Baltic Dry Index. 635 +28 Brent Crude 32.83 Spot Gold 1684
Coronavirus Cases 13/4/20
World 1,853,495 Deaths 114,516
Winston Churchill
In less than 4
months at the start of 2020, we have gone from largely free markets, to rigged stock
and bond markets, massive corporate bailouts, subsidies for wages, bailouts for
hedge funds, and starting on May one, price rigging in the crude oil market.
Whatever “ism”
this insane new world order is, it certainly isn’t capitalism. Not even close.
Communism “Lite” perhaps. “Banksterism heavy” perhaps. “One-percenterism heavy”
perhaps. “Elitist protectionism heavy” perhaps. “Trumpism” perhaps. All five,
perhaps.
Where it all ends
is anyone’s guess, but my guess is that it ends in massive global disorder and
the collapse of the Great Nixonian Error of Fiat Money, communist money, and
probably the end of personal freedoms as we knew them, 1945-2005.
Below, the
consumers must be protected from the benefits of cheap oil, but why? For oil
worker votes for Trump?
Asian markets dip after deal to cut oil production
April 12, 2020 /
2:00 PM / Updated 40 minutes ago
BAKU/DUBAI/LONDON (Reuters) - OPEC and
allies led by Russia agreed on Sunday to a record cut in output to prop up oil
prices amid the coronavirus pandemic in an unprecedented deal with fellow oil
nations, including the United States, that could curb global oil supply by 20%.
Measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus have destroyed demand for
fuel and driven down oil prices, straining budgets of oil producers and
hammering the U.S. shale industry, which is more vulnerable to low prices due
to its higher costs.
The group, known as OPEC+, said it had agreed to reduce output by 9.7
million barrels per day (bpd) for May and June, after four days of talks and
following pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to arrest the price
decline.
OPEC+ sources said they expected total global oil cuts to amount to more
than 20 million bpd, or 20 percent of global supply, effective May 1. OPEC had
the same figure in its draft statement but removed it from the final version.
The biggest oil cut ever is more than four times deeper than the
previous record cut in 2008. Producers will slowly relax curbs after June,
although reductions in production will stay in place until April 2022.
In a statement from the White House, Trump welcomed the commitment by
Saudi Arabia and Russia “to return oil production to levels consistent with
global energy and financial market stability.”
---- Oil demand has dropped by around a third because of the coronavirus pandemic. Oil prices jumped more than $1 a barrel in Monday trading after the agreement, but gains were capped amid concern that it would not be enough to head off oversupply with the coronavirus pandemic hammering demand.
Total global cuts will include contributions from non-members, steeper
voluntary cuts by some OPEC+ members and strategic stocks purchases by the
world’s largest consumers.
---- Three OPEC+ sources said non-members Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Norway and the United States would contribute 4 million to 5 million bpd.
Three OPEC+ sources said the International Energy Agency (IEA), the
energy watchdog for the world’s most industrialised nations, would announce
purchases into stocks by its members to the tune of 3 million bpd in the next
couple of months.
---- Trump had threatened OPEC leader Saudi Arabia with oil tariffs and other measures if it did not fix the market’s oversupply problem as low prices have put the U.S. oil industry, the world’s largest, in severe distress.
Canada and Norway had signalled a willingness to cut and the United
States, where legislation makes it hard to act in tandem with cartels such as
OPEC, said its output would fall steeply by itself this year because of low
prices.
----
Global oil demand is estimated to have fallen by around 30
million bpd as more than 3 billion people are locked down in their homes due to
the outbreak.
More
April 13, 2020 /
5:10 AM / Updated an hour ago
(Reuters) - Goldman Sachs said on Sunday that the deal between major oil
producers to cut output by nearly 10 million barrels per day is ‘historic yet
insufficient,’ adding that no deal would be enough to offset the sharp drop in
demand already occurring.
The investment bank still expects oil prices to fall in coming weeks as
storage fills rapidly even as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries and its allies came to an agreement to drastically cut world supply.
Now back to the end of the world
as we knew it.
April 12, 2020 /
5:23 AM
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India and other
South Asian countries are likely to record their worst growth performance in
four decades this year due to the coronavirus outbreak, the World Bank said on
Sunday.
The South Asian region, comprising eight countries, is likely to show
economic growth of 1.8% to 2.8% this year, the World Bank said in its South
Asia Economic Focus report, well down from the 6.3% it projected six months
ago.
India’s economy, the region’s biggest, is expected to grow 1.5% to 2.8%
in the fiscal year that started on April 1. The World Bank has estimated it
will grow 4.8% to 5% in the fiscal year that ended on March 31.
“The green shoots of a rebound that were observable at the end of 2019
have been overtaken by the negative impacts of the global crisis,” the World
Bank report said.
Other than India, the World Bank forecast that Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan
and Bangladesh will also see sharp falls in economic growth.
Three other countries - Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Maldives - are
expected to fall into recession, the World Bank said in the report, which was
based on country-level data available as of April 7.
