Baltic Dry Index. 607 +11 Brent Crude 33.08 Spot Gold 1648
Coronavirus Cases 09/4/20
World 1,520,517 Deaths 88,569
Note, there will
be no LIR on Good Friday. The next update will be on Saturday.
COVID-19 Resource Centre
Latest Content COVID-19 Archive
To assist health workers and researchers working under
challenging conditions to bring this outbreak to a close, The Lancet
has created a Coronavirus Resource Centre. This resource brings together new
2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) content from across The Lancet
journals as it is published. All of our COVID-19 content is free to access.
We have gold because we cannot trust governments.
Herbert Hoover.
Despite
the dire coronavirus picture from America, especially New York City, nearly all
coronavirus computer models are still projecting the crisis to peak this month
between April 11 and April 15. We can only hope that the models are right.
Below,
the sad news yesterday from New York.
Speed of coronavirus deaths shock doctors as New York toll hits new high
April 8, 2020 /
2:47 PM
NEW
YORK (Reuters) - New York state, epicenter of America’s coronavirus crisis, set
another single-day record of COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, as veteran doctors
and nurses voiced astonishment at the speed with which patients were
deteriorating and dying.
The number of known coronavirus infections in New York state alone
approached 150,000 on Wednesday, even as authorities warned that the official
death tally may understate the true number because it omits those who have
perished at home.
“Every number is a face, “ said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who
ordered flags flown at half-staff across New York in memory of the victims.
“This virus attacked the vulnerable and attacked the weak, and it’s our
job as a society to protect the vulnerable.”
Doctors and nurses say elderly patients and those with underlying health
conditions are not the only ones who appear relatively well one moment and at
death’s door the next. It happens to the young and healthy, too.
Patients “look fine, feel fine, then you turn around and they’re
unresponsive,” said Diana Torres, a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York
City, the center of the nation’s worst outbreak. “I’m paranoid, scared to walk
out of their room.”
Nearly 430,000 cases of COVID-19, the highly infectious lung disease
caused by the coronavirus, were confirmed in the United States as of Wednesday
afternoon, including more than 14,700 deaths. For the second straight day the
virus killed at least 1,900 in a 24-hour period.
Cuomo said 779 people had died in the past day in his state. New Jersey
reported 275 had died there. Both totals exceeded one-day records from just a
day earlier.
Despite the grim figures, Cuomo said overall trends still appeared
positive. Cuomo cited a drop in new hospitalizations and other data as evidence
that New York’s social-distancing restrictions were “bending the curve,”
helping to gain some control over the infection rate.
New York is one of 42 states where governors have issued “stay-at-home”
orders and closed all non-essential workplaces.
More
In
economic news, the worst of the new recession is still to come. Despite froth and
hype in the stock market gambling casinos, most stocks have further to fall.
Some are all too likely to fail.
Gold is money. Everything else is credit.
J. P. Morgan
Starbucks says earnings cut roughly in half due to coronavirus effects
Published:
April 8, 2020 at 6:36 p.m. ET
Starbucks
Corp. SBUX, +4.16%
said Wednesday that fiscal second-quarter earnings will be chopped roughly in
half from a year ago due to the spread of COVID-19 in China and then the U.S.
Starbucks revealed that it expects adjusted earnings of 28 cents to 32 cents a
share for the second quarter, which would be down from 60 cents a share in the
second quarter of 2019.
"These
estimates reflect the impact of lost sales for the period as well as
incremental expenses for partner wages and benefits, store operations and other
activities related to the COVID-19 outbreak," the company disclosed.
"This includes inventory write-offs, honoring supplier obligations, store
safety-related items, asset impairments and preliminary estimates of certain
government stimulus program benefits."
Analysts
on average expect earnings of 39 cents a share, down from 66 cents a share at
the end of 2019, according to FactSet. The company also rescinded its annual
guidance. Starbucks shares fell 1% in after-hours trading immediately following
the release of the information. Starbucks expects to report second-quarter
earnings in full on April 28.
Published: April 8, 2020 at 7:23 a.m. ET
---- There isn’t data available yet, but the 20% downturn for the S&P 500 SPX, -0.16% in the first quarter will put a big dent in household wealth when that data gets published by the Federal Reserve in June.
