Baltic Dry Index. 1738 +33 Brent Crude 41.66
Spot Gold 1760
Coronavirus Cases 26/6/20
World 9,758,284
Deaths 492,854
"Based on our
estimates, we believe up to 10% of all restaurants globally will disappear,
with 20% or more also going through a restructuring process," said
founder Aaron Allen. "This is a conservative case, in our
view."
Of the
roughly 22 million restaurants worldwide, about 2.2 million are
expected to shutter operations.
The Fed, and a mob
of other lesser central banksters, have pushed their latest massive stock
market bubble, far beyond any economic reality and now a surge in new global Covid-19
cases threatens to burst all the central bankster bubbles.
New cases in much
of the USA are now out of control. Worse, at national or local level there
doesn’t seem to be any rational attempt at containment, though in Florida,
Texas and Arizona it may already be too late for containment.
In wider America,
new unemployment filings remain astronomically high. Still running near 1.5
million a week versus about 220,000 a week pre-pandemic. With almost 20 million
still on continuing claims, a massive segment of US consumer demand is under pressure
and dwindling.
Below, as both
Canada and America head off next week to celebrate the Canada Day and US
Independence Day holidays, to this old dinosaur commodities trader and market
follower, stock markets everywhere seem headed for a summer Covid-19 crash.
Both national holidays are only likely to increase the rate of Covid-19
infection.
Stocks going nowhere as virus fears hold optimism in check
June 26, 2020 /
1:12 AM
SINGAPORE/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Asian stock
markets ground higher on Friday, and are set to end a choppy week more or less
where they began it as surging coronavirus infections cast a shadow over
encouraging economic data and checked hopes for a swift global recovery.
Bulls seem to have the upper hand in currency markets, with the U.S. dollar down 0.3% for the week, and riskier currencies such as the Australian dollar marginally ahead. Majors were steady in morning trade on Friday.
“The market probably ran ahead of itself anticipating a smooth recovery, which has set us up for the rougher period we’re now going through,” said Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP Capital in Sydney.
“We’re stuck in a bit of a range. There’s a degree of optimism that any second wave will be offset by stimulus ... but if we have to go back to a renewed lockdown then it’s a different story, and markets face a lot more downside risk.”
The moves followed a bumpy session on Wall Street, which finished in positive territory after a late surge led by banking stocks. Financials caught a boost from a relaxation in some capital requirements that ought to free up cash for lending.
Still, volumes were light and plenty of headwinds remain.
The governor of Texas paused the state’s reopening on Thursday as COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations surged and the country set a new record for a one-day increase in cases.
Localised restrictions to slow the virus have now been re-imposed in parts of Lisbon in Portugal, western Germany, Australia’s Victoria state and Beijing.
The U.S. Senate has also passed legislation that would impose mandatory sanctions on people or companies that back efforts by China to restrict Hong Kong’s autonomy, yet another potential Sino-U.S. flashpoint.
More
BOJ's Kuroda warns second-round effect of COVID-19 may dent economic growth
June 26, 2020 /
4:34 AM
TOKYO (Reuters) - Bank of Japan (BOJ) Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said
second-round effects of the coronavirus pandemic could hurt the Japanese
economy “considerably”, signalling the bank’s readiness to ramp up stimulus
measures again to cushion any blow from the crisis.
But in an online seminar on Friday Kuroda said the central bank saw no
immediate need to cut interest rates, and instead will focus on easing
corporate funding strains and stabilising markets with its lending facility and
asset purchases.
“Japan’s economy has been in an extremely severe situation ... In the
second quarter, we’ll likely see considerable negative growth,” Kuroda said.
“At this moment, we didn’t see the need to further lower the entire
yield curve. Of course, if necessary we will do that. But now, we don’t think
it’s necessary,” he said.
The BOJ eased policy in March and April, mainly by boosting asset buying
and creating lending schemes to channel funds to companies hit by the pandemic.
It has kept its interest-rate targets unchanged.
Kuroda said he was “cautiously optimistic” that Japan’s economy will
gradually recover from the second half of this year, allowing the BOJ to scale
back its crisis-response steps.
