By Jeff
Mason , Jarrett Renshaw
WILMINGTON,
Del. (Reuters) - President-elect Joe Biden outlined a $1.9 trillion stimulus
package proposal on Thursday, saying bold investment was needed to jump-start
the economy and accelerate the distribution of vaccines to bring the
coronavirus under control.
Biden
campaigned last year on a promise to take the pandemic more seriously than
President Donald Trump, and the package aims to put that pledge into action
with an influx of resources for the COVID-19 response and economic recovery.
---- The aid package includes $415 billion
to bolster the response to the virus and the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, some
$1 trillion in direct relief to households, and roughly $440 billion for small
businesses and communities particularly hard hit by the pandemic.
Stimulus payment checks would be
issued for $1,400 - on top of the $600 checks delivered by the last
congressional stimulus legislation. Supplemental unemployment insurance would
also increase to $400 a week from $300 a week now and would be extended to
September.
Biden’s plan is meant to kick off
his time in office with a large bill that sets his short-term agenda into
motion quickly: helping the economy and getting a handle on a virus that has
killed more than 385,000 people in the United States as of Thursday.
Many Republicans in Congress balked at the
price tag for such payments.
Biden will face similar hurdles with his
proposals, which come on the heels of a $900 billion aid package Congress
passed in December.
But he will be helped by the fact that his
fellow Democrats will control both the House and the Senate. Chuck Schumer, who
is about to lead a narrow Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, and House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday that Biden’s package was “the right
approach” and pledged to begin working on legislation.
The incoming president will seek to pass the
legislation even as his predecessor faces an impeachment trial.
The Democratic-led House of Representatives
voted to impeach Trump on Wednesday, making him the first president in U.S.
history to be impeached twice. Ten of his fellow Republicans joined Democrats
to charge him with inciting an insurrection in last week’s deadly rampage at
the Capitol.
The impeachment proceedings threaten to hang
over the beginning of Biden’s term, and Biden has encouraged lawmakers to
handle the trial while also moving forward with his agenda.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-stimulus/biden-unveils-plan-to-pump-1-9-trillion-into-pandemic-hit-economy-idUSKBN29J1B1
In the real US
economy far from the gambling stock casinos, more sign of rising distress. All the previous trillions of spending on
central bankster fuelled stock mania doesn’t seemed to have worked.
U.S. weekly jobless claims
increase more than expected January 14, 2021 1:38 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of
Americans filing first-time applications for unemployment benefits surged last
week, confirming a weakening in labor market conditions as a worsening COVID-19
pandemic disrupts operations at restaurants and other businesses.
Initial claims for state
unemployment benefits totaled a seasonally adjusted 965,000 for the week ended
Jan. 9, compared to 784,000 in the prior week, the Labor Department said on
Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 795,000 applications in the
latest week.
Claims were also likely lifted by
reapplications for benefits following the government’s renewal of a $300
unemployment supplement until March 14 as part of nearly $900 billion in
additional relief approved at the end of December.
Government-funded programs for the
self-employed, gig workers and others who do not qualify for the state unemployment
programs as well as those who have exhausted their benefits were also extended.
Authorities in many states have
banned indoor dining to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The economy shed
jobs in December for the first time in eight months.
The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book
report of anecdotal information on business activity collected from contacts
nationwide in early January showed on Wednesday that “contacts in the leisure
and hospitality sectors reported renewed employment cuts due to stricter
containment measures.”
The central bank also noted that the
resurgence in the coronavirus was causing staff shortages in the manufacturing,
construction and transportations sectors. The virus has infected more than 22.5
million people in the United States and killed over 376,188, the most of any
country.
Though jobless claims have dropped
from a record 6.867 million in March, they remain above their 665,000 peak
during the 2007-09 Great Recession. Economists say it could take several years
for the labor market to recover from the pandemic.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy/u-s-weekly-jobless-claims-increase-more-than-expected-idUSKBN29J1Q8
Bond Market’s Scariest Gauge Is
Worse Than Ever Corporate credit markets are more exposed to duration risk
than at any other time in history.
By Brian
Chappatta January
14, 2021, 11:30 AM GMT
Around this time a year ago, I ruffled a few feathers among
bond traders with the headline
Well, if that gauge was scary in January 2020, it’s
downright terrifying now.
The “Sherman Ratio,” named after DoubleLine Capital
Deputy Chief Investment Officer Jeffrey Sherman, basically shows the
amount of yield investors earn for each unit of duration. It tumbled to as little
as 0.1968 on Dec. 31 for the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Corporate Bond Index, a
record low in data going back more than three decades. That compares with the
previous low of 0.3467 I flagged in early January 2020. And while
that former milestone wasn’t too much lower than previous instances,
current investment-grade corporate-bond yields are an outlier in every sense of
the word.
