Baltic Dry Index. 1617 +59 Brent Crude 42.57
Spot Gold 1769
Coronavirus Cases 24/6/20
World 9,402,768
Deaths 481,035
24
June 1314. Day two of the Battle of Bannockburn. The Scots rout the English.
Edward II flees to Berwick, as a third to a half of his army are killed and
nobles captured for ransom. With the baggage train captured, Scotland doubles
in wealth.
Up first, more on
the Fed’s latest Fantasy Bubble. Going all in. Never mind new Covid-19 cases rapidly
approaching ten million with no sign of any let up. For context, global cases
only officially hit one million on April 2nd . In reality, actual cases are unknowingly much
higher.
To infinity or
bust!
"A company for carrying out an
undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is"
1720 South Sea Bubble.
Asian markets inch higher after
Wall Street rally, despite rising coronavirus fears
Published: June 23, 2020 at 11:38 p.m. ET
TOKYO — Asian shares were mostly higher on Wednesday with another
mood boost from Wall Street, but fears persist over the surge in coronavirus
cases in parts of the world.
Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 NIK, 0.07% XJO, 0.45% 180721, 1.82% HSI, +0.05% SHCOMP, 0.15% Y9999, 0.36% STI, 0.09% JAKIDX, +1.80%
Analysts are warning that, despite the recent market
rallies, there is little reassurance infections won’t keep spreading, given the
growing numbers in some parts of the U.S., Brazil and Asia.
“The nuance though is that the recovery falls short of
being entrenched,” said Hayaki Narita of Mizuho Bank, adding trade contractions
for various countries this year are expected to be the worst ever.
Prakash Sapal, senior economist for ING, said the focus is
slowly shifting back to the COVID-19 pandemic from optimism about a rebound
from loosening lockdown restrictions.
“The recent acceleration in infections has rekindled
concern that governments will be forced to shut down their economies once
again, squandering the chance for the much-hoped-for economic bounce back,” he
said in a report.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 rose 0.4% and is on
pace for its third straight monthly gain. The Nasdaq composite, which is
heavily weighted with technology stocks, climbed to an all-time high for the
second day in a row. Bond yields rose, another sign of increasing confidence in
the economy.
Health care stocks and companies that rely on consumer
spending were also among the big gainers, while safe-play sectors like real
estate and utilities stocks fell.
More
Below, Real World Harsh Reality.
What is a second wave of a
pandemic, and has it arrived in the U.S.?
June 23, 2020 /
10:02 PM
CHICAGO
(Reuters) - Infectious disease experts, economists and politicians have raised
concerns about a second wave of coronavirus infections in the United States
that could worsen in the coming months.
But some, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s
top infectious disease expert, said it is too soon to discuss a second wave
when the United States has never emerged from a first wave in which more than
120,000 people have died and more than 2.3 million Americans have had confirmed
infections with the novel coronavirus.
Here is an explanation of what is meant by a second wave.
WHY DESCRIBE
DISEASE OUTBREAKS AS WAVES?
In infectious disease parlance, waves of infection describe
the curve of an outbreak, reflecting a rise and fall in the number of cases.
With viral infections such as influenza or the common cold, cases typically
crest in the cold winter months and recede as warmer weather reappears.
Fears about a second wave of COVID-19, the respiratory
disease caused by the coronavirus, stem in part from the trajectory of the
1918-1919 Spanish flu pandemic that infected 500 million people worldwide and
killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people. The virus first appeared in the
spring of 1918 but appears to have mutated when it surged again in the fall,
making for a deadlier second wave.
“It came back roaring and was much worse,” epidemiologist
Dr. William Hanage of Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health
said.
Epidemiologists said there is no formal definition of a
second wave, but they know it when they see it.
More
Fauci says in 40 years of dealing
with viral outbreaks, he’s never seen anything like COVID-19
Published: June 23, 2020 at 7:44 p.m. ET
Anthony Fauci, director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for three decades and one of the
leading experts on pandemics in the U.S. for the last four decades, told U.S.
lawmakers on Tuesday that the SARS-CoV-2 has taken him by surprise,
particularly in a singular way that helped lead to one of the biggest
public-health crisis in a generation.
I’ve been dealing with viral outbreaks for the last 40 years. I’ve never
seen a single virus — that is, one pathogen — have a range where 20% to 40% of
the people have no symptoms,” he told a House Committee on Energy and Commerce
on the Trump administration's response to the novel coronavirus pandemic on
Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
The World Health Organization currently estimates that 16% of people
with COVID-19 are asymptomatic and can transmit the coronavirus, while other
data show that 40% of coronavirus transmission is due to carriers not displaying
symptoms of the illness. As a result, public-health officials have advised
people to keep a distance of six feet from one another.
