By Tom
Westbrook
SINGAPORE
(Reuters) - Chinese stocks led Asian markets higher on Monday as investors bet
on a steady recovery for the world’s no. 2 economy, though caution about the
fate of U.S. stimulus kept the dollar firm and a central bank policy tweak
unwound some of the yuan’s gains.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan rose 0.8% to
2-1/2-year highs, buoyed by a 2% gain in Chinese blue chips and a 1.5% rise by
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index. Japan’s Nikkei slipped 0.3% as investors fretted
about corporate earnings. [.T]
“If capital is moving on relative growth rates, then China is looking
quite attractive,” said Chris Weston, head of research brokerage Pepperstone in
Melbourne. Equities are cheap, yields advantageous and the outlook solid, he
said.
“From a virus perspective as well, we’re seeing concerns in Europe,
while China is considered a quasi-safe haven.”
China has returned from an eight day Mid-Autumn festival with investors
encouraged by a robust rebound in tourism and ebbing coronavirus cases.
Qingdao city said on Monday it will conduct COVID-19 tests for the
entire population of more than 9 million people over five days after small
number of new cases.
Elsewhere, in the U.S. midwest, infections are at record levels and the
World Health Organization is urging fresh curbs for Europe.
Coronavirus aid plans in the United States are also in disarray, with
the Trump administration on Sunday calling on Congress to pass a stripped-down
relief bill while talks on a more comprehensive proposal were again at an
impasse.
S&P 500 futures wobbled either side of flat in the Asia session,
while European futures edged higher.
“The economic fallout of COVID-19 has accelerated the relative decline
of the U.S. as the world’s economic engine,” said ANZ chief economist Richard
Yetsenga. “It is also increasing the centrality of Asia - and particularly, of
China.”
Chinese blue chips have gained nearly 17% this year, compared with an
almost 8% gain by the S&P 500. Foreigners’ buying of Chinese government
bonds hit its fastest pace in more than two years last month.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-markets/china-gains-hoist-asian-stocks-to-two-year-peak-idUKKBN26X00X
Goldman Says Short Dollar as Odds
Firm for Biden Win, Vaccine By Ruth Carson
October
12, 2020, 2:52 AM GMT+1
The dollar may tumble to its lows of 2018 on the rising likelihood of
Joe Biden winning the U.S. election and progress on a coronavirus vaccine,
according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
“The risks are skewed toward dollar weakness, and we see relatively low
odds of the most dollar-positive outcome -- a win by Mr. Trump combined with a
meaningful vaccine delay,” strategists including Zach Pandl wrote in a note
Friday. “A ‘blue wave’ U.S. election and favorable news on the vaccine timeline
could return the trade-weighted dollar and DXY index to their 2018 lows.”
The ICE U.S. Dollar Index has fallen over 3% so far this
year to just over the 93 level as investors reacted to unprecedented
pandemic-related monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve and rock-bottom
interest rates. The gauge traded below 89 in 2018, a level which would imply a
further slide of more than 4%.
Goldman joins the likes of UBS Asset Management Invesco Ltd.
The strategists also suggest buying the euro, Canadian and
Australian dollars against the greenback.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-12/goldman-says-short-dollar-as-odds-firm-for-biden-win-vaccine
Elsewhere, more signs of a faltering
global economy. Be careful what you wish
for US voters. Why would anyone want to be US president for the next four years?
Power.
Japan September wholesale prices
slump, heightening deflation risk October 12, 20203:10
AM
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese wholesale prices fell 0.8% in September from
the same month a year earlier, data showed on Monday, marking the seventh straight
month of year-on-year declines and heightening the risk the country will slide
back into deflation.
Squeezed mostly by soft global demand for commodities and Japanese
machinery goods, the weakness in wholesale prices highlights the challenge
Tokyo faces in cushioning the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the world’s
third-largest economy.
