Baltic Dry Index. 694 -34 Brent Crude 22.30
Spot Gold 1713
Coronavirus Cases 23/4/20
World 2,648,514 Deaths 184,524
“There's
danger in just shovelling out money to people who say, 'My life is a little
harder than it used to be. At a certain place you've got to say to the people,
'Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope. '”
Charlie Munger, Vice Chairman Berkshire Hathaway, 2010.
Note
to President Trump, the US Congress, the Treasury, the Fed, send lots more
money urgently, the last lot’s already gone into a bottomless pit and
disappeared!
We
open with vastly over priced stocks continuing 2020s vast churn and burn. Will
someone push the button that summons the instant money help.
Stocks, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.
Asia stocks pull ahead on U.S. stimulus, oil rebound
April 23, 2020 /
12:57 AM
WASHINGTON/SYDNEY
(Reuters) - Asian stock markets rose on Thursday as the combination of a
rebound in crude prices from historic lows and the promise of more U.S.
government aid to cushion the coronavirus-ravaged economy helped calm nervous
markets.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia Pacific shares outside of Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS bounced from two-week lows to be up 0.5% at 460.43 points.
Australian S&P/ASX added 0.4%, Chinese shares opened firm with the blue-chip index .CSI300 up 0.3%. Japan's Nikkei .N225 climbed 0.8%.
The gains followed a strong overnight lead from Wall Street with the Dow .DJI up 2%, S&P 500 .SPX adding 2.3% and Nasdaq .IXIC rising 2.8%.
All 11 S&P 500 sector indexes climbed as the U.S. Senate unanimously approved the new relief package, adding to trillions of dollars in stimulus that has helped Wall Street rebound from its March lows.
The House of Representatives is expected on Thursday to clear the relief, which would be the fourth coronavirus measure passed by Congress, and would boost the overall federal financial response to almost $3 trillion.
Stock markets may have bottomed out after the impressive bounce since a
rout last month, analysts said.
Even so, the recent recovery has been narrowly focussed on the big tech
firms, said Seema Shah, chief strategist at Principal Global Investors.
Four out of every five stocks are still in a bear market while European
benchmark equity indices and the U.S. small-cap index are also in bear
territory, “throwing severe doubts on the impression that investors are
optimistic about the outlook,” she added.
More
For SoftBank's Son, coronavirus turns vision to illusion
April 23, 2020 /
4:41 AM
BANGALORE/TOKYO
(Reuters) - SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T)
founder Masayoshi Son’s dream of a global tech empire is unravelling, with the
coronavirus crisis compounding losses at his $100 billion Vision Fund and
distress at his big bets portending more pain
More than half of the fund’s capital is in startups that are suffering
from the virus impact or exhibiting stress pre-dating the outbreak, a Reuters
analysis showed. Ride-hailing usage at flagship transport investments has
fallen more than 50% and six SoftBank-backed startups have pushed IPO plans
from this year to next.
The Japanese conglomerate has already flagged a 1.8 trillion yen ($17
billion) loss at the fund for the year to March - during which Son’s
“intuitive” bet WeWork spectacularly imploded - unsettling Middle Eastern
backers which stumped up much of the fund’s money.
Though many problems at portfolio firms pre-date the pandemic, the
resulting economic meltdown has exposed what critics have long called an
extraordinarily risky strategy of ploughing huge sums into unproven businesses
in the expectation that would enable them to dominate big new markets.
“The Vision Fund has been a mess. It has been a case of an organisation
with too much money just splashing it around without doing enough due
diligence,” said Joe Bauernfreund, chief executive of SoftBank shareholder
Asset Value Investors.
Son transformed SoftBank into a tech investor over
the past three years and raised the world’s biggest late-stage investment fund
in the Vision Fund. To be sure, some investments are doing better, but examples
are scant as the pandemic magnifies problems.
The pain is particularly keen in transport and real estate, which make
up $43 billion of investment and include car-share firm Getaround, home-seller
OpenDoor and real estate brokerage Compass.
Restrictions on movement worldwide has hit the market for the
portfolio’s four major ride-hailing firms, with India’s Ola suspending
operations in cities in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, three people with
knowledge of the matter said.
SoftBank and Ola declined to comment.
U.S. peer Uber Technologies Inc (UBER.N), whose stock is stuck 40% below its 2019 initial public offering (IPO) price, last month said it had sufficient cash reserves to weather the crisis. Southeast Asia’s Grab said its food delivery business is doing well. China’s Didi declined to comment.
The fund does not include all $13 billion invested with SoftBank itself in office-share startup WeWork, or SoftBank’s bet on satellite operator OneWeb, which filed for bankruptcy protection last month.