A recent University of California, San Francisco study said there’s a
high viral load of SARS-CoV-2 shedding in the upper respiratory tract, even
among pre-symptomatic patients, “which distinguishes it from SARS-CoV-1, where
replication occurs mainly in the lower respiratory tract.” Such a viral load
makes symptom-based detection of infection less effective in the case of SARS
CoV-2, it said.
---- The COVID-19 pandemic, which was first identified in
Wuhan, China in December, had infected 9,178,773 people globally and 2,338,275
in the U.S. as of Tuesday. It had claimed at least 474,513 lives worldwide,
121,119 of which were in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University’s
Center for Systems Science and Engineering. The Dow Jones Industrial Index DJIA, +0.50% SPX, +0.43%
German economy to shrink by 6.5%
this year due to coronavirus - economic advisers
June 23, 2020 /
11:16 AM
BERLIN (Reuters) - The German economy will shrink by 6.5% this year due
to the coronavirus pandemic, the government’s council of economic advisers said
on Tuesday, adding that the slump will be prolonged if the number of new
infections jumps again.
“The coronavirus pandemic is expected to cause the largest slump of the
German economy since the founding of the Federal Republic. But we expect the
recovery to start in the summer,” council head Lars Feld said.
Adjusted for calendar effects, the German economy is seen shrinking by
6.9% this year. The council said it expects a slow recovery in the second half
of the year, with gross domestic product (GDP) forecast to grow by 4.9% next
year.
“This means GDP probably won’t get back to its pre-pandemic level until
2022 at the earliest,” the council said in a statement, adding that the
government’s stimulus measures were likely to support the recovery.
The
economic advisors cautioned, however, that the forecast was subject to
“considerable uncertainty” as a second wave of new coronavirus infections would
prolong the slump.
Germany imposes local lockdown
after virus outbreak at meat plant
June 23, 2020 /
10:11 AM
BERLIN (Reuters) - The premier of the western German state of North
Rhine-Westphalia said on Tuesday he was putting the Guetersloh area back into
lockdown until June 30 after a coronavirus outbreak at a meatpacking plant
there.
Guetersloh, with about 360,000 residents, is the first area in Germany
to go back into lockdown after the authorities began gradually lifting
restrictive measures at the end of April.
State premier Armin Laschet, who had led calls for Germany to ease
lockdown measures, said bars, museums, galleries, cinemas, sports halls, gyms
and swimming pools in Guetersloh would be closed, and picnics and barbecues
prohibited.
“We will lift the measure as soon as possible, when we have certainty
about the safety of the infection,” Laschet told a news conference. “It is a
preventative measure.”
More than 1,500 workers at a meat processing plant in Guetersloh had
tested positive for the coronavirus, plus some of their family members and 24
people with no connection to the plant, he said.
Laschet is a leading contender to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel when
her fourth term in office expires next year. Further outbreaks of the virus in
his state, Germany’s most populous, could damage his chances.
More
In
German scandal news, Singapore faces a tough decision. Maybe it’s a decision
that can wait until the autumn.
Singapore's central bank says
received licence application from Wirecard
June 23, 2020 /
8:01 AM
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The Monetary Authority of Singapore
(MAS) has received a license application from scandal-hit electronics payments
firm Wirecard (WDIG.DE )
under the country’s new Payments Services Act, the central bank said on
Tuesday. It said Wirecard’s primary business activities in Singapore
are to process payments for merchants and help companies issue pre-paid cards.
Wirecard is operating under an exemption until the new law comes into force. “MAS has required Wirecard to ensure that they keep
customer funds arising from these activities in banks in Singapore,” the MAS
said in response to a query from Reuters but did not specify when it had
received the application.
Bank of China Weighs Ending
Wirecard’s Credit Line
Jun 23, 2020
01:24 PM
(Bloomberg) — Bank of China Ltd. is discussing ending a
credit facility to Germany’s Wirecard AG , a move that would complicate
the beleaguered company’s fight for survival after it was engulfed by
a multi-billion-dollar accounting scandal.
China’s fourth-largest lender may write off most of the 80 million euros
($90 million) it’s owed and not extend the credit line, said people familiar
with the matter, asking not to be identified as the discussions are private.
