Baltic Dry Index. 1894 + 71 Brent Crude 43.06
Spot Gold 1772
Coronavirus Cases 06/7/20
World 11,572,240
Deaths 536,768
“They had stumbled either upon
a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run.
Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out,
“It’s really hard to know when you’re lucky and when you’re smart.”
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.
We
open, as usual, in the fantasy world of central bankster, fiat money fuelled,
world of stock market casino gambling. If we didn’t know better, we might think
that the Fed and the rest, were deliberately stoking up social division, wealth
inequality, and revolution.
Asia shares climb as China blue chips hit five-year peak
July 6, 2020 /
1:41 AM
SYDNEY
(Reuters) - Asian shares scaled four-month peaks on Monday as investors counted
on super-cheap liquidity and fiscal stimulus to sustain the global economic
recovery, even as surging coronavirus cases delayed re-openings across the
United States.
Eyes were on Chinese blue chips .CSI300, which jumped 3%, on top of a 7% gain last week, to their loftiest level in five years. Even Japan's Nikkei .N225, which has lagged with a soft domestic economy, managed a rise of 1.3%.
“We think there is a case for raising tactical allocation on Asian equities in the context of global equity portfolios,” wrote analysts at Nomura in a note.
“We see a number of catalysts that could drive Asia ex-Japan (AeJ) equities’ outperformance over U.S. equities in the near term,” they added. “Better COVID-19 trends and mobility data in economies/markets that dominate the AeJ index should translate into faster economic recovery vs the U.S.”
E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 ESc1 also firmed 0.8%, while EUROSTOXX 50 futures STXEc1 added 1.8% and FTSE futures FFIc1 1.5%.
Most markets had gained ground last week as a raft of economic data from June beat expectations, though the resurgence of coronavirus cases in the United States is clouding the future.
In the first four days of July alone, 15 states have reported record increases in new cases of COVID-19, which has infected nearly 3 million Americans and killed about 130,000, according to a Reuters tally.
More
Now
back to the harsh real world where everyone else lives. The great real estate bubble
is already bursting and we’re only at the start of the tsunami of coming
bankruptcies, mortgage defaults, rent defaults, and eventually, mass evictions.
What
do you do with largely fast emptying, death trap skyscrapers built for happier
times in a bygone era? Suggestions please to Chairman Powell, Federal Reserve
Bank, Eccles Building, Washington, District of Crooks.
Fujitsu to halve office space by end-FY2022 citing 'new normal'
July 6, 2020 /
3:07 AM
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan’s Fujitsu Ltd (6702.T) said on Monday it
would halve its office space by the end of the fiscal year through March 2023
as it rewrites the way employees work under a “new normal” amid the coronavirus
pandemic. Under a concept dubbed “Work Life Shift”, the IT solutions giant said its roughly 80,000 group employees in Japan would work flexible hours, and work-from-home would be standard wherever possible.
Real Estate Prices Fall Sharply in New York
Since the coronavirus shut the city
down, the number of sales in Manhattan dropped 54 percent and the median price
fell to $1 million.
July 2, 2020
The coronavirus has dealt a blow to the Manhattan real estate market
unmatched in recent history, and the prospects of a near-term recovery remain
unclear.
The number of closed sales in the second quarter were down 54 percent
compared to the same period last year, the largest decline in at least 30
years, according to a new report from the brokerage
Douglas Elliman. The median
sales price fell 17.7 percent, compared to the same time last year, to $1
million, the biggest drop in a decade.
The number of contracts signed for apartments in June, the latest
indicator of buyer appetite, was
down 76 percent, compared to the same time
last year.
“This
is what you get when the market is not able to function,” said Jonathan Miller,
a New York appraiser and the author of the report, noting that in-person
apartment showings in New York City were banned for nearly the entire quarter.
“It’s an extreme moment, to put it lightly.”
More
WeDone: South Beach landlord seeks to evict WeWork for unpaid rent
Embattled co-working giant allegedly owes
$660K at South of Fifth location
July 03, 2020 06:51 PM
The landlord of a WeWork location in South Beach is looking to evict the
embattled co-working giant for what it says is more than $650,000 in unpaid
rent.
A photo obtained by The Real Deal shows the three-day notice
tacked onto the door of the 43,500-square-foot building at 429 Lenox Avenue,
which is fully occupied by WeWork.