Among SoftBank-backed startups, at least six that have pushed back IPO plans to 2021, including BigCommerce, which powers e-commerce sites for the likes of Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) and Sony Corp (6758.T), said the three people, who were not authorised to speak with media so declined to be identified.
More
When $8 Trillion in Global Fiscal Stimulus Still Isn’t Enough
By Michelle Jamrisko and Gregor Stuart Hunter
·
·
Significant amount of global stimulus includes
bank guarantees
As governments dedicate more than $8 trillion to fight the coronavirus pandemic, a further widening in the gap between rich and poor countries threatens to exacerbate the global economy’s pain.
Wealthy nations have delved deep to cushion the blow. For instance, Germany and Italy have each allocated more than 30% of gross domestic product to direct spending, bank guarantees, and loan and equity injections, for a combined $1.84 trillion in aid, figures from the International Monetary Fund show.
Yet the countries IMF analysts say they’re most concerned about have only been able to trickle out support: Many African and Latin American economies have failed to reach even a few billion dollars in fiscal aid, according to IMF data and reporting from more than 60 countries collated by Bloomberg News.
More
Next, did Trump, via his son-in-law, just
blow up US frackers and US banks?
EXCLUSIVE: Saudis launched oil price war after 'MBS shouting match with Putin'
Saudi
crown prince threatened Russian president over production cuts prior to
flooding market. 'The call ended badly,' sources tell MEE
Published date: 21
April 2020 14:05 UTC
A telephone call last month between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman degenerated into a shouting match just before Riyadh decided to flood the market with oil in a move which sent prices spiralling.
Saudi officials with knowledge of the disastrous call told Middle East Eye that the row threatened to undo months of detente between the two countries, in which a significant arms trade was also agreed.
The call took place just before an Opec+ meeting on 6 March, in which major oil producers failed to agree a deal on cutting production despite falling global demand as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Just before that meeting there was a call between Putin and MBS. MBS was very aggressive and gave an ultimatum. He threatened that if there is no agreement, Saudi would start a price war.
"The conversation was very personal. They shouted at each other. Putin refused the ultimatum and the call ended badly,” the Saudi official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Before getting aggressive with Putin, bin Salman checked in with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, who has been described as “the prince's most important defender inside the White House”, according to a second source who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
“The call [to Putin] had Trump’s blessing through Kushner. Kushner did not ask MBS to do it, but Kushner knew about it and did not veto it. Bin Salman drew his own conclusions,” the source said.
Oil prices plummeted after the meeting in which Opec, Russia and other countries failed to agree on proposed cuts of 1.5m barrels a day. Reports of the meeting suggested that Saudi Arabia had tried to "strong arm" Russia, with one industry analyst commenting: "We have just witnessed the perils of backing Putin into a corner."
The collapsing oil price was initially hailed by Trump, who initially presented it as an opportunity to fill up the US’s own reserves with cheap oil.
“We’re going to fill it right up to the top, saving the American taxpayer billions and billions of dollars, helping our oil industry [and furthering] that wonderful goal - which we’ve achieved, which nobody thought was possible - of energy independence,” he said.
But the White House subsequently reversed course after protests from US oil producers, many of whom have invested in more costly shale oil extraction and require significantly higher prices in order to break even.
More
The Worst Is Yet To Come For Oil Prices
Dashing hopes for some oil producers who may have thought negative
prices were a weird quirk, the June WTI contract fell sharply on Tuesday.
During intraday trading June contracts collapsed by more than 45
percent, falling close to $11 per barrel. The selloff demonstrated that the
ruinous supply glut is not going away, and that the meltdown for the May
contract was not just a bizarre anomaly, but representative of an acute state
of oversupply in North America.
In fact, there could be a rerun of negative prices in a month’s time,
according to several analysts. “We believe prices are likely to remain at
basement levels in the short-term with further shut-ins forthcoming - expect
late-May to bring similar price movements as the June contract rolls over,”
Raymond James wrote in a note on Tuesday.
The malaise bled over into Brent prices, which collapsed below $20 per
barrel by midday Tuesday, down more than 25 percent.
While forecasts have suggested that U.S. oil production could fall by 1
or 2 or 3 million barrels per day (mb/d) by the end of 2021, depending on who
you ask, the lack of storage and collapsing prices means that shut ins could
begin to mount very quickly. “[T]he physical reality of a still massively
oversupplied oil market will likely exert downward pressure on the June WTI
contract,” Goldman Sachs analysts wrote on Tuesday. “But with ultimately a
finite amount of storage left to fill, production will soon need to fall
sizeably to bring the market into balance, finally setting the stage for higher
prices once demand gradually recovers.”
