Search This Blog

Thursday, November 7, 2024

Pound Jumps After BOE's Last Rate Cut Of 2024, Warns Reeves Budget Will Spike Inflation

 Just hours before the Fed's second rate cut this cycle, the Bank of England cut interest rates to 4.75% - as all economists expected - its second rate hike this cycle (it kept rates on hold at its previous meeting in September, following a reduction in August)...

.... after inflation fell to a three-year low in September; however the cut was seen as hawkish by the market, sending the pound up 0.7% to session highs after Governor Andrew Bailey signaled that a further move is unlikely before early 2025 as rates are likely to fall only "gradually from here" and that last week’s UK budget will lift inflation by just under half a percentage point at its peak.

“We need to make sure inflation stays close to target, so we can’t cut interest rates too quickly or by too much,” said BoE governor Andrew Bailey on Thursday. “But if the economy evolves as we expect, it’s likely that interest rates will continue to fall gradually from here,” he added.

As the FT notes, this week’s decision suggests the BoE is taking a cautious approach to lowering rates as it weighs the impact of chancellor Reeves’ inflationary Budget last week, which aggressively loosened fiscal policy. The outlook has also been affected by Donald Trump’s victory in this week’s US election, particularly because of his support for higher tariffs, which many economists argue could stoke inflation.

The BoE said the Budget would increase consumer price inflation by just under 0.5 percentage points at its peak compared with previous projections, as well as boosting GDP by 0.75 per cent in a year’s time.

Inflation hit 1.7% in September, the first time it has dipped below the BoE’s 2% target since 2021, but the central bank expects it to increase in coming quarters. Partly as a result of the Budget, the BoE considers that inflation will now take longer than previously expected to return to target, reaching 2.2% in two years’ time before falling to 1.8% by the end of the following year. At the same time, growth will pick up from 1% this year to 1.5% in 2025 the BOE predicted, before easing back to 1.25 per cent in 2026.

In an indication of the Budget’s impact on UK businesses, J Sainsbury warned on Thursday that Reeves’ changes would be "inflationary", as it complained that they would subject it to an "unexpected" and "significant" £140mn "barrage of costs." BT also described the Budget as a “new inflationary pressure”, as it said it would now be hit by a £100mn increase in costs.

As we discussed previously, the Budget unveiled a £40bn increase in taxes, most of which will come from national insurance paid by employers. It also boosted government borrowing by an average of £28bn a year over the course of the parliament as Reeves increases.

The BOE's inflation outlook prompted traders to trim their expectations of a further quarter-point cut at the BoE’s next meeting in December from about 30% to about 20%, which in turn led to tightening in financial conditions and sent the pound to session highs, up 0.7% on the day against the dollar at $1.297. The 10-year gilt yield was steady at 4.54 per cent.

Hussain Mehdi, a strategist at HSBC Asset Management, said he now expected a “fairly shallow easing cycle” that would put upward pressure on bond yields, in part due to the Budget’s impact on inflation.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/pound-jumps-after-boes-last-rate-cut-2024-warns-reeves-budget-will-spike-inflation

Soros Puppet LA DA Replaced

 by Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov via Headline USA,

George Soros’s puppet Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón failed his reelection on Tuesday when city residents decided to choose someone who would make their town safe again, Nathan Hochman.

Los Angeles Times reported that Hochman defeated Gascón by a wide margin (23-point lead based on early returns).

“The rightward shift across America last night is heartbreaking. Democrats have a long road ahead, but the work is more vital than ever, and our commitment will not waver,” Gascón said, according to the news source.

“I’m deeply proud of what we’ve accomplished over the past four years and grateful to the communities who have been and will always be the heart of criminal justice reform,” he added.

Hochman released a statement on Twitter on Wednesday after winning the election.

“The voters of Los Angeles County have spoken and have said enough is enough of D.A. Gascon’s pro-criminal extreme policies; they look forward to a safer future. As D.A., I look forward to representing all of the people, whether they voted for me or not, since their safety will be my responsibility,” he wrote.