No
Buffer As was the case last time around, this is happening
because the numerator (yield) has continued to tumble while the denominator
(duration) increases. The average investment-grade corporate bond yield was a
record-low 1.74% as of Dec. 31, compared with 2.84% a year earlier, while the
modified duration on the index increased to 8.84 years at the end of 2020,
just about a record high, from 7.96 years at the start.
The first
week of 2021 demonstrated how potentially perilous this dynamic can be for
credit investors. Investment-grade corporate bonds suffered their worst loss
since August, and second-biggest decline since March, even though spreads
narrowed and there’s no sign of broad stress in high-grade markets. Duration,
for the unfamiliar, is simply a measure of a bond’s sensitivity to a given move
in interest rates. For example, a security with a duration of five years
would gain 5% if rates fell 100 basis points or lose 5% if rates rose by 100
basis points.
While one-way moves of that kind of magnitude are rare,
benchmark 10-year Treasury yields did increase by 20 basis points in the
first five trading days of the new year. So with the duration of the corporate-bond
index at almost nine years heading into 2021, it’s basic math (roughly
8.84 times 0.2%, with a slight adjustment for spread tightening) that
investment-grade bonds lost 1.52% last week. It really doesn’t take much
of a move higher in interest rates to wipe out the income return on the
index or a fund tracking it.
Yes, U.S. yields have retreated so far this week, providing
a reprieve from the losses. But the Sherman Ratio should serve as a reminder to
those investing in corporate bonds that they’re effectively buying U.S.
Treasuries with slightly higher yields. To that point, the 120-day
correlation between the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond exchange-traded fund
(ticker: TLT) and the iShares iBoxx $ Investment Grade Corporate Bond ETF
(ticker: LQD) reached 0.73 on Wednesday, the highest since March 6. A
reading of 1 implies the two funds move in perfect lockstep; a reading of
negative 1 signals they move in entirely opposite directions. On a 60-day
basis, the correlation is 0.8.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-14/bond-market-s-scariest-gauge-is-worse-than-ever
Finally, only in America, as they say. Impeachment to
throw a President out of office even after they’ve left office! Or maybe not. Shades of King Charles the
Second having Oliver Cromwell’s body dug up and beheaded after the restoration.
Trump Impeachment Trial After His
Term Ends Is Backed by History By Greg Stohr January 14, 2021, 7:00 AM GMT
·
·
Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial will be the first
ever to extend beyond a president’s time in office, creating a novel legal
question that ultimately could require Supreme Court resolution.
The answer isn’t settled but history has bad news for
Trump: a sparse but consistent line of lower-level impeachments in the past
suggests the Senate retains power to put him on trial even after his term ends.
If it convicts him, the Senate could take a second vote to bar him from running
for office again.
A number of legal scholars say the framers of the
Constitution didn’t intend to leave presidents free in the waning days of their
terms to engage in egregious wrongdoing without consequence.
“Drafting history, impeachment practice, and basic
constitutional design all point clearly in favor of the constitutionality of
trying an ex-president,” said Kate Shaw, a constitutional law professor at
Cardozo School of Law.
The Constitution doesn’t explicitly
say whether a Senate trial can take place after a president leaves office.
Article II, Section 4 says the president and other officers “shall be removed
from Office” if convicted. Article I, Section 3 says the Senate’s remedies are
limited to removal and disqualification from holding office in the future.
But the context in which the Constitution was written
provides some clues. The 1787 Constitutional Convention took place as the
British Parliament was in the process of impeaching and trying William
Hastings, the former governor-general of India.
What’s
Next as Trump’s Impeachment Heads to Senate: QuickTake
And practice since then suggests a broad understanding that
the Senate retains jurisdiction, according Brian Kalt, a professor at Michigan
State University College of Law and author of a 2001 law review article
about so-called late impeachments.
“In multiple cases, the House
and Senate have proceeded as though they can impeach and try people who have
already left office, and in one case the Senate took a specific vote to that effect,”
Kalt said.
Congress invoked the impeachment power for the
first time in 1797, when the House impeached Senator William Blount for
conspiring to let the British take control of the Spanish-controlled
territories of Florida and Louisiana. The Senate held a trial even though it
had already expelled Blount. Senators eventually acquitted him on the separate
grounds that he wasn’t an “officer” subject to the impeachment clause.
In 1876 the Senate voted 37-29 that it had authority to try
ex-Secretary of War William Belknap even though he had resigned just as the
House was poised to impeach him for accepting kickbacks. The Senate eventually
acquitted Belknap.
In several instances since then, including the 2009 case of
former U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent, lawmakers have said that the official’s
resignation didn’t affect the right of the Senate to hold a trial, Kalt and University
of Missouri law professor Frank Bowman wrote this week in the Washington
Post.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-14/trump-impeachment-trial-after-his-term-ends-is-backed-by-history?srnd=premium-europe
The legend of how the head left Westminster Hall states that a
high wind blew the head and spike from the roof, where a guard found the head,
removed the spike and took it [the head. GI] home. On hearing that a large
reward was being offered to find the person in possession of the head, the
soldier became scared and hid it. Here it remained until his death, when it was
passed down to his daughter. This is the only story of how the head came to
leave Westminster Hall.