“This inflection will play out in a matter of weeks, not months, with the market likely forced to balance before June,” Goldman analysts warned. In other words, the U.S. oil industry could lose several million barrels per day in the next few weeks in what Goldman analysts called a “violent rebalancing.”
The crisis for the industry has entered a new phase, which will surely provoke more twists and turns. The Trump administration, flailing about, is trying to come up with ways to bailout the industry. On Monday, President Trump suggested that he would consider halting imports of oil from Saudi Arabia (“We’ll look at it”), while also reiterating his plan to fill up the strategic petroleum reserve with 75 million barrels of oil.
On Tuesday, he tweeted that he ordered the Secretaries of Energy and Treasury to come up with a rescue plan.
My
guess is that the rescue plan will be to pay frackers for the in ground oil
with a restriction on drilling “temporarily.”
The deeply in debt frackers will likely use the money to play the oil
contango slide, by shorting the December contract at say 35 hoping to slide down the contango to cover
at 15.
Easy
money provided Trump doesn’t start a war with Iran, turning the contango into a
backwardation in a heartbeat, generating an instant need for all that
unproduced oil.
Finally,
how the Democrats plan to buy the White House in November. Shame about losing
the fiat dollar’s reserve status if implemented.
Opinion: One $1,200 stimulus check won’t cut it. Give Americans $2,000 a month tax-free to fire up the economy
Published: April 21, 2020 at 4:30 p.m.
ET By [Representative]
Tim Ryan
Since the coronavirus struck our shores, my focus has been
on keeping Americans safe and ensuring working people don’t get left behind.
Their struggles today are greater than ever. Too many have suffered job losses,
shrinking income, isolation, and health issues — all while caring for children
and other loved ones.The one-time $1,200 stimulus check that many Americans are now receiving under the CARES Act was a good start, but it does not go far enough as this quarantine enters its second month. Rent is still due, credit card bills keep coming in, utilities still need to be paid, our phone plans haven’t gotten cheaper, we still need to buy groceries to feed our families. How far do politicians think one $1,200 check can stretch?
That is why Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) and I introduced the
Emergency Money for the People Act, which will provide almost every American
$2,000 per month until employment levels reach pre-coronavirus levels. Every
American age 16 and older who earns less $130,000 per year will receive this
money tax-free.
Congress recently passed three different bills in response to the
coronavirus. They included trillions of dollars of assistance for individuals
and businesses, and while I supported all three, we immediately started
noticing that many of Rep. Khanna’s constituents in Silicon Valley and my
constituents in Youngstown, Ohio were still falling through the cracks.
I spoke to a woman who is low-income and receives Supplemental Security
Income (SSI); she takes care of five other people in her home, yet was not
eligible for the $1,200 check. I heard from a constituent on disability who has
custody of her children, but the $1,200 check went to her former spouse. I
talked to a college freshman living by himself, independent of his parents, but
he did not qualify for any assistance.
This is just a small snapshot of the what real Americans are going
through every day. They deserve a fair shake. They deserve to be cut in on the
deal.
A one-time payment is simply not enough to sustain most Americans for the length of this crisis. One of the most important things we can do right now is to put cash in the hands of average hard-working Americans. Consumer spending makes up roughly 70% of U.S. gross domestic product, so how will our small businesses survive if their customers don’t have money in their pockets? The old strategies have failed us. This is an unprecedented crisis, and it is time for government to respond in an unprecedented way.
Up to $5,500 a month for families
How is the Emergency Money for the People Act different from the $1,200 provided in the CARES Act? First, this is not a one-time payment. These payments will be guaranteed for a minimum of six months, continuing until the U.S. employment rate reaches pre-coronavirus levels. Second, payments will be increased to $2,000. Third, unlike with the CARES Act, college students and adults with disabilities will receive the payments even if claimed as a dependent by someone else. Finally, realizing that not everyone has a bank account or a permanent home address, the money will be made available in more ways, with payments coming through direct deposit, check, pre-paid debit card, or mobile money platforms such as Venmo, Zelle, and PayPal.
More
“To get what you want, you have
to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a
whole bunch of undeserving people.”
Vice Chairman Berkshire
Hathaway.
Covid-19 Corner
Though
hopefully, we are passing the peak of new cases, at least of the first
SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, this section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
'A disaster': Roche CEO's verdict on some COVID-19 antibody tests
April 22, 2020 /
6:27 AM
ZURICH
(Reuters) - Some blood tests being marketed to tell people if they have had the
new coronavirus are a “disaster”, Roche (ROG.S) Chief Executive
Severin Schwan said on Wednesday as he prepares to launch the drugmaker’s own
antibody test next month.