Later, on the same day, Hochman published another social media post, stating he would spend the entire Wednesday being interviewed by journalists.

“I was happy to speak with Phillip Palmer this morning on ABC7 about our historic win in last night’s DA election. I have a full day of media interviews lined up and look forward to sharing my plans for the office with the residents of L.A. County,” he wrote.

Child abuse prosecutor Jonathan Hatami also congratulated Hochman, adding that now people who live in Los Angeles would be able to live in a safe city again.

“There are still votes to be counted but I believe the 4-year reign of George Gascón is finally over. Gascón will go down as the worst DA in LA history,” he wrote.

“I want to congratulate @NathanHochmanDA on becoming the District Attorney of Los Angeles County.”

Hatami also noted that he is “ready to work” with Hochman and “continue [his] service & leadership to our great LA community by making sure all of us, especially our children, families and vulnerable members, are safe.”

Dentsply outlook cut after Q3

 

  • Net sales of $951 million increased 0.5%, organic sales increased 1.3%
  • GAAP gross margin of 52.1%, GAAP net loss of ($494) million or loss per share of ($2.46)
  • Adjusted EBITDA margin of 17.9%, adjusted EPS of $0.50
  • Revised FY24 outlook: expect organic sales of (3.5%) to (2.5%) (previously (1%) to flat); adjusted EPS of $1.82 to $1.86 (previously $1.96 to $2.02)

Lensar advances on Q3 growth, system placement

    24 ALLY Robotic Laser Cataract Systems™ placed in 3Q 2024 including 11 sales in EU and Southeast Asia; Robust backlog with 24 systems pending installation as of September 30, 2024

38% Revenue growth over third quarter 2023 and 22% Recurring revenue growth in twelve-month trailing average

Worldwide procedure volumes increased 29% over third quarter of 2023

Installed system base grew 20% over third quarter of 2023

“Our third quarter results further show the continued momentum behind ALLY in each of our key metrics. We are reporting solid growth in system placements, system backlog and procedures purchased, in addition to robust demand following the pivotal, mid-quarter regulatory certification and clearance in the European Union and Taiwan. We sold 11 ALLY systems in the first two months of commercial availability outside the U.S., which contributed to robust total revenue growth of 38% over the third quarter of 2023. We believe LENSAR is positioned well for continued procedure and recurring revenue growth as we enter the fourth quarter, which is typically our strongest quarter of the year,” said Nick Curtis, President and CEO of LENSAR. “Our installed base has expanded to over 100 ALLYs worldwide as of quarter end, reflecting a 170% increase from the same period last year, and a total installed base of approximately 355 systems. Procedure volumes were up 29% over the third quarter of 2023 and translated to recurring revenue of $38 million on a trailing twelve-month basis, representing an increase of 22% over the comparable September 2023 twelve-month period. Market Scope estimates that LENSAR gained an additional 3.5% market share in the past year in the largest premium market, the U.S., and now has a total U.S. market share of 19.9% as of September 30, 2024.

LENSAR management will host a conference call and live webcast to discuss the third quarter results and provide a business update today, November 7, 2024, at 8:30 a.m. ET.

To participate by telephone, please dial (800) 715-9871 (Domestic) or (646) 307 1963 (International). The conference ID is 8444582. The live webcast can be accessed under “Events & Presentations” in the Investor Relations section of the company’s website at https://ir.lensar.com. Please log in approximately 5 to 10 minutes prior to the call to register and to download and install any necessary software. The call and webcast replay will be available until November 21, 2024.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/11/07/2976485/0/en/LENSAR-Reports-Third-Quarter-2024-Results-and-Provides-Business-Update.html

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Beam points to positive data with key base editing asset

 It has been around a year since Beam Therapeutics slashed its headcount and R&D programmes to focus mainly on a sickle cell disease candidate – and the biotech has now revealed the first data with the base-editing drug.

