11:53 PM By Andrew
Galbraith , Jessica DiNapoli
SHANGHAI/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Asian
stocks rose to new record highs on Thursday, tracking U.S. markets as investors
hoped for more economic stimulus from newly inaugurated U.S. President Joe
Biden to offset damage wreaked by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Republicans in the U.S. Congress
have indicated they are willing to work with the new president on his
administration’s top priority, a $1.9 trillion U.S. fiscal stimulus plan, but
some are opposed to the plan’s price tag. Democrats took control of the U.S.
Senate on Wednesday, but will still need Republican support to pass the
program.
But after record high closes on Wall
Street overnight, markets in Asia reflected relief over an orderly transition
of power and strong expectations that U.S. stimulus will provide continued
support for global assets.
Kay Van-Petersen, global macro
strategist at Saxo Capital Markets, said that Democratic control of the Senate
“increases not just the probability of more fiscal (stimulus), but the
magnitude.”
“That means that this market should
be way, way, way higher as a whole and we’re going to get there. We’re entering
this regime of even more accelerated asset class inflation,” he said.
MSCI’s broadest index of
Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan touched record highs and was last up 0.85%,
with markets across the region posting gains.
Chinese blue-chips added 1.2%,
Australian shares climbed 0.69% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng breached the 30,000
level, rising 0.31%.
Japan’s Nikkei was up 0.72%, less
than 1% off three-decade highs reached last week.
The rises in Asia followed fresh
record highs on Wall Street overnight. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose
0.83%, the S&P 500 gained 1.39% and the Nasdaq Composite added 1.97%. On
Thursday, e-mini futures for the S&P 500 ticked up to new records, and were
last up 0.26%
“The market is still taking a sanguine
view to tighter regulatory/tax risks given the narrow Senate majority, while
still expecting additional fiscal stimulus,” Tapas Strickland, an economist at
National Australia Bank, said in a note.
Tech shares stood out after Netflix
Inc said it would no longer need to borrow billions of dollars to finance its
TV shows and movies, prompting its shares to surge nearly 17%.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-markets/asian-stocks-at-record-highs-as-biden-inauguration-lifts-stimulus-hopes-idUSKBN29P2Y7
Inauguration
of President Biden Kicks Energy and Climate Agenda Into Action Hours after being sworn in, Joe Biden resubmits U.S. to
Paris Agreement and lays the groundwork for a major climate-change mitigation
push. U.S. President Joe Biden hit the
ground running Wednesday, with plans to sign a raft of executive orders to
start the process of reversing Trump administration environmental and energy
regulations and set the groundwork of what will be the federal government’s
most aggressive effort to date to combat climate change.
On the day of his inauguration as
the 46 th president, Biden turned to
fulfilling a host of
promises
Biden’s “day one” actions
included executive orders that will launch the process of reversing some
of the Trump administration’s most “harmful actions” preventing the country
from combating the climate crisis, domestic “climate
czar” Gina McCarthy
On the international front, Biden
will formally resubmit the U.S. to the Paris
climate agreement
The executive order will also seek
to roll back oil and gas infrastructure projects opposed by the Obama
administration and supported by the Trump administration. Those include
rescinding federal permits for the Keystone XL pipeline
project
----The Environmental Protection Agency could also regulate
greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, starting with the power
sector. This week’s court
decision vacating
Biden also plans to revive an
interagency working group disbanded by Trump in 2017 that sets the “social cost
of carbon,” a measure of the economic damage caused by the release of a ton of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A handful of states with aggressive
decarbonization goals, such as New York, have used a calculation of the social
cost of carbon in ways that boost the economic value of reducing
emissions; changes to the federal benchmark value could combine with its
use in policy to spur more aggressive action nationwide.
---- Groups focused on the climate and energy crisis offered praise for
Biden's early actions and laid out hopes for greater efforts to
come.
“The sweeping nature of these
executive orders are an important down payment in addressing the tatters left
behind by President Trump," Kathleen Rest, executive director at the
Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a prepared statement.
