Monday, 23 March 2020

WeWork Doesn’t. Asia Sinks. Another “Black Monday?”


Baltic Dry Index. 625 -05   Brent Crude 26.37 Spot Gold 1493

Covid-19 Pandemic finally underway, according to the WHO, at long last!

Coronavirus Cases 23/3/20 World 343,848  Deaths 14,923 (Maybe.)

Now the companies that borrowed big face a reckoning. Strategists at UBS Group AG estimate as much as $140 billion of investment-grade debt may fall to junk this year, driven by energy companies hit by a global demand slump and the Saudi-Russian oil price war. The strategists expect high-yield bond defaults to soar. “

Another “Black Monday” ahead? Well if the US Democrats in the Congress fail to deliver on a US economy rescue deal today, that’s pretty much guaranteed. They wouldn’t do that would they, just to try to sink President Trump’s re-election prospects in November?

Well given the weak leading Democrat candidate likely to face off against President Trump in November, they just might.

Below, Asian markets get off to a bad start.

Asian markets fall, led by plunge from Australian stocks

Australia’s share benchmark initially plunged 8.5% on Monday as work on more stimulus for the U.S. economy hit snags in the U.S. Senate. 

Sydney’s S&P/ASX 200 XJO, -5.61% was trading 7.8% lower after plunging sharply just after the open. South Korea’s Kospi 180721, -4.781% lost 4.3%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng HSI, -4.351% also lost 4.3%, while the Shanghai Composite SHCOMP, -2.395% slipped 2.5%. However, Japan’s Nikkei 225 index NIK, 2.058% held steady, gaining 0.5%.

Top-level negotiations between U.S. Congress and the White House continued after the Senate voted against advancing the $2 trillion economic rescue package.

The Democrats said the bill was tilted too much toward aiding corporations and would not do enough to help individuals and healthcare providers.

---- Markets reopened after the weekend to an altered business landscape as lockdowns and closures intended to halt the spread of the new coronavirus expanded to include many cities around the world and the number of people infected surged past 300,000.

Sydney’s S&P/ASX 200 plunged sharply just after the open. Australia announced at 66.4 billion Australian dollar ($38.5 billion) stimulus package on Sunday. That’s in addition to an earlier mandated $10 billion package and other stimulus from the central bank.

Stocks fell sharply on Wall Street and the price of oil sank again Friday as New York became the latest state to mandate that nearly all workers stay home to limit the spread of the coronavirus. California and several other states have also imposed limits on business activity.
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Dow futures plunge as coronavirus slams market, Fed official warns unemployment could hit 30%

Published: March 22, 2020 at 11:44 p.m. ET
U.S. stock-index futures fell by the most allowable for the day Sunday evening as the cases of coronavirus globally neared 330,000 and the market appeared unhappy with a lack of government action to address the current and expected fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

On top of that, a U.S. central bank official estimated that the unemployment rate could surge from just over 3% to 30% at its peak as businesses shutter in an effort to clamp down on the spread of the deadly illness.

After plunging 5% early in the session, futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average YMM20, -3.934% were last down 712 points, or 3.8%; those for the S&P 500 index ESM20, -3.823% were off 80 points, or 3,5%, at 2,304.92; while Nasdaq-100 futures NQM20, -3.203% were down 199 points, or 2.8%.

All three index futures hit their 5% daily limit at the open of trade, which began at 6 p.m. Eastern. Futures index moves that are greater than 5% trigger so-called limit-up and limit-down rules.

On Friday, the Dow DJIA, -4.54% fell 913.21 points, or 4.6%, at 19,173.98, representing the lowest level for the blue-chip gauge since Oct. 10, 2016. The S&P 500 index SPX, -4.33% closed at 2,304.92, down 104.47 points or 4.3%, marking its lowest level since Feb. 8, 2017, and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -3.79% shed 271 points to end at 6,879.52, a decline of 3.8% after hitting a high at 7,354.44 on the session.

