Baltic Dry Index. 629 +17 Brent Crude 25.71 Spot Gold 1491
Covid-19 Pandemic finally
underway, according to the WHO, at long last!
Coronavirus Cases 19/3/20
World 219,345 Deaths 8,969 (Maybe.)
“Ultimately no amount of cash
or measures to mitigate the economic impact of the crash can tell investors
what they want to know right now, which is when daily life will return to
normal,” said Russ Mould, investment director at online broker AJ Bell.
Wednesday’s “sell everything” panic continues
this morning in Asia, despite massive promised “helicopter money” promised by our
totally panicked central banks.
For a third time in 20 years, our incompetent
central banksters, have blown stock, real estate, and “everything” bubbles,
only to have each bubble to blow up spectacularly with immensely damaging consequences
to the general public.
But this latest central bank bubble blow up is
special. It’s global, massive, covers nearly all sectors of society, is
generating massive unemployment not seen since the 1930s, and since last
September seems to be turning into a bond market financial crisis.
Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen and Powell all
tried to use insane debt fuelled, stock market bubbles to cover up the failings of the Great Nixonian
Error of fiat money, communist money, August 15, 1971.
At this point in time in 2020, all they may
have succeeded in getting us, is the first Great Depression starting since
1929.
These clowns are now attempting to restart
the “everything bubble,” with massive helicopter fiat money thrown at one and
all. Bernie Saunders magic money without the need to employ Bernie Saunders.
I have very little expectation for it to
work, and every expectation for it to fail and make our arriving depression worse
in the long run.
Below, the Great Sell Everything Panic.
"a company for carrying out an
undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is"
1720 South Sea Bubble.
Cash is king as emergency stimulus fails to stop market panic
March 19, 2020 /
12:21 AM / Updated an hour ago
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The dollar surged
and everything else was blown away on Thursday as emergency central bank
measures in Europe, the United States and Australia failed to halt a fresh wave
of panic selling.
“There’s no buyers, there’s not much liquidity and everyone is just
getting out,” said Chris Weston, head of research at Melbourne brokerage
Pepperstone. Stocks, bonds, gold and commodities fell as the world struggles to
contain coronavirus and investors and businesses scramble for hard cash.
U.S. stock futures EScv1 were a hair’s breadth from hitting session down
limits. The growth-sensitive Australian dollar was crushed 4% to a more than
17-year low.
Nearly every stock market in Asia was down and circuit breakers were hit
in Seoul, Jakarta and Manila. Traders reported huge strains in bond markets as
distressed funds sold any liquid asset to cover losses in stocks and
redemptions from investors.
Benchmark 10-year sovereign bond yields in Australia, New Zealand,
Malaysia, Korea and Singapore and Thailand surged as prices tumbled. Gold XAU=
fell 1% and copper hit its downlimit in Shanghai.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS
fell 5% to a four-year low, with Korea and Hong Kong leading losses.
The Nikkei .N225 fell nearly 1%, the ASX 200 nearly 3%, while the Kospi .KS11 lost 8% and the Hang Seng 5%.
“We’re in this phase where investors are just looking to liquidate their positions,” said Prashant Newnaha, senior interest rate strategist at TD Securities in Singapore.
Meanwhile, the virus outbreak has worsened. Italy on Wednesday reported the largest single-day death toll increase from coronavirus since the outbreak began in China in late 2019.
It has killed more than almost 9,000 people globally, infected more than 218,000 and prompted emergency lockdowns on a scale not seen in living memory.
J.P. Morgan economists forecast the U.S. economy to shrink 14% in the next quarter, and the Chinese economy to drop more than 40% in the current one, one of the most dire calls yet as to the scale of the fallout.
“There is no longer doubt that the longest
global expansion on record will end this quarter,” they said in a note. “The
key outlook issue now is gauging the depth and the duration of the 2020
recession.”
---- The selloff followed an attempt at stabilising in morning trade, with an ECB pledge to buy 750 billion euro (711.71 billion pounds) in bonds through 2020 offering some support.
In the afternoon the U.S. Federal Reserve promised a liquidity facility
for money market mutual funds.
The Reserve Bank of Australia also cut interest rates to a record-low
0.25% and announced an historic foray into quantitative easing after at an
out-of-cycle meeting.