The 0.8% fall in the corporate goods price index (CGPI), which measures
the price companies charge each other for their goods and services, was bigger
than a median market forecast for a 0.5% drop. It followed August’s 0.6%
year-on-year decrease.
Wholesale prices also slid 0.1% in September from August, marking the
first on-month drop in four months, the data released by the Bank of Japan
(BOJ) showed.
“With the global economy still reeling from the pandemic’s pain, the
pace of its recovery remains modest. That will weigh on Japan’s wholesale
inflation,” a BOJ official told a briefing.
The drop in wholesale prices adds to headaches for the BOJ, which frets
that sluggish consumption, particularly for services, will push consumer
inflation further away from its 2% target.
Core consumer prices - the BOJ’s key inflation measurement - fell 0.4%
in August from a year earlier, marking their fastest year-on-year drop in almost
four years.
The slew of soft price data may increase the chance the BOJ will cut its
inflation forecasts at this month’s rate review, when it also conducts a
quarterly review of its projections.
Japan
suffered its biggest economic slump on record in the second quarter as the
pandemic crippled demand. Analysts expect any rebound to remain modest as fears
of a second wave of infections weigh on consumption.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-japan-economy-prices/japan-september-wholesale-prices-slump-heightening-deflation-risk-idUKKBN26X05J?il=0
New section , Winter Watch .
The Arctic winter ice expansion and
northern hemisphere snow cover. From around mid October the northern hemisphere
snow cover usually rapidly expands while the Arctic ice gradually expands back
to its winter maximum.
Over simplified, a rapid expansion of
both, especially if early, can be a sign of a harsher than normal arriving winter.
Perhaps more so in 2020-2021 as we’re in the low of the ending sunspot cycle,
which possibly also influenced this record Atlantic hurricane season.
US National Ice Center.
https://www.natice.noaa.gov/ims/
There came the awful day of reckoning for the bulls and the
optimists and the wishful thinkers and those vast hordes that, dreading the
pain of a small loss at the beginning, were now about to suffer total
amputation – without anaesthetics. A day I shall never forget, October 24 1907.
Jesse Livermore
BENGALURU (Reuters) - India’s total coronavirus cases rose by 66,732 in
the last 24 hours to 7.12 million on Monday morning, data from the health
ministry showed.
Deaths from COVID-19 infections rose by 816 to 109,150, the ministry
said.
India’s coronavirus case load topped 7 million on Sunday and the country
has added a million cases in just 13 days. It has the second-highest number of
infections, behind the United States which is approaching the 8 million mark.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-india-cases/indias-coronavirus-infections-rise-to-7-12-million-idUKKBN26X0C6?il=0
Coronavirus Can Persist for Four
Weeks on Banknotes, Study Finds Jason Gale October 11, 2020
The
new coronavirus may remain infectious for weeks on banknotes, glass and other
common surfaces, according to research by Australia’s top biosecurity
laboratory that highlights risks from paper currency, touchscreen devices and
grab handles and rails.
Scientists at the Australian
Centre for Disease Preparedness showed SARS-CoV-2 is “extremely robust,”
surviving for 28 days on smooth surfaces such as glass found on mobile phone
screens and plastic banknotes at room temperature, or 20 degrees Celsius (68
degrees Fahrenheit). That compares with 17 days survival for the flu virus.
Virus survival declined to less than a day at 40 degrees
Celsius on some surfaces, according to the study, published Monday in Virology Journal . The findings
add to evidence that the Covid-19-causing coronavirus survives for longer in cooler weather, making it potentially harder to control in
winter than summer. The research also helps to more accurately predict and
mitigate the pandemic’s spread, the researchers said.
Our results show that SARS-CoV-2 can remain infectious on
surfaces for long periods of time, reinforcing the need for good practices such
as regular hand washing and cleaning surfaces,” said Debbie Eagles, the
center’s deputy director, in an emailed statement.
How Do People Catch Covid-19? Here’s What Experts Say:
QuickTake
The coronavirus tended to survive longer on nonporous or
smooth surfaces, compared with porous complex surfaces, such as cotton.
