Trade

What Went Up Came Down And Up And Will Come Down Again

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By David Haggith – Re-Blogged From Silver Phoenix

It can’t come as any surprise that the stock market’s lofty balloon ride during the past couple of months fell because of a few words this week. It only rode up on sweet tweets by Trump about trade, which created a thermocline for it to ride. So, of course, the market plummeted this week in the unexpected downdraft of Trump’s out-of-the-blue statement that his trade deal may be a year away … even for phase one.

I don’t know if ignorant traders drive these vain accessions and declensions or just ignorant machines that have no ability to discern truth, so blindly they take all presidential headlines at face value.

Who could be surprised that stocks got off to their worst December start since the beginning of the Great Recession when Trump said a trade deal might best be shelved until after the 2020 elections? It was, however, apparently a fleeting horror to those who had actually believed Trump about a phase-one deal being imminent this month. One could only watch the surprised reactions with amusement, given there was no reason there should have been any surprise at all.

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America’s Trade Policy Will End Up Destroying The Dollar

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By Alasdair Macleod – Re-Blogged From Silver Phoenix

America’s tariffs against China are already showing signs of undermining the global economy and will create a funding crisis for the Federal Government when it leads to foreigners no longer buying US Treasury debt and selling down their existing dollar holdings. A subversive attempt by America to divert global portfolio investment from China by destabilising Hong Kong will force China into a Plan B to fund its infrastructure plans, which could involve actively selling down her dollar reserves and hastening the introduction of a new crypto-based trade settlement currency.

The US budget deficit will then be financed entirely by monetary inflation. Furthermore, the turn of the credit cycle, made more destructive by trade tariffs, is driving the global and US economy into a slump, further accelerating all indebted governments’ dependency on inflationary financing. The end result is America’s trade policies have been instrumental in hastening the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, ultimately leading to its destruction.

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U.S. Relations With China Just Were Destroyed

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By Michael Snyder – Re-Blogged From http://themostimportantnews.com

Our relationship with China just went from bad to worse, and most Americans don’t even realize that we just witnessed one of the most critical foreign policy decisions of this century. The U.S. Senate just unanimously passed the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019”, and the Chinese are absolutely seething with anger. Violent protests have been rocking Hong Kong for months, and the Chinese have repeatedly accused the United States of being behind the protests. Whether that is true or not, the U.S. Senate has openly sided with the protesters by passing this bill, and there is no turning back now.

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A Chinese Steel Giant Is Upsetting the Global Nickel Market

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Re-Blogged From Bloomberg

Behind one of China’s biggest industrial companies is a husband and wife team that reinvented how to make stainless steel.

The company founded by billionaire Xiang Guangda and He Xiuqin has transformed the stainless steel industry this century. Now, it’s upending the nickel market.

With cheaper production techniques, Xiang Guangda and his wife He Xiuqin helped change the industry in less than two decades — turning Tsingshan Holding Group Co. into a company that churns out a fifth of the world’s stainless steel and creating a billion-dollar fortune. Now it’s making waves in a different market: the London Metal Exchange.

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Dinner in Hanoi

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By Jeff Thomas – Re-Blogged From International Man

“Trump is doing the right thing. Without him, we have no protection against China. China doesn’t only wish to dominate Asia, but the world.”

Here in Hanoi, so said my dinner companion – a major manufacturer and worldwide exporter of steel products.

He, like so many other major Asian producers, sees an opportunity in international trade for all of Asia to capitalize on.

In the Western world, the argument rages as to whether the US tariff war will benefit the US or not.

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #376

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The Week That Was: September 14, 2019, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week – “If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please: But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it.” —Benjamin Franklin (1789)

Number of the Week: UP 24%

 

Climate Model Issues – Greenhouse Feedbacks: Prior to the 1979 Charney Report, numerous laboratory experiments established that a doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) would cause a modest increase in global temperatures, nothing of great concern. The Charney Report states that advocates of global climate models, mainly NASA-GISS and NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton advocated that a positive feedback, mainly from water vapor from the oceans would result in a far greater warming, which was estimated to be 3º C plus or minus 1.5º C. The last paragraph of the report, Section 4 – Models and Their Validity states:

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China, US to Hold Trade Talks in October

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By Reuters – Re-Blogged From IJR

China and the United States on Thursday agreed to hold high-level talks in early October in Washington, boosting markets as investors hoped for a thaw in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies that has taken a toll on global growth.

The meeting was arranged during a phone call between Chinese Vice Premier Liu He and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, China’s commerce ministry said in a statement on its website. China’s central bank governor Yi Gang was also on the call.

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