Chart Book Is up To Date check it out!
Spend twenty minutes per week browsing Investment Tools and you will be better informed than most financial experts!
Tuesday, September 22, 2020
Sunday, September 20, 2020
After some years of neglect, InvestmentTools.com is again up to date. Expect chart book. Chart book to follow in a couple of days. If you detect a missing, incorrect, or overlooked item - let me know.
THX
Saturday, September 19, 2020
- U.S. Consumer sentiment ticked up a bit.
- Reuters: The Commerce Department said on Friday the currentaccount deficit, which measures the flow of goods, services and investments into and out of the country, jumped 52.9% to $170.5 billion last quarter. That was the biggest gap since the third quarter of 2008 when the economy was working its way through the Great Recession.
- The Fed said it would keep interest rates near zero for as long as it takes to get inflation back above 2%. The Fed seems to think that’ll be 2023 at the earliest.
- Brazil buys Argentine soybean oil as tightness persists
- Reuters: Trump announced a new round of pandemic assistance to farmers of about $13 billion at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Thursday night, delivering aid to an important sector in a crucial battleground state. (Not much money in beans I suppose - see above)
- The White House on Friday announced a $13 billion aid package for Puerto Rico, three years after the territory was hit by Hurricane Maria.
- Copper moving right along, on hopes that China's stimulus would spur demand.
- Reuters: Investment between the US and China tumbled to a nine-year low in the first half of 2020, hit by bilateral tensions that could see more Chinese companies come under pressure to divest U.S. operations, a research report said.
- Bloomberg: China’s trade surplus with the U.S. has grown almost 25% since the start of the Trump presidency, exceeding $300 billion on an annualized basis.
- How quickly, realistically, can a vaccine be produced and distributed in enough quantity to vaccinate 25 million Americans? The “super forecasters” of Philip Tetlock’s Good Judgment project see the probabilities like this.
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- Economist: The director of the FBI warned that Russia is actively interfering in America’s presidential election, with the Democratic party’s nominee as its primary target. Russian agents are producing what Christopher Wray called a “steady drumbeat of misinformation” intended to undermine Joe Biden and voters’ confidence in the results. President Donald Trump has continuously downplayed Russian interference.
- A German laboratory detected traces of Novichok on a water bottle apparently retrieved from the Siberian hotel room in which Alexei Navalny stayed before falling ill on a plane.
- Citigroup placed a senior
member of IT staff on leave after revelations that he was running a website
dedicated to QAnon.
This conspiracy theory holds that President Donald Trump is battling a powerful
paedophile ring enmeshed in American high politics. Jason Gelinas was
disciplined for running an undisclosed side business; he is thought to have
earned around $3,000 a month. AND QAnon conspiracy theory gaining
ground in UK, per Guardian.
- The Guardian tracked five slogans associated with QAnon shared by UK-run Facebook..(AKA the plague on humanity)
- COVID Plans, Game Theory, and the Problem of A**holes
- In other words, the physicists made the same mistake as many attempts to model human behavior: they didn’t account for assholes.
- New Zealand 5
- South Korea 7
- Japan 12
- Austria 85
- Germany 113
- US 613 ( 203,000 Total - so far)
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
- In August, a study showed that Greenland lost a record amount of ice during an extra-warm 2019, with the melt massive enough to cover California in more than 4 feet of water.
- WTO finds Washington broke trade rules by imposing tariffs on China. WTO future is in danger just when we need it most
- Shipping orders of corn and soybean out of the US
Two of BP’s latest scenarios predict that crude demand will fall by half or more over the next 30 years.- (I am prognosticating crude demand to fall by 80% and more over the next 30 years)
- Oregon GOP state senator Fred Girod was one of 11 Republicans who made headlines when they walked out of the senate – some even leaving the state – so that a quorum could not be achieved for a climate change bill. Now the wildfires have claimed his home
- WSJ: says the FTC is prepping a possible antitrust suit against Facebook
- Japans exports fell 14.8% YoY in August
- Bloomberg: Out west of Sydney it gets hot. Really hot. Like 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) hot. Stand in a car park and the radiant heat from the tarmac can push the mercury to 80C—approaching the temperature of a slow cooker.
- It’s these new suburbs that the government is banking on to accommodate almost half of the 1.8 million people ..
