What my first Daxxify treatment was like
I left Dr. Levine’s office eager to see my injections in action, and although I wasn’t expecting to see any effect until five days or so in, to my surprise and delight, the Daxxify started to kick in the following day. In the weeks that followed, after it reached its full effect, I was increasingly happy with my results. I had that same familiar paralysis of my muscles, while still maintaining a natural look and some movement, and my skin even appeared smoother.

But my initial satisfaction with Daxxify soon turned to disappointment when it began wearing off about a month and a half after my treatment. By mid-April, the Daxxify had disappeared completely, meaning that it not only fell short of its lofty six-month claims but it didn’t even last the three months I’d historically gotten out of Botox, Dysport, and Jeuveau.

Just as my high hopes for Daxxify faded into oblivion, so too it seemed did those of the larger aesthetics industry, as patients and providers grew weary of its claims to last longer and concluded that it was not worth the higher price tag. Revance Therapeutics, the pharmaceutical company behind Daxxify, took note. In the year since the neurotoxin came to market, its focus has completely shifted, and there’s now a whole new approach to both its marketing and its actual injection. While the makers of Daxxify still claim it’s “long-lasting and keeps frown lines smoother with the convenience of as few as two treatments per year,” they have made sure to better clarify what this means.

Daxxify’s claims, explained
Unlike other popular neurotoxins, which tend to have an overnight fadeout and wear off seemingly all at once, Daxxify slowly softens over time, a difference that may have contributed to some of the disappointment patients felt when trying it for the first time.

“When you’re familiar with other neuromodulators, your expectations are set by those,” explains Dr. Jody Comstock, a board-certified dermatologist and paid Revance consultant in Tucson, Arizona, and the top user of Daxxify in the country. “So, when people tried [Daxxify] for the first time, they were thinking in those terms around when they expected it to kick in and how it would behave, and with the early messaging that it was going to last longer, patients and clinicians expected it to be in full effect for that time.”

When some of Dr. Comstock’s Daxxify patients came in for follow-up appointments three and four months after treatment, many thought that it had worn off, but when she compared their movement to their expression photos take prior to injection, it seemed the toxin had actually just worn off slightly, roughly 25 to 50%. “What we noticed that was so different was that while Botox and other products have a steady nosedive of going away, Daxxify would sort of plateau at three to four months and oscillate for another few months,” she adds.

There’s also been renewed focus on Daxxify’s effect on skin texture, its quick kick-in time, its ability to increase facial symmetry, and even its peptide formulation, a departure from most neurotoxins’ use of human or animal byproducts. “Daxxify, more than the other neuromodulators, makes brows symmetric, and what we noticed in our expression photos of patients was that even when you were only injecting the glabella area, the other muscles on the face softened, almost like there’s a communication between them that when you don’t have to pull so much on one side, you don’t have to pull so much on the other,” Dr. Comstock says. [Editor’s note: No studies have been done to show that Daxxify outperforms other neuromodulators in regard to achieving facial symmetry.]

However, even with these advantages, Revance was very aware of the uphill battle Daxxify faced to convince patients and providers, to give it a second chance. That’s why it removed the foremost barrier to entry: its higher price tag. As of November, the injectable is now sold to clinicians at the same price as Botox and other neuromodulators. And while the eventual cost for the patient varies from provider to provider, depending on factors like their location, expertise, and demand, most doctors say they are offering Daxxify for the same price as other toxins.

Why I gave Daxxify a second chance
After hearing about all these changes in recent months, I decided to give Daxxify another try. In late February, I once again had the neurotoxin injected into my glabella, forehead, and crow’s feet, hoping for the best. As she placed injections around my face, Dr. Comstock stressed just how much technique matters when it comes to Daxxify and how it will perform. When injected at the head and tail of the corrugator, the C-shaped muscle around the eyebrow, notably a bit lower than other neuromodulators, Daxxify will last noticeably longer, she told me. But less than half of providers were consistently using this technique in the neurotoxin’s early months. “That was really an aha moment,” says Dr. Comstock. “But a lot of people have since been able to change their technique to ensure patients are getting the best possible results.”

About a day and a half after my treatment, I was thrilled to notice I couldn’t move my eyebrows more than a centimeter or so, and in the days and weeks since, the effect has only increased. My skin has an overall smoother look, but my movement remains natural-looking, and I still have ample room to emote and react without looking frozen. Although it’s still too soon to say whether this go-around with Daxxify will last longer than last year’s attempt, I remain cautiously optimistic—and more importantly, my expectations for the toxin have shifted considerably to take into account the many differences between it and Botox. And with the same price tag as all the other neuromodulators, it feels like there’s really nothing to lose by giving it a shot.

