“The price of cocoa surged through $10,000 per ton for the first time on Tuesday, as a dizzying rise in prices caused by poor harvests in Africa accelerates…
“The market was “out of control”, said Andrew Moriarty, price reporting manager at Mintec, a commodities data group. “Everyone is just bracing for impact.” Poor weather and disease have slashed crop yields in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together produce more than two-thirds of the world’s beans.”
https://www.ft.com/content/c847251c-0940-46b3-899c-5e38e720d484
“Ghana is set to lose access to a key funding facility as a crisis in its cocoa crop has left it without enough beans to secure the funds.
“It’s the latest sign of the fallout from the extreme weather and disease that’s hit cocoa output in both Ghana and neighboring Ivory Coast, the biggest grower.”
“The $280 Billion Climate Bond Market That Isn’t Working…
“CBI’s research found that just 14% of SLBs issued are aligned with the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to well under 2C from pre-industrial times, according to its own assessment methodology.”
“Could the Bond Market crash and, if so, what would that mean for your money?
“…He says that the exposure to debt that all the main western powers have is so extreme and so huge (particularly Japan which has around 260% debt to GDP ratio!) that it’s unsustainable and has to come crashing down at some point.”
“Japan steps up intervention warnings as yen slides to weakest level since 1990…
“The recent drop comes despite the Bank of Japan’s pivot from its ultra-loose monetary policy, which some analysts had expected to exert upward pressure on the yen. The BoJ last week raised interest rates for the first time since 2007…”
https://www.ft.com/content/5421159d-e2b4-4856-bc5e-e1287271e33e
“Is America at risk of a bond market meltdown? This watchdog thinks so…
“The United States risks a bond market crisis of the kind that engulfed the United Kingdom 18 months ago, sending yields soaring and sparking a run on the pound, according to Congress’s independent fiscal watchdog.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/26/business/us-debt-cbo-warning/index.html
“The Economic Impact Of The Baltimore Bridge Collapse Will Linger, Contributing To Inflation…
“Considering the bridge’s role in facilitating interstate commerce and its position as part of the I-695 corridor, a major link in the Interstate 95 network, the disruption will snarl freight movements and create logistical challenges, leading to delays heading into Easter weekend and in the longer term, increased costs for shipping and transportation industries…”
“Britain’s barren boozers: Pubs say cost of living crisis and huge rises in energy bills means they have had to scale back operations with some venues closing as early as 8pm…
“…a poll of British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) members found 32 per cent had reduced their hours due to high costs.”
“Tractors descend on Parliament over ‘betrayal’ of British farmers in post-Brexit trade deals…
“Organised by Save British Farming and the Kent Fairness for Farmers group, they are calling for an end to a number of post-Brexit trade deals, which they claim are allowing imports into the country that fall short of UK standards.”
“Brussels: Metro station set on fire as farmers’ protests continue in Belgium.
“Farmers’ protests that have been widespread across Europe for several months continued in the Belgian capital. The group has been demonstrating against what they consider adverse EU regulations and unfair prices.”
“Child poverty in Germany reaches record high.
“Nearly 17 percent of Germans live in poverty, according to latest statistics. Two thirds of people living in poverty belong to the working poor, criticise welfare associations. They are particularly alarmed by the number of children living in poverty.”
https://www.dw.com/en/child-poverty-in-germany-reaches-record-high/video-68675022
“Poverty in Italy hits new high despite economic recovery…
“Those living in “absolute poverty” – who were unable to buy essential goods and services – rose to 5.75 million, or 9.8% percent of the population, national statistics bureau ISTAT reported. That’s up marginally from 9.7% in 2022 and the highest since the current data series began in 2014.”
“Could corruption bring down Spain’s government again?
“Just four months into its second term, Spain’s Socialist-led government is already mired in corruption allegations. The latest scandal emerged this week and focuses on the wife of prime minister Pedro Sanchez, Begoña Gómez.”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/could-corruption-bring-down-spains-government-again/
“Thousands protest against Hungary’s Orban after former insider leaks graft case tape…
“Peter Magyar earlier published a recording of a conversation with Judit Varga, then his wife and Hungary’s justice minister, in which she detailed an attempt by aides to Orban’s cabinet chief to remove certain parts from documents in a graft case.”
“‘I’m not profiting from misery. I’m averting more’ – Thales’s UK boss on making missiles for Ukraine…
“In Britain, defence accounts for most of its business – and is growing rapidly. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022, the group’s shares have gained more than 80%, its value has swelled to €33bn and its order book has reached a record high, at €45bn.”