Niels Jensen, the founder and chief investment officer of London-based investment adviser Absolute Return Partners, said in a monthly letter to investors that wealth has been running too far ahead of the underlying economy for some time.
In the fourth quarter, household net worth to gross domestic product was a record 545%. “If you have followed my writings for a while, you’ll be aware that total wealth in society cannot grow faster than nominal GDP over the long term, and that every country has a well-defined mean value in terms of the wealth-to-GDP ratio. In the U.S., that mean value is 380%. In other words, when the actual wealth-to-GDP ratio deviates too much from 380%, you know that the ratio will mean revert at some point. You just don’t know when,” he said.
Property and equities are the two asset classes most exposed to a decline in wealth, he said.
Jensen acknowledged that you can’t just sit out a bubble. “One lesson I learned in the late 1980s, when Japanese equities were defying all logic for years, was the need to participate in the rally regardless, even if valuations were ridiculous. Clients demanded it, and the boss expected it,” he said. But he says it was “suicidal” not to protect for the downside via put options for when the wheels eventually come off.
He also discussed the current situation, and why European stocks have sold off more than U.S. equities even though he viewed the former as overvalued heading into the pandemic.
“More Europeans have died (so far), resulting in a higher fear factor on this side of the Atlantic, i.e. the impact on risk assets has been bigger,” said Jensen, adding that European markets also are less liquid. “Before we come out on the other side of this crisis, more likely than not, the day will arrive when European equities begin to outperform U.S. equities, just like Chinese equities have outperformed equities from the rest of the world in recent weeks.”
This year, the Shanghai Composite has dropped 8%, the S&P 500 has dropped 18% and the Euro Stoxx 50 has lost 25%.
More
The CEO who built Cisco into a powerhouse has a sobering coronavirus diagnosis: At least nine months of economic pain
Published: April 7, 2020 at 10:12 p.m. ET
Silicon Valley sage John Chambers is usually a sunny sort. But COVID-19 has him expecting the worst over the next nine months to year.
The legendary tech executive-turned-venture capitalist predicts the health and economic crisis will take three to five quarters to run its course, and any economic uptick won’t occur until at least late fall. A full recovery would likely happen until early 2021, Chambers warned.
“Companies are running out of cash,” Chambers told MarketWatch in a phone interview Tuesday. “The next quarter is going to be ugly.” He cautions many companies will see revenue decline by half and, “only the strongest startups will survive.”
A self-described “realistic optimist,” Chambers is looking at the crisis through the lens as a businessman who has navigated through several financial downturns and as the son of two doctors. He sees the pandemic as a three-axis disrupter to the economy, health-care system, and global supply chain, with the travel and airline industries recovering much more slowly than retail and financial institutions.
But Chambers, who led Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO, -1.90% as chief executive for 20 years until 2015 and is now a venture capitalist and adviser to 18 startups, also believes the crisis is an opening for innovative, bold companies. “For many, it will be like a second chance to do an IPO,” he says, citing pivots by Cisco in 2001, 2005, and 2008-9 to strengthen its business. He built the company from $1.2 billion in revenue, when he became CEO in 1995, to $47 billion in 2015 before sliding into the role of Cisco executive chairman for two years.
---- His unease is echoed by nearly 40% of all venture capitalists, who believe the U.S. economy won’t be back to normal until April 2021-April 2022, based on a survey of 286 seed Series A founders and 114 venture capitalists by VC firm NFX this month.
The disproportionate loss of jobs will weigh heavily on the economy until the fall, when Chambers expects some signs of life in the economy. “There is no magical rebound,” he said. “I think the federal government, the Fed, central bank, and Treasury [Department] did an amazing job in reacting as quickly as they did.”
That, and the indomitable American spirit during trying times, give
Chambers hope that the country will eventually emerge from COVID-19 stronger.
“There will be terrible pain and loss from all this, but we need to
believe that in the darkest moment there is light yet to come,” he said.
Retailers lost 46,200 jobs in March but could lose millions by May
Published: April 7, 2020 at 4:29 p.m. ET
The latest U.S. government data shows the retail industry
lost 46,200 jobs in March to furloughs and layoffs, but the cuts will be much
deeper as the crisis wears on, research from the National Retail Federation
shows.The U.S. lost 701,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department reported Friday, due to business shutdowns to combat the coronavirus pandemic,
But the total retail workforce could drop by two million by May, according to The National Retail Federation.
