Baltic Dry Index. 635 +28 Brent Crude 31.48 Spot Gold 1697
There can be few fields of human endeavour in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.
16 million people just got laid off but U.S. stocks had their best week in 45 years
U.S. Cases Over 500,000; L.A. Lockdown: Virus Update
Bloomberg News April 11 2020 U.S. deaths exceed 2,000 for the first time in a single day while the country’s total cases climbed over 500,000. President Donald Trump signals help for Italy while New York, which remains the U.S. epicenter of the coronavirus, had a slight decline in fatalities after three record-high days.
A Gilead drug showed promise for treating patients with severe infections. France reported four deaths in patients using experimental drugs.
Italy extended its lockdown into May, ignoring pleas from businesses. Argentina’s nationwide lockdown is now until April 26 and Los Angeles city and county are also lengthening the order to keep people at home for two more weeks to May 15.
Record 16.8 million Americans out of work due to coronavirus
Today 06:20 am JST
WASHINGTON A
staggering 16.8 million Americans lost their jobs in just three weeks in a
measure of how fast the coronavirus has brought world economies to their knees.
----Numbers released Thursday by the U.S. government showed that 6.6 million American workers applied for unemployment benefits last week, on top of more than 10 million in the two weeks before that. That amounts to about 1 in 10 American workers - the biggest, fastest pileup of job losses since the world's largest economy began keeping records in 1948.
And still more job cuts are expected. The U.S. unemployment rate in April could hit 15% - a number not seen since the tail end of the Great Depression.
Sharon Bridgeman, 57, of Kansas City, Missouri, was laid off from her job two weeks ago at a nonprofit that helps homeless people and is still waiting to be approved for unemployment benefits.
"I'm worried I may not have a job to go back to," she said. "I'm also worried about the people I work with."
In the U.S., the Federal Reserve announced it will provide up to $2.3 trillion in loans targeted toward both households and businesses.
In many European countries, where the social safety nets tend to be stronger than in the U.S., government programs that subsidize workers' pay are keeping millions of people on payrolls in places like Germany and France, though typically with fewer hours and at lower wages.
The head of the International Monetary Fund warned that the global economy is headed for the worst recession since the Depression. The United Nations' labor organization said the equivalent of 195 million full-time jobs could be lost in the second quarter, while the aid organization Oxfam International estimated half a billion people worldwide could be pushed into poverty.
More
China factory gate deflation deepens as coronavirus paralyses global economy
April 10, 2020 / 5:01 AM
BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s factory gate
prices fell the most in five months in March, with deflation deepening and set
to worsen in coming months as the economic damage wrought by the coroanvirus
outbreak at home and worldwide shuts down many countries.
The world’s
second-largest economy is trying to restart its engines after weeks of near
paralysis to contain the pandemic that had severely restricted business
activity, flow of goods and the daily life of people.
Friday’s
data from the National Bureau of Statistics suggested a durable recovery was
some way off, with China’s producer price index (PPI) falling 1.5% from a year
earlier, the biggest decline since October last year. It compared with a median
forecast of a 1.1% fall tipped by a Reuters poll of analysts and a 0.4% drop in
February.
Headline
consumer inflation also eased somewhat last month, partly led by government
control measures, while core prices remained benign, leaving more room for
monetary easing, some analysts said.
The overall decline in the factory gate
gauge was exacerbated by a slump in global oil and commodities prices, which
filtered through to crude oil, steel and non-ferrous metal industries, the
statistics bureau said in a statement accompanying the data.
More
Up next, free money for all, and if
that’s not enough, the central banksters have plenty more free helicopter money
for all at the magic money tree, in Washington, London and Frankfurt. What I
want to know is what’s happened to my helicopter?
Fed, Bank of England push deeper into uncharted territory in face of coronavirus slump
April 9, 2020 / 8:10 PM
The Fed, in
its boldest move to date to soften the historic shutdown of much of the U.S.
economy, pledged $2.3 trillion to help local governments on the front lines of
the health crisis and to prop up small and mid-sized businesses.
In London,
the BoE said it would allow Britain’s government to run up an unlimited
overdraft as the state promises to pay wages to millions of people laid off
during shutdown, cut taxes for businesses and expand its welfare system.