The Democratic president has a big megaphone to weigh in on the matter, but he is not intervening in the review process or formally blocking the deal, according to a person familiar with deliberations who insisted on anonymity to discuss the situation.


Trump said earlier this year after meeting with the Teamsters union that he would stop the U.S. Steel acquisition: “I would block it. I think it’s a horrible thing, when Japan buys U.S. Steel. I would block it instantaneously."

Pfizer Inc. will charge $1,390 for a five-day course of its Paxlovid COVID-19 antiviral when the drug moves to the commercial market later this year. That’s more than double the amount the company charged the U.S. government during the pandemic.

The government paid about $529 per course when it was making Paxlovid available to patients free of cost. The news of the price increase was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

“You have to understand how these vehicles are made; this isn’t a bed like a normal pickup truck, this is more like an SUV. The quarter panel […] is tied to the cab of the truck, it goes all the way across the roof across the vehicle, all the way to the rear view side mirror,” explained Boyette in his video. “In order to replace this panel, all that has to be cut off; the back glass has to be taken out, the panoramic roof has to be taken out, the windshield, the battery pack has to be removed. There’s a lot of disassembly that has to occur in order to for this to get fixed the conventional way at a body shop.”

Though Rivian made use of large body panels to create a sleeker car, huge repair bills like the ones that the R1T owners faced could become a reality for other prospective EV owners, as both Tesla (TSLA) - Get Free Report and Toyota (TM) - Get Free Report set out to use gigacasting methods to produce cheaper electric cars in the future.

Gigacasting speeds up the process of creating a vehicle through the elimination of welding joints — traditionally done by people or robots — by making large components of the car out of a huge single casting. The downside of such methods is that damage to said components can result in owners facing the same reality of the mentioned R1T owners, where the littlest of damage can impact a major part of the car.

Mix the possibilities with Tesla’s reputation for poor build quality and you have a recipe for disaster put in the hands of owners. This is already a reality for Tesla owner Nizar Kamel, who took to social media in August 2023 after discovering large cracks in gigacasted components in his five-month-old Model Y that were large enough to jeopardize the car’s structural integrity.

Tesla’s rise over recent years has also put ever-ratcheting pressure on the legacy automakers to cut costs. Including benefits, Musk’s non-unionized EV company spends $45 per hour on labor, significantly less than the $63 per hour spent in the Big Three, according to industry analysts.

Musk’s willingness to upend auto manufacturing shibboleths has also forced his legacy competitors to seek new efficiencies. Tesla led the way in building large-scale car casts, stamping out very large metal components in one go rather than making a series of small casts that have to be joined together. And it pioneered an automotive chassis building process that can be easily adapted to produce different makes and models.

Tesla’s Silicon Valley roots also helped it become the first automaker to envision the car as a software-first, iPhone-like “platform” that can be modified via over-the-air updates. And the company aims to automate more of its factories, and extract more of the materials it needs to build its batteries itself.

Tesla’s novel production ideas could soon lead the company to put even more pressure on legacy automakers. Musk said earlier this year that Tesla plans to build a new, smaller vehicle that can be made for half the production cost of its most popular (and cheapest) vehicle, the Model 3

“I went line by line of everything that was in his (MRI notes) and plugged it into ChatGPT,” she says. “I put the note in there about ... how he wouldn’t sit crisscross applesauce. To me, that was a huge trigger (that) a structural thing could be wrong.”

She eventually found tethered cord syndrome and joined a Facebook group for families of children with it. Their stories sounded like Alex's. She scheduled an appointment with a new neurosurgeon and told her she suspected Alex had tethered cord syndrome. The doctor looked at his MRI images and knew exactly what was wrong with Alex.

The project is owned by Lithium Nevada, LLC, a subsidiary of Lithium Americas Corporation (LAC), which funded the recent research.

According to the company's latest review, the caldera's southernmost rim, including Thacker Pass, contains the highest concentrations of lithium in the region.
Most of the caldera's clay is called magnesium smectite, which is a known source of lithium elsewhere in the world.

But towards the southernmost rim of the caldera, researchers have found an unusual type of clay, called illite, that is especially concentrated with lithium.

