Résultats de recherche

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss resigns after failed budget and market turmoil Liz Truss is resigning as UK Prime Minister. She announced a ballot to succeed her "within the next week". She had been in the post for less than two months. It was the backtracking on tax reform that brought her down. The British Prime Minister Liz Truss announced her resignation on Thursday after just six weeks in office, which resembled a descent into hell, triggering a new internal election within the Conservative Party. "The situation is such that I cannot fulfil the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party," Truss, who becomes the shortest-serving head of government in modern UK history, said outside 10 Downing Street. She said a new internal majority vote would be held "within the next week" to replace her. The leader of the British opposition, Labour's Keir Starmer, has called directly for a general election "now", after the announcement of the resignation of Prime Minister Liz Truss. The Labour leader's new call comes as Liz Truss announced that an internal Conservative party ballot would be held to appoint her successor "by the end of next week".

IMF's gloomy forecast for the world economy reverses the upward trend in crude oil prices crude oil prices. After the sharp rise in crude oil prices in early October, following OPEC+'s decision to cut production by 2 mb/d, the trend reversed last week with the release of the IMF's World Economic Outlook and the IEA's monthly report on the oil market. In one week, prices lost almost $5/b. At the close of trading last Friday, Brent crude oil on the London futures market was trading at $91.6/b and WTI fell back below $90/b to $85.6/b. On a weekly average basis, Brent gained $0.6/b (+0.6%) to $93.8/b and WTI +$0.7/b (+0.8%) to $88.5/b. The consensus of economists surveyed by Bloomberg as of 14 October is stable with a median Brent price in 2023 at $94.6/b. Online crude oil price: Brent and WTI market IMF paints a bleak picture of the global economy In its latest report (World Economic Outlook) published last week, the IMF paints a bleak picture of the global economy, warning that "we are entering a new danger zone". of the world economy, warning that "we are entering a new danger zone". Record inflation (+8.8% in 2022), tighter financial conditions (rising interest rates and the dollar), the war in Ukraine and the persistence of the Ukraine and the persistence of the Covid-19 pandemic are the main factors that explain the slowdown in global growth to 3.2% in 2022. growth to 3.2% in 2022 and 2.7% in 2023, As a reminder, last April, the IMF's growth outlook was 3.2% in 2022 and 2.7% in 2023, 3.6% in 2022 and 2023. View our full Crude Oil Market Report - Week of 11/10/2022 - due out this 17/10/2022.

In Wilhelmshaven, on the North Sea coast, Germany is building its first liquefied gas terminal. This platform, which will be operational by this winter, will be able to supply 20% of the Russian gas imports to Germany. LNG terminals allow the regasification of natural gas imported by sea, which has first been liquefied to make it more transportable. They consist of an offshore platform connected by pipes to the onshore gas network. Berlin has also made three billion euros available for leasing FSRU vessels to equip its terminals, which store and regasify liquid gas. This year, the German federal government has urgently re-launched five projects to compensate for the end of Russian gas deliveries. For years, Germany has mainly imported natural gas from Russia via the Nord Stream 1 & 2 pipelines. This cheap and continuous supply has resulted in Berlin's vigilance and pragmatism not being able to invest in the construction of liquefied gas terminals and large storage capacities for years. From 2023 onwards, the whole package is to deliver 25 billion cubic metres per year, half the capacity of the Nord Stream pipeline. A regasification terminal is being built, which will enable Germany to diversify its sources of supply. The country passed a law in the spring that considerably accelerated the procedures for the rapid opening of the terminals and the construction is progressing rapidly. The terminal should therefore be completed "as early as this winter", Holger Kreetz, chief operating officer of the German energy group Uniper, which is managing the project, told AFP. This extraordinary speed is a sign that the government considers this subject a priority: "Normally, we carry out a project like this in five or six years," added Mr Kreetz. The German pragmatism is reflected in this project, which is to be converted to green hydrogen by 2030, a clean technology in which Berlin wants to become the champion in the coming decades.

Italian company Prysmian Group has begun manufacturing some 725km of submarine cables for the €2.8bn 'NeuConnect' interconnector, which will create the first direct link between the UK and German energy markets and allow the two countries to export surplus energy from wind and other renewable sources with up to 1.4GW of surplus electricity in both directions between the two countries, enough to power up to 1.5 million homes. Miguel Berger, German Ambassador to the UK, said: "As a champion of offshore wind, the UK is a crucial partner for us in pursuing our common goals. NeuConnect will enable our energy networks to share excess power - ensuring that renewable energy is not wasted." It will link the Isle of Grain in Kent, England, to the Wilhelmshaven area of Germany, using high voltage direct current (HVDC) submarine cables laid in British, Dutch and German waters. "When live, NeuConnect will open up new opportunities for the UK to export clean, cheaper renewable energy and reduce our exposure to the volatility of global fossil fuel prices." Construction work on the link is expected to begin this year and be completed in 2028. In April this year, NeuConnect appointed Siemens Energy to design and build converter stations in the UK and Germany. The scheme is privately financed, with more than 20 international lenders reaching financial close on the deal in July. The investors are led by France's Meridiam, Germany's Allianz Capital Partners and Japan's Kansai Electric Power. Project and commercial management will be provided by the consultant Arup and the engineering company Fichtner.