More
http://www.creatingmycambridge.com/history-stories/cromwells-head/
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
The Covid-19
Death Toll Is Even Worse Than It Looks World-wide deaths are running far beyond what would have
been expected without the pandemic Jan. 14, 2021 10:07 am ET
The recorded death count from the
Covid-19 pandemic as of Thursday is nearing 2 million. The true extent is far
worse.
More than 2.8 million people have
lost their lives due to the pandemic, according to a Wall Street Journal
analysis of data from 59 countries and jurisdictions. This tally offers the
most comprehensive view yet of the pandemic’s global impact. Deaths in these
places last year surged more than 12% above average levels.
Less than two-thirds of that surge
has been attributed directly to Covid-19. Public-health experts believe that
many, if not most, of the additional deaths were directly linked to the disease,
particularly early in the pandemic when testing was sparse. Some of those excess
deaths came from indirect fallout
To better understand the pandemic’s
global toll, the Journal compiled the most recent available data on deaths from
all causes from countries with available records. These countries together
account for roughly one-quarter of the world’s population but about
three-quarters of all reported deaths from Covid-19 through late last year.
The tally found more than 821,000
additional deaths that aren’t accounted for in governments’ official Covid-19
death counts.
Notes: Some countries have Covid-19
deaths but negative excess deaths. Countries with negative excess deaths were
zeroed out of the ‘other’ calculation.
Only about one in four countries
world-wide track deaths on a running basis—and few of those have data more
recent than November. The countries in the Journal’s tally would likely have
counted about 15 million deaths through late fall without the pandemic, based
on prior-year trends. Instead, they reported nearly 17 million deaths through
that time period. The difference equals roughly the population of Nebraska.
More
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-19-death-toll-is-even-worse-than-it-looks-11610636840
Coronavirus live updates: Nearly all
US metro areas 'in full resurgence,' White House report says The White House
coronavirus task force report issued a sober warning this week. By Morgan Winsor , Erin
Schumaker , and Emily
Shapiro
Last Updated: January 13, 2021, 8:41 PM ET
A pandemic of the novel coronavirus
has now infected more than 92.2 million people worldwide and killed over 1.97
million of them, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science
and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Latest
headlines: ·
Nearly
all US metro areas 'in full resurgence': White House task force
·
US
daily COVID deaths surpass 4,000 for 2nd day in a row
·
Ohio
State researchers identify 2 new variants
·
Tuesday
death toll equaled 1 American dying every 20 seconds
·
More
Americans died of COVID-19 in past week than during last flu season
·
CDC
expands testing rules for people flying to US
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/live-updates/coronavirus/?id=75171980
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
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.
Sprinkle of chili compound boosts
perovskite solar cell efficiency By Michael Irving January 13, 2021
A
touch of chili peppers can spice up just about any dish – and maybe, it turns
out, even solar cells. Researchers have now found that adding a sprinkle of
capsaicin to a perovskite precursor can improve the efficiency of solar cells.
Perovskite
is quickly emerging as a promising material to make better solar cells, with
efficiencies improving rapidly from less than four percent in 2009 to over 20
percent in the past year. Combining it with other materials can make it even
better – paired with silicon it’s closing in on 30 percent
efficiency , indium helps
improve its power output, while 2D additives and “bulky” molecules make
it more stable. Now it seems we can add capsaicin to the ingredients list.
Effective as they are, metal halide
perovskites still have some kinks to iron out. One issue is what’s known as
non-radiative recombination – essentially, defects in the crystal structure can
interfere with electrons passing through, converting their energy into heat and
reducing the overall output. The team was looking for a natural additive that
could help overcome this problem, and capsaicin seemed to fit the bill.
"Considering the electric,
chemical, optical, and stable properties of capsaicin, we preliminarily found
that it would be a promising candidate," says Qinye Bao, senior author of the study.
The researchers added just 0.1
percentage by weight of capsaicin into the precursor of methylammonium lead
triiodide (MAPbI3) perovskite. The team found that perovskite solar cells made
with the compound had a power conversion efficiency of 21.88 percent, up from
19.1 percent in the control devices. Their stability also improved, still
operating at over 90 percent of that original efficiency after 800 hours of
storage in ambient air.
On closer examination, the team
determined that the capsaicin worked boost charge transport by reducing the
density of defects in the perovskite film, and creating a better interface
between the different semiconductor layers.
The team says that further work will
need to be done to investigate how well capsaicin might work in other types of
perovskite solar cells.
The
research was published in the journal Joule .
https://newatlas.com/energy/chili-perovskite-solar-cell/
Another weekend in
the never uninteresting, humble reign of US King Donald the First. What to
expect of this his final weekend in office? Pardons? Have a great weekend
everyone.
It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it.
George W. Bush
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