More
Jobless claims dip to 1.48 million, but slow decline signals choppy economic recovery
Published: June 25, 2020 at 9:31
a.m. ET
The numbers: New applications for traditional jobless benefits fell slightly last week to 1.48 million, but they remain stubbornly high three months after the start of the coronavirus pandemic and signal that a fledging economic recovery is likely to be uneven.
Initial jobless claims, a rough gauge of layoffs, dipped in the seven days ended June 20 from 1.54 million in the prior week, the Labor Department said Thursday. The figures are seasonally adjusted.
While it marked the 12th straight decline, new claims are still extremely high and raise questions about whether a small rebound in the economy after a prolonged coronavirus-tied shutdown is about to hit a wall.
Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a seasonally adjusted 1.38 million new claims.
These figures reflect applications filed the normal way through state unemployment offices.
If people who applied for benefits through a temporary federal program are included, new claims totaled an unadjusted 2.19 million last week. That was down slightly from a revised 2.2 million.
The number of people who are actually receiving traditional jobless benefits, meanwhile, slid to 19.5 million in the week ended June 13 from 20.3 million. These so-called continuing claims, reported with a one-week lag, have fallen painfully slow after peaking in the middle of May at nearly 22.8 million.
What happened: New jobless claims have fallen gradually across the country, but
economists had widely expected they would decline more rapidly after a
nationwide lockdown of business activity ended and people began returning to
work.
The elevated level of new claims could reflect a worrisome wave of fresh
layoffs in the worst-case scenario. Some businesses also complain that generous
unemployment benefits have dissuaded employees from returning to work.
It’s also possible the record deluge of applications has led to widespread
errors by overworked state employment offices trying to handle the crush.
More than 50 million applications for benefits have been filed in the past three months. Before the crisis the states were handling around 222,000 a week.
Along with applications for benefits filed regularly through the states, an additional 728,120 new claims were submitted last week under a temporary federal relief program put in place after the pandemic began. Forty-six states reported unadjusted figures for federal claims under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program.
If all eight state and federal assistance programs are included, continuing claims totaled an unadjusted 30.5 million in the seven days ended June 6, the most recent data available. That marks a small increase from 29.3 million in the prior week.
More
2.2 Million Restaurants Worldwide Teeter on Brink of Collapse
With demand plunging and costs piling up, these business owners talk about how they’re fighting to stay afloat.By Leslie Patton and Kate Krader
When Chicago restaurant owner Manish Mallick does the math, the outlook isn’t pretty: Sales are 10% of what they were, while costs continue to pile up, from credit card fees and city permits to masks and thermometers.
The owner of ROOH Chicago, an Indian restaurant nominated for the city’s 2019 restaurant of the year by foodie publication Eater, gives himself a couple months at most.
“It’s going to be tough to survive,” Mallick said. “Ultimately I need people to come and start dining in. And the more time it takes, the worse it gets for us.”
More
In everyone loves
a good scandal news Germany’s “fraudcard” says goodbye. Mostly to gullible
banksters money. Singapore’s OK Lim, founder of oil trader Hin Leong Trading (Pte) Ltd,
wasn’t.
Wirecard files for insolvency, becoming first DAX member to fail
June 25, 2020 /
9:41 AM
BERLIN/MUNICH
(Reuters) - Wirecard (WDIG.DE) said on Thursday
it was filing for insolvency after disclosing a $2.1 billion (£1.6 billion)
financial hole in its accounts, becoming the first sitting member of Germany’s
blue-chip share index to go out of business.
Shares were
suspended by the Frankfurt Stock Exchange before the news. They have lost more
than 90% since auditor EY refused to sign off on the 2019 accounts last week,
leading to the resignation of long-time CEO Markus Braun.
Wirecard said in a two-paragraph statement that its new management had
decided to apply for insolvency at a Munich court “due to impending insolvency
and over-indebtedness”.
It also said it was evaluating whether to file for insolvency
proceedings for its subsidiaries.
The Munich-based ‘fintech’ collapsed less than two years after it won
admission to Germany’s prestigious DAX blue-chip index. At its peak worth $28
billion, the company becomes the first sitting member of the DAX to collapse.
The Munich prosecutor’s office, which is already investigating Braun on
suspicion of misrepresenting Wirecard’s accounts and of market manipulation,
said: “We will now look at all possible criminal offences.”