WeWork
did not pay rent in April, May or June, according to the notice. WeWork began
operating at the South of Fifth location in early 2016, and its triple-net lease runs until 2031.
More
End Of An Era: WeWork Closing Its First-Ever Location
30 June 2020
30 June 2020
WeWork is
shutting down the location of its first-ever coworking space as the company
moves to reassess its vast global footprint.
More.
Nightmare in New York: How Covid-19, BLM protests and a liberal mayor are turning the city into a no-go zone as murders skyrocket, shops are looted and 500,000 middle-class residents flee
·
The number of
shooting victims has gone up 51 per cent to 616 this year in NYC
·
In June, there were
250 shootings compared to 97 in the same month in 2019
·
Many blame New York’s
mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has slashed police funding
·
New York state has
suffered the highest coronavirus death toll in America
World’s Largest Pension Fund Loses $165 Billion in Worst Quarter
By Shoko Oda and Shigeki Nozawa
July
3, 2020, 7:30 AM GMT+1 Updated on July 3, 2020, 9:02 AM GMT+1
The
world’s biggest pension fund posted a record loss in the first three months of
2020 after the coronavirus pandemic sparked a global market rout in the period.
Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund lost 11%, or 17.7 trillion yen ($164.7 billion), in the three months ended March, it said in Tokyo on Friday. The decline in value was the steepest based on comparable data back to April 2008, reducing the fund’s total assets to 150.63 trillion yen. Foreign stocks were the worst performing investment, followed by domestic equities.
The results come just months after the fund revamped top management and revised its asset allocation to focus more on overseas debt. The loss, which wiped out gains for the fiscal year, may attract political attention as social security remains a major concern for tens of millions of Japan’s retirees.
“The decline in domestic and foreign equities led to a negative return
for the fiscal year,” said Masataka Miyazono, the president of GPIF. “Both
equity markets performed strongly during 2019 even under pressures from the
U.S.-China trade negotiations. The global coronavirus pandemic led to investors
taking a risk-off stance.”
Overseas bonds were the only major asset to generate a positive
quarterly return. The securities gained 0.5%, compared with losses of 0.5% for
domestic bonds, 18% for local equities and 22% for foreign stocks. In April,
GPIF raised its asset allocation to foreign bonds by 10 percentage points to
25%, while keeping the target for foreign and domestic stocks unchanged at 25%.
Naoki Fujiwara, the chief fund manager at Shinkin Asset Management Co.,
said the losses were expected. Equities have rebounded since March, so the
pension fund should be recouping losses for the April-June period, Fujiwara
said.
“The current portfolio is exposed to equity volatility,” he said. “We’re in a low-yield environment right now, and will likely be for the next two years, so maybe it’s alright for now, but in the long run, the pension fund should correct the allocation of equities.”
“The current portfolio is exposed to equity volatility,” he said. “We’re in a low-yield environment right now, and will likely be for the next two years, so maybe it’s alright for now, but in the long run, the pension fund should correct the allocation of equities.”
More
Finally,
Shell is thinking of moving its headquarters from Holland to London. But, the BOE, Bliar, Brown and Obama gang,
said after Brexit everyone would leave London for unsafe Paris, boring
Frankfurt, risky Amsterdam, dubious Dublin, or the Siberian wasteland of
Luxemburg. What happened? What went so wrong in Utopian Euroland?
Shell CEO does not rule out moving headquarters to Britain
July 4, 2020 /
10:07 AM
AMSTERDAM
(Reuters) - Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L)
is not ruling out moving its headquarters from the Netherlands to Britain, the
oil company’s chief executive Ben van Beurden said in a Dutch newspaper
interview published on Saturday.
Van Beurden did not explicitly say Shell wants to move its headquarters, het Financieele Dagblad said.
“You always need to keep thinking,” Shell’s Van Beurden told the newspaper. “Nothing is permanent and of course we will look at the business climate. But moving your headquarters is not a trivial measure. You cannot think too lightly about that.”
A Shell spokesman confirmed the CEO’s comments to Reuters and said the
company was looking at ways to simplify its dual structure, as it had been
doing for many years.
Shell has a complex Anglo-Dutch holding structure with a tax residency
and headquarters in the Netherlands and a registered office in Britain.
Unilever’s decision to move followed the scrapping in 2018 of a plan by
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to do away with a 15% dividend withholding tax.
