Baltic Dry Index. 1273 +38 Brent Crude 50.65
Spot Gold 1855
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 16/12/20 World 73,810,169
Deaths 1,641,753
“Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.”
Edmund Burke.
I you have little time to read the LIR today, just read the first article in the Covid-19 section. Never was vaccinate in haste repent at leisure at greater risk of happening.
In the global stock casinos, boom time. The future has never looked better apparently.
Free money is set to pour out of the US Congress this week. Just wait until socialists Biden-Harris get control of the spigots in January. Miracle vaccines are appearing almost weekly. Just don’t tell anyone in stocks about today’s Covid-19 article.
It’s even suggested that Santa Claus is bringing along a Brexit trade deal for Christmas.
And the on Monday, miracle stock Tesla is going to join the S&P 500, soon to be worth more than all other stocks combined! Don’t you just love stock manias. What could possibly go wrong.
And they all lived happily ever after.
Asia stocks climb on vaccine, U.S. stimulus optimism; dollar skids
December 15, 2020 11:37 PM By Swati Pandey
SYDNEY (Reuters) -Asian stocks were buoyant on Wednesday and the dollar eased as hopes of effective coronavirus vaccines and the growing prospect of more U.S. fiscal stimulus cheered investors ahead of the Christmas holiday season.
In a sign the positive momentum was set to extend, Eurostoxx 50 futures and Germany’s Dax futures edged 0.1% higher, while futures for London’s FTSE firmed 0.3%.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia Pacific shares outside of Japan rose 0.8% after two straight days of losses.
The index, hovering near record highs, is up 3.8% so far in December and is on track for its best yearly performance since 2017 thanks to generous government and central bank stimulus around the world.
Australian shares rose 0.8% while South Korea’s KOSPI was up 0.4% and Japan’s Nikkei added 0.2%.
China’s blue-chip CSI 300 index added 0.15% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index climbed 0.86%.
“We expect many emerging market economies to continue to show positive momentum in 2021 led by Asia,” TD Securities wrote in a note, adding that, on aggregate, they would recover lost output from 2020.
“China is likely to see a more rapid convergence to pre-COVID GDP levels.”
Overnight, U.S. and European stocks, gold and oil were upbeat. The Dow rose 1.1% while the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq climbed 1.3% each. [.N]
Optimism over a $1.4 trillion U.S. spending package increased after House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited other top congressional leaders to meet late on Tuesday to hammer out a deal to be enacted this week.
Progress on the roll-out of vaccines continued after Moderna Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine appeared set for regulatory authorization this week.
The U.S. also expanded its rollout of the newly approved vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.
“Despite COVID still raging in Europe and the United States, markets are looking through the near-term risks to economic growth and focusing on the likely better times in 2021,” Betashares chief economist David Bassanese wrote in a note.
“Central banks are promising to keep rates low for 1 to 2 years, which is supporting the economy and financial markets and also provides a ramp for equity price,” he added.
Markets will now look to the U.S. Federal Reserve for new projections on whether the economy will suffer a double-dip recession or is on the cusp of a vaccine-inspired boom.
The central bank is to release a statement later in the day, with analysts expecting some guidance on when and how the Fed might change its bond purchases.
Optimism for a trade deal on Brexit also boosted stocks, while contributing to a weaker dollar against the British pound and the euro.
---- In commodities, gold prices rose 0.1% to $1,855.17 an ounce. [GOL/]
Gold, regarded as a hedge against inflation and currency debasement, has risen over 22% so far this year amid unprecedented government stimulus globally.
Buzz among MPs that UK heading towards Brexit deal with EU - BBC
December 15, 2020 4:30 PM
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain and the European Union are heading towards a trade deal that will satisfy Brexit supporters, BBC Newsnight’s Political Editor Nicholas Watt tweeted on Tuesday.
“Big buzz in the last hour among Tory MPs that the UK is heading towards a Brexit deal with the EU. Eurosceptics being reassured they will be happy,” he wrote on Twitter.
