jeff Bezos lost $20 billion of his fortune, Changpeng Zhao of Binance dropped $17.7 billion, and Zuckerberg’s wealth fell $10.4 billion. 
• Feel better?

• The Arizona Democratic Party on Saturday voted to formally censure the state’s senior senator for her part in killing the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Acts.

• Artificial snow has become a Winter Olympics fixture as climate change shrinks the number of countries that get enough natural snowfall to hold the event. But Beijing will be the first host to rely completely on man-made powder. 

Powerful evidence suggests that fishing fleets are deliberately dumping their used nets and lines at sea, threatening the complete collapse of marine ecosystems.

 

Quick Overview is up to date

You may want to note that the China Containerized Freight Index is making new highs while The BDI Baltic Exchange Dry Index is making lows.

Nassim Taleb on BitCoin - 

to 0

@nntaleb

View BTC is as a contagious disease. It will spread, spread & its price will rally until saturation, that is ~every sucker stupid enough to buy the story is invested. When all suckers are in, the prevailing belief will make it an "obvious" investment. That's maximal fragility.

 

Comment 1: Why BTC is worth exactly 0 Gold and other precious metals are largely maintenance free, do not degrade over an historical horizon, and do not require maintenance to refresh their physical properties over time. Cryptocurrencies require a sustained amount of interest in them.

Let us go deeper into how a currency can come about.

No transaction between two persons is analytically pairwise

in an open economy. The root of the confusion lies in the

prevalent naïve-libertarian illusion that a transaction between

two consenting adults, when devoid of coercion, is effectively

just a transaction between two consenting adults and can

be isolated and discussed as such12. But one must consider

the ensemble of transactions and the interactions between

agents: people happen to engage in contractual agreements

with others; for them a specific transaction is just one piece.

To be able to regularly buy goods denominated in bitcoin

(whose prices fixed in bitcoin but floating in U.S.$ or some

other fiat currency), one must have an income that is fixed in

bitcoin. Such an income must come from somewhere, say, an

employer. For an employer to pay a salary fixed in bitcoin, she

or he must be getting revenues fixed in bitcoin. Furthermore,

for the vendor to offer a can of beer in fixed bitcoins, she or

he must be paying for the raw material, and have the overhead

fixed in bitcoin. The same applies to the mismatch of assets

and obligations on a balance sheet. All this requires a parity

in bitcoin-USD of low enough volatility to be tolerable and

for variations to remain inconsequential.

Notes Today:

 

• Nikkei 225 Hits 6-week Low
• Heating Oil Hits 7-year High
• S&P/ASX 200 at 4-week Low
• Crude at 7-Year High 

• British consumer price inflation rose more than expected to 5.4% in December, its highest in almost 30 years
• Germanies housing boom has accelerated yet again. Home prices rose 14% in 2021. 

• Julia Davis @JuliaDavisNews: On multiple (RUSSIAN) shows, experts and pundits are claiming that the principle of MAD (mutually assured destruction) is obsolete and trying to convince the audiences that Russia could prevail over the U.S. in a nuclear war. 

• The Baltic Exchange Dry  Index  at its lowest level in about a year, on weaker demand across all vessel segments.

 Palm Oil at all time high

 Quick Overview is up to date

 US wages growing at the fastest pace in two decades

Moex Russia Index  falls 13% over past four trading days on fears of Moscow invasion of Ukraine 

Green Hills Software CEO Dan O'Dowd took out a full page ad in Sunday’s New York Times calling TSLA's “Full Self-Driving” software “the worst software ever sold by a Fortune 500 company.

• AP California prosecutors have filed two counts of vehicular manslaughter against the driver of a Tesla on Autopilot who ran a red light, slammed into another car and killed two people in 2019.

British troops sent to Ukraine: Soldiers and hi-tech weapons on way amid fears of Russian invasion | Daily Mail Online

 

 Dow Theory

 Philadelphia housing index  (HGX)

 Nasdaq advance decline line

 NYSE advance decline line

Has Eurodollar (interest rate) decided to put in a “long term” top?

Notes Today:

 

• China’s economy expanded 8.1% in 2021, defying expectations, despite slowing in the last quarter.

• The pentagon declares climate change a national security issue. Btw, the pentagon has known this for decades. 

• US annual rate of inflation jumped to 7% in December, its highest level since June 1982. 

• The euro zone’s annual inflation rate rose to 5%, record high, in December. 

• The Insurance industries had the fourth-costliest year ever for natural disasters, according to Munich Re. 

• Argentina’s interest rates are currently at a remarkable 40%. Inflation  at 51.2%

• TheBaltic Dry index has lost nearly 23% this week. 

• China would like to produce 40% more soybeans by 2025 hoping to become self-sufficient. 

• Fears rise over how unregulated trading and promotion of crypto assets are creating a new generation of addicts.

Tulip file:  Economist  According to some estimates, Bitcoins’ electricity use is approaching that of Italy. “You waste all these resources only to end up with a system that is controlled by people you have even less reason to trust than those who run conventional financial institutions,” 

•  China’s birth rate plummeted to just 7.5 births per 1,000 people in 2021, the lowest figure since records began in 1949.

 

Quick Overview is up to date

 Is Soy Bean Oil about to follow Palm Oil to new highs?

Notes Today 

S&P 500 Earnigs grew by 65% in 2021 - the highest annual increase on record.

RCEP: Asia readies world’s largest trade deal

Trade barriers between most countries in the Asia Pacific will be lowered significantly from January 1 as the world’s largest free trading bloc opens for business. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is a trade deal between the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. RCEP will cover about 30% of global gross domestic product (GDP), worth $26.2 trillion (€23.17 trillion), and nearly a third of the world’s population, some 2.2 billion people.

ChinaIs Running Out of Water and That’s Scary for Asia

Thousands of rivers have disappeared, while industrialization and pollution have spoiled much of the water that remains. By some estimates, 80% to 90% of China’s groundwater and half of its river water is too dirty to drink; more than half of its groundwater and one-quarter of its river water cannot even be used for industry or farming.

Pat Gelsinger: When I make statements like we're on or ahead of schedule on Intel 7, 4, 3, 20A and 18A, over the same period of time that the competitors have slipped their process technology. The gap is closing faster than I forecast at the beginning of the year for this. (chart  log scale)

Btw, INTC is part of the Dogs of the Dow for 2022

 

Quick Overview is up to date