Shell’s corporate structure features the parent company headquarters in
The Hague but two share classes and other arrangements to prevent the Dutch
government from levying withholding tax on dividends paid to shareholders of
its former British arm.
The arrangement has come under renewed scrutiny after the Dutch
government tried to scrap the dividend tax as an incentive to convince Unilever
to unify its dual structure in Rotterdam.
Rutte abandoned the plan after a popular outcry over the tax cut, which
was seen as a gift to rich foreigners.
Shell has consistently lobbied against the dividend tax, which it says
makes financing dividends, share buy-backs and acquisitions more difficult.
“Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they
made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also
fraught with moral hazard. “It was a fast-buck business,” says Jacobs. “Any
business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry
how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people.”
The Big Short: Inside the
Doomsday Machine.
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.
Hundreds of scientists say coronavirus is airborne, ask WHO to revise recommendations: NYT
July 5, 2020 /
5:48 PM
(Reuters) - Hundreds of scientists say there is evidence that novel
coronavirus in smaller particles in the air can infect people and are calling
for the World Health Organization to revise recommendations, the New York Times
reported on Saturday.
The WHO has said the coronavirus disease spreads primarily from person
to person through small droplets from the nose or mouth, which are expelled
when a person with COVID-19 coughs, sneezes or speaks.
The WHO did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
Whether carried by large droplets that zoom through the air after a
sneeze, or by much smaller exhaled droplets that may glide the length of a
room, the coronavirus is borne through air and can infect people when inhaled,
the scientists said, according to the NYT.
However, the health agency said the evidence for the virus being
airborne was not convincing, according to the NYT.
More
Australia closes state border for first time in 100 years to halt coronavirus
July 6, 2020 /
3:18 AM
SYDNEY (Reuters) - The border between Australia’s two most populous
states will close from Tuesday for an indefinite period, Victoria Premier
Daniel Andrews said on Monday, following an outbreak of the coronavirus in his
state.
The decision marks the first time the border with neighbouring New South
Wales has been shut in 100 years - officials last blocked movement between the
two states in 1919 during the Spanish flu pandemic.
The number of COVID-19 cases in Melbourne, Victoria’s capital, has
surged in recent days, prompting authorities to enforce strict
social-distancing orders in 30 suburbs and put nine public housing towers into
complete lockdown.
The state reported 127 new COVID-19 infections overnight, its biggest
one-day spike since the pandemic began. It also reported one death, the first
nationally in more than two weeks, taking the country’s total tally to 105.
“It is the smart call, the right call at this time, given the
significant challenges we face in containing this virus,” Andrews told
reporters in Melbourne as he announced the border closure.
The closure will, however, likely be a blow to Australia’s economic
recovery as it heads into its first recession in nearly three decades.
---- Australia
has fared better than many countries in the coronavirus pandemic, with just
short of 8,500 cases so far, but the Melbourne outbreak has raised alarm bells.
The country has reported an average of 109 cases daily over the past week,
compared with an average of just 9 cases daily over the first week of June.
Official U.S. coronavirus death toll is ‘a substantial undercount’ of actual tally, Yale study finds
Published Wed, Jul 1 202011:41 AM EDT
Updated Thu, Jul 2 20209:11 AM EDT
The number of confirmed U.S. deaths due to the coronavirus is
substantially lower than the true tally, according to a study published
Wednesday in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Using National Center for Health Statistics data, researchers at
Yale University compared the number of excess U.S. deaths from any causes
with the reported number of weekly U.S. Covid-19 deaths from March 1 through
May 30. The numbers were then compared with deaths from the same period in
previous years.
Researchers found that the excess number of deaths over normal levels
also exceeded those attributed to Covid-19, leading them to conclude that many
of those fatalities were likely caused by the coronavirus but not confirmed.
State reporting discrepancies and a sharp increase in U.S. deaths amid a
pandemic suggest the number of Covid-19 fatalities is undercounted, they said.
“Our analyses suggest that the official tally of deaths due to Covid-19
represent a substantial undercount of the true burden,” Dan Weinberger, an
epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health and a lead author of the
study, told CNBC. Weinberger said other factors could contribute to the
increase in deaths, such as people avoiding emergency treatment for things like
heart attacks.
However, he doesn’t think that is the main driver.
The study was supported by the National Institute of Health.
The 781,000 total deaths in the United States in the three months
through May 30 were about 122,300, or nearly 19% higher, than what would
normally be expected, according to the researchers.