Preliminary results from the phase 1/2 BEACON trial of BEAM-101 showed evidence that the drug was able to normalise markers of haemolysis – the red blood cell destruction that is a feature of SCD – in patients at high risk of severe vaso-occlusive crises (VOCs).

BEAM-101 is an ex vivo genetic therapy delivered as part of an autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) after a conditioning chemotherapy regimen to destroy the bone marrow and allow it to be repopulated with the modified cells.

Beam is a pioneer of the base-editing approach to gene-editing, which can be used to convert one nucleotide base into another without cutting both strands of DNA, unlike other technologies like CRISPR/Cas9. BEAM-101 modifies haematopoietic stem cells to express foetal haemoglobin (HbF), rather than the mutated form of the protein (HbS) seen in SCD patients.

The full dataset from the first seven patients in the BEACON trial will be presented at the American Society of Haematology (ASH) congress in December, but Beam has teased preliminary results ahead of time.

Among the findings are that, in four patients with at least a month of follow-up after the HSCT, all saw "rapid and robust" induction of HbF expression at 60% or more, while after two months HbS levels were cut by at least 36%.

There have been no reports of any VOCs - the painful attacks that intermittently afflict SCD patients – in the four patients and markers for haemolysis "normalised or improved," according to Beam.

There was one death among the patients, from respiratory failure, although the company said that was likely a result of the aggressive condition regimen with chemotherapy agent busulfan and unrelated to the base-editing treatment.

Beam also reported non-human primate results with its ESCAPE technology, which aims to remove the need for busulfan conditioning, which it suggested could be a breakthrough for the gene-editing sector, although it is not yet in clinical testing.

"Today represents an important milestone [...] as we unveil data with our base editing technology across both approaches to treating sickle cell disease," said chief executive John Evans.

Beam was formed in 2017 by David Liu, Feng Zhang, and Keith Joung, all pioneers of CRISPR gene editing. 

In October 2023, the biotech opted to cut one in five of its workforce and shelve R&D programmes to focus on BEAM-101, along with its BEAM-302 base-editing candidate for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD) and BEAM-301, an in vivo lipid nanoparticle (LNP) therapy for glycogen storage disease 1a.

https://pharmaphorum.com/news/beam-points-positive-data-key-base-editing-asset

The Greatest Comeback of All Time

 By J.B. Shurk

The “experts” said it couldn’t be done.  They called him a “loser” and an “illegitimate” president whose time in office should be stricken from the pages of history.  Political pundits said his refusal to accept the mail-in-ballot-fraud-tainted 2020 election results made him an “insurrectionist” and a “dangerous threat to democracy.”  Democrat prosecutors and judges threw his supporters in jail.  Democrat operatives in the FBI and DOJ insinuated that he is a “Russian spy” and “domestic enemy” who should be convicted of treason.  The most hoity-toity “reporters” from the fanciest newspapers in the land said that Americans would never elect a criminal defendant facing the possibility of life in prison.  All of the “very best people” from the “most respected institutions” told us that Donald Trump’s political comeback was impossible.

They...were...wrong.

No president has won a second term in office after suffering a re-election loss in 130 years.  When Grover Cleveland last pulled off this neat trick, he, too, returned to the White House after first losing it to gross electoral fraud.  Americans do not like rigged elections, but they absolutely despise elections that are so rigged that the robbery is impossible to ignore.  

In 2020, President Trump won almost every traditional bellwether county in the country by double-digits and increased his 2016 totals by over ten million votes.  He won a record share of the vote from black and Hispanic Americans, blue-collar workers, and other Democrat-leaning voting blocs.  Despite all of this evidence that the American people supported Trump’s handling of the economy, illegal immigration, violent crime, and foreign wars, professional political pundits immediately painted Joe Biden’s razor-thin “victory” (in which the dementia-addled nursing home patient magically “won” extra mail-in ballots in Democrat-controlled counties in battleground states days after the election) as a national rejection of Donald Trump.  

