Baltic Dry Index. 425 +04 Brent Crude 57.32 Spot
Gold 1584
Brexit now in effect.
Trump’s Nuclear China Tariffs Now in effect.
The USA v EU trade war started October
18. Now in effect.
Coronavirus Cases 08/2/20 China 35,010 Deaths 726 (Maybe.)
Coronavirus Cases 15/2/20 China 67,101 Deaths
1,526 (Maybe)
When the operations of
capitalism come to resemble those of the casino, ill fortune will be the lot of
the many.
John Maynard Keynes.
Prepare for the worst! While we can hope
for the best, global just in time supply chains are in collapse. So too is much
of the Chinese economy. An economy that accounts for about 18 percent of global
GDP, not that global GDP is really meaningfully measurable.
But manufacturing, retailing, tourism,
is in collapse in China and starting to widen out into the rest of Asia, and all
too soon will be affecting Europe and North America.
While this could change in the rest of
the year if China quickly contained the new still spreading Covid-19 virus, there’s
absolutely no sign of that happening any time soon. Even less sign that there
will be a medical antidote before sometime next year at the earliest.
While absolutely no one believes China’s
published figures on the new virus, nor their explanation of how, where and
when it arrived, even the rigged figures are alarming enough.
Even on the rigged figures covid-19 is
probably unstoppable short of isolating China, but is that even possible? And even if it were, it entails collapsing
the global economy as we know it.
So this weekend’s special update is a
recommendation to start preparing for the worst. Having feasted and binged on an unrepayable
mountain of central bankster fuelled massive artificially cheap debt, our
global economy is on the cusp of implosion. Helicopter money comes next.
But if covid-19 gets loose in the rest
of the world outside of China, I seriously doubt that even helicopter money can
alter the Great Retrenchment.
If covid-19 gets loose outside of China
the way it’s loose inside China, no one on planet earth has seen anything like
the destruction to come since the middle ages.
Get your facts first and
then you can distort them as much as you wish.
Mark Twain.
Under China's coronavirus lockdown, millions have nowhere to go
February 14, 2020 / 11:38 AM
(Reuters) -
Around 500 million people in China are currently affected by policies put
in place restricting movement, to contain the COVID-19 coronavirus.
That’s more than the entire population of the United States and is equivalent to roughly 6.5% of the world’s population.
As of
Friday, at least 48 cities and four provinces in China have issued official
notices for lockdown policies, with measures ranging from “closed-off
management”, where residents of a community have to be registered before they
are allowed in or out, to restrictions that shut down highways, railways and
public transport systems.
The lockdowns began with Wuhan - the epicentre of the outbreak and where half the world’s confirmed coronavirus cases are. After the city’s borders were closed on Jan. 23 and all incoming and outgoing flights cancelled, other nearby cities in Hubei province also implemented their own policies restricting the movement of people.
But not every city or province is facing Wuhan-like restrictions. Citizens cannot leave the cities of Wuhan, Huanggang, Ezhou and a few others in Hubei province, while Shanghai and Beijing have only put movement restrictions in place for some smaller communities such as building blocks or neighbourhoods.
Many cities have reduced public transport lines and routes, while few have closed intra-city public transport entirely. Altogether, 80.41 million people have been affected by shut bus or metro lines.
Some communities have instituted curfews or only allow people to exit and enter at particular times. There is even a restriction where only a certain number of people from a household can leave their residence at any one time.
The COVID-19 coronavirus has hit one of the most populated regions on the planet and thus has led to an unprecedented lockdown on the movement of people.
Over 1,700 frontline medics infected with coronavirus in China presenting new crisis for the government
Updated 0808 GMT (1608 HKT) February 14, 2020
(CNN)Ning Zhu, a nurse in Wuhan, the
central Chinese city at the heart of a deadly coronavirus outbreak, is restless.
Instead of helping on the frontlines, she has been under self-quarantine at home for weeks, after a chest scan on January 26 revealed that she had a suspected case of the novel Coronavirus.