"If you believe their back-of-the-envelope estimation, this is a very, very significant deposit of lithium,' Anouk Borst, a geologist who was not involved in the study, told Chemistry World.

"It could change the dynamics of lithium globally, in terms of price, security of supply, and geopolitics."

Under the terms of the global settlement and licensing agreement, Gilead will make an upfront payment of $1.25 billion to ViiV Healthcare which is expected in the first quarter of 2022. In addition, Gilead will also pay a 3% royalty on all future US sales of Biktarvy ($6.09 billion in 2020) and in respect of the bictegravir component of any other future bictegravir-containing products sold in the US. These royalties will be payable by Gilead to ViiV Healthcare from 1 February 2022 until the expiry of ViiV Healthcare’s U.S. Patent No. 8,129,385 on 5 October 2027. Gilead’s obligation to pay royalties does not extend into any period of regulatory paediatric exclusivity, if awarded. Regulatory paediatric exclusivity would extend the period of exclusivity after the expiry of the ‘385 patent by six months from 5 October 2027 to 5 April 2028.

But since the "Barbie" movie released in July, there has been an uptick in demand for use as a cosmetic procedure. The hashtag BarbieBotox had 11.2 million views on TikTok.

The procedure "supposedly slims the neck and somehow that got attributed to the actress that's playing Barbie," Revance Therapeutics (RVNC.O) CEO Dustin Sjuts told Reuters in an interview.

"They're not treating wrinkles or lax skin. They want less girth to their neck, a slimmer, more contoured neck," said Scot Glasberg, president-elect of Plastic Surgery Foundation, who practices in New York.

The approval of such injections for cosmetic purposes is only limited to procedures involving the face, making the use of the injection in the trapezius "off-label".

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration places the responsibility of "off-label" use on health professionals to judge such procedures as "medically appropriate".

Meanwhile, Revance and Evolus Inc (EOLS.O), which make similar toxins under the brand Daxxify and Jeuveau, respectively, told Reuters that though "Barbie Botox" has picked up in recent months, they do not see the trend significantly boosting sales.

Botox maker AbbVie Inc (ABBV.N) declined to comment.

Reuters reported in July that Tesla cars often fail to achieve their advertised range estimates and projections reported by the cars' own equipment, citing experts who tested or studied them. The company wrote algorithms about a decade ago to create "rosy" in-dash driving range estimates, Reuters reported a source as saying, and set up a "Diversion Team" to cancel range-related service appointments.

The Austin, Texas-based electric carmaker deployed the team because its service centers were inundated with appointments from owners who had expected better performance based on the company’s advertised estimates and the projections displayed by the in-dash range meters of the cars themselves, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Al Root
Investors just don't know the fate of United States Steel . Something big is likely to happen, though.
Tuesday, U.S. Steel (ticker: X) updated investors about a strategic review it disclosed this month. In a letter posted on the steel company's website, management said they are entering customary confidentiality agreements with third parties, starting due diligence, and are focused on maximizing shareholder value.

That isn't a lot, but it's enough. Shares are up about 2% at $30.53 a share. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average are up about 0.3% and 0.2%, respectively.
U.S. Steel said on Aug. 13 that it was considering what to do next after receiving bids both for parts of the business and the whole company. Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF), one of the U.S.'s biggest steel company, disclosed the same day that it had submitted a cash and stock bid that valued U.S. Steel at close to $35 a share. The bid is worth about $32.70 a share based on where Cliffs stock is trading today.

It isn't certain if Cliffs is one of the parties signing a confidentiality agreement. U.S. Steel and Cliifs didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Following the Cliffs bid, steel service center Esmark announced, and then withdrew, an all-cash bid. ArcelorMittal (MT) was also interested, according to a Reuters report. ArcelorMittal didn't respond to a request for comment about the report.

It isn't clear who is bidding and on what. There are plenty of foreign steel producers that are large enough to take a look. POSCO (PKX), Gerdau (GGB4.Brazil), Ternium (TX), ThyssenKrupp (TKA.Germany) are all possible merger partners or bidders for certain assets, though none of those companies have been linked to the strategic review process.

It wouldn't make sense for the big steel company Nucor (NUE) to bid. Nucor is a nonunion operation and U.S. Steel workers are represented by the United Steelworkers . The culture clash would be significant.