Don’t tell anyone in the casinos, but the rules in the social media game have changed. The terror starts for social media in 2021.
Irish watchdog fines Twitter in landmark for EU data privacy regime
December 15, 2020 10:17 AM By Reuters Staff
DUBLIN (Reuters) -Ireland’s data regulator has fined Twitter 450,000 euros for a bug that made some private tweets public, the regulator said on Tuesday, in the first sanction against a U.S. firm under a new European Union data privacy system.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) “One Stop Shop” regime makes Ireland’s Data Protection Commission lead regulator of Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Google in the bloc, due to the location of their EU headquarters.
GDPR has been in force since 2018, but the Twitter case is the first using a new dispute resolution system under which one lead national regulator makes a decision before consulting with the other EU national regulators.
Some European Union regulators objected to Ireland’s preliminary Twitter ruling when it was issued in May, triggering a referral to the dispute resolution body, the European Data Protection Board to secure a two-thirds majority among member states.
The Twitter fine relates to a 2019 probe into a bug in its Android app, where some users’ protected tweets were made public.
In particular it was levied due to Twitter’s “failure to notify the breach on time to the DPC and a failure to adequately document the breach,” the Data Protection Commission said in a statement.
Twitter said in a statement that the delay in reporting the incident was an “unanticipated consequence of staffing between Christmas Day 2018 and New Years’ Day” and that it had made changes so that future incidents would be reported in a timely fashion.
“We take full responsibility for this mistake and remain fully committed to protecting the privacy and data of our customers, including through our work to quickly and transparently inform the public of issues that occur,” the statement, posted on Twitter, said.
The Irish regulator, which has more than 20 major inquiries into U.S technology firms open, has the power to impose fines for violations of up to 4% of a company’s global revenue or 20 million euros ($22 million), whichever is higher.
Twitter is the subject of at least one other inquiry by the Irish regulator.
In other news, is downwardly mobile New York City the future of cities everywhere? A coming global real estate bust if it does.
Fleeing New Yorkers resulted in an estimated $34 billion in lost income -study
December 15, 2020 1:40 PM
(Reuters) -Millions of people have moved out of New York City during the pandemic, but at the same time, millions of others with lower incomes have taken their place, according to a study released on Tuesday.
All told, a net 70,000 people left the metropolitan region this year, resulting in roughly $34 billion in lost income, according to estimates from Unacast here, a location analytics company.
About 3.57 million people left New York City this year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7, according to Unacast, which analyzed anonymized cell phone location data. Some 3.5 million people earning lower average incomes moved into the city during that same period, the report showed.
“The exodus isn’t as big as people have been talking about,” said Thomas Walle, chief executive and co-founder of Unacast. “Maybe the greater impact is how the population is changing and how the demographics are changing.”
In Tribeca, a wealthy neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, residents who left this year earned an average income of about $140,000, Walle said. The typical person moving into the neighborhood earned an average $82,000, he said.
The dual hit to population and income across the city can have lasting consequences for New York City as it recovers from the economic crisis caused by the pandemic, Walle said. “The big question is, ‘How does real estate and retail in particular adapt to that?’” he said.
In the longer run, the changing demographics could lead to more affordable brands taking the place of higher-end stores, the researchers noted. At the same time, real estate developers may need to offer more lower-priced housing options, Walle said.
A separate report released earlier this year by StreetEasy found that vacancies rose and rents dropped between February and July in high-end neighborhoods, including the financial district downtown. But rents continued to rise in more affordable neighborhoods.
Winter Watch.
From around mid-October, the northern hemisphere snow cover usually rapidly expands, while the Arctic ice gradually expands back towards its winter maximum.
Over simplified, a rapid expansion of both, especially if early, can be a sign of a harsher than normal arriving northern hemisphere winter. Perhaps more so in 2020-2021 as we’re in the low of the ending sunspot cycle, which possibly also influenced this year’s record Atlantic hurricane season.
