Wednesday 15 July 2020

Trump v Xi. Rain or No Rain?


Baltic Dry Index. 1742 -50  Brent Crude 43.05
Spot Gold 1807

Coronavirus Cases 15/7/20 World 13,418,382
Deaths 579,457

July 15:
St. Swithin's day, if thou dost rain, For forty days it will remain;

St. Swithin's day, if thou be fair, For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.

So far, so good, no rain.

Today’s early news is all about the new political war unfolding between America and China. Not that it’s interfering with the gambling going on in the central bankster fueled stock casinos.

I suspect that Trump’s war on China will just continue to get worse the worse the polls get on his prospects for re-election.

Of course, this new cold war on China and China’s retaliation, when it happens,  will act as a big drag on the already in difficulty global economy. Jobs will be lost in America and China, costs of Chinese goods will rise for US consumers. It will take the global economy longer to overcome the effects of the still out of control global coronavirus crisis.

Our eventual “new normal” will be a lower new normal for many, than if relations with China were more 2016.

But with neither President Xi or President Trump likely to back down on anything, I suspect the global economy is in for a very rough time out until early November.

Below, stocks party on like its January 2020. I think I know how Noah felt as he was building his ark and assembling all those dangerous animals.

Asian shares pare gains as U.S.-China tensions intensify

July 15, 2020 / 12:40 AM
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Asian shares pared gains on Wednesday, led by losses in Chinese stocks, after Beijing vowed retaliatory sanctions against the United States, while the euro rose to a four-month high on the prospect of stimulus ahead of a crucial EU summit.

---- MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS was last up 0.14%, after rising over 1% earlier in the session. 

Chinese shares were deep in red, with the blue-chip CSI300 index .CSI300 off 1% and Hong Kong's Hang Seng index .HSI down 0.6%.

Japan's Nikkei .N225 and Australia's benchmark index remained upbeat though, and were up 1.4% and 1%, respectively.

E-mini futures for the S&P 500 EScv1 gave back some of their gains but were still up 0.7%.

---- Overnight risk appetite was boosted by Moderna Inc’s (MRNA.O) experimental vaccine for COVID-19 which showed it was safe and provoked immune responses in all 45 healthy volunteers in an early-stage study.

On Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose over 2%, while the S&P 500 .SPX gained 1.34% and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC climbed 0.94%.

Stocks climbed despite rising Sino-U.S. tensions and three U.S. states reporting new record daily deaths from the pandemic.

“Markets have traded sideways for over a month as bulls and bears move their bishops and horses out on the chess board and then hoard them back in when the other side makes a move. The net result has been a prolonged stalemate,” said Perpetual analyst Matthew Sherwood.

“Forward-looking assumptions about COVID-19 treatments and vaccine offset what is happening today in terms of rising case numbers and an unwinding or stalling of re-opening plans.”

The dollar was on the defensive, particularly against risk-sensitive currencies, following news of progress in vaccine development.
More

China vows retaliation after Trump ends preferential status for Hong Kong

July 14, 2020 / 8:38 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered an end to Hong Kong’s special status under U.S. law to punish China for what he called “oppressive actions” against the former British colony, prompting Beijing to warn of retaliatory sanctions.

Citing China’s decision to enact a new national security law for Hong Kong, Trump signed an executive order that he said would end the preferential economic treatment for the city. 

“No special privileges, no special economic treatment and no export of sensitive technologies,” he told a news conference.

Acting on a Tuesday deadline, he also signed a bill approved by the U.S. Congress to penalize banks doing business with Chinese officials who implement the new security law.

----Under the executive order, U.S. property would be blocked of any person determined to be responsible for or complicit in “actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in Hong Kong,” according to the text of the document released by the White House.

It also directs officials to “revoke license exceptions for exports to Hong Kong,” and includes revoking special treatment for Hong Kong passport holders.

China’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday Beijing will impose retaliatory sanctions against U.S. individuals and entities in response to the law targeting banks, though the statement released through state media did not reference the executive order.

“Hong Kong affairs are purely China’s internal affairs and no foreign country has the right to interfere,” the ministry said.

---- U.S. relations with China have already been strained over the global coronavirus pandemic, China’s military buildup in the South China Sea, its treatment of Uighur Muslims and massive trade surpluses.

Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has raised doubts about whether he can win re-election on Nov. 3 amid a surge of new infections. He has attempted to deflect blame onto China.

“Make no mistake. We hold China fully responsible for concealing the virus and unleashing it upon the world. They could have stopped it, they should have stopped it. It would have been very easy to do at the source, when it happened,” he said.

