Doubles down on emissions
This week Biden fulfilled a campaign promise in convening a “global climate summit” within his first 100 days in office. The two-day virtual meeting, attended by the leaders of a number of US allies and two of its adversaries China and Russia appears like many of these gatherings to be mostly a talking shop.
But a decision on Thursday is substantive, and therefore bears examination. The president committed the US to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52% below its 2005 emissions levels by 2030, without revealing any details as to how this would be achieved.
The announcement also brings GHG reduction targets 20 years forward from what is set out in Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure/ clean energy proposal unveiled in March. That plan commits to net-zero emissions by 2050 (net-zero refers to balancing the amount of emitted greenhouse gases with the equivalent emissions that are either offset or sequestered).
This young gold-stock upleg is accelerating, with fast-rising prices enticing in more capital. This sector has surged sharply to multiple major upside breakouts in recent weeks, which is starting to turn skeptics into believers. Despite their strong upside momentum being chased, gold-stock prices remain far from overbought levels warning of impending selloffs. This mounting upleg still has great room to power way higher.
Gold miners’ earnings are highly leveraged to prevailing gold prices, which drive this sector’s upleg and correction cycles. In early March as the last extended gold-stock correction was bottoming, I wrote an essay on gold’s momentum selloff. It concluded with “the gold-futures selling that ignited all this is finite, and is likely nearing exhaustion. After that, gold should rally hard.” We were positioned for a new upleg.
The Fed wants to have their cake and eat it too, but the cake is stale. Jerome Powell’s remarks in testimony before the Senate recently provoked considerable attention.
Responses, interpretation, and analysis by observers were many and varied. Unfortunately, no one learned anything different from what they thought they knew before Powell’s testimony.
The Fed is well aware of the problem. It is systemic in nature and goes far beyond corporate due diligence, bank liquidity, and the safety of your broker.
Most everyone else (with the exception of Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke, and Alan Greenspan) thinks they understand the problem, but their limited understanding doesn’t allow for the subtleties of Fed Chair behavior.