Update: we seem to have started new sunspot cycle 25 this month, though it’s unlikely to affect 2020-2021s coming winter.
Northern Eur-Asia turned snowy fast in mid-October. The Arctic sea ice expansion was slow, and from a very low level at the end of September, but with the vastly expanded snow cover, sea ice formation sped up.
The Laptev Sea ice was back to normal at the end of November. The failure of the Kara Sea ice to return to normal, leads me to bet on a warmer western European winter ahead.
Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
https://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_gif/DATA/cursnow_asiaeurope.gif
21st century adage: Is that true, or did you hear it on the BBC?
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Vaccinate in haste, repent at leisure.
An Internal Medicine Doctor and His Peers Read the Pfizer Vaccine Study and See Red Flags [Updated]
Posted on December 14, 2020 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Reader IM Doc, an internal medicine practitioner of 30 years, trained and worked in one of the top teaching hospitals in the US for most of his career before moving to a rural hospital in an affluent pocket of Flyover. He has been giving commentary from the front lines of the pandemic. Along with current and former colleagues, he is troubled by the PR-flier-level information presented to the public about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, at least prior to the release of an article in the New England Journal of Medicine on the Pfizer vaccine: Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine. However, he did not find the study to be reassuring. He has taken the trouble of writing up his reservations after discussing the article with his group of nine physicians that meets regularly to sanity check concerns and discuss the impact that articles will have on their practices.
---- Unfortunately, this study from Pfizer in the latest NEJM, and indeed this whole vaccine rollout, are case studies in the pathology Agnell described. There are more red flags in this paper and related events than present on any May Day in downtown Beijing. Yet all anyone hears from our media, our medical elites, and our politicians are loud hosannas and complete unquestioning acceptance of this new technique. And lately, ridicule and spite for anyone who dares to raise questions.
I have learned over thirty years as a primary care provider that Big Pharma deserves nothing from me but complete and total skepticism and the assumption that anything they put forth is pure deception until proven otherwise. Why so harsh? Well, to put it bluntly, Big Pharma has covered my psyche with 30 years of scars:
• As a very young doctor, I treated an extraordinary
middle-aged woman who had contracted polio as a toddler from a poorly tested
polio vaccine rolled out in an “emergency.” Tens of thousands of American kids shared her fate1
• The eight patients I took care of until they died from congestive heart
failure that had been induced by a diabetes drug called Actos. The drug company
knew full well heart failure was a risk during their trials. When it became
obvious after the rollout, they did everything they could to obfuscate. Actos
now carries a black box warning about increased risk of heart failure
• The three women who I took care of who had been made widows as their husbands
died of completely unexpected heart attacks while on Vioxx. I have no proof the
Vioxx did this. But when Vioxx was finally removed from the market, the
mortality rate in the US fell that year by a measurable amount, inconsistent
with recent trends and forecasts. Merck knew from their
trials that Vioxx had a significant risk of cardiovascular events and stroke,
and did absolutely nothing to relay that danger in any way. Worse, they did
everything they could to muddle information and evade responsibility once the
truth started to come out
More
New coronavirus strain spreading in UK has key mutations, scientists say
December 15, 2020 10:38 AM By Kate Kelland
LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists are trying to establish whether the rapid spread in southern England of a new variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 is linked to key mutations they have detected in the strain, they said on Tuesday.
The mutations include changes to the important “spike” protein that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus uses to infect human cells, a group of scientists tracking the genetics of the virus said, but it is not yet clear whether these are making it more infectious.
“Efforts are under way to confirm whether or not any of these mutations are contributing to increased transmission,” the scientists, from the COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) Consortium, said in a statement.
The new variant, which UK scientists have named “VUI – 202012/01” includes a genetic mutation in the “spike” protein, which - in theory - could result in COVID-19 spreading more easily between people.
The British government on Monday cited a rise in new infections, which it said may be partly linked to the new variant, as it moved its capital city and many other areas into the highest tier of COVID-19 restrictions.