Measures taken to counter the coronavirus have disrupted supply chains
across South Asia, which has recorded more than 13,000 cases so far - still
lower than many parts of the world.
India’s lockdown of 1.3 billion people has also left millions out of
work, disrupted big and small businesses and forced an exodus of migrant
workers from the cities to their homes in villages.
In the event of prolonged and broad national lockdowns, the report
warned of a worst-case scenario in which the entire region would experience an
economic contraction this year.
More
April 13, 2020 /
12:51 AM / Updated 6 hours ago
(Reuters) - Britain’s gross domestic product (GDP) could fall by up to
30% between April and June, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak told his
colleagues as members of the cabinet call for easing lockdown restrictions amid
the coronavirus outbreak, the Times reported.
Sunak discussed the possibility of a 25% to 30% fall in GDP in the
second quarter, the newspaper reported, adding that ten ministers were pressing
for the lockdown to be eased next month.
The report did not identify those ministers.
“It’s important that we don’t end up doing more damage with the
lockdown. We’re looking at another three weeks of lockdown and then we can
start to ease it,” a minister was quoted as saying by the newspaper. The
minister was not named.
The world economy is entering a recession with
$87 trillion more debt than at the onset of the financial crisis, IFF warns
An “unexploded bomb” of debt is being destabilised by the coronavirus
shock, the global banking body has warned, as it predicted an “unprecedented
surge” in borrowing ahead.
More than $20 trillion (£16 trillion) of global bonds and loans due
before the end of the year pose a “refinancing risk” with vulnerable emerging
markets heavily exposed to the latest crunch, according to the Institute of
International Finance (IIF).
“In the past we’ve warned that a global shock could destabilise the
mountain of debt that’s been created in the last decade, creating an avalanche
of defaults” warned Emre Tiftik, an IIF director.
“We’re in the midst of the
destabilising shock we were worried about. A sharp, upward trajectory in debt
levels looks all but certain.”.
More
The tyranny of Communism is as old as the Pharaohs and the
Pyramids - that the State stands above all men and their individual
aspirations.
Robert Kennedy
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.
April 11, 2020 /
2:58 PM
NEW
YORK (Reuters) - The United States surpassed Italy on Saturday as the country
with the highest reported coronavirus death toll, recording more than 20,000
deaths since the outbreak began, according to a Reuters tally.
The grim milestone was reached as President Donald Trump mulled over when the country, which has registered more than half a million infections, might begin to see a return to normality.
The United States has seen its highest death tolls to date in the epidemic with roughly 2,000 deaths a day reported for the last four days in a row, the largest number in and around New York City. Even that is viewed as understated, as New York is still figuring out how best to include a surge in deaths at home in its official statistics. (Graphic: tmsnrt.rs/2w7hX9T)
Public health experts have warned the U.S. death toll could reach 200,000 over the summer if unprecedented stay-at-home orders that have closed businesses and kept most Americans indoors are lifted when they expire at the end of the month.
Most of the curbs, however, including school closures and emergency
orders keeping non-essential workers largely confined to home, flow from powers
vested in state governors, not the president.
Nonetheless, Trump has said he wants life to return to normal as soon as
possible and that the measures aimed at curbing the spread of the COVID-19
disease caused by the novel coronavirus carry their own economic and
public-health cost.
Speaking by telephone with Fox News on Saturday evening, Trump said he
would make a decision “reasonably soon,” based on the advice of “a lot of very
smart people, a lot of professionals, doctors and business leaders.”
He said “instinct” would also play a role.
---- Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, told Fox News that “purist medical professionals” who took the position that the only way to minimize loss of life was to shut down the economy and society until the virus was “vanquished” were “half right.”
He said, “That will minimize the deaths from the virus directly,” but
added that economic shocks also killed people, through higher depression and
suicide rates and drug abuse.
“So that very tough decision this president is going to be making is to
have to weigh the balance and figure out which path does more damage.”
In New York, the state’s governor and New York City’s mayor engaged in a
fresh squabble over their efforts to combat the virus in what is now the global
epicenter, in this instance over how long schools might stay closed.
---- On Saturday morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared that New York City’s public schools would no longer reopen on April 20 but stay closed for the rest of the academic year, saying it was “the right thing to do.”
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, however, later used his widely watched
daily news conference to dismiss the mayor’s edict as merely an “opinion,” and
say he would make his own decision on school closures.
More
Published: April 12, 2020 at 11:16 p.m. ET
NEW YORK — More than 3,600 deaths nationwide have been linked to
coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes and long-term care facilities, an
alarming rise in just the past two weeks, according to the latest count by The
Associated Press.
Because the federal government has not been releasing a count of its
own, the AP has kept its own running tally based on media reports and state
health departments. The latest count of at least 3,621 deaths is up from about
450 deaths just 10 days ago.
But the true toll among the 1 million mostly frail and elderly people
who live in such facilities is likely much higher, experts say, because most
state counts don’t include those who died without ever being tested for
COVID-19.