The Dow is off 35.1% from its Feb. 12 peak, while the S&P 500 is 32% and the Nasdaq is down nearly 30% from their Feb. 19 peaks, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
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https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-futures-plunge-the-most-allowable-as-coronavirus-slams-market-fed-officials-warns-unemployment-could-hit-30-2020-03-22?mod=mw_latestnews

Things look grim and getting grimmer at Japan’s Softbank and WeWork. Bailout time? Just how bad would a WeWork bust become?

SoftBank to sell up to $41 billion assets to fund another share buyback, reduce debt

March 23, 2020 / 5:08 AM /
TOKYO (Reuters) - SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T) said on Monday it would sell up to 4.5 trillion yen (35.09 billion pounds) in assets to fund a share buyback of up to 2 trillion yen and reduce debt.

The share buyback is in addition to a buyback of up to 500 billion yen announced earlier this month.

WeWork board’s special committee is demanding that SoftBank follow through with investment

Five months after SoftBank agreed to a massive bailout of office-sharing start-up WeWork, a big part of the deal is in jeopardy of falling apart. A special committee to WeWork’s board is now trying to ensure that SoftBank doesn’t walk away.

In an emailed statement on Sunday, public relations firm Joele Frank said, “the Special Committee of the WeWork Board of Directors remains committed to taking all necessary actions to ensure that the tender offer which SoftBank has promised to our employees and shareholders is completed.”

Last week, reports surfaced that SoftBank may be backing off a $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares, as SoftBank’s struggles with its Vision Fund are exacerbated by recent the market downturn. That commitment was part of a larger package, along with a $1.5 billion acceleration of equity it already promised and $5 billion in syndicated debt. WeWork needs the fresh cash after the company’s IPO fell apart last year. 

---- “SoftBank has made numerous assurances to employees, and reneging on the agreement would be completely unethical, especially given the current environment,” the statement said. “The Special Committee continues to believe that completing the tender offer is fair and in the best interest of the Company, its stockholders and all WeWork shareholders, including our employees and former employees.”

It’s an awkward situation considering that the agreement gave SoftBank 80% control over WeWork and designated Marcelo Claure, SoftBank’s operating chief, as WeWork’s executive chairman. 

Claure is not on the special committee, which consists of early investor Bruce Dunlevie of Benchmark and Lew Frankfort, former CEO of handbag maker Coach. 

SoftBank responded in a statement, saying that it “continues to honor its obligations” under the agreement and that WeWork hasn’t satisfied all the conditions required for the deal to close. Still, SoftBank says it’s provided over $5 billion in capital to WeWork since October.
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Real Estate Billionaire Barrack Says Commercial Mortgages on Brink of Collapse

By Erik Schatzker
·        


Warns of cascade of margin calls, foreclosures, bank failures
·         White paper calls for banks, government to coordinate relief

Real estate billionaire Tom Barrack said the U.S. commercial-mortgage market is on the brink of collapse and predicted a “domino effect” of catastrophic economic consequences if banks and government don’t take prompt action to keep borrowers from defaulting.


Barrack, chairman and chief executive officer of Colony Capital Inc., warns in a white paper of a chain reaction of margin calls, mass foreclosures, evictions and, potentially, bank failures due to the coronavirus pandemic and consequent shutdown of much of the U.S. economy. The paper was posted late Sunday on online publishing platform Medium.

“Loan repayment demands are likely to escalate on a systemic level, triggering a domino effect of borrower defaults that will swiftly and severely impact the broad range of stakeholders in the entire real estate market, including property and home owners, landlords, developers, hotel operators and their respective tenants and employees,” he wrote.

Barrack said the impact could dwarf that of the Great Depression.
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Next, a trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money. Well fiat money anyway. Time to scale in to fully paid up physical gold and silver at bargain basement prices.

Central banks deploy record sums to break financial logjam, but may need more

March 23, 2020 / 5:02 AM
LONDON/BOSTON (Reuters) - Central banks have offered trillions of dollars of support to markets in recent days to keep them from freezing up, as investors worried about the economic damage from the coronavirus and made a chaotic dash for the exits.

While the intervention helped bring back some order to markets, policymakers may need to do more.
Investors, economists and bank strategists said they expect policymakers will have to step in with more support in the coming days to prop up both markets and the real economy - companies losing customers and workers thrown out of jobs.

