Sunday, September 22, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • Obama urged Republican/Tea to stop political brinkmanship on gov't funding and debt limit in order to avert self-inflicted wounds to economy.

  • The Dow and S&P 500 set record highs on Fed's "no taper" decision.

  • MoM existing U.S. Home Sales Beat Expectations rising 1.7% September

  • US Philly Fed business index 22.3vs 10.0 exp

  • (Reuters) - China could import 20-30 million tonnes of corn a year to cover growing supply shortages, a researcher with a government think tank said on Thursday, as much as four times current levels.

  • (Bloomberg) Global cocoa demand will outstrip supply by 209,000 metric tons in the season ending Sept. 30, estimates KnowledgeCharts, a unit of Commodities Risk Analysis in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. That is bigger than the 52,000-ton deficit forecast by the International Cocoa Organization in London. The shortage next season will amount to 188,000 tons.

  • 27% of Americans say now is a good time to find a quality job, up from 21 % in August. The figure is the highest since January 2008. At the same time, lower-income Americans' optimism has faded; with 19% saying now is a good time to find a quality job.


  • The US National Security Agency (NSA) has posted an ad for a "Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer".

  • The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed limits on carbon pollution from new fossil fuel (coal) power plants. The move, if successful, would be the first major step by the U.S. to limit greenhouse gas emissions from this sector.

  • The Czech Republic became the latest EU member to denounce subsidies for clean but costly renewable energy and pledged to double down on its use of fossil fuels.

  • Results from a referendum in the southern Swiss canton of Ticino showed that 65% of the electorate backed a proposal to forbid the covering of faces in public areas by any group.

  • The Sunday Assembly—the London-based “Atheist Church” grew at 3,000% since January, a rate that might make this non-religious Assembly the fastest growing church in the world”.

Sunday, September 08, 2013

Sunday, September 01, 2013

Jerry Brown's Tough-Love California Miracle "He preceded Al Gore," says Tom Hayden, the counterculture icon whom Brown appointed as the first chairman of his solar-energy council. "He's out there with solar beanies and rooftop collectors, and it's 1974 and people think he's a lunatic."

   “But I’ m not habituated – I disrupt my own thought pattern every day. I have learned to disbelieve almost everything I think!”

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • MoM U.S. consumer sentiment declined to 82.1 from July’s 85.1.
  • Chicago PMI rose to 53.0 from 52.3 in July.
  • Consumer spending barely rose in July, the first month of the third quarter, indicating little change in the U.S. economy's mild pace of growth.

  • China returning to full speed? China official manufacturing PMI rises to 51 in August a 16 month high.

  • The United States' High Plains Aquifer — a vast underground reservoir that stretches through eight states, from South Dakota to Texas, and supplies 30 percent of the nation's irrigated groundwater — could be used up within 50 years, unless current water use is reduced, a new study finds.

  • NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails The NSA is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second… But ask the NSA, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology…
  • However, a document seen by SPIEGEL reveals that the NSA  spied successfully on the French Foreign Ministry and news broadcaster Al Jazeera - the technology worked fine.

  • The Most Efficient Health Care Systems in The World: among the 48 countries included in the Bloomberg study, the U.S. ranks 46th, outpacing just Serbia and Brazil - worse than China, Algeria, and Iran.

  • Radiation levels around Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant are 18 times higher than previously thought, Japanese authorities have warned.

  • (MarketWatch) -- August was the worst outflow month in more than three years for U.S. exchange-traded products, according to preliminary data from No. 1 ETFs provider BlackRock Inc. U.S. ETFs saw $16.1 billion in redemptions through Thursday, representing the biggest outflow in one month since $17.1 billion exited in January 2010. The largest ETF was the main driver, as the SPDR S&P 500 endured $13 billion in August outflows, BlackRock said.

  • (Guardian) General patterns suggest that internet users in the UK deliberately access online pornography more frequently than they access all social networking sites put together..

  • (Reuters) - British manufacturers are planning the fastest increase in capital investment in the year ahead since before the financial crisis, a survey showed, suggesting the economy could be heading for a more balanced recovery.

Saturday, August 24, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • Purchases of new U.S. homes fell 13.4 % in July, the most in more than three year.

  • Consumer confidence in both the euro area and the European Union (EU) rose in August, from minus 17.4 in July to minus 15.6.

  • German economy expanded by 0.7% in Q2 of 2013 compared with the previous.