At the end of March, the retail sector had 15.6 million jobs, down from an all-time high of 15.9 million, reached in September 2016.
Many retailers, including Under Armour Inc. UA, +4.87% UAA, +5.89% and Macy’s Inc., began closing stores across the U.S. in mid-March in order to adhere to the social-distancing guidelines for preventing the spread of the coronavirus. Since then, companies have extended those closures indefinitely.
Read:The U.S. officially lost 701,000 jobs in March, but in reality millions vanished
Businesses have accompanied those store closures with furloughs of store workers and members of the distribution center staff. Retailers have invested heavily in their e-commerce channels in recent years, and continue their operations virtually, but that part of the business is generally smaller than core brick-and-mortar sales.
“While retailers with robust e-commerce capabilities will be better positioned, store closures will be detrimental to financial results and also compound stress in an already declining traffic environment for mall retailers,” wrote Cowen analyst Oliver Chen in a Friday note.
More
Tesco says coronavirus costs could reach $1.1 billion
April 8, 2020 /
7:31 AM
LONDON
(Reuters) - Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco expects to take a hit of up to 925
million pounds from the costs of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and
warned it was unable to give a profit forecast for this financial year.
However, the supermarket group said on Wednesday that if customer
behaviour returned to normal by August, it was likely the extra expenses -
mainly related to staff and operations costs - would be offset by higher sales
and relief from a business tax introduced by the government to help companies.
“There are significant extra costs in feeding the nation at the moment
but ... Tesco is a business that rises to a challenge and this will be no
different,” CEO David Lewis said, as the company reported a 14% rise in
underlying operating profit for the year ended Feb. 29, broadly in line with
expectations.
Industry data last week showed UK grocery sales leapt more than a fifth
to a record 10.8 billion pounds in the four weeks to March 22.
However, the crisis has come with higher costs, such as social
distancing measures that restrict the number of shoppers in store at any one
time, expanding online delivery operations, staff bonuses and hiring more
employees.
Tesco’s wholesale business is also likely to have been hit hard by the
closure of restaurant and cafe customers.
The company estimated extra costs related to the health crisis could be
between 650 million and 925 million pounds.
It said that in the last two weeks alone it had recruited more than
45,000 workers in Britain to help cover staff sickness and cope with additional
demand.
More
Few UK firms successful in getting government funds - BCC survey
April 8, 2020 /
12:04 AM
LONDON
(Reuters) - Only a small fraction of British companies have successfully
accessed financial help from the government to withstand the economic fallout
from the coronavirus outbreak, while scores more have failed so far, a survey
showed on Wednesday.
The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said 1% of companies had
successfully applied for the government’s Coronavirus Business Interruption
Loan Scheme, while 8% said they had been unsuccessful.
Another 7% said they had made use of government grants for small
businesses, but double that proportion said they had been unsuccessful.
Although some of the survey was conducted before April 2, when the
government announced it would relax rules to allow more businesses to apply for
help, the figures make unpromising reading for the future of British companies.
Gauges of business activity have already slumped to record low levels
and analysts expect Britain’s economy will contract by around 10% or more in
the second quarter.
The companies that had so far failed to access government finance cited
complexity and slow response times.
The BCC said 16% of companies had less than a month’s worth of cash
reserves left, while 6% had run out entirely.
“Our latest data shows that many businesses face a cliff-edge scenario,
either at the end of this month or over the course of the next quarter,” BCC
Director General Adam Marshall said.
More
With the exception
only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history
have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the
people.
Friedrich A. Hayek
Covid-19 Corner
Today,
how long before we face a systemic G-7 collapse? My guess, I’m not sure it’s
avoidable now. The WeWork economy didn’t work before the corona crisis hit. It
certainly doesn’t work now. Want to share a desk, couch, anything?
There
are rumours that WeWork is desperately trying to renegotiate its office leases with
hundreds of landlords. But with Covid-19 likely to become a recurring annual
illness, even with eventually a vaccine available, the WeWork business model
seems deeply flawed.
Since
1971 we have built a false global economy built on fiat money. I think we all
know how fiat money wealth ends.
