Baltic Dry Index. 1527 +281 Brent Crude 41.89
Spot Gold 1728
Coronavirus Cases 19/6/20
World 8,625,733
Deaths 459,146
The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal
government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.
Ronald Reagan
Are we in for a
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs employment ending? Well probably not.
Nevertheless, we
start with a good news article from CNN on McDonald’s hiring 260,000 people
this summer in the USA.
That’s probably
great news for all Americans about to leave school or university this summer.
If they move fast, they just might have a job after all.
McDonald's is hiring 260,000 people in the US this summer
New York (CNN Business)McDonald's plans to hire 260,000 people this summer in the
United States as it begins to resume normal operations.
The
beefed-up staffing comes as it prepares to reopen its dining rooms after a
majority of them were temporarily closed because of coronavirus. The positions are a mix of full- and part-time
roles.
In
May, McDonald's (MCD)
laid out the new safety precautions it will use as it reopens its dining rooms.
Notably, customers will see stickers on floors encouraging social distancing,
blocked-off tables and the closure of its self-serve beverage bar. Employees
have to wash their hands every hour and wear personal protective equipment.
Roughly
95% of its restaurants around the world have reopened in
some capacity, and around 99% of its US restaurants have continued operating
some services throughout the pandemic.
"We've
put new minimum national standards and nearly 50 new processes in place in our
restaurants as they continue to reopen safely and judiciously," said Joe
Erlinger, president of McDonald's USA, in Thursday's press release. The company
employs around 850,000 people in the United States.
McDonald's
is experiencing a rebound in sales and demand. Its US sales fell 19% during the
month of April compared with the same period in the year prior, but were down
just 5% year-over-year in May. Those numbers include sales at all locations
that have been operating for at least 13 months, even if the restaurants were
temporarily closed during the pandemic.
Breakfast
sales were particularly low, something executives lamented on the company's quarterly earnings call in early
May. Wendy's (WEN),
however, reported strong sales for its newly launched breakfast
menu.
Jobless claims dip to 1.51 million in mid-June, but layoffs remain stubbornly high
Published: June 18, 2020 at 9:03 a.m. ET
The numbers: About 1.5 million people applied for traditional jobless benefits in mid-June, but the high number of people still seeking or receiving financial aid suggests a fresh wave of layoffs may be crashing over the economy and stunting an embryonic recovery.
Initial jobless claims filed the traditional way through state unemployment offices fell slightly in the seven days ended June 13 from 1.57 million in the prior week, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the 10th decline in a row.
Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a seasonally adjusted 1.35 million new claims
If people who applied for unemployment benefits through a temporary federal program are included, new claims totaled an unadjusted 2.19 million in mid-June.
Yet the number of people who are actually receiving traditional jobless benefits barely fell to 20.54 million in the week ended May 30. These so-called continuing claims, reported with a one-week lag, had peaked in the middle of May at nearly 23 million, but are declining at an agonizingly slow pace.
What happened: New jobless claims have fallen steadily from a peak of almost 7 million in late March, but the decline has been much slower than economists had expected. They worry a second wave of layoffs is keeping the numbers elevated, posing a potential threat to an economic recovery that’s now in the early stages.
More
Nor
is unemployment just a US problem. From Australia to Europe and just about
every nation around planet Earth, unemployment levels are flirting with Great
Depression levels. Just don’t tell anyone in the Fed’s Great Disconnect Stock
Bubble.
Australia unemployment rate jumps to 19-year high
Published: June 18, 2020 at 2:03 a.m. ET
SYDNEY--Australia's economy shed a further 227,700 jobs in May, causing
the unemployment rate to surge to a 19-year high of 7.1% as coronavirus
lockdowns continued to undermine business confidence and cripple activity.
The plunge in employment compared with an expected decline of 75,000,
the Australian Bureau of Statistics said Thursday.
The drop in employment added to a 600,000 fall in April, bringing the
total to 835,000 since March.
The increase in the unemployment rate was tempered by larger-than-usual
numbers of employed and unemployed people leaving the labor force, the ABS
said.
This was reflected in a further drop in the participation rate, which
fell 0.7 percentage point to 62.9% in May, a 19-year low.
The pandemic has pushed Australia's economy into its first recession in
29 years but signs of a recovery are beginning to emerge.
Consumer confidence and spending data have been looking more positive in
recent weeks. The underemployment rate fell to 13.1% from 13.8%.
