Iran Escalates Attacks on Ships, Threatening Oil Export Recovery
People working in the shipping industry said there were signs that the flow of cargoes through the waterway may be slowing, after rising close to prewar levels earlier this month. Still, there was no clear evidence of change in oil loadings observed from several of the region’s top producer countries, and one shipowner said movements through Hormuz didn’t appear curtailed. (…)
Four tankers were hit by unknown projectiles while transiting the chokepoint in separate incidents on Oct. 11, according to UK Maritime Trade Operations. That’s roughly double the daily average number of attacks observed by the agency in the previous week.
There are growing signs of wariness among vessel operators, with tanker-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg showing more than a dozen supertankers and several Suezmax-class vessels either turning around or reversing course as they approached the key shipping hub of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, near the entrance to Hormuz.
Shipbrokers and some owners operating in the region described other signs of a slowdown in traffic, in particular longer waiting times for ship-to-ship transfers. One owner involved in these operations hadn’t experienced a slowdown. (…)
China’s state-run refiners are set for a months-long effort to replenish oil stockpiles, according to Eurasia Group, after tapping reserves to cushion the impact of elevated prices stemming from the US-Iran war.
Processors are expected to add 400,000 barrels a day to their oil inventories between November and April, according to an Oct. 13 note from the consultancy. Since April, Beijing has centralized crude inventory management and extended the mandatory period required for refiners to replenish stockpiles to three to five months from one to two months, Eurasia said. (…)
- Russia Hits Ukraine Energy Plants in Blow to Trump’s Truce Claim
- Ukraine blindsided by Starlink restrictions and intelligence gaps
Ukrainian troops have been caught off guard by restrictions on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet systems that disrupted frontline operations, while Kyiv received no warning from its partners of a Russian missile attack on its energy facilities for the second day running, according to Ukrainian officials.
Starlink terminals used by Ukrainian drone units began experiencing signal failures at speeds above 160kph, disrupting several missions early on Wednesday morning, according to military personnel and senior Ukrainian officials.
“Logistics at the frontline and middle strikes are badly limited,” one senior Ukrainian official familiar with the situation on the front told the FT. Ukraine’s middle strikes target Russian military supply lines and logistics. The limitations came with “no warning, just in the middle of the night”, the official said.
Ukrainian defence ministry adviser Serhii Beskrestnov said long-range drone operations were also impacted. “It is clear that this action is not coincidental and is related to the current political situation,” he wrote on Telegram. (…)
Trump on Wednesday denied that Washington had cut off intelligence sharing. “No, we haven’t. We help them,” he said. “We are helping them, we are sharing intel. We want the war to end.”
(…) Musk posted messages critical of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week. (…)
Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski wrote on X, Musk’s social media platform: “Hey, @elonmusk, big man, are you playing politics with your products again? As your European customers, we are watching you.” (…)
Fed’s Williams Currently Sees No Need for Rate Hike in 2027
Federal Reserve Bank of New York President John Williams said he still sees one more interest-rate hike as appropriate this year, but at the moment doesn’t believe it will be necessary for the central bank to increase rates again in 2027.
“I haven’t changed my view that it may be appropriate to have one more rate hike,” Williams said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg News at the New York Fed. “I don’t think at this time I have any reason to believe that we would need to do more” after that.
Williams said there are still signs inflation will slow “quite a bit” and approach the Fed’s 2% target next year, as the impacts from tariffs and an energy price shock fade. That, along with other signs that underlying inflation is cooling, should help overcome the price pressures driven by the build-out of infrastructure for artificial intelligence, he said. (…)
“I still believe there’s disinflationary forces at play,” he said. “We definitely had the effects of tariffs and the energy prices, and now with AI. But some of those are, I think, not indicating upward movement in underlying inflation. In fact, these measures of underlying inflation have come down.”
Importantly, he added, there’s no sign that the labor market is out of balance and contributing to inflation.
“This is not an economy that is overheating overall,” he said. “This is not an economy where this added inflationary pressure is beyond these particular shocks that we’re experiencing.”
A number of his colleagues, however — including Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack and Dallas’ Lorie Logan — have made clear they believe more than one additional move will be required to bring inflation back to 2%.
Investors currently anticipate the Fed will raise rates in December and twice more in 2027, based on pricing in federal funds futures. (…)
The president of the New York Fed holds a permanent vote on monetary policy decisions and acts as vice chair of the Federal Open Market Committee. Together with the chair and vice chair of the Fed’s Board of Governors, the New York Fed chief is traditionally considered part of the central bank’s leadership “troika.”
Surging China Exports Push Trade Surplus Toward Fresh Record
Shipments abroad soared 36% last month from a year earlier and imports jumped 31%, data released by China’s General Administration of Customs showed on Wednesday. As a result, the surplus for September widened to almost $134 billion, exceeding every forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists. (…)
Shipments of high-tech products soared almost 64% in September, which Bloomberg Economics estimates contributed around half of China’s total export growth.
