Journal to portfolio afterlife

portfolioafterlife · 29 Aprile 2022

L'etf Hang Seng Tech avvia le contrattazioni a +10,3%.

portfolioafterlife · 29 Aprile 2022

Dopo i magheggi del LME sul Nickel arriva anche questa notizia. Tutto sotto controllo.

Start with a recap. The price of nickel, a metal used in stainless steel and electric-vehicle batteries, had been rising in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. Russia produces a fifth of the world’s purest-grade nickel. Stocks were already low. Then, on March 7th, nickel prices rose by 66% to $48,000 a tonne. In the early hours of March 8th the price doubled. The LME suspended trading in nickel, judging that prices no longer reflected the underlying physical market. But it went further. It cancelled all trades made after midnight. The price rises, the exchange said, had created a systemic risk to the entire market.

The parallels between the nickel-trading fiasco and the LIBOR scandal

From afar London’s vaunted finance-industry heritage looks a lot like backwardness

www.economist.com

Io possiedo metalli preziosi usando etc, ma quando leggo queste notizie capisco chi compra le monete d'oro sonanti. Anche a costo di pagare spread più alti, e con il rischio di custodia.

portfolioafterlife · 29 Aprile 2022

By now, Putin has essentially written off its gas business with Germany. Either in four weeks or in 24 months, Russia knows that it will not sell energy to Berlin. So the Kremlin is forcing Scholz into some painful choices, with Putin turning some of the economic weapons deployed against his regime on his favor.
The Kremlin has told its European gas customers that if they want to continue receiving Russian gas, they have to pay for it via an account at Gazprombank, a state-controlled lender. The payment involves a two-step process with two accounts, one in euros, and one in rubles. The first step is a payment in euros; the second is its conversion into rubles for the client’s account. Only after that conversion, which technically touches the Russian central bank, is completed, the payment is considered fulfilled.
Germany – and France and Italy — never intended to impose an embargo on Russian gas now. The sanctions on the central bank were about stopping Putin accessing billions of dollars in hard-currency reserves, not about stopping gas payments. But Putin has turned the table: he’s using the EU sanctions now against them by forcing them to do business with the central bank in rubles.
If Berlin, Paris and Rome allow the payments to continue, they would be showing their own hypocrisy, opening a crack that would advance the Kremlin’s divide-and-conquer political strategy. They will also show that the EU is prepared to continue paying billions of euros each week to Russia, supporting the ruble -- and subsidizing his military — in the process.

If Berlin and other capitals follow the letter of their own sanctions, payments can’t continue. But that means accepting gas sanctions they didn’t intend to impose – at least, not yet. It will mean enormous economic and social costs and could cause European public support for Ukraine to wilt. On Thursday, Scholz said Germany was ready for a halt supplies. “You have to prepare for it, and we already started this before the war broke out. We know what we have to do.”
It’s not just a short-term problem, either. If Germany manages over time to find replacements for the gas, it will be at a much higher price. The era of cheap-Russian gas fueling the German economy is over. German energy-intensive companies, like its chemical giants, could not compete in the global market. Germany will face painful choices about the future of its industrial economy.

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

www.bloomberg.com

portfolioafterlife · 29 Aprile 2022

Euro-area inflation climbed to a fresh all-time high, raising pressure on the European Central Bank to remove crisis-era stimulus and lift interest rates.
Consumer prices were up 7.5% from a year earlier in April, in line with the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey. A gauge excluding volatile items such as food and energy jumped to 3.5%.