  • QoQ Britain's GDP rose by 0.7 % Eurozone PMI rises to 51.7 in August

  • Soybeans are focused on current weather forecasts (dry) and the perceptions that US production potential is sliding. More upside potential exists, but it is based on weather development.

  • On 8/12/13 Kochi Japan hit 41C (105.8F). That's the hottest temperature ever recorded in Japan.

  • India’s July exports rose 11.6% YoY

  • The Singapore-based Cocoa Association of Asia said that processing rose 2% to 153,792 metric YoY. Analysts and traders expected a decrease.
  • The European Cocoa Association said on July 15 that grindings rose 6.1% in Q2. Cocoa Demand will exceed output by 119,000 metric tons in the 12 months starting in October, the first shortage in four years, according to Macquarie Group. However, hedge fund bets on higher prices are near a five-year high..

  • The World Gold Council sees Q2 Global gold demand at 856.3 tons - down 12% YoY to a 4-year low on liquidation from gold ETFs.

  • (Spiegel) Most in Britain seem unconcerned about the mass surveillance carried out by its intelligence agency GCHQ. Even the intimidation tactics being used on the Guardian this week have caused little soul-searching. The reason is simple: Britons blindly and uncritically trust their secret service.

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Wall Street's Biggest Institutions Are Testing Quantitative Software for Non-Quants

"You literally press a button, say 'run the study,' and then [Robotrage] uses cloud computing capacity – it allocates to you that capacity – and it runs the study for you,

Sunday, August 04, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • The US economy added 162,000 jobs in July, slightly below expectations, but the unemployment rate fell to 7.4 %.
  • U.S initial claims for jobless benefits fell by 19,000 to 326,000, the fewest since January 2008, from a revised figure of 345,000 for the previous week.
  • U.S. economy grew 1.7% in Q2 U.S. personal income rose 0.3 % in June, after a 0.4 % gain in May
  • U.S. personal consumption expenditures rose 0.5 % in June, after an increase of 0.2 % in May.
  • U.S. savings rate, personal saving as a % of disposable personal income, edged down to 4.4% in June from 4.6% in the previous month, but remained well above the 2.1% average savings rate for all of 2007 before the financial crisis.

  • The United States Trade Representative (USTR), to whom the White House has delegated the authority to veto ITC rulings, has decided to veto an early-June ITC ruling, which would otherwise have taken effect on Monday, to ban the importation of older iPhones and iPads into the United States market over a Samsung declared-essential patent

  • China's PMI for the manufacturing sector improved slightly to 50.3% in July from 50.1% in June, above the boom-bust line of 50% for 10 months in a row.
  • China's non-manufacturing PMI rebounds to 54.1 % in July

  • An advanced computer numerical control (CNC) machine tool was shipped to Germany from China in the country's first export of cutting-edge equipment to a developed economy.

  • Eurozone jobless rate remains at record high of 12.1% in June
  • Eurozone consumer price inflation stays at 1.6% in July

  • The British economy to grow 1.2% in 2013


  • The Danish Meteorological Institute is reporting that on Tuesday, July 30, the mercury rose to 25.9 C (78.6 F) at a station in Greenland, the highest temperature measured in the Arctic country since records began in 1958.

  • Saudi website editor gets 7 years in prison and 600 lashes.


  • A Swedish sociology professor named Stefan Svallfors has nominated NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Saturday, August 03, 2013

James Galbraith on Social Breakdown and Financial Stress in Europe  JG: I think that ultimately the decision on the future of Europe will be made in Germany, and Germany has to decide, does it want it or not? If it wants it, it has to take minimal steps to stabilize it on the same principles on which they stabilized the East, and on which they built the Federal Republic in the first place. And if they don’t want it, well, it will go away.
RS: I think even if they want it, they’re not going to stabilize it.
JG: In which case they’ll lose it, and then we can see what is left. But when it’s lost, Germany’s going to have the problem it had before of an appreciating currency, and an industry that quickly loses competitiveness, and there’ll be higher unemployment. And its markets will have collapsed and its debts won’t get paid.
Germany is not going to escape the consequences of this. Again, it’s a choice that Germans can, and I’m sure, will make. But what is necessary is to state clearly what the choice actually is.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Goldman Sachs aluminum scandal could roil financials and commodity prices this week ..Goldman and other financial players has cost American consumers more than $5 billion over the last three years..
Rolls-Royce Revives Age of Sail to Beat Fuel-Cost Surge: Freight Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc (RR/), best known for powering planes from Concorde to the Airbus superjumbo, is working on a modern-day clipper ship as it bets on emissions curbs to jack up bunker-fuel costs and herald a new age of sail.

