TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares edged lower on Tuesday amid
uncertainty about Senate runoffs in Georgia, which could have a big impact on
incoming U.S. President Joe Biden’s ability to pursue his preferred economic
policies.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific
shares outside Japan fell 0.05%, pulling back from a record high. Australian
stocks fell 0.26%.
Chinese shares erased early losses
and rose 0.52%. In Hong Kong, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom
rallied by more than 6% after the New York Stock Exchange abandoned plans to
delist the companies’ shares from its bourse.
Japanese shares lost 0.34% after a
spokesman said the government will reach a decision on a state of emergency for
Tokyo and surrounding cities on Thursday to curb coronavirus infections.
U.S. S&P 500 stock futures edged
up 0.03%. Euro Stoxx 50 futures were down 0.39%. German DAX futures fell 0.34%,
and FTSE futures fell 0.26%.
Oil futures were little changed in
cautious trade as investors awaited a meeting later on Tuesday where major
crude producers are set to decide output levels for February.
In the United States, control of the
Senate is at stake with Tuesday’s dual runoff elections in Georgia.
A Democratic victory in both races
could tip control of the Senate away from Republicans, but both contests are
very tight and the results may not be immediately known, which could lead to a
repeat of the chaotic vote re-counts after the U.S. presidential election last
year.
“2021 starts with a bang with
pivotal political and economic news for markets to digest. The undisputed
highlight will be the result of the Senate seat run-off elections in Georgia,”
James Knightley, chief international economist at ING, wrote in a research
memo.
“If the Democrats win both seats
this should lead to the most substantial 2021 fiscal stimulus. Nonetheless, it
could be the excuse for a near-term consolidation in risk markets after a
strong post-election rally.”
Uncertainty about the Georgia vote
and worries about rising coronavirus infections sent Wall Street sharply lower
on Monday.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average
fell 1.27%, the S&P 500 lost 1.49%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped by
1.48%.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-markets/asian-stocks-grind-lower-as-focus-shifts-to-georgia-senate-runoff-idUKKBN29A02C?il=0
David
Rosenberg: Behold the most speculative and momentum-driven market on record Bubbles of epic proportions are fun to trade, but
eventually they pop Jan 04, 2021
It is difficult to believe we could
have experienced such human misery and see the Nasdaq soar 44 per cent in 2020
and the S&P 500 by 16 per cent.
The Nasdaq has now enjoyed a
94-per-cent two-year surge, something that last happened in 1998-99. Take that
for what it’s worth, but do remember that 2000 ushered in a completely
different environment altogether and the same commentary then is in vogue
today, which includes all the reasons why we are in a new era and stock prices
can never go down.
As was the case then, memories are
very short. This is the most speculative and momentum-driven market on record.
Tesla Inc. rose 743 per cent in 2020. Bitcoin soared 305 per cent. More than
200 special-purpose acquisitions companies (SPACs) raised more than US$80
billion. This is pure speculation.
There is US$21 billion sitting in
exchange-traded funds that only track momentum, the most in at least a decade.
This was a year in which average daily trading volume in the options market
topped 30 million — by far a record and topping the 19 million shares that
traded hands in 2019.
What happened in December has to be
described as nothing but obscene. The United States entered the third wave of
the pandemic. More than 100,000 new cases per day were recorded in the final
month of the year, totalling 6.3 million new cases, or about one-third of the
total since the crisis started. A monthly record for cases as well as for
hospitalizations (125,379 to close out the year — this number was less than
50,000 in October and was never above 100,000 until December came). The number
of deaths in December totalled 77,572 and the seven-day average spiked to an
all-time high of 2,659.
How do the markets respond? The
S&P 500 jumped 3.7 per cent and the small-cap Russell 2000 surged 8.5 per
cent. Liquidity! The Fed! More fiscal juice! Nearly US$18 trillion of bonds
with a negative yield and three-quarters of global investment-grade debt
trading below one per cent! TINA! Money has to find a home somewhere!
More
https://financialpost.com/investing/investing-pro/david-rosenberg-behold-the-most-speculative-and-momentum-driven-market-on-record
2021 Will Be the Year of Guaranteed
Income Experiments At least 11 U.S. cities are piloting UBI programs to give
some of their residents direct cash payments, no strings attached.
By Sarah Holder
January 4, 2021, 12:00 PM GMT Giving people direct, recurring cash payments, no questions
asked, is a simple idea — and an old one. Different formulations of a
guaranteed income have been promoted by civil rights leaders, conservative
thinkers, labor experts, Silicon Valley types, U.S. presidential
candidates and even the Pope . Now, it’s U.S. cities that are putting the
concept in action.
Fueled by a growing group of city leaders, philanthropists
and nonprofit organizations, 2021 will see an explosion of guaranteed income
pilot programs in U.S. cities. At least 11 direct-cash experiments will be in
effect this year, from Pittsburgh to Compton. Another 20
mayors have said they may launch such pilots in the future, with
several cities taking initial legislative steps to implement them.