With central
banks around the world trying to cocoon their their shuttered economies while
the shutdowns last, Fed chief Jerome Powell dismissed suggestions they risked
creating an inflation surge or distorting the way companies do business.
Unlike the
global financial crisis more than a decade ago, when a largely broken banking
system brought the world economy to its knees, this time governments were
asking entire populations to make what Powell described as “sacrifices for the
common good” by staying to try to curb the spread of the virus.
As a result
of those social-distancing measures, millions are threatened with unemployment
or seeing businesses that were thriving just a few weeks ago pushed to the
brink of failure as commerce grinds to a halt.
“We should
make them whole. They did not cause this,” Powell said in a webcast hosted by
the Brookings Institution. “This is what the great fiscal power of the United
States is for, to protect these people from the hardships they are facing.”
In a
reminder of the scale of the hit to the U.S. economy, data showed 16.8 million
Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the last three weeks.
The Fed,
adding to an already extensive set of crisis programs, on Thursday said it
would pump up to $500 billion into local governments by buying municipal debt.
It also said a new “Main Street” facility will use banks to funnel up to $600
billion in loans to small to medium-sized firms, and it expanded measures to
back up corporate debt markets.
Analysts
said the Fed seemed willing to buy into any assets that could support the
economy as it cast aside some of its traditional caution about risky lending.
Oliver
Blackbourn, a portfolio manager at Janus Henderson, said helping companies that
choose to take on debt to boost their shareholder returns brought a level of
moral hazard in terms of what sort of behaviour a central bank should support.
“It will be
interesting to see how the Fed reacts to losses should the coming default cycle
take a significant toll on its holdings,” he said.
Powell on
Thursday emphasized that, as broad as the central bank’s effort has become, it
is meant to be temporary. Once the virus is controlled and recovery under way,
“we will put these emergency tools away,” he said.
Still, BoE
Governor Andrew Bailey has had to counter claims that the British central bank
is resorting to direct monetary financing of the government.
The BoE said
on Thursday it had agreed to lend to the government temporarily, if needed, to
help finance its massive COVID-19 spending plans.
Sensitive to
claims it is resorting to monetary financing, or permanently supporting
government spending by printing money, the BoE stressed its move was a
short-term measure and any money borrowed would be repaid by the end of 2020.
EU ministers agree half a trillion euro coronavirus rescue plan
April 9, 2020 / 9:44 AM
The
agreement was reached after EU powerhouse Germany, as well as France, put their
feet down to end opposition from the Netherlands over attaching economic
conditions to emergency credit for governments weathering the impacts of the
pandemic, and offered Italy assurances that the bloc would show solidarity.
But the deal
does not mention using joint debt to finance recovery - something Italy, France
and Spain pushed strongly for but which is a red line for Germany, the
Netherlands, Finland and Austria.
It only
defers to the bloc’s 27 national leaders whether “innovative financial
instruments” should be applied, meaning many more fraught discussions on the
matter were still ahead.
“Europe has
shown that it can rise to the occasion of this crisis,” said French Finance
Minister Bruno Le Maire, praising what he said was the most important economic
plan in EU history.
Earlier on
Thursday, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte warned that the EU’s very
existence would be under threat if it could not come together to combat the
COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus.
For weeks,
EU member states have struggled to present a united front in the face of the
pandemic, squabbling over money, medical equipment and drugs, border
restrictions and trade curbs, amid fraught talks laying bare their bitter
divisions.
While Le
Maire said the Thursday agreement paved the way for debt mutualisation, his
Dutch counterpart, Wopke Hoekstra, stressed the opposite.
“We are and
will remain opposed to eurobonds. We think this concept will not help Europa or
the Netherlands in the long-term,” Hoekstra said after talks ended.
Apr 06, 2020 05:23 AM
In Depth: Why There Will Be No Quick Cure for Trade After the Pandemic
The merchants and traders of Yiwu, the
world’s busiest small-commodity business hub in eastern China, have a sobering
message on the outlook for global trade: There will be no quick recovery from
the economic devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the fallout may be more
severe than from the 2008 financial crisis.
