Monday, July 12, 2021
Global Catastrophe Worse than Pandemic to Hit 2025, Solar Coronal Mass Ejection Super Storm Black Swan / Politics / CMS
By: Nadeem_Walayat
So the inevitable pandemic in our lifetime that most of the world including the whole of Europe and North America were totally unprepared that had moronic government scientists spouting in the early months that the general public should not wear masks which was due to lack of PPE stock, whilst prime ministers and presidents laughed it off as something that would magically disappear before Easter, instead has had a severe economic and social impact on all of our lives this past year. However given the fast materialisation of vaccines should soon start diminishing in significance of future impact.
So what else is out there lurking in the near mists of time about to have en equal if not greater impact on our everyday lives?
Asteroid impact? Inevitable yes, for instance Apopthis (named after the Egyptian snake god of chaos) is due for a very close rendezvous with Earth in April 2029, which is one of thousands that cross Earths orbit, but the range of probabilities span decades to tens of thousands of years, so not something that can be assumed to be definitely imminent in terms of a catastrophic impact.
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Monday, July 12, 2021
England V Italy - Euro 2020 Final - Fans React To Losing On Penalty Shootout - UEFA 2021 / Politics / Social Issues
By: N_Walayat
England ALWAYS lose at Penalties and so it was for the finals of the Euro 2020, 2021. This is how the penalty shootout went down in our house as the inevitable happened.
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Monday, July 12, 2021
Why Amazon, Google and Netflix Are Fighting Over this Rare Gas / Companies / Energy Resources
By: Submissions
Big Tech may be in for a major crisis in the coming months, all because of a global shortage virtually nobody’s talking about.
And it has nothing to do with the shortages we’ve seen worldwide in everything from computer chips to lumber to chicken wings.
This supply squeeze runs far deeper and has the potential to crush major blue-chip companies if the situation doesn’t dramatically improve soon.
That’s because Big Tech companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, and Netflix all depend on this one gas to keep their servers up and running around the clock.
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Saturday, July 10, 2021
US Home Buying Trends Showing Signs Of An Extreme Bubble Setup – Is It About To Burst? / Housing-Market / US Housing
By: Chris_Vermeulen
As we continue to explore the recent data and setup related to the current Housing market bubble, this, Part II of our research, will continue to highlight the similarities we are seeing in the current market climate to the 2005~2008 Housing/Credit market event that crashed the markets over 15 years ago. Additionally, we’ll also highlight some of the efforts the US Federal Reserve and global central banks have taken to support the recovering global economy over the past 15+ years. Are they pushing the markets to extremes and will they be prepared for a reversion event if one takes place?
In the first part of this research article, we highlighted the Supply/Demand equilibrium function and the four laws of the Supply/Demand equation. It is important to understand that all price exploration/valuation functions operate within the boundaries of these Supply/Demand functions. Buyers and Sellers are always operating within these boundaries – even if they don’t know it.
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Saturday, July 10, 2021
Escaping The United States May Be Leading To An Extreme Market Bubble Setup / Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2021
By: Chris_Vermeulen
The past few years have seen housing prices skyrocket as Flippers, Speculators and Traditional Buyers jump into home buying or selling to relocate to different areas throughout the US. One interesting facet of this phenomenon recently hit NBC news over the past few days related to the super hot Boise Idaho and Coeur D’Alene Idaho market. Home prices in the Boise area have skyrocketed higher by over 30% in just 12 months. In Coeur D’Alene, home prices have risen over 85% in the past 12 months.
Is a Supply/Demand Measure Distorted By Recent Buying Activity – And What’s Next?
My concern is that the post-COVID buying/relocating trends have pushed the Supply/Demand pricing factors well past the equilibrium. Simply put, the moratoriums and policies related to home renters and homeowners throughout the COVID-19 crisis have created a supply crisis at a time when many people had the capabilities to sell and relocate into different areas of the US at the same time. Diminishing supply with hyper-active demand pushes price levels upward and to the left, as illustrated on the Supply/Demand chart below.
