PPCC: Pisitófilos Creditófagos. Primavera 2025

[Cadavre Exquis]

Inflated Salaries Put Targets on Workers' Backs as Market Cools
Posted by msmash on Wednesday May 14, 2025 @10:40AM from the closer-look dept.

Workers who secured substantial salary increases during the pandemic hiring frenzy are now confronting a stark reality: they're likely overpaid in today's cooling job market. According to new Korn Ferry data, two-thirds of U.S. workers believe they're compensated at or above their market value.

The tech sector has experienced significant wage deflation, with expanding pay transparency laws making market corrections impossible to ignore. Only 60% of recent job switchers received raises in Q1 2025, down from 73% just one quarter earlier.

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

Rogue Communication Devices Found in Chinese Solar Power Inverters
Posted by msmash on Wednesday May 14, 2025 @12:55PM from the strange-things dept.

Gilmoure shares a report:

U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said. Power inverters, which are predominantly produced in China, are used throughout the world to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids. They are also found in batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers.

[...] Using the rogue communication devices to skirt firewalls and switch off inverters remotely, or change their settings, could destabilise power grids, damage energy infrastructure, and trigger widespread blackouts, experts said. "That effectively means there is a built-in way to physically destroy the grid," one of the people said, The two people declined to name the Chinese manufacturers of the inverters and batteries with extra communication devices, nor say how many they had found in total.

Saludos.

[Derby]

https://www.ft.com/content/e50eae58-6586-45db-a7ec-445644b390ab

Wall Street’s sudden rebound catches investors ‘offside’

Fund managers were positioning for a US economic downturn before America and China forged a trade pact


NYSE floor on Tuesday: the S&P 500 has rallied 3.3% this week, erasing all of its losses this year © Getty Images

The furious rally in US assets sparked by the tariff détente between Washington and Beijing has caught big investors off guard, colliding with widespread bets against the dollar and Wall Street stocks.

The S&P 500 has rallied 4 per cent this week, erasing all of its losses this year, after the US and China agreed to cut tariffs for at least 90 days, signalling an end to the worst of the trade war. The dollar initially rose too, while US government bond prices have dropped as traders exit traditional havens.

The rush of money back into stocks has stung large asset managers and other institutional investors, who were cautiously positioned on US assets on fears of a dramatic economic slowdown and broader worries over US policymaking.

“I think the market got caught quite offside,” said Robert Tipp, head of global bonds at PGIM Fixed Income. “As the climbdowns and deals started to look more plausible — even though there are still a lot of tariffs by modern standards — that has forced a reassessment and a major position squaring.”

Broader negative bets, including those by trend-following hedge funds, may have exacerbated the moves higher as traders were squeezed out of their positions, analysts said.

A fund manager survey from Bank of America, which was largely completed before the US-China announcement, found respondents had their dimmest view of US stocks in two years.

The BofA survey respondents also had the most negative collective view of the dollar since 2006. That was backed up by Commodity Futures Trading Commission data, which showed that asset managers last week had the biggest bullish bets on the euro since September 2024.

Charlie McElligott, a strategist at Nomura, added, “essentially, every thematic macro trade of the past few months is going [the] wrong way.”

In a sign of the dramatic shifts in sentiment, the Nasdaq Composite has surged nearly 30 per cent from a low just weeks ago, after Trump’s April 2 “liberation day” tariff announcement shook markets.



The CFTC data, which covers the seven-day period ended May 6, also showed that asset managers had their largest ever long position in 10-year Treasury futures, a bet that prices would rise and yields would fall.

The 10-year yield is particularly sensitive to growth expectations, so the trade suggested that investors were betting on higher chances of a recession later this year. It has jumped to 4.5 per cent from a closing low in early April of about 4 per cent.

“There are some institutional investors who had de-risked pretty significantly. And there was loads of cash on the sidelines,” said Gargi Chaudhuri, chief investment and portfolio strategist for the Americas at BlackRock.

The dramatic recovery in stocks has been accompanied by a fall in market expectations of volatility. The Vix, Wall Street’s “fear gauge”, is back at pre-liberation day levels. Expectations of swings in the euro-dollar exchange rate have fallen to their lowest since March, according to an index provided by derivatives giant CME Group.

Deutsche Bank data suggests that retail investors may have benefited from buying the dip, snapping up stocks throughout most of April while professional investors held off.

The S&P’s rally over the past month has been driven by buying during regular New York cash trading hours, when amateur investors are most active, the bank said. In contrast, returns during overnight trading, when institutional investors continue to purchase stock futures and derivatives, “have been muted”.

Some asset managers warn that this shift towards trade optimism has run too far. “We should remember the policy chaos damage to consumer and business confidence before getting too optimistic,” said Andrew Pease, chief investment strategist at Russell Investments.

In particular, investors said the dollar, which gave up the bulk of Monday’s gains on Tuesday and Wednesday, could weaken as the economic impact of the trade disruption becomes clear.

“My guess is that this is a temporary relief for the dollar, and the tariff rates will be high enough to have a stagflationary impact on the US economy, said Athanasios Vamvakidis, head of global G10 FX strategy at Bank of America. “For the dollar to weaken again, we need the US data to weaken — we believe it will.”

