Baltic Dry Index. 1765 -45 Brent Crude 55.44
Spot Gold 1855
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 26/01/21 World 100,286,788
Deaths 2,149,507
In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In stock manias, no one cares about anything but getting in on the next sure thing rags to riches stock. And so it is now, and has been since about April 2020. But this mania is now long in the tooth. Look away from the Covid-19 numbers now.
In reality, I could make the case that we have been in a central bankster stock mania since the Greenspan-Bernanke stock bubble collapsed in 2008, and was bailed out by Everest mountains of electronic fiat money printed up by the west, and more specifically China.
We are all going to get rich front running central banksters intent on bailing out stock billionaires, and dodgy populist, socialist politicians willing to bribe the voters into a Venezuela like looming disaster.
In theory, the popular myth says, that after vaccinations return us all back to normal, a massive pent up demand is going to be unleashed, and we are all going to flock back to spending habits of 2016-2019.
But is that true or even possible?
What happens if reality turns out to be very different?
What happens if Central banksters and bent politician’s socialism goes the corrupt way of all failed socialsm?
What happens if we get the Biden Bust?
There can be few fields of human endeavour in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.
John Kenneth Galbraith
When the bull market breaks, it’s ‘likely to break hard,’ warns longtime bear who suggests investors are putting too much faith in the vaccine
Last Updated: Jan. 25, 2021 at 11:00 a.m. ET First Published: Jan. 24, 2021 at 7:25 p.m. ET
I’m a believer in the Austrian School of Economics that says that the magnitude of the decline is proportional to the excesses created during the prior boom. I was early in 1998, 1999 and in 2006 to 2007… When it breaks, it’s likely to break hard’
That’s David Tice, the former manager of the Prudent Bear Fund BEARX , explaining to CNBC in a recent interview why he believes the market will eventually take a 30% hit that will last two years.
“We now have a Biden administration that has a Senate and a House. They’re likely to enact very much more anti-capitalist policies,” he said on Friday. “They have already raised the minimum wage. That’s going to hurt earnings on the cost side.”
Tice, known for making bearish bets through his career, has had his share of misfires. In fact, the AdvisorShares Ranger Equity Bear ETF HDGE , where he now serves as an advisor, has lost about a third of its value over the past three months.
The fund, however, is designed to benefit when the market gets beaten up, and Tice believes that day is coming. The problems, he said, are piling up, whether it be lofty valuations or perhaps putting too much faith in getting control of the pandemic.
“The vaccine is not really a panacea,” Tice told CNBC. “We’ve seen a lot of optimism about that, but there are new strains of the virus, and there is certainly risk going forward.” So what’s an investor to do in this climate? Tice is bullish on gold GC00 and bitcoin BTCUSD .
“Gold is dramatically under-owned by individuals and portfolio managers,” he said. “I don’t think that bitcoin can be ignored. We have seen the price of bitcoin go from $10,000 to $40,000 which I think is foreshadowing potentially what might happen in gold.”
More
Life after the COVID-19 vaccine: Americans won’t rush back to restaurants and ballgames — or public transportation
Last Updated: Jan. 25, 2021 at 6:16 p.m. ET First Published: Jan. 25, 2021 at 11:07 a.m. ET
‘The arrival of vaccines won’t automatically flip a switch to put the world back on its pre-COVID path,’ said Scott McKenzie, global intelligence leader at Nielsen
The pandemic has upended most people’s 9-to-5 existence.
Most have stopped commuting to offices, aren’t dining out and watch their favorite sports teams play exclusively on TV screens.
Those pandemic habits aren’t going to disappear once people receive a coronavirus vaccine, according to a new survey.
Some 64% of Americans indicated that they would spend the same amount on groceries after a vaccine is widely available as they’re spending now, according to a Nielsen NLSN survey of more than 11,000 respondents from 15 countries, including the U.S.
While 21% of Americans said they’ll spend more on groceries, 15% said they’d spend less. That’s contrary to Wall Street analysts who predict there will be a significant decline in grocery spending in the upcoming years.
Nearly one-quarter of people (24%) say they’ll spend more dining out once a vaccine is widely available, but roughly the same proportion (22%) said they’ll spend less eating out.
This survey suggests a slower-than-expected return to normalcy and economic recovery from the pandemic.
“Confidence levels around the vaccines, and the desire to take the vaccines, certainly may change as countries begin more concerted rollouts and deliver education campaigns around the vaccines,” said Scott McKenzie, global intelligence leader at Nielsen.