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Saturday, July 10, 2021
WD MY Book DUO Drives Lottery - What Disks are Inside - Red or Blue - 28tb Model / ConsumerWatch / Computing
By: HGR
What Drives are inside a Mybook DUO is it a red or blue find out as I open up a 28TB My Book DUO enclosure and find out.
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Friday, July 09, 2021
Stock Market Summer Correction / Stock-Markets / Stock Market 2021
By: Nadeem_Walayat
I'll take a more in-depth look at the stock market trend in a forthcoming analysis. However as things stand the stock market is starting to move out of my original forecast window for a summer correction (9th Feb 2021 Dow Stock Market Trend Forecast 2021).
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Friday, July 09, 2021
FOMC Minutes: A Confirmation of Fed’s Hawkish Shift? / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2021
By: Arkadiusz_Sieron
The latest FOMC minutes were… mixed. The discussion between hawks and doves continues giving gold no comfort. Who will gain the upper hand?Yesterday, the FOMC published the minutes from its last meeting in June. Investors who counted on some clear clues are probably disappointed, as the minutes can please both hawks and doves. Indeed, the report showed that the Fed officials are divided on their inflation outlook and the appropriate course of action. The dovish side believes that the recent high inflation readings are transitory and they will ease in the not-so-distant future, while the hawkish camp worries that the upward pressure on prices could continue next year:
Looking ahead, participants generally expected inflation to ease as the effect of these transitory factors dissipated, but several participants remarked that they anticipated that supply chain limitations and input shortages would put upward pressure on prices into next year. Several participants noted that, during the early months of the reopening, uncertainty remained too high to accurately assess how long inflation pressures will be sustained.
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Friday, July 09, 2021
Gold: The Tapering Clock Is Ticking / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2021
By: P_Radomski_CFA
With the FED increasingly hawkish and the USDX rising from the ashes, don’t be fooled by the recent upswing in gold. The bears are getting ready.
With the reflation trade getting cut off at the knees, the only asset class not feeling the pain is U.S. equities. However, while shorts capitulate and send the U.S. 10-Year Treasury higher (and the yield lower), the flattening of the U.S. yield curve screams of a potential recession. However, while the development is bullish for the USD Index and bearish for the PMs, investors are putting the cart before the horse.
To explain, while the U.S. 10-Year Treasury yield languishes in its depressed state, J.P. Morgan told clients on Jul. 6 that the Treasury benchmark is roughly three standard deviations below its model-implied fair value. For context, J.P. Morgan believes that the U.S. 10-Year Treasury yield should trade at roughly 1.60%, and, given the three-sigma underperformance, standard normal probabilities imply a roughly 99.9% chance that the Treasury benchmark will move higher over the medium term.
Friday, July 09, 2021
5 Little-Known Ways Businesses Waste Money / Companies / SME
By: Boris_Dzhingarov
Most companies are often so focused on making money that they forget about the importance of saving it.If you’re struggling with a small profit margin, you may need to make various cutbacks to improve your company’s financial security.
Poor cash flow management can result in many organisations closing for good. Don’t follow in their footsteps by learning about the five little-known ways businesses waste money.
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Friday, July 09, 2021
EURUSD Drops Below 1.20 As Dollar Shorts Are Trimmed / / US Dollar
By: S_N_Chatterjee
Activity is back in full swing in the forex market after the latest FED meeting, which has stirred all major currency pairs, including the EURUSD. Even though the pair has been trading up since the beginning of April, the order flow shifted towards the bearish side as interest rates are expected to rise as soon as 2022 in the US, due to a faster economic recovery and robust inflation figures.
A weakening US Dollar for the entire 2020 had been a supportive factor for the global economy, at a time when the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic had started. However, experts at Axia Investments believe that reverse in Dollar weakness will have the opposite effect, acting as a tightening.