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • The Group of 20 nations pledged on Saturday to put growth before austerity, seeking to revive a global economy.
  • The Group of Twenty (G20) nations will back a global taxation reform, which will help avoid double taxation.

  • German austerity chief, finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble has warned Greek leaders not to play with fire by pressing for fresh debt-relief. He urged Greeks not to back track from their painful austerity and reform path. What’s the problem? You Greek’s don’t like 28.2% unemployment - too high?

  • Investors, fearing that the end of the commodity super cycle of ever-rising prices are heightened by China’s slowdown, are heading for the exits.

  • U.S. Fed chief emphasizes bond purchases could yet be accelerated if economic recovery shows signs of faltering. Bernanke said there are three main reasons for the rise in longer-term interest rates, which he thought was relatively low. He cited better economic news as the first reason. "As investors see brighter prospects ahead, interest rates tend to rise," Second reason is probably the "unwinding of leverage, and the third reason, is related to the Fed's communications and market interpretations of Fed policy. "But I want to emphasize that none of that implies that monetary policy will be tighter at any time within the foreseeable future," he said.

  • Moody's Investors Service lifted its outlook on the U.S. government bond rating to stable from negative and reaffirmed the U.S. government's Aaa rating.

  • (FT) US banks have lost billions of dollars of paper profits on their securities portfolios as market interest rates rise. Data released by the Federal Reserve on Friday showed unrealised gains in these portfolios had plummeted from more than $40bn at the beginning of the year to about $6bn

  • The U.S. home builder sentiment index gained 6 points to 57 this month, the highest level since January of 2006, according to the National Association of Home Builders Any reading over 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as good rather than poor.
  • U.S Privately-owned housing starts in June dropped 9.9% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 836,000, its lowest level since August last year.

  • Wildfires are chewing through twice as many hectares a year on average in the US compared with 40 years ago, US Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell told a Senate hearing.

  • U.S. Automakers are thriving – Detroit however files for bankruptcy: U.S. automaker General Motors Co. said that it sold 4.85 million vehicles globally in the first half of 2013, up 3.9% YoY. "Can we help Detroit? We don't know," Vice President Joe Biden said in response to a reporter's question about a possible federal rescue.

  • Chinas Industrial Output rose 8.9% YoY
  • China Q2 GDP up 7.5 % YoY

  • Spain's public debt rose to 89.6% of GDP in May

  •  (Pritchard) If you think, China's Communist Party fully understands the mess it has created by ramping credit to 200pc of GDP and running the greatest investment bubble know to man, read its shockingly complacent response to warnings from the International Monetary Fund.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

With its 41-megapixel camera, (NOK) Nokia’s Lumia 1020 absolutely brings the wow factor, proving that Nokia can innovate with the very best - that it is a mobile force to be reckoned with!


Go to 37:30 of the presentation and check out the needle-in-a-haystack – Remarkable!

Saturday, July 06, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • Markets have overreacted to the likelihood that the U.S. Federal Reserve will taper its quantitative easing policy, or QE, HSBC said in its quarterly equity insights research released on Friday. "The lesson of history is that the first tightening in a cycle -- as long as it comes because risks to growth have diminished, not because of inflation or structural worries -- typically causes only a short-lived correction in stocks," the bank said.

  • The US figures showed the economy had gained nearly 200,000 jobs in June, and a revision of previous low estimates saw an extra 70,000 added in April and May. However, the unemployment rate stays unchanged at 7.6%.

  • Marine Le Pen vows to smash the existing order of Europe and break-up the Euro if she wins the next election.

  • Ukraine anticipates a 25% increase in wheat output this year

  • The European system of carbon trading has practically collapsed as politicians prioritize the economy over the environment.

  • The Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller home price index showed a 12% increase in prices in 20 cities from April 2012 to April 2013, the largest gain since early 2006, when home values began to level off in advance of the market collapse.

  • The IMF is preparing to suspend aid payments to Greece by the end of next month unless Eurozone leaders plug a €3bn-€4bn shortfall that has opened up in Greece’s €172bn rescue program.