Outbreaks in just the past few weeks have included one at a nursing home
in suburban Richmond, Virginia, that has killed 42 and infected more than 100,
another at nursing home in central Indiana that has killed 24 and infected 16,
and one at a veteran’s home in Holyoke, Mass., that has killed 38, infected 88
and prompted a federal investigation. This comes weeks after an outbreak at a
nursing home in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland that has so far claimed 43
lives.
And those are just the outbreaks we know about. Most states provide only
total numbers of nursing home deaths and don’t give details of specific
outbreaks. Notable among them is the nation’s leader, New York, which accounts
for 1,880 nursing home deaths out of about 96,000 total residents but has so
far declined to detail specific outbreaks, citing privacy concerns.
Experts say nursing home deaths may keep climbing because of chronic
staffing shortages that have been made worse by the coronavirus crisis, a shortage
of protective supplies and a continued lack of available testing.
And the deaths have skyrocketed despite steps taken by the federal
government in mid-March to bar visitors, cease all group activities, and
require that every worker be screened for fever or respiratory symptoms at
every shift.
But an AP report earlier this month found that infections were
continuing to find their way into nursing homes because such screenings didn’t
catch people who were infected but asymptomatic. Several large outbreaks were
blamed on such spreaders, including infected health workers who worked at
several different nursing home facilities.
More
April 11, 2020 /
11:29 AM
GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Saturday
that it was looking into reports of some COVID-19 patients testing positive
again after initially testing negative for the disease while being considered
for discharge.
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, told a briefing that the
virus may have been “reactivated” rather than the patients being re-infected.
The Geneva-based WHO, asked about the report from Seoul, told Reuters in
a brief statement: “We are aware of these reports of individuals who have
tested negative for COVID-19 using PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing and
then after some days testing positive again.
“We are closely liaising with our clinical experts and working hard to
get more information on those individual cases. It is important to make sure
that when samples are collected for testing on suspected patients, procedures
are followed properly,” it said.
According to the WHO’s guidelines on clinical management, a patient can
be discharged from hospital after two consecutive negative results in a
clinically recovered patient at least 24 hours apart, it added.
----
South Korean health officials said on Friday that it remains unclear what is
behind the trend, with epidemiological investigations still under way.
More
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.
Date:
April 9, 2020
Source:
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Summary:
Researchers have captured 3D images of nanoparticles in liquid with atomic
precision, and developed an ultrathin electrical switch that could further
miniaturize computing devices and personal electronics without loss of performance.
Since their invention in the 1930s, electron microscopes have helped
scientists peer into the atomic structure of ordinary materials like steel, and
even exotic graphene. But despite these advances, such imaging techniques
cannot precisely map out the 3D atomic structure of materials in a liquid
solution, such as a catalyst in a hydrogen fuel cell, or the electrolytes in
your car's battery.
Now, researchers at Berkeley Lab, in collaboration with the Institute
for Basic Science in South Korea, Monash University in Australia, and UC
Berkeley, have developed a technique that produces atomic-scale 3D images of
nanoparticles tumbling in liquid between sheets of graphene, the thinnest
material possible. Their findings were reported April 2 in the journal Science.
"This is an exciting result. We can now measure atomic positions in
three dimensions down to a precision six times smaller than hydrogen, the
smallest atom," said study co-author Peter Ercius, a staff scientist at
Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry.
The technique, called 3D SINGLE (Structure Identification of
Nanoparticles by Graphene Liquid cell Electron microscopy), employs one of the
world's most powerful microscopes at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry. The
researchers captured thousands of images of eight platinum nanoparticles
"trapped" in liquid between two graphene sheets -- called a
"graphene window."
These graphene sheets -- each one just an atom thick -- are "strong
enough to contain tiny pockets of liquid necessary to acquire high-quality images
of the nanoparticles' atomic arrangement," Ercius explained.
---- Unlike the magnetic materials used to make a typical memory device, antiferromagnets won't stick to your fridge. That's because the magnetic spins in antiferromagnets are oppositely aligned and cancel each other out.
Scientists have long theorized that antiferromagnets have potential as
materials for ultrafast stable memories. But no one could figure out how to
manipulate their magnetization to read and write information in a memory
device.
Now, a team of researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley working in
the Center for Novel Pathways to Quantum Coherence in Materials, an Energy
Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, have
developed an antiferromagnetic switch for computer memory and processing
applications. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Materials,
have implications for further miniaturizing computing devices and personal
electronics without loss of performance.
---- Study co-authors Nityan Nair and Eran Maniv discovered that applying small pulses of electrical current rotates the spins of the antiferromagnet, which in turn switches the material's resistance from high to low.
To their surprise, they also found that "these magnetic spins can
be flipped or manipulated with small applied currents, around 100 times smaller
than those used in any other materials with a similar response," said
Analytis.
The researchers next plan to test different antiferromagnetic TMDs in
the hope of identifying a system that operates at room temperature and thus
further develop the field of spin-based electronics or spintronics, where
information is transported by the electrons' magnetic spin.
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.
Ayn Rand.
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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