The year-to-date measure of the difference between what China exports and what it imports is already at $938 billion — almost 8% more than during the first nine months of last year.
Facing higher barriers in the US, Chinese companies have sought out new markets abroad, with the International Monetary Fund estimating that emerging and advanced Asian economies absorbed about half of the diverted trade, followed by the European Union with near one-fifth. Together with the US, China accounts for about 40% of global current-account balances, according to the IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook. (…)
Sales to the US grew 40%, the fastest in more than five years, as it ramps up purchases of capital goods needed for the buildout of AI infrastructure. According to China’s official data, that caused its monthly trade surplus with the world’s biggest economy to swell to $34 billion, the widest since January 2025.
The US reports a substantially smaller deficit. Figures from the Commerce Department showed it at $110 billion in the eight months through August — almost 45% less than compiled by China. US officials like Trade Representative Jamieson Greer have been touting the progress made in narrowing the imbalance under Trump.
If the US follows through on promises to lower tariffs on some Chinese goods, imports could rise even more
Surging prices for chips and commodities like oil and metals have inflated China’s trade figures, with exports and imports rising less in volume terms. Prices at the factory gate exceeded most estimates and jumped 5% in September from a year earlier, reaching their fastest since 2022, according to data published by the National Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday.
After years of exporting disinflation to the rest of the world, higher input costs have led to an abrupt jump in Chinese export prices, with their gains accelerating in August to 15% from a year earlier — the most since 2022.
The prices of imports surged even faster, however, and rose almost 30%, the fastest increase in data going back two decades. (…)
AI CORNER
ASML Rises as Chip-Gear Maker Can’t Keep Up With AI Demand
ASML said its current supply plans mean it won’t be able to fully meet demand in 2027 and 2028. “We are investigating ways to increase capacity for 2028 beyond the 30% increase we previously communicated,” Chief Executive Officer Christophe Fouquet said in a statement Wednesday on its third-quarter results. “Customers are asking us every single day to get more tools,” he said in a separate video.
Strong demand has given ASML leverage in pricing its tools, which can cost as much as $400 million per unit. The company said it completed price negotiations with major clients, with the impact set to become partly visible next year and fully reflected in 2028. (…)
ASML, Europe’s most valuable company, boosted its 2026 sales forecast to between €44 billion ($49 billion) and €45 billion. The low end of the range was previously €43 billion. Gross margin rose to 57.5% last quarter from 54% in the second quarter.
In July, ASML said it plans to boost capacity by 30% next year for its second-most advanced tool, the low NA extreme ultraviolet lithography machine, which would take its annual shipment target to about 85 units.
It will be “extremely hard to get something done that gives you tremendous capacity by 2028, even if we start digging today,” Chief Financial Officer Roger Dassen said on a call with journalists.
Dassen said the company has built Elon Musk’s Terafab project into its capacity plans for 2027 onward. The company is still “kicking the tires on the exact size of that opportunity,” Dassen said. (…)
ASML is the only company that makes the cutting-edge lithography machines used to produce semiconductors for the data centers powering the AI boom. Its outlook offers an indication of investment plans by chipmakers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Samsung Electronics Co. and Intel as spending on AI infrastructure surges.
The chip-gear maker’s customers have boosted their equipment demand forecasts based on the “size and duration of AI-related investments,” Fouquet said. Some customers “are expressing an interest in placing orders with us for 2029 and even 2030,” he said. (…)
“So the EUV business grows over 45% this year.” (…)
ASML has never been allowed to ship its most advanced EUV machines to China, due to US-led export controls. US lawmakers have proposed a new bill, the MATCH Act, that threatens to further restrict the supply of chip-making gear to Beijing.
“Limiting immersion technology into China might slow down China, but it’s not going to stop” it from developing homegrown solutions, Dassen said.
(…) Fouquet said on Wednesday that its customers, which include Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Intel, were seeing “very, very strong demand” from their own clients, and so were “accelerating their plans” to expand production capacity. (…)
China Is Poised to Spearhead a $5 Trillion Humanoid Robot Market Advanced humanoid hardware is one of the strategic high-tech fields where China has an early lead over the US.
(…) Robotics is one of the strategic high-tech fields where China has seized an early lead over the US. (…) Chinese companies accounted for 97% of global humanoid shipments in the first half of this year.
Thanks to robust government support, vast supply chains and ample mechanical engineers, China is staking its claim to an industry that may help dictate the path of modern economies. Morgan Stanley estimates the market for humanoids could top $5 trillion by 2050, as labor forces shrink and age, and AI adoption swells.
What’s unsettling Washington is not any single breakthrough, but the possibility that Beijing could end up writing the blueprint for how the machines enter daily life.
“China is ahead because they have a national strategy that goes back over a decade where they saw robots and AI as the future,” says Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, a US-based trade body representing more than 1,500 organizations in robotics, AI and related technologies. “The United States never had any national strategy.”
