Baltic Dry Index. 575 -23 Brent Crude 30.86
Spot Gold 1703
Coronavirus Cases 06/5/20
World 3,727,993
Deaths 258,354
John Kenneth Galbraith. The Great Crash: 1929.
In the stock
casinos, all bad news is good news, buy more. It’s madness of course, driven by
global central banksters adopting Zimbabwe economics, although that may be
coming to an end at the ECB, and a mistaken belief in the fear of missing out
on a new bull market starting in stocks.
Bull markets don’t
start with depression era rising unemployment, crashing auto sales, dead real
estate markets, a sinking Baltic Dry Index, and a massive oil production glut
from cratered demand due to all the global lockdowns.
Even as some of
the lockdowns in America and Europe are slightly easing, the coronavirus crisis
is far from over, and if the easings cause it to surge again, another round of
restrictions is certain to be applied.
There is no reason
to think that most stocks don’t have further to fall. The central bankster
driven FOMO bounce is a selling opportunity to dump dodgy shares for central bankster
cash.
Below, greed
trumps reality for now.
U.S. stock futures, Chinese shares slip amid Sino-U.S. tensions, oil falters
May 6, 2020 / 1:06
AM
SYDNEY (Reuters) -
Shares struggled and the yen gained on Wednesday, with markets in China
faltering on their return from a long holiday as investors fretted over
Sino-U.S. tensions, while oil ended an extended winning streak on oversupply
risks amid weak demand.
China, opening for the first time since Thursday, started on the backfoot with the blue-chip index .CSI300 down 0.6%. Australian shares skidded 0.8%.
“There is a distinct risk-off tone to greet China coming back from holiday,” said Stephen Innes, chief global markets strategist at AxiCorp.
“With Trump and the company still on the Wuhan Lab rampage, traders are incredibly cautious this morning, weighing all the possible China responses. And the one that would hurt the most would be for China to reduce imports of U.S. oil.”
Global financial markets have been caught this month between grim economic figures and worries about worsening U.S.-China relations, and optimism over easing COVID-19 lockdowns in many countries.
U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly taken aim at China as the source of the pandemic and warned that it would be held to account.
On Tuesday, he urged China to be transparent about the origins of the novel coronavirus that has killed more than a quarter of a million people worldwide since it started in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year.
Elsewhere, Hong Kong's Hang Seng index .HSI added 0.7% while South Korea's KOSPI was also upbeat, rising 1%. Japanese markets were closed for a public holiday.
That left MSCI’s broadest index of Asia Pacific shares outside of Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS up 0.3% in relatively light volumes.
On Wall Street overnight, the S&P 500 pared earlier gains after U.S. Federal Reserve Vice Chair Richard Clarida warned that economic data would get much worse before getting better.
The index .SPX finished 0.90% higher, the Dow .DJI rose 0.6% and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 1.1%.
More
Dow futures flat as stock market braces for private-sector report from ADP that could show 20 million jobs losses in April
Published: May 6, 2020 at 12:13 a.m. ET
U.S. stock-index futures on Wednesday were seeing
lackluster early action in thin trade as investors braced for an update on
private-sector employment from ADP for April and react to corporate quarterly
updates from some of the nation’s largest companies, which are mostly swooning
from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.Walt Disney Co. profit dove more than 90% in the second quarter, highlighting the harm from the viral outbreak on the entertainment giant.
----The stock market has gained eked out gains over the past two sessions as appetite for stocks has overcome concerns about the deadly pandemic that has slowed its pace of destruction across the country, but still leaves uncertainty about the path forward for the economy.
A private-sector report from payment processor Automatic Data Processing Inc. ADP, +0.92% will provide, at 8:15 a.m. Eastern, a snapshot of the state of the jobs market, a day before the weekly jobless claims report and ahead of the more closely followed nonfarm-payrolls report on Friday.
ADP is expected to show that some 20 million private-sector jobs were lost in April, according to consensus estimates from economists polled by Econoday. Last month, ADP’s data didn’t reflect the full scale of the employment picture that has left more than 30 million Americans without jobs in less than two months.
More
German court ruling ties ECB's hands - now and in the future
May 5, 2020 /
2:53 PM
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A landmark German court ruling will tie the
European Central Bank’s hands in fighting current and future crises even if
rate-setters eventually resolve legal concerns over trillions of euros worth of
money printing.
Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled on Tuesday that the ECB overstepped
its powers in gobbling up 2 trillion euros ($2.17 trillion) of government debt
in the past five years, and gave the central bank three months to prove that
the purchase scheme was necessary and “proportional”.
