Showing posts with label under. Show all posts
Showing posts with label under. Show all posts
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
FOREX-Yen under renewed pressure as gold jitters ease
* Yen down broadly as demand fades
* Steadier gold, after historic plunge, soothe jitters
By Masayuki Kitano and Ian Chua
SINGAPORE/SYDNEY, April 17 (Reuters) - The yen fell broadly on Wednesday, succumbing to renewed pressure after gold prices steadied somewhat from an eye-watering plunge earlier in the week.
The dollar was changing hands at about 98.14 yen, up 0.6 percent from late U.S. trade on Tuesday. It was still down about 1.8 percent from a four-year high of 99.95 yen set last week.
The euro climbed 0.6 percent to 129.29 yen, although it still remained some way off a three-year peak of 131.10 yen hit last week.
A historic plunge in gold prices on Monday, coupled with concerns about China's economic growth had sapped risk sentiment and given a lift to the yen earlier this week, reversing a tide of selling sparked by the Bank of Japan's aggressive stimulus programme.
"We still believe that the recent volatility in the commodity prices was mainly driven by long position liquidation, while the underlying backdrop remains risk-positive due to expanding global monetary easing," said Vassili Serebriakov, strategist at BNP Paribas.
"Overall, we expect the focus to gradually shift back to JPY which remains the key driver of FX markets. We see renewed USD/JPY gains driven by Japanese investor outflows, targeting USD/JPY at 105 by year-end."
A focal point is whether Japanese investors will eventually look overseas for higher returns as the Bank of Japan injects about $1.4 trillion into the economy in two years as part of a dramatic plan to jump start growth.
"We expect significant outflows of capital from Japan and increased use of the yen as a funding currency," said Mitul Kotecha, Hong Kong-based head of foreign exchange strategy for Credit Agricole.
"We're forecasting 104 for dollar/yen by the end of the year," he said.
G20 MEETING
In the near-term, the market will be focused on the Group of 20 meeting beginning on Thursday in Washington, where finance ministers and central bankers from the world's leading economies will discuss the economic and financial market outlook, including the Cyprus crisis and asset price reactions.
It seems unlikely that Japan will face any significant criticism over the Bank of Japan's aggressive monetary easing at the G20 meeting, said Credit Agriole's Kotecha.
"Although there may be some warnings about not focusing on exchange rate levels, etc. I don't think there is going to be anything categoric to put pressure on Japan to change its monetary policy," Kotecha said.
A senior Canadian financial official said on Tuesday that Canada was supportive of Japan's effort to kick-start its economy and that the G20 believed policy should target domestic economies and not exchange rates.
Separately, a U.S. official said on Tuesday that ways to boost global demand to help the faltering recovery will be a key focus for the United States at the G20 meeting.
Asked about competitive devaluations and the impact of Japan's aggressive monetary policy on the yen, the U.S. official said the United States will be watching closely to see how effective the policies are at boosting Japanese demand.
The euro held steady against the dollar at $1.3174, after having hit a seven-week high of $1.3202 on Tuesday, partly helped by its bounce versus the yen.
The single currency had added to its gains on Tuesday after breaching resistance at its 100-day moving average at roughly $1.3155, a level which could now act as support for the euro.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Clays can expand under pressure
It was always believed that water is "squeezed" out of the clay structure under pressure but physicists at Umea University in Sweden together with German colleagues show that this appear to be not always true if excess of liquid water is available around. The new findings are published in Angewandte Chemie. 
Provided by Umea University
Clay minerals are among most common on the Earth and some of the most important materials in the construction and building industry. Layered structure of clays can easily be expanded if water is added. This phenomenon is called swelling and it is explained by the insertion of water into the inter-layer space of clays structures. Swelling affects all possible applications of these materials and is important for example in sealing of natural oil reservoirs as the hydrated clays are not permeable for oil.
Clay rocks are formed in nature by sedimentation and it is commonly supposed that water is released from hydrated clays under the influence of pressure increase, gravitational compaction, and formation of rock deposits. Therefore, it is expected that deeper in the earth the clays contain less water.
New experiments, performed at Umeå University in collaboration with team of German scientists, demonstrate that the structure of synthetic clays expands under pressure due to additional hydration if liquid water is available in the system.
"Previously we have found a similar phenomenon for graphite oxide which is also hydrophilic layered material but a non-natural material produced in the laboratory. The new study demonstrates that pressure induced water insertion is very general phenomenon as it is found in two rather different materials – graphite oxides and clays," says Alexandr Talyzin, researcher at the Department of Physics and co-author of the article.
Natural clays are notoriously difficult to use in structural studies due to their poorly ordered structures. Therefore, the researchers selected a specific type of synthetic clay material, Na- fluorohectorite, which was recently characterized very well at ambient pressure. It has been found to hydrate in clear steps connected to insertion of water monolayers and its structure preserves when pressure is increased.
At certain pressure point the researchers observed step-like increase of distance between the two- dimensional sheets of the clay material.
"The increased pressure caused water molecules to be inserted into the clays. It can be expected that a similar pressure-induced swelling effect will be found also among natural clay minerals," says Alexandr Talyzin.
In this case, water rich clays can possibly be found unexpectedly deep in the earth or in ocean sediments. It is also likely that exposed to various water solutions, clays can also adsorb additional amounts of organic matter under high pressure conditions and release it when pressure is decreased.
This possibility of accumulation of organic material could be a piece of the puzzle in the clay-related theories for the origin of life. Organic matter must be highly concentrated to produce such immensely complicated forms as life is.
The work was performed by the research group of Alexandr Talyzin group in collaboration with the team of Prof. Josef Breu at Bayreuth University, Germany.
More information: Shujie You, Daniel Kunz, Matthias Stöter, Hussein Kalo, Bernd Putz, Prof. Josef Breu, Alexandr V. Talyzin: Pressure-Induced Water Insertion in Synthetic Clays. Angewandte Chemie. DOI: 10.1002/anie.201210060
Provided by Umea University
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