"The future is not so far away," Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the Californian group, said on Tuesday at a conference on the company's progress in building the metaverse, which is seen as the future of the internet. In October 2021, the "Meta" group launched the metaverse, a new technology in which it has already invested some 10 billion dollars. Admittedly, metavers has not yet been as successful as one might have expected, perhaps due to the limited functionality of its launch. This could change with new equipment such as the virtual reality (VR) headset -- the Quest Pro, a $1,500 tool for professionals -- but also many other gateways, via computers and smartphones. Avatars are coming to Instagram, and Meta is preparing bridges to Teams (Microsoft's collaboration software) and Peacock (NBCUniversal's video platform). By the end of 2021, more than 10 million Quest 2 headsets had been sold worldwide and more than $1.5 billion on the platform, and about a third of the 400 available titles have exceeded $1 million in sales. "You need to be able to reach your friends in the metaverse wherever you are," said chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth. "We want everyone to be able to have the most immersive experience possible, but it's going to take a while before there are enough headsets." As virtual reality improves, so do the apps, with the design getting closer and closer to the real thing. On the Quest Pro, internal cameras reproduce the user's facial expressions on the avatar's face. The metaverse as an advertising platform: Horizon Worlds, Meta's platform for VR creation and social interaction, is struggling to convince. Despite the launch difficulties, we believe that metavers will gradually take hold as the smartphone is certain to be replaced by more intuitive methods such as VR, augmented reality or voice recognition. But Meta is running out of steam. The group is facing bad economic times and competition from the ultra-popular TikTok, among others. And the other tech giants are also entering the metaverse. The market is hoping that Apple will release its first headset next year. "The metaverse is going to come as a surprise," assured Mark Rabkin, Meta's vice president of VR. "It's going to feel like it's a long way off, and then there are going to be compelling use cases, pockets of creators, sections of the population that will spend more time in it.

Some investors say that recent market swings herald a general decline in stocks: the recent stock market rally on 14/10/2022 is just a "swan song" before a massive sell-off in stocks. When the breakout occurs. The most volatile assets, economic tensions and dysfunction in the UK are raising red flags. Fears that markets are close to breaking down are gaining ground on Wall Street and among influential investors and experts. Signs of stress in the system are accumulating: jagged asset movements, economic instability, the reluctance of banks such as Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse, and the crisis in the UK has shown that government bonds and pensions are no longer safe havens. "Volatile assets, economic difficulties and signs of distress at major banks are fuelling fears of market collapse and disruption to the global financial system. Market strategists point to the Federal Reserve as a key driver of the current chaos. The US central bank raised interest rates from near zero in March to a range of 3% to 3.25% in an effort to calm historic inflation". A stock market crash can also be an opportunity, so it's time to get advice. However, the rate hikes have driven down equities, pushed up bond yields and pushed up the US dollar. The risk of a global economic slowdown has in turn increased, experts say. Many strategists question the Federal Reserve's strategy of fighting inflation by dramatically and rapidly raising interest rates. This has pushed bond yields and the dollar to 20-year highs, causing economic stresses that are spilling over into the markets. There are also signs of distress in the financial services sector with credit default swaps from monetary central banks doubling and even tripling in Europe. Tensions in the financial system have begun to show, first with the LDI crisis in the UK. There is already a lack of liquidity in many markets. Some experts believe that the first signs will be seen in the financial markets and ETFs. One of the indicators will be the decline in equity trading volumes in emerging markets where there is a substantial amount of dollar denominated debt, there is already a debt crisis there caused by the restrictive monetary policy in the US which is having a huge impact on the rest of the world, especially on emerging markets.

On Thursday 13/10/2022, Wall Street experienced a decline due to massive and significant selling, resurrecting the doubt of a "stock market crash". Stocks went into oversold territory for the first time since 2016. This chill in the air came from the fact that the U.S. Department of Labor announced that the overall consumer price index (CPI) rose by 8.2% per year. Finally, on Friday 14/10/2022, investors took advantage of the overs old low to seize opportunities, Wall Street stock indices rallied dramatically, closing sharply higher "while the dollar gave up its earlier gains as investors returned to riskier bets after digesting a very high US inflation reading that fuelled bets of a sharp rate hike by the Federal Reserve next month."