- The chart showing German exports to China would indicate a German need to be agreeable with China.
Sunday, September 13, 2020
Saturday, September 12, 2020
Quick Overview is up to date
- Odds of a second bailout for the U.S. economy fell due to a split over a lean deal proposed by Republicans, estimated at $500 billion. This is just a fraction of the $2.2 trillion deal supported by Democrats.
- The U.S. budget deficit climbed by $200 billion and tops $3 trillion for the first time ever..
- The public debt ratio of industrialized countries is about to set a new record.
- Biden proposed a plan that calls for a 10% tax penalty on U.S. companies that move operations overseas and a 10% tax credit for companies that create jobs in America.
- In August, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose 0.4 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis; rising 1.3 percent over the last 12 months, not seasonally adjusted. The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.4 percent in August (SA); up 1.7 percent over the year (NSA).
- Notable
# in the CPI: The index for used cars and trucks increased 5.4 percent in
August, its largest monthly increase since March 1969.
- Americans claiming ongoing unemployment assistance rose 93,000, to 13.4 million in the week ended Aug. 29.
- People are accusing Woodward of valuing book sales over public health. Nearly 200,000 Americans have died because neither Donald Trump nor Bob Woodward wanted to risk anything to keep the country informed,” wrote Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce.
- Microsoft found that groups from Russia, China and Iran have stepped up cyber-attacks to disrupt the U.S. presidential election.
- US GDP to rise 35% in Q3 so says Goldman Sachs
- JPMorgan published a note warning that based on recent surveys, iPhone sales are "moderating substantially" ahead of the iPhone 12 launch,
- The number of homeowners in forbearance is
falling, but the July 31 expiration of extra
unemployment benefits this month will provide a serious test.
- UK PM Johnson accuses EU of using threatening food blockade..
Johnson said on Saturday that a planned bill, which would breach a divorce treaty with the bloc, was needed to protect Britain’s integrity. However a no-deal Brexit would hurt the British economy a lot more than the European Union, German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz responded. “Europe would be able to deal with it and there would be no particularly serious consequences after the preparations we have already made,” he added.
- South Korea Money Supply Growth came in at 8.5%, above expectations (8.4%) in July
- World corn stocks fall to 306.79 mmt, down from 317.46 mmt last month and below trade at 311.11 MMT
- World soybean stocks fall to 93.59 mmt, down from 95.36 mmt last month, but just above trade at 93.11 MM
Thursday, September 10, 2020
Wednesday, September 09, 2020
Hate Social Media? You’ll Love This Documentary
The Social Dilemma argues that humanity’s greatest existential threat is not climate change, but Facebook.
AKA The Plague on Humanity
(FT)Those boats in Texas paraded at the wrong speed
The Trump boat parade on Saturday in Texas failed to do these things, and ended up fighting an opponent more formidable than any Democrat: physics.
Tuesday, September 08, 2020
- (Reuters) - Britain began a fresh round of Brexit trade talks by warning the European Union that it was ramping up preparations to leave the bloc without an agreement as the two sides bicker over rules that govern nearly $1 trillion in trade. Meanwhile, (FT) the UK government admits it will break international law over Brexit treaty.
- This British regime is blatantly cheapening the concept of a
rules-based international order – quite astounding!
- Japan, the world’s third-largest economy shrank an annualized 28.1% in April-June.
- Bloomberg: About 2.25 million mortgages were at least 90days late in July, a 450% increase from pre-pandemic levels and the biggest number since the global financial crisis, according to industry tracker Black Knight Inc.
- General Motors Co. said it would take a $2 billion equity stake in Nikola Corp. the maker of hydrogen fuel cell electric pickup trucks (the future ?)..… Contributing to Tesla’s plunge of 21.06% its biggest daily percentage drop. The car maker was also spurned from a group of companies being added to the S&P 500.
Monday, September 07, 2020
Suggested
Reading regarding CLO's: The Looming Bank Collapse
Unless you work in finance, you probably
haven’t heard of CLOs, but according to many estimates, the CLO market is
bigger than the subprime-mortgage CDO market was in its heyday. The Bank for
International Settlements, which helps central banks pursue financial
stability, has estimated the overall
size of the CDO market in 2007 at $640 billion; it estimated the overall size of
the CLO market in 2018 at $750 billion. More than $130 billion worth of CLOs
have been created since then, some even in recent months. Just as easy
mortgages fueled economic growth in the 2000s, cheap corporate debt has done so
in the past decade, and many companies have binged on it.