At the same time, the climate and
energy crisis is just one of the most pressing issues facing the
Biden administration in the weeks and months ahead, Rest noted,
including "embracing the economic and public health benefits of
renewable energy, modernizing the grid, increasing energy storage, electrifying
our transportation system [and] incentivizing science-based farming
practices to safeguard our food supply and farmers’ livelihoods. The plan must
also invest in climate-resilient infrastructure, help frontline communities
prepare for climate impacts and support a just transition for
coal-dependent workers.”
More
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/inauguration-of-president-biden-kicks-energy-and-climate-agenda-into-action
But David Stockman’s
Contra corner covers the impending doom Biden era best.
“The botched mail-in election of 2020 was just the
final straw. And the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns merely exposed a far
more deadly disease: Namely, the poisonous brew of easy money, cheap debt,
sweeping financialization and unbridled speculation that has been injected into
the American economy by the Fed and Washington politicians over the last three
decades.
It has turned Wall Street into a dangerous gambling
casino while leaving Main Street buried under mountainous debts, faltering
investment in growth and productivity and the hand-to-mouth economics of
spending more than you earn.
It has also left the American economy exceedingly
vulnerable to external shocks like the thundering blow of Lockdown Nation and
the impending period of virtual partisan civil war.
AMERICA’S HAND-TO-MOUTH ECONOMY
America’s dangerous economic fragility stems in part
from the fact that 80% of households have no appreciable rainy-day funds and
businesses have piled their balance sheets sky high with debt and artificially
extended their supply chains to the four corners of the earth in order to goose
short-run profits and share prices.
Needless to say, this unprecedented fragility became
starkly evident after public health authorities essentially shut down normal
commerce and economic function last spring. Workers were separated from their
workplaces, consumers from the malls, diners from the restaurants, travelers
from the airlines, hotels and resorts—with many more like and similar
disruptions to the supply-side of the economy.
In turn, these disruptions caused production and
incomes to fall abruptly. And now shrunken household incomes and business cash
flows are literally pulling the legs out from under the $82 trillion edifice of
debt and speculation that has been piled atop the American economy.
So both a renewed financial and economic crisis and an
abrupt change of course lie dead ahead. The 30-year party of False Prosperity
is over. And to boot, we now have a viciously partisan and progressive/woke
government in Washington that has no clue about the impending fiscal and
financial calamities.
Accordingly, even if the Covid-19 hysteria eventually
abates and the albatross of Lockdown Nation is lifted, the 2020s will be
a decade when the chickens come home to roost.
As the next four years unfold, they may occasionally
oxygenate and prop up Sleepy Joe in front of the Oval Office teleprompter to
talk unity and hope. But the Kamala Harris/Progressive Left Regency will only
massively exacerbate the crisis with a tsunami of new spending, borrowing,
regulating, taxing and Nanny State meddling.
NOW COME THE DUE BILLS
And if you overlay on all that a renewed
Biden-promised burst of Covid lockdowns and unconstitutional assaults on
personal liberty, private property and business enterprise, the limits of
kicking the cans of delay and denial down the road to tomorrow will be reached.
America’s economic and political fantasies will soon be overtaken and crushed
by its accumulated due bills.
Bubbles will be burst. Speculators will get carried
out on their shields. Easy money wealth will evaporate.” End.
Since the central
bankster’s helicopter drops of free cash have entirely passed me by, I have now
set my hopes for dying filthy rich on the Democrats plans for more and more
free money for us hoi polloi.
Meet the mayors pushing for
guaranteed income in 30 cities across the country Published Tue, Jan 19 2021 1:46 PM EST
In Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 book “Where Do We Go From
Here: Chaos or Community?” the civil rights leader discussed how to best
address poverty in the United States.
“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove
to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by
a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income,” he wrote.
King was not the first to propose a guaranteed income;
political philosophers from Montesque to Thomas Paine
also penned their support for what is often referred to as “universal basic
income.” And the idea was recently re-popularized by former Democratic
presidential candidate and current New York City mayoral candidate Andrew
Yang .