More
Germany Wonders How Wirecard Could Misplace $2 Billion
The fintech darling was supposed to revive the German tech sector but got dragged down by financial improprieties.June 25, 2020, 5:01 AM GMT+1
The question everyone in the German business world is asking these days is as simple as it is perplexing: How, exactly, do you misplace more than $2 billion? That’s the mystery surrounding Wirecard AG.
The darling of the financial community was founded two decades ago as a processor of payments for porn and gambling websites, but it morphed into a developer of software for online transactions with a roster of A-list customers such as FedEx, Ikea, and Singapore Airlines.
On June 18, Wirecard said auditors couldn’t locate €1.9 billion ($2.1 billion)—about four-fifths of its net cash—that was supposed to be held at a pair of banks in Asia. That spurred a sharp drop in the company’s already battered share price (it’s now down more than 90% from its 2018 peak) and the departure of Markus Braun, the Austrian who’d been chief executive officer since 2002.
In a resignation note, Braun said, “Responsibility for all business transactions lies with the CEO.” On June 23, German prosecutors said they had arrested him on suspicion of accounting fraud and market manipulation.
The sordid tale has become an embarrassment for Germany, which has been a laggard in technology despite its engineering prowess and position as Europe’s biggest and most advanced economy.
Wirecard was the financial-tech whiz kid that was supposed to change all that, with internet payment systems, fraud detection software, and an online bank serving both individuals and companies.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-25/germany-wonders-how-wirecard-could-misplace-2-billion
Exclusive: Legal tussles snarl millions in oil from Hin Leong deals
June 24, 2020 /
3:52 PM
SINGAPORE
(Reuters) - Millions of dollars of oil stored in tanks and ships in Asia and
Europe has become caught in a web of lawsuits related to trade and financing
deals by Singapore’s Hin Leong Trading (Pte) Ltd, according to court documents
and shipping data.
A report filed this week in Singapore’s High Court and reviewed by
Reuters found Hin Leong obtained financing from various banks for cargoes of
oil which did not exist, complicating the competing claims of ownership.
The oil inventories that Hin Leong did have include diesel on three
tankers that arrived fully loaded in Europe last month, and which have since
been floating off the United Kingdom and France, shipping data on Refinitiv’s
Eikon showed. The ownership of the fuel on four floating storage units (FSUs)
off Malaysia is also in dispute, the report said.
Hin Leong, one of Asia’s largest oil traders, was placed under so-called
judicial management in April owing $3.8 billion (£3.06 billion) to 23 banks as
oil prices crashed and the coronavirus swept across the globe.
The report by interim judicial managers from PricewaterhouseCoopers
Advisory Services Pte. Ltd (PwC) found that Hin Leong’s total oil inventory
stood at $212 million as of May 20, less than a third of the $646 million owed
to banks that provided inventory financing facilities.
Hin Leong and PwC did not immediately respond to emailed requests for
comment. A spokesman for Rajah & Tann, legal advisor to the interim
judicial managers, declined comment.
Hin Leong’s oil inventories “are likely to be subject to multiple claims
by creditors,” according to PwC. The accountancy firm plans to sell some of the
inventory, which is currently incurring storage costs, to minimise costs.
The sale proceeds would be set aside while ownership of the oil was
determined, which it expected would take a “significant time” to complete.
Determining who owns the oil is part of a
wider restructuring of Hin Leong, which PwC has said has no future as an
independent company after it “grossly overstated” the value of its assets by at
least $3 billion.
More
Oil trader Hin Leong was allegedly 'selling and buying back non-existent cargo' to mislead banks: PwC
SINGAPORE - More than 270 letters of credit facilities were allegedly
used by Hin Leong to get billions of dollars in financing, although in some
cases, there was no underlying cargo to secure the funding, the interim
judicial managers said.
There are 23 banks exposed to Hin Leong for more than US$3.5 billion
(S$4.9 billion). This amount includes bank financing that had been granted
under 273 import letters of credit facilities that were supposedly used by the
company to fund the purchase of cargo from various suppliers, PWC said in a
report filed on Monday (June 22) in Singapore’s High Court.