Asked if he planned to talk to Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump said: “I have no plans to speak to him.”
More

China warns it will protect its companies if U.S. comes after them on human rights


Humans are almost constantly connected to devices and electronics that generate a significant amount of data about who they are and what they do. Many commercially available products like Fitbits, Garmin trackers, Apple watches and other smartwatches are designed to help users take control of their health, and tailor activities to their lifestyle. Even something as unobtrusive to wear as a ring can collect data on sleep patterns, body temperature, heart rate variability, calorie burn, and steps, and even go a step beyond to analyze these biostatistics and package the information so it can be read on a user’s smartphone. Similar, less common but more precise monitoring devices are also being used at clinics and hospitals to help health care providers individualize treatments for a range of conditions from cardiac care to stroke rehabilitation.

Researchers working to contain COVID-19 are increasingly turning to these sleek new wearables for a diagnostic solution. But there is some debate about the best way to do so. Can commercially available devices be leveraged as a tool, or would clinical-grade wearables be more effective?

In April, the Journal of the American Medical Association identified fever, cough and shortness of breath as primary symptoms in both positive and false negative COVID-19 cases. Around the same time, medical thought leaders in the Chicago area approached John Rogers, the director of Northwestern University’s Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics. Rogers and his team are known for developing next-generation, flexible, wearable devices with clinical-grade monitoring capability that mount on relevant body areas. The patches look and feel much like a Band-Aid, but contain biosensors, onboard memory, data processing and wireless transmission features.

The quality of data the devices can capture is high enough that they can reliably be used in settings and on patients with limited hospital access to run specialty-care tests like electrocardiograms (EKGs). Others reduce the need for complicated machines used to monitor premature infants in intensive care units. For example, the Rogers Research Group works in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to deploy devices in India, Pakistan and several areas throughout Africa that capture information about maternal and newborn health.

“We were asked whether we could adapt, modify and customize those technologies to COVID-19 patients and specific symptoms associated with that disease,” says Rogers.
More
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/band-aid-patch-could-detect-early-covid-19-symptoms-180975301/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20200714-daily-responsive&spMailingID=42955238&spUserID=NjUwNDIzNTUzNDE0S0&spJobID=1801077983&spReportId=MTgwMTA3Nzk4MwS2

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.

2D semiconductors found to be close-to-ideal fractional quantum hall platform

Date: July 6, 2020

Source: Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science

Summary: Researchers report that they have observed a quantum fluid known as the fractional quantum Hall states (FQHS), one of the most delicate phases of matter, for the first time in a monolayer 2D semiconductor. Their findings demonstrate the excellent intrinsic quality of 2D semiconductors and establish them as a unique test platform for future applications in quantum computing.

The study was published online today in Nature Nanotechnology.

"We were very surprised to observe this state in 2D semiconductors because it has generally been assumed that they are too dirty and disordered to host this effect," says Cory Dean, professor of physics at Columbia University. "Moreover, the FQHS sequence in our experiment reveals unexpected and interesting new behavior that we've never seen before, and in fact suggests that 2D semiconductors are close-to-ideal platforms to study FQHS further."

The fractional quantum Hall state is a collective phenomenon that comes about when researchers confine electrons to move in a thin two-dimensional plane, and subject them to large magnetic fields. 
First discovered in 1982, the fractional quantum Hall effect has been studied for more than 40 years, yet many fundamental questions still remain. One of the reasons for this is that the state is very fragile and appears in only the cleanest materials.

"Observation of the FQHS is therefore often viewed as a significant milestone for a 2D material -- one that only the very cleanest electronic systems have reached," notes Jim Hone, Wang Fong-Jen Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia Engineering.

While graphene is the best known 2D material, a large group of similar materials have been identified over the past 10 years, all of which can be exfoliated down to a single layer thickness. One class of these materials is transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD), such as WSe2, the material used in this new study. Like graphene, they can be peeled to be atomically thin, but, unlike graphene, their properties under magnetic fields are much simpler. The challenge has been that the crystal quality of TMDs was not very good.

---- The two Columbia University laboratories -- the Dean Lab and the Hone Group -- worked in collaboration with the NIMS Japan, which supplied some of the materials, and Papic, whose group performed computational modelling of the experiments. Both Columbia labs are part of the university's Material Research Science and Engineering Center. This project also used clean room facilities at both the Columbia Nano Initiative and City College. Measurements at large magnetic fields were made at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, a user facility funded by the National Science Foundation and headquartered at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fl.

Now that the researchers have very clean 2D semiconductors as well as an effective probe, they are exploring other interesting states that emerge from these 2D platforms.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Walter Bagehot.

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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