There is a limit for now to how effective authorities can be, however, some said. Before investors calm down, these observers said, they will need to see a peak in new virus infection rates, an improvement in hospitals’ ability to cope with an influx of patients, and an end in sight to the 
economy-killing quarantines, travel bans and other restrictions being imposed to save lives.

“The best that economic and financial policymakers can do right now is limit the damage. They cannot turn the economy around because this is a health issue, not an economic or financial issue,” said Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic advisor to the German insurer Allianz SE < ALVG.DE>, in an interview.

Estimates of the sums required to keep Corporate America afloat are reaching eye-popping levels. Ray Dalio, founder of hedge fund giant Bridgewater Associates LP, estimates the financial losses for U.S. companies from the coronavirus-induced slump could be about $4 trillion. That’s nearly one-fifth the value of America’s total economic output last year. The government will have to come to the rescue, Dalio told Reuters via email, backed by a central bank that prints money.
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Australia adds $38 billion in stimulus; states move to tighten lockdown steps

March 21, 2020 / 1:10 PM
MELBOURNE/SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia’s government will spend additional A$66.4 billion ($38.50 billion) as part of a second stimulus package to shelter the economy from the financial impact of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Sunday, as states moved to impose major lockdowns.

The new stimulus will go to individuals in need and small and medium-sized businesses. Those businesses produce about a third of the country’s annual economic output and employ more than 40% of the workforce, according to government statistics.

“We will be focusing on those in the front line, those who will be feeling the first blows of the economic impact of the coronavirus,” Morrison said in Canberra on Sunday. “There will be more packages and more support.”

The package, which dwarfs the A$17.6 billion ($10.20 billion) in initial measures announced last week, came with a pledge by the government to enforce social distancing rules after many Australians appeared to disregard health warnings and flocked to pubs and beaches amid a warm autumn spell.

After an initial relatively slow spread, the number of coronavirus infections in Australia has been rising quickly in recent days, climbing to 1,098 confirmed cases as of Sunday morning with seven recorded deaths linked to COVID-19.

---- Together with more than A$100 billion announced earlier in emergency banking measures to prevent a credit freeze and the initial stimulus package, Australia has now announced financial measures equalling about 10% of the country’s annual gross domestic product, the government said.
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Below, everything you need to know about viruses, and an economic reality check from Canada.

What Are Viruses Anyway, and Why Do They Make Us so Sick? 5 Questions Answered

Viruses are basically parasites and, as such, can wreak havoc – but not always. They cause the most damage when jumping from a familiar host to a new host.

Marilyn J. Roossinck
Editor’s Note: You may sometimes have felt like you “have come down with a virus,” meaning that you became sick from being exposed to something that could have been a virus. In fact, you have a virus – actually, many – all the time. Some viruses cause the common cold, and some are crucial to human survival. New viruses can also emerge, and they typically create illness in humans when they have very recently jumped from another species to humans. As world health leaders try to determine how to respond to the new coronavirus, virus expert Marilyn J. Roossinck answers a few questions.

1. What Is a Virus?

Defining a virus has been a challenge, because every time we come up with a good definition someone discovers a virus that breaks the rules. Viruses are entities that infect cellular life. They are very diverse. The simplest just have a couple of genes made of RNA or DNA wrapped up in a protein coat. Others have hundreds of genes, more than some bacteria. 

All viruses are ultimately parasites. They require a host for replication. They cannot generate their own energy like cells can.

2. Why Does a Virus Make People Sick?

When a new human virus disease appears, it is most often because the virus has jumped from a different species into humans. The worst viruses are often the ones that have very recently jumped into the species. 

After jumping species, the virus goes through a process of adjustment to its new host. The real challenge, however, is to the host. As it tries to figure out how to adjust to an invasion from something completely new, the immune system overreacts. This is what makes the host sick. It usually isn’t an advantage for the virus to make people sick; it is an accident of the hosts’ immune system overreacting to something it doesn’t recognize.

Viruses that have been in a host for a long time are less likely to cause disease. For example, HIV jumped into humans from wild primates, in whose bodies it wasn’t causing any disease.