But as with previous massive stimulus measures already announced by
central banks around the world, it offered little salve to dire sentiment.
More
Markets Enter New Phase—Where Cash Is All That Matters
Investors sold nearly everything they could Wednesday
By Paul J. Davies Updated March 18, 2020 5:34 pm ET
A rush for cash shook the financial system Wednesday, as companies and investors hunkered down for a prolonged economic stall, taking the recent market turmoil into a new, more troubling liquidation phase.
Investors sold nearly everything they could in the most all-encompassing market drawdown since the darkest days of the 2008 financial crisis. Short-term money markets at the heart of the financial system were strained and large companies have drawn heavily on credit facilities while they have them.
The selling engulfed stocks, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 1,338.46 points, or 6.3%, to 19898.92, its first close below 20000 in more than three years. The blue-chip index, which dropped more than 2,300 points earlier in the session, has fallen by about a third in just the past month.
Wednesday’s selloff crushed shares of companies as varied as airlines, restaurants, banks and retailers. The declines showed the extent to which investors are worried that the novel coronavirus pandemic—which has already forced airlines to cut flights and businesses to close—could send the economy into a recession.
Shares of Boeing Inc. tumbled 18%, while stock in Citigroup lost nearly 10% in value. A drop of more than 20% in the price of oil slammed shares of energy companies. Exxon Mobil Inc. fell 10% and has halved so far this year.
Several stocks fell so sharply that exchanges had to temporarily halt trading in them. One such stock, Alaska Air Group Inc., tumbled 23% Wednesday. Olive Garden owner Darden Restaurants Inc. slid 19%. Coty Inc., whose beauty portfolio includes Sally Hansen, dropped 31%.
In debt markets, the sell-everything approach drove down prices of safe investment grade bonds and government debt alongside stocks and commodities of nearly all stripes. Normally, when investors turn away from risky assets, they buy safer government debt—or if they are really frightened, gold. Investors appear to be putting their trust in only the shortest-term government bonds or cash.
----“There are very few places to hide. The tightening in financial conditions is happening across markets,” said Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, global markets strategist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. He pointed to strong selling of bond funds that own the debt of the safest big companies, which is causing corporate borrowing costs to rise despite central bank efforts to do the opposite.
Another factor pushing government bond yields higher: As investors dash for safety, they are contending with a potential massive new supply of government bonds that will be necessary to fund stimulus measures, including $1 trillion of spending discussed in Washington Tuesday. In the simplest terms, a greater supply of bonds should cause prices to fall and yields to rise.
More
Analysts slash China growth forecasts to record lows amid coronavirus
March 18, 2020 /
11:10 AM
BEIJING (Reuters) - Analysts are slashing their growth forecasts for
China to lows not seen since the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, as the
coronavirus pandemic takes its toll on the world’s second largest economy.
Most analysts now expect negative growth in the first quarter, with
projections dropping sharply after dismal activity data for the January and
February period was released Monday.
Most full year GDP forecasts are also now well below last year’s growth
of 6.1%
DBS says Singapore recession inevitable in 2020 due to coronavirus
March 19, 2020 /
3:41 AM
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore’s economy will contract by 0.5% in 2020,
the city-state’s biggest bank DBS said on Thursday, adding a recession was
inevitable due to an expected hit from the coronavirus outbreak.
DBS’s prior estimate was for the economy to grow 0.9%.
“A recession in Singapore appears inevitable, and we have revised our
full year GDP growth forecast for 2020 to -0.5% to reflect the recession
scenario,” said DBS economist Irvin Seah.
The government has already signalled a chance of a recession this year
and cut its growth forecasts.
The possibility of Singapore edging towards its first full-year
recession in nearly two decades is firming the case for the central bank to
loosen policy.
Airline industry turmoil deepens as coronavirus pain spreads
March 18, 2020 /
11:26 PM / Updated 17 minutes ago
SYDNEY/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Airline
industry turmoil deepened on Thursday as Qantas Airways Ltd (QAN.AX)
told most of its 30,000 employees to take leave and India prepared a rescue
package of up to $1.6 billion to aid carriers battered by coronavirus,
government sources said.