If the ECB fails, the Bundesbank must quit the scheme and sell its 533.9
billion euros worth of German government debt, the court said, setting the
stage for potential mayhem in bond markets.
But even if the euro zone central bank eventually prevails, which
appears to be the base case among market analysts, lasting damage has been
done.
The ECB will struggle to expand stimulus any further and a fresh legal
challenge to its recently launched Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme
(PEPP), a key tool to overcome the bloc’s coronavirus-induced economic
meltdown, appears to be just a matter of time.
“If the (court) ...took such a sceptical stance on the (long-running)
Public Sector Purchase Programme, the PEPP, which relaxed many of the
(PSPP) safeguards..., would probably meet an even harsher verdict in German
courts,” Nordea said in a note.
This is more than a simple headache.
With the euro zone economy shrinking faster than feared, the bloc is all
but certain to require more stimulus, including generous support from the ECB.
However, the hastily prepared pandemic purchase scheme ditched many of
the rules the ECB observed in other programmes. Its purchases are not
proportional to the size of euro zone economies, they are not capped at
one-third of each country’s debt, some junk debt is included and fewer data is
disclosed.
That suggests it is just a matter of time before the coronavirus-linked
scheme is challenged, with the German academics who filed Tuesday’s suit - and
have made it a mission to take the ECB to court over the past decade - prime
candidates.
Markets took a similarly grim view. Italian bond yields jumped over 15
basis points while other debt on the euro zone periphery also took a hit as
confidence was shaken in the ECB’s powers.
As soon as June, the ECB will be under pressure to increase the
emergency buys and relax some of its rules even further, for example to include
the purchases of non-investment grade corporate debt.
But Tuesday’s ruling is also likely to make it think twice about such a
move in the hope of preempting legal challenges.
More
Small UK manufacturers gloomiest in over 30 years - CBI
May 5, 2020 / 12:05 AM
LONDON (Reuters) - Small British manufacturers expect the biggest fall
in output in more than 30 years over the next three months as the hit from the
coronavirus intensifies, according to a survey which echoes other gloomy
forecasts for the sector.
The Confederation of British Industry said smaller manufacturers had
already suffered the largest drop in output and the biggest quarterly loss in
jobs since the financial crisis during the three months to April.
“SME manufacturers are seeing a sharp shock to activity due to the
COVID-19 outbreak, with expectations signalling a sharper downturn to come,”
CBI economist Alpesh Paleja said.
Last week a monthly survey of purchasing managers in the manufacturing
sector showed the biggest fall in output in April since the survey began in
1992.
The CBI said its members’ expectations for factory output over the next
three months were the weakest since its survey started in 1988.
Total economic output could fall by more than a third during the second
quarter - a drop with no precedent in more than 300 years - according to a
scenario published by the government’s budget forecasters last month.
More
Irish services industry PMI plunges to historic low of 13.9
May 6, 2020 /
1:13 AM
DUBLIN (Reuters) - Activity in Ireland’s services sector collapsed to a
historic low in April, with a survey showing activity at less than half the
previous lowest mark, seen during the global financial crisis that hit Ireland
particularly hard a decade ago.
The AIB IHS Markit Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) forservices fell to
13.9 from 32.5 in March, far below the 50 markthat separates growth from
contraction and broadly in line with a flash reading for the euro zone as a
whole.
The March reading was already the third-weakest in the survey’s 20-year
history after a gradual shut down of the economy to slow the spread of the
coronavirus from mid-March. The previous record low of 31.8 occurred in
February 2009.
All four sub-sectors registered unprecedented contractions in activity
in April with two categories — transport, tourism & leisure and business
services –- recording single-digit index readings of 5.2 and 7.4 respectively,
the survey’s authors said.
With unemployment forecast to hit 25%, Ireland laid out a roadmap on
Friday for a steady reopening of the economy that could allow building sites
and some retailers to open in two weeks, with restaurants following in June,
hotels in July and finally pubs in August.
The services collapse follows a similar record decline for Irish
manufacturing. Ireland’s finance ministry forecasts a decline of at least 10%
in gross domestic product this year.
“The extent of the weakness in April is
truly remarkable: 78% of firms reported lower business activity; 80% recorded
declines in new orders; over 40% of companies cut staff numbers, while almost
60% saw a decline in order backlogs,” AIB Chief Economist Oliver Mangan said.
