Russia is a major metals producer and exporter. According to Institut Polytechnique de Paris, last year the country held a 13% market share for titanium production, 11.2% for nickel, 10.5% for platinum, 5.4% for aluminum, 4% for copper and 4.4% for cobalt. It is the world’s top producer of palladium, a rare metal used in car manufacturing, accounting for 37% of production in 2021.…
Russia is not only a major producer of primary aluminum but it is also embedded in the global supply chains needed to make the metal....
RT (Russian state-sponsored media)
Russia to divert metals away from West
There was a time when Putin was gravitating towards the West. See Oliver Stone's interviews where we get a glimpse of Putin's office, filled with US tech; Microsoft operating systems (not linux) and Cisco phones.
ReplyDeleteBut Biden well and truly shot the West in the foot, by refusing to meet with Putin before the invasion, leaving every minor EU politician to frantically meet with him instead in an attempt to pacify him.
So much for Biden's green policies - they'll be too expensive for the majority, with the main net-zero commodity prices skyrocketing.
We're heading for a dystopian future where China dominates the world. The US's ONLY job was to keep Russia close, to keep the balance of power in the West, but Biden blew it. Who could have foreseen a worse leader than Trump, let alone far, far worse.
Happy New year to Mike and the Guys.
ReplyDeleteHope you had a fab festive chaps and your families are well.
An update trading the 10 year using ING spread betting - in less than a year nearly doubled my money. 71% return.
Haven't used any real money yet. Just used the dummy account they give you When you join. Not one losing spread betting trade, trading the 10 year during that time.
All thanks to Robert Balan's work.
Hold onto your hats in the first quarter of 2023. There's a wind blowing in some change.
:)
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4563760-the-white-house-fed-inflation-and-flow-of-funds-for-december-2022
Will start throwing real money at the 10 year when the world returns to normal. The seasonal inflection points are more stable.
Hope all your predictions come true in 2023.
Foot.
Putin remains stuck with Microsoft Windows... ReactOS needs more work to be viable.
ReplyDeleteWho could have foreseen a worse leader than Trump, let alone far, far worse.
ReplyDeleteSteve Grumbine.
A few selected quotes from this article by David Rosenberg:
ReplyDeleteThe amateurism at the White House is absolutely astonishing
Donald Trump and his band of protectionists need to enroll in an Econ 101 course – there are few 'winners' in a trade war. They will then be able to learn some basics like 'Harberger's triangle', an area of the supply-demand diagram of tradeable goods depicting the size of the 'deadweight loss' to society from what is otherwise a tax on global production and U.S. consumption. If you are not one of the 400,000 workers in the steel or aluminum industry, you should be up in arms about this.
The amateurism at the White House, I have to say, is absolutely astonishing. Seriously, to see Wilbur Ross on TV with a can of Campbell's soup in his hand – I'm sure that was a first for him. He should have also shown a farm tractor, a car, a piece of natural gas pipeline, an airplane, and some construction equipment to show the viewing public too – because the increase in cost and decline in production from this stupid tax is going to cut a very wide swath. Something tells me Mr. Ross will be crying in his can of soup once the economic carnage is tallied up.
The White House already has stated that there will be no exemptions and that the actions on steel and aluminum are being taken for 'national security' reasons. That would be funny if it weren't so sad. Frozen electricity – which is essentially what aluminum is – is deemed to be a security of supply issue. The world is awash in steel capacity and this is somehow a national security issue? No. It is rather a political issue.
How Canada stands in the way of U.S. national security interests is anyone's guess. And we should also keep in mind, that the United States exports US$2-billion annually more steel to Canada than the other way around.
Let's examine the claim that 'protecting' industries that employ 400,000 people in a work force of 130 million will not cause any damage. After all, nearly seven million Americans work in industries that will be negatively affected by the tariffs. Well, the economic impact will actually take 10 to 20 basis points off annual real GDP growth. The job loss will range anywhere from 190,000 to 380,000 – as the gains in Ohio and Pennsylvania will be swamped by declines in the states most sensitive to the cost run-up in other segments of the industrial economy such as Indiana, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Alabama – all states that Mr. Trump carried in the 2016 election.
So look – before the hardcore Trump supporters get all in a tizzy, I never said that the President "doesn't know what he's talking about" as the weekend Wall Street Journal editorial pages asserted. I only said he needs an immediate crash course in Economics 101, along with his entire trade team.
Yo, Peter Navarro has a PhD in Economics from Harvard… he is the author of the Trump trade policy…
ReplyDelete“ Mr. Rosenberg received both a Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Arts degree in Economics from the University of Toronto.”
ReplyDeleteRosie only has a masters arts degree from some backwater … Navarro PhD from Harvard … written best selling books on trade policy…
And btw Rosie right now is EXTREME bearish….