More
Jean-Claude
Juncker. Failed former Luxembourg P.M., serial liar, ex-president of the
European Commission. Scotch
connoisseur.
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.
Exclusive: Vaccine alliance finds manufacturing capacity for 4 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines
June 25, 2020 /
12:08 AM
CHICAGO
(Reuters) - An influential foundation focused on preparation and response to
epidemics that is backing nine potential coronavirus vaccines has identified
manufacturers with capacity to produce four billion doses a year, the group’s
top manufacturing expert told Reuters.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI) plans to have
two or three manufacturing plants for each vaccine, James Robinson, a longtime
biopharma executive leading CEPI’S vast manufacturing push, said in an
interview.
“Right now, we know we can do the two billion doses that we have as our
kind of our minimum target” by the end of 2021, he said.
The group is planning for eight to 10 regional distribution sites “so
that we don’t have to make everything centrally and try and ship it around the
world,” he said.
Even with no existing approved vaccines, CEPI is already getting
manufacturing and supply chains lined up in a quest to ensure coronavirus
vaccines are distributed equitably around the globe.
The Oslo, Norway-based group is backed by 14 governments, the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, and Britain’s Wellcome Trust.
CEPI has deployed up to $829 million so far in the search for a COVID-19
vaccine through partnerships with nine developers, with the hope that at least
some will be successful.
They are Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc (INO.O), the University of Queensland with CSL Ltd (CSL.AX), CureVac, Moderna Inc (MRNA.O) with U.S. government backing, Novavax Inc (NVAX.O), the University of Oxford with AstraZeneca (AZN.L), Clover Biopharmaceuticals, the University of Hong Kong, and a consortium led by Institut Pasteur and including the University of Pittsburgh and Themis Bioscience, which was recently purchased by Merck & Co (MRK.N).
Robinson said CEPI has taken initial steps toward securing manufacturing capacity with more than 200 biopharma or sterile vaccine production companies.
More
The world is putting America in quarantine
June 25, 2020
Europe, where most countries have largely contained the virus (after initial screw-ups), is looking at America with slackjawed horror. The European Union is likely to close its borders to American travelers when it restores some international travel on July 1. Canada will most likely keep its U.S. border mostly closed when the current agreement expires on July 21.
---- It is plainly obvious why the U.S. is experiencing a second wave. The point of coronavirus lockdowns, as I and dozens of others explained months ago, was to buy time for the government to set up more fine-grained containment protocols that could contain the virus more effectively. With transmission reduced to a manageable rate and a test-trace-isolate system in place, countries can return to something like normal life, and an increasing number are doing so. It's a tricky business and renewed lockdowns may be necessary, as fresh outbreaks in China and elsewhere have shown, but it can be done.
But the Trump administration did not even try this on a national level, or do anything of significance. Indeed, American politics is so broken that we couldn't even manage the simplest common-sense containment strategy of mandating universal mask-wearing in any indoor space. American public health experts spent weeks on a bizarre and scientifically illiterate crusade against masks
More
Houston Facing ‘Apocalyptic’ July 4 Holiday as Virus Surges
June 25, 2020
(Bloomberg) -- Houston’s Covid-19 outbreak is accelerating at an
exponential pace that will swamp the fourth-largest U.S. city’s medical
infrastructure by the Independence Day holiday, less than two weeks away, a
leading disease specialist warned.
Even as Houston-area intensive-care wards approach full capacity, the
worst is yet to come because of “the huge amount of transmission going on in
our community,” Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine
at Baylor College of Medicine, said in an interview Thursday.
Current trends in Harris County, which includes Houston, indicate the
caseload will triple or quadruple by mid-July, Hotez said, citing modeling by
the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s PolicyLab. Such a scenario would be
“apocalyptic,” he said. “We can’t go there.”
Hotez’s remarks came a day after the Texas Medical Center warned the
Houston region’s intensive-care capacity was quickly filling up and would soon
force medical authorities to convert other facilities to ad hoc Covid-19 wards.
Harris County officials said they are prepared to reopen a field hospital at a
professional football stadium if so-called surge capacity shows signs of
strain.
The trajectory of new cases is “going vertical,” Hotez said. “That’s
what epidemic diseases classically do.”
