Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : The Financial Collapse of 2001 Unwinding -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gg cox who wrote (7875)	9/1/2021 9:13:14 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 13780

A new doctrine. Not a withdrawal. People are not seeing the obvious. The US DoD is not telling but the withdrawal has to be seen as the change in doctrine. Why use troops on the ground when you can pinpoint and neutralize the enemy using UAVs? Now the enemy is free to come into the open in Afghanistan, either coming back from the countries that sheltered them or from their hideouts in the hinterland. Time to prepare, pinpoint and hit them.

To: gg cox who wrote (7875)	9/2/2021 3:00:12 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 13780

The theme of the thread Emerging economies cannot afford ‘taper tantrum’ repeat, says IMF’s Gopinath Fund’s chief economist sounds cautious note as Fed inches closer to dialling back stimulus IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath told the FT that emerging markets ‘cannot afford a situation where you have some sort of a tantrum of financial markets originating from the major central banks’ © AFP via Getty Images ELMAT: After failing in 2013, they are at it again Fed to begin dialling back its $120bn asset purchase programme this year. Looks like the $120bn tail, trying to wag the $93 trillion dog. Can someone tell the IMF that no Emerging Market Central Banker will defend his country's currency by burning foreign reserves anymore. Looks like the EMs moved on but the IMF didn't. Colby Smith in New York and Jonathan Wheatley in London AUGUST 29 2021 Emerging markets cannot “afford” a repeat of the 2013 “taper tantrum” market disruption that occurred when the US Federal Reserve signalled a sooner-than-expected withdrawal of stimulus, sparking a surge in global borrowing costs, the IMF’s chief economist has warned. In an interview with the Financial Times, Gita Gopinath sounded a cautious note as the Fed prepares to dial back its pandemic support, highlighting the economic pressures on low and middle-income countries, which have suffered disproportionately from the coronavirus crisis. She also warned of the potential fallout should inflation become a more pernicious issue in the US and force a sudden move to tighten monetary policy. “[Emerging markets] are facing much harder headwinds,” she said. “They are getting hit in many different ways, which is why they just cannot afford a situation where you have some sort of a tantrum of financial markets originating from the major central banks.” Gopinath’s comments come after Fed chair Jay Powell, in a speech at the virtual Jackson Hole symposium of central bankers on Friday, indicated that the US economy would be strong enough for the Fed to begin dialling back its $120bn asset purchase programme this year. Business activity has picked up sharply over the past five months alongside the Covid-19 vaccination drive. US consumer prices have also soared, propelled by booming demand and supply-chain bottlenecks that have led to an acute shortage of some goods. Inflationary pressures have jumped higher and faster than most economists expected, although the Fed has long said they will fade over time. But policymakers have become more attuned to the risk that they could persist longer, especially with the more contagious Delta variant fuelling an alarming rise in Covid cases globally. “A lot of the problems we’re facing, even with regard to inflation and supply bottlenecks, have to do with the fact that we have the pandemic raging in different parts of the world,” Gopinath said. If higher inflation lingers, “that can feed into inflation expectations and then have a self-fulfilling feature to it”. “We are concerned about a scenario where you would have inflation come up much higher than expected, and that would require a much quicker normalisation of monetary policy in the US,” she added. The IMF calculated in July that $4.5tn could potentially be erased from global gross domestic product cumulatively by 2025 by what Gopinath called a “double whammy” of new waves of infections in emerging markets, which have struggled to gain access to vaccines, and a “massive” normalisation of monetary policy in the US, although that was not the fund’s base case. The damage would be particularly acute for low- to middle-income countries, according to Maurice Obstfeld, a former IMF chief economist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, given the run-up of debt levels since the start of the pandemic. Average government debt in large emerging economies rose from 52.2 per cent of GDP to 60.5 per cent in 2020, according to the Institute of International Finance. That was the biggest surge on record and helped countries weather the pandemic. Many are in better shape today than they were during the 2013 tantrum. Bigger foreign currency reserves and better budgetary and external balances have helped fortify their defences, but a large shock could penetrate that buffer. “If they are hit by an abrupt increase in the tightness of dollar financing conditions and perhaps a reversal of capital flows, that could be pretty devastating in the midst of an ongoing pandemic,” he said. More than $360bn flowed into emerging markets stocks and bonds in the last nine months of 2020, according to the IIF. While the pace of inflows has slowed, many countries remained highly vulnerable to a swift change in investor sentiment. Higher inflation has already forced several countries to raise interest rates including Brazil, Hungary, Mexico and Russia, but additional tightening may be necessary to fend off capital flight and currency depreciation, inflicting more economic pain. Gopinath said central bankers needed to provide “super clear communication” on a frequent basis about their policy path forward — something she said Powell has done effectively. “One of the issues when [then-chair Ben] Bernanke made his statement in 2013 was not so much that quantitative easing would start unwinding, but that it was also mixed up with expectations that interest rates will start rising faster than was expected,” she said. “This time round, they’ve laid it out very clearly by saying that they will first start tapering?.?.?.?and then they will start raising interest rates.” Unhedged — Markets, finance and strong opinion Robert Armstrong dissects the most important market trends and discusses how Wall Street’s best minds respond t