The research received funding from Australia’s defense
department. It involved drying the coronavirus in an artificial mucus on
different surfaces, at concentrations similar to those reported in samples from
infected patients, and then re-isolating the virus over a month. The study was
also carried out in the dark, to remove the effect of ultraviolet light, as
research has demonstrated direct sunlight can rapidly inactivate the virus.
More
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/coronavirus-can-persist-for-four-weeks-on-banknotes-study-finds/ar-BB19UtuQ
Lesson not learned: Europe
unprepared as 2nd virus wave hits By
NICOLE WINFIELD October 10 2020
ROME (AP) — Europe’s second wave of coronavirus infections has struck
well before flu season even started, with intensive care wards filling up again
and bars shutting down. Making matters worse, authorities say, is a widespread
case of “COVID-fatigue.”
Record high daily infections in several eastern European countries and
sharp rebounds in the hard-hit west have made clear that Europe never really
crushed the COVID-19 curve as hoped, after springtime lockdowns.
Spain this week declared a state of emergency for Madrid amid increasing
tensions between local and national authorities over virus containment
measures. Germany offered up soldiers to help with contact tracing in newly
flaring hotspots. Italy mandated masks outdoors and warned that for the first
time since the country became the European epicenter of the pandemic, the
health system was facing “significant critical issues” as hospitals fill up.
The Czech Republic’s “Farewell Covid” party in June, when thousands of
Prague residents dined outdoors at a 500-meter (yard) long table across the
Charles Bridge to celebrate their victory over the virus, seems painfully naive
now that the country has the highest per-capita infection rate on the
continent, at 398 per 100,000 residents.
“I have to say clearly that the situation is not good,” the Czech
interior minister, Jan Hamacek, acknowledged this week.
Epidemiologists and residents alike are pointing the finger at governments
for having failed to seize on the summertime lull in cases to prepare
adequately for the expected autumn onslaught, with testing and ICU staffing
still critically short. In Rome this week, people waited in line for 8-10 hours
to get tested, while front-line medics from Kiev to Paris found themselves once
again pulling long, short-staffed shifts in overcrowded wards.
“When the state of alarm was abandoned, it was time to invest in
prevention, but that hasn’t been done,” lamented Margarita del Val, viral
immunology expert with the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center, part of
Spain’s top research body, CSIC.
“We are in the fall wave without having resolved the summer wave,” she
told an online forum this week.
Tensions are rising in cities where new restrictions have been
re-imposed, with hundreds of Romanian hospitality workers protesting this week
after Bucharest once again shut down the capital’s indoor restaurants, theaters
and dance venues.
----As infections rise in many European
countries, some — including Belgium, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain and
France — are diagnosing more new cases every day per capita than the United
States, according to the seven-day rolling averages of data kept by Johns
Hopkins University. On Friday, France, with a population of about 70 million,
reported a record 20,300 new infections.
Experts say Europe’s high infection rate is due in large part to
expanded testing that is turning up far more asymptomatic positives than during
the first wave, when only the sick could get a test.
But the trend is nevertheless alarming, given the flu season hasn’t even
begun, schools are open for in-person learning and the cold weather hasn’t yet
driven Europeans indoors, where infection can spread more easily.
More
https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-pandemics-italy-madrid-eastern-europe-159a68a460337948d25281c153994c70
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
Stanford
Website . https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
Regulatory
Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker . https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some other useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus
resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
https://rt.live/
Covid19info.live
https://wuflu.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.
Experiments with twisted 2D
materials catch electrons behaving collectively Date:
October 6, 2020
Source:
University of Washington
Summary:
A team reports that carefully constructed stacks of graphene -- a 2D form of
carbon -- can exhibit highly correlated electron properties. The team also
found evidence that this type of collective behavior likely relates to the
emergence of exotic magnetic states.