They...were...wrong.

It turns out that Americans really do not like “Green New Deal”–induced inflation, COVID lockdowns, mandatory vaccinations, open borders, skyrocketing violent crime, “woke” sermonizing, child mutilation, “transgender” madness, censorship, political persecution, bungled military withdrawals, or the prospect of nuclear war in Europe and the Middle East.  

President Trump spent his years in office lowering food and energy prices, increasing personal income, securing the border, rejecting the suffocating tenets of “political correctness,” and avoiding unnecessary and costly foreign wars.  He kept his campaign promises, made America energy-independent, used America’s economic leverage to contain foreign adversaries, and brought manufacturing jobs back home.  He negotiated peace between Israel and her neighbors, bypassed a decades-long stalemate by meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and dealt with foreign terrorists swiftly and severely.  He reminded Americans again and again that “economic security is national security” and that “peace is the prize.”  Most importantly, he rejected the stale groupthink of the administrative state and the efforts of the permanent bureaucracy to wield Executive Branch authority without the president’s blessing.  For his numerous successes and the threat he posed to the Deep State’s continued indulgence in unchecked power, President Trump became the U.S. government’s number-one enemy.  

Twenty twenty’s election-riggers installed clueless Joe Biden and dumb-dumb Kamala Harris at the top of the federal government, and Americans have suffered ever since.  Everything now costs more.  Foreign criminal networks have taken advantage of Democrats’ open borders and left towns across the country broken and unsafe.  The Department of Homeland Security has headed an all-of-government effort to spy on Americans’ movements and censor Americans’ speech.  And we are one miscalculation away from World War III.  Stolen elections have consequences, and none of those consequences has been pretty.  For the pain and suffering of the last four years, blame Democrats, RINOs, the propaganda press, multinational conglomerates that regularly purchase American policy, and of course the unelected and unaccountable Deep State.

Now we get a do-over.  Or, rather, we get a chance to put our country back on track.  It will be hard work.  We will be vigorously opposed every step of the way.  The propaganda press will call us “Nazis” and “racists” for wanting secure borders.  Economic illiterates who have never run a small business will screech that our “America First” trade policies are damaging to Wall Street’s bottom line.  Apologists for the Biden-Harris regime will freak out when President Trump begins pardoning political prisoners and terminating the Department of (in)Justice’s political prosecutions.  Warmongers, imperialists, and deep-pocketed military industrialists will brand us “isolationists” and “nativists” unwilling to “defend democracy” from elected foreign governments that the CIA has secretly overthrown.  The same political “elites” who conspired with Big Tech to censor our words, encouraged companies to fire conservatives, disbarred lawyers who fought electoral fraud, and demanded that banks punish citizens for their personal beliefs will — with no sense of the irony! — call us all “fascists” now. 

Why?  Because for the political left, anyone who refuses to bow down to government bureaucrats, credentialed “experts,” the World Economic Forum, armed federal agents, or multinational oligarchs is a threat to the advancement of “progressive” totalitarianism.  Anyone who stands up for the Bill of Rights is an obstacle to globalist tyranny.  Just as the CDC conveniently redefined “vaccines” to include gene-altering therapeutics during the fake COVID emergency, those who suffer from the “woke” mind virus have redefined “fascism” to smear all people who simply wish to be free.  Leftists will continue to inexplicably defame those of us who fight authoritarianism as being authoritarian.

That’s okay.  Let them call us names.  That’s all they know how to do.  They employ language games and overt propaganda to confuse anyone who listens.  So don’t listen.  They produce nothing of value.  Treat their opinions as worthless.  They are ticks that feed off society and leave honest people feeling miserable.  Recognize them as parasites, and cast them aside.  Direct your energies toward the many tasks before us.  Real goals and real work matter.  We have no time to be distracted.  We must get down to the serious business of making America great again.