U.S. Steel and Cliffs each produced roughly 16 million tons of steel in 2022, while Nucor pumped out about 26 million tons. Posco, Gerdau, Ternaium, and Thyssen produced roughly 40 million, 14 million, 12 million, and 12 million tons, respectively.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal .
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08-29-23 1106ET
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The economic travails of the pos tpandemic years have led to intense intellectual and policy debates. One thing almost everyone agrees on, however, is that the post-Covid crisis bears very little resemblance to the global financial crisis of 2008.

So, sure enough, China — the world’s biggest or second-biggest economy, depending on how you measure it — seems to be teetering on the edge of a crisis that looks a lot like what the rest of the world went through in 2008.

I’m not confident enough in my understanding of China to judge whether it will manage to contain its Minsky moment, the point at which everyone suddenly realizes that unsustainable debt is, in fact, unsustainable. In fact, I’m not sure if anyone — including Chinese officials — knows the answer to that question.

But I think we can answer a more conditional question: If China does have a 2008-style crisis, will it spill over in a major way to the rest of the world, the United States in particular? And there the answer is pretty clearly no. Big as China’s economy is, America has remarkably little financial or trade exposure to China’s problems.

Before I get there, let’s talk about why China in 2023 resembles the North Atlantic economies, both America and Europe, in 2008.

The 2008 crisis was brought on by the bursting of a huge, trans-Atlantic housing bubble. The effects of the burst bubble were magnified by financial disruption, especially the collapse of “shadow banks” — institutions that acted like banks, created the risk of what amounted to bank runs, but were both largely unregulated and lacking the safety net provided to conventional banks.

Now comes China, with a real estate sector even more swollen than those of Western nations in the run-up to 2008. China also has a large, highly troubled shadow-banking sector. And it has some unique problems, notably huge debts owed by local governments.

The good news is that China isn’t like Argentina or Greece, nations that owed large sums to foreign creditors. The debt in question here is, in essence, money China owes to itself. And it should in principle be possible for the national government to resolve the crisis through some combination of bailouts of debtors and haircuts for creditors.

But is China’s government competent enough to manage the kind of financial restructuring its economy needs? Do officials have sufficient resolve or intellectual clarity to do what needs to be done?

I worry especially about that last point. China needs to replace unsustainable real estate investment with higher consumer demand. But some reporting suggests that top officials remain suspicious of “wasteful” consumer spending and also balk at the idea of “empowering individuals to make more decisions over how they spend their money.” And it’s not reassuring that Chinese officials are responding to the potential crisis by pushing banks to lend more, basically continuing along the path that got China where it is.

So China may have a crisis. If it does, how will it affect us?

The answer, as far as I can tell, is that America’s exposure to a potential China crisis is surprisingly small.

How much has the United States invested in China? Direct investment — investment that involves control — in China and Hong Kong is about $215 billion. Portfolio investment — basically stocks and bonds — is a bit more than $300 billion. So we’re talking around $515 billion in total.

That may not sound like a small number, but for an economy as big as ours, it is. Here’s one comparison. Right now, there are many concerns about U.S. commercial real estate, especially office buildings, which probably face a permanent reduction in demand because of the rise in remote work. Well, U.S. office buildings are currently worth about $2.6 trillion, or around five times our total investment in China.

Why has a huge economy attracted so little U.S. investment? Basically, I’d argue, because given the arbitrariness of Chinese policy, many potential investors fear that the nation may be a kind of Roach Motel: You can get in, but you may not be able to get out.

What about China as a market? China is a huge player in world trade, but it doesn’t buy much from the United States — only about $150 billion in 2022, less than 1 percent of our G.D.P. So a Chinese slump wouldn’t have much direct effect on demand for U.S. products. The effect would be larger for countries that sell more to China, like Germany and Japan, and there would be some ricochet effect on America via sales to these countries. But the overall effect would still be small.

A Chinese economic crisis might even have a small positive effect on the United States, because it would reduce demand for raw materials, especially oil, and as a result possibly reduce inflation.

None of this means that we should welcome the possibility of a Chinese slump or gloat over another nation’s troubles. Even on purely selfish grounds, we should worry about what the Chinese regime might do to distract its citizens from domestic problems.

But in economic terms, we seem to be looking at a potential crisis within China, not a 2008-style global event.

At the core of China’s current economic trouble is real estate, which represents a quarter of the country’s economic output and at least three-fifths of household savings.

When Mr. Zhou, the former central bank chief, unleashed a surge of borrowing in 2016, he triggered a frenzy of apartment construction even in remote cities like Qiqihar, a fading, frozen center of artillery manufacturing near the Siberian frontier. As easy credit sent apartment prices skyward, people in Qiqihar and throughout the country felt richer and flocked to car dealerships and other businesses to spend more money.