Roche’s (ROG.S) diagnostics business has moved out of the shadow of its main medicines unit during the pandemic, as the Swiss pharma giant confirmed its 2020 sales and profit outlook amid rising demand for COVID-19 testing.
Countries around the world hope such blood tests - meant to show whether people exposed to the disease have developed antibodies thought to offer some immunity - will guide efforts to restart their economies and keep healthcare workers safe.
An erroneous false-positive result could lead to the mistaken conclusion that someone has immunity. In developing its test, Schwan said, Roche scrutinised some existing products for reliability before rejecting them.
“It’s a disaster. These tests are not worth anything, or have very little use,” Schwan told reporters on a conference call. “Some of these companies, I tell you, this is ethically very questionable to get out with this stuff.”
Schwan said there were about 100 such tests on offer, including finger-prick assays that offer a quick result. The Basel-based company declined to specify which rival tests it had studied, but said it was not referring to tests from established testing companies.
More
First U.S. coronavirus death occurred in early February in California
April 22, 2020 /
9:14 AM
(Reuters)
- Health officials in California’s Santa Clara County have identified two
people who died from the new coronavirus in early and mid-February, making them
the earliest known victims of the outbreak in the United States.
It was previously thought that the first U.S. death from COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus, was a man in his 50s who died in Washington state on Feb. 29.
"The Medical Examiner-Coroner performed autopsies on two individuals who died at home on February 6, 2020 and February 17, 2020", Santa Clara County Public Health said in a statement bit.ly/2VqjBxa.
“Today, the Medical Examiner-Coroner received confirmation from the CDC that tissue samples from both cases are positive for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19)”, the statement added.
The county’s medical examiners also confirmed on Tuesday that another death there early in March was caused by COVID-19.
The victims died at home during a time when very limited testing was available only through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to the statement, which added that additional deaths from the outbreak were expected to be identified.
The testing parameters set at the time by the CDC restricted testing to individuals with a known travel history and who sought medical care for specific symptoms.
News of the deaths in California could improve public health officials’ understanding of how the outbreak took hold in the United States.
U.S. coronavirus deaths topped 45,000 on Tuesday, doubling in a little over a week and rising by a near-record amount in a single day, according to a Reuters tally reut.rs/2WVPxuE.
The United States has by far the world’s largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases at more than 810,000, almost four times as many as Spain, the country with the second-highest number. Globally, cases topped 2.5 million on Tuesday.
The new coronavirus is believed to have emerged in a market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year. It has spread around the world killing nearly 177,000, Reuters calculations show tmsnrt.rs/3cBeEYg.
Infect Everyone: How Herd Immunity Could Work for Poor Countries
By Ari Altstedter
April 21, 2020, 10:00 PM GMT+1 Updated on April 22, 2020,
6:44 AM GMT+1
·
Letting virus spread less costly than lockdowns:
researchers
·
Young population means not as many deaths as
European nations
Controversial given the high risk of deaths, a coronavirus strategy discarded
by the U.K. is being touted as the solution for poor but young countries like
India.
Herd immunity, which allows a majority of the population to gain
resistance to the virus by becoming infected and then recovering, could result
in less economic devastation and human suffering than restrictive lockdowns
designed to stop its spread, according to a growing group of experts.
“No country can afford a prolonged period of lockdowns, and least of all
a country like India,” said Jayaprakash Muliyil, a prominent Indian
epidemiologist. “You may be able to reach a point of herd immunity without
infection really catching up with the elderly. And when the herd immunity
reaches a sufficient number the outbreak will stop, and the elderly are also
safe.”
A team of researchers at Princeton University and the Center for Disease
Dynamics, Economics and Policy, a public health advocacy group based in New
Delhi and Washington, has identified India as a place where this strategy could
be successful because its disproportionately young population would face less
risk of hospitalization and death.
They
said allowing the virus to be unleashed in a controlled way for the next seven
months would give 60% of the country’s people immunity by November, and thus
halt the disease.
Mortality could be limited as the virus spreads compared to European
nations like Italy given that 93.5% of the Indian population is younger than
65, they said, though no death toll projections were released.
The radical proposal underscores the challenges that poorer developing
countries -- including nations like Indonesia and some in sub-Saharan Africa --
face in curbing the epidemic using the lockdown measures that have been adopted
by advanced economies.
The impossibility of social distancing in crowded living conditions like
in many cities and villages in India, the lack of testing kits to detect
infections and the human suffering that occurs in lockdowns suggests a
different path may be needed in these places.
