9:15 PM
By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Janet
Yellen, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee to run the Treasury
Department, will tell the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday that the
government must “act big” with its next coronavirus relief package.
Biden, who will be sworn into office
on Wednesday, outlined a $1.9 trillion stimulus package proposal last week,
saying bold investment was needed to jump-start the economy and accelerate the
distribution of vaccines to bring the virus under control.
“Neither the president-elect, nor I,
propose this relief package without an appreciation for the country’s debt
burden. But right now, with interest rates at historic lows, the smartest thing
we can do is act big,” Yellen, a former Federal Reserve chair, said in a
prepared opening statement for her hearing before the committee.
“I believe the benefits will far
outweigh the costs, especially if we care about helping people who have been
struggling for a very long time,” she said in the statement, which was obtained
by Reuters.
The proposed aid package includes
$415 billion to bolster the U.S. 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.
Many Americans would receive
stimulus payments of $1,400, which would be on top of the $600 checks approved
in a pandemic relief bill passed by Congress last month. Supplemental
unemployment insurance would also increase to $400 a week from the current $300
a week, and it would be extended to September.
In her prepared testimony, Yellen
also says the U.S. economy must be rebuilt “so that it creates more prosperity
for more people and ensures that American workers can compete in an
increasingly competitive global economy.”
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-treasury/yellen-says-u-s-must-act-big-on-next-coronavirus-relief-package-idUSKBN29N1YJ
The Debt Question Facing Janet
Yellen: How Much Is Too Much? Treasury
secretary nominee supports Biden plans that add trillions to U.S. borrowing, a
turnabout in economic thinking January 18, 2021
A big question hangs over Janet Yellen this week at her confirmation hearing to
become U.S. Treasury secretary: How much debt is too much?
In the past four years, U.S. government debt held by the
public has increased by $7 trillion to $21.6 trillion. President-elect Joe Biden has committed to a spending program that could
add trillions more in the year ahead. At 100.1% of gross domestic product, the
debt already exceeds the annual output of the economy, putting the U.S. in company
with economies including Greece, Italy and Japan.
When Ms. Yellen served in the Clinton administration as
Chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, she was among those
who pushed for a balanced budget. Today, she has joined, cautiously, an emerging consensus concentrated on the left that more
short-term borrowing is needed to help the economy, even without concrete plans
to pay it back. Central to the view is the expectation that interest rates will
remain low for the foreseeable future, making it more affordable to finance the
borrowing.
The Biden administration will now contend with progressives
who want even more spending, and conservatives who say the government is
tempting fate by adding to its swollen balance sheet. Ms. Yellen’s challenge,
if confirmed, will be to keep Democrats together and persuade some Republicans
to come along.
Ms. Yellen, who will be a top economic adviser to Mr.
Biden, is scheduled to testify Tuesday before the Senate Finance Committee,
which will vote on her nomination. She served as top White House economist in
the 1990s and Federal Reserve chairwoman in the 2010s. Confirmation of Ms.
Yellen as Treasury secretary would make her the first person to achieve such a
trifecta of economic leadership roles.
Ms. Yellen would be managing the nation’s debt when the economic consensus has
flipped. In the 1990s, economists argued that surpluses would push down
long-term interest rates and encourage private-sector borrowing and investment.
Government borrowing, this view held, crowded out the private sector. The
strategy seemed to work. The U.S. saw an economic boom, with the longest expansion
on record at the time, fueled by technology investment.
After years of low inflation and interest rates near zero,
more economists say the government should be borrowing to keep the economy
going because the private sector isn’t. With borrowing costs expected to remain
low and the pandemic-stricken economy still weak, temporary increases in
deficits aren’t only tolerable but desirable if they help strengthen the
recovery, the thinking goes.
More
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-debt-question-facing-janet-yellen-how-much-is-too-much-11610993908
Next, will President
Biden allow the IMF to sell off its gold and issue more Special Drawing Rights “fake
money?” We are entering very scary times.
IMF chief sees 'high degree of
uncertainty' in global outlook January 18, 2021 4:31 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of the
International Monetary Fund on Monday said the global lender needed more
resources to help heavily indebted countries, citing a highly uncertain global
economic outlook and a growing divergence between rich and poor countries.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva,
who has long advocated a new allocation of the IMF’s own currency, Special
Drawing Rights (SDRs), said doing so now would give more funds to use address
both the health and economic crisis, and accelerate moves to a digital and
green economy.
Under outgoing President Donald Trump, the
United States, the IMF’s largest shareholder, has blocked such a new SDR
allocation, a move akin to a central bank printing money, since it would
provide more resources to richer countries since the allocation would be
proportionate to their shareholding.
