Baltic Dry Index. 1518 +27 Brent Crude 46.05
Spot Gold 1924
Coronavirus Cases 26/8/20 World 24,020,089
Deaths 828,357
The most effective way to destroy people is
to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
George Orwell.
Ignore the insanity of
the latest central bankster fuelled stock mania. Our real world is just in the
beginning stage of major structural change.
Who knew at the start
of the year that by late March close to 70 percent of the economy would be
ordered closed as “non-essential?”
Now with our economy
mostly open again, a great deal of that non-essential economy is about to find
out just how non-essential it is. And we haven’t even started on the next flu
season on top of a continuing never-ending Covid-19 pandemic.
That new harsh
reality will eventually even sink in to the gamblers in our stock casinos.
But for now, another
day waiting on tomorrow’s Fed Chairman Powell’s “white rabbit” speech.
Asian shares slip from two-year top as economic strains pile up
August
26, 2020 / 1:03 AM
SINGAPORE/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Asian stocks eased from a
two-year high on Wednesday, as a mixed bag of economic data had investors a
touch more circumspect about the global recovery, while oil jumped to a
five-month peak owing to a hurricane disrupting output in the Gulf of Mexico. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS edged down 0.1% after hitting its highest since mid-2018 on Tuesday. Japan's Nikkei .N225 was off 0.1%.
The U.S. dollar nursed small losses in currency trading, though moves were muted ahead of a key Thursday speech from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell in which he is expected to outline the central bank’s next steps.
A day ago, investors had been cheered by signs of progress - or at least the lack of deterioration - in Sino-U.S. trade relations. But as company earnings season wraps up, and focus comes back to economic data, the outlook is turning murkier.
Consumer confidence dropped to a more than six-year low in the United States this month, data showed on Tuesday, overshadowing a boom in new home sales.
“If you look at the macro numbers, a lot of the improvement in Q2 seems to be slowing down in momentum,” said Tai Hui, Hong Kong-based J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s chief market strategist in Asia.
“Central banks and governments are not really announcing anything new, and so markets are in a bit of a sideways move at this point in time.”
In commodity markets oil prices hung on to overnight gains as U.S. producers closed offshore output and battened down as Hurricane Laura drives toward the Gulf coast.
Producers evacuated 310 offshore facilities and shut 1.56 million barrels per day of crude output, 84% of Gulf of Mexico’s offshore production - near the 90% outage that Hurricane Katrina brought 15 years ago.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-markets/asian-shares-slip-from-two-year-top-as-economic-strains-pile-up-idUKKBN25L2Y9?il=0
Back in the real world far from the Fed’s fiat money fueled stock mania, the next wave of unemployment is just getting underway.
American Airlines to cut 19,000 jobs when federal aid expires in October
The Fort Worth, Texas-based airline, which employed more than 140,000 people in March, is prohibited from laying off workers through Sept. 30 under the terms of a $25 billion federal aid package set aside for carriers to weather the worst of the crisis. But demand has only modestly recovered, presenting a dire scenario for airlines. American said its fourth-quarter capacity will be half of the year-ago level and that international long-haul flights will be just 25% of its 2019 schedule.
---- American said it expects to have 40,000 fewer employees in October compared with when the pandemic began, the carrier said. The involuntary cuts include furloughs of 17,500 union workers, including flight attendants, pilots and mechanics, and 1,500 administration and management jobs.
Other airlines have also warned about job cuts. Delta Air Lines on Monday said it plans to furlough 1,941 pilots unless it can reach a cost-cutting agreement with the labor union. United warned 36,000 employees last month that their jobs are at risk but the impact of voluntary programs on final numbers hasn’t yet been disclosed. Southwest Airlines said it doesn’t expect to cut jobs in 2020 because more than a quarter of its workforce signed up for some kind of voluntary leave or buyout. About half of Spirit’s 2,500 pilots will work fewer hours to avoid furloughs this fall, the union said Tuesday.
More
In the UK, and all
across Europe and much of the world, tomorrow will not be like today, which was
like yesterday. 2019’s economy is not coming back.
Fewer employees will
be needed overall, and in less office space. Less workers in town centre
offices, supports less food outlets and bars and pubs. Fewer commuters need
fewer busses and taxis. A great downsizing is just getting underway.
UK retailers cut jobs by most since 2009, CBI says
August 25, 2020 /
11:03 AM
LONDON
(Reuters) - British retailers have cut the most jobs since the depths of the
financial crisis and expect the pace of losses to accelerate, the Confederation
of British Industry said, adding to warning signs of an expected sharp rise in
unemployment.
Tuesday’s data also showed an unexpected drop in sales this month, which
contrasted with a recent pick-up in demand by consumers after the coronavirus
lockdown was lifted.
“Trading conditions for the retail sector remain tough,” CBI economist
Alpesh Paleja said.
“...Firms will be wary of deteriorating household incomes and the risk
of further local lockdowns potentially hitting them in the pocket for a second
time.”
Well-known British retailers Marks & Spencer, Debenhams and WH Smith
have announced job losses in recent weeks, reflecting a shift in demand to
online sales during the pandemic.
Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket, said on Monday it would create
16,000 permanent roles to meet a surge in home deliveries.
Quarterly CBI figures showed the employment balance - which measures job
changes over the past 12 months - sank to -45 in August from -20 in May,
reaching its lowest since February 2009. A deeper fall is expected later this
year.
More
No plan for a return to the office for millions of staff
·
5 hours ago
Fifty of the biggest UK employers questioned by BBC have said they have
no plans to return all staff to the office full-time in the near future.
Some 24 firms said that they did not have any plans in place to return
workers to the office.
However, 20 have opened their offices for staff unable to work from
home.
It comes as many employees return to work from the summer holidays with
the reality of a prolonged period of home working becoming increasingly likely.
The BBC questioned 50 big employers ranging from banks to retailers to
get a sense of when they expected to ask employees to return to the office.
One of the main reasons given for the lack of a substantial return was
that firms could not see a way of accommodating large numbers of staff while
social distancing regulations were still in place.
Many companies said they were offering choice and flexibility to those
who want to return, particularly in the banking and finance sectors.
A few firms have already announced they have no plans to return to the
office until late autumn, and Facebook has said it does not plan a return of
employees until July 2021.
Some smaller businesses are deciding to abandon their offices
altogether. Tara Tomes runs a PR agency with an office in the heart of
Birmingham's business district.
Her team of eight cannot fit in the space they have if they are to obey
social distancing guidelines and she will not be renewing the office lease in
September.
"I personally don't want to force my team back onto public
transport," she told the BBC.
"Not having four walls around us won't change the dynamic or
culture of the team. If anything it will make us more pioneering in the way the
world of work is going."
She said that the money saved on rent and utilities and the time spent
not commuting were other benefits to giving up the office.
Every
generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before
it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
George
Orwell.
Covid-19 Corner
India's coronavirus cases top 3.2 million
August 26, 2020
/ 5:46 AM
MUMBAI (Reuters) - India recorded more than 60,000 cases of COVID-19 for
the eighth day in a row on Wednesday, as total cases crossed 3.2 million, data
from the federal health ministry showed.
The world’s second-most populous country is third behind the United
States and Brazil in terms of total caseload, and has recorded the world’s
highest single-day caseload consistently since August 7, a Reuters tally
showed.
Deaths in the last 24 hours stood at 1,059, taking the total number of
fatalities from the infection to 59,449.
Two European patients re-infected with coronavirus
August 25, 2020
/ 7:25 AM
AMSTERDAM/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Two European patients are
confirmed to have been re-infected with the coronavirus, raising concerns about
people’s immunity to the virus as the world struggles to tame the pandemic.
The cases, in Belgium and the Netherlands, follow a report this week by
researchers in Hong Kong about a man there who had been re-infected with a
different strain of the virus four and a half months after being declared
recovered - the first such re-infection to be documented.
That has fuelled fears about the effectiveness of potential vaccines
against the virus, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, though
experts say there would need to be many more cases of re-infection for these to
be justified.
Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst said the Belgian case was a woman who
had contracted COVID-19 for the first time in March and then again in June.
Further cases of re-infection were likely to surface, he said.
“We don’t know if there will be a large number. I think probably not,
but we will have to see,” he told Reuters, noting that COVID-19 had only been
in humans for less than a year.
“Perhaps a vaccine will need to be repeated every year, or within two or
three years. It seems clear though that we won’t have something that works for,
say, 10 years,” he said.
Van
Ranst, who sits on some Belgian COVID-19 committees, said in cases such as the
Belgian woman’s in which symptoms were relatively mild, the body may not have
created enough antibodies to prevent a re-infection, although they might have
helped limit the sickness.
More
Experts respond to first documented case of COVID-19 re-infection
Rich Haridy August 24, 2020
A
new case study, from scientists at the University of Hong Kong, is reporting
the first clinically confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 re-infection. Responding to
the news, a variety of infectious disease specialists suggest the re-infection
is not necessarily surprising, could be rare, and may have implications for the
efficacy of a vaccine, but many unanswered questions still remain.
More
than six months into this global pandemic, scientists are only now beginning to
glean insights into the longer-term characteristics of this novel coronavirus.
One of the key questions yet to be resolved is whether a person can contract
COVID-19 a second time.
Many of these secondary positive cases are thought to be due to remnants of the virus still present months later. These cases are not new infections, but instead more likely lingering residual signs of the initial infection, and experts suggest these viral remnants cannot infect others.
The important detail in this new case study, accepted but not yet
published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, is it offers the
first robust clinical evidence of an entirely new, secondary infection, months
after the subject recovered from their initial infection.
The report outlines the case of a healthy 33-year-old Hong Kong man. He
suffered his first SARS-CoV-2 infection in late March. The primary infection
was relatively mild, with the patient suffering standard COVID-19 symptoms:
cough, fever, headache, and sore throat.
By mid-April the man tested negative for SARS-CoV-2. Months later the man
arrived back in Hong Kong after travels to Europe. Routine testing upon arrival
at Hong Kong airport revealed the man was again positive with SARS-CoV-2.