"It will take us around two years to get back to where we were
before it happened, and we think over five years we can seek to catch up to
where we were planning to be," Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison
told reporters.
Australian health authorities have been successful in containing the
virus, with steps now being taken to reopen key parts of the economy.
Major banks recently raised their expectations for gross domestic
product growth in 2020, but few are expecting a V-shaped recovery as it will
likely take years to repair the damaged job market.
More
Finally,
yesterday we wrote:
The
tide has just turned and is going out. A massive wave of corporate fraud and
malinvestment is about to get exposed.
While
not sure into which class this falls, something tells me it might be both. Of
course, there might be an innocent explanation for all this, I look forward to
hearing what it might be.
One company previously
said Wirecard had "more red flags than you would see at a communist
rally."
Wirecard shares plunge as Ernst & Young says no evidence for 1.9 billion euros of cash on balance sheet
Published:
June 18, 2020 at 5:05 a.m. ET
Shares
of Wirecard WDI,
-48.10% lost 59% as the company said Ernst & Young told
it that no sufficient audit evidence could be obtained so far of cash balances
on trust accounts of 1.9 billion euros, or approximately a quarter of the
balance sheet.
"There
are indications that spurious balance confirmations had been provided from the
side of the trustee respectively of the trustee's account holding banks to the
auditor in order to deceive the auditor and create a wrong perception of the
existence of such cash balances or the holding of the accounts for to the
benefit of Wirecard group companies. The Wirecard management board is working
intensively together with the auditor towards a clarification of the
situation," said the company.
Wirecard urges UK High Court to dismiss fraud lawsuit
German payments group is accused of
wrongdoing in €326m acquisition of a company sold for €36m
More
No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size.
Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government
bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!
Ronald Reagan
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.
100 days of the COVID-19 pandemic: 5 critical mistakes that created the biggest public-health crisis in a generation
Published: June 19, 2020 at 12:49 a.m. ET
It’s been 100 days since the World Health Organization
declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. Several important red flags were
missed, so what can we learn from those mistakes?The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths continues to rise. As of Friday, there were 2,189,056 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and 118,420 deaths, including 30,974 deaths in New York, the most of any state in the country. Worldwide, there were 8,464,739 confirmed cases and 453,289 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. The Dow Jones Industrial Index DJIA, -0.15% and the S&P 500 SPX, +0.05% ended broadly flat Thursday, as the market mulled hopes of a potential therapeutic steroid treatment and vaccine research.
The missteps of the past 100 days must not be repeated, said Gregory Poland, who studies the immunogenetics of vaccines at the Mayo Clinic.
“Imagine this scenario: It’s October,” he said. “The seasonal influenza epidemic occurs. COVID-19 comes back. We’re fussing with China. There’s been a glitch with the Moderna MRNA, +2.59% vaccine trials. There’s another incident with police, and now the riots are inflamed because, after all these years, nothing appears to be fixed, and we’re in the middle of a political campaign ahead of the presidential election in November. This does not have good optics to me.”
This is the first pandemic since the AIDS crisis. So what key moments led to this point?
More
·
Products from German slaughterhouse Toennies are
banned from entering China after a coronavirus outbreak at the facility,
customs agency says
·
Outbreak is likely add to concerns about the
safety of imported food in China and comes just days after Beijing halted
shipments of European salmon
Orange Wang Published:
8:50pm, 18 June, 2020
China on Thursday banned imported pork from a German company after its
workers became infected by coronavirus, adding to uncertainty over fresh food
shipments to the country amid a new outbreak in Beijing.
More than 650 out of 1000 staff at the meatpacking plant owned by
Toennies tested positive for the virus, leading German authorities to close the
facility, as well as schools and childcare centres in the western city of
Guetersloh.
All products from the German slaughterhouse were banned from entering
China as of June 17, the General Administration of Customs said on Thursday,
adding German authorities had alerted China to the cluster of infections.
The outbreak is likely to add to concerns about the safety of imported
proteins in China – a country of 1.4 billion people -and comes just days after
Beijing halted shipments of European salmon amid fears it may be the source
of a new coronavirus outbreak.
Though food experts say salmon is unlikely to carry the disease,
shipments were frozen after the virus was discovered on chopping boards used
for imported salmon at Beijing’s Xinfadi market, which has been linked to a new
infection in the capital.
The outbreak has resulted in a partial lockdown of the capital, though
authorities are still investigating its origin.