Zhu was told to wait for a nucleic acid test that would provide the final verdict, but it never came.
"Right now, it's really a problem. Our hospital already has more than 100 people who are quarantined at home," she told CNN over the phone. An additional 30 medical workers have been confirmed to have the virus, she said.
"If the tests are fine, we can go back to work. I actually don't have any symptoms, there's just a slight problem with my CT scan, it seems there's a bit of infection," she said.
Zhu estimates that of the 500 medical staff at the hospital, more than 130 may have been stricken by the virus, which has so far infected more than 60,000 globally. She declined to publicize the name of her hospital and asked to use a pseudonym as she was not authorized to speak to the media.
The situation at her hospital is not unique. A nurse from the Wuhan Central Hospital said on Weibo, China's Twitter-like platform, that around 150 colleagues at her hospital have been confirmed or suspected to be infected -- including herself.
The nurse, who had been under self-quarantine at home since being infected last month, was finally admitted into the hospital she works at for treatment on Tuesday.
"The (in-patient) floor I live on is basically filled with colleagues from my hospital," she wrote in a post on Wednesday. "These are mostly double or triple rooms, with my colleagues' names and bed numbers clearly written in black and white on the doors."
----More than a thousand infected in Wuhan
Health care workers have long faced a high
risk of infection during major outbreaks, including the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic
that swept China from late 2002 to 2003. In Wuhan, the epicenter of the noval
corronavirus outbreak, however, that risk is now exacerbated by a dire shortage
of medical resources to cope with the influx of patients, as well as the
government's belated warning of the high-infection rate.
In Wuhan alone, 1,102 medical workers have been infected, accounting for 73% of infections in the province and 64% nationwide.
The city of 11 million people has 398 hospitals and nearly 6,000 community clinics. However, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission has designated nine hospitals to treat coronavirus cases, as well as an additional 61 hospitals whose outpatient clinics will receive patients with fever -- believed to be a common symptom of the pneumonia-like illness.
More
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/13/asia/coronavirus-health-care-workers-infected-intl-hnk/index.html
Coronavirus victim attended conference in London with 250 people
London's first Coronavirus patient arrived at hospital in
an Uber, contrary to public health advice
One of the UK's nine confirmed coronavirus patients attended a conference in central London last week alongside 250 people before they were diagnosed, it emerged last night.
Organisers of the UK Bus Summit, which took place on Tuesday Feb 6, wrote to attendees yesterday under the instruction of Public Health England to inform them they may have come into contact with a person confirmed to have the virus.
Among the speakers slated to attend the Transport Time event were MPs and industry leaders.
The one-day conference was held in Westminster at the QEII Centre, one of London's largest conference halls.
In an email, delegates were told to stay indoors and avoid contact with others if they were symptomatic, according to the Financial Times.
Chinese economy clobbered by coronavirus but set to recover soon - Reuters poll
February 14, 2020 / 12:25 AM
(Reuters) - The coronavirus-hit Chinese economy will grow
at its slowest rate since the financial crisis in the current quarter,
according to a Reuters poll of economists who said the downturn will be
short-lived if the outbreak is contained.
A Feb. 7-13
Reuters poll of 40 economists based in mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, as
well as Europe and the United States, predicted China’s annual economic growth
in the first quarter of 2020 to slump to 4.5% from 6.0% in the previous
quarter.
That drop was expected to drag down the full-year growth rate in 2020 to 5.5% from 6.1% in 2019, its weakest since at least 1990 when comparable records began.
However, economists were optimistic the economy would bounce back as soon as the second quarter, with growth then forecast to recover to a median 5.7%, according to the poll.
That figure was pushed higher by several optimistic forecasts from economists based in mainland China. The range was 2.9%-6.5%.
---- “Nobody knows the damage China’s virus containment efforts will have on growth, and we probably never will for sure, given the opacity of the statistics. We reckon true GDP growth will fall below 2% in Q1, from 4.0% in Q4, which already was substantially lower than the official 6.0%,” said Freya Beamish, chief Asia economist at Pantheon in London.