More
Finally, in Softbank news, will
there ever be good news again? Below, when the wheels fly off, the sky falls
in, and the price of oil collapse shuts the bank of the Arab peninsula, all at
the same time. Will the BOJ step in with a Fed style trillion dollar bailout?
WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann sues SoftBank over failed tender offer
Published Mon, May 4 202010:32 PM EDT
WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann filed a lawsuit against
Japan’s SoftBank Group
and its Vision Fund on Monday for terminating a $3 billion tender offer to the
office-sharing startup’s shareholders.The tender offer was part of a $9.6 billion rescue financing package that SoftBank agreed with WeWork in October and gave it control of the company. Since then, WeWork’s occupancy rates have plummeted amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
In April, SoftBank said it would not press ahead with the tender offer because several pre-conditions had not been met, frustrating WeWork’s minority shareholders, who were expecting a payout. The investors included Adam Neumann.
“The abuses committed by (SoftBank) and SBVF (SoftBank Vision Fund) are so brazen that they have prompted legal action by a special committee of WeWork’s board,” the lawsuit filed in a Delaware Court said.
An independent special committee, comprised of Bruce Dunlevie, who is a general partner at WeWork shareholder Benchmark Capital, and Lew Frankfort, former CEO of luxury handbag maker Coach, had also filed a lawsuit, calling SoftBank’s decision to terminate the tender offer wrongful.
SoftBank’s lawyers had questioned the special committee’s right to represent minority shareholders, an assertion the committee rejected last month.
“In real time, SBG (SoftBank) and SBVF (SoftBank Vision Fund) are abusing their control of WeWork in an effort to stop the special committee’s meritorious lawsuit from being heard,” the lawsuit said.
Meanwhile, SoftBank’s Chief Legal Officer Rob Townsend called Neumann’s claims “meritless”. Under the terms of the agreement, he said, SoftBank had “no obligation” to complete the tender offer in which Neumann – the biggest beneficiary – sought to sell nearly $1 billion in stock.
SoftBank-Backed Home-Flipping Company Says It's Time To Resume Buying Properties
by Tyler Durden Tue, 05/05/2020 - 08:40
Opendoor, a company backed by SoftBank that
specializes in buying homes and flipping them, says now is time to get back
into the market. Far be it for us to question motives here at Zero Hedge, but one also must dryly note that their survival as a company likely depends on the market picking up, as well. The company's main service allows owners to sell their homes without open houses or in-person closings, according to Bloomberg.
Opendoor allows owners to request bids online and then buys homes from those who accept. Then, it makes light repairs and re-lists homes without large markups, instead profiting by charging a fee above normal real estate commissions. Opendoor uses debt to buy homes and its borrowing costs move higher the longer it holds onto a property.
The company purchased about 19,000 homes in 2019 and 3,800 homes through March of 2020.
The company had previously halted purchases in March and laid off more
than 33% of its staff as the housing market, like the rest of the economy,
simply disappeared due to the coronavirus.
Chief Executive Officer Eric Wu said in an interview: “The value
proposition we provide to customers is to help them move with certainty and
convenience. We should be willing to take on some of that exposure and we
should price homes appropriately due to that risk.”
Mike DelPrete, a real estate tech strategist who tracks the industry
said: “They can’t afford to wait for things to get back to normal because
they’re never going to get back to normal.”
Wu says that the company is even considering converting some of the
houses on its books to rentals: “It’s always an option for us. It’s not
something we’re actively pursuing at this moment.”
“There is still demand for people to move. That could be driven by the
fact that people need more space because they work from home, or they want to
move out of the middle of the city because they want something less
dense," Wu continued.
For now the company is touting the fact that its process is mostly "hands off", which at a time of a global pandemic can act as a huge positive for those looking to social distance or quarantine.
Opendoor had previously raised $1.3 billion from investors that included SoftBank's Vision Fund. We reported last month that SoftBank posted an astounding $25 billion loss for Q1.
And while growing home inventory and a potential lack of buyers remain obvious looming risks for Opendoor, Opendoor's performance as a company remains a risk for Softbank. One big happy house of cards family.
"In
economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension."
John Kenneth
Galbraith.
Covid-19 Corner
Though
hopefully, we are passing/have passed the peak of new cases, at least of the
first SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, this section will continue until it becomes
unneeded.
Fauci: The Virus Was Not Made In a Lab, You Idiots
The evidence "is very, very strongly
leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately
manipulated."