Of the 122,300 excess
deaths, 95,235 were attributed to Covid-19, they said. Most of the rest of the
excess deaths, researchers said, were likely related to or directly caused by
the coronavirus.
More
Will COVID-19 fears stop you from hurricane evacuation? In Florida, 2 out of 5 say yes
June 02, 2020 01:41 PM , Updated June 05,
2020 06:47 AM
Coronavirus is no longer keeping South Floridians at home.
But that might change if or when a hurricane threatens the state.A new survey by AAA shows that two out of five people — 42 percent — surveyed in Florida say fear of being exposed to COVID-19 makes them less likely to evacuate under a hurricane warning.
Not only that: More than a quarter of Florida residents say they would refuse to leave their homes if they were told to evacuate.
AAA’s annual hurricane season survey also reports that 31 percent of Floridians are more worried than ever about the 2020 hurricane season, which began June 1 and runs through Nov. 30. Their anxiety is justified: The state is already making plans for possible evacuations as the pandemic continues and considering how to maintain social distance in traditionally crowded shelters.
NOAA has already predicted an above-average hurricane season, with 13 to 19 named storms and six to 10 hurricanes, with three to six of them major. The earliest third named storm on record, Tropical Storm Cristobal, has formed in the Gulf of Mexico.
“The coronavirus just complicates matters even more for those preparing for what is forecast to be an active hurricane season,” said Mark Jenkins, spokesman, AAA — The Auto Club Group, in a press release. “AAA urges families to develop an emergency plan now. Your plan should include several evacuation destinations, in case a shelter or hotel is closed due to the pandemic.”
more
Some useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus
resource centre
Rt Covid-19
Covid19info.live
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.
Building a harder diamond
Date: July 1, 2020
Source: University
of Tsukuba
Summary:
Scientists create a theoretical carbon-based material that would be even harder
than diamond. This work may have industrial applications for cutting and
polishing in place of current synthetic diamond.
Researchers at
the University of Tsukuba used computer calculations to design a new
carbon-based material even harder than diamond. This structure, dubbed
"pentadiamond" by its creators, may be useful for replacing current
synthetic diamonds in difficult cutting manufacturing tasks.
Diamonds, which
are made entirely of carbon atoms arranged in a dense lattice, are famous for
their unmatched hardness among known materials. However, carbon can form many
other stable configurations, called allotropes. These include the familiar
graphite in pencil lead, as well as nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes. The
mechanical properties, including hardness, of an allotrope depend mostly on the
way its atoms bond with each other. In conventional diamonds, each carbon atom
forms a covalent bond with four neighbors. Chemists call carbon atoms like this
as having sp3 hybridization. In nanotubes and some other materials, each carbon
forms three bonds, called sp2 hybridization.
Now,
researchers at the University of Tsukuba have explored what would happen if
carbon atoms were arranged in a more complex structure with a mixture of sp3
and sp2 hybridization.
"Carbon
allotropes with both sp2 and sp3 hybridized atoms have greater morphological
diversity due to the huge number of combinations and arrangements in
networks," says first author Yasumaru Fujii.
To calculate
the most stable atomic configuration, as well as estimate its hardness, the
team relied on a computational method called density functional theory (DFT). DFT
has been successfully used throughout chemistry and solid-state physics to
predict the structure and properties of materials.
Keeping track of the quantum
states of all of the electrons in a sample, and especially their interactions,
is usually an intractable task. Instead, DFT uses an approximation that focuses
on the final density of electrons in space orbiting the atoms.
More
“There
was more than one way to think about Mike Burry’s purchase of a billion dollars
in credit default swaps. The first was as a simple, even innocent, insurance
contract. Burry made his semiannual premium payments and, in return, received
protection against the default of a billion dollars’ worth of bonds. He’d
either be paid zero, if the triple-B-rated bonds he’d insured proved good, or a
billion dollars, if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad.
But of
course Mike Burry didn’t own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or
anything like them. He had no property to “insure” it was as if he had bought
fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down. To him, as to Steve
Eisman, a credit default swap wasn’t insurance at all but an outright
speculative bet against the market—and this was the second way to think about
it.”
The Big Short: Inside the
Doomsday Machine
The Monthly Coppock Indicators finished June
DJIA: 25,813 -2 Down. NASDAQ: 10,059 +196 Up.
SP500: 3,100 +75 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. The Dow has now gone negative.
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