The contest is still in its early days. While Chinese firms demonstrate their hardware prowess, their American rivals are edging ahead on a parallel path to robotic dominance: brains. Startups there are pinning their robotic hopes on AI models aimed at guiding humanoids, boosted by their open access to advanced chips that Chinese firms can only dream of. (…)
Recent releases from US firms like Physical Intelligence and Generalist outperform similar Chinese models, according to Zang Tianyu, a partner at Jinqiu Capital, which holds stakes in Unitree and other Chinese robotics firms. (…)
To catch up, Chinese firms are looking to the country’s tried-and-tested industrial playbook — and the factory floors themselves. China produces some 5 million STEM graduates every year, while its vast manufacturing industry employs and trains tens of millions more.
Beijing has dedicated enormous resources to building large-scale data-collection facilities to train robot brain models, and pushed manufacturers to try out humanoids on assembly lines. The AI systems are rolling out in factories, automotive plants and warehouses as part of a widespread effort to train humanoids. The process is simple: send the machines out into the world, generate more real-world data, and use that to make the robot brains work better. (…)
In Shenzhen, a bustling city of 18 million that has emerged as the world’s robotics hub, Dong’s team moves at “China Speed” and spends money at the “China price,” he says. “The speed and efficiency in this city shock me.” (…)
An analysis by Morgan Stanley shows the cost of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid would nearly triple if Chinese components were excluded from its supply chain. Experts say US dependence is now so great that a move by the Federal Communications Commission to curtail the growth of Chinese humanoid robots and some of their materials has actually hindered development for many startups because they struggle to get the components elsewhere.
Going forward, China’s chokehold over rare earths gives it a unique position to grow this dominance. Beijing currently controls as much as 90% of permanent magnets needed for rotary actuators, according to research by McKinsey. The country also accounts for 40% of precision bearings, 40% of sensors and 30% of all the power electronics used in the components, which act as joints for humanoids. (…)
American robot companies and industry groups are lobbying Washington for a national strategy to better compete with China. (…)
Agility Robotics in June urged the US government to provide something like the support that Beijing extends to its robotics sector, including the formation of an American supply chain, support for companies adopting humanoids and rewards for early adopters.
“Without targeted US government action to support the domestic humanoid robotics industry, it appears likely that the gap between US and China will grow,” says Sam Bresnick, a researcher at Georgetown University.
The cost of all the components in an average Chinese-made humanoid is projected to drop by about half to below $17,000 by the end of the decade, according to a recent report by the Bank of America Institute. That could boost shipments to 10 million by 2035 from last year’s level of 20,000, analysts Lynelle Huskey and Vanessa Cook forecast. By 2060, there could be 3 billion humanoid robots in operation, they estimate, suggesting countries with more of the machines will reap significant economic benefits. (…)
From our China trip last December: Who got a plan?
BlackRock takes profits on stocks as it turns to Treasurys after six years
- Yardeni, who coined the term “bond vigilantes” in 1983, said their influence was suppressed during years of quantitative easing and zero interest rates that kept yields low. They may return for “revenge” as bond markets operate more freely and interest rates get back to normal, demanding higher yields in response to the large government debts.
- He sees several forces pushing yields higher globally, including government deficits, tightening monetary policies, inflation, strong economic growth and the unwinding of the yen carry trade. He’s watching the Bank of Japan’s actions closely as it faces pressure to strengthen the yen by raising interest rates, which in turn impacts bond markets.
- He thinks it would take U.S. 10-year Treasury yields rising over 7% to seriously impact the U.S. economy. (see chart below) With nominal GDP growth at 6.6% in Q2 2026, the 10-year Treasury yield exceeding the economy’s growth rate could make the U.S. government debt burden much harder to manage. But a rapid rise in yields could be “destabilizing” before that, for example if borrowers cannot refinance.
- He argues the U.S. economy is less interest-rate-sensitive than it used to be — baby boomers would be happy to earn higher yields on their investments, and many homeowners have paid off their homes or locked in low mortgage rates.
- He thinks this is a great opportunity to buy bonds, but there’s potential for yields to go higher. He added that U.S. municipal bonds are looking attractive.
- With the U.S. midterm elections coming up, he said gridlock in Congress is “usually bullish”, but it may make it harder to resolve the problem of unsustainable fiscal deficits. In his bearish scenario, which he has assigned a 30% probability to, there could be a conflict between the bond vigilantes and politicians.
- He points to the comeback productivity has made and said it will eventually have a disinflationary impact on the economy, if not a deflationary one. This makes him optimistic that the current inflation problem is cyclical in nature, and not structural.
SMALL BIZ (NFIB)
- “This is the worst business climate I have seen in my 34 years as a business owner. Sales have dropped dramatically this summer. Big corporations have taken most of the sales away from us (Costco, Sprouts, Amazon) … My expenses are way up, and my sales are way down.” – Retail, FL
- PPI trade services, a leading indicator of underlying retail sales growth, has slowed sharply, signaling further weakness in consumer spending, according to Pantheon Macroeconomics. (The Daily Shot)
Source: Pantheon Macroeconomics