But, he added, even broad access to vaccinations “won’t automatically flip a switch to put the world back on its pre-COVID path.”
Another sign that people will not return to their previous lives as soon as they have received the vaccine: Only 40% of Americans said they’d feel comfortable using public transportation once they’re vaccinated. That’s potentially troubling for business owners in cities that are counting on commuters to return to their offices, analysts say.
Next, will Covid-19 kill off affordable life insurance, health insurance and travel insurance for most of us? And if it does, what then for a return to 2019 spending habits?
Global life insurers impose restrictions, worried about long-term pandemic risks
January 25, 20216:09 AM By Suzanne Barlyn, Carolyn Cohn, Noor Zainab Hussain
(Reuters) - Global life insurers are taking steps to curb payouts stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, including long-term health consequences that are not fully understood, industry sources told Reuters.
Life insurers, including Prudential Financial Inc, and Aviva PLC, are now imposing waiting periods before COVID-19 patients, including those who have recovered, can apply for coverage, executives and spokespeople said. Some are also limiting coverage for certain age groups.
These changes come as some reinsurers demand new safeguards from life insurers they backstop, and as the industry struggles to ascertain the extent of problems caused by the novel coronavirus.
COVID-19 has killed over 2.1 million people globally and infected nearly 100 million, according to a Reuters tally. (tmsnrt.rs/39Qa1d2)
Some victims suffer long-term consequences including severe respiratory problems, organ damage, circulatory impairment and chronic fatigue. Three weeks after recovery, 10% of COVID-19 patients are still unwell and up to 5% feel sick for months, according to scientists at King’s College London.
The pandemic has also caused a mental-health crisis for those who could not say goodbye to loved ones or have been isolated for months, while exacerbating substance-abuse issues for others.
It is too early to know how many people will file claims for death, long-term illness or disability as a result, but insurers worry the consequences could last for decades.
“We have attempted as a company to strategize about modeling this and have made some headway but are far from the crystal ball that is able to predict this,” said Dr. Paulo Bandeira Pinho, chief medical director of Optimum Re Insurance Co.
Optimum has met with life-insurer customers, including Prudential Financial, to map out long-term risks and possible financial impacts.
Prudential now imposes a minimum 30-day waiting period for recovered COVID-19 patients.
“Ultimately, many of the long-term implications of the pandemic are still unknown,” said Prudential’s Vice President of Operations Keith Bexell. “As the long-tail effects become better understood, our approach to underwriting may adjust as necessary.”
Since April, British life insurer LV= has postponed applications from anyone who was diagnosed with COVID-19, experienced symptoms or lived with someone who got sick, according to an underwriting policy on its website.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-insurance-idUSKBN29U0FC
Up next, just whose idea was it to shift all manufacturing to East Asia?
Volkswagen looks to claim damages from suppliers over chip shortages
January 24, 2021 11:06 AM By Michael Nienaber
BERLIN (Reuters) - German car manufacturer Volkswagen is in talks with its main suppliers about possible claims for damages due to a shortage of semiconductors, a company spokesman said on Sunday.
Automakers around the world are shutting assembly lines due to problems in the delivery of semiconductors, which in some cases have been exacerbated by the former Trump administration’s actions against key Chinese chip factories.
The shortage has affected Volkswagen, Ford Motor Co, Subaru Corp, Toyota Motor Corp, Nissan Motor Co Ltd, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and other car makers.
“For Volkswagen, the top priority is to minimise the effects of the semiconductor bottleneck on production,” the Volkswagen spokesman said, adding the company wanted to resolve the problem in close cooperation with its suppliers.
But the spokesman added that this exchange would also include examining claims of damages together with its suppliers.
Among the affected car suppliers are Germany’s Bosch and Continental, which in return are dependent on chip suppliers in Taiwan and other Asian countries.
Volkswagen had communicated to its suppliers shortly after the first lockdown in spring that it was ramping up production to pre-pandemic levels again, industry sources said.
Still, manufacturers of semiconductors shifted production to other industrial sectors with high growth rates such as consumer electronics which left clients in the car industry with less chips than needed, the sources said.
Automobilwoche magazine reported that Volkswagen was in talks with alternative suppliers of semiconductors but there were concerns this could lead to higher prices.
Volkswagen wants to make sure that both Bosch and Continental share the burden and partly compensate the company for the resulting additional costs, the magazine reported.
A Bosch spokeswoman said the company was currently focusing on maintaining supply chains as much as possible.
“We will discuss all further aspects of the shortage of semiconductors directly with our customers and suppliers in due course,” she added.
Continental declined to comment.
German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier has urged his Taiwanese counterpart Wang Mei-hua to persuade Taiwanese chip manufacturers to help ease the semiconductor shortage in the car industry which is hampering its fledgling economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Altmaier has asked Wang to address the issue in talks with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker and one of Germany’s main suppliers.
To reduce dependency on Asian suppliers and avoid similar problems in the future, Berlin is now planning to increase state support to increase the production capacity of semiconductors in Germany and Europe.
Finally, get gold as real long term insurance. Fully paid up of course and held outside of the larcenous US or UK financial system.
“Fed policymakers have little doubt that costs for many goods and services will jump this year, a bitter pill for consumers if gasoline, travel and other prices start to rebound from sharp declines last year. But, Fed officials argue, that’s part of getting back to normal, not the start of a more persistent inflation problem.”
Well maybe, maybe not. They simply have no way of knowing. But their track record since the Great Nixonian Error of fiat money, communist money, has been breathtaking for all the wrong reasons.
They never saw an inflation or bubble coming, nor a bubble bust, nor have ever forecast an inflation or recession ahead of it starting. If didn’t know better, I’d think they were doing it on purpose.
“Sometimes I wonder if the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
Mark Twain.
Fed set to look beyond possible post-pandemic inflation shock
January 25, 2021 11:07 AM By Howard Schneider
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Between the closed theaters and restaurants, the prices slashed by airlines and half-empty hotels, and the government benefits paid or in the pipeline, Americans may have as much as $2 trillion in extra cash socked away by this spring.
For the Federal Reserve, that is both blessing and curse: fuel for the economic recovery once coronavirus vaccines take hold and people can travel and shop freely, but also the possible spark for a surge in prices that policymakers already are bracing to explain.
Fed policymakers have little doubt that costs for many goods and services will jump this year, a bitter pill for consumers if gasoline, travel and other prices start to rebound from sharp declines last year. But, Fed officials argue, that’s part of getting back to normal, not the start of a more persistent inflation problem.
“As people return to their normal lives ... there could be quite exuberant spending and we could see upward pressure on prices,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell told a Princeton University seminar earlier this month.
“The real question is how large is that effect going to be and will it be persistent?” Powell said. “A one-time increase in prices ... is very unlikely to mean persistently high inflation.”
Powell and other Fed officials will likely reinforce that message after their two-day policy meeting this week.
Few if any changes are expected to the Fed’s policy statement and no new economic forecasts are scheduled to be released.
But Powell will likely address inflation in his post-meeting news conference. Indeed, he and other top Fed officials in recent days have rolled out a sort of public service announcement about what’s ahead: Ignore the coming sticker shock, they say, because even if inflation moves above the Fed’s 2% target this year, it likely won’t last and won’t change the central bank’s very long horizon for lifting interest rates.
More.
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Merck Shuts Down Covid Vaccine Program After Lackluster Data
By Riley GriffinJanuary 25, 2021, 11:45 AM GMT Updated on January 25, 2021, 11:59 AM GMT
· Immune response to candidates is inferior to existing shots
· Merck to repurpose resources, facilities to Covid-19 therapies
Merck & Co. is discontinuing development of its two experimental Covid-19 vaccines after early trial data showed they failed to generate immune responses comparable to a natural infection or existing vaccines.
The U.S. drug giant, which has a long history of successfully developing vaccines, had adopted a different strategy from rivals Pfizer Inc., Moderna Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, using a more traditional approach of focusing on shots based on weakened viruses. One, called V590, borrowed technology from Merck’s Ebola inoculation, while the other, V591, is based on a measles vaccine used in Europe.
Both V590 and V591 were laggards in the vaccine-development race. Merck finished recruiting the first participants for early-stage safety studies near the end of 2020, when front-runners Pfizer and Moderna were preparing to report late-stage data on their shots’ effectiveness. Merck received interim results from its trials this month.
The results were “disappointing, and a bit of a surprise,” said Nick Kartsonis, senior vice president of clinical research for infectious diseases and vaccines at Merck Research Laboratories. Both shots generated fewer neutralizing antibodies to halt infection than other Covid-19 vaccines, and produced inferior immune responses compared with people who had naturally contracted the coronavirus.
“We didn’t have what we needed to be able to move forward,” Kartsonis said in an interview Sunday. After evaluating the data, Merck’s senior leadership decided to discontinue the programs and divert resources to the company’s efforts to develop Covid-19 treatments.
The shares fell 0.8% in trading before U.S. markets opened Monday. They’ve lost 9.7% over the past 12 months through Friday’s close.
