Showing posts with label hurricane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hurricane. Show all posts

Monday, January 5, 2015

Why the World Needs the US Economy to Struggle

By John Mauldin


The headlines this morning talk about the US dollar hitting an 11-year high. I have been saying for years that the dollar is going to go higher than anyone can imagine. This trade is just in the early innings. And the repercussions will be dramatic, not only for emerging markets that have financed projects in dollars, but also for commodities and energy, gold, and a variety of other investments. The world is at the doorstep of a new era of volatility and currency wars.

In this week’s letter, my associate Worth Wray explores what a rising dollar means for emerging markets and what central banks are likely to do in response. Can they smooth the ride, or will it be the world’s scariest roller coaster? This letter will print long because of the number of fabulous charts Worth provides. I might make a brief comment or two at the end. Here’s Worth.

On the Verge of a Disaster… or a Miracle

By Worth Wray
Twenty years after the first divergence induced currency crisis of the 1990s, commodity prices are tumbling, the US dollar is rallying, and externally fragile emerging markets are reliving the horrors of their not so distant past. Except, this time, major economies like the United States, the United Kingdom, the Eurozone, Japan, and the People’s Republic of China may not be able to side step the ensuing contagion.

With 2014 now behind us, I want to focus this week's letter on what may prove to be the most important global macro pressure points in the coming year(s):
  • The growing divergence among the world’s most important central banks
  • The ongoing collapse in oil and other commodity prices as a function of excess supply and/or weakening global demand
  • The rise of the US dollar, driven by divergence and risk aversion… and the squeeze it’s putting on the multi-trillion-dollar carry trade into emerging markets
  • The vicious slide in emerging-market currencies
  • The rising risk of 1990s style contagion and financial shocks
  • And what, if anything, can avert the next global financial crisis
But first, let me tell you a story.

As some of you already know, I was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana – an old Southern city built on a bluff above the Mississippi River. It’s about an hour northwest of New Orleans – you can see it circled on the map below.


Given its inland position, Baton Rouge is fairly insulated from the fiercest impact of coastal storms; but hurricane season still tends to be the most stressful time of year. Our oak-covered neighborhoods and low-lying swamplands are vulnerable to the high winds and flood rains that can accompany a direct hit – not to mention the violent tornadoes that occasionally occur in the unpredictable northeastern quadrant of the tropical cyclone zone.

These storms don’t hit us often, but locals recall a handful of hurricanes that dealt heavy blows to the area over the years. And it goes without saying that the damage from any storm gets dramatically worse the closer you get to the Gulf of Mexico. Entire towns along the Gulf Coast have been swallowed up and swept away over the years by catastrophic storms like Camille (1969), Andrew (1994), and more recently Katrina (2005).

Twelve years ago, my father and I found ourselves in the path of such a storm.

According to the National Hurricane Center, Hurricane Lili was “supposed” to make landfall as a relatively weak storm. Just another named hurricane for the record books that would soon fade from our collective memory… or so we thought.

At 10:00 PM on Tuesday, October 1, 2002, Lili was a Category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 105 mph. Routine hurricane season stuff.



I went to sleep that night expecting a little rain and few uneventful days home from school; but when I woke up on Wednesday, October 2, I was shocked to see Lili develop an incredibly well articulated eye wall and grow more powerful by the hour – from 110 mph at 7:00 AM that morning to 135 mph at 1:00 PM and finally to 145 mph at 10 PM that night.

I remember the nervous look on my dad’s face that night as the two of us boarded up our doors and windows. A little earlier that evening, one of his local government contacts shared that, behind closed doors, state and local officials were expecting “mass casualties” from Morgan City (on the coast) to Baton Rouge… but it was already too late to order an evacuation so far inland. Given the mild forecasts, few were prepared for a major hurricane; and at that point in the day, making a public announcement would do little more than spark a panic. The best we could do was hunker down and pray.

This was the last advisory I saw before my head hit the pillow that night: Lili had strengthened to a strong Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds around 145 mph, reported gusts above 210 mph, and the very real possibility of making landfall as a merciless Category 5. If you look at the Saffir Simpson hurricane scale, there’s a reason the first word you see next to Category 4 and 5 storms is catastrophic.

These storms are real killers.



Expecting to wake up early the next morning to sounds of thunder, pounding rain, and the eerie whistle of gale-force winds – or worse, I went to sleep Wednesday night with this image swirling through my mind:



But when I woke, I was shocked once more to learn that Lili – for reasons no one had anticipated – had all but died in the night and made landfall that morning as a small Category 1 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of only 90 miles per hour. In less than twelve hours, it had sharply decelerated from what could easily have been one of the most catastrophic storms on record to an inconvenience for most inland communities. Sure, it inflicted some damage along the coast – tearing up marshlands, knocking down power lines, blowing over trees, and flooding homes – but a Category 4 or 5 storm would have swallowed those areas whole.