Swedish Finance Minister Magdalena
Andersson, the new chair of the IMF’s steering committee speaking at an online
news conference with Georgieva, said it was clear the need for liquidity
remained great, and she would consult with member countries on options for
expanding liquidity.
Andersson, the first European to head the
International Monetary and Financial Committee in more than 12 years and the
first women, started her three-year term here
in the role on Monday.
Georgieva said the IMF had rapidly increased
concessional financing to emerging market and developing economies, including
through donations by member countries of some $20 billion in existing SDRs.
That would continue to play an important role, but further steps were needed,
she said.
“It will continue to be so important, even
more important, for us to be able to expand our capacity to support countries
that have fallen behind,” Georgieva said.
She said a new SDR allocation had never been
taken off the table by IMF members, she said, adding that some members
continued to discuss it as a possible move. A possible sale of gold from the
IMF’s reserves would have “some opportunity costs” for the IMF, but would be up
to members, she said.
She said she expected the Group of 20 major
economies to extend the current moratorium in official debt service payments by
the poorest countries, now slated to end in June, but much would depend on the
pace of vaccinations in coming months.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-imf-outlook/imf-chief-sees-high-degree-of-uncertainty-in-global-outlook-idUSKBN29N1M8
Finally, a dose of markets
reality from the land of midges and snow. 2021 isn’t going to be a rerun of 2019.
David
Rosenberg: Life is not going back to normal even if the market doesn’t see it
yet Ready or not America is headed back into recession Jan 18, 2021
The United States economy has headed
back into recession. Three months in a row of negative retail sales. Personal
incomes have been shrinking at a 10-per-cent annual rate since August. Initial
jobless claims point to a 200,000 payroll decline in January after a 140,000
contraction in December. Consumer confidence indexes and household spending
intentions rolling over. JP Morgan’s tracking of its 30 million debit and
credit card holders shows a negative year-over-year trend of 2.7 per cent in
the week through Jan. 11. The Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP poll found that 43
per cent of households have at least one member out of work and 56 per cent
fear losing a job.
Does anyone really think that means
consumers are going to be drawing down their savings for conspicuous
consumption? If so, the retail sales report on Friday was a real shot across
the bow. Retail sales plunged 0.7 per cent versus a flat consensus reading, but
it was the areas of decline that were disturbing. It’s one thing to have
restaurants post a 4.5 per cent plunge as the coronavirus spread and
restrictions returned across many parts of the country, but things that had
done well during the pandemic also declined, such as electronics (-4.9 per
cent) and appliances/furniture (-0.6 per cent), which tells you the consumer
sector is now maxed as far as “stuff” is concerned.
Something is happening here, and
what it is, is pretty clear. There is no more pent-up demand for all the things
we bought in the past year in lieu of the plunge in services. Now, as for
services and the primary view of a looming economic boom, the services that
have the potential for a big post-vaccine rebound — airlines, restaurants,
theme parks, recreation services and events — come to a grand total of four per
cent of GDP and six per cent of total consumer spending. Knock yourself out.
We shall see if Joe Biden’s fiscal
plan can get through without having to resort to a budget reconciliation. If
not, he needs 60 votes in the Senate. And the reconciliation route generally
lasts at least two months — as was the case with Donald Trump’s tax plan. By
then, the economy will be in an even deeper hole, but there will be Republicans
who won’t vote for a doubling in the minimum wage or all the aid to the state
governments.
And let’s not forget that the second
half of the year will be filled with discussions on tax hikes on corporate
income rates (21 per cent to 28 per cent) and capital gains (20 per cent to 40
per cent). We will see more fiscal stimulus, to be sure, but likely not the
full US$1.9-trillion tab (never mind that only US$400 billion has anything to
do with COVID-19; the remainder is all about the Democrats chasing their Big
Government agenda). But this is what the market has discounted.
---- Let’s assess what the markets believe and
what they have discounted. The markets believe we are getting massive fiscal
stimulus and it’s coming very soon. The markets believe this money will get
plowed into spending. The markets believe we all get vaccinated by June and
that is why we can look through all the current bad economic news and the
rising death count from the coronavirus.
We can look through all this because
(a) stimulus is coming yet again and (b) once we all get inoculated in June,
there will be a wild spending party that will last a long time since the
government is aiming to overstimulate the economy.
More
https://financialpost.com/investing/david-rosenberg-life-is-not-going-back-to-normal-even-if-the-market-doesnt-see-it-yet
"It is never difficult to distinguish between a Democrat
with a grievance and ray of sunshine."
With apologies to P. G. Wodehouse and Scotsmen.
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
California warns against using a
batch of Moderna COVID-19 vaccines after allergic reactions By Laura J. Nelson Staff
Writer Jan. 18, 2021 5 AM UPDATED 7:37 AM
California’s top epidemiologist told healthcare
providers on Sunday to stop using a batch of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine after a
“higher than usual” number of people had apparent allergic reactions at a San
Diego vaccination clinic.
Dr. Erica Pan, the state epidemiologist, said Sunday that
“out of an extreme abundance of caution,” providers should stop using the doses
until federal, state and company officials finish an investigation.
California has received about 330,000 doses from the
Moderna lot in question — about 10% of all the vaccine, both Moderna’s and
Pfizer’s, that have been distributed across the Golden State, officials said.
The apparent allergic reactions occurred at San Diego
County’s drive-through mass vaccination site at Petco Park, said California
Department of Public Health spokesman Darrel Ng.
A “higher than usual” number of
patients who received the vaccine appeared to be suffering from allergic
reactions. Their symptoms were severe and required medical attention, Pan said.
Dr. Eric McDonald, San Diego
County’s director of epidemiology, said during a livestreamed news briefing
Wednesday that operations at Petco Park slowed down after six healthcare
workers who had just been vaccinated had apparent allergic reactions.
“That number, clustered together,
was slightly higher than expected for the time period,” McDonald said. He said
the health providers swapped out the batch of vaccines they were administering,
“in the possible event” that reactions were connected.
“Any vaccination, whether it’s the
COVID vaccination or the flu vaccination at your doctor’s office, should be
given under medical supervision,” McDonald said. “In this case, with a new
vaccine, there are very specific guidelines that all sites giving this vaccine
must follow.”
That includes monitoring patients
after the shot is administered for at least 15 minutes, and longer in cases
where patients have a medical condition that could lead to an allergic
reaction.
More
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-18/moderna-vaccine-allergic-reaction-california-batch
CDC, FDA
Investigating California Moderna Covid-19 Vaccine Lot With ‘Higher Than Usual’
Allergic Reactions Alison Durkee
10:12am EST Updated Jan 18, 2021,
11:35am EST
California’s state epidemiologist urged extremely rare
California State Epidemiologist Dr. Erica S. Pan issued the
recommendation after fewer than 10 patients who received the Moderna vaccine at
a clinic in San Diego experienced severe allergic reactions and required
medical attention within 24 hours of being vaccinated.
The state said it was urging
providers to use other vaccines and pause distribution of the Moderna lot “out
of an extreme abundance of caution” while the manufacturer, Centers for Disease
Control (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) review the vaccine lot
“and related medical information.”
The vaccine lot included more than
330,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine distributed to 287 vaccine providers
statewide, which arrived in the state between Jan. 5 and 12.
No other clusters of severe
reactions linked to the vaccine lot have otherwise been reported.
There is a risk
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/01/18/cdc-fda-investigating-california-moderna-covid-19-vaccine-lot-with-higher-than-usual-allergic-reactions/?sh=201e774c7dfa
Japan PM Suga: Will exhaust all
means to protect pandemic-hit medical system January 18, 2021 5:49 AM
By Kiyoshi Takenaka
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga
said on Monday his government will take all possible measures to protect the
country’s medical system, as hospitals creak under the strain of the COVID-19
pandemic.
Suga this month issued a state of
emergency for Tokyo and three surrounding prefectures in a bid to stem a
resurgence of infections. He expanded it to seven more prefectures, including
Osaka and Kyoto in western Japan.
“What is important is to provide
necessary medical services to people in need. We will exhaust all measures to
safeguard the medical system,” Suga said in his policy speech at the start of a
regular session of parliament.
“We are all ready to deploy the
Self-Defence Forces’ medical team if requested by governors.”
Japan, though less seriously hit by
the pandemic than many other advanced economies, has seen infections spike in
recent weeks, prompting Japan Medical Association president Toshio Nakagawa to
say the nation’s medical system is collapsing.
The outbreak has forced Japan to
largely shut its doors to foreigners and limit large-scale events.
Administrative reform minister Taro Kono told Reuters on Thursday the
once-delayed Tokyo Olympics may not go ahead as planned.
But Suga reiterated his resolve to
host the Games this summer.
“We will press ahead with
preparations, with determination of building watertight anti-infection measures
and holding an event that can bring hope and courage to the world,” he said.
Total coronavirus cases in Japan
have doubled over the past six weeks to about 330,000, according to public
broacaster NHK, with 4,525 fatalities.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-japan-suga/japan-pm-suga-will-exhaust-all-means-to-protect-pandemic-hit-medical-system-idUSKBN29N0BK
Fauci: U.S. 'weeks away' from
evaluating new vaccine candidates Jan. 17, 2021 / 4:49 PM
Jan. 17 (UPI) -- Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday said that the United States
will soon begin the process of approving new COVID-19
vaccines.
