China to be carbon-neutral by 2060

Xi Jin Ping promised this, and promised that Chinese emissions would start to decline by 2030. It’s a big ambition. It will be interesting if it can be delivered without huge hardship for the greying population of this country.

Markets this morning

The rise in the dollar has slowed, but not reversed. The collapse in everything priced in dollars has slowed correspondingly. A few commodities have showed signs of life, but silver seems to continue to collapse. I had had a good run. Japanese and European equities rallied modestly, but not convincingly. ES and MXEA futures point to a feeble rally, as does bitcoin.

Update after US opens: equities still pretty flat. DX a tad higher.

Kent secedes from the UK

(Not really.) The lack of readiness for customs checks at Dover seems to have forced the government to a somewhat hare-brained scheme of forcing these checks out beyond the borders of Kent. I have no idea how this will work. My guess is that it won’t be as bad as the media are predicting, but that would suggest that the government are good at something (managing expectations), for which there is not a great deal of evidence.

Farm subsidies

This article suggests that those receiving farm subsidies are not the most deserving. It falls into the “dog bites man” category of news stories that provokes a barely stifled yawn from readers. Of course farm subsides are not designed to help farmers. Their principle purpose is to tilt the result of elections. The same goes for most taxes and subsidies, but farm subsidies are particularly egregious, because of the way they help to cement a grotesquely non-optimal allocation of capital.

How to get rich quick

Here it is explained that you have a NASDAQ listing, as a penny stock, and you put out a press release telling investors that you plan to become the next Nikola (which was the next Tesla). Your stock rockets up by a factor of 44, but then crashes down to earth just as quickly. Selling at the top must take some nerves of steel.

Wrap

The day finished in fairly clear risk on territory, although equity markets are still down over a week. As usual large growth led the charge. Commodities were generally stronger, as the dollar weakned a tad. Bitcoin jumped 5%. Natural Gas leaped. I read that Nordstrom 2 is going ahead. Not sure how that impacts NG pricing. Soft commods are complicated beasts: Angie Setzer is worth a follow. Copper is weak. Always a worry. Silver is behaving very oddly: