Baltic Dry Index. 1267 -02 Brent Crude 39.98
Spot Gold 1948
Coronavirus Cases 14/9/20 World 29,062,498
Deaths 936,526
"It's far better to buy a
wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful
price."
Warren Buffett.
Another Monday, and time to buy more stocks. Time to
front run another Fed central bankster “no billionaire left behind” meeting.
In casino-land, everything is just perfect. It’s time to
move on from the billions and trillions, and take stocks into the quadrillions. Is Tesla worth more than all the other stocks
put together?
Well maybe, but call me sceptical. What if President
Trump doesn't win?
What if the Sars-COV-2 vaccine is too little too late?
What if unemployment starts surging again?
What if city centre skyscrapers become 21st
century millstones?
What if the Democrat Socialists bring in wealth taxes
next year?
But for today and tomorrow, buy more!
Asia shares rise as investors look ahead to Fed meeting
TOKYO (AP) — Asian shares rose Monday, despite
the rollercoast ride that closed Wall Street last week, as traders awaited cues
from the U.S. central bank expected later in the week.
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party was set
to pick a new leader, who will by definition become the prime minister because
of the party’s control over the more powerful lower house of Parliament.
Favored to win is veteran ruling party politician, Yoshihide Suga, who will
continue Shinzo Abe’s “Abenomics” policies of easy lending and deregulation.
“That decision should not be market moving as
we fully expect a steady hand to remain on the tiller of Abenomics. Mr. Suga
has signalled that no further rises in sales tax are on the horizon, but all
else should stay the same,” said Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at
Oanda.
----Japan’s Nikkei 225 gained 0.7% to
23,570.55. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 added 0.6% to 5,893.40. South Korea’s
Kospi jumped 1.2% to 2,426.42. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gained nearly 1.0% to
24,744.86, while the Shanghai Composite rose 0.6% to 3,278.89.
SoftBank, which announced Sunday that it was
selling Britain’s Arm Holdings to computer graphics chip company Nvidia for $40
billion, jumped 9.4% in morning trading. SoftBank spent $32 billion to acquire
Arm in 2016. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processing chips, while Arm
is renowned as an innovator in the “Internet of Things.”
Also on players’ radar screen is the Federal
Reserve Open Market Committee, which is meeting later in the week.
The Federal Reserve’s massive aid for the
economy has helped underpin the markets’ recovery from the coronavirus downturn
by slashing short-term interest rates to record lows and buying up bonds to
support markets.
The Bank of Japan also is due to hold a policy
meeting this week. No major changes are expected in its ultra-lax monetary
policies.
Stephen Innes, chief global market strategist
at AxiCorp, noted that investors face “many uncertainties,” including the U.S.
elections and the global pandemic.
“Unquestionably the virus story is the dominant
macro pivot event, especially for equities, and is more likely to be dominated
by optimism surrounding a vaccine. Indeed investors will be keeping their eye
on the vaccine prize,” he said.
More
Biden is favored to win the election
Updated 6 hours ago
We’ve moved past Labor Day and into the
home stretch of the 2020
election cycle. Joe Biden still leads in national
polls by about 7 or 8 percentage points, and state polls also show a
relatively stable race, with most — excluding those in Florida — containing good
news for Biden. However, don’t count President Trump out yet. He still has
a roughly one-in-four chance of pulling off an upset.
More
Next, the wisdom of Sir Isaac
Newton. A cautionary tale via the Wall Street Journal. And deficits don’t
matter until one day, they do!
Newton’s Law of Stock Momentum
As Sir Isaac learned, market pile-ons follow the same pattern. Investor, beware.
Does this sound familiar: Smart guy owns a stock in March at $200, sells
it in June at around $600, but then buys it back in July and August for between
$900 and $1,000. By September it’s back at $200. Ouch. Tesla this year? Yahoo
in 2000? Nope. That was Sir Isaac Newton getting pulled into the great momentum
trade of the South Sea Co., which cratered 300 years ago this month. He lost
the equivalent of more than $3 million today. Newton, whose second law of
motion is about the momentum of a body equaling the force acting on it, didn’t
know that works for stocks too.
When bull markets get going, investors come out of the woodwork to pile
in. These momentum investors—I call them momos—figure if a stock is going up,
it will keep going up. But usually there is some source of hot air inflating
stocks: either a structural anomaly that fools investors into thinking
ever-rising stock prices are real, or a source of capital that buys, buys,
buys—proverbial “dumb money.” Think of it as a giant fireplace bellows, an
accordion-like contraption that pumps in fresh oxygen to keep flames growing.
Most simply blame the Federal Reserve—especially today, with its
zero-interest-rate policy—for pumping the hot air that gets the momos going.
Fair enough, but that’s only part of the story. Long market runs have always
allured investors who figure they’re smart to jump in, even if it’s late.