  • Bernanke says US central bank could start slowing asset-purchase scheme later this year and end it by mid-2014.

  • Car sales are down 10% in Austria, France and Germany, and 47% in Romania. The European market has contracted by a quarter from its heyday before the debt crisis and the fiscal squeeze.

  • China's shadow banking system is out of control and under mounting stress as borrowers struggle to roll over short-term debts, Fitch Ratings has warned.

  • The CBO concludes that immigrants will generate additional tax payments over the next decade and reduce the U.S. deficit…

  • Several former Bank of America employees filed declarations in a federal court claiming the mortgage lender told them to lie to customers seeking loan modifications...

  • The flash HSBC China Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index fell to 48.3 in June from 49.2 in May, the weakest in nine months.

  • Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega said that the government will trim its 2013 budget by 15 billion reales (or 6.7 billion U.S. dollars).

  • According to the Italian central bank, national public debt reached 127% of gross domestic product (GDP) last year, up from 120.8% in 2011, placing the country second in the European Union (EU) after Greece.

  • A mother of seven, Ursula von der Leyen is Germany's labor minister and a role model for women juggling demanding careers with family commitments. In an interview, the 54-year-old has some advice for young people struggling to find work. How best to solve Europe's youth unemployment crisis? Make young people learn English.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • (FT) Markets often put a different slant on central bankers’ words than was intended, thus when Mr. Bernanke said ‘tapering’ the markets heard ‘tightening’

  • The IMF on Friday urged the US to repeal sweeping federal budget cuts that will be a severe drag on economic growth this year. (Teabags not listening)


  • U.S. Industrial production was unchanged in May. The sector has seen little growth since the turn of the year, the Fed said

  • The troubled city of Detroit will stop making payments on a portion of its unsecured municipal bond debt Friday, according to a report in the WSJ.

  • China worried that tightening could trigger capital flight and set off debt crisis, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

  • The World Bank cut its global growth forecast for this year after emerging markets from China to Brazil slowed more than projected, while U.S budget cuts and slumping investor confidence in Europe’s are not helpful.

  • Emerging markets risk an interest rate shock once the US Federal Reserve and other Western authorities start to withdraw global liquidity, the World Bank has warned.

  • U.S. Banks repossessed 38,946 homes, an increase of 11% MoM. The number of homes hit with default notices for the first time grew by 4% (US housing might not be as strong as advertised)

  • Fed's Beige Book business survey shows "modest to moderate growth" across U.S

  • The Dow Transports, adjusted by the CPI, are in new high ground. Industrials, S&P etc are still lagging.

  •  (FT) Gabon is planning to take assets back from three international oil companies including a subsidiary of China’s Sinopec in a sign of Africa’s growing assertiveness as competition intensifies for its natural resources.

  • (Spiegel) There are more journalists in prison in Turkey than in any other country.

  • Germany's high court made clear that it was skeptical of the ECB's program to buy unlimited quantities of sovereign bonds from struggling euro-zone member states. It could strike down the most successful tool in combating the crisis.

  • The USDA trimmed corn production just 1%, to 14.005 billion bushels, well ahead of the market consensus. Traders had expected a drop of 2.2%. Ending stocks also surpassed market expectations. The USDA pegged 2013/14 corn ending stocks at 1.95 billion bushels, down from May but still the largest in eight years, and more than 8 % larger than the 1.8 billion traders expected.

  • This year the world will eat 112m tonnes of pork. Around half will be munched in Chinese mouths, according to the Agricultural Outlook report from the FAO and the OECD, a rich country club. The Chinese have been the world's biggest meat-eaters for over two decades. Pork is their favourite: each person scoffs about 38kg a year, compared with 28kg swallowed by Americans.

  • (FT) Sharp drop in availability of scrap copper has caught the attention of some hedge funds and traders, making them bullish about the red metal
Gangsta Government by WILLIAM O'CONNOR“I’ll let you have the $10,000 for three points. That’s only because I know you.” I’m listening to Tony yak, my Shylock. Yak, yak has earned the moniker. He never gives his mouth a rest. Yak’s giving me the loan at street price: $30 for every $1,000. That’s “juice.” Every week I’ll pay $300, but nothing comes off the top.
Elizabeth Warren’s QE for Students by ELLEN BROWN On July 1, interest rates will double for millions of students – from 3.4% to 6.8% – unless Congress acts