The worst part of the rigged 2020 election was how mail-in-ballot fraud distorted history.  By pretending Joe Biden had somehow “won” over fifteen million more votes than the Democrats’ demigod Barack Obama had eight years earlier, the propaganda press and the professional political class advanced a false narrative that the American people had soundly rejected President Trump’s MAGA agenda.  Instead of favoring energy independence and a “drill, baby, drill” economic mindset, political “elites” assured us that Americans were very concerned about man-made “global warming” and eager to mandate the purchase of electric vehicles.  Instead of favoring low taxes and an end to endless wars, political “elites” told us that Americans wanted even more taxes and even more endless wars.  Instead of favoring secure borders and the deportation of criminal illegal aliens, political “elites” insisted that Americans wanted tens of millions of foreign nationals to swamp their towns and schools and drain already insolvent welfare programs.  Instead of favoring a manufacturing renaissance and the rebuilding of blue-collar towns, political “elites” assured us that Americans wanted to own nothing and embrace America’s decline.  None of this is true, but it has been the official story for four long years.

American voters had only one way to break free from this bleak dystopia: vote for Donald Trump as if their lives depended on it, and achieve electoral victory beyond the margin of Democrat fraud.  That’s exactly what we’ve done.  The economy, border security, domestic safety, free speech, the global balance between war and peace — everything Joe Biden and Kamala Harris touched, they broke.  President Trump and his MAGA coalition have an awful lot to fix.  So let’s get to work.

Hat tip to the late, great Lloyd Marcus, who would have loved this moment in history.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/the_greatest_comeback_of_all_time.html

All of a sudden, Yemen's Houthis decide to bow out from making war on the U.S. Navy

 By Monica Showalter

What a difference an election makes.

With President Trump's mighty victory in last night's election, Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who have been literally at war with the U.S. Navy in the Red Sea region, all of a sudden would like to be peaceable and play nice.

They said so themselves:

 

 

There's no doubt that was their election response. They don't want trouble from Trump.

Word of Trump's peace through strength has gotten around among our enemies, and Houthis want Trump's attention diverted elsewhere. It roughly parallels the release of the U.S. diplomatic personnel held hostages by Iran's crazies back in 1980. When Iran got word that Ronald Reagan had been elected, they dropped their hostage spectacular like a hot potato, after holding our men and women in captivity for 444 days.

The Houthis are Iran's crummy little piratical pawn, taking cash and arms from the mullah regime and making Yemen a hellhole all by themselves. But they've become a real problem since they've been firing on cargo ships and tankers around the Red Sea, disrupting ships, burning many, creating ecological dangers in the fragile Red Sea ecosystem and forcing many ships to go around the Horn of Africa to avoid them, creating supply chain backups and much higher fuel and labor costs.

Worse still, they have been fighting the U.S. Navy, which has been dispatched there from San Diego and other major Naval bases to get rid of them. The U.S. Navy has faced its "most intense combat since World War II," as reported by the Associated Press. Why our sailors should be placed in harm's way is outrageous, since all the Houthis needed was the fear of Allah in them, which President Trump's election gladly supplied. That tells us a lot about their respect for the Harris-Biden administration and how far this war might have gone if, god forbid, she got elected instead.

That tells us a lot. Thank goodness President Trump was elected instead, providing peace through strength without even taking office, his very name striking terror in the hearts of pirates and terrorists.

That bodes well for peace in a lot of places. Hamas, Hezb'allah, and other Iranian pawns are bound to act similarly, nervous about what Trump might do. Only Vladimir Putin seems interested in challenging him, having held off on delivering congratulations to Trump as the world's leaders fall over themselves to send greetings and hold out olive branches after plotting to help Harris-Biden (See Keir Starmer of the U.K. and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine).

Peace may well be breaking out all over, just at the sound of the name "Trump" as terrorists and enemies scramble. Word gets around among the America-haters who watch the U.S. closely.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/11/trump_wins_and_all_of_a_sudden_yemen_s_houthis_decide_to_bow_out_from_making_war_on_the_u_s_navy.html