Everyone forgets the adage, “Don’t mistake brains for a bull market.”
More
Federal Spending Tops $6 Trillion for First Time; Deficit Tops $3 Trillion for First Time
By Terence P. Jeffrey | September 11,
2020
(CNSNews.com) - Federal spending has topped $6 trillion for
the first time in any fiscal year in the nation’s history and the federal
deficit has topped $3 trillion for the first time, according
to the Monthly Treasury Statement for August that was released today.There is still another month left in fiscal 2020, which runs through the end of September.
As of the end of August according to the Treasury, the federal government had spent a record $6,054,175,000,000. At the same time, total federal revenues were $3,046,786,000,000—leaving the federal government with a record deficit of $3,007,390,000.
Prior to this fiscal year, the most the federal government ever spent
through August was the $4,209,743,000,000 it spent (in constant August
2020 dollars) in fiscal 2019.
The largest deficit the federal government had ever run through August
before this fiscal year was the $1,659,890,630,000 deficit (in constant August
2020 dollars) it ran in fiscal 2009, during the last recession.
The
most expensive federal department so far this year has been the Department of
Health and Human Services, which spent $1,378,786,000,000 through August.
The second most expensive has been the Social Security Administration,
which spent $1,056,912,000,000 through August.
Through August, the Department of Defense had spent $627,497,000,000.
The Treasury also spent $483,892,000,000 through Augsut in gross
interest on Treasury debt securities.
In other news,
will this year’s Atlantic hurricane season beat all the records?
Gulf Coast residents brace for possible new hurricane
WAVELAND, Miss. (AP) — Storm-weary Gulf Coast
residents prepared for a new weather onslaught Monday as Tropical Storm Sally
churned northward.
Jeffrey Gagnard of Chalmette, Louisiana, was
spending Sunday in Mississippi helping his parents prepare their home for Sally
— and making sure they safely evacuated ahead of the storm.
“I mean, after Katrina, anything around here
and anything on the water, you’re going to take serious,” he said, as he loaded
the back of his SUV with cases of bottled water in a grocery store parking lot
in Waveland, Mississippi. “You can’t take anything lightly.”
Gagnard said he planned to head back across the
state line to prepare his own home for winds and rain Sally was expected to
bring to the New Orleans area.
Forecasters from the National Hurricane Center
in Miami said Sally is expected to become a hurricane on Monday and reach shore
by early Tuesday, bringing dangerous weather conditions, including risk of
flooding, to a region stretching from Morgan City, Louisiana, to Ocean Springs,
Mississippi.
“I know for a lot of people this storm seemed
to come out of nowhere,” said Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards. “We need
everybody to pay attention to this storm. Let’s take this one seriously.”
Edwards urged people to prepare for the storm
immediately. He also said there are still many from southwestern Louisiana who
evacuated from Hurricane Laura into New Orleans — exactly the area that could be
hit by Sally, which is a slow-moving storm.
More
Finally, how to wreck a
large city without using a nuclear bomb. Interesting animation and pictures by
the New York Times investigative team.
How a Massive Bomb Came Together in Beirut’s Port
By Ben Hubbard, Maria Abi-Habib, Mona El-Naggar, Allison McCann, Anjali
Singhvi, James Glanz and Jeremy White
September 9, 20220.
Fifteen tons of fireworks. Jugs of kerosene and acid. Thousands of tons
of ammonium nitrate. A system of corruption and bribes let the perfect bomb sit
for years.
Late
last year, a new security officer at the port of Beirut stumbled upon a broken
door and a hole in the wall of a storage hangar. He peered inside and made a
frightening discovery.
Thousands
of tons of ammonium nitrate, a compound used in explosives, was spilling from
torn bags.
In
the same hangar were jugs of oil, kerosene and hydrochloric acid; five miles of
fuse on wooden spools; and 15 tons of fireworks — in short, every ingredient
needed to construct a bomb that could devastate a city.
About
100,000 people lived within a mile of the warehouse, which had jury-rigged
electricity and not so much as a smoke alarm or sprinkler.
-----An investigation by a team of New York Times reporters who
conducted dozens of interviews with port, customs and security officials,
shipping agents and other maritime trade professionals revealed how a corrupt
and dysfunctional system failed to respond to the threat while enriching the
country’s political leaders through bribery and smuggling.
More
"For the investor, a
too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the
effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments."
Warren Buffett.
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.Pfizer CEO Says Americans Could Get Covid Shot Before Year-End
By Riley Griffin and Anna EdneyBourla said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he’s “quite comfortable” that the vaccine the company is developing in partnership with BioNTech SE is safe and that it could be available to Americans before 2021, contingent on an approval from U.S. regulators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“I cannot say what the FDA will do,” Bourla said. “But I think it’s a likely scenario, and we are preparing for it.”