Bank of China — one of a group of at least 15 commercial banks behind $2
billion in financing to Wirecard — plans to engage an external legal team
to look into how it can minimize losses, they said.
When a borrower breaches the terms of a revolving credit facility, the
lenders may decide to renew the agreement, but the decision usually needs
unanimity, meaning the borrower may need to repay the entire loan if one bank
refuses to sign the deal. Banks that refuse to extend the agreement can also
try to sell the loan to another party — usually loan traders, thereby
transferring the decision-making power to a new party.
More
Former Wirecard CEO detained on
accusation of inflating balance sheet - prosecutors
June 23, 2020 /
9:27 AM
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Former Wirecard (WDIG.DE ) Chief Executive
Markus Braun has been detained on accusations of inflating the company’s
balance sheet and revenues to make it appear stronger and more attractive for
investors and customers, prosecutors said in a statement on Tuesday. Wirecard had said on Monday that 1.9 billion euros (£1.7
billion) it had booked in its accounts likely never existed, a black hole that
threatens to engulf the payments company. Braun turned himself in on Monday evening and will be
presented to a judge on Tuesday who will decide on whether he will remain in
custody, they added.
Finally,
in UK news, was the UK lock down worth it. While we’ll never really know for
certain, some senior UK academics have given it their best shot. Click on the
link for their full report.
Conclusion
– lockdown has been massively costly and benefits unlikely to have matched it.
We find that the costs of lockdown in the UK are so high relative to likely
benefits that a continuation of severe restrictions is very unlikely to be
warranted. There is a need to normalise how we view COVID-19 because its costs
and risks are comparable to other health problems (such as cancer, heart
problems, diabetes) where governments have made resource decisions for decades.
Treating possible future COVID-19 deaths as if nothing else matters is going to
lead to bad outcomes. Good decision making does not mean paying little
attention to the collateral damage that comes from responding to a worst case
COVID-19 scenario.
The
lockdown is a public health policy and we have valued its impact using the
tools that guide health care decisions in the UK public health system. On that
basis, and taking a wide range of scenarios of costs and benefits of severe
restrictions, we find the lockdown consistently generates costs that are
greater – and often dramatically greater – than likely benefits. Weighing up
costs and benefits of maintaining general and severe restrictions is necessary.
That is how decisions over a wide range of public policy issues are made – many
directly concerning public health issues.
While
there are inevitably risks in easing restrictions there are very clear costs in
not 17 doing so - a policy of “let’s wait until things are clearer” is not
reliably prudent. A policy of not easing restrictions until the point at which
there is virtually no chance of a resurgence in infection rates rising is not a
policy in the interests of the population. We find that a movement away from
blanket restrictions that bring large, lasting and widespread costs and towards
measures targeted specifically at groups most at risk offers is now prudent.
Such a policy should probably have been started before June 2020; by June 2020
it was urgently needed.
Pubs, restaurants and hotels to
reopen as England eases social distancing
June 22, 2020 /
10:37 PM
LONDON
(Reuters) - Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Tuesday pubs, restaurants and
hotels could reopen in England early next month when the social distancing rule
is relaxed, easing the coronavirus lockdown that has all but shut the economy.
Johnson
has been under pressure from businesses, especially in the hospitality sector,
and from members of his governing Conservative Party to relax the lockdown, but
until now he had resisted for fear of prompting a second wave.
On Tuesday, he said that with infections rates falling and because of a
belief that there was little threat now of a second wave of COVID-19 cases, he
could reopen swathes of the economy and try to get life in England back to
something like normal.
By relaxing the rule on social distancing from two metres to one metre,
with mitigation such as wearing of masks and the use of protective screens,
Johnson said many businesses could reopen from July 4.
“Today we can say that our long, national hibernation is beginning to
come to an end,” he told parliament. “All hospitality indoors will be limited
to table service and our guidance will encourage minimal staff and customer
contact.”
The changes will allow two households to meet in any setting and all
schools will reopen in September, he said.
Hairdressers would be allowed to reopen along with places of worship,
most leisure facilities and tourist attractions such as theme parks. However,
nightclubs, indoor gyms and swimming pools will stay closed.
More
UK reports lowest daily COVID-19
death toll since mid-March: 15 deaths
June 22, 2020 / 2:53 PM
LONDON (Reuters) - The number of people confirmed to have COVID-19 who
have died has risen by 15 to 42,647, the lowest daily toll since mid-March,
health officials said on Monday.
Britain’s daily tally of deaths peaked in April, when the toll exceeded
1,000 on nine days.
The recorded number of COVID-19 deaths usually dips on Sunday and Monday
due to delays in reporting fatalities during the weekend.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduced a lockdown on March 23 that
required people to stay at home except to travel for work if necessary and for
essential shopping, exercise, and medical and care needs.
Oats: a grain that in England is fed to horses
and in Scotland fed to people.
Samuel Johnson.
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.
Coronavirus surges in Latin
America as deaths surpass 100,000
June 24, 2020 /
1:27 AM
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Latin America’s
death toll from the coronavirus pandemic surpassed 100,000 on Tuesday,
according to a Reuters tally, with few signs of the outbreak easing in a region
marked by crowded cities and high poverty levels.
Latin America has seen an alarming spike in cases and deaths even as the
tide of infection recedes in Europe and parts of Asia. The number of
infections, at 2.2 million, has doubled in less than a month.
Brazil - Latin America’s largest and most populous nation - this week became
only the second country to reach the 50,000 deaths milestone, after the United
States. Mexico on Tuesday registered a fresh one-day record for confirmed
infections.
The true scale of the coronavirus damage to Latin America is likely to
be much deeper, experts say, as countries across the region have failed to
implement rigorous testing programmes. Many officials concede the death toll is
likely far higher.
Hugo Lopez-Gatell, Mexico’s deputy health minister and the country’s
coronavirus tsar, on Tuesday signaled that his nation is in for a long battle
against coronavirus.
“We must learn to live with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and permanently
incorporate hygiene and prevention practices into the new reality,” said
Lopez-Gatell, urging the Mexican society to adapt its response to the threat.
On top of creaking healthcare systems in many countries across the
region, Latin America’s battle against the virus has been hamstrung by
widespread poverty and many workers living a hand-to-mouth existence in the
informal sector that has hindered quarantine efforts.
More
German coronavirus reproduction
rate 'R' at 2.76 - RKI
June 23, 2020 /
9:31 AM
BERLIN (Reuters) - The coronavirus reproduction rate in Germany is
currently estimated at 2.76, probably mainly due to local outbreaks, the head
of the Robert Koch Institute for public health, Lothar Wieler, said on Tuesday.
A reproduction rate, or ‘R’, of 2.76 means that 100 people who
contracted the virus infect, on average, 276 others.
If the Virus Slows This Summer,
It May Be Time to Worry
We hoped that Covid-19 would be a seasonal
infection. We hoped wrong.
06.18.2020 08:00
AM
The past few days have brought alarming news about the state of the pandemic in
the US. Hospitalizations from Covid-19 reached new highs in Alabama, Arkansas, California,
Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and
Texas, while case totals have been on the rise in recent weeks for more than half the country . But summer starts this weekend,
and there’s still good reason to believe that this infection might be seasonal.
If that’s the case, then hot and humid weather could attenuate the spread of
the disease. Case counts would fall off. Any “second wave” would be delayed. That’s a good thing, right? ----But now that we’re on the cusp of summer, and that
hoped-for seasonality could be ready to kick in, its implications no longer
seem so rosy. In the longer view—looking ahead to fall and winter, too, and
then to 2021—this pattern of infectivity could make the virus even more
destructive than we thought. If sunlight and humidity do indeed slow its
spread, they won’t knock it out completely in the next few months, and that
means we should expect a rebound down the line. What’s more, epidemiologists
suggest this down-and-up won’t cancel out and be a wash: In fact, the
exponential bounceback in the winter would likely overshadow any slight
deceleration that happened in June, July, and August. That would be very, very
bad. To be clear, whether the new coronavirus is really seasonal
remains unknown. We still haven’t gone through a full year of this pandemic, so
it’s impossible to compare how infection rates have waxed and waned in a single
location. Even the beneficial effects of humidity are somewhat uncertain; as
Maryn McKenna pointed
out in WIRED last month, many studies of this question have used laboratory
observations, and their findings may not apply in the real world. And to
complicate matters further, high heat and humidity may drive people to spend
more time indoors, where coronavirus seems to transmit more easily in the air.