As of Dec. 13, 1,108 COVID-19 cases with the new variant had been identified, predominantly in the south and east of England, Public Health England said in a statement.
But there is currently no evidence that the variant is more likely to cause severe COVID-19 infections, the scientists said, or that it would render vaccines less effective.
“Both questions require further studies performed at pace,” the COG-UK scientists said.
More
What the Pandemic Christmas of 1918 Looked Like
Concerns about the safety of gift shopping, family gatherings and church services were on Americans’ minds then, too
By Livia Gershon smithsonianmag.com December 14, 2020 7:00AM
On December 21, 1918, the Ohio State Journal published a warning about the lingering flu pandemic from the state’s acting health commissioner: “Beware the mistletoe.” Not only should readers resist the temptation of a holiday kiss, but they shouldn’t even be at a social gathering where it might come up.
“You will show your love for dad and mother, brother, sister and the rest of ‘em best this year by sticking to your own home instead of paying annual Christmas visits, holding family reunions, and parties generally,” the commissioner said.
Christmas 1918 was not Christmas 2020. The pandemic had already peaked in the U.S. in the fall of 1918 as part of the disease’s second wave. Meanwhile, this week the deaths attributed to Covid-19 in the U.S. are the highest they’ve ever been, showing no signs of waning as the holiday approaches. But the flu also killed far more people (675,000) than Covid-19 has to date, in a country that was much smaller, population-wise, at the time. And it wasn’t over by any means. In some cities, a third wave was already starting as Christmas approached, says Kenneth C. Davis, author of More Deadly than War, a history of the pandemic and World War I aimed at young readers.
“There was an uptick, and it was a serious uptick in some,” he says.
A century ago, the federal government held much less authority and power than it does today; the CDC, for instance, wouldn’t get its start until 1946. Decisions about how seriously to take the disease fell to states and, especially, municipalities.
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
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
Covid19info.live
Centers for Disease Control Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
The Spectator Covid-19 data tracker (UK)
https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported.
Nanoengineered cement shows promise for sealing leaky gas wells
Date: December 14, 2020
Source: Penn State
Summary: Leaking natural gas wells are considered a potential source of methane emissions, and a new nanomaterial cement mixture could provide an effective, affordable solution for sealing these wells.
Leaking natural gas wells are considered a potential source of methane emissions, and a new nanomaterial cement mixture could provide an effective, affordable solution for sealing these wells, according to a team of Penn State scientists.
"We have invented a very flexible cement that is more resistant to cracking," said Arash Dahi Taleghani, associate professor of petroleum engineering at Penn State. "That's important because there are millions of orphaned and abandoned wells around the world, and cracks in the casings can allow methane to escape into the environment."
When natural gas wells are drilled, cement is used to secure the pipe, or casing, to the surrounding rock, creating a seal that prevents methane from migrating into the shallow subsurface, where it could enter waterways, or the atmosphere, where it is a potent greenhouse gas, the scientists said.
Wells can extend miles underground and over time changing temperatures and pressures can degrade the cement, causing cracks to form. The scientists said repairs involve injecting cement in very narrow areas between the casing and rock, requiring special cement.
"In construction, you may just mix cement and pour it, but to seal these wells you are cementing an area that has the thickness of less than a millimeter, or that of a piece of tape," Dahi Taleghani said. "Being able to better pump cement through these very narrow spaces that methane molecules can escape from is the beauty of this work."
Adding almost 2D graphite created a cement mixture that better filled these narrow spaces and that was also stronger and more resilient, the scientists found. They recently reported their findings in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control. Maryam Tabatabaei, a postdoctoral scholar in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, also contributed to this research.
The scientists developed a multi-step process to uniformly distribute sheets of the nanomaterial into a cement slurry. By treating the graphite first with chemicals, the scientists were able to change its surface properties so the material would dissolve in water instead of repelling it.
More
I thought it would be a good idea to go into Politics, maybe I am a little old... but you know... I'd love to be Chancellor of the Exchequer - That way I'll be reunited with my money!
Ken Dodd.
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