New York-based Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech are seen as frontrunners in the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine, alongside Moderna Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc. Bourla said Pfizer and its partner have a 60% chance of knowing the efficacy of its still experimental vaccine by the end of October.
“Of course that doesn’t mean that it works; that means that we’ll know if it works,” Bourla said. The timing of clinical trial results depends on enough people in the study getting Covid-19 to make a calculation. But positive results could clear the way for approval, he said.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-13/pfizer-ceo-says-americans-could-get-covid-shot-before-year-end?srnd=coronavirus
Israel to Enter Second Virus Lockdown After Bungled Reopen
By Amy Teibel
Updated on September 13, 2020, 8:33 PM GMT+1
Israel’s cabinet voted to impose a second nationwide lockdown starting
Friday to try to tamp down a raging coronavirus outbreak, brushing aside
appeals from both a business world warning of economic strangulation, and the
powerful ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
Ministers voted Sunday to strictly limit movement, gatherings and
economic activity for at least three weeks coinciding with a major Jewish
holiday season.
Health experts “raised a red flag,” said Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, whose emergency coalition government was formed in May expressly to
tackle the health emergency. “Senior Health Ministry officials warned us that
the morbidity situation requires immediate steps.”
If the Israeli public viewed the original lockdown in March as a health imperative, then the upcoming one is seen as the consequence of a government fiasco. An abandonment of caution after restrictions were eased, together with government inaction as cases climbed, have sent infections surging ninefold and deaths quadrupling since late May. Nearly one-fifth of the labor force remains out of work even though most of the economy has been open for months.
The Finance Ministry has estimated the new restrictions will cost the economy 19 billion shekels ($5.5 billion), and a relief program is to be presented by Thursday. The timing of the lockdown is fraught, and threats of non-compliance abound.
The restrictions are to take effect on the eve of the Jewish New Year, and the stringent restrictions will continue throughout a three-week season of major Jewish holidays, to the outrage of many ultra-Orthodox. Retail and leisure industries that had geared up for the holiday season will be clobbered.
Some businesspeople still trying to recover from the first lockdown in
the spring say they’ll be forced to close unless the government offers
immediate and substantial relief. Some are threatening to keep their stores,
hotels and health clubs open, and joined the mass protests against Netanyahu
that have been fueled by the health crisis.
Tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox are also expected to defy the
lockdown, gathering for mass holiday prayers in overcrowded conditions, the
Haaretz newspaper reported.
More
Germany Braces for the Second COVID-19 Wave
In Germany, the number of coronavirus
infections is once again on the rise, but the disease is killing fewer people.
Still, epidemiologists warn that the pandemic could spin out of control again
this winter.
By Holger Dambeck und Veronika Hackenbroch 10.09.2020, 14.36 Uhr
Germany’s most famous virologist is at a loss. After returning to his
highly popular German podcast after the summer holidays, Christian Drosten told
his listeners that it’s "very difficult to assess” the current situation.
No one can reliably say how many people are currently infected with the
coronavirus in Germany. The official number of cases reported by the Robert
Koch Institute (RKI), the country’s center for disease control, could be two
times lower than the true figure, or perhaps even 20 times lower. "We have
to honestly admit to ourselves that we don’t actually know where the virus is
right now.”
There’s only one thing that's certain: The number of coronavirus
infections is rising again significantly. After lockdown measures were eased in
mid-July, around 300 to 500 new cases were reported each day, but now that
figure has increased to 1,300 a day, even reaching more than 2,000 on one
recent occasion.
"I am very concerned about the latest developments in
Germany," says RKI head Lothar Wieler. Are we witnessing the beginning of
the dreaded second wave of the coronavirus in Germany? Will we soon be
threatened with a new lockdown, with school closures and many other
restrictions? Chancellor Merkel has also described the situation as
"alarming.”
For many people, it is increasingly difficult to take these warnings
seriously because there are very few people dying from coronavirus-related
complications right now. There are also enough beds available in the intensive
care units. Conditions like the overflowing ICU wards seen in Italy in the
spring seem like the distant past.
And is the rising number of cases not simply explained by the fact that
so many people have recently returned from vacation and also the fact that
patients who have very few symptoms are now getting tested more regularly? Or
is it possible that the virus has become less dangerous through a mutation?
"It’s a very human reaction to interpret all the signs as
indicating that things could get better,” says Emma Hodcroft, an epidemiologist
at the University of Basel’s Biozentrum, a center specializing in molecular and
biomedical research. "But you have to be logical about it."
And the logic is clear: Studies from Britain and Spain show that the
infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is 0.8 to 0.9 percent – many times higher
than for influenza.
Face masks could be giving people Covid-19 immunity, researchers suggest
Mask wearing might also be reducing the severity of the
virus and ensuring that a greater proportion of new infections are asymptomatic
Face masks may be inadvertently giving people Covid-19 immunity and making them get less sick from the virus, academics have suggested in one of the most respected medical journals in the world.