Apartments were bought as investments to rent out, including by many Chinese families that saw an opportunity to accumulate wealth. But as more and more apartments were built, their value as rentals declined. Investors were left with apartments whose rent wouldn’t pay for their mortgages. In many cities, annual rent has been 1.5 percent or less of an apartment’s purchase price, while mortgage interest costs have been 5 or 6 percent.

Apartments in China are commonly delivered by builders without amenities like sinks and washing machines, or even basics like closets or flooring. Because rents are so low, many investors have not bothered to finish apartments over the past decade, holding newly built but hollow shells in the expectation of flipping them for ever-higher prices. By some estimates, Chinese cities now have 65 million to 80 million empty apartments.

Demand for new apartments has now plummeted, leaving little expectation that a repeat of Mr. Zhou’s measures in 2016 would quickly revive the market. The annual number of births and marriages has almost halved since 2016, eroding much of the need for people to buy new apartments.

Prices for existing homes have fallen 14 percent in the past 24 months. Prices of new homes have not fallen as much, but only because local governments have told developers not to cut prices drastically. Sales of new homes have plunged as a result.

Many economists in China now suggest that the country needs to go beyond reductions in down payments and cut interest rates sharply, far more than a tiny interest rate reduction on Monday. Deep cuts in interest rates would make it much cheaper to borrow money for a new home or car or other big purchases. It could also spur more exports, long a driver of the Chinese economy.

A risk of cutting interest rates is that Chinese companies and families would be able to earn much higher interest rates on bank deposits in other countries, and would try to transfer large sums of money out of China. That would cause China’s currency, the renminbi, to sink against the dollar, which would also make Chinese exports more competitive in foreign markets.

China cannot export its way out of economic trouble without incurring considerable hostility from governments in Europe, the United States and developing countries, which have become increasingly reluctant to accept job losses associated with a dependence on imports. But that may be a risk that China is willing to take as pressure increases for further interest rate cuts.

“Cutting interest rates is necessary,” said Xu Sitao, the chief economist in the Beijing office of Deloitte. “It is about stabilizing the property sector and offering calibrated relief to companies and local governments that are experiencing financing woes.”

Li You contributed research.

Keith Bradsher is the Beijing bureau chief for The Times. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit and as a Washington correspondent. He has lived and reported in mainland China through the pandemic. More about Keith Bradsher

It does appear to be somehow more transmissible than previous variants given the fact that it has been spreading. The EG.5.1 has effectively become the “Eris” to the throne of most dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant. The U.K. Health Security Agency estimated that as of July 20, the EG.5.1 variant comprised and estimated 14.55% of all Covid-19 cases and has been growing at a 20.51% rate per week in the U.K. In the U.S., the EG.5 variants have gone from an estimated 11.9% of all Covid-19 cases during the two-week period ending July 22 up to 17.3% during the two-week period ending August 5, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Covid-19 Data Tracker. It’s now the most prevalent variant in the U.S., having surpassed the XBB.1.16.

At the same time, various Covid-19 measures across the U.S. have been trending upwards. The CDC Covid-19 Data Tracker indicated that Covid-19 hospitalizations were up 12.1% in the week ending July 22. And the presence of the virus in wastewater samples around the country has increased as well.

Fitch Ratings downgraded the United States’ long-term foreign currency issuer default rating to AA+ from AAA on Tuesday, pointing to “expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years,” an erosion of governance and a growing general debt burden.

“The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management,” said Fitch.

U.S. stock futures opened lower after the rating agency issued its downgrade, with Dow futures sliding about 100 points.

In May, the agency placed the nation’s AAA rating on negative watch, blaming the debt ceiling fight. At the time, lawmakers in Washington butted heads over an agreement that would keep the federal government from running out of money. President Joe Biden signed the debt ceiling bill on June 2, just days away from the “X-date” on June 5.

The country’s recent debt limit feud was mentioned again in Tuesday’s downgrade.

“In Fitch’s view, there has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years, including on fiscal and debt matters, notwithstanding the June bipartisan agreement to suspend the debt limit until January 2025,” the ratings agency said.

Fitch also highlighted the rising general government deficit, which it anticipates will rise to 6.3% of gross domestic product in 2023, from 3.7% in 2022. “Cuts to non-defense discretionary spending (15% of total federal spending) as agreed in the Fiscal Responsibility Act offer only a modest improvement to the medium-term fiscal outlook,” Fitch said.