To: gg cox who wrote (7875)	9/11/2021 2:44:18 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 13780

Throttling oil and gas to protect the climate will backfire Environmental agenda cannot ignore energy supply security Vandana Hari September 9, 2021 17:00 JST Vandana Hari is founder of Singapore-based Vanda Insights, which tracks energy markets. Pressured by U.S. inflation running at 13-year highs and surging gasoline prices, the Biden administration acted somewhat uncharacteristically in July by publicly urging OPEC and its allies to pump more oil. Oil-producing nations shrugged off the request, but the White House drew flak from both sides of the energy and climate change debate. Coming from an administration touting a green agenda, the move was seen as hypocritical by many. But the White House is hardly alone in this predicament. In a report titled "Net Zero by 2050," published in May, the International Energy Agency stated that all oil and gas field development must end from this year if the world is to stay within safe limits of global warming. Then, a month later, in its regular market outlook report, the Paris-based energy policy adviser called on OPEC to boost output to meet expected demand recovery in 2022. As headlines highlight progressively bigger doomsday views on climate change -- even though they sit within a wide range of possible scenarios painted by scientific studies on the subject -- the global community appears eager to embrace the notion of abundant clean energy, available at the flick of a switch. The embarrassingly erroneous assumption that our current way of life can be maintained -- and the global economy can power ahead -- even if oil and gas supplies dry up tomorrow has become the generally accepted default position. Passionate opponents of fossil fuels do not concern themselves with the question of how and when the world -- middle and lower-income countries especially -- can access all this clean and affordable energy. Long the mainstay of the world's energy needs, oil and gas has become a favorite scapegoat. Not only are banks, investors and even the oil majors themselves abandoning the development of new oil and gas reserves, but many are also beating a retreat from oil refining. Insurance companies, too, are coming under increasing pressure to quickly wash their hands of oil and gas. Global upstream oil and gas spending this year is estimated to reach $351 billion, a staggering 43% drop compared with 2015. Meanwhile, carbon capture and storage technology is not getting sufficient attention, partly because producers are more focused on pivoting to other sources of energy, and partly because of concerns that it will be used to justify the continued use of fossil fuels. With the 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP26, in November aiming to accelerate action toward the goals set by the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the sense of urgency has reached fever pitch. There is no arguing that doubling down on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and moving toward sustainable use of the world's natural resources are critical to our survival and well-being. But the frenzy and hype around the subject is concerning. A complex science has been boiled down to dangerously simplistic concepts. Rhetoric over how several big, bad commercial and political actors are deliberately avoiding obvious or easy solutions to the climate change and energy supply conundrum has elbowed out levelheaded discourse. No one cares to challenge the reductive thinking of the teenagers who joined Extinction Rebellion's blockade of Norway's energy ministry recently with "ban oil" written on their palms, or the tenuous deductions in media reports such as the CBS News story "How climate change helped strengthen the Taliban" aired on Aug. 20, linking the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan with climate change. Countries and companies have hopped on to the bandwagon of net-zero pledges -- setting targets of up to three decades for removing the entire amount of greenhouse gases they add to the atmosphere -- without road-maps for how they will get there. A rush to get somewhere without charting a course that balances the interconnected imperatives of environmental sustainability, economic growth and energy security can only bring disastrous consequences. The IEA estimates that annual investment in clean energy needs to triple to around $4 trillion by 2030. But here is the rub -- it also acknowledges that in 20 years from now, half of those emissions reductions will have to come from technologies that are still under development. Electricity is expected to become the core of the new green energy world, but not only will global power generation need to scale up, but it will need to do so without adding carbon emissions to the atmosphere. That is a tall order. China, India and a handful of other countries rejected the planned wording on net-zero pledges in the final communique of a Group of 20 energy and environment ministers' meeting in July, saying they could not promise to phase out coal-fired power generation by 2025, as desired by their peers. It remains to be seen whether the petrostate governments attending COP26 will provide other nations with a reality check on the oil and gas cancel culture or simply toe the line. Or, perhaps there is no stopping this runaway train and it would be best to brace for oil prices of $100-a-barrel or higher in the not-too-distant future. asia.nikkei.com

To: gg cox who wrote (7875)	9/21/2021 9:51:08 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 13780

Global capex booms as companies prepare for post-pandemic era Global companies from noodle makers to semiconductor giants are spending on new plants and machinery in ways they haven’t done for years. On the supply side, blockages brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic are forcing businesses to invest in new production facilities; calls for a cleaner environment are spurring spending on electric vehicles, batteries and alternative energy; and the big semiconductor crunch has prompted a wave of investment. LATAM highest CAPEX: Consumer, Industrials, Materials, Utilities Read more at: economictimes.indiatimes.com