The commentary, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, advances the unproven but promising theory that universal face mask wearing might be helping to reduce the severity of the virus and ensuring that a greater proportion of new infections are asymptomatic.
If this hypothesis is borne out, the academics argue, then universal mask-wearing could become a form of variolation (inoculation) that would generate immunity and “thereby slow the spread of the virus in the United States and elsewhere” as the world awaits a vaccine.
It comes as increasing evidence suggests that the amount of virus someone is exposed to at the start of infection - the “infectious dose” - may determine the severity of their illness. Indeed, a large study published in the Lancet last month found that “viral load at diagnosis” was an “independent predictor of mortality” in hospital patients.
Wearing
masks could therefore reduce the infectious dose that the wearer is exposed to
and, subsequently, the impact of the disease, as masks filter out some
virus-containing droplets.
If this theory bears out, researchers argue, then population-wide mask wearing might ensure that a higher proportion of Covid-19 infections are asymptomatic.
Better still, as data has emerged in recent weeks suggesting that there can be strong immune responses from even mild or asymptomatic coronavirus infection, researchers say that any public health strategy that helps reduce the severity of the virus - such as mask wearing - should increase population-wide immunity as well.
This is because even a low viral load can be enough to induce an immune response, which is effectively what a typical vaccine does.
While this hypothesis needs to be backed up with more clinical study, experiments in hamsters have hinted at a connection between dose and disease. Earlier this year, a team of researchers in China found that hamsters housed behind a barrier made of surgical masks were less likely to get infected by the coronavirus. And those who did contract the virus became less sick than other animals without masks to protect them.
More
Next, some vaccine links
kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most
informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.
World
Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines. https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
NY
Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Regulatory
Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker. https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
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.
Understanding electron transport in graphene nanoribbons
Date:
September 11, 2020
Source:
Springer
Summary:
New research aims to better understand the electron transport properties of
graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) and how they are affected by bonding with aromatics
- a key step in designing technology such as chemosensors.
Graphene is a modern wonder material possessing unique properties of
strength, flexibility and conductivity whilst being abundant and remarkably
cheap to produce, lending it to a multitude of useful applications --
especially true when these 2D atom-thick sheets of carbon are split into narrow
strips known as Graphene Nanoribbons (GNRs).
New research published in EPJ Plus, authored by Kristians
Cernevics, Michele Pizzochero, and Oleg V. Yazyev, Ecole Polytechnique Federale
de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, aims to better understand the
electron transport properties of GNRs and how they are affected by bonding with
aromatics. This is a key step in designing technology such chemosensors.
"Graphene nanoribbons -- strips of graphene just few nanometres
wide -- are a new and exciting class of nanostructures that have emerged as
potential building blocks for a wide variety of technological
applications," Cernevics says.
The team performed their investigation with the two forms of GNR,
armchair and zigzag, which are categorised by the shape of the edges of the
material. These properties are predominantly created by the process used to
synthesise them. In addition to this, the EPFL team experimented p-polyphenyl
and polyacene groups of increasing length.
"We have employed advanced computer simulations to find out how
electrical conductivity of graphene nanoribbons is affected by chemical
functionalisation with guest organic molecules that consist of chains composed
of an increasing number of aromatic rings," says Cernevics.
The team discovered that the conductance at energies matching the energy
levels of the corresponding isolated molecule was reduced by one quantum, or
left unaffected based on whether the number of aromatic rings possessed by the
bound molecule was odd or even. The study shows this 'even-odd effect'
originates from a subtle interplay between the electronic states of the guest
molecule spatially localised on the binding sites and those of the host
nanoribbon.
"Our findings demonstrate that the interaction of the guest organic
molecules with the host graphene nanoribbon can be exploited to detect the
'fingerprint' of the guest aromatic molecule, and additionally offer a firm
theoretical ground to understand this effect," Cernevics concludes:
"Overall, our work promotes the validity of graphene nanoribbons as
promising candidates for next-generation chemosensing devices."
These potentially wearable or implantable sensors will rely heavily on
GRBs due to their electrical properties and could spearhead a personalised health
revolution by tracking specific biomarkers in patients.
US Politics Betting Odds
"If
you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning
it for ten minutes."
Warren
Buffett. Clearly, Warren has never heard of RobinHood.
The Monthly Coppock Indicators finished August
DJIA: 28,430 Up. NASDAQ: 11,775 Up. SP500:
3,500 Up.
The NASDAQ
remained up. The DJIA and SP500 turned up in July. With stock mania running
fueled by trillions of central bankster new fiat money programs, especially
tech stock mania in the NASDAQ, the indicators are essentially worthless after
all these years. I will discontinue this section at the end of the month.
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