Thursday, July 08, 2021
Financial Crisis 2.0 - You Don't Know How Big of a Bubble Your in until AFTER it BURSTS / Stock-Markets / Financial Crisis 2021
By: Nadeem_Walayat
A handful of stocks are driving the indices higher, Apple worth $2.3 trillion, Microsoft $2 trillion, Amazon $1.8 trillion, Google 1.8 trillion, Facebook $1 trillion even that over priced pile of poop Tesla came close to being valued at $1 trillion, we are definitely in a bubble, you only need to go onto youtube and watch the to the moon videos of Cathy Wood, literally everything's going to go to the moon because her barely out of puberty Quants decree it to be so. This is clearly a major warning sign of a unsustainable trend when indices are ruled by such a small clique of tech stocks where the greatest similarity is with the dot come bubble in terms of the valuation of stocks that actually produce revenues unlike the largely worthless dot com's of that time.
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Thursday, July 08, 2021
Why U.S. Corporate Bankruptcies Could Skyrocket / Companies / Financial Markets 2021
By: EWI
"U.S. bankruptcies in the first quarter of 2021 and all of 2020 were above the 13-year average"An April 17 article headline on the website of National Public Radio says:
U.S Economy Looking Good As Spending Jumps In March
And, on April 29, The New York Times said:
Americans' spending on durable goods -- cars and furniture and other goods meant to last a long time -- rose at a stunning 41.4 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year.
Considering that the economy is "looking good," economic observers might conclude that a wave of corporate bankruptcies is of little concern.
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Thursday, July 08, 2021
The Silver Bull Is Not Transitory / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2021
By: The_Gold_Report
Peter Krauth of Silver Stock Investor delves into the silver market and discusses why it "looks primed to rally strongly on the back of multiple drivers."
Transitory. That's something we've been hearing a lot lately.
At its latest FOMC meeting the Fed naturally decided to keep the fed funds rate target at 0.25%.
It also decided not to mess with the $120 billion monthly bond buying program to help "support the flow of credit to households and businesses." Par for the course.
Meanwhile inflation numbers of the previous four months have been anything but typical. The Fed's favored Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index has soared: in February it was 1.6%, March 2.4%, April 3.6% and in May 3.9%.
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Thursday, July 08, 2021
US Interest Rates: Making the Improbable Today’s Reality / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
By: Paul_Rejczak
The US Federal Reserve has raised its interest rate guidance for 2023; and potentially late 2022. Oddly enough, interest rates have moved lower since the last Fed meeting.
I see an opportunity today.
You would think that the higher interest rate guidance would have created a bump higher in the $TNX (Ten-Year Note Yield). However, wouldn’t that make too much sense? The more trading experience I have gotten over the last two decades, the clearer it is, that logic doesn’t always work - unless you are early enough.
If you have been following along, you know that yesterday, I discussed the S&P Banking sector, namely KBE, as we wait for a pullback to some key technical levels.
It got me thinking: the Ten-Year Note yield should be very similar to that trade.
Thursday, July 08, 2021
ZeroAvia Featured in New U.K. Video to Promote International Trade / Companies / Social Media
By: Umer_Mahmood
ZeroAvia, the company that is revolutionizing the aviation industry, is a proud partner of the U.K.’s Department for International Trade.
ZeroAvia, which is developing sustainable aviation solutions in partnership with leading investors and airline partners, is one of the agency’s collaborators to promote trade with innovative U.K. companies.
A new video produced by the department that touts the country’s commitment to clean transportation solutions features ZeroAvia. Those technological advancements are critical pieces in the country’s move toward its goal of being net zero in emissions by 2050.
Thursday, July 08, 2021
San Diego's Krishen Iyer on Branding and Digital Marketing Suggestions for Nonprofit Organizations / Companies / SME
By: Submissions
For nonprofit organizations, the race is always on for novel ideas to expand outreach. Thanks to digital marketing rising in popularity, the opportunity to revamp your nonprofit’s public awareness is here. Digital marketing gives your nonprofit a way to connect with corporate sponsors, loyal supporters, and potential donors. Here are some suggestions for keeping your branding and digital marketing on par with current trends.