“We are at a moment right now where city leaders,
residents policymakers, and activists are all looking for big ideas to
begin to chip away at some glaring structural problems in our systems and
institutions,” said Brooks Rainwater, senior executive and director of the
National League of Cities’ Center for City Solutions. “This new wave of pilots
is different because of the groundswell of support for guaranteed income we are
seeing in cities across America.”
These programs are often called UBI, for Universal
Basic Income, but with each distributing monthly payments to just some
households, they aren’t yet truly universal, and there’s disagreement over
whether they should be. Instead, they’re “unconditional,” a contrast to
many existing government programs that tie benefits to work requirements, or
set parameters on how recipients can use the money. Still, the idea isn’t to
replace the existing safety net, but build upon it.
The current wave of city programs was catalyzed in the U.S.
with a two-year pilot in Stockton, California, that began in February 2019.
Originally slated to sunset in the summer of 2020, philanthropic support
allowed the program to continue for six more months during the Covid-19
pandemic. After gaining a national profile for helping to initiate the
program, former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs was voted out of office this November — but not before
launching a coalition of local leaders called Mayors for a Guaranteed
Income, which he will continue to lead in 2021.
“We need a social safety net that goes beyond conditional
benefits tied to employment, works for everyone and begins to address the call
for racial and economic justice through a guaranteed income,” Tubbs
said in a statement.
In the short term, the goal of the nearly 30 mayors in the
coalition is to run guaranteed income experiments. The ultimate
aim of the mayors coalition is to pass a federal guaranteed income
program. Every city that joins is eligible
for $500,000 in pilot funding; they’ve partnered with the University of
Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice to produce research
reports, and will share best practices throughout. The effort has gained
high-profile philanthropic supporters, including Twitter CEO Jack
Dorsey, who donated $3 million to the group in July and another $15
million in December.
The results will be supplemented by other experiments
in global cities, past and present. The largest such program is
in Maricá, Brazil, where tens of thousands of residents below the poverty
line are currently receiving monthly payments .
Although the U.S. programs announced thus far can serve
only hundreds of residents per city, advocates say their immediacy,
simplicity and emphasis on radical trust are an antidote to the biases and
bureaucracies that hinder other welfare programs.
“Cash is the currency of urgency,” said Mayor Shawyn
Patterson-Howard of Mount Vernon, New York, at a conference convened by the
National League of Cities in November. “People need money right now.”
Recent stimulus payments from the federal government have
helped some Americans see the benefit of direct disbursements and may have
chipped away at public resistance: A poll commissioned by the Economic Security
Project found that 76% of respondents supported “regular payments that
continue until the economic crisis is over,” and a Gallup poll found widespread support for additional
stimulus. Proponents hope these local efforts will normalize and popularize
guaranteed income in the U.S. for potential future federal action.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-04/guaranteed-income-gains-popularity-after-covid-19?srnd=premium-europe
“Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.”
Edmund Burke.
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
What you need to know about the
coronavirus right now
January
4, 2021
5:36 AM
Updated 26 minutes ago By Reuters Staff
(Reuters) -
Here’s what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:
England back in lockdown
England wakes up on Tuesday to a new
national lockdown to contain a surge in COVID-19 cases that threatens to
overwhelm parts of the health system before a vaccine programme reaches a
critical mass.
Non-essential shops and hospitality
remain closed, while primary and secondary schools close from Tuesday for all
students except vulnerable children and those whose parents are key workers.
---- Decision on Japan virus measures ‘too
little, too late’
A Japanese government decision on a
state of emergency in and around Tokyo will be made this week, a top official
said on Tuesday - a move derided by citizens as too little, too late,
especially in a nation set to host the Olympics in under 200 days.
Tokyo and the three surrounding
prefectures, which have requested an emergency declaration, asked residents to
refrain from non-essential, non-urgent outings after 8 p.m. from Friday until
at least the end of the month, and said restaurants must close by that time.
---- Most U.S. COVID-19 vaccines sit unused
More than two-thirds of the 15
million coronavirus vaccines shipped within the United States have gone unused,
U.S. health officials said on Monday, as the governors of New York and Florida
vowed to penalize hospitals that do not dispense shots quickly.
Medical authorities have confronted
widespread distrust of immunization safety, even among some healthcare workers,
owing in part to the record speed with which COVID-19 vaccines were developed
and approved, 11 months after the virus emerged in the United States.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-snapshot/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-coronavirus-right-now-idUKKBN29A0GX?il=0
Chemotherapy drug may be
effective against COVID-19, researchers say Dec. 31, 2020 / 2:01 PM
Dec. 31 (UPI) -- The chemotherapy drug pralatrexate, originally developed to treat
lymphoma, may be effective in patients with COVID-19, according to a study
published Thursday by the journal PLOS Computational Biology .
That's based on the results generated by a new
computational drug screening approach created by researchers in China and lab
experiments conducted by their colleagues at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced
Technology in Shenzhen, China, the researchers said.