Every virus-host relationship is different. In most cases, viruses do not cause any disease, and many are beneficial. For example, in mice a herpes virus prevents infection from the plague bacteria.
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The coronavirus is pushing the world into unknown territory. Canada is especially vulnerable

Published March 21, 2020 Updated 8 hours ago 

This is a unique event in the history of the world. We have seen worse pandemics, though not since the 1918 influenza pandemic, killer of an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide. But we have never seen the kind of sharp and sudden economic contraction around the world that is now under way in response, in part because we have never seen the kind of comprehensive shutdown of economic activity that the world’s governments have imposed to fight the virus.

Nor have we seen, even in the depths of the financial crisis a decade ago, the kind of massive and near-instantaneous release of resources – monetary, fiscal and regulatory – by governments in major economies to lessen the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Governments, that is, are attempting to contract the economy and expand it at the same time, in each case on a scale never before attempted, based on the sketchiest of forecasts, and all in a matter of days.

So we are, in every sense, in unknown territory.

Start with the pandemic itself. On its own, the effect of the virus, or more particularly fear of the virus, would be paralysis quite unlike anything we have ever seen, as people shrank from each other to avoid contracting it. Now add in the restrictions on public activity, both broad and deep, enacted in the name of “social distancing.” A blizzard can shut down a city for a day or two; an earthquake can devastate a region for longer. But to shut down normal human activity worldwide – hundreds of millions of people on multiple continents are now subject to quarantines of greater or lesser severity, with more to follow as the virus spreads around the globe – for weeks, months, even a year? 
Unprecedented.

---- But the cost has also been immense. Not only has the supply of goods and services been restricted, whether by the ravages of the disease itself or the self-isolation edicts issued to curb its transmission, but also the demand, via the bans on any activity that involves gathering people in close proximity, from schools to restaurants to public entertainments to mass transportation. Add in the related collapse in the price of oil, and the impact of all this on investor confidence – reflected in the 30-per-cent fall in the S&P 500 since its mid-February peak, the fastest such descent in history – and you have the makings of the steepest drop in output since the Great Depression.

A recent report from JPMorgan Chase summarizes the likely carnage: For the first quarter of this year, the bank forecasts a 41-per-cent decline in real GDP, at an annual rate, in China, where the epidemic began; for the second quarter, declines of 22 per cent, annualized, in Europe and 14 per cent in the United States, after drops of 15 per cent and 4 per cent, respectively, in the first quarter. For comparison: In the worst quarter of the 2009 recession, output in Canada fell at an annualized rate of less than 9 per cent.

More, much, much, more.

Canada pulls out of 2020 Games as Japan, IOC consider postponement options

March 23, 2020 / 2:59 AM
TORONTO/TOKYO (Reuters) - Canada became the first country to boycott the Tokyo Games due to the coronavirus pandemic and Australia told its athletes to prepare for an Olympics next year as Japan and the IOC flagged the prospect of a postponement for the first time.

Opposition to holding the Games in July has risen sharply in the past 48 hours, with several major stakeholders such as U.S. Track and Field and UK Athletics, along with some national Olympic committees, calling for a delay because of the pandemic.

More than 13,000 people have died globally since the coronavirus outbreak began.

On Sunday, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said it would hold discussions that would include an option of putting back the July 24 start date or even moving the Games by a year or more.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told parliament on Monday postponing the Olympics may become an option if holding the Games in its “complete form” became impossible.

“If that becomes difficult, we may have no option but to consider postponing the Games, given the Olympic principle of putting the health of athletes first,” he said.

Abe also said calling off the Games entirely was not an option, echoing the IOC position in its statement that cancellation “was not on the agenda”.
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Finally, a contrarian view on the coronavirus crisis. With a little luck, self isolation, and if the virus is heat and humidity sensitive like a regular annual flu virus, he might be right. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

Why this Nobel laureate predicts a quicker coronavirus recovery: 'We're going to be fine'

Joe Mozingo,  LA TimesMarch 22, 2020
Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted.

Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world.

While many epidemiologists are warning of months, or even years, of massive social disruption and millions of deaths, Levitt says the data simply don't support such a dire scenario — especially in areas where reasonable social distancing measures are in place.