Bernanke rejects Great Depression comparisons as he says GDP could slump by 30%
Published: April 8, 2020 at 3:05 a.m. ET
Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve,
is a scholar of the Great Depression, a background he put to use during the
global financial crisis when he invented many of the emergency lending programs
the central bank is now re-using. But he thinks the Great Depression is a bad comparison to make to the current economic nosedive caused by the shutdowns in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic.
“People have made comparisons to the Great Depression. It’s not a very good comparison. The Depression was 12 years long,” he said at a presentation on Tuesday sponsored by the Brookings Institution, where he is a fellow in residence.
“This is like a natural disaster, and the response is more like an emergency relief than it is a typical stimulus or anti-recessionary response.” He said he was “pretty pleased” with the fiscal and monetary responses.
Bernanke’s prognosis for the economy was pretty grim, however, saying GDP on an annualized basis could fall by 30% or greater in the second quarter. He raised the prospect the economy could be partly opened up in the summer and closed back down again in the autumn.
“So overall, it could be a very bad year for the U.S. economy,” said Bernanke.
Japan's economy faces 'extremely high' uncertainty on pandemic hit - central bank head
April 9, 2020 /
2:22 AM
TOKYO
(Reuters) - Uncertainty over Japan’s economic outlook is “extremely high” as
the coronavirus pandemic hits output and consumption, central bank Governor
Haruhiko Kuroda said, stressing his readiness to take additional monetary steps
to prevent a deep recession.
While aggressive central bank actions across the globe have eased
financial market tensions somewhat, corporate funding strains were worsening,
Kuroda told a quarterly meeting of the Bank of Japan’s regional branch managers
on Thursday.
“The spread of the coronavirus is having a severe impact on Japan’s
economy through declines in exports, output, demand from overseas tourists and
private consumption,” he said.
Japan recorded 503 new coronavirus infections on Wednesday - its biggest
daily increase since the start of the pandemic - even as a state of emergency
took effect, underscoring the difficulty authorities have in trying to contain
the outbreak without imposing a sweeping, mandatory lockdown on the population.
Even with less stringent restrictions compared with other countries,
analysts polled by Reuters expect Japan to slip into a deep recession this year
as the virus outbreak wreaks havoc on business and daily life.
More
Bank of France sees 6% GDP contraction in Q1
Published: April 8, 2020 at 3:27 a.m. ET
The Bank of France forecasts a 6% gross domestic production contraction
in the first quarter, the biggest contraction since the Second World War.
This sharp decline is due to the containment measures implemented to
stop the spread of the virus on March 17, which are currently set to end on
April 15, although the government has warned they could be extended.
Every two weeks of lockdown could reduce annual economic activity by
1.5%, the Bank of France estimated, in line with the estimates from the French
statistics office INSEE.
German economy forecast to slump 4.2% this year
Published:
April 8, 2020 at 4:00 a.m. ET
The
coronavirus pandemic will cause the German economy to shrink by 4.2% this year,
according to a joint forecast from 5 leading German institutes. In the second
quarter alone, the economy will slump 9.8%, the worst figure ever recorded
since quarterly accounts were tracked in 1970 and more than twice as steep as
during the global financial crisis. For next year, they are forecasting a
recovery and growth of 5.8%.
EU's future at stake over financial response to coronavirus - Spanish ministers
April 8, 2020 /
9:04 AM
MADRID (Reuters) - The European Union’s future is at risk if it cannot
come up with a joint financial response to combat the new coronavirus, Spanish
ministers warned on Wednesday, after the bloc failed to agree on joint debt
issuance to fight the crisis.
Government spokeswoman Maria Jesus Montero said Europeans will begin to
lose trust in the EU if it does not act together in the crisis, which she
compared to the Second World War.
Agriculture Minister Luis Planas echoed that, but both officials also
said they were optimistic further negotiations would eventually yield positive
results.
Impossible dilemma? World watches Italy as businesses plead to return to work
April 7, 2020 /
3:36 PM
ROME (Reuters) - Many Italian companies and
academics are pressing the government to reopen factories to prevent an
economic catastrophe, as the world watches how the first Western country to
impose a lockdown can extricate itself from the unprecedented measures.
The same debate is being held around the globe: how long and stringently
can bans to combat the coronavirus pandemic be held in place before
irreversible damage is wrought, with businesses sunk and swathes of the
population jobless?