The agency also noted that a combination of tightening credit conditions, weakening business investment and a slowdown in consumption could lead the economy into a “mild” recession in the fourth quarter of 2023 and first quarter of next year.

For now, the $1 trillion estimate, the largest ever for the July-September period, has analysts concluding that the U.S. is facing a deteriorating fiscal deficit outlook and continuing pressure to borrow. At stake for the broader fixed-income market is whether the presence of large ongoing auctions over the coming quarter and beyond will lead to a prolonged period where demand from potential buyers might begin to dry up, Treasury yields could edge higher, and the government-debt market returns to some form of illiquidity. "You can make the argument that since 2020, with the onset of Covid, Treasury issuances have been met with reasonably good demand," said Thomas Simons, an economist at Jefferies (JEF). "But as we go forward and further away from that period of time, it's hard to see where that same flow of dollars can come from. We may be looking at recent history and drawing too much of a conclusion that this borrowing need will be easily met."Simons said in a phone interview Tuesday that "the risk is that you don't get continued demand from foreign or domestic buyers of fixed income." The result could be "six to nine months where the market is fatigued by bigger auction sizes, Treasurys become more and more difficult to trade, there's a grind higher in yields, and there may be issues with liquidity where markets may not be so deep."

In a Tuesday note title "Treasury tsunami," rates strategists at Barclays said "Treasury's latest financing estimates point to a worsening fiscal profile" and "the fiscal picture has worsened significantly since last year." They point to the likelihood of "a sharp increase in the supply of notes and bonds over the coming quarters," and cautioned investors against expecting "a typical end-of-cycle bond market rally." "We have noted that the Treasury will soon need to increase auction sizes meaningfully across the curve, potentially to levels beyond the COVID peak, and that the rates market was too complacent. But based on the Treasury's latest financing estimates, released earlier this week, we may have been too conservative," strategists Anshul Pradhan and Andres Mok wrote. "We would not be surprised if net issuance of notes/bonds to investors were to be close to $2 trillion" for the 2024 calendar year. As of Tuesday, investors appeared to be less focused on the Treasury's borrowing needs than on signs of continued strength in the U.S. labor market, which raises the prospect of higher-for-longer interest rates.One- through 30-year Treasury yields ended higher, with the rate on the long bond finishing at an almost nine-month high. Meanwhile, the three major U.S. stock indexes closed mostly lower.According to Simons, who the most likely buyers will be at Treasury's upcoming auctions will depend on where the department decides to focus its issuances. If the focus is on bills, then money-market mutual funds could "move some cash over," he said. And if it's on long-duration coupons, it would be "real money" players such as insurers, pension funds, hedge funds and bond funds -- though much will rely on inflows from clients "before demand would pick up."

Let’s look at what’s being claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be. The authors describe a lead-based copper-doped material, LK-99, which is made by first preparing a well-characterized mineral (lanarkite, Pb2(SO4)O) from lead oxide and lead sulfate. Separately, copper phosphide (Cu3P), another well-characterized compound, is also freshly prepared from elemental copper and phosphorus. These two substances are ground together in a 1:1 ratio and the mixture is sealed in a vacuum-evacuated quartz tube and heated to 925C, forming LK-99, which is Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O, a dark polycrystalline material. The structure is very similar to lead apatite, a well-characterized phosphate mineral, but its crystallographic unit cell is slightly smaller due to the substitution of particular lead atoms in its lattice by copper ones.

And it’s this effect on the compound’s structure, the authors believe, that leads to its extraordinary superconducting behavior. Honestly, “extraordinary” doesn’t get it across. We’ve been getting excited over the years about superconducting materials that don’t even quite have to be cooled with liquid nitrogen, and this stuff is claimed to superconduct all the way up to room temperature and indeed up past the boiling point of water. Its critical temperature is said to be 127C (!) The phrase “boiling-water superconductor” is not one that I had ever used until yesterday, trust me on that.

Again, no adult wants to give their kid this drug.

Unless the government gets involved and bans the future use of livestock

The long-term ocean freight rates have registered a major decline again, with 50% drop in key pricing benchmark across last three months, according to Xeneta, a leading ocean and air freight rate benchmarking and market analytics platform.

The beleaguered carrier industry took another major hit in June, with the latest data from Xeneta’s Shipping Index (XSI) showing a decline of 9.4% in global long-term shipping rates.