"What we need is to control the panic," he said. In the grand scheme, "we're going to be fine."

Here's what Levitt noticed in China: On Jan. 31, the country had 46 new deaths due to the novel coronavirus, compared with 42 new deaths the day before.

Although the number of daily deaths had increased, the rate of that increase had begun to ease off. Essentially, although the car was still speeding up, it was not accelerating as rapidly as before.

“This suggests that the rate of increase in number of the deaths will slow down even more over the next week,” Levitt wrote in a report he sent to friends Feb. 1 that was widely shared on Chinese social media. And soon, he predicted, the number of deaths would be decreasing every day.

Three weeks later, Levitt told the China Daily News that the virus' rate of growth had peaked. He predicted that the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in China would end up around 80,000, with about 3,250 deaths.

This forecast turned out to be remarkably accurate: As of March 16, China had counted a total of 80,298 cases and 3,245 deaths — in a nation of nearly 1.4 billion people where roughly 10 million die every year. The number of newly diagnosed patients has dropped to around 25 a day, with no cases of community spread reported since Wednesday.

Now Levitt, who received the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing complex models of chemical systems, is seeing similar turning points in other nations, even ones that did not instill the draconian isolation measures that China did.

He analyzed 78 countries with more than 50 reported cases of COVID-19 every day and sees "signs of recovery." He's not looking at cumulative cases, but the number of new cases every day — and the percentage growth in that number from one day to the next.

"Numbers are still noisy but there are clear signs of slowed growth."

-----Of course, recovering from an initial outbreak doesn't mean the virus won't come back: China is now fighting to stop new waves of infection coming in from places where the virus is spreading out of control. Other countries are bound to face the same problem as well.

Levitt acknowledges that his figures are messy, and that the official case counts in many areas are too low because testing is spotty. But even with incomplete data, "a consistent decline means there's some factor at work that is not just noise in the numbers," he said.

The trajectory of deaths backs up his findings, he said. So do data from outbreaks in confined environments, such as the one on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Out of 3,711 people on board, 712 were infected and eight died. In his view, this unintended experiment in coronavirus spread will help researchers estimate the number of fatalities that would occur in a fully infected population.

Levitt said the social-distancing mandates are critical — particularly the ban on large gatherings — because the virus is so new that the population has no immunity to it and a vaccine is still many months away. "This is not the time to go out drinking with your buddies."
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“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” 

Jerome Powell, with apologies to Lewis Carroll and Alice.

Crooks and Scoundrels Corner 

The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.

Today, Bloomberg muses on the death of globalisation. Perhaps local is better for all?

The Coronavirus Might Kill Globalization: Bloomberg New Economy
March 21, 2020, 10:45 AM GMT

As emergency room doctors and nurses in the U.S. prepare for the coronavirus onslaught, their 
desperation is building: Face masks are in short supply, so many will go into this life-and-death battle unprotected. If ever there was a moment for America and China to pull together, it’s now.

China makes half of the world’s medical masks, and dominates production of ventilators and respirators. But instead of collaborating on the manufacture and distribution of emergency gear, Washington and Beijing are engaged in a blame-game about the source of the virus, while upping the ante in their tit-for-tat expulsions of journalists.

These actions may have calamitous consequences, and not just for the fight against a once-in-a-century virus. It also augurs poorly for global struggles against climate change and weapons proliferation, not to mention globalization itself. 

In a hyper-connected world, there can be no global health security—or climate security, or economic security, or financial security—without the world’s two largest economies working closely together
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter recognized as much when he established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979: Cooperation on medicine and public health were a cornerstone of the deal.

Likewise, the first exchanges of journalists symbolized the critical importance of mutual understanding between the people of these two countries. Now, at a moment of global peril, the two governments are throwing away the benefits of four decades of engagement.

A similarly unfortunate dynamic is playing out in the European Union, which was founded on the ideals of amity and reconciliation between former wartime enemies—virtues that found expression in free trade and open borders. Now, as barriers go up across the continent, Germany, France and other nations are blocking export of face masks. Solidarity has given way to self-interest. A desperate Italy, now the epicenter of the pandemic with more than 41,000 infected and 3,400 dead, has turned from its bickering EU partners to China for needed medical supplies.