However, King stands out as the most visible influence on Mayors for a Guaranteed
Income , a coalition of 30 mayors from Texas to Minnesota, who support
direct, recurring cash payments for citizens and are starting
guaranteed income programs of their own. The organization
prominently features King’s words on its website, describing its mission as
“rooted” in the civil rights leader’s legacy.
Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, sometimes called “MGI,” was
founded by Michael D. Tubbs, then-mayor of Stockton, California in June 2020
after his city launched , and later extended , a basic income program where 125 residents
received $500 monthly thanks to funding from the Economic
Security Project , a nonprofit that supports other guaranteed income
experiments.
CNBC Make It recently spoke with mayors who are pushing the
guaranteed income movement forward in their cities — and giving out thousands
of dollars in the process.
“When you look at 2020 and the inequities that have been
illuminated this year, you’ve also seen the injustices that a lot of Black and
Brown people have encountered for generations. It’s systemic,” says Levar
Stoney, mayor of Richmond, Virginia where the city is piloting a program in
which citizens will receive $500 a month for 24 months. “Some people may think
this is a radical idea, but I think there’s nothing radical about helping
people.”
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/19/the-mayors-piloting-guaranteed-income-programs-across-the-us.html
“I believe there is something out there watching us.
Unfortunately, it's the government.”
Woody Allen
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Record Daily Deaths; Hong Kong
Set for Pfizer Nod: Virus Update Bloomberg News January
20, 2021, 10:56 PM GMT Updated on January 21, 2021, 4:53 AM GMT
U.S. President Joe Biden plans to re-engage with the World
Health Organization and will dispatch the government’s top infectious-disease
expert to speak to the group this week. The new president’s team is worried
that a more-transmissible strain of the virus threatens his plans to contain the
outbreak.
Hong Kong is set to grant emergency approval for the
Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, the South China Morning Post reported,
citing an unidentified government source. The move would mark the first
approval for any Covid-19 vaccine in the Asian financial hub. Meanwhile, Singapore
plans to host a tennis tournament next month.
The U.K. suffered its deadliest day, prompting one
official to compare some hospitals there to “a war zone.” Spain reported the
most new cases since the pandemic began. A new daily record was set for global
deaths.
Key
Developments: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-20/biden-to-rejoin-who-u-k-s-suffers-deadliest-day-virus-update?srnd=coronavirus
Scientists can detect new
COVID-19 variants by analyzing wastewater Jan. 19, 2021 / 6:20 PM
Jan. 19 (UPI) -- New research suggests viral genome sequencing of wastewater can be
used to identify new COVID-19 variants before they're picked up via other
screening methods.
In Britain, scientists have been regularly sequencing the
DNA of hundreds of COVID-19 samples on a weekly basis.
Since Britain's Covid-19 Genomics Consortium was formed in
the early weeks of the pandemic, the project has traced the genetic history of
more than 150,000 viral samples.
Elsewhere in the world, genomic surveillance efforts remain
limited. In the United States, for example, hospitals, county health
departments and testing labs are already overwhelmed testing and treating
patients, while also facilitating an unprecedented vaccination effort.
RELATED Study:
Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine just as effective against viral variant
However, the emergence of what scientists suspect to be
more contagious variants of the COVID-19 virus have health officials looking
for new ways to track the spread of important viral mutations.
As detailed in a new paper, published Tuesday in the
journal mBio , researchers at the University of California-Berkeley have
developed a new technique for isolating unique viral strains amidst the
millions other microbes.
"The way that we need to process the sequence
information is complex. One contribution of this paper is the ability to
prepare samples for sequencing from wastewater," lead researcher Kara
Nelson, professor of civil and environmental at Berkeley, said in a news
release.
"Instead of directly sequencing
everything present, we used an enrichment approach where you first try to
enrich the RNA that you are interested in. Then we developed a novel
bioinformatic analysis approach which was sensitive enough to detect a single
nucleotide difference. You can't get any more sensitive than that," Nelson
said.
For the study, researchers sequenced
the genes of different COVID-19 mutations in San Francisco wastewater. The
analysis revealed levels of the most common COVID-19 variants similar to those
identified by clinical sequencing efforts.
