1. Crude Up 75% One Year …Hits 2014 Resistance Levels
Wolf Street
This chart shows how fast production was ramped up until the price collapsed in mid-2014, which caused some slow-down in production as oil and gas companies filed for bankruptcy one after the other. But then production began to surge again in the fall of 2016 after the price bounced off the bottom of $26 a barrel. And by September 2018, the price began to collapse again as production surged from record to record:
Now the industry is in no hurry to increase production. The survivors are finally making money at these prices, and they have no interest in pushing down the price again.
Crude Oil WTI Spikes: The Storm Today after the Calm Yesterday–by Wolf Richter https://wolfstreet.com/2022/
2. Russian Sanctions Being Offset by $100 Oil
WSJ By Jon Sindreu Follow-It is hard to conceive a complete collapse of Russia’s economy as long as it can keep selling its oil at almost $100 a barrel. Ever since invading Crimea in 2014, Moscow has sought to reduce its foreign dependency. Imports have been partly replaced by domestic products, the Russian central bank has beefed up its reserve pot, linkages with foreign banks have been reduced and a Russian alternative to Swift has been developed.
Central Bank Squeeze Lacks Energy to Cripple Russia’s Economy https://www.wsj.com/articles/
3. Five-Year Break Even Rates Turn Back Up Above Fed Target Rate
FRED Charts
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
Chance of 50bps Fed Raise Falling Fast …Dave Lutz Jones Trading..Fed’s meeting in 15 days. Market expectations around the size of the coming hike have dropped and are currently BELOW a full 25-bps move.
4. Visual of Modern Day Geopolitical Crisis Events…Keeping in Mind Ukraine Could Be Bigger than All of Them
Capital Group
Robert Lind-Capital Group https://www.capitalgroup.com/
5. PayPal -70% from Highs
6. Hedging of Taiwan ETF Soars Plus $65m in Outflows but Chart Holds Up
Hedging of Taiwan ETF Soars Amid Russia’s Ukraine Invasion-BloombergMaria Elena Vizcaino
The put-to-call ratio on the largest exchange-traded fund that buys Taiwanese equities — or the amount of outstanding bearish options contracts relative to bullish ones — has jumped to the highest since November. That signals traders are concerned about the island’s stocks, which may suffer if China uses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a distraction to ramp up tensions with Taiwan.
“Investors are worried China might invade Taiwan,” said Lu Yu, a money manager at Allianz Global Investors in San Diego. “I feel like it’s a spillover effect. I don’t think it’s likely right now.”
READ: Ukraine Invasion Unnerves Global Funds Bracing for Taiwan Risk
U.S. Commander of Pacific Air Forces General Kenneth S. Wilsbach said two weeks ago his country was concerned that China will take advantage of the tensions between Russia and Ukraine and “try to do something” in the Indo-Pacific region. Still, Taiwan’s president played down concerns that the conflict in Europe could trigger a similar crisis in Asia.
https://finance.yahoo.com/
EWT Chart Sideways for One Year
7. This Chart is a Few Years Old but Gives Good Idea on German Military Reduction
https://www.statista.com/chart/13077/the-german-military-is-woefully-unprepared-for-action/
8. NFT sales hit $565 million over the past week. These were the 5 best-selling digital collections.
Business Insider
Jan 26, 2022, 10:39 AM
–NFT sales had a breakthrough year in 2021, with total sales volume surging to $14 billion.
- The NFT market is dominated by a handful of standout leaders due to their popularity and rarity.
- These are the five best-selling digital collectibles that helped drive $555 million in NFT sales over the past week.
The cryptocurrency boom over the past few years has helped propel a newer market to record heights: digital collectibles known as NFTs.
In fact, 2021 was a breakthrough year for NFTs, with total sales volume topping $14 billion as artists, investors, and entrepreneurs descend upon the nascent Web3 space.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique, irreplaceable, mostly digital items that users buy and sell online.
NFTs use blockchain technology to keep a digital record of ownership, similar to cryptocurrencies. They were first launched on ethereum, the same blockchain that supports the cryptocurrency ether, and most NFTs can still only be purchased using ether.
Despite the ongoing sell-off in cryptocurrencies, NFT sales have held up relatively well. In the past week alone, sales of NFTs hit $565 million, according to data from NonFungible.com.
With NFT sales soaring, these are the five best-selling NFT collections over the past week, according to NonFungible.
5. FLUF World
7-Day Sales Volume: $7.9 million
Number of Sales: 670
Highest Sale Price: $99,742
OpenSea
Explainer:“FLUFs have been programmatically generated from 270 attributes across 14 categories to be entirely unique by at least three degrees of separation. This also excludes their expression, dance, scene, and soundtrack. FLUFs are stored as ERC721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.”
4. Doodles
7-Day Sales Volume: $9.3 million
Number of Sales: 318
Highest Sale Price: $214,666
OpenSea
Explainer: “Doodles come in a joyful range of colors, traits, and sizes with a collection size of 10,000. Doodles are a funky bunch that like to role play or transmogrify themselves into delicious treats. Holding a Doodle allows you to participate in coordinating the Doodles Community Treasury.”
3. The Sandbox
7-Day Sales Volume: $9.9 million
Number of Sales: 910
Highest Sale Price: $84,553
A snapshot from The Sandbox virtual metaverse The Sandbox
Explainer: “The Sandbox is a community-driven UGC-voxel platform where users own their LAND and host their creative magic.”
