Business

Update 2: there were some rumors of a surprise during tonight's presentation, and Musk did not disappoint when just as the semi-introduction was ending, Tesla also unveiled a new Roadster, the new version of its original sports car. According to Musk, It’s the fastest production car ever made, with speeds of just 1.9 seconds for 0 to 60 and 4.2 seconds for 0 to 100. It can handle a quarter mile in 8.9 seconds.

Authord by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

When the Fed raised interest rates last December, many believed gold would plunge. But it didn’t happen.

Gold bottomed the day after the rate hike, but then started moving higher again. 

Incidentally, the same thing happened after the Fed tightened in December 2015. Gold had one of its best quarters in 20 years in the first quarter of 2016. So it was very interesting to see gold going up despite headwinds from the Fed.

Just days ahead of this weekend's Guangzhou Auto Show, Volkswagen has announced plans to invest $12 billion dollars into efforts to build coal-fueled electric vehicles in China.  According the Wall Street Journal, VW plans to produce 400,000 EVs by 2020 and introduce 5 new all-electric models each year through 2025.

Volkswagen AG and its Chinese partners will jointly invest nearly $12 billion by 2025 in developing electric cars for the local market, VW’s China chief executive said.

 

Oh no…with the Federal Reserve in a state of flux as one Chairman prepares to step down and another (shock horror, who is not an economist) takes over, some of his colleagues who think they’ve found the “Holy Grail” of monetary policy are agitating for change. And, dare we say it, hoping it will raise their own prestige no doubt. We are specifically referring to John Williams, President and CEO of the San Francisco Fed, but it’s not just him. What they have in their crosshairs is the Fed’s 2% inflation target. It’s too low. According to Bloomberg.

Amid the empty-vessel-driven "deep-learning", "artificial-intelligence", and "algorithmic" narratives-du-jour, more and more fund managers are jumping on the bandwagon. The latest is Finnish fund manager FIM, who is introducing the first investment fund in the Nordic region, where a self-learning algorithm gets to pick all the stocks.