Close on the heels of a 27.5% collapse last month and a 10.3% fall in April, contracted rates have now shed 47.2% of their value in the last three months alone, and 51.7% over the course of 2023, it stated.

Xeneta’s real-time data, crowd-sourced from leading global shippers, shows falls in the prices of valid long-term contracts across all key trading corridors.

Even as the uniform declines have now pushed the XSI to a 23-month low, Xeneta CEO Patrik Berglund says there is a little hope of a turnaround on the industry horizon.

Challenging times
“The fall from the peaks of last year have almost been as dramatic as the rates explosion which gave carriers such a profitable 2022. Those higher rates now appear to be a distant memory, while 2023 is becoming quite challenging,” stated Berglund.

“A fall of almost 50% in contracted prices in just three months on the XSI is highly unusual,” he pointed out.

“Furthermore, with on-going weak demand, continuing macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty, and a growing excess of capacity, it’s difficult to see how the industry can turn this current trend around – at least in the short-term,” he added.

Toyota said it aims to launch next-generation lithium-ion batteries from 2026 offering longer ranges and quicker charging.

It also trumpeted a "technological breakthrough" that addresses durability problems in solid-state batteries and said it is developing means to mass produce those batteries, targeting commercialisation over 2027-2028.

Solid-state batteries can hold more energy than current liquid electrolyte batteries. Automakers and analysts expect them to speed transition to EVs by addressing a major consumer concern: range.

Still, such batteries are expensive and likely to remain so for years. Toyota will hedge with better-performing lithium iron phosphate batteries, a cheaper alternative to lithium-ion batteries that have spurred EV adoption in China, the world's largest vehicle market.

At the high end of the market, Toyota said it would produce an EV with a more efficient lithium-ion battery offering a range of 1,000 km (621 miles). By comparison, the long-range version of the lithium-ion-powered Tesla Model Y, the world's best-selling EV, can drive for about 530 km based on U.S. standards.

An EV powered by a solid-state battery would have a range of 1,200 km and charging time of just 10 minutes, Toyota said. By comparison, the Tesla Supercharger network - the largest of its kind - offers the equivalent of 321 km of charge in 15 minutes.

Toyota did not detail expected costs or required investment for the plans.

ChatGPT’s input proved valuable in both the conceptual and implementation phases of the project. According to Stella, “ChatGPT extends the designer’s knowledge to other areas of expertise. For example, the chat robot taught us which crop would be most economically valuable to automate.”

The AI also provided useful suggestions during the implementation phase, like using silicone or rubber for the gripper to avoid crushing tomatoes and recommending a Dynamixel motor to drive the robot. The resulting robotic arm, designed through the collaboration between humans and AI, can successfully harvest tomatoes.

In their Nature Machine Intelligence article, the researchers explore the varying degrees of cooperation between humans and Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT. In the most extreme scenario, AI provides all the input for the robot design, and the human blindly follows it. In this case, the LLM acts as the researcher and engineer, while the human acts as the manager, specifying the design objectives.

Deutsche Bank strategists Jim Reid and Steve Caprio just wrote the bank’s annual default study, now in its 25th year. Last year’s, correctly, called for the end of the ultra-low default era, though the current numbers are certainly not terrible. The U.S. high-yield bond default rate through April rose to 2.1% from 1.1%, and U.S. loan default rates rose to 3.1% from 1.4%. Over in Europe, speculative-grade default rates rose to 2.7% from 1.7%. According to Fitch, the average U.S. high-yield default rate is 3.6%.

But, the Deutsche Bank team say, “a default wave is imminent.” By the fourth quarter of 2024, they say the U.S. high-yield default rate will peak at 9%, and the U.S. loan default rate will reach 11.3%. The European speculative-default rate will rise too, though to a less steep 5.8%.

Why? “The tightest Fed and [European Central Bank] policy in 15 years is running into elevated corporate leverage built upon stretched profit margins. This is especially true in the leveraged loan market, where LBO leverage was juiced higher year after year (after year) by zero rates and central bank QE,” they say. LBO means leveraged buyouts, performed by the $5 trillion or so private-equity industry.

And don’t expect the Fed to run the rescue either, as the central bank continues to fight inflation. (Unmentioned by the analysts, but the debt-ceiling deal effectively kills any potential for U.S. fiscal support through the next election, barring an unusually nasty recession.)

Granted, Deutsche Bank is far from the only outfit calling for a recession. Isn’t a downturn, and ensuing defaults, built into prices? Maybe not. The Deutsche Bank strategists say investors might not be ready, given that high-yield bond index quality has improved this cycle, and global loan default rates have been tame for the past 15 years.