“The lost production probably will be made up over the remainder of this year. But some service sector activity simply will be lost... people aren’t going to get their hair cut twice because they missed getting it cut in Q1, or buy two coffees to make up for missed consumption.”
The enforced shutdown started during the Lunar New Year - usually the busiest time for most services businesses and according to most economists will accelerate an already-noticeable downturn before the outbreak.
When asked to comment on what would happen to the economy if Chinese authorities failed to contain the virus from spreading rapidly, some mainland economists were reluctant to respond.
Growth was expected to slow to 3.5% in the first quarter in a worst-case scenario, according to a median from 15 economists in response to a separate question, with forecasts ranging between zero and 5.5%.
“I think the virus will be under control by April. However, in the worst-case scenario, growth may fall to 2-3% in the first quarter and to 5% in (full-year) 2020,” said Bingnan Ye, senior macroeconomic analyst at Bank of China International in Beijing.
More
In other news, Europe’s just about succeeded in reaching recession even without help from covid-19.
Germany's economy stagnated in the fourth quarter
By Maria
Martinez Published: Feb 14, 2020
2:39 a.m. ET
Germany's
economy stalled in the fourth quarter, the German statistics office Destatis
said Friday.
The
country's gross domestic product remained flat at 0.0% compared with the
previous quarter, according to Destatis. This is below economists' expectations
of a 0.1% expansion in The Wall Street Journal's survey.
Weak manufacturing-orders and industrial-production data in December had raised fears that the economy stagnated or even contracted in 4Q.
The agency, however, also revised data for the third-quarter of 2019. Following the revision, Germany's GDP increased 0.2% in the period, compared with a first estimate of a 0.1% rise.
GDP grew 0.4% on year in the fourth quarter on a calendar and price-adjusted basis, Destatis said, in line with a Wall Street Journal poll of economists.
Opinion: Coronavirus could kill fragile hopes of European recovery
By Pierre
Briançon Published: Feb 12, 2020
7:39 a.m. ET
Economists agree that it is much too soon to assess the
real consequences of the coronavirus shock on global growth. But it is already
clear that it comes at the worst possible time for the European economy.At the very least, the disruption that the spread of the virus may soon cause in industrial production and exports could fail to quickly lift Europe out of the slump it went through in the last quarter of 2019. Eurostat, the EU statistics institute, said on Wednesday that industrial production had declined by 2.1% in December in the eurozone, compared with the previous month, and by 4.1% over the same month of 2018. That is a big fall, driven by the dismal performance of the German car industry.
But after that gloomy year-end, optimism seemed to be slowly returning among manufacturers. The embryo of a trade deal with China, diminished protectionist threats emanating from Washington, and even the vague possibility that a post-Brexit trade deal might be concluded between the U.K. and the EU, all created hopes that some form of recovery would happen in the first half of 2020.
It can still happen. According to Deutsche Bank analysts, the coronavirus so far might cost China between 0.3% and 0.5% of growth, which would in turn impact the rest of the world, notably big exporters such as Germany. If the impact stays at that limited level, the European economy will be able to cope. The European Central Bank expects eurozone gross domestic product growth to slow down to 1.1% this year.
There is no reason, for now, to expect a major hit from the new risk created by the fast-spreading virus. But sentiment here may be more powerful than actual facts. Just after the trade war threats that slowed global trade last year seemed to be receding, more uncertainty, delaying yet again investment decisions, will weigh on the already-fragile European economy.
Public calamity is a mighty leveller.
Edmund Burke.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished January
DJIA: 28,256
+97 Up. NASDAQ: 9,151 +152 Up. SP500: 3,226 +130 Up.
All higher again, but it’s not a buy signal I would take. The rally is all down to the Fed monetizing at a rate of about 100 billion a month. I continue to look on the Fed’s latest stock bubble as an exit rally, made all the more urgent by the still increasing coronavirus crisis.
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