Vaccine Anxiety
While Merck’s vaccines weren’t expected to be part of the initial immunization push in the U.S., the development comes amid heightened anxiety over vaccine supplies and a sluggish pace of injections. The emergence of new variants of the coronavirus has also raised questions about whether the shots that have been cleared will lose effectiveness as the pathogen mutates.
More
Could a homegrown coronavirus strain be partly to blame for California's surge?
Melissa Healy, Rong-Gong Lin II Sat, January 23, 2021, 1:00 PM
California scientists have discovered a homegrown coronavirus strain that appears to be propagating faster than any other variant on the loose in the Golden State.
Two independent research groups said they stumbled upon the new strain while looking for signs that a highly transmissible variant from the United Kingdom had established itself here. Instead, they found a new branch of the virus' family tree — one whose sudden rise and distinctive mutations have made it a prime suspect in California's vicious holiday surge.
As they pored over genetic sequencing data in late December and early January, the two teams saw evidence of the new strain's prolific spread leap off their spreadsheets. Though focused on different regions of the state, they uncovered trends that were both remarkably similar and deeply worrying.
Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles found that although the strain had been barely detectable in early October, it accounted for 24% of roughly 4,500 viral samples gathered throughout California in the last weeks of 2020.
In a separate analysis of 332 virus samples culled mostly from Northern California during late November and December, 25% were of the same type.
"There was a homegrown variant under our noses," said Dr. Charles Chiu, a laboratory medicine specialist at UC San Francisco who examined the samples from the northern part of the state with collaborators from the California Department of Public Health. Were they not on the hunt for the U.K. strain and other viral variants, he said, "we could have missed this at every level."
The new strain, which scientists have dubbed B.1.426, bears five mutations in its genetic code. One of them, known as L452R, alters the virus' spike protein, the tool it uses to infiltrate human cells and turn them into virus-making factories.
Over multiple generations, even a small improvement in this ability will help a virus propagate more easily through a population, driving up infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
https://news.yahoo.com/could-homegrown-coronavirus-strain-partly-130053205.html
Can the COVID-19 Vaccine Beat the Proliferation of New Virus Mutations?
By Lawrence Wright January 21, 2021
All viruses change. SARS-CoV-2 had been remarkably stable as it coursed around the world, being so well adapted to the human host. This stability allowed the development of vaccines that are finely targeted for vulnerable regions of the virus’s spike protein. In February, 2020, a new variant emerging from Italy proved to be more infectious than the original Wuhan variant. Scientists were on guard, expecting an assault of new mutations. “We were getting sequencing up and running” to detect new variants, Gregory Armstrong, the director of the Advanced Molecular Detection program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me. “Then for ten months, it was crickets.”
Last September, just as the first vaccine candidates were undergoing their Phase III trials, an aggressive new variant began circulating in southeast England, centered in Kent, along the highway from London to Dover. On Halloween, England announced a monthlong lockdown, which was dramatically successful in curbing the spread of COVID-19 in other parts of the country, but not in the Kent corridor. There were already a number of distinct variants of the novel coronavirus, with a few genetic variations of little consequence. But the U.K. variant, initially labelled a “Variant Under Investigation,” contained twenty-three different mutations, including several on the spike protein; moreover, it was rapidly driving out competitors and becoming the predominant virus in the country, especially among younger people. On December 18th, it was upgraded to a “Variant of Concern.”
What made the U.K. variant so much more successful than the original virus? One possibility is pure chance. It could have been amplified through some superspreader event, like the variant that took root at an employee conference at the Boston biotech firm Biogen, in February, 2020, which eventually accounted for more than three hundred thousand infections. Or perhaps it got seeded in a school or a church, and spread rapidly among a tightly knit population. But, as researchers went back and studied the growth of the U.K. variant’s mutations through serum samples, they realized that neither of these hypotheses could account for the accelerated pace of the spread. “Some mathematicians modelled how the variant has spread, and they found it was between forty and seventy per cent more infectious,” John Brooks, the chief medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control’s COVID-19 Emergency Response, told me. The current hypothesis is that the Kent variant, now called B.1.1.7, has a mutation that switched an amino acid in the spike protein, allowing it to bind more tightly to the body’s ACE2 receptors. “That means it takes less virus to infect you,” Brooks said. “That tighter binding also means that it can replicate more efficiently.” Once infected with the new variant, a person will be shedding more virus than someone infected with another variant. “It’s a wicked cycle,” Brooks observed. B.1.1.7 quickly spread to dozens of countries. The ongoing mystery is why it is not more fatal, given its increased viral load. It may be just a matter of luck.