They quantify this by looking at the percentage of speculative-grade markets trading at distressed levels. Historically, distressed ratios lead default cycles by about 12 to 16 months. Regressing defaults by distressed ratios, they find the current U.S. high-yield market implying a 3.6% rate of defaults in the third quarter of next year, and European high-yield bonds projecting just over 2.2%.

According to Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, solar investments are expected to attract over $1 billion a day in 2023 with over $1.7 trillion slated to flow clean energy technologies such as EVs, renewables and storage. Overall, global investment in energy is projected to hit ~$2.8 trillion in the current year.

Speaking to CNBC’s Arabile Gumede on Thursday, Birol said there was a “growing gap between the investment in fossil energy and investment [in] clean energy. Clean energy is moving fast--faster than many people realize. This is clear in the investment trends, where clean technologies are pulling away from fossil fuels. For every dollar invested in fossil fuels, about 1.7 dollars are now going into clean energy.”

By applying proprietary modern processing technologies and strategic partnerships Standard Lithium (TSXV.SLI) (NYSE.A:SLI) (FRA: S5L) is poised to bring the first new U.S. based lithium project in over 50+ years into production. The company’s flagship south Arkansas project is the largest and most advanced lithium brine project in the U.S. The 3.94 million tonne lithium carbonate equivalent resource, 175,000-acre project is located in a region of southern Arkansas that is home to North America’s largest brine production and processing facilities.

Standard Lithium is partnered with global specialty chemical company Lanxess AG on the project. The partnership is in the demonstration stage of testing the commercial viability of lithium extraction on a mass scale from brine that is a byproduct of existing bromine production facilities run by Lanxess in southern Arkansas.

Almost $1.5 trillion of US commercial real estate debt comes due for repayment before the end of 2025. The big question facing those borrowers is who’s going to lend to them?

“Refinancing risks are front and center” for owners of properties from office buildings to stores and warehouses, Morgan Stanley analysts including James Egan wrote in a note this past week. “The maturity wall here is front-loaded. So are the associated risks.”

The investment bank estimates office and retail property valuations could fall as much as 40% from peak to trough, increasing the risk of defaults.

The wall of debt is set to get worse before it gets better. Maturities climb for the coming four years, peaking at $550 billion in 2027, according to the MS note. Banks also own more than half of the agency commercial mortgage-backed securities — bonds supported by property loans and issued by US government-sponsored entities such as Fannie Mae — increasing their exposure to the sector.

“The role that banks have played in this ecosystem, not only as lenders but also as buyers,” will compound the wave of refinancing coming due, the analysts wrote.

Rising interest rates and worries about defaults have already hurt CMBS deals. Sales of the securities without government backing fell about 80% in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News.

Kiyosaki’s warning about a third bank collapse comes as speculation around the future of another investment bank, Credit Suisse, continues to mount.

This is after the bank announced a delay in the annual report after the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) call regarding the lender’s cash flow statements for 2019 and 2020. As a result, the bank’s shares hit a new all-time low on March 10, 2023.

Additionally, back in October 2022, Finbold reported that Graham Stephan, a real estate investor, suggested that Credit Suisse could be in a ‘critical moment’ after the bank’s credit default swaps (CDS), which is essentially insurance purchased against a potential default, costs have hit the highest level since 2008. Notably, Credit Suisse’s CDS kept growing in 2023.

Five-year credit default swaps for the Zurich-based lender jumped as much as 36 basis points on Monday to 453 basis points, according to pricing source CMAQ. They widened the most in a Bloomberg index that tracks the CDS of 125 European high-grade companies.

Shares of European banks and insurers slumped on Monday and Credit Suisse’s stock tumbled as much as 15% to a fresh record low. Even before the turbulence caused by SVB’s demise, investors were worried about Credit Suisse’s ability to put in a place a restructuring plan that will pivot it further to private lending, hive off large parts of the investment banking business, and reduce costs by cutting 9,000 jobs.

Earlier this month, Credit Suisse said it was delaying publication of its annual report following a last-minute query by US regulators over previous financial statements.

The bank is also grappling with departures across departments. At least a dozen private bankers at the managing director-level and above have left in Singapore and Hong Kong since September, or are planning to leave. That has further complicated efforts to win back assets and raised pressure on wealth head Francesco De Ferrari, who joined just over a year ago.