----But Feb. 20 was also the day that northern Italy’s Lombardy region confirmed its first Covid-19 patient, setting off explosive growth of cases there and beyond. Since then, the global epicenter of the outbreak shifted away from China to Europe and the U.S. As of Saturday, the disease has seized a foothold in 181 countries and regions, infecting more than 1.1 million people, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
Consequently, Yiwu was unable to avoid the rolling shockwave of the global pandemic as international trade froze up amid travel bans and business closures. Since March, foreign orders plunged while requests for cancellations or delays swamped Yiwu’s merchants, which sell everything from lighters to straws to Christmas decorations to shoppers around the world. Some said they now fear greater setbacks than in the financial crisis a dozen years ago.
As China picks up the pace to revive business at home, the worsening pandemic abroad is undercutting recovery efforts in a measure of how interconnected global commerce has become. Although the country’s economic indicators suggested a rebound of business activity in March, a barometer of new orders remained in contractionary territory following the steepest drop on record in February. The gauge for new export orders remained below pre-pandemic levels.
China faces
a 30% decline in external demand in the next one to two quarters because of the
pandemic, said Lu Ting, chief China economist at Nomura International Ltd. in
Hong Kong. Gao Shanwen, chief economist at Essence Securities, warned of a
sharp drop in external demand in the second quarter that could be more
devastating than the financial crisis.
“Europe is
just like Hubei about a month ago when it was hit worst by the outbreak,” said
an executive of a Guangzhou trading company. “Covid-19 is causing damage
everywhere.” For global traders, there is almost nowhere to hedge the risk, the
executive said.
Chinese
factories are experiencing profound shifts in global demand as restrictions to
slow the spread of the virus keep hundreds of millions of people at home.
Makers of textiles, shoes and consumer electronics are among those getting
hammered.
----In late February, hopes rose that trading would revive and losses could be recouped as the outbreak waned and factories reopened. But in mid-March, China’s Ministry of Commerce said exports faced mounting uncertainties reflecting declines in external demand. Two weeks later, Xin Guobin, vice minister in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), warned that China’s foreign trade might further slow this year as the virus spread worldwide.
Since March
20, a Yiwu stationery manufacturer has received requests from customers in
Europe, the U.S., the Mideast and Southeast Asia to postpone deliveries for at
least a month. Some can’t even provide a projected new delivery date because of
unknown schedules for customs closings at the destination, the owner of the
plant told Caixin.
In a survey
by the China Cotton Textile Association, some member companies reported 50%
order declines from Europe and the U.S. by late March. The pandemic’s impact on
Chinese clothing exporters may last four to six months, the association
predicted.
More
Next, proof China’s leaders lied, and
they and the WHO are continuing to lie. Since no one inside China can hold
China’s leaders to account, the outside world must hold china’s leaders to
account, and publicly.
Opinion: What the doctors and nurses who beat back the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, want you to know about their months in hell
Published: April 8, 2020 at 6:23 p.m. ET
AUSTIN, Texas (Project
Syndicate) — Dr. Li, a heart specialist at Wuhan No. 4 Hospital, spent the
third week of March preparing for the reopening of the hospital’s general
clinics, which closed on Jan. 22, when No. 4 became a key facility for treating
COVID-19 patients.After working for two months on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak, Li is mentally and psychologically at a loss for what to do next. He can’t sleep or eat, he often feels dazed, and sometimes, seemingly out of nowhere, he weeps.
Li’s trauma stands in stark contrast to the image projected by China’s media, which is filled with articles and broadcasts glorifying the government’s response to the epidemic. Amid so much exultation, Li is increasingly reluctant to express fears or concerns to others around him. He has become a different man — one who understands that “life is fragile and weak.”
----Insofar as China has achieved a
“victory” over the coronavirus, it has come at a massive and lasting human
cost.
----That morning, after passing through several stages of disinfection, Li had walked into the hospital’s contamination zone, where he immediately encountered a man sprawled on the floor, masked, covered in a quilt, with a yellow-green complexion.
Two steps
away, another person lay prone on a bench, seriously ill and hardly breathing.
A young man sitting next to him was yelling into a phone, seeking help. And
many other patients were lying on the ground in the clinic hallway, gasping for
breath. All around, patients and their family members stood, sat or simply lay
on the floor.