More
Coronavirus and the Laboratories in Wuhan
Their researchers travel to caves across China, where they capture live bats to study viruses.
By
Tom Cotton April 21, 2020 12:36 pm ET
The
U.S. government is investigating whether the Covid-19 virus came from a
government laboratory in Wuhan, China. The Chinese Communist Party denies the
possibility. “There is no way this virus came from us,” claimed Yuan Zhiming
over the weekend. Mr. Yuan is a top researcher at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology, which studies some of the world’s deadliest pathogens. He is also secretary of the lab’s Communist Party
committee. He accuses me of “deliberately trying to mislead people” for
suggesting his laboratory as a possible origin for the pandemic.
----Wuhan has two labs where we know bats and humans interacted. One is the Institute of Virology, eight miles from the wet market; the other is the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, barely 300 yards from the market.
Both labs collect live animals to study viruses. Their researchers travel to caves across China to capture bats for this purpose. Chinese state media released a minidocumentary in mid-December following a team of Wuhan CDC researchers collecting viruses from bats in caves. The researchers fretted openly about the risk of infection.
These risks were not limited to the field. The Washington Post reported last week that in 2018 U.S. diplomats in China warned of “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate” the Institute of Virology. The Wuhan CDC operates at even lower biosafety standards.
While the Chinese government denies the possibility of a lab leak, its actions tell a different story. The Chinese military posted its top epidemiologist to the Institute of Virology in January. In February Chairman Xi Jinping urged swift implementation of new biosafety rules to govern pathogens in laboratory settings. Academic papers about the virus’s origins are now subject to prior restraint by the government.
In early January, enforcers threatened doctors who warned their colleagues about the virus. Among them was Li Wenliang, who died of Covid-19 in February. Laboratories working to sequence the virus’s genetic code were ordered to destroy their samples. The laboratory that first published the virus’s genome was shut down, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported in February.
This evidence is circumstantial, to be sure, but it all points toward the Wuhan labs. Thanks to the Chinese coverup, we may never have direct, conclusive evidence—intelligence rarely works that way—but Americans justifiably can use common sense to follow the inherent logic of events to their likely conclusion.
Government does not solve problems; it
subsidizes them.
Ronald Reagan.
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.
Semi-transparent solar cells could rival rooftop solar for efficiency
Paul Ridden April 21, 2020
Windows
capable of harvesting energy from the sun have been on the horizon for a
number of years, but they're yet to help cut down a building's energy
costs. A new development from Australian researchers may change that.
The semi-transparent solar cells have been produced by researchers from
Monash University and CSIRO (Australia's national science agency), and led by
members of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science. The cells make use
of perovskite, which can efficiently convert ultraviolet and visible light into
electricity, and feature an organic semiconductor that replaces a
hole-transport material known as Spiro-OMeTAD for improved stability. And the
design is said to have resulted in a conversion efficiency to rival rooftop
solar too.
"Rooftop solar has a conversion efficiency of between 15 and 20
percent," said Professor Jacek Jasieniak of Exciton Science and Monash
University. "The semi-transparent cells have a conversion efficiency of 17
percent, while still transmitting more than 10 percent of the incoming light,
so they are right in the zone. It’s long been a dream to have windows that generate
electricity, and now that looks possible."
The researchers say that windows tinted to the same level as current
commercial glazing could generate around 140 watts of electricity per square
meter. And they reckon that the additional costs of implementing the technology
into the kinds of large windows used in multi-story buildings would be
marginal.
"But even with the extra spend, the building then gets its
electricity free," added Jasieniak.
The team is now looking at incorporating the technology into commercial
products together with Australia's largest glass manufacturer, Viridian Glass.
"The development of such solar windows presents an opportunity that
could translate into the new glass innovations and technologies going
forward," said the company's Jatin Khanna. Though it could be up to 10
years before we see the first commercial application, depending on how well the
technology scales up.
But lead author on the study Dr. Jae Choul Yu is already looking to improve on the conversion efficiency in a new design.
"Our next project is a tandem device," he said. "We will use perovskite solar cells as the bottom layer and organic solar cells as the top one." And as we saw recently, tandem solar cells can be very efficient.
A paper on the research will be published next month in the journal Nano Energy, but an early release is available online.
"Someone must stand up to those who
say, "Here's the key, there's the Treasury, just take as many of those hard-earned
tax dollars as you want."
Ronald Reagan.
The Monthly Coppock Indicators finished March
DJIA: 21,917 +45 Down. NASDAQ: 7,700 +149 Down.
SP500: 2,585 +38 Down.
The NASDAQ and S&P have
joined the DJIA in down. All three monthly slow indexes have collapsed.
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