5/5/2020
In a new interview with National Geographic, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and public face of America’s fight against the coronavirus Anthony Fauci made it abundantly clear — yet again — that evidence strongly suggests the coronavirus was not created in a lab in China.
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,” Fauci told National Geographic. “Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.”
Fauci was responding to conspiracy theories that have flourished on social media, claiming China created the coronavirus inside a lab in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.
Authorities in the United States — including President Donald Trump —have parroted elements of that theory, though both domestic and international intelligence agencies have also failed to turn up evidence for it.
Fauci also warned about a second, stronger wave of COVID-19 cases later this year, noting that testing needs to ramp up before then.
“Shame on us if we don’t have enough tests by the time this so-called return might occur in the fall and winter,” he said, noting that he didn’t “think there’s a chance that this virus is just going to disappear.”
Yet, he’s still hopeful that a vaccine will be available to the general population as early as January. To make that happen, a lot of different types of vaccines will have to get tested. “You want a lot of shots on goal. We want four or five candidates that we put out there all within a reasonable time,” Fauci told National Geographic.
Fauci is particularly hopeful about “mRNA vaccines” that use the virus’s genetic material to build proteins to trigger the body’s immune system response, noting that “the promise is great” and that the time it takes to gain immunity is “really quite impressive.”
Scientists Create Antibody That Defeats Coronavirus in Lab
By Tim Loh
May 4, 2020, 3:01 PM GMT+1 Updated on May 4, 2020, 4:30
PM GMT+1
Scientists created a monoclonal antibody that can defeat
the new coronavirus in the lab, an early but promising step in efforts to find
treatments and curb the pandemic’s spread.The experimental antibody has neutralized the virus in cell cultures. While that’s early in the drug development process -- before animal research and human trials -- the antibody may help prevent or treat Covid-19 and related diseases in the future, either alone or in a drug combination, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Communications.
More research is needed to see whether the findings are confirmed in a clinical setting and how precisely the antibody defeats the virus, Berend-Jan Bosch of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues wrote in the paper.
The antibody known as 47D11 targets the spike protein that gives the new coronavirus a crown-like shape and lets it enter human cells. In the Utrecht experiments, it didn’t just defeat the virus responsible for Covid-19 but also a cousin equipped with similar spike proteins, which causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.
Monoclonal antibodies are lab-created proteins that resemble naturally occurring versions the body raises to fight off bacteria and viruses. Highly potent, they target exactly one site on a virus. In this case, the scientists used genetically modified mice to produce different antibodies to the spike proteins of coronaviruses. After a subsequent screening process, 47D11 emerged as showing neutralizing activity. Researchers then reformatted that antibody to create a fully human version, according to the paper.
More
Iran reports success with repurposing Hep C drugs for COVID-19
Last month, an announcement by Iran’s news agencies on the successful treatment of COVID-19 patients appears to have slipped beneath the radar. Unusually, contrary to customary reporting, the names of the drugs and the treatment were withheld. Has Iran found a possible cure for COVID-19?Dr James Freeman investigates.
For those of you who like executive summaries, here it is.
Iranian reports on success of clinical trials but details scanty
It may surprise you to know that doctors in Iran have commenced 109 clinical trials on treatments for COVID-19 and recently announced that“Antiviral drugs have been successfully tested on critically ill patients with COVID-19 by the Infectious Diseases Department of Abadan University of Medical Science.”
The cure looks like no ICU deaths and rapid recovery for patients. While Iran has not announced the name of the drug, it can be accurately deduced via an analysis of their clinical trials database. The drug is a locally produced fixed dose combination of Sofosbuvir (Sovaldi) and Daclastasvir (Daklinza) which is normally used to treat Hepatitis C virus. In what I personally consider a staggering oversight, doctors in developed countries are not testing this combination. It has been right under our noses the whole time and we have left it to Iran to prove it works.
So, which are the possible anti-viral drugs used in the trials?
What follows gets a little technical for a moment then moves on to some Sherlock Holmes-style investigation and a call for action to duplicate the trials in Iran to see if their observations hold true.Keeping in mind that both Hepatitis C (HCV) and SARS-CoV-2 are +ve sense RNA viruses (which means quite similar, in plain English) it would be reasonable to assume that nucleotide analogues (NUCs) proven to work for HCV might work on SARS-CoV-2. In simple terms, NUCs are fake letters in the RNA genetic alphabet CGAU.
Ribavirin, Remdesvir and Sofosbuvir are all NUCs and represent fake letters “G”, “A” and “U” respectively. The strategy of using fake genetic letters to impair the activity of critical viral polymerases (the thing that clones the genetic material) is well known and will not be discussed further.