Saturday, September 05, 2020
Quick Overview is up to date
- Nonfarm payrolls rose by 1.37 million, including the hiring of 238,000 temporary Census workers. The unemployment rate fell more than expected, by almost 2 percentage points, to 8.4%. However, the # was distorted by people misclassifying themselves as being “employed but absent from work.” Without this error, the unemployment rate would have been about 9.1% last month, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated.
- Buffett’s $6.2 billion expedition into Japan’s five largest trading houses may indicate that Buffett is expecting inflation and a weaker U.S. dollar thereby making international equities more attractive.
- Reuters: The ISM said its index of national factory activity increased to a reading of 56.0 last month from 54.2 in July. That was the highest level since November 2018 and marked three straight months of growth.
- Reuters: The Federal Reserve will need to roll out new efforts "in coming months" to help the economy overcome the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and live up to the U.S. central bank's new promise of stronger job growth and higher inflation, Fed Governor Lael Brainard said on Tuesday.
- The Caixin/Markit Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) rose to 53.1 last month from July’s 52.8, marking the sector’s fourth consecutive month of growth and the biggest rate of expansion since January 2011. ….. LME copper stocks fall to lowest since Dec 2005.
- Economist: ..on September 2nd Germany’s government said it had proved “unequivocally” that Mr Navalny had been attacked with a military-grade nerve agent of the Novichok family—the same sort of chemical weapon used against Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, in the British city of Salisbury in 2018.
- (Reuters) - Soaring corn prices are stokingfood security jitters in China, where food inflation has climbed to the highest in over a decade and President Xi Jinping made a recent high-profile plea for an end to wastage.
- According to new research from JPMorgan analyst Stephen Tusa, GE stock - once the classic "widows and orphans" investment - might be worth nothing at all.
Monday, August 31, 2020
Sunday, August 30, 2020
- President Donald Trump is willing to sign a $1.3 trillion coronavirus relief bill, a top aide said on Friday, but Democratic House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the sum was not enough to meet the needs of the American people.
- Reuters: Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, rose 1.9% last month, after jumping 6.2% in June. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast consumer spending would gain 1.5% in July. July’s increase left consumer spending about 4.6% percent below its February level.
- “The Fed said it can allow inflation to run above its 2% target for some time seems like they are going to keep their monetary policy extremely loose”.
- Iowa, the biggest U.S. corn-producing state, is facing its most widespread drought since September 2013, state agriculture secretary Mike Naig said on Friday.
- In a dramatic U-turn, Brazil's Environment Ministry said on Friday it would continue to fight deforestation, reversing its position after saying hours earlier that it could not afford to continue enforcement efforts in the Amazon.
- Reuters: The company that operates the Trump International Hotel in Vancouver said on Friday it has filed for bankruptcy, blaming the coronavirus pandemic for lost revenue and financial hardship.
- Nearly half of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen America may be bots.. The plague on humanity, merrily plaguing away..
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Study: Black turbine blades reduced bird mortality by 72%
- Some very long-term trends are changing for the
better. First, insurance giant Suncorp says it won't insure oil or gas
companies and projects. And now Exxon, the world’s biggest company as recently as 2011 is booted
from the Dow Industrials.
- Utilization rates for Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCC) fell to 44% in August, their lowest level this year according to Vortexa data. The sharp drop since the year-to-date high of 52% in May follows stymied global demand recovery for crude and a significant loss of cargoes compared to 2019 levels.
- DJIA changes: Out go Exxon Mobil (ticker: XOM), Raytheon Technologies (RTX), and Pfizer (PFE). In come Salesforce. com (CRM), Honeywell International (HON), and Amgen (AMGN).
- Germany’s economy shrank by 9.7% from April to June compared with the first three months of the year.
- The Conference Board said its consumer confidence index slumped to 84.8 in August after tumbling to a downwardly revised 91.7 in July.
- U.S. new home sales rose by 13.9 % to an annual rate of 901,000 in July after rising by 15.1 % to a rate of 791,000 in June.