June 18, 2020 /
4:19 PM
June 18 (UPI) -- Members of a large groups of viruses, including
influenza viruses, can build new genes using genetic code copied from hijacked
human cells, according to new research.
When virologists surveyed the genetic diversity and protein synthesis
capabilities of a group of viruses known as segmented negative-strand RNA
viruses, or sNSVs, they found a variety of human pathogens can code for new
proteins by combining host and viral sequences.
The so-called UFO proteins could explain why these viruses are so adept at infecting human hosts, but they could also be useful targets for future vaccines and anti-viral drugs.
Researchers detailed the production of these never-before-documented proteins in a new paper, published Thursday in the journal Cell.
"The capacity of a pathogen to overcome host barriers and establish infection is based on the expression of pathogen-derived proteins," study co-author Ivan Marazzi, professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, said in a news release. "To understand how a pathogen antagonizes the host and establishes infection, we need to have a clear understanding of what proteins a pathogen encodes, how they function, and the manner in which they contribute to virulence."
Viruses can't make their own proteins. To survive and replicate, they must find a host and hijack their cells. Once inside cells, they find ways to feed protein-making instructions to the host cell's protein-making machinery.
Viruses typically use "cap-snatching" to create protein-making codes, snipping off the end of one of the cell's messenger RNA sequences and combining it with a genetic sequence of their own.
"For decades we thought that by the time the body encounters the signal to start translating that message into protein (a 'start codon') it is reading a message provided to it solely by the virus," Marazzi said. "Our work shows that the host sequence is not silent."
The latest analysis showed that because sNSVs make mRNAs using their own genes, they're able to make protein-production instructions featuring host-derived start codons -- a technique called "start snatching." This ability allows sNSVs to synthesize previously unknown proteins using hybrid host-virus sequences.
Though previously invisible to scientists, these proteins are recognizable by the immune system, and they can alter the virulence of the invading virus, but more research is needed to determine the full functionality of UFO proteins.
"Viruses take over their host at the molecular level, and this work identifies a new way in which some viruses can wring every last bit of potential out of the molecular machinery they are exploiting," said study co-author Ed Hutchinson, research fellow at MRC-University of Glasgow Center for Virus Research. "While the work done here focuses on influenza viruses, it implies that a huge number of viral species can make previously unsuspected genes."
Researchers hope their research will illuminate new ways of attacking viruses with drugs and vaccines, and potentially aid the effort to thwart future pandemics and epidemics.
I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have
looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.
Ronald Reagan
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.
New material, modeling methods promise advances in energy storage
Date:
June 4, 2020
Source:
University of Houston
Summary:
The explosion of mobile electronic devices, electric vehicles, drones and other
technologies have driven demand for new lightweight materials that can provide
the power to operate them.
The explosion of mobile electronic devices, electric vehicles, drones
and other technologies have driven demand for new lightweight materials that
can provide the power to operate them. Researchers from the University of
Houston and Texas A&M University have reported a structural supercapacitor
electrode made from reduced graphene oxide and aramid nanofiber that is
stronger and more versatile than conventional carbon-based electrodes.
The UH research team also demonstrated that modeling based on the
material nanoarchitecture can provide a more accurate understanding of ion
diffusion and related properties in the composite electrodes than the
traditional modeling method, which is known as the porous media model.
"We are proposing that these models based on the nanoarchitecture
of the material are more comprehensive, detailed, informative and accurate
compared to the porous media model," said Haleh Ardebili, Bill D. Cook
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UH and corresponding author
for a paper describing the work, published in ACS Nano.
More accurate modeling methods will help researchers find new and more
effective nanoarchitectured materials that can provide longer battery life and
higher energy at a lighter weight, she said.
The researchers knew the material tested -- reduced graphene oxide and
aramid nanofiber, or rGO/ANF -- was a good candidate because of its strong
electrochemical and mechanical properties. Supercapacitor electrodes are
usually made of porous carbon-based materials, which provide efficient
electrode performance, Ardebili said.
While the reduced graphene oxide is primarily made of carbon, the aramid
nanofiber offers a mechanical strength that increases the electrode's
versatility for a variety of applications, including for the military. The work
was funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
More
Another weekend, and
only just under 5 months for the rest of the world to find out who will rule
the “land of the not so free,” between the shining seas. After a run of terrible bad luck, Clinton,
Bush, Obama and Trump, is 5 in a row actually possible? Have a great, safe, weekend everyone.
We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society
is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American
precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.
Ronald Reagan
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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