According to JP Morgan, if the consumer price index (CPI) rises above 8.3%, investors should expect a stock market decline around 5% - CPI report for September. The bank JP Morgan, expects the stock market to sell-off by 5% if the inflation gauge shows a re-acceleration relative to August's 8.3% reading, as it would bolster the Fed's call that it needs to continue to hike interest rates to tame inflation. While the Fed is widely expected to hike interest rate by another 75 basis points at its upcoming FOMC meeting on November 2, its following two meetings lack consensus and this Thursday's CPI inflation could determine whether the Fed continues with its aggressive rate hikes after November 2, or if a slow-down in rate hikes is appropriate. Conversely, any CPI readings below 8.1% could spark some big gains for the stock market. Specifically, a CPI print below 7.9% would likely generate a 2%-3% rally on Thursday, "though if we see CPI gap down more than 60 basis points the move could be larger,

The world's biggest crypto exchange Binance, was hacked, and around $100 million worth of Binance Coin was stolen. Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency platform by volume, said on Friday it had been hacked, estimating the scale of the theft at around $100 million. According to Binance, the hackers managed to withdraw a total of 2 million BNB, the cryptocurrency issued by Binance, or about $580 million at Friday's price. However, they were only able to mine a fraction of that amount, as the majority of the amount was immediately blocked. The hackers attacked the BSC Token Hub cross-chain bridge. Note: A bridge is a service that allows a user to transfer cryptographic tokens from one blockchain to another. The Binance Smart Chain (BSC) blockchain to which the hackers' bridge is connected was suspended after the hack and then restored a few hours later. Attacks on cross-chain bridges have increased in recent months. In August, hackers stole the equivalent of $190 million by exploiting a flaw in the Nomad Bridge. According to Chainanalysis, $2 billion was stolen via 13 cross-chain bridge hacks between January and August. These attacks account for 69% of cryptocurrency theft in 2022, Chainanalysis says. Elliptic, another cryptocurrency analytics firm, noted in its quarterly hack report published this week that bridges "tend to accumulate large amounts of locked assets across many blockchains, many of which may not have an advanced security or auditing culture due to their relative obscurity." This makes bridges "an attractive target for cybercriminals", adds Elliptic. Buy crypto on the BV Financial platform.

The US economy added 263,000 jobs in September, raising investor fears of a further interest rate hike by the Fed. The U.S. Department of Labor announced Friday that the U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs in September, slightly less than analysts had expected. Why the drop in the unemployment figure is not good news for Wall Street. However, the unemployment rate fell from 3.7% in August to 3.5% last month, the lowest in fifty years. The US labour market remains very strong, which is normally a positive economic indicator, but in a market where inflation remains high, i.e. above average wage growth, full employment poses a risk of overheating the economy and can sustain, or even worsen, inflation as it sustains demand for consumer goods, while reducing inflation requires a reduction in consumption. In order to obtain this decrease in consumption, the American central bank (the Fed) wants to make "credit" less attractive for consumers, and in the current context of very high inflation, it will raise interest rates once again, which means that it is almost certain that the Fed will approve a fourth consecutive 0.75 point increase when it meets at the beginning of November. A rate hike means a more expensive dollar, which means higher costs for companies, which impacts stock prices. Recession risk. While the US economy is still creating jobs in absolute terms, the drop in the unemployment rate is also partly due to a smaller workforce, as the number of Americans looking for work has declined since the pandemic. There are now 1.7 jobs for every worker. In this context, investors fear that the Fed's policy of rate hikes, without fully countering inflation, will eventually plunge the economy into recession. Fed officials are aware of this, but they prefer rising unemployment to inflation. They believe that a rise in unemployment will be less violent than inflation at the level of the 1970s.