ReplyDeleteThinks the Fed’s QT is going to run us “out of money!”…
Peter Navarro... not like the other economists.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Politico, Navarro's economic theories are "considered fringe" by his fellow economists. A New Yorker reporter described Navarro's views on trade and China as so radical "that, even with his assistance, I was unable to find another economist who fully agrees with them." The Economist described Navarro as having "oddball views". The George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has described Navarro as "one of the most versatile and productive American economists of the last few decades", but Cowen noted that he disagreed with his views on trade, which he claimed go "against a strong professional consensus." University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers described Navarro's views as "far outside the mainstream," noting that "he endorses few of the key tenets of" the economics profession. According to Lee Branstetter, economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University and trade expert with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Navarro "was never a part of the group of economists who ever studied the global free-trade system ... He doesn't publish in journals. What he's writing and saying right now has nothing to do with what he got his Harvard Ph.D. in ... he doesn't do research that would meet the scientific standards of that community." Marcus Noland, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, described a tax and trade paper written by Navarro and Wilbur Ross for Trump as "a complete misunderstanding of international trade, on their part."
Navarro is a proponent of the notion that trade deficits are bad in and of themselves, a view which is widely rejected by trade experts and economists.
Harvard University economics professor Gregory Mankiw has said that Navarro's views on the trade deficit are based on the kind of mistakes that "even a freshman at the end of ec 10 knows."
According to Tyler Cowen, "close to no one" in the economics profession agrees with Navarro's idea that a trade deficit is bad in and of itself. Nobel laureate Angus Deaton described Navarro's attitude on trade deficits as "an old-fashioned mercantilist position."
Dan Ikenson, director of the Cato Institute's Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, goes so far as to call Navarro a "charlatan" and says that "99.9 per cent of respectable economists would eschew" what he says: "He says imports deduct from output, and he calls that accounting identity the 'economic growth formula'. He thinks that for every dollar we import, our GDP is reduced by a dollar. I don't know how he got his PhD at Harvard."
—Wikipedia
Frances Coppola weighs in...
ReplyDeletePresident Trump's Triffin problem
Trump's trade agenda was set out in Peter Navarro & Wilbur Ross's paper (pdf) of September 2016. Peter Navarro's most famous work is the documentary "Death By China" which essentially blames China for all America's woes. Wilbur Ross is a businessman who made a fortune from buying up and restructuring manufacturing businesses, some of them protected by George Bush's trade tariffs. Both of them are unashamedly protectionist, labelling countries running large trade surpluses as "cheaters" and "manipulators" and demanding that the rules of international trade be changed to benefit America at their expense. Both of them have been appointed to top trade jobs by Donald Trump.
Many people have pointed out the gross economic errors in Navarro & Ross's analysis. At Vox, Matt Yglesias explains how imports contribute to exports: imposing high tariffs on imports simply raises business costs, reducing business profits and threatening people's jobs. The economist Greg Mankiw notes that they fail even to mention the effect on the capital account (foreign investment in America) of closing a current account deficit. Paul Krugman describes their discussion of VAT as "utterly uninformed". And Larry Summers says Trump's global economic plan is based on a "misunderstanding of how the global economy works".
I'm with Larry Summers on this. Navarro & Ross have failed to understand the nature of the US's relationship with the rest of the world. And they have therefore disastrously misinterpreted the cause of its trade deficit. There may well be currency manipulation, mercantilism and skewed trade deals. But these are not the principal cause. No, the main reason for the US's trade deficit is the US dollar.
The US dollar is the world’s premier currency for international trade and investment. More trade is done in U.S. dollars than any other currency.
How global demand for dollars creates a balance of payments problem for the US was first described by the economist Robert Triffin. Testifying before Congress in 1960, Triffin explained how the US's trade deficit was essential for the global economy, but potentially disastrous for the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system:
Navarro & Ross wrongly blame this on the trade practices of other countries, failing to recognise its true origin in the US's responsibility for maintaining global dollar liquidity as global trade increased during this period. And consequently, they have come up with a policy prescription which, by closing the trade deficit, would cause a crisis of dollar liquidity, potentially leading - as Triffin warned over half a century ago - to a global contractionary spiral. We have a name for such a spiral. It is called a Depression.
I suppose Trump and his team of voodoo economists would say that they don't care if the rest of the world goes into a Depression, as long as America is ok. But there is no way that America could be insulated from the effects of such a severe global monetary contraction. To show this, we have to look at how such a monetary contraction would play out.
None of that matters…
ReplyDeleteYou cited: “trump needs to hire some economists “….
He DID hire economists…
Checkmate.,,, AGAIN….
Why bring up Trump when it is the Biden regime that is continuing MAGA doctrine?
ReplyDeleteDid Xi reject Hunter's resume?
It’s politically popular … so Biden has to be at least paying the policy lip service… just like he says he is securing the southern border…
ReplyDeleteTrump originally seized upon the popularity of the policy which is based on Harvard PhD Navarros thesis on trade…
She gets this part correct:
ReplyDelete“ I suppose Trump and his team of voodoo economists would say that they don't care if the rest of the world goes into a Depression, as long as America is ok.”
Biden securing the southern border... when was that?
ReplyDeleteHe says he is every day…
ReplyDeleteOnly thing Biden does every day is take a nap...
ReplyDeleteHes probably on a drip…
ReplyDeleteSo is your country...
ReplyDeleteBLOATED & INSANE $1.7T Omnibus Passes Senate As GOP FOLDS, $45B To Ukraine As US Border COLLAPSES
ReplyDeleteTim Pool
https://youtu.be/Aq3RqSr7CbE
Gets angry, tells it as he sees it.