The U.N.’s International Civil Aviation Organization called on governments to ensure cargo operations were not disrupted to maintain the availability of critical medicine and equipment such as ventilators, masks, and other health and hygiene items that will help reduce the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
Passenger operations have collapsed at an unprecedented rate as the virus spreads around the world, with Delta Air Lines Inc (DAL.N) parking more than 600 jets, cutting corporate pay by as much as 50%, and scaling back its flying by more than 70% until demand begins to recover.
Shares in U.S. airlines fell sharply on Wednesday after Washington proposed a rescue package of $50 billion in loans, but no grants as the industry had requested, to help address the financial impact from the deepening coronavirus crisis.
The Trump administration’s lending proposal would require airlines to maintain a certain amount of service and limit increases in executive compensation until the loans are repaid.
American Airlines Group Inc (AAL.O) in a memo to staff rebuffed criticism that it had rewarded its shareholders with too many dividends and stock buybacks in better times, leaving it with less cash to manage the crisis.
“Unfortunately, this is no ordinary rainy day,” said Nate Gatten, American’s senior vice president global government affairs. “These are extraordinary circumstances, and additional support is necessary to protect jobs and ensure that the flying public can continue to rely on our industry after the crisis ends.”
More
Below, total central bank panic.
Start up the helicopters. A disaster in the making long term, but who’s
thinking about the long term now. Free money for all! Spend it fast while it
still has purchasing power.
U.S. Fed moves to ensure liquidity in money market mutual funds
March 19, 2020 /
3:47 AM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve on Wednesday night
rolled out its third emergency credit program in two days, announcing it would
make loans to banks that offer as collateral assets purchased from money market
mutual funds.
The new facility through the Boston Federal Reserve bank will offer
“support for the flow of credit to households and businesses” by ensuring the
$3.8 trillion money market mutual fund industry can sell its holdings of U.S.
Treasury bonds and other high quality assets at full value if investors ask to
withdraw their cash.
Japan may hand out cash to households in stimulus package to battle virus fallout
March 19, 2020 / 2:35
AM
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan will look into
offering cash payouts to households as part of a stimulus package that could be
worth more than $276 billion to combat the widening fallout from the
coronavirus outbreak, joining efforts across the world to roll out huge fiscal
support to fend of recession risks.
Economy Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura said the stimulus package, likely
to be compiled by the government in April, will be bold enough to fend off a
crisis he described as potentially more serious than when the collapse of
Lehman Brothers in 2008 jolted financial markets.
“We’d like to look into various possibilities including on the size of
any cash payouts,” Nishimura told reporters after a cabinet meeting on
Thursday, though he could not say at this stage what the size of the package
would be.
The Sankei newspaper reported on Thursday Japan’s ruling coalition was
considering an economic package worth more than 30 trillion yen (239.83 billion
pounds) to deal with the virus fallout.
That would far exceed the 26-trillion-yen stimulus package the
government compiled in December last year to ease the impact from the
U.S.-China trade war on the export-reliant economy.
“It’s a crisis situation now, so the government will likely use as much
money as needed,” a senior government official told Reuters.
More
South Korea pledges $39 billion emergency funding for coronavirus-hit small business
March 19, 2020 /
1:26 AM
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean President
Moon Jae-in on Thursday pledged 50 trillion won ($39 billion) (33.93 billion
pounds) in emergency financing for small businesses and other stimulus measures
to prop up the country’s coronavirus-hit economy.
The package is the latest in a string of steps Seoul has taken in recent
days to curb pressure on Asia’s fourth-largest economy, including an interest
rate cut, an extra 11.7 trillion won budget and more dollar supplies.
The government will issue loan guarantees for struggling small
businesses with less than 100 million won in annual revenue to ensure companies
can easily and cheaply access credit, Moon said.
Local commercial banks and savings banks will also allow loans to be
rolled over for small businesses if they cannot afford to pay off the loan when
it is due, he said.
“We’ve decided to take the measures to prevent small and medium firms
and merchants and the self-employed from going bankrupt and ease anxiety in the
financial sector”, Moon told an emergency economic policy meeting.
“As the situation unfolds, we will scale them up if necessary.”
The crisis has jolted South Korea’s financial market, soured business
and consumer confidence and disrupted manufacturing.
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 152 new
cases on Thursday, taking the country’s total infections to 8,565.
More
Finally, how exactly will
helicopter money cure this?