Scientists can have ambitious goals:
curing disease, exploring distant worlds, clean-energy revolutions. In physics
and materials research, some of these ambitious goals are to make
ordinary-sounding objects with extraordinary properties: wires that can
transport power without any energy loss, or quantum computers that can perform
complex calculations that today's computers cannot achieve. And the emerging
workbenches for the experiments that gradually move us toward these goals are
2D materials -- sheets of material that are a single layer of atoms thick.
In a paper published Sept. 14 in the
journal Nature Physics , a team led by the University of Washington
reports that carefully constructed stacks of graphene -- a 2D form of carbon --
can exhibit highly correlated electron properties. The team also found evidence
that this type of collective behavior likely relates to the emergence of exotic
magnetic states.
"We've created an experimental
setup that allows us to manipulate electrons in the graphene layers in a number
of exciting new ways," said co-senior author Matthew Yankowitz, a UW
assistant professor of physics and of materials science and engineering, as
well as a faculty researcher at the UW's Clean Energy Institute.
Yankowitz led the team with
co-senior author Xiaodong Xu, a UW professor of physics and of materials
science and engineering. Xu is also a faculty researcher with the UW Molecular
Engineering and Sciences Institute, the UW Institute for Nano-Engineered
Systems and the UW Clean Energy Institute.
Since 2D materials are one layer of
atoms thick, bonds between atoms only form in two dimensions and particles like
electrons can only move like pieces on a board game: side-to-side,
front-to-back or diagonally, but not up or down. These restrictions can imbue
2D materials with properties that their 3D counterparts lack, and scientists
have been probing 2D sheets of different materials to characterize and
understand these potentially useful qualities.
But over the past decade, scientists
like Yankowitz have also started layering 2D materials -- like a stack of
pancakes -- and have discovered that, if stacked and rotated in a particular
configuration and exposed to extremely low temperatures, these layers can
exhibit exotic and unexpected properties.
The UW team worked with building
blocks of bilayer graphene: two sheets of graphene naturally layered together.
They stacked one bilayer on top of another -- for a total of four graphene
layers -- and twisted them so that the layout of carbon atoms between the two
bilayers were slightly out of alignment. Past research has shown that
introducing these small twist angles between single layers or bilayers of
graphene can have big consequences for the behavior of their electrons. With
specific configurations of the electric field and charge distribution across
the stacked bilayers, electrons display highly correlated behaviors. In other
words, they all start doing the same thing -- or displaying the same properties
-- at the same time.
"In these instances, it no
longer makes sense to describe what an individual electron is doing, but what
all electrons are doing at once," said Yankowitz.
"It's like having a room full
of people in which a change in any one person's behavior will cause everyone
else to react similarly," said lead author Minhao He, a UW doctoral
student in physics and a former Clean Energy Institute fellow.
Quantum mechanics underlies these
correlated properties, and since the stacked graphene bilayers have a density
of more than 10^12, or one trillion, electrons per square centimeter, a lot of
electrons are behaving collectively.
The team sought to unravel some of
the mysteries of the correlated states in their experimental setup. At
temperatures of just a few degrees above absolute zero, the team discovered
that they could "tune" the system into a type of correlated
insulating state -- where it would conduct no electrical charge. Near these
insulating states, the team found pockets of highly conducting states with
features resembling superconductivity.
Though other teams have recently
reported these states, the origins of these features remained a mystery. But
the UW team's work has found evidence for a possible explanation. They found
that these states appeared to be driven by a quantum mechanical property of
electrons called "spin" -- a type of angular momentum. In regions
near the correlated insulating states, they found evidence that all the
electron spins spontaneously align. This may indicate that, near the regions
showing correlated insulating states, a form of ferromagnetism is emerging --
not superconductivity. But additional experiments would need to verify this.
More
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201006153508.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmatter_energy%2Fgraphene+%28Graphene+News+--+ScienceDaily%29
US Politics Betting Odds https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/us-politics
After a man makes money in the stock market he very quickly
loses the habit of not spending. But after he loses money it takes him a long
time to lose the habit of spending.
Jesse Livermore
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