----A month after the new variant was uncovered in England, a similar lineage emerged in South Africa, called B.1.351. It quickly became the dominant variant in that country and began its own tour of the world. It has the same mutation as B.1.1.7, which allows it to adhere more tightly to the ACE2 receptors, but it also carries an additional mutation that is far more concerning. The mutation is denominated E484K, meaning that the amino acid, glutamic acid (code letter E), has been replaced by another, lysine (code letter K), in position 484 of the genetic sequence of the spike protein. This tiny alteration may possibly make the vaccine less effective against it. In a lab experiment, the E484K mutation caused greater than tenfold drop of immunity in the antibodies of some COVID-19 survivors. The vaccines that are being deployed now should still be effective, researchers have said, but clearly the virus is evolving new strategies that make it more contagious and less able to be corralled by a vaccine.
Yet another dangerous variant, B.1.1.28, turned up in Brazil. A forty-five-year-old health-care worker in the northeastern part of the country, who had no comorbidities, got COVID-19 in May of 2020. She was sick for a week with diarrhea, muscle aches, exhaustion, and pain while swallowing, but she fully recovered. Then, in October, a hundred and fifty-three days later, she fell ill again with COVID-19, and, this time, the disease was more severe.
“This made the hair on my neck stand up,” Brooks said. Like the South African variant, the Brazilian variant does have the mutation that makes it more infectious, and it also has the E484K mutation, which raises the unsettling possibility that “it could possibly overcome the vaccine, and it may reinfect.”
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
“Never
be haughty to the humble, never be humble to the haughty.”
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported.
This lithium-Ion battery is (almost) indestructible
The battery can be cut, bent, soaked, shot and lit on fire – and it'll still work just fine
Daniel OberhausWIRED US17 Jan 2020
Lithium-ion batteries have shaped the modern world. These power pouches are at the heart of most rechargeable electronics, from cell phones and laptops to vapes and electric cars. But while they’re great at holding a charge and have a high energy density, lithium-ion batteries aren’t without their problems. Their reliance on toxic, flammable materials means the smallest defect can result in exploding gadgets.
A team of researchers led by physicists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory believed a safer battery was possible, and for the past five years they have been developing a lithium-ion battery that’s seemingly immune to failure. The rugged battery they first unveiled in 2017, working with researchers at the University of Maryland, can be cut, shot, bent, and soaked without an interruption in power. Late last year, the Johns Hopkins team pushed it further, making it fireproof and boosting its voltages to levels comparable with a commercial product.
----The secret to making an indestructible battery comes down to the electrolyte, the chemical goulash that separates the positive and negative ends of a battery, says Konstantinos Gerasopoulos, a senior scientist at APL who is leading the research. When you use a lithium-ion battery, charged lithium particles travel through a barrier in the electrolyte from the anode (the negative end) to the cathode (the positive end), where they undergo a chemical reaction that produces energy.
Most lithium-ion electrolytes are a mix of flammable lithium salts and toxic liquids, which means that “in today’s lithium-ion chemistry you have a recipe for disaster,” says Jeff Maranchi, the materials science program manager at APL. If the permeable barrier that separates the cathode from the anode crumbles, it creates a short circuit—and a whole lot of heat. When all this heat hits a highly flammable material like lithium-ion electrolyte next to the oxygen-rich cathode in the battery, you’ve got a flaming electronic device on your hands.
Aqueous batteries avoid all these problems, with electrolytes that are water-based and therefore both nonflammable and nontoxic. They’ve been around for 25 years but have been too weak to be useful. What the APL team figured out is that by increasing the concentration of lithium salts and mixing the electrolyte with a polymer—a material resembling a very soft plastic—they could bump the electric potential from around 1.2 volts to 4 volts, which is comparable with commercial lithium-ion batteries.
When Gerasopoulos and his colleagues attached a commercially available anode and cathode to this plasticky electrolyte, they ended up with a lithium-ion battery unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s clear and flexible like a contact lens, nontoxic and nonflammable, and can be manufactured and operated in the open air without a case. On top of that, it can withstand pretty much any kind of abuse.
During tests, which you can watch here, the APL team submerged the device in salt water, cut it with scissors, used an air cannon to simulate a ballistic impact, and lit it on fire. Through each test, the battery kept pumping out electricity. After one trial by fire, the charred portion was cut off and it continued to operate normally for 100 hours.
More
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-ion-battery-indestructible
“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”
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