With Hepatitis C, we can observe Ribavirin is weak with a log kill of only 0.5 (2/3 viruses killed) and a wide range of well-known side effects because it is not very selective. Conversely, Sofosbuvir is very potent with a log kill of 4.5 (31999/32000 viruses killed). Besides staggering potency, the key feature of Sofosbuvir is its lack of toxicity. Almost every other NUC developed for HCV, HIV and other viruses failed, not due to a lack of potency, but rather due to toxicity on human cells.
While there are high hopes for a Gilead drug called Remdesvir, the reality is that Remdesvir is intravenous only and currently only exists at experimental scale, so, even if it is proven to work, the likely global utility is small unless you are super rich.
Conversely, Sofosbuvir is a tablet and widely deployed making it a superior trials candidate on those grounds alone. We know Sofosbuvir is safe in humans, we know the doses, so why are we not testing it? We did, in fact, consider testing it way back in February but for reasons that elude me that avenue of investigation appears to simply evaporate.
Fortunately, some people are testing it in humans, and the results appear very encouraging.
U.S. Covid-19 Cases Rise 2%; Deaths Surpass 68,000: Virus Update
Bloomberg News
May 3, 2020, 11:00 PM GMT+1 Updated on May 4, 2020,
10:02 PM GMT+1
U.S. President Donald Trump said some states “aren’t going
fast enough” to reopen,
even as he acknowledged that the nation’s death count would likely be higher
than he had predicted. Globally, deaths topped 250,000. Trump accused Beijing
of attempting a cover-up and promised a conclusive report
on the pandemic’s origins.Scientists created a monoclonal antibody that can defeat the new coronavirus in the lab, an early but promising step. U.S. researchers will track thousands of children to determine how they’re affected by the pathogen.
The worst-hit countries in Europe moved to ease curbs as cases slowed. Italy began to reopen its economy after two months, but the premier was criticized for being too cautious, and Spain started to relax its lockdown regime after weeks of confinement.
Russia has more than 10,000 new infections
for a second day
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.
Twisting 2D materials uncovers their superpowers
Date:
May 1, 2020
Source:
Aalto University
Summary:
Researchers can now grow twistronic material at sizes large enough to be
useful. While an exciting potential area of nanotechnology, twistronics until
now has mostly been explored on samples smaller than human hairs. Now
researchers can produce samples on the centimetre scale.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials, which consist of a single layer of
atoms, have attracted a lot of attention since the isolation of graphene in
2004. They have unique electrical, optical, and mechanical properties, like
high conductivity, flexibility and strength, which makes them promising
materials for such things as lasers, photovoltaics, sensors and medical
applications.
When a sheet of 2D material is placed over another and slightly rotated,
the twist can radically change the bilayer material's properties and lead to
exotic physical behaviours, such as high temperature superconductivity --
exiting for electrical engineering; nonlinear optics -- exciting for lasers and
data transmission; and structural super-lubricity- a newly discovered
mechanical property which researchers are only beginning to understand. The
study of these properties has given birth to a new field of research called
twistronics, so-called because it's a combination of twist and electronics.
Aalto University's researchers collaborating with international
colleagues have now developed a new method for making these twisted layers on scales
that are large enough to be useful, for the first time. Their new method for
transferring single-atom layers of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) allows
researchers to precisely control the twist angle between layers with up to a
square centimetre in area, making it record-breaking in terms of size.
Controlling the interlayer twist angle on a large scale is crucial for the
future practical applications of twistronics.
'Our demonstrated twist method allows us to tune the properties of
stacked multilayer MoS2 structures on larger scales than ever before. The
transfer method can also apply to other two-dimensional layered materials',
says Dr Luojun Du from Aalto University, one of the lead authors of the work.
A significant advancement for a brand-new field of research
Since twistronics research was introduced only in 2018, basic research
is still needed to understand the properties of twisted materials better before
they find their ways to practical applications. The Wolf Prize in Physics, one
of the most prestigious scientific awards, was awarded to Profs. Rafi
Bistritzer, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, and Allan H. MacDonald this year for their
groundbreaking work on twistronics, which indicates the game-changing potential
of the emerging field.
More
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to
do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The Monthly Coppock Indicators finished April
DJIA: 24,346 +26 Down. NASDAQ: 8,890 +162 Up.
SP500: 2,912 +89 Down.
The NASDAQ has rebounded to
up. The S&P and the DJIA remain down.
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