How long will coronavirus last? It depends — but ‘prepare yourself for a long ride’
Published: March 18, 2020 at 6:24 a.m. ET
The reality of the global COVID-19 pandemic in America has
started to set in. An avalanche of school
closures, remote-work mandates, large-event cancellations, and travel
disruptions have ground normal life to a halt. Some people have
lost jobs or seen
business suffer. Many are stockpiling emergency supplies and finally
learning how to wash
their hands properly.Governments around the world are in race to stem the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new virus SARS-CoV-2. Worldwide, there were 198,756 confirmed cases and 7,955 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering. In the U.S. there have been 1,960 confirmed cases and more than 100 deaths.
As the deadly coronavirus threatens to upend economic, professional and personal lives, one big question weighs on everyone’s mind: How long will this last?
That will depend on several variables, according to public health experts, some of which remain unknown. For instance, scientists still don’t know whether warm weather will suppress the virus, as it does the seasonal flu, said Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development think tank and former USAID official in the Obama administration, told MarketWatch.
Experts also don’t know whether COVID-19 will become a seasonal bug akin to influenza, or whether it might return in the fall in a mutated form, said Joshua Epstein, a professor of epidemiology at the NYU School of Global Public Health. Even after a vaccine is developed, he added, some Americans are likely to refuse it.
One thing seems clear: “The length of time that this is with us is really a function of how good a job we do right now of limiting the spread,” Konyndyk told MarketWatch.
To that end, the CDC has urged “social distancing” — that is, steering clear of mass gatherings and staying about six feet away from other people when possible — to help slow the transmission of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. And, counterintuitively, a longer period of precautions like social distancing could mean better outcomes in the long run, experts say.
----
Social distancing can take an economic and psychological toll. But in the end,
“if you feel like this was all for nothing, then you’ve done it right,” said
epidemiologist Emily Landon, the medical director for infection prevention and
control at University of Chicago Medicine.
“If we spread this out over longer periods of time, then people will feel like, ‘Well, it wasn’t that bad — only one person I knew was in the hospital at a time, and I stayed home but nothing horrible ever happened,’” Landon said. Ideally, she added, most people who took precautions against the pandemic will feel like it was “a big nothingburger.”
In a worst-case scenario, the disease could infect 160 million to 214 million people in various U.S. communities over the course of months or a year, with up to 200,000 to 1.7 million potential fatalities and between 2.4 million and 21 million hospitalizations, according to projections by CDC officials and epidemic experts reported by the New York Times. But those figures don’t take into account the present actions aimed at slowing the disease’s spread, such as social distancing, virus testing and contact-tracing, the report said.
Experts who spoke to MarketWatch hesitated to predict the “end” of the coronavirus given the number of unknowns, but they had some ideas of how coming weeks and months might play out.
---- In a best-case scenario, steps like social distancing could suppress COVID-19 transmission, Epstein said, though that would depend heavily on people’s behavior. Late spring would roll around, with “possible responses of the virus to warmer weather” and people spending time outside rather than cooped up in close quarters.
Konyndyk said he wasn’t sure how long social-distancing measures in the
U.S. would be in effect, but recommended that people mentally prepare. “Life in
the country is going to be different for the next few months — how different
and how long is hard to say,” he said. “I don’t know how long, but prepare
yourself for a long ride.” Epstein echoed that sentiment: “Get ready to hunker
down.”
More
If the financial system
goes down, our business is going down and, trust me, yours and everyone else's is going down, too.
Lloyd Blankfein’s CEO Goldman
Sachs, threat 2008. “Mr. Goldman Sacks.”
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled
over.
Today, coronavirus, the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Coronavirus can persist in air for hours and on surfaces for days: study
March 17, 2020 /
7:42 PM / Updated 3 hours ago
(Reuters)
- The highly contagious novel coronavirus that has exploded into a global
pandemic can remain viable and infectious in droplets in the air for hours and
on surfaces up to days, according to a new study that should offer guidance to
help people avoid contracting the respiratory illness called COVID-19.
Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, attempted to
mimic the virus deposited from an infected person onto everyday surfaces in a
household or hospital setting, such as through coughing or touching objects.
They used a device to dispense an aerosol that duplicated the
microscopic droplets created in a cough or a sneeze.
The scientists then investigated how long the virus remained infectious
on these surfaces, according to the study that appeared online in the New
England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday - a day in which U.S. COVID-19 cases
surged past 5,200 and deaths approached 100.