Additionally, researchers were able to identify the
presence of specific COVID-19 variants that have been found in other parts of
the United States but not yet found locally.
RELATED New COVID-19
variant spreads in France, Spain and Sweden
Scientists hope the new sequencing method can be used by
health officials to track to spread of variants like B.1.1.7, the more
contagious variant that has spread rapidly across Britain in recent months.
"Of everyone who gets tested, only a fraction of those
samples even get sequenced. When you are sampling the wastewater, you get a
more comprehensive and less biased data on your population," Nelson said.
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2021/01/19/Scientists-can-detect-new-COVID-19-variants-by-analyzing-wastewater/7131611084355/
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/
Centers for Disease Control
Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
The Spectator
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.
Today, “ a giant electron current that appears to be nearly
dissipationless.”
For those readers,
(like me) who have never run into “nearly dissipationless” electric current
before, Wikipedia throws more mud on the subject below this article.
Light-induced twisting of Weyl
nodes switches on giant electron current Date: January 19, 2021
Source:
DOE/Ames Laboratory
Summary: Scientists have discovered a new
light-induced switch that twists the crystal lattice of the material, switching
on a giant electron current that appears to be nearly dissipationless.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of
Energy's Ames Laboratory and collaborators at Brookhaven National Laboratory
and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have discovered a new light-induced
switch that twists the crystal lattice of the material, switching on a giant
electron current that appears to be nearly dissipationless. The discovery was
made in a category of topological materials that holds great promise for
spintronics, topological effect transistors, and quantum computing.
Weyl and Dirac semimetals can host
exotic, nearly dissipationless, electron conduction properties that take
advantage of the unique state in the crystal lattice and electronic structure
of the material that protects the electrons from doing so. These anomalous
electron transport channels, protected by symmetry and topology, don't normally
occur in conventional metals such as copper. After decades of being described
only in the context of theoretical physics, there is growing interest in
fabricating, exploring, refining, and controlling their topologically protected
electronic properties for device applications. For example, wide-scale adoption
of quantum computing requires building devices in which fragile quantum states
are protected from impurities and noisy environments. One approach to achieve
this is through the development of topological quantum computation, in which
qubits are based on "symmetry-protected" dissipationless electric
currents that are immune to noise.
"Light-induced lattice
twisting, or a phononic switch, can control the crystal inversion symmetry and
photogenerate giant electric current with very small resistance," said
Jigang Wang, senior scientist at Ames Laboratory and professor of physics at
Iowa State University. "This new control principle does not require static
electric or magnetic fields, and has much faster speeds and lower energy
cost."
"This finding could be extended
to a new quantum computing principle based on the chiral physics and
dissipationless energy transport, which may run much faster speeds, lower
energy cost and high operation temperature." said Liang Luo, a scientist
at Ames Laboratory and first author of the paper.
More
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210119122048.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmatter_energy%2Fgraphene+%28Graphene+News+--+ScienceDaily%29
Dissipation In thermodynamics , dissipation is the result of an
irreversible process that takes place in
homogeneous thermodynamic systems . A dissipative process
is a process in which energy (internal , bulk flow kinetic ,
or system potential ) is transformed from some initial form to some
final form; the capacity of the final form to do mechanical
work is less than that of the initial form. For example, heat
transfer is dissipative because it is a transfer of internal energy from a
hotter body to a colder one. Following the second law of thermodynamics , the entropy varies
with temperature
(reduces the capacity of the combination of the two bodies to do mechanical
work), but never decreases in an isolated system.
These processes produce entropy (see entropy production ) at a certain rate. The
entropy production rate times ambient temperature gives the dissipated power .
Important examples of irreversible processes are: heat flow
through a thermal resistance , fluid flow
through a flow resistance, diffusion (mixing), chemical
reactions , and electrical current flow through an electrical resistance (Joule
heating ).
More
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipation
Got it? And I thought
dissipation was what happened to one’s money when one traded commodity futures using
10:1 leverage, known as gearing in British English.
“Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”
Woody Allen
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