Evaluation carried out on four types of vehicles: the 44-tonne heavy goods vehicle, the 18-metre articulated bus, the regional bus and the 75-tonne tracked excavator. This article is the result of a study on the development of the hydrogen sector. It aims to evaluate and compare the energy, economic and environmental relevance of the two possible ways of using hydrogen in motor vehicles: its use in a fuel cell (FC), on the one hand, or its combustion in a combustion engine, on the other. Preambule In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pollutant gases from the transport sector that are harmful to living organisms and the environment, alternative energy sources to petroleum-based fuels have been developed in recent years. Electric vehicles are gradually being introduced into the regulations of many countries. In terms of decarbonising transport, battery-powered vehicles are very energy efficient and should therefore be favoured when their use meets the user's needs. However, for intensive use or high energy consuming vehicles, the battery vehicle may not be suitable for reasons of insufficient range or charging time incompatible with the needs of the service. Being very energy intensive, the size and mass of the batteries have to be adapted accordingly and can therefore exceed several tons. This becomes problematic when the purpose of the vehicle is to transport goods or passengers, for example. Hydrogen heat engine. Hydrogen is a very good fuel. It is therefore possible to burn it in a combustion engine, in a process similar to the combustion of fossil fuels. combustion engine, in a process similar to the combustion of fossil fuels. In this case, the chemical energy. In this case, the chemical energy is converted directly into mechanical energy via the combustion engine. The study was conducted with a internal combustion engine, or even hybrid thermal-electric operation Hydrogen fuel cell (FC). Another way is to transform chemical energy into electrical energy, and to use this electrical energy in an electrical machine to transform it into mechanical energy. An electrical machine to transform it into mechanical energy. This is the principle of fuel cell vehicles (FC). The study was carried out with a hydrogen fuel cell of the proton exchange membrane type. Evaluation carried out on four types of vehicles: the 44-tonne heavy goods vehicle, the 18-metre articulated bus, the regional bus and the 75-tonne tracked excavator. These vehicles consume large amounts of energy and often require fast refuelling times, needs that are difficult to meet with a battery electric vehicle. Difficult to meet with a battery electric vehicle. The use of hydrogen as a substitute for fossil fuels or the battery may be a solution. Energetic evaluation The fuel consumption of the four types of vehicles is evaluated over different duty cycles. Parametric variations (power of the fuel cell or of the combustion engine in the case of a hybrid engine, energy capacity of the battery) make it possible to assess the impact of the powertrain design on consumption. These heavy machines, at their peak, consume large amounts of energy and require fast and convenient refuelling times, needs that are difficult to meet with a battery electric vehicle. The use of hydrogen as a substitute for fossil fuels or the battery may be a solution. However, vehicles equipped with a fuel cell are 10 to 40% more energy efficient, depending on use, than those powered by a hydrogen combustion engine. Economic evaluation The economic evaluation is based on the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) indicator and aggregates the different cost items. Sensitivity analyses on the key parameters of the evaluation - such as the price of hydrogen and vehicle life. It can be seen that the switch to hydrogen leads to a 1.5 to 3-fold increase in TCO for the four vehicles evaluated compared to the reference diesel configuration. There is a slight TCO advantage for the hydrogen engine over the fuel cell (FC), as the high investment cost of the fuel cell is not offset by the lower fuel consumption. The main ways to reduce the TCO gap with the diesel configuration are lowering the price of hydrogen and the fuel cell, while improving the efficiency of the combustion engine and the FC seem to have a limited effect on the TCO. The investment effort required to switch to a fuel cell vehicle remains high at present, however, as demand continues to grow and policy measures to limit the use of diesel engines - banned in 2035 - mean that investment in fuel cells is becoming increasingly profitable without manufacturers having to charge high prices to customers. Environmental assessment The environmental assessment is based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology and compares the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of hydrogen solutions for two types of vehicles: heavy duty and articulated buses. Note: Considering hydrogen obtained by electrolysis with locally produced electricity, hydrogen vehicles have a significantly lower impact than diesel vehicles. In addition, the impacts related to hydrogen production account for most of the GHG emissions over their life cycle. This favours fuel cell vehicles, which have lower hydrogen consumption than combustion vehicles. The use of renewable hydrogen can further halve the lifecycle GHG emissions of fuel cell and hydrogen-powered thermal vehicles, compared to the use of low-carbon, electrolytically produced hydrogen. Our conclusion In the next twenty years, fossil fuel engines (Diesel, etc...) may no longer be allowed in Europe for self-propelled machines. Manufacturers are moving towards engines using non-polluting or low-polluting energy sources. For vehicles used by the general public, the hydrogen fuel cell could validly replace the current combustion engines and even the current electric cars. For heavy machinery such as excavators, construction machinery and heavy trucks, the hydrogen fuel cell engine seems to be the obvious choice, or a hybrid system: a hydrogen fuel cell engine coupled with fuel cells that will be installed in a modular fashion in the machinery.

Brent up very slightly pending confirmation of a recovery in Chinese demand Crude oil prices rose very slightly last week. The market is still awaiting confirmation of the recovery in Chinese demand, while oil supply is expected to tighten by the end of the year with the end of the US strategic stockpile release program and the entry into force of the European embargo on Russian oil. Oil prices have been falling for months after peaking at around $122 a barrel in June. On a weekly average, Brent on the London futures market gained 1.0 $/b (+1.1%) to 92.7 $/b and WTI in New York 2.0 $/b (+2 .3%) at $86.8/b. Online crude oil price: Brent and WTI market The consensus of economists surveyed on September 9 is down very slightly with an average price of Brent in 2022 at 105 $/b and 96.3 $/b in 2023. Some banks like Morgan Stanley and UBS having recently lowered their price forecasts for this quarter and next. Other institutions like JPMorgan Chase & Co, however, warn that once the pandemic-related lockdowns in China are lifted, the price of crude could quickly reach much higher levels, around $150/bbl. View our full Crude Oil Market Report - Week of 19/09/2022 - due out this 26/09/2022.