“Defense And Aerospace Stocks To Watch…
“…this new focus on national and international security… is leading countries to bulk up their military posture, which should generate demand for U.S. defense contractors. Current events in The Middle East add to the uncertainty.”
https://www.investors.com/news/defense-and-aerospace-stocks-to-watch-and-industry-news/
“Japan gets out of post-World War pacifism, allows sale of fighter jets…
“Japan’s cabinet on Tuesday (March 26) gave the green light for the export of new fighter jets currently under development in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Italy. The move signals Tokyo’s growing assertiveness in defence partnerships amid its evolving security posture.”
“Chinese ex-trade negotiator who backed Trump slams US for ‘dismantling the system’ of global trade.
“Long Yongtu tells Boao Forum for Asia that ‘globalised economic and trade systems are at stake’, and targeting Chinese companies in Mexico would mean higher prices for Americans.”
“‘Statement to China’: India’s strategic Sela tunnel raises tensions as New Delhi boosts border control.
“The opening of the world’s longest twin-lane tunnel sparked a war of words between Beijing and New Delhi, as each claims Arunachal Pradesh for its own. The tunnel enables all-weather troop deployments and other movements…”
“India backs Philippines amid sea tensions with China…
““The progress and prosperity of this region is best served by staunch adherence to rules-based order (and) UNCLOS is particularly important as the constitution of seas,” Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar told a news conference streamed live from Manila.”
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/india-backs-philippines-amid-sea-tensions-with-china/3175454
“Dozens arrested as Indian capital hit with protests over arrest of Delhi leader and Modi rival…
“Indian police arrested several protesters to prevent them from marching to prime minister Narendra Modi’s home to demand the release of Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal who was arrested on graft charges last week.”
“Conflict, climate, corruption drive Southeast Asia people trafficking: UN…
“Tens of thousands of people from Myanmar as well as from other parts of Southeast Asia and from outside the region are smuggled to, through and from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand every year, the UNODC said…”
“Warnings against normalising conflict as Yemen marks decade of war…
““While the truce reduced some violence, it hasn’t ever brought the stability families desperately need to rebuild their lives. Above everything else, families in Yemen need an official ceasefire; without one, families are left in limbo.””
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/25/report-millions-of-children-out-of-school-in-yemen
“South Sudan on the brink after oil exports derailed by Sudan’s civil war…
““The pipeline accounts for two-thirds or three-quarters of oil revenues. Unless [South Sudan] is able to get the pipeline working again, it will be a massive pull on South Sudan’s budget,” said Alan Boswell…”
“Gaza’s hungry eat wild plant with no aid relief in sight…
“As the U.N. Security Council demands an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and concerns grow that famine may take hold, the territory’s hungry civilians are foraging for a wild green plant called Khobiza for lack of anything else to eat.”
“Starvation: Anatomy of ‘a very cruel, slow death’…
“Starvation occurs over three stages. The first starts as early as a skipped meal; the second comes with any prolonged period of fasting when the body relies upon stored fats for energy… The third, and often fatal, stage is when all stored fats have been depleted and the body turns to bone and muscle as sources of energy.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/27/starvation-anatomy-of-a-very-cruel-slow-death
“A vortex of violence and poverty – starving families take shelter from Haiti capital’s battlefield.
“What should be a beautiful Caribbean country with a vibrant capital is stuck in a vortex of violence and poverty – and a leadership void. People are praying things get better, but many fear it could actually get worse.”
“Unexploded bombs from the second world war are getting more dangerous…
“There are millions of tonnes of unexploded ammunition around the world, some in old ammunition dumps and some in shells and bombs that failed to detonate after being fired or dropped. There is a widespread misconception that this unexploded ammunition is becoming less dangerous over time…”
“Here’s How Nuclear War Could “Destroy Civilization” in Just a Few Hours…
“Twenty-four minutes. That’s how long it would take—just 1,440 seconds—for a nuclear warhead to travel from North Korea to the largest nuclear power plant in California, where it could set off a chain reaction of events that bring human civilization back to the Stone Age.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/how-nuclear-war-could-destroy-civilization
“A US space startup is planning to sell advertising space on the Moon after penning a deal with a creative agency.
“California-based Astrolab already has an agreement in place with SpaceX to send its jeep-sized rover to the Earth’s natural satellite aboard the next-generation Starship rocket.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/space/moon-adverts-astrolab-spacex-space-b2518980.html
You can read the previous “Economic” thread here. I’ll be back tomorrow with a “Climate” thread.