Italy faces among the most pressing dilemmas, not only because its
lockdown has been in place longer than most nations and it has the world’s
highest death toll, but because the novel coronavirus has hit hardest in the
northern industrial heartlands that generate a third of its economic output.
“How can I pay wages if I do not make money? How can I keep American
clients if I am not in the position to respect any contracts?” said Giulia
Svegliado, CEO of Celenit, a producer of industrial insulating panels with 50
employees in the northern town of Padua.
About 150 Italian academics have published a letter in Italian financial
daily Il Sole-24 Ore, owned by the Italian business lobby Confindustria, urging
the government to unblock the economy.
“The social and economic consequences would risk producing irreversible
damage, probably more serious than those caused by the virus itself,” the
letter said.
More than two weeks after the government ordered a shutdown of non-essential
factories, Italian businesses are calling for the ban to be quickly lifted to
avoid jobs being lost.
Rome imposed a nationwide lockdown on March 9 when the new virus, which
emerged in China, had already killed more than 460 people. Two weeks later,
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced that non-essential businesses,
including car, clothing and furniture production, would have to close until
April 3.
The death toll has risen relentlessly and now stands at more than
16,500. The government extended the restrictions last week until April 13 and
is widely expected to extend them again, for another three weeks.
More
“At the end fiat
money returns to its inner value—zero.”
Voltaire
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.
On Mars or Earth, biohybrid can turn carbon dioxide into new products
Bacteria on nanowires convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to organic building blocks
Date:
March 31, 2020
Source:
University of California - Berkeley
Summary:
Chemists have created a hybrid system of bacteria and nanowires that captures
energy from sunlight and transfers it to the bacteria to turn carbon dioxide
and water into organic molecules and oxygen. On Earth, such a biohybrid could
remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. On Mars, it would provide colonists
with raw material to manufacture organic compounds ranging from fuels to drugs.
The efficiency is greater than the photosynthetic efficiency of most plants.
If humans ever hope to colonize Mars, the settlers will need to
manufacture on-planet a huge range of organic compounds, from fuels to drugs,
that are too expensive to ship from Earth.
University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) chemists have a plan for that.
For the past eight years, the researchers have been working on a hybrid
system combining bacteria and nanowires that can capture the energy of sunlight
to convert carbon dioxide and water into building blocks for organic molecules.
Nanowires are thin silicon wires about one-hundredth the width of a human hair,
used as electronic components, and also as sensors and solar cells.
"On Mars, about 96% of the atmosphere is CO2. Basically,
all you need is these silicon semiconductor nanowires to take in the solar
energy and pass it on to these bugs to do the chemistry for you," said
project leader Peidong Yang, professor of chemistry and the S. K. and Angela
Chan Distinguished Chair in Energy at UC Berkeley. "For a deep space
mission, you care about the payload weight, and biological systems have the
advantage that they self-reproduce: You don't need to send a lot. That's why
our biohybrid version is highly attractive."
The only other requirement, besides sunlight, is water, which on Mars is
relatively abundant in the polar ice caps and likely lies frozen underground
over most of the planet, said Yang, who is a senior faculty scientist at
Berkeley Lab and director of the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute.
The biohybrid can also pull carbon dioxide from the air on Earth to make
organic compounds and simultaneously address climate change, which is caused by
an excess of human-produced CO2 in the atmosphere.
In a new paper to be published March 31 in the journal Joule, the
researchers report a milestone in packing these bacteria (Sporomusa ovata)
into a "forest of nanowires" to achieve a record efficiency: 3.6% of
the incoming solar energy is converted and stored in carbon bonds, in the form
of a two-carbon molecule called acetate: essentially acetic acid, or vinegar.
Acetate molecules can serve as building blocks for a range of organic
molecules, from fuels and plastics to drugs. Many other organic products could
be made from acetate inside genetically engineered organisms, such as bacteria
or yeast.
More
Experience,
however, shows that neither a state nor a bank ever have had the unrestricted
power of issuing paper money without abusing that power; in all states,
therefore, the issue of paper money ought to be under some check and control;
and none seems so proper for that purpose as that of subjecting the issuers of
paper money to the obligation of paying their notes either in gold coin or
bullion.
David Ricardo
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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