As far as I know, there was no precedent in the Gulf of Mexico – or anywhere in the world – for Lili’s sudden death. It baffled even the most experienced meteorologists and left us all scratching our heads. Some people talked of miracles; others insisted there had to be a logical explanation. I imagine there’s some truth to both ideas.

While the press coverage surrounding Lili’s remarkable weakening has largely faded into obscurity, I was able to find one surviving article from USA Today that captures the confusion in the storm’s aftermath:

Scientists Don’t Know Yet Why Lili Suddenly Collapsed.”

Hurricane Lili showed forecasters there is still a lot they don't know about hurricane intensity. Lili weakened in the hours before landfall Thursday as rapidly as it had strengthened into a ferocious storm the day before. Forecasters with the National Hurricane Center in Miami had hinted as early as Monday that Lili could rev up into a dangerous hurricane over the extraordinarily warm Gulf of Mexico, though they were surprised to see it grow so strong so quickly. But Lili's quick demise … had them admitting they didn't know what had happened…. National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield agrees. At a loss to explain Lili's fluctuations, he says, “A lot of Ph.D.s will be written about this.”

We still don’t have a definitive answer, but three theories emerged in the immediate aftermath:

1) Dry air was pulled into the storm and ate away at its moisture sucking core;
2) Winds aloft increased across the storm, creating wind shear and tipping the delicate balance that keeps intense storms going;
3) Water cooler than the 80° necessary to sustain a hurricane sapped Lili's strength when it moved over the same part of the north central Gulf of Mexico that had been churned up by a smaller hurricane, Isadore, a week earlier.

Regardless of why it happened, I learned something that day that will stay with me for the rest of my life: Even when a disastrous course of events is set in motion, disaster does not always strike. Surprises happen. Even miracles. Forecasts are often wrong – but it always pays to prepare.

Let me explain…..

Boom & Gloom

Just before Halloween, I wrote a letter (“A Scary Story for Emerging Markets”) explaining that the widening gap in economic activity among the United States, Japan, and the Eurozone was starting to demand a dangerous divergence in monetary policy.

Within a matter of days, the FOMC announced the end of its QE3 program... and then the Bank of Japan shocked the world, announcing a massive expansion in its own asset purchases timed to coincide with the government pension fund’s announcement that it was getting out of JGBs and into global equities.



Just as I had feared, the US dollar and Japanese yen were breaking out in opposite directions on real policy action, as Mario Draghi meanwhile continued to talk the euro down with the threat of future action. This may seem like a trivial shift in global FX markets, but it may have been the most important development we have seen since the global crisis peaked in 2008.



Since then, global economics has been a story of boom, gloom, and doom, as Marc Faber likes to say. We’re seeing a boom in US economic activity (or as much of a boom as you can expect with a massive debt overhang); a gloomy slowdown and slide toward deflation across Europe and China, along with the still-likely failure of Abenomics in Japan and renewed signs of FX contagion in emerging markets; and doom in commodities markets, particularly oil.

I’ve shared this next chart before, but it’s worth an update. Those of us who watch the US dollar were not surprised by the collapse in oil prices, because the dollar’s surge was already telling us something about global demand.



What did surprise a lot of economists (myself included) was the breakdown within OPEC, particularly Saudi Arabia’s willingness to accept whatever price the market offered in order to protect its market share.

Conspiracy theories aside as to whether OPEC’s move constitutes an anti-American trade war against US shale producers or a pro-American squeeze on Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, it’s already putting a serious squeeze on Texas oil men, Russian “oiligarchs,” and oilexporting emerging markets.

We’ll revisit the oil shock in a bit, but for now let’s get back to the US dollar.

To continue reading this article from Thoughts from the Frontline – a free weekly publication by John Mauldin, renowned financial expert, best-selling author, and Chairman of Mauldin Economics – please click here.

The article Why the World Needs the US Economy to Struggle was originally published at mauldin economics


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Monday, September 13, 2010

Commodity Corner: Oil Gets Boost from China, Pipeline Closure

From the Rigzone staff....

The October crude oil futures price increased by nearly 1% Monday on news about China's industrial production growth rate.