However, this time he remained entirely asymptomatic, with no fever or abnormal
signs whatsoever.
Genomic testing revealed the new infection was an entirely different
strain of the virus, offering the first documented evidence of a SARS-CoV-2
re-infection.
The case study raises a whole host of questions that currently have no
good answers. Perhaps the most pressing question raised by the new report is
exactly how infectious is an individual during a second COVID-19 episode?
----“… [The report] raises the possibility that vaccinations may not provide the hope that we have been waiting for,” says Strain. “Vaccinations work by simulating infection to the body, thereby allowing the body to develop antibodies. If antibodies don’t provide lasting protection, we will need to revert to a strategy of viral near-elimination in order to return to a more normal life.”
Brendan Wren, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,
on the other hand is not at all surprised by this report. He points out viruses
naturally mutate all the time, so this case of reinfection is not unusual, may
be rare, and shouldn't influence the development of vaccines.
More
China’s Vaccine Front-Runner Aims to Beat Covid the Old-Fashioned Way
Sinovac Biotech in Beijing is taking a brute-force approach to developing an inoculation for the coronavirus.Many of the 200-plus Covid-19 vaccine projects under way around the world are focused on new technologies—inoculations based on messenger RNA, for example, or genetically modified cold viruses. The company developing one of China’s leading vaccine candidates, by contrast, is betting that humanity’s best chance may lie with a shot not too different from the kind that’s been in use for hundreds of years.
Beijing-based Sinovac Biotech Ltd., a company with a strong medical track record but a turbulent corporate history, began final-stage trials in July on CoronaVac. It relies on an inactive version of the novel coronavirus to teach human immune systems to recognize and destroy the real thing. In terms of timing, the company was ahead of most other potential vaccines, including the new models meant to facilitate strong protection and fast production. Sinovac’s candidate has a good chance of entering commercial production almost as quickly as Moderna Inc.’s mRNA vaccine, or the genetically modified shot being developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca Plc.
Sinovac’s method is relatively crude, relying on a similar principle to the one Edward Jenner, the 18th century British scientist sometimes called the father of immunology, employed when he used the mild cowpox virus to perform the first-ever inoculations against smallpox. But it just might work—and it could be easier to use than the never-before-tried approaches of other companies.
“We’ve got to learn about history and not forget what’s worked in the past,” says Michael Kinch, a vaccine specialist at Washington University in St. Louis. “Don’t get fancy when simple will do it for you just as well.”
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-24/coronavirus-vaccine-china-s-covid-front-runner-uses-brute-force-approach?srnd=coronavirus
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.
Wireless "photosheets" turn CO2 and sunlight into clean fuel
Nick Lavars August 24, 2020
A
device that effectively mimics the natural process of photosynthesis would
represent a massive breakthrough for energy researchers, and a team from the
University of Cambridge has been at the cutting edge of this technologies for
the better part of decade. Its latest step forward involves a wireless sheet
packed with photocatalysts that can convert sunlight, water and carbon dioxide
into clean fuels, with the team hoping to one day use the device as part of
giant energy farms.
The
research was carried out by a group working under Professor Erwin Reisner in
the university’s department of chemistry, which has made a number of promising
advances in energy research over the past decade. In 2013 it demonstrated how
hydrogen could be produced using
cobalt as a cheap catalyst, and in 2017 showed how the gas
could be made using biomass as the
starting point.
Most recently, we looked at a type of artificial leaf developed by the group, which much like natural leaves, converts sunlight and water into fuel – in this case syngas made of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. This device captured sunlight through perovskite light absorbers, a component in some solar cells, but the team has now made some tweaks to its approach. Rather than the perovskite light absorbers, the new platform relies on novel photocatalysts embedded in a sheet made up of semiconductor powders, which can be produced easily and cheaply.
The 20 cm2 (3.1 in2) sheet developed as a test unit was used to convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and formic acid (rather than syngas), which can be stored easily for direct use as fuel or later used as a building block for hydrogen.
According to the team, this method is an entirely new way of converting
carbon dioxide into clean fuels, and one that could quite readily be scaled up.
The scientists say it should be relatively straightforward to produce versions
that span several meters, and imagine these types of devices forming large
arrays as part of facilities that produce clean energy, much like solar farms.
“We were surprised how well it worked in terms of its selectivity – it
produced almost no by-products,” says first author of the study Dr Qian Wang.
“Sometimes things don’t work as well as you expected, but this was a rare case
where it actually worked better.”
“We hope this technology will pave the way toward sustainable and practical solar fuel production,” says Reisner.
The research was published in the journal Nature Energy.
Source: University of Cambridge
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always
stronger than internationalism.
George Orwell.
The Monthly Coppock Indicators finished July
DJIA: 26,428 -1 Up. NASDAQ: 10,745 +243 Up. SP500:
3,271 +89 Up.
The NASDAQ
has remained up. The DJIA and SP500 have turned up. With stock mania running
fueled by trillions of central bankster new fiat money programs, I would not
rely on the indicators.
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