Appearing on NBC News' Meet the Press
"I would imagine within a period of a week or so, or
at the most, a couple of weeks, they're going to be getting their data together
and showing it to the [Food and Drug Administration]," he said.
"They're going to have to get their data and safety monitoring board to
look at it to see if it is appropriate to start, you know, essentially putting
the package together to get an emergency use authorization. But we're weeks
away, not months away, for sure."
The U.S. has administered 13.7 million shots since
inoculations began on Dec. 14 with healthcare workers for an average of 847,387
doses per day, according to Bloomberg .
RELATED Mainland
China on high alert after COVID-19 outbreak near N. Korea
Biden, who is set to be inaugurated on Wednesday, has
pledged to administer 100 million vaccines within his first 100 days in office.
Fauci said "there's no doubt" the goal can be
achieved by invoking the Defense Production Act to gather the necessary
supplies.
"One thing that's clear is that the issue of getting
100 million doses in the first 100 days is absolutely a doable thing," he
said.
RELATED Saliva-based
COVID-19 tests as accurate as those using nose, throat samples
Biden wi7,0086,682 deaths since the start of the pandemic,
according to data gathered by Johns Hopkins University. On Saturday, the nation
reported 198,218 new cases and 3,286 new deaths.
Ron Klain, Biden's incoming White House chief of staff,
told CNN's State of the Union Sunday he expects the
United States will hit 500,000 coronavirus deaths sometime in February but that
the incoming administration plans to combat the virus by ramping up
vaccinations and testing as well as encouraging mask-wearing.
More
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021/01/17/Fauci-US-weeks-away-from-evaluating-new-vaccine-candidates/8511610912526/
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.
New way to control electrical
charge in 2D materials: Put a flake on it Date: January 14, 2021
Source: Washington University in St. Louis
Summary: Gaining control of the flow of electrical
current through atomically thin materials is important to potential future
applications in photovoltaics or computing. Physicists have discovered one way
to locally add electrical charge to a graphene device.
Physicists at Washington University
in St. Louis have discovered how to locally add electrical charge to an
atomically thin graphene device by layering flakes of another thin material,
alpha-RuCl3 , on top of it.
A paper published in the journal Nano
Letters describes the charge transfer process in detail. Gaining control of
the flow of electrical current through atomically thin materials is important
to potential future applications in photovoltaics or computing.
"In my field, where we study
van der Waals heterostructures made by custom-stacking atomically thin
materials together, we typically control charge by applying electric fields to
the devices," said Erik Henriksen, assistant professor of physics in Arts
& Sciences and corresponding author of the new study, along with Ken Burch
at Boston College. "But here it now appears we can just add layers of RuCl3 3.
It soaks up a fixed amount of electrons, allowing us to make 'permanent' charge
transfers that don't require the external electric field."
Jesse Balgley, a graduate student in
Henriksen's laboratory at Washington University, is second author of the study.
Li Yang, professor of physics, and his graduate student Xiaobo Lu, also both at
Washington University, helped with computational work and calculations, and are
also co-authors.
Physicists who study condensed
matter are intrigued by alpha-RuCl3 because they would like to
exploit certain of its antiferromagnetic properties for quantum spin liquids.
In this new study, the scientists
report that alpha-RuCl3 is able to transfer charge to several
different types of materials -- not just graphene, Henriksen's personal
favorite.
They also found that they only
needed to place a single layer of alpha-RuCl3 on top of their
devices to create and transfer charge. The process still works, even if the
scientists slip a thin sheet of an electrically insulating material between the
RuCl3 and the graphene.
"We can control how much charge
flows in by varying the thickness of the insulator," Henriksen said.
"Also, we are able to physically and spatially separate the source of
charge from where it goes -- this is called modulation doping."
Adding charge to a quantum spin
liquid is one mechanism thought to underlie the physics of high-temperature
superconductivity.
"Anytime you do this, it could
get exciting," Henriksen said. "And usually you have to add atoms to
bulk materials, which causes lots of disorder. But here, the charge flows right
in, no need to change the chemical structure, so it's a 'clean' way to add charge."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210114130121.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmatter_energy%2Fgraphene+%28Graphene+News+--+ScienceDaily%29
“I
sometimes get the impression that many U.S. media outlets work according to a
principle which was common in the Soviet Union. Back then, people used to joke
that the newspaper Pravda [Truth] had no truth in it, and the Izvestia [News]
paper has no news in it. I get the impression that many U.S. media operate in
the same way.”
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov. May 2017.
No comments:
Post a Comment