Oil settled at $77.19 a barrel, a 74-cent increased from Friday, after the National Bureau of Statistics of China reported the country's August 2010 industrial production rate was 13.9% higher than the comparable figure for August 2009. Broken down by various sectors, the government agency reported year on year increases of 12.9% in raw chemical material and chemical product manufacturing; 20.1% in transport equipment manufacturing; and 14.9% in the production and supply of electricity, gas, and water.

Also supporting the oil futures price Monday was the ongoing closure of a key segment of Enbridge's Lakehead System near Chicago following a leak reported last Thursday. Enbridge announced Monday that it had recovered all but approximately 50 of the 6,100 barrels of crude that had leaked from the pipeline. The company had no current estimate of when it might restart the line, but it was working with shippers to divert crude oil volumes to other available pipelines and storage facilities.

Oil traded within a range from $76.36 to $78.04 Monday.

A suddenly active Atlantic hurricane season, and the possibility that energy infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico will be in the path of a tropical system, helped to nudge the natural gas price toward $4.00 Monday. Gas for October delivery settled at $3.94 per thousand cubic feet, a six-cent gain from Friday, with the existence of three systems circulating in the tropics. In the west-central Caribbean, a broad, poorly organized low-pressure system was moving west-northwestward Monday afternoon. The National Hurricane Center was giving the system a medium chance (40%) of developing into a tropical cyclone by Wednesday afternoon.

Out in the mid-Atlantic, Hurricane Igor was packing maximum sustained winds of 150 miles per hour late Monday morning. Forecasters were expecting the storm to follow a northwestward track and become centered approximately 500 miles northeast of the Lesser Antilles by Thursday morning. Another system, Tropical Storm Julia, was churning near the Cape Verde Islands Monday afternoon and moving in a west-northwestward direction at 13 miles per hour. Thanks in part to shearing conditions produced by Igor, forecast models anticipate that Julia will become a low end hurricane and then weaken into a tropical storm.

The October natural gas futures price fluctuated from $3.80 to $3.97. Gasoline futures increased by a penny to settle at $1.98 a gallon Monday. The intraday range for gasoline was $1.97 to $2.01.

From Rigzone.Com

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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Phil Flynn: The Hurricane Threat!

Many oil traders when they think about the impact of hurricanes on the oil market most often focus on the threat to supply. Yet the truth is more often than not hurricanes are more of a threat to demand then they are to supply. That is definitely the case when it comes to Hurricane Earl, not to mention tropical storm Fiona, Hurricane Danielle and a storm to be named later. Earl in particular could do major demand destruction as its path is perilously close to the East Coast.

Earl currently is a category 4 hurricane and is expected to graze the tip of North Carolina on Friday at 2 am just as vacationers are planning to arrive for the big three day Labor Day holiday weekend. I am sure many looking at the weather maps may be canceling their plans already as many will not want to chance the storm. In fact cancelation may become more prevalent as storm warnings all up and down the East coast may cause vacationers and beach lovers to stay closer to home! Hurricane Earl could just destroy a lot of holiday weekend travel plans and the gasoline demand that was expected. The oil and gas market was expecting.....Read the entire article.

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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Crude Oil Rises, Snapping Two Days of Declines as Dollar Weakens

Crude oil headed for a monthly increase, before a report forecast to show crude inventories declined in the U.S., the world’s largest energy user. Hurricane Alex has halted about 25 percent of crude production in the Gulf of Mexico and 9 percent of natural-gas output, the U.S. government said. U.S. crude stockpiles probably dropped 1 million barrels in the week ended June 25 from 365.1 million the prior week, according to a Bloomberg News survey before today’s Energy Department report. Crude was still heading for its first quarterly decline since 2008.

“Today’s Energy Department data may help prices,” said Hannes Loacker, an analyst at Raiffeisen Zentralbank Oesterreich in Vienna. “While the supply picture does not support crude in the short term, demand is becoming a bit better. Much depends on risk aversion, so if equity markets recover, crude will go up.” Oil for August delivery traded for $75.96 a barrel, 2 cents higher on the New York Mercantile Exchange as of 1:35 p.m. London time. Brent crude for August delivery was up 2 cents at $75.46 a barrel on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London.

Crude has lost 9.3 percent in New York since the end of March and 4.3 percent this year. The commodity pared earlier gains of as much as 1.2 percent after data from ADP Employer Services showed the U.S. added fewer jobs than economists estimated in June. The contract has advanced 2.8 percent in June. The Dollar Index, which measures the U.S. currency against those of six major trading partners, fell for the first time in three days, losing 0.3 percent on concern economic growth may falter, stoking demand for commodities as an alternative investment.....Read the entire article.

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