If you found value in this content, please help me continue this work by becoming a patron of my work via Patreon. And if you are already a subscriber or have donated – thank you!
Ads on the moon. I live in a small state which banned all billboard/commercial signs as “traffic hazards” decades ago… so I am always startled when driving out of town.
Now they want to put them on the moon?
Meanwhile, one of my favourite gloomy doomy doomers ponders Britain’s lack of steel in a collapsing economy.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/03/24/the-enemy-was-always-within/
Remember watching a PBS documentary on the Great Leap Forward in China. This from Wikipedia..
With no personal knowledge of metallurgy, Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighborhood. Mao was shown an example of a backyard furnace in Hefei, Anhui, in September 1958 by provincial first secretary Zeng Xisheng.[30] The unit was claimed to be manufacturing high quality steel.[30]
Huge efforts on the part of illiterate peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap metal. To fuel the furnaces, the local environment was denuded of trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants’ houses. Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the “scrap” for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural workers were diverted from the harvest to help the iron production as were the workers at many factories, schools, and even hospitals. Although the output consisted of low quality lumps of pig iron which was of negligible economic worth, Mao had a deep distrust of intellectuals, engineers and technicians who could have pointed this out and instead placed his faith in the power of the mass mobilization of the peasants.
From my readings and experiences, recycling only functions in target sectors, like traditional car batteries, which are the most recycled items .
Difficult to digest all the headlines, some very, very upsetting, i.e, starvation…
And then we people make matters even worse…
Very nice weather here today in Florida, hoping for a fine day…take care everyone
it’s good to know that even as capitalism wrings out the value of the very last ecosystems on planet Earth we can wipe our brow and pray to God that “communism” didn’t “win” because that would have definitely been a worse disaster, somehow, I’m sure.
“Now they want to put them on the moon?”
There’s so much wrong with the “space conquest” narrative, both pragmatically and ethically, that it is hard to know where to start. It signifies a species reaching a crescendo of delusional megalomania, I fear.
At least there’s no biosphere or indigenous peoples up there for us to screw over.
“It signifies a species reaching a crescendo of delusional megalomania, I fear.” wonderfully put Pan. I still read sci-fi books, etc. but those books clearly aren’t the future of humanity. i read a book Burial Rites set in 1829 Iceland hinterland and that felt more like near-future sci-fi than anything actually in the genre.
Lol … how do you conquer emptiness? … which is what space is … As exemplified by your closing statement, “@ least there’s no biosphere or indigenous peoples…”, the mission is impossible precisely because earthlings have no experience with colonization that doesn’t require both a biosphere to trash and an indigenous population to enslave for it to succeed.
Love that blog!
And what an incredibly apropos metaphor for the willful blindness of the techno-green crowd. Oh, yeah, that inconvenient gorilla in the room that no one wants to notice, you know, that bit about wind turbines using MORE steel than a coal-fired power plant. Don’t forget vast amounts of cement, the production of which accounts for a significant amount of global carbon emissions.
Wait, it gets worse! Those giant carbon-fiber turbine blades only have a 20 or 30 year lifespan and, no, they CANNOT be recycled.
We are wasting incredibly precious time and resources building out what we already know will become a tsunami of dead turbine blades and rusting steel pylons. And for what? So people can continue driving their death machines to the mall for a box of microwave pizza?
God help us.
Speaking of things techno-green, I came across this story the other day but couldn’t really make it fit into a thread:
“A hailstorm hammered thousands of solar panels at a Fort Bend County farm with emergency crews investigating, and neighbors worried whether any chemicals were leaking.
“Last Saturday was a night Nick Kaminski will never forget. After the wind tore off his roof, golf ball-sized hail rained from the sky. “The hailstorm we experienced Saturday morning was unimaginable,” Kaminski recalled. “We’ve never seen anything like it in our lifetime.””
https://abc13.com/fighting-jays-solar-farm-guy-texas-fort-bend-county-tx-hailstorm/14559628/
A handful of years back I browsed a study that predicted hail would likely increase in size, but the number of hail storms would probably not increase.
Their prediction on the increased size of hail, and it’s destrctive has come to pass
~~~~~~~
Published: 26 June 2017
The changing hail threat over North America in response to anthropogenic climate change
Abstract
“Although fewer hail days are expected over most areas in the future, an increase in the mean hail size is projected, with fewer small hail events and a shift toward a more frequent occurrence of larger hail.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3321
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dec. 27, 2023
2023 was the year of massive hail across North America
“We saw thousands of reports of “very large” hail across the U.S., Canada, and around the world this year, measuring about 5 cm in diameter or larger. That’s the size of a hen’s egg.