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Wednesday, July 07, 2021
BITCOIN PRICE HALVINGS TREND TRAJECTORY / Currencies / Bitcoin
By: Nadeem_Walayat
The supply of bitcoin is capped at 21 million coins. Imagine what would happen to the price of Gold if no more Gold could be mined, that's the trend trajectory that Bitcoin appears to be on i.e. there will come a time when NO MORE bitcoin can be mined!
So the simplest thing to do would be to to buy bitcoin when cheap and forget about it for a decade or so and then likely see a return of X10 that which one paid for it.
Total bitcoins mined to date number 18,700,000, 210,000 blocks will be mined from May 2020 to roughly March 2024, totaling 1.3 million bitcoins, which implies a total of 20 million bitcoins by the time of the next halving of rewards for miners to 3.125 bitcoin rewards per block mined (block rewards to miners is how the block chain works).
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Wednesday, July 07, 2021
The Rise of Precious Metals and Commodities / Commodities / Gold and Silver 2021
By: Monica_Kingsley
S&P 500 closed Friday on a strong note, and as the holiday-shortened week is usually accompanied by positive seasonality, it would be reasonable to expect extension of gains. Is therre any show stopper at the moment? Credit markets are strong and in a risk-on mode – but what about the odd strength in long-dated Treasuries? Are the stock traders getting it right – or the bond ones? Remember that such divergencies can take a long time to resolve, and don‘t require immediate action. It‘s the same with the Industrials and Transports in the Dow theory. So, don‘t jump to S&P 500 bearish conclusions just yet.
The stock market advance is characterized by improving market breadth, and a fresh push of reflationary trades. It would have been all too easy to lose one‘s cool post the June FOMC, and declare value to have topped – while tech amply helped by heavyweights powers the S&P 500 advance, value performance ain‘t too shabby. Even financials are weathering relatively well the retreating yields pressure, counterbalanced by the Fed relaxing share buybacks and dividend rules. Real assets including energy are surging again, and the Fed‘s bluff is being called.
Little wonder when all the central bank did, was influence inflation expectations, and precisely nothing about current inflation – let alone pressures in the pipeline. I‘ve discussed the cost-push pressures building up, leading to inflation becoming unanchored. Add job market pressures beyond the difficulties in hiring, and the issue grows more persistent. While it‘s not biting overly noticeably for the financial markets to take notice the way they did in Mar and early May, left unattended, inflation would come to bite in the not so distant future. The takeaway is that with the constant redefinitions of what transitory should mean now, the concept of Fed as inflation fighter is subject to well deserved mockery.
Look for the lull in Treasury market to continue, it‘s almost goldilocks economy as the monetary and fiscal support rivals wartime footing circumstances. Makes you wonder what would be on the table if we were faced with a recession. Thankfully, that‘s not on the horizon – we‘re in multi-year economic expansiona that won‘t end with the tapering or tightening games this year or next, not in the least.
Wednesday, July 07, 2021
HUI Gold Stocks: The Illusionist's Trick Left Investors Speechless / Commodities / Gold and Silver Stocks 2021
By: P_Radomski_CFA
The gold miners’ 2021 gains prompted a standing ovation among investors. However, they didn’t notice a magic trick until everything vanished.
The Gold Miners
After the HUI Index plunged by more than 10% and made all of its 2021 gains disappear, the magic trick left investors in a state of shock. But while Mr. Market still hasn’t sawed the HUI Index in half, the illusionist is likely gearing up for his greatest reveal. Case in point: while the Zig Zag Girl captivated audiences in the 1960s, the HUI Index’s zigzag correction leaves little to the imagination. And with the recent swoon a lot more than just smoke and mirrors, the HUI Index’s short-term optimism will likely vanish into thin air.
To explain, despite the profound drawdown, the HUI Index hasn’t been able to muster a typical relief rally. Moreover, with ominous signals increasing week by week, if history rhymes (as it tends to), the HUI Index will likely find medium-term support in the 100-to-150 range. For context, high-end 2020 support implies a move back to 150, while low-end 2015 support implies a move back to 100. And yes, it could really happen, even though such predictions seem unthinkable.