2. CryptoPunks
7-Day Sales Volume: $35.3 million
Number of Sales: 183
Highest Sale Price: $951,844
CryptoPunks Rokas Tenys
Explainer: “10,000 unique collectible characters with proof of ownership stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The project that inspired the modern CryptoArt movement.”
1. Bored Ape Yacht Club
7-Day Sales Volume: $75.8 million
Number of Sales: 916
Highest Sale Price: $834,938
This Bored Ape is just one of the NFTs auctioned at Sotheby’s recently. Sotheby’s
Explainer: “BAYC is a collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs — unique digital collectibles living on the Ethereum blockchain. Your Bored Ape doubles as your Yacht Club membership card, and grants access to members-only benefits.”
The 5 Best-Selling NFT Collections of Last Week Include Doodles, FLUF (businessinsider.com)
9. 75% Of People Who Bought a Home During Pandemic Have Regrets
From Barry Ritholtz Blog
75% of people who bought a home during the pandemic have regrets: Here’s why
Source: Grow https://ritholtz.com/2022/03/
10. Feeling Fatigued and Burned Out? Inflammation May Be Playing a Role
Are you wondering why you feel fatigued all the time?
KEY POINTS
- A recent study showed that fatigue associated with the COVID-19 pandemic may be due to brain inflammation.
- The inflammation was probably attributable to immune mechanisms that were activated because of social isolation.
- Approaching your doctor is the first thing to do, but other tips to reduce inflammation and improve cognition include socializing and exercise.
Nearly three in five U.S. adult workers surveyed in 20211 by the American Psychological Association reported negative impacts of work-related stress, including a lack of interest, motivation, energy, and effort. Employees also reported experiencing cognitive weariness (36 percent), emotional exhaustion (32 percent), and physical fatigue (44 percent). Somehow, the pandemic-related burnout has felt different,2 and people can’t quite account for why they feel this way. A doctor even wrote about how it might have permanently changed him.3 And, until recently, there was no information clear enough to point to a possible reason, until this study from Massachusetts General Hospital in collaboration with King’s College London, The Maudsley NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, and other collaborators.4
Study Comparing Brains Before and During Pandemic Lockdowns
This study compared 57 pre-pandemic and 15 pandemic data sets from individuals originally enrolled as control subjects for various completed or ongoing research studies available, with a confirmed negative test for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) antibodies. The investigators used a combination of brain-imaging modalities as well as blood samples to investigate whether there were any differences in the brains of healthy people before and during the pandemic after the lockdowns.
The study found that healthy individuals examined after the enforcement of the lockdown had elevated brain levels of two independent neuroinflammatory markers (the 18 kDa translocator protein, TSPO, and myoinositol) compared to pre-lockdown participants. And participants endorsing higher symptom burden showed higher TSPO signal in the hippocampus (mood alteration, mental fatigue), intraparietal sulcus, and precuneus (physical fatigue), compared to those reporting little or no symptoms. This implied that inflammation in these regions may have accounted for their mental and physical fatigue and mood alterations. This study provided preliminary signals that the lockdown had the effect of increasing brain inflammation, and this was probably due to immune mechanisms that were activated because of social isolation.
Prior studies would support this hypothesis. One study illustrated that adverse social experiences (social isolation, perceived social threat) may induce inflammatory responses while suppressing antiviral immunity, whereas positive experiences of social connection may reduce inflammation and bolster antiviral responses.5 Social isolation has also been associated with impaired memory6 and immune dysfunction in other studies.7 And studies have also demonstrated that social isolation could increase immune markers such as IL-6,8 and it could also increase microglial cell activity in the brain as part of this inflammatory response.9,10 Called sterile neuroinflammation, these changes resemble changes caused by infections, and they are correlated with fatigue and anxiety.11,12
What You Can Do
Aside from checking in with your primary care physician to clarify what is happening, there are a few things that you may try to help to get yourself out of his fatigued state:
1. Socializing: The pandemic might have left you feeling somewhat isolated, but also perhaps pleased that you don’t have to interact with people. This may have left you smugly on your own, and you may even think you prefer this. However, to the extent that you can safely socialize, it could help to be around other people. A large number of studies have shown that social isolation impacts your life negatively in a variety of ways.13
2. Diet: In her book, This Is Your Brain on Food,14 Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo explains that neuroinflammation is a real thing. She recommends anti-inflammatory and fiber-rich foods. Spices like turmeric with black pepper can help, and she refers to how helpful it can be to eat vegetables that are the colors of the rainbow, such as peppers, tomatoes, and leafy greens. Take this idea to your doctor to personalize your diet for you.
3. Nature-based imagery: Studies have shown that viewing nature15,16 can have beneficial effects on the brain. We have demonstrated17 that people can feel clearer and focus better with less anxiety and emotional distress just 10 minutes after viewing nature in virtual reality, and we have also found that people are less fixated on worry.18 Both studies have been accepted by peer-reviewed journals and will be published soon.
4. Physical exercise: Physical exercise can improve the neuroimmune response19 and can be anti-inflammatory.20 Work with your doctor to determine what routine is best for you.
Social isolation could lead to brain inflammation. But there are things that you can start doing today about this, so why not begin now?