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.
Dirac electrons come back to life in magic-angle graphene
Date:
June 22, 2020
Source:
Weizmann Institute of Science
Summary:
A new symmetry-broken parent state has been discovered in twisted bilayer
graphene.
In 2018 it was discovered that two layers of graphene twisted one with
respect to the other by a "magic" angle show a variety of interesting
quantum phases, including superconductivity, magnetism and insulating
behaviours. Now a team of researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science
led by Prof. Shahal Ilani of the Condensed Matter Physics Department, in
collaboration with Prof. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at MIT, have discovered
that these quantum phases descend from a previously unknown high-energy
"parent state," with an unusual breaking of symmetry.
Graphene is a flat crystal of carbon, just one atom thick. When two
sheets of this material are placed on top of each other, misaligned at small
angle, a periodic "moiré" pattern appears. This pattern provides an
artificial lattice for the electrons in the material. In this twisted bilayer
system the electrons come in four "flavours": spins "up" or
"down," combined with two "valleys" that originate in the
graphene's hexagonal lattice. As a result, each moiré site can hold up to four
electrons, one of each flavour.
While researchers already knew that the system behaves as a simple
insulator when all the moiré sites are completely full (four electrons per
site), Jarillo-Herrero and his colleagues discovered to their surprise, in
2018, that at a specific "magic" angle, the twisted system also
becomes insulating at other integer fillings (two or three electrons per moiré
site). This behaviour, exhibited by magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene
(MATBG), cannot be explained by single particle physics, and is often described
as a "correlated Mott insulator." Even more surprising was the
discovery of exotic superconductivity close to these fillings. These findings
led to a flurry of research activity aiming to answer the big question: what is
the nature of the new exotic states discovered in MATBG and similar twisted
systems?
---- "What is most surprising is that the phase transitions and Dirac revivals that we discovered appear at temperatures well above the onset of the superconducting and correlated insulating states observed so far," says Ilani. "This indicates that the broken symmetry state we have seen is, in fact, the 'parent state' out of which the more fragile superconducting and correlated insulating ground states emerge."
The peculiar way in which the symmetry is broken has important
implications for the nature of the insulating and superconducting states in
this twisted system.
"For example, it is well known that stronger superconductivity
arises when electrons are heavier. Our experiment, however, demonstrates the
exact opposite: superconductivity appears in this magic-angle graphene system
after a phase transition has revived the light Dirac electrons. How this
happens, and what it tells us about the nature of superconductivity in this
system compared to other more conventional forms of superconductivity remain
interesting open questions," says Zondiner.
A similar cascade of phase transitions was reported in another paper
published in the same Nature issue by Prof. Ali Yazdani and colleagues
at Princeton University. "The Princeton team studied MATBG using a
completely different experimental technique, based on a highly-sensitive
scanning tunneling microscope, so it is very reassuring to see that complementary
techniques lead to analogous observations," says Ilani.
The Weizmann and MIT researchers say they will now use their scanning
nanotube single-electron-transistor platform to answer these and other basic
questions about electrons in various twisted-layer systems: What is the
relationship between the compressibility of electrons and their apparent
transport properties? What is the nature of the correlated states that form in
these systems at low temperatures? And what are the fundamental quasiparticles
that make up these states?
Another weekend and
why do I feel like I’m a second class passenger traveling on the RMS Titanic.
We long ago hit our iceberg, and all our central banksters do to remedy our
sinking, is issue trillions of new cash to the first class passengers to spend
in the casinos!
If anything
approaching ten percent of all global restaurants are about to fail, the real global economy is on the cusp of
a massive supply and demand foodstuffs shock.
No amount of casino gambling will make any difference. Have a great
weekend everyone.
"We shouldn't pour cold water on everything. We, the eight
or nine players in global investment banking, have a very good future."Deutsche Bank, CEO Josef Ackermann. Davos, January 2007.
The Monthly Coppock Indicators finished May
DJIA: 25,383 +12 Down. NASDAQ: 9,490 +178 Up.
SP500: 3,044 +83 Down.
The NASDAQ has remained up.
The S&P and the DJIA still remain down despite the best efforts of the Fed
to get them to go higher.
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