The hail grew so large in some areas that it smashed all-time records for the biggest hailstones ever measured.”
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/weather/severe/2023-was-the-year-of-massive-hail-across-north-america-europe-canada-united-states-italy
~~~~
I wonder if hail damage might be the next thing insurance companies drop?
14 Aug, 2023
Insurers hit hard as US hailstorms grow more severe, costly in warming climate
“Severe hailstorms that scientists believe may be driven by climate change, coupled with rising populations in areas prone to violent weather, pummeled insurers during the first half of 2023.
A series of destructive thunderstorms in the US racked up $34 billion in insurance losses, according to Swiss Re AG, which tracks the cost of natural disasters. Almost all losses resulted from hail damage. In all, the US accounted for as much as 68% of all global natural catastrophe losses through the end of June, the insurance company said in an Aug. 9 report.”
“Scientists believe that climate change may also be increasing the size of the icy stones, but they caution that more research is needed.”
“A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture in the atmosphere [that] combined with higher temperatures make the atmosphere more unstable and therefore more prone to forming thunderstorms — with strong updrafts that can support the development of larger hailstones,” Tim Raupach, a professor at University of New South Wales’ Climate Research Centre, told S&P Global Commodity Insights in an email.”
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/insurers-hit-hard-as-us-hailstorms-grow-more-severe-costly-in-warming-climate-76991910
~~
All Hail the Endtimes
“Could the Bond Market crash and, if so, what would that mean for your money?” – couple of good looking articles/podcasts on current state of Bond Market. excited to explore. one of the big outcomes of the 2008 GFC and continuing through COVID (largest transfer of wealth in human history by far – entirely towards the rich) is that private debt has been transferred onto the public. or what we like to call “the Mother of All Bubbles” in my circles. it’s also good to imagine bubbles crowded within bubbles – a sort of fractal series of bubbles. with our current industrial “civilization” teetering on top of it. the productive capacity of the globe remains enormous – but the structures on which it relies are weakening systematically. when do they cave and how? no one could possibly know.
The USA creates 6x’s the methane emissions to produce approximately the same amount of oil as Saudi Arabia; Russia, 5x’s as much (per IEA stats). As the fracturing industry continues its rampage across the vast continent, it more and more resembles the oil producing countries of Egypt & Indonesia, both of which used to be oil exporting nations. But just as the growing internal consumption of oil soon enough grew so rapidly it consumed more than they could produce, the energy needed to produce a given amount of light tight oil will follow the same trajectory. We are balancing on this knife’s edge now.
When Permian production falters, the bonds leveraged on US economic growth will become not only worth less, but worthless.
Hence the Biden mandate of leveraging the Permian to build the renewable infrastructure. Slight problem with that strategy: for it to work the energy intensity of modern society must decrease, but despite the known necessity of this, since the turn of the century it has instead soared, making a complete farce of the much ballyhooed, but entirely phony, “energy transition”. Think crypto: in a world where energy production is destroying vast expanses of land, leaving a poisoned wasteland leaking methane like a sieve, how is it possible for an “industry” that has no function other than to enable fraud and money laundering and uses the dirtiest fuel on the planet, pop up overnight and combust more fuel than the modern industrialized state of Argentina? Yet this subject wasn’t even broached @ the COPout conferences.
https://www.reuters.com/business/insurers-brace-multi-billion-dollar-losses-after-baltimore-ship-tragedy-2024-03-27/
Insurance losses due to bridge collapse
Thanks, Heather. An interesting titbit from the article – the ship’s insurers are themselves insured by a so called “P&I Club” made up of 80 different reinsurers, acting like a kind of financial shock-absorber for colossal mishaps of this nature.
Nothing like a little dark humor to lighten the mood.
“Child poverty in Germany…” & “Starvation…” with pictures of hungry children tells me all I need to know about scum parents. Globally every parent whose child is hungry, homeless, cold, needs clothes & shoes, lacking a great education should be be caned,10 lashes. If the child’s situation does not improve in a week the parents will be caned with 20 lashes. Each week if their is no improvement for their children
the number of lashes will be increased, until the self absorbed, self-centered, narcissistic, my desires are the end all & be all parents learn to take responsibility for the suffering they bring into the world.
Wait! That’s too extreme! So let’s hold no one responsible, do nothing ourselves & continue to watch the suffering of children. I apologize for being slightly pissed off. Is this where I post a smiley face?