Globalization operates on the basis of trust. Specialization of production across borders creates mutual dependencies: Companies and countries willingly make themselves vulnerable to disruption from lengthy supply chains because of the gains to efficiency and profits. Why waste money filling warehouses with inventory when global production is optimized for “just-in-time” delivery?

But as Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman write in Foreign Affairs, in the midst of a pandemic, “just-in-time can easily become too late.”

We’ve seen sudden supply chain disruptions before. Floods in Thailand in 2011, and the earthquake and follow-on tsunami that devastated Japan that year, knocked out critical parts of the global electronics manufacturing network. But the world has never experienced a breakdown on this scale before. Globalization as we’ve known it may never fully recover.

The problem with barriers, both physical and virtual, is that they are easy to erect and hard to demolish. That’s especially true in the context of the world’s most important bilateral relationship. Hardline ideologues in Beijing have long been suspicious of foreign journalists just as hawks in Washington have argued supply chains that start in China are a threat to national security.

Nothing illustrates the mutual distrust more than the lack of coordination between the U.S. and China on medical masks, and the way each country is pursuing its own coronavirus vaccine. Plainly, the U.S. and China should be working night-and-day together on a cure: they have the world’s largest pools of scientists and researchers, the biggest troves of data, the most advanced life sciences and biotech industries. Yet they are largely going it alone. So is Europe.
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“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to." "I don't much care where –" "Then it doesn't matter which way you go.” 

The US Congress, with apologies to Lewis Carroll and Alice.

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?

Room-temperature bonded interface improves cooling of gallium nitride devices

Date: March 12, 2020

Source: Georgia Institute of Technology

Summary: A room-temperature bonding technique for integrating wide bandgap materials such as gallium nitride (GaN) with thermally-conducting materials such as diamond could boost the cooling effect on GaN devices and facilitate better performance through higher power levels, longer device lifetime, improved reliability and reduced manufacturing costs.

A room-temperature bonding technique for integrating wide bandgap materials such as gallium nitride (GaN) with thermally-conducting materials such as diamond could boost the cooling effect on GaN devices and facilitate better performance through higher power levels, longer device lifetime, improved reliability and reduced manufacturing costs. The technique could have applications for wireless transmitters, radars, satellite equipment and other high-power and high-frequency electronic devices.

The technique, called surface-activated bonding, uses an ion source in a high vacuum environment to first clean the surfaces of the GaN and diamond, which activates the surfaces by creating dangling bonds. Introducing small amounts of silicon into the ion beams facilitates forming strong atomic bonds at room temperature, allowing the direct bonding of the GaN and single-crystal diamond that allows the fabrication of high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs).

The resulting interface layer from GaN to single-crystal diamond is just four nanometers thick, allowing heat dissipation up to two times more efficient than in the state-of-the-art GaN-on-diamond HEMTs by eliminating the low-quality diamond left over from nanocrystalline diamond growth. 
Diamond is currently integrated with GaN using crystalline growth techniques that produce a thicker interface layer and low-quality nanocrystalline diamond near the interface. Additionally, the new process can be done at room temperature using surface-activated bonding techniques, reducing the thermal stress applied to the devices.

"This technique allows us to place high thermal conductivity materials much closer to the active device regions in gallium nitride," said Samuel Graham, the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair and Professor in Georgia Tech's George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. "The performance allows us to maximize the performance for gallium nitride on diamond systems. This will allow engineers to custom design future semiconductors for better multifunctional operation."

The research, conducted in collaboration with scientists from Meisei University and Waseda University in Japan, was reported February 19 in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces
The work was supported by a multidisciplinary university research initiative (MURI) project from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR).

For high-power electronic applications using materials such as GaN in miniaturized devices, heat dissipation can be a limiting factor in power densities imposed on the devices. By adding a layer of diamond, which conducts heat five times better than copper, engineers have tried to spread and dissipate the thermal energy.
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“It would be a brave, or foolish, man to call the bottom in equities without a dramatic medical breakthrough,” said Alan Ruskin, head of G10 FX strategy at Deutsche Bank.  

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.

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