According to
Li, they had no expressions on their faces, as if they had become accustomed —
or at least resigned — to their misery.
The floor
was covered in garbage, blood, vomit and sputum. The patients far outnumbered
the medical personnel. Li saw two nurses in charge of intake and registration
surrounded by patients’ family members, some of whom knelt at their feet
begging for help. Occasionally an ambulance arrived with still more patients.
Looking
outside, Li saw a seemingly endless line of people waiting at the hospital
door, many of whom could support themselves only by leaning against a wall.
In the early
days of the lockdown, Li told me, the number of outpatients coming to the
clinic each day was in the thousands. People waited four or five hours just to
sign in, then waited another four or five hours either to receive take-home
medicine or to be admitted to an infusion room on the second floor, where they
joined several hundred others waiting for available beds.
Some people
collapsed while waiting; some, clearly, were near death. The hospital’s wards
were so full that the corridors and doctors’ lounges had to be used for
additional beds. All of these were filled, and remained so, because no one
seemed to be recovering.
“There’s
insufficient manpower, limited treatment and scarce PPE,” Li told me. He
struggled to explain why he couldn’t help these people. “I’m doing my best,” he
said over and over. “What more could I have done?”
----Li’s messages depicted a scene of continuing deterioration. More and more people were dying. But because PPE was so scarce, there were times when medical staff would not enter the wards even to carry away dead bodies. Li, sitting beside the corpses, tried to distract himself by mechanically writing prescriptions for those who were still alive. It was a living hell.
In the early
days of the lockdown, the local funeral home had gotten by with a van to
transport corpses from the hospital. But soon enough, it needed a cargo truck.
One day, after his shift, Li witnessed hospital workers putting corpses — he
counted seven or eight — into body bags and throwing them onto the truck bed.
More
Finally,
a very bad Covid-19 development in South Korea. Depending on why it’s occurring
this could become very bad news for restarting the global economy.
South Korea reports recovered coronavirus patients testing positive again
April 10, 2020 / 2:54 AM
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean officials
on Friday reported 91 patients thought cleared of the new coronavirus had
tested positive again.
Jeong
Eun-kyeong, director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(KCDC), told a briefing that the virus may have been “reactivated” rather than
the patients being re-infected.
South Korean
health officials said it remains unclear what is behind the trend, with
epidemiological investigations still under way.
The prospect
of people being re-infected with the virus is of international concern, as many
countries are hoping that infected populations will develop sufficient immunity
to prevent a resurgence of the pandemic.
The South
Korean figure had risen from 51 such cases on Monday.
Nearly 7,000
South Koreans have been reported as recovered from COVID-19, the disease caused
by the new coronavirus.
“The number
will only increase, 91 is just the beginning now,” said Kim Woo-joo, professor
of infectious diseases at Korea University Guro Hospital.
The KCDC’s
Jeong raised the possibility that rather than patients being re-infected, the
virus may have been “reactivated”.
Kim also
said patients had likely “relapsed” rather than been re-infected.
False test
results could also be at fault, other experts said, or remnants of the virus
could still be in patients’ systems but not be infectious or of danger to the
host or others.
“There are
different interpretations and many variables,” said Jung Ki-suck, professor of
pulmonary medicine at Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital.
“The
government needs to come up with responses for each of these variables”.
South Korea
on Friday reported 27 new cases, its lowest after daily cases peaked at more
than 900 in late February, according to KCDC, adding the total stood at 10,450
cases.
The death
toll rose by seven to 211, it said.
The city of
Daegu, which endured the first large coronavirus outbreak outside of China,
reported zero new cases for the first time since late February.
With at
least 6,807 confirmed cases, Daegu accounts for more than half of all South
Korea’s total infections.
More
This weekend’s musical diversion. Vivaldi again. Vivaldi for the highbrows.
Though I never saw a Vivaldi opera, the
now defunct New York City Opera at the old Lincoln Center, put on magnificent
summer seasons educating my guests and I about opera, in the last row of the
mezzanine. Eye level with the stage and easy to follow the overhead sur-titles.
A. Vivaldi: O mie porpore più belle [cantata] for alto, strings & b.c. (RV 685)
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by
spectacular error.
John Kenneth Galbraith.
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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