"From our data, pralatrexate is able to potently
inhibit [COVID-19] replication [better] ... than remdesivir," study
co-author Yanjie Wei, executive director of the Center for High Performance
Computing at the Shenzhen Institutes, told UPI.
Since the start of the global pandemic earlier this year,
researchers have sought to repurpose existing drugs for use in infected
patients, in an effort to develop an effective treatment more quickly.
RELATED COVID-19
leaving patients with neurological harm, even moderate cases
Computational models can help identify potential drugs for
repurposing by simulating how they would interact with the coronavirus that
causes COVID-19, according to Wei and his colleagues.
For this study, the researchers combined multiple
computational techniques with deep-learning technologies that simulate
drug-virus interactions.
They used this hybrid approach to screen 1,906 existing
drugs for their potential ability to limit or stop the replication of COVID-19
-- the growth of the virus in the body -- by targeting a viral protein called
RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, they said.
RELATED WHO
advises against using antiviral drug remdesivir for COVID-19
The novel screening approach identified four promising
drugs, which then were tested against the virus in lab experiments, according
to the researchers.
Two of the drugs, pralatrexate and azithromycin,
successfully inhibited replication of the virus, with pralatrexate seemingly
more effective than remdesivir, a drug that is used to treat some COVID-19
patients, the researchers said.
"However, more animal or clinical tests in humans are
needed [before] these drugs can be used in the treatment of [COVID-19],"
Wei said.
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/12/31/Chemotherapy-drug-may-be-effective-against-COVID-19-researchers-say/8391609433819/
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.
Putty-like composites of gallium
metal with potential for real-world application Date: January 1, 2021
Source: Institute for Basic Science
Summary: Researchers created a novel functional
composite of gallium with putty or paste-like physical properties. The
composite possesses excellent electromagnetic shielding properties as well as
thermal conductivity.
Gallium is a highly useful element
that has accompanied the advancement of human civilization throughout the 20th
century. Gallium is designated as a technologically critical element, as it is
essential for the fabrication of semiconductors and transistors. Notably,
gallium nitride and related compounds allowed for the discovery of the blue
LED, which was the final key in the development of an energy-efficient and
long-lasting white LED lighting system. This discovery has led to the awarding
of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics. It is estimated that up to 98% of the
demand for gallium originates from the semiconductor and electronics industry.
In addition to its use in
electronics, the unique physical properties of gallium have led to its use in
other areas. Gallium itself is a metal with a very low melting point and is a
liquid at just above room temperature (30 °C). Also, gallium is capable of forming
several eutectic systems (alloys that have a lower melting point than any of
its constituents, including gallium) with a number of other metals. Both pure
gallium and these gallium based liquid metal alloys have high surface tension
and are considered "non-spreadable" on most surfaces. This renders
them difficult to handle, shape, or process, which limits their potential for
real-world application. However, a recent discovery may have unlocked the
possibility for broader use of gallium in the field of functional materials.
A research team at the Center for
Multidimensional Carbon Materials (CMCM) within the Institute for Basic Science
(IBS) in Ulsan, South Korea and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and
Technology (UNIST) has invented a new method for incorporating filler particles
in liquid gallium to create functional composites of liquid metal. The
incorporation of fillers transforms the material from a liquid state into
either a paste- or putty-like form (with consistency and "feel"
similar to the commercial product "Plasticine") depending on the
amount of added particles. In the case when graphene oxide (G-O) was used as a
filler material, G-O content of 1.6~1.8% resulted in a paste-like form, while
3.6% was optimal for putty formation. A variety of new gallium composites and
the mechanism of their formation is described in a recent article published in
the journal Science Advances .
The mixing of particles inside the
gallium based liquid metal alters the physical properties of the material,
which allows for much easier handling. First author Chunhui Wang notes:
"The ability for liquid gallium composites to form pastes or putties is extremely
beneficial. It removes most of the issues of handling of gallium for
applications. It no longer stains surfaces, it can be coated or
"painted" onto almost any surface, it can be molded into a variety of
shapes. This opens up a wide variety of applications for gallium not seen
before."
More
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210101141915.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmatter_energy%2Fgraphene+%28Graphene+News+--+ScienceDaily%29
The Great Frost of
1709 The Great Frost , as it was
known in England, or Le Grand Hiver
("The Great Winter"), as it was known in France, was an
extraordinarily cold winter in Europe in 1708–1709, [1] and
was the coldest European winter during the past 500 years. [2] The
severe cold occurred during the time of low sunspot
activity known as the Maunder Minimum .
William Derham recorded in Upminster ,
near London, a low of −12 °C (10 °F ) on the night of 5 January 1709, the lowest he had ever
measured since he started taking readings in 1697. His contemporaries in the
weather observation field in Europe likewise recorded lows down to −15 °C
(5 °F). Derham wrote in Philosophical
Transactions : "I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal
also) than any other within the Memory of Man."[3]
More
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Frost_of_1709
No comments:
Post a Comment