The science here is still, in many ways, a hot mess. There are inklings, though, from studies of the past and
present, to suggest that weather will indeed modulate the spread of the
pandemic. For a paper that came out in April, researchers looked at eight years
of data from households in Michigan and found that common respiratory
coronaviruses were “sharply seasonal .” ----A few months ago, when the outbreak was exploding, it
was tempting to think of these seasonality effects in terms of what would
happen first: a downward modulation in the summertime. But the very same
effects—of 30 percent, let’s say—could just as well be understood the other
way, in terms of boosted viral superspreading later on. It might make more
sense to focus on the winterized disease, and what David Fisman of the
University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health refers to as a
“seasonally juiced” coronavirus. When pandemic waves happen to be synced with
the weather conditions in which they thrive—such as fall and winter for
influenza—they tend to do more damage, Fisman says. This is what may have
happened with the Spanish flu : Some argue that it first emerged in the spring of 1918 , when it was out of season for the virus,
and then came back the following autumn with far worse effects. Jalali agrees that the upside of a weakened spread in
summer is less consequential than the downside of a boosted spread effect in
winter. ----The fact that influenza would also strike in winter
adds to the concern. It’s not much fun to imagine what a rise in flu and
Covid-19 cases would look like if they arrived in concert.
More
Long-term
immunity to COVID-19 questioned in new study
Six months into the COVID-19 global pandemic and many questions still
remain unanswered concerning the nature of this novel coronavirus. Perhaps one
of the most important unresolved mysteries surrounds human immune responses to
the virus and how long a person may be resistant to SARS-CoV-2 following
recovery from an initial infection.
A new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Medicine ,
has found antibody levels in subjects suffering from asymptomatic infections
dropped significantly when measured two months after hospital discharge. While
this does not at all mean these subjects are prone to reinfection, the study
suggests it does affirm how little we know about long-term antibody-mediated
immunity.
The research followed 37 asymptomatic cases of COVID-19, detected in
China’s Wanzhou District. The cases were compared against a control group of 37
sex-and-age-matched symptomatic cases. The asymptomatic cases were detected
through contact tracing methods and quarantined in hospital until their
infection passed. All subjects were then tracked for eight weeks following
discharge from hospital.
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.
Japan's Fugaku surpasses Summit
as world's most powerful supercomputer
The
world’s most powerful supercomputer has just fired up. A newcomer named Fugaku
has nabbed the number one spot in the Top500 list of
supercomputers , surpassing Summit , the
reigning champion of the past few years.
Fugaku
is installed in the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, and
only just began some operations this month. The Top500 list primarily ranks
systems based on a metric called High Performance Linpack (HPL), and Fugaku
boasts a HPL of 415.5 petaflops. That makes it 2.8 times more powerful than
runner-up Summit, on 148.8 petaflops.
And in single or further reduced precision, Fugaku’s peak performance
tops 1,000 petaflops. That pushes it into the exaflop range, which looks to be
where the next generation battles will be waged.
By an alternative metric called the High-Performance Conjugate Gradient
(HPCG), Fugaku also comes out on top. It runs at 13.4 HPCG-petaflops, marking a
huge leap over Summit on 2.93 HPCG-petaflops.
Fugaku
is running 158,976 individual CPUs, based on Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX
system-on-a-chip. This makes it the first number-one supercomputer to be
running on processors with the ARM architecture.
It
dethrones Summit, installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA,
which was the top dog for 2018 and 2019. Sierra, also in the US, drops down to
slot three with a HPL of 94.6 petaflops. China rounds out the top five, with Sunway TaihuLight at 93
petaflops, and Tianhe-2A at 61.4 petaflops.
But Fugaku probably won’t hold onto the crown for very
long. Next year the exascale revolution begins in earnest, with Intel and the
US Department of Energy launching Aurora ,
while Cray and AMD launch Frontier .
Aurora will pack 1 exaflop of processing power, while Frontier leapfrogs it to
1.5 exaflops. Although Fugaku can technically reach 1 exaflop, it’s only during
a particular type of operation – Aurora and Frontier will do it natively. Fugaku is set to begin its full operations in 2021.
24 June 1440 Eton College founded.
Eton was founded in
1440 by King Henry VI as "Kynge's College of Our Ladye of Eton besyde
Windesore” to provide free education to 70 poor boys who would then go on to
King's College, Cambridge, which he founded 1441.
When Henry founded
the school, he granted it a large number of endowments, but when he was deposed
by Edward IV in 1461, the new king removed most of its assets and treasures to
St George's Chapel, Windsor, on the other side of the River Thames.
Construction of the chapel, originally intended to be slightly over twice
its current length was stopped hurriedly, but by this time the chapel in its
current form and the lower storeys of the current cloisters, including College
Hall, had been completed.
More
Eton
College is only about 20 miles from where I live as is Windsor Castle. Some
very pretty cross country routes to both, although the ostrich farm along the
way is long gone. Note the very British English spelling of “storeys.”
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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