Dominic Schnider, head of global FX & commodities at UBS’s wealth management arm, said investors “have yet to see how much the damage [from the trade war] is going to be”.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/mercados-financieros/2025-05-14/el-precio-de-las-hipotecas-cae-al-nivel-mas-bajo-en-mas-de-dos-anos.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/opinion/2025-05-14/las-claves-cada-tornillo-del-cohete-de-la-economia-condiciona-un-aterrizaje-exitoso.html

https://elpais.com/economia/2025-05-13/la-renta-de-los-hogares-espanoles-crecio-en-2024-por-encima-de-la-media-de-la-ocde.html

https://elpais.com/economia/2025-05-14/la-productividad-de-la-economia-espanola-se-frena-en-los-ultimos-trimestres.html

Saludos.

[Derby]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-14/finland-s-data-centers-are-heating-cities-too

Power-Hungry Data Centers Are Warming Homes in the Nordics

By pairing computer processing facilities with district heating systems, countries like Finland and Sweden are trying to limit their environmental downsides.

The Finnish utility Fortum Oyj is building a heat recovery facility on the site of an under-construction Microsoft data center in Kirkkonummi, Finland. Photographer: Roni Rekomaa/Bloomberg

When Finnish engineer Ari Kurvi takes a hot shower or turns up the thermostat in his apartment, he’s tapping into waste heat generated by a 75-megawatt data center 5 kilometers away. As its computer servers churn through terabytes of digital information to support video calls, car navigation systems and web searches, an elaborate system of pipes and pumps harvests the cast-off energy and feeds it to homes in the town of Mantsala in southern Finland.

Since it began operation about a decade ago, the data center has provided heat for the town. Last year, it heated the equivalent of 2,500 homes, about two-thirds of Mantsala’s needs, cutting energy costs for residents and helping to blunt the environmental downsides associated with power-hungry computing infrastructure. Some of the world’s biggest tech companies are now embracing heat recovery from data centers in an effort to become more sustainable.

Kurvi is one of the pioneers of this emerging technology: As an engineer and project manager for Hewlett Packard starting in the 1980s, he spent years working with humming stacks of hardware in hot server rooms during the freezing Finnish winters. That made him think that there must be a good way to put that wasted heat to use.

“Initially, I was focused on the health of the server,” Kurvi said. “I had this understanding that the heat inside was harmful, but when I myself went outside the building, I needed that warmth because it was cold. I came to this simple understanding: There is warmth, there is cold, and maybe we can exchange something here.”

He first applied the concept back in 2009, at a center in Kuopio in central Finland, where the waste heat was sold back to the building’s landlord. Five years later, he scaled up and led the work at the Nebius Group NV facility, which heats his home. The project for Nebius, he says, marked a significant step up — the first time the technology was applied at such a large scale in Finland, and maybe even globally.


The site of the Microsoft data center under construction in Espoo, Finland.Photographer: Roni Rekomaa/Bloomberg(...)

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/companias/2025-05-13/nissan-despedira-a-20000-trabajadores-en-todo-el-mundo-hasta-2027.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/companias/2025-05-14/el-gigante-de-la-ia-coreweave-desembarca-en-espana-en-los-centros-de-datos-de-barcelona-y-alava-de-merlin.html

https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2025-05-11/el-pueblo-aragones-que-se-moviliza-contra-un-centro-de-datos-estamos-dispuestos-a-todo.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/mercados-financieros/2025-05-13/los-gestores-rebajan-su-pesimismo-y-refuerzan-la-apuesta-por-la-bolsa-europea-y-sus-bancos.html

https://cincodias.elpais.com/mercados-financieros/2025-05-13/la-bolsa-y-el-ibex-35.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/mercados-financieros/2025-05-14/las-bolsas-vuelven-a-la-casilla-de-salida-siete-lecciones-de-la-caida-y-recuperacion-de-los-mercados.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/mercados-financieros/2025-05-13/las-letras-a-tres-meses-caen-del-2-y-la-demanda-de-los-particulares-se-esfuma.html

https://cincodias.elpais.com/criptoactivos/2025-05-13/inviertes-en-cripto-estas-son-las-preguntas-a-las-que-tienes-que-contestar.html

https://cincodias.elpais.com/mercados-financieros/2025-05-13/sabadell-emite-cocos-por-primera-vez-en-mas-de-un-ano-en-plena-opa-de-bbva.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://elpais.com/internacional/2025-05-13/ee-uu-y-arabia-saudi-anuncian-durante-la-visita-de-trump-acuerdos-por-600000-millones-de-dolares-en-armas-y-minerales-raros.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/opinion/2025-05-14/los-aranceles-de-trump-nacionalismo-economico-mediante-acuerdos-comerciales-bilaterales.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/opinion/2025-05-14/aprender-del-apagon-para-alcanzar-un-sistema-electrico-100-renovable.html

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://cincodias.elpais.com/opinion/2025-05-14/la-desintoxicacion-de-china-de-apple-es-dolorosa-y-tardia.html

Saludos.