The tests show that when the virus is carried by the droplets released
when someone coughs or sneezes, it remains viable, or able to still infect
people, in aerosols for at least three hours.
On plastic and stainless steel, viable virus could be detected after
three days. On cardboard, the virus was not viable after 24 hours. On copper,
it took 4 hours for the virus to become inactivated
In terms of half-life, the research team found that it takes about 66
minutes for half the virus particles to lose function if they are in an aerosol
droplet.
That means that after another hour and six minutes, three quarters of
the virus particles will be essentially inactivated but 25% will still be
viable.
The amount of viable virus at the end of the third hour will be down to
12.5%, according to the research led by Neeltje van Doremalen of the NIAID’s Montana
facility at Rocky Mountain Laboratories.
On stainless steel, it takes 5 hours 38 minutes for half of the virus
particles to become inactive. On plastic, the half-life is 6 hours 49 minutes,
researchers found.
On cardboard, the half-life was about three and a half hours, but the
researchers said there was a lot of variability in those results “so we advise
caution” interpreting that number.
The shortest survival time was on copper, where half the virus became
inactivated within 46 minutes.
Technology Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy
mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards?
How impermeable is the impermeable graphene?
12 March 2020
New experiments by researchers at The University of Manchester have
placed the best limits yet on impermeability of graphene and other two-dimensional
materials to gases and liquids. The work has also revealed that the carbon
sheet can act as a powerful catalyst for hydrogen splitting, a finding that
promises cheap and abundant catalysts in the future.
Graphene theoretically boasts a very high energy for the penetration of
atoms and molecule, which prevents any gases and liquids from passing through
it at room temperature. Indeed, it is estimated that it would take longer than
the lifetime of the Universe to find an atom energetic enough to pierce a
defect-free monolayer graphene of any realistic size under ambient conditions,
say the researchers led by Professor Sir Andre Geim. This hypothesis is
supported by real-world experiments performed over a decade ago which found
that one-atom-thick graphene was less permeable to helium atoms than a quartz
film of a few microns in thickness. Although the film is 100,000 thicker than
graphene, this is still very far from the theoretical limit.
Perfectly sealed containers
The Manchester team developed a measurement technique that is many
billion times more sensitive to permeating gas atoms than any of the known
methods. In their study, reported in Nature, they began by drilling
micron-sized wells in monocrystals of graphite or boron nitride, which they
covered with a one-atom-thick graphene membrane. Since the top surface of these
containers is atomically flat, the cover provides a perfect air-tight seal. The
only way that atoms and molecules can enter a container is through the graphene
membrane. The membrane itself is flexible and responds to minor changes in
pressure inside the container.
The researchers then placed the containers in helium gas. If atoms enter
or exit a container, the gas pressure inside increases or decreases,
respectively, and makes the surface of the cover bulge over some small
distances. The team monitored these movements with angstrom precision using an
atomic force microscope.
“
The new result backs up (and provides an explanation for) some of the
previous reports in the literature on graphene’s unexpectedly high catalytic
activity, which was particularly counterintuitive because of the extreme
inertness of its bulk parent, graphite.
Professor Sir Andre Geim
From changes in
the membrane position, the number of atoms or molecules penetrating through
graphene can be calculated precisely. The researchers found that no more than a
few helium atoms - if any - entered or exited their container per hour. “This
sensitivity is more than eight to nine orders of magnitude higher than achieved
in previous experiments on graphene impermeability, which themselves were a few
orders of magnitude more sensitive than the detection limit of modern helium
leak detectors. To put this into perspective, one-atom-thick carbon is less
permeable to gases than a one-kilometre-thick wall of glass”, explains Geim.
More
Alan Schwartz, CEO Bear Stearns, March 12, 2008.
Bust March 16, 2008.
The Monthly Coppock Indicators finished February
DJIA: 25,409 +75 Down. NASDAQ: 8,567 +171 Up.
SP500: 2,954 +133 Up.
In current circumstances,
this is no time to be blindly following technical signals. Given the
severity of the still growing coronavirus crisis, I wouldn’t follow technical
signals in what I think will turn into the first depression since the 1930s.
Barring a miracle recovery in all three markets